Losing My Religion: Chapter 12 - Om Beach, here we come!

Losing My Religion: Chapter 12 - Om Beach, here we come!

Vishwas Mudagal Vishwas Mudagal

Vishwas Mudagal

CEO, Author | Founder GoodWorks Group (GoodWorkLabs, GoodWorks Cowork, Sansovi GCC, Netskill, GoodWorks Angel Fund)

发布日期: 2018年5月13日
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In this week's article of #LosingMyReligion series, I am posting snippets of Chapter 12, where Rishi and Alex end up in the pristine Om Beach in costal Karnataka, India. They fall in love with the beach and decide to run a shack! How are they going to fund this shack? Read the snippets of this chapter to know more.

CHAPTER 12

June 19

2:20 a.m.

Gokarna

The moon was a big glob of illumination, surrounded by a thousand stars. The breeze blew softly, rustling the fronds of coconut and palm trees, almost making them whisper conspiratorially. The sea shimmered; its soft, blue waves rolling on to the beach, wetting the feet of those who lay hugging the shoreline.

It was sometime after two in the night. The beach was deserted save for a few couples—who had found their way to its secluded stretch from the party taking place at the shack nearby—and a lone, bearded man.

He lay sprawled on his back; shirtless. A lithe figure with a tanned body. His face looked weary but contented. His eyes, a warm dark brown, glinted with mirth and laughter . . . and something else. The moon shone bright on his tattooed arm, making the dragon appear life-like.

He had come here a few minutes ago, after ensuring that everyone inside was having a good time. The party had been on for over twelve hours now and still showed no sign of letting down; a signal he took to be positive, considering he owned the shack.

Having closed it for a good two months, he had opened it today, with a party that he knew people would talk about for weeks to come, if not months. Back in there, he had partied with the crowd, shared jokes, given them drinks, swapped personal stories, plied them with more drinks, and—after having made sure that each one of them was having fun—made his way to the beach to catch the waves breaking on the shore.

Since the time he had come here, he had done this: come out at night all by himself and catch this sight. There had been times when he had spent the entire night just looking at the sea . . . seeing the surfs, and walked back to his hut only when the first rays of the sun had hit his eyes.

But tonight he wasn’t here just for that. Truth was he was partially disappointed. He had hoped she would come. Every face he had looked at, every person he had interacted with, he had been, unwittingly, searching for her.

She had hit him like a bolt from the blue. One moment he had been talking to the police about his duffel bag—that had got stolen when he had reached Gokarna—and the next, something had come in his peripheral vision, making him take a brief, imperceptible stop while thanking the inspector. And that had turned out to be his undoing.

‘These robbers had become a nuisance of late. Now Om Beach will be totally safe,’ the inspector had been telling him, happy in the knowledge that his team had been able to curb the menace and salvage the belongings of most of the people. Save one. The young foreigner’s who was standing right beside him. She had come and stood serenely; her demeanour hinting at no urgency whatsoever. But despite that the inspector had quickly shifted his gaze from him to her and begun talking.

He couldn’t really blame the cop. There was something about her that would have made anyone take notice. She had an air of elegance and dignity, the force of which refused to go unnoticed.

‘I really don’t care about the bag officer. The passport is most important,’ she had said in a clipped accent. She wore a grey t-shirt, tight black jeans, and black boots. A black biker jacket had been draped over her left arm and her thumbs were hooked to the front pockets of her jeans. Biker babe, he had immediately thought. She had golden blonde hair that fell till her breasts in soft waves.

‘We will try our best, madam. Passport is the first thing the robbers sell, no? They get good money because these stolen passports are used to create fake identities and passports for smugglers. It’s hard to track it down,’ the inspector had said.

‘I get that, officer. Let’s hope you manage to find it, else I have to apply for a new passport. You know what a pain that is; getting a US passport in India.’ She wasn’t happy that her bag wasn’t in the recovered lot.

‘We have almost cracked the case, madam. Give us a few more days,’ had urged the inspector, eager to try despite knowing it wouldn’t be of any use. There was something about her that made one want to give that one last attempt, he had realized then and there.

“How did you lose your bag?” he had found himself asking her. She had looked at him for the first time—an eyebrow raised in question, a half-formed statement on her deep-red lips—and his heart had skipped a beat. There was a strange beauty to her face; it looked as raw as it looked refined. Are you for real? he had wanted to ask her.

‘A kid took it and ran away. I was sitting at a sugarcane juice stall down the road. It had my passport. He was like ten-years-old or something. Looked pretty innocent. It’s so hard to imagine he could do something like this,’ she had said. She had seemed more miffed at herself than the kid for not adjudging the situation better.

All he had been able to do was nod, and do his best to not stare so openly at the red wound her lips seemed to be.

‘Officer, I’m heading back to Goa. Call me the minute you have any news,’ she had finally said and walked out.

He had watched her leave, an amused smile playing at his lips . . . a fascinated look glinting in his eyes, and followed her out; his feet moving of their own will.

She sat straddling her Harley-Davidson bike. Next to her, a well-built, white guy sat atop another bike, its engine idling. Lucky son-of-a-bitch. She had put on her black jacket, bent forward to take control of her bike—her curves getting deeply accentuated as she did—positioned her helmet, put on her aviators, and kick-started the mean-machine and vroomed away.  

And since then she had come and gone from his thoughts as she had damn well pleased. And that got to his nerves.

Lying on the beach now, he, Rishi, hooted in laughter at his condition. After all that he had done and gone through in his life, he had let the sight of a girl get under his skin. Well, not just any girl . . .

His reverie was broken as a couple exited from the party and hollered out to him. He grinned in the darkness and raised his beer bottle at them.

His thoughts switched back to the shack and how it had all materialized. This had been a good decision, this buying of the shack. Not prompted by concerns of making profit or going into loss, but just a simple, more profound reasoning . . . following your heart. 

After leaving Manali and a teary-eyed Ram Singh, Laxman, and Ranta their first real stop had been Chandigarh—to take care of the charas. Alex had kept a bit for their personal use and then split the remaining stuff into four packs and stored it in the railway station cloak room of the city. He had bribed the officials to keep the luggage which hid the Cream for an indefinite amount of time. “The safest places are government places,” he had intoned with utmost seriousness.

They had then travelled to Goa and spent two weeks in Palolem Beach before an Israeli tourist had convinced them to try Om Beach in Gokarna, Karnataka.

And they were glad they had.

The beach, shaped like the symbol ‘Om’, was idyllic. Secluded and clean, it was a haven for foreign tourists. It’s cool, shallow waters, warm golden sands, miles of shoreline along the foothills of the Western Ghats, and proximity to Goa was the reason behind its growing popularity and exactly why the tourists called it the new Goa.

Rishi and Alex had fallen in love with it the minute they had seen it and had checked into a hut in one of the shacks in a flash. The huts were basic—thin beds, bare-bones bathroom, a single bulb. But the experience was unparalleled. The food was cheap and booze was available at Goan rates which had made the deal sweeter for them. They drank beer in the mornings, swam in the sea till sundown, smoked, listened to music, took pictures of cows and salesgirls selling beaded necklaces, and ate plenty of exotic seafood.

By the end of their first week they had explored all the nearby places—the Paradise Beach, Half-Moon Beach, the forests—and by the end of second, had visited most of the shacks on the long shore and gotten to know the owners.

One afternoon, during the third week, Rishi and Alex had been sitting in ShackyWow, one of the most happening shacks on Om Beach, when Alex had said, ‘I ain’t sure how that one survives,’ pointing at the shack next to the one they were sitting in. ‘The owner, Raju, hardly has anyone out there, except for a few tourists in the huts at the back. Good he is lookin’ for buyers, I say.’

‘Why don’t we buy it?’ Rishi had asked casually. They both sat bare-chested with shades on, feasting on their third plate of hot egg-pakodas and sipping beer.

‘Buy a shack? Are you effin’ mad? It ain’t a walk in the park, man,’ Alex had replied.

‘Why not? It’s going to be fun—a beautiful shack on this pristine beach with beautiful sun and babes. The way I look at it, it’s perfect.’

‘Where are you gonna get the dough from?’

‘I don’t know. There are always ways to get money. We’ll figure something out if we want to. I don’t think it will be expensive, anyway.’

Although Rishi had made the suggestion in a seemingly casual way, he had put a lot of observation behind it. In the last three weeks of being here, he hadn’t been able to help but stake out business opportunities everywhere he had gone. He had observed and analysed profit-loss and supply-demand as easily as he had checked out the chicks. It was his other side, the entrepreneur, whom he had wanted to blot out and forget in this uncharted journey, strip himself away from anything remotely connected to it, but that had not been the case.

As fate would have it, the entrepreneur in him had not died, but been reborn.

And he had realized that suited him better. Much better. He didn’t seem to care too much about success or failure anymore. The motive was fun . . . challenge was fun, once again.

Out here on the beach, he had subconsciously weighed the business potential lurking at every corner; he, inadvertently, knew the beach’s dynamics like the back of his hand.

Tourism had multiplied in Gokarna over the past five years and foreign tourists poured sizeable sums of money into the beach hotels. The fact that it was so easy on the pocket helped things further. Most of the valued customers of the beach were potheads and young foreigners who came to experience the Indian hippie trail. They usually came in search of weed, rave parties, alcohol, and sex, and lost themselves, among these things, to the intoxicating mysticism of India. It was potent, this combination, and drew thousands of visitors all year round. The police hardly interfered with the goings-on in Gokarna, making the deal even sweeter.

Keeping all this in mind, buying a shack was actually a good proposition. Rishi knew that planning and execution would be the key to success here. And he was in the mood of giving his mind a little exercise.

‘You’re kiddin’, right? Please tell me you are jokin’,’ Alex had said, breaking his train of thoughts.

‘Come on. It might just be fun,’ he had cajoled.

‘Whoa! Hold on. We don’t run businesses! We’re wanderers! We are happy people, buddy. In search of better weed and peace and sex and, I dunno, maybe even weirdness. We can’t stagnate here—that’s gonna ruin our fun!’

‘Okay, just picture this,’ Rishi had countered. ‘A sexy shack on the beach. Cool breeze, endless sea, and golden sands. You laze around . . . smoke pot all day at the shack. In the evening, you play great music and make some neat cocktails for your exotic customers.’

‘No. No. No, no, no, no! Don’t get started! I know you’re tryin’ to hypnotize me. I ain’t listenin’ to you, man.’ Alex had plugged his ears with his fingers.

***

‘Yeah. It could be fun,’ Alex had mused. ‘But we aren’t pros in runnin’ hotels or shacks. What if we lose all the money?’

‘If we lose the money, we lose the money. Who cares? This shack is not about earning money. It’s about spending! We’ll spend money in a way that makes us happy. The day we run out of it or the day we get bored, we’re out of here.’

Alex had thought about Rishi’s words for a while and then said, ‘I have one condition.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll fund the shack.’

‘How?’ Rishi had asked, surprised.

‘You know how! I’ll sell the Cream’

‘What! You’ll sell your Cream! Really? Why?’

‘Cos it’s easy money, genius.’

‘I . . . am not sure, Alex.’

‘Look, pardner. Those bags fell into our laps. We didn’t do anythin’ wrong. What good would it’ve been if those smugglers or Inspector Dogra got his hands on it? If we give that weed to the police, it’s gonna end up in the market anyway. They’re all corrupt. It’s gonna fill someone’s pockets. Even if we destroy it, some other hash’ll make its way into the market. Malana’ll continue to grow hash and sell it.’

‘Alex, don’t try to convince me. You don’t have to. I am not a saint and I am not na?ve. I have no problem using that money. I have bent rules before. As long as we are in our limits, I am fine with it.’

‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘I don’t bend rules for my own profits. If we put it to a better use, it will make me feel good. I’ll tell you what I feel. Whatever money we get from selling the hash, we put it in the shack as a loan. When we make money from the shack, we pay back the Malanis with ten percent interest. We fund the school or something. Hopefully when we go with a bunch of cash for them, they won’t throw us in the river.’

Without missing a beat, Alex had said, ‘All right. Fine.’ Rishi was a little surprised. He had thought that after all that had happened at Malana, he would be against his idea.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah. Done!’

Rishi had laughed incredulously.

‘Blondie, you are officially my investor now. And just so that you know. You are the brother I never had,’ Rishi had said with emotion. He knew that Alex wasn’t doing it all for the good of Malana. He had offered to sell hash just for their friendship and for sticking together.

‘You too, brother. You too. You remember I told you the hash fell into our hands for a reason? May be this was the reason.’

‘You are right!’

They smiled and did a high-five.

‘All right Om Beach . . . Here comes our shack!’ had said Alex, opening a beer bottle

***

Read the previous parts of this series here:

If you want to get a copy of the book, here are some quick links

 You can also learn more about the book on my website - VishwasMudagal.com

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