Part 19. My last Days in Goa. Opium and Philosophy

 Contrary to popular legend we didn’t smoke dope everyday and have sex with everybody we met, we were ideas people, we conversed, we debated, we explored religion, poetry, music, gender and ideology. The hashish that we occasionally smoked was mostly done in a ritualistic way, usually with prayers and chanting learned from passing Sadhu’s and Holy men. Occasionally eaten in cakes for recreation and party nights, full moon dancing or a birthday. Many abstained altogether.

Some of the couples we met were, in fact, celibate, saving themselves for religious reasons or just exploring more open relationships, we certainly had a lot more sexual freedom than our parents generation and celebrated it, but the media certainly got it all wrong. A few of the popular religious teachers recognised the confusion that so many young westerners had with their sexuality and helped them explore and understand their own feelings. I’m sure that some people exploited the situation for their own gratification but don’t believe the media hype and stupid modern films about the era, manufactured for titillation and cheap thrills. We were just kids whose intentions were good...India and especially Goa, were nonetheless great places to try and live out your personal goals and fantasies.
Hillary befriended a young German, pale faced and fragile, a bookish sort of lad who lived in a small room not far from the beach. Conversations ran around Victorian poets, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, Timothy Leary and other thinkers, we laughed a lot together and he invited us to his place for lunch one day. His place was like a little museum, so tidy and well organised. He had books and pictures, artefacts and equipment all centred on his fascination with Opium. He was going to stay for three months and try and write about his experience of taking the drug and how it changed him. He would then go back to work in a library in Germany who were holding his job for him. It sounded like a risky strategy, everyone knew it was easy to develop a dependency on the stuff (as many of his favourite authors would attest).
When he invited us to try it with him we decided that, in a positive environment with full knowledge of the pitfalls, we would. We knew we would be leaving within a week or so and would be away from him and further temptation if we needed to be and the experience was very pleasant. He was fairly ritualistic about preparing and smoking the substance and the promised ‘open door of perception’ was thoroughly rewarding, a dream like experience that wasn’t unlike some modern day anaesthetics but the conscious dream state lasted much longer. A genuine insight into some of the more unusual writers and thinkers of our age?, probably.
The well outside our accommodation was getting a bit busy, travellers would now arrive and shower using the bucket but their shampoos and toothpastes would be left in puddles around the shaft and it seemed a bit like an oily film was developing on the surface of the water when it was drawn. A girl who showered there with her husband most days came on her own one day and came into our room asking if she could hide there for a day or two. Turns out her husband was on a kind of one man’ fear and loathing’ tour in a camper but with her, behaving worse and worse as he dabbled in heroine and injected cocaine. He had started to be violent and controlling and was locking her in the van for days on end in dark jealous fits of withdrawal. At the outset, she told us, he wanted to write a book about his experiences with drugs and alcohol and was measured and reasonable, but clearly it had got the better of him and he now had a gun and beat, raped and threatened her. He imagined himself a sort of further demented Hunter S. Thomson figure. I helped her hide and took her to town where she could get a bus back somewhere she could feel safe. Not everybody had a positive experience with drugs, there were a lot of casualties.
We set off for Benares and an Ashram that a friend had recommended in Utter Pradesh, a gruelling 3 days of buses and trains. Our money was getting quite low now and we hadn’t come to India to lay on the beach and party, however pleasant it might be to do so.






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