Lost in Pattaya

by Kishore Modak

  After a few hits, we settled for wine and fruits, warm humid sea breeze soothing us with the mist of sea.

  “Wait, let me steer a few kilometres away from the beach so we are truly by ourselves,” she said, moving to the small but efficient bridge, commandeering the vessel with the confidence of a seasoned sailor for about fifteen minutes into the dark of sea, before ratcheting the anchor into the ocean depths.

  We curled, puppy-like in love as I held her body, wanting to show her the tenderness that men are capable of.

  Later we drank a bit more on the upper deck, a couple of Merlot’s before descending into the vessels belly where we fell asleep naked, having made more lingering love for about an hour.

  Not heading back to the beach-house that night was the last nail in the death of reason, the point from which things started to fall rapidly apart and into the deepest abyss of my final loss.

  On the following morning as the sun spread its colours across the ocean again, Thuy Binh awakened me to a dull ache from the alcohol and coke of the previous night. She seemed distant and worried as she quickly wrapped on her Sarong.

  “We seem to be drifting, something is wrong, quick, get dressed,” she said, moving towards the one-person wide spiral-stairwell leading to the open deck above.

  I was only a few minutes behind Suay, and when I emerged, it wasn’t the vastness of the ocean on one side with our empty stretch of beach on the other that greeted me; my vision instead was marred by the ugly claustrophobia of a loathsome giant metropolis – Bangkok. The polluted coastline loomed only a few hundred meters away from us, the mouth of her black-hearted river spread like an evil smile, as if wanting to dissolve us with the industrial liquid acid-waste that spewed out from the city’s sewers and into the blue crystalline purity of our ocean. As I moved forward, the outcome of my failed reason lay in tatters. Miho, she was on the bow with her naked knives spread alongside, like pets meant to keep mute company. Small bits of her clothing had been bitten away by her knives, her hair was dishevelled and her face had been washed clean by rivers of tears from her big luminescent bloodshot eyes, which widened further as they looked at me. Thuy Binh was kneeling besides her, cradling Miho’s head in her lap, caressing her forehead, trying to open conversations while Miho stared pan dead, her gaze burning right through me as she gritted her teeth in anger, tightening the grip around the handle of her Tanto. Thuy Binh raised her right arm, fanning her palms at me, wanting me to go away, which I did, since the image of the beast that had possessed Miho was too frightening to be in the vicinity of.

  Miho had witnessed the intimacy between her mistress and me. From that discovery, her convolution of thought would lead to a breakdown of measurement. On some such thought-avenue, she may have taken herself to be all but finished, now that she had lost her mistress to another. Further, in her night of anguish she may have steered the Yacht towards Bangkok, and into the gaping hell where Kawai was Prince. My instinct was to pack and leave, for which I was ill prepared since we had not planned on a journey of any sort on the previous evening. All the same, I grabbed a dry-bag, ruing the persuasions deployed by me in wooing Thuy Binh on the previous evening. I threw what I could into the bag, a few sachets of coke, a few threads of clothing, a towel and a small army knife that I found in the drawer.

  “Quick you have to swim ashore, time is short, just follow my instructions,” Thuy Binh entered, locking the door to the lower deck, hastily scribbling on a post-it. “When you get ashore, call the doctor and ask him to make arrangements to get us out of here. No cell phones,” she opened the safe, embedded in the hitherto hidden wooded teak panelling, and gave me wads of US dollars.

  “Why don’t we just turn around and motor back to Pattaya, we will be there in a couple of hours at most. I can’t see anything quicker than the Southern Cross in these waters,” I tried to remain calm, reasoning with her.

  “We have lost power, we are drifting, she has a broken transmission, we can’t sail back. You go and find a hotel in the city. Meet me around sunset at the temple of the monkey-headed god at the southern end of Patpong. If you don’t find me there, look for me at sunrise near the lake in Lumphini Park. In case we don’t cross in the next week, you are on your own. Now go and get in touch with the doctor immediately. May the lord go with you,” from the safe she extricated a pistol too and handed it to me along with a small box of bullets.

  “What about you and Miho?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, she is upset and cannot fathom losing me to another. I will have to speak to her, persuade her back to Pattaya. If I can’t do that, I am sure by the time the day runs out Kawai will know his opportunity at crushing us has finally arrived. There is a rope ladder at the stern, use that to descend and swim ashore. Wait for me to kill the engine first. Go now, and call the doctor immediately when you get ashore.”

  I waited for the boat’s motor to die since its propellers and their violent revolt would never allow me to descent stern-side without casualty.

  The swim was long and strenuous, but it provided a diversion from the fear that was gripping me with eventualities my mind conjured. I had no documents, what if I lost touch with Thuy Binh altogether, what would I do? Even if I did find Thuy Binh, it was likely that Kawai would sense her absence in Pattaya and launch a manhunt. With her Yacht in plain sight, he would not take long to add things up. It was also plausible, with Thuy Binh’s absence Kawai would swoop into Pattaya, gaining control of our ground, leaving us to hide and run. If discovered, he would slay us. Maybe, it was better for me to simply move away, try and find a passage back to Singapore all by myself. I had records of identification there, which could be pulled up to verify my sorry existence. It was a long walk back, but on grounds of pure reason, it was not unfathomable for me to cross the Thai and Malaysian borders on foot, given the money I was carrying on me.

  I prayed, even as I swam, for Thuy Binh and the triumph of strength that she always put in her lord, to see us through the next few days, emerging unscathed, having accosted Kawai. Accosting Kawai, was it even plausible in the absence of her most powerful weapon, deadly Miho, who was wasting in jealousy when finally the need of her allegiance arose.

  Then there was Li Ya, who would pass through Bangkok in as few as seven days. In such mental turmoil I finally stood beached, still, in the shallow sands of exhaustion. I could confront her parents, lamenting my past and begging them to stand as guarantors while I worked my way through the officialdom of immigration and checkpoints in Thailand. They would agree, since from it they stood to add another moral victory to their tally of gains, to see me cower and beg, allowing them to exhibit a failed father to a teenage child, tearing her permanently away from me.

  All these avenues of thought were just figments of my imagination. Ahead lay a path I never once conceived on that first day spent by myself in Bangkok.

  The dry-bag I was carrying proved its worth. I dressed on the beach and moved quickly because I wanted to lose myself to the streets of Bangkok as inconspicuously as possible, just in case Kawai’s gang came around to question the ragged people in the shanties along the beach that I had landed on.

  In a couple of hours I was in the most forgotten lodge in the world. I had travelled in a tuk-tuk and then wandered about for an hour on foot, ensuring the tuk-tuk driver had no opportunity of directing anyone onto my tail. In that hour I procured a cell phone and tried calling the doctor in Pattaya, to no avail since his phone seemed switched off. At the forgotten-lodge I paid in advance for the week, showered, got stoned and lay in bed, staring at the revolutions of the ceiling fan above my head. Fear seethed through my pores and I felt unsafe in the stillness of my rented room, so I ventured back out and entered a movie theatre where I spent a couple of hours in the relative safety of darkness. Towards evening I strolled into Patpong and found the temple, staying well away from it, alert for any sign of Thuy Binh, observing from a distance. After an hour I gathered the courage to enter the temple, bowing and praying in front of t
he lord, hoping Thuy Binh would find me and make things well again.

  She never showed up, neither at the temple nor at the lake in Lumphini Park which I patrolled each day in the silly garb of a jogger.

  I tried reaching the doctor a couple of times, from different phone booths and internet cafes, it rang unanswered only once; the rest of my attempts were met with polite switched off recordings.

  On the third day, I made my way back to the beach where I had landed. The yacht was no longer on the water.

  On returning to the forgotten-lodge I contemplated my next move. Things had spiralled away from my control and it was logical to wind my way back to Pattaya, seeking the truth of events that may have befallen my lover-benefactor Thuy Binh and her soured-lesbian lover, Miho. In Pattaya I would be recognised, yet it would not be tedious to make inquiries surreptitiously, since I would be in my neighbourhood.

  I was baffled at my inability in reaching the doctor.

  Was Kawai already in Pattaya laying siege on our ground? Were they all dead, in which case it would be best to disappear from this plot too? If I were to eventually disappear, the thought of seeing Li Ya once, telling her that I loved her, before melting into oblivion consumed me in the three days ahead, before I actually saw her.

  Until I met her, I never once felt the true guilt of losing Li Ya.

  This thought of disappearing, it was another trick of the desperate mind, knowing well that I had limited destinations for doing so. The option of acting naive, by hiring whores and making enquiries about Kawai’s whereabouts kept me enlivened. In fantasy, when Kawai confronted me, I would kill him, freeing Thuy Binh and Miho from his clutches, repaying in one stroke all the kindness they had bestowed upon me. In a stoned extension of that same fantasy, I would have the means to travel to, and from where Li Ya lived in the future, participating in her life while retaining the luxury of returning back to the life that I had with Thuy Binh and Miho. In that same dream, I wanted Miho’s memory to become accepting of me and Thuy Binh, just as I was ready to accept her lesbian past with my present lover.

  Through those three days, I spoke to no one, simply tangling up in conversations with my counter, that same other which appears each time cocaine takes on an excessive proportion.

  When I reached the terminal building, I did not have definite plans other than that of observing my little girl from a distance. On the concourse past immigration, her image came sparkling through the stone, giving purpose that diverted me from the addiction gripping me these past days. In that instant, I felt her, cuddled as an infant in my arms and the energy of rough-housing that we expended each weekend when she was growing up with me. Now, she was nearly a woman, striking with the glow of youth, smiling as her parents’ secured papers that travelling families become paranoid over. Fang Wei and Georgy, they were with Li Ya in the distance, across from the crowds that milled on the concourse. They were looking ragged with the passage of time, as if the burden of their moral decrepitude had been too heavy to bear without physical decay. No ill-will or spite surfaced in me when I saw my ex with my stealing friend, even though they were the pirates of my life’s torment. Maybe, I was too full with the miracle of Li Ya’s image which glowed and tingled, spreading its luminescence across the terminal building. I bathed in that miracle, knowing well it was the coke sparkling.

  Like the aging do often after flights, both Georgy and Fang Wei left for the washroom, a good fifty meters away, treading in my direction. I pulled my cap lower and moved towards them. We crossed only metres from each other. Li Ya was ahead of me, fidgeting on her phone, glancing around as if in the discomfort of feeling a constant unwavering gaze, mine, which had been on her from the minute I had spotted her on the concourse.

  It was a narrow time window, of only a few minutes before her parents would return comforted from their visit around the corner. In the impulse of an opportunity that may not present itself again, I grabbed chances and was barely a meter or two from Li Ya, still concealed enough to stride past without her noticing me, if I so decided.

  From behind her I took the cap off my head and gently spoke her name “Li Ya,” the first word I had uttered in days, almost as if the word was worthy of breaking the penitent vow of silence that Thai Buddhism preaches.

  Her reaction to my sudden presence was all revealing in its spontaneity, finally letting me know the sentiment that she harboured in her heart as regards the memory of her biological father went; a sentiment of hatred, love or worse still indifference.

  “Dad,” she almost screamed to my alarm, a beam of happiness spreading across her face, as if in a sudden eruption of pleasure.

  She leapt into my arms making us conspicuous, but I held her, my big baby, taking her in, knowing well that very few teenage girls hug their dads unabashedly.

  In the next instant, I took her hand and moved about twenty meters away from the luggage she was looking over. Here, behind the huge vertical cement beam resisting the infinite inertia of the terminal roof above, we were hidden enough to talk, at least for the few minutes before panic may strike parents suspecting misfortunes befalling children. From the corner of my eye, I saw Georgy emerging and moving listlessly back towards the heap of his baggage. He did not panic, with the incomplete picture in which he saw his luggage in; after all the missing element, Li Ya, she was old enough for a parent to feel easy about a short absence.

  “How have you been my darling?” I asked her, tears brimming in my eyes.

  “I missed you dad. I knew you would come and see me when you could. I just had to be patient and wait for you,” she too was overcome.

  “I want to spend some time with you. We don’t fly till a few days later, I want to be with you for a few days in Bangkok, Can I, can I?” she begged.

  “You know your mother will never allow that, and I can’t force the matter since you are not yet eighteen,” I replied.

  “I am old enough to be allowed time with my dad, you can just take me away for a few days, why do you have to tell mum?” she said.

  “But . . . your mum will be worried and she will go berserk looking for you,” I was taken completely aback, though comforted in the proposal of exaggerated time that she wanted with me.

  “It will be for a couple of days, nothing compared to the years of misery that she has put you through. I can only imagine how you would have torn yourself apart, knowing that I was lost in the red-light district of Thailand,” her eyes hardened, though her words were of compassion.

  I sunk, feeling disappointed with the thankless demeanour of a child towards her ward, Fang Wei. The sinking was from the ignorance of my child, about investments that mums make when dads lie stoned in whorehouses. Li Ya was young and unforgiving of the environment that nurtured her, abusing what was helping her become an educated, affluent woman. In my mind, I was thankful to Fang Wei and Georgy for taking care of my kiddo.

  “Li Ya, you must pray, you must seek peace, you must study and lead a grand life. I am the past; don’t enter the mess of my discord with your mother. She is caring for you and that is what is important,” I grew worried, for I knew youth is wasted upon the young, and, I never wanted Li Ya to enter my world in the manner she was suggesting. Fang Wei was capable of settling Li Ya well, it was me who wanted to be part of Li Ya’s world, never the other way around.

  Georgy studied the abandoned baggage, fished out his phone before thumbing its keypad, rousing Li Ya’s phone, which glowed blue with the name of her foster father on it, simply Georgy. Just one word, saved in the devoid presence of softness, it upset me, for she should have provided a suffix he deserved: ‘Dad’.

  She did not answer the phone, moving simply towards the exit, leaving me to follow her about seven to ten meters behind.

  Outside the terminal, she hailed a cab, waited for me to join her before providing directions to the taxi driver ‘Holiday Inn, Silom.’

  “Dad, chill, I have it all worked out. Don’t worry; I will let them know I am safe and that I will see them be
fore we board the flight for the Gold-coast,” she said, keying her message of disappearance on her phone, leaving hapless I was sure, parents on the receiving end of the line, the line of teenage rebellion.

  “Li Ya, your mother does not deserve that, they will become frantic, calling the police and looking for you. If they find you with me things will be very unpleasant,” I said, worried at the rebellion and the ability at plotting that this young woman displayed.

  “No dad, they won’t call the police. I fight over you all the time with them. They will guess that I am with you; I know that they know you are in Thailand staying on after you failed to find me. They will simply wait for me to turn up for the flight out of Bangkok.”

  “Are you hungry?” I asked, not knowing what to say without thinking-through things for a while.

  My biggest folly was the hope of future remedies for what we must confront in the present.

  “Yes,” she said. We rode for about thirty minutes before arriving at the Inn, which was only a ten minute walk from the forgotten-lodge.

  In the half-hour ride, I mulled the revelation of Li Ya, discovery of her adult built that only a few minutes of conversation had lain stark.

  They, Georgy, Li Ya and Fang Wei, discussed me and probably knew more about me than I thought. It was possible that they had paid private agencies to track and report on my life from time to time, reports which may have left them more than satisfied as regards my inability at causing disruptions to their life.

  Li Ya knew that I lived in Thailand, with the same folks who had provided her with playful company for a few weeks in her childhood. How would she have known? Actually, was it not straight forward for a child to discover the truth despite all the lies she may have been envenomed with?

  At the Holiday Inn, she had a room reservation, on the supplementary credit card that her parents had gotten for her.

  “Don’t use that card, here I will pay by cash,” I extended US dollars to the check-in clerk.