Although my mum’s de Sousa family home is in Siolim, their original village is Anjuna. Sadly, I know precious little more, besides the fact that they were neighbours of Venerable Fr. Agnel.
A book I happened to come across (and made my blood boil) provides the backdrop to the problems that bedevil Anjuna (and indeed the rest of Goa) and have made our once-famed beach belt a den of sin.
‘Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India’ (1995) by Cleo Odzer (1950-2001) is shabbily written but I soldiered through it only to get another perspective of the Goa of my childhood. She describes five years 1975-1980 of her life, based out of Anjuna, “the best place on the planet.” However, Odzer was so self-absorbed that even while writing about it nearly two decades later and revisiting (and dying in) Goa, she was blind to how she and her ‘Goa Freaks’ accelerated the ruin of that same idyll.
From Odzer’s own description, the Goa Freaks loved Anjuna’s (and the rest of the beach-belt’s) scenic location, the sea, surf, sand, gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. But not “the Goans” for whom she has only condescending contempt. Goa is just a backdrop for exclusively-white (not one Black or Asian among her Goa Freaks) drug-fuelled hedonism; “the Goans” do their cooking, cleaning and other menial tasks. Very few Goans are mentioned by name: her landlord Lino, for instance. Her maids who dutifully keep house while she globe-trots on so-called ‘adventures’ (but are international crime: drug couriering, trafficking, money-laundering) are just “the maids.” All “the Goans” are owed back-payments in rent and wages running into months and years but Odzer splurges on furnishings for her Goan home (‘Anjuna Drugoona Saloona’, which as the name suggests, is a drug haven) and on her own insatiable drug habit and generous offerings to her Goa Freak friends. This despite raving about “the low cost, pennies an hour, of
Goan labour.”
Odzer deludes herself into thinking that in the 1970s, hers was “the first Goa home with running water and a flushing toilet.” Yet, when “the maid” isn’t around to fill the tank,
the toilet remains unflushed for weeks. Sanitation
and hygiene are not Goa Freak priorities.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Goa was a drug haven then, precisely because “no police disturbed them there.” (But Odzer seems to imply a “special relationship” with one Inspector Navelcar, then posted in Panjim police station. She remembered his name, so he must have been truly extraordinary). The drugs have evolved into more varied, more lethal, soul-destroying avatars that still seem to enter with unchecked impunity. Odzer et al smuggled their consignments in suitcase linings and other ingenious hideaways, including body cavities. If one believes local accounts, today jet-skiers go out into the high seas and ferry them in from waiting boats, and absolutely no-one stops them.
Odzer’s contempt for Goa comes across when she gleefully describes how she and her boyfriend dined at Fort Aguada, Goa’s “fanciest hotel” and “enjoyed the food tremendously by slinging it with our forks across the elegant dining room.” And she similarly trashed hotel rooms in Bombay (Mumbai) and elsewhere in India. But never in the western world, oh no. In India, especially Goa, anything goes. We took it lying down then, and we do it now.
Even when apprehended by police lock-up all over India, “breathtakingly beautiful” twenty-something Odzer seems to have received preferential treatment. In Tihar, Charles Sobhraj and partner interceded for her.
I skipped through a lot of the loathsome writing, but I did learn for example that electrification came to Anjuna only in 1977/78. The descriptions on her sojourns into 1970s Mapusa (and the Panjim police station and Inspector Navelcar!) are also quite revealing. I’m also amazed: if enough time has lapsed after committing a crime (drug trafficking, swindling hapless co-Westerners of their money in travellers’ cheques, etc), are there no consequences for breathlessly bragging about it in a trashy book that some websites recommend as a “good read”?
In all Odzer’s Goa years, she made no attempt to learn Konkani, just like most so many who have made Goa their “home” today. She is oblivious to and has no empathy for anyone not white, least of all the poor. Today’s Indian ‘Goa Freaks’ also invisibilise Goans, living in their own bubble with their “tribe”, to use their lingo. Odzer had zero interest in Goan culture; today’s casino and beach-party freaks are the same.
The languid drug-fuelled lifestyle of her circle sounds so dull and monotonous, even downright hazardous, with toddlers (unimmunised, of course) crawling through coke powder and hypodermic needles.
What became of Odzer’s Goa Freaks? A sizeable number died of some complication or other of drug use.
But here’s the thing. When her insane lifestyle finally became untenable, she could pack up and go to her real “home”, the US. When today’s Indian ‘Goa Freaks’ find the idyllic Goan backdrop-playground ruined or they tire of it, they’ll go “home” or find somewhere else. What happens to the locals who have to pick
up the pieces and clean up
after them, like Odzer’s nameless “maids”?
The mess the coastline villages of Anjuna and vicinity are in today, with the literally hundreds of noise limit-defying nightclubs and the burgeoning drug menace are the inevitable organic offspring of the unfortunate hedonistic reputation Goa acquired soon after Liberation, and encapsulated by the Goa Freaks that Odzer describes in such detail, and perpetuated even now by Bollywood.
Yet because of Odzer’s circle’s isolationist snobbery, the rest of Anjuna’s beach-belt was still accessible to the locals. The Anjuna beach I knew from the 1980s, even early 1990s, is unrecognisable today. The nouveau Goa Freaks and the crony capitalist ecosystem that feeds off them rule the roost. We, the descendants of “the Goans” that Odzer so despised, have less and less agency over our own land and leisure spots for the good wholesome fun we once knew and loved.
(Dr. Luis Dias is a
physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play
India Foundation.
He blogs at luisdias.wordpress.com)