by Eleanor Wood
Ravi is a man with a slight air of mystery about him. He has a pleasantly battered boxer’s face, with a flattened nose that has clearly been broken more than once. He has a large tattoo on one bicep and a gnarly-looking scar that twists all the way down the other arm. He likes terrible dance music. One day he disappears into town and comes back with a new spiky red-tinted hair do.
‘I think he might be trying to impress you, Ells,’ notes Ann.
Every day, he’ll come and sit on the edge of my sun lounger and chat. His English isn’t great, although he also speaks a smattering of Russian, which is rather impressive. It’s always slightly awkward without Nan and her Urdu skills, so our conversation mostly consists of him asking if I’m OK and me saying yes, thank you, repeatedly. If anyone else comes over to talk to me, usually the water sports guys that I have also got friendly with, who always seem to want to take selfies with me, he hovers and looks menacing until they go away.
He’s always inviting me to come to the beach party with him and I always say no. I never tell him how old I am and I guess he must be working on the common assumption that I am an extremely haggard teenager, because every time, I tell him ‘my grandmother won’t let me’ and make a sad face for good measure. Family pressure seems to be something he understands, as he never hassles me about it. I have to admit, it’s very relaxing having this as a ready-made instant excuse. Nice as Ravi is, I barely feel tempted. I’m too ensconced in my routine of bed before midnight and early morning yoga.
I never make it to any of the beach parties, although I can hear them sometimes from our balcony. I chat about them with a young hipster Russian couple on the beach one day – they have just arrived and want to know what people do for fun around here. When I mention the beach parties, they turn their noses up – it’s all just drugs, they say. They’ve heard the beach parties are ‘terrible’. Then again, they have come via Mumbai, which they keep telling me is ‘a total shithole’. They have found Goa marginally preferable so far, but they’re still not sold. They wish they hadn’t come to India. Next year they think they’ll go to Tulum instead. Of course.
Although I keep turning down his beach party invitations, Ravi is extremely kind to my nan and aunties, which makes me feel very fondly towards him. He cannot do enough for them, hugs them all every time he sees them (while nodding formally at me), and generally goes out of his way to be a good guy. Every day, he asks us if we’re coming back for dinner (which we sometimes do), and if he doesn’t see us for a few days because we’re off travelling, he gets worried.
He doesn’t have a car but he doesn’t like us having to walk home along the beach, so he always gets his friend to give us a lift along the back road back to the hotel, or finds us a tuk-tuk. He helpfully suggests it might be more comfortable if he gave me a lift on the back of his moped, and we meet the others back at the hotel, rather than trying to fit four of us in a tiny tuk-tuk. Every time, my nan shakes her head firmly and insists I cram into the front with the driver.
‘Oh, let her go with him, Dot!’ Ann says. ‘She’s a big girl. You know her mother would be on the back of that moped like a shot – and so would you if you could!’
Ann and I both agree that while Ravi is not exactly attractive per se, there is something interesting about him.
As well as his kindness to old ladies, we are particularly taken with his affection for animals. The ubiquitous dogs that roam the beach are not bothersome and look fairly healthy, but they go largely ignored. Nan is not a fan of them and continually tells me off for getting too close. They can be a bit intimidating because they roam around in large packs and we can hear them howling at night, but they are always friendly. It’s easy to forget they’re there – there is always a dog lying under my sun lounger that I forget about and step on whenever I get up for a swim in the sea. They take it in good humour.
Ravi has adopted one of the stray beach puppies and dotes on her. He has bought a collar for her and christened her Lucy.
‘She is my little darling,’ he tells us.
This battered-looking, tattooed beach dude gets pretty sappy around Lucy the puppy. I don’t blame him. She is very sweet. I spend hours playing with her and Nan tells me off for letting her lick my face.
On our last day, I go down to the beach by myself for a few hours, while the others are packing. It pretty much goes without saying by now that their packing would take about ten times as long as mine. I have shoved all of my belongings into a suitcase, and even with all the hippie tat I have been amassing by the day, there is still room to spare. I’m not sure what the others are doing that takes so long.
So I use the time to have a last swim in the sea, lying on my back with my eyes closed and the sun shining on my face. It’s easy to float in the Arabian Sea and it’s warm as bathwater. It seems impossible to imagine what late January at home is going to feel like in less than twenty-four hours. Ravi brings me a beer and asks where the others are.
‘They’ll be coming down for lunch in a little while,’ I tell him. ‘They’re packing. We’re leaving tonight.’
He makes a sad face. Then he tells me he has a break coming up, and maybe we could go for a walk down the beach together. It’s my last day and Ravi is probably the closest thing I have to an actual friend in India.
‘Sure, why not?’
Ravi grabs two beers from the bar and says something to his boss that I don’t understand. He puts the beers in my bag and we walk down the beach. We walk silently for a little while, and I find I don’t really know what to say to him now we’re alone. Once we’re quite a way down the beach, he starts to veer away from the shoreline, into some scrubby land behind the beach that has the odd shack and cow in it, but no people.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask.
‘I show you a place to stay. If you come back next year. Without the family. I tell my boss I show you.’
He points to a wooden building in the distance.
‘Is that where you live?’
‘No, I live on the beach. Sometimes I go there to sleep. I show you. This way. Not far.’
I’m instantly cross with myself for agreeing to this walk in the first place. I don’t want to wander into the wilderness with this man, or see some dodgy cheap accommodation where he will probably murder me. It’s incredible how quickly I assume that a man’s going to murder me.
‘If I get murdered, please note it was probably Bad Boyfriend,’ I’ve been saying to friends lately, only half joking.
It would be ironic if I came to the other side of the world to ‘find myself’ or whatever, and managed to get myself murdered by an entirely different man in the process.
‘I’d rather not, actually,’ I say out loud. ‘I don’t really need to see any accommodation. I’d like to stay on the beach. My family will be here soon.’
‘OK. Up to you.’
He shrugs, perfectly good-naturedly, and I remember again how kind he has been to my family, and how sweet he is with Lucy. I feel a bit silly for assuming he was a murderer only seconds ago.
We sit down on the edge of the beach in silence. He opens two bottles of Kingfisher with his teeth and lights a filterless cigarette without offering me one. We drink our beers in more silence. I drink mine quickly as I find I’m a bit bored and want to go back as soon as I politely can.
I guess I thought we might become friends, but the atmosphere has turned awkward. Although our previous chats consisted of a lot of nodding and smiling, I felt like we got on quite well. As soon as we got out of sight of his workplace, he seems to have changed.
I try and fail to think of something innocuous to say, just to start any kind of conversation. So I smile and drink my beer.
I don’t even know if I’m surprised or not when he suddenly lunges and kisses me. It’s a fairly chaste closed-mouth kiss that tastes of particularly strong cigarettes and disappointment.
I’m a tiny bit cross with myself – what did I think was going to happen? Still, what a depressing way to ha
ve to think. I don’t want to think this was inevitable. I don’t want to have to assume that all men who are kind to old ladies and animals must have ulterior motives.
After approximately two seconds of modest, closed-mouth kissing, Ravi tries unceremoniously to jam his hand down the front of my dress and bikini top.
I am done with this experience. It makes me realize I’m kind of ready to go home.
‘My grandmother will be wondering where I am,’ I say primly, leaping up and walking back towards the bar.
‘I know, I know … you’re a good girl,’ Ravi sighs.
He doesn’t add ‘but you can’t blame a dude for trying’. He doesn’t need to. I feel mildly fraudulent. He probably thinks I’m a virgin.
When we come back into plain sight, Nan, Rose and Ann have arrived at the bar and are setting themselves up on sun loungers.
‘There she is!’ Nan calls out. ‘Over here, Ells!’
‘Where have you been?’
‘Oh, nowhere.’
Only Ann smiles knowingly.
Present Day
Every day when we’ve been on the beach, Rose has been longingly eyeing up the parasailing going on down at the watersports shack. It’s visible from all around – a bright striped parachute sailing through the sky, attached to a speedboat.
Rose has always loved anything to do with flying – it’s no coincidence that she married a former RAF pilot. During her adventurous younger days, she used to hang out at the Bombay Flying Club. A boy who had a crush on her, trying to impress her, once took her up in a two-seater plane, flying out over the sea and doing a complete loop-the-loop. She adored it. She only found out later that he must have really been trying to impress her, as he didn’t have a full pilot’s licence and was not qualified to take her up alone. As with so many things, even at the age of eighty-eight, Rose still notes she did not tell her mother about this, or she’d have been in trouble.
She loves anything to do with speed and adventure; she has always zoomed around on her own steam, ever since learning to drive when she was in the WACI. She recently took her advanced driving test – she wanted to make sure she was still up to scratch as she drives her grandchildren to and from school each day – and passed with no faults.
Every day, we watch the colourful parachute billowing in the sky and Rose says how she wishes she could go up there. I’d be able to tell she was looking at the parachute even if I couldn’t see it myself, just from the wistful expression in her eyes.
We do some research and – not altogether surprisingly – find that she isn’t able to go parasailing. She’s in pretty good nick, but her mobility isn’t brilliant. More to the point, it’s not covered on her insurance, which was difficult enough to get to start with.
She takes this on the chin but it’s a disappointment. There are some significant downsides to getting older, obviously. It’s rubbish being the person with the most knowledge and experience, and being told that you’re not allowed to do things.
That’s when Rose decides that I should do it instead. Someone’s got to do it, she reasons. We’re not going home missing out on this opportunity entirely.
‘Up, up and away,’ she whispers to me at fairly regular intervals throughout our holiday, just to remind me that this is definitely happening.
She instructs me to find out the price from the watersports boys on the beach, and then she slips me the money. We wait until the last day for me to do it, the others poised to watch me. Nan of course is mildly panicked by the situation and isn’t convinced it’s safe. Ann volunteers to film it on her iPad, while the others find a comfortable bench in full view of the beach.
I go down there first thing in the morning, preparing to get it done. The watersports guys tell me to come back in the afternoon, maybe about two o’clock. That’s when the wind is best for parasailing.
I go away feeling a bit twitchy and anticlimactic. It’s funny, I was never wild on the idea of parasailing before. Now I am anxious to do it. A bit nervous, even though none of the elements involved are things that I am nervous of.
On holidays when I was a teenager, it was always Stepdad and I who would do these sorts of activities together, while my mum and my sister watched from a safe distance. He and I would go jet skiing, water skiing, kayaking, whatever. With him I never once felt nervous about it. I always felt looked after.
I loved having our little gang of two. When time went on, we would go on family skiing holidays where my mum, sister and K would form ‘the spa gang’. They would go and have massages and facials in the hotel spa, or spend the day hanging out and chatting in the steam room, while Stepdad and I went skiing, just me and him and a hipflask.
I can’t dwell on this for too long, but maybe thinking of him doesn’t make me as sad as it used to.
I go off and lie about on the beach for a while, then I go back to the watersports guys in the mid-afternoon. It’s still too early, they tell me, the wind’s not right. Come back maybe at four, five o’clock.
None of these smiley, chatty watersports guys seem to have any sense of urgency about this. They have been good-naturedly hassling me for days to go out on a boat with them or do some sort of sea-based activity. Now that I want to, they don’t seem particularly fussed about whether I actually do or not. I have been out with boys like this.
By about half past four, conditions are apparently OK. The wind has whipped up and is blowing in the right direction. I duly go down onto the beach in my bikini and Ann accompanies me, ready to film the whole great adventure on her iPad. Nan and Rose are watching from a distance. I wave at Rose, wishing she were able to come up with me.
I feel strangely nervous as I am strapped into a life jacket, with loops that will attach to the parasail. Later my mum will watch the video on Ann’s iPad with a raised eyebrow: ‘is it really necessary for five of those boys to help you into that life jacket, Ells?’ It’s possibly excessive. They all seem to be hanging around, and I hope the spectacle of me trying to go parasailing isn’t going to be too amusing. Then an English photographer from Bristol turns up and asks if he can take pictures. As always in India when there is anything going on, a small crowd begins to form, and random strangers take pictures of it all.
I then have to spend a lot of time standing around, while they test the parachute and wait for the speedboat to turn up. We can see it on the horizon; it’s miles away and doesn’t seem to be speeding particularly quickly in our direction. After a while, my nerves turn to boredom, and I’m not sure which is preferable.
Mostly I stand around feeling slightly self-conscious, wishing I had brought my sarong with me. Eventually – thankfully – we’re ready and I am strapped in, attached to the parachute, which is attached to the boat. A man in a Bob Marley T-shirt, whose name I am not told, will be accompanying me up and steering. He’s behind me, so I get the full panoramic view of the coast below.
And so we go up – up, up and away. There’s only a second of frantic running along the beach, like something out of The Flintstones, before my feet leave the ground. We are up there surprisingly quickly and surprisingly high. At first, the wind is rushing in my ears and it feels like we’re moving at the speed of light. Or at least the speed of, like, a fast car or a motorbike or something. I hold onto the ropes while the dude behind me has his bare feet wedged into the middle of my back. It’s surprisingly reassuring.
Once we’re up there, at full stretch with the parachute behind us, everything falls quiet. It’s very, very still. I am never still. I am surprised at how peaceful it is. I am floating silently.
We can see for miles and the sun is just starting to set beyond us. I feel very, very high up. My friend behind me points out a shoal of black fish, hundreds of them in formation.
It feels like meditating. Or, rather, it feels like I wish meditating felt. I am very bad at meditating. My brain being this quiet is a rare occurrence. It feels like we’re up there for hours, but it’s only a few minutes.
I never want it to end
. I marvel at how liberating it feels for everything to have fallen away. Money problems, boys, existential angst … how much does any of it really matter, anyway? I feel fully myself, up here. I feel, as they like to say, like enough.
And it’s long enough, I realize. I can’t stay up there forever; it has to end eventually. I will have to return to my real life. But it’s OK. I’ve had some time and things have got better. I can take this feeling with me. I am ready.
While we are still all the way up there, above India, I do a little salute to Rose. A literal salute. She can’t see me from all the way down there but I do it anyway.
Present Day
When we organized this trip, I anticipated it would be a great and interesting experience, but – to be perfectly honest – I expected to have had enough of being around family and to be ready to come home by the end of it. I am fairly used to living alone by now and my tolerance levels are not notably high. I’m quite set in my ways by this point.
However, now the end is upon us, I could honestly stay longer. I’m not sick of sharing a room with my nan; in fact, I’m genuinely going to miss it. Of course, I’m going to miss doing yoga every morning and having my breakfast made for me and generally living in this luxurious manner, but most of all I am going to miss hanging out with these incredible women every day. I am going to miss them terribly. Even as Nan and Rose inexplicably take around six hundred hours to pack their suitcases, long after Ann and I have finished doing ours and are hanging out on the balcony, drinking coffee and waiting for them – I will miss all of this.
Of course, on our last day in India, everything takes on a predictable but special significance. Packing up our stuff feels a bit sad. We have got used to living in these rooms. We have got used to our routine. It’s a really fucking nice routine.