On my last trip to Goa, I stayed in South, which gives a sense of serene calm compared to the livelier and noisy North. I rented an apartment near Zalore beach and spent the first couple of days doing practically nothing. In the evenings, I would simply walk down to the beach with a couple of beers, watch the sun go down into the ocean and listen to the music created by waves as they crashed onto the shore. In September this place is usually quiet. Other than the fishermen and a few locals, you can have the entire beach to yourself. The only downside is that the beach shacks and food joints are not yet operational so you have to carry everything with yourself. I spent the nights drinking beer and contemplating my own existence and its purpose in the grand scheme of things, if any. Mornings were spent sleeping and afternoons in roaming around the villages in search of local cuisine. After three or four days like this, I thought about taking a break from this routine. I have always liked Baga beach in North Goa and it had become kind of a ritual for me to visit Baga every time I visited Goa.
The next day, I rented a scooter and started my journey to Baga. It was almost afternoon and the sun was at its peak. The landscape changed often during the two hour journey. Villages and fields gave way to the cityscape of Panaji. At Calangute, I asked for directions to Baga beach. It was almost two in the afternoon, when I reached Baga. I parked the scooter and paid the parking attendant. As I started to walk down the beach, memories from my previous visits rushed to my brain and suddenly it all started to look so very familiar. On the right, numerous shacks lined the beach. The tables were placed outside in the sand and beach umbrellas were guarding them from the sun. The ocean was calm and the waves glittered in sunlight. Hundreds of people had come out to enjoy the beach. The sound of the waves, the chatter of people and music from the shacks added a unique background score to the scene.
I sat down in one of the shacks, in a less crowded part of the beach and ordered beer and fries. It was a fair mix of people on the beach, pot-bellied men showing off their bodies, families with children who looked amazed by the ocean, groups of college friends drinking beer on the beach, some couples sitting cosily on the sand, some groups of teenage boys roaming around the beach, gawking at all the females and vendors trying to sell their wares. Some people were playing in the waves, some were sitting on sand, soaking up the sun and some were walking along the beach. I was fairly certain that I could find at-least one person from all twenty nine states of India, on that beach. Not to mention, a few groups of foreigners in beachwear who received special attention from everyone. I could feel the sand in my toes and a calm ocean breeze in my hair. I sat there sipping beer and enjoying the ocean. Even in that crowd and noise, I was able to find a certain sense of peace.
After some time, two elderly women, a teenage boy and a girl aged eight or nine came down the beach. The dark colour of their skin made it quite obvious that their labour involved frequent trysts with the sun. They were carrying wooden poles, ropes, a dholak (drum) and some other stuff. They stopped at an area of the beach which was visible from the shack I was sitting in and the shack next to it. The women and the boy started digging the sand and planted the wooden poles in the ground. Two of the poles had a rope tied to it. I realized that they were building a make-shift structure for tightrope walking. The rope was around eight feet above the ground.
One of the women helped the little girl climb the rope. The boy handed her another wooden pole (for maintaining balance). I had seen these kind of performances at fairs and circuses, but at a beach, this was a first and that too by an eight year old girl. The other woman started beating the dholak. First, the girl walked forward on the rope a couple of times. After that, she walked backwards. Most of the people sitting in the shacks were watching this spectacle. A few looked with concern, some looked with sympathy and some simply looked because it was in their line of sight. The little girl then put three small earthen pots on her head and walked the rope. Then came the final act in which the rim of a bicycle tyre was placed on the rope and the girl walked the rope, keeping her feet inside this rim. The little girl kept a straight face throughout the performance, with an occasional glance towards the spectators. After the performance, the girl started going to the people, to ask for money.
At first, I was filled with angst towards our society. How can a civilized world let this happen? This little girl deserves her ‘childhood’ and a ‘quality’ education. As do many other such children, throughout our country, who are engaged in child labour or roaming and begging on the streets or sometimes fighting for their very survival. Their parents are in no position to afford a ‘childhood’ or ‘quality’ education for them. Sure, there are free government schools, but what do they really offer? Children going to these schools often drop out as they move up in grades. Even if they complete their graduation, they are hardly in a position to compete with those children who went to an expensive private school and speak ‘fine’ English. Are we really in a position to create a better present and a sustainable future for these children?
Before I could complete my thought, she was standing in front of my table. She already had a couple of hundred rupee notes and some fifty and ten rupee notes in her hand. Someone had given her a packet of chips as well. She spoke shyly and asked for money. Lost in my own thought, I asked her whether she went to school. She said sometimes. I asked whether she liked going to school. She was silent. I asked about her parents. She said that her father was at home and one of the women accompanying her was her mother and the other her aunt. The teenage boy was her brother. She looked determined not to show any emotion and answered with a straight face. At a different time and a different place, I would have tried to hold a more meaningful conversation. I asked her name. She said it was Rinki. I gave her a fifty rupee note. She managed a little smile and went off to the next table.
I was sure that she would collect more than five hundred rupees for this performance. I thought to myself, if one can do ten such performances in a day, along the beach, the daily earning would be around five thousand rupees. Working like this for just twenty days in a month would generate an income of one lakh rupees. This little girl was already an artist. If by some chance she were to get basic lessons in business and a little more freedom, she would definitely turn this into a highly profitable business venture. Perhaps then, the world will see her true mettle. It would then see her with respect instead of sympathy. But she was already an earning member of our society. She was not only earning, but also supporting her family at such a young age. How many eight year olds do we know can boast of being in such a place? If the only goal of our education is to get a job and earn money, she was already way ahead of the curve. I felt like a hypocrite, simply sitting there and contemplating about the right kind of life for this little girl. Who was I to judge what was good for her?
After visiting the occupied tables in both the shacks, she went to her brother. She gave the money to her brother, who kept it in a pouch, hung by his waist. She kept the packet of chips for herself. In the meantime, her mother and aunt had already dug the poles out of sand and packed them up. They all started to go down the beach, probably for the next performance. She walked behind her mother eating her chips, head held high and a sly smile on her face. Her walk emanated a certain sense of accomplishment. I had a feeling that she had already understood the hypocrisy of my world and in her world, the social structures of my world were meaningless.