The Dragonriders of Pern

Shlayma’s Birthday Weekend
Arambol, Goa
April 4^th-7^th, 2008

The font was larger than I remembered, the binding cheap, and the type falling off the right-hand side of the page. The cover was burgundy instead of green, but soft and pliable from repeated readings on the beach. I felt distinctly as if I were meeting on old friend, but one I had always been a little reluctant to let other kids see me playing with. This book, I later hypothesized, was a large part of the reason I was able to be happy during the mythically tortuous period known as ‘middle school,’ while my class was divided into social straight-jacket strength cliques, and my own clique routinely kicked out one friend for rotating periods of time. I picked up the novel, turned it over, and slipped it back into the English section of the chest-height bookshelf, paying more attention to the long wooden table than I did to the rows of titles that had to be compressed to re-accommodate their recent neighbor. I slipped my flip-flops back on my feet and sauntered across the restaurant, folded my newly-tanned limbs across the polished wood, and ordered a cheese platter and a green salad with vinaigrette.

We left India before we left Hyderabad. To be precise, we left India when we pulled up to the new airport, over an hour outside our bustling city. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport was built with a private-public partnership, completed on its 10-month construction schedule, and – along with a sister project near Bangalore – is the first ‘world class’ airport in India. It is meant to raise profiles, to welcome business, to grease palms for investment and infrastructure. Steel and glass sit in a wave across the recently empty plain, palm trees with branches still bound by string lining the driveways of fresh cement and drying paint. The stiff, warm breeze on the open runway whipped our clothes in circles around our bodies, and gave us a loving hug goodbye. One and a half hours later, we landed in Goa.

Goa is a former Portuguese colony, a tiny state south of the middle of the west coast of India and dwarfed by its neighbors, Maharashtra and Karnataka. It seems to consist mostly of beaches, populated mostly by half-naked Europeans enjoying the sparkling ocean waves, cheap hippie paraphernalia, and easy-access drug culture. In a pseudo-new wave (you know, man, you can just be free here) way, Goa feels very colonial; the local people are treated more like a resource (cheap labor for European-owned restaurants, a ‘friend’ to go home from the night market with) than as human beings, and any concept of a ‘local culture’ is quickly drowned in images of transplanted backpackers who arrived a decade ago and never left. The pizza, however, was superb, and the ‘pancakes’ were actually delicious crepes filled with stunningly fresh fruit.

The ocean waves leapt up to greet us the moment we minced across the hot sand from our dirt-cheap huts made of woven bamboo and draped with pink mosquito netting. The receding tide buried our toes in the wet sand that marked the momentary edge of the Arabian Sea, and the foam flicked into our faces, teasing. The water was warm, and it pulled and pushed at our meandering limbs until we internalized the pattern and floated up or dove beneath with each creaking crest. I didn’t take a shower in the afternoon because I knew that the most precious time with the ocean would be sunset, that swimming out towards eternity would be blissful, and that if I didn’t show up, she might not call back for a second date. The last few moments when the burning ball is still visible seemed to run in high-speed, but the colors – the blue-gray of the water solid steel and woven with thick silk ribbons of orange and pink, a few threads of gold – lingered as I pushed my newly resuscitated Spanish and introduced myself in Hindi to smiles emerging from nearby waves.

We sat on beach chairs, and I read. I read at the lunch table, over pasta with prawns, and on the porch of our huts with the bamboo walls. We walked on meandering paths, and passed whole stretches that didn’t contain clothes made out of recycled Indian cloth that very few Indians would ever wear. We dipped in a fresh-water pond a hundred yards across, but only a few meters deep, and I read on the shore. I re-entered a world that I have rarely articulated but frequently inhabited, and I smiled at the horizon because it was there, cutting a clean line across the back of the page, to share my secrets.

We carried wine and candles and brown bread to the sand and counted the cabaret stars when the curtains pulled back and the sky showed off her new tattoos. We sang with the waves, and sometimes against them, and cupped our hands around the sputtering flames and sanctified a day of rest and a weekend away. We ended the vacation the same way – but instead of weekly candles there were yearly candles for Shlayma’s 25^th, and instead of bread to be blessed there was chocolate cake to be cut. By the time we were crammed into a cab meandering towards the airport we had bathed in pools of relief, washed away hours of air conditioning and plasticized wooden desks, replaced it all with mouthfuls of saltwater and the permeating smell of sunscreen left to melt off reddening thighs and shimmering shoulders.

And as I leaned into a pile of women and let the road whip my hair into a massive knot behind my face, I thought of the last time I dipped into the Indian Ocean. I thought of the white sand beaches of Zanzibar, the Beach Boys we had gone there to talk to (we missed our appointment with the local AIDS activist), the little resort we stopped by and the relief of the water against our skin as I dipped blonde dreadlocks into the salt and stared intently out towards what I imagined, eventually, would take me to India. And on the eastern shore of the same body of water (its always the same body, with water) I had looked back, towards Zanzibar, or maybe towards the San Juans or Pemaquid Point or the Mediterranean (it all goes in a circle, so you’re always looking in the direction of any or everything, I imagine), and I sang (out of tune) and danced (against the water, this time) and smiled.

This post was brought to you by the novel Dragonflight, written by Anne McCaffrey, and first given to me by my cousin Ann.