I bumped into an old friend this week. Not literally bumped into him, but he found me on Facebook. After 20 odd years, despite being on separate continents, he found me.

Raaj and I didn’t go to the same college. By some quirk of fate, we became friends through the Cosme Matias Menezes’ sons, the pharmaceutical giants, of Goa. Their grand houses grace the slopes of that exalted hillock, Altinho in Panjim, where once the powerbase of Goa resided and ruled in an Olympian-styled oligarchy. By the time, I went to college that social and economic hegemony had all but been decimated and the crème of that moneyed aristocracy was not averse to mixing with commoners like us. So a motley group formed, drawn by youthful camaraderie and the need to share our budding ideas on life, love and politics.

In those heady days of innocence, we were oblivious to caste, class and religion. We didn’t care that our parents would not have dared to walk in each other’s shadows. That in centuries past, our caste-ridden identities would never have allowed us to have friendships, that our religions would have rendered each other impure and that class disparities would have made us virtually invisible to each other.

The Goan elite of the Colonial era were incestuously bound together by an impenetrable clanship, which made them mini-islands segregated from the impurity of labouring Goa. Their walls lined with leather-bound books from France and Lisbon, their larders stocked with imported wines and their sojourns in European colleges had produced some of the finest intellectuals on the Indian sub-continent but this intellectual and material wealth did not in any way permeate to the vast sections of Goan society who meandered without the benefit of education and privilege. There were in fact, two Goas mutually sharing earth space but living parallel lives for all purposes.

In our naiveté, we believed this was the New Goa of the Eighties. We knew only of the pleasures of talking endlessly about our tenuous place in the Universe, our unexplored sexuality and our, as yet, undetermined potential in life. Conversations about belief systems and morality, our need to conform and yet chart new courses raged as we swam in the shallow waters of the Donna Paula enclave, snacked on warm pao stuffed with chorizo at Godinhos and sneaked out late at night, making our way to the Farmagudi College rock concerts, fearing the wrath of hostel wardens as daylight peeped from the cover of darkness and made itself felt.

Some 20 odd years later, as Raaj and I caught up on each other’s lives, time melted away. Within hours we were back to talking about God, Consciousness, Paulo Coelho and the finitism of life. We had both become agnostics over the years; our religions, our castes, our class as irrelevant to us today as they had been back then but the naiveté of our youth had betrayed us in the intervening years. We didn’t know then, that Goan society would become more polarised with the years, that the politics of religion, caste and class would re-instate itself, amplified by hyperbole and fear-mongering. That the New Goa we believed we were part of was just the arrogance of our youth and the unbridled desire of our innocence wanting to believe we were revolutionaries and the harbingers of change.

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