"Goa runs on vindaloo, feni, and fourteen gas cylinders parked under the party"
Tasha Dlamini is twenty-six, a chartered accountant on sabbatical from a Johannesburg audit firm, and the host of Tasha Tastes the World, a food channel whose last video managed 2,114 views. Her sabbatical ends on 31 December. She has twelve days, one cook-off and one video to go viral before a grey cubicle in Sandton takes her back. So she books the Spicy Saffron Shack in Anjuna: a saffron-yellow Portuguese villa on the cliffs, with oyster-shell windows and a vindaloo that makes her cry. It's run by Aunty Rosalind D'Souza, a sixty-seven-year-old retired ship's cook who carries a ladle like a sidearm. On Tasha's first afternoon, a burner that is switched off lights by itself and melts her ring light into a Dalí clock.
Everyone has an explanation for the smell of rotten eggs. Aunty says it's the drains. The guests blame Dreadlock Dieter's incense, or the curse on the locked room at the end of the east wing, where a cook named Esperança complained about the same smell in 1911 and was told it was the drains. Mei Lin, a refinery chemist turned sunrise yoga teacher, knows exactly which egg it is. Neil, the nephew who wired the shed's gas cylinders to a smart hub called Baby Moon, can't smell anything at all. Meanwhile Sven, a Swedish competitive chilli eater with fear nothing tattooed on his forearm, is training to win the cook-off with his whole body. Honeymoon vloggers Jake and Madison film every fight they have, and Arjun, the scooter-hire guy from Kochi, keeps quietly feeding Tasha. Then Tasha's clip of Aunty telling Esperança's ghost story gets millions of views, and FreeToWander rebrands the event the Cursed Cook-Off.
The valves in the gas shed keep opening at three in the morning. The Wi-Fi password is NoSmokingPlease, and nobody is taking it literally enough. By New Year's Eve there are four hundred and twelve paper stars over the terrace, twenty burners in two neat rows, two hundred and forty people in Santa hats, three million viewers on the stream and a fireworks display waiting on the beach below. Tasha has the story she came for. What she doesn't have is any way to turn off the gas.
Age: 26
Type: Food vlogger and chartered accountant on sabbatical
Fatal Flaw: Can't see a hook without pressing record
Role: Protagonist
Age: 28
Type: Competitive chilli eater from Gothenburg
Fatal Flaw: Has fear nothing tattooed on his forearm and means it
Role: Guest
Age: 67
Type: Retired ship's cook who runs the Shack
Fatal Flaw: Blames every smell on the drains
Role: Keeper of the house
Age: 30
Type: Refinery chemist turned sunrise yoga teacher
Fatal Flaw: Knows exactly which egg she's smelling, then decides not to push it
Role: Ally
Age: 27
Type: Scooter-hire guy from Kochi
Fatal Flaw: Came to Goa for one season seven years ago
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Firmware 7.0.11"
At 3:07 a.m. on the eighteenth of December, Neil D'Souza was the only person awake at the Spicy Saffron Shack, if you did not count the frogs, the generator, the stray dog, the German in the hammock, or the smart home hub on the wall, which Neil did not, because it was a machine and Neil had been raised Catholic, and in his family only God and Aunty Rosalind were allowed to watch you sleep.
He sat cross-legged on the cool red floor of the balcão, the covered front porch of the old villa, with a laptop balanced on a plastic chair and a mug of coffee gone cold beside his knee. Above him, screwed to the whitewashed wall between a framed Sacred Heart and a laminated sign that read NO OUTSIDE ALCOHOL (ESPECIALLY FENI) — MGMT, the FreeToWander Partner Hub glowed its soft, patient blue.
It was the size of a hockey puck and the colour of a new sink. It had no buttons. It had a ring of light around its edge that breathed slowly, in and out, like something asleep.
Aunty Rosalind had named it Baby Moon the day he installed it.
"Look at it," she'd said, arms folded over her housecoat, a wooden ladle sticking out of her pocket like a sidearm. "Round. Shining. Useless. Like a baby moon."
"It's not useless, Aunty. It runs the locks. The Wi-Fi. The water pump. The geysers. The cylinders—"
"It runs my cylinders?"
"It monitors your cylinders. It has sensors. If there's a leak, it shuts the valve by itself. Automatically. You won't even have to go into the shed."
Aunty had looked at the puck for a long moment, the way she looked at fish at Mapusa market when the fishwife swore on her mother that it was caught this morning.
"Baby Moon," she'd said again, and patted it, twice, the way you pat a naughty grandchild on the head just before you tell him what's going to happen to him if he breaks anything.
That was eleven months ago. Since then, Baby Moon had not broken anything, unless you counted Aunty's faith in progress, which had arrived pre-broken.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Spicy Saffron Shack, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I came to Goa for the beach and stayed for Aunty's prawn curry. I have not seen the beach." — Lukas, Germany
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Best hostel in India. The Wi-Fi password is a warning. Respect it." — Callum, Glasgow
☠ "lovely terrace. excellent ventilation. for now. thank you for wandering." — @HostelReaper