The Gokarna villa that doesn't have a sign.

The directions I was given were these: walk south along Kudle until the sand runs out, take the path up through the cashew trees, and when you reach a blue gate that is always open, you have gone one house too far. Come back. The house before the blue gate is the one. There is no name on it. There has never been a name on it, and the family who built it in 1974 have turned down, by their own count, four separate offers to put them on a booking site.

Shalini runs it now, with her father Ramesh doing the mornings because he wakes at five regardless and has to be given something to do. Four rooms, all of them on the seaward side, all of them with a door that opens onto the same long veranda. The tiles are Mangalore red. The ceiling fans are older than I am and are wired, alarmingly, into a switchboard that Ramesh describes as “mostly fine.” Every room has a mosquito net, a desk, and a hook for a wet towel, which after four days I decided was a more complete list of what a room needs than most hotels arrive at.

If you need a sign to find us, you have not been told about us by the right person.

I asked about the sign on the first evening, mostly to make conversation. Ramesh answered as though he had been waiting years for someone to ask. “If you need a sign to find us, you have not been told about us by the right person.” He said it without any edge. It is not a policy about exclusivity — it is a policy about arrival. Every guest in that house had been sent by another guest, and the effect of that on a dinner table is not subtle. On my second night, six people who had never met discovered they were connected by a chain of four recommendations that ran from Bombay to Berlin and back.

The mornings belong to Ramesh. He is at the well by six, then in the kitchen, and by seven there is coffee — filter, aggressive, served in steel — and whatever he has decided the day is. Twice it was neer dosa with a coconut chutney he grinds on a stone because the mixie “makes it sound like a machine.” Once it was leftover fish curry with rice, at seven in the morning, which is a thing I had never considered and now think about with some regularity.

The beach below is not a private beach and nobody pretends otherwise. Kudle in January is busy by ten and loud by four, and the house's answer to that is simply altitude: forty feet of headland and a stand of cashew between you and the noise. In the afternoon you can hear the drum circle from the far end, faintly, the way you hear a neighbour's radio. Shalini calls this “the correct distance from Gokarna,” which is a phrase I have since used about several places and one or two people.

On the last morning I asked Shalini whether they would ever list the house properly. She was folding sheets on the veranda and did not stop. “We are full,” she said. “Every season. If we list it we will be full with different people.” Then, after a moment: “My father would have to learn a computer.” She was joking about the second part. I am fairly sure she was not joking about the first.