Not wishing her to become the sort of habitually condemnatory traveller one too often meets in India, I muttered something about ‘thoughtlessness rather than cruelty’; but I could see she was not impressed by this. Our bus-driver’s behaviour was most probably a result of his enjoyment of power, but it would have been both absurd and unwise to try to explain to Rachel that recently urbanised young Indians, in positions of petty authority, often become bullies for complex reasons connected with the structure of the Hindu family. Therefore, to avoid confirming her deduction that many Indians are callous louts, I had fallen back on the sort of waffling she so rightly scorns. The snag is that small children have their own black and white code and to try to make them focus on the grey areas too soon would impose an unfair strain. Against one’s own cultural background one manages this situation without even thinking about it, but given the added complication of an alien set of values it can become decidedly awkward.
I have been advised that the best and cheapest place to relax in Goa is Colva beach, where the hippy colony is small, the beach long and the absence of man-eating insects makes sleeping out feasible. Although Goa has a lot to offer I don’t plan to explore: we are pausing there solely to give Rachel a few days’ rest while she completes her adjustment to the time-change.
19 November. Colva Beach.
We berthed at Panaji two and half hours late; I’m not sure why, but who cares anyway? Today I have been quite overcome by Indian fatalism plus European sybaritism. This beach really is everyman’s dream of a tropical paradise.
Our night on the boat was imperfectly restful; during the small hours we stopped twice at obscure ports and the usual pandemonium ensued by the light of the moon and a few Tilly lamps. Soon after five o’clock both Rachel and I gave up the attempt to sleep and sat looking over the side at the tender beauty of moonlight on water. Then gradually came a dove-greyness to the east; and then a lake of bronze-green light widening behind the Western Ghats; and finally a sudden reddening and a radiant arc above the night-blue mass of the hills. That was a sunrise to remember.
We sailed up the palmy, balmy Aquada estuary through schools of frolicking porpoises, yet despite its lovely setting I was not impressed by Panaji which is being developed with more haste than taste.
Goa has traditionally enjoyed a standard of living higher than the Indian average, but recently new industries fostered by Delhi have attracted thousands of landless peasants, from Andhra Pradesh, U.P. and Mysore, and many have been unable to get the jobs they hoped for. Therefore the scene as we berthed was not quite what the tourist literature leads one to expect of dreamy, easy-going, old-world Goa. Some fifty or sixty porters were grouped on the quay and they fought each other like tigers for access to the boat and an opportunity to earn the equivalent of two and a half pence. In some places such mêlées are no more than a local sport; here the frantic desperation on these men’s faces made one realise that carrying a load could mean the difference between a meal and no meal.
Panaji’s best buildings line the quay – the Old Fort, Government House and the Palace of the Archbishop, who is Primate of the Roman Catholic Church in India. (Since reading Desmond Morris I cannot use that phrase without visualising a gorilla in cardinal’s robes.) Having strolled past these and other handsome façades we spent half an hour wandering through the narrow but astonishingly neat and clean lanes of the old, Iberian-flavoured quarter of Fontainhas. During Portuguese times every urban householder was compelled by law to paint the outside of his house annually, after the monsoon, and it seems the Goans have not yet abandoned this habit.
From Panaji one can take a motor-launch to Rachol, en route for Colva beach, but wishing to glimpse the countryside we went by bus – a roundabout journey, because of Goa’s many rivers and estuaries. For two hours we jolted slowly between still, palm-guarded paddy-fields, or over steep hills entangled in dense green jungle, or past tidy hamlets of red-brown thatched cottages, or over wide, slow rivers serenely reflecting a deep blue sky. I couldn’t help longing to be on foot, with a pack-animal to carry my kit; but another year or so must pass before I can revert to that way of life.
In four and a half centuries the Portuguese naturally made a much deeper impression on Goa (area 3,800 square kilometres: population 837,180 in 1971) than the British could make on their unwieldy empire in less than half that time. Margao is emphatically not an Indian town – not even to the extent that the British-built hill-stations now are – but neither is it Portuguese, despite a few imposing buildings with Moorish touches. Like the rest of Goa, it has its own unique, unmistakable character.
One immediately senses the effect on local attitudes of the hippy influx. The Goans are by nature welcoming and warmhearted, and not unduly disposed to take financial advantage of the tourist, but many do now feel it necessary to be politely on guard with outsiders. Much hippy behaviour grossly offends Indians of every sort, though this country’s high standards of tolerance and hospitality usually preserve the offenders from being made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. In Goa, however, with its strong Christian minority, I had thought people might be less temperate in their reactions to such hobbies as nudity and drug-taking; but apparently this is not so.
When we got down from our bus it was two o’clock, and hot and still in the streets of Margao. Most of the shops were shut – I was looking for a liquor store – so we sat drinking tea under a tattered awning, watching a couple of American hippies rolling a joint. When someone beckoned from the tea-house door the young man jumped up with more alacrity than hippies are wont to display and hurried round to the side of the building. His companion then looked at us, smiled hazily and asked, ‘You want some grass?’
‘No thank you,’ I said, ‘my vices are of another generation. I’m looking for a liquor store. But it seems they’re all closed.’
The girl stood up. ‘I’m Felicity,’ she said, shaking pastry-crumbs out of the folds of her voluminous ankle-length robe. ‘Come, I’ll show you – there’s always one open down here.’ And she took the trouble to guide us for half a mile through dusty, sun-stricken streets. At the door of the shop she nodded and turned away, having given a perfect example of the sort of disinterested kindness practised by many hippies but for which the tribe gets too little credit.
Colva is a scattered settlement, rather than a town or village, and my heart sank when the bus stopped on the edge of the beach beside a shack in which Coke and other such fizzy potions are sold. The place seemed to be infested with foreigners. Not less than ten were visible at a glance, including a flaxen-haired youth who was strolling under the near-by palms, stark naked, his eyes fixed raptly on the horizon as though it were vouchsafing him some vision not normally granted to man – as, indeed, it doubtless was. Rachel considered him closely for a moment and made an unprintable judgement before turning her attention to the camping possibilities of the terrain.
As we walked on to the beach it became apparent that Colva is not, after all, too seriously infested; pale, smooth sands stretch for many miles with no trace of development and away from the bus stop there are few people to be seen. Close to the sea, palms flourish on low, scrubby sand-dunes where I reckoned it should be possible to camp comfortably; but first we would bathe, and then return to the settlement to eat before looking for a sleeping-spot. Floating in clear green water, listening to pure white surf singing on golden sands beneath an azure sky, I felt as unreal as a figure in a travel brochure for millionaires.
The local fisherfolk – whose boats and nets are strewn all over the beach – seem very shy, though willing to be friendly with Rachel. They are almost black-skinned, quite tall and beautifully proportioned. (Good advertisements for a fish and coconut diet.) The women wear gay blouses and swirling skirts, the men only a cod-piece attached to a string around their waist, or sometimes to a belt of silver links. As we bathed they were constantly passing to and fro, the women and girls carrying on their heads enormous circular wicker baskets, or earthenware or bras
s jars. Twice we saw crews loading elaborate nets into heavy boats, which were then pushed on rollers into the sea. It delighted me to watch these men – all grace, strength and skill – performing a ritual unchanged for millennia. As they worked they chanted a slow, haunting song and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. These aboriginal inhabitants of Goa have never interbred with invaders.
Back at the settlement we met a pathetic American youth named Bob who had the unmistakable appearance of one suffering from chronic dysentery. When I explained that we were going to sleep out he jumped like a shot rabbit and told us that a hippy sleeping on the dunes had had his throat slit three nights ago. The naked body was found only this morning and has not yet been identified, nor have the police any idea who the killer might be, so we are now installed in a typical Goan fisherman’s hut at Rs.5 a night. It is half-full of nets and other equipment, with a roof and walls of palm-fronds, interwoven with palm-trunks, and a floor of loose, fine sand. The beds are strips of coir laid on the sand and since there is no door the place has its limitations as a protection against throat-slitters. However, our landlord’s cottage is scarcely thirty yards away and his pi-dogs are large, fierce and vociferous.
From our non-door we have a splendid view of the sea; I threw a stone to see if the waves were within a stone’s throw and if I were a better stone-thrower they would be. Rachel rejoices in the innumerable small black pigs and minute piglets, and in the brown-and-cream goats and mangy pi-dogs (too much fish produces mange) who roam around near by. The whole beach is permeated by a strong but pleasant fishy smell: noisy flocks of gulls and crows see to it that no fish rots. Slightly less pleasant-smelling is my present form of illumination – a wick floating in a small tin of shark’s oil.
20 November. Colva Beach.
This has been an extremely idle day: I can think of none other quite like it in my entire life. Yet now my muscles are reminding me that ‘idle’ is not the mot juste; since morning I must have swum seven or eight miles, up and down, parallel to the beach.
I am writing this sitting in the doorway of our hut, with a glass of Feni (the local spirit, distilled from cashew-nuts) beside me, and through a fringe of palms, stirring in the evening breeze, I can see a fleet of ancient fishing-boats sailing away into the gold and crimson sunset. But this is a place and a time for purple prose, so I must exercise restraint.
A coconut-picker has just been distracting me: I delight in watching them as they swarm up these immensely tall trees, with no aid but a few shallow footholds cut in the bark, and send huge nuts thudding on to the sand. Nuts are now 75 paise each – a few years ago a rupee bought half a dozen – but one nut provides a full meal for two.
A ripple of morbid excitement went through the settlement today as the police from Margao man-hunted. They have apparently established that the murdered man was a German – good detective work since he wore nothing, carried no documents and had communicated with nobody during his fortnight or so amongst these dunes. Such a degree of withdrawal is common at a certain stage of drug-addiction, when the victim himself hardly knows who he is, but the Goan police do not realise this and clearly suspect Colva’s foreign colony of an unhelpful conspiracy of silence.
21 November. Colva Beach.
The hazards of tropical life are upon us. This morning Rachel trod on a malevolent dead fish with a frill of four-inch spikes around its neck. One spike penetrated far into her right foot, which bled profusely, but prolonged immersion in sea-water seems to have cured it.
When I looked up just now I saw a line of five young women walking by the edge of the waves, balancing enormous wicker fish-baskets on their heads. They moved with marvellous grace and against a turquoise sea their full-skirted gowns – orange, blue, pink, yellow, red, green, mauve – billowed and glowed brilliantly. Life on Colva beach is full of such pictures, making the ugliness and suffering of Bombay seem not part of the same human existence. But the snag about even a rudimentary tourist industry is that it inexorably raises barriers between travellers and residents. Here the Us and Them atmosphere is already so strong that one can only admire the locals from a distance.
This is being another slightly unreal day; it is just too idyllic to waken on golden sand in a palm-leaf hut, and to look through a non-door at a milky blue early sky, and to hear the gentle hiss of the surf behind the shrieking of parrots and the immemorial chanting of fishermen beaching their boats.
Later. The first disaster of the trip: despite all my security precautions someone stole between 500 and 600 rupees while we were having our sunset swim. As usual I had put my purse – containing watch, cash and traveller’s cheques – in the pocket of my shorts, which were left close to the water with my boots on top to make an easily watched pile. I could have sworn I never took my eyes off that pile for more than thirty seconds and it was a nightmarish moment when I put my hand into my empty pocket. To be without one paise some 6,000 miles from home is not funny. Immediately I found myself thinking, ‘Thank God it’s a hippy colony!’ for in such situations the less way-out type of hippy may be seen at his concerned best.
On the way back to our hut I paused to ask a young Australian couple – camping under the palms in a tiny tent – if they had noticed anything suspicious. They had not, but instantly offered to lend me Rs.10 and to baby-sit Rachel while I went to the police in Margao. (Here there is neither policeman nor telephone.) No one believed the police would even pretend to attempt to recover the money – responsible Indians themselves admit the rule of law has virtually collapsed since the British left – yet the average European’s first reaction to any crime is to report it to the police. Though one may know this exercise to be pointless it still has a therapeutic effect, probably because it is our way of sublimating a primitive longing for revenge.
Leaving Rachel with the Australians, I hurried between the palms to our hut – and saw my purse lying on the floor the moment I stepped through the doorway. My first thought was that it must have slipped out of my pocket before we went for our bathe, but all the cash had been taken, including the coins, though all the cheques and my watch have been returned. So I feel certain the thief was not an Indian, who could use traveller’s cheques as currency notes and to whom a Swiss watch would seem a treasure beyond price – even one bought for 30 shillings in Kathmandu eight years ago. It is, however, easy to imagine a destitute hippy lurking among the palms, or behind a beached boat, and being irresistibly tempted to solve his pressing financial problems at my expense. The hippy conscience is a curious, unpredictable thing and it does not surprise me that such a thief would go to some trouble to return unwanted loot. Very likely if the same young man – or woman – suddenly inherited a fortune they would give most of it away.
This is Colva’s third major robbery from a foreigner in ten days. Last week an unfortunate English girl, on the way home from a working holiday in Tokyo, was robbed of £400, a gold watch and her passport. (British passports are currently fetching £300 each in India.) Such a calamity makes our loss look pretty insignificant and when I heard about it my lust for vengeance ebbed and I decided not to bother trekking to and from Margao police station.
22 November. Karwar.
Last night four sympathetic fellow-foreigners arrived at our hut to cheer me with a mixture of Feni and Arlem beer and their mission was entirely successful. We sat happily on the sand, beneath a black sky that was lively with the golden blazing of tropical stars, and soon I had decided that money-losses were of no consequence and that all was right with my world. But I woke this morning feeling dreadfully otherwise. Clearly the aforementioned mixture is injudicious and the thought of our stolen money seemed the last straw.
Then our landlord’s toothless wife called, as usual, with a little present for my breakfast – a thick, cold, moist slab of slightly sweetened rice-bread flavoured with coconut. Despite its promising ingredients, this bread is repulsive beyond anything I have ever eaten: but, because its cook always sat smiling in the doorway to observe
my enjoyment of her gift, I had hitherto forced myself to masticate gallantly while looking as though taking an intelligent interest in her rapid Konkani monologue. This morning, however, being past such well-mannered heroism, I implied that I was hoarding the choice morsel for consumption on the bus. Whereupon our friend hastened away to return half an hour later, beaming, with two more slabs.
After our early swim I left Rachel digging a canal with a Swedish hippy and sought a large pot of tea in the recently built tourist restaurant – a small, inoffensive building. For obvious reasons I retired to the least bright corner but was soon pursued by the only other breakfaster, a bustling Bombay whizz-kid who even at the best of times would have done my equilibrium no good. He informed me that he was ‘associated with the Taj Group of hotels’ and had come to Colva to plan another excrescence to match that now being built near Calangute beach on the once-magnificent ramparts of an old Portuguese fortress. He was full of contempt for the shiftless Goans who, he claimed, were simply not interested in the profitable development of their territory. However, he assured me that things are about to improve. Apart from his own present endeavours, a hotel complex (which sounds like what I’ve got, but must mean something quite different) is being built near Colva by a Goan company; and Goan millionaire mine-owners are planning a five-star hotel at Siridao; and a Bombay travel agency is planning another five-star hotel at Bogmalo beach. And so ‘the death of the goose’ is being as ruthlessly and obtusely organised in Goa as in Ireland.
At our present pace it will not take humanity many more years to obliterate every trace of natural beauty on this planet; then people will look back on the Landscape Age as we look back on the Ice Age, believing it once existed yet unable to imagine it.
On a Shoestring to Coorg Page 3