Peyton Place revisited is how a noted editor named the social life of Goa, referring to the America bestseller of the fifties, a book about bitchiness. And, of course, the narrow provincialism exists as an undertow. But there is broader depth asserting itself. There is a conscious clinging to Beauty, not as a derivative but as an absolute. And here there is still room for the solitary from which all divergences  arise. There could be distinction in the future, not especially Goan, but a shining in what is called India, writes HELENA JOSHEE.

 PERHAPS, everything is a symbol. No thing exists entirely singular and independent in meaning. Everything is something other than itself. Everything is constantly sliding away, without stay. Nothing is certain, nothing is static. The fact that the world seems to be the same each day, hard-edged and solid, is probably a matter of habit.

 Entering the new, one remains in the shadows for a while, shadowy to oneself and to others, an almost blessed state of uncertainty. There are three images which, however, stand out.

 A black furry spider on a pile of books, killed on the instant, simply because it looks too much like a tarantula. A long, pale worm squashed underfoot in tandem with the thought: this looks like the nematode; life beginning its adventure with form. The nematode and I are linked by the long chain of existence. Dread of the thought, the shapeless squiggle on the floor brings the foot down, the form reduced to even more uncertainty, a squashed mess.

 And, third, a moth mad for the light. Six inches the wing span, colour a deep orange, scarlet circles on each wing, so beautiful to see. But its place is not indoors, not here in the room with me. Impossible to murder this moth! Knock it out and place it in the night. It may revive by and by, resume its craze for light in the night. Three signs of a beginning.

 Spider, worm, and moth are, perhaps, symbolic. But they also speak for Goa, where the morphology of life has not been entirely obliterated by people, machines, the  riot to produce and consume, not yet. There is expanse of Time and Space here; the unsuspected, the dread, the marvellous. The marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvellous is beautiful. Nothing but the marvellous is beautiful —— this feeling surfaces from the First Surrealist Manifesto set down by Andre Breton a century ago. And, one might add, what is not marvellous? One forgets, though, in an urban sprawl..

 Nature insinuating herself in wave and curved line draws human beings from across India, and from across the planet, to Goa. Why else would they come! Not the tourist, here today and gone tomorrow, but a small leisured class spread thinly over the extent of Goa, not an aristocracy, not relics of a past, and whose meaning does not derive from the individuals themselves but from the structures to which they give expression and which they uphold. Those structures have to do with culture that include, but also reach beyond, the indigenous.

 It is a small class with means and leisure. Such as is usually necessary to effect and discern transformations of style and form, as well as provide the appreciation for new cultural soundings. This, it seems to me, in Goa is likely to happen. And although Goa is not like the South of France, it certainly does suggest that Riviera in which a century ago the great ideas of 20th century civilisation emanated, where writers and artists, musicians and dancers struck as much by the marvel of each other as by the beauty of shoreline, tree and wave were drawn, as a moth is to light. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes gave voice there to the literary ferment that would shape twentieth century literature. Jazz broke free of  the USA there, surrealism was born. There was menace and absurdity, the tarantula and the worm. But also Beauty and Art.

 Goa too seems to provide the atmosphere of freedom, the  space for cultural appreciation and bold creativity to breed side by side. Menace often brings out creative forces. The menace in the last century was a world war that was ending, and another which was about to begin. The menace today is the crazed rush for gain, the raging need to enjoy, and the destruction which attends both —— of forest and tree, of human sensibility, of life; death of water courses, whoever heard of the mortality of a lake before this loony age, post-modern or not, that is upon us.

 So  Goa is, in this time, where some people are drawn to live. There are no fixed demarcations between those born and bred in this pleasing place and the others, but listening in on the influx one picks up a wide range of clues of the global dysfunctions, and configurations, which even the ones with ancestral home and field are becoming privy to.

 For one, nothing is particular anymore. Everything has elements of everything else. Nothing can be discovered as discrete and defined any more. The nematode worm is linked to us by an existential coda. Who made it all? —— one is tempted to say: who cares! Nothing is separate, that seems to be the fact of the matter, and the basis of matter, leaving aside the question of whether matter exists as such or is energy. And so it was that on a lovely October night, in the grounds of a Portuguese-era mansion, one had the peculiar feeling of entering many worlds at one time and of being a little dazed.

 There is the world of the old aristocracy. The garden was strung with lights that express the need for glittering exuberance of the growing class of noveau riche in India. This was going to be the setting for a jazz concert, a fusion of Eastern meditative mutations and western tastes in tempo and sound. There was time to linger and stroll, get sand in ones sandals, take stock of the people wandering, aperitif in hand,  in search of tables, or to stand by and await the artists.

 There was time to stroll into the mansion, admire the floor patterns, stand by the entrance of an in-house private chapel, look at some hybrid hot-house lilies, take in the ancestors on the walls, read the recorded lineage, look at the wedding photographs of times past, the gewgaws of nineteenth century European taste, and  contemporary paintings put on  display designed to give a modern apartment chic.

 Then the concert began. Ancient India was there with brow-mark, flowing tunic,  glistening, wavy hair, bronze skin of the artist. He carried a saxophone. The raga was the beautiful Hamsadvani : The Song of the Swan — not the end of things as in the Western cultural context, but a song of the ascent to freedom, the Hamsa in the Upanisadic teachings being a symbol for enlightenment. It separates not wheat from chaff — that’s easy! — but milk from water. Essence from the mundane flux.

 It was music that was lovely, ancient, bringing into the garden the wisdom of seers who had it that  Reality was ineffable, other than a world seen and described. But the beat was modern and Western. The saxophone, most familiar as an instrument for the pacing and pitch of American jazz, the swift, the pulsing tenure of the world, with its wail for the fleetingness of human feelings. The performance was world class. The audience entirely riveted by  virtuoso performers on saxophone, violin and Indian percussion. And at a table in the garden sat a calm, greying man, receptive to the rhythms of the night. Having spent three decades in the suave capitals of Europe, back  home again not in his native North India, but in Goa,  musing on the near inevitability of a revolution in the land for the pressure of need of the less-lucky in society was too urgent to contain. And in the crowd drifting around the midnight musicians, a lanky young man tells of getting a degree in legal sociology from Barcelona, doing research on the legal systems of Goa with their colonial overtone, and of his ambition to join a global bureaucracy, do something, somewhere, possibly in Latin America!

 So, this is Goa, mildly Proustian.  The old Christian aristocrats banding together, keeping tight watch on manners, and on each other, on morals that are slipping, they say, mores giving way to the new  from the West that is coming in with its need for the organic, the contemplative, the gradual, ironically striving  for the dimension free of time and space with quick-fix highs.

 I sit by the window at dawn. The ladies soon appear to gather red hibiscus for the worship of the morning. Watering the shrubs after plucking the flowers, weeding and pruning, picking out the dead leaves and aborted blooms, in the garden before  the puja, when bells chime sporadically throughout the building set in a terraced garden, announcing the offerings to the Divine. There are wildflowers of the hills cultivated in the garden among the roses, lilies, jasmine and hibiscus. And just within range of the eye, the Mandovi flows into the deep grey sea.

 What does it all mean? -- a post-structuralist set-up here in Goa? Where formality of the act, and the actor, do not count as much as the meanings hidden  in the interstices?

 In Saligao, in the home of a marketing man from Milan, an old Goan house tucked away in the grid of narrow country alleys, the gracefulness of a North Italian country house holds sway. The patio has grass elegantly showing through the flagstones. Mauve trumpet –flowers climb on the trellis. There is the cool glow of highly polished floors,  and the warmth of terracotta and porcelain, wood gleaming in table and chair. The lunch is quiet and excellent. The talk is of the best of Italy. The subtlety and mystery of modern Italian literature in the works of Dino Buzzati, Italo Svevo, Carlo Levi, and, of course, Calvino. And this is Goa, with cowdung in the alley behind the garden wall,  a setting of ruined houses and matted orchards whose owners have emigrated who knows where, and will not return.

 Frogs at dusk fly from the garden outside through the open windows, or hop in from the front door into the parlour. The French are also here, along with the Italians, the Germans, Russians, Israelis, English, and a  strewing of Americans. New mood shifts come in with the strangers. The frogs get a drubbing, broom-driven into the garden. India’s affluents also pick out Goa, wanting greenness of hills, grove and field, and the greyness of sea to live by.

 The modern face of  India is also in Goa, and so there is a brave and spirited attempt to keep Goa itself, with the Portuguese statements of three centuries preserved in stone and sentiment. And yet there is something else, not new but alive: a sort of leisure that could be the best ground for the creative to take form. A reputed journalist from New Delhi has come to write  his novel here, looking down on a sea of foliage from an apartment on the central hill of the capital.

 The rough and ready is no doubt here too. Suspicious deaths, petty larcenies, raised tempers and brawls which all the newspapers of the world consume and egurgitate. The young, it seems,  are unruly, headstrong, and their clothing hangs loose, or looks shrunken, and that’s in keeping with the rest of the world.

 There is sex, of course. The smaller cafes in the towns display nutbrown Lolitas dining quietly with grandfatherly men from colder climes. But if there is willingness in the air, who is to complain!

 A series on the Blues, produced by one of the most striking filmmakers of urban America —— Martin Scorcese, is being shown at an old and stolid club in the capital. People come, people go, not to talk of Michelangelo, or the blues, but to languidly order a drink, or to dine. A bearded, curly-haired man of Konkan rescension, but straight out of Philadelphia, is the host of the series. He came up with a software solution to the millennium transition and then chose to sit in Goa with the proceeds to make a film on a Chinese myth with the most sophisticated animation technology available to the world.

 This seems to me to be the way for those choosing to live, in Goa. Sri Aurobindo, famed sage, dreamed of it. Even before India shook off the British, he talked of a cultural renaissance and wrote a charming little book on the need to carry the ancient promise forth to the new. But Pondicherry failed to provide it, Goa may.

 There is no art in the manic, which may be a prelude but can never be the end. Yes, the frenzy of the metros may generate realism, counter-realism, satire, farce, and, at worst, repetitive sit-coms. But a true work of art needs leisure, and a leisured class to support it. Critics must arise along with the art. There will be follies and debacles, and a a tendency to indolence may have to be overcome, but a trend and a movement could emerge here, making an art and literature that is Indian in the grand sense. There are attempts to foster awareness of a Goan identity  distinct from the rest of India. But leave alone India, the rest of the world is busy assimilating Goa. So, whatever comes to pass is hardly going to be provincial, or merely national.

 To come back to the three signs of the beginning. The tarantula? Yes, the tabletalk of communalism, saffron-isation, evangelism may never get too far afield. Businessmen gibe about infrastructural failures but they want their wives and children to live graciously in Goa. It wouldn’t be Goa if trains, and the mechanics of in dustry, ran on time.

 The nematode, slimy and shapeless as it is, perhaps, is what all the world seeks through post—modern, structuralist, industrial, etcetera labels. It exists in Goa, where the paddy is put to dry by farmers on the tarmac to catch the heat of the road below, as well as the sun above. There is an organic link with nature. Field mice must be assuaged, not killed. Serpents suffered, and frogs played out with a broom, when they come indoors, not sprayed with insecticide killers, or squashed. There are ugly buildings and the beginnings of urban sprawl, plateglass, and  malls, but those who really crave the world’s metros go there. The Goan turned on by field and sea remains.

 And the magnificent moth with scarlet circles mad for the light —— the inpouring, it is probable, of something new and different which could generate a new style, truly global, if you wish to call it that. North Italian calm gracefulness captured in a Goan village – it works for those who want it.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The author is a veteran journalist who has returned to her roots after several decades abroad.