Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  I hate it, she said, I think it is too morbid an idea.

  Why?

  Because we die. Why do we die?

  But he lives.

  But he is not the one who exists. In reality we exist. And you make us die. I mean you will make us die.

  It is only an idea.

  I don’t like it. At all. I don’t like the idea.

  Should I also kill him in the end then?

  Fuck off, man. You’re stupid sometimes.

  Now you’re getting angry. There is no need to be angry.

  I’m not angry.

  You are angry. It’s just an idea.

  It’s a silly idea.

  I don’t think it’s silly. I think no idea is silly. Execution makes ideas silly. By themselves ideas are just air.

  It’s a silly idea.

  Ideas are just odourless somethings. Nothings.

  This coconut does not have any flesh. We asked for a coconut with flesh.

  Malai. It’s called malai. Not flesh.

  Yes, malai. We asked for a coconut with malai.

  Our unborn son will wage a crusade against liberal capitalism.

  Do you want another coconut? I’m going to ask the lady for a discount. Mine didn’t have any malai.

  No. You can have mine. There’s malai here.

  We should have as much coconut water as we can here. It’s really cheap.

  Yeah.

  Do you think people in Goa are happier in the off season?

  Why?

  They look relaxed. In high season they will be all hurried, I guess. Plus there must be people from all over the country looking to do business. That must be irritating.

  And prostitutes.

  Bof. Why do you think of prostitutes?

  Just like that. Goa has prostitutes, you know.

  I think you think weird things sometimes.

  I’m actually not thinking too much. Look … the sun is touching the sea now.

  It’s really hazy. I think it is raining over there.

  Where?

  Where the sun meets the sea.

  Is the malai good?

  Yeah, it is. You want some?

  No. But think of it. A child of Indian and French parentage, without a real homeland. Torn between the West and the East, having lost the only two people who could have given him that feeling of home.

  I don’t know why, but it sounds clichéd.

  Really? Can you name one novel with a similar plot?

  Maybe I can’t. But that’s not the point.

  Okay. I get your point.

  So what does this guy do then?

  Our son. Not ‘this guy’.

  Why does he have to be our son?

  He has to be our son for me to care about him enough and write about him. And write well.

  You scare me sometimes.

  Are you scared that whatever I’m saying will come true? You’re not that superstitious, are you?

  I’m not scared of that. You know that.

  What are you scared of then?

  The way you think. Your thought process. You think so easily of death. Doesn’t it scare you? I don’t like thinking of my death. I like thinking of my life. My happiness.

  Do you think of me when you think of happiness?

  Of course.

  I think of you when I think of death.

  And that’s not going overboard?

  I don’t see how.

  Anyway, so what does this guy do?

  I don’t know yet. But he travels.

  Pfft. Sometimes I think you say things just to irritate me. Your entire idea starts and ends with our death. There’s nothing more to it.

  Yeah, yeah. I mean I know what he feels and what he is looking for, but I don’t think I can tell you now.

  So don’t tell me now.

  You are pissed. You want more coconut?

  I’m not pissed. You know what, maybe you shouldn’t kill the parents. Maybe they should just get separated. Get divorced or something.

  How can you say that?

  Why are you looking at me like that?

  How can you say that? How can you say that we will be separated … divorced?

  It’s not us, baby. I’m talking about the parents. You are going to write fiction, my love. Those dead parents are not us.

  But I told you he is our son. We are the parents.

  If you insist.

  But why not die? Why shouldn’t the parents die?

  Can’t you see? It’s simple. Their death just deletes the complexities that living characters will bring. That’s my opinion. Their death makes this novel a road novel. The son just travels aimlessly. If they were alive, this could be anything. Self-discovery, redemption, travel, family, love, reunion, et cetera, et cetera. Whatever.

  In my mind it is all those things, but they are dead. The parents are dead.

  How can it be about love then? Or reunion?

  That’s the point. It can’t be, and yet it is.

  Whatever you say.

  Well.

  We should go now. I think it will rain again.

  Okay, let’s go. By the way, just to let you know.

  What?

  I have just now decided, in this very moment of seaside revelation, that our unborn son will be a poet.

  Of course you have, my love.

  I think she kissed me then. Not a big one, just a little peck on the lips, the kind that lovers come to love more than the big ones till the big ones become so scarce that those little pecks begin to feel like violent scratches.

  We left the beach.

  (13)

  Tipsy already, we left Marie Bar Beer after I had paid the check and the bar fine. We walked toward my hotel. We were the only two souls on Soi4 then, although as we walked I felt looked at from the buildings on either side, which led to a cloud of terror and shame engulfing me. The metronomic click of Noon’s heels on the asphalt was either relaxing or exacerbating this state of my nerves—as in I could not say what the exact effect of that periodic sound was. Noon had put on a faded denim jacket over her pink top and was completely un-whore-like, even with the pointed percussion that her footwear made on the lonesome road. The photo that she had gifted me—I was repeatedly feeling it in the back pocket of my jeans. Not far ahead of us there was the roughly rectangular cutout of the Beach Road wherein I could note a lot of frenetic activity—little organisms of light and desire rushing in and out of the shape, as if a movie accidently shot had been put on display on a minuscule screen. Had someone been looking at us from there, we would have probably appeared to that somebody like two shadows holding hands inside a dark tunnel. Like ghosts in love.

  In the middle of our walk in Soi4, Noon tugged at me and pointed with some excitement at a large building to our left. It was an unremarkable building that I would have passed by without noticing even in the light of day. ‘Hospital,’ she said, her fingers now pointing at an entrance flanked by wheelchairs on either side (the wheelchairs seemed incongruous somehow), and I was confused by this till I remembered that Noon had been a nurse. I thought of risking a stilted conversation and asking her what was on her mind just then, but I didn’t, choosing to speculate on my own. What does she think when she looks at the hospital? Was she pining for the hospital job? Or was her gesture more complex? Was it tied to the specificities of our walk, to me, to the fact that it was I and not someone else with her at that moment, the fact that I had taken a room in Soi4, where there was a hospital too? If it was so, what was my role here in crossing a hospital on the way to my … my empty harem, with a prostitute nurse? Who was I? What was I becoming? And who was Noon—a girl, a nurse, a prostitute, a mistake, a decision, a coincidence, a plan—just what?

  It was then that I had the first premonition of bad sex.

  (14)

  The sleepy lady at the reception deposited Noon’s identity card as a safety against possible malfeasance. Common practice, I learnt.

  We climbed the staircase to my second-flo
or room then, Noon’s heels breaking the silence of the corridor. As I opened the door to my room there was a moment in which faint sounds from the adjacent room could be heard. Sounds of love-making. Noon hunched her shoulders and smiled at me, restraining laughter, as if those love-making sounds were a little secret that we would come to share and laugh about in years to come. I switched on the lights in my room and the obvious was suddenly clear as day, at least to me, and I dreaded that it was clear even to Noon, that there were no years to come. There was just this night, and whatever intimacy there was in that shared hilarity had to be consumed in this night alone, in whatever was left of it. In this room with a king-sized bed, a taut white bed sheet, puffy pillows and two chairs around a short square table. And an LCD TV and a long mirror beside it. And a bathroom with a plastered white tub and silvery faucets.

  Noon ambled about in the room for a little while, as if inspecting it. I just stood there blankly during all the minutes it took for her to register things. Nothing about her survey was even remotely prostitute-like, and part of my mind claimed that it was just a natural reaction upon entering a room that one hasn’t ever been in; though what was natural was also absurd in this situation.

  ‘Watch TV?’ she said, picking up the remote from the bed. She put on a channel playing Thai pop songs. I kept standing still, blankly, as if marooned, as if registering in those strange rhymes a strange inimical poem about the banality of mankind. I was tired. I could have slept. The songs were peppy. Thai girls and boys dancing in plastic glee on an iridescent set. There was something both disorienting and uplifting in the world where the songs came from. Disorienting only for me, and uplifting only for Noon, for while I stayed on my feet, looking at the TV, the songs got her into the groove and she stood up from the bed and started dancing.

  My gloom was checked when Noon held my hands and coaxed me to dance. A new song was playing now. I tried to dance. My body’s movement roiled something in me and suffused me with a weird mix of feelings. I gazed at Noon’s laughter and almost fell in shocking ecstatic love; at the same time I felt the hollow before the onset of crying; also, I fell into my memories with Anne-Marie.

  (15)

  I’ve finally found the voice for our unborn son, I said.

  This was in Kathmandu, more than three years after Goa. The two of us were lying idly inside our hotel room, our muscles still aching from the seventeen-day trek we had just returned from. We were too tired even for bad sex.

  When did you find it?

  Last night. I scribbled a bit after you dozed off.

  So what is the voice like?

  It is peppy and nostalgic. Although the nostalgic part is implausible. He is nostalgic for events that he has proof of, but no memory of.

  Eh?

  Okay. Maybe I want to say something else. It’s tough to answer what it’s like. I mean tough to attach adjectives to the voice.

  Okay.

  But it is also alive. The voice. Alive is important for this character. His voice has to be the opposite of death. Because the parents are dead and the son is alive, you know.

  Can you read to me what you wrote last night?

  Yes, of course.

  Is it him talking?

  Meaning?

  Meaning is it … is it in first person?

  Yes, it is in first person. Of course it is in first person.

  Can you read it to me in the way you imagined him saying it?

  I don’t think I imagined him saying it.

  Then how is it his voice?

  I imagined him writing it. I imagined him writing it in a voice that he must have imagined as his voice.

  That’s really complex. But maybe it helped you imagine.

  Yes it did. Wait, let me read it to you.

  Because I have pictures with me I can be nostalgic without really possessing memory. There is a special one—Maman holding me (did I mumble Maman or Mummy in those days?), with some presence having taken the picture, likely Papa, and me looking at the camera, me a blob of fat and spongy bones, me giggling, and Maman looking away, with one hand of hers holding me tight to her chest and the other controlling her blondish hair, hair that the wind is blowing. Maman is perhaps looking at the horizon, for the surroundings in the photograph look like they could offer a long horizon, or maybe she is looking at a mountaintop that we had come to watch, or at a river, or at the maw of a distant valley, or at a wind that she had momentarily wished to see. Or maybe she was just being asked to pose like that. How could I know? One of my tiny hands, its fingers spread like a web, is at her collar bone, trying to clutch at her skin, and now whenever I look at this picture I wonder if our mind archives all sensations of touch, if it files them somewhere, in some dark drawer. And then there comes that moment when I find myself stressing to recall how it was to touch her then, when I was no more than a toddler. At least I know that once you’ve seen your mother, even in stillness of the kind that only a photograph can provide, there is no other mother that you can imagine. I also know that there is nothing more picturesque than the picture of your young mother.

  This is not his voice, she said.

  Why? Whose is it then?

  It is yours.

  What?

  It is obviously Oedipally charged. These are your fantasies imposed on a character you define as your son. This is about you, not the character.

  You mean my fantasies with my mother?

  NO. No, not that. I mean your fantasies with me.

  So I want to be your son?

  You know what I’m talking about. Leave it … even I don’t know what I’m talking about.

  You say this because you know me. Because you know how and why I’m writing this. No one else can guess so easily.

  Maybe. Maybe I’m too harsh. But is it okay for a writer to be dishonest like this?

  A writer is always dishonest.

  That doesn’t answer my question.

  (16)

  We danced at a sinuous pace to a rather pulsating song, almost in protest against its verve, and Noon looked half the time at me and the other half at the TV, whereas I distributed my gaze equally between her face and the ready white bed behind her, the bed’s surface receiving a flurry of colours from images on the TV. I must say that I was happy to be holding Noon’s narrow waist, the sense of touch transporting me to benign memories that seemed to me resonant with the play of colours on the bed. I felt comfortable and melancholic and also a bit sleepy, but within a minute or so this resonance became threatening and soon acquired a pitch that began to crush things within me. And I could have gasped, gasped not for breath but for the present, I could have gasped for more of the present, as if it were only the present that I wanted to inhale, and I did gasp; I gasped and bent my neck and touched Noon’s forehead with mine, and I raised my hands from her waist and grasped her at the shoulders, her tender and tiny shoulders, but just as I held her there the song broke off to an advertisement, and our embrace also broke, as if it had been hired exclusively for the purpose of the song. The advertisement was for a headache pill, followed by another one for a tampon.

  Noon, meanwhile, had noticed Anne-Marie’s picture stuck on the frame of the large mirror beside the TV. She took it out and looked at it deeply, as if trying to recall an acquaintance or trying to memorize the face forever. I was standing a foot away from her, awaiting a comment or a question, and for a brief second I even entertained the ridiculous idea that I’d been found out, that my love Noon had discovered my philandering ways with a white woman. I think I even braced myself for a rebuke, trying to believe the joke myself.

  ‘Photo?’ she asked.

  I scrunched my forehead in response.

  ‘Photo … umm … you, photo?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, it’s … it’s mine. I put it here,’ I said.

  ‘Who is she?’

  It was strange how Noon had spoken those three words, with an elongation of ‘who,’ a near effacing of ‘is’, and an abrupt truncation of ‘she’. It w
as the general Thai way of speaking, its stresses and ellipses discordant with the demands of English. But her voice and her quizzical expression had added a certain signature to those words.

  ‘She is my ex-girlfriend,’ I said.

  ‘Ex … girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes. She was my girlfriend. But she is not my girlfriend anymore.’

  ‘Aaaa. Ex-girlfriend.’ Noon nodded in comprehension now and tried to insert the photo back between the mirror and the frame. But it just wouldn’t go in now for some reason, and so she placed the photo on the writing desk below the mirror.

  Yes, the room had a writing desk below the mirror. It is, perhaps, a good place for a writing desk.

  (17)

  All this while, I forgot to mention that the cigarettes Noon and I had been smoking and were going to smoke through the night had all been provided by Noon. She had been carrying with her a small leather bag since leaving Marie Bar Beer, a bag that looked expensive and had inside it a good number of cigarette packets. All menthol, all easy for the lungs.

  (18)

  We slid open the window and smoked a cigarette each, looking silently at that distant neon-lit board that said PATTAYA and did the irritating task of reminding us both of where we were. It struck me then that I had beer in my fridge and I asked Noon if we should have some. She agreed. But as I took out two San Miguels, I realized that I did not have a bottle opener. I signalled this problem to Noon, at which she laughed heartily and proceeded to grab the bottles from my hands. She then went toward the bathroom and found in the bathroom door’s jamb a groove into which she inserted the bottle heads one by one and twisted them open. Some foam spilled on to the floor, which was great.

  With a beer bottle each in our hands, we sat on the two chairs set on opposing sides of a low flat table. We clinked our bottles. Noon took a gulp larger than any that she had taken at Marie Bar Beer.

  ‘Why you come to Pattaya?’ she asked.

  ‘I am on a vacation,’ I said.

  ‘But why? If you hap girlfriend?’ she said.

  ‘I told you. She is not my girlfriend anymore.’

  ‘Any—more,’ she said. It was clear that the syllables confused her. ‘Where she now?’ she asked.