The apartment smells funny. It’s been a week of traveling and back. The smell seems to be strongest in the guest room. I open the cupboard bracing myself. I am simultaneously relieved and disgusted. The de-humidifier bag has not burst but the spores have found their ideal conditions to proliferate. White specks of mold have made their way from the edge of the cupboard onto my clothes. My never used in Goa deep blue jeans look like I used white paint on my toothbrush to spray all over. I’m fascinated and repulsed at the same time. I bring it closer to my nose and smell the must. Should I just burn all the clothes in this closet? Is this punishment for hoarding my thin -fat girl clothes when I told myself I will have less things this time around ?

I use a disinfectant cloth to clean it out and take all my clothes out and dunk them in the washing machine. I push my work calls to the second half of the day. I know I’m going to spend the rest of the night and perhaps tomorrow morning battling spores.

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There’s nothing that I haven’t tried short of having a full-time household help who cleans surfaces as psychotically as I do. I’ve used vinegar, soap water, alcohol, dehumidifiers, kept the doors of the cupboards open and called a carpenter who sprayed something that more likely poisoned me than the spores. He assured me last monsoon I would never be traumatised by fungus again. That was a lie.
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In 2020, when the world shut down, I became obsessive about cleaning. I would see one strand of my hair on the wooden floor and begin to unravel. I would drop everything to vacuum. When I got a full time job that was making me work 14 hours a day, I realised I could be stuck in this loop forever. So to alleviate my stress I bought a Rumba which is one of those automated devices that you can send to designated spots in your house to clean the floor. My trust deficit was at an all-time high. I would follow the Rumba around, to ensure it was cleaning properly.
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After cleaning and spraying, I finally fall asleep exhausted. My dreams are about the spores I’ve probably inhaled growing inside of me. The feeling of being overtaken by fungus becomes particularly intense at 3:30 am. I force myself to go back to sleep so I can dream a workaround in my head. A few hours later; I’ve woken up feeling I’m a mobile phone in a canister of rice waiting to be dried out. My sheet feels damp. I ask myself why don’t I just go back to the city I was born in and stop dealing with the fungus?

Dawn has broken and I can see the colours change around the creek my balcony overlooks. Very often the colour spectrum makes me feel like my pupils are dilated. I decide to take a walk. As i walk down to the creek; I’m astounded at how many different shades of green I can count, how magically nature spurts out of the most unexpected of spots. One could sneeze a handful of seeds of any plant and they would ‘mushroom’ in monsoon season. The sky is on a trip of its own and even after 1 year and 9 months of living here, I’m still taking pictures like a tourist. The photographs never do it justice but that hasn’t been a deterrent. The stillness of the water against the green, the rice fields swarming with kingfishers, egrets and herons is a sight for sore eyes. If I’m lucky there will be a baby python too. The scene feels like one of those interactive wallpapers shifting slightly everyday. The dynamic art that nature provides at every hour brings tears to my eyes fairly often. Is this what they call transcendence?

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I’m getting better at dealing with fungus. I’m coming to accept that it has nothing to do with how good or bad I am at keeping house. It helps to have friends who’ve lived here for longer than you have. When I hand them a bottle of alcohol: they just calmly wipe off the mold sticking to the top and pour it into the glasses, reassuring me that mold is growing inside all of us by this point. We laugh.
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I went into a forest near Surla in the southern part of Goa last weekend for a night walk. It is nearing the end of monsoon season. Wildlife was abundant as the rain poured down on us. We saw a viper, tarantula, tree crab, scorpion, vine snake and rat snake in their natural habitat but none of them were the show-stopper. It was the fungus in the forest. Giant mushrooms that faintly illuminated the forest because of their colour. Brown mushrooms on fallen tree barks.

I could have been on the set of Lord of the Rings. We watched the mushrooms spore under the torchlight- It was bewitching. It is how I’ve visualised the casting of a spell – the spell slowly diffusing into the air to land on the person you want to bless/curse. We walked deeper in the forest and turned the torchlights off and closed our eyes. My eyes opened to a green white light on the forest floor and in the roots of trees climbing their way up to the bark. Bioluminescent fungi produce light through a chemical reaction involving the enzyme luciferase and the molecule luciferin. When luciferin reacts with oxygen in the presence of luciferase, it emits light. These fungis ( Mycena and Neonothopanus gardner) are essential for the health of a forest ecosystem. And the dampness is essential for their growth.

I’m trying to see if I can pass the exist in the monsoon in Goa test. It’s a lesson in trade-offs and in being detached from material things which you may have to burn or throw out because the fungus took over. To paraphrase Bob Marley: The truth is many things are going to give me anxiety, I just have to find the ones worth suffering for.
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This is Goa monsoon Season 2. So far the nightmares about being consumed by the mold monster doesn’t outweigh my love for Goa. I hope that sticks for the foreseeable future.

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