Every morning, for two full years, I stood at the same spot on the road outside my college gate in Margao — the one with the cracked pavement and the coconut tree that leaned slightly, as though it too had given up on standing straight — and I waited. Not for the bus. Not for a friend. I waited for a man on a motorcycle who charged twelve rupees to take me three kilometres down a road that I had, by then, memorized to the last pothole.

His name was Santosh, though I called him nothing to his face, as one does in Goa, where names are often unnecessary between people who already know each other by instinct. He wore a blue half-sleeve shirt tucked into dark trousers that seemed immune to Goa’s humidity — a detail I noticed only because my own collar was perpetually damp before 9 a.m. His bike was a battered Hero Honda that sounded, on cold mornings, like it was clearing its throat before a speech. He would slow as he approached me, not quite stopping, because we both understood the routine: I would step off the kerb and swing onto the pillion in one practiced motion, and we would be off before I had finished adjusting my bag.

There were other pilots at that stand. There were always other pilots. Some charged ten rupees. A few had newer bikes. One fellow had a Honda Activa so clean it looked like it had been ridden directly out of a showroom and parked on that dusty roadside as a personal insult to the rest. And yet, every single morning, I waited for Santosh.

Looking back now, I realize I did not make a single rational decision in those two years. I made one decision — on the first day, by accident — and then I repeated it, automatically, until it became the only decision I knew how to make.

Twelve Rupees and the Long Way Round

The first time I rode with Santosh, it was pure chance. He happened to be at the front of the queue. The college was new to me, the road was new to me, and having a pilot who nodded calmly and said, in Konkani, “Bos, bhitor ye” — “Sit, come inside” — with the casual authority of someone who had been doing this since the state was young felt like exactly the kind of stable ground I needed. He did not ask me twice. He did not explain the route. He simply drove, and I simply held on, and when we reached the right junction he slowed without being told.

The second day, I went back to him. And the third. By the end of the first week, something unspoken had been agreed upon between us: a mutual recognition that this arrangement worked, and that working arrangements were not to be disturbed.

Our conversations were, by any measure, deeply unimpressive. He told me once that the rains had come earlier this year than last year. I agreed. I told him once that the college canteen served pohe that tasted of sorrow. He did not disagree. We talked about cricket exactly once, reached no conclusions, and did not return to the subject. But these small, empty exchanges — conducted over the noise of the engine and the occasional aggressive horn from a truck — had a peculiar warmth to them. They were the conversations of two people who did not need to impress each other, and that is a far rarer thing than it sounds.

There were other incidents. The time it rained without warning and Santosh handed me, from beneath the seat, a thin plastic sheet that smelled of old fish and something else I never identified, which I held over my head with the dignity of a person who has abandoned dignity. The time we got behind a procession for a local zatra — a temple festival — and sat for eleven minutes while a painted elephant thought slowly about its next step, and Santosh and I watched together in a companionable silence that felt, absurdly, like friendship.

By the second year, he knew which junction I needed without my saying anything. I knew he preferred to be paid at the end of the week rather than daily, though neither of us ever discussed this explicitly. These are the small grammars that develop between people who see each other every morning: entirely wordless, completely understood.

The Activa man, for his part, gave up trying approximately seven months in. I like to think we parted on good terms, though we never actually spoke.

My Mother and the Fish She Did Not Need to See

My mother had her own version of this arrangement, conducted at a scale considerably more aromatic.

The Margao fish market is not a place that eases you in gently. It announces itself from outside the building — a dense, living smell of salt and sea and something urgent that I can only describe as time passing quickly for someone other than you. Inside, the chaos is organized in the way that experienced chaos always is: rows of women in bright sarees seated behind shallow baskets of bangda, surmai, pomfret, and more, every one of them conducting three conversations simultaneously while keeping one eye on the customer in front of them. Silver fish lay packed in ice under fluorescent lights. The floor was wet. Everyone’s chappals were wet. This was accepted.

My mother walked through all of it — past the woman with the pomfret arranged like a fan, past the young girl selling shrimp with the aggression of someone who had been told she was born to sell shrimp, past a man inexplicably carrying a large empty bucket — and went directly to Maushi. That was what she called her: Maushi. Aunty. A comfortable, warm, essentially Goan form of address for a woman she had been buying fish from for eleven years.

Maushi’s fish was not always the freshest. I say this with love and also with the evidence of two specific incidents involving bangda that my mother blamed on the monsoon and I blamed on optimism.

But my mother went back. Every time.

The exchange between them was ritual. My mother would approach. Maushi would look up from whatever negotiation she was currently winning and say, “Kay ghevchi aaj?” — “What do you want today?” — and my mother would reply by pointing at the surmai, and then they would spend the next four minutes arguing about the price with an energy and enthusiasm that bore no relation to the amount of money involved. The difference was rarely more than twenty rupees. They appeared to enjoy the argument. It was, I came to understand, not really about the fish.

Once, and only once, I suggested to my mother that the woman two stalls to the left had very good pomfret and was selling them at a noticeably better price. My mother looked at me with the patient disappointment of someone being told by a child that clouds are made of cotton.

“Her pomfret might be fine,” she said. “But I don’t know her.”

And that was the entire argument, delivered in seven words.

Maushi, for her part, gave my mother a small discount on festival days that was never announced and never acknowledged. She kept aside surmai when she knew my mother was coming. On the day my father was ill and my mother came looking harried and distracted, Maushi packed the fish without the usual theatre, charged a fair price, and said, simply, “Bara jata” — “It’ll be fine.” My mother told me this story six months later, casually, as though it were unremarkable. Which is, of course, the point.

The Same Story, Told Twice

It took me embarrassingly long to notice that my mother and I were doing the same thing.

She had her corner of the fish market. I had my spot on the road outside the college gate. She had Maushi; I had Santosh. She had pomfret; I had three kilometres of Margao road I could have travelled on any bike at all. Neither of us had made a conscious choice to be loyal to these particular people. We had simply chosen them once — she probably decades before I was old enough to hold a fish, me on an unremarkable morning in June — and then, without any further deliberation, kept choosing them.

There is a word for this in economics. I believe it involves the phrase “switching costs,” which economists use to describe the friction involved in changing from one provider of a good or service to another. In their models, this friction is usually quantified in time or money. Two rupees saved. Five minutes gained.

What they do not put in the model — what cannot be put in the model — is the feeling of walking up to someone new and being, for a moment, no one. Just another face. Starting from zero.

In Which I Pretend to Be a Rational Consumer

I should say, in fairness to myself, that I was at this time a college student who believed quite sincerely that I was a clear-eyed, evidence-based person. I had opinions about efficiency. I used the word optimize unironically in conversation. I occasionally talked about opportunity cost with the confidence of someone who had read half a chapter about it.

None of this prevented me from standing in the morning sun, bag on one shoulder, waiting for a specific motorcycle.

The internet had, by this point, already begun to offer us the magnificent promise of maximum choice. We were told — and have been told, with increasing insistence, every year since — that more options lead to better outcomes. Compare prices. Read reviews. Switch providers. There are apps designed to help you find the cheapest version of every good and the most efficient version of every service. There are algorithms learning your preferences so that you can efficiently discover new preferences. The entire architecture of modern consumption is built on the principle that you should always, always be looking for something better.

And here was my mother, in the Margao fish market, buying pomfret from the same woman she had bought pomfret from since the previous government, because she knew her name and she knew how she cut the fish and she knew that on bad days, Maushi would say bara jata and mean it.

She was, by any rational metric, an inefficient consumer. She was also, by any human metric, doing exactly the right thing.

I think about this sometimes when I open an app that offers me seventeen variations of a thing I need and I spend twenty-five minutes reading reviews written by strangers before choosing the option with the most stars, which I then receive three days later and feel nothing about. The transaction was efficient. Nothing was built. No one knows my name.

There is a pilot in Margao, probably still at the same stand, who knew without being told that I needed to be at the junction before 8:45, who handed me a plastic sheet smelling of old fish without comment or apology, and who would slow at my corner without my having to say a word. I never optimized my way to anything half as useful.