Outlook Anniversary Issue: The Subterranean Shores of Goa

The mortal remains of an arterial road skims my home on its way to downtown Anjuna, once a quiet beach village ‘discovered’ by the hippies, explored by backpackers, only to be jackbooted by mass tourism and finally consumed by real estate sharks.

You could call it a road until more than a year ago, before it was indiscriminately dug up for widening in anticipation of a new wave of luxury villas and gated communities springing up in downtown Anjuna and the neo-elite-infected village of Assagao alongside. And there are aplenty coming up. One rarely builds a home now. One only invests in villas.

Each vehicle that passes lifts a plume of dust that takes minutes to settle. But in tourism-plagued coastal villages in Goa, where time was once rumoured to come to a standstill, nothing really settles now.

At night especially, the dust makes everything disappear; sometimes even the darkness.

Like it is in 2025, everything is on sale in Goa by 2075. Only there is no one left to raise an eyebrow 50 years hence.

By 2075, governance in the state is no longer in the hands of elected representatives but with a corporate board called the Democratic Corporation of Go-aah. The surface is reserved for wealthy tourists and a class of uber-rich licensed residents known as Overlords, who pay a hefty fee for the privilege of living above ground. Most of the land’s original inhabitants and blue-collar migrant workers, labelled ‘economically unviable’ or Subterraneans, have been relocated to artificially created underground caverns: out of sight.

The subterranean world is not science fiction at all. It is simply what happens when those who do not ‘fit in’ are pushed far enough away to stop being seen. Much like present-day Goa, where the lower middle class and the poor have been priced out of the housing market and pushed to the farthest margins of the state’s boundaries and sometimes even beyond its borders, in search of an affordable home. The middle class is next on the chopping block.

Shorn of all body hair for public health reasons (which is also why no one raises their eyebrows anymore; they have none) and subject to strict movement controls, the Subterraneans are permitted only on commute routes and designated work zones in service of the Overlords and their enterprises. Surveillance is justified as vigilance and control is the bedrock of administrative efficiency in Go-aah, circa 2075.

Above ground, Go-aah’s visual and ecological character is radically transformed. The historic Fontainhas neighbourhood, Goa’s 18th-century Latin quarter styled after narrow-laned Lisbon streets, has been remodelled into a stylised Chinatown to serve Macau-based casino interests. As a result, the pastel-coloured houses of the old quarter are repainted in various shades of red. Fontainhas’ original residents, seemingly as ‘aged’ as the locality itself, have already been quietly eased out of sight.

Drones zip along designated aero skyways above, mapping tourist flows and spotting unauthorised movement below. On the ground, forests are cleared on a war-footing, replaced with genetically modified vegetation tailored to the Corporation’s aesthetic standards. In the Corporation’s ethos, nature, like architecture, is curated and allowed to exist only if it photographs well. Of late, Goa’s beach villages are praised for the range of cuisines they now offer. There’s invariably more than one restaurant serving sushi, ceviche, carpaccio, quinoa bowls, truffle-laced pastas, bao bangin’ buns... that’s rare variety alright in a village ecosystem. But faced with such unfathomable excess, one must at least on some occasion question the cost involved. What did one lose for the comfort of choosing from three Neapolitan wood-fired pizza vends? What did one lose for the option of drinking a warm sake on a cold December night?

With their habitat shrinking, carnivorous peacocks scavenge meat in the Mhalshe Wildlife Sanctuary, the state’s only natural forest left, home to Goa’s last surviving tigress. Go-aah’s segregated metro system ensures Subterraneans are shuttled in barebone, rust-red cattle rakes, while only Overlords and tourists board the Tyrian Purple line, which glides noiselessly along the coastline, where whole hillsides have been scraped down to make way for infinity pools that overlook a sea that is being increasingly fenced off from those who once lived beside it.

The denizens of this space―Tanaji Raul, a stage actor; Karvi Khan, a brooding ex-soldier plagued by loss; Michael Crespo, an out-of-shape tech nerd with a sweet tooth; and Conchita and Nihal Bennett, Anglo-Indian twins born to an English father and an Indian mother. They reunite after the death of their friend Nathan and his wife, Ida, in what is officially declared a drunk-driving accident. Along with Nathan’s father, Malcolm, they suspect otherwise. The couple had refused to sell their ancestral home, Solar Anjuna, the last traditional structure in a beach village swallowed by gated modern villas and tourism businesses. Solar Anjuna is modelled on my own home in Anjuna, which has quietly watched the village’s real estate scalp being tonsured bare over four decades. It was hand clippers that did the job a couple of decades back; now electric razors tonsure faster and more efficiently.

Solar Anjuna and those connected with the last standing traditional home become prime targets for Vikramaditya Dessai, a Corporation director and real estate baron who orchestrates the ‘Beautification and Upgradation Drive’, an unscrupulous authoritarian campaign to raze old homes and heritage structures in favour of high-end enclaves for speculators. Beautification, in this imagined future where Goa < 2075 is framed, is an official euphemism for erasure.

The novel’s wider resistance ecosystem includes Claud the Clairvoyant, a prophetic mystic fused with a termite mound and revered by the Subterraneans. Claud inspires Ranga Parab, leader of a nativist resistance movement called the Bhuierantle Munis, The Tunnellers, who carve hidden passageways through subterranean caverns to move undetected in a hyper-surveilled state. Some characters, villains and heroes (yes, there are heroes and there are villains. Not everything is grey!) in the novel have been inspired from certain characteristics of certain real-life personalities of consequence.

As the Corporation moves to eliminate the last surviving tigress to clear land for yet another luxury forest-living project, the vigilantes hatch a plan to lure Vikramaditya, a wildlife buff who’s split between his hobby for photographing wild beasts and his fetish for putting a bullet through them, into the Mhalshe Wildlife Sanctuary. Karvi assumes the identity of Ayesha, a seductive forest guide, embedding herself into Vikramaditya’s hunting circuit in Turkey, before leading him into a staged hunt back home.

The hunt fails. Vikramaditya does not survive it. Nature does him in. Criminal litigation of folks like Vikramaditya circa 2075 is even more a pipe dream than it is in the times we live in. Hence, at least in an imagined future within the confines of fiction manuscript, Vikramaditya, the Corporation's Director overseeing the Land Resource Division, has got to die.

In the novel, the tigress emerges as both a literal and symbolic embodiment of nature pushed to extinction. The vigilantes, in turn, evolve into avatars of a betrayed people reclaiming agency, no longer willing to remain out of sight or out of mind.

Goa in 2075 looks prosperous on postcards. The beaches are manicured. The casinos glow brighter. The metros run on time. The forests are exotic, almost exclusively inhabited with genetically modified varieties of exotic vegetation, whose growth, produce and even its seasonal shedding is controlled by the Corporation’s botanists.

Of late, Goa’s beach villages are often praised for the range of cuisines they offer. There’s invariably more than one restaurant serving sushi, ceviche, carpaccio, quinoa bowls, truffle-laced pastas, bao bangin’ buns... that’s rare variety alright in a village ecosystem. But faced with such unfathomable excess, one must at least on some occasion question the cost involved. What did one lose for the comfort of choosing from three Neapolitan wood-fired pizza vends? What did one lose for the option of drinking a warm sake on a cold December night?

Postscript: Many others rooted to other pin codes like mine, 403509, may have their own stories that have haunted them. Acknowledged. Nevertheless, this one’s mine.

Mayabhushan Nagvenkar Is the author of Goa < 2075. It is available on www.goa2075.com in two languages—English and Marathi. It is a warning of sorts of Goa’s swift descent into a dystopian future, assembled on the ruins of the fast-decaying old

This article appeared as 'Goapocalypse' in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘Party is Elsewhere’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.