Lost in Pattaya by Kishore Modak

I declared to the whore, kneeling in front of her Lord- “I am
bored.”
    A one, to whom all
pray and beg, has to get lonely, like the pimp queen and her muse Miho, who lay
only hours ahead now.
    “I have not come
all this way to enjoy what I can get anywhere in the world,” was the summary of
my soft-spoken complaint.
    “What else do you
want, you have to just let us know and we will help you get what you want,” the
prostitute assumed that I was looking for the variety of substance beyond the
pot, coke and alcohol that they had on offer. “Heroin? Crack? Pill? Mandrax?
Charas? Hashish? Psychotrop?” she asked, smiling right there, besides her
temple.
    My request which
followed, one of debauched sexual gratification, she could never have guessed.
I had been straight and simple with her, not asking once for her to get down on
her knees.
    “No no, if
anything I want to get off the drugs. I am looking for younger love, love from
a virgin,” I said, my eyes lowering in the hidden shame of my request, as I
picked the seeds out of the weed I was threshing meaninglessly in my palms,
becoming clumsy with the voicing of the solution-sapling . Unlike the
dead weed seeds in my hand, the plot I hatched began to grow.
    Hatching a plan,
till it is thought to perfection is supremely easy. Acting upon it, I found it
shameful, left fumbling, now that the thought had been emitted from my mouth,
and in the words written here for you to enjoy. She noticed my inability at the
conversion of a cigarette into a simple joint and took the reefer from its eventual
contents, rolling with steady hands, wetting the joint with her saliva in
gentle licks from her raspy-soft pink tongue, eventually lighting up, extending
the joint gently my way, like an offering to her God, smoke curling away from a
stick of incensed narcotic.
    She taught me,
making joints should be an extended prelude to smoking them.
    “You mean a young
girl or a virgin? Virgins are a bit messy, and not that enjoyable. That is what
we advise our clients,” she added.
    “Why so?” I asked,
wanting to extend conversation, not that I did not know why.
    “Well, they are
scared and often not very compliant. The crying and the weeping can be a bit of
a turnoff. You don’t seem the type for that kind of thing. Young girls, I can
understand and help you with, so your holiday is made livelier than with an
older woman like me,” she smiled all the while. There was no hint of her having
felt rejected or discarded by me; she was seasoned, simply a whore, happy with
the week of steady employment behind her. “In fact, if you want a young thing
for a few extended weeks or more, we can arrange that too.”
    The prostitute,
she was perfect, like a Goddess for a God she found each week.
    Back in the room,
she left me by myself, returning with large photo albums.
    “Here, take a look
if you like anything,” she handed the portfolio of nymph-prostitutes my way.
    I checked the
tremble to my fingers as I opened the album, dreading the picture of Li Ya that
may stare back up at me. Inside, was a neat alluring arrangement of prints, one
on each page, annotated with nationality, spoken languages . . . lies for the
tourist to study and pick off the menu. Most poses were ordinary, meant to
showcase detail that draws attention of a male connoisseur. A few appealed to
an audience, dressed in leather and chains, and, a very few were in school
dresses, with buttons of the uniform blouses undone till the navel. I dwelt on
one such school dressed girl, just momentarily, but long enough for my
attendant prostitute to notice. “She is nice, very young, do you want to see
her?”
    In time, I became
the richest man in the Bangkok and all women attended to me in prostitution,
whether they liked it or not. The winning and the ruling, it was in my
restrained reaping.
    “Maybe tomorrow,”
I answered, kneeling before snorting the line of powder white that she always
laid out for me after our temple