16 Chapter 16. Moira

Moira and I disembarked late the next morning at the port of Mormugao, near the coastal city of Vasco da Gama, on the southern side of a broad estuary. Knowing nothing about the town, we immediately set off for the tourist bureau but were quickly approached by a Goan man of about fifty. He asked many questions and answered a few we asked, as well as a good many we hadn’t asked. Following this Q&A, he launched into his own account of 1961, which I wrote down:

One day, I was returning from Karachi, and when I got here, Goa was “liberated.” That’s what they called it. It was invaded. The Portuguese did not call it a colony; they called it a province, but the Indians took it. They arrested me for a month because I had a Portuguese passport. They flew the Portuguese officials home or put them on a ship.

He gave us his name and address. He said I should write him a postcard and come stay with him sometime.

The Indian state’s takeover clearly remained front of mind for many Goans. Whether by coincidence or not, that event coincided with enormous cultural changes that occurred soon after.

Thirty kilometres north of Vasco da Gama, but roughly forty-five minutes by bus, is Goa’s capital city of Panaji, located on the far side of the estuary in the district of North Goa. To the north of Panaji is the subdistrict of Bardez, which features three golden sand beaches separated by rock outcroppings—Anjuna, Vagator, and Calangute. Attracted by these beaches and the quiet serenity of the people and their culture, some twenty to thirty Western travellers arrived in Goa in the mid-1960s.¹ One of the first arrivals was Yertward Mazamanian.

Born in the United States in 1915 to Armenian parents, “Eight-Finger Eddie”—as he became known, having been born with only three fingers on his right hand—Mazamanian moved to Goa in 1966. In time, he earned the title of “king of the hippies,” though he declined to call himself that, preferring to see himself as a hipster, “a generation even before the beatniks.” Eight-Finger Eddie spent the rest of his life on the Indian subcontinent, dividing his days until his death in 2000 between Kathmandu during monsoon season and Goa the rest of the year. He started a flea market in Anjuna and was a welcoming figure to Western travellers—hippies and freaks—over the decades that followed.²

One year before Moira and I landed, a beautiful and wealthy young American woman arrived in Goa: Cleo Odzer, who would soon become a major international trafficker of cocaine and heroin. In her autobiography, she summarizes Goa’s transformation between the 1960s and the 1970s: “As the early residents of Goa involved themselves in the drug trade, the lucrative business transformed the sixties hippies into the rich freaks of the seventies. Soon the loose cash led to the widespread use of cocaine, which led to cocaine nerves and then to the discovery of the soothing smack effect.”³

Irrespective of the impact of any crackdown on drugs elsewhere—and this was minimal—the effect was nil in the two locales of Kathmandu and Goa, where Odzer set up her business. Don Skelton said of Goa, “It was beautiful and cheap, the drugs also cheap and easy. You could live there for nothing. Some wealthy European parents sent their kids cheques in the mail every month.”

Like Cleo Odzer, Patrick Welland arrived by ferry the year before Moira and I did. He recalls the place as still inhabited by “empty golden sands peopled by the odd papaya seller and leftover hippies from the 60s” but notes that, even then, “Goa’s secret was out.” It had become a party place where drugs of all sorts flowed—especially on the beaches. According to Bernie Howgate, the “Children of God monopolized the fallen in Calangute,” whereas “in Vagator, Timothy Leary, the undisputed king of Acid, reigned supreme.”⁴

Full Moon parties began in the mid-1970s. Arthur remembered that parties held on Anjuna Beach attracted hundreds of Western youths, often high on drugs, and the entertainment was provided by rock bands. People would carry sound systems by hand to the beaches and erect stages where bands would play all-night concerts. The parties were in their infancy in 1976 when I arrived but became legendary over the next few years for the ubiquitous use of alcohol and drugs and public displays of sex.

Moira and I took a bus to Panaji and then on to Anjuna Beach, where we immediately set about finding accommodation. In the early 1970s, travellers could rent entire houses in Goa for 100 rupees a month, little more than ten dollars.⁵ This was the cost of Patrick Welland’s beachside one-room cottage in 1975, though there were downsides:

At night the walls and canopy above our bed were vibrant with roaches. Lavatory facilities comprised a concrete plinth under palm leaves with a chute at the bottom of which a grateful pig waited for its noisome treat. We had a roast, suckling pig for Christmas. I don’t remember feeling very happy about that.

Moira and I purchased a thatched hut on Anjuna Beach from local “builders.” It, too, cost 100 rupees. If lucky, such huts lasted two months before wind, heat, and insects dismantled them, at which point you simply bought a new home.

Our hut was only a hundred yards from the water, one of five together at the farthest end of the beach. It was about 14 feet by 16 feet and, like all the others, was made of supporting palm trunks and cross pieces and thatched with palm leaves. It had a sand floor, typically strewn with towels, shirts, socks, and underwear, along with the occasional orange peel.

A young traveller had set up his tent to the left of our hut, looking out on the Arabian sea. Every morning, he sat cross-legged and silent in meditation. To our right, the beach stretched into the distance, with a gradually diminishing number of huts as you looked farther out. Behind our hut, roughly fifty metres from the water, was a jungle of palm and mango trees, and a tangle of flowering and edible plants, some of them medicinal—if you knew what you were eating. The thick underbrush was also habitat for cobras that sometimes moved into homes. I watched one slither away from me one day while walking into town for lunch. I was told of a foreigner who had recently been bitten by a cobra and was now in hospital receiving a series of anti-venom injections.⁶

Naturally, we spent much of our time on the beach:

The water is warm, if a bit salty; it compels one to stay. The waves are high at times but break too close to shore to body surf. Water snakes sometimes wash up on the shore. I pick them up by the tail and throw them back into the surf.

We sit naked on the beach while Goans pass with their fishnets, or men specializing in cleaning ears come by. They all have certificates issued by some pharmacy in Margao attesting to the fact they are experienced ear cleaners and can do it without pain.

The beach features several places to eat. For breakfast, Angels has good tea, so-so porridge, and a charming and efficient waitress. Unfortunately, she is replaced in the afternoons by two doped-up young men and the service drops off. They play Pink Floyd or Wings most of the time.

We usually eat supper at Vinny’s. The food is good and cheap. It has comfortable bamboo chairs and soft lighting, and a good range of taped music. The only detriment are the numerous dogs that beg, bark, fight, and fuck—sometimes under your feet—while you eat.

An alternative is Josepha’s. Its culinary claim is good, but expensive, omelettes, served up to the Rolling Stones.

A tea shop at the crossroads sells masala dosa for 60 paise, seera—a kind of semolina—for 50 paise, and an omelette for 125 paise. The place is quiet.

Every day, a woman comes to our hut to sell bananas, mandarins, and papayas. She usually gives us something extra for free if we buy three rupees’ worth. Another guy sometimes comes down the beach with coconut bread.

Life along the beach was pleasantly languorous: a sense of drift occupied many of our days. I still remember walking along the shore, stepping over narrow streams full of small fish stranded by the receding tides, tiny crabs scurrying beneath my feet. In the background, yellow-green palms hung their heads, drunk with coconuts. On the horizon, the golden disk of the setting sun cast a warm glow over the water. Idyllic stuff, the life of the lotus-eater. I was surrounded by hard-working Goans, women selling produce, men fishing, while I enjoyed the life of the indolent elite.

For many itinerant Westerners, life in Goa centred around the cafés and restaurants, where travellers congregated. Some had journeyed overland and were staying only a short time; others—those more heavily into drugs—intended to stay longer. A few, like a former Los Angeles advertising agent who now fancied himself a writer, had flown to India for the sole purpose of partying. It was an eclectic assembly. Our evenings were usually spent at Vinny’s in the company of American, Australian, British, Dutch, German, and Israeli expats, the majority of them men. Beer, food, and the passing of joints, to the music of Carlos Santana and others, filled the space between conversations we thought were deep, or at least clever.

In the morning, the sun’s unfiltered rays usually woke us early. If one chose, there was much to do in Goa. There were motorcycles and bicycles for rent, and one could spend many days visiting old churches, historic sites, and markets. Music and exotic smells were everywhere in abundance.

One day, we travelled to the city of Margao (now Madgaon), in South Goa. As we wandered around, a diminutive woman in a red dress told some children nearby that they were being silly for calling us hippies. She then told us that she and her family had come to Goa five years ago—five children, three of them now living in London and another in Delhi, and her retired husband. We continued our walk and later had something to eat at a restaurant. The waiter handed us the bill. “Four rupees,” he said. “Four rupees is nothing to you.” Stung by his remark, I retorted, “It is four rupees more than nothing,” and paid him. We then visited the tourist information office, just as it was closing. Clearly annoyed by our arrival, a young woman in a polka dot dress thrust some pamphlets at us. I filled out the guest book, and we left.

It took me some time to realize that the undercurrent of hostility I detected in some of interactions I had in Margoa and elsewhere in Goa had little, if anything, to do directly with me and should not be taken personally. Rather, the attitude I encountered was evidence of an underlying tension between local residents and people from the West, especially young people. Most of us were harmless enough, but we tended to be self-indulgent and rather shallow. Although some were stoned a lot of the time, others were only occasional users and then only of hash or marijuana. But the clash in values was very real. Many of us made a conscious effort to be respectful of cultural differences, but we were often unconscious of the ways in which our privileged status revealed itself.⁷

Additionally, most Goans were devoutly Catholic and no doubt offended by our nakedness—and on occasion open sex—on the beaches. It conflicted sharply with their sense of moral decorum, even as it also sent confused messages to impressionable young Indian men. Not all Western travellers to India indulged—or at least overindulged—in sex and drugs, but Goa was an oasis of hedonism. Over time, the attitude toward Westerners became more negative.⁸

In the face of any breach of cultural mores, most local people remained polite and friendly. But the increased use of drugs was a different matter. By the time I arrived in 1976, Goa’s drug scene had already morphed from hash and marijuana to opium and heroin. The harmless days of a few spaced-out hippies had given way to larger numbers, some of whom now flew to India to take in Goa’s party scene and amped up the use and variety of drugs. My notes listed the cost of various drugs that could be purchased in Goa: “Opium = 20 rupees per tola; hashish = 40 rupees per tola; cocaine = US$70 per gram; acid = 20–25 rupees per tab or microdot.”⁹

An individual told me of a particular house on a hill in Vasco de Gama where drugs were sold. It seemed to me a place of mystery, vaguely Kafkaesque:

I had visions of exotic wealth, of rooms lined with mottled carpets and opium smoke, and hookahs on the floor sat ’round by intense men sitting on cushions. A single, dark house with many pathways leading to it, none more correct than any other, with tangled, stripped trees arching over the sky. Lights appear at windows and are gone. The owner has a paisley housecoat, a bald head, and a Fu Manchu moustache. He is fat and smokes thick cigars and has a gold ring on his left forefinger. He forces the doorway to make room for him as he begs you to enter. His arm motions, and he follows you in behind and shuts the door. You see the doorknocker, and the door locks, while J. Arthur Rank pounds his gong.

The reality is more mundane, as one foreigner tells me:

“It’s a one-room house, and this middle-aged guy with his wife and kid live there. She’s really beautiful. There are lots of houses around. You’d have to know which one to find it. No, it’s not a big deal. There are usually about ten other people around buying. He asks if you want to buy a kilo, but most just want a tola. I think he said he gets it from Rajasthan.”

Cleo Odzer bought a house in Goa shortly after arriving there in 1975, out of which she ran her drug operation. I have often wondered since whether it was Odzer’s house and whether she was the woman the man had referred to.

Inevitably, drug dependency led to other problems. Desperate, burned out, and strung out on heroin, some Westerners turned to theft for survival. John Wall, who travelled overland several times, commented that “India was full of desperate travellers living on rice and dal … more interested in survival than in enjoying being in India.”

Often victims, sometimes victimizers, some Westerners who travelled to India during that time died of drug overdoses; a few were murdered, often by fellow travellers.¹⁰

Goa was the site of some of these tragedies.

After months of travelling, its ordinary strains and stresses magnified by the hardships of the route, I was glad to settle down for a while in a spectacularly beautiful setting with someone whose company and sexual closeness I enjoyed.

Moira could be tempestuous and stubborn, which sometimes annoyed me, and was not averse to calling me out (correctly) when I was condescending or thoughtless (which also sometimes annoyed me). But she was also warm, generous, and funny. Our guards dropped as the weeks passed, and our relationship subtly changed. We became a couple, an “us,” rather than two solitary travellers.

Our occasional arguments were followed by intense lovemaking. We communed better in our sex than in our conversations. Makeup sex was not exactly the basis for a long-term relationship, but it worked for the time.

We both knew the relationship would not last. Yet here we were in it, and I was content to live in the moment. I had little real interest in the future; in fact, I didn’t much think about the future and what it might bring.

On Christmas Day, Moira and I went to Angels, where we had fried fish and egg-fried rice, topped off with white wine. As we ate, my attention was drawn to an elderly priest standing nearby. He was evidently in ill health and seemed uneasy and bewildered. I invited him to join us. He sat down at our table, tucking his white frock in. He mumbled and at times it seemed as though he was addressing no one who was actually present. We carried on a conversation of sorts, but one so inordinately stiff that we couldn’t relax either.

Suddenly, he asked, “Do you have any games with you?”

I had to confess we didn’t. He was obviously disappointed. “Do you like playing games?” I continued.

“No, no,” he replied.

The conversation changed to what Goans thought of foreigners. Not much, it turned out. Then he reverted to his main question, which concerned a game of some sort. At last we realized that he wanted to know about backgammon—once anathema to the Church as a temptation to gambling. Moira wrote its name down in his little book so that he could try to find a set somewhere.

That evening, we had supper at Vinny’s and then went back to our hut, where we made love, sang carols, and exchanged gifts. She gave me sandals; I gave her a sari. Afterwards, we went for a walk to the sounds of Christmas music in the distance.

Theft was a constant problem on the beach. Moira and I began burying our passports and travellers’ cheques deep under the sand in our hut but left other less valuable items available. A few nights earlier, I had written: “We were robbed last night of eight bananas, two coconut breads, one bag of dates, a half bag of sweets, one bar of soap, one deodorant, and one knife. The bastard slipped between the hut’s locked door and the post.”

A few nights later, the thieves returned. My account details my stupid response to this second theft. My behaviour was shameful then, and I still look back at it with regret:

After supper one Sunday, going on midnight, Moira and I returned to our shack and found a travel book scrambled on the ground. “Wild dogs,” I thought, as I had attributed the earlier theft.

“Thieves,” said Moira, quite correctly as it turned out. Our packs plus all the clothing hung and strung from the width and breadth of our rafters was gone, leaving only our sleeping bags (thank God!), the clothes on our backs, and whatever had been left on a small table. I had buried my notes two days earlier and now was quite relieved that they were safe, but several rolls of exposed film had been taken, now lost.

After a cursory inspection, noting that our passports were safe, we set off about the immediate environs. I held a candle in one hand, shielding it from the slight breeze with my other, while Moira wielded a stick that was left lying about the hut. Of course, it was fruitless. We were heartily pissed off but also a bit amused, I think. Then, as we returned, we saw a silhouetted figure approaching from the beach. I thought it was Derek or John, our neighbours, and Moira, being in a playful mood, rushed out flailing the stick about her head and uttering pagan hysterics. Immediately, however, the figure shrieked and backed far away, and Moira laughing said, “Oh, it’s an Indian!”

It occurred to me in that moment that the person Moira had frightened away could be the thief, so I handed her our passports and set out after him. It was not overly dark, and I could see the man ahead of me, but in watching him, I tripped over an object. “Stop that man!” I yelled as I stumbled. I recovered and quickly gained ground again, but my cries woke our neighbours. When I did catch him, I could sense he was terrified. He was down on his knees, with his hands clasped together above his head, pleading, “Please mister, please.” As I shook him, the whites of his eyes rolled up at the moon, and his mouth hung slack. With a sense of revulsion, I realized I was enjoying the sense of fear I had instilled in him. I felt stupid and ashamed.

At that point, another Indian man arrived. In embarrassment at my actions, I stabbed both men in the chest with my finger and walked off to find Moira. She was not at the hut, and I learned she had gone back to Vinny’s for tea with our neighbours, John and Derek.

It was not my finest hour. I might have blamed my bad behaviour on illness but will not. The incident still causes me deep regret when I think about it. But learning unpleasant things about oneself is a part of growing up.

The following morning, Moira and I found some of our missing belongings strewn about a nearby clearing. We reported the incident, but the policemen barely pretended that they would do something about our loss as they made us fill in the forms in triplicate.

January came and along with it a return of my amoebic dysentery. I will spare the details but to say that it is the great leveller of class and status. It renders one a plaything in the epidemiological universe. To her immense credit, Moira didn’t make fun of my predicament and did not really comment at all. She just stayed by me as I suffered through the repeated bouts.

We spent our last weekend together at Anjuna and Vagator beaches, as well as taking a biking tour through Old Goa. At some point, we stopped to walk along a river road. A dead cow was floating in the water, fat and bloated, its tits purple. Several days dead, I thought. Further on, a white rat had met the same fate. Sailing ships in the harbour were bent to the breeze. A small, red cargo carrier steamed up the other shore. Moira and I walked on the sea wall a way, our hands joined in mid-air, outstretched.

We stopped at a village four kilometres upriver and had a chai and Limca, a lime-flavoured soft drink ubiquitous in India. The proprietor smiled and asked where we were from. The other patrons stared. It was uncomfortable, as situations of that sort always seem to be in these countries, not unfriendly, just hopeless. By that time, Moira and I both sensed that our relationship was floating out to sea, and there was little we could do to stop it, even if we wanted to. In Old Goa, we visited Se Cathedral, the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Goa and Daman as well as the seat of the Patriarch of the East Indies, and the Basilica of Bom Jesus. St. Francis Xavier is buried there in a silver casket entombed in a marble mausoleum built in the Florentine style. At last, we returned to Panaji, to the Bhonshe Bar where we had been staying, weak with fatigue. My notes reflect that fatigue, but also a sense of sadness as our relationship entered its final days:

There, we had an early supper and went to our hotel. We wanted a late chai, but everything had closed, so after reading a while, we pushed our single beds together and made ready for the night. Unfortunately, the walls of the room did not go all the way to the ceiling, for reasons of ventilation, I suppose, and we could hear the sounds of gentlemen—I reckoned three of them—coughing and, later, having sex in the next room.

The next day saw us up at 8:00. After a light breakfast, we boarded buses first to Mapusa and then on to Anjuna. We spent the early afternoon at the flea market with friends of Moira. There was an assortment of freaks and travellers selling everything from rings, bracelets, and clothes from all over, to dope and food, banana fritters and hash brownies. There were also middle-class Indians looking to buy goods, though not dope. Likewise, neither Moira nor I were seriously into dope, and we couldn’t afford any of the goods no matter how elegant they were.

We hiked over a nearby bluff, opposite a café where we’d earlier had rice, and moved down onto the broad beach, now resplendent in the mid-afternoon with several people swimming in the water and others strolling on the beach. Further up the sands, a crescent of bush awaited behind which, doffing our clothes, we entered the water for a brief swim and made love against a rock while the water splashed around us. We then took a bus back to Anjuna Beach.

It was January 19. Our last night together, we had a quiet meal in the Indian restaurant—bhaji and chapati—followed by a beer at Vinny’s. Back at the hut, we started a fire and burned our accumulated garbage.

“There’s something quiet and serene about a fire,” I said. “It calls the rest of the world to ‘stop’ and draws all the energies to itself before releasing them again.”

“You’re a romantic,” she said, just as she had the day before on a beach as we gathered stones.

“Do you want to make love by the fire?” I asked.

“No, let’s go inside.” And so we did, one last time before morning came.

The bus came too quickly, but then what more was there to say? Our farewell words were short, our last kiss a mere brush on the lips. Moira lofted her backpack, climbed on the bus, and was gone.

Moira was gone and I immediately missed her. I wished at that moment I could hold her again in my arms, but part of me was also glad she was gone because, although I liked her, I did not love her. Such are the contradictory emotions of youth.

I never saw Moira again, though a couple of years after I had returned to Canada, I received a postcard from somewhere in India where she was again travelling. I foolishly ended my correspondence with her at that time, and even now regret it, not because we had any future together but because she had been part of my vanishing past. It was my way of dealing with relationships at the time: not an honourable trait, but an accurate reflection of who I was then.

1. David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 143.

2. Andrew Pereira, “The Hippie Who Got Goa the Globe,” The Times of India, November 22, 2015, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/The-hippie-who-got-Goa-the-globe/articleshow/49875431.cms.

3. Cleo Odzer, Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in Goa, 76.

4. Bernie Howgate, Tales of a Travelling Man, 188.

5. Tomory, A Season in Heaven, 145.

6. There were several myths about cobra venom: that it was not poisonous unless mixed with adrenalin; that some sadhus would meditate for several days, draining the adrenalin from their bodies, and then inject cobra venom; that cobra venom was a hallucinogen that could be smoked; that there lived in Goa a freak who got his kicks only by letting cobras bite him and then taking the antidote. I was also informed that cobras could sense danger and would move away if you wore shoes, but not if you walked in bare feet. If there was truth in any of these tales, however, I was unable to confirm it.

7. Cleo Odzer’s account in Goa Freaks of her life as a drug queen in Goa is an extreme example of arrogance and privilege. Goan peoples do not appear in her book as anything other than wallpaper to her life of indulgence.

8. Tomory, A Season in Heaven, 156. In contrast, Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland say most travellers on the Hippie Trail “found the weeks or months they spent on the road surprisingly austere and sexless.” The Hippie Trail: A History, 70. Ssee also Grant John Szuveges, “The Overland Hippie Trail to India and Nepal in the 1960s and 1970s,” 44. But Goa was different from the overland Hippie Trail experience; it was, and is, an intensely sensual place, warm and lush.

9. A tola (also written as tolah or tole) is equivalent to roughly 11.7 grams.

10. Howgate, Tales of a Travelling Man, 188–92.