Read Online Lost in Pattaya by Kishore Modak - Free Book Online Page A

stood before me
and I noticed its stillness all about the household, with just me and the
bottle in bed. The alcohol that afternoon pushed me towards the torrent of
grief that was soon flooding down the plains of my face. The tears of alcohol
were empty, like when you drink enough for any theme of life to open the sluice
of sorrow. In the empty house, from Li Ya’s room, every now and then I thought
I heard her voice, “Give me it”. Kids, they have a way of learning languages
with distortion. In Li Ya’s case, she said that for years. “Give me it,” instead
of “Give it to me.” We would laugh playfully with her, repeating, “Give me it,
it, it ,it,” and then we invented games around which one among the three of us
could say “it it it,” three times, no more, and when said quickly enough, it
would be like saying a single “it”. We let Li Ya win, letting her know that she
had the fastest it-it-it in town. “Give me it” echoed all afternoon, as I
cried.
    The alcohol and the pills, they kept me in
bed for the rest of the day and in the intermittent patches of consciousness,
masturbation happened before I simply reached for more pills and the vile
liquid from another bottle of liquor, which I purchased before the shops closed
for the night.
    All morning, I lay on the sofa, physically
shattered from the excesses of the previous day, almost sleeping through the
visit of Fang Wei who caught me just as she had wanted to, passed out on the
couch.
    She simply collected most of her stuff and
left, just as I was coming around and murmuring “Wait, wait…”
    By late afternoon on the following day, I
was on the couch with the same intolerable ache all over my neck, shoulders and
head. I looked at my phone, realising Rashmi had replied, consenting to meet.
    Though I shaved and showered before heading
out, my face would have seemed puffed and swollen with shiny shorn skin, like
the stretched surface of an underinflated balloon. My eyes, they would have
looked narrow and sunken in the bloat that the alcohol and sedatives had
caused. Despite the vigorous brushing, the throwing up, and the bowl of evening
cereal, a faint alcoholic whiff remained about me, a constant reminder of the
stupor from which I had awakened a few hours ago.
    Upright, my body felt unsteady, maybe
because I had been lying drunk and sedated for over a day now.
    For a supposed player of squash racquets,
this was utter, complete, waste of form and my lips pouted in grief, as I
imagined my body skating in court shoes across the slatted wooden floor,
neutering all that my opponents had to offer. A post-alcoholic tear ran down the
swollen slopes of my face.
    A little crying is mostly ignored on
commuter trains. People do notice grief; it is just that the turning away from
another’s grief is an inward prayer, not staring and soaking in the naked
spectacle of another’s anguish.
    Turning away from grief, it is built into
seasoned commuters. They plummet in well-lit rakes through dark subterranean
tunnels. You will agree that they are supremely claustrophobic labyrinths, the
dark day-less furrow of the screaming velocity tunnel; especially if you were
recovering from the bottles and pills that I had laid in the wake of that
train.
    I still maintain trains are not what they
used to be, a cure for any phobia and anyone’s dreads. The world, it needs
pastoral silence, before a rhythmic steam train gushes across, toiling upslope
with kinetic victory into the peaks, illustrating what was missing from the
scape of land, a plume of elegance against the steepest gradient on offer.
    Daylight is panacea for the stoned and the
un-drunks; take it from me. Even the last few wisps of the receding day’s
evening brightened me slightly. If there is one motif for each of us, it has to
be the formless story of our own lives, trapping each and every one of us, till
we find a sense of normalcy to fake, despite the unplanned chaos that life
takes us through. Very few of us