I reached Marie Bar Beer and there she was, Noon. She was seated across the bar, next to a man who looked Japanese. It was as if she didn’t work at the bar but had in fact arrived there with this man. The man cracked a joke in a language everyone but I understood, and I saw Noon fake a laugh at that joke. The entire crew at Marie Bar Beer, the old woman, the fat woman, the broad broad, everyone laughed at this man’s joke, and so when I took a stool right opposite to where Noon and this man sat (the bar was semi-circular, I should have mentioned earlier), it took a while for my presence to be registered. I ordered a beer, a Singha, and waited for Noon to look in my direction. I let myself talk to the broad broad who told me her name and asked me to buy her a drink, which I did. Then Noon looked at me. She acknowledged me with a concealed half-smile, a gesture that I deemed more genuine than the hilarity she was sharing with the Japanese man. That smile kept me at Marie Bar Beer till I finished half of my beer, at which point the Japanese man seemed to pull Noon closer to him. He had his arm around her waist, the same way that I had had my arm around the other whores.
He kissed her.
At the sight of that kiss, that long kiss that did not even carry a hint of being forced, I felt within me the flight of a group of birds, and the rustling in my heart made me turn away. I looked down at the wooden surface of the bar, its brown texture slowly turning into tar in my eyes, and that moment from months back when I had crumbled on that road in Mumbai flickered before me, as if my mind’s projector had decided to make its own movie, as if all major and minor devastations of my soul were linked, as if all sense in my life could coexist with the absurdity of the world. I blinked hard and fast to dissipate what could have become tears and to cast away these thoughts, to rein in the migration of the birds of my spirit, to hold myself tight. When I opened my eyes to the world, this world intent on the puzzles of experience and memory, I saw that there was now sitting next to me a man who held a bottle of water in his right hand. He was the man who could fuck everything. He kept a compassionate hand on my shoulder. ‘You all right?’ His touch was abnormal, chilly, as if something either too close to birth or too close to death had touched me. I shuddered, feeling a need to escape. I pulled out two hundred baht from my wallet, gave them hurriedly to the broad broad, and scampered away from Marie Bar Beer.
(29)
I crossed over to Beach Road through Soi6, hurriedly, looking down, avoiding the gazes of whores. Noon’s hand was on the man’s shoulder when they kissed. Her fingers were bent, as if holding him. Was Anne-Marie kissing someone right now? At Beach Road I considered going back to the hotel room and reading a book. Read a book and lose yourself in that world, I thought. Read a war, read an odyssey, read whatever. You are tired and confused. You are tired and confused, and you are in a city where nothing matters. Nothing. Everything is the wrestling in your own mind. Nothing matters. Neither Anne-Marie, to whom even your debaucheries are but grovelling avowals of love, nor Noon, to whom an avowal of love will not just be a silly lie but another addendum to debauchery.
Nor this young man with the water bottle, a mysterious detective on your trail.
(30)
I shunned the reading-in-the-room idea for no other reason except that I was a tourist. There was still Walking Street to see, and so I turned left and started walking toward it. Half a kilometre, and the beachside boulevard vanished. Further on, the road was all dug up, and pedestrians like me had to walk on the narrow way beside it. What had they dug for? Whatever the answer, the freelance prostitutes had only gratitude for the works, for they provided them with a narrow channel through which all tourists had to pass. Many of these freelancers clung on to my shoulders and said, ‘Hey handsome man, I want you.’ I shook my head and walked ahead.
Another fifteen minutes and I was there. I passed a gate that announced Walking Street beneath a large LCD screen with a rather well-animated advert on display. On the other side of the street there were a slew of ATMs ready to arm everyone with the only weapon needed inside. I saw a bar where girls dressed as winged angels swooned around poles, but that sort of thing became a common sight in the next few minutes. I was surrounded by a sizeable population of neon-lit boards flashing the names of various enterprises, including go-go bars—Silver Star and Golden Leaf and Lancer and Bombay Blues and Iron Club and so on—though the function of neon lights was not only to flash names but to mark shapes as well, and as I walked I saw blinking arrows and curvy ladies and fish and birds and lipsticks and burgers and beer cans constructed in neon. It was all strange because it was only the beginning of evening. Clearly the merciless god of neon could not wait for the sun’s daily apology. As for me, I was one among a multinational crowd on whose heads shone rainbows of neon, a crowd composed of families of all sorts and quite a few single blokes and some blokes who had Thai escorts by their sides. Their eyes mixed boredom and its opposite and dismay and its opposite and disenchantment and its opposite in equal parts and the look of these eyes was so confusing, so very confusing, it made me feel that I was the only one who was new here, the only one who had not seen all this too many times already. I gaped again at the spectacle all around me, forgetting all about Anne-Marie and Noon and the man who could fuck everything. I saw how in front of most bars there stood costumed Thai ladies holding placards that specified the beer price in large font, how on some elevated glass balconies, near-naked Thai or white women contorted in invitations of desire, the lights on their balconies slowly mutating from one colour to the other; I noticed some joints fronted almost exclusively by East-European girls, whose bodies’ metallic kind of precision produced a startling effect in combination with their flowery scents; I saw how the number of ladyboys increased as I waded deeper into the street; I saw how some Thai women were unrealistically attractive and how most tourists immediately backed away when approached by these women, perhaps distrustful of their own luck or perhaps suspecting the gender of these heavenly specimens, for it was common knowledge that the most attractive Thai ladies in Pattaya were not ladies. Each joint played its own party music; and, passing them, I could not help but feel hysterical with possibilities. I crossed these joints and their women and half-women. I walked and walked. There was so much sex and so much market, so much flash and glitz all around. I knew it would be difficult to stop at any one joint and not think about what you were missing in the others.
But what of the other things? What of the Thai lady who grinned ear to ear and in the process revealed the hollow formed by the two missing molars in her mouth? What of the grim walking salesmen who flashed their wares uninterestedly, as if they were part of a conspiracy grander than the simple motives of salesmanship? What of the two Thai men who every now and then stopped close to the East-European girls scouting on the road and whispered something in their ears? What of the restaurant owners who tried to woo me by speaking in Hindi, as if they knew me all too well? What of the ladyboy who tried dragging me to her/his bar and got irritated by my terrified refusal, and who then cupped my genitals in her/his hands, saying ‘ANACONDA’ as if it meant something beyond the sarcastic and the obscene? What of the large white men in wife-beaters who looked pissed as if their football team had lost, and who generally pushed everyone around in the way, including the diminutive Japanese and Korean tourists? What of senile men shaking next to sexy whores? What of fat ladies whose love handles looked like little wings sprouting from inside their tight dresses? What of the French old song ‘Dans le Port D’Amsterdam’ by Jacques Brel (Anne-Marie’s favourite) that played in one of the joints, Brel’s shrieks subsuming the other sounds while I passed the front of the joint—what of the stupendous congruity of the song with the mood? What of the alleys that branched off from Walking Street, alleys that were so immersed in the residual glow of the joints’ neon that all you saw in them was a luminescence inside which feminine figures danced sinuously and invited you, you and you alone, with their index fingers curling like a scorpion’s tail? What of your mind that could not not think of Dante�
��s Inferno? What of hells and heavens? What of the various wars that this world had fought and was still fighting? What of the blemishes on the arms of certain ladies, scars and blemishes and burn marks? What of the marks that last night’s customers had left behind which had not yet gone away? What of HIV? What of the road beneath my feet? What of the kebab seller’s dog who barked only at me? What of the sleazy movies that turned into horror flicks by the interval? What of the void of the dark sky above all this, above me, a void well hidden yet doing what voids do? What of the horror?
And so it was not too long after I had entered Walking Street that I began to feel the octopus of paranoia. I was myself but I was also some other inimical person who was documenting me. I imagined a camera fixed two feet behind my neck and moving in a semicircle to capture my head and the iridescent activity of the street, and I imagined watching myself through the rectangle of this camera … and all of this while I was walking. Some of the tourists looked at me as if there was something wrong with my face, and probably there was. I grew dizzy. I felt like those drugged movie characters who saunter inside a grand fair of great commotion while a background score of cathartic quality plays on, like those characters who experience a life changing sort of revelation inside the fair. I had an unnameable fear that couldn’t deal with its very first manifestation. I was floating on the thin surface of horror, one that existed behind the lights and the desires and the sex, behind the works, the games, the charades, the joys on offer, behind everything that existed in Walking Street, or in Pattaya. I plugged my ears with my fingers and closed my eyes. Sex and monsters sell well, I thought, absurdly. The background music of the movie I was constructing in my head stopped. I turned around and walked briskly to get out of Walking Street. On my way blind I collided with many tourists and had to eventually open my eyes and ears. But by then I had regained a grip on reality.
I felt very thirsty. I walked on.
I walked on till I reached the Walking Street gate and felt some peace. I turned to a joint toward my left. At the bar there sat a man dressed in women’s clothes, his chest hair jutting out of the neckline like little hooks. He was more hirsute than a normal Thai man. ‘Weccome,’ he said.
I sat down on the stool facing him.
‘Howudoin? You hap fun in Pattaya? Want Singha?’
‘No. Can you get me a bottle of water please?’ I said.
‘Okay,’ he said and pushed a chilled bottle of mineral water toward me. The bottle had a straw inside. I took out the straw and took a gulp, but the water was too cold and my throat ached. I put the bottle down to wait till it warmed a little.
And just then, natural and inevitable as these things are (this is my assessment today), the man who could fuck everything appeared on the stool next to mine. He had a bottle of water in his hand that looked as cold as mine, but he drank from it like a fiend and finished it in what appeared to be a single gulp. I shuffled in my seat and looked at the cross-dressed man behind the bar who was now engrossed in a Thai auto magazine and did not seem to care for the new arrival. I could have run away from the place but my water was still warming, some droplets had condensed on its plastic. I touched these droplets, took a deep breath, and surrendered myself to the situation.
‘Hi,’ the man said, ‘we meet again.’
‘Yes, we meet again.’
‘It’s funny to meet again, no?’
Of all things that were funny to me, meeting this man was not one.
‘Do you like Pattaya?’ he asked me.
‘Well, do you?’ I said.
‘Let me see. It depends on the time of the day. For example, it’s nice right now. Evening time. The whole place is abuzz.’
‘Eventide,’ I said coldly, weirdly.
He repeated the word ‘eventide’ and laughed.
‘With naked girls,’ I added.
‘But these girls have a certain confidence, don’t they?’
‘In what way?’
‘I mean they are not sorry for themselves, is what I feel,’ the man said. ‘You know where they all come from? They come from the poorest provinces of Thailand, and they are here to make some money. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
The man scratched the table surface with his fingernails. I did not like it. But this, the scratching of the tabletop, was my only worry right now. Surprisingly the conversation with him had calmed me, as if sharing words were a proof of normalcy.
‘So are you looking for something here?’ I asked him, to take his mind off the scratching.
‘Yes, and no,’ he said.
‘Okay.’
The scratching ended. But then I felt his eyes on me. I was not looking in his direction; I was looking instead at a neon figure on a wall. That of a snake, eating itself, its tail in its mouth. ‘My name is Orhan,’ he said and nudged me. He was offering his hand.
I shook his hand and told him my name. His name struck me as weird.
‘You were sort of, you know, pained … at the other place,’ he said. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Just what kind of person could come up with the idea of a snake eating itself inside a Pattaya joint, I was thinking. I also thought of that phase in my childhood when my sleep was besieged by terrible dreams of snakes and lizards and other reptiles. It was an ugly reminiscence, especially at the place I was in. To occlude it I said, ‘And you, everything all right with you?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
The snake on the wall was blinking on and off.
From my left side (Orhan was seated to my right), three Thai girls approached me and one of them caressed my shoulder. I waved them away, at which they laughed mockingly. For a second I thought that the news that Noon had conned me with a story had spread, that information about my emotional faux pas had spread to all the whores, but then I swatted away these stupid thoughts.
‘I think they like you,’ Orhan said.
‘They like everyone,’ I said.
‘I think they especially like you. Look how they don’t even see me.’
‘So, Or-han … are you Turkish?’ I asked, just to talk about something else.
‘No, no, don’t go by the name. I am not Turkish. I am half Indian, half French. I live in Mumbai,’ he said.
I felt for the droplets on my bottle. ‘Uh-huh,’ I said.
‘You’re Indian?’ he asked me.
I nodded.
‘You live in Mumbai?’
This time I did not nod, assuming that my lack of response would convey the information that his guess was right.
He scratched the tabletop again. ‘Are you here because you broke up with someone and now you need to forget her?’
I was stunned. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked. It wasn’t exactly the question I wanted to ask, but that is what came out.
‘Well, you look like it,’ he said. ‘I have another guy in my hotel with the same look as you, and he is here for this very same reason.’
‘It’s sad,’ I said, vaguely. I don’t know why I said that. The suggested disappointment with the world’s lovelessness was unintentional.
‘Oh, I am sorry. I did just nose into your affairs, didn’t I?’ Orhan said.
I assumed silence, determined to keep it for a few moments. The cross-dressed man across the barfront tore a page from the magazine he was reading; he folded it twice and pushed it under his neckline. He did so surreptitiously—why, I did not understand. Once again I started sensing a camera behind my back. I felt I was at risk, but at the same time a certain insolence grew within me and I knew that the only way I could counter everything—but what was it that needed countering?—was to risk things even further. It was as if a hole had opened before me and I had decided to jump into it headlong. I realized—and my realization was like the product of an immediate epiphany—that Orhan and I had more things to talk about.
‘Orhan,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘How did you get your name? There is
a writer by that name, you know?’
‘Yes. It was … my father,’ Orhan said. ‘His idea was to go for a Turkish name. Turkey being, like, midway between Indian and France.’
‘You’ve read Orhan Pamuk?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a couple of his novels,’ Orhan said. Then, after a few second he added, ‘My father was a writer too.’
I noticed how he referred to his father in the past tense. ‘And your mother?’
‘She was … she was various things,’ he said.
‘When …’ I considered how to pose this, ‘when did your parents pass away?’
‘They didn’t,’ Orhan said. ‘They separated. It was like they ceased to exist for me when they separated. I was fourteen then, and had to switch between India and France a lot.’
‘It could become a good novel, you know. Do you write?’ I asked him. My question made Orhan nervous, it seemed. But I knew there was sweat on my face too. For some reason, I had a flashing image of flipping a book in my mind’s eye.
‘I write some poetry,’ he said. ‘Nothing grand.’
I drank the water from my bottle. Completely. Then I ordered another. It was as cold as the first one; it, too, would have to wait.
‘Orhan the orphan’ he said for some reason, smiling, although visibly stressed, perhaps by my questions.
And me, was I not distressed? For sure I was. Sitting next to Orhan, I had another bout of incoherence in which I remembered watching YouTube videos where animals—an iguana, a cat, a monkey, or even a dog—would confront its own reflection in a mirror and become very aggressive out of pure fear. And then the thought that the world was huge, too huge. The world was huge, yes, and it was futile to look for any redemption, but what was I to do with its enigmas? With Orhan I knew precisely what to say, as if my words were preordained by the very narrative that the camera behind me wanted to capture, but this conviction of mine was also to hit me hard on its return, reflected as it were from the surface that was Orhan; it was to come back to me as fear, because it was beyond doubt that Orhan too knew precisely what to say to me, and this senseless yet exact duality was almost a physical presence between us now, a presence as present as the droplets that were yet again accumulating on my second water bottle, a presence as real as the yellow t-shirt that Orhan was wearing, which was an exact replica of a t-shirt that had been gifted to me by Anne-Marie on my twenty-fifth birthday. For a second I considered asking Orhan where he got this shirt from, but decided against it. Everything seemed to me complex beyond solution, but I was also close to a point where it seemed enticing to give up all solving. To continue talking to Orhan, here, now, as obliquely or as directly as it were, seemed more important than anything else in the world. It was another matter altogether that some of the bar girls had mounted the pedestals and a ubiquitous carnival of pole dancing had begun. The place was suddenly very noisy with party songs. The cross-dressed man in front of us had his tongue out of his mouth, in what was definitely a grotesque form of excitement.
Neon Noon Page 11