Like fruit, travelers in India have their season. They first arrive in September, green and unripe; by October, the tourist enclaves in Delhi and Bombay are full of fresh-faced foreigners on their way to Goa, Rajasthan, Daramsala, or any of a dozen famous ashrams scattered around the country. By midwinter the tourists are ripening -- there are great crowds of them now, and those who arrived early are already adjusting to the complexities of Indian tourist life. And now, as the season grows late, the remaining tourists are overripe, perhaps a bit rotten and mealy. Now that it's late March, the crowd in Delhi's Paharganj district is decidely free of fresh-faced tourists; those who are left look like they've been here a while. It's all dreads, tattoos, nose pierces, bright cotton hippie pants, tattered rucksacks, haggard faces. We overhear in people's conversations words like "home," "finish up," "a few more days."

We too are on our last stretch. We've taken our last train, and in a few days we'll at last leave India, the Subcontinent, and all of Asia behind us. We are going home.

*

Our trip has been winding up for a while now. After a bit of adventuring around Kerala, we took off for Goa, India's famous beach enclave, for a week or so of lolling about under palm trees and staring at the breakers.

I'm a bit leery of tourists' protestations that this or that place in India is "not really India," especially as such claims are usually made for locations that tourists find unusually pleasant: the Himalayan region of Himachal Pradesh, Pushkar, Darjeeling. It seems unfair to rob India of its most pleasant territories simply because so much of the rest is dusty, noisy, polluted, hot and horrible. But in terms of places in India that are "not really India," Goa has a pretty good claim. For one thing, it really wasn't India until 1962, when the Indian army arrived and politely asked the Portuguese to leave a territory they'd held since the early 16th century. Culturally as well as politically, Goa has been a place apart from the surrounding territories of Karnataka and from India more generally. The Portuguese, after all, came as traders, and though they built forts to protect their interests, they were never perceived as conquerers. Portuguese merchants settled and married, and their beliefs in Catholic Christianity, siesta and alcoholism have blended into Goan culture.

It is perhaps this easygoing tolerance -- and particularly toleration of people who bring money -- that drew the first wave of hippies in the early 1970s. They came, they saw, they colonized, and the Goans, who were used to that sort of thing, didn't kick up much of a fuss. Gradually Goa grew into an international party spot, like Ibiza or Mazatlan, and by the early 90s it had become famous for its drug-fueled all-night raves on the beach. Eventually the Goans decided they needed a good night's rest and banned loud music past 10 pm, and they even got their police to enforce the law, thereby ending the psychedelic paradise for foreigners. They're now doing what they can to turn Goa into a strip of chic resort beaches, much to the chagrin of the old-timers who came here to smoke pot and get laid and stare into space back in 1973 and have never quite left, at least mentally.

We headed straight for Vagator Beach when we arrived. From what we'd read in the Lonely Planet, it sounded like an in-between beach -- too far north to be covered in resorts yet, but too far south to be one of the beaches where people go to get away from it all. Unfortunately, we discovered that it's also the party beach of the moment, with all the attendant pathos one finds among people who've arrived at a very good party twelve years too late. We spent our first evening out on Little Vagator Beach, watching scrawny German women strip down to their bikini bottoms, then sitting in a beach shack with the sort of people who sport mullet hairdos and tattoos of pot leaves. It was a grim and desparate scene. No one on the beach had a book. They seemed to be there for the sex and the drugs, and neither looked to be of particularly good quality. Goa attracts a certain sort of person who imagines that it's a place with no prior cultural rules -- a place where he or she can be gloriously free of society's inhibitions. Of course, Goa does have a lengthy history and a culture of its own, but these people have chosen to ignore all that. They also tend to be remarkably narrow in their tolerance: they're all for sex and drugs as long as that means straight people using drugs everyone's heard of. For me, at least, perhaps because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, there's something unnerving about a vast beach colony that isn't the least bit gay.

*

In Goa we got around by "scooty," which is what the locals call motor-scooters. We rented a Honda Kinetic, a vehicle which is propelled by a motor slightly less powerful than that of a good Braun blender. No, I'd never driven anything like it before, nor am I quite licensed to drive in India, and it's not worth asking whether there were helmets available. But it was the only way to get around, and I don't think I ever took the thing up past 30 kph; we were risking limb, perhaps, but not life. The whole rental process was almost distressingly casual: I wasn't asked my name, I never showed my passport, I just paid a single day's deposit of 150 rupees ($1.60) and drove off.

With the Power of Scooty we were able to explore beyond grim Little Vagator, and we discovered that the desperation gave way to a much mellower and cheerier scene just one beach to the south, at Anjuna 4 kilometers down. We first went for the famous Wednesday flea market, a huge, bustling outdoor market where merchants sell every imaginable sort of Indian and Tibetan tchotchke, plus certain Goan innovations like crocheted cotton-yarn bikini tops (Jenny bought a couple and looks fabulous in them).

In the afternoon we slipped out of the market and into a beach shack, where we watched hippies parading topless on the beach -- one older man stripped down to nothing but a hat and swam out to one of the small boats that ferry tourists down to Calangute and Baga beaches. They were a glaring contrast to the beggar children who played in the waves. One of them had no forearms -- I don't know, but I guessed he'd been mutilated by his own family to make him a better beggar, still a common enough practice in India. But it would be unfair to reduce this boy to a pair of limbs he doesn't have; he was swimming with the other kids, laughing, eating a samosa. Sometimes even the miserable people have fun, a fact we tend to forget almost as easily as we overlook the miserable people in the first place.

Back in the bustle of commerce, we were startled by a Karnatic tribal woman standing so still in her mirrored clothes and gold hair clips and nose rings that at first we thought she was a manequin. Like the extreme poor, the tribal people of India are very difficult for me to relate to. I just don't know what their experiences are, what goes on in their minds, and I haven't worked out any way to open communication. I gather, in fact, that communication isn't particularly wanted. It occurs to me that one purpose of the tribal dress and behavior that looks so exotic to us is precisely to keep us at arms' length. I found it impossible in these moments to traverse the gulf created by the exoticism; the tribal women just felt alien to me, almost as if they were a different species. Of course I've been trained quite extensively to know and understand that humans are humans regardless of race, creed, dress, nationality. But the experience gives me a visceral sense of how disastrous such an encounter could be had I not been so educated.

There is very little to do in Goa. Wherever else you meet tourists in India, they're invariably mentally engaged in *something*, even if it's hopelessly inane. If you're in Pushkar, then you're in Rajasthan, and that means you're bothering to go out and look at some forts and palaces. If you're in Daramsala, then you're either looking at the mountains or studying Tibetan Buddhism; likewise Nepal. Only in Goa did we meet the sort of tourist who just wants to turn off his brain completely. For us, it got a bit tedious, but we did enjoy staring out at the sea from cliffside restaurants shaded by coconut palms. Still, a week of nothing was quite enough.

*

Soon the heat will come and wither away all but the hardiest of the tourists; those few who crawl up into the hill stations will have the country more or less to themselves, give or take a billion Indians. In Panjim, Goa's capital, the hyperactive Assamese waiter at our hotel told us that now the foreign tourist season was ending and the Indian season beginning. This made him sad, because foreign tourists, he claimed, are always happy, while Indian tourists complain about everything.

From Goa we passed briefly through Bombay, then came again to Delhi. After the mellow pace of the south, it's culture shock all over again to be in the overwhelming hurly-burly of the north. There are beggars everywhere in India, and certainly plenty in Bombay, but there they just beg. Yesterday I saw a man whipping himself with a makeshift bullwhip while a young woman played drums. This is extreme busking, although I checked the man's back and saw no whipmarks. Later in the day, in Connaught Place, I heard a man shouting, "Shit! Shit on shoe! Shit on shoe!" Sure enough, I looked down to discover a great heap of it sitting on the toe of my new shoes. "I clean!" shouted the man, a shoe-shiner. It's an ugly ploy used by the shoe-shiners, whose partners fling feces at the feet of tourists -- and really, how else was I going to end up with it on *top* of my foot? Needless to say I wasn't going to hire the perpetrator's services; I found a piece of newspaper and wiped it off myself.

Not all of India is like that, or all of Delhi, though at times it does feel as if the whole country is collectively flinging shit at you and then trying to cadge money out of you to clean it off. Delhi is one last blast of full-on India to remind us why we came, why we're leaving, and why we'll probably be back. There was the shit on shoe, but there was also the good shopping in Paharganj, where we were able to buy beautiful stone boxes and textiles and other goodies for just a few dollars. And there were the decent shopkeepers who were genuinely helpful and quoted us reasonable prices. It happens.

Still, I'm ready to go. It's not that I haven't enjoyed my travels; I have, and I'm incredibly grateful and glad to have had these experiences, even the difficult ones. But after 18 months abroad in Korea, Nepal and India, I'm looking forward to how spectacularly clean and organized the Los Angeles suburb of Covina will feel. Lawns will be lawns, houses houses, shops shops. The shops will not speak to me as I walk by; I will either be in them or out of them, with no in-between state of hawking. No one will sidle up to me on the street with a litany of mysterious products I don't want -- "hellotaxitravelinformationjewelryIhavemanycomemyshop." I will not have to check my dishes for trace droplets of water that could be carrying dangerous bacteria. I will be able to rinse my toothbrush in the tap water instead of using a bottle of mineral water. No rickshaw-wallahs will assualt me, even if I'm carrying my backpack. All the TV stations will be in English. I will be able to purchase such exotic items as root beer and Mexican food. There will be sidewalks. People will drive according to a shared set of laws, and the lines painted on the pavement will serve as legitimate indicators of traffic flow. The electricity will stay on (well, probably -- this *is* California). I will not have to convert currency in my head.

And most important of all, I will cease to be foreign. For a year and a half I've been an object of curiosity, an outsider, a freak of some kind. After all this time, it will be a pleasure almost beyond imagining just to blend in.

Almost an ex-expat,
Josh

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"San Francisco is a mad city -- inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty." - Rudyard Kipling, "American Notes" (1891)