A Slow Parade Past Colva

‘Our’ dogs

The ocean mist had not yet lifted, and the dogs were the only others on the beach, dancing with joy at the human company, leaping at us, at each other, darting into the sea, then up the sloping beach, gradually settling into a gentle trot, as they sensed that this was going to be a long morning. Twenty five kilometers long, Google maps told us, till the beach tapered off, below the Vasco headlands. 

The sunbeds of our own Cavelossim beach were not yet out, but in the shadow of the coastal trees, a squad of navy men were doing a punishing set of drills on the sand. Packs strapped on their backs, they unspooled pushups at a rapid pace, then spent a minute in a static squat. Another set of pushups…I tried to take a photograph in the early light, but they were a grey blur in their camo clothing. The sergeant saw us, and shouted into the morning, “Sir, please delete kar lo!” I gestured back - Done.

At low tide, the waves slow to a gentle puddle on the sand, then quietly recede in a necklace of froth, now lit with a hint of orange from the sun, still rising behind the treeline. The first of the fishing boats had been beached, in a welter of dark nets and bright plastic, of sun-darkened skin and silvery fish, and one white man picking out his haul for the day. 

The dogs, “our dogs”, Premila and Annie decided, leapt at the tiny fish discarded on the beach, but when they edged towards the main catch, one firm “OI!” by a fisherman sent them right back down to us, trotting along the sand, completely innocent of any ill intent.

Now the sun was out, and the first walkers. The beach dippers would follow, and a lifeguard walked up the beach to set up his station for the day, his orange float angled over his back, the warning flag and signpost ready to be planted in the sand, walkie-talkie strapped onto his hip. 

Our dogs danced down to the sea, a sea urchin posed in the sand, and a gent with a shaved head trotted resolutely by. We were nearing the tourist cluster of Benaulim, and a team from a watersports outfit prepared to wheel their gear onto the sea. They counted out their pushups, the civilian version, without combat gear, without lowering themselves to the sand. 

This, I too can do, I declared, and the beach boys made place for me against the trolley, and began counting for me, while Mohit Oberoi looked back briefly, then marched on.

 “Babajee, the sea is glorious”, he declared when I caught up with him.

 “Let’s swim when we cross Colva?”, I suggested.

“Let’s not stop now, it’s getting hot”, Premila suffers terribly in the heat, and was now shading herself against the sun. We negotiated a breakfast stop when we were two-thirds done, and Mo and I agreed we would end the day’s excursion with a dip.

Colva loomed, in a knot of shacks and ski-jets, families dipping in and out of the water, like teabags clothed in black lycra. A newly wedded couple posed in the surf, backs to us, heads turned back for the telephoto lens, his plump torso clothed in a gleaming white banyan that clung, wet, to his skin; she in a bright green kurta which perfectly offset red wedding bangles and fresh lipstick. 

“Sir, photo?” the beach photographers turned to me.

I struck a pose, a leggy model mincing down a ramp. They joined the charade, and aimed their lens at me, a group of anxious paparazzi, hunting for a shot that would leap out at the photo editors. 

At breakfast, we watched two villagers exercise their bull in the sand. What’s that about, we asked the patrao. 

“My bull fight your bull. Many people betting, big money.”

When? We asked - will you text us?

‘No fixed, sir. Police finding, then 10,000 rupees fine. Still people doing”

You need to get off the beach of Cansaulim, he also told us, to find a cab back south. The sun had now bleached the sky, and Premila was in full Beau Peep* mode, marching resolutely across the hot sands of the Sahara, to set up the next outpost of the French legion.

Beau Peep and Annie wait

I stopped to admire a set of drawings in the sand: a flower, a detailed butterfly, and a series of delightful cats, one with a smirk, this one with a determined insouciance. They were the work of a sure hand, of an artist with a self-assured swagger. Yet, with the next tide, they would be gone. Art, for the joy of creation, not the ego of display and preservation. 

Like the sand mandalas, fantastical worlds of cosmological symbolism, crafted one coloured grain at a time, by Buddhist monks. When the mandalas are declared complete, the faithful assemble, the horns blow, the drums beat, and the artists dedicate their work to the cosmos, erasing it with a series of deliberate brush strokes, sharing the effacement as they did the creation, with bowed head and intent gaze. 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

* A cartoon series, which was a spoof on the 1924 novel, Beau Geste, by P.C. Wren