Good? Bad? Ugly?

Paradise, in Contract

March 18, 2007 New York Times
By Somini Sengupta

One afternoon in December, Roy Patrao peered through a sturdy iron gate and scanned the gnarled roots of a tree embracing the ruin of an old stone house. Only a shell of the house survived, with thick columns holding up a portico. A window shutter made of seashells and slatted wood was visible amid the overgrown bush. On this plot of land, Patrao saw his dream.

He would build a villa here, with cool limestone floors and a modern kitchen. The upstairs windows would open to a view of the river that meandered through the village.

In the backyard, he pictured a family gathering around the barbecue, as they might on a summer’s evening in Southern California, where Patrao once lived. But this time, the domestic scene would take place in Goa, the sliver of a state on India’s western coast.

The site was perfect. On the adjacent property was a paddy field, which by law was off limits to construction. The river view was a bonus, for in the real estate business, river views are nearly as lucrative as Goa’s legendary ocean views, which have become virtually impossible to attain. The village itself, called Aldona, was long on Goan charm, surrounded by rolling hills with the beaches of the Arabian Sea less than an hour’s drive away. Across the road from the old house stood a small white chapel. The fishmonger did the rounds each morning. The charm factor was sweetened by local lore: Patrao told me there were tales of two ghost sightings in the house.
Patrao hadn’t bought the plot yet, but he was already picturing that this would be the first of 10, maybe 20, houses that he would build across Goa. He would use his own money and that of friends, who likewise would be banking on the appeal of Goa’s lore. One day, he imagined, a community of Indian-Americans like him might spend holidays in their Goan homes or eventually retire here. He was born in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), but when he spoke of homecoming, he meant Goa.

Goa, like much of India, is in the midst of a real estate frenzy, and Patrao, a man nearly 60, a veteran of the construction business in California and New York, is nothing if not an entrepreneur. His ambitions were fueled as much by his canny business sense as by Goa’s enticements. The houses he imagined building would sell for at least $180,000, he reckoned, or more than twice the investment in the land and construction costs. Real estate, he figured, was the way to go in India. “One billion people. Limited land supply. It’s a no-brainer,” he concluded.

With that plan in mind, Patrao and his girlfriend, Sundiv Kaur, known as Sunny, were devoting their days and nights to the quest for land. They drove from village to village, eyeing ruins and plots, inspecting views, making drawings and, in the evenings, plotting their findings on a flowchart to see how well the math worked.

Theirs was also a personal venture. Goa is where they both came to recover from their old lives. Both had left their previous marriages — she in Singapore, he in the United States. They met in Goa, became friends, fell in love, rented an apartment together and decided to put down new roots. One day, they said, they would build themselves a house in Goa. “This is a second-chance place, baby,” was Patrao’s verdict.

As Patrao drove through Aldona on the warm December afternoon, Kaur sat next to him, quietly smiling. The next morning, they planned to put down money on their dream ruin.

In popular culture, Goa has long embodied qualities hard to find in India — it is quaint, laid-back, libertine — and its real estate boom may be more about mythology than location. It is the kind of place, you repeatedly hear, where a woman can go out of the house in shorts, or where people are reasonably tolerant of a situation like Patrao’s living with Kaur, who, at 34, is much younger, and not even his wife. An acquaintance of mine in Delhi who owns a house in Goa put it bluntly: If you want to get out of India, come to Goa.

Goa has long been a crossroads of East and West. It was conquered by the Portuguese in the early 16th century, just after Vasco da Gama reached India (he landed a bit farther south) and effectively planted the flag for European rule in India. Chilies came to India through Goa, after the Portuguese ferried them from the Americas, and forever changed Indian food. The echoes of Portuguese rule are still felt in the houses with their frescoed walls and wraparound porches.

In a 1964 essay called “Goa the Unique,” Graham Greene wrote, “Outside Goa one is aware all the time of the interminable repetition of the ramshackle, the enormous pressure of poverty, flowing, branching, extending like flood water.” In Goa, he recalled attending a party where he was offered a Benzedrine tablet at 4 a.m.

Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and novelist, says that in the Indian mind Goa has long signified freedom, particularly of the sexual kind. It is an association advanced by Hindi movies of another era, he said, in which Goan women were often portrayed as sexually available and Goan men as drunks. “Goa is associated with free sensuality,” he said by way of explaining its real estate lure. “That I think is a very big attraction — and the keeping up with the Joneses. It’s a party place, a place to let go of your inhibitions.” Kakar himself let go of his two homes — renting out one in “aggressive” Delhi, in his words, the other in “cold” Berlin — and moved to Goa four years ago. He and his wife, Katharina, set about restoring an old Portuguese-era house.

The makeover of Goa into an upscale vacation spot — the Hamptons, if you will, for the upwardly mobile Indian — began in the late 1960s, when hippies came to conquer Goa’s beaches. Over time, it became a mandatory stop on the Israeli post-military-service circuit.

A string of five-star resorts opened in the 1990s. Onetime visitors, both Indian and foreign, began restoring old houses. Then, over the past few years, as private airlines added new flights to Goa, affluent urban professionals from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and elsewhere began coming in droves. The economy was soaring. People suddenly had money to invest. They started buying Goan real estate.

The Goa phenomenon has been fueled by India’s economic rise. There is more money swirling around than ever before, including more foreign investment for real estate. Drive along any major highway in India and you are likely to see earth being moved day and night, laborers carrying cement on their heads, steel pilings pointing up to the sky like so many skinny fingers of ambition. Once unremarkable small towns now see a rush of high-rise apartment blocks under construction. Erstwhile fields of wheat and mustard are fenced off, with giant billboards announcing the arrival of new townships.

There is a genuine demand for some types of development: office buildings are absorbed in cities like Bangalore as quickly as they are built. But there’s also a breathless quality to some of the forecasts. One report from Deutsche Bank of Germany predicted in January that 600 malls would be under way across India in the next three years. In recent months, in an apparent effort to temper soaring real estate prices, Indian banks have gradually raised interest rates on home loans.

In Goa, the boom started, naturally, with tycoons. Eight years ago, Vijay Mallya, who owns Kingfisher Beer, hired Dean D’Cruz, one of Goa’s best-known architects, to design what Mallya dubbed the Kingfisher Villa, spilling down to the Arabian Sea. “When people walk into my house, I want them to go weak in the knees,” is how D’Cruz recalled his instructions.

Somewhat less wealthy seekers followed, but their real estate fantasies burned just as hot. Gated communities with clubhouses and pools began to go up. Hillsides were carved out for condominiums. Cashew groves were cut for a road. Recently, some of the country’s biggest developers have put forward plans for apartments, golf courses, hotels, shopping malls and a software park.

Prices have swiftly climbed into the stratosphere. In April of last year, DLF Universal, one of India’s largest builders, bought a patch of land near the capital, Panaji, for more than $1,100 a square yard. Just two years ago, the state government, which owned the land, could not dispose of the property for a sixth of that price. DLF plans to build a mall and office complex on the site.

This construction has not been greeted with universal joy. Last fall, after the Goan state government approved a five-year regional plan that opened new swaths of land to development, some of it hillsides with coveted views of river and sea, residents of laid-back Goa were roused to action. Builders welcomed the plan as relief from what they deplored as overly stringent restrictions on construction, including a ban on buildings taller than the nearest coconut palm. But critics in Goa, who included D’Cruz, saw it as an open invitation to destruction. Where would all the garbage go? Where was the clean drinking water for all the newcomers when the village wells were running dry or salty? Goa’s ecology would be destroyed, the critics cried, its magic would be gone.

Protests were organized, and a campaign, called Save Goa, was established. One protest in December drew thousands of people to Panaji. Amateur photographers fanned across the state snapping pictures of supposedly illegal construction. The Catholic Church put its weight behind the campaign. Save Goa took state officials to court. “Paradise Lost,” its Web site warned.

By mid-January, the campaign could claim a substantial victory. The government of Goa, ruled by the Congress Party, voted to scrap the regional plan and draft a new one. Menino Peres, the director of the department of information and publicity, said it was because of the “sentiment of large numbers of people in Goa, and on environment and congestion considerations.”

Roy Patrao watched the controversy closely, and not without self-interest. He regarded the debate as unnecessarily polarized. In the anti-development lobby he saw tendencies of Nimby-ism. But during the week of the big protest in Panaji, he sent me an e-mail message saying he was glad he had refrained from big projects and what he called “controversial lands.”

“I had a powerful feeling that something smelled here — and that I did not want to be part of the stench,” he wrote. “Having said that, I also believe that many of the luminaries of Goa feel slighted because {lsquo}outsiders’ want to develop mega-projects in Goa. They want Goa to remain as it always was. I feel they would like to be the ones in charge.”

Spread across 140 acres along a wooded ridge on the edge of the water some 11 miles from Aldona, Aldeia de Goa, a lavish gated community, bears little resemblance to the rest of India. Irvine, Calif., might be a closer cousin. There are no potholes. There are street lamps and around-the-clock water from the tap. Sewage is treated and not left to fester in a septic tank. Terraced lawns lead down to a clubhouse under construction, along with a gym, tennis courts and a swimming pool. A five-star hotel will be built on the beach. Where the ridge bends, a section has been cleared for the construction of another cluster of bungalows and condominiums. The views face west onto the widening mouth of the Zuari River as it pours into the Arabian Sea.

The rest of the hill tells you what Aldeia de Goa once was — shrubs and trees formerly zoned as orchard land where no development was allowed. The developers argued for a rezoning many years ago and managed to relax Goa’s strict coastal regulations for the patch of beach where they are putting up the hotel. They convinced local authorities that since the property abuts the mouth of the Zuari, the 200-meter buffer that applies to hotel construction on the seacoast should not apply; they have been allowed to build closer to the water.

Aldeia is the postcard for a new Indian aspiration — the country house, which had been the province of Indian blue-blood families, and even for them it meant a cottage in the hills, bought from the departing British. In Aldeia, completed houses can go for as much as $700,000. Prices of bungalow plots have more than doubled in two years. All told, about half of the roughly 250 properties in Aldeia have been bought by people from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The rest are Indians who live abroad. “Invest in the lifestyle you deserve,” the cover of the sales brochure declares.

The owners at Aldeia also include local officials who at one point or another have smoothed the way for building permits and rezoning. Among them is Goa’s most famous politician, Atanasio Monserrate, who until recently served as the minister for town and country planning and was a chief architect of the repealed regional plan. One of his most controversial acts of rezoning was to allow for a road to be built through paddy fields in order to connect two of his houses. At Aldeia, he has a corner plot with a prime view of the water. Monserrate declined several requests for an interview, but in December, when a private Indian television news station, NDTV, asked him about charges of graft, Monserrate said flatly that such accusations were impossible to prove. He resigned in January, saying that he had been unfairly blamed for the new regional plan.

One afternoon a few months ago, a few miles north of the capital, Dean D’Cruz drove across a narrow bridge and pointed to mangroves that had recently gone up for sale. We were headed to check on a hotel in Calangute that D’Cruz had designed, and along Aguada Bay he showed me a gentle slope that leads down to the water. It had been shaved off, and a new house was under construction; D’Cruz suspected it was a violation of the coastal regulations.

As we continued our drive north to Morjim, where there has been a flurry of real estate deals, we saw a bulldozer burrowing a road through a wooded hill. These activities distress many Goans. Kalu Ganesh Shetgaonkar, the 75-year-old patriarch of an extended family of 60 in Morjim, said he regularly wards off buyers and brokers who come to inquire about his property on the hill. There’s nothing up there, not even water, Shetgaonkar said — just cashew trees. “It’s our ancestors’ land,” his son, Ganesh Kalu, injected. “Why should we sell it? We didn’t buy it.”

As attached as many Goans are to their ancestral lands, the money can’t always be so easily declined. Saba Bhiva Shetgaonkar, another Morjim resident, said he was compelled to sell 1,200 square yards of his cashew hills, so poor and indebted had the family become. The sale paid for the weddings of some of his eight daughters. Shetgaonkar said he would have to dispose of another parcel soon, for the weddings of his two youngest daughters. His only consolation was that prices had nearly quadrupled since he last sold.

As an architect and a Goa native who grew up in Mumbai, D’Cruz has had a front-row seat to the transformation of Goa. A few years ago, he designed a house for a friend from Mumbai, who in turn sold it for a small fortune and asked D’Cruz to design a dozen more. D’Cruz has since built his share of hotels and private houses, even some small apartments. He welcomed the settlers who came to rescue the crumbling Portuguese-era houses.

“It’s nice to see people buy in villages, because the old houses are crumbling,” D’Cruz said. “A fair number of people restore them nicely. But they don’t participate in the community. It helps architecturally. It doesn’t necessarily help the community.”

Lately he has also reluctantly come to see tourism as better fuel for Goa’s economy than the rush to build private houses. At least, he says, tourism creates a few more jobs. What scares him, he says, is the specter of sprawl on these hills. He sent a text message to my cellphone on the day of a vital court hearing on the regional plan. “Pray for us,” he said.

Roy Patrao and Sunny Kaur were keenly aware of the roiled waters they were entering as they searched for perfect plots on which to build. They would build small. They would win over the neighbors.

On the December afternoon I spent with them, having given up finding anything close to the coast, they were in a village not far from Aldona, inspecting an overgrown plot of land that appeared to have been used as a public toilet.

“Roy, you should come see this,” Kaur called out from the bushes. Through the brush, you could make out a winding river, snaking through paddy fields. The village was still undiscovered, in real estate terms, and so the plot was still reasonably priced — about $50 a square yard. A dilapidated house that stood next door, Patrao guessed, would go on the market as soon as construction started on this plot. “It’s gentrification,” he said. “Remember TriBeCa?”

They drove down to the river. There was a white cross, decorated with a garland of marigold and a daub of yogurt, an emblem of the entangled Christian and Hindu practice common in Goa.

As they were learning, Goan real estate was also entangled in its own particular ways. It is not easy to confirm which lands are actually zoned for construction, nor to get a clean title deed, nor even to follow building codes. A local builder told Patrao that if he built by the rules, government inspectors would get mad. “They make their money from {lsquo}mistakes,’ ” he told me.

That afternoon, they drove on to Aldona, to show me the old house behind the gate. “The ruin I’ve got my eye on,” Kaur said, eyes twinkling.

They would reorient the house, turning an overgrown front garden into the backyard. They would keep the portico on the side. The slatted seashell windows, they weren’t sure about. They could easily double their investment, they said, even with the bribes they assumed they would need to pay to local officials for building permits. They had already increased their initial bid on the plot. They expected the owner’s blessings the next day.

But then, the reality of Goan real estate hit them. First, their broker told them the owner had chosen another buyer. Then the buyer backed out, because, as Patrao explained, two of the owner’s sisters refused to relinquish their claim on the family property. Under Goan law, which dates back to Portuguese times, the sisters could lay claim at any point in their lifetimes, bungling any future owner’s plans. Six weeks later, the place was still on the market. The agent said the asking price had nearly doubled. The family, he reckoned, would eventually sell.

Somini Sengupta is chief of The New York Times’s South Asia bureau.

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