Goa, Oct. 1 -- STEVE CORREA

My earliest mem ories of Goa are not of beaches. They are of a house. Our ancestral home in South Goa, which my parents and I visited, seemed enormous to me as a child. Perhaps it was. Or perhaps childhood has a way of enlarging the spac es where we felt loved. I remember the bustle when we arrived: relatives emerging from every cor ner, overlapping voices, calls from room to room, people vanishing into the kitchen, and children rac ing through the house. At dusk, we lit lanterns whose warm glow spread across the walls and fac es, filling us with com fort. The house seemed to draw everyone in. Mornings had simple rituals: drawing cool, startling water from the well for a bath. No thermostats, elaborate showers...