On the west coast of India the sands of two beaches joined together to become one long, wide strip of paradise, washed by clean, white surf: I expect they still do, but not with quite the same innocence as they did in 1977. Those beaches at Baga and Calangute were separated from Anjuna Beach by a small hill and also by a river that rose somewhere back up towards the Western Ghats. All along the back of Anjuna and at its far end there were palm groves and solid walls of bush, and that’s where some of us spent every long, hot, lazy day in December well over thirty years ago.

I fell in with an Italian crowd, all a bit older than me. They were mostly in their early to mid twenties; I was nineteen. We had all rented houses or huts in Calangute or in some of the other small villages out towards Mapuça, but during the days we made our way to Anjuna to be together. We lazed and swam, ate and drank, talked and laughed and felt confident. The sun shone every day, purifying everything its rays touched. When the afternoons began to grow hot we left the shade of the palms and ran naked across the scorching sand into the sea with joyful honesty and trust filling our hearts.

The nights were different. Just before sunset others always came to sit about in groups under the palms at the edge of our beach. They came to smoke and drink and lose themselves, they came to lose their minds. They paid scant attention to the sunsets that made our bodies glow like gold till the sun plunged quickly into the Arabian Sea and dissolved. The night called and they turned their backs on the sea. With no sun there was no heat and that was when we put on our clothes and left; only a few of the Italians ever stayed behind on Anjuna.

With only a faint gleam coming from beyond the sea it was a difficult climb back over the small hill to reach the village. We left behind the rising chang of badly-played guitars, the smoke and the stirring madness, and waded through the waist-high river with our bundles of clothes and left-over food held above our heads to keep them dry, then dressed again in the darkness to walk along Baga Beach towards the huts we’d rented for the winter.