A HOUSE IN GOA

By HETA PANDIT on May 03, 2014

For those of us who believe it, everything in life is pre-ordained. Why else would I have been caught in the 1993 communal riots in Mumbai, been terrified of being asked if I was Hindu or Muslim (I am neither and I am both) from that year onwards and decide to move out of Mumbai supposedly never to return? “The personality of the metropolis has changed,” I told my friends and family when I left. “I am going to a place where I can be closer to nature,” I told them, “away from the bestial expressions of the building burning and decapitating desires of men and women. 

After years of allowing destiny to lead me by the hand (and head) I thought I was the mistress of my own destiny finally. How wrong one can be. A year and a half after being close to nature in the tea gardens of Munnar, Kerala, I found myself upside-down on its precipitous mountain tracks, hit by a jeep packed to the floorboards with people, a goat and a few sacks of tamarind. My motorcycle made it without so much as a scratch but I had to undergo surgery, have a bag strapped on my leg to collect fluid and bear the scars of 24 stitches (I was sewn up with ordinary black sewing thread in India’s best industrial hospital, if you please) for the rest of my life.

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