We are on our way towards the beaches of Vagator from Mapusa, Goa. Along the way, we pass by so closely to Anjuna village's St Michael's Church that a few patches can be seen where the white-washer had been lazy the last time around, slapping on just a single coat of lime wash. At the foot of this massive church, the road splits in two ways. The route to the left skirts the church's façade before curving sharply towards the heart of Anjuna village. For the moment, we will turn left with it.
Tens of thousands of the tourists who land up in Goa each year drive down this road, either heading for the Wednesday flea market or Anjuna beach, which fringes the village on its western edge. They arrive in crowded motorcars or on motorcycles, armed with fruit juices in tetra packs, pints of beer and bottles of drinking water – most of which, empty, later line the streets. Then there are the ever-hurried package-tour buses, tightly packed with tourists from Rajasthan, Gujarat, West Bengal and Karnataka. While a sizeable number of these tourists arrive with their families, quite a few also come in gangs of single males on macho pilgrimages. Anjuna is where the skimpily-clad occidental deities dot the beaches, after all, like tanned idols washed ashore by the sea, soaking in the sun. The eroticism of the famed sculptures of Ajanta, up north in Maharashtra, is trapped in cold stone. But here in Anjuna, the waves and sun kiss the beached, European goddesses to life.
Of course, Anjuna is not that different from other coastal communities. Over the years, a coastal community gets used to the tides bringing in all sorts of driftwood and whatnot. You take it in stride whether the sea washes up a beautifully gnarled piece of root, its surface as smooth as a shark's underbelly; or an opened bottle of brandy; or a used syringe. The tourists are just another kind of arrival on the beach and, boisterous or not, the tourists bring in the money. What makes Anjuna unique compared to other coastal tourism hubs is the virtual absence of massive hotels, or even large buildings of any kind. For comparison, look at the town of Calangute, just two miles down the beach from Anjuna. What was once an attractive, tropical coastal community has now become Goa's most prominent tourism casualty – a village that has been swallowed up by a concrete town. Calangute is today like a dying organism: the density of hotels here is much higher than anywhere else in Goa, including the capital Panaji, and the character of the idyllic village is lost.
While it was the sudden, rapacious blessings of tourism that did Calangute in, it is thanks to an old curse that Anjuna has managed, thus far, to stave off the concretisation. Few of the local folks are sure of the origins of this curse, but it has been around for such a long time that they have become used to having it around, like the cobweb in the unreachable recesses of one's ancestral home.