Once a hippie haven where even India's tightly chaperoned teens could turn on, tune in, and drop out, Goa has lately gone upscale. Shoba Narayan returns to a scene from her youth and finds that Goa (like the author herself) has only gotten better with age

It is Christmas in Goa. The sun-dappled veranda of Alban and Maria Couto's sprawling ancestral hacienda is as good a place as any to discuss the future of India's smallest state. Old family friends, they are in their sixties, maybe seventies—I dare not ask. Even though I've met them only twice, I call them Auntie and Uncle, Indian style. Alban, dapper in suspenders and tie, served in the Indian Civil Service with my in-laws; Maria, regally composed, is an acclaimed author. I have brought along her book Goa: A Daughter's Story, for an autograph.

After hellos and small talk about Aldona, the tiny enclave in which they live, we settle down. What, they ask, will I have to drink?

"Orange juice?" I reply doubtfully. (It is before noon.) Alban looks at me with pity. We will have feni, he announces. I should have known. Goans drink feni (thirty-five percent alcohol) at weddings and wakes, baptisms and birthdays, after butchering a pig and before lunch. A Goan home, the saying goes, will lack anything but liquor. Maria opts for white wine. Their man Friday brings me a shot glass and some salted cashews.

The feni is velvety smooth and fiery. I shake my head at its potency. Seeing what he takes to be my appreciation, Alban summons his Jeeves again. "Take an empty Sprite bottle and fill it with feni for madam," he says, chuckling at the duplicity of the act. My head buzzes.

"Goa has changed, hasn't it?" I begin, with a wide, somewhat silly smile. A who's who seems to be moving in: Bombay socialites, photographer Dayanita Singh; why, I heard that author Amitav Ghosh has bought here, too. Turns out that Ghosh is their neighbor. Later, during a tour of the house, I spot his books in Alban's library, each lovingly inscribed.

The Coutos are both descended from Brahmin families who were converted to Christianity by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, something that Maria recounts in her book. Worldly and well traveled, with a son in the United States and a British daughter-in-law, they could live anywhere, yet they chose Goa.

"It is a place where you can shed your inhibitions," says Alban. "Revel in simple pleasures. Goa is about . . . the good life." A life they fear is fast disappearing. "Goa has a wistful, elegiac quality to it," says Maria, sounding wistful herself. "And this quality is contained in Goan music: both joyful and sad."

They tell me about their neighbor, a poor farmer who came to them with a sob story about needing money. Generations of his people had toiled on their land and he was heavily in debt, so the Coutos transferred title of a plot to the man—only to discover that he turned around and sold it for a small fortune. "What he doesn't realize, the poor fool, is that he now has no place in Goa to live," says Maria. "All these outsiders come in and tempt the locals with wads of cash."

At the Coutoses' recommendation, I call political cartoonist Mario Miranda, a living legend in Goa. I introduce myself as a journalist, and apologize for intruding on his Christmas holiday.