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.

On one of those nights I decided to sleep on the beach. I’d thought of it often enough before but had never bothered. I went to have something to eat first at the Bengali Maya on the little dusty square that made up the centre of Calangute village, still not knowing if I would be brave enough to fulfil that dream I’d had since the last time I was in Goa. Those beautifully warm, moonlit, star-filled skies were made for lying beneath, away from under the dusty, ceiling of the hut that masked the smell of the sea, a smell that carried around the village on the soft, fresh breath of the night air. I stopped by the hut to pick up a blanket, and by then it was late, and the family who owned the hut were asleep.

There was a part of the beach not far from the village that I’d thought would be a good place to lie down. It was far enough away from the sound of the music that sometimes continued in the cafes well into the night, but not so far to be unsafely remote. It was a spot where a large bite of sand seemed to have eaten into the palm grove creating a bay that was out of reach of the breeze that sometimes blew a fine dust along the beach. It was perfect to lie on and watch the magnificent heavenly court in action above.

So I la down, full of the warmth and love of the day and the people I’d shared that warmth with. For a while I just sat on the still warm sand, wrapped in my blanket, gazing out upon the sea. While I waited for sleep I remembered my aversion for snakes. The thought also came to me that exactly a year before a German man I vaguely knew had been murdered on that beach. I felt apprehensive, but forced myself to focus on the spectacle above rather then to give into fear. Sleep came.

After a few hours I woke. I was sweating and in a panic, with the remembrance of a bad dream in my head. There was a foul taste in my mouth and heaviness in my chest. The details of the dream slowly came back to me, uncovering its full horror layer by layer, terror and disgust rising in my thoughts at each turn.

In the dream a snake had made its way out of the sea. It was long and heavy and made its way with slow determination towards me. It lifted its head to move on top of me, dragging its body up behind it until it had completely left the sand and was lying in coils on my chest. In the dream I reckoned that it didn’t know I was a live person, but that if I as much as breathed it would sense the movement and smell either danger or dinner. Either way I was finished. I had to act first while the snake was falling asleep in ignorance.

With no weapons and no way of getting from under the creature to run from it there was only one way that I could resolve the situation. I grabbed the thing at both ends and bit it in two. That’s when I woke.

I woke into a world that so different from the world I had fallen asleep in. By now the moon was sitting directly in front of me, a huge silver disc in an ink black vault of pin-prick stars and nothingness. The ripples of the sea lapped the shore they caught the silvery light shining from above and threw it back towards me. Palm fronds rattled overhead like a clutch of garden canes as a gentle breeze moved them about, and the once-sweet air was now taken over by the malevolent stench of evil.

I knew instantly that it had all been a dream, but I felt crawled over, violated. The foul taste in my mouth couldn’t be dissociated from the bite I’d taken from the dry, scaly flank of the imaginary snake and I had no food or drink to take to overcome it. This was not where I wanted to be, but I was determined to see the night through, and if I was honest, I was afraid on moving from that protected arc of sand onto the exposed beach to get to the sleeping village. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, but to remain unnoticed by the moon, the stars, the sea.

I forced myself to lie down again, using reason but still checking that no mutilated serpent was lying on the sand beside me. Somehow I slept.

Morning arrived, and with it the cheerful voices of fishermen that broke the cruel spell of the night as they returned from the sea. The air was cold and the village was not yet awake. It was hard to think about moving from the warmth of my blanket, but I stood up, stiff from lying on the hard mattress of tightly packed sand. I shook sand from my tousled hair, and from my clothes, and as I lifted my head to look across the beach towards the retreating line of the sea I saw about twelve long snakes lying dotted around the hollow my body had just left on the ground. They were no more than five meters in each direction from my bed, and each snake had a blood-encrusted wound where its head had been torn off, and the heads were nowhere to be seen.