Bangkok Days by Lawrence Osborne

Author:Lawrence Osborne [Osborne, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409087083
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

IN SEARCH OF ANOTHER PAST

Just southeast of Thong Lor lies the neighborhood of On Nut, a sprawling no-man's-land where the servants and chauffeurs who service the Thong Lor palaces have their lodgings. Early in the morning you see these darker-skinned armies of help disembarking from the windowless buses which roar down Sukhumvit Road all the way from On Nut. They look like a slightly different race and in them I recognized the staff of our house on Soi 51, wide and copper-hued, wearing pro-Thaksin T-shirts that winter to remind the upper middle classes for whom they worked that they, at least, were in favor of the flamboyant crook who showered them with government favors.

As they poured down the leafy soi where their employers' mansions stood, they sometimes raised two fingers to me in a V sign. It was a proletarian code for "Thaksin Number Two," for the prime minister was listed in the second position on the national ballot sheets and that flashed sign was a defiant insubordination toward their enlightened masters. The latter would often say, at luxurious parties in luxurious gardens, and speaking in English so that the proles hovering nearby with the trays of canapés and champagne flutes wouldn't understand them, "You know, the ordinary people are so appallingly stupid. Thaksin gives them money and government assistance and they all adore him." And I would think, "You mean, they're dumb for taking the money instead of knowing their place in your fête champêtre, where they're paid a dollar a day?" And because they all lived in On Nut, which was convenient for the buses down Sukhumvit, the masters themselves rarely ventured into On Nut unless they had to buy a Christmas tree at the giant Tesco there, or make a foray to the equally giant Carrefour which had opened nearby in recent years. But I of course began to walk there frequently when I was tired of Thong Lor.

It's a long walk to On Nut, but you pass through places like Ekkamai, where the great bus station stands and where a number of secretive streets turn themselves into pleasure gardens at night. Sukhumvit turns quiet and brooding after Thong Lor, more Thai, and its exhausting, repetitively asphalt nature comes to the fore. Small hardware stores alternate with showrooms, bathroom equipment outlets, and pharmacies. At night the sidewalks look black, like flows of lava, and halfway to Ekkamai you pass a massive head with a spiked crown, a Greek titan of some kind who announces the Coliseum Club—he is holding a tankard of beer.

"Tartarin," wrote Joseph Roth in his travel book about France, The White Cities, "found Marseilles more perplexing than Africa," and this was why. For elsewhere Roth writes something delicate as he explores "the white cities" of southern France: "I won't live to see the beautiful world in which every individual can represent in himself the totality, but even today I can sense such a future as I sit in the Place de l'Horloge in Avignon and see all the races in the world shine in the features of a policeman, a beggar, a waiter.

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