There are not a lot of flights into Goa, but one of them comes directly from Moscow. This explains a lot. The beach is full of unhealthy-looking Russian women and their monolithic husbands, whose hairless, pressurized torsos pivot atop speedos like artillery turrets. In the afternoon they are as drunk and passed out as our xenophobic cold war stereotypes have promised. Just like those topless glamor shots of Vladimir Putin, theirs is a virile aesthetic almost completely divorced from physical beauty. I’ve found Goa to be a very agreeable place to be carrying ten spare pounds of holiday weight.
But perhaps this is just Baga Beach, where we stayed. A day trip to Anjuna, the purported center of Goan hippie culture, revealed even fewer Russians than hippies. The people on the beach seemed athletic and competent and not in the mood for anybody’s shit. Absurdly, there were even a few joggers. The Bob Marley towels and offers of drugs seemed mostly about delivering the local color promised in the guidebooks. Anjuna is an American beach, a beach from which conference calls have been joined.
Seasides are timeless. The surf is perpetual, very nearly immune to seasons and human meddling. Shells and driftwood and sand are relentlessly ground down in a process that clearly does not require much supervision. Everything about the ocean is, frankly, much too big.
I used to like to sit in front of it and (pretentiously) read Calvino and feel as tiny and quiet and unnoticeable as a stone buried in the sand beyond the breakers. But that was years ago, when my self-regard was still immaculate. Pondering mortality and insignificance was a nice vacation experience once upon a time, but was never any more life-changing than a cooking class.
It’s less fun now. I’m no pebble, I’m just part of a huge herd of mammals, wallowing in the surf and shade and beer like everyone else. It’s certainly still relaxing, but regular life has lost its childish grandiosity and so the old idea of escape feels a bit more desperate. How can you relax when, back home, entropy is increasing?
I went into the Indian Ocean, which I never thought I’d do. The sand was smooth and the waves were like bath water. Soon I found myself amid some Indian boys who were bodysurfing.
Where are you from? USA. He was going there soon, he said, to work for a new company, had I heard of it. I was sorry, I hadn’t. He told me how many lakhs he was going to make. I wished him luck, which his friends thought was funny. I started to head out further and they asked me if I could swim. I told them yes; they seemed disappointed.
My cousins were born here. Or maybe that’s not right. Were they raised here? I can’t remember. One day they arrived at my grandparents’ house on Kenmore Street, in Virginia, so that the process of civilizing them could begin. Within weeks my cousin Emily gave herself a haircut, which became an important chapter in subsequent family lore and cemented a sense of wildness that was probably undeserved.
Why did my aunt go to India, and why did she come back? I’ve never been told and have certainly never asked. I imagine that she was, like many others of her generation, attempting an experiment. Sometimes I worry that its failure has disappointed her since.
My cousins seem none the worse for it, though. They are now implacable Vermonters, wise and capable and, if one insisted on naming a fault, perhaps even too strong for their own good. Just like their grandmother, and her grandmother. A generational displacement as geographically and culturally vast as possible couldn’t dislodge their destiny. At times I find this immensely reassuring.
