Daybreak in Goa. From the wrought-iron balcony of my suite overlooking Coco Beach, I watched women in colorful saris hunt for clams at the water’s foamy fringe. Boats with names like Holy Spirit and Divine Heart bobbed in the bay, tangles of fishing nets filling their wooden bellies. On the beach, a pack of dogs scavenged for snacks amid a confetti of seashells while a lone crow surveyed the scene from the edge of the hotel’s infinity pool.
Spread across three laterite-walled villas near the northern village of Nerul, Ahilya by the Sea offered a taste of the Goa I had been hoping to find: one of dusty roads and long, honey-hued beaches, of gingerbread-trimmed bungalows brimming with antiques and feni-spiked drinks served in gardens sweetened with frangipani blossoms. A Goa far removed from the rowdy all-night benders on Vagator Beach or the crowds of Calangute. A slice of southwestern India that had long lingered in a faux-nostalgic part of my mind in faded sepia tones.
Given the tumult of the past few years, I had expected to arrive in a place that had, in a way, returned to its sleepy past. But even as Covid-19 kept foreign tourists away, a new crop of visitors swooped in and turned the state increasingly hi-def. “Goa was booming during the pandemic,” Delhi-born Richa Sharma told me over a local lunch at Wildflower Villas, her discreet
