Goa

No state arrived in my imagination more thoroughly pre-packaged than Goa. I had seen it a thousand times before I saw it once, the film songs shot on its beaches, the college trip photographs, the sunburnt clichés. Goa was where the rest of India went to be briefly unlike itself, and I nearly treated it that way: three days, two beaches, one sunset, next state. What changed my mind was the train. The Konkan Railway from the south is among the most beautiful lines in the country, an engineering feat of the 1990s that stitched the west coast together through nearly a hundred tunnels and two thousand bridges, and somewhere after Karwar, as we crossed a river estuary with fishing canoes arranged on it like punctuation, an elderly Goan gentleman across from me asked how long I was staying. Three days, I said. He looked at me the way teachers look at promising students with bad study plans. 'Three days is enough for the Goa in the photos,' he said. 'The real one needs you to slow down. We have a word for it, susegad. Not lazy. Content. There is a difference, and it takes more than three days to learn it.' I stayed twelve.