As far back as anyone can remember, the narrow road from Mapusa – the market town of North Goa – dropped down towards the Arabian Sea at Anjuna by skirting dense woods where it wasn’t easy to detect any life. There was always a village there, and thus the Konkani reassurance “assagao”. Fast-forward to the 21st century and no doubts linger because this entire area bubbles with countercultural energy. Crowds of people from around the world have made it the hub of their New Age lives. For millennials, Assagao is their own private Shangri La.
An unusually surreal texture characterises this rapid transition. Runaway real estate development is punctuated by permaculture. Several of India’s best restaurants nestle inside century-old Goan houses. Tattoos and dreadlocks and high-tech digital nomadism coexist casually, often in the same person. Seamlessly simultaneous, the timeless rhythms of traditional village life.
The irony of these juxtapositions struck me hard at the end of this monsoon, when I drove out from my home in Panjim, the pocket-sized riverside capital of Goa, to interview Shalini Krishan and Chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar at Edible Archives, their hit new restaurant on the Assagao-Anjuna border. Just before its driveway, I found what looked like a neighbourhood, but turned out to be a tiny restaurant festooned with a profusion of buzzwords: “heirloom superfoods”, “primitive”, “unmodified”, “open-pollinated”. The day’s special was “hemp & red rice dosa”.
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