There was a table and two chairs, a bed with a bare rubber mattress, and a metal rack for hanging clothes. A large matka was filled with clean water. He announced, with pride, that the water had been drawn that day from a local well. There was a bottle of coconut feni on the table, with two glasses. Assuring me that the bike and I would be safe there, because it was known by all in the area to be his house, Dashrant handed me the key to the door's chain and padlock, and told me to stay until I found my girl. Winking a smile at me, he left. I heard him singing as he walked back between the slender palms to his restaurant.
I pulled the bike in against the hut, and tied a length of cord from it to the leg of the bed, covering it with sand. I hoped that if someone tried to steal the bike, the movement would wake me. Exhausted and disappointed, I fell onto the bed and was asleep in seconds. It was a nourishing, dreamless sleep, but I woke after four hours, and I was too alert, too restless, to find sleep again. I pulled my boots on, took a can of water, and visited the toilet at the back of the hut. Like many toilets in Goa, it was nothing more than a smooth, steep slope behind the squatting keyhole. Waste matter rolled down the slope to a narrow lane. Wild, hairy, black Goan pigs roamed the lanes, eating the waste. As I walked back to the house to wash my hands, I saw a herd of the black swine trotting along the lane. It was an efficient and environmentally benign method of waste disposal, but the sight of those pigs, feasting, was an eloquent argument in favor of vegetarianism.
I walked down to the beach, only fifty paces from Dashrant's hut, and sat on the dunes to smoke a cigarette. It was close to midnight, and the beach was deserted. The moon, almost full, was pinned like a medal to the chest of the sky. A medal for what? I thought. Wounded in action, maybe. A Purple Heart. Moonlight rushed with every rolling wave to the shore, as if the light itself was pulling the waves, as if the great net of silver light cast by the moon had gathered up the whole of the sea, and was hauling it to the shore, wave by wave.
A woman approached me, carrying a basket on her head. Her hips rolled and swayed in time to the running wavelets that lapped at her feet. She turned from the sea toward me and dropped the basket at my feet, squatting to look into my eyes. She was a watermelon seller, about thirty-five years old, and clearly familiar with tourists and their ways. Chewing forcefully on a mouthful of betel nut, she gestured with an open palm toward the half watermelon that remained in her large basket. It was very late for her to be on the beach. I guessed that she'd been baby sitting, or nursing a relative, and was returning home. When she saw me sitting alone, she'd hoped for one lucky-last sale for the night.
I told her, in Marathi, that I would be glad to buy a slice of melon. She reacted with happy surprise and, when the routine questions about where and how I'd learned Marathi were resolved, she cut me a generous slice. I ate the delicious sweet kalinga, spitting the seeds onto the sand. She watched me eat, and tried to resist when I forced a note rather than a coin into her basket. As she rose, lifting the basket to her head, I began to sing an old, sad, and much-loved song from a Hindi movie.
Ye doonia, ye mehfil Mere ham, ki nahi...
All the world, all its people Mean nothing to me...
She yelped in appreciation, and danced a few slick moves before walking away slowly along the beach.
"This is why I like you, you know," Karla said, sitting down beside me in one quick, graceful movement. The sound of her voice and the sight of her face pulled all the air from my lungs, and set my heart thumping. So much had happened since the last time I'd seen her, the first time we'd made love, that a fevered squall of emotion stung my eyes. If I'd been a different man, a better man, I would've cried. And who knows, it might've made the difference.
"I thought you didn't believe in love," I answered, straining against my feelings, and determined not to let her know the effect that she had on me, the power she had over me.
"What do you mean, _love?"
"I... I thought that's what you were talking about."
"No, I said that's why I like you," she said, laughing and looking up at the moon. "But I do believe in love. Everyone believes in love."
"I'm not so sure. I think a lot of people have stopped believing in love."
"People haven't stopped believing in love. They haven't stopped wanting to be in love. They just don't believe in a happy ending anymore. They still believe in love, and falling in love, but they know now that... they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin."
"I thought you hated love. Isn't that what you said, at the Village in the Sky?"
"I do hate love, just like I hate hate. But that doesn't mean I don't believe in them."
