Goa

The ladies wear light cotton saris and bindis and gold noserings and earrings and bangles and toe rings. And, incongruously, baseball caps. Their saris brush the hot white sand away from their bare feet as they carry their shops from one beach lounger to the next, hoping for one small sale. Niketa said she comes from a village where girls are married at 12. She waited until she was 17. But her husband doesn't speak English, can't work. Her daughter is 14, the eldest of five, not married but also not in school. She needs to work, mother says. The others are all in school, and it costs money. The daughter wants to go to school, but Niketa says if she went back now, the other children would tease her because she'd be so behind. And anyway, they need money. Niketa pulls apart a tight fold of light cotton shawls in bright colors or printed with Hindi letters, the ubiquotous OM, with machine-sewn gold trim. She also carries a bundle of Pashmina--heavier stock with the shapes found on the hennaed feet of Hindu goddesses. She also pulls caftans in every color from her ever-expanding bundle. She pries open a fish-tackle box full of heavy earrings and anklets in bronze and silver paint. I grab a peach-colored caftan and a blue one, and an intricate, long-sleeved top - "good for Delhi, where men can't see your arms," she says conspiratorially. As we settle our business with a handshake, three more women similarly dressed, similarly burdened with their own shops descend upon my beach chair. Each has her own story, her own family to feed. "Darling, please. Just buy one small thing," says Anna in a conspicuous British accent. "Don't you remember me? The lady in the blue cap?" I don't, I apologize. She says I promised to buy from her. Said I had no money the other day, would buy something tomorrow. It both sounds like something I wouldn't say and have said. I'm out of money, I crave the quiet and aloneness I'm deprived of in Delhi. I want to swim, read, close my eyes. Yet they're here. Because I am. So many white women from Sweden, Russia, U.K., France, America, all wanting to be left alone with purses full of rupees. How about henna? Foot massage? Cotton threading? None of it, none of it. What any of the women wouldn't do to support so many children and in-laws and husbands who don't speak English and therefore can't work, trudging through the sand laden with costume jewelry and cotton shawls from the age of 10.