The Israeli was handsome and unkind. I grew fat on German pastries, he poked my backside and said so. His cool Israeli friends came over and sat about smoking chillums; a complicated series of rituals which I got wrong. How to mix the Charis and tobacco in your palm, how to pack it and wrap your special ragged cloth about the base, the boom shankar throw of a prayer and touch to the forehead, how to light it, get it burning without dying, breath in without throwing a whitey, and for god’s sake don’t pass it to the left. I pretended to know everything while wishing I spoke Hebrew. I think I thought I was happy. I’d cut ties from England, taken off on my own, taken up with a man who’d done military service, who’d stripped out of his uniform and grown his beautiful hair; I felt grown up. We took LSD and walked amongst the apple trees. He taught me how to cook Shakshuka. When he went out I sat in the window and wrote my diary, smoked spliffs and listened to Edie Brickell. The cows beneath our rooms rang their bells at night. We spent three months in the mountains of Manali and then the seasons changed and we took the bus to Goa. He rented a house in Arambol. A mosquito net over our bed that caught scorpions which he killed with a stick. Pigs chased us through bamboo for a feed on our morning faeces. Water was pumped from the village well and carried in buckets, and his friends, more of them, gathered on our porch. Circles of handsome women and confident men, they moved effortlessly, sat carelessly, knew the rules; not tourists but travellers, they made that distinction in every sweeping statement about Indian life. I swept the floor and made the bed and fetched water from the well. We went to a full moon party on the beach. My handsome and unkind Israeli gave me a microdot. His friends played djembe and threw back their heads at the stars. I ran down to the water’s edge. Thousands of stone soldiers were marching from the sea. I said, look! and he said why do you think I see what you see, you are on your own and he left me there. A night tripping without anchor, I set sail and didn’t come back. The sun rose, we returned to our house and life together. Like a mute maiden he’d picked up at the market, my body continued to sweep the floor and fetch water, cater to his beautiful friends on our porch but my mind was gone. I stopped speaking.
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Intense.
Oh Goa !!