Lost in Pattaya by Kishore Modak Page A

visits.
    On the following
evening, I moved brothels, waiting for the school dressed girl I had chosen
from the catalogue. While waiting, I was comfortably stoned, the new room being
not very different from the one I had vacated.
    The promise in the
photograph was not inaccurate. When the young prostitute was brought to me, she
was in the same school dress which had been used for the catalogue. I imagined
a large wardrobe of school dresses, arranged neat in ascending sizes, making
them useful over and over again, on objects including grown up women. The dress
was blue and seemed to melt like molten wax on her firm pink-white body,
turning to a white paraffin river, streaks of blue flowing over her body. It
had been a week since I had landed in Pattaya, and unsurprisingly the cocaine
began to speak to me, whispering was more like it. I made a mental note of
abstinence. From tomorrow, I would seek out the beach and a stretch that was suitable
for running, before checking into a hotel, ensuring it had a gym-room I could
use each day.
    Another talk, of
me with my failed self.
    When we were by
ourselves, she undid her school shirt well below her navel, and blurted
playfully, “Can I have some of your coke,” she had spotted the white powder
remnants on the table, and more revealingly, the bath-robed tension-twitch of
her customer.
    She was Asian,
strangely well endowed, a lithe body running down and away from a flood of
breasts above, built for the purpose she served, derivation of sexual pleasure.
On purely sexual grounds, this was a major elevation from the relatively mature
prostitute with whom I had spent the last week.
    She was not mine;
the young one, and neither was she mine to be.
    “Sure,” I threw a
little white packet of pleasure at her, my own high imagining her rubbing the
drug in her crack, from where too absorption into the stream of blood is made
possible.
    “Do you have a
credit card?” she asked, checking if her nasal-ways were blocked, her thumb
pressing against her nostrils, one at a time, determining which passage may
offer the strongest gale for insufflations.
    “Yes,” I handed
her a cancelled one, to separate the lines. She snorted straight up, right
nostril pressed to the pedestal glass top table without any currency notes or
cutaway straws helping direct the drug brain-wards. She was a seasoned narcotic
partaker; I could tell by the way she rubbed the remaining coke into her gums,
leaving the table top glass clean, like a whistle. She eased back, resting on
the bed post, her hands stuffing her short blue skirt between her thighs, naked
knees jutting upwards like soft silken flags.
    “Now what?” she
opened her eyes in about ten seconds, smiling. “Why did you pay for me for the
night? I know you cannot go on all night old man.”
    “Do you like
music,” I asked, sensing that it would be a treat for the young, those who had
not stoned in days.
    “Yes,” she, jumped
spring-like on the floor, “What do you have?”
    “David Bowie,” I
said.
    “Is that the name
of your stereo?” she asked.
    “No, it is the
name of my singer, it is the only one I have on my laptop,” I said, connecting
the speaker to the PC after it booted up; the minutes in between were boredom
enough for us to shoot up again.
    “Do you have
Justin Bieber?” she asked, a bit calmer after the boot-up, her eyes shot with
blood, seeking the refuge of rock and roll.
    “No, but if you
want we can download him,” I said.
    “Can you please,
please please,” she moved towards the phone in the room, asking for the wireless
password, rushing to my PC, before getting online.
    Baby, Baby…
    I did not mind it,
since I too was getting progressively high. The brothel manager came knocking,
leaving, after collecting the broadband tariff.
    She danced with
her shirt completely undone. Beads of sweat were soon flicking off her
forehead, frenzied hips throwing her skirt high in the air. She tore off her
shirt and danced into the