Panaji

I came into Panaji off the Mandovi River ferry on a Tuesday morning in January, carrying a bag that smelled of overnight train and a headful of expectations built on things I’d heard from other travelers. The ferry was small and crowded and the captain played Konkani film songs over a crackling speaker. When the boat touched the ghats and I stepped onto the embankment and looked up at the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception — that blazing white baroque facade sitting above the market square on its hill — I had the involuntary feeling that I’d arrived somewhere that had decided, long ago, to be exactly what it was and to stay that way.

Panaji is the capital of Goa, but capital is a grand word for what is actually one of India’s most genuinely pleasant small cities. Nobody rushes here. The civil servants drift between government buildings at a pace that feels principled rather than lazy. The restaurants open when they feel like it. The Mandovi slides past without comment.

The neighbourhood that caught me and wouldn’t let go was Fontainhas, Panaji’s old Latin Quarter squeezed between two small rivers at the city’s eastern edge. The streets here are narrow enough that two people can barely pass without turning sideways, and the houses — painted in ochre, yellow, terracotta, with their azulejo-tiled facades and ironwork balconies and wooden shutters thrown open in the morning — feel less Indian than they feel like a fragment of Lisbon dreaming itself somewhere warm. I walked these streets most mornings before it got hot. The smell was extraordinary: jasmine from the vendors near the chapel, coffee from the handful of cafes where Goan Catholic aunties serve their biscuits alongside a very strong espresso, coconut oil from somebody frying something nearby. The chapel of St Sebastian at the end of one lane has a Christ figure with its eyes open — the only such Crucifixion I’ve ever seen — which gives it a quality of alertness that the surrounding silence amplifies to something strange.

I ate thalis in the places near the fish market, where the morning catch — pomfret, kingfish, prawns — was laid out on ice under fluorescent lights and the vendors bargained in a mix of Konkani and Portuguese-accented English. In the evenings, the waterfront promenade filled with families, the ice-cream vendors materialised, and the casino boats on the Mandovi lit up against the water. I never went on a casino boat. I just watched them from the bank with a feni in hand, feeling like I understood something about this place that I probably didn’t.

What Panaji does better than almost anywhere in Goa is the feeling of a city that has integrated its contradictions without violence. The Catholic church bells and the muezzin from the mosque on the edge of the quarter ring within minutes of each other every morning and nobody seems to find this remarkable. The old houses and the new apartment blocks sit side by side on the riverbank. The feni stalls and the chai stalls share the same laneway. It is, I think, the specific mood of Goa — an accidental tolerance that became a way of life over five hundred years.

When to go: November through February. December and January are peak season — warm days, cool evenings, everything open and festive, especially around the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th when the church is lit up with fairy lights and the square below fills with food stalls and brass bands. Avoid May and June when pre-monsoon heat makes the streets feel like an oven.