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Chapter One

“If it didn’t happen this way, it should have.”

INDIA, NOVEMBER 1971

Goa, India, was hyped as the counter-culture Nirvana. If the hippies ran Disneyland, it would be a lot like Goa – with sex, some herb to smoke and the greatest mango lassies you ever tasted. It would be real life, not the plastic, future-modern society that stifles freedom with conformity and bourgeois boredom.

The pirates that preyed on cargo traffic out of hidden coves that lined the Goa coast were not the “Pirates of the Caribbean,” an amusement park attraction acted out by human manikins, but were real pirates and there the differences begin.

In fact, Goa was anything but what the traveling, hippiecommunity exaggeration of paradise was said to be. The first night that my fiancée, Rebecca, and I arrived, we missed our creature comforts and we learned what the real definition of “creature” comfort is.

Sleeping on the hard wooden slats that passed for a bed, to the accompanying buzz of mosquitoes eagerly feasting upon us two American delights, caused us to have a few moments of doubt about our proposed stay.

Rebecca and I found the house with the heart on the roof the next day. It was one of only three structures on the entire 50 miles of beach that had the benefit of intermittent electricity. We discovered that padded mattresses were available from local merchants as were colorful fabrics to use for bedding or beach wear. A mosquito net provided the necessary protection from our buzzing, blood-besotted friends. The alternative was a coil of reeking incense, probably laced with DDT.

The farmer’s market consensus was that a couple of hundred people lived on the beaches from Calengute to Anjuna. The local populace survived off fishing and were happy with the low-key commerce these international types contributed to their villages.

Our next-door neighbors were Shashi and Jennifer Kapoor and their two young sons. The Kapoors were definitely not hippies and while not opposed to the lifestyle, were strongly anti-drug, especially in front of their children. Shashi was a third-generation actor related to a long line of Bollywood producers, directors and promoters. Jennifer, Shashi’s lovely, blonde English wife, boasted of parents who were Shakespearean actors during the period of the English Raj and who had remained in India. Now, in the retirement age of their lives, Jennifer’s parents continued to perform two-person Shakespearean plays.

Shashi was notified, by telegram, of his starring role in producer/director Conrad Rooks film “Siddhartha” a week after we met them. He and Jennifer and the children were elated and had a small, celebratory party when they shared the news with us.

The beaches of Goa were spectacular, a seemingly endless span of sand and palm trees. The waters of the Arabian Sea were not particularly beautiful, being somewhat murky and filled with small sharks. All the same, we enjoyed a couple of swims every day. Evenings would find us strolling along, enjoying the sunset and admiring the waves lining the shore with glittering, phosphorescent streaks.

Conversely, one of the more charming aspects of Goa was the sanitary system. All houses came complete with a convenient out-house that was backed up against a pig pen and raised above the area that the pigs inhabited by three steps. When one used the facilities, little snouts would be visible at the end of the shoot, grunting eagerly while awaiting their morning breakfast. The pigs became our constant companions on treks to these outhouses. Watching them scurry for the choicest spot at the end of the plumping shoot caused us to realize how the term “piggy back” may have originated. Nevertheless, once we moved into our charming little home with the heart on the roof, mosquito nets in place to protect us and softer bedding for indulging in topical lust, the days and nights became much more pleasant in the land of Goa.

Daily life in Goa included one Father Perez, the last Catholic priest left in the former Portuguese colony. Kicked out of the subcontinent at gun point in 1964 by the Indian government, all that remained of the colonists was the traditional Portuguese sweetbread that we had enjoyed, and the one Catholic Church managed by Father Perez on four rupees a day. Father Perez was either admired or despised by the traveling community. He made a living changing money on the black market for the foreigners and would often drop by our house with his own coconut chillum contraption and mooch a little hashish to smoke. He was known to have had postcards made up of himself standing in front of a gaggle of young Hindi boys. He sent these postcards to unsuspecting suckers asking them for donations to support a fictional soccer team. Father Perez spent hours recounting, always with great laughter, his threats to the Hindi wives of local fishermen. After their husbands sailed out to sea for the daily fishing expedition, Father Perez would intimidate the wives with impending evil spells if they didn’t give him money.

Attracted to these beaches was a parade of characters from all over the world. Being frequent guests at Joe Banana’s Fruit Shake shop and “Tony’s Up the Beach” we joined the international throng dining on seafood and the simple, local fare. The relaxed, jovial atmosphere made it seem to us that the cream of the traveling community had found their way to Goa. Artists came with portfolios of their original work and decorated many of the houses with murals. The musically talented played exotic instruments such as the sitar, oud and vina, and the not-so-exotic guitars, drums and flutes. Spontaneous music was a daily occurrence on the porches of hippie houses. Writers, searching for perfect metaphors for a brand new scene, sent letters and articles to their far flung families, friends and homeland media, chronicling the happenings and high jinks in Goa and beyond. These original hippies created a swirling, mesmerizing cacophony of sound and color. Getting into the spirit of things, Rebecca and I enjoyed psilocybin one full-moon night. It added more magic and romance to an experience already in a timeless, primal setting with a feeling of human oneness. Goa.

For Christmas we decided to throw a party. Rebecca had purchased a gallon of Canadian maple syrup at a duty-free shop on our way to India. It inspired me to use the local Portuguese sweetbread and readily available eggs for French toast. Before Christmas morning I hired four Goanese women to chop up a variety of fruits and make huge fruit salads. We produced a unique, welcome feast for about 200 people, including Peace Corps volunteers and other travelers who heard about the party by coconut telegraph up and down the beach from as far as 50 miles away.

Photos by Rebecca

As the party cranked into full gear, a group spontaneously decided to rent three canoe-style outriggers from the local shark fishermen. This turned out to be a much more exciting adventure than first thought. After piling a half-dozen sated and stoned party-goers into the boats, and clearing the shore break, we found ourselves cruising festively in open water. The fishermen then proceeded to set up for themselves several bottles of an illegal, powerful whiskey and launched into a celebration of their own. Gleeful at their unexpected, over-paid rental success, they swilled liquor until they were blind drunk. These outriggers were very narrow and no one had experience in manning such a craft – our lives were given over to the more and more inebriated, celebrating fishermen. It was with great difficulty that we managed, by hand signals and body language, to instruct them to row us ashore at Chapora Beach for a swim. After a relaxing, enjoyable dip and a few hits off the chillum, it was then up to us to pile the besotted fishermen, now asleep, back into the boats and launch ourselves and the other fools towards our home beach – in the darkness, through shark-filled waters. When we finally hit the beach at our Heart House, the party was still raging and would do so all night long.

As the days flowed together in the month that we spent in Goa, it became obvious that the primitive living conditions were putting an unhealthy stress on everyone’s lifestyle. Foolish hippies were eating something called Mandrax, a form of Quaalude, just to get them through the nights. Smoking prodigious amounts of hashish all day long was a common pastime. More acid arrived when members of the Brotherhood of Light from Southern California came upon the scene. Girls went topless on the beach and men wore nothing but the g-string type bathing suit preferred by the local fishermen. The local women bathed in full saris and seemed not to mind that their scantily clad foreign sisters were bouncing around the beach. This fantastic feeling of “freedom found” was compromised by the primitive lifestyle and the spread of lice and disease. The time to move on was quickly approaching.

It was in Goa that I connected with a Canadian we called Montreal Michael. Michael came up with the concept of extracting oil from hashish in an ingenious way to slide it past unsuspecting customs agents. Michael’s “bonafides” to me were his 20 or more heavy textbooks, U.N. Reports and scientific journals that he referred to as a “study library.” His mother had been a member of the LeDain Commission created by the Canadian Government to study and present recommendations to the progressive Prime Minister, the worldly Pierre Trudeau. The commissioners voted five to four against legalization in their report. Michael inherited the “study library” his mother had used in her academic examination of the history and use of cannabis. Michael had hauled these heavy books to this center of low-key hedonism more replete with paperback novels than texts. He told me that he was going to go to Afghanistan and try and put the extraction operation together. I said I was planning to make a trip to Afghanistan as well for the major, ultimate horseback ride of my life and that if I saw him there I’d consider taking a look at his idea. We talked about a plan to transport hashish from legal Nepal and Afghanistan to quasilegal Amsterdam. If only the countries in between didn’t carry a sentence of ten years of hard prison if caught. We never shared these thoughts or plans with Rebecca. She had little use for legal subtleties.

Shashi Kapoor departed for Bombay to begin filming “Siddhartha.” We found ourselves spending more quality time with Jennifer and the children rather than the hippies who found their way to our front porch and who mostly wanted to talk of their acid trips the night before. It was at this time that I made a cardinal rule in my traveler’s life: no stories about acid trips. Boring. What was not boring, however, was the whisper of war between India and Pakistan.

Most people arrived in and departed from Goa on large, cargo-carrying ferry boats that plied their trade along the shore to Bombay and back. On the way down from Bombay the boat would moor a half-mile from shore and it was fascinating to see the small boats rowing out to collect the various supplies that were, in many instances, just tossed overboard into the waiting vessels.

The ferry did have six lovely first-class cabins on the upper deck, which we had the foresight to book round trip.

We left Goa in January with our sights on Nepal and the beginning of an import business. Jennifer Kapoor and her two children joined us on the ferry. The lower deck was filled with hippies heading back towards the hashish trail, replaced by those pouring into the hippie Disneyland.

Rebecca and I were so overcome by the romance of our journey that we decided to be married by the ship’s Captain, an event reminiscent of those classic seafaring ceremonies of yore.

In the spirit of occasion Jennifer Kapoor went below and commandeered, as she said, “the best looking European Don Juan I could find.”

He was Alejandro, a handsome Spaniard whom Rebecca and I had met at various Goa celebrations. Unfortunately he could not be the best man and stand up at the wedding because he was so inebriated he could not stand. We propped Alejandro against the life ring and Jennifer Kapoor accompanied Rebecca as maid of honor. The first mate was my best man. The brief rite was held on the open deck and highlighted by a beautiful, gigantic red sun setting into the Arabian Sea behind us.

The Captain entered our marriage into the ship’s log.