It’s 5:45 am on the first proper morning, and I am, against every instinct of a napcation, awake. Not from an alarm, but from a restlessness that only a new bed can produce, and the vague memory of the front desk mentioning an 80-year-old bakery worth losing sleep over
“Any plans today?” the butler asked, sliding a tray of cut papaya onto my Pool Patio balcony. “None,” I said, and meant it fully. I had come to The Westin Goa for three nights to do the one thing I’m chronically bad at: nothing. This is a napcation, I remind myself, not a vacation. There is a difference, and I intend to honour it, susegad rhythm and all.
We’d landed well past eleven, the kind of hour when even lobby chandeliers seem to dim in sympathy, and by the time the key card slid into my palm it was closer to midnight than not. There was talk of freshening up, of maybe just sleeping straight through, but then dinner arrived anyway, in-room, on a trolley that seemed to know something about jet lag and the hunger it produces. No restaurant, no menu debate, just curry and rice under a silver dome, eaten cross-legged on the bed while Goa introduced itself through an open window, all cicadas and warm salt air, the promise of the trip already, quietly, keeping itself.
It’s 5:45 am on the first proper morning, and I am, against every instinct of a napcation, awake. Not from an alarm, but from a restlessness that only a new bed can produce, and the vague memory of the front desk mentioning an 80-year-old bakery worth losing sleep over. I ask the driver on airport-transfer duty if he knows it, and he does, of course he does, everyone in these parts seems to have grown up on this bread and 20 minutes later I’m standing in Moira, a village known for its colourful Portuguese bungalows and a short drive from the resort, well outside the manicured hush of the property, in front of the Tavares Bakery, a traditional Goan house that now bakes poee for 80 years to feed not just the entire Goa, homes and hotels included, but also some parts of Mumbai.
Poee, for the uninitiated, is Goa’s own hollow, pillowy bread, eaten with sausage curry or simply torn apart and eaten warm, plain, straight off the paddle. Inside, the bakery is dim and furnace-hot, lit mostly by the orange glow of an oven that has, I’m told, not gone cold in 80 years. The bakers assigned for different tasks for different stages of baking, move with the unhurried certainty of someone who has done this 10,000 mornings in a row. They don’t speak much English, and I don’t speak much Konkani, but one of them hands me a poee anyway, still too hot to hold properly, and gestures for me to eat. I do. It’s soft in the centre, faintly charred at the edges, and tastes like nothing I can compare it to except, perhaps, patience itself.
Back at the resort by seven, poee wrapped in paper like contraband, I make it just in time for the buffet breakfast at The Market, the sprawling spread more than a match for anything I could have brought back with me. I do the only sensible thing available to a woman on a napcation after that: I go back to bed.
The Westin’s beds are dangerously good, the kind that make you suspicious of your own mattress at home. I surface only for lunch, a chef-curated meal, once again at The Market, that arrives in unhurried courses, each one better suited to a nap than the last. Later, I let the Heavenly Spa do what its name promises, 45 minutes of being kneaded into something closer to jelly than journalist. Dinner is at Haven, the resort’s Asian dining space, where I share plates I can’t finish over cocktails I definitely can, the evening dissolving into that particular Goan quiet where the loudest sound is cutlery.
The following day brings a Goan thali at lunch, all fresh spice and coastal memory, and by afternoon I’m coaxed out of my pool-patio room for a kayaking session in the Chapora River that I approach the way I approach most exercise: reluctantly, then happily. Ten on ten points for post kayak snacks, a Goan special called alle belle, which are basically soft rice pancakes (or crepes) rolled or folded around a rich, moist filling of freshly grated coconut and jaggery. Dinner that night is at Drift, in-water dining, quite literally, the table lapped by the pool as the sky goes copper over the hills, feet still faintly damp from the paddle earlier. It occurs to me, somewhere between courses, that I have eaten better in three days than I have caring for myself in three months.
I did not see a single fort, market, or waterfall this trip, beyond breakfast. I saw a bakery that has outlived three generations, a spa that undid my shoulders, and more of my own eyelids than the itinerary technically allowed for. Some holidays are checklists. This one was closer to a long, warm exhale — poee in one hand, a cocktail in the other, nothing urgent on the agenda, everything, somehow, accounted for.
Arunima Mazumdar is a Delhi-based independent journalist, writer and literary critic. She is also the founder of Dokusha Book Club, India's first book community dedicated to reading Japanese literature.
