Everyone who comes to Goa is hungry for something.
You are a young tourist, looking for release, a chance to shake out your weary bones before the city’s hustle reclaims you. Or you are a middle-aged city-slicker heeding Goa’s siren call to take the reek of dodginess off your funds, in the form of a third home with minimal days on Airbnb. Or you are a corporate lifer who has had enough of our maximum cities, seeking a quiet place to raise your kids and maybe dabble in a cafe or two.
Seeking, desiring, hunkering, hunting. Appetite, a new anthology of 36 stories, poems, essays—and even a graphic piece—is interested in capturing what happens to a place when everyone’s busy wanting it.
Published by Penguin Random House earlier this year and edited by Shivranjana Rathore and Tino de Sa, the collection brings together original pieces from members of the Goa Writers Group, a community of over a hundred writers based in the state or connected to it by ancestry. The contributors span generations, from Jnanpith Award-winner Damodar Mauzo and 100-year old American writer and journalist Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, the oldest member of the group, to emerging voices publishing for the first time.
Despite the title’s straightforward suggestion, not a single entry is about food. The appetite that the anthology is interested in is for Goa itself: For its land, for belonging, for reinvention, and for desire.
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‘Wannabe colonisers’
Two of the collection’s entries that address this directly work as companion pieces. Seema Mustafa’s essay “The Wannabe Colonizers or Some Such” is a personal account of moving to Goa from Delhi. Mustafa at first wrestles with, and later, slowly comes to terms with the idea of being an outsider: That Goans have very specific reasons for disliking what people like her represent, and that those reasons have nothing to do with her personally.
Mustafa, a veteran journalist who has covered conflict zones, writes about deploying those same instincts in her adopted state, chatting up everyone from the shopkeeper to the taxi driver, trying to understand the resentment. What she finds is a place living two lives: The one the Goans lead, and the one the visitors have built on top of it, complete with soaring real estate prices, restaurants that open in weeks and shut in months, and a vulgar appetite for land and money that the locals are forced to watch from the outside. “You can recognize the outsiders from a mile off,” she writes, “the same fake smiles, the talk about real estate and money… the conversation around new elite food places with a mention, in passing of course, about the restaurant owner by his first name to impress the audience.”
This is the milieu that Michelle Bambawale brings alive in her satirical short story “The Real Housewives of Assagao”. Her characters are a group of wealthy women congregating around wine and conversations circling through property prices, new restaurants, which villages are “over” and which are still worth buying into. In these archetypes, there is no curiosity about what was there before them, no Goan friends, no engagement with the gram sabha, and certainly no handwringing over the impact that they have on Goa.
Bambawale, who is originally Goan but grew up in Pune, settled in her ancestral village of Siolim after living in different cities around the world. She said that many people expressed their identity through a beautiful house, but “owning a house in Goa is also the next thing you do after getting an expensive car”. Recalling her years in Delhi, Bambawale said that people would often become interested in talking to her once they heard she had a house in Goa, not realising she was Goan herself. “They will ask you things like, ‘Oh, where did you pick up this place?’ like I’d bought a piece of jewellery. In the same breath, these people will tell you that ‘Assagao and Siolim are just gone!’” she said.
Bambawale’s main grouse—and that of several Goans—is the cluelessness with which house-owners will talk about the sizes of their houses or pools, but have no sense of what life here actually entails. “We are still a village with many basic issues like sewage, water, and waste management,” she said. “I keep hearing things like, ‘Don’t worry, we have tanker water’, not understanding that water is a shared resource. It’s this idea that my money can buy anything and I can leave whenever things get difficult. But if you are from here, you have nowhere else to go.”
The housewives in Bambawale’s story are simultaneously oblivious and overfamiliar. But the anthology is too smart to suggest that consumption is only the preserve of the rich and the tasteless.
There is a subtler, funnier dynamic at work in Goa, which anyone who has spent time here will recognise. Every new-wave migrant to the state is “doing Goa” wrong, according to older migrants. The transplant from five to 10 years ago now holds forth about the soul of the place and speaks with genuine anguish about what Goa is becoming. They can tell you exactly when things started to go wrong and they reserve their talons for the people who showed up two years after them.
A few months ago at a popular Panjim cafe, I overheard a group of older women sincerely rant about how the whole place was overrun by “bloody tourists” and new settlers—in Punjabi. In this hierarchy of belonging by consumption, each rung gets to look down at the one below.
Appetite’s co-editor, Shivranjana Rathore, was candid about this. “I had to be extra careful, given my own positionality,” she told me. Rathore grew up in Jaipur, studied and worked across different Indian cities, and has lived in Goa for almost a decade now. The anthology’s original impulse, she said, was around food and culture, a certain consumptive angle that seemed to fit Goa naturally. “But by the time we began editing in 2024, the pace and saturation of consumption has become exponential. It was very clear that many people didn’t want to think of ‘food and culture’ in a flat, superficial way alone.” So the editors opened the theme up to encapsulate every other kind of appetite.
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Dating in Goa
Some of the entries in the anthology turn inward, toward the more private hungers that Goa seems to invite. Alisha Souza’s very lively essay “I’ll Do It My Way” treads familiar ground of Goan aunties and uncles playing matchmakers, and compares it to the well-rehearsed dance of buying the best fish at the market. Just like the wares on display, your love life is a community project whether you like it or not.
Meanwhile, Pragya Bhagat’s “An App-etite For Love: Dating in North Goa” covers the same territory from the other side. Goa is a tiny playground for a variety of young folks in all their swiping, ghosting, curated glory—encompassing people who are either passing through or have moved to the state and are trying to find connection in a place they don’t fully belong to yet.
So many of them rue the fact that they keep running into the same people everywhere, a genuine problem of “scarcity” you’d never experience in a metro with its endless swipeability. As one writer in the essay exclaims, “Goa is incestuous as f**k!” Read side by side, the essays suggest that appetite extends beyond—into loneliness. The hunger is also about wanting to be known and witnessed, about the distance between the life you came here to build and the one you are actually living.
Which brings us to a question that several of us who live here grapple with: Is there a version of belonging to Goa that is not predicated on consumption and extraction? Rathore was careful about this. There is a visible, structurally powerful and/or extractive outsider in Goa, she said, the one with money and access, but there is also a subtle pressure to perform the “model outsider”. “I hold my mind from going there,” she told me, “because it can very easily feed into the model minority complex, which is its own vicious cycle within the same structures of exploitation.”
It is to the anthology’s credit that it does not try to resolve this. Appetite does not offer you a guide to being in Goa correctly. Instead, it offers you some discomfort, and trusts you to sit with it.
This article is part of the Goa Life series, which explores the new and the old of Goan culture.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)