In a trance

When I told Aleks he laughed out loud.
'How do you accidentally go to a Goan trance party?' he asked. 'Well,' I replied, 'I'll tell you how.'
I'd got chatting to a Swiss man called Paul on the beach and when he was there again the next day we talked some more and he told me that apparently there was a big party happening tonight at a place on the beach in the nearby town of Morjim. He and some of his friend were going and he asked me if I wanted to join them. He didn't say it was a trance party and it didn't occur to me to ask.

From my previous experience of parties in Goa I wasn't expecting much. In Arambol there was always a rumour going round of some 'party' or other: 'Apparently there's a party going on at The Blue triangle tonight. Everyone's going to be there.' A 'party' was usually an artificial event dreamt up by wily bar or club owners who'd cottoned on to the fact that the rumour would grow and that hoards would descend on their establishment, drinking money in hand, if it became known that there was something happening there. These party rumours happened regularly and after a while you just got suspicious. If you could be bothered to turn up, you'd find that 'everyone' else had not, and the place would be packed full of no-one, made up of about 15 people and a few stray dogs under the table. Of these 15, two or three would be having their own internal party, totally off their head on their drug of choice. They would dance blearily on an otherwise empty dancefloor, watched by bored staff, surplus to requirements and the slightly huffy faces of those who'd believed in the power of the word 'party'.

So it was with this low expectation that I accepted Paul's invitation. Although I was on my own here and was quite happy being so - getting up late, going to the beach, eating, reading, writing and sleeping, pretty much being the sum of my parts - I thought it could be a fun, chilled evening and a chance to meet a few new people. 'A few' would prove to be a gross underestimate...

Paul said he'd pick me up on his motorbike at 4.30pm and we'd take the 30-minute ride to Morjim to get there for the start at 5pm. This may sound ridiculously early for a party to start but there was a reason for it. Recent elections in Goa meant that the Congress Party who had got into power had brought in a law forcing all restaurants, bars and clubs to switch off the music and close at the astonishingly early time of 10pm! So now the start time of any event was likely to have been pulled back to much earlier in the day in order to give people a decent spell of partying before the lights, music and alcohol were all turned off.

When we got the place in Morjim, the party was already in full swing. Apparently it hadn't started at 5pm but at 10am, making it a 12-hour party!
'This is nothing,' remarked Paul, who was a Goa regular. 'They used to go on for three days non-stop.' As he cut the bike's engine outside my ears were filled with a terrible sound and my heart with an equal dread: trance music. An online dictionary defines trance music thus: "Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that developed in the 1990s. It is usually characterised by a tempo of between 125 and 150 beats per minute." In other words, it's very fast and very repetitive. I am not a fan of this frenetic form of dance music in much the same way that I am not a fan of gouging out my eyeballs with hot spoons. Its too-fast beat irritates me and makes me feel on edge and anxious. You can't dance to it and it rarely has anything approaching a melody, let alone lyrics. Yes, I know I sound old and bad-tempered but with age has come discernment: I know what I like and trance music is not it. Had I known Paul's night out was going to be a trance party I probably would have said no to it and - with the benefit of hindsight - would have missed out on a superb evening's entertainment.

Paul looked at me for my reaction. 'Great music, ya?' he said enthusiastically. 'Do you like this kind of music?'
'Um, it's not really my kind of thing,' I said carefully. 'It's a bit fast for me, but it's fine,' I continued with a smile that I hoped would stand in for the excitement I was not feeling. Paul didn't seem to notice my lukewarm reaction.
'It's gonna be great, ya?' he said. It was also gonna be big. He'd parked the bike a few hundred metres down the dirt track that led to the beach and venue and as we walked the remaining distance, we passed bikes, scooters, taxis and rickshaws parked in every available nook and cranny. Outside the entrance a field full of hundreds of bikes and scooters stretched out, glittering hotly in the afternoon sun.

As we walked in there was no entry charge but my precious bottle of water was confiscated to force me to buy theirs at a greedily inflated price. Paul, however, knew the deal and how to get around it. He was wearing big, baggy knee-length shorts, with several pockets on each side. In these he had managed to stash several miniatures of vodka and, oddly, red wine. Now he'd only have to pay for mixers, at least at first. I was glad to be with someone like Paul, as it was becoming clear that he had a history of trance parties and knew their workings as well as I didn't.

Paul was a 45-year-old divorcé with an eight-year-old daughter. He had a mop of floppy brown hair, cut short at the back and sides and slightly greying at the temples. He had large pale blue eyes with which he always made intense eye contact when he talked to you. His skin was the hot nut-brown of someone who'd lived forever on the beach, yet he was only in Goa on his annual three-week holiday. He was about 6ft 1in tall and slimmish with a belly just slightly going to a paunch. He was Swiss by birth, but of an English mother from Manchester and an Italian father. This gave his English an peculiar, quirky lilt with the odd flat northern vowel and the sing-song intonations of Italian, all overlaid with a Swiss German stridency that ended most sentences with a question-inflection 'ya?': 'You wanna go doo a pardy, ya?' He was a great guy and easy to talk to but this question inflection always made me feel I had to make a reply, even when he was clearly only making a statement. Paul was a pizza chef back home and ran a couple of restaurants in Lucerne, where he lived. When he wasn't doing that or looking after his daughter trance parties were his thing.

Now inside, I saw that this was far from the three-man-and-his dog-affair I'd been expecting. A large area of the beachfront had been laid with turf and covered overhead with cloth shades in Indian and psychedelic prints. This area, still in full daylight, was packed full of writhing, moving bodies, all dancing to the 'boom-tiss, boom-tiss, boom-tiss' of heavy trance. There must have been at least 1,000 people there. Everywhere you looked polished, gleaming, tanned people jumped and lurched awkwardly around (trance is not easy to dance to, as the rhythm is too fast for most normal speed moves), all in broad, natural daylight, unlit by lights of any kind. It was very odd to see this sight without the darkness and the flashing lights. I got the feeling you get when you go somewhere familiar and something has changed but you can't work out what it is right away. It's like going back to your parents' house and they've moved a couple of pieces of furniture: everything's there, but it's not quite right somehow. Seeing crowds dancing in the daylight with no flashing lights felt like someone had moved an armchair - very unsettling.

At the front of the dancefloor area was the DJ stage, a glinting desk of techno buttons, knobs, faders, computers and snakes of cable. To one side of it a huge screen showed computer-generated abstract images. They were swirling, folding, twisting and curling in and out of themselves in a rainbow of colours and a mass of shapes.

But it was the people and their outfits that stopped me in my tracks. It was like a carnival, crossed with a circus, mixed with a freak show, with a sprinkling of a festival, splashed with a dash of India. Almost the first person I saw as I walked in was a tall man - 6ft 5in at least - painted entirely in bright pink body paint, even his hair. His only clothing was a pair of bright pink baggy trousers and a pair of tiny pink child's fairy wings, attached to his body with straps of elastic round the shoulders. He held a pink fairy wand in one hand and had even found little pointy ears from somewhere to complete the look. In the intense heat from the press of people, his body paint was melting with his sweat and little rivulets of it ran down his sides from his armpits. Against the pink of the paint, the blue of his eyes (which I think were his natural colour and not coloured contacts) was startlingly intense and the whites of his eyes took on a greenish tinge. He saw me staring and rather than giving me a dirty look, smiled broadly and posed with his fairy wand aloft. I was so surprised I took a photo to please him.

Elsewhere I saw another big striking man. He wore knee-length black shorts and ankle boots but his chest was bare. All visible parts of his solid, toned brown body covered in heavy, strong black Maori tribal tattoos. Great bands of black inked his arms, legs, torso and back. Glinting between these, he had row upon row of decorative body piercings. Tiny little pairs of silver balls, like cake decorations, outlined his ribs and chest and, on his back, they followed the line of his broad shoulders and the small of his back. His head was shaved but for a topknot of thick, spongy dreadlocks, tipped with feathers and beads. He was an awesome and impressive sight and I surreptitiously took a photo of him. I found this strange, savage beauty quite stirring. It wasn't the tattoos or the piercings themselves that I was in awe of but more the sheer presence of the man. He must possess such strength of character to make these permanent changes to his physical body and such assured confidence to be able to carry them off.

Now, in my little black dress which showed off my tanned skin, and my simple, tasteful gold bangles, I felt like the odd one out. Back in my room I'd thought it was quite cute but oddly now, I felt like the freak at the party.

The women were also eccentrically dressed - or rather half-dressed. A thin, lithe girl with cropped dark hair danced past wearing a pair of skimpy, shiny purple and black lace-edged knickers - they were definitely underwear - and a mismatched, clashing patterned bikini top. Apart from a few glittering face jewels, stuck at the corner of each eye, this was all she wore. I couldn't help staring at her pert bum, wriggling suggestively and barely covered by her knickers. I wondered vaguely about the level of maintenance such a bikini line would require...

Meanwhile Paul had found his friends and introduced me to them. I can't remember most of their names, apart from Maya, a dark Italian-looking lady. She was all dressed-up in trance party attire too - though more conventional - and every detail of her outfit was meticulously correct for the scene. She had loose waist-length black hair and large blue eyes fringed with thick crusts of black mascara. She was probably in her mid-40s but was trying to look younger. She'd had her lips done and probably her breasts too, which were thrusting from a low-cut top, just a little too perky and with no visible means of support. Her skin was a deep solid gravy brown that looked as though she'd been dyed from the inside out, so that if you cut her it would probably be brown right down to the bone. She wore a backless top in a black suede fabric with an asymmetric, ragged-edged cut and a fringed black suede miniskirt and brown fringed suede Native-American-style boots. On her arms and wrists she wore a menagerie of feather, leather, shell and bead armbands and bracelets. She was pleasant and friendly and I liked her, but I couldn't stop staring at her and wondering if this was 'normal' dress or 'fancy'.

At 40ish, her age wasn't an anomaly there, more like a normality. A quick scan of the crowd showed me that at 37, I was firmly in the middle of the age range, rather than being at the higher end as I would be in a club back home. Grizzled men and women anywhere from 60 to fresh-faced teens mingled with each other. There were even families with children and toddlers, the latter wearing enormous ear defenders to protect them from the volume of the music. Men and women, who were probably grandparents, with skin like a beloved worn-out handbag, wondered round in outfits too young, too short, too tight, too revealing that they wouldn't have dreamt of wearing back home. Wrinkled cleavages vied with baggy knees and artificial flowers decorated greying, thinning hair, while neon T-shirts stretched across middle-aged paunches.

My first uncharitable thought was to laugh and smirk at these people, too old to be clinging to their long-past youth with leathery brown fingers. They should have been at home knitting, not partying. But, observing their faces, all I could see were smiles. No-one was judging others, no-one was checking out and scorning what anyone else was wearing, no-one cared. Everyone was having a good time, doing what they enjoyed and expressing themselves in whatever way they liked in an atmosphere where anything and everything was acceptable. They felt free and were wearing this freedom painted on their faces, tattooed on their bodies, tied to their hair and proudly for all to see.
Who was I, in my conventional LBD, with my 'should do, shouldn't do' notions of acceptable behaviour to judge their happiness and pleasure? No-one was hurting anyone else, everyone was accepting everyone else, so I decided to do the same. In fact, it wasn't difficult as I love to see people doing what they love doing, being who they love being. I strongly believe that our differences, not our similarities, are what make us interesting. Having the strength to stand up and be visibly different to those around you takes a courage that I cannot but respect and admire. Even if I don't share someone's passion (they can keep their trance music, thanks) or their taste in self-expression (body piercings and I will remain apart until my grave) I love to see them indulging it, unapologetically revelling in it and being proud, not ashamed of or embarrassed by of their differences.

In England, being normal is the norm, whereas here there was no normal, the concept of such a limiting, proscriptive idea didn't seem to exist. People had no need for it as they could write their own rules, then break them as they pleased.

As if to underline my thoughts a man, probably in his 50s, walked by wearing a spiky orange and black fright wig, quite likely a Halloween relic. He carried a long, serious-looking wooden staff and wore yards and yards of heavy bead necklaces and flower garlands around his neck. With a smile on his face he walked serenely past, his first two fingers together raised in a gesture of blessing, like a Pope from some outlandish nightmare horror film. As he passed, the crowd parted to let him pass. No-one laughed at him, they only smiled too, the indulgent beam of those who recognise a happy person. Some shook his hand and said complimentary things about his outfit. He didn't even acknowledge these. Why should he? Why should he care what other people thought? He was doing it for himself not others.

I began to relax now and, despite myself, even began to enjoy the music. Happiness breeds happiness and seeing 1,000 people expressing their own peculiar brand of enjoyment was infectious and I began to feel the vibe too. While I danced demurely and neatly, keeping to a small space around me, others were wildly expressive, abandoning themselves to the vibrating, pulsating beat and the possibly involuntary inclinations of their own bodies to bounce, twitch, contort and stomp at will. In front of me were a couple who embodied the spirit of abandon perfectly. They were facing each other with the simpering smiles of those in love or of those tripping on a drug that induced such feelings. He was tall, thin and wiry, with a deep Goan tan and long iron-grey hair, done up in two neat French plaits, one on either side of his head. Although he could never have passed for one, there was something of the schoolgirl pigtails about it.

His partner was contrastingly pale. Not a 'just-arrived-in-India' pale but a bit of an unhealthy, sickly pallor with dark maroon circles under her eyes, but she seemed happy enough. Her hair was so full of dreads and feathers that from the back she looked like a big matted bird that had somehow flown inside the party. While he stood upright and did nothing much, with his arms around her waist providing support, she swung her upper body from side to side and over backwards, arching her back and sweeping her hair from side to side so her plumage fluttered through the air, occasionally trailing across the ground. She writhed like this unselfconsciously for several minutes, always returning to an upright position eventually, with her face tilted lovingly up towards his, like some alternative pastiche of a Gone With The Wind poster. For his part, he smiled at her indulgently, occasionally brushing an errant feather out of her simpering eyes. It was lovely, if amusing, to watch. They were in a world of their own and didn't care who witnessed it.

While these two didn't have a tattoo between them, others made up for it. Everywhere I looked body art, most of it larger rather than smaller, curled round arms, legs, backs and chests. On man nearby had an enormous design of an ant, detailed in black, that ran the whole length of his back, disappearing under the waistband of his shorts. It was horribly precise and detailed, yet impressive in its way. Even the tiny hairs on the ant's legs and the oily gleam on its domed head had been rendered for eternity on the man's skin. Another full back tattoo, also on a man's back, was of a pair of wings, but rather than a design of soft feathers, the wings were made of bones. The position of each vertebrae, bone and articulation inked on his skin, corresponded with his real anatomy underneath. Pointed rib bones curved around his own and long 'wing' bones arched over his shoulders, fanning out into several fingers, just like a bat's wings, before tapering to points. Over his right shoulder blade, embedded and skillfully incorporated into this skeletal structure was a skull design complete with huge portion of the front of the forehead missing in a jagged hole, as if the head had been smashed in violently.

I stared in fascination, grateful that the owners of these tattoos (Do you 'own' a tattoo? You can't be parted from it, even in death, as from any other physical possession, so does the same verb apply? I don't know) couldn't see my eyes drilling with mildly appalled curiosity into their backs. While I wouldn't have a tattoo myself, I don't disapprove of them on others and admire those who have them, bewildered as I am by their confidence to endure the pain that accompanies an act that will mark their bodies forever. I see a tattoo as a form of art but, unlike most 'drawings', it has the capacity to appall merely because it is executed on one's own skin, an unconventional and living canvas that is both private and personal, yet shockingly public and open at the same time. I have heard it said that having tattoos is addictive and that once you have one, you want another and another. Looked at logically, this is no different from an art collector who buys work after work, each more beautiful and meaningful than then last. A painting or sculpture is created by someone else and may be for public viewing but at the same time it has a meaning which is deeply personal, deeply beautiful to the collector and strong enough for him to want to possess it. The same is true of a tattoo, the only difference being that the collector of skin art will eventually run out of exhibition space...

The sun was beginning to set now, and the rich, warm light intensified the bronze of the partygoers' bodies. It was an odd sensation to dance in daylight, unprotected by the flash and strobe of lights that would normally imbue the incoherent, lumpish movements of dancers with an elegance, grace and sexiness, suggested because only half-seen. The dancefloor immediately in front of the DJ was packed with seething, writhing bodies and the heat, even under the shade of the fabric roof must have been unbearable. Faces, arms, legs, backs and chests gleamed slick like polished wood with a sheen of sweat and many dancers were dripping with it. But no-one seemed to care. Their minds were on some higher plane of consciousness - connecting through the deep, dark, vibrating base and the chirps, tweets and rasps of electronic sounds - with a blissful state of euphoria I couldn't quite join but was more than happy to observe.

I could certainly feel, if not entirely appreciate, the lure of the music. It was not deafeningly loud but loud enough to physically feel the vibration inside you. It made my whole body buzz and pulse and come alive, until I almost felt as though the beat was coming from within me, and not from outside. It was like a second, confused yet ultimately more powerful heartbeat. Was it a relic of evolutionary psychology in which I was subconsciously transported back to the ancestral African drums and was now feeling that distant pulse, as my ancestors once did in the cradle of civilisation? Was that primal beat stirring in me sensations long-stifled under thousands of years of distancing civilisation and social structures? Or was it merely because the pulsating rhythms so closely reflected my own heartbeat that I felt twice as alive and as if I had two hearts pumping life through me?

Behind me, over the beach, the setting sun was not a cause of celebration for once, as it meant that darkness would soon fall and I would be deprived of the fun I'd had in my detailed people-watching. But for the now I still had time...

Paul was enjoying himself too. Shortly after we'd arrived he'd taken some MDMA and was now tripping. His pupils were dilated, wide like inkwells, and his 'talk' button, usually set to 'voluble', was now stuck on 'constant'. He rambled on, his Swiss accent now overriding his Manchester/Italian strain, about the the music, the people, the music, the beach, the music, the freaks and - again for good measure - the music.
'Awesome music, Ya?', 'Great pardy, ya?', 'Cool freaks, ya?' At first I agreed with him, adding my own comment then, as he continued repeating the same thing, I just nodded then, when I realised he wasn't really talking to me but was just talking, I just smiled and ignored him. He didn't seem to mind. In his little world all was good. He had offered me some of his MDMA earlier on but I declined. I'd never taken it before so I didn't know how it would affect me and I didn't want to leave him, already wasted, responsible for me if I had a bad trip. I was interested though and asked him how it affected him.

'It chust mekks you feel reelly heppy, ya?'
'Is that all?'
Ya. It's reelly great, ya?'

This rather lame attempt at promoting the appeal of the drug didn't exactly leave me desperate to try it or thrilled with its potential powers, so I didn't feel I was missing out so much after all. Besides the spliffs and chillum pipes were out in force and being smoked openly all around. Their mist of sweet second-hand grass smoke was already contributing to my mellow mood.

Paul now got out some of his own hash and sat down to build a spliff. He employed me to hold the paper and filter while he built the joint. When it was done, I conveniently forgot two pieces of vital information I'd gained in India: firstly that smoking weed just makes me sleepy and secondly that Indian tobacco is cough-inducingly harsh. I took a drag and once I'd stopped hacking and my eyes had stopped watering, I began to feel it working its usual magic. The familiar deep relaxation began to penetrate my muscles and a smile of peaceful content welled up from inside me for no particular reason. I was happy now.

Then I made another error by thinking it was a good idea to stand up again. At first I was OK, but once I started to dance, I realised my legs had been replaced by bendy rubber ones and someone had forgotten to connect them to the part of my brain that told them how to work. I held on to a nearby pillar for support, but jigging up and down while thus encumbered felt and probably looked silly, so I sank to the floor instead with my back against the pillar and watched the partygoers from knee-level instead.

They had quite nice knees on the whole. Slim, tanned and smooth, they were made more interesting by the clothes above and the footwear below them. In my blissful state they were so very fascinating, in fact, that I decided making a short video of their beauty would be a work of art I would treasure for years to come. I focused on Maya's knees first, framed above and below by the fringes of her miniskirt and boots. Then I moved on to a pair of white leather boots, divided between the big and second toe. My altered mind was momentarily confused and I thought they were a pair of white socks worn with invisible flip-flops. Amazing! Their owner stomped up and down vigorously but helpfully remained more-or-less static in the frame. Next I spied a brightly-coloured ankle tattoo, partly hidden behind the Velcro strap of a sensible-looking pair of sandals. I zoomed in on it, hoping to capture its detail, realising as I did so that I didn't know how to focus again after going in close-up. Reviewing my 15-second masterpiece, it was as blurred as I was feeling, so I gave up and and just sat content to watch knees and feet instead.

Some time passed very agreeably in this manner, as I sat with a dopey smile on my face, stoned out of my tree. Paul came over, looking slightly concerned and leaned over.

'Are you stoned?' he asked bluntly, but not without concern.

'I think so,' I replied airily with a happy smile, 'but I'm OK.' And I was. I was felt so mellow, the feet were unbelievably fascinating and, at that moment, the pillar was the most comfortable thing I had ever leaned against in my life. My simple mind and been reduced to the simplest of pleasures and it was happy. He looked at me closely with his saucer eyes for a moment, trying to detect signs of imminent catastrophe, but seemed content with my answer.

Soon the munchies were upon me, so I got to my feet, feeling steadier now and headed to the food stall off to one side of the dancefloor. There I parted with three times the price for a chicken tikka wrap that was half the normal size. On my way back I was distracted by the flickering glow of candlelight and a large sign advertising 'The Alchemist & Magik Tequila'. The candlelight was coming from a long trestle table, covered in clear glass bottles of every shape and size, interspersed with flickering candles. Liquids in various colours inside the bottles picked up the glow of the candles and shone like magic potions. Behind the table a muscled man - The Alchemist - bare to the waist, with a cloth wound round his head like a turban, was leaping energetically from bottle to bottle and from each one, adding a drop of this and a splash of that to a shallow, richly decorated metal goblet. This was a cocktail bar, Goan trance party style! As he worked, the candlelight shone on his rippling body, making him look like a demon from the underworld working among the flickering fires of Hell, and his movements caused the candle flames to shiver and stir. It was a magical scene. I watched, mesmerised for several minutes, as he concocted his Magik Tequila, with theatrical gestures and flourishes, pouring very long and high from one bottle, then dripping minutely from another. His face shone with amber light and concentration until, eventually his potion was finished. He leaned low over the goblet and lit its contents. It was instantly covered with a sheet of electric blue flame shimmering over its surface. He turned to me with a big grin, posed for my camera and handed the flaming potion to his customer. As the price of one of his concoctions cost approximately my food budget for two days I declined his offer to make me one.

I could have watched him all night, but I didn't want Paul to worry that something had happened to me and he'd lost me, so I pushed my way back through the crowds to our spot. I needn't have worried: when I returned I'd lost him and he was nowhere to be seen. Remembering suddenly and belatedly that he was my ride home that night, I sobered up rather suddenly. I had no idea where he was and would never find him in the crowd, which was now so packed in you could hardly move. I didn't fancy trying to find a taxi back to Vagator when the hordes of people left at the end or paying the over-the-odds price the driver would inevitably charge me. But then I remembered Paul had left his jacket on the floor nearby and sure enough, it was there, so I thought it was just a matter of staying close by or coming back to it at the end when he would come back to pick it and me up.

Now that it was dark - very few lights of any kind illuminated the place - and the people-watching was limited, the novelty and the weed began to wear off. The throbbing, primal beat, gradually became annoying again and my feet were starting to ache. It would be impossible to find Paul and his friends in the dark, sticky throng so I resigned myself to waiting, like a faithful puppy, by his jacket until he returned. Jigging half-heartedly to myself, I watched the dark shapes moving, a handful nearby lit up by what seemed to be the only flashing disco light in the place. The rest, including the main dancefloor, were in semi-darkness.

A few UV tubes had been installed on the pillars at the corners of the dancefloor. A few figures dressed in white, had been attracted to them like ghostly moths to a blue flame. They circled and danced around the tubes, their clothes pouring out lilac light and their teeth glowing an odd pistachio green.

I was getting bored now. People-watching had been unbelievably entertaining under the influence, but now it was just a dark club with terrible music and no-one to pretend to enjoy it with. I began to wonder how I could make it to 10pm without dying of boredom, when my eye was caught by a burst of flame at the back of the venue. My first thought was that The Alchemist had set his turban on fire by mistake, but the light was coming from somewhere else. And so were loud cheers. Peering through the gloom I could make out a ring of people on the open area overlooking the beach, their faces lit by a glow and in the centre of the circle, two fire dancers putting on a show.

I pushed my way to the back to see. On an open-air platform that jutted out over the beach, two girls were putting on an impromptu display. They looked stunning. Both were petite and slim. One had long, dark, dreadlocked hair, decorated with an ill-advised feather decoration, while the other had short strawberry blond hair. Both their faces gleamed with dramatic theatrical make-up in dark shades of grey and charcoal and sparkled with stick-on face jewels and glitter. Each wore a short skirt that looked as thought it was made of animal hide with an artfully tattered and asymmetric hemline and a strappy top of a similar style. They wore flat knee-high black leather boots and their arms and wrists were adorned with all manner of studded, jewelled, leather and metallic armbands and bracelets. In each hand, each girl carried a ball of fire on the end of a short chain which they spun and whirled around them as they danced to the music that came from the main stage. It looked fantastic.

Their movements were smooth, fluid and well-practised but their expressions of deep concentration gave them a fierce, savage look that worked perfectly with the tribal costumes and the beat of the music. The crowd all round was lit up by the golden light of the flames, their faces awestruck and slightly smiling. This being India, there were no marshalls or safety barriers and the crowds were held back by nothing more than their fear of being inadvertently torched. The girls twisted and turned about the stage, their ragged flames strobing the jet-black sky above with intricate circles, loops and curls. At one point they even sank to their knees and arched over backwards till their head touched the floor behind their feet, all the while twirling their searing flames along the length of their bodies. The crowd lapped it up, cheering and clapping intermittently but mostly watching in silence with the odd gasp. One Indian man was so excited by the display that he screamed alarmingly at intervals, an animal yelp of pain that made those nearby turn to look worriedly at him in case he'd been caught by a stray flame, but no, he was just enjoying himself in his own peculiarly vocal way.

Now the girls were joined by a man, tall and slim and dressed entirely in black. He carried a long fire stick, about 2m long, topped at either end with a ball of fire. With strong masculine shapes he moved, bent, crouched and knelt, while the flaming baton whizzed round him with a roar of flames, above, below, to the sides, rotating across his back, his chest or his shoulders. As he moved from one side of the open area to the other, the crowd backed off at his approach and then surged back as he passed by, forming a tidal ebb and flow that advanced and receded in time with the danger. The air was thick with the smell of burning kerosene and feathers of black smoke trailed after the spinning flames. 

During the man's routine, the girls had melted away into the crowd, extinguishing their fires to give him centre stage but now they returned, with two fans of flames each. These they pirouetted and fluttered like wings and tail feathers, performing complicated, bird-mimicking dances and moves, sometimes coming together to form one 'bird' at other times separating and becoming two again. The Yelper loved it, shrieking and shouting like an injured but happy man. Their feathers fluttered and shook, framing the girls in flickering, dancing arcs of orange blaze.

Suddenly, without warning, the dark girl's hair decoration caught fire, a snake of flame devouring a long trailing feather in an instant. A gasp issued from the crowd, at first stunned and disbelieving their own eyes. Then a man yelled and gesticulated at her. But she didn't notice, either oblivious or carrying on with a misplaced professionalism. He shouted out again as a mini inferno took hold of the side of her head. Still she did nothing, I looked on in panic, too far away to be of any use. The man put down his drink and started to make a dash towards her to bat out the fire, when suddenly, as quickly as it had taken hold, the fire shrivelled and died out, having consumed all the feathers. The girl carried on, apparently still unaware that she now had a scorched stump where one bright plumes had graced her hair.
The crowd backed off nervously, fearing similar could happen to them if a flame strayed too close, but after a few minutes, wrapped up in the spectacle, they forgot their fear and edged closer again. Now the girls were joined by the man again and another girl. Now the four of them danced, filling the space which was surely too small to hold them all. The crowd shrank back again, giving them vital room in which to perform. Through the whirl of stirring flames, I was as mesmerised by their bodies as by the fiery shapes they made and wielded. Their limbs and bodies folded, curled, twisted and rolled themselves like circus acrobats with grace, beauty and precision, never dropping or stopping the spinning, soaring, arcing fires they held. When they finally ended to roaring cheers and applause and wolf-like howls from The Yelper, I was dizzy and dazed with the beauty of it all. I didn't even try to take any photos or videos, as I knew I would never be able to capture the glowing, smoking, moving, shifting hot brilliance of such a performance.

I stumbled back into the dark interior, tripping over ledges and getting tangled in unseen pot plants. I was glad now that I'd stayed to witness that. Eventually Paul turned up, dark with sweat and talking non-stop with MDMA-fuelled excitement. He had made his way into the centre of the main dancefloor and had had the time of his life thrashing about to his heart's content. I was glad I had not tried to find him.

The journey back through the dark villages and down country roads was cool and sobering. We stopped at a late-night juice bar and greedily downed thick, sweet, fresh mango juices, one after another, topped with oozing vanilla ice cream. Paul rambled on, his eyes still almost black, so big were his pupils. To him it was just another party but to me it had been a revelation of a sub-culture in India that I had known existed but had not yet experienced. While I'd felt a bit out of place there, I hadn't felt at all uncomfortable. After all, people are people and a party is a party, whatever either one looks like, so there was absolutely no need to feel uncomfortable. Ultimately a good party is within you, in the mood you allow yourself to adopt when you go to one. If you tell yourself you'll hate it, you will. If you try to find things to like about it, you probably will too. That the music, the people and the scene were not familiar to me didn't prevent me from having as good a time as I did, because I made myself open to its strange possibilities and didn't judge on its decidedly outlandish appearances.

Paul was going back to Switzerland early in the morning. He dropped me off at my dark and silent guest house where I said goodbye to him and to an experience that I wouldn't forget in a hurry but am unlikely to repeat in one either.