Lost in Pattaya (8 page)

“Are you Ok, you look awful today,” she
said, after we had greeted. My state was reduced to such, even a complete
stranger could tell there was something physically wrong here.

“Yes I am fine. How are you today?” I sat
down, asking for coffee. We made small talk, meaningless, before she asked
kindly, “You wanted to see me?”

“I wanted to share stories,” I said, a
pearl of water appearing across my eyes, like a child controlling a wailing
weep.

She too had lost a girl.

“We had given up on finding her, before I
decided to move to Bangkok and start looking for her again,” she said, sliding
her hand off mine, after the minutes it took for me to collect myself.

“You mean you and your husband?” I asked.

“No, I mean me, alone. She was our only
child and the falling apart of our marriage was inevitable after she was gone.
It is tough to remain coupled after you have lost the essence of a
relationship, children,” she looked at me, kind enough not to pry into my
impressions of her words, mostly agreement gathered through personal
experience.

My ballooned face seemed to de-tense back
to its natural shape with the conversation that ensued. The coffee lay
untouched and tepid on the table. I called for ice and a taller glass, into
which I poured the latte over melting ice. I called for some water too, sensing
that I was settling into an important conversation.

“There was a gap of over ten years from
when we lost her to when I found her,” she continued, speaking softly, but
clearly; her composure too was cracking with each word of illustration.

“How did you look for her?” I asked, this
time keeping my hand on hers, hoping I’d ease the recounting of horror that I
knew lay ahead.

“First, I patrolled the red light
districts, just moving about looking in the throng of girls that work in
Bangkok. In fact, I even approached and worked with pimps, who were strangely
sympathetic and some even tried to help, leading me into the dark, hidden world
of child prostitution. She was not there, we did not find her . . . ” she drew
her hands back, gently folding them as if in a long laborious prayer.

“Why did the pimps offer help?”

Because, for the right price, everything is
for sale. “Where did you eventually find her?” I asked.

“I found her begging in the streets. It is
inaccurate to say that I found her, because what I found was not her, not
mentally at least,” Rashmi spoke with an uneasy composure, forced, hiding all
her angst and disappointment with her herculean effort of will. “I knew it was
her, my baby, all grown physically, though her looks were ragged and her
clothes were in tatters. But, she never recognised me, simply begging money off
me as if I was another passer-by. Only the shell of her body remained . . .
mentally she was ruined, or, shall we say rescued in premature senility. I was
never able to hold her or hug her; she trembled and resisted my embraces. For
that matter, any human touch left her panicking. The ten years, they had stolen
her, and, in that sense, I never really found my daughter, I just found her
walking dead body.”

“Is she with you now? I am sure long term
treatment will help bring her back?” I did not know what else to say since it
would be unkind to relate to her my actual thought – Relief at meeting another
who shared my state of failure as a parent, it was like finding and
participating in a secret cult-club of a like-minded Klan members.

“I tried all avenues of therapy . . .
nothing seemed to work, so I put her in a home for the challenged, where she
got the care and the usual therapy, which never helps,” her shoulders drooped,
her head bent in defeat, yet her eyes moved and sparkled like beacons from a
stormy shore. “Such a loss, it is for us to learn and live through . . .
spirituality, service to society, care groups, they all help. But we need to
find a way to live on as if we have lost a limb, learning to cope without it.”

Insurance for squash players is to be
ambidextrous.

“Go ahead; ask me all the questions that
you may have?” I knew she could make out, I was hesitant due to the grief that
her answers to my questions may erupt in. Humans, we must be empathetic.

“What happens to kids that are lost?”

“It depends on the age and the gender. Boys
and girls below the age of ten are usually part of ‘beggar’ mafias, they beg on
the streets during the day and hand over earnings to their keepers at night.
After they lose their childhood, they squander their youth to prostitution,
particularly girls, gratiating the disfigured vile thirst that some men have.
If they take to prostitution well, they may have a shelf life of up to twenty
years, a point till which they are economically productive and maybe another
ten years before their looks stale, rates dropping to a level where
prostitution stops making sense for their pimps. This is the outcome of a few
very lucky ones, becoming prostitutes and leading a fucked healthy life.
Unfortunately, a large number simply disappear along the way, mostly to disease
or addiction, or the mental decay that the trauma each day leaves one in.”

That is a terrible truth. Why?

“Yes, in the initial years of loss, you
will feel that way. However, with each year you will learn to build arguments
of acceptance. Each lost parent is different, but, in general we all find
different mental tactics to accept the loss.”

That is a terrible acceptance. Why?

“Acceptance, in most cases, stems from a
simple notion. Irrespective of our status, or wealth, all of us are handed an
equal amount of joy and happiness in our life time. If you lead a biologically
complete life, you will be as happy or as sad as another. Child prostitutes,
they too live a life, a complete one. One applies this logic to naturally
complete lives, leaving anomalies that cut lives short on the tapering ends of
the statistical bell, leaving all else an average.”

Handing down of ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’, who
does this in a manner equanimous? Are we not supposed to strive, and grab what
our labour of body or mind may deserve?

Empathy, good and fine, but this finally
revealed her soft vulnerable decrepitude of self-resistance, hidden in the
pretence of helping another. I could not resist piercing it with my pointed
questioning, “So, you think your child, God help her, led… leads, a life as
normal as another, who was not lost and ravaged before her time?” I coughed
artificially at the faux pas of ‘led’ vs. ‘leads’, past vs. present fucking
continuous, they were palpably relevant here. Suddenly, she seemed as if
leaden, cold and metallic, impermeable.

“Yes,” affirmation, that was the bedrock of
her acceptance of loss. Her tears appeared, cloudy, squeezed through her lime
green irises as she picked a serviette to blot the drips of sorrow with.

I imagined her, a few years down the road,
weeping in her grave, loud enough for all above to scream and run. Consumed in
the jaws of rodents before succumbing to microbes, her flesh would decay,
leaving behind ivory clean sockets of the skull. How can a thing, dry as bone,
produce tears? I knew Rashmi, sitting opposite me in bright pastel designs,
would find a way to melt her cranial ridges to tears.

My untouched coffee had watered down with
the ice that I had added earlier. I slugged it, and the glass of water besides
it, hoping that the fluids would help me through the revival from hangover.

A hangover is like a fork on a journey. On
one path is abstinence and physical recovery, while on the other finger lie the
dungeons of a mental excess, commonly understood as addiction.

Outside, the evening turned to honey and
the light of the city gradually phased the day out with a halogen glow from
neatly separated street lamps. Just for a few moments, before the city turned
on its night lights, the steeple of the cathedral at City Hall peaked into the
warmth of an Impressionist hot-embered sky. In the day’s dead twilight, a few
lovers held on to each other, just glad that the work day was over and behind
them. Some stopped to kiss, spreading smiles before moving on. An
uncharacteristic cool breeze swept across the street and then it poured cats
and pelicans, forcing me to shelter in the subterranean rail station,
eventually riding towards the riverside, where I sat pinting in beers.

I ate and drank immorally. Sausages and
mash with fries, exactly the stuff that squash players avoid. Of course, the
resolve of a comeback on the squash court kept me sane and within a mental
boundary of restraint, a line beyond which lies death from a single night of
drinking. Alcohol is the worst poison, mostly because it is so easily
available. Seeing me by myself, a few bar girls were drawn, asking for drinks
in exchange for a few words and some faked moments of companionship. Faked from
their side; I was all up for any friendship that passed my failed past and my
empty present by.

It was not an unfair trade.

Mondays, not having to wake up and ride to
work, found me nursing hangovers from the drinking blizzard of the weekend
past, with massages following insipid steamed food, paving a soft tortured
revival. By Tuesday mornings each week, I resumed life, joining the day-people,
not fitting in their slow pace and extremes of age. In the evenings, I dragged
myself to the squash club, seeing buddies transform into targets of extraction,
mining deep and unashamed, favours of employment, wanting desperately to
re-join the workforce. Squash too, was attempted to a point where the
infraction of hearts can arrest enthusiasm. I failed, as regards dying on the
squash floor. I simply ran up and across on the court, thinking I would die,
but it did not end that way. Exertion at squash caused a familiar benign pain
along the sides of my abdomen, fallout from the excess of drinking on the
weekend. The pain kept me from the bottle but drew me to my stash of pills,
before I improved my performance on the squash court by Thursdays. Fridays, I
headed back to the riverside, drinking without the guilt that I had wiped clean
with a few days of squash, seeking respite in those who part with good-natured
company in exchange of money. I paid often for sex on Fridays, never at my flat
though, since I did not want Fang Wei to walk in on me, even though it did not
matter anymore. All weekend, I wasted myself in bars, parks, and supermarkets,
wandering in the angst of loss until one day an idea took root. It sprouted in
a faraway part of my brain, like a tiny sapling of a future giant appearing in
the forest of my thoughts. It was a solution for all the losses that had piled
like crushing weights upon me. I felt like a mathematician presented with a
hint, like an ever so small a key, yet fitting intricately through locks,
revealing the un-ventured space of a proof, a path through a maze that he or
she alone was chosen to negotiate.

After the
sapling-solution
got sown,
it was visible only when the thought-forest was watered by the fluid shafts of
the golden alcohol, surfacing each and every time I took to the bottle.
Otherwise, I never dwelled upon
it
, until it became plausible, growing
despite the illumination of daylight and without the devoid-manure of liquor,
during the hours of wakeful dead dawns, often the only hours that I did not
drink in.

I did not hear from Fang Wei, and simply
dreaded the SingPost man who carries the message of separation from lawyers, an
inevitable communication forcing my signature of receipt, the thought of which
sank the dagger of failure deeper into my grief.

Unwittingly, I fell into the unchanging
routine of a weekly rhythm, somewhere midway giving up upon the strength that
society and its people are supposed to provide. I was simply drinking the
drink, hitting the ball, popping the pill, bedding the whores fifty-odd times,
before I realised that the year was out. Excessive living, it makes one
reticent, wanting to cover an inner core of consumption, one that society
perceives as debased. The simplest escape is to be cut off, socially. It
happens unwittingly, wearing dark glasses in malls, or by pulling baseball caps
low, over the forehead when in crowds lest an acquaintance may stop you, or by
not writing to nor receiving any word from friends for weeks at end, avoiding
even the benign questions that innocuous members of society like taxi drivers
or sales clerks may pose from time to time. The only conversations that
occurred were of me with myself. Soon all voices were goading me to stare
unblinking at the
sapling-solution
. My stare watering it to grow at an
unnatural pace, till I and the forest of my thought-conversations stood dwarfed
by the gigantic tree that towered above us, a cancer we had created, nurtured
by us, me and the conversational Yin of my Yang.

A counter, since each and every act of mine
was both completely right and utterly disappointing. Even the solution that
we
came upon, my counter arguments to it were numerous and solid, yet it had grown
and assumed a proportion that left me in front of the internet screen one
night, checking for flights and hotels in Pattaya.

Employment, re-entry into the workforce
remained an elusive goal. Its longing dulled with each passing month, till the
point where I stopped seeking employment. It was at about the same time that I
lost my fear of the Postman, since by then he had found me, delivering the
notice of separation from Fang Wei through her lawyers, leaving me to hire a
lawyer of my own, one who would wrestle with terms that may become lucrative
for me. For now I remained in the flat; my lawyer was confident that we would
retain it.