Lost in Pattaya (7 page)

My sms’s to Fang Wei, asking for the
details which the Missing Persons Bureau may have given her, were met with
vacant unresponsiveness.

At home, I avoided Li Ya’s room, not
wanting to go in there since I knew it would be disturbing to see and touch her
things, completely ruining my hopes of falling asleep.

Instead, on the internet, I surfed
pharmacological sites, gleaning details of the sedatives that Dr. Tho had
prescribed, and, more importantly, trying to ascertain if they could be
consumed with alcohol or with other anti-depressants and sedatives, of which I
had a small stash. Most of the information was conservative, choosing the
option of fore-warning over the measured risk of experiment that I was seeking.
The user forums were a bit more encouraging. Eventually, it turned out to be an
ordinary night, simply falling asleep with the one medication that Dr. Tho had
prescribed.

When I woke up, the spread of steel across
my skull had shrunk; I simply felt a metal pellet of freeze at the base of my
neck. By the time I was riding the trains, the pain returned in identical fury
from the previous day. The pain, it diverted my mind, bringing back the horror
of my failing health, making me take a detour from my way to office back into
Dr. Tho’s clinic.

“Doctor, I have the same searing pains,
what could it be?” I was close to a lament, a bit panicked, and convinced that
I was sick and withering.

He pushed the films and papers away, simply
folding his arms “You are fine, you need to work out what is bothering you and
then calm down. I can refer you to a psychiatrist if you like, sometimes
therapy can be very effective in such conditions,” he was clearly unimpressed
by my symptoms.

“Psychiatrist?” I was a bit taken aback.

“Look, if you are in a situation where you
need to find a care group, just to speak to people about things, I don’t know
what it is, but you need to take it out of your system, otherwise there is no
medical route except psychiatric intervention,” he said calmly, spending the
time for me to understand that I was going mad.

At the office, on the internet, I searched
for groups who helped others with similar problems. In my case, I found no
forums for suffering parents of lost kids in Singapore, but when I dug enough I
found Rashmi, a single lady who was registered on an internet forum for parents
who had lost their child, a girl child. I was drawn to her since she was based
in Singapore. I wrote in, asking for a time to meet and hoping she would reply.

“So, what have you decided?” Georgy, he was
on my back, clinging like a diseased monkey.

“Come, let us grab a room,” just his sight
brought the skull crushing ache back into the afternoon.

“I have taken time from BMI tomorrow; if
you are agreeable we can head up to their office and then close the audit out.
We can also discuss the next phase of our contract renewal with them. Come, let
us leave things behind us,” he said, clearly hoping that the steady ticking
bomb of our interpersonal calamity would defuse.

“Did you return Fang Wei’s call yesterday?”
I simply asked, poker faced, ignoring the aches, as I faced my issues.

He was clearly caught off guard; I could
see the sudden-nervous twirling of the pen he had at hand.

“What do you mean?” he began, buying time
to construct mentally where he may head in this conversation.

Fundamentally, he remained dull.

“I mean, are you in touch with Fang Wei? I
saw her call on your phone yesterday,” I repeated myself.

“Look, let us talk about work first, OK?”
Yes, he was in touch with her; it was apparent by the way he shifted into a
crooked posture into his chair, and the way he did not want to talk about it.

“Work is simple, I don’t support the
passing of audit that you are proposing,” it was an impulsive outburst, with
images of Fang Wei weeping on Georgy’s shoulder fuelling the anger that melded
in the ache that my head regressed further into.

“If that is your choice, then we will have
to let you go,” his eyes hardened, like when tying oneself to a resolve of
decisive, yet unpalatable action. He placed a large envelope on the table,
“This has the terms of separation that we propose, and a cheque of severance
that accounts for your years of service, unutilised leave etc. Really sorry it
has to be this way,” he made good on the threats that he had delivered on the
previous day. “It does not have to be this way, but it is your decision. If you
do not uphold and support the larger cause of our long term business, then we
will have little choice in this matter.”

I took the envelope and reached inside,
looking for the cheque, which I found to be substantial. The rest of the
documents were straight, crafted agreements of severance, simply needing my
signatures ensuring I was bound to the confidentiality of audits I had been
involved in over the years past.

“Got a pen?” I looked up and asked Georgy.

I could make out he was surprised, not
expecting me to accept the end so soon.

When I look back, I too am surprised by the
ease with which I gave up my career, comprehendible only in the background of
larger losses - my family. Only in that light can one understand my urge to
give the remainder up too. I did not want to thrash about, preserving and
grabbing at the remainder of divisible loss. Instead, I craved grace, allowing
my losses to pile, and hopefully remaining stoic through them. In other words,
I was giving up.

“Don’t do it man. Please, you know it is
the wrong decision,” he was sympathetic. It was I who became adamant, wanting
to throw to the wind what remained. Suddenly an imaginary gale ripped
everything off me, my past and all of my present, leaving me cleansed to write
afresh upon my restored consciousness.

“It’s OK, maybe it is better this way,” I
had signed the papers with a pen that I found on me, my head throbbing as if a
freight train was thundering through it.

One stroke of the pen, the deposition of
devices and cards, and I was left loosening knots in the elevator shaft,
plummeting away from a life that I would barely look back upon through the
roller coaster years with Miho and Thuy Binh ahead of me. The future where I
was headed, my past life paled in insipidity, though the loss of Li Ya defined
both my lives; it defined all the crimes that got committed, as you shall see.

In the train, voices of school kids buzzed
around me with talks of quizzes and grades. I did not sit down since I assumed
all seats were taken; it took me a few months before I settled down, before I
joined the ‘day people’. People who don’t crowd trains at rush hour, they are
of the same average age as the ‘rushed ones’, except they are distributed
awkwardly in years, well away from the median. The old ones carry bags by their
side, walking slowly as they block entire passageways with uncertain strides
and their width of baggage. Kids, they walk abreast, giggling, leaving me to
nudge forward in compliant ‘excuses’ towards the bus stop from where I would be
carried away. At the bus stop, the old folks and the kids catch up and we board
the same buses that I had hurried towards, thinking I was getting ahead. The
day people, they greet and chat-up the bus captain, who rides unhurriedly in
smiles. When I reach my stop, I hurry towards the traffic island, waiting for
lights to change, as the ‘day people’ catch up again, soon waiting alongside.

I stopped at the tuck shop, exchanged
‘hellos’, and to the keeper’s surprise, bought a bottle of liquor. Surprise,
since I passed up the good stuff, settling for local brew. Singapore is safe
and I bought it with confidence, avoiding his friendly questions, smiling. Back
at my apartment, I lay down in my boxers with a bottle’o whiskey beside me. Cheap
stuff, it still has alcohol.

Before I got too drunk, after about a half
bottle, I masturbated, my thoughts roaming in the fleeting flesh of desire,
knowing not that I was to get what I most desired, stoned-slow-safe-rhythmic
sex, with a one who moaned in the inner world of her own pleasure, flowing from
hallucinations, attributable to me who thrust deep, making real the world of
fantasy. Such is the world of drugs, measured drugs, allowing one to close eyes
in the pleasure of music or whatever it is that gives us pleasure. It is
alcohol which makes the closing and resting of eyes horrific, keeping the
entire torso turning and twisting till one vomits.

I hate drugs and alcohol. They don’t.

Without employment, time stood before me
and I noticed its stillness all about the household, with just me and the
bottle in bed. The alcohol that afternoon pushed me towards the torrent of
grief that was soon flooding down the plains of my face. The tears of alcohol
were empty, like when you drink enough for any theme of life to open the sluice
of sorrow. In the empty house, from Li Ya’s room, every now and then I thought
I heard her voice, “Give me it”. Kids, they have a way of learning languages
with distortion. In Li Ya’s case, she said that for years. “Give me it,” instead
of “Give it to me.” We would laugh playfully with her, repeating, “Give me it,
it, it ,it,” and then we invented games around which one among the three of us
could say “it it it,” three times, no more, and when said quickly enough, it
would be like saying a single “it”. We let Li Ya win, letting her know that she
had the fastest it-it-it in town. “Give me it” echoed all afternoon, as I
cried.

The alcohol and the pills, they kept me in
bed for the rest of the day and in the intermittent patches of consciousness,
masturbation happened before I simply reached for more pills and the vile
liquid from another bottle of liquor, which I purchased before the shops closed
for the night.

All morning, I lay on the sofa, physically
shattered from the excesses of the previous day, almost sleeping through the
visit of Fang Wei who caught me just as she had wanted to, passed out on the
couch.

She simply collected most of her stuff and
left, just as I was coming around and murmuring “Wait, wait…”

By late afternoon on the following day, I
was on the couch with the same intolerable ache all over my neck, shoulders and
head. I looked at my phone, realising Rashmi had replied, consenting to meet.

Though I shaved and showered before heading
out, my face would have seemed puffed and swollen with shiny shorn skin, like
the stretched surface of an underinflated balloon. My eyes, they would have
looked narrow and sunken in the bloat that the alcohol and sedatives had
caused. Despite the vigorous brushing, the throwing up, and the bowl of evening
cereal, a faint alcoholic whiff remained about me, a constant reminder of the
stupor from which I had awakened a few hours ago.

Upright, my body felt unsteady, maybe
because I had been lying drunk and sedated for over a day now.

For a supposed player of squash racquets,
this was utter, complete, waste of form and my lips pouted in grief, as I
imagined my body skating in court shoes across the slatted wooden floor,
neutering all that my opponents had to offer. A post-alcoholic tear ran down the
swollen slopes of my face.

A little crying is mostly ignored on
commuter trains. People do notice grief; it is just that the turning away from
another’s grief is an inward prayer, not staring and soaking in the naked
spectacle of another’s anguish.

Turning away from grief, it is built into
seasoned commuters. They plummet in well-lit rakes through dark subterranean
tunnels. You will agree that they are supremely claustrophobic labyrinths, the
dark day-less furrow of the screaming velocity tunnel; especially if you were
recovering from the bottles and pills that I had laid in the wake of that
train.

I still maintain trains are not what they
used to be, a cure for any phobia and anyone’s dreads. The world, it needs
pastoral silence, before a rhythmic steam train gushes across, toiling upslope
with kinetic victory into the peaks, illustrating what was missing from the
scape of land, a plume of elegance against the steepest gradient on offer.

Daylight is panacea for the stoned and the
un-drunks; take it from me. Even the last few wisps of the receding day’s
evening brightened me slightly. If there is one motif for each of us, it has to
be the formless story of our own lives, trapping each and every one of us, till
we find a sense of normalcy to fake, despite the unplanned chaos that life
takes us through. Very few of us are ready to share and confess the random
order in which life commits us to.

It would be abusive to call any lifetime
‘normal’.

At the café, I spotted Rashmi easily. She
was well aged, with no attempts at hiding the grey in her hair, or the
pendulous sinking that we expect from any beyond our own age. She was slight
built and it seemed she looked herself after since she was athletic and quick
to move if the need for action presented itself. She was strangely attractive,
in a cosmetic-free, natural sort of a manner, and friendly in the bright pastel
shades of her ethnic wear.

If you were to kiss a person like that,
spontaneously, you would meet only healthy lips with no chemicals to mask the
taste of a woman. Spontaneity was the gravity which I longed for, not needing
washing and wiping before the moment of nearness dies belly up, leaving me
flaccid and ready for sleep.