“Forty years ago, Goa was a trip. Now it’s also a business, a disease,” writes Sudeep Chakravarti in Hindustan Times. Chakravarti’s novel, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta, set in present-day Goa, will be published later this year.
Two days ago, a friend and I were breakfasting at a chic café in Baga, a bizarre Goan confluence of the digital hippie, Indian yuppie and those whom I simply call Charter Jack and Charter Jane – “Oi, mate!” and chips with everything. A French couple, replete with tattoos, wearing worn clothes, BO, and a girl of about six came and sat by us, burnt some charas, rolled a joint, and began to fumigate the vicinity. My friend, a Goan preparing to adopt a girl, was outraged at the couple’s nonchalance in doing something so openly in Goa that would land them in jail in their own country, besides possibly placing their daughter under State care.
“I can’t believe these guys,” she spat. “They should be whipped. And this Scarlette,” she continued, “how could her mother leave a 15-year-old girl by herself in this day and age, in an area known to be unsafe, known for drugs and raves and what not and go away on her travels? Would she do that in England? No. But this is Goa, right? So now the girl is dead.”
Scarlette Eden Keeling, flower-child of a flower-parent, is dead, after allegedly being on an extended trip of substance abuse, after allegedly being raped by a manager of a shack at Anjuna beach. Less than an hour’s drive north of where I live, in Panjim, Anjuna was once the eastern extremity of Woodstock.
Mothers and monsters
In the media’s hands, Scarlett Keeting’s mother Fiona MacKeown has become a scapegoat for the middle classes. Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, UK:
Compassion is not a response the media seem able to sustain. That small window that affords a degree of respect for the grief of the bereaved seems to shrink ever more, but even so the treatment of Fiona MacKeown, the mother of the 15-year-old murdered on a Goa beach, has plumbed new depths of harsh judgmentalism.
While MacKeown struggles to get the police to take on the case of her daughter’s killing, she has a second child lying in hospital in the UK with a broken neck from a car accident that happened shortly before her daughter’s death. This goes well beyond the platitude of a mother’s worst nightmare. Yet even such circumstances have not inhibited the torrent of criticism and contempt that has poured down on this woman’s head. Open season has been declared on every part of her family life, her parenting style and even her appearance. She is blamed for abandoning her daughter in a resort while continuing her travels; accused of a recklessly indulgent style of parenting; and criticised for her mode of grieving. Almost every article refers to her hair – it is “lank”, a “curtain” and, most unforgivably, grey.
Previously on Asian Window:
