35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

122
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
‘Opium.’
‘Jesus!’
It was presumed, of course, that Ray had expanded the range of
his exports. No one really minded a person smuggling hashish, but
opium was something else again. Smuggling opium made you a
drug dealer.
An edgy silence descended. We were the guests of a man who
would go to jail for many, many years if caught in the West, or be
executed if caught in parts of the East.
‘What if they raid the house?’ Esther asked. ‘We’ll be accomplices.
We’ll spend sixty years in the Black Hole of Calcutta.’
No one replied. If the slums of Bombay were where people who
were merely poor lived, we could only speculate on what Indian
prisons must be like . . .
After half an hour – or what felt like half an hour – there was still
no sign of Ray and Debbie, so we decided to walk down to the
beach. The dogs eyed us hungrily as we slipped through the gate,
but obviously approved of our exit in principle.
Past fifty yards of palms, the beach appeared: a broad stretch of
fine yellow sand stretching off for miles on either side. A deep,
thrashing azure, the Arabian Sea heaved into frothing breakers that
crashed clawing at rocks and shoreline as if trying to drag the world
back down into itself. This was indeed the very image of a tropical
paradise – sky, sea, pristine sand, coconut palms. After Ray’s stoned
and claustrophobic museum, the beauty was especially liberating.
We were far from alone in Eden. On both sides, young Westerners
sat or lay in pairs and small groups. Chillums were being passed
around, guitars strummed, tablas tapped, discordant flutes blown.
And not a soul wore more than the cotton equivalent of a fig leaf. I
felt preposterously overdressed. Everything I’d ever heard about
Goa was patently true. Little wonder Indian men were convinced
all Western women were incorrigibly immoral. They, of course,
knew that all men everywhere were irredeemably immoral; God
planned things that way.
But the carefree Goans were different. They did not mind in the
least. Although their women would never go topless, they had no
objection to anything the hippies did . . . providing they paid their