“The Chinese guys will come down bored out of their minds and order ten rounds of beer. The Muslim guys are like alcoholics. Drink, drink, drink. It’s not our fault. We just hope they don’t do a drive-by shooting on us. They love drive-by shootings down here.”
They said it with contempt. They also said they had heard all the gossip being spread in Bangkok about the funding for the insurgents. Both local police and insurgents are suspected of being deeply involved in the drug trade. As in Pakistan, a country with four million drug addicts, narcotics are acceptable, but a sip of beer merits death.
Thais are also often convinced that the money comes from tom yam kung soup restaurants on the Malaysian side of the border. Since tom yam kung (a hot and sour clear soup with lemongrass, Kaffir lime leaves, and shrimp) is Thai cuisine’s most recognizable tourist dish, that means a lot of restaurants funneling money for the terrorists. I had heard this same story many times myself in Bangkok, but these girls seemed totally convinced of its truth. Insidious soup sellers were fueling the beheading of Buddhist monks. It made them say cruel things about their Muslim cocitizens. It seemed so unfair, they said. Tom yam kung is a lovely soup, beloved of all patriotic Thais. The only thing harmful about it is its heat.
The following morning I walked into Pattani and bought a ticket for Narathiwat at one of the minivan transit companies. Narathiwat, two hours down the coast toward the Malaysian border, in the state of the same name, is another troubled Muslim city but with a much shorter history—it was founded only in 1936. It sits by a wide river and is known for its bellicose mosques. Ironically, the province’s name is Sanskrit for “the dwelling of wise men.” Eighteen percent of its population is Buddhist, and the more ardent Islamic persons wish them gone.
In April 2004 a group of thirty-two guerrillas in Narathiwat attacked a Thai Army outpost, killing two soldiers, then retreated to a sixteenth-century mosque named Krue Sae. After a seven-hour standoff, the Thai Army destroyed the mosque and killed all 122 people inside it. Thaksin was blamed by Thai liberals and reformists for excessive use of force. However, since 2006 the Thai government has been more conciliatory, apologizing for incidents like Krue Sae and promising to look into local grievances. This tone of contrition and apology, admirable in itself, has been greeted by the insurgents with an irresistible rise in violence. This has, to put it mildly, bewildered those who believe in the power of conciliation.
I fell in with one of the religious students who always seem to throng these collective vans moving from city to city. Hakim was studying in Yala and wanted to know if I could speak Arabic as well as Thai. No? He seemed mystified. He wanted to go study in Pakistan and, even more ambitiously, Saudi Arabia. We had a conversation about Islam’s distaste for alcohol during the ride, and he made the delicate and sensible point that alcohol was forbidden by Islam because under its influence we are not “true to ourselves or our relationships.”
Drink, in other words, distorts the individual’s relationship to himself, or herself, and therefore our relationship to everything else. It was very like the conversation I had had in Solo in Java. Hakim was studiously compassionate and calm on this point.
“Have you ever drunk a drop?” I asked.
“Never.”
“Then how do you know how bad it is?”
“The Koran has described it.”
I said the Koran was quite vague on the issue.
Hakim did not see it with such equanimity.
“The ones who drink,” he said, “should be flogged in public. What use is there for them?” Then, realizing that I might be some kind of Christian lush, he toned it down. “Of course, I mean the Muslims.”
I asked him if he thought Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno should have been caned for a sip of beer.
“Absolutely, absolutely. Was she not aware of the law? It’s not important that it was just a sip. It’s symbolic.”
“Symbolic of what?”
“Of letting Satan into the picture!”
The minivans here take everyone to their front door, and our driver let Hakim off in front of a well-tended suburban house. He wished me luck in his “beautiful town” and gave me a friendly, masculine handshake that was intended to reassure me that nothing of what he had said was to be taken personally. Deep inside him, there seemed to be a dreadful innocence combined with a delicious sarcasm that was only half-conscious. Was he serious about whipping the Malaysian model?
I was dropped at the Imperial Hotel, the only habitable place in town. It was empty. The room was gloomy and bare with a black qibla arrow stuck to the ceiling indicating the position of Mecca. Nonalcoholic bottles filled the minibar, as accusatory as they always are, and the curtains smelled of thirty-year-old cigars. I didn’t mind. I went out for a walk after dark, as the loudspeakers from the mosques began to bray. In hotels like this, one is always forced out onto the street sooner or later.
The Friday-night sermon in the mosque across from the hotel was in Yawi, the variant of Malay spoken in the south, and after every furious phrase, the imam paused and sighed a long, exasperated aaah. Men stripped to the waist in the cafés, watching Manchester United games with plastic mugs of litchi juice mixed with green gelatin, paused between goal kicks to lend an ear, and the boys lounging on their motorbikes by the river glanced up as the aaah echoed across the night.
I failed to find a single outlet for alcoholic pleasures and, defeated, slogged back to the Imperial and the prospect of a long night of orange juice and Malaysian Koranic TV. As I was going through armed security, however, I saw a tall kathoy or “ladyboy” (technically a hermaphrodite, but usually a man who has had surgery) clattering across the plaza. When in joyful hedonistic Narathiwat, I thought to myself, always follow a ladyboy. She went to a “saloon” that I had not noticed earlier.
The saloon, however, only contained the ladyboy, and she looked at me shyly before asking me what I wanted. It was a good question. I had the feeling then that asking for sex with a transsexual hooker might be less dangerous than asking for a Stella Artois, and the transsexual hooker knew it. She confronted me playfully along these lines, and I stuck my neck out and ventured for the beer. She went into a back room and came back with a Chaang, a local brew, and then turned on the karaoke screens. I had to be entertained.
“Me and you?” she finally said in English, turning a long painted fingernail upon herself, and then upon me.
Refusing gallantly, I asked her if drinking a Chaang was safe. Those aaah sounds coming from the mosque did not sound friendly.
“No,” she said in Thai. “He is talking about the importance of washing. Washing your feet.”
“Nothing about drinking?”
“That was last week.”
What about ladyboys, I wanted to ask. What does the Koran say about them?
It’s a sad fact that life by and large would be endurable, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis once said, were it not for all the pleasure we have to endure. That night I had a nightmare and woke up convinced that, as far as I could see, a giant beetle was walking across the ceiling. It was, however, the humble qibla. In the morning, either way, they politely and apologetically informed me that a bomb had gone off in Narathiwat the previous day. No one seemed particularly surprised, but a generalizing, cosmic apology was nevertheless offered.
I rode in another minivan down to the Malaysian border, to the raffish and unstable town of Sungai Kolok, which sits insalubriously along a narrow river (sungai in Malay means “river”) that is, in effect, the border. How sweet life would be if one could, at all costs, avoid Sungai Kolok. One could grow old and happy and hale without Sungai Kolok.
It is here that most Malaysians furtively come when they need a break from the sharia regime of Kelantan, and there are special all-in-one hotel brothels that cater to their urgent and time-constrained needs. Chief of these is the Chinese-style Genting Hotel, named for the hill region of Malaysia where the British once had their charming stations. The Genting is only a hundred meters fro
m the border, and you can walk if you don’t mind the heat. You can pay here in Malaysian ringgit, and the second-floor cabaret and lounge is a source of local girls who eagerly await the flow of Muslim men. Frequent bombings and shootings in Kolok have only temporarily dampened their ardor, and it is remarkable what men will brave to get laid and to sip a tumbler of Sang Thip whisky, preferably at the same time.
The Genting specializes in dance parties, and that night one of them was in full swing. Unlike the Pink Lady, the Genting is also a merry family hotel, and its restaurant doubles as a nightclub where six-year-old children dance between the tables to wildly out-of-tune middle-aged Thai crooners singing luuk kruung country music ballads. The girls from upstairs sit around in their fringed white boots holding teddy bears and halved pineapples, eating dishes of kaeng som, and among them move the slightly uncertain, slightly tense Malaysian visitors who never seem to smile and whose eyes look subtly hunted. It’s a ragbag crowd, and there is nothing very louche about it. Even the massage parlor upstairs seems laid back and wonderfully unrepentant.
At the bar next to it, I sat talking to a sixty-year-old engineer from Kota who said he had just scored a cut-price haul of kanagra, the generic Thai version of Viagra that retails for about five dollars for a blister pack of four. He had a glass of Mekong Scotch on the bar, and the girls were telling him not to drink the fearsome Mekong and take kanagra at the same time. He was tiny, bald, and slipping off his stool. His name was Yussef. He was protesting that the symbiosis of kanagra and Mekong was perfect bliss.
“You bad man,” they said in English. “You come here boum-boum lady. You die heart attack.”
“Wonderful ladies, la,” he said turning to me. “So graceful.”
“I’ll buy you a drink,” I said. “Mekong again?”
We talked about Kolok. It was a fine enough hellhole, he said in English, thinking the girls wouldn’t understand, but the insurgents liked bombing it, perhaps because they thought it was a haunt of Satan.
Wasn’t that a little ironic, I asked, given that it was a Muslim town filled with Malaysian tourists?
“Yes, but we are sinners to be here in their eyes. We deserve to be killed with shrapnel.”
“Are you their ideal target then?”
“I am not sure they are trying to kill Malaysians. They are trying to intimidate the Thais. But many Malaysians have been injured by bombs in this town. It’s a tiny town, too.” He smiled. “They can’t miss us.”
The bombings of coffee shops, bars, and ATM machines had indeed mutilated a fair number of Malaysians. Yet still they came.
At night, though, most of Kolok was quiet, and the trees in February swarmed with thousands of chattering birds that yielded its only nocturnal sound. The streets were deserted after the food stalls closed down, and it was only the hotels and their surrounding dives that seemed to remain alive. The Marina, the Sum Time Bar, the Tara, which housed the Narcissus massage parlor, the Mona Lisa Massage at the Marina, which sported a large image of Leonardo’s dame with bared breasts. Downstairs at the same hotel the Malaysian men crowded around the plasma TV to watch English Premier League games. “Liverpool!” they cried, as if in anguish, raising their fists. The Chinese temples, on the other hand, and the lanes of red lanterns and metal shutters remained darkened. The pendant birdcages had their birds removed. There was a strange charm to the place. The mixture of Chinese, Thai Buddhists, and Muslims was not dead or fossilized. It was the public space of the hotel, however, that kept it humming after hours, even if none of the bars appeared to be open.
I got up early to get some cash from a nearby ATM machine and had breakfast at the Genting: Nescafé, oranges, and congee. I was joined by some of the Kota sex tourists who insisted on recounting their conquests of the prior night. They seemed immensely pleased with themselves and were going back to Kota with a measure of decent, glowing satisfaction that needed an audience. Super Premium model good, la?
I listened to them dutifully and then left the hotel a few minutes later. As I walked through the windless heat to the ATM machine, I noticed that the street seemed uncommonly deserted. It was about eight a.m. Suddenly there was an ear-splitting detonation, and a puff of smoke appeared above the roofs. When I got to the ATM machine, it had been atomized by a small bomb. The local police later identified the culprits as members of the RKK insurgent group, headed by the splendidly named Wae-ali Copter Waji.
As I took a taxi across the border to Kota Bharu after lunch, I pondered the inherent glamour of being murdered by Wae-ali Copter Waji for the sin of using an ATM machine. Would Mr. Copter slay me, too, for watering my lips with fermented barley?
I wanted to see Kota at long last because it seemed to me that in some way it was a version of what the insurgents in Thailand were fighting for: a sharia way of life, at least partially; an Islamic city free of the scourges they associated with the corruptions of Thailand. Not only no girlie bars, but no bars period. I also wanted to see where Malaysian sex tourists came from.
Nik Aziz’s capital, as it turned out, was a pleasant city. It was calm, orderly, and mild, with air-conditioned malls like the KB Trade Centre, little red phone boxes with the word Helo written on them, branches of EONCap Islamic Bank, and neoclassic cream-white emporiums dating from the British 1930s like the Bangunan Mawar. It was a much nicer city than Sungai Kolok or Hat Yai. It was cleaner, more salubrious, more familial. I saw signs for Frost Rut Bir but, as expected, no vestiges of nocturnal social life. I had expected a version of Tehran, or even worse, a dark and dingy pile terrorized by loudspeakers, and lo, it was more like Elizabeth, New Jersey, a slice of imitation America influenced perhaps by the aspirations of Singapore.
As the sun fell and dusk came on, the mosques sprang to crackling life, but the streets began to die. Between the mosque and the mall—our version of the souk—there was nothing but domesticity, a guarded privacy. The city was closed against outsiders, against visitors. While Malaysians flocked to Thai cities, clearly no Thais ever came here.
Roger Scruton, in his book The West and the Rest, has described this bipolarity of the traditional Islamic city:
The mosque and its school, or madrasah, together with the souq or bazaar, are the only genuine public spaces in traditional Muslim towns. The street is a lane among private houses, which lie along it and across it in a disorderly jumble of inward-turning courtyards. The Muslim city is a creation of the shar’ia—a hive of private spaces, built cell on cell.
But is Kota such a traditional city? That may be what it increasingly aspires to be, but it is also a place where the malls are chilled and the infidel brands proliferate merrily enough. It is certainly comforting, provincial, domestic. One misses at once the garish, insolent public space that is the bar. An idle reflection: if a town cannot have opera houses, theaters, art galleries, or sports stadiums, the bar is the simplest, the most universal, and the most accessible public space. As I walked through Kota’s delicate quiet, under its trees heavy with birds, I thought nostalgically—but also incredulously—of the scores of mobile bars that line Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok every night, little more than motorized wheelbarrows that appear at dusk and are mysteriously driven away at dawn. It’s a brilliant concept: a temporary occupation of a piece of sidewalk, a row of vodka and Scotch bottles, a line of chairs open to any stranger. It’s part of what makes Bangkok feel so free in its earthy, immediate, open-to-all way, and I’ve noticed that the mobile bars are much loved by visiting Malaysians, Arabs, and Iranians. But they are not here and never will be.
It is not just the booze and the loose women, however, that draw the men of Kota north of the border. It’s public spaces where anything can be said without fear of misappropriation. The things that cannot be said in the mosque or at home, in other words—the humble subversions of the spoken word that have been lubricated by alcohol. Or set free by it. In the West the bar began as the coffee shop and café in eighteenth-century London and Paris—it is where modern politics was born. Its absence
in a large town or city strikes one as a repudiation of sorts, a turning back. Though it is a repudiation that is not without its reasons or its charms.
Kota was the first place in the region I visited that did not live in daily fear of assassinations and bombings. Perhaps the absence of any trappings of contemporary urban life was the reason. The Islamic warriors did not see anything to enrage them. The bar did not exist. The women were not “exposed.” There was just the mall, where I sat down at last to eat an ice cream under the smiles of the headscarfed girls who served them. Ice cream. Isn’t ice cream always the substitution for a nice beer, from dry Islamabad to dry Ocean City, New Jersey? A good ice cream lulls the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue.
Usquebaugh
Often when I am in a bar in the East—at the bar on top of the Baiyoke Tower in Bangkok, for example, whose exterior skyscraper is draped with a vast image of a striding Johnnie Walker—I will think back to days spent on the island of Islay in the Inner Hebrides.
Scotch has a special place in the Asian heart, and for that matter in the heart of virtually every non-Western country. It is a strange drink for the world to have adopted so vigorously. Its appeal is a mystery. The obsession with Johnnie Walker, for example—that fetish brew that is without fail produced after dinner at affable and affluent tables from Cairo to Seoul to Bombay. Status, refined manliness, colonial-officer-class panache—all are rolled into the amber fluid. And while Johnnie Walker is the preferred whisky of palateless businessmen all over the East, the more refined single malts of Islay and elsewhere have also begun to make their way into the haughtier bars. The affair with whisky is only beginning.
The Wet and the Dry Page 13