The Innkeeper's Daughter
In which mothers and daughters team up to keep Goa Goan.
The innkeeper’s daughter is only 12 years old, but she is already taller than the innkeeper. I met them the night of their first big party, on a Tuesday, when they make their money, because the inn is spare and basic, just a few rooms and a mostly empty restaurant. The innkeeper is running more than a business. She is feeding 25 people or more: her husband and children, staff members from all over India, several disabled men, a Nepali refugee couple, a few dogs and a skinny cat with two surviving kittens.
The innkeeper’s daughter is bright but shy; she hunches her shoulders. Maybe she is not ready to be quite so tall. On Tuesday nights she helps her mother run the bar, uncapping beers and pouring me white wine and ice like a pro even though she has never sipped herself, and maybe never will. No one behaves badly because this is a family place. The vibe is world’s best bar mitzvah, with House music and disco that moves all attendees from 2 to 82, babies and aunties and grandmas dancing with guests and staff from every place in town. The DJ is in his 60s, he was big in the ’80s, now he too will soon be smaller than the innkeeper’s daughter.
The innkeeper’s daughter reminds me of myself. All girls do, but some especially so. She wears frilly purple dresses and raita is her favorite food. We glide across the floor to practice our posture, like young ladies at a posh finishing school on the other side of the world. I bring her and her mother flowers: yards of hand-strung marigolds, mogra, jasmine, red roses that stay fresh for days. I show her my unicorn pen and crystal ball and she agrees: Yes, they are magic.
I have left the inn because there are too many people, women climbing into my room in the wee hours of the morning to dance, dogs hiding under the bed, nothing dangerous, simply much too much. The innkeeper rents me an apartment of my own. Her daughter buys me a bracelet with her money but is too shy to give it to me herself, so her mother does instead. We are a team. This is not India but Goa, a place where women and their daughters work together to keep the men from crashing it all to pieces.
We will dance again on Tuesday.
Solidarity.
