Lost in Pattaya
By Kishore Modak
Copyright © Kishore Modak 2014
All rights reserved
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Sunrise doesn’t last all morning and a cloudburst doesn’t last all day
Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning
But it’s not always going to be this grey
All things must pass,
All things must pass away.
George Harrison (1943-2001)
Harsh Joshi, never met him, don’t know how he looks, we just spoke for hours and hours, days and nights, detailing the intricacies ahead.
You seem a good man. Thank You.
Table of Contents
The Memory of Loss
Pictures of Li Ya
Kawai’s Kingdom of Cards
Sins of the Mekong
Part 1
The Memory of a Loss
Important things in life are the ones we don’t have; like a limb to an amputee, enjoyed, then lost and yearned. All our disappointments remain hidden, as we feign confidence through the motions that work and family life demand. The feigning surfaces each day, sucking dry, till there is nothing left to deplete while we act out our forced, measured lives.
Our losses, even seemingly commonplace ones, they define us. Take unrequited teenage love; it lingers, eventually leading us to internet photo albums, of families that could have been our own. Or, take fading youth; it leaves us pensive, ruminating upon the empty net-worth of amassed wealth and societal gains. All the while, joy, like a clown, follows its own plot, choosing its own players, condescendingly passing a few of us completely by.
If you are fortunate, a loss is something you can live with, like a well-loved loud and vicious dog, who needs the simple severing of chords before the life-energy of a beast is left dampened into a pip-squeak whimper.
The waste of a life in the squash room, the drink parlours, and in the sex dens of Pattaya is something that I have barely survived to pen this tale. This tale is of the daughter we lost in the night markets of Pattaya. We are who are responsible for the loss, though I have spent years, blamed singularly by my own corrupt sub-conscious. Yes, she is my daughter, wherever she is; but you too, the social milieu, embraced her, committing acts that lost daughters experience.
My vacuum is from the loss of a daughter, an empty space I have finally gathered courage to share with you.
If your life draws you to words which help you smile and cry, maybe even cower behind the reading of books, then, you are better off remaining away from the rest of these accounts, since they are tallied dispassionate, spoken and told like they should be, as irreversible as mistakes.
This is a sordid tale of loss, the loss of a pre-teen girl, my daughter–Lost in Pattaya, while Fang Wei and I were on an impromptu get-away from our home in Singapore.
We shall discuss Fang Wei in a bit; let me first confess the part of me that did play a dominant role in the loss, a penchant to get high, or shall we say safely high in parts of the world where such trips are not punishable by death or amputation, or, in regions where they are still escapable in bribes. Drugs and drinks have been my constant companions, except for the years in Singapore, where I remained dry on alcohol alone, probably the worst of all chemicals that has ever stimulated me. Alcohol, especially in hard drunk nights, begs addiction, like the morning chase of cocaine before you get to work, beating that hangover from the 7 A.M. alco-orgy on the previous evening. Cannabis is the best. At least there is an element of a-sexual appreciation of beauty, like the visitation of the Buddhist temple, on Miho’s insistence, when she found me crying, having decapitated my first and only victim.
Let us work with the most important event in these pages, the loss of my daughter. It was my idea, to get to Pattaya, where I knew I could score and get high on good stuff, a nose for which I had cultivated.
Why Pattaya? Simply because of the poster and the lure that it holds for those who seek things that other posters don’t offer, like fat white men holding hands with soft Asian women and the background of stimulants that fat white men are drawn to.
Fang Wei and I were married for ten years before we split up. She is Singaporean, which meant that I was marrying up, since I am ethnic Indian. I loved her, ‘past’ being the critical tense in the present, and I enjoyed her company through the married years, all up to the point where the loss of Li Ya redefined our relationship. I met her at work, growing fond of her with each passing Friday that we spent in the bars and the pubs of Singapore, drinking before going home, waking up in the other’s bed.
I became indoctrinated easily, accepting the island that I came to live in, Singapore. Her marriage to me was far more calculative, the math that her mind worked, covered all eventualities that a married couple may encounter; profits from a bond or the pay-out from a split, before she was convinced that I was a good catch, despite my ethnicity. This to her parents meant she was marrying down. Parents, aging gracefully with the health they had invested in, parents; worth bending and bowing to, parents; who had the welfare of a daughter to wish unselfishly for.
In the end, she failed, since her stunted math could never envision the wealth that a man can accumulate.
The venom that I built inside me is from the lack of support that a man expects from his wife, even if it was me who was responsible for the loss our daughter, little Li Ya. Even if . . . I will leave you to judge if I was responsible for my loss.
It was Fang Wei who insisted on a Chinese name for our kid.
Li Ya, she always thought herself as Leah, yearning the whiteness that comes through the internet with staid clap-tracked recordings from the west. I suspect white is what she always wanted to be, or become, just like her mother, who was already white, at least in skin tone, chasing what she already had. Neither of my girl’s names, given or assumed, holds any indication to my half in her, her Indian half. Li Ya looked mixed, a bit dark with a tint of the tropics yet slanted at the eyes like from any oriental strain. Thai is what she may have become and got accepted as, because strangely that is exactly how she looked, Thai.
I write, while confined to a hospital bed, still free from prosecution and jail since the stream of my funds continues to befuddle the police and the judiciary in Thailand, postponing the handing of a gruesome and deserved death. I pour it all into these keystrokes, knowing well that when they find this manuscript, well before you do, they will ignore the bribes and assume the duties that their uniforms must compel them to.
Li Ya was standing right next to me in Pattaya before she went missing. While next to me, she was satisfied with the ice-cream that I had gotten her, while I chatted with the smiling peddler who wanted to ascertain what would make me part with money. Fang Wei, she was only about ten
meters away, kneeling at the cardboard-layered sarong shack spread on the foot path of the night market. She held a few sarongs up. From that distance they seemed like gaudy drapes swaying in the breeze revealing her choice of forest-floral patterns, while what I was thinking about was acid batik, and the formless burst of colour the pot I wanted to score may leave me in. The whiskey did not help, since it was evening and I had been drinking all day. Neither did the vodka, little bottles of which along with beers don’t count. The debris of my drinking lay wasted in my man-bag.
“Do you have some that I can taste?” I looked at the peddler, wanting to whiff the drug, more for the assurance of an immediate high, than the need to sample what I knew I would buy. Scoring, it is a bit like a quest for water by a man parched of a thirst, a thirst for pleasure derived from every and each act that can be enjoyed after getting high. My mind was mostly on Fang Wei and the possibility of coaxing her into acts we committed seldom, and many seasons ago.
Fang Wei was filthy cute, and she knew it. A promise of irresistible pleasure for any man, at least when she was younger, without the faint wrinkles and the ever-so-slight sag of skin that stole the lingering looks she once received from passers-by, mostly men. In vain she tried, resisting the revenge of time, investing in useless enhancement treatments, alongside suitable clothes that masked physical decay. A steady supply of creams and rubs eventually flowed into the sink-hole, applied then rinsed off each day. From cluttered cabinets, tubes and jars wound up clumsily into the waste bin each time she had a disagreement with the cosmetics. That bitterness towards the course of nature, it too became a weapon which she pointed at me, her husband, a convenient and available target.
I never blamed her for that.
“Come aside sir, we taste, come here,” the peddler ushered me beachwards. I dragged Li Ya behind me, impatient and rough from the alcohol that I had had all day. Li Ya was focussed on the ice-cream and its deposition in her mouth, her age preventing her from managing the heap of cream sagging precariously on the cone. She needed the aid of a father, or a mother; a parent who had not had the better part of an entire bottle of booze. Inevitably, the ice-cream fell into the sand and she looked up, a bit disappointed at her own clumsiness, making well, the liquid of eyes that ensured that her drunken parent bought her another cream-topped cone. I came up with coins, pointing at Fang Wei across the street from where me and the peddler stood “Li Ya, go to your mum, here, take this money and cross at the green man,” I handed her the change, ignoring the peddler and focussing on my daughter as she skipped across the street, heading straight for her mom. I waved just as she reached Fang Wei and she waved back, little Li Ya, for the last time that evening. Fang Wei looked up, closing the purchase of floral sarongs, depositing them in the red translucent bag by her side. She held the bag in one hand as the other reached for Li Ya.
At least it seemed so.
I turned to the peddler, who had lit up, passing the joint for me to drag. I kept and nursed the lit joint, spreading saliva on its paper walls, scoring just enough for the one more day we were to spend in Pattaya. He took the cash and disappeared into the black ink of the beach, caused by the contrast of street lights against the infinite darkness of the sea. The moon was out but hidden behind clouds, which drifted in an even motion across its far away white surface. I looked up, feeling the need to calibrate downwards the amount of alcohol in me, now that cannabis entered the dim lit picture of moonlight. It made me lie back on the sand, and look up at the faint sprinkle of stars in the sky, large blobs of clouds moving fast and wondrously over the moon and across my brain.
I broke into sweat, at the question Fang Wei posed innocuously, as she came up from behind and sat down beside me on the beach. “Where is Li Ya?”
“I sent her to you, I thought she was with you,” my eyes widened as I sat up jerkily, pointing at the Sarong shack across the street. The colour drained away from our faces.
“You stay put here,” I shouted to Fang Wei rushing across the street shouting “Li Ya, Li Ya…” My run made the traffic screech, and, at the ice-cream parlours I tore into the stalls, discovering nothing but the vacancy of synthetic essence that hung in the air. When I emerged, I hoped Li Ya was there, on the beach with Fang Wei, a child being reprimanded by her mother for causing anxiety. Fang Wei was there, alone on the beach, speaking frantically into her phone, reporting crime as a few people gathered around her. A tourist-police officer approached. I ran across, as he met her. By the time I arrived, she had already related the gist of our loss to him, leaving me sliding on my phone, searching for Li Ya’s snaps.
The peddler appeared from the dark of the beach, like a flash from a lighthouse.
“Officer, ask him, he saw it, he saw her, I sent her across the street to buy an ice cream,” I spoke like in the middle of a scream and a lament. The crowd began to scatter as he began to speak.
“Are you high?” the officer asked me. This silenced me. I almost begged the peddler to go away, for him not to reveal our illicit trade that evening.
“Here, I am a Singaporean and she is my daughter,” Fang Wei rescued me, leaving the officer to hold a plastic card that he may have seen, a Singapore citizen ID.
Pictures of Li Ya were transferred into the police records of Pattaya, as we all struggled and tapped on phone screens. Time, every second exponentially proportional to me not finding my daughter, because, with each second she was being sucked deeper into the labyrinth of her unfortunate destiny. I left them to the phones and went into the streets screaming for Li Ya.
The family whistle too, a sort of short hoot and chirp; I used it till the muscles in my face, unused to prolonged whistling cramped up, for the last time that evening.
The crowds stood arrested by a man weeping as he held his daughter’s crying image up on his phone, “I have lost my girl, have you seen a child, help me, help”.
They parted, realizing that I was drunk and desperate. Some clasped their hands and bowed, throwing coins into the sea wind, and towards me in prayer.
The people in Pattaya that evening, they moved away from me, sensing what they did not want to encounter, unsavoury holidays in a land that draws us with its allure of pleasure. In about five minutes, I changed my stance, becoming un-drunk, walking up instead to people and showing them images of Li Ya on my phone, asking if they had seen her. My night without sleep was visible in the my bloodshot eyes, as was the futility that the hours past had been spent in, roaming hoarse in search of Li Ya, till shouts faded into the oblivion that listeners may have assumed the drunks of the night in. I became singular, looking for her, knowing well within minutes that I had lost her, and in an untenable recess of my mind, I knew it was best that I searched alone, without anyone else being given the opportunity of discovering me, and the drugged state I was in. My high made the passage of time immeasurable; because, by the time I reached the beach where I had left Fang Wei, it was deserted. There was only the sun coming through, drowning the last lights of the city night, and the peddler, SriJaya, who lay asleep on the sand, only a water bottle stuck upright in the sand next to him.
A drunken sleepless night, charged by loss had left me awake. I shook SriJaya, whose name I knew not then, and confronted him.
SriJaya, like me, was in the same shirt as on the evening of loss, but when I jerked him awake, he responded badly, not wanting to wake, making me drag him across the sand, towards the sea. I let the roar of the waves bring him about into the day before I deposited him in the sand.
“Leave me,” was all he said, without a shred of resistance, allowing me to complete the dragging of his body. I let his legs drop back onto the sand, landing away from my tiring hands. His slippers lay two meters behind. In-between was a deep grey furrow in the meters of sand that I had dragged him across.
SriJaya woke up at last, to what he saw, a sleepless drunk with a daughter lost.
“You bastard, bhenchod,” I said, as I released his ankles from my grip. “You were the last one who saw me
with her,” I was in the tempest of my loss, crazed and hapless.
An orange sun was climbing rapidly from the brightening blue brine of the sea. SriJaya opened his eyes “Sir, did you find her, you did, right?” he asked, genuinely wanting to hear that Li Ya was safe, and hoping to let the trades of my pleasure commence.
“No, I did not,” I said, backing off, succumbing to the genuine innocence of his question.
He pulled himself together, heading out to piss into the ocean. Then he faced me.
“You have not slept at all, have you? Here,” he placed a short line of coke on a small black marble cube and gave me a plastic bubble-tea straw, which I stuck in my nose before taking the powder in through my nostril. The effects were almost immediate, the coke left me feeling fresh and energised with almost no hint of the sleepless night I had spent looking for Li Ya. The heavy head from the hard drinking vanished as the coke spread its palliative tentacles over my brain. The snort had a sudden confidence boosting effect when I took it in, and, for the first time in the day past, deep inside I felt it would all work out, eventually. I was completely distraught before I had walked up to SriJaya. Now, I filled with a new confidence, confidence that I would find Li Ya, soon.
We drank from his bottle of water.
“Come let us go to the Police, maybe they have news about your girl, your wife may be there too,” we moved across the street and towards the station. SriJaya was thin and dark toned, he looked scrawny in a worned brown trouser, a dull grey shirt, tucked out, making easy, blending into crowds. He obviously lived on the streets, and in the beach shacks that he may find sleep in, on some nights. It was this sorry, ordinary, almost pitiful drug peddler who said what I have yearned to hear from Fang Wei and all of the other family and acquaintances who spoke to me about the loss of my daughter in the years ahead.
Lost in Pattaya Page 1
