In monsoons past, Mandrem Beach was caught between two seas.
On one side of this sandy sliver of land in North Goa lay the forbidding Arabian Sea. Roused to anger by powerful climatic currents, it dredged up submerged debris and tugged swimmers into its dark, hungry churn.

On the other stretched a tranquil expanse of azure. This second sea was made of tarp. It covered bamboo beach shacks, huts made of woven coconut mats, and slapdash roadside stalls. It battened down leeward windows and roofs made of earthen Mangalore tiles. It hid heaps of sand and cement, stockpiled for hurried off-season improvements.

Gradually—then, post-pandemic, quite suddenly—this sea of tarp began to recede. New concrete structures dotted Mandrem’s streets, standing firm through the year. Unlike earlier establishments, these businesses didn’t pause in deference to Goa’s abundant monsoon from June through September. They had little use for the tarp.

The burst of activity crackled with anticipation. By early 2023, a new airport, decades in the making, finally took off. Situated at Mopa, a short ride inland from the northern stretch of Goa’s coastal belt, it made previously remote areas more accessible to domestic tourists than ever before.

Mandrem, in particular, seemed primed for transformation. A placid village of farmers and fishermen, it is perched at the edge of vast cashew plantations. Most of these are owned by wealthy absentee landlords and tended to by workers from the surrounding district of Pernem.

No bridge connected Mandrem to Goa’s capital, Panjim, until the nineties. Still, few ventured this way. At most, Mandrem’s pristine sands made for a peaceful weekend outing removed from the rabble of Calangute or Vagator beaches. Even today, many residents of the more urban parts of Goa consider it beyond the pale of civilisation.

Not long after my partner Meghana and I met in 2015, we plotted a three-day escape from our daily slog in Mumbai. We drove a wobbly Activa up the coast from Candolim, a tourist hub in North Goa. We bristled—even in August, mid-monsoon—at the crush of tourists, the riot of signboards, and the shrinking natural landscape near the popular beaches south of the Chapora river. Mandrem, by comparison, impressed us with its quiet restraint. 

A great deal looks different today. Mandrem has become our home. It is where we built a restaurant, now in its tenth year. Our time here has afforded us an alarmingly close view of the dramatic changes underway. We are not passive spectators but among the many catalysts propelling these shifts. 

Our own transition started, fittingly enough, with a dinner party. One evening, just before our Goa trip, Meghana and I hosted friends over light salads, a freshly baked quiche, and a peach galette. One of them passed us a drunken compliment: You guys should open a restaurant. And with food like this, why not a shack in Goa? 

We all laughed, a roomful of ad filmmakers and graphic designers. But Meghana and I were intrigued. It’s a fantasy many deskbound professionals have fleetingly entertained. Umbrellas on a beachside deck or maybe a Portuguese bungalow with a kitchen out back and a few tables in front. And this wasn’t just a flight of fancy; we’d earned our chops hosting a series of pop-up dinners. The thought lingered, ripening in the monsoon humidity.

A month after the dinner, we arrived in Goa with a vague curiosity. Poking our noses through gates and windows, we asked after the disposition of a shuttered shop here or an unkempt grove there. We passed a terraced fruit orchard nestled into a hillside between Ashwem and Mandrem beaches. Its arched entrance stood open but we found no trace of a proprietor.

Disappointed, we resolved to pack our bags. The hosts of our B&B were absorbed in a heated negotiation, in French, to buy furniture from the owners of a nearby cafe. No sooner did we enquire than they took us to see the very spot we had just admired. The subtle workings of serendipity sent a chill up our spines. The owners quoted a surprisingly nominal price for the equipment and furniture, and asked for a decision in forty-eight hours. We nursed a large Kingfisher as we sat on the beach, watching a storm rolling in off the sea, to consider. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

We called it Verandah.

For many years after we moved there, Mandrem remained in not just a literal backwater but a commercial one, too. It resisted a Swiggyfied lifestyle of instant amenities. Even now, the practice of susegad, or afternoon rest, remains in force. Since our neighbours’ livelihoods depended on the weather, their schedules were fully attuned to the changing seasons. Our restaurant, too, was synchronised to these rhythms. It shut from May to October, while a deluge of heat and rain affected the flow of visitors, and hunkered down beneath its  protective tarps.

Businesses on and off the beach followed the same pattern. When, in 2019, the two-decade-old Artjuna Cafe took over a space near Mandrem Beach, it inherited a roof made from an Israeli paratrooper’s chute: adequate protection from sun and coconuts but not from rain. And so, it remained shut through the monsoon. JJJ, the cafe’s former manager—who goes by this adopted moniker—told me that Artjuna’s migrant staff, most of whom hailed from villages in Himachal Pradesh, received a stipend even when they returned home to work their fields for half the year.

Then came the pandemic. It brought with it a throng of young creatives fleeing the oppressiveness and claustrophobia of metros under lockdown. Many of them hung on afterwards—even if their offices were no longer content to let them work remotely—and made Mandrem their home. These newcomers would stare blankly at the mere suggestion that our restaurant would close, however briefly, for seasonal maintenance. 

As a result, many businesses like ours made the leap into year-round operations. At Verandah, this allowed us to attract and retain highly qualified professional staff who would have been deterred by seasonal work. They helped breathe life and authenticity into our menu and service.

Artjuna took the transition in its stride. “We never shut ever, not even for a single day,” said JJJ of the cafe’s first few months in Mandrem. “Until the lockdown happened.” But even then, JJJ added, the cafe only shut for a few days “and we were back again with the hole in the wall”—a street-facing window through which takeaway orders could be picked up. With year-round operations, JJJ began staffing the cafe with full-time employees to cater to “a huge residential population”.

Vaayu Kula opened as a boutique hotel on Mandrem Beach in 2022 after closing down its surfer hostel which faced the neighbouring Ashwem Beach. Jill Ferguson, Vaayu’s co-founder, said that keeping a facility open through the year was simply more sustainable for business, even with a narrower flow of guests. “We did the seasonal thing for nine years. And it’s just… it’s exhausting,” she added.

On the other hand, Dunes, a beach shack that has been a Mandrem staple for over twenty-five years, has found success with its time-tested formula. Every May, it is stripped down to its foundations until the onset of the tourist season in October again. James Fernandes, who grew up in Mandrem and owns this adored establishment, hasn’t changed his prices either. “When we see a recession, it doesn’t make sense to raise prices,” he said. “Some places are charging three hundred rupees for a beer, but we’re keeping it at a hundred and twenty. You can have three here instead of one somewhere else.”

As a full-year destination, Mandrem looks very different from the tranquil place we first moved to. JJJ, who bounced around Anjuna’s psytrance scene and ran a shack on Morjim Beach before joining Artjuna, remembers the village as even more remote than the one we chanced upon. The Mandrem of the 2000s was a “yoga retreat place” for the English, he recalled. It also attracted a steady flow of Russians and Ukrainians, many of whom settled here over several decades.

Nevis Britto, who grew up in Ashwem village and operates a guesthouse there, recalled playing atop sand dunes as a child and taking the ferry to high school. Over time, the dunes dwindled as restaurants and resorts took their place.

The balance hasn’t tipped from wilderness to concrete yet. But it is likely just a matter of time before building projects flood in. JJJ rued the recent incursion of major developers with evident despondency. “Villas are coming, jungles are burning,” he said.

Assagao, an inland village in North Goa where holiday villas and second homes abound, provides an instructive example. Here, the Goa-based real estate company, Vianaar Homes, has become a controversial subject. In 2021, the property developer, which builds luxury villas under the tag of sustainability, invoked the ire of activists in Assagao when it reportedly felled some 200 trees, including a banyan that was a few hundred years old.

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Renowned even before the pandemic as a culinary destination, Assagao has since witnessed an explosion of restaurants. Punam Singh, who co-founded and has operated the French-Bengali cafe Mustard since 2015, estimated that new entrants to Assagao, sprawling in size and in outside funding, have added at least 1,450 new dining seats between 2022 and 2023 alone.

As large restaurants from Mumbai and Delhi flock to the region, they challenge not only the bottom line of incumbent, independent establishments but also the atmosphere that once made them exciting. With options everywhere, the electric spark of a place-to-be can be found nowhere.

Monsoons offer relief from this overwhelming abundance of choice. While the crowd is smaller, it is more discerning, having opted out of high-season trends. Happily, we also see Goan foodies from Mapusa and Panjim brave the distance in these months, eager to sample the dishes that caught their eye during high season. For a brief while, the buzz returns.

Falling through the roof taught me a very specific lesson: bend, don’t break. We’d learned through years of trial and error the knots, winches, and windings that fastened our tarps to the roof, but the first gusts of 2020’s monsoon snapped the nylon cables like an old rubber band. I hoisted myself up to remedy the damage, but I plunged right through the roof. We took the opportunity to replace the old cement sheeting with Mangalore tiles.

Britto notes that the shore’s proximity, along with the intensifying power of recent storms, has put even concrete structures at risk. “I thought for sure our house would fall into the sea,” he told me after 2020’s major cyclone. (It did not; the sea wall was reinforced two years later.)

We pay tribute to the Goan landscape by bending with seasonal flows rather than breaking for the off-season. It allows us, for one thing, to forgo the annual plastic-wrapping ritual on which we expended so much time and energy.

Ferguson pointed out that doing away with huge amounts of plastic sheeting didn’t just reduce waste, it also kept in check the mould and mildew that thrives in damp, closed quarters. “It’s always better in the monsoon to have things actually being used and lived in because there’s circulation,” she said.

Vaayu Kula was incorporated with centuries-old Tamil design principles to build resilience to hostile weather. Winds from the sea blow straight through the eaves of its peaked roofs. “A lot of these really new, high-end places that have brought in a beautiful interior designer or architect not from Goa aren’t monsoon-proof at all. They haven’t referenced the annual environmental influences into their design concept,” Ferguson said.

Some of Vaayu’s employees accept the offer to stay on through the year, while others return to seasonal businesses in Ladakh—such as motorcycle rentals—or farming in Karnataka. They also use the time for well-earned rest. “Sometimes, they just chill, they travel, go to Thailand, Nepal, whatever. Kinda like how we chill,” Ferguson said.

For Meghana and me, the entrepreneurial life has involved precious little chill. Back when Verandah took its six-month hiatuses, we looked westward to open an off-season business. In my native Detroit—home to temperate springs and summers, about a quarter of the planet’s freshwater, and world-famous music—we launched an Indian-deli-fusion food truck during the summer after we took our Verandah plunge. Nu Deli now enjoys a cult following—and stays parked in a garage through the winter until we return. While we both work in the US, Verandah is run by our solid team with minimal supervision. Meghana, who braved Mandrem’s sweltering summer heat for several years to stand up the restaurant in its monsoon format, is once again a seasonal migrant.

What has now become Verandah first appealed to us because of what it was not. A series of open, tiled pavilions were nestled into the landscape, not thoughtlessly stamped onto it. Our hillside has been shaped by decades of sustainable, seasonally sensitive cultivation. Coconut palms, of course, but also jackfruit, mango, tamarind, jamun, kokum, tirphal. Several majestic cashew trees planted a half-century ago anchor the terraces.

These trees have embraced the contours of the restaurant with something approaching intention. We’ve done as little as possible to impede them. In the transgenerational narrative of this hillside, our appearance is a brief cameo.

Meghana and I have sometimes wished for a touch more excitement on our stretch. A few interesting places to draw a well-informed audience might be helpful. Too many would risk a Baga-like bedlam where facades overwhelm the foliage. Can we get one without the other? Only if those along for the ride appreciate the irreplaceable gifts that drew us to this beautiful part of the world in the first place. Mandrem, for now, sits on the knife’s edge.