Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We were visiting Ray, a friend of David and Esther's, then living in
Goa. He was hard to find. The road to Calangute wound through
dense forests of palms and luxuriant vegetation pullulating with
exotic flowers. The occasional colonial villa, weather-worn, its
curved terracotta tiles cracked or occasionally replaced by corrugated
tin, emerged along our route, but even total ruins charmed us. The
people looked as different from what I knew of the rest of India as
the architecture: stout men with drinkers' bellies on motorbikes;
women in printed cotton dresses, not saris, and comfortable enough
with their gender to hitch-hike or shout greetings to strange men.
And the names painted on doorposts and store signs differed from
the Hindu and Muslim names I'd become so accustomed to by
then: Da Silva, Pereira, Da Costa, Miranda, Da Souza . . . There
were also little bars everywhere, bars that sold alcohol. In a land still
operating a partial form of Prohibition, this was a raving novelty in
itself.
Calangute in the seventies was a tiny town of low buildings,
deep verandas, sleepy amiability, dollar-a-week 'hotels,' and, near
the sea, a meandering strip of makeshift thatched huts designed to
serve a new kind of foreign invader. Everywhere were what we still
called hippies. And here they were not the grimy, pale-skinned,
unhealthy drop-outs of London or Amsterdam. Lithe, suntanned,
hair tied in knots or plaits, rattling with ethnic jewellery, the men
wore patterned loincloths so spare they were scarcely more than
little bags stuffed with genitals. And the women mostly went topless,
sarongs wrapped around their waists for streetwear modesty, to cover
the G-strings that covered precious little themselves. The only
footwear seemed to be toe rings. Jingling ankle bracelets made of
little bells warned you the way Saint Francis Xavier once had that
Western influences were approaching. Outside the little straw cafés,
or in the shade of restaurants with roofs but no walls, these latter-
day conquistadores sat smoking ornate chillums or Rasta-size joints.
The warm breeze was fragrant with hashish and pot day and night.
Little wonder a dreamy lethargy seemed to have invaded these new
colonists, who walked in slow motion, broke off conversations in
mid-sentence, and stared at nothing in particular for hours on end.
