Shoes. What are they good for? Absolutely nothing. Well, maybe for getting across Goa’s baking beaches without frying the soles of your feet.
And for negotiating the not exactly smooth streets — there are no pavements — on rare forays to restaurants, bars and shops that are not a wobbly frisbee throw off the warm, welcoming Arabian Sea. Once seated, the first thing you do is return your feet to their natural naked state.
By shoes we mean flip-flops or sandals. No-one would think of wearing anything fitted with uppers and laces. Socks? Don’t be silly.
The air is invariably north of 30°C, and the humidity could make sandpaper sweat. Besides, who doesn’t prefer their feet bare?
That said, a pale, pigtailed woman was out there one sticky night in socks and sandals. Was she stupid? Who knows. But, when she spoke to a fellow traveller, we did know she was German.
So she might not have recognised the ritual observed on the firm, wet sand near the shoreline as every searing day gave way to a scarcely cooler evening. Its devotees were silhouetted against the setting sun, the calm sky and the gently ruffled water.
They arrived carrying a properly or roughly hewn bat and a tennis ball. Something — a cardboard box, three more or less straight sticks, an oblongish piece of driftwood — would be found to serve as stumps. A guesstimation of the length of a pitch would be made, and sticks used to draw the creases.
Then the cricket would start. It would continue after the sun had melted into the sea, long after the light had gone, and an age after the players could be bothered to count runs or wickets.
There’s magic afoot here, as anyone who has played this kind of cricket — on a beach, in a backyard or a park, on a quiet street — could attest.
Sight of the ball is not required. You know where it is and will soon be by the chalky smudge of a bowler’s arm against the blackboard of night and the slightest low-lit rumour of the stroke played. But, mostly, you just know where the ball is. Call it faith.
Some Goans don’t have even a mustard seed of the stuff. Eight Finger Eddie didn’t. “People want to believe,” Eddie said weeks before he turned 86 on March 8 2010. “I’m telling them, ‘There’s nothing to believe, man.’ The best thing is to be completely disillusioned. With everything. With everybody. Be completely hopeless.”
Eddie was born Yertward Mazamanian, apparently in Boston, Massachusetts, to Armenian parents from Istanbul. One day circa 1964, he wandered over a hill and into Colva, a village in the Salcete district of south Goa. By then he had married and divorced, consumed vast quantities of drugs, played bass in a slew of jazz bands, lived in Southern California, Mexico and Denmark, and travelled through Spain, Morocco, Iran, Nepal and other parts of India.
He remained in Goa, moving 50km northward along the coast from Colva to Anjuna. There he established a soup kitchen and basic accommodation — both at no charge — catering to the growing number of hippies who dropped in to tune out of the world by getting high and dancing on the beach wearing only hashish pipes strung around their waists. Later Eddie organised a flea market where money was useless. Everything was bartered.
Soon people who called themselves things like Junky Robert, Hollywood Peter and Trumpet Steve appeared and, like Eddie, never left.
“I was the first freak in Goa,” Eddie said. “I turned up and liked it so much I just wanted to stay.”
He died in Goa on October 18 2010. But he’s still on YouTube, as thin as a stick insect and aiming a face at the camera that’s so wrinkled it looks like an animated Transkei donga.
Good thing he went before September 2018, when the Goa Brewing Company launched Eight Finger Eddie IPA. His dudgeon at being exploited by The Man would have been higher than he was.
Yes, he did have only eight fingers. He was born without a ring finger and pinkie on his right hand. Did he play beach cricket in Goa? We don’t know. There were no scorers, and even if there were they would have been too stoned to notice.
Eddie’s Goa isn’t there anymore. The hippies have been replaced by tourists, many of them white Western women in search of the Eat Pray Love yoga experience. Retreats offering teacher training courses in the ancient practice are everywhere, along with dodgier-than-thou-looking Russians and Israelis fleeing who knows what.
You can tell the foreigners who have made the place home by the fact that — like the locals — they load their entire families onto a single scooter.
Drugs still abound, but these days they’re more likely to be cocaine or ecstasy than dear old weed or hash. The hopelessly hopeful songs the hippies played have been usurped by the sound of shattering glass called trance music that on some beaches is aimed at you, at an ear-ripping volume, from giant speakers before 10am. Taking a quiet walk alongside the waves requires local knowledge.
The hopelessly hopeful songs the hippies played have been usurped by the sound of shattering glass called trance music
“The beaches are full of shacks,” our host had told us. If she had said that about Camps Bay, every police officer in Cape Town would have been sent there in fast cars and on foot. In Goa, a shack is a beach bar. They are indeed everywhere.
Find a table at one that’s to your liking; leave everything there — phones, cameras, cash — throw yourself into the ocean, return after an hour or so to find your belongings as you left them, order a beer and a fish curry, and wait for the daily cricket ritual to start.
Indians tolerate the outsiders and their weird ways because tourism accounts for almost 17% of the state’s economy and supports 35% of the locals. Most of the visitors cluster around the coastal areas, where the legacy of the Portuguese colonisation that endured from 1510 to 1961 can be seen in the curved terracotta roof tiles, the abundance of pork on restaurant menus, and the many Catholic churches and schools.
Inland villages are sprinkled with sacred groves in secret forests where gods many Indians would not know of are worshipped. This is where wealthy Hindu families live or holiday in once grand, now decaying, mansions. No pork there.
The closest Goa gets to a metropolis is Panjim in the north. Its population of around 100,000 is more than 300 times smaller than Delhi’s 30.3-million. India’s capital is one of 79 cities in the country where more than a million people live.
On December 19 1961, Operation Vijay ended with the Indian military annexing Goa. Fifty-two people died during 36 hours of land, sea and air strikes. Not all Goans, particularly among the upper Hindu castes, were happy about the change. They still aren’t. “Goa wasn’t liberated,” they say. “It was invaded.”
Maybe the Indian government was after the iron ore that has been mined in Goa since the 18th century. The rich red ore is extracted from massive open-cast mines, far from the beaches, that look like bloody gashes hacked into the body of the earth.
Goa has at least one notable South African resident: Jonty Rhodes and his family spend several months of the year in Agonda in the south of Goa. While there, Rhodes surfs and travels to other parts of India to coach and speak at events. His wife, Melanie Wolf, is a yoga and meditation teacher. Their daughter, born in Mumbai in April 2015, is named India.
Does he play beach cricket? “Yeah,” Rhodes tells the FM. “It usually starts with my kids and their friends, and then guys walking past just stop and join.”
Not all sport played on Goa’s beaches is cricket, and not all cricket in Goa is played on the beach as a sundowner. Sometimes it explodes in a jungle clearing at lunchtime. Also, not all Goan cricket is casual.
On a random Thursday in March, 24 matches were staged at grounds between 19km and 89km from our accommodation. Innings ranged from five to six, 10, 17, 18, 20 and 45 allotted overs.
Shoes, even socks, not to mention pads, batting gloves and helmets, were worn.
