On a sun bed in a secluded beach in Goa, I'm jolted out of a reverie by a man wielding a knife. "Coconut?" he asks, "or pineapple?" I look at him, then at the fruit, and get some, thinking it's always a bad idea to say no to a man with a knife. He squats by my side and cuts juicy chunks of pineapple on a paper plate on which he's scribbled a phone number. "Call me if you'd like a foot massage, my brother is the best masseur on the beach," he says pocketing the money I give him. "If you'd like your hair braided, my wife right there does a good job. And do ask your children if they'd like fake tattoos - my daughter, sitting under that umbrella, has a good hand!" Did he have any more family members working the beach, I ask in amusement. "No more currently, but I'm working on it," he says with a smile.
His name is Fakhruddin, and he's from Karnataka. "Although my village is only 100 kilometres from here, it seems as if Goa is on a different planet! Initially, when I came here 10 years ago, it took me a while to understand this life," he says. The change was made starker by the fact that while in his village people struggled to earn a living, there were opportunities, many of them rather unconventional, to earn money in Goa. "But you can imagine the lack of comprehension on my mother's face when I told her I wanted to bring my wife here so she could braid tourists' hair!" He laughs. "My mother couldn't believe that people would pay money for something she did every morning for our daughters!"
After his wife joined him, Fakhruddin says the duo was able to send as much as Rs 10,000 home every month during Goa's five-month tourist season. This gave the canny ex-farmer more ideas. "Using some of my savings, I enrolled my 16-year-old daughter in her school's art class. She was always fond of drawing, but this helped her improve her skill. The following year, I brought her here to make henna tattoos on the beach," he says. The young girl soon began earning as much as her parents. His younger brother came along as well and spent a month apprenticed to a masseur. "I know the man who owns these eight sunbeds. He asked my brother to market the beds, bring food and drink for guests from his shack for free. In turn, he got a place to ply his trade and kept all the money he made..." Fakhruddin says, calling him over with a whistle.
Saifuddin ambles over with a laminated acupressurist's illustration of the human foot, and convinces me to get a foot massage as we chat. Just then, the kids come back from a swim. Before I know it, Salma Begum is braiding the daughter's hair and then, the two brothers give the husband and son back massages. It sounds like Fakhruddin's family has a sweet deal, I say, eating the last piece of the pineapple.
"It's hard work, but we're not complaining. Sales are good on some days and not on others. There are many risks in businesses here that are totally dependent on tourists," he says. "But in the last three seasons that we've all worked together on the beach, we've managed to send home enough money to make a pucca house in the village and hire labour to tend to our fields…" he says. "Just that when we all go back home, we never say how exactly Goa has helped us become prosperous - we just say we run a Rs family business' here!"
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