Free Lost in Pattaya by Kishore Modak Page A

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,