Lost in Pattaya (2 page)

A drunken sleepless night, charged by loss
had left me awake. I shook SriJaya, whose name I knew not then, and confronted
him.

SriJaya, like me, was in the same shirt as
on the evening of loss, but when I jerked him awake, he responded badly, not
wanting to wake, making me drag him across the sand, towards the sea. I let the
roar of the waves bring him about into the day before I deposited him in the
sand.

“Leave me,” was all he said, without a
shred of resistance, allowing me to complete the dragging of his body. I let
his legs drop back onto the sand, landing away from my tiring hands. His
slippers lay two meters behind. In-between was a deep grey furrow in the meters
of sand that I had dragged him across.

SriJaya woke up at last, to what he saw, a
sleepless drunk with a daughter lost.

“You bastard,
bhenchod
,” I said, as
I released his ankles from my grip. “You were the last one who saw me with
her,” I was in the tempest of my loss, crazed and hapless.

An orange sun was climbing rapidly from the
brightening blue brine of the sea. SriJaya opened his eyes “Sir, did you find
her, you did, right?” he asked, genuinely wanting to hear that Li Ya was safe,
and hoping to let the trades of my pleasure commence.

“No, I did not,” I said, backing off,
succumbing to the genuine innocence of his question.

He pulled himself together, heading out to
piss into the ocean. Then he faced me.

“You have not slept at all, have you?
Here,” he placed a short line of coke on a small black marble cube and gave me
a plastic bubble-tea straw, which I stuck in my nose before taking the powder
in through my nostril. The effects were almost immediate, the coke left me
feeling fresh and energised with almost no hint of the sleepless night I had
spent looking for Li Ya. The heavy head from the hard drinking vanished as the
coke spread its palliative tentacles over my brain. The snort had a sudden
confidence boosting effect when I took it in, and, for the first time in the
day past, deep inside I felt it would all work out, eventually. I was
completely distraught before I had walked up to SriJaya. Now, I filled with a
new confidence, confidence that I would find Li Ya, soon.

We drank from his bottle of water.

“Come let us go to the Police, maybe they
have news about your girl, your wife may be there too,” we moved across the
street and towards the station. SriJaya was thin and dark toned, he looked
scrawny in a worned brown trouser, a dull grey shirt, tucked out, making easy,
blending into crowds. He obviously lived on the streets, and in the beach
shacks that he may find sleep in, on some nights. It was this sorry, ordinary,
almost pitiful drug peddler who said what I have yearned to hear from Fang Wei
and all of the other family and acquaintances who spoke to me about the loss of
my daughter in the years ahead.

He said
it
as we stood across the
station “Sir,
it
was not your fault, I was there and I saw what
happened. You could not have done any more to keep your daughter safe. It was
just an accident. For all you know they may have found her. Go and check
inside,” he pointed to the Police Station in front, and gave me his number with
a small pouch, with a bit more cocaine in it. “You will need this later; don’t
drink for a few days and don’t sleep in the day time today, just have this in
the afternoon, it will keep you going till night fall, and then go to bed. All
the best.” It was probably the only kind word that anyone ever said to me about
the loss of Li Ya, because for the rest of the world, Li Ya did not get lost. I
lost her.

Reaching into my pocket, I took out a few
hundred dollars and handed it to SriJaya, who touched my shoulder in
consolation before he disappeared back into the streets of Pattaya.

Inside the station, Fang Wei sat at the
Thai Police Inspectors desk, speaking into the phone, weeping gently. They had
obviously not found Li Ya at night.

“Where the fuck have you been?” she
screamed when she saw me, “We have been trying to call you all night,” she kept
her phone on the desk and switched to speakers. She was now weeping in wails,
not allowing me to keep my palms on her shoulders, pushing away as she spoke
into the phone, “Georgy, he is here, speak to him, God alone knows where he has
been all night.”

Georgy was my friend from work, at the
audit firm that we managed out of Singapore. He was a family friend too, and
our closest acquaintance in Singapore.

“Fang Wei, calm down, please, we have to
hold ourselves together, I have already informed the Police in Singapore and
they too are doing all that they can to find Li Ya. Where have you been, we
have been looking for you frantically,” his high strung, electronic voice came
sparkling over the speakers of the phone.

“I was looking for Li Ya, my phone ran out
of charge since I was using it to show everyone her pictures, asking if they
had seen her,” I had only SriJaya to thank, had he not fixed me up with the
coke, I would not have survived that hung-over conversation.

“Shit, you nose is bleeding, what have you
been having? Okay, you just go to the hotel and stay put there, maybe she will
turn up there, I am sure she will remember the name of the Hotel. Just stay
there, I will tackle this here and reach you at the Hotel,” she wiped her face
and put her phone in her bag, before turning to the inspector who was doing the
paperwork.

Had I been sober, I would have been
demanding, insisting on the police force to be deployed, and personally
overseeing the search that the Police in Pattaya had initiated. Instead, I was
high and simply left, going first to the beach where I thought Li Ya may have
miraculously appeared, and then shattered, I returned to the hotel, where I
bathed, before patrolling the lobby of the Hotel, looking every now and then
for that which disappeared from my life, my little girl, Li Ya.

I charged my phone, hoping it would stir,
with voices demanding ransom before our darling was returned to us, knowing
that she, Li Ya, had hearted well my number.

A train of eventualities thundered past,
eventualities that haunted me for decades. The biggest being abduction for some
nature of profit, from whatever it is that little girls can be sold or
transacted for. The present value of her economic annuity, I was ready to
divide it by the most meagre percentage of returns, ready to part with an
infinite amount that any may seek, in return of my daughter. Or, did she
genuinely get lost, slipping into some street corner before turning around and
finding herself without her parents. She would be terrified, she would have
cried, she would have been at a complete loss, not knowing how to communicate
in Thai. A few kind people might have even tried to help, by channelling her
into what the city accepted as the right ducts for little girls.

My phone remained silent, making me feel
helpless and panicked as the effects of the drug began to wear. Reaching for
the packet of coke from SriJaya, I emptied it on the back of my clenched fist
and snorted up right there in the lobby, stuffing the powder into my nostrils
with fingers before brushing the remains off my upturned palms. Fang Wei saw me
doing it as she walked into the hotel and past me to the lift lobby, not
acknowledging me. I ran into the lift as it shut and followed her to the room.

“What did the police say?” I asked her.

She did not reply, simply walking into the
bathroom, where washing, cleaning and flushing sounds continued for about five
minutes.

“They are doing their best, I have made the
reports and they are working with the Singapore police, they are doing their
best,” she was completely exhausted, looking drained, unlike me who was surfing
on the cocaine.

In the corner of the room lay Li Ya’s
stroller luggage, with a bright bubble printed princess on it, the one that we
allowed her to pack with toys, board-books and such, for the holidays. Fang Wei
crumbled in front of the princess bag and broke down again “My baby, my baby.”
I reached for her, wanting to take her in my arms, wanting to console her, but
she jerked away from me with widening ivory-red eyes.

“What are you doing here in this room, get
out and search for her, don’t come back till you find her, you lost her you
fool; now you go and find her. Go away,” she was understandably crazed,
speaking meaninglessly as she clutched the stuffed bunny she had picked up from
the floor.

The bunny’s ears drooped and it blinked its
eyes at me, before tears, inky-blue, rolled down its white furry cheeks and
onto Fang Wei’s over creamed, aging, desire-less palms. I knew it was the coke
weeping and simply left the room, settling back onto the couches of the hotel
lobby below. Her hands, they were desire less only because they did not seek my
touch anymore.

Me and Fang Wei, we had not made love in
over a year, if not more. The alcohol had decayed from my body by now, given
that I had not imbibed in almost twenty hours, half-life of alcohol favouring
the abstinent. Other drugs linger; an experiment of discovery, I strongly
advise you against.

Her grief, I understood. What I did not
understand was the binding of love that the grief of a loss is supposed to
drive couples towards. Having lost the most precious denominator of a
relationship, should that not compel us to stand together as we face a societal
jury, who are safe and judgmental of what happened, and more importantly, of
how it can be avoided. I was befuddled by the steady motions that came by, not
yet erupting in the grief that gnawed and ate me over the years of loss that
lay ahead. For now, I was just coasting on the cocaine.

When I lost Li Ya, I was at the pinnacle of
my life, a point reached with steady industrious ascendancy, before the flag of
her loss was planted on the zenith, murdering me. Then, the plummeting began,
the awkward descent into the abyss of what I could not plan or control. The
ascent had been measured and educated, before I landed the ‘Partner Position’
at the audit house, and the related ‘marrying up’ to Fang Wei. The descent was
rough, like when gravity takes over.

There is so much to narrate and my
keystrokes fumble, for I have only that much time, so let me try and lay the
background out quickly for you in three points, before I introduce deadly Miho
and her mistress Thuy Binh, both in whose love I lie in my sick-bed, typing
furiously away before the end comes and announces ‘curtains’ on my excessive
past.

The squash was good, the women even better,
but, it was the deluge of drugs and drink which did me in, needing no judge to
spell my death sentence. My end was the culmination of my own excess, leaving
me to accept the consequences of that what we subject our bodies to.

Let me get back to the three quick points.

First, I am ethnic Indian, with no
financial or familial links with the sub-continent, the only brother I have, a
Canadian citizen, has made clear that the ties we share limit us to the
amicable settlement of inheritance, which we have already affected. From that
settlement, actually away from it, we have drifted, apart enough for us to
lament the loss of relation that leaves the internet and its promise of
proximity completely misplaced. We would help each other, if and when the need
arose, and, if and when we called or wrote for help. That call for aid had not
presented itself in a decade or so, leaving us cut off and cocooned in our
respective lives.

Second, I am a family man. Family, the only
reason I remained married to Fang Wei for over a decade, about three years
after our love came apart. It was simply my goal at keeping knit a
unitary-whole-family that kept me and Fang Wei together in the final ugly
stretch. We had even discussed it before concluding that it was not worth
scarring a child with the blows of a breaking family, as she came of age.
Actually, there was a lot about me not being able to survive outside of my
family that played up in the unit being held together, even if it was only an
illusion, and, even if it was only theoretical and physical togetherness, with
strong ties between child and parent and none between man and wife.

So, with the two closest relations in my
life, my brother and my wife, I led a life of bare essential and urgent
communications. With my brother, the settlement of inheritance had shut the
need for communication. With my wife, the monthly transfer of money led to the
tacit settlement of us leading separate lives under the same roof. Adult and
business-like, we had agreed upon the weekly children’s movie night and the
holidays when school breaks presented themselves, often insulating the child
from what was apparent to others around us -- sterility in marital continuity.
You may now fathom the harshness that I received from Fang Wei when we lost Li
Ya; the binding thread between us was our child and when it snapped, she
unleashed all her spite and bitterness, stifled for all these years, upon me.
In the absence of Fang Wei’s body, creamy, milky and firm against mine,
bringing alive the reality of the oriental goddess was impossible, at least
until I was with Thuy Bin. Till then, I masturbated, with whom I know not, even
as I try and build back the list of women who have provided me sexual pleasure
without ever being with me. In my defence, I never once headed into town,
paying for sex, since deep in the folds of my foolish mind, I thought
we
,
the holy couple, would rise to love again. Of course, hand jobs after massages
don’t count, they being antiseptic and fleeting, announcing the mere end of a
beginning, the beginning of a habit.