The Wet and the Dry (18 page)

I soon got lost, speeding through the Pattani hinterland, alongside the sleepy canals, warehouses, and rice paddies stilled within an unnerving calm. I was stopped by heavily armed Thai soldiers at a roadblock. They came out with their cameras to snap me astride the dirt bike, and I was high-fived: Buddhist recruits in complicity with the six-foot-five Englishman mistaken for an American. I asked them in Thai where the bars were, then how they felt to be posted here to Pattani, the most feared city in Southeast Asia, unable to even go to a bar when they were off duty. They were lackadaisical. The southerners were backward bastards, that was all. They were dying to get back to Bangkok for a weekend. We chatted about our favorites among the 120,000 watering holes in Bangkok, exchanging cigarettes, and I realized that our political complicity
relative to the insurgents was centered on what the latter loathed most: drink.

That night there was a Chinese New Year festival in Pattani’s old town. I rode there on the bike, through alleys where the lamps had been cut off, lit by overhead strings of red Chinese lanterns. A whole small city without neons, submerged in an atmosphere of latent violence and paranoia. Nocturnal running gun battles between police and insurgents are hardly uncommon in the streets of Pattani; nor are assassinations, executed with a chilling casualness from the backs of mopeds. Circling the town for an hour by myself, I didn’t see a single night spot or bar, and not a single Malaysian tourist either. This is now by default an Islamic city that has stepped back from participation in modern Thailand. But the New Year festival had a rock concert and a dragon dance: I wandered through it with an iced litchi juice, while the girls in headscarves at the food stalls told me shyly that they didn’t even stock Coke. Was it disdained in some way?

The Deep South does indeed feel like a place that has slipped away from modernity. The go-go bars, the obsession with technology, the raucous sex, and—perhaps above all—the relative freedom of women in the workplace? For Thai Muslims, one might say, it’s Thai Buddhists with their easygoing tolerance who are “the West,” the Dar Al Harb, the realm of infidels. The people who permit everything.

Back at the hotel, the lobby was a morgue, and the terrace
wasn’t even serving Tea Pot. It was nine-thirty. I wandered out into the grubby plaza beyond the security barriers and noticed a rose-lit establishment of some kind where the usual Thai waitresses in slit dresses were lounging about at sticky tables. An astonishing sight. Sure enough, it was a modest one-room karaoke lounge of some kind, and I was able to order a Singha beer. It was clearly set up for Chinese businessmen staying at the CS or the occasional naughty Muslim willing to brave death, but there was no one there. I asked the girls where they were from. Unsurprisingly, they were Buddhists, some of them from the north, and they were uneasy working at perhaps the only bar in Pattani and so close to a hotel that had already been bombed. But business was business.

“The Chinese guys will come down bored out of their minds and order ten rounds of beer. The Muslim guys are like alcoholics. Drink, drink, drink. It’s not our fault. We just hope they don’t do a drive-by shooting on us. They love drive-by shootings down here.”

They said it with contempt. They also said they had heard all the gossip being spread in Bangkok about the funding for the insurgents. Both local police and insurgents are suspected of being deeply involved in the drug trade. As in Pakistan, a country with four million drug addicts, narcotics are acceptable, but a sip of beer merits death.

Thais are also often convinced that the money comes from
tom yam kung
soup restaurants on the Malaysian side of the border. Since
tom yam kung
(a hot and sour clear soup with lemongrass, Kaffir lime leaves, and shrimp) is Thai cuisine’s
most recognizable tourist dish, that means a lot of restaurants funneling money for the terrorists. I had heard this same story many times myself in Bangkok, but these girls seemed totally convinced of its truth. Insidious soup sellers were fueling the beheading of Buddhist monks. It made them say cruel things about their Muslim cocitizens. It seemed so unfair, they said.
Tom yam kung
is a lovely soup, beloved of all patriotic Thais. The only thing harmful about it is its heat.

The following morning I walked into Pattani and bought a ticket for Narathiwat at one of the minivan transit companies. Narathiwat, two hours down the coast toward the Malaysian border, in the state of the same name, is another troubled Muslim city but with a much shorter history—it was founded only in 1936. It sits by a wide river and is known for its bellicose mosques. Ironically, the province’s name is Sanskrit for “the dwelling of wise men.” Eighteen percent of its population is Buddhist, and the more ardent Islamic persons wish them gone.

In April 2004 a group of thirty-two guerrillas in Narathiwat attacked a Thai Army outpost, killing two soldiers, then retreated to a sixteenth-century mosque named Krue Sae. After a seven-hour standoff, the Thai Army destroyed the mosque and killed all 122 people inside it. Thaksin was blamed by Thai liberals and reformists for excessive use of force. However, since 2006 the Thai government has been more conciliatory, apologizing for incidents like Krue Sae and promising to look into local grievances. This tone of contrition and apology, admirable in
itself, has been greeted by the insurgents with an irresistible rise in violence. This has, to put it mildly, bewildered those who believe in the power of conciliation.

I fell in with one of the religious students who always seem to throng these collective vans moving from city to city. Hakim was studying in Yala and wanted to know if I could speak Arabic as well as Thai. No? He seemed mystified. He wanted to go study in Pakistan and, even more ambitiously, Saudi Arabia. We had a conversation about Islam’s distaste for alcohol during the ride, and he made the delicate and sensible point that alcohol was forbidden by Islam because under its influence we are not “true to ourselves or our relationships.”

Drink, in other words, distorts the individual’s relationship to himself, or herself, and therefore our relationship to everything else. It was very like the conversation I had had in Solo in Java. Hakim was studiously compassionate and calm on this point.

“Have you ever drunk a drop?” I asked.

“Never.”

“Then how do you know how bad it is?”

“The Koran has described it.”

I said the Koran was quite vague on the issue.

Hakim did not see it with such equanimity.

“The ones who drink,” he said, “should be flogged in public. What use is there for them?” Then, realizing that I might be some kind of Christian lush, he toned it down. “Of course, I mean the Muslims.”

I asked him if he thought Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno should have been caned for a sip of beer.

“Absolutely, absolutely. Was she not aware of the law? It’s not important that it was just a sip. It’s symbolic.”

“Symbolic of what?”

“Of letting Satan into the picture!”

The minivans here take everyone to their front door, and our driver let Hakim off in front of a well-tended suburban house. He wished me luck in his “beautiful town” and gave me a friendly, masculine handshake that was intended to reassure me that nothing of what he had said was to be taken personally. Deep inside him, there seemed to be a dreadful innocence combined with a delicious sarcasm that was only half-conscious. Was he serious about whipping the Malaysian model?

I was dropped at the Imperial Hotel, the only habitable place in town. It was empty. The room was gloomy and bare with a black
qibla
arrow stuck to the ceiling indicating the position of Mecca. Nonalcoholic bottles filled the minibar, as accusatory as they always are, and the curtains smelled of thirty-year-old cigars. I didn’t mind. I went out for a walk after dark, as the loudspeakers from the mosques began to bray. In hotels like this, one is always forced out onto the street sooner or later.

The Friday-night sermon in the mosque across from the hotel was in Yawi, the variant of Malay spoken in the south, and after every furious phrase, the imam paused and sighed a long, exasperated
aaah
. Men stripped to the waist in the cafés, watching Manchester United games with plastic mugs of litchi juice mixed with green gelatin, paused between goal kicks to lend
an ear, and the boys lounging on their motorbikes by the river glanced up as the
aaah
echoed across the night.

I failed to find a single outlet for alcoholic pleasures and, defeated, slogged back to the Imperial and the prospect of a long night of orange juice and Malaysian Koranic TV. As I was going through armed security, however, I saw a tall
kathoy
or “ladyboy” (technically a hermaphrodite, but usually a man who has had surgery) clattering across the plaza. When in joyful hedonistic Narathiwat, I thought to myself, always follow a ladyboy. She went to a “saloon” that I had not noticed earlier.

The saloon, however, only contained the ladyboy, and she looked at me shyly before asking me what I wanted. It was a good question. I had the feeling then that asking for sex with a transsexual hooker might be less dangerous than asking for a Stella Artois, and the transsexual hooker knew it. She confronted me playfully along these lines, and I stuck my neck out and ventured for the beer. She went into a back room and came back with a Chaang, a local brew, and then turned on the karaoke screens. I had to be entertained.

“Me and you?” she finally said in English, turning a long painted fingernail upon herself, and then upon me.

Refusing gallantly, I asked her if drinking a Chaang was safe. Those
aaah
sounds coming from the mosque did not sound friendly.

“No,” she said in Thai. “He is talking about the importance of washing. Washing your feet.”

“Nothing about drinking?”

“That was last week.”

What about ladyboys
, I wanted to ask.
What does the Koran say about them?

It’s a sad fact that life by and large would be endurable, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis once said, were it not for all the pleasure we have to endure. That night I had a nightmare and woke up convinced that, as far as I could see, a giant beetle was walking across the ceiling. It was, however, the humble
qibla
. In the morning, either way, they politely and apologetically informed me that a bomb had gone off in Narathiwat the previous day. No one seemed particularly surprised, but a generalizing, cosmic apology was nevertheless offered.

I rode in another minivan down to the Malaysian border, to the raffish and unstable town of Sungai Kolok, which sits insalubriously along a narrow river (
sungai
in Malay means “river”) that is, in effect, the border. How sweet life would be if one could, at all costs, avoid Sungai Kolok. One could grow old and happy and hale without Sungai Kolok.

It is here that most Malaysians furtively come when they need a break from the sharia regime of Kelantan, and there are special all-in-one hotel brothels that cater to their urgent and time-constrained needs. Chief of these is the Chinese-style Genting Hotel, named for the hill region of Malaysia where the British once had their charming stations. The Genting is only a hundred meters from the border, and you can walk if you don’t mind the heat. You can pay here in Malaysian ringgit, and the second-floor cabaret and lounge is a source of local girls who
eagerly await the flow of Muslim men. Frequent bombings and shootings in Kolok have only temporarily dampened their ardor, and it is remarkable what men will brave to get laid and to sip a tumbler of Sang Thip whisky, preferably at the same time.

The Genting specializes in dance parties, and that night one of them was in full swing. Unlike the Pink Lady, the Genting is also a merry family hotel, and its restaurant doubles as a nightclub where six-year-old children dance between the tables to wildly out-of-tune middle-aged Thai crooners singing
luuk kruung
country music ballads. The girls from upstairs sit around in their fringed white boots holding teddy bears and halved pineapples, eating dishes of
kaeng som
, and among them move the slightly uncertain, slightly tense Malaysian visitors who never seem to smile and whose eyes look subtly hunted. It’s a ragbag crowd, and there is nothing very louche about it. Even the massage parlor upstairs seems laid back and wonderfully unrepentant.

At the bar next to it, I sat talking to a sixty-year-old engineer from Kota who said he had just scored a cut-price haul of
kanagra
, the generic Thai version of Viagra that retails for about five dollars for a blister pack of four. He had a glass of Mekong Scotch on the bar, and the girls were telling him not to drink the fearsome Mekong and take
kanagra
at the same time. He was tiny, bald, and slipping off his stool. His name was Yussef. He was protesting that the symbiosis of
kanagra
and Mekong was perfect bliss.

“You bad man,” they said in English. “You come here boum-boum lady. You die heart attack.”

“Wonderful ladies, la,” he said turning to me. “So graceful.”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” I said. “Mekong again?”

We talked about Kolok. It was a fine enough hellhole, he said in English, thinking the girls wouldn’t understand, but the insurgents liked bombing it, perhaps because they thought it was a haunt of Satan.

Wasn’t that a little ironic, I asked, given that it was a Muslim town filled with Malaysian tourists?

“Yes, but we are sinners to be here in their eyes. We deserve to be killed with shrapnel.”

“Are you their ideal target then?”

“I am not sure they are trying to kill Malaysians. They are trying to intimidate the Thais. But many Malaysians have been injured by bombs in this town. It’s a tiny town, too.” He smiled. “They can’t miss us.”

The bombings of coffee shops, bars, and ATM machines had indeed mutilated a fair number of Malaysians. Yet still they came.

At night, though, most of Kolok was quiet, and the trees in February swarmed with thousands of chattering birds that yielded its only nocturnal sound. The streets were deserted after the food stalls closed down, and it was only the hotels and their surrounding dives that seemed to remain alive. The Marina, the Sum Time Bar, the Tara, which housed the Narcissus massage parlor, the Mona Lisa Massage at the Marina, which sported a large image of Leonardo’s dame with bared breasts. Downstairs
at the same hotel the Malaysian men crowded around the plasma TV to watch English Premier League games. “Liverpool!” they cried, as if in anguish, raising their fists. The Chinese temples, on the other hand, and the lanes of red lanterns and metal shutters remained darkened. The pendant birdcages had their birds removed. There was a strange charm to the place. The mixture of Chinese, Thai Buddhists, and Muslims was not dead or fossilized. It was the public space of the hotel, however, that kept it humming after hours, even if none of the bars appeared to be open.