Split Screen

Split Screen

Thanks to Nightcafe

“Enjoy your trip to Goa”, relatives wished us as we left a Bhai-duj lunch for the airport.

It’s not really a trip, I said, largely to myself. More like a change of scene; we’re going for two months, and hope to embed ourselves there, make ourselves at home. Unlike on a trip, where the focus is on the new - new sights, new food, new experiences.

Over the decades, I’ve stayed at over 20 different properties in Goa, swum off 12 different beaches, eaten out of a hundred kitchens, and drunk everything from resinous kaju feni to a satiny pre-war Madeira from a Portuguese doctor’s cellar. Now, I’m not here for novelty, but for the deep joy of the familiar.

In the four days that we’ve been here, we’ve cocooned ourselves in the familiar. I lift my scrambled eggs from the stove while they’re still buttery smooth, like no restaurant does, and have taught myself to cook a thick moong dal with a fresh jeera tadka. I still begin the day with Wordle, and a couple of times a week, end it with Netflix. My spreadsheets travel with me, thanks to Google drive, and I still watch the markets every trading day - though that part of the day has to wait till I’m good and done with the swimming and beach-bumming. 

Two days in, I realised how much I miss my cycle, so we got a friend to drive us to the nearest town, and our two gleaming new bikes are now parked at the entrance to the condominium. This morning, something I read reminded me of a Dire Straits song, and for a self-indulgent minute, I missed the gorgeous new speakers I bought earlier this year.

That moment passed, but set me thinking about how far one could go in trying to reproduce the comforts of home in each holiday setting. The super-rich do it, but what if technology offered another option: stay at home, but for a few hours every day, transport yourself to a different setting in a flash. Where would I go?

In winter, I think I’d be here every dawn, on a beach hazy and grey. A sea without contours, turning to sky in a soft, distant horizon. Waves, frill playing upon frill of froth, soft white lace caressing sands that are still to acquire the colour of day. A lone walker takes shape, we nod. Behind me, the sun emerges, and a tiny wave is lit green as it crests, like Nureyev - “when I reach the highest point – I just pause for a moment.” Now the sun beds are unfolded, parents help infants form mudpies on the wet sand. I ease into a jog, and when I slow, wade into the ocean, and strike out into the long, easy strokes of an aging swimmer’s crawl. 

In summer, it would be a cliff on the northern edge of our globe, the Loophead lighthouse on an Irish promontory, the Atlantic raging below. “Next stop, Newfoundland”, a signboard read, as we drove along a narrow bluff to the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, exquisitely restored by a heritage trust. Dinner over, we turned into our beds. I awoke an hour later, to an intense play of colour in an evening sky. “It’s dusk at ten”, we woke our son, and walked upon the meadow, lifted by the magic of our globe that softly turns into the sun, revelling in the gift of hours of glorious day. 

In autumn, a perch in the Himalayan foothills, warm and snug in the first light of day. Part a curtain, or fold back a tent-flap, to see dew on the grass, trees dark against the grudging light. As subtle as imagination, a silhouette emerges, grey upon a lightening grey. One grey acquires a fringe of pink, another a streak of yellow cloud. The blush spreads, then fades to white. The sky acquires blue, the snows glisten, and etched by craggy features of towering rock, Nanda Devi smiles her unmoving smile, smug above her protective cirque - the veil of Nanda Ghungti, the staff of Trishul, the ramparts of Nanda Kot.

In the monsoons, allow me to walk above the forest of Wan, past the dwarf rhododendrons that edge the treeline, up the final slope to the vast meadows of Bedni Bugyal. Or along the frothing Bhyundar, into the notch of the Valley of Flowers. Pray for the mists to swirl, and the drizzle to ease, for the blinding sunlight of the high mountains in a sky scrubbed clean by rain. For wildflowers that are unrestrained by a gardener's beds, and lammergeiers that are liberated from time and gravity.

Dreaming is free, but till we find the magic of teleporting, I’ll settle for this reality, the coconut fronds brushing each other in the afternoon breeze, the sunbird on the bare branch of the neighbour’s tree, a glimpse of the Sal river, and the coconut barfi that my wife picked up from the church stall after Sunday mass.