FREN JOSHUA

GOA: FEBRUARY 9
Everybody at the Fren Joshua concert is a small crowd of maybe one hundred. The true sound of Goa is German. He sits in splendour on a raised dais on the stage and plays the sitar and a flute. To his right, a grey-haired Japanese with a frozen face plays base guitar next to a tabla player who might be Indian. A second German plays keyboard and fiddles with a lap-top. Fren Joshua is both serious and spiritual. He dedicates his songs to a series of Sufi saints and mystics. My untrained ear finds one song much like the next. Perhaps the Sufi mystics were equally similar. The concert is enlivened on occasion by all four musicians emitting a series of very loud harsh barks.
The Japanese base player runs out of battery.
I clap once at the wrong moment.
The prawn risotto is dry and without taste.
So where is the luck?
In meeting a young Dutch couple, Paul and Fiona, at the restaurant.

SEARCHING FOR THE PAST

GOA: FEBRUARY 9
Calangute is the northern end of a thirty kilometer hodgepodge of high-rise apartment blocks, bed-bug dosshouses, luxury resorts, bars and restaurants that range in quality from brilliant to instant dysentery. My memories are of a small village. We were fifty foreigners at most. Fishermen mending nets were the only Indians. I trust to luck in searching for my past. The luck is an Italian with a shack restaurant amongst the trees a kilometer back from Vagator beach. He has long hair, an old bike and spent years up in Poona or Pune at the Shri Rajneesh ashram - wow! a real life sennayasin. How old? Mid-sixties and an old stager. He belongs...While I fall at the first hurdle. I've never heard of Fren Joshuah, never listened to his music, the true sound of Goa (so the Italian asures me).
Fren Joshua is in concert tonight on the beach north towards Arambol. Everybody's going. Return to the restaurant afterwards for prawn risotto.