Around this time last year, I went to Goa with my cousins. The first day we were there, my eldest cousin ordered cheese garlic naan for a meal. It blew my mind! It is basically a poor-man’s pizza. I have since eaten it at every restaurant I have visited.
We are a close-knit family. I was close to all my cousins growing up. As adults, we still lived close by, meet often, but I didn’t feel like I really knew them. This trip, I was hoping would fix this.
We had been planning this trip for so long I wasn’t sure it would ever happen. We disagreed on where we wanted to go: Darjeeling to Allepy, everything was rejected. Every year someone had something that could neither be postponed nor ‘cancelled with an excuse’. Then we agreed on Goa. My cousins have been many many times and still somehow we all agreed on Goa. Many more scheduling mishaps later, in 2019, we finally went. It was my first time visiting Goa.
Goa is beautiful and all that but it got overshadowed by the joy of being with these guys. We went back to being how we were as kids, laughing at trivialities, questioning each other about everything and sharing stories that didn’t seem true. There were times, restaurant and hotel staff would ask us if we were friends. They would look at us in disbelief when we said we were cousins. We don’t know many people who do that, they would say.
One night, the whole night, we stayed in a pool and spoke about our new lives and struggles. But more importantly we spent the whole night trying to float on our backs, devising theories for why one of us couldn’t do it.
I got a lot from that trip. The cheese garlic naan was just one of those things.
