World, the World

by Norman Lewis

  The sex industry went into top gear at the spur of the Vietnam war, when 46,000 American troops rested here in the intervals of combat. Up to that point the art of healing as practised in Thailand was based upon an ancient conception that thirty-six bodily parts responded to massage. This had been practised since antiquity in numerous temples throughout the country, and prayers and invocations accompanied the physical ministrations. The Americans exposed to this novel treatment passed on their enthusiasm to their comrades who were quick to apply for sick leave. In consequence, even before the end of the war numerous massage parlours had opened up. Now 750,000 Thai women are said to be employed in this once basically religious exercise, in surroundings where the sounds of prayer are rarely heard.

  From this blameless start, prostitution on a large scale rapidly developed and, in response to a Western taste for make-belief, often adopted bizarre forms. The Patpong and Petchiburi areas of Bangkok, for example, draw tourist crowds that outnumber the local populace and give the impression of being in revolt from normality.

  It is hard to find a place of entertainment where strangeness does not pervade the atmosphere. Entering a bar one may be served by a bar-girl who wears absolutely nothing but a belt of silk round her waist, or instead a school uniform or perhaps a wedding dress complete with train. In one restaurant topless waitresses career from table to table on roller skates, and in another guests—whether they like it not—must actually expect to be fed.

  The great stark buildings in which the multi-faceted edifice of sex is to be explored in modern style appear on their outside as copies of supermarkets, and only the stacked trolleys are missing. One enters to encounter the central feature of all such establishments in the shape of a well-lit room behind a glass screen and within it a row of dignified ladies seated on an example of what must be the largest sofas in the world. All wear pink evening gowns, are substantial without being fat and have expressions described by the Bangkok Post as of maternal indulgence. The illumination is as artful as the most up-to-date provided by Tesco to display to the best effect their vegetables and fruit—and these women, too, seem to glow. Each lady has a number pinned to her dress, and can be reached by dialling this on a telephone in the surrounding ambulatory. In this, potential clients prowl uncertainly, conversing in low voices in a cool twilight. The atmosphere is passionless and even institutional, and this shortfall of romantic inspiration is emphasised by the presence of an ‘information and advice desk’ staffed by female employees in airport-style uniforms. Nevertheless, the appetite for fantasy survives. Of this place the Bangkok Post reports that the most popular of the available pampering facilities involves dressing up and that any of the fifteen ladies seated on the long sofa and smiling a maternal invitation can convert herself in a matter of seconds into a stern headmistress, a nun of a strict order, or even an angel with wings.

  Thirty odd years before, I had visited Pattaya in the company of somebody from our embassy who introduced me to a singular sport. In those days, like Torremolinos, Pattaya was a charming fishing village, with brightly painted boats strewn among nets drying on an immaculate beach. Inland from the village was a wide area of lagoons and creeks which attracted a great population of fish resembling the mud-skipper. They had developed the extraordinary ability to transfer themselves from one body of unconnected water to another by propelling themselves overland for fairly short distances on their fins. The sport was to lie in wait with a gun and shoot the fish as soon as they began these exertions. Many sportsmen travelled the fifty miles from Bangkok to amuse themselves by these unrewarding assassinations, although the flavour of the fish was irremediably affected by the mud in which they lived. The fishermen of old were infatuated with flying the high bellicose kites they made themselves, and for those who had finally escaped the boredom of shooting fish, there was no better way to relax than drinking a beer in the village’s single fretwork-adorned bar and watching the regular evening battle between the kites.

  As was to be expected, the Pattaya of the eighties retained no trace of the entrancing coastal settlement of the past. The town had come under heavy criticism by the Bangkok Post which said that foreign visitors had been alarmed to notice that quite often the smartly turned-out police patrolling the streets seemed to be drunk. More alarming still was the habit of the drivers of police cars, who were also assumed to be intoxicated. When passing each other, they took their hands off the steering wheel to press them together in the polite salutation that accompanied a slight bow.

  Despite its 400 hotels, its fizzing nightlife and its almost hysterical pursuit of modernity, Pattaya had not quite recovered from the fascination with the American Far-West that had inspired the total rebuilding of Hat Yai as a replica of the old Dodge City, based on thousands of photographs taken in the last century. The town still had a few swing-door saloons, boarded side-walks and even hitching posts, although no horse had been seen in its streets for at least twenty years. When disputes arose, people still drew guns in a threatening manner, as I saw for myself, and occasionally shot each other. My experience of movie-style violence happened after I had taken a room for the night in a small hotel and settled for a nightcap in the bar. A man at a nearby table suddenly pulled out a huge revolver and pointed it at the man seated opposite. He was immediately overpowered and disarmed, a shouting match subsided in a matter of minutes, the dispute ended in embraces and smiles. When shepherded to my room, I pointed to several bullet holes in the floor. ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Anybody hurt?’ The boy smiled. ‘Maybe two guys don’t see each other for a long while. They shoot in the air like they say good to see you again. They don’t fight. They happy.’

  Escaping from Pattaya with its pampering and gun-slinging, I went to Phuket in Thailand’s far south. It had been praised by friends who had been there only five years before, but by now I had learned that remote and reputedly unspoilt islands have become the most vulnerable to attack by the ugliness of our times. Phuket offered an extreme example of the strange impulses of the escapist who goes in search of the exotic yet cannot free himself from dependence upon a familiar background. South-east Asia is the scene of soft colours and gentle, blending shapes. What remains intact of the largest of Thailand’s islands offers beauty of a subtle and intricate kind. There is a grey pallor in the blue of its lakes, and often a lavender mistiness across the sky. Its native houses are elegant structures of wood, built often in the shade spread by the dark, mossy foliage of a casuarina. Why should a Swiss enterprise in the village of Paton have added a breeze-block and cement suburb of mountain chalets designed to support loads of Alpine snow, and the Germans a Bavarian-style Bierkeller and Speisehaus, outside which an employee in lederhosen stands to hold up a menu. Inevitably the British are here, too, with a mock-Tudor pub in which the half-timbered structure is of concrete artfully painted to pass as wood.

  The only obvious Thai undertaking was a tea-house in an old village building, which at least suited its background, although there was something in the atmosphere of the place and a familiarity in the manner of the woman who served me that left me perturbed. I finished the tea and got up and the woman came through the curtain dividing the tea-house proper from the family quarters at the rear. She beckoned to me and I followed her through to pay. The room at the rear held a wash-tub full of crockery, a thin cat, a parrot in a cage and an unmade bed. There was also a young girl in a grubby flowered frock with her head turned away, and the woman gestured at the girl and at myself in a way that was unmistakable. She then held up both hands for me to count the fingers, following this by two fingers held up of a single hand. I shook my head, paid her for the tea and went out. Down the road I stopped for a beer at Karon among the ironed-out dunes, the drained marshes, the streams corseted with cement, and the hills sliced away. It was here that I ran into my first British ex-pat, and I described my recent experience. He was both scornful and amused.

  ‘They do it all the time,’ he said. ‘They tell you these girls are twelve to
make the sale, but they’re most likely to be fourteen or fifteen. She ought to be reported. It’s something the police really crack down on here.’

  A hundred yards out at sea, one of the new 125 hp Dragon Boats brought down from Bangkok ‘to liven things up a bit’, my friend said, went howling past. He jammed his fingers in his ears and I waited until he took them out. ‘Reported for child prostitution, you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘For offering sexual services under false pretences. It really gets up their noses. It gives the place a bad name.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  I WENT TO INDIA four times in all, the first two of these journeys being at the beginning of the sixties when I wrote about India’s takeover of the French colonial enclave of Pondicherry, and that of the Portuguese in Goa.

  Pondicherry provided by far the more interesting of these experiences. I stayed in the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, which following the Indian philosopher’s death had passed into the firm control of his wife, known as the Mother. She was a little old French woman of extremely dominant personality who had come by a large number of Western disciples, most of them members of the English upper class, and of superior education. Their search for enlightenment in the ashram caused them almost to welcome physical discomfort and even to view the possession of wealth as a disadvantage. Many of them had placed all their worldly goods in the Mother’s care, and were happy that she could be persuaded to dole out small sums in cases when some rare emergency might have arisen. One disciple had been a fashion photographer and, believing that his skills might be utilised by the ashram, asked for permission to buy a camera. The Mother assured him that a camera would be found for him without going to the expense of buying one, and sure enough, within days a new disciple arrived with a camera which he was assured would no longer be of use, and this was handed over to the photographer.

  The ashram raised funds through vegetables grown in a garden surrounded by a high wall and guarded by armed ghurkas inherited from the British Army, and in these the disciples worked joyously and without pay for twelve hours a day. In the evening they squatted in a refectory to recite mantras before tackling vegetable curry with their hands. As a visitor who might possibly be persuaded to stay on, I received indulgent treatment, eating at table and sleeping not on a straw palliasse but a bed. As a supplement, perhaps, to sparse rations, there was an evening ceremony for which the disciples were assembled in a row to be fed by the Mother with nuts. When introduced to her on one of these occasions I was told by an attendant that I might take her sari between thumb and forefinger and count to five, in the course of which a discharge of power would pass from her into me. This, I was warned, was so strong that I might faint, and when the moment came an ex-British army regimental sergeant-major in charge of the ceremony placed himself behind me to catch me if I fell. There was no noticeable transfer of power in my case.

  In a single instance in my life have I felt myself a subject of hypnotism. This was on leaving the ashram at the end of my stay, when I checked out through a kind of guardhouse, in which were offered for sale the whole gamut of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical works. Despite knowing full well I should never read a sentence of any one of them, I bought the whole collection, and lugged them with some difficulty and at substantial overweight cost back to England. I presented these books to Oliver Myers, whose eyes glistened with gratitude as he filled two suitcases with them.

  After Pondicherry and the rapturous disciples, Goa was calm to the point, almost, of sluggishness. The predominant problem of the near-empty Central Hotel was the thievishness of invading crows with beautiful amber eyes that stole the guests’ sun-glasses. The manager warned me that the town offered little in the way of entertainment. Night-clubs were banned, the cinema showed Western films only when a minimum audience of fifty could be rounded up. Otherwise there was snake-charming. Jose Custodio Faria, who discovered the doctrine of hypnotic suggestion, had been born here, and a club of Goanese hypnotists held regular meetings and practised his techniques on each other. The principal industry was the smuggling of gold carried in the bodily orifices into India, and caravans of young girls were daily marshalled to cross the frontier. Otherwise, a small army of the not-quite-destitute searched the beach for slivers of mother-of-pearl cast up by every tide, from which the handsome windows of Goa were made.

  Coming back to the subject of entertainment, the hotel’s manager said I should not fail to see the mummified body of St Francis Xavier in the church of the Bom Jesus. Until a few years before it had attracted pilgrims to Goa from all parts of the Catholic world. Lately there had been a falling-off as a result of the common trick by which persons pretending to kiss the saint gnawed off small portions of the remains and carried them away in their mouths, so that now not much was left.

  By the time I returned to Goa in 1990 little remained that was recognisable of the old city. A laundromat replaced the Central Hotel with its jewel-eyed crows and the one-time white sheen of mother-of-pearl on the beach was no more. The iron statue of the most compelling of all hypnotists had gone for scrap, snake-charmers were banned as detrimental to the nation’s image, and although smuggling flourished as before, it no longer involved gold but dope. Of the Saint’s remains only an arm that had been severed and sent to Rome for application to the Pope’s piles was still on view. In the old days all the lights of Goa had gone out at 10 pm on the dot. Now five cinemas blasted the night with the broadcast music and outcry of violent Indian films.

  I was on holiday with my family and had chosen the north coast of Goa because I had been told it was relatively unspoiled. This might have been the case when my friends had visited it the year before, but it was no longer true because Indians are the fastest builders in the world, and holiday apartments were going up in a matter of weeks. What interested me about this upsurge of building activity was that most of it was carried out by young girls imported from Rajasthan. They worked a twelve-hour-day in the great heat, and were crammed at night into plastic shelters roughly four feet in height. These were bonded labourers who in theory did not exist because the Indian Act of Parliament known as the Bonded Labour System Abolition Act, 1976, had ensured their release. Nevertheless, in 1990, precisely at the time when we were in Goa, the Anti-Slavery Society published a statement that ‘the majority of bonded child labourers, 20 million, are in India’. These cheerful, smiling little girls were some of them.

  How many Europeans buying a cheap holiday home in Goa realise that it has been built by slave labour?

  Converted to Voltaire’s viewpoint by a personal experience of primitives, I had developed a near-obsession with the opportunity to study them in Central India. Here, although they had escaped the attention of the travel writers, I believed that I should discover remnants of those aboriginal peoples thrust into the background by the Aryan invasion and the invention of the caste system.

  From preliminary enquiries I was to learn to my surprise that the Central Provinces still contained as many as 54 million tribal peoples, many of them at a bow-and-arrow level of development, and in possession of many of their ancient customs. The area of greatest interest was the unspoiled region of Madhya Pradesh, but on my arrival in India I was to learn that governmental problems with the tribals had led to Bastar being temporarily out of bounds. Orissa, I was told, would be the next best thing, sheltering in its mountains and forests tribes that had even remained nomadic and of which little was known.

  In Bhubaneswar, the Orissa capital, I had the extraordinary good luck of meeting a young Brahmin, Ranjan, who had spent part of his childhood in tribal areas and spoke three of their languages. He was free to travel, he said, and mapped out an itinerary through 1,500 miles of territory seldom visited except by government officials, in the course of which we should see something of seventeen tribes. It turned out that an additional inducement in coming on this trip was a romantic involvement with a Paraja girl whom he was anxious to see once again before deciding whether or not to drop out of bour
geois Indian life by marrying her, renouncing his caste and settling in the Paraja village.

  Ranjan found a car and a driver and we set out. ‘Every experience of this journey,’ I was to write, ‘contradicted the image of India as presented on the films.’ India has always been shown as overbrimming with people. Here it was lonely. Having left the main coastal road with its unceasing procession of lorries, there was no traffic at all except a single car in an occasional small town. There was in general nowhere to stay, nowhere to eat, and with Naxalite revolutionaries scattered through the hills it was not particularly safe.

  The last car vanished and we saw the first of the Saora villages, cool places in a hot country, with the roof thatches sloping to within three feet of the ground, converting verandahs into deep havens of shade in which the Saoras, wearing sparkling white cottons, took their ease. These villages were dazzlingly clean. Some of the Saoras had decorated their walls with spirited naïve paintings on which magic symbols were scattered through scenes which might include a goddess, a plane piloted by an elephant, a man on a bicycle, a tiger, a village bus. There were no crops to be seen, instead a grove of pines dribbled their sap into bottles hung under incisions in the bark. This would become alcohol, and Ranjan said that the only form of crime in such tranquil villages was the theft of alcohol-making equipment or the alcohol itself. The equivalent of a policeman in a white toga leaned against the trunk of one of the palms, apparently asleep.

  Such were the villages of the Saoras and after them the Kondhs, in the first of which a travelling medium was going from house to house offering to lay troublesome ghosts. In another house several jungle fowls sat on clutches of eggs in decorated baskets, soothed by a boy crouched nearby who played to them on a flute.