The Paradise Cafe

The night is pristine, star-sprinkled, tropical and romantic and the four travelers are finding their way down toward the beach to eat their evening supper. Along the road are a band of gypsies who have congregated near the village well to cook their evening meal and to sell their wares to tourists. The women, intricately bejeweled and bangled, are given the task of spreading the blankets to display their sale items: jewelry, trinkets, cookware, clothing, baskets and even such things as transistor radios. They are the ones who solicit the customers while the men sit in a group swigging on a bottle of feni, the local spirits brewed from coconuts or cashews.

They are here most evenings and Karen does not feel intimidated to stop and browse without necessarily buying. After three or four times, the gypsy women know her and welcome her smilingly without pushing her to buy, although she does buy something from time to time. Passing through the midst of these folk in the semi-darkness is an exotic experience, one that seems out of time. These gypsies are those of storybook and legend, absolutely unchanged through the centuries.

Down at the beach the twinkling lights of the Paradise Cafe welcome us. There are already a few familiar faces seated at the round table, travelers we've met other nights and days in this small community. There is Toon, a cultured and gentle airline pilot from Delhi who adores our children and teaches them how to drink from their glasses like monkeys and stand on their heads in the sand. He is in the company of a pleasant young Englishwoman with whom he is living.

There is a gray-haired, friendly woman from the Midwestern United States who used to teach school and who now travels to different parts of the world in her retirement. Her road-smart attitude belies her school-mistress appearance.

There is a red-headed German woman of middle age, her hair chopped mannishly, who has traveled much and enjoys holding court at the Paradise. From behind wire-rimmed spectacles she recounts her travels in Northern India and directing our attention to the fingernail moon points out that if we look carefully, we can see it is holding the old moon in its arms. To our astonishment, there seems to be a full black globe hovering in the sky ringed entirely by a barely seen nimbus, one side of which is the crescent moon. She explains that the yogis call this phase of the moon the Shiva Moon and that it bodes good luck for the whole month to come, to all who behold it. From this day forward, Karen and I will count our blessings each time we see the Shiva Moon.

There are many other travelers who pass through for one or two nights only but Karen and I, being relatively long-term residents of this community, soon become members of a select inner group who meet informally, regularly in this way.

The dinners at the Paradise consist mainly of fresh fish, fried or baked in a batter and usually delicious but there are other delights such as the spaghetti in tomato sauce with huge chunks of white cheese on top which is a welcome alternative to the curried rice dishes that are the norm. One night Karen asks for a deviled egg sandwich and the cook, who has never heard of it, invites her into the kitchen to make one.

The next day it appears on the menu and I joke with Karen about her "importing" the deviled egg sandwich to Goa. The food is washed down by one-liter bottles of Kingfisher Beer, a gassy, amber brew that we quaff like water mostly because it's so cheap. The children's beverage of choice is either Thumbs-Up Orange or Campa Cola.

Sitting here on these balmy nights in the fraternity of fellow travelers we feel a sense of mystery. A month ago we had never heard of this place and now here we are partaking of its beauty and life. What invisible threads have drawn us all together in this time and place? Each person we meet seems so full of natural wisdom, each seems to have a message for us, something we can learn from, admire. Is it simply that we travelers are more open and thus able to perceive what is always around us more clearly? Or does the act of taking to the open road actually unlock doors that would otherwise remain forever closed?

This night Karen and I raise a glass of beer in a silent toast thanking the fates that brought us on this journey. There are so many reasons why we should never have come to this place, never have been able to come. I experience a sense of peace and well-being within me, a satisfaction that we have succeeded in surmounting so many obstacles to reach here, some seen and perhaps many unseen. Tonight there seems to be no other reason for coming but to be a part of this feeling of being in the right place at the right time.

The faces of our children are shining around the table. They are fully awake to their own joy, to their sense of being a part of the journeyers. They don't take part like children but like seasoned travelers, interacting fully with those we come into contact with.

I remember a time in New Delhi when someone passed  us in the street, yelling out, "Nika! Nika!", the name of our youngest daughter easily recognizable as a word in Hindi. We joked that our children had become more popular than we.

They are dressed in matching dresses that Karen had hand-made by a tailor in the market who stands all day in the shade of his open-fronted shop at the treadle of his ancient Singer sewing machine. For about $2.50 Canadian Karen can pick out the material and have an outfit made for herself or the girls whose only flaw is that most of the material is not color-fast, a fact we discover at first washing.

Things are so cheap in India, by North American standards that one easily becomes accustomed to a lifestyle that could not be afforded in the West. Sumptuous meals eaten almost every night in restaurants, hand-tailored clothing or new clothing purchased at every turn for only a few dollars, porters at ones' beck and call wherever one travels for the price of a few rupees, all of these things contribute to a reverse culture-shock when one returns to the west after any length of time there.

Along the sand near the beach-front restaurants a marketplace of tents has sprung up in which trinkets and clothing are sold, mostly to tourists. My clothing has changed in the past few weeks from jeans, sneakers and shirts to light cotton kurtas and colorful short sleeve shirts and pantaloons with baggy legs, tied at the ankle, in oranges, whites and yellows. My tender, well-protected feet are now chafing against the bindings of imitation leather sandals. The weather is so hot and humid that any heavier clothing is uncomfortable. We wash these clothes daily by hand and they dry on a clothesline in a few minutes. Even at night the temperature remains so warm that no heavier clothing is necessary.

Everything seems to be getting lighter, in weight, texture, feel. I feel very comfortable in this setting. Something in me that has been covered up a long time or hidden below the surface is wakening. There is the feeling of a lifting of spirit. Even our moods feel like they are getting lighter. The swings are less dramatic. We are living on the surface of things, like colorful birds, taking just enough for our sustenance and moving on. In a way this is a parallel to my life before I was married, when I just drifted, not really sure of where I was going but confident that life itself would somehow show me the way.

Money has not been a real issue in the short term. The funds for this journey came from the sale of some property a couple of years earlier. However, we know that this pleasant release will come to an end the moment we return to Canada and have to dwell on the material questions. In fact, that knowledge is a backdrop to our entire journey that makes our present freedom seem even more unreal, fairytale-like.

The fact that I am a musician who wishes to pursue my vision despite lack of material success has already caused tremendous strain in our relationship. Karen's work as a midwife apprentice has only just begun to take root and so there is this financial question that remains unanswered. For the present I push it out of my mind but it remains in the background like some Shakespearean ghost threatening to surface on the completion of our idyllic journey.

Karen feels I should be more serious in terms of making money through the vehicle of my art. I am still wrestling with old issues about money versus art and this ongoing difficulty I have had all my life around money and the lack of it. I can't seem to talk about it with her, without becoming too defensive, too emotional.

Deep down, I feel I am inadequate and that I don't make money because I am not a good enough musician to do so. I reason that if I had been good enough I would have attained success long ago, at the time my contemporaries were becoming rock and roll heroes. I find a middle ground with the thought that perhaps my path has been a more reflective, spiritual one and that music has been a tool for me to get a handle on matters of the spirit although I would give anything for a small taste of success. Well, perhaps not quite anything or I might have had that taste by now.

Success in these terms of course is directly related to notoriety and money. I do see myself deeply as a musician but one who has not yet discovered that special spark that will ignite the flame of my success. My life has been a constant preparation for that moment in time which has never come. Which may never come, although my deep streak of optimism will not allow for that possibility.

My lifelong search for spiritual understanding has been tied up with this search for material success, for pleasing and proving to my dead father that I can succeed in my own terms, in my own way, even though he suggested I could not. In my mind, spiritual knowledge will provide me with the necessary power and skill to go for my goals and win. Yet despite my years of meditation, travel and study I still have not found a way to realize this in a way that satisfies me. I still do not know how to make money doing what I love to do and is not this, at the very least, a sign of spiritual immaturity? Or is this the illusion fostered upon us by our culture?

As we are walking homeward from the beach, our oldest daughter Shannon begins to whine. She will not walk any further. The whine turns into a wail. In a very few minutes we are deep in another family crisis. We have been talking about the money and begun to argue. Perhaps this has affected Shannon but at any rate she is turning belligerent and tempers begin to flare. What's that I said about serenity, peace and balance? Suddenly we are like four, semi-insane lost souls, shouting down the road through this tranquil village in the middle of the night, all of our worries boiling to the surface like festering sores.