Authors: Kishore Modak
“Will you be
accepted in your village again?”
“Yes, since I will
be the rich one. Families may even ask for the agent’s numbers from me. I will
get a husband too.”
I hoped her uncle
died prematurely of unnatural disease, before she ruled dowager over the
village, kneeling before pissing on his grave each day.
“How can you live
a life like this?”
“It is OK. Only
the first few months are a bit scary, after that it can even be fun,
particularly if you like sex. Most of the customers are gentle, and if an odd
one becomes violent the pimps jump in and rescue us.”
“Do new girls
enter the trade regularly?”
“Yes, but it
happens in batches, every few months. The pimp prepares them mentally before
the customers are allowed to enter them. It is quite humane.”
“How can sex with
a thirteen year old be humane?”
“After the first
few months it is all right. The body gets used to it.”
“Do you hate
customers who seek out young girls, virgins?”
“No I don’t. No
more than I do any other customers. You are making too much out of the whole
thing. Can I go now?” she rose, buttoning back her shirt.
“One last
question,” I said, pulling out the photograph of Li Ya from out of my wallet.
“Have you seen this girl anywhere?” I asked, letting her look at the
photograph.
“No,” she said
bluntly, moving to the door and leaving me alone.
At night the worms
arrived, mostly aphids, first crawling under my skin before spewing all out of
my ears. I knew it was the cocaine yet I felt scared like a child, alone in the
dark with beasts. Screams leapt like cats, screeching in my anxiety. I searched
for that pain in my chest, a final pain which the tag on my toe, at the morgue
on the following day would confirm as ‘Overdose’.
I slept and
snorted that night almost on the hour.
On the following
morning the sleep had deprived me of drug for over four hours. My bed crept
with the hallucination of insects that were buried in the evolution of my
primeval brain, and the nest of mattresses from which they spewed out. I lay in
the comfort of knowledge, it was the cocaine that was crawling, and if I had
not cardiac arrested in my sleep, I was okay for now, medically speaking.
I awoke, still
stoned and craving for drug, given the abstinence of sleep, sensing immediately
that I was not alone. A fragrance of fresh Jasmine rose in my nose. It was an
illusion at first, an olfactory one, but, when I tried to sneeze it away, it
persisted, turning its character to a clinging stench, like from an armpit
soured and pickled in a dead-day’s sweat. The sour-jasmine notes, before I
learnt to love them, I had to understand them. They were coming from the
doll-dressed body of Miho. She lay in my bed of worms, startled as I woke up to
her, registering her presence.
I stood
frantically, with all of the bed clothes wrapped around me. “Who are you?”
“I am Miho.”
Whispering, she lit two joints held between her teeth, handing one on to me.
The contents of my wallet were strewn on the bed. She smoked my joints, not
feeling any discomfort at revealing the mounds of breasts that pressed braless
against her silken blouse. She was Asian, stunningly beautiful as the first
sight of morning. Her voice was laden with a sharp Asian twang. English was
certainly not her first tongue.
“What the fuck are
you doing here?” I asked. My displeasure was spontaneous, stemming from the
rude invasion of privacy. I wanted to get a hit desperately, to face what came
with the morning. Physically, my thighs and buttocks itched in craving. I
wanted to scratch with nails, drawing blood, which only the fabric of my
pyjamas prevented.
“We wanted to ask
you the same question,” a butterfly sound glided in, its wings beat-less like a
predator perched high in the winds. It was Thuy Binh. She was standing near the
window through which sunlight streamed, dispersing and bouncing off the sheer
fabric of her Thai tunic. She was much more of a woman than Miho. Miho was
childlike in her high stocking-legged boots and her silk pinafore, two arrow
straight black pig-tails falling on either side and away.
The ceiling of the
room turned to clouds, clouds saturated beyond retention with worms, and I felt
them rising up through the floor, straight-up into my feet. Desperately, I
brushed my palms over my arms and legs, wanting to be rid of the hangover that
cocaine causes. I began itching irresistibly. With a bit of will I could cold
turkey, but on that morning, with two strange intruders I wanted a hit, of
which I got from the coke that was left on the table from the previous night. I
wanted it in me before it disappeared into any of them; it was my coke after
all. Animal like, I completed my wild morning’s insulations. Then, I pulled on
the joint that Miho handed me. Almost instantly, the feeling of being myself
returned.
“Listen whoever
you are, just get the fuck out of my room before I cause trouble,” I rubbed my
nostrils noisily, still breathing remnants of coke off my fingers, moving
towards Thuy Binh, my finger pointing at her. Deadly Miho, she leapt feline
from the bed, landing on my chest, her knees pinning me to the floor, leaving
my legs flailing behind her. I stopped struggling when she pulled the
Tanto
from its scabbard, thrusting its pointed edge gently under my right eyeball,
drawing a drop of blood, the crusting of which I noticed much later. In that
position my struggle would simply make untidy, and dangerous the delicacy with
which the knife’s blade-tip got placed.
A few pregnant
seconds passed where nothing happened, except, the appearance of a faint smile
that ornamented Miho’s face. She began to toy, moving the cold blade of the
Tanto
slowly across my face, drawing a faint line of red, the blade announcing my
losses as it trended downwards.
“You have already
caused trouble,” Thuy Binh spoke calmly, adding a tch-tch-tch as she raised her
hand and waved her palm upwards, exactly one-slow wave, as if to a dog or a
horse who is accustomed to instructions from its master. Miho eased her knee
from the crook of my neck and went back to the bed where she lay down,
returning to her smouldering joint in the ashtray.
“What sort of
trouble,” I asked sitting up, desperately wanting to work my way out of this
strange mess.
“We don’t like it,
when our customers snoop around, not consuming paid-for goods,” she moved
towards me, throwing my wallet in the air.
“But I paid what I
had promised last night? What wrong did I do?” I asked. My tone low, as if in
an interrogation that could end badly for me.
“You didn’t even
touch my girl last night, instead you asked unnecessary questions. We don’t
like that, it feels like free money,” Thuy Binh said.
Inside my wallet,
I peered and found a vacant transparent window where Li Ya’s image had stood on
the previous night.
“You are fucking
big-pimp, are you not?” in one fluid motion I leapt, gripping Thuy Binh’s neck
in my arm. Her back was athletic, fitting well in the grip of my body. In the
mirror, I saw Thuy Binh smiling back at me. In the same mirror, behind me, Miho
was standing militant, the blade-tip of her
Tanto
firm between her
fingers
,
raised high in the drawn slingshot of her right arm. I was
completely vulnerable and she, Miho, would kill me if I made any move to hurt
her mistress. My grip loosened and I simply whispered into Thuy Binh’s ears
“You know her, right, you know where Li Ya is?”
“Tch-tch,” she
motioned gently for Miho to back down, signalling through the mirror in which
we all held each other, Miho being the only one in complete control of our
tangled impasse.
Turning like a
planet on its axis, she, my future lover, giver of physical gratification,
remained in the fading gravity of my arm. Thuy Binh’s face was no more than a
few inches from mine. Still smiling, she looked up at me.
“You are a good
man, but you have to learn to be a man, don’t have to run around like a child
before you come off. Man-up, we can even use you,” her whisper was faint, like
a secret revealed to only me.
“What?”
“No one attacks me
in the presence of Miho and lives to brag,” softly she hissed, looking up, eyes
wide, lips curving in a smile.
“What . . . What
does that mean?”
“Lesson one, don’t
speak of my weak moments, else you will join the list of my dead-unsuccessful
assailants,” she switched to a conversational tone, loud enough so Miho did not
have to strain to hear. I had completely released Thuy Binh, though she had not
moved one inch away from me. The wrinkles of time were on her face for me to
see close up, dry-ridged and beautiful, unaltered by the cosmetic slather of
advertising. Her silken lapels dove deep into her breasts as she disarmed me
with the mere presence of her words.
The tips of her
breasts touched my chest in an unhurried lingering manner.
“You want some
more,” she whispered, undoing the wire-noose around the neck of a little
transparent pouch of white-powder drug, her forefinger tapping some onto her
palm. I dove in, bent like a dog eating greedily from a bowl, needing
desperately to remain high through the ladies of the morning.
Just as the white
soot hit the base of my brain, I knew it was going all wrong. First my knees
buckled, and on the floor I touched my nostrils, blood streaming through them
and onto my fingers.
“Lesson two, taste
before accepting stuff offered by strangers,” her whisper clanged in my brain
like un-rhythmic snare drums. I felt my heart beating; it was slowing in
echoes, with each beat becoming laborious.
In the blur that
followed, I had visions of Thuy Binh’s unequipped doctor administering vials of
liquid in my body, straight through the soft tissue between my ribs. It all
happened in the same room where I had fallen. From the floor I could see Miho
and Thuy Binh kneeling by the coffee table, no more than a few feet away, shooting
up.
The interminable
passage of time ended with me in the back of their Camry, still alive and
conscious, bumming in depths of unimaginable discomfort and amid hellish
invasion of insects. In the Camry, on either side of me, Miho and Thuy Binh
chatted in Thai, all smiles and giggles as if lone and by themselves. The Camry
stopped on the busy streets as
they
grabbed take-away which our chauffer
went out and scored in white styrene boxes. The policemen helped manage traffic
meticulously around the Camry while we waited for food to-go. Motorists and
commuters bowed all around us as they sped and walked past.
All the while, the
plain clad doctor sat in front, silent and respectful, seemingly unworried
about my state of being.
This worried me.
We drove for a
good while before the Camry stopped in the sands of a deserted beach. The ocean
was blue and the ladies entered the surf, swimming playfully in circles and
splashes, mostly naked. The doctor and I were left alone in the Camry as the
driver spread a picnic on the beach, guarding it dutifully from the beach dogs
that appeared around us. I tried but found myself unable to talk to the Doctor
who spoke reassuring in Thai, checking my blood pressure and pulse, smiling all
the while.
I felt better and
must have slept, for when I awoke I was alone in the Camry, the air
conditioning contrasting against the warmth of the sea and sand outside. The
keys in the Camry meant that I could run it through my captors in front, as
they lay on the sand. The Driver and the Doctor gently massaged oil further
into their suppleness. For a few minutes, they lay face down in the
powder-white sand and then they threw towels across their faces as they
relaxed, faces sheltered from the sun. She glanced and smiled at me, Thuy Binh,
as she turned over in her afternoon of pleasure. A few beach dogs lay around
them, resting alert, ears pricking, snarling at me every once in a while. I
must have fallen asleep again.
The Camry was
chocolate and I came to love her, much more than the green-vintage-overpriced
Mercedes that we later came upon and bought in a drunken auction, simply
because it may have hauled Goering’s arse once in a while in the war.
Ghastliness in
cruelty is ridiculously readable, like the life of Saloth Sar or for that
matter Goering, in whose car we committed acts of glee, our pleasure enhanced
in his genocide-will, which may have been as cold as ours, the buyers of his
legacy.
The cold chill of
turkey was for me to live through, since the availability of hits was
completely cut off by Thuy Binh and her deadly muse, Miho.
In the secret
space of my dreams, I was scared each evening before being bathed in a glow of
psychedelic lights, transitioning gently between green and red. On the first
night, I lay in the soft of down, my stomach cramping and retching in the
discomfort of convulsions, while Miho moved in flowing silk towards Thuy Binh.
They were unhurried, the lips of each dwelling upon the lips of the other for
tens of seconds at a time, savouring and growing gentle in tasting the rewards
of patient-unhurried lust.
It is the
in-between that stones you, brown, surging when green struggles against red,
landing in a shade of stone.