Goa, 1976 with buffaloes.

The guest house was cool and quiet. From under its thatched roof and high ceilings I stepped into a stale morning. It was like walking into a warm, damp cloth and the smell of ashes and the sea hung around the garden. The low moan of the ocean was not far away; above me the snap of palm fronds rattled in the air like a gardener shaking a fistful of canes.

A cart was waiting as usual at the end of the garden. Two water buffalo with wide, orange-lacquered horns were shifting in their yoke, waiting to plod along the track that skirts the rice paddy, although I don’t suppose they knew that they were “waiting” as we call it. Before I reached the cart someone in the guest house started to play Gilbert and Sullivan on a 1960s gramophone player. The chorus spilled out into the garden after me, racing in my direction as if trying to catch me. The buffalo were slow to start and the music overtook me. I was stuck with Yum Yum and Nanki Poo running around in my ears for the rest of the morning.

(I suppose Gilbert and Sullivan are considered racist these days, but I can’t help the fact that someone in the guest house was blasting their music into the Indian countryside as I was trying to travel to town. Get over it – I had to.)

The buffaloes stopped along the way. They weren’t supposed to stop. By the side of the track they had spotted an enormous snake curled up and they wouldn’t approach it even though there was no way the snake would have taken on two hefty buffalo. The boy driving the buffalo jumped down and grabbed a few stones. Back on his seat where he felt safe, he lobbed stones at the snake till it headed off into the undergrowth. We could see from the swelling along its body that it already had eaten breakfast. The buffaloes started up again.

Mandovi bridge came into view half an hour later and with it the sound of motorised traffic. I jumped down from the cart when it stopped at the edge of the river and I took the small ferry across rather than wait for a taxi to drive me over the new bridge, the new bridge that was to collapse a few years later.