Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  (6)

  I took a shower and stepped out to get a whore for the night.

  (7)

  I walked on the Second Road, the one behind the Beach Road, and to-ed and fro-ed for a long time. I was excited at the prospect of entering a place for beer and exiting it with a pretty Thai girl, but imagining the maneuvers between these two events made me nervous. I did not want to go to Soi6 again; that would be too easy. I wanted to try new tricks, new lanes, new types of girls—basically to reach out for new experiences. I finally entered a place called Marie Bar Beer, in no less arbitrary a manner than I had affected in the afternoon. At the moment of my entry there were three ladies behind the round, road-facing bar table, and none of them was to my interest, which is to say sexual interest, and perhaps this was the little chink in my so-called arbitrariness of choice. What I mean to say is that it is possible that I found it both easy and serendipitous to enter Marie Bar Beer out of all the bars in Pattaya because what was on show there was not attractive, and must have immediately and surely relaxed the psychic fortifications that I sometimes construct in anticipation of feminine beauty.

  For details: When I entered the Marie Bar Beer there were three women there: a fair old lady with unkempt hair who seemed to be minding the cash counter; a fat girl who was too bulky to be in the business; and a broad broad who, although dressed skimpily, wasn’t someone I could ever fancy. Clearly, with my notions of beauty accompanying me, I found myself in a place where the probability of immediately finding a delectable whore seemed probably the lowest in Pattaya.

  I mounted a high stool, oriented such that it let me have a view of the street, and I ordered a Singha. Within a couple of minutes the broad broad approached me from behind the bar and gave me one of the strongest-toothed, broadest grins I’ve ever seen in my life. Everything about her was broad. She wanted me to buy her a drink. She told me her name out loud (she would tell me her name again during the course of this story, but I can’t remember it). At that time I was a bit distracted, because I was revising what my twice-been-to-Pattaya friend—a colleague from Mumbai—had told me about the workings in evening-time Pattaya some days back. According to him, things could be expected to proceed like this: The spectacularly-jawed woman would ask me to buy her drinks, for each drink she would receive a commission, and then when I am adequately tipsy she would offer to be my whore for the night, for which ‘rights’ I would have to pay the bar a ‘fine’ of a few hundred bahts, and after which I would have to negotiate the fuck-rates with the woman in private. The whole thing was kept decent all along the way. But precisely because of this very inherent contradiction at its base, where it gave the illusion of decency to something venal, these all-night picks, which were the only picks my Mumbai friend had had experience with, seemed to me trickier than the simple afternoon quickie I’d had in Soi6.

  Presently I wanted to duck for cover, for the broad broad’s wheedling for a drink was unnerving me and I feared that I would end up spending precious bahts on an entirely non-erotic rendezvous. I half-suspected her to be a ladyboy, which is to say a transsexual (I guess). A bone structure like hers was unusual in petite Thai girls. I ignored her exhortations, unable to say no flatly. I acted as if I could not understand what she said and took tentative sips of the Singha, avoiding eye contact by looking at the street while she whined.

  Night was approaching. I looked at the dumbbell-shaped cutout of the sky between the upper peripheries of Marie Bar Beer and the buildings opposite the road, one of which was the famous transvestite go-go theatre called Alcazar or something. The city was slowly acquiring a grainy glow that obfuscated the darkness in the sky. Below, a maniacal music sounded all around, with some decipherable strains of Bollywood music that my mind placed in the late nineties. I noticed that Marie Bar Beer was playing Enrique’s ‘Love to see you cry’, something that I found both ridiculous and melancholic. I could sense the broad broad relenting, perchance because of the new opportunity provided by a middle-aged white customer who had come to the bar. Across the road, on either side of the Alcazar go-go theatre were open bars with diffused red lights, and as I looked closely at these bars and the activity inside them—activity that constituted bar girls shifting the stools or the chairs or the bottles, or bar girls playing snooker, or bar girls generally standing akimbo guessing which one of the nearby hotels they would end up sleeping in, et cetera—I felt a poetic urge within me. I mused that the insides of the open bars were bloody aneurysms surrounded by dark little ruptured nervelets that were these bar girls. My unborn son, I thought, obliquely. My unborn son would raid these nightly paths and find the burnt remains of his father’s homeless poems. Anyhow. Soft red light had become prominent inside Marie Bar Beer as well. It was clear that even the second customer was not interested in the broad broad. This lack of interest had produced a rictus on her face that only I noticed and only I felt uncomfortable for noticing. So much red, I thought. So many hungry souls.

  After some time, two young ladies with extremely comely bodies entered Marie Bar Beer, both of them dressed in short black skirts and revealing black tops, both speaking in loud Thai to the three ladies behind the bar, both smelling electric and flowery. These were professionals who had daily fare, no fucking doubt, and the white customer at the bar had even started to show very visible interest in the younger of the two, who proceeded to touch him on his left cheek and asked him to buy her a drink, a request that he gladly accepted. As the other lady came close to me, I instinctively turned my head and relegated her to the periphery of my vision. But then I slowly turned toward her, because some inner voice told me that it was plain stupid to avoid a whore in Pattaya. The lady started talking to the broad broad. I said ‘Hi,’ almost interrupting them. She looked at me and sat on the stool next to mine, and said something that sounded like Nohap. I was confused if she had ended her syllables with a question mark or not. Nohap seemed eerily close to being an acronym for Not Happening, which made it important that I know whether she had meant to ask me a question or was just clarifying that there were no erotic possibilities between the two of us.

  The song currently playing now at Marie Bar Beer was a song I did not know, and mixed as it was with the music from all around, it was quite difficult to follow. I was confused if I should restart a conversation with the whore sitting next to me (she was now looking into her handbag), but then I realized that what I suffered from was not confusion but something way more complicated than confusion, something that didn’t even have much to do with the whore next to me. I wanted to enter and exit at the same time. But what? Was I not already inside it? Was I not already outside it? Anne-Marie, I thought. Anne-Marie’s cunt.

  On the other side of the bar table there was a new girl now. I had completely missed her arrival, and she seemed to me to have emerged from nowhere. She was preparing drinks for the younger whore and her white middle-aged customer. She stood at an angle from me, and I could not really see her face and had to strain to ascertain her prettiness and her exact role at Marie Bar Beer. The broad broad caught my gaze and promptly nudged the new girl, who then turned to face me. I found her pretty in a homely way, which was strange to me then, so strange that in that otherwise bizarre setting it registered like a kind of familiarity. I took long seconds to notice everything in her appearance. She was not made-up, had tired eyes, had short hair, two thick locks of which fell on either side of her face, did not look like she had really taken a shower that day, was in a pink sleeveless top that wasn’t really attractive, had a faded black jeans beneath the top, was thin, had thin arms and legs, had Eastern eyes, had a short nose, had nice lips, had a thin beauty spot on the left cheek …

  ‘I want to buy her a drink,’ I said to the broad broad, pointing to the new girl.

  (8)

  The introduction of the new girl in the section above shames me as a writer, or as someone who needs to pretend to be one. How devoid it is of any presentiment, or even postsentiment. I could not even weave into this introduct
ion the smallest hint that the story, this story, my story, has moved a stage with her entry. And so now I have to resort to this, this naked avowal, begging you to exercise your imagination and create this new girl at Marie Bar Beer as a kind of female presence that reminds a man of some good in the world, reminds him that he is splintered and shattered but can be fixed. What I felt, when I first looked at her in her simplicity, was a surprising connectedness, in a way that does not necessitate splendour—and I know this sounds mushy. It was this very apprehension of sentimentality that, along with the poverty of my lexicon and my lack of literary depth, had made me wary of mentioning the word connection. It would have appeared abrupt or convoluted, considering the flow of whatever had preceded her entry. That I’ve been able to use the word now is from being able to look up from the page, being able to look up from the page and think of poetry and not prose. Consider me: I was surrounded that moment by streaks and strobes of neon, along with cheap perfume that somehow fostered the idea that every pleasure could be bought or sold. I was a lover shorn of love, searching for sex, surrounded by the lurid music of a thousand parties. Even with eyes closed one could feel the glitter and pomp in that space and time. She, this plainly dressed girl, appeared to me an oasis of dullness, the quintessence of being un-ready and un-prepared for the occasion of the night, not giving the oncoming night and its injunction for enjoyment any heed, not imposing anything on herself and being in fact genuinely tired in the face of the demands of her occupation. I was beset with a similar fatigue too, but it was my role to deny it then—I was the customer. It was, however, a glimpse of all this that made me connect.

  As an aside I claim that the best literature is also sentimental, and that there are many kinds of sentimentality in literature.

  (9)

  She, the new girl, sat opposite me on my beckoning, the wood of the bar between us. She smiled at me. But it was not a real smile, and her face appeared for a fraction of a second to be crumbling. As if her sharing a drink with me was something that could bring great pain. I blinked hard and long, and when I opened my eyes they immediately fell into her dark inscrutable eyes that were like jaded copper coins set in wide cowries; and then she blinked, and suddenly there was a shimmer in those eyes, a glistening, such that in the next moment her fake full smile turned into a true half one. I sensed that in these few moments with me, she had somehow relaxed. I asked her for her name. She said something that sounded like a mix of ‘New’ and ‘Nuan’ and ‘Noon’. I decided to go with ‘Noon’.

  The drinks arrived, and she responded with an earnest little nod of gratitude. I felt like pinching myself and waking up in a place far, far away from Pattaya, and although I did not do that, the pinching, that is, I did for a moment wonder if she was really a prostitute. The few silent seconds in-between made me stupid and I asked her for her name again. ‘Noon,’ she replied, again with a true half smile and a sparkle in her eyes.

  I must have looked bemused, must have looked drunk even, and something about Noon, the slow fluctuations on her face perhaps, were forcing upon me an awareness of how I looked. I did not want to look bemused or drunk at all.

  I told her my name. This was the first time I had spoken my name in Pattaya.

  I wanted to take a gulp of the beer but could not make myself do that. She was now looking away from me, talking to the broad broad and laughing with her, presumably at my appearance, at my bemusement and drunkenness. I looked at her hair, her slim neck, and then I looked down at my beer bottle, at my hands and my fingers next to the beer bottle. Just then she turned toward me, and she was still laughing, her little teeth beautiful in her mouth. She called me by my name, which sounded more like an approximation of my name, an approximation that my mind registered as original and priceless. My face must have forgotten to react, for she then placed her hand upon mine on the table and shook it, and called me by that name again. I felt a jolt, as if some lost part of me had returned to my body.

  ‘You no good?’ she asked me

  ‘No,’ I said aloud, smiling. ‘I good.’

  (10)

  I

  Grand classrooms of that red-bricked campus

  Of strange angles and stranger agency,

  Inside them my stolen glances.

  Love was the daybreak after sound sleep,

  Then.

  II

  First dinner my fancy blunder,

  Stale lettuce and no cherry tomatoes,

  The restaurant stunned by the contrast in our skins.

  A silk stole slid on her.

  She talked of parents’ divorce, broken family,

  being Celtic, happiness.

  I should have taken pause at happiness.

  I should have asked her what she meant.

  III

  At eleven in the night I knocked

  And she opened.

  I sat down on her single bed, shaking,

  Wanting to stay.

  She asked if I’d brought my toothbrush.

  Didn’t make love.

  Although when she slept I was

  certain that she was dreaming.

  (11)

  I struck a deal with Noon, a deal for long-time, which means the whole night. But this happened after many drinks and many board games that she subjected me to, and also many staccato conversations. Her English was either basic or absent, and took turns between the two unpredictably. I gathered that she was twenty-nine years old, the same age as Anne-Marie, both two years my elder. It was only her second week of employment in Pattaya. She had been a nurse in Bangkok before, and had come to this city to make enough money to recover from a family catastrophe that she tried to explain to me unsuccessfully.

  During the entire evening, sitting across me with alcohol between us, her manner was a mixture of sadness and chirpiness, and the conflict between the two was all too visible on her face. On occasions when she could not understand me, she would create an expression of great concern, as if our inability to communicate was not ours but mine alone and was something to be pitied in me. Through this pensive look of hers would sometimes burst forth a grin or a giggle so effusive it would make me chuckle as well, and I would feel as if I had finally found a partner in ridiculing the heaviness of life. This glee would in turn be betrayed in the eyes, those plain eyes that I’ve described before and tried to make something big of, and although it would be wrong to call those eyes downcast, they did indeed have in them the flickers and scratches of defeat. Watching those eyes I felt I was facing someone who was trying hard to be both a person and a product. This sort of charade is what all of us have to do at our workplaces today, it’s no big deal really, but through Noon I understood then that there is a difference between trying to be a product and trying to be a consumable product. Noon was not the prostitute yet, this much was clear. She had not yet metamorphosed into that ultimate consumable good. She was still trying, still grasping the concept that the prostitute’s primary offering is not a talent or a skill or experience, but the self, or the self’s physical definition, the body. Everything comes after that. As I looked at her that evening, at her swift and shy eyes, at her laughter that could be both reckless and edgy, I saw that she was vulnerable, not yet capable of rebirth every morning, not ready for the sort of Sisyphean stubbornness (or compulsion) that her profession demanded. It was still possible for her to be hurt. And this fact endeared her to me.

  Of course it was not only her eyes and her laughter. That she was more girl and less prostitute could be deduced from other little things as well. Sometime in the middle of the evening, street-side beggars had come into Marie Bar Beer and asked the few customers, including me, for money. I didn’t offer any for the simple reason that I never give money to beggars. But Noon gave them ten or twenty baht notes from her pocket, something that I found profligate, because the money that she let go of so easily was equivalent to whatever commission she was making on the drinks that I was buying her. There was another such instance of generosity. A man with a pola
roid camera approached us and offered to take an instant picture, and I refused, suspecting that his hundred baht offer was too expensive and involved an element of commission to Messrs. Marie Bar Beer. But Noon didn’t let the man go. She came out from behind the bar to my left side, leaned on me as I sat on the stool, and asked the photographer to shoot. Then she went behind the bar, happy and giggling, and paid the photographer from her wallet. Upon taking the photo in her hand, she shook it violently for a minute or more, apparently to air it, and then offered the picture to me. ‘My gift for you,’ she said.

  I accepted the gift, although I didn’t know what this gesture meant. Today this picture looks to me a rectangle of hope. Hope for what, I don’t know. But hope.

  (I do not have the courage to show it in full, to reveal her face.)

  Posing for the photograph, I had taken the liberty to put my left arm around Noon’s waist. My gesture was nervous, and as can be seen, I could only let my wrist dangle carelessly about her midriff. It was not in my powers yet to hold Noon. Still, this was my first attempt at intimacy with her. And whether I was a customer beginning to assert his right over a product of choice or a boy simply trying his luck with a girl, I cannot really say. Maybe it was both. It was both.

  It was after the photograph that I discussed the long-time deal with Noon, as if receiving the gift had made me want to take her home. By that time the two prettier whores had gone away with the white customers and the broad broad was having a drink with a fat Indian man. When I asked Noon how much she would charge to spend the night with me, she smiled at me wistfully, and for a second the air in my lungs vanished for I thought that she would refuse.

  ‘What you want you pay me. Ok?’ she said.

  (12)

  Our son, I said. Our yet-to-be-conceived son.

  It was in Goa, the two of us sipping coconut water while facing a faraway hazy sunset.

  We will die and our son will survive and then he will grow up and then he will travel the world, I said. To certify our absence. To find the terminal point and then move on. How is that for an idea? An idea for a novel?