"Would you like anything else, sir," the waiter said, almost challenging my right to walk into a place like that. Not wishing to reveal my financial status in a hurry, I replied, "Maybe, after some time." He walked away with a nonchalance that said something like, "Oh, I know your type...you're not the worth the pants you are wearing," which was true. I looked out of the window, slowly frosting with the wet, wet air from the west. It was then that I heard the voices. Slowly, as my ears adjusted to the damp acoustics of the room, I could make out words, then whole sentences.

Ben Arnoldy: I needed to change money because I didn't trust the many street offers. I already learned the hard way that no one takes a ripped rupee bill, which one merchant gave to me as change hoping I was a sucker. With money, I wanted to go through the legitimate channels since I could not afford making another mistake. This trip was bound by a tight student budget.

Would the smartly dressed man at the hotel desk change my money? Would he see that I really didn't have the money to be in this place, and was certainly not a guest of the hotel? I was an outsider just as much here as out in the streets. I had never thought this much about money in my life.

"Certainly, sir," he said. As he flipped rupees, I wished that I shared this man's assumptions of my financial stability and future...

RG: "What she did to me completely killed my faith Tarun, I just.....I just couldn't take it anymore." My mind, being a nosy self-professed psychoanalyst, started drawing a picture of the man — early thirties, confident in the daytime, pretentious, probably a brand or sales manager in some FMCG, and other adjectives that usually put the man in an uninhabitable pigeon-hole of personality.

I could have walked out, loathing the déjà vu of public portraits that life kept throwing at me, but by then I had a hazy hypothesis that needed verification. It was a game a lot of people might enjoy playing now and then, unaware of the searching eyes that have bid on them in turn, like the waiter on me. Men on their own in pubs are like black boxes, but there is a pattern to their sadness, each feeding on itself, glorified in its assumption of uniqueness.

Soon enough, the talking man tired my soul with his rants stretched to the point of being utter drunken lies. The coffee had been consumed, though I wished it had taken a little longer, for it was my excuse to occupy that seat. I called for the "cheque." Cheques are never disappointing. In a life gone stale with repeating patterns, they have never failed to surprise me. I paid my dues and walked out, disenchanted with the surreal air that had seemed to occupy the place when I had walked in 40 minutes ago.

The lobby was still abuzz with the voice of room service, a perplexed house manager stared at me, and the valet wished me good night, almost in contempt or mockery, possibly both. The air was less stuffy outside, I tried to tell myself, almost succeeding.

A vehicle was parked across the empty road; its occupants were sitting and standing on the culvert. Their gestures made it obvious that they were a group of teenagers, no girls though. I walked up to the other side and sat down facing the sea, about twenty feet away, with a feeling that my action had not gone unnoticed. In fact, I had been hoping that it would be noticed. After a long utilitarian day, I would have been grateful for a pointless conversation. I might even have paid for an utterly silly one, but there was the danger of being perceived as if my mind was askew. I have always loved teenage perspectives, having omitted my own teenage years to the pursuit of mere Reason. Goethe echoed what I had come to suspect of late.... Faust says:

All that philosophy can teach
The lore of justice and of leech,
I've master'd, ah! And sweated through
Theology's deserts, too,
Yet here, poor fool! For all my lore,
I stand no wiser than before...

BA: It was becoming painfully clear that I did not have the stomach to become an American radical or a "starving artist." I had spent my college years in the pursuit of mere Romanticism. Rabindranath Tagore's play "The Post Office" summed up my previous attitude about gearing my life pursuits toward profitability:

Amal — I called out to him and asked, "Where are you going?" He answered, "I don't know, anywhere!" I asked again, "Why are you going?" He said, "I'm going out to seek work." Say, Uncle, have you to seek work?

Madhav — Of course I have to. There's many about looking for jobs.

Amal — How lovely! I'll go about, like them too, finding things to do.

Madhav — Suppose you seek and don't find. Then—

Amal — Wouldn't that be jolly? Then I should go farther!

But unlike the wandering Amal, Tagore's India, like everybody else in world, was engaged in the serious business of getting ahead and avoiding the gutter...

RG: A clear, delicious smell of ganja announced a teasing presence in my nostrils, though it could have been hashish. I immediately reached a decision. Counting on proximity to strike a conversation I walked over to the group, accosting a short chap with goatee and long hair.

"What's the hour, bud?"

"Four," he said, turning his wrist to see the time and exposing the joint in the process. I had to follow up fast on my query.

"Er...I'm kind of new in town, do you think this place is safe if I decide to wait for the dawn sitting around here... I mean, will the moral cops fuck with me?"

BA: I left the Taj and headed for The Gateway of India, an arch built by the British to welcome ships from the West. It was an obvious tourist destination, and therefore an obvious mistake.

As I approached, a man opened his hand to reveal some unknown substance. "Heroin? I can get you anything you like. Girls?"

I pushed on through a gauntlet of shady men with illicit offers.

"Change money, Sahib?" "Ganja?"

Setting up for a photo of the arch, I was approached by two men with wicker baskets.

"Want to see our snakes?"

"You have snakes?"

One man pulled forth a python, while the other removed the lid to expose an upraised cobra.

"Take a photo of the snakes."

"No." I knew that would involve money, and I didn't really want a photo.

"It's free. Take the photo."

"Free?"

"Free. Take photo."

I gave in, so they would leave me alone. They posed, I snapped the shot. Instantly, one of the men approached me and got in my face.

"Fifty," he said.

"Free," I reminded him.

"No, you give me fifty."

Noticing a crowd assembling to watch, I looked for a fifty rupee note.

"No, fifty dollar."

"No way," mustering all the indignation I could.

"You cheat me? You see my cobra? ... IT BITE YOUR FACE!" He drew out the "c" in "face" like the hiss of a snake.

Seeing no way out, I spotted a gap in the circling crowd and ran for it.

As I hopped into a cab without any destination, I reflected on how I probably deserved it. Weren't snake charmers part of the silly exoticism of wandering to the Orient...?

RG: The four-letter word seemed to warm him up — he could relate to me now . Me — a bespectacled stranger with a diary in his hand, who just walked out of the hotel to spend the night staring at the sea. My last question needed explanation at length and it also gave the chance for the others to pitch in whatever cool stuff they knew about sitting on Marine Drive at night. It is so much more fun to play the fool!

Hoping to trip me silly, they passed me the joint (it was hashish) and from then on it was easy. I talked a bit about this and a bit about that, I talked about me and a bit about them. I even found a common friend they knew, and solemnly discussed a tragedy that had lately affected her life. I hushed that up fast, since I am not much for sharing personal information about myself, and I was deeply sympathetic toward the girl because of my friendship and the nature of the tragedy. A common contact had suddenly laid my identity open for exploration and interpretation. Thankfully, they were planning to depart, having helped me kill some time very satisfactorily. It's a fucking small world to be anonymous.

Another coffee would bring me very close to dawn, and I was getting impatient.

By now my mind had gone for a toss and my eyes were burning. I would have done a lot, if not anything, for a bed to sleep on. I went back inside the hotel, adamantly and defiantly exercising my rights in a free country, even as the sentry's eyes scathed my back like lasers. The waiter saw me, and did not bother to ask what I wanted. We understood each other without much frivolous chit-chat, and coffee was served in no time.

BA: On the Goa beach, walking toward the rock outcrop where I would meet Dagdu, I crossed paths with a totally naked, tall white woman with long blonde hair. In the background near some rock caves I noticed a naked white man sitting in a cave entrance.

The Rough Guide to India noted that there were Westerners living in beach caves throughout Goa. Many were modern day digambaras ("sky-clad" ascetics), usually remnants of a hippy immigration during the 60s and 70s. This woman was clearly too young for that crowd, but probably was following in their footsteps. The book said that most of the cave-dwellers survived by selling marijuana and crafts at local fairs. Back in the States, a Jewish friend told me that many young Israelis were known to be living in South India. These were typically youth just released from a tour of duty who could not come to terms with what they witnessed — the price of Israeli security.

As I walked to the rocks beyond the digambaras' home, I imagined living their life. Waking up each day with no agenda. Taking trips from the cave to the sand, from the sand to Arabian Sea, aware of nothing greater than sun on skin and smoke in mouth.

I understood that true renunciation and dramatic off-turns from the prevailing American life path were no longer serious considerations for me. Exoticism, asceticism, arcane academic pursuits — these had all been debunked by massive, hostile, deceitful Mumbai.

My meeting with Dagdu kept me from cynicism, however. He told me how he and his family combed his property looking for rocks, smashing them open to see if they revealed marketable geodes. They did this for six months, and he lived amongst them at his home in Maharhastra. The other half of the year, he traveled alone to Goa to sell his geodes and carvings. He approached his work with noble fairness, and stopped long enough to observe the sea and the beauty around him. A fitting model for me, I thought, as the sun set on the sea and I packed for the journey ahead.