The Lost Girls (31 page)

“Aye, miss, maybe one-a these fine skirts for ya? Right good, they are.” I couldn't help myself—I stopped in my tracks as I heard the line delivered in a perfect British Cockney accent. Turning around, I saw that it came from a spindly-limbed teenage girl. She held up an armload of tie-dyed fabric twisted into ropes. “Beautiful skirt for beautiful lady?”

I shook my head, but she didn't break her stride and followed me across the beach. When the other women peeled away, off to find more pliable targets, she stuck around and followed our group to a café set up under a perky green-and-white awning. I wasn't going to buy anything from her, but figured it couldn't hurt to get her something to eat.

Rebecca, as she introduced herself, seemed thrilled to be the center of attention and chattered on about her life as one of Goa's beach girls. She explained that since her parents had passed away a year earlier, she'd been selling trinkets and clothes on Vagator to support her little brother and sister, to raise enough money to feed them and send them to school. It was tough going out every day and asking people to buy things, but at least the holiday season was approaching: that meant more customers and more sales.

“Do you ever get harassed by the people on the beach?” Sarah asked. “Are you ever afraid to walk home after dark?”

“Sometimes. That's why me and the other selling ladies, we team up and walk home together. One time a man tried to touch me, and I stood right up and told him to bugger off!” she shrieked, reenacting the scenario.

I wasn't sure whether the story about her parents was true or not, but I definitely believed one thing: Rebecca was quite the little fighter. I hoped that her instincts would somehow keep her safe from the danger she faced daily by approaching random strangers on the beach. I could imagine how easy it would be for someone to snatch her up, carry her away. I wondered if anyone would go looking for a missing fifteen-year-old.

As she finished her food, I looked through my purse to see if I had enough change left to buy one of the bracelets she was selling, but she waved me off.

“If you don't got the money today, no worries.”

“Will you be here tomorrow?” I asked, pressing a few rupees into her hand anyway.

“Sure, I'm gonna be here tomorrow, and tomorrow after that. You see me, and then you buy skirt, bracelet, whatever you like. Just remember me. Remember Rebecca.”

 

O
ur newly formed crew of five decided to celebrate our American, Indian (and British) Thanksgiving in the exact same spot we'd eaten lunch. Between rounds of tropical fruit cocktails and semideep conversations (discussions such as the need to enforce child labor laws in India and the ever-popular topic of the lack of mandatory vacation time in America), midday transitioned into languid afternoon. The five of us took turns cooling down by running into the surf, commandeering the trampoline that had been set up in front of the restaurant for little kids, and walking along the hard-packed sand to an old fort at the end of the beach. We started a game of volleyball, a sport I've always been terrible at, but today, the sweatier and sandier I got, the more liberated I felt (and better I played!). I couldn't have chosen a better week to immerse myself into the world of the vagabond backpacker.

“Hey, Jen, I think you might have been right about something,” I confessed as we walked back to our table with Sarah and collapsed into the chairs. “This is
definitely
more fun than hanging out in some smelly old Internet café.”

“Really? Are you sure? I mean, I saw a few on the main road into town,” she teased. “You could still squeeze in a couple hours of work before you go to bed.”

“Screw it. I'm over it,” I said, suddenly possessive of my newfound free time.

“Okay, ladies, where are we going out tonight?” asked Cliff as he and Stephen returned from the beach. “What's the plan?”

Stephen explained that on any given night in Goa, you could party at one of dozens of bars, lounges, and nightclubs—and over the past couple of weeks, the guys had explored them all. They'd smoked hookahs in the back room at Tito's, gotten bottle service at Shore Bar, raved to trance anthems at Paradiso, and gone skinny-dipping with a cast of hundreds in the swimming pool at Club Cubana. The pool wasn't open tonight, but the guys offered to take us somewhere even better to check out the Goan underground culture. We all agreed to let them lead the way and headed back to shower and change before our big night out.

After a couple of hours of barhopping, I was ready to raise the stakes and go dancing, but was shocked when both Jen and Sarah begged off.

“Are you guys kidding?” I was stricken. “You don't want to stay out?”

“Well, yeah, we do, but maybe not tonight.” said Jen. “I mean, we've been drinking all afternoon and…I think Sarah and I are just wiped out.”

“Tomorrow we'll be rock stars, I promise,” said Sarah.

I was disappointed, but I knew there was no sense in pushing them. Cliff, Stephen, and I put the girls in a rickshaw and headed to the next location.

About an hour later, we approached the entrance of Paradiso, a massive multitiered nightclub built into the limestone cliffs perched above the Arabian Sea. Slipping past the velvet rope, we walked under a darkened passageway cut through the rock and emerged into an outdoor section bathed in lantern light.

At our feet, local women had covered nearly every inch of ground with thistle mats. Most were arranging candy and mints for sale or brewing small pots of chai on miniature burners. Clubgoers wearing thin cotton shirts, loose pants, and colorful sundresses were spread out on the mats, lounging on their elbows, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and sipping cocktails from little plastic cups. The unmistakable, pervasive aroma of hash mixed with sweet tobacco hung like incense over the crowd.

The club was aboveground, but the dense saltiness of the air, the exposed rock walls, and the swath of darkness gave it the feel of an enormous grotto. The skittering electronic beats of Goa trance swelled and reverberated through the cavernous space, and the revelers moved to the waves of sound like an enormous jellyfish. Watching from the fringes, I felt energy firing through my muscles and out my fingertips. We worked our way into a crush of bodies, moving for what seemed like forever to a song that had no beginning or end.

“So, here's what I'm thinking…” Stephen shouted over the music as he surveyed the crowd. “I'm not really sure if I can handle this place tonight if all we're doing is drinking, you know?”

Cliff nodded in agreement, wiping his forehead against a T-shirt sleeve to clear the sweat. “Totally, man. It's a full-on rave in here.”

“Well, if you guys are down, a friend of mine thinks that she can get us something a little stronger.” Stephen looked directly at me. “You know what I mean, right?”

Yes, I knew what he meant. Thanks to Jen's Lonely Planet
research, I'd learned that drugs were as easy to come by in Goa as cups of chai and that travelers down them just as casually. I hadn't specifically planned to delve into that side of the local culture, but I didn't want to stand in the way either. I shrugged in response to the question, which the guys took to mean that I was down with whatever.

We walked back upstairs to the area where the chai ladies sat on their mats, and Stephen introduced me to Anna, a skinny German chick with steel-wool dreadlocks, chewed-up fingernails, and a raggedy cotton skirt that clung to her bony hips.

“Hey. This is my boyfriend, Jack,” she said, motioning toward the first beefy Indian guy I'd seen. “He's gonna come with us.”

“Come with us? Come with us where?” I asked as we started moving toward the exit. “Where are we going?”

“Not far,” said Anna breezily. “Just gotta make a stop to visit my guy.”

I grabbed Cliff's forearm and sent him a “what's the deal?” expression.

“I know where we're going,” he assured me, grabbing my hand. “It's okay.”

Anna led our group out the front doors of Paradiso, past the electric lights, and up a road that gradually narrowed into a dirt path. Walking away from the beach, we entered a section of Goa where I was sure backpackers weren't meant to tread. In the watery light of the moon, I could just make out the outlines of tiny shelters, roughly constructed shacks made from wood, cardboard, and corrugated tin. It was some kind of shantytown village tucked away among the trees. What were we doing here?

Up ahead, without fear or hesitation, Anna was shoving back the plastic tarps and gauzy thin fabric that covered the doorways, hissing the name of some guy called Devraj. I could hear
muffled sounds and voices inside the shacks, but Anna ignored them. She was a woman on a mission. I willed myself not to freak out, convinced that her raspy voice would act as a bullhorn beckoning local police looking to make an easy bust.

To my relief, Anna finally found the guy she'd been looking for. Together, the five of us ducked our heads and crossed the threshold of a sagging hovel, entering a room lined with emaciated men draped across one another like a litter of abandoned kittens. As we made our presence known, they stirred, rubbing their sleepy eyes and staring at us like the weird white specters we were. The air here was as dense and humid as the inside of a dishwasher and laced with the musky, spicy aroma of too many bodies pressed up against one another.

Devraj, a shrunken man with a tangled gray beard and hollow eyes, wasted no time getting down to business. “You want red pill or blue pill?”

He knelt down before us, holding out the options in gnarled hands thick with calluses, an ersatz Morpheus in my increasingly bizarre Indian-
Matrix
world.

Cliff paid $5 apiece for a couple of the red pills (which Anna had assured us would be “mellow” and “pure”) and gave one to me. For a second, I was convinced this had all been an elaborate setup. Any second now, the cops would step out of the darkness and haul the idiot Westerners (or maybe just me?) off to prison to rot.

I stared sharply as Anna and Jack, then Cliff and Stephen casually tossed back their pills and chased them with a single bottle of beer passed among them. Okay, so we weren't getting arrested, but still…did I want to do this? I could have backed out—pretended to take the pill, dropped it on the ground, handed it off to the dirty German girl, and just run back toward the ocean, but I stared at the pill, torn between fear and fascination. What would happen, exactly, if I just stopped thinking so hard about everything and took it?

“I think maybe you better do half that thing.” Anna paused long enough to drag off the cigarette she and Jack were sharing. “That shit is pretty strong.”

I glanced down at the red pill in my hand, then back at her. Gouging my thumbnail into the butterfly stamp in the top, I watched as it split cleanly along the wings. I sat there, contemplating the halves, trying to figure out which of the two was the smaller one. Willing my brain to divorce itself from all rational thought, I grabbed the bottle of beer from Jack's outstretched hand and allowed myself to get sucked down the rabbit hole.

 

A
nna had not lied—the stuff we'd taken mellowed me out completely. The next few hours passed in a warm, incandescent haze. Once back at Paradiso, our group leased a parcel of straw mat real estate from one of the chai ladies. As the first waves of sensation hit, I looked up at the Indian woman's face and swore I could feel her disapproval. She poured the milky brew into tin cups, and I watched intently as the liquid landed smoothly in the bottom. Nobody drank.

As the club filled, people came to join us, friends of Anna's, strangers who wanted sweets, randoms seeking a place to chill. We talked with our new friends, conversations about extremely important issues, none of which I can remember now. I gazed across the endless landscape of the concrete floor, carpets affixed like patches across its bald face, and wondered what the other groups of people were talking about at that moment. What were they thinking? I wanted to find out, absolutely needed to know what was being discussed, but I was superglued to my spot, alternating between incredible swells of warmth and feelings of being sucked into the floor.

Minutes or hours later, I didn't know, I looked around, glancing at all of the strange faces. I recognized nobody. Where were
the dreadlocks? Where were the other new friends I'd just met? How could they all be gone? My watch read 3:08 a.m.

Streaks of reality started to pierce the fog. Cliff and Stephen had already gone home—they'd tried to take me along, but I'd told them I wanted to stay. I couldn't find Anna and Jack, and even if I could, then what? Arrange a ride with my drug dealers? It was the middle of the night, and I had no idea how to get back. Then I remembered the rickshaws parked in front of the club.

I walked outside, in the direction of the drivers, and was almost instantly mobbed. Men were tugging at my clothes, snatching at my body, loudly demanding, pulling, and insisting that I get inside their vehicle. I could hear myself shriek as I reeled backward toward the entrance.

Almost at once, things turned completely lucid, and I immediately regretted that I'd stayed alone at some nightclub on a beach in India until after 3 a.m. without a safe way to get back. I had no cell phone, no number for our guesthouse, no way to get in touch with anyone who could rescue me. I returned to the club, frantically searching the floors for a face I recognized.

Several desperate minutes passed as I lurched between bodies. In a crowd filled with young people, I was hopelessly alone. I started questioning groups of girls—“Are you leaving soon? What town are you going to?”—aware that I must sound psychotic. Most shrugged or ignored me altogether. Then, from the corner of my eye, I spotted a guy I'd been chatting with for a few hazy minutes on one of the straw mats. He was in the middle of a conversation, but I interrupted anyway.