GOA

St Francis Xavier's preserved foot
The third component arrives in the shape of one Hannah Williams, and finally our journey and plans of almost two years are complete.

We plunge head first into the tourist trail by holidaying on a Goan beach. Ibethan style tourism at its worst, but still we enjoy the forgotton pleasures of cocktails, beach lazing and dolphin boat rides. The great mystery of the moral landscape of beaches means we are free to expose more skin to the sun without unwanted attention.

Inside though, we are a little confused-is this real India? Are we just escaping to a tourist bubble land? Or is there no such thing as 'real' India? Maybe the search for the 'authentic' is a negation of a modern India where the tourist trade is every bit just as 'real' as village life...For many tourist touts, rickshaw drivers and shop owners, the tourist trade is a life line, but one that only exists for a few months each year as the monsoon drives most people away. In four months enough money must be made to last the year...I try to allow this sympathy to curb my frustrated anger the next time we are hassled by tourist touts or fleeced by a rickshaw driver...

Panaji, the Goan capital is India flavoured by its colonial Porteugeuse past.

Hispanic sounds amidst cobbled quarters and Catholic culture. But it is an Indianised Catholicism, shoes are taken off to enter churches, historically Dalits (the 'Untouchable' caste) were built separate churches, and Jesus is often found on street corners-little icons covered in the same flower wreaths as used in Hindu worship. Paper stars abound-hanging from every window for the Christmas season we had forgotton. We take a walking tour of the town and see an affluence and Mediterranean architecture unknown to other parts of India.

Only with the arrival of Hannah do we realise how far a journey our eating habbits have been on too. The space we have covered on land, is reflected in the subtle distance we have lost to our food.

Cutlery are tools of seperation from food- we are able to sit back, cutting from afar with long sterile implements. In China we were suddenly made accutely aware of this distance-chopsticks cannot be used whilst sitting back from the table. Despite its long elegance, the chopstick demands a closeness to food. You have to lean your face over your food and use it as a kind of shovelling tool. It wasn't long before we joined in with the added slurps and smacks that complete the Chinese eating experience. Then in Pakistan, we edged even closer to our food...implements gone, replaced by the chappatti. At every meal a chappatti is used to pick up the rice or vegetables, it becomes an edible spoon. And then in India, all pretense of separation was gone. Our hands become our eating tools as rice is mashed in with Dal or sauce with our fingers. Scooping up a small clump on the edge of your fingers, the thumb is used to push the rice mix into your mouth. And at all times,the left hand (normally used for less hygienic acts like washing your bottom after the toilet instead of using toilet roll) remains firmly out of sight on your lap. This intimacy with food actually makes it taste better for some unknown reason and is a more humble way of eating-no pretensions of 'civilsation'. But sometimes, in more expensive restaurants, we found ourselves the only ones eating with our fingers amongst Indians. It seems there is a class system at work amidst food, the higher castes do not generally eat with their fingers. Whatever the setting though, our eating habbits come under close scrutiny no matter where we are, sometimes attracting unabashed staring groups of people, bemused, amused, confused or dissaproving of our finger techniques. Our refusal to eat the chappatti first on its own, and instead subverting tradition by eating it rolled up with rice, has often caused direct intervention on trains...'No madam...chappatti, chappatti!". But we are free to laugh and turn this confusion and inept cultural behaviour into a source of amusement for ourselves and those around us. Yet when Ghandi, and countless other young Indian's came to England to study, their cultural experience of food was one filled with terror and shame. Unable to use cutlery, and too mortifyingly embarressed to ask, Gandi remained locked his room, eating only crackers.

Old Goa is a riverside graveyard of forgotton churches....the ghosts of colonialism past now filled with foreign faces, but this time as curious tourists.

The churches are huge and filled with an eerie sense of abandonment. The battle against termites and the inevitable crumbling of time feels rather futile and limited, giving once imposing buildings an ephemeral and almost ridiculous presence.

In the 'Basilica de Bom Jesus' are the preserved remains of St Francis Xavier, displayed for pilgrims to worship in a glass casket. The story of the body is rather bizarre and grizzly...first buried on an island off the mainland of China, it was dug up a year later and found to be miraculously preserved. It was then moved to Malacca, before dug up again and shipped to Goa. His right forearm was later detached and is now displayed in a church in Rome. Once a year it is paraded through the streets for a festival.

Down by the river we find an empty old church, sunlight drifting through windows high, silent stone cool against the day's heat.

And only in this empty silence can a taste of that mysterious 'something else' be savoured...and we sit to savour that presence that is too often absent. We sit and we sing, our voices curving into the echoeing high ceilings. A local woman in old, tired sari stops to sit and listen. And together we all hold a moments breath for that silence after singing, the presence of a deeper, richer sound...

Stop your singing!

Stop, because,

as I heard it,

I heard also

another voice

coming from the interstices

of the gentle enchantment

which your singing

brought unto us.

I heard you,

and I heard it,

at the same time

and different,

singing together.

And the melody

which was not there,

if I well remember

makes me cry.

Your voice:

was it an enchantment which,

unwillingly,

in this vague moment

woke up

a certain being,

to us a stranger,

which spoke to us?

I don't know.

Don't sing.

Let me hear

the silence

that there is

after your singing.

Oh! Nothing, nothing!

Only the sorrow

for having heard,

for having wished to hear,

beyond the meaning a voice has.

Which angel, as you spoke,

without your knowledge

came down to earth

where the soul wanders

and with his wings

blew the embers

of an unknown home?

Stop your singing!

I wish the silence

to put to sleep

the memory

of the voice I heard,

misunderstood,

which was lost

as I heard it

(Fernando Pessoa)