EARTHY SERENITIES

Nov 2022

You are home.

Far, far from the familiar, amid people who sing in a language you don’t speak, wear dresses and props you’ve not seen, you are home.

In this theatre of stirred senses, there is spontaneous connectedness in song and dance and smile – and that most kindly look of kinship, like that boy dressed as a black langur gave me when I strolled past the open green room behind the open stage.

These past few days were a spectacular montage of different life journeys: folk theatre, kirtan, fashion, feast, artisanship and activism.

There was mellifluous melody and muted colour, gentle teasing and ardent evocation. There was also disruption and dissonance: a costume that was deliberately grotesque; a headgear that was blindingly pink; a posture that was outlandish; an expression that was bewildering; men in skirts, men my age.

They’d appear, do their part, and retreat into the shadows from where they had emerged. Life was dressed up briefly to entertain and edify.

Their unworldliness, earthliness was disarming. In an instant it peeled off all your sophistication and self-obsession and fear (an epidemic stronger than pain).

All that remained was you – lost in this caravan of fellow pilgrims.

I watched a Fuggdi dance where the oldest woman was so spirited, the audience swayed to her moves. I watched Tiatr where the lead actor traversed with great ease profound philosophical questions, mundane social preoccupations, relationships, lust, and mid-flight flatulence (the ‘Air India’ joke brought the house down).

I watched a Kunbee sari fashion show where all that mattered was the delight in the dress, not some fanciful ideal of skin and shape. Everyone grinned and glowed.

Simple can be so stylish.

Then there was Ranmalle, a mix of folklore and mythology, and there was Intruz, a slice of carnival.

Off the stage, winding through stalls, I spoke to a self-exiled artist who painted spiritually psychedelic tee-shirts, young folks trying to protect a forest from the business of politics, a technology VC who had transitioned to the social sector and asked me what the cheapest thing in the world was. (He broke my awkward silence with his answer: money.)

I had a warm chat with a man who handcrafted decorations out of coconut shells, and with his neighbour who weaved flowers from coconut leaves. They invited me home.

The five-day Goa Heritage Festival at Campal was a curation of the many different lives that are lived in the real, folksy Goa.

The conclusion was a crescendo, a chorus: Ghumot Arti.

Sitting there on the grass, entranced by these young men in red singing with raw devotion, I felt that the week had been one long flowing, fluttering moment, a great and gentle inrush of exuberance and equanimity.

~*~