Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  I was at first somewhat skeptical of this line of reasoning. But a couple of months later I had a chance to see some of the most acclaimed of the New Wave movies when the Festival of India came to California. Leading the pack was a movie about campus unrest called Holi. It was, without a doubt, the least entertaining movie I’d seen in years.

  The film established its mood in the first five minutes, and there its development ended. It began with a group of nihilistic students sitting around in a dilapidated hostel, drunk and with nothing to live for. Full of angry energy, they shouted and ran around. The graffiti on the hostel walls said “When? Why? Where?” The students shouted and raced around some more. Along the corridors was painted a huge question mark. The kids screeched and shouted. On one wall was the word kal, meaning both “tomorrow” and “yesterday”; a student spat on it. The kids shouted and screamed. Then they sang a song. “For one thing we pray / To witness doomsday.” Later they sang another song, “No affection, no love / No virtue, no sin / No hope, no direction / No intention, no purpose / No direction, no goal.” Then they pelted a visiting speaker with rotten fruit and ran around screaming and shouting. Then they tortured a fellow pupil. Then there was a suicide. Nobody could accuse Holi of subtlety.

  Yet few could remain unaware of Holi’s strident aspirations to subtlety. It was full of showy overhead shots and very long takes. It had the nice device of containing forty-five single takes and a central take that had forty-five parts. It was designed to be symmetrical—it began with the kids drinking beer and concluded with them smoking dope. It was performed by a group of nonprofessionals who improvised as they went along (not for nothing had its well-educated director dedicated his first movie to Brecht). And the whole picture was, I thought, a farrago of borrowed gestures and secondhand beliefs. It had all the blank anger of a punk movie with none of the bravado. It had all the brutality of a kung fu movie with none of the extraordinary stunts. It had much of the behaviorism of Lord of the Flies but none of the point. I did not mind that the movie was boring, repetitive and crude. But I did feel cheated by its unspoken assumption that it was addressing a serious problem with serious candor, bravely fighting despair with despair. More than anything, I recoiled from its air of self-importance; it seemed in more ways than one a sub-Continental kind of movie.

  True to Masud’s claim, however, Holi seemed to find its ideal audience in America. It had been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had been praised, with some bemusement, by a critic in The New York Times who mistook the whole setting for a coed high school and, failing to understand it, chivalrously tried to find something to praise in it. Many viewers in California felt they could relate to its shock-therapy anarchy, its vision of a society in ruins. They found it clever, intense, realistic. They may even have enjoyed the cafeteria song-and-dance routine that was at once a sneering parody of Hindi movies and a rip-off from Fame, by way of Rock ’n’ Roll High School. But I wished I were watching the mad singing and dancing of Mard instead. And had I been a regular Indian, besieged by chaos, struggling to survive, surrounded by corruption and poverty and noise, and in no position whatsoever to enjoy the allusions to Buñuel and the virtuosity of the swiveling camera, I would have bitterly, desperately wished that I were seeing Mard. Mard at least had a happy ending.

  TEN DAYS AFTER my arrival in Bombay, my schedule called for me to go to Kathmandu for ten days. When I arrived back, a young cousin of mine picked me up at the airport. The relative who had been in such agonized pain, he said, had died. And two days later, the man’s healthy old father, shaken by the tragedy, had followed him to the grave.

  THAILAND

  Love in a Duty-free Zone

  WELCOME, MY friend! Welcome to Bangkok!” cried the small man in sunglasses hurrying toward me, hand outstretched and smile well-rehearsed. Outside the dumpy single block of Don Muang Airport, the tropical dusk was thick with sultriness. On every side, lank-haired, open-shirted cabbies were whispering solicitations. Smooth-skinned soldiers were fingering $100 bills. Girls in loose shirts slouched past, insouciance in their smiling eyes.

  “Have a good time in Thailand!” offered the signs inside the terminal. “Have a good time in Thailand!” said the boards on the back of the baggage carts. “Bank of Love” read the sign on the back of a minibus.

  “You wait for official government bus into city?” my new friend demanded.

  I nodded.

  “Very good!” He slapped an arm around me, half comrade and half conspirator. “I am official government guide.” By way of proof, he pointed to the official government badge he wore on his heart. “Johnny,” he explained, then whipped out an official government form.

  “Okay,” he began, frowning over his form. “Your name? Your country? Where you stay? Business”—he gave a quick leer—“or pleasure?” Every answer Johnny repeated to himself, syllable by syllable, then painstakingly copied down on his form. For that, I was most grateful. Clearly, Johnny was completing some neglected formality, or taking down some information required by the tourist police, or, at the very least, giving me the receipt I would need when I boarded the bus. Clearly, he was trying to save me, or rescue me from, trouble.

  Sure enough, as soon as his interrogation was concluded, Johnny ripped out his chit, handed me a receipt and grinned expectantly. “Ten dollars!” I smiled back. I had, I explained, paid for my bus ticket already.

  Johnny looked decidedly unnerved. I had not, he suggested, paid for the official government service already. Then, with the weariness of a much-tried bureaucrat, he opened the thick black folder he was carrying and began flipping through its pages. Finally, he stopped at a black-and-white passport photo of a sloe-eyed nymphet. “Miss Joy,” he explained. “Tonight. Three hours. Miss Joy take you everywhere in Bangkok. Car included.” I looked a little dubious. “Official government service,” he continued. “Very good service. No problem, my friend.”

  This was indeed a thoughtful offer, I said, but perhaps a guidebook might serve my needs as well.

  “Miss Joy Number One girl,” Johnny shot back, with more than a hint of tartness. Of that, I hastily assured him, I had no doubt, but still I felt obliged to decline. “I think, perhaps, tonight, I might, actually, want to rest.”

  “No problem, my friend,” the incorrigible smiled back. “Miss Joy come to you hotel. Eight o’clock? Eight-thirty? Nine o’clock?”

  “That’s very kind. But, well, I think, perhaps, you see, I might, very possibly, have to do some work tonight.”

  Johnny looked stricken. “Only ten dollars,” he protested. “Number One price. You go into town—no good price.” Then he returned to the smirk that was his specialty. “Drinking, dancing … anything you can do.”

  Impressive though this bill of rights was, I begged off.

  Johnny’s official government bonhomie was fast disappearing. “Okay,” he said, wincing. “Look. I give this you free.” He scribbled down a phone number. “Official government place. You go to hotel. You talk to office. Say Miss Joy.”

  “Well, er, actually, no, thanks. Maybe if I change my mind, I can call your office later.”

  At that, Johnny slammed shut his ledger and trudged back, muttering, into the gloom from which he had emerged …

  … And out of which appeared, just a few seconds later, another beaming local, papers dangling out of an overstuffed folder as he hustled over toward me. Pointing to his badge—he too, it seemed, was an official government guide—he invited me to deliver a rough summary of my agenda. Anxious not to whet his hopes, I told him vaguely that I had many meetings, conferences, appointments, commitments.

  “My friend, why you no have fun in Bangkok? Many nice ladies in Bangkok.”

  Of that, I said, I was sure. But I would be happy to take it on trust, I was starting to say … when, with a magician’s flourish, he pulled out his dun-colored folder and began riffling through page after page of official government soft-focus, four-color glossies. Languorous limbs on heavy carpets
. Silky legs on velvety sofas. Pouting lovelies splayed across satin sheets.

  “Here.” He settled on a young lady who seemed to have conquered shyness. “She very beautiful girl.”

  That was beyond dispute.

  “Beautiful girl graduated from college,” he went on.

  “In physical education?”

  “We have three massage,” he continued relentlessly. “A, B, C.”

  I decided not to ask whether these corresponded to the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctor’s degrees, respectively. This was all most interesting, I assured him, but I’d nonetheless have to turn him down.

  “You no like Bangkok? Very good place.”

  So it seemed. Already I was convinced that the city welcomed visitors with open arms. And already I could see that its service industries were exceedingly well developed and its authorities admirably eager to please. But by the time a third official government tout approached me with the novel invitation: “My friend. You no like birdwatching?” I was inclined to suspect that ornithology was not among his interests. And when at last I entered the airport bus, the driver who took me for an official government ride lost no time at all in urging upon me the merits of a special hotel and, by happy chance, a nice young lady he happened to know.

  II

  I had long been wary of big bad Bangkok. It was a city, they said, whose main industry was recreation and whose main business was pleasure. Wickedness, by all accounts, was an art form here. For not only were all the seven vices, and quite a few others, embellished, expanded and refined in Bangkok, but they were also coupled with all the seven graces. In free-and-easy Bangkok, so legend had it, half the women were pros and half the men were cons. Everywhere in Asia, the Thai capital was spoken of in whispers, with the fascinated horror that attends a shadow Saigon. It was, by common consent, the best place around for procuring anything and everything illicit—smuggled goods, fake Rolexes, pirated cassettes, hard drugs, forged passports and IDs. And the Thais were famous for their gentleness and grace.

  “Ah, such a charming people,” mused Alan, a kindly sixty-nine-year-old British photographer-eccentric I met in Bali, “and yet the streets of Bangkok are really so terribly wicked.” Once, he said, he had been approached on the sidewalk by a man offering Number One king prawns; when he accepted, the man had led him down a shady side street and into a dark café, served him the promised prawns and then presented him with a bill for $100. (“I must say, though, the prawns were awfully good.”) Another time, he reported, a monk had taken him out for a drink and then had asked him pointedly whether he was sleeping alone, adding, “I am very nice man!” “Imagine that!” cried Alan with an innocence only strengthened by his knowledge of the world. “And he a monk! But still, you know, the Thais are really such a charming people.”

  Of all the unlikely resources husbanded in Bangkok, however, the most famous were potential wives. Two days after meeting Alan, I ran into another Brit in Bali, who was, by profession, “how shall I put it—a smuggler.” No stranger to the blackest of markets, this character assured me that along the roads of northern Thailand $35 would buy a boy for life, and $50 a girl. I had also read that at village auctions virgins were the pièce de résistance. And it was common knowledge that the principal crops grown in certain parts of the country were young girls sent by their families to the bars of Bangkok to make fortunes they could plow back into the community as soon as they resumed their rustic lives. Indeed, said one Thai gentleman, talent scouts roamed the northern villages, offering families $150 for every prospective B-girl. “Here,” he reported happily, “everything is for sale. Even human life.”

  The government itself seemed hardly bashful about advertising the skin trade. The Yellow Pages alone listed 100 massage parlors, and 350 bars, in every corner of the capital. Brochures circulated around the world, enticing packs of male visitors from Japan and Germany and the Gulf on special sex-tour vacations with the assurance that in Bangkok “you can pick up girls as easily as a pack of cigarettes” (those who found even that too onerous could select their companions from photo booklets before leaving home). In the city itself, accredited tourist agencies organized expeditions around Bangkok’s most breathtaking natural wonders—its pretty shopgirls. By now, in fact, an estimated 60 percent of all the country’s visitors came only for the dirt-cheap sex, and more than a million girls were waiting to oblige them. And since their international reputation—not to mention their gross national product—depended on the mass production of pleasure, the authorities made sure that the fantasy business was the best-run industry in town: well organized, fastidiously tended and lavishly displayed. All the playboys of the Western world made for Bangkok, and Bangkok was increasingly made for them.

  Of late, of course, a terrible shadow had fallen over the business: crowded with bar-girls, heroin addicts and men who were gay just for money, Bangkok had the perfect conditions for an epidemic of AIDS. By the spring of 1986, six people had already died of the syndrome, and four of them were foreigners. Yet where countries like Japan had responded to the threat with a panic-stricken decisiveness and talk of testing all who entered the country, many Thais seemed content just to shrug off the danger. The public health minister himself had requested agencies to exercise discretion about publicizing AIDS statistics so as not to damage the tourist trade.

  And indeed, the minute I entered my Bangkok hotel, I found myself surrounded by consumers of the Bangkok Dream. Simon, from Durham University in Britain, had first visited Thailand a couple of months ago and had now returned, he said, with a sly smile, for no reason at all really, and for how long, he didn’t know. An Indian who was entwined in the snack bar with a couple of local ladies told me, rather shyly, that he had collected photos and tapes of almost a thousand Bangkok girls as souvenirs of his annual visits. A black man from the South Bronx explained that he was here on an extended R and R break from the pro basketball league in Australia. “People come here for different things,” explained a male nurse from San Francisco. “Some people come for the temples. Some people come for the deals. Some people come for the sex.” He pronounced this last with such disgust that I was moved to ask what he had come for. “Girls,” he said, hardly pausing. “Fourteen-, fifteen-year-old girls. I’ve already been to Sri Lanka and Korea, but this is the best place to find them: the girls are real fresh here, straight from the hills.” Noting my look of bemusement, he went on to explain himself. “Look,” he began earnestly, “I’m forty-two years old. I’m losing some hair. I could lose a little weight here and there. I’m not getting any younger. But I don’t want no thirty-five-year-old woman. I want to marry a girl who’s twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. In America, none of them girls are gonna look at me. But here—here it’s different.”

  No less typical of the city’s supplicants was twenty-one-year-old Dave, who had arrived three months ago on vacation from the University of British Columbia. By now his tertiary education was a thing of the distant past, his ownership of a local bar a prospect for the perpetual future. Bright with ingenuous good nature, Dave had somehow managed to bring sincerity even to Sin City. Not long after we sat down to dinner, he leaned over in my direction. “Just look at these beauties,” he whispered, gesturing toward the waitresses. “And you know something? They aren’t even working girls.” His own girlfriend, he confessed, was “out at work” tonight.

  As soon as we had finished eating, Dave volunteered to serve as my Virgil through the inner circles of Bangkok’s inferno. The best introduction to the city, he declared, was a pilgrimage to the heart of the Patpong Road, a mess of more than fifty look-alike bars set along two narrow lanes, designed with nothing in mind but the bodily pleasure of foreigners. We could try the Honey Bar, or the Pink Panther, or the Adam and Eve—they were all the same. But we might as well go to the Superstar.

  And so we did. At the door, a scantily clad young sylph flashed me a soft smile, led me by the hand to a barstool, pressed her body lightly against mine, urged me to or
der a drink. As soon as I did so, she threaded long and languid arms around me, brushed lustrous, sweet-smelling hair against my face, inclined my straw into my mouth, tickled her lips with her tongue and whispered sweet nothings that could not have been sweeter or more full of nothing. Then, gradually, gently, all sidelong glances, kittenish giggles and seraphic smiles, she glided through a cross-questioning as ritualized and precise as those delivered by immigration officers deliberating whether to allow one entry. “Where you from? Where you live in Bangkok? How long you stay?” Give the right answers, I quickly discovered, and the response was immediate.

  “Where you live?” asked a bewitching, orange-bikinied houri.

  “Metro Hotel.”

  “Oh,” she said, “sexy eyes.”

  All my reservations confirmed, I had, I felt, been transported back to some B-movie image of Saigon, 1968. Behind me, a jukebox with a throbbing bass pounded out “Do It to Me” and “Slow Hand” and “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy.” A psychedelic light show on the wall fuzzily gave off a deliquescent blur of naked bodies mixing and mingling. On a platform behind the bar, a handful of beauties went through the motions of excitement in body language that needed no translation. Their reflections kept them company in mirrors behind them, above them and in front of them. And distractedly gawking up at the dancers from their barstools were rows upon rows of burly men in white bush shirts and crumpled trousers, Australians and Germans and Americans. As they looked on, every one of them bounced a giggly girl up and down on his lap, pawing soft limbs, stroking spare parts, slurring endearments. For purposes of identification, every handmaiden had a number on her breast.

  Though Bangkok was famous for its narcotic properties, I did not sleep well that evening. All night long, from outside my room came the sounds of giggles and slamming doors, heavy feet padding after light ones down the corridor. And sometime before sunrise, I was abruptly awoken by a call from a hotel employee. “I miss you,” she purred. This was strange, I thought, since I had not yet had the pleasure of her acquaintance. “I see you last night,” she moaned. “I love you very much. You no remember me—the one with black hair and brown skin?”