Free Lost in Pattaya by Kishore Modak

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