Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  There was a pause. I couldn’t think of what to say.

  ‘I like you very much,’ Noon said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I go to Seoul in one week. Korean man hap money.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘You hap fun in Pattaya?’

  ‘Yes, I had fun.’

  ‘I’m sorry I make bad your vacation.’

  ‘No, don’t be sorry.’

  ‘You should go. You should go to more bar.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hap fun, please. Please go. Tomorrow you go to India. So hap fun tonight, please.’ Noon pushed me and turned away, exaggeratedly. She didn’t really want me to go.

  ‘I want to be here with you,’ I said.

  ‘But I hap to go. I hap to change my dress and then I hap to go.’

  ‘To the Korean man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much time do you have?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What time do you have to leave?’

  ‘In … in one.’

  ‘Hour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Okay. Beer?’

  I ordered beers for us both. The cashier lady brought them. Noon took out an iPhone from her little purse and showed it to her. They talked in hurried Thai. I understood that the phone was a gift from Noon’s fiancé. Then Noon wiggled the fingers on her right hand, one of which was wearing a rather spectacular ring. I found this exhibitionism vulgar, but as soon as the cashier lady left us, Noon’s expressions took a grim air.

  ‘He pay twenty thousand baht for me. And he gibme iPhone and ring,’ she said.

  I nodded. There couldn’t be any exhibitionism. Everything was a coping mechanism.

  ‘I go to Seoul,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Noon. You will go to Seoul.’

  ‘And you to go to India.’

  ‘Yes. I will go to India.’

  With eyes locked into each other’s we talked in short sentences that were easier to understand. After a while Noon said that she had to change her dress, and went behind the bar. As soon as she left, the cashier lady came up to me. ‘I want to tell you something,’ she whispered.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘The Korean man come here daily. He like Noon. But Noon no like him. You first customer for Noon. But Korean man hap more money. You understand? She hap to work.’

  ‘But why does she have to marry him?’ I asked. ‘He only wants her for the sex, no?’

  ‘Do you hap money?’

  I only had silence as a reply.

  Noon returned. She had put on the same clothes that I had seen on her the first time: the pink top, the black jeans, the denim jacket. She took a cigarette out of her purse and lit it. The cash lady went back to mending the counter.

  ‘What she tell you?’ Noon said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The rain intensified, and the loud pattering sound subsumed the sound of music from the bars. Noon looked worried; she told me that she had to leave in some time. I asked her to pass the cigarette to me. She did. I caressed her cheeks as I smoked and she looked back at me blankly. Then I crushed the cigarette in an ashtray and tried to kiss her on the lips. She didn’t let me, turning a cheek toward me instead. Then she put her hands on my shoulders and made to hug me. It was an awkward position, the two of us seated on high stools and hugging.

  ‘I want you to hap fun,’ Noon said into my ear, still holding me.

  ‘What fun?’

  ‘I want you to hap lady tonight.’

  ‘Really!’ I said, breaking the hug. Getting a lady for the night was the last thing on my mind.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I want you,’ I blurted out.

  ‘I hap to go.’

  ‘I know,’ I said loudly. There was the sound of a million rain drops hitting the asphalt.

  ‘You know the song?’ Noon said.

  I tried to listen. A faint beat was discernible; it was something familiar, from a Bollywood movie.

  ‘It’s Hindi song. Dhoom Dhoom. Tata Young … Thai singer. She sing this song.’ Noon tried to dance a bit without getting off her stool.

  ‘I don’t want you to marry the Korean man,’ I said.

  She stopped dancing. ‘I hap to.’

  That was the moment. It was then that I could have decided to use my money, to buy her and bring her to India with me and wed her and love her. I did consider all this, only to quickly concede defeat to the Korean man’s decisiveness. But being indecisive did not mean that my feelings were ambiguous. I was in the middle of a possibility of love, a possibility that wanted more but could be content with being just what it was. I felt no compulsions; I didn’t want anything more to happen than what was already happening. And maybe it was the same for Noon, she who looked into my eyes for distended minutes, she who locked her fingers in mine, she who lit a cigarette for me, she who didn’t want to leave me but knew that she should and would.

  ‘I like you very much.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘If Korean man no good, I come back to Pattaya. In December. You come to Pattaya in December?’

  ‘I will come to Pattaya in December,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  The promise did something to her, something enormous for the dimensions of her heart. She got up from the stool and dragged me outside, to the street, where the rain didn’t waste even a second in drenching us.

  (It is what happened next that had made me reluctant about writing any of this.)

  We kissed. But it was not a mere kiss. It took place on the middle of road, under a downpour. The taxi drivers grew delirious with rage for having to wait for it to end. It was, in fact, not a single kiss but a flurry of kisses, and in-between Noon held my head in her hands and shouted the words ‘I want you to hap fun.’ We kissed not like two people in love, but like two people in love with the possibility of love, with the affirmation that it could happen with us too, for us too, by us too, that we could hold the other person and make a promise that we would keep no matter what, no matter how impossible our lives had turned the idea of our being together, and no matter how hard our worlds would still try to make us renege on that promise. And it didn’t just end. Noon took my hand as we got abuses from folks on the road and cheers from the ladies inside Marie Bar Beer. She led me through Second Road for some distance, and then we turned to a street that I hadn’t been to before. I asked her where she was taking me. She repeated that she wanted me to have fun. There were some bars on this street. Noon took me inside one called ‘Capital Bar’.

  ‘The most beautiful lady in Pattaya,’ Noon said. ‘My friend. She work here. I want you to take her tonight.’

  It was dark and cramped inside. There was a narrow stage surrounded by narrow stools and tables. Noon waved to a costumed girl who was contorted around a steel pole on the stage. The bar was almost empty, possibly because of the heavy rain, so the costumed girl didn’t have any problem stopping her act and coming over to us.

  Noon introduced the girl as Agun. Agun had facial features that were not as Thai as other women in Pattaya. She seemed to have a Western streak in her blood. In sheer sexiness, she beat Noon hands down, especially in the kind of sexiness valued in the Pattaya business. She was a hardcore business girl.

  ‘Agun best girl in Pattaya,’ Noon said. ‘She my friend. You enjoy with her, okay?’

  ‘But what about you?’ I asked Noon.

  ‘Now I hap to go to Korean man.’

  Next to us, Agun put on her clothes swiftly. Then she tugged me on the elbow and gave me a happy grin. She was beautiful. I looked at Noon, her eyes. ‘I come in December,’ I said.

  ‘I know you come. But maybe I no come.’ Noon said. Her clothes were dripping and it occurred to me that the Korean man might not like that. But there was no point thinking about that.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I will wait for one week. From Christmas to New Year’s.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, holding my hands with tha
t strange longing that assails one just before saying goodbye. We hugged. Then all three of us moved outside, in the rain. Noon kissed me on the lips again.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, almost perfunctorily. I felt compelled to say the same, but didn’t. ‘Next time you tell new soldier story, okay?’ she said then, and it was on hearing this that I, I who considered himself broken enough, broke again.

  Noon ran into the street, to be made invisible by the heavy raindrops. I kept staring at the watery streets and the spread of neon on them. ‘You beautiful man,’ Agun said after some seconds, probably after she realized that she had to interject, that otherwise I would be staring at that blank static of rain for a long time.

  (41)

  When your salvation depends on love, you don’t waste any time. It can brew immediately after the first meeting; it can culminate as soon as the second one. These, and other such, were my thoughts inside the taxi that Agun and I had hailed to take us to my hotel room. As the rain fell heavily on the car’s windows, the neon city of Pattaya transformed into a mellow image of itself. Its colours spread and gained benevolence.

  I didn’t know the import of Noon’s kisses, the meaning of her ‘I love you’. I didn’t know if I was in love with her. But an enormous kindness had overtaken me, a wellness of being, as if some nourishment long sought had been finally had. Did that mean that I would not take pleasure in the prostitute next to me? No. Agun was a gift from Noon. I had accepted Noon’s injunction to enjoy with Agun, and in the taxi ride I internalized this fact whole heartedly. Perhaps I was justifying my immorality. I didn’t know if I was supposed to pay Agun or not, but I knew that my time with her would be great and that it would—in a convoluted way—give meaning to my image of Noon. I was strangely comfortable with her, was able to converse with her like I would with any woman in Mumbai (she spoke English well). It was as if she too had become softer in the rain, as if she too had been washed clean of all the insinuations and accents and connotations of Pattaya, and for a while it seemed that the two of us held a higher ground and could see why all of this—the city of Pattaya, its grey clouds, its silver linings, its base humanity, its rare human connections—was a sort of world too.

  That night, I had sex with Agun thrice, and I enjoyed it immensely each time. She was almost entrepreneurial in bed. The only blemish on her body was the long scars just below her breasts. ‘I had fake breasts once,’ she told me. I paid her handsomely, at a rate higher than any that I had accepted in Pattaya, not minding that at all. I offered to let her sleep in my bed, but she declined and left the room. This gave me time to pack my things, to smoke a cigarette looking at the PATTAYA sign one last time. It was probably two in the morning. The rain had lessened to a negligible drizzle. The streets were still quiet and one could hear the sea waves hit the little beach periodically. I finished my cigarette and turned, and my gaze fell on Anne-Marie’s photograph stuck on the mirror. I instinctively took it off and tore it, feeling nothing, or feeling very little. When I blew the dead parts out of the window, the words of the Japanese geisha Kimiko came back to me. And I had a silly wish: that Noon should come to the hotel tomorrow and see the torn bits. Knowing it to be impossible, I closed my window and started reading.

  Acknowledgements

  I thank my first readers—Mohit Parikh, Apoorv Vyas, Ujjwal Agarwal, and Mihir Vatsa. I thank Manasi Subramaniam, my editor at HarperCollins. I thank Alexandra Le Trionnaire, for letting me break the promise that I would dedicate all my books to her. I thank Satyavir chacha, whose passion for books I inherited, if only in part. I thank my wife who was courageous enough to love me and marry me after reading the novel in its raw form. I thank my late father: the memory of him struggling with one of my published stories late at night, despite his patchy English, has inspired me many times. I thank my mother, who is very much in the habit of asking me, every other day, to be ‘awesome’. I thank my brother, conversations with whom always remind me of my ten-year-younger self.

  Parts of this novel appeared as short stories in forms vastly different from the current ones in various literary magazines around the world. The first chapter appeared as ‘The Other Room’ in One Throne Magazine, run by the indomitable George Filipovic; the second chapter appeared in The Atticus Review; the third chapter in Out of Print magazine, perhaps the best space for short stories in India, run by Indira Chandrasekhar. The two chapters in the second part were both published in the Burrow Press Review, then edited by Hunter Choate and Ryan Rivas. The first, published as ‘The Bachelor’, was also nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

  About the Book

  He is a bruised man, adrift, keening for a lost love. His sorrow submerges everything: his agony is truest, his epiphanies greatest. Do you despise him? You’re too late. He despises himself already.

  This is his story: Anne-Marie, his true love, has left him and their Mumbai flat. There is a girl who pretends to be a lesbian with whom he has an awkward encounter of the almost-coital kind. And then, when he goes to Pattaya looking for sex (when he could have gone to Interlaken looking for love), he finds Noon, just the sort of woman who might mend – and break again – his wounded heart; and he finds Orhan, who may or may not be the son he never had.

  Here is a debut at once pensive and feral, cutting down to our most private tragedies – and to that shameful inference we must all some day come to: we are neither heroes nor insects.

  About the Author

  TANUJ SOLANKI lives in Mumbai. His short fiction has appeared in the Caravan, DNA, Hindu Business Line, Out of Print and numerous other publications. He’s a Pushcart nominee and a two-time runner-up in the DNA-Out of Print short fiction contest. He is also the founder of the Bombay Literary Magazine. His second book, a collection of short stories, is due in 2017.

  Advance Praise for Neon Noon

  ‘An impressive new voice. A whole new way of storytelling. Neon Noon is a compelling read. And it is indeed a delight to read Solanki’s captivating prose.’ – Anees Salim

  ‘Neon Noon is a truly accomplished debut. A searing exploration of love, loss, sex and the making of literature. Solanki is staking out new ground for Indian writing in English.’ – Kaushik Barua

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  First published in India in 2016 by Fourth Estate

  an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

  Copyright © Tanuj Solanki 2016

  P-ISBN: 978-93-5029-694-3

  Epub Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 978-93-5029-695-0

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  Tanuj Solanki asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.

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