People always look quite surprised when I mention I used to live in Goa. Oh, Goa, they say. How could you leave?
I smile. I think about the snake in my toilet.
Let me explain.
In 2020, newly turned consultant, suddenly untethered from the requirement to be in any particular city, I rented a house in Goa. And not just any house — a 70-odd year old 6 bedroom Portuguese beauty, set in half an acre, forest on two sides, acres of uninterrupted paddy fields on the third. Seventeen mango trees. Twenty-something coconut trees. A garden I converted into a magnificent tangle of raised beds. During the second Covid wave, when markets were shuttered half the time, we ate almost entirely from that garden.
It was, by any reasonable measure, paradise.
The snakes arrived almost immediately.
Cobras, rat snakes, a python — fat, I want to stress, a fat python — kraits. In the garden, in the house, in the rafters. Jiwanti, my helper, a woman of extraordinary nerve, stood by me through all of it. Sophie, who loves nothing more than open space, would regularly disappear into the forest or the paddy fields, and we’d wade in after her — waist-deep water, water snakes going past our legs — trying to look calm about the whole thing.
I had nine snake catchers on speed dial. Nine. And here’s the thing about snake catchers in Goa — they won’t always come. You have to send them a picture first so they can identify the species. If it’s a rat snake, they tell you to leave it alone. It’s harmless, they say. I had a dog. Nothing felt harmless.
The bathroom situation deserves its own paragraph. It was a beautiful spa-style bathroom — a deep sunken tub, stone floors, windows with iron grills. Very atmospheric. I put mesh on the windows when I moved in. The snakes came anyway. I don’t know how. I stopped asking.
Then there were the rats. Rats in the rafters, rats chewing through plastic containers, rats conducting what sounded like relay races above my head at 2am. The snakes came after the rats. One night, a snake fell on my best friend sleeping in the next room. She was surprisingly calm about it. I pretended to be calm but was mortified deep inside.
In our second year, a cyclone took out large chunks of the roof. We moved into a hotel — peak Covid, no easy thing — and waited. It took ten days. Thank god for a dear friend from Marriott who came to our rescue when no pet-friendly hotel would let us in.
And then there was the slower, quieter difficulty of being an outsider. Goa had, during Covid, absorbed waves of people from Delhi and Mumbai — big city money, big city attitudes, rents driven up beyond what locals could pay. I wasn’t that person, but there’s no explaining that to a place that has learned, quite reasonably, to be wary. My neighbours were polite and distant.
I stayed two and a half years. I loved the house. I loved the location — ten minutes to Mapusa market, twenty to restaurants that would hold their own in any world capital. I loved my garden, where I learnt all the things you shouldn’t do.
But when my landlord told me he was doubling the rent, something clarified very quickly.
It was time to buy. To find somewhere that was actually, permanently mine.
Goa, as it turned out, was a chapter. A very eventful, occasionally terrifying, genuinely beautiful chapter.
I don’t regret a day of it.
I also don’t miss the snakes.
Read also: Sushi vs Cool Climate
