Part 18. A simple life and a casualty

 On the beach in Goa, we made our own yogurt, we’d bought a small live yogurt in the market at Mapusa and every other day we’d get a few litres of milk from the cafe and put it in a big bowl on the roof of our hut with a cover on. We’d share it with whoever chipped in a couple of rupees toward the milk and keep enough as a starter for the next batch. Sometimes we’d just share it with whoever was around. We picked up new starter yogurt on our way back from the west coast trip. The hut opposite ours was being rented by a young Australian doing a low budget round the world trip, he’d always scrounge a bowl of yogurt when we had some.

He seemed a bit shy and lonely, we took him to the cafe on Vagator one evening soon after we got back. I remember about 15 people being there and a German guy and I were talking about a Rolling Stones album, we started a drum rhythm on one of the tables from ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, someone on the other side of the room recognised it and started to sing the ‘wooh wooh’ vocal , someone joined in on an acoustic guitar and the whole room started singing the vocal line. It went on for about twenty minutes, one of those magical moments in life, music unifying people, transcending the mundane. I can never hear that song without being transported back to that day, that beach, those people. We walked the Australian lad back and he said he felt a bit rough and went to bed.
We didn’t see him the next day and when we didn’t see him the day after we asked around people on the beaches and they hadn’t seen him , we knocked on his door that night and again in the morning and got no reply, the door was locked. I asked a group of people to help me get on to the roof and look in through the palm leaf roofing. I could see him in his sleeping bag, but couldn’t get him to reply to me. I lowered myself in and opened the door, Hillary and a French couple came in.
He was delirious and running a terrible fever, couldn’t focus or respond to us. We tried to cool him down with water from the well but without effect. This was scary stuff, there was no doctor in Chapora and the nearest hospital was in Panjim. The French couple said they knew of a charity run clinic about 3 miles up the river and one of them set off jogging to see if they could get someone to come out and see him. About 3 hours later a doctor from Medicins Sans Frontieres arrived on a motorcycle and diagnosed advanced septicaemia, he gave him a shot of antibiotic and drove off to organise an ambulance. Hillary and I packed all his stuff and went with him to the hospital.
Now the hospital was a bit of a shock to our sensibilities, it was big and he went straight onto a ward because of the doctor’s diagnosis. The ward was filthy, about 20 beds with stained mattresses and no sheets or covers. There was a flow of people visiting relatives, or indeed sitting with them and caring for them. There were cockroaches in the corners and general peelings and food detritus on the un-swept floor. There was no way we were going to leave his passport, traveller’s cheques and belongings under his bed, he was still delirious. We tried to find a matron or nurse and eventually we were taken to the hospital director’s office. We took the lads home address and telephone number and insisted that they lock his valuables into a safe and give us a receipt. We gave some of his cash to pay for his ‘food and keep’, as the director described it. We booked an international call to his family in Australia and later that day spoke to his younger brother and gave him all the hospital details. Turns out his parents were on a world cruise, currently somewhere around Indonesia.
We went back two days later to meet his parents and sign out his valuables so they could fly him home to Australia. Now they weren’t particularly chuffed to have had to cancel their cruise only a week in and they’d had to fly a long way and make complicated arrangements, but you’d have thought that they might have said thanks, well done for saving his life etc. No they refused to speak to us, wouldn’t look us in the eye and treated us with complete disdain. It would seem that it wasn’t only the Indian Film industry and press that had demonised hippies and these rich right wing Australians somehow convinced themselves it was us, representing anti war, commie, anarchists that had caused their son to be there in the first place.





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