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.
