A Visit to Gorai Village

A bunch of us spent from last Saturday evening till Sunday late afternoon at the beautiful “Gorai Beach Cottage” in Gorai Village. It was supposed to be a Tango weekend. My friend Malaika and her mother have relatives in the village and visit often; that is how we came to know of the popular picnic spot. We took the ferry from Borivli and reached Gorai Village.

Incidentally, Deline happened to be there in line waiting for the ferry just like me. We reached together. 

loved the brick wall of this century old house! They're capturing a novel spider's nest.

Deline took me to her cousin’s beautifully solid hundred year old house first, where the rest of us gathered before leaving for the cottage. Let’s hope the century-year old house stays like that for a long time, with all its memories, as we also learned how the village gets flooded now, due to ecological and climatic changes (read inconsiderate development).

Deline’s cousin Syrina made sumptuous East-Indian dinner for us (including very special ‘rice-roti’, chicken curry and daal) and we had Deline’s delicious green-chutney sandwiches earlier and a barbeque before dinner, which included sweet potato (I loved it), capsicum, paneer, chicken and shark. Yes, you read that right. I wanted to taste that before turning back to vegetarianism as Diva and Manya, my nieces have asked me often if I had tasted shark. It was ok:) With so much good food around we could not stay for long on the topic of ghosts.

Paneer by Gaurav, who complained about the colour of flame in his phone

The coals were fanned quickly with an electric table fan, the Resort’s owner, Allen, (it’s Allen Wadi, where we were at) another relative of Deline’s (that’s how we got the place in peak season) helped us with that and the next day, also gave us his home-made black-currant wine to taste! Some of us have duly ordered it for ChristmasJ

view of portico from verandah of the cottage

The resort was well maintained and had recycled old bottles as decoration… Please note the white and blue bottle chandelier on top of the table.

In the morning we had hot “batata- vada” and tried fresh toddy from ’taal-gora’ (tender fruit from a palm tree). It tasted a little bit like pungent coconut water. We were told, if it is stored for a few more hours it will be like vodka. Some people tried that too later, I dared not, as vodka does not suit me at all.

Gaurav, Abhishek and Debrup, clicked by Malaika.

After checking out a large community hall to see if it might be hired for a Tango evening that could be organized later, we went to a cleaner beach (it’s basically a fishing village), a little further from the resort and tried to postpone the coming back trip as much as possible.

We also went to another relative of Deline’s, where we had a little green fruit from the tree, (really sour, very tasty) called ‘bimbli’, and saw the biggest well in the area. This one was uncovered and housed many fish and toads. We fed bits of chapattis to them.

We were all in holiday mood and ended up dancing very little, just before lunch and had had to leave after tea. Oh, the tea was flavoured with lemon-grass, which was farm-fresh BTW, just like all the vegetables we were served.

Deline and Malika (coolest mother-daughter team ever) did all the hard-work and finally came back in the morning. 

This is the picture shared by Malaika, of when they crossed the creek back to Borivli.

I really feel fortunate to have caught a glimpse of the rich Maharashtrian village culture (oh, there are many dialects of Marathi, all over, not that I understand much yet), only a few kilometers from the city... and above all such amazing warm-heartedness!

Looking forward to going there again when we can have a larger gathering and Tango weekend!:)