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

130
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
criminal skills. Hotels were robbed; tourists were mugged; villas
were burgled; dope deals turned sour. Now, clearly, people were
being murdered, as well.
The Portuguese had left Goa nearly fifteen years before I arrived.
But the hippies, in their own way, cared as little for Indian culture as
their colonising forebears had, also taking what they wanted from it
and scorning the rest.
Freaks looked less freakish in India. Once you’ve seen a thousand
naked sadhus running toward the Ganges covered with ash from the
cremation grounds, garlanded with human skulls, dreadlocks
daubed with cow dung hanging to their knees, nails driven through
their tongues and tridents in their hands – once you’ve seen this
and not found it especially unusual, you’re hardly going to get upset
about a guy with shoulder-length hair and a beard who wears beads
and floral shirts. Of course, the hippies mistook this for tolerance.
They soon discovered how intolerant the Indians could be if
provoked, however – which was why they gravitated to Goa, where
the inhabitants were more confused about what to believe than
actually open-minded. Again, the hippies didn’t care what the locals
felt or thought.
This disgusted me. These kids had no idea, either, how appalled
the Indians were to see visitors from the affluent West begging on
the streets of their desperately poor land. But India as a nation was
then only twenty-five years old. Memories of the white masters
were still fresh, especially in Goa. The hippy colonists were making
a big mistake, and others have been paying for it ever since.
Ray and his cronies were another matter, living like grandees,
with the vulgar arrogance typical of the nouveau riche.
Unaccustomed to servants, they imagined one treated them much
like intelligent pets; they also imagined that having servants meant
not doing a single thing yourself, assuming their menials were
stupid if they didn’t know the difference between a brandy snifter
and a whiskey tumbler, or that red wine shouldn’t be served with
fish. By the time of our visit, both Ray and Debbie firmly believed
that they were regarded as royalty by locals and white tribes alike. It
seemed glaringly obvious to me that Ray’s servants thought he was
a lazy, pompous prick. And they considered Debbie a cheap tramp