Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  (34)

  My unborn son, that bastard spawned in sentimentality, that symbol of an imagined future, that monkey on my back. My unborn son, my sweet monkey, the remainder of a disaster, my oncoming madness, my artistic possibility, my idea of art, my fountainhead, my curse, my terrible curse, the blood and tincture, both, of my traumas, the locus of my rebellions, my Marxist son, my novelist son, my poet son, my absent son, the detritus of my love, the cancer of my heart, my us, my us, my pus—that son of a bitch had to die.

  (35)

  When I woke up the next morning, tired and with a head ache from all that dreaming, I knew the pattern my day was going to take. I took a crap. I washed my hands. I brushed my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. I had no trouble with what the mirror showed me, which is to say that I had some unselfconscious moments that morning. What I didn’t do was try to construct a grin. I was going to fuck whores, this being my last day, and I felt comfortable in that knowledge. There was the matter of Noon. As for Orhan, I didn’t give him much thought. I somehow knew I was not going to bump into him.

  I had the staff clean my room before I took a shower. The change of bed sheets and towels, the clearing of beer bottles and cigarette butts, the replacement of the odour in the room with something both flowery and synthetic—all these had a salutary effect on me. I felt anew, didn’t smoke the entire morning, and even considered quitting smoking forever. I went to a restaurant that served English breakfast. I ate slowly, and read the first two chapters of an American crime novel.

  Then I took a walk along the seaside boulevard. I noticed the tourists, especially the ones who were alone like me. They walked slower than the rest, a bit dazed, perhaps, by how their mindless sexual romps still managed to play with their minds. Maybe some of them were clean, had not frolicked with the ladies in Pattaya, but I was lethargic and allowed my assumptions to be all-inclusive. While most faces were impassive, none could be said to be looking happy. That the transaction always left behind a remainder inside, a beautiful ache or an ugly trouble—this knowledge was not mine alone, I realized.

  At that moment I felt as light as I do when I am writing longhand on unruled paper, focusing only on the sentence, unburdened by any need for beginning or closure; and like the tense rhythm of a pencil’s lead on paper, the sounds of people walking on the boulevard and the occasional horn of a vehicle and the low grumble of motorbikes right now had a positive effect on me.

  Nothing would change in the world of action, I knew. In an hour or so I would enter Soi6 and fuck a new whore. I would have some beer before and after that. Then I would walk past Marie Bar Beer, just to check if Noon was there. If I found her, I would share a drink with her, maybe have a photo of us taken. I would then try to gift her that photo. I would spend the whole day with her. After that I would say goodbye and probably have a heavy Thai dinner all by myself. Or maybe I would invite Noon to dinner. I would then go back to my room to let the night glide by. Or maybe I would invite Noon to my room as well, not for anything more than a short round of beers …

  (36)

  But it rained. Fat droplets fell on my face as I exited the place where I had gone in for some foot reflexology. Grey clouds grumbled every now and then. I rushed toward Soi6, trying to move under the awnings of the various cafes and bars as much as I could. I looked down when I crossed the joint where the girl I had fucked twice in the last two days might have been available. I looked down also before the joint where the old woman could have been. I entered a lounge bar at the far end of Soi6, the one close to Marie Bar Beer. Wet as I was from the rain, I nevertheless sat on an imitation-leather couch and ordered a Singha. Almost immediately, a fair Thai girl approached me, and even before she could say a word I said yes aloud. I left my beer behind and followed her to a room upstairs. She gave me the towel, and I started using it to dry myself, but then she hinted toward the bathroom and I remembered that I had to in fact take a shower. After the showers, we started doing what we were supposed to do. She had some crumpled skin on her lower belly, like a dried mango, and it was clear that she had had a child not too long back. This fact unnerved me once again, and because of this, or perhaps because of a combination of various things—the rain, the foot reflexology, my mindset or the adequate sexual activity lately—I just could not come. We tried for long, my exertions in the heightened humidity of the room had me soaked in sweat, and there came a point when I just gave up. The woman took it as an affront. Maybe she thought that if I was not satisfied I would not pay. To dispel her fear I told her that it was okay, that it was not her fault, and that I would pay her the price nevertheless. But she was unwilling to accept this settlement. She wanted me to come, and her insistence seemed to be a matter of adhering to some hidden Pattaya code that mandated a client’s satisfaction even if the client had no energy for such a thing. It was a frustrating situation, maybe a bit funny too, for I knew that sex with her could not make me come. The only way it could happen was if I did it by myself, though that too could take a long time. But she insisted. And so I started stroking myself back into excitement, with her by my side, kissing me intently and rubbing my chest. I contracted all my muscles and pushed, and after some minutes I did come, though it happened only after I had closed my eyes and imagined that the whore was in love with me.

  When I exited the bar the rain had become lighter. The air was filled with a strange youthful quality and also some melancholy, both of which I inhaled with every breath. It became necessary that I go to a place that I was familiar with. I walked to Marie Bar Beer. The place was empty save the woman whose job it was to manage the cash counter. I sat down and ordered a coffee, and the woman looked at me smilingly. ‘Coffee?’ she asked, as if allowing me the time to rethink what I wanted. After some time, after she cleaned the bar top and the bottles and washed a few of the glasses, she asked if she could join me. She poured herself a whiskey. ‘Noon hap to work, you understand, right?’ she asked.

  That she mentioned Noon without my having asked her, that she both explained to me that Noon had to work and cared if I understood that fact, that Noon had told her coworkers at the bar about me—all of this made me smile. I rejected my coffee and ordered a whiskey, at which this lean woman of deep wrinkles and unruly hair gave me an approving wink. I realized that I could ask questions about Noon and that she would be happy to answer.

  ‘Was Noon a nurse before she came to Pattaya?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said. ‘Bangkok. She new in Pattaya.’

  ‘Why did she have to come here then?’

  ‘She hap to make more money, no? She hap trouble.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Just then the broad broad emerged from behind the bar. She looked at me and grinned, and this time I did not find anything wrong with that grin. I think I grinned back, even raised my glass to further acknowledge her presence. She came up to us and asked me if I would buy her a drink. I bought her one, after which she told me her name, which I cannot of course recollect.

  ‘You come for Noon?’ the broad broad asked me.

  ‘Ye-yes,’ I answered. I felt a certain fear in certifying that I had come for a specific girl, for Noon; it was as if I were exposing a weakness.

  ‘She get married to Korean man,’ the broad broad said. The cashier woman immediately slapped her on the arm. It was clearly something that could not be revealed, or could not be revealed to me.

  The shock of it did not hit me immediately. My first thought was that the man I had mistook as Japanese was in fact Korean. But then the word ‘marriage’ was heeded in my mind, and at once I was overtaken by an immense confusion that took me violently off guard. My eyes must have betrayed me, for the cashier woman placed her hand upon mine and said, ‘She hap to work.’

  Hearing this I could feel my own pulse quickening. What work demanded marriage? I thought, stupidly. The answer was of course too clear. But then there were other questions in my head: Why had Noon talked about me? What had she said? Had she decided to marry
this Korean man only yesterday? Was it really going to be a marriage? et cetera. But as the rage subsided in silence and the lights in the street adjoining Marie Bar Beer slowly came into their own, I knew that what concerned me most was not how Noon had felt for me or how Noon had agreed to marry the Korean man. It was, strangely, the question of her happiness. I wanted to know if I had made her happy, if the Korean man had made her happy, if marriage with the Korean man would make her happy; I wanted to know the amount of sadness she had at this very instant and whether she was moving to a life of more happiness.

  (37)

  This time, as you can see, I took pause at happiness.

  (38)

  I drank more at Marie Bar Beer as the night thickened and the women who worked there joined in and showered the other customers with their attention. Perhaps they were aware too that I would reserve my interest, at least at Marie Bar Beer, only to Noon. For company, I had the cashier lady who continued to sit opposite me and take sips of whatever drink it was that she was having. She was also reading a little book, and when I asked her what it was she passed it to me. It had for cover a cartoon of a Pattaya girl in a go-go costume. It was titled ‘Pattaya Bar Girl Handbook’ and had no more than fifty tiny pages, each of which contained sentences in Thai and their translation in English. I skimmed through the book, and I saw Sir, your penis is too big for me … Sir, I do not suck cock … Sir, I will not do anal sex, et cetera. The discovery of this booklet meant that there should be other such little things to be discovered in Pattaya, and that I, by whoring and getting massaged and worrying about the neon lights, hadn’t really looked at, or into, Pattaya; I hadn’t really tried to discover what the prostitutes did to be who they were. Where the gaudy dresses were made, what cosmetic brands were preferred, where did these women really live—these would be interesting bits to know. Whenever my Pattaya trip turned into a written story, a turning that I knew I would ensure, it could benefit from these additional details. These would endow my story with some journalistic authority if not anything else.

  It was while thinking of this, of little discoveries and the great time they require that I hit upon the realization that it was my last night in Pattaya. It disconcerted me, and not without ill-feeling did I think that tomorrow would bring the return to Mumbai. To think that Pattaya was almost over filled me with a kind of dread, because I knew that now I would be left to think about whether Pattaya did or did not give me what I had come here for. At that point I felt that the story had not ended; or perhaps, because I was aware, and am aware, that stories in real life do not seek an inflection for an end, that in fact real life is constantly fizzling out and has no stories to talk about, I was disappointed with the ending that was staring down my tired face: there was loud music; there was the lust of the customers and the pliant touches of the dolled-up girls; there was the cashier lady sitting opposite me and reading a booklet of smut education; there were taxis on the road carrying fat clients and their thin girls; there were tourists crowding the footpaths … and there was rain, lots and lots of it, again.

  (39)

  To end it right here is a big temptation, for the rest of the night is something that I have not made sense of completely. It might just be too banal. There are occasions when I consider it as the stuff of soap operas, sentimental tosh of the kind that this story has already suffered a lot from. At other times, I think of that night’s subsequent events as the best end—even better than what fiction could provide—to my story of Pattaya. I think it is an end that seems quite like the middle, yet carries the weight of intention that an end should have. As you must have guessed, it involves Noon. But please don’t expect too much. It is not that I come out of the end understanding Noon any better; she remains as unknowable as in the middle of the story. It is also not that I come out of the end with any shred of dignity; I remain as naked as in the middle of the story. What happens—and this is my best explanation for it—is that Noon’s unknowability and my nakedness shed their malaise.

  (40)

  The broad broad and the cashier lady looked toward the road and shrieked in joy. I looked up sluggishly from my drink. Noon had arrived on the back of a motorbike taxi. She was in a yellow raincoat, and for a moment she looked to me like a schoolgirl returning from a late evening class. While she paid the bike rider, and as my excitement grew, I caught the cashier lady looking at me with a wistful smile. I gathered that she and the broad broad were happy not because of seeing Noon, which is something they did every day, but because they expected good things out of the meeting between me and Noon, which was, perhaps, a kind of meeting they did not see that often.

  Noon waved at me and smiled. I think I smiled back. Then she came close to me and started taking off her raincoat, but because our gazes were locked and because she was a bit too eager to take the raincoat off, she couldn’t manage to do it as swiftly as she wanted to. We laughed together, probably in the shared knowledge that meeting me had made Noon visibly happy, that she didn’t want to waste a minute doing little things, that she was excited enough to want to tear out of the raincoat. My inhibitions and questions about her vanished into thin air.

  I helped her with the raincoat the second time. ‘Thank you,’ Noon said.

  I noticed then the rather gaudy party dress that Noon was in, a dress that began too late and ended too soon, and the meaning of the dress disturbed me.

  Noon sat on the stool next to mine. ‘You hap fun in Pattaya?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘NO!?’ she laughed at that.

  ‘No. Because I didn’t see you a second time.’

  ‘I hap to work.’

  ‘Are you coming back from a party?’

  Noon didn’t understand my question. So I repeated it, but this time I replaced the word ‘party’ with ‘customer’.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  At that point the cashier lady came in and talked to Noon in Thai. It was obvious that I was a part of their conversation. Suddenly Noon turned to me and said, ‘You here for four hours?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Yes, to meet you.’

  ‘But why?’

  The cashier lady excused herself, letting us have the privacy to have a little argument.

  ‘Because I wanted to see you before I left,’ I said. ‘I am leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘You go tomorrow? India?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Noon sighed and turned, staring at something distant. To be, she had to delete her past, and she had to let go of that bothersome idea of the future. This was what the world demanded of her. Whatever her story was, it was a story more painful than mine. And there was no Pattaya for her to go to. For she was already in real Pattaya, where pains like hers were massacred each day. Softly I took her arm and pulled her toward me. Her beautiful face, blackened by the smudged eyeliner, her eyelashes dabbed in tears. ‘You marry Korean man?’ I asked. My question startled her. She gave out a sob, implored me with her eyes to talk about something else. And then she burst out crying. She hid her face with her hands, hid it so tightly that I could not make her show it for a while. Embarrassed, I looked around. The broad broad was sipping her whiskey solemnly, with a stern hopelessness on her face that I could not bear more than one glance of. The cashier lady was looking at us and chewing her nails. The other women and their customers, unmindful of us, were doing what they were wont to do. Then Noon showed her face, taut and expressionless. What was shame had mutated into strength. I repeated my question, needlessly, but my voice was now bottomless. Noon clasped my hands tightly. ‘Yes, I marry Korean man,’ she said.