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Hippies in Goa

18 November. At sea between Bombay and Panaji.

The deck-area of our steamer is not too crowded and after Bombay one appreciates sea-breezes, even when adulterated by clouds of hash; forty or so of our fellow deck-passengers are hippies on their annual migration from Nepal, or the north of India, to Goa.

In affluent Europe I find it easy enough to understand an individual hippy’s point of view, but on seeing them massed against an Indian background of involuntary poverty I quickly lose patience. Several of those within sight at this moment are emaciated wrecks – the out-and-outers, travelling alone, carrying no possessions of any kind, clad only in tattered loin-cloths, their long sadhu-style hair matted and filthy, their bare feet calloused and cracked, their legs pitted with open scurvy sores, their ribs and shoulder-blades seeming about to cut through their pallid skins, their eyes glazed with overindulgence in Kali-knows-what and their ability or will to communicate long since atrophied. This is dropping-out carried to its terrible conclusion – but dropping into what, and why? Certainly these wrecks will soon drop into a nameless grave, and for their own sakes I can only feel the sooner the better. One agrees when hippies criticise the essential destructiveness of a materialist society, but what are they offering in its place?

All day we sailed south under a cobalt sky, within sight of the mountainous Maharashtrian coast, past dark-sailed fishing-boats that scarcely have changed since pre-Aryan times. The deck, shaded by a vast tarpaulin, never became too hot and now the night breezes feel deliciously cool.

This afternoon, while Rachel was bossing three shy little Goan boys into playing her sort of game, I was talked at by a young engineer from Poona who proved to be a compulsive statistics quoter. He told me that Maharashtra makes up one-tenth of India’s territory, that two out of every five industrial workers employed in India are Maharashtrians, that the Indian film industry, most of the defence factories and two-thirds of the textile and pharmaceutical industries are in Maharashtra, that that State contributes more than one-third of India’s revenues and that its per capita consumption of electricity is more than twice the all-India average.

At this point the plump, amiable young Goan who was sitting on my other side – father of Rachel’s current boyfriends – remarked thoughtfully, ‘And in the capital of Maharashtra more than a lakh people sleep on pavements every night.’

The Maharashtrian glared. ‘At Nhava Sheva a second Bombay is to be built soon,’ he said coldly.

‘How soon?’ wondered the Goan mildly, his eyes on the Western Ghats.

‘Sooner than anything is likely to be built in Goa!’ snapped the Maharashtrian.

The Goan continued to gaze at the mountains. ‘But I don’t think we need new buildings,’ he said. ‘Not many, anyhow. We are content.’

‘Content!’ sneered the Maharashtrian. ‘Do you not know that after 450 years of the the Portuguese ruling not one village had electricity? Now after eleven years of the Indians’ ruling, most villages have it.’

The Goan looked from the mountains to me and smiled very slightly. ‘But for a lot of those 450 years no village anywhere had electricity,’ he observed.

Then he and I stood up and went to make sure our respective offspring had not flung each other overboard.

At about five-thirty we altered course, making for Ratnagiri harbour, and the sun was swiftly sinking as we sailed between high headlands, covered with long red-gold grass that glowed like copper in the slanting light. A romantically ruined fort and a small white temple crowned the cliffs to starboard – lonely against the sky, looking out to sea. ‘It is a very holy temple,’ my Roman Catholic Goan friend told me. A civilised respect for all religions has rubbed off on to many Indian Christians from their Hindu neighbours.

In Ratnagiri’s wide lagoon little craft sped towards us like water-beetles and briefly the western sky was a flaring expanse of scarlet and purple, orange and violet. Then the sun was gone, but still I stood enchanted, gazing across the dark green waters of the bay to where distant flecks of firelight marked the many thatched huts on the lower slopes of the steep encircling hills.

A steamer puts in at Ratnagiri every evening, except during the monsoon, yet our arrival caused such excitement we might have been calling at Pitcairn. The unloading and loading of passengers and cargo took over an hour, but unfortunately Rachel missed the fun – having gone to sleep, almost literally on her feet, at four o’clock. A Spartanish upbringing is now paying off: she thinks nothing of lying down on a filthy deck amidst scores of talking, eating, praying or copulating Indians. Yet she cannot – positively cannot, without retching – tolerate the deck-class loo and I have had to show her the way to the first-class lavatories. No amount of Spartan brainwashing can reasonably be expected to eradicate this sort of inherent fastidiousness.

A hazard I had overlooked was the degree of spoiling to which a small child would be exposed in India. During these first few days it has perhaps helped to give Rachel confidence in relation to her new surroundings, but I hate to think what four months of it will do to her.

Indian reactions to the very young can be most trying from a European’s point of view. While we were unloading at Ratnagiri Rachel slept deeply, undisturbed by hundreds of people – passengers, crew and coolies – running, leaping and shouting all around her. Yet, despite her being so obviously exhausted, at least a dozen women had to be physically restrained from trying to fondle, play with and talk to her. I fear a few of them misunderstood my motive and fancied I was operating some mleccha caste taboo. In a country of overcrowded joint-family dwellings there can be no conception of a child’s need for long hours of unbroken sleep. In other respects, too, the tendency is to treat Rachel as an animated toy rather than a human being. Most of the Indians we have met so far are complimentary about her in her presence, recklessly provoke her to show off (little provocation is needed) and allow her to interrupt their conversations with impunity. All this naturally aggravates her bumptiousness, which trait seems to me the chief distinguishing mark of small female humans. But perhaps I should have said ‘Western humans’, since most Indian children are evidently immune to it. The Indian tradition discourages the development of a child’s self-reliance and no doubt counteracts what to us is ‘spoiling’. One can afford to be tolerant of bad manners and constant demands for attention, and effusive about a child’s allegedly winning ways, if one has no real regard for him as a unique human personality.

Another minor problem at present is how to take Rachel’s occasional harsh criticisms of the behaviour of certain Indians. For instance, early this morning our half-empty bus twice sped away from bus stops, leaving several would-be passengers behind, and she asked, ‘Why didn’t the driver give these people time to get on? He’s being cruel.’

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 brass 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.

From Margao to Karwar is only forty-five miles but the journey took three and a half hours; Indian buses are probably the world’s least frustrating motor vehicles. They always arrive (unless they crash, instantly killing everyone on board), yet they move so slowly, and stop so often for so long, that one can observe quite an amount of local life from a well-chosen seat.

This afternoon we passed first between newly harvested, golden-brown fields where pillars of blue-grey smoke marked bonfires of burning maize stalks. Then for miles our road twisted through lonely mountains covered in dense, shadowy jungle, or plantations of teak or eucalyptus – the last popular as quick-growing firewood. A few brown rhesus monkeys sat or sauntered by the roadside but Rachel missed them. In buses I refrain from pointing out things of interest, feeling she must be left to observe and absorb at her own pace. There is so much – details I take for granted – to delight and amaze her: full-grown bulls gently wandering between the benches in a bus stand waiting-room; cows with brilliantly painted horns wearing silver necklaces or garlands of flowers; flocks of bright green parakeets flying parallel with the road, racing the bus and, not surprisingly, overtaking it; petite women-coolies carrying great loads of earth or bricks or timber beams on their heads and babies on their hips; elaborately carved wayside temples; gigantic banyan-trees like bits of Gothic architecture gone wrong; cascades of bougainvillaea and poinsettia; demented-seeming, nearly naked sadhus moaning mantras as they hold their begging-bowls under one’s nose.

A group of slim, ebony-skinned tribal people boarded the bus for a short time in the mountains but kept aloof from the other passengers. The men wore only the most meagre of loin-cloths and the bare-breasted young women were laden with necklaces of tiny black beads – each necklace must have weighed at least two pounds – and with large golden ornaments in their noses and ears. They also wore countless tinkling glass bangles on their slender arms and many silver rings on their toes.

At the State border two armed military policemen came aboard to check all the luggage. Then they beckoned to three men who left the bus and followed them behind a small palm-frond shelter. A few moments later the men returned, openly replacing their rolls of rupees in their shirt pockets. Goa has long been a notorious smugglers’ colony and since the Government of India banned the import of luxury articles the Goans have been supplying foreign status-symbol goods to both the newly rich, who want to flaunt their new riches, and the traditionally rich, who want to maintain their normal standard of living. Nor do the State police on either side of the border overlook the opportunities thus provided. Also, alcohol is sold throughout Goa for about half the price demanded in heavily taxed Mysore State. So it was tactful of the police to ignore my rucksack.

Over the border, we were still in unpeopled, heavily forested country, but the well-kept Goan road was replaced by a rough dusty track. Then we came to a village – to a town – to more villages – and were back in the ‘teeming millions’ belt. As the sun set I could see tiny lamps burning before crude shrines in domestic courtyards on the edge of the darkening forest.

At last the bus stopped, its front wheels only feet away from the lapping waters of the Kalinadi river estuary. Boarding the antique, overcrowded ferry-boat, I took Rachel on my knee and admired the ribbons of pink and gold cloud reflected in the wide waters. Then, turning to look towards the open sea, I saw a picture of unforgettable loveliness. The dark expanse of the estuary was catching the last russet-and-green sunset tints on its ripples, and to the north palms were etched black against a royal blue sky, and to the west, silhouetted superbly against the final fiery band above the horizon, a solitary, slim boatman stood astride his loaded craft, leaning on a long pole, straining to push off.

In India one rarely sees an ugly face but beside us on the bus today sat one of the ill-favoured minority who also suffered, poor lad, from severe acne. He passed the time by picking obsessively at his pimples and talking pidgin English to me, despite the evident impossibility of my being able to hear him above the rattling and roaring of our vehicle. On arrival at the ferry he solicitously helped us on to the boat, and off again at the other side, and then he insisted on taking us to the dak-bungalow in an auto-rickshaw. While I was thanking him, he predictably murmured ‘It is my duty’ and faded away into the night. Unfortunately the dak-bungalow was full; so, because of our spotty friend’s conviction that a dak-bungalow is the only suitable accommodation for foreigners, we found ourselves stranded two miles from the town’s hotels. While we were discussing what to do next an engineer from Bangalore introduced himself and as he knew Karwar well we gladly joined him in the search for rooms. A short, stout, middle-aged man, he spoke excellent English. I wondered if he would prove sufficiently Anglicised to offer to carry my water-bottle or foodbag but, though himself carrying only a fat brief-case, he made no attempt to share the white woman’s burden.

For Rachel’s sake, this was the sort of situation I had hoped to avoid, since I believe a small child can be expected to rough it only if allowed enough sleep at regular hours. However, she was thoroughly enjoying being out under the stars as we pushed our way through the noisy, crowded bazaar from one full hotel, or doss-house, to another. Children usually revel in unalarming crises which prove that grown-ups are not always able to organise things exactly as they want them.

Eventually we gave up and went to a vegetarian restaurant where we sat by open windows in the purdah compartment and much astonishment was expressed at the speed with which I – having eaten nothing all day – dispatched a moderately hot curry and a foot-high mound of rice. In South India food is served either on a large circular metal tray – usually, nowadays, of stainless steel – or, more sensibly, on a large square of banana-leaf. No cutlery is used and every restaurant is provided with hand-basins for the rinsing of hands and mouths before and after meals; if running water is not available a barrel or water-jar and several dippers will be placed beside the basins. The majority of South Indian restaurants are owned and run by Brahmans, since food cooked by the highest caste may be eaten by most Hindus. Usually in such establishments the floors are not very well swept, the tables are a trifle grubby, the walls are badly in need of paint, the hand-basins are fairly revolting and the latrines are quite unspeakable – but in the kitchens all will be well. Probably, in fact, a lot better than in most European hotel kitchens.

When we stood up to leave, our friend abruptly announced that he had decided to take us to the Government Polytechnic College, where the warden – a friend of his – would certainly allow us to doss down. So off we went in another rickshaw, weaving and honking and bouncing through the packed streets, back to the dak-bungalow suburb where the handsome, British-built college also stands, overlooking the sea.

The warden is away for the night, but his deputy received us most warmly – we might have been expected guests – and at once decided the luckless foreigners must have the warden’s room. Within seconds of Rachel’s lying on the narrow cot under the mosquito-net she was asleep and I then returned to the huge, high-ceilinged, almost unfurnished room where our host had been having his supper off a steel tray when we intruded. He ordered tea for me and we were joined by several of his staff, including three Tamils and a Madrasi Christian. All were dressed in lunghis and loose shirts and each man carried with him his own light chair, though they might well have felt more relaxed sitting on the floor. Our host wears thick horn-rimmed spectacles, which suit his long, lean, very dark face, and he is obviously a man of outstanding ability. For hours we sat happily drinking tea and discussing South Indian languages, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, the caste system, cow-worship, Watergate and Indian attitudes to birth control. I found these teachers excellent company. It is always the half-educated Indians who get one down. The educated and the uneducated each have their own style of charm and graciousness.

When the conversation turned to birth control I mentioned something that has been haunting me for the past few days – a colossal advertisement in Bombay’s railway station proclaiming ‘Sterilisation “The Best Method”. Many Lucky Prizes Awards/Certificates to Promoters and Patients who Under Go Vasectomy from 20 Jan. ’73 to 7 March ’73.’

The deputy-warden and most of his staff agreed that, despite the inevitability of such a campaign, there is something disquieting – even sinister – about attempts to solve a population problem by depriving men and women, for ever, of their procreative powers. I asked their opinion of the sixty or so recanalisation centres, to which men who wish to replace dead children may apply; but it seems these operations carry no guarantee of success and the centres are little more than a propaganda device to reassure parents who fear sterilisation because of India’s high infant mortality rates.

I have always been anti-sterilisation, perceiving behind the idea an insult and a threat to human dignity. Yet looking around any Indian railway station, or walking through any Indian bazaar, one realises there is now merely a choice of threats. And perhaps sterilisation is preferable to slaughtering or being slaughtered by one’s neighbour.

The statistics are well known. An Indian is born every 1 seconds, which means that more than 55,000 are born a day, which means that at present a country with 2·4 per cent of the world’s land and 1 per cent of the world’s income is supporting 14 per cent of the world’s population. These are menacing figures, particularly when one has personally tasted the flavour of Indian urban life. Our struggle to get on a bus at Juhu beach was only slightly annoying; but for those who have no escape from the consequences of over-population, which in Indian cities constantly offend almost every sense, such experiences can be infuriating. During the hot weather, especially, they often provoke to uncontrollable violence people whose nerves are already frayed by hunger and money-worries.

A decade ago, when the world first heard of the Indian government’s sterilisation campaign, many people were deeply shocked; now one is half-inclined to wish it luck. And it is being moderately effective; the deputy warden told me that well over 2 million men were sterilised during 1971-72. In 1965 India’s Birth Control Programme was given ‘top priority’ and launched on a ‘war footing’ and in the fourth Five-Year Plan some Rs.3,000 million were to be set aside for its promotion: so no one can say the Indians have not been trying. Yet the population went up from 361 million in 1951 to 548 million in 1971. By now it must be nearly 600 million and if one dares to look ahead one can see the spectre of compulsory sterilisation on the horizon. My teacher friends emphasised that this would be repugnant to most Indians, but then we gloomily agreed that many ethical scruples may have had to be disregarded, all over the world, before the end of the twentieth century.

Now I am back in the warden’s room, where I have had to close the window, because of weirdly zooming insects, and switch on the fan. Considering the status of its usual occupant, this apartment is very simple. The only furnishings are the cot, a long narrow table laden with books and papers, two camp-chairs and a steel filing-cabinet. Over a small shelf in one corner hangs a picture of a blue-bodied Shiva – representative of life-energy in all its manifestations – with a third eye in the middle of his forehead and wearing a necklace of serpents. On the shelf are the remains of a puja offering, a safety razor and a small tin of Nescafé.

Some moments ago a kind student looked in to tell me our bus for Mundgod leaves at eight-thirty in the morning. When I first asked about this, nobody here had ever heard of Mundgod – a small town four miles from the Tibetan Refugee Settlement where we are going to spend the next few days. This settlement is run by an outstanding Tibetan refugee leader, T. C. Tethong, and his Canadian wife Judy, an old friend of mine. To get there it seems we must take one bus down the coast to Kumta, another to climb into the ghats and a third from Sirsi to Mundgod. My map tells me a more direct route would be through Kadra and Yellapur, but I suppose the local man knows best.