‘She is in France,’ I said. I didn’t feel the need to qualify that she was actually in Interlaken now.
‘Aaa. France. Paris. She France and you India,’ she said. There were exclamations in everything that she said, and her eyebrows arched even as she took another swig of the beer.
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. It always brought a smile to my face when people showed surprise at the distance in nationalities between Anne-Marie and me. It had always felt like an achievement, right from the campus days when we had first met.
‘But how?’ she asked.
‘We met in college. In India,’ I said.
‘Aaa,’ she said. ‘But she no with you? Any—more?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
There was some distress in her voice, and it made me uncomfortable. But the distress was probably a result of whatever she was simultaneously watching on television. I glanced sideways at the screen: two Thai young men were talking to each other excitedly, one of them pointing a knobby finger at the other. There was a doll-like Thai woman too, standing perpendicular to the direction of the pointy finger, staring agape at the conversation and also at the camera—a duality that only soap opera occupies.
‘Younotell,’ Noon said, still looking at the television set.
‘What?’
‘You no tell?’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘She had to go back to France, to her family.’
‘Hmm. Family. France,’ she said. She didn’t turn toward me as she said this, and I assumed that her scrutiny had ended. I was watching TV too.
The doll-like woman was consoling one of the young men now, the other had left the scene. The young man was terrible at crying. The background music strained a single note. Some of the melodrama of the scene had seeped into Noon’s expression, her beautiful eyes wet now, concern filling them, and so when she turned toward me and asked her next question, it was easy for me to believe that this look and everything in it was for me too—for my woes too, for my woes with the French girl who had left me after four years together. And so I allowed myself the illusion that I had found someone who shared my pain, or at least understood it. ‘But why you come to Pattaya. For lady. If you hap girlfriend,’ Noon had asked. It was a question that was tough and easy, correct and incorrect, with no ready answer that might have been communicated to Noon. It was tough because I really did not know why I had come to Pattaya. It was easy because obviously I had come here sex-starved. It was incorrect because I did not have a girlfriend anymore. It was correct because Anne-Marie did smog my world, still. I could say that I had come here to forget her. I could say that I had come here to remember her. I could say that I had come here to hate her. I could say that I had come here to love her. Or I could say that I had come here to be free from the verbs—love, hate, forget, remember. Everything I said would be true, like in the universe above and around and within us, where matter and dark matter, supernovas and black holes, constellations and dust, whales and amoebas, winds and machines, memories and polymers, fantasies and freckles, coexist.
And so I did not answer Noon’s question—which made her concentrate on the soap opera, the intensity of her face mitigated a bit, her beer almost done. I stopped thinking about the meaning of the question for me and thought instead of the reason why Noon could have asked it. Why was she concerned by my being in Pattaya? Why was she disappointed—if she was—by it? She knew now that I was a man who had known love, who had lived it. Did she think it was immoral for such a man to be in Pattaya, seeking ladies? Was Pattaya, in her mind, only a haven for the never-loved ones? Had I disappointed her?
Maybe it was all in my head. A sweet puzzle, nevertheless, to imagine that by being in Pattaya I had betrayed an expectation that could never have been built had I not come here.
‘Do you want more beer?’ I asked Noon. She nodded, and I proceeded to do with the two Singhas what Noon had done with the two San Miguels. When I handed her a Singha she jerked up from her chair and gave me a peck on the cheek. Then she went on to pick up Anne-Marie’s photo from the writing desk. While being amused at that moment, and while thinking that Noon was drunk now, I realized that our photo—Noon and me at Marie Bar Beer—was still in my back pocket. I took it out and kept it on the windowsill to my left. To my relief it hadn’t crumpled at all.
‘Why she go? She beautiful,’ Noon said, stressing the ‘ful’ of beautiful. And again, sadness seemed to constrain her voice. The TV became louder by itself. It was the headache pill ad.
‘Yes. She is beautiful,’ I said.
‘You no go to France?’ she asked.
‘No. I cannot.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Eh. But why?’
‘Because she went there without me,’ I said.
Noon didn’t understand me. Even I didn’t. For a moment I felt like telling her of the choice between Interlaken and Pattaya, that if I had chosen Interlaken, I would’ve never met Noon.
‘You go to Walking Street in Pattaya?’ she asked me, perhaps to change the topic.
‘No. I have not been there yet.’
‘You careful, okay. On Walking Street. You careful.’
‘Okay,’ I said. I had already been warned about the aggressive ladyboys of Walking Street by my Mumbai friend. But the concern in Noon’s voice made me drunk. And what about her eyes that were a filmy wet now, again.
‘What happened?’ I asked her.
‘I hap—boyfriend,’ she said.
‘You do?’ I said. My heart sank. Why did my heart sink?
‘Yes. But he go to London. To study,’ she said.
‘When?’
She looked up to the ceiling, to count. ‘Sick,’ she seemed to say.
‘Six months back?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Six days?’
‘Nooo,’ she laughed.
‘Six years then.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He go but he not call me after. No call. Find new lady there. I think.’
‘Maybe he found her,’ I said, pointing to Anne-Marie’s picture, which Noon had placed on the table between us.
‘Nooo,’ said Noon, smiling incredulously.
I looked at Noon and imagined her with a Thai man. Noon, a happy nurse. Then I picked up Anne-Marie’s picture and kept it on the windowsill, above my picture with Noon. I wanted that photo to be out of sight.
(19)
The room, despite the split AC chugging with minimal sound, had a stale sort of temperature, a warmth that was efficient at producing films of sweat, which it did both on my face and on Noon’s. Noon lit a cigarette and added some smoke to the stuffiness in the room. The windows had been shut after our earlier smoke, and all I could do was to nudge the ashtray toward her and watch her alternate between the cigarette and the beer. She was hurried in both, as if she had somewhere to go, as if she were Cinderella and a distant gong had just gone off. It was midnight now, and I had the second premonition of bad sex. I feigned a yawn, not knowing why I was feigning a yawn.
Perhaps my disingenuousness stemmed from the fact that I was really getting sleepy, and that to sleep without doing anything at all appeared to me a waste. At the same time, there wasn’t really any polite way to begin. To ask for sex would be to break a bubble.
Noon, I’m sure, saw some sleepy indecision on my face. She switched off the TV and said, ‘You tired?’
I knew my response should clarify what I really wanted. ‘Let’s go to the bed,’ I said.
‘You sleep. Okay?’
‘But …’ I said.
‘You want me take care of you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you hap girlfriend,’ Noon said. She picked up the photo from the windowsill and showed it to me, as if presenting evidence.
‘She means nothing to me,’ I said.
‘Then why you come to Pattaya with photo,’ Noon said. There was anger in her voice.
I couldn’t answer that. Ther
e was a long silence in which every small sound in the room could be heard. Noon’s argument enraged me, and the rage was a result of being confronted with my demon yet again. On an impulse I snatched Anne-Marie’s photo from Noon, opened the sliding window and gestured to throw the photograph out.
‘No no no no no!’ Noon grabbed my hand. Whether her reaction was really necessary, whether it was really within my powers to throw Anne-Marie’s picture out, I do not know.
‘She means nothing to me,’ I said, my voice quivering.
‘Come to bed,’ Noon said. ‘I take care of you.’
(20)
I entered her, not with ease, not completely, and she winced. She winced, not out of physical pain or disgust but out of something abstract, something related to loss, or negation. I was looking at her; I wanted to be gentle. Maybe she was wincing at the loss of symbolism in this act, a pure corporeal act, whose only meaning could be in the exchange of currency that would follow it. But the loss was not limited to those nebulous things alone. I felt that it was also the loss of the recent present, of what we’d had till now. What was made in the last three hours, girt as it was in Pattaya protocol, had some value. And my little motions on her, my assertion of my rights as buyer, were crushing that value.
All this about her, this interpretation, I had gained in a moment or two. Her blank face: hidden behind the semi-darkness of the room. She was imagining, perhaps, a time when this act had had meaning for her, though in her stare a void larger than this seemed present. Her stare was beyond me, beyond the ceiling, beyond the floors above, directed straight at the cosmos that hold the literature of our past, present and future. A stare caused by some sort of betrayal of which I was unsure if I was the reason. I knew I was thinking too much, and so despite that stare I—indifferent, insistent—kept on. I kept on, sweaty, kept on because I had paid for it, kept on moving my hips, I kept on, a misery urging its own obliteration, and I tried to make contact with Noon’s eyes, only because I needed to lock them in mine in order not to feel like a consuming automaton, not to feel like a raging pig, but everything about her was evasive, everything about her was out of the moment. She was made of mud, I felt; Noon was made of mud and I was morphing into plastic, and both of us were worthless, a world apart—one aiming to become dust, the other burning noxiously. And even before I realized it there came a moment when I stopped.
I sat up on the bed and took the rubber off me. This was it; this was how far it could go with Noon. But it didn’t seem final, probably because I was not an outsider anymore. I was like a man who has seen someone drowning. Now I was a participant in a rescue. Noon’s vacant stare was now a vacant question. There was shame and shock and some coughing. Save her, a voice said. Love her.
The voice was followed by a silence annotated by the hum of the air conditioner. I sat naked, turned away from a prostrate Noon, watching my feet touch the cool floor. Noon touched my bare back with her fingers. I needed a cigarette. I got up and walked toward the window. I took out a cigarette from Noon’s handbag and lit it. Its burning menthol brought to my mouth a sensation of plastic. My nudity began to feel improper.
‘I nohap sex,’ Noon said from the bed.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I hap sex with boyfriend. But after he go, I nohap sex,’ she said.
‘Are you kidding me?’ I said, facing her.
‘Eh?’
‘You mean really?’ I said.
‘Yes, re-ally,’ Noon said. She shuffled and sat on the bed as she said it, covering her breasts with the duvet. Some orange light was falling on her face. Its source was outside our room. But it did show me the welling up of tears in Noon’s eyes. ‘I sorry,’ she said.
What have you done? The voice spoke again. What have you been doing?
‘You have had no sex in last six years?’ I said.
‘No,’ Noon said.
‘And no sex in Pattaya?’
‘No,’ she said. She had a pout. ‘Customer nohap,’ she added, meaning it to be some sort of a complaint. This confused me. My cigarette was down to the filter. I crushed it in the ashtray, looking askance at the two pictures on the windowsill. She was new to the business.
‘I sorry,’ Noon said. ‘But I take care of you if you want.’
‘No. Thank you,’ I said, without irony. I was not angry at Noon, and I didn’t want to appear obtuse. But I guess I was obtuse. More so because I didn’t know what could be done with the rest of the night. Could we watch TV again? Dance again? Do the whole thing again? Could I actually throw Anne-Marie’s picture from the window this time? Could she forget her afflictions and desire me as a woman would desire a man? Or as a good whore would want a man? I desired her. I was going to pay her.
In those moments, the room had seemed to me full of witnesses. The TV was a witness, so was the mirror, and so was everything else. The hair on my neck stood up. The worst was not knowing how to think of myself, not knowing how to think of the situation, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to want, not knowing where to hide. To ask Noon for sex and to keep at it till I was done was still an option. But so was asking her to leave. And I feared both these scenarios.
‘Come we sleep,’ Noon said then, providing a third option. There was a smile on her face, and it burst something inside me. The assurance in that smile—an assurance not of love but of its pliancy—made me forget the awkwardness of being naked. And not just the awkwardness of being naked. It made me forget everything except itself. And something like this happened for Noon too, for she opened her arms to invite me, losing the cover over her breasts. I walked up to those arms, to those breasts, to her. We lay in an embrace, clasping each other as if we were saving ourselves from falling, like lovers on the eve of Judgement Day. I looked at her eyes like I had never before looked into a pair of eyes, not even Anne-Marie’s. She gazed at the contours of my face, its relaxing muscles. She smiled and gave me a slow blink that seemed to delete all the sounds. I kissed her, and immediately the tiredness of our lives caught up with us. She battled the slow but oncoming fall of her eyelids, lost, then opened her eyes hastily, then blushed; she blushed, and with a drowsy smile asked the question, ‘You okay?’
Me? I was in an ocean of okayness. I nodded.
And then her eyelids fell. ‘If you talk, I hear,’ she mumbled.
(21)
After this invitation to talk, I somehow developed a strong desire to narrate a story, slowly, and to push Noon slowly to the deepest and the most tranquil slumber she had ever had. I searched my mind for a story. Of course, the deepest and the most tranquil slumber would be death, and I did, for a moment, wonder that if I had a story so powerful and so poignant so as to be able to kill someone, would I have narrated it now, to Noon. The story would have to be sentimental enough to sink the heart of the one listening. And as I searched for this song of the sirens, the chance that Noon would go to sleep before the culmination of my search became real. To me her oncoming sleep was a grave risk to the length of our night together, a night that I realized I did not want to end. Her eyes were closed and their quaking was abating. There was sweat between us now; I liked it. I passed my fingers through her hair, pressing her scalp with the ends of my fingers, the same way I used to with Anne-Marie. I started with a story from the war novel I had been reading earlier.
(22)
I told her the story of a lone soldier, left behind by his company and hiding in a trench. At one point, a wounded enemy soldier fell inside, and the first soldier, terrified as he was, pushed his bayonet inside the enemy. He then looked at the identification papers and family pictures of the other man. Looking at these, he was suddenly overcome with pity and remorse. He asked the enemy for forgiveness, calling him his comrade. He promised to take care of his family, promising to send them money after the madness of war was over.
The man died in the soldier’s arms, amidst the sodden, rat-infested earth of the trench.
In my arms, I, too, felt Noon’s dead weight. The crumples of the b
ed sheet surrounded us.
(23)
In all likelihood, my narration of the story was a dishonest one. But whether I had severely disfigured the narrative—appended it with details or subtracted a thing or two—it did not matter to me then.
Another thing that did not matter was whether Noon understood it. It sufficed that she cared for it long enough. Had she grappled to derive any meaning from it—I do not know. What I do know is that even under the fog of sleep, she had stayed with it, perhaps till the very end.
Which brings me to the question of this story, the larger story that you are reading: Is the fidelity of its retelling a concern worth mentioning? Were Noon’s eyes really the kind of fixation that I have made them to be? Did those eyes really have the grammar that I have fallen back to so readily and so frequently to suggest what was on her mind on different occasions? Or are those eyes rendered through my text as an exposition of my own wishes in those moments? Am I projecting my projections through Noon? Am I making a collage of twice-projected images and feelings, all to make it a story?
I cannot answer these questions, they are too complex. But what I can say with honesty is that whenever I sat down to write pieces of this story, pieces where Noon made an appearance, the memory of her eyes spoke the loudest to me.
In other words: Her eyes are sentences to me; I am serving the sentences of her eyes. In other words: I am in a sort of prison, serving sentences, the walls are made of memory, the floor and the ceiling made of imagination. It is but a prison of contentment. In other words: I am naked; Noon is unknowable.
(24)
I was woken up in the morning by a clatter from the bathroom. When I stepped in to check on Noon, I found that she was dressed, all ready to leave, applying makeup. She looked at me and we acknowledged each other. She had tired eyes, conveying some sullenness, even irritation. It hurt me to see those eyes, their fatigue, their hurry, their eyeliner. It hurt me to sense that she was already archiving last night as a silly happenstance that her position and her profession would not allow very often.
I wanted to stop her, but of course there was no way to.
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