All Queued Up

It's fun to string along a bunch of flowers with a thread running through. What's the story here? Once upon a time in ancient Sunaparanta, three young men set out to cross a road. Go straight ahead, their guru had advised them. But one of them paused to look back at a damsel bathing in a pond and poof! all three of them were turned to stone.

Local Medusa lore aside, these old stones in a field at Davorlim near Margao were obviously a part of a megalithic dolmen. I have a picture of a dolmen at Bali in Quepem, with its capstone intact. Amazing structures. And absolutely unprotected. Someday soon some real estate developer will knock out these stones which are probably more than 2000 to 5000 years old, considering that dolmens were mostly built in the Neolithic period. Even roadwidening will remove them. Knock 'em over and they are just stones on the ground. But to our ancestors they were memorials to their dead.

These three mobile dividers at Panjim don't try to cross the road, they just sit there in a queue, going nowhere. Only telling stressed out drivers to use seat belt and drive fine to avoid fine. And of course, relax at red light.

Coconut trees standing in a line are always a wonderful sight, as this pano shot along the Agasaim bypass will attest. But they don't just stand there, if you are a keen observer. They sway with the wind, wave their fronds about and toss dried nuts at drunken passers-by. Don't ever believe the myth that a coconut will never fall on a chap passing below. An acquaintance was riding on a scooter below a coconut tree, when the tree dropped a nut and knocked him out, fracturing his skull. He survived, but now refuses to drink madd feni.

Mourners waiting to offer condolences at a cemetery in Salcete. That light at the end of the queue is bright morning sunshine. That's what we walk into every morning, don't we? And we take it all for granted, every day. These queues are also pleasant opportunities to catch up with distant relatives separated by light years.

I wonder how these canoes at Colva would look in the water. I mean like the advertising text would be upside down and all. But then the airline itself is going upside down. Yet this is a splendid sight, like the red beaks of a fleet of Concordes. Oh, those beaked birds also got grounded in their time...

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