Goa in March: Tourist Cutlets and Margao's Nobler Offerings

March is the shoulder season in Goa: the charter plane crowd has thinned and the number of tourists has dwindled a bit since the air has gotten hotter. Yet, it is still lovely in the shade and the sea is calm, unlike in the next few months, when the monsoon will bring rough waves and a dangerous undertow.

While it was probably too hot to be doing anything other than swinging in a hammock on the beach, Misha and I were seized with a desire to do something active. With the help of our fisherman friend, we rented a scooter and rode off to some of the nearby beaches. Palolem, which Misha had remembered as an idyllic strip of sea and sand, where he spent hours reading in his beach hut was now an overdeveloped, overtouristed strip of beach and sand. Despite the said shoulder season, it was filled with white visitors, one gently swaying to the music inside his drug-addled head, another topless (this is not India anymore, Dorothy!), her pink breasts frying in the sun like unbreaded cutlets.

From this cauldron of inauthenticity, we fled to the capital of South Goa, Margao, In this busy provincial town, there were few visitors and many signs of former Portuguese glory and cruelty (upon the Portuguese invasion in the late 15th century, all the Hindu temples were destroyed and Catholic churches built in their place). Transported to some overheated corner of Europe, we took in the blue-painted tiles, glamorous, pastel-colored villas, goggle-eyed idols and imposing, late-Baroque churches. It felt like the last gasp of the once-glorious maritime power, now forced out by the almost uniformly Indian (and increasingly Hindu) presence on the streets.