Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  She came up to my naked, standing self and for a moment I thought she would kiss me on the lips. She didn’t. I still had to pay her, and for a flash it entered my head that she hadn’t really done anything with me to deserve any money. But I knew better not to take that direction. At the same time, I did not have it in me to ask her how much she wanted to be paid, for that too would have lessened the possibility of genuineness in our interaction. She was a whore who needed to be paid, and she was a girl who needed to be respected. I was the naked pervert and the bashful boy.

  But there she was in front of me, a large fake smile belying the fatigue on her face, her expression not yielding any more meaning than the simple demand for a wage.

  So I went to the far side of the bed to take my wallet from the jeans lying there. I gave her a thousand baht.

  ‘Five hundred more?’ she asked, pointing with her fingers.

  I gave her five hundred more.

  ‘You beautiful man, I like you,’ she said, and kissed me on the cheek. I put on the jeans I was holding in my hands. ‘I go now,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘You take care, ein?’

  ‘Yes, I will. You too. Take care.’

  She made for the door. But then she turned and looked at me. Don’t let her go, the voice said again.

  ‘I very happy,’ she said, ‘if you come to Marie Bar again.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I hap to go. You understand, right?’

  ‘But what do you have to do in the morning?’ I asked.

  ‘I hap to work.’

  She didn’t have to work. No whore works in the morning, not even in Pattaya. Or maybe they do something else in the day.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘But you come, okay?’ she said. ‘You come after three p.m.’ I was noncommittal, silent. She walked up to me. ‘You come?’

  Those eyes were beseeching me. And yet, they had in them enough dignity to not let me feel the master. They wanted me to come, and yet they knew that life would go on if I did not come. ‘I will,’ I said.

  She touched me on my arm, as if consoling me. Then she turned and left the room, her footwear making desolate sounds on the floor.

  (25)

  The day that Anne-Marie left me was a hot October day in Mumbai. We woke up and had our breakfast. I do not remember whether we had made love the previous night, and I do not remember whether we made love on that last day. It is likely we did. It is possible we did not. She was the sort of person who would not get the sentimental significance of making love on that last day. And because she would be ignorant of such significances, I had, over time, taken the habit of trying to ignore them myself. Which is to say that the only way we could have made love that last day was if I had asked for it explicitly.

  I remember we went to the movies that day. I must have held her hand there, must have deeply inhaled from her hair, even whispered a thing or two as a commendation or a critique of what the director had done. It must have passed by like the dozens of movies we had seen in theatres over the years. After the movie, I must have called her beautiful, must have told her that I loved her. She might have said similar things.

  After the movie we took a long walk through Bandra lanes. We must have soaked, yet again, in the architectural beauty of the many old buildings in that district. The sunlight must have been pleasant by late afternoon.

  In the evening, back in the apartment, I remember lying on the sofa eating an apple or a guava and she going through her packed bags one last time. While she was arranging the bags, she put one of them on the dining table a bit heavily. The table cracked. We didn’t speak a word about it. My insides were hollering, though, demanding that I ask her not to go.

  Somehow I didn’t.

  We took a taxi to the airport. This I remember exactly. I had planned for the taxi to drop me midway, so that I could join a group of friends who were getting together that evening. I could have skipped this and gone to the airport, but I did not want to sign up for the gigantic sadness of departure terminals. I would have broken down, done something silly. And so when the point of my departure came, I kissed her hurriedly on the lips. She said, ‘I will be back soon, or you will come to see me.’ It was said in a hurry, certain not to happen.

  Her taxi started and she looked back at me. I made the wistful smile on my face more wistful. After a point she turned her head. I turned too, to make for my friend’s house. Ten steps later I crumbled to the ground, unable to breathe.

  (26)

  I slept for a few more hours after Noon left. When I woke up, the first thing I saw was the few remnants of the previous night—there on the low table before my eyes. Bottles of beer, a glass that Noon had only half-emptied, an ashtray stuffed with cigarette butts. I took a shower and had my breakfast in the hotel.

  (27)

  I left the hotel and walked on the sunny Beach Road. The sun rained down, a divine decree. The sun cannot quash the darkness within, I thought, and I wondered if this line could be used in my writing, but then it appeared too plain to be worth anything. Then I thought of many sentences with ‘the sun’ in them: the sun was shrapnel; the sun was obsessive love; the sun was the collective luminescent dream of Pattaya’s whores, the inexhaustible dream that recurred every day. I kept my belief that writing is first of all bumping into some sentences, and only then making more of them.

  The sun was strong. The sweat on my forehead trickled over my sunglasses again and again, and I had to wipe them every two minutes. I went into a massage parlour and asked for a body massage.

  The lady who attended me was on the wrong side of forty, and I imagined her taking up this profession after a healthy stint as a Pattaya lady. She did well, and any misgivings I had about the massage taking an erotic turn turned out to be mere misgivings. The massage was in fact so good and soothing that it dulled me after I left the parlour.

  After this prosaic massage I went straight to the raw poetry of Soi6, without any agenda and eager to follow my instincts. I crossed the bar I had visited the previous day but could not locate the girl I had fucked then. Maybe she was on the first floor, serving somebody. I realized I would feel less dull if I could see her. I went to a bar on the other side of the street, where I sat on a high stool on the street-facing terrace, on a stool often used by ladies to cross their bare legs and make calls to passers-by. There were six or seven ladies around me right now, some sitting on stools, others standing, all in the same skimpy red top and black miniskirt. This bar had a costume thing going.

  Within minutes, an adenoidal, short lady from the group came up to me and began massaging my shoulders. She asked if she could get me something to drink. I asked for a beer and told her that I had just had a massage and did not need another, thank you very much. She screamed in laughter, maybe because she thought that I had just had one of those erotic massages that Pattaya was famous for. Everyone joined in her laughter. I too joined in; there was no point in not doing so. Then there came and sat across my little table, toward the street, an old lady who was dressed in the same costume as the others. She was not one year below sixty. She looked shrunken and friendly, and it seemed that both her shrunken stature and her amiability were due to decades of giving her body to men. She smiled at me warmly, in a manner that warranted a conversation. ‘Hello,’ I said. She asked me how long I had been in Pattaya. She asked me if I had been to Walking Street yet. After answering these questions, I tried to gain some advice regarding the best go-go theatre in Walking Street, to which she responded by saying that Walking Street was not very safe for a single traveller, and that I would do better to stick to theatres in Soi6, of which there were plenty both in quality and quantity.

  After this bit of conversation and a few silent seconds, the old whore nodded to my left, signalling toward the youngest girl of the place. This young one looked no more than sixteen, her age decoded by my eyes that instinctively took note of her skin’s freshness. The old whore smiled mischievously at the
girl, baring her stained teeth. The girl just hung her head in smiling shyness. I felt the tentacles of manipulation at work; it was confirmed when the old whore asked me: ‘You want her?’ To answer this question honestly would be to say yes, but something about this girl’s perceived age pulled the reins on me. ‘How old are you?’ I asked her directly, at which she once again smiled coyly and hung her head while the rest of the bar burst in laughter. The adenoidal girl shouted, ‘Old enup for you!’ I looked at the youngest recruit and affirmed to myself that I did not want to do this. At least this, I will not do, I told myself; I will not fuck a minor. And will certainly not be manipulated by old whores.

  ‘Actually she is too old for me,’ I said jokingly, pointing toward the teenager.

  At this point a young man came into the bar and sat on the chair behind me. He ordered a bottle of water. The old whore pointed in his direction and smiled; I could not understand the gesture. Within minutes he was offered the same girl who had been offered to me. He refused politely, the politeness misplaced in the ribald air. ‘He is tired,’ I whispered to the old woman, in jest. In jest she replied, ‘Oh no! He can fuck everything. EVERYTHING!’

  I could not stop my laughter and looked back at the guy. ‘Everything?’ I asked, and winked in the manner of co-conspirators. I might have even lifted my beer for a little toast, for I did feel like a co-conspirator: as if this young man and I were part of a community that was doing exceptionally well despite the ruses and manipulations of the ladies.

  But as I looked at his face for that extra jot of reflection, I had a strange feeling that I was looking not at a comrade but at myself, or at someone who looked a lot like me. This man was fairer than me, whitish, but not completely white. He was my age, or younger than me—I could not say. He, in fact, did not respond effusively to my wink or my half-toast. He picked up the bottle of water he had been sipping and left the bar. I felt stupid and alone the very next instant. The old whore opposite me was smirking and I could not locate her emotionally. I could not locate myself emotionally. A shot of colour dashed through my mind, obscuring everything for a tiny second. Who was the man? I thought. Did I know him?

  To gather myself I began conversing with the old whore, who had furtively taken a sip from my beer bottle. ‘Why do families come to Pattaya?’ I asked her, this question had been floating around in my head. Hearing it the old whore seemed offended. I guess she thought that I was expressing general suspicion about Pattaya’s delights as a tourist destination. But then she understood better and told me that the American or Japanese or Korean or European or Indian families that came to Pattaya were mostly on package tours for the whole of Thailand.

  ‘Pattaya is part of package for family,’ she said. ‘Family come to Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket, Koh Samui. They stay here for two day, for three day. Family come, go to beach, go to big hotel, go to bar, go back. They go to bar, but no lady fun. But some family hap lady fun. Young couple sometime take lady. Sometime old couple take lady. Take lady, take lady, fuck fuck fuck. Three people fuck. Sometime old couple take me. Sometime young couple take me. I like that. Three. But hey, family come to Pattaya ein. Family hap fun in Pattaya.’

  Family: the idea stuck to me rather bizarrely, and I felt in my consciousness some sediments of a mindless terror. To disallow that sedimentation was to roil the entire mixture again. So I looked at my watch and saw that the time was close to two p.m. Two hours past noon. I thought of Noon. I thought of Noon because I wanted to think of Noon and because I did not want to think of the man. The old lady asked me if I wanted another beer, and although I felt thirsty for plain water I gave my assent to beer, fearing that having a bottle of water would somehow pitch me closer to that man who was drinking water, that silent disapproving apparition.

  I moved my head, trying to shake my mind out of the fuzziness it was beginning to threaten me with. I talked to the old whore about my time in Pattaya. I told her about last night with Noon, how we had danced together in my room, how we had been affectionate with each other. And as I was telling her these things, I was also aware that here I was, in a different country, taking liberties with an old whore, being frank with her. But then what did it matter what I told her. To her credit she heard me patiently. Then I told her how Noon had cried when we had sex, and the story about the boyfriend she told me after that. At this the old lady sniggered, which did not sit prettily with me. I pushed my beer toward her and prodded her for the reason for her dismissive reaction.

  ‘Did you give her drink?’ the old lady asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Many drink or one two drink?’ she inquired, taking a huge gulp of my beer.

  ‘Many, I think,’ I said.

  ‘I tell you because you are good man,’ she said, ‘Pattaya girl, if she drink too much, too much, she cry. This true. She cry and then she no good for fuck.’

  I gave a start. This allotment of Noon’s tears to the sole act of drinking, and this generalization of Noon’s tears as nothing but iotas of the drunken tears of thousands of girls in Pattaya … I was saddened and did not want to agree.

  ‘Do you think she lied to me?’ I asked the old woman.

  She did not reply. Instead she turned to the teenage girl and said something in Thai. The trivializing, near comic tone told me that she was recounting my story about Noon. Hearing it the teenager laughed and looked at me as if ridiculing me from within the confines of her shyness. I felt cheated by Noon, by the old woman, by the teenager, by the other whores around me, who were all filing or polishing or biting their nails and snorting at the Thai version of my story; I felt cheated by Pattaya. In some time it would be three in the afternoon, the time when Noon had said I could see her at Marie Bar Beer.

  ‘You give money to lady?’ the old lady asked, ‘Aein? You give money?’

  I did not reply, and the distress on my face only made her laugh harder. Some of the others laughed too, and this time I could not join because of my shame. Was it possible that Noon had cheated me? That she had lied about every little thing?

  I asked for the check and left the bar in a couple of minutes. ‘No love with Pattaya girl …’ I heard the old lady shout at my back, ‘… you handsome man.’

  I felt disoriented. The confusions about Noon comingled with the weird feelings I had regarding the young man, leaving me in a flustered state that manifested, conversely, as physical stasis. I found myself standing in the middle of Soi6, looking either way, but moving neither left nor right. Whores from the surrounding bars laughed at me. Then, remembering where I was and what my purpose was, I moved. I went inside the same bar that I had gone to yesterday. The darkness of the interiors engulfed me; I was the only customer in the lounge. Almost as if on cue, a thin Thai girl came next to me. She asked for my name and where I was from. I answered and then asked her the same questions. I ordered a Singha. When she requested me to buy her a drink, I said, ‘Wait for some time.’ I looked around for the girl I had fucked yesterday, because it seemed important that I find something familiar in this place and latch on to it, as if familiarity could save me. But she was not here, so I wrapped my arm around the thin Thai girl, who was beautiful but not so young. I pinched the skin on her waist. I asked her for her age. She responded by asking mine, and upon hearing the reply told me that she was older than me. Then she told me that she had two children who lived with their grandparents in her hometown, and that she had come to Pattaya after her husband’s death. I asked her if I could fuck her upstairs. She told me that she would like me to fuck her but it was not possible because she was having her monthlies. Then the girl I had fucked yesterday came down the staircase, following a lean old white man. She was wearing the same red dress as yesterday. I felt relieved and let the other lady go, signalling to my lady of before to come sit next to me. She did.

  ‘Ooo horny,’ she said. ‘I horny. Old man do me no good fuck.’

  I knew I was being lied to, but her words still excited me.

  I took her upstairs a
nd fucked her. The room and the events inside were the same as yesterday, except the bed sheet that had been changed.

  (28)

  In twenty minutes I was buckling my belt. As I exited the bar and turned to meet Beach Road, a conspiratorial fog began to surround the impressions of my recent actions and I, once again, found it hard to recall things that I had just done with that red-dressed whore of mine. It was as if I had been part of a ritual that erased itself, a kind of possession. This scared me, this scared me like how the symptoms of a nasty disease would scare an otherwise healthy man, and at Beach Road I looked at the placid sea before my eyes, the sea that was almost a non-sea, a sort of blue-green lake, and I tried to pacify my fears by telling myself that my mind was only letting go of things that it should let go of—that I was supposed to forget things I did with Pattaya whores, for what use were these memories going to be. But then what was the point of coming to Pattaya, I also asked myself. What was it, if all that could be done here was fuck whores and if that action was not to leave any trace in memory. This argument played inside me and I watched the sea mutely. A bus carrying a horde of Japanese tourists stopped by me, Japanese tourists of all ages. I thought of Noon and how everything that had happened with her, almost everything, was still in my memory, ready to be played for my mind’s eye, rendering itself to the question of Noon’s specialty, of what was there in Noon that was not in the red-dressed whore, and the questions seemed too simple and also too complex, and I also got a bit irritated by the loud Japanese who were disembarking from their luxury bus now, looking left and right like birds ever excited by the vastness of things, and it was three in the afternoon and the sun was harsh, and I turned one-eighty to cross Soi6 and to go to Marie Bar Beer.

  On my way I saw my red-dressed whore, now seated on the terrace, her legs crossed, and when she saw me on the street again she called me teasingly. ‘Weccome,’ she said, winking. For a moment I considered going in and fucking her again, if only to forcibly memorize how I fucked her and how much I liked fucking her, but the feeling that Noon was waiting for me had somehow gripped me, and so I could only smile at my red-dressed girl and walk on. Also, like someone checking himself at the first sign of addiction, I resolved that I would not fuck her again.