The news editors and feature editors and editors-in-chief and numberless marketing imbeciles who chose to imagine Goa, within the narrow and noisome worlds that defined their own existences in the megapolis of their choosing, had on the other hand no such overarching humaneness, despite generous applications of all that is narcotic and alcoholic. 'Aparanta', I found, may welcome all comers, but it also encourages those processes that sift out the unbelievers. How, I asked myself, is one to distinguish? What is the Goan-ness that one is seeking to understand and, if possible, to give substance to in a 1,200-word report (under the illiterate regimes that run newsrooms these days, that is a torrent of words)? Can one encapsulate all that seeks to be distilled by this multitude of experiences, of personal encounters, by listening to the narratives of the histories of Goa? And when one does become an ideological sympathiser of the dharma that is 'aparanta', how can one convey it to the hard-eyed stewards who rule over the column centimetres in Bombay or Delhi? It was a question that had no simple answer. My own method was to attempt to blend in with the rhythms of the village in which I lived, Betim, which lies across the river Mandovi, opposite Panaji. The river is like a slow-moving artery that expresses Goa -- the rusting, elderly ferries of the River Navigation Department chug across the gap with a ponderous regularity, and in doing so determine the schedules of legions of Goans who live within a short bus ride of the water -- 'aparanta' tends not to respect time-pieces worn on one's wrist. In this I was marginally successful. Mahadeo was one of my neighbours -- a generously-bellied Betim elder who with surprising agility climbed into his canoe and laid his meagre nets along the river shallows. Mahadeo was also adept at catching river crabs, and when one morning I found a pair -- neatly trussed and no more than two hours old -- squirming outside my front door I realised with a thrill that I was accepted by the Betim-kars. Mahadeo -- despite his belly a very handsome man with a tanned visage crowned by a mop of white curls, with a commanding presence and possessing an enviable facility with a little skiff barely a foot across -- was only one of a series of revelations. There were the nearby family Bhosale, whom I had been warned "were trouble", the "rowdy boys" of the village who tended to be destructive, the crooked 'possorkars' from whom I would be forced to purchase my groceries. The roll-call of potential villains was long indeed.