March 11, 2022 | Leave a comment Turns out February is a 28-day scam and a sixth of 2022 is already defunct and I want my money back. My emotions are rolling and coasting thanks for asking. The country I trusted through the vicissitudes of a pandemic and whose economy I contributed to with my life savings for two years invoices me a cordial sixty two thousand twenty rupees. Monthly Mood: Where’s The Love? i’m naked, and far away from home-Queen Exiting India is only daunting if you choose to be dramatic about it and we all are. Even the immigration bureau themselves. The penalty for visa overstay is random and without valid explanation. Many foreigners are still straggling out here on expired visas because the world went up in flames and India graciously extended them for free every month. *Hands in prayer over heart center.* Until they stopped doing so without any announcement while the website homepage still flashes Visa services granted on account of COVID-19 are GRATIS. across the screen and all news outlets repeatedly state that the ban on commercial international flights have not been lifted. Rumor has it that they bill more for being North American and less for being South American. Others have had a fine go from 7,000 to 500 rupees with just a phone call about their confusion. Most people apply to exit and receive an automated email saying it’s all “under process” and hear nothing after. Months crawl by. Others have said their family members died (they didn’t) or that they be pregnant (they ain’t) so they kinda sorta NEED TO GOOOOOOOO… and got just as little avail. Pushy phone calls and multiple visits to multiple police stations about a mythological piece of paper that I was promised would be waiting for me (it never was) got me all the way to Nofuckingwhere. So imagine my surprise when, in early March, my inbox receives a payment request. A drumroll courses through my veins as I log in. My eyes register the numbers and my mouth has been laughing out loud ever since. Yes there’s a man up there and I couldn’t walk by until he was done chucking coconuts onto the road. Relationships are built in the silences. —Trevor Noah, Born a Crime Other than that the last thirty minus two days have been cozy with a side of misunderstandings and conflicts. Three of those days were taken in snuggly, serendipitous silence—no reading, no writing, phones powered off—which chanced to coincide with Valentine’s Day and a very full moon. The topic encroaches on the part of my life that I call ~private~ except it’s not actually and I’m possibly just saving all the good stuff for a book so we’ll just have to hang tight for an indeterminate amount of time. TIME. Does it take until March for us to admit that the calendar actually says 2022? We blink and the breezy February mornings have turned muggy. Just muggy. When there’s a power outage the only relief is lying down on any cold tiles you can get. The fuchsia flowers have dwindled off and I no longer see leafbirds or that one Indian roller on the neighborhood lamp post. Even the sunsets have a new look. It’s hard to believe i forgot there are 28 days in february despite it being one of the main theorems one learns in school…. —Catherine Cohen, Sexy Little Email Days 1,480-1,483 25-28 February 2022 Arambol, Goa → Gokarna, Karnataka → Arambol A blitz trip to Gokarna is unfairly exhausting and sprinkled with purry kitties and banana buns. We name the most aggressive baby felines Le Pouet et Le Prout. You take it personally when I prioritize crispy breakfast buns “over your health.” Sorry love but the laws of my universe explicitly state that getting deep-fried while it’s hot ‘n’ fresh >>> going to the government hospital to see if any residue from yesterday’s tree-sized thorn you fell on is still inside your heel, only to be ignored by the staff as we wait for the doctors who are all attending a heart cancer conference in a hot tent twenty meters away. Relevant read: My Favorite Indian Breakfast Is Banana Buns, Hun One longyi fabric is clearly most beautiful so we leave the rude shop twinning with shiny new additions to the scraps of our four-years-on-the-dusty-road wardrobes. Sitting with a hundred-odd souls on the floor in the prasad hall is as much a Gokarna ritual as banana buns and sarong shopping sprees are. The meal smashes the record for best one I’ve had there, perhaps because Maha Shivratri starts in two days. We schlepp our bellies and their contents of black-eyed pea coconut curry and soft rice and mung beans and sambar and buttermilk through the foreigner-permitted zones of the Sri Mahabaleshwara Swami Temple which leaves you dazzled and telling me you are “sure someone has attained enlightenment in there.” The 100% Scheiße nature of Goan policemen has you decide to drive back to Arambol from 9pm-4am and that’s what we do. Just like two days ago when we passed Cafe Covid, neither of us has enough layers for the return journey. Despite a car of creepy intoxicated men bullying us into stopping our bike on the FREEWAY thrice, we manage to reach home, albeit both iced into pops. Relevant read: Chasing Calories Gokarna My I-had-banana-buns-for-dinner-and-a-10pm-soy-capp face. Days 1,484 01 March 2022 Arambol → Pernem → Arambol The words were the most ambiguous in the language, because the things they referred to so sorely lacked stable meaning. Certainly travellers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare coloured butterfly, often sighted, but never conclusively identified. —Alain de Botton A train station farewell hits hard but also tugs at the heartstrings with gratitude. Starting with driving back from the train station, I learn how to scoot. So far a bumper, a side panel of my scooter himself, my palm, left pinky, and a tiny bit of my knee have been sliced open. Only. Overcoming my psychological resistance to participating in traffic on two wheels is long overdue. I find it beneficial for my mental health and gloriously liberating in Goa, where venues are spread across several beaches and walking and bussing gets dangerously hot, which brings me to another true story… Days 1,490 07 March 2022 Arambol → Mapusa → Panjim → Arambol I choose today to tackle the torturous local bus ride down and up from the office processing visa documents because I still hold on to the theory of #MondayMotivation. Moreover, the seventh of every month is the month-iversary of my trip, making my journey 49 continuous months to date. Walking to the bus stop is perspiring. A rickety oven on wheels pulls up and with a deep breath I jump in. I don’t read the front of the bus and we go out of the way, by the train station, before getting to the stop where I have to transfer. The second leg is mercifully more direct. 10am sun beats down on my hat and body scarf as if to castigate me for trying my best. I avoid every gaze and slurred speech of bachelors stumbling the alleys after a night of gambling. Panjim casinos, floating on parked ships on the Mandovi River, are a Goan specialty. An Udupi Pure Veg Hotel bustles with locals and seeing that my upma craving hasn’t diminished at all since the lousy, stale blob I got on the way to Gokarna ten days ago, I pop in. 15 minutes and 45 rupees (15 for chai) later, I’m back on the street and satisfied. Nothing to say. The big gates and guards wearing European style uniforms of the police station signal that I can finally stop walking. I step in to the office I am seeking and everyone looks up to smirk at my hat. Their heads go back to their desks and I no longer exist. I stand for minutes in front of eight employees. Finally I ask a baby-faced man to be seen and based on my nationality I am pointed to an inner room. A big man “in charge of USA” says he can’t provide any information because he’s been out of the office for 15 days and doesn’t know what’s happened and my best shot is to email the help desk in Mumbai. He nods toward the printed address on the wall. I tell him I bussed two hours just to hear this and I don’t tell him I’m wondering what his job even is. Just before stepping out the door defeated, I ask Baby Face one more time for any information at all about my case. I am directed to a slightly walled up rectangle at the back of the room. A makeshift private office. Let’s call the person inside this office Bitchy Slightly Balding Manager. Half of that title could be discerned before even stepping in. I told her In Charge of USA could tell me nothing of substance because he’s been absent and within seconds he’s next to me with his head down getting a curt scolding. BSBM gave me reasons for the 12,020 + 50,000 rupees over my head that were plausible at the time, but by the end of the day, shameless bullshit to cover up for the fact that no one in this clusterfu—I mean post-pandemic bureaucratic maze has their shit together. As I stride out a colony of other foreigners steadily grows at the doorway. I lose my appetite for Kokni Kanteen’s fish meal that begins in another hour and go back to the nonchalant hotel from earlier to smash down two uttapams. The first rice-based pancake is a dark green spinach-fenugreek version paired with chutney and sambar. The second is a banana pancake drenched in melted butter, served with sweetened yogurt, and washed down with a “filter coffee” that always suspiciously suggests of actually being Nescafe. Feeling uplifted in spirit and heavy in the tummy, I close my tab and am happy to find that my friend’s guitar is in the adjacent establishment and shares a wall with my beloved breakfast canteen. Unlike the police and puppets at cubicles, Parth has given me purpose in life. I am to tow his acoustic in its crusty case with broken straps back to Arambol. That thing joined me in the public toilets, on a bus that started empty and quickly filled with school kids far beyond capacity where we (guitar and I) were smushed next to a snoozing man in the back corner, and at a sugarcane juice stand (where I chugged just short of a liter) before balancing on my head until it was safely in the hands of Parth’s guesthouse’s Papaji. I touch down at home just in time to save my pants from my period who evidently decided to begin on the bus, and crumpled into a heat stroke/ dosa gut/ uterine pain coma for the rest of the day. How accurate the universe is! obsessions: black sticky riceragi cookies – linkthree days of silenceОй, у гаю при Дунаюkasuri methibanana bunsupmasouth indian tiffin hotelscapp+croissantblack coffee+biscottielite season iscooting ‘round townmy scooterboiled yamscoconut palm frondscoconut milkcoconut yogurtcoconut jaggeryspirulina overnight oatshand-drawn stickersnepali handmade paper Bird of the month: Greater Coucal Source: Albin Jacob, eBird. Total babe of a cuckoo bird with the size and personality of a chicken and look of a color-blocked, enlarged crow. Piercing red eyeballs contradict their poultry style timidity in human presence. Endearing component to the fauna in my life for almost two years, oop-oop-ooping away at each other from the north of India to the south. current book: Bel Canto, Ann Patchett pretend you’re back in your pediatrician’s waiting room playing What Doesn’t Belong: Previous Monthly Mood: Four Years Of Gifts Explore my full archive of India and Monthly Moods. Learn more about this round-the-world solo trip.