Lost in Pattaya

by Kishore Modak

  By late afternoon on the following day, I was on the couch with the same intolerable ache all over my neck, shoulders and head. I looked at my phone, realising Rashmi had replied, consenting to meet.

  Though I shaved and showered before heading out, my face would have seemed puffed and swollen with shiny shorn skin, like the stretched surface of an underinflated balloon. My eyes, they would have looked narrow and sunken in the bloat that the alcohol and sedatives had caused. Despite the vigorous brushing, the throwing up, and the bowl of evening cereal, a faint alcoholic whiff remained about me, a constant reminder of the stupor from which I had awakened a few hours ago.

  Upright, my body felt unsteady, maybe because I had been lying drunk and sedated for over a day now.

  For a supposed player of squash racquets, this was utter, complete, waste of form and my lips pouted in grief, as I imagined my body skating in court shoes across the slatted wooden floor, neutering all that my opponents had to offer. A post-alcoholic tear ran down the swollen slopes of my face.

  A little crying is mostly ignored on commuter trains. People do notice grief; it is just that the turning away from another’s grief is an inward prayer, not staring and soaking in the naked spectacle of another’s anguish.

  Turning away from grief, it is built into seasoned commuters. They plummet in well-lit rakes through dark subterranean tunnels. You will agree that they are supremely claustrophobic labyrinths, the dark day-less furrow of the screaming velocity tunnel; especially if you were recovering from the bottles and pills that I had laid in the wake of that train.

  I still maintain trains are not what they used to be, a cure for any phobia and anyone’s dreads. The world, it needs pastoral silence, before a rhythmic steam train gushes across, toiling upslope with kinetic victory into the peaks, illustrating what was missing from the scape of land, a plume of elegance against the steepest gradient on offer.

  Daylight is panacea for the stoned and the un-drunks; take it from me. Even the last few wisps of the receding day’s evening brightened me slightly. If there is one motif for each of us, it has to be the formless story of our own lives, trapping each and every one of us, till we find a sense of normalcy to fake, despite the unplanned chaos that life takes us through. Very few of us are ready to share and confess the random order in which life commits us to.

  It would be abusive to call any lifetime ‘normal’.

  At the café, I spotted Rashmi easily. She was well aged, with no attempts at hiding the grey in her hair, or the pendulous sinking that we expect from any beyond our own age. She was slight built and it seemed she looked herself after since she was athletic and quick to move if the need for action presented itself. She was strangely attractive, in a cosmetic-free, natural sort of a manner, and friendly in the bright pastel shades of her ethnic wear.

  If you were to kiss a person like that, spontaneously, you would meet only healthy lips with no chemicals to mask the taste of a woman. Spontaneity was the gravity which I longed for, not needing washing and wiping before the moment of nearness dies belly up, leaving me flaccid and ready for sleep.

  “Are you Ok, you look awful today,” she said, after we had greeted. My state was reduced to such, even a complete stranger could tell there was something physically wrong here.

  “Yes I am fine. How are you today?” I sat down, asking for coffee. We made small talk, meaningless, before she asked kindly, “You wanted to see me?”

  “I wanted to share stories,” I said, a pearl of water appearing across my eyes, like a child controlling a wailing weep.

  She too had lost a girl.

  “We had given up on finding her, before I decided to move to Bangkok and start looking for her again,” she said, sliding her hand off mine, after the minutes it took for me to collect myself.

  “You mean you and your husband?” I asked.

  “No, I mean me, alone. She was our only child and the falling apart of our marriage was inevitable after she was gone. It is tough to remain coupled after you have lost the essence of a relationship, children,” she looked at me, kind enough not to pry into my impressions of her words, mostly agreement gathered through personal experience.

  My ballooned face seemed to de-tense back to its natural shape with the conversation that ensued. The coffee lay untouched and tepid on the table. I called for ice and a taller glass, into which I poured the latte over melting ice. I called for some water too, sensing that I was settling into an important conversation.

  “There was a gap of over ten years from when we lost her to when I found her,” she continued, speaking softly, but clearly; her composure too was cracking with each word of illustration.

  “How did you look for her?” I asked, this time keeping my hand on hers, hoping I’d ease the recounting of horror that I knew lay ahead.

  “First, I patrolled the red light districts, just moving about looking in the throng of girls that work in Bangkok. In fact, I even approached and worked with pimps, who were strangely sympathetic and some even tried to help, leading me into the dark, hidden world of child prostitution. She was not there, we did not find her . . . ” she drew her hands back, gently folding them as if in a long laborious prayer.

  “Why did the pimps offer help?”

  Because, for the right price, everything is for sale. “Where did you eventually find her?” I asked.

  “I found her begging in the streets. It is inaccurate to say that I found her, because what I found was not her, not mentally at least,” Rashmi spoke with an uneasy composure, forced, hiding all her angst and disappointment with her herculean effort of will. “I knew it was her, my baby, all grown physically, though her looks were ragged and her clothes were in tatters. But, she never recognised me, simply begging money off me as if I was another passer-by. Only the shell of her body remained . . . mentally she was ruined, or, shall we say rescued in premature senility. I was never able to hold her or hug her; she trembled and resisted my embraces. For that matter, any human touch left her panicking. The ten years, they had stolen her, and, in that sense, I never really found my daughter, I just found her walking dead body.”

  “Is she with you now? I am sure long term treatment will help bring her back?” I did not know what else to say since it would be unkind to relate to her my actual thought – Relief at meeting another who shared my state of failure as a parent, it was like finding and participating in a secret cult-club of a like-minded Klan members.

  “I tried all avenues of therapy . . . nothing seemed to work, so I put her in a home for the challenged, where she got the care and the usual therapy, which never helps,” her shoulders drooped, her head bent in defeat, yet her eyes moved and sparkled like beacons from a stormy shore. “Such a loss, it is for us to learn and live through . . . spirituality, service to society, care groups, they all help. But we need to find a way to live on as if we have lost a limb, learning to cope without it.”

  Insurance for squash players is to be ambidextrous.

  “Go ahead; ask me all the questions that you may have?” I knew she could make out, I was hesitant due to the grief that her answers to my questions may erupt in. Humans, we must be empathetic.

  “What happens to kids that are lost?”

  “It depends on the age and the gender. Boys and girls below the age of ten are usually part of ‘beggar’ mafias, they beg on the streets during the day and hand over earnings to their keepers at night. After they lose their childhood, they squander their youth to prostitution, particularly girls, gratiating the disfigured vile thirst that some men have. If they take to prostitution well, they may have a shelf life of up to twenty years, a point till which they are economically productive and maybe another ten years before their looks stale, rates dropping to a level where prostitution stops making sense for their pimps. This is the outcome of a few very lucky ones, becoming prostitutes and leading a fucked healthy life. Unfortunately, a large number simply disappear along the way, mostly to disease or addiction, or the mental decay that the
trauma each day leaves one in.”

  That is a terrible truth. Why?

  “Yes, in the initial years of loss, you will feel that way. However, with each year you will learn to build arguments of acceptance. Each lost parent is different, but, in general we all find different mental tactics to accept the loss.”

  That is a terrible acceptance. Why?

  “Acceptance, in most cases, stems from a simple notion. Irrespective of our status, or wealth, all of us are handed an equal amount of joy and happiness in our life time. If you lead a biologically complete life, you will be as happy or as sad as another. Child prostitutes, they too live a life, a complete one. One applies this logic to naturally complete lives, leaving anomalies that cut lives short on the tapering ends of the statistical bell, leaving all else an average.”

  Handing down of ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’, who does this in a manner equanimous? Are we not supposed to strive, and grab what our labour of body or mind may deserve?

  Empathy, good and fine, but this finally revealed her soft vulnerable decrepitude of self-resistance, hidden in the pretence of helping another. I could not resist piercing it with my pointed questioning, “So, you think your child, God help her, led… leads, a life as normal as another, who was not lost and ravaged before her time?” I coughed artificially at the faux pas of ‘led’ vs. ‘leads’, past vs. present fucking continuous, they were palpably relevant here. Suddenly, she seemed as if leaden, cold and metallic, impermeable.

  “Yes,” affirmation, that was the bedrock of her acceptance of loss. Her tears appeared, cloudy, squeezed through her lime green irises as she picked a serviette to blot the drips of sorrow with.

  I imagined her, a few years down the road, weeping in her grave, loud enough for all above to scream and run. Consumed in the jaws of rodents before succumbing to microbes, her flesh would decay, leaving behind ivory clean sockets of the skull. How can a thing, dry as bone, produce tears? I knew Rashmi, sitting opposite me in bright pastel designs, would find a way to melt her cranial ridges to tears.

  My untouched coffee had watered down with the ice that I had added earlier. I slugged it, and the glass of water besides it, hoping that the fluids would help me through the revival from hangover.

  A hangover is like a fork on a journey. On one path is abstinence and physical recovery, while on the other finger lie the dungeons of a mental excess, commonly understood as addiction.

  Outside, the evening turned to honey and the light of the city gradually phased the day out with a halogen glow from neatly separated street lamps. Just for a few moments, before the city turned on its night lights, the steeple of the cathedral at City Hall peaked into the warmth of an Impressionist hot-embered sky. In the day’s dead twilight, a few lovers held on to each other, just glad that the work day was over and behind them. Some stopped to kiss, spreading smiles before moving on. An uncharacteristic cool breeze swept across the street and then it poured cats and pelicans, forcing me to shelter in the subterranean rail station, eventually riding towards the riverside, where I sat pinting in beers.

  I ate and drank immorally. Sausages and mash with fries, exactly the stuff that squash players avoid. Of course, the resolve of a comeback on the squash court kept me sane and within a mental boundary of restraint, a line beyond which lies death from a single night of drinking. Alcohol is the worst poison, mostly because it is so easily available. Seeing me by myself, a few bar girls were drawn, asking for drinks in exchange for a few words and some faked moments of companionship. Faked from their side; I was all up for any friendship that passed my failed past and my empty present by.

  It was not an unfair trade.

  Mondays, not having to wake up and ride to work, found me nursing hangovers from the drinking blizzard of the weekend past, with massages following insipid steamed food, paving a soft tortured revival. By Tuesday mornings each week, I resumed life, joining the day-people, not fitting in their slow pace and extremes of age. In the evenings, I dragged myself to the squash club, seeing buddies transform into targets of extraction, mining deep and unashamed, favours of employment, wanting desperately to re-join the workforce. Squash too, was attempted to a point where the infraction of hearts can arrest enthusiasm. I failed, as regards dying on the squash floor. I simply ran up and across on the court, thinking I would die, but it did not end that way. Exertion at squash caused a familiar benign pain along the sides of my abdomen, fallout from the excess of drinking on the weekend. The pain kept me from the bottle but drew me to my stash of pills, before I improved my performance on the squash court by Thursdays. Fridays, I headed back to the riverside, drinking without the guilt that I had wiped clean with a few days of squash, seeking respite in those who part with good-natured company in exchange of money. I paid often for sex on Fridays, never at my flat though, since I did not want Fang Wei to walk in on me, even though it did not matter anymore. All weekend, I wasted myself in bars, parks, and supermarkets, wandering in the angst of loss until one day an idea took root. It sprouted in a faraway part of my brain, like a tiny sapling of a future giant appearing in the forest of my thoughts. It was a solution for all the losses that had piled like crushing weights upon me. I felt like a mathematician presented with a hint, like an ever so small a key, yet fitting intricately through locks, revealing the un-ventured space of a proof, a path through a maze that he or she alone was chosen to negotiate.

  After the sapling-solution got sown, it was visible only when the thought-forest was watered by the fluid shafts of the golden alcohol, surfacing each and every time I took to the bottle. Otherwise, I never dwelled upon it, until it became plausible, growing despite the illumination of daylight and without the devoid-manure of liquor, during the hours of wakeful dead dawns, often the only hours that I did not drink in.

  I did not hear from Fang Wei, and simply dreaded the SingPost man who carries the message of separation from lawyers, an inevitable communication forcing my signature of receipt, the thought of which sank the dagger of failure deeper into my grief.

  Unwittingly, I fell into the unchanging routine of a weekly rhythm, somewhere midway giving up upon the strength that society and its people are supposed to provide. I was simply drinking the drink, hitting the ball, popping the pill, bedding the whores fifty-odd times, before I realised that the year was out. Excessive living, it makes one reticent, wanting to cover an inner core of consumption, one that society perceives as debased. The simplest escape is to be cut off, socially. It happens unwittingly, wearing dark glasses in malls, or by pulling baseball caps low, over the forehead when in crowds lest an acquaintance may stop you, or by not writing to nor receiving any word from friends for weeks at end, avoiding even the benign questions that innocuous members of society like taxi drivers or sales clerks may pose from time to time. The only conversations that occurred were of me with myself. Soon all voices were goading me to stare unblinking at the sapling-solution. My stare watering it to grow at an unnatural pace, till I and the forest of my thought-conversations stood dwarfed by the gigantic tree that towered above us, a cancer we had created, nurtured by us, me and the conversational Yin of my Yang.

  A counter, since each and every act of mine was both completely right and utterly disappointing. Even the solution that we came upon, my counter arguments to it were numerous and solid, yet it had grown and assumed a proportion that left me in front of the internet screen one night, checking for flights and hotels in Pattaya.

  Employment, re-entry into the workforce remained an elusive goal. Its longing dulled with each passing month, till the point where I stopped seeking employment. It was at about the same time that I lost my fear of the Postman, since by then he had found me, delivering the notice of separation from Fang Wei through her lawyers, leaving me to hire a lawyer of my own, one who would wrestle with terms that may become lucrative for me. For now I remained in the flat; my lawyer was confident that we would retain it.

  My lawyer was Singaporean, and hence I trusted him, leaving even banking p
asswords with him, with a balance of sums that he could cash and manage while I was away.

  The sapling-thought was not about suicide, which was just a constant companion, like a meaningless friend who keeps clawing and rummaging at his own crotch, just empty in useless nose-digging companionship.

  The germinal, it was planted on the path of finding Li Ya, whom I did, but in a manner that left me far more depleted with her than I was without her.

  My attack of hearts, literally, lay ahead in the hands of Miho and her mistress Thuy Binh.

  Part 2

  Pictures of Li Ya

  My plan, the one I obsessed over, was simple. In the rubble of dead flesh and wasted youth, I would pose as a client seeking child prostitutes, working through the pile of girl-children till I stumbled upon Li Ya, my own flesh.

  When I landed in Pattaya, first off I saw Sri Jaya, scored, shot up, and had him put me in the same whore house which had soothed me on that first night following the loss. I asked for the same prostitute by name, and did not emerge from the brothel for a week except for a walk each evening when she took me out to the little Buddhist temple at the end of the street. I squared my bills in cash each day from the ATM right next to Buddha and that kept the pimp’s attention away from me, till on day-eight I declared to the whore, kneeling in front of her Lord- “I am bored.”

  A one, to whom all pray and beg, has to get lonely, like the pimp queen and her muse Miho, who lay only hours ahead now.

  “I have not come all this way to enjoy what I can get anywhere in the world,” was the summary of my soft-spoken complaint.

  “What else do you want, you have to just let us know and we will help you get what you want,” the prostitute assumed that I was looking for the variety of substance beyond the pot, coke and alcohol that they had on offer. “Heroin? Crack? Pill? Mandrax? Charas? Hashish? Psychotrop?” she asked, smiling right there, besides her temple.

  My request which followed, one of debauched sexual gratification, she could never have guessed. I had been straight and simple with her, not asking once for her to get down on her knees.