Nomad Codes

Rajasthani man was giving camel rides to blond kids with names like Shakti, while their bronzed parents played paddle-ball or soaked up the rays. Packs of young fully clad Indian men strolled by, middle-class guys from Bombay who piled on Goan tour buses for the sole purpose of glimpsing European tit. I watched their sheepish, furtive eyes; I watched the sun-bathing tourists pretending they hadn’t themselves become a tourist attraction.
    The last chai shop on the beach was a grimy hut filled with folks who looked as weather-beaten as the long wooden tables they hunched over. Some played backgammon, others sipped orange juice and chai, and everyone smoked like the Amazon. A sour-faced Indian girl serving up a bowl of porridge and honey pointed to Laurent: a scrawny guy in a Japanese print T-shirt, tossing a pair of dice. Gaunt and bloodshot, his teeth stained and bent, the man looked like a hungry ghost.
    Laurent gave a caustic laugh when I asked to interview him. While we talked, he kept slapping the tiles with his partner, a balding, middle-aged Brit named Lenny. “Art does not pay so I am forced to gamble,” he explained in a throaty Parisian accent thick with sarcasm. He fiddled with my Sony mini-tape recorder, clearly bent on soaking this little episode for all the humor it was worth.
    “The spy in the chai shop,” mused Lenny as he drew heavily on a cigarette. Laurent cracked up, his laugh quickly degenerating into an asthmatic coughing fit.
    “You know, it used to be very bad here for spies,” Laurent said, with a cocked eyebrow indicating mocking concern. I couldn’t tell, but it seemed like he was referring to two journalists who had been slipped heavy knock-out drugs some years before.
    Despite his heavy sarcasm, creepy laughs, and constant hints that he’d tell me more if I gave him a lot of money, I took a liking to Laurent. He reasserted Goa’s contribution to rave culture—”This is the source of the source”—but he was low-key about it all. No mysticism, no nostalgia. He gave his friend Fred the credit for first mixing electronic tapes at the parties, but said his friend’s style was too bizarre for the crowds. “Nobody liked it. Then I played and made it so people liked it. And now people like it all over the world.”
    Laurent paused, and looked me in the eye. “Here you make parties for very heavy tripping people who have been travelling all over the place. You have to take drugs to understand the scene here, what people are thinking.”
    Some pals walked over, and Laurent began to carry on three conversations in three different languages. Meanwhile, the game with Lenny came to a head, and Laurent was losing. He stood up, rolling the dice with macabre drama.
    I was getting frustrated. Could this sarcastic wraith gambling for pennies in a burned-out shack be the father of raves? One tale I heard had it that Laurent got his start DJing because he had been an unrepentant leach. Figuring to put him to good use, someone handed him a tape deck and said “Make party music.” And the same source said that Laurent was the most brilliant DJ he’d ever heard, doing things with cassette tapes that blew away most vinyl-spinning DJs in the West.
    Laurent let slip that he still had some of his early party tapes, and I pressed to hear them. “Ah, this would be very, very expensive,” he said, curling his lip. “We must draw up a contract.” Then he turned away from me and racked up another game.

    One hazy, hot afternoon, I was hanging around the Speedy Travel agency waiting for a fax. A steady stream of freaks bought tickets for Hampi. “It is a very ancient place,” a bronzed Dutchman rolling a Drum told me, describing what sounded like a Hindu Stonehenge 300 kilometers to the east. “I hear some German with a bus will throw a full moon party in the temple there.”
    A week or so later, a creaking local bus spits me out at Hampi Bazaar. I’m worn to the bone. The dusty main street is lined with trinket shops, cheap restaurants, and packs of sad-eyed kids with their outstretched hands and mantras of “Rupee! Pen! Chocolate!” At the end of the bazaar stands a massive 160-foot gopuram, a gaudy pyramid with the melted curves of a drip sand-castle.
    Hampi is not an “ancient” place—the Hindu city fell to rampaging Moslems during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. But the ruins that spread out for miles around the small, freak-filled village exude a haunting, archaic calm. Green parakeets