set in Anjuna, Goa, India
If you told me a few months ago I would have been in one of the hippiest parts of Goa, I wouldn’t have believed you. Then again if you had told me a few months ago I had been accepted into the University of Melbourne, and my father was paying for me to go to graduate school, I wouldn’t have believed it either. Time is an odd thing. For the last year I was an English teacher working in Tokyo, working fourteen hours a day, barely breaking even in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I barely got any breaks, I barely got a chance to see Japan, and now I’m backpacking all across Asia, before I settle down for some time and focus on my studies. Obviously I’m a little nervous to study again. I’ve not done it for decades, and I’m not that sharp of a learner. But I like teaching, and my father sees that I really want to get good at something, and he is respecting that by giving me a chance to improve my skills, and I want to respect him by doing my best.
Right now I’m not in Japan, and I’m not in Australia. Given that I have a month and a half until my course starts, I thought I’d see as much as Asia as I can, and there’s few countries in the world that enchant from afar as much as India…
I mean I’ve barely seen India. I’ve done Delhi and Agra and now I’m in Goa. It’s just my third day. First day was in the capital, next day was in one of the old Portuguese-style towns, and now I’m in Anjuna. I’ve been to plenty other beach places in the world. The infrastructure here is objectively horrible. I’ve never seen so many dirt roads in my life, or crumbling down buildings.
But India’s about the vibes, and maybe I’m not in the right mood to soak it in.
I probably need to be taking the same things of drugs that the people who sell in this flea market are on.
Who am I to judge? I can’t imagine what it’s like to knit my own scarfs or bags and sell them in the middle of a dirt road. I think it’s all the braided hair, the women who aren’t married but wearing bindi, the alternative take on the Indian sari or kurti that they’ve chosen to dress in. I haven’t talked to any one in the market yet but I feel like I’ve figured out their entire life story by observing how they present themselves. I wouldn’t want any one to take one look at me and think they know what I’ve been through.
They probably see an out-of-fashion gay in trousers and T-shirt and wonder who dresses like this in 40 degree heat…
I see a girl selling stickers. She doesn’t have a stand. Rather she’s taken an umbrella and puts her stickers on top of it, walks around while covering herself, shows off her products. I smile at her, she smiles at me. She has red and white braids but her actual hair is black. She’s wearing a shirt with a lion on it and a really short skirt. She gives me Russian vibes… but I don’t want to go out and say it.
‘Hello, how are you?’ I say in an effort to break into conversation.
‘I am good. You?’
Her accent is totally Slavic.
I say, ’I love what you’re wearing.’ Again, I despise what she is wearing, but she looks lonely in the heat and I don’t know if I want to buy anything yet. I want her to feel good about herself.
But she wasn’t buying it. She looks deep into my eyes and she tells me ‘I don’t think you like single thing about me.’
I don’t know if it’s because Slavs have a third sense when it comes to people speaking bullshit, or because this woman has spent so much time travelling that she’s gotten a read for what people really mean. It was because she said it so directly that my feelings started to hurt me, and I wasn’t even trying to hurt her. I take a second to look away, gather my thoughts, or my attempts at thoughts.
Why is it that she didn’t like what I said? is all I end up thinking.
‘Are you going to buy anything?’ she asks.
I feel bad for hurting this woman’s feelings, I feel the least I can do is look at her stickers and see if any speak to me. I see some in the shape of Shiva or Vishnu, I see some that look like bursts of random colours, shapes like dissipating clouds.
The woman starts laughing at me.
‘Stop, stop,’ she says, and then she offers me a swig from her thermos. I look at it as she gives it to me. It is hot, and she must have noticed I am sweating. I thank her, and then try to drink, in the Indian style in which you let the water drop into your mouth rather than drink touching your lips to the tip of the flask.
I immediately spit it out. It’s vodka, and a strong one at that.
‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Why are you wasting it?’
I am coughing, choking.
‘You are little baby,’ she says.
I laugh because I am acting a little bit like a baby, and she laughs because I’m also laughing.
‘You are gay?’ she says.
Again this is a little too direct for me, and I start blushing.
‘In my culture we don’t say such things so directly,’ I say. ‘But yes.’
‘I have cousin like you,’ she says. ‘He live in Spain.’
‘Spain’s quite nice. I love Madrid.’
‘And I love Goa!’
She shouts it, really enunciating each and every word, almost like how the drunks speak when they are rooting for a sports team. She’s made her body look bigger by putting her arms out and up. It’s like she’s trying to be the goalie for a football team. But the exaggerated pose gets the locals’ attention, and they start bobbing their head, smiling energetically. Maybe this is how she gets sales. A few random people do stop and come to us, first to ask where she is from, then look at what she’s offering.
After she’s done with them she tells me, ‘I like you. Come with me.’
I decide to follow her, because given what I’ve witnessed of her thus far, whenever she’s saying something, she’s telling the truth.
Now we’re in a really different part of Anjuna. It’s like the market but more spread out and no one is selling anything. It’s not facing the beach, it’s more in the field. People are on carpets or rugs on the dirt. Some people are smoking, drinking, dancing to themselves. The crowd is twenty percent indian, eighty percent white. She takes me to a corner where’s a green van overlooking some palm trees.
‘Dance with me.’
I try to dance. I’m not drunk and I don’t really dance that often. I can’t make out if she’s drunk or a little bit on the odd side, but she dances way better than me. She’s doing a lot of poses I’ve seen from the posters of Indian classical dances, with her fingers pressed together. I don’t know how it makes sense ot the music we’re jiving to. It’s a bit more on the techno side, but with some sitar.
‘Take, take.’
She’s really pushing me to sip out of her thermos She can make out how awkward I am… but it’s the middle of the day and I’m in a new country and I don’t know anyone. What if someone takes advantage of my inebriation to rob me? Or what I can get raped, trafficked, sold off?
I wish I was one of these hippy types who just took risks and left everything up to chance. You think I’d be more like them given how much I travel. Travel for me was never about freedom. It was about escape. I have parents who just don’t agree with the fact that I’m gay. Even if they understand that I am homosexual by condition, they’re of that belief it doesn’t matter. Why not a girl, marry, and have children anyways? It’s part of tradition for them. They can’t understand that it feels unnatural for me.
How can I live with them? It’s not that they are pressuring me to marry… but I know if we stayed together in the same house or in the same vicinity it’d be constant fighting and disagreeing and I’m just not built for that.
So I’ve travelled, I’ve lived away, and I’ve tried to make home in the other places of the world that will take me, and the other people I meet that feel relatable to me in some way.
That’s never been hippies, by the way. I actually hate how free they are. It seems they want to be open to literally anything, at all times, and it doesn’t matter what they take in, partake in, or imbibe.
I’m just not comfortable with any of it.
I suppose it’s also because I’m not comfortable in my own skin.
We stop dancing, mostly because it’s really fucking hot. I don’t know how people dance in this heat. I’m sweating all over, but I don’t take my shirt off. I have pretty big man boobs. I expect people to whistle or laugh if I reveal them. I get into a little bit of a chat with this girl and her friends. The girl is from Russia. Guessed it. Apparently so is her male friend, and the other one is from Ukraine. Basically they’re all Slavs but in another way. I’m a little surprised that this Ukrainian has bonded with this group of Russians given the war, but I’m sure most of the Russians outside of Russia hate the war and what they are doing to Ukraine.
I’m sitting with them, and they’re shouting to each other in what I assume to be Russian, and pouring drinks down each other’s throats. The Ukrainian girl offers me a cup. It’d be rude not to take it when they’ve invited me to sit with them.
‘You are not coughing now,’ the Russian girl notices.
‘That’s because I’m prepared to drink,’ I tell her.
Still she starts to mime how I tried to pour the liquid from the thermos into my mouth, and then exaggerates the faces of disgust I made after, all the while speaking in the loudest tone of Russian possible, to the point that some men and women on another carpet, most likely Russian given how much they’re understanding, start smiling towards me. Her friends are slapping their thighs and hollering in laughter. Good for them, I think in the back of my head. I made them laugh.
And good for me too. The alcohol’s starting to get into my system. I’m starting to lighten up a bit.
After a few more drinks I start telling them my sex stories. I’m a little shocked at how open they are to them, given how homophobic Russian is. They are surprised at how much public sex I get away with in India.
‘You’d be surprised,’ I tell them. ‘India is a more open country than you expect.’
‘Not more open than Russia,’ the Russian guy says.
‘Yes, far more open than Russia,’ I tell him.
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
And I kiss him, to prove a point. I get scared after I do this. Russians are quite homophobic. He might feel emasculated in front of his girl friends and beat me up.
Instead he pulls me closer to him, and we start to make out. I regret this decision, mostly because the girls are hooting at us like they are watching a sex show, and he has the strong taste of alcohol and cigarettes on his breath. He also slobbers with his tongue. I get the sense he doesn’t really have as much experience kissing as his sculpted body lets on.
Still we’ve started something and we both like the attention. Now people are coming around us. One girl shouts, ‘Take it off.’ I feel someone pour alcohol on us, which I’m not used to. I break the kiss and start coughing from the smell.
I look at this guy. He’s so ripped, he has beautiful pink nipples. I would love to suck on them.
But I don’t think he’s gay. I’m almost convinced he’s not gay because now him and the Ukrainian are making out. He’s really get into it. His fingers are going into her skirt. I’m getting jealous.
I stand up, thinking I’m going to head out.
The shopkeep bumps into me. She wants to dance again. Fine, let’s dance. This time I’m crazier than even her. I do some flamenco, some vogue-ing, and some salsa steps. I think there must have been something laced into this alcohol because the room is spinning and I’m feeling so hot and I just want to take off clothes. Do I want to take off my pants? I’m wearing underwear anyways. And do I want to take off that too? No, I don’t know any of these people, and my dick isn’t big. I don’t want strangers to see it.
She takes off some of her clothes. I think some of the others are as well. Our bodies sweat against each other, we dance and we dance.
I think she wants to kiss me.
I’m also feeling a bit vulnerable.
She leans in to kiss me but I tell her, ‘I’m about to go to school again, but I don’t know if I want to. I don’t want to be on my daddy’s money, but I love taking money. I don’t have that much of it in the first place. Someone has to give it to me. And he has so much of it and finally he’s giving some of it to me. Did you know he once wrote me out of the will? And what did I to do to deserve that, other than being gay?’
It’s a good question, but frankly no one here is in a place to answer it. In fact the girl who was about to kiss me is flabbergasted. After revealing something so intimate what can she say back? Her lips are still puckered but her eyes are now wide open. She doesn’t know how to move herself into me. She doesn’t know what comes next.
So I shout, ‘I just want to please them. I just want them to be happy. What can I do to make them happy? And what can I do to make myself happy?’
Her eyes open because she wants to answer me but she can’t find an answer no matter how much she searches in the back of her head. It’s awkward, the pain inside of me and the pain it’s causing inside of her. And I don’t think she knows what to do withi t…
A short muscular African man comes to her from behind. He wraps his arms around her and she starts to gyrate her body. She stops paying attention to me and starts making out with him. With her off of me I take a look all around. There are still eighty percent foreigners and twenty percent Indian, but it doesn’t matter. Male upon male, woman upon woman, dark-skinned against light. Everyone is dancing, making out with each other, revealing body parts.
Is there any one out here who’s going to answer me?
Of course not. No one was listening. Everyone is lost in each other’s bodies…
I don’t want any of this. I find my shirt, I find my pants, I dress myself again, and I leave the market. To think that I almost revealed my body in the middle of the beach in Goa..
Then again, what I did end up sharing to these strangers was far more embarrassing…
