Lost in Pattaya Read Online Free PDF

days ahead, moving her
towards monochrome adulthood. She would be left colourless before the month ran
out.
    In my estimate, a month as a child
prostitute would be enough for her to be left unsalvageable, even if I found
her.
    Would she be prostituted incessantly, day
and night, looting what was made available in the narrow window of age and
freshness that some seek? Customers would mentally map her age before selecting
and laying waste the remains of abuse that would live on, dead inside her.
    A child is convinced easily with narrative
of fable and fake. She would be taken in by the mere presence of promises,
losing what she would never gain back, the colour of childhood truncated by
acts that some might be committing upon her right now, as I, her father headed
business-like for meetings, knowing not what else to do. I imagined her being
promised the fluffiest of dolls if she simply spent the next hour in that room
at the end of the corridor. To a child, it would be a profitable trade, even
after the hour passed, since it takes years to realise the joyless evil that
soft toys hold. During lean periods, would she be hoarded in rooms with other
girls, where they would play ‘house’ and rest, before getting to work again.
    These thoughts sent me into an anxiety of
panic, inescapable, since the pills that could help were checked in, angularly
cluttered in the belly of the plane. A sardine packed flight did not help as I
sought a free-personal-space around me. From the window it seemed the plane was
perched upon clouds, mid-flight, screeching noisily, above a vacant empty blue
plunging space, which is not calming in the presence of the turbo din and the
sense of emergency that physical altitude can leave the first few hours of
turkey in. I simply shifted, breathing and taking the name of god, one name
with each inhalation and another with a stretched measure of exhalation. The
moment passed in about seven minutes.
    Even in choosing the name of God there is
confusion, since urbanity exposes all religions, each of which has a salience
of comfort that can be leaned upon in an hour of panic.
    Religion fails in pre-empting the moment of
misery. It is the miserable who are forced to be religious.
    In utopia, one should always walk away from
the infant ward, with another’s child.
    Across the aisle right opposite me, a
family of three attacked their meals, with a child adventuring the world of
cutlery in a mess, his caring parents managing one meal, the child’s.
    Me and Fang Wei, we could have another
child, if only we could sit, talk and conclude on what we wanted for our
future. I doubted sane conversations would help, unless I planned an evening of
construed love, synced with the fertile period that a woman experiences each
month.
    This was the silly plan of resurrecting my
broken family, a plan I knew had no possibility, but it bubbled up, in the
absence of any other thoughts that lent any possibility of building back my
broken family.
    The words and the numbers on the computer
screen, those that I kept scrolling without comprehension, it was a bit like
reading a book without really assimilating anything that is written, ignorance
flying past the eyes, and the brain beyond.
    As the plane descended, I asked for tea,
the request awkward since the ‘belts’ lights were on, but the stewardess
complied, having been witness to my sorry state all through the flight. I
slurped black dip-tea, completely drowned by the landing of a jet liner. What
is it that pulls us towards the unacceptable, like waiting for all of the two
legitimate flight hours, before wanting and asking for a hit of tea, right at
the point when it is unserveable?
     
    * *
*
     
    Ortega, the manager of purchases at the
RBM, was a man who held me in suspicion, and confessed he had never been asked
for a meeting with an auditor from one of his vendors. Outwardly he was
cordial, but inside, he was reticent, wanting to ascertain what had drawn me to
him. In the meeting