German Claudia Derain and her Indian husband, Hari Ajwani, are another such couple, having opened the magical Nilaya Hermitage, an eleven-room hotel with a cult following, fourteen years ago. Englishman James Foster, another expat, manages Casa Boutique Hotels, a chain whose accommodations have the feel of bungalows. In fact, the only foreigners who don't seem plentiful these days are the Portuguese.

"Goa has a special vibration, a Latin feel," says fashion designer Wendell Rodricks, one of the few openly gay Indians. Rodricks lives with his French partner, Jerome Marrel, in a beautifully restored Portuguese mansion in Colvale.

I visit Rodricks on the eve of his spring fashion show. It is midmorning. He sits outside under a banyan tree, sketching and describing the model lineup to an assistant. A manservant brings breakfast: fresh fruit juice, green tea, and oatmeal on a stylish wooden tray. Five dogs lounge around Rodricks's feet, occasionally nuzzling his Prada sandals; Marrel sits on a balcony above us, reading. It is a cozy domestic scene, and I want it all—the restored Portuguese mansion, the manservant, the dogs, and, if possible, the Prada sandals.

Although his flowing monochromatic designs have long been scooped up by India's most stylish women, Rodricks feels that he "bloomed" as a designer only after moving to Goa in 1993. Today, he lives an idyllic life: walking the village and sketching in the morning, spending the bulk of his day at his shop in Panjim, going out on his boat at sunset, and attending a different soirée almost every night. "I was at a party last night where I was the only Goan," he says. "Lots of international citizens live here, a life that is part lotus-eater, part evolved globe-trotter."

Living in a trading port for the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Europeans meant that Goans were forced to interact with the outside world far earlier than the average Indian. This has made them friendly but not overly curious about foreigners. Unlike in the rest of India, white people don't get stared at here, even in the most rural settings. Trance music and tranquil beaches nudge type A personalities into subdued sublimity. The heat and, yes, the hashish encourage a languid pace of life and a state of mind that Goans call sussegado, political cartoonist Miranda told me. "It means a life of leisure—and it is vanishing."

A couple of years ago, a group of concerned citizens began a Save Goa campaign to prevent the government from converting off-limits agricultural land into Special Economic Zones (SEZs) subject to development. Everyone I meet is up in arms—against the "Russian mafia," who are buying large tracts near Morjim Beach, where the olive ridley sea turtles come to nest, and against nouveau riche North Indians who are buying up Goa without respecting its values.

Upendra Gaunekars and his wife, Sangeeta—an old, aristocratic Hindu family in hilly Ponda—say the solution lies in green businesses that suit Goa's psyche. They talk with pride of the "Nylon 66" agitation that forced the DuPont chemical company to withdraw from Goa. It reminds me of a Southern gentleman I once met in Memphis who told me that the difference between a Yankee and a damn Yankee is that Yankees go back home.