Two days ago, a friend and I were breakfasting at a chic café in Baga, a bizarre Goan confluence of the digital hippie, Indian yuppie and those whom I simply call Charter Jack and Charter Jane — “Oi, mate!” and chips with everything. A French couple, replete with tattoos, wearing worn clothes, BO, and a girl of about six came and sat by us, burnt some charas, rolled a joint, and began to fumigate the vicinity. My friend, a Goan preparing to adopt a girl, was outraged at the couple’s nonchalance in doing something so openly in Goa that would land them in jail in their own country, besides possibly placing their daughter under State care.
“I can’t believe these guys,” she spat. “They should be whipped. And this Scarlette,” she continued, “how could her mother leave a 15-year-old girl by herself in this day and age, in an area known to be unsafe, known for drugs and raves and what not and go away on her travels? Would she do that in England? No. But this is Goa, right? So now the girl is dead.”
Scarlette Eden Keeling, flower-child of a flower-parent, is dead, after allegedly being on an extended trip of substance abuse, after allegedly being raped by a manager of a shack at Anjuna beach. Less than an hour’s drive north of where I live, in Panjim, Anjuna was once the eastern extremity of Woodstock. Today, it is a tawdry zoo-market of veggie and chemical kundalini, Che T-shirts, Tibetan exileware, brownies and banana lassi by a coast denuded by theft of sand and encroachment of humanity in shacks, shacks and more shacks: legal, illegal, extra-legal. Unfettered rave parties take place on hilltops and valleys within everyone’s hearing — even the administration and the police. At the Café Looda each Wednesday in season, world travellers with beatific smiles brought on by produce from Shiva’s kitchen garden take photos of each other on mobiles, as they gyrate to mediocre psychedelic lounge music and fairly robust rock.
And now the world has come to Goa to inspect this tiny, pretty state’s seedy, seething underbelly, all because of Scarlette. Where the heck was the world all these years? Why the quiet till Scarlette?
Perhaps, because for too long the world and Goa have mutually dressed each other in contraceptives of ‘hip’ and ‘cool’. Perhaps for too long we have bought into an idea of Goa complete in delusion and denial that India’s premier ‘party state’ all too readily offers us, and all too readily has learnt to prostitute. People call it many things. I call it Malaise de Goa.
Goa, once Gomantak and Govepuri, and in the time of the ancients, Aparanta — the land at the horizon — is a charmed place. To come back home to Goa from travels is to ascend into calm. Walkabout in Panjim, I can greet familiar touch points from the grocer and pharmacist to the ageing grandee and elderly beggar. For days, there is little reason to speak; to hear birdsong is enough. Friends and family criss-cross Goa to be with each other, share a drink, meal, humour, care. Here, I learnt again about colour. After two decades in the Big City, here I learnt again to breathe.
But even as I look upon Goa with the eyes of a lover, I experience violent disenchantment with it. It is difficult to deny a place that resembles a fading courtesan, desperate for coins; even, a Banana Republic with caricature dictators. This is a creaky paradise, a pilgrimage for Marquez.
Nearly two years ago a restaurateur acquaintance of mine, an Indian and a longtime Goa resident, was killed at his home. He was first beaten up, and then his neck nearly severed. The whispers were soon about: land deal gone sour, dangerous business. There were also overtones of marital deal gone sour, dangerous business. Both happen.
They still haven’t found — ‘apprehended’? — his killer. Family and friends were advised by the powers not to push investigation; even a flamboyant businessman who calls Goa home passed the word. Let it rest, he advised. Look to the future.