The smoke
bellowed from the recesses of nothingness, wafting around the shack caressing
the gyrating bodies, enveloped in a trance. The stench or aroma or exhilaration
of grass and its family friends, which leapfrogs the consumer closer to the
Gods, was all pervasive. Beyond the shack, the ocean rose flinging itself onto
the sand on which the shack stood.
Time: 3 am.
Place: Arambol. Date: Could be 1960, or 70 or even 2015, as it was. This was
last week. If you thought that the flower children had left, as did the hippies
and the hedonistic, it is time for a serious relook. At the shack, which takes
its name from one of the most evocative Hindu religious intonations, the
sixties met the hippies and the hippies met the hash and the ganja and the
cocaine and the mix was done, across decades and generations.
Yours truly was
in Arambol to meet a friend and decided to stay over at his little resort of
rooms and food on the beach. As the night wore on, the silence was broken by
the sound of slow drum beats from another part of the beach. One realised later
that there were multiple drumbeats and other assorted sounds from different
points, one just next door, the other up on the hill and still more from the
direction of the not so distant ‘sweet lake’, Arambol’s hotspot of all things,
well, not-so-legal.
In the cold
night, we followed the sound of the drums to the shack which had a name of a
religious intonation. That is where the action was. Through the jungle of
tattooed torsos we wriggled our way to the bar from where we had a vantage
view. To our right, the DJ took a long drag from his joint, one hand on the
laptop keyboard as the music changed. Right in front, a young woman jostling to
keep a semblance of clothing on her rhythm induced body, moved closer to the DJ,
with a purpose. She soon did away with unwanted textiles on her upper torso as
she enveloped herself in a manner a baby monkey does around her mother. It’s
just that this wasn’t a baby hug, but pretty adult, drugged out stuff. But
perhaps the description fits. Cause she was indeed monkey-ing around. Sigh!
By the way, I, my
friend and the guys at the bar were the only Indians. In a space packed with at
least a 100, each one was a foreigner, and very few seemed Russian. If the
tourism department of Goa were in this place and looked at the nationalities
and scaled it multiple times to make this the big picture of Goa, they would
have a great story to tell. All their foreign trips to get foreign tourists
would be justified. It’s just that in that space, on that night, no one knew or
cared about Goa’s tourism department and no one was there because of them.
Next to the girl
monkey who was wrapped around the very dexterous DJ who managed to play music
for the crowd and make music to his enchanted partner, was a bare bodied
clothing hater, who was so drugged that he had a direct connection between his
nerves and the music. Both did a one on one, with his body dancing wildly,
completely out of control. Everywhere we looked it was the same. Some jumped,
some shrieked, grinding their bodies with each other. Yes it was a good party
with only one casualty – clothes or at least some clothes. As the intoxication
rose, this impediment was done away with by many. And what’s more, no one
bothered.
After a bit, when
the smell of dope couldn’t be handled, we went out into the cold sand and the
fresh air to recover, only to find another cog in the wheel who keeps this
giant seamless assembly line of entertainment going, waiting there. This
character and others of this tribe get up when the sun goes down and move from
their temporary camps in Parra, Calangute and Morjim to Arambol. Loosely called
‘Nigerians’, they could be from anywhere in the African continent. Even if a
racial profiling has been done, they have done nothing to make it go away. “Ya
maan, all ok, all good, want some stuff eh? he asked. Yours truly, with a
swagger and a shake and with an air of a veteran who analyses offers like these
with the ease of a Manhattan venture capitalist, said “No maan, all good, all
ok, cool.” Having said that, I and my friend, who could barely control his
laughter fit, walked into the inky night, looking to close our adventure,
knowing that this was just a vignette of the Arambol picture.
As I drove back
when the sun rose, hugging the ocean across Mandrem, Ashwem, Morjim and through
the traditional villages of Siolim, Chopdem and Sodiem, the Goa government, its
police arms and the mammoth tourism department seemed innocuous and totally
irrelevant.
