Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  (3)

  That night, Kimiko and Other Japanese Tales by Lafcadio Hearn served as a distraction because of its first tale, which was about a geisha named Kimiko and her love affair with a young man from a good family. Although their love is pure, it is also doomed. Kimiko eventually protects her lover from the obvious social disaster of marrying a geisha by spurning him.

  The story gave me a big pause right at the beginning, when it quoted:

  Wasuraruru

  Mi naran to omō

  Kokoro koso

  Wasuré nu yori mo

  Omoi nari-keré.

  which is translated in the book as:

  ‘To wish to be forgotten by the beloved is a soul-task harder far than trying not to forget.’

  That I did not think of her, my love, after reading this would be a lie. In fact, I gave some serious thought to who it was between the two of us who was doing the wishing now. It was probably she who wished to be forgotten. But was I still her beloved? Was she trying not to forget? Was she finding it hard?

  I got sentimental and realized that I needed to scribble something. I picked up my notebook and wrote what is now the first paragraph of this story. Reading it again I feel that it doesn’t say much and yet says it all, which perhaps suits a beginning.

  The next day I moved to a hotel right opposite the beach at Pattaya. The room was spacious, the bed grand and comfortable. After taking a shower I stepped out in search of a girl. The network in my smartphone was not working; I could not search for ‘Pattaya Girls’. I had only my instincts to guide me. I circled the connections between the Beach Road and the road behind it more than once. The bars were closed; it was too early maybe, though it was very hot. I feared a repeat of the debacle at Jomtien. I thought I had come to Pattaya at low season, feared that the business of pleasure hadn’t really moved into gear. Then I chanced upon Soi6, one of the many roads connecting the Beach Road to the Second Road. The bars here were open and flecked with ladies who sat invitingly on stools, leaning on railings in front of each joint. Red was the prominent colour, although it was a general prominence that was greater than the specificities in objects or walls or signboards or the dresses they were wearing. My watch said one p.m. I became nervous for some reason and did not step inside any of the bars. The possibility that I was too scared to indulge in Pattaya-grade fun hit me then. It hit me that maybe I just didn’t have the guts to pick up a whore, and this fact both hurt and terrorized me.

  Why was I scared to take a lady? Did I still feel an obligation of fidelity? Did she really care anymore?

  The sun brightened. I walked out of Soi6 and took to sipping a cappuccino at a Beach Road café, allowing myself to indulge in thoughts about her, and the thoughts that came to my mind immediately were from our last travel together. A month-long trip to Nepal, where we trekked non-stop in the high mountains. Even in the serenity of those mountains we had had our tiny arguments, I remembered, and as I thought about them, the arguments, my coffee turned cold and my desire to go back to Soi6 turned into a mini-resolve.

  (4)

  • On a stony pathway by a stream my foot slipped a bit and she clapped her hands in angry desperation, for she suspected that my socks would be wet now, my twin-layered woollen socks, which she had bought especially for the blister-prone, long-duration Himalayas trek. Her big anger at my little failure made me angry too, and I said, ‘Never, ever, be angry at me for something I cannot do,’ and then we crossed the stream and I added, ‘I felt very violent, I felt like hitting someone.’ My violent remark somehow made her feel extremely sorry and I continued with my bad mood for another half hour.

  • In a semi-cosy room four thousand metres above the level of Mumbai, a room with a pale solar-powered bulb and double blankets on each of the two single beds, I got a hard-on. She was sitting on the other bed reading Anna Karenina on my Kindle, her face wrapped in a cinnabar scarf. I moved over to her bed and we lay spooning, me behind her and she reading. I moved my hands over her thigh and then her lower abdomen and then her crotch, but then she told me she did not want to make love in that filthy room of single-ply walls and with constipation burdening her duodenum, et cetera, and she told me that what she really wanted to do was read. This refusal made me angry and I thought it unjust that we would only sparsely, if at all, make love during our beautiful Himalayas tryst and I said, ‘You are never ready for it, are you?’ After some time we kissed and reconciled, but we did not make love that night. We did not make love on any of the Nepal nights.

  • While walking a sinewy path through a rhododendron forest, where the stems of the trees looked like arthritic fingers holding the mountain together, I told her of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I told her how Žižek thought communism was due a second reckoning. I told her many other things about him, mostly the provocations that he was fond of hurling at people. It was as if I were provoking her. For most part, she agreed with me in a manner I did not approve of, a silent manner, and I realized her agreement did not matter much nor did it satisfy me much. Then she told me that she did not quite understand how such philosophy can ever help an individual because an individual always has to make do with the system he finds himself in. I replied that her stance eventually boiled down to whether an individual can change a system and I said, ‘Žižek is also one man.’ It sounded silly to me as soon as I said it. She remained silent. Her silence provoked me and I grew angrier. I did not speak much for the rest of the day.

  (5)

  I walked into the red Soi6 with such ribbons of memories and also another installment of a recurring fantasy about our unborn son. Our unborn son, my unborn son, the son that I could have had and probably should have had with Anne-Marie. Our unborn son who would have become a Marxist and a novelist, a true-to-himself character who would have traced the dotted lines of his parents’ love, and who would have found in those lines a grand idea, something that would connect his broken parentage to the world at large, say capitalism, say the cult of the five-day week and the two-day weekend in which love is only allowed in the wrinkles of time that have not been smoothened, and gone on to write a deeply personal, deeply universal, deeply political poem that he would immediately set about to expand into a multi-layered novel. As I stood at one end of Soi6, contemplating my entry into it, this fantasy of mine made me grow ashamed of my incapability to achieve something as complex as my imaginary son could, though in reality I was ashamed of the simple fact that I was here, that my life had brought me here, to Soi6, where mid-sized capital and mid-sized enterprise waltzed together to present the world’s oldest value proposition in glitzy red, inescapable allure.

  I entered and saw bars bedecked with ladies on either side of me. Some of the ladies were calling me. ‘Hey handsome man, I want you.’ ‘Hey strong man, how do you do?’ I did feel handsome and strong for one moment. And what was to be my modus operandi? Was I to stare at this bevy and choose the most beautiful specimen? How indecent would that be? How shamefully incriminating? How obvious would it make it to them, the ladies, and to me, that I was here to fuck? But of course this was obvious already. What was I thinking? Of course I was going to be whoring. That’s what I had come to Pattaya for. To calm my nerves I put my right hand in my pocket and clasped the pack of Durex condoms inside. I took a deep breath. I passed by some bars, some invitations. Then I turned to enter a place to my right. I hadn’t chosen this bar or any of the ladies on display. I had just … turned. This disingenuous randomness (in choosing the bar to go to) was how my actions accommodated the faint strains of my conscience, allowing the semblance of accident and chance to the chain of events till now and the chain of events to follow.

  The bar was more like a lounge, dark inside. I sat on a sofa and ordered a pint of Singha beer. A square-faced lady in a becoming red dress asked to join me. I let her. She giggled and sat close to me, very close. On the sofa next to mine, a thin white man was making out with a thin Thai girl. I stared at them for a few seconds, trying to gain confidenc
e from the ready intimacy that the two seemed to share. I took a big gulp of the beer. The girl with me was fairer than the others. She had some pimples on her face, which was not too bad, I decided. I asked her for her name. She said something I did not register. Then I moved my right hand over her back, in what I considered to be a suggestive move, and drew her closer. I took another gulp of the Singha. I was a soldier on a furlough, I imagined. Just then, the thin couple next to us got up and took a staircase that had suddenly materialized in one corner of the place. They disappeared into the staircase, holding hands. In the next moment, my girl put her left hand on my crotch and caressed the thick denim there. The sweat on my forehead cooled. She moaned, and although I suspected the veracity of her sounds, they produced their intended effect. Desire is a crazy woman whose gestures you cannot fully comprehend, but who touches you in the right places.

  Within five minutes we were inside the girl’s little chamber on the first floor. The two opposing walls of the room had large mirrors plastered to them—the pair of mirrors aiming to replicate the bed and its actions interminably. A dim, yellowish-orange light prevailed, and under its disorienting effect I noticed a stupendous coincidence. The bedcover on the double bed inside the girl’s room was exactly the same as one of the bedcovers Anne-Marie and I had used in our apartment in Mumbai. Looking at this strange familiarity, I felt teleported for a second or two; a vision of Anne-Marie in pyjamas flashed before my eyes.

  The girl, looking at what must have been a pensive face, laughed, and then she thrust a towel in my hand, signalling that I needed to take a shower in the bathroom adjacent to the room. I obeyed the hygiene ritual and returned to the room, wrapped beneath the waist in the towel and carrying my clothes in my hands. I saw the girl wrapped in a towel too, and she went to the bathroom now, leaving me alone in the room for the few minutes it would take for her to shower. I noticed the heap of her clothes on a chair, the undergarments on top. I heaped mine on another chair and splayed myself on the bed. The fact that she had undressed herself meant that I would not get to undress her. But that was not too bad. Now she would return from the bathroom, moist beneath the towel, moist and smelling of soap.

  She came back and immediately took off her towel in the most matter-of-fact way, revealing a shapely body that somehow glowed in the dim light of the room. I lay expectantly on the bed. As she came up to commence her job, I was unsure whether to look at her in the mirror on the wall opposite us, where I could see her ass, or in the mirror to my immediate right, where the ovals of her breasts could be conveniently gazed at. To look at her directly would be to get only parts of the two views. For a little while my desire to devour all the views at once made me lose them all. As for her, she tittered flirtatiously and freed my lower body from the towel. I alternated between the mirrors. Then she began doing the things that porn stars do.

  For twenty minutes or so we thrashed in various geometries, the jauntier of our angles made exquisite by the play of the mirrors. Amid the plenitude of views, I managed to notice that the girl had a clichéd tattoo of a butterfly on her right shoulder blade and a similar one on her taut tummy. As for the sex, she seemed to be generally cheerful about it.

  But as the girl went to the bathroom for a post-fuck shower, and as I donned my clothes and stepped out of the room, the fun began to evaporate a bit. I stepped down into the bar and paid the manager 1100 baht, 100 of which were for the beer. Then I sat on the sofa and drank my beer, warm by now. The girl emerged from the staircase in the same red dress, and after giving me an impish smile she took to the seats behind the railing facing the street. There, she crossed her legs, and after a minute or so I heard her shout to someone: ‘Hey handsome man, I like you.’

  I left the bar. Outside it was evening, with neon lights beginning to strobe away the tiny truths of Soi6. A few transvestites had emerged on the road. Scores of ruddy white men, possible customers or passers-by, walked to and fro. A hodgepodge made of the various kinds of music hung in the air. I put my fingers in my pockets, felt the lightened Durex packet, and walked away, humming a stupid Hindi song.

  As I left Soi6 and headed toward my hotel, I felt I was in a state that can be described as the opposite of sentimental. I had just been sexually sated, and the exhaustion had left a pleasing fatigue in my legs. I took to walking on the beachside boulevard, breathing in the humid air. But there was something lacking. I noticed that the air was missing the salty feel that seaside air is usually suffused with. In the next twenty paces, this thought about the absence of a salty quality in the air morphed into a thought about absence in general. The absence of things, of right and wrong, of people. I left the boulevard and crossed the adjoining road to reach a departmental store on the other side. It occurred to me that buying beer for the refrigerator in my hotel room would not be a bad idea, because I’d decided that I was going to stay in the same hotel for the remaining three days of my vacation. Pattaya was fun, or was going to be fun, I had told myself, and my hotel was a decent one. So I bought four pints of beer and some ham and some bread. The teller gave me a receipt. I happened to look at the receipt. The receipt as a physical object. It was a thermally printed, long, rectangular paper, set to lose its print and become blank again in the course of time. … Like my sexual experience in Soi6, I thought—each detail of which I was bound to forget in due time. As I walked out of the store carrying my polybags, I tried to trace the events on that dimly lit bed one after another. I realized that already, in less than half an hour, some of the details of the action with my first Pattaya whore had gone missing. Knowing this made me sad, and the fine fatigue in my legs turned into something cumbersome.

  Inside my hotel room I stuffed my little refrigerator and then slid open a window to enjoy a view of the Pattaya bay, and although the view was somewhat curtailed by another hotel building just opposite to mine, I could still see the big city board on a distant hill with its letters PATTAYA standing out, the letters illuminated in turns in purple, red, green and blue light. I thought of many melancholic characters from novels and movies who did what I was doing—gazing at a cityscape through a window while smoking a cigarette. It was a romantic thought. But I was aware of being tethered to reality in the bay of Pattaya, where night was gaining strength; and faced with the night and the many confusions that I now acknowledged to myself, I lit a cigarette by the window and smoked it to the filter in short hurried puffs before hurling it still alit out of the window, its red dot shattering upon impact two floors below. Then I turned to my bed where my Kindle lay and I switched it on.

  I read a war novel for some time, and as I read on the soldiers’ sense of disillusionment began to seep into my own notions of reality. I felt a bit nauseated. I switched off the Kindle and took out a bottle of beer from the fridge. I looked around for a bottle opener but couldn’t find any. Exasperated, I returned the bottle to the fridge, for I was never the sort to try my teeth on the cap. It never occurred to me to ask the hotel staff for the opener. Amid all the moving about in the room for the simple tool, I had caught some glimpses of myself in the large mirror beside the LCD TV, and after I placed the bottle in the fridge I stopped and stood before the mirror to look at myself. I wasn’t a soldier on a furlough, I thought. That wasn’t the case at all. I was a soldier at war. I was a soldier at war, and this was the battle of Pattaya. A battle to be fought inside rooms, on beds, between the gazes of the mirrors and the crumples of the bed sheets. These were its trenches. But then, who was the enemy? And for what land, what spoil, what redemption, what revenge, was it being fought? Was the enemy far, far away or deep, deep inside? Were the whores on the side of the enemy or were they my comrades?

  I started taking off my clothes while continuing to stare at the mirror. I took Anne-Marie’s picture from my wallet and affixed it on the space between the mirror and the frame. I looked at my body. I touched myself. It was clear that like all trench warfare, the battle of Pattaya would be an arduous, testing one.