Chapter 13: Anushka / São João

# Chapter 13: Anushka / São João

This feast of São João fell on a Saturday, twelve days into Anushka's stay.

She woke to find Benaulim transformed. The village that had been quiet and domestic — a place of sewing machines and well water and chickens, had turned festive overnight. Bunting hung between the coconut palms along the main road. A loudspeaker mounted on the church's outer wall was playing Konkani folk music at a volume that suggested the operator had confused the dial with a challenge. Children ran through the lanes wearing crowns of wildflowers — kopel, the local jasmine-like blossoms, threaded into garlands that dripped petals as they ran. He pressed his palm flat against the table to stop the trembling.

"São João is the feast of St. John the Baptist," Shalini explained, wrapping a fresh saree — white with a gold border, the best she owned, usually reserved for weddings and funerals. "The tradition in Goa is to jump into wells. Young men. They wear kopel crowns and jump. It's related to the baptism — water, purification, rebirth. That's the theological version. The actual version is: young men get drunk on feni, put flowers on their heads, and compete to see who can make the biggest splash."

"And this is considered... safe?"

"It's considered tradition. In Goa, the two are often confused."

Conceição arrived at nine with a basket of food, sannas, dodol (a dense, sweet confection of coconut and jaggery that stuck to Anushka's teeth in the most satisfying way), and a bottle of cashew feni that she presented to Shalini with the gravity of a diplomat presenting credentials.

"For medicinal purposes," Conceição said.

"Of course," Shalini replied, accepting the bottle.

That three of them walked to the village well, the big communal one near the church, not the small one in Shalini's courtyard. The well was ancient, circular, built of laterite blocks that were green with moss where the water splashed. A crowd had gathered around it, families, old people in chairs, children on shoulders. The atmosphere was carnival: loud, joyful, slightly chaotic, the kind of collective energy that happens when a village of twelve hundred people decides to celebrate the same thing at the same time. The weight of the phone felt heavier than it should in her hand.

Anushka stood between Shalini and Conceição and watched as the first jumper approached the well's edge. He was young, maybe eighteen, bare-chested, wearing shorts and a crown of kopel that was already sliding over one ear. He stood on the well's stone rim, raised his arms, and the crowd cheered, and he jumped.

The splash was enormous. Water fountained up from the well in a crystalline arc, catching the sunlight and throwing prisms. Tiny, fleeting rainbows that appeared and vanished in the time it took to blink. The young man surfaced, gasping and grinning, his flower crown now plastered to his forehead, and the crowd roared, and someone threw more flowers into the well, and the loudspeaker played a Konkani song that everyone seemed to know the words to except Anushka. She felt the seam of her dupatta against her collarbone.

More jumpers followed. Some were graceful — clean dives that entered the water with minimal splash. Some were theatrical, belly flops and cannonballs and one memorable entry that involved a backflip and nearly ended in contact with the well's stone wall. The crowd judged each jump with cheers and groans and a running commentary in Konkani that Conceição translated for Anushka in real time: "He's showing off for Teresa Rodrigues — she doesn't care, oh, that one's going to hurt — yes, it hurt, his mother is going to kill him."

Shalini watched with her arms crossed and the faintest smile on her face, not the almost-smile Anushka had learned to read, but something closer to genuine amusement. The festival had softened her. The crowd, the music, the collective joy of a village doing something ridiculous together, it had loosened something in her posture, in the set of her jaw, as if the village's happiness was a solvent that worked on the compound of her reserve. His jaw clenched hard enough to send an ache through his temples.

"You used to jump," Conceição said to Shalini. It was said casually, dropped into the noise of the crowd like a stone into a river. The wooden frame of the door was smooth and worn under her fingertips.

"That was a long time ago."

"1987. You were seventeen. You jumped into the well at the old Fernandes property in Colva. The one that was three metres deeper than this one. Your father nearly had a heart attack."

"He did have a heart attack. Three years later. Unrelated."

"You wore a kopel crown and a white dress and you jumped like you were diving into the sky. I remember because I was standing exactly where Anushka is standing now, and I thought: that girl is either the bravest person in this village or the most insane."

"Option two," Shalini said.

"Option one," Conceição countered.

---

In the afternoon, the celebration moved to the beach. Tables were set up on the sand, rough wooden tables covered in banana leaves, and the village ate together: pork vindaloo and fish recheado and solkadhi and rice, served in quantities that suggested the cooks had been preparing for a siege rather than a feast. The feni flowed. The music grew louder. Old men told stories. Children built sandcastles and then smashed them. A group of teenagers produced a football from somewhere and started a game on the hard sand near the water's edge.

Anushka ate until she couldn't eat anymore, and then ate some more because Conceição kept piling food onto her banana leaf with the relentless generosity of someone who measured love in calories. She sat between Shalini and Rhea — who had driven down from Panjim for the feast, leaving Santosh in charge of the restaurant with instructions that were, apparently, "don't burn anything, and if you burn something, don't tell me until Monday."

Rhea was in her element. She knew everyone. She moved between tables like a social butterfly with a feni glass, exchanging gossip and insults in equal measure. She introduced Anushka to half the village: "This is Anushka, she's from Mumbai, she's mavshi's niece" — a simplified version of the truth that Anushka was grateful for, because explaining the full version would require a flowchart and a therapist.

As the sun went down and the beach turned gold and then copper and then the deep blue of a Goan evening, someone produced a guitar. Then another guitar. Then a ghumot — a traditional Goan drum made from a clay pot with a lizard-skin membrane, which sounded, when struck, like the earth itself was keeping rhythm.

The music started. Konkani folk songs — mandos, slow and sweet and melancholic, the kind of music that sounds like it was written by the sea itself, with its rhythms of arrival and departure. People sang along. Some danced — the slow, swaying dance of the dekhni, couples moving together with a formality that was also tenderness. Goosebumps rose along her forearms.

Anushka looked at Shalini. Shalini was sitting very still. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were moving — barely, almost imperceptibly — forming the words of the song without releasing them. She was singing silently, the melody trapped behind her teeth, the voice that Conceição said could stop a room confined to the private theatre of her own body. His shoulder blades pressed into the wall behind him.

Anushka reached over and took her hand.

Shalini's eyes opened. She looked at Anushka. The music continued. The ghumot kept its rhythm. The guitars wove their chords into the salt air. The sting of salt air nipped at her cheeks.

"Sing," Anushka said.

"I can't."

"You are singing. I can see your lips moving. Just — let the sound out."

"You don't understand, "

"I'm a piano teacher. I understand music. And I understand what it looks like when someone is holding a sound inside them that needs to come out. You're holding it so tightly your shoulders are shaking." She rubbed the ache from her left palm.

Shalini's hand trembled in hers. She looked at the singers, at the crowd, at the beach, at the sky. She looked at everything except Anushka, as if she could find permission in the landscape, in the feast, in the collective joy of a village that had known her since birth and would forgive her anything, including silence, including song. The weight of the silence pressed against her chest like a physical thing.

The mando ended. A new one began — slower, sadder, a song about a woman waiting for a fisherman who never returns. The melody was simple: four notes, ascending, then descending, like a wave building and breaking. His fingers found the rough edge of the envelope.

Shalini opened her mouth.

The sound that came out was quiet. Almost inaudible. A ghost of a voice, tentative and rough from twenty-eight years of disuse, the vocal cords remembering a shape they hadn't been asked to make in decades. It was imperfect. It wavered. It cracked on the high note. The heat from the stove radiated against her shins.

But it was there.

Conceição, sitting three seats away, turned. Her face, that warm, busy, opinion-having face, went completely still. She looked at Shalini with an expression that contained something very close to reverence.

The voice strengthened. Note by note, word by word, the way a fire builds from ember to flame. Shalini's eyes were closed again. Her hand gripped Anushka's so tightly that Anushka could feel the calluses on her palm, the ridge of bone in her index finger, the tremor running through her tendons. But the voice. The voice was not trembling. The voice was finding itself, excavating itself from the ruins of a silence that had lasted a generation.

It was not the voice of a young girl singing at weddings. It was deeper, rougher, scored by years of grief and exile and that specific abrasion of holding everything inside for too long. It was, Anushka thought, more beautiful for the damage. The way a building is more beautiful for its weathering. The way a face is more beautiful for its lines.

The song ended. The beach was quiet for a moment. That particular silence that follows music that has touched something communal and private at the same time. Then someone began another song, and the guitars picked it up, and the ghumot resumed, and the night continued.

Shalini released Anushka's hand. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. A quick, efficient gesture, the way you wipe away something you don't want anyone to see. Then she picked up her feni glass and drank, and the glass hid her face, and by the time she lowered it, the composure was back.

But the voice had been heard. The village had heard it. Conceição had heard it. Anushka had heard it.

And something that had been closed for twenty-eight years — a door, a wound, a well — had been opened, and the water that came up from it was clean.