O the girls are so pretty,
The girls are so pretty,
So spicy like curry,
They come to the city,
And I am not picky,
And the girls are so pretty,
In Kanchanaburi.
—Traditional Thai Song

The Thais say, “Where are you going?” instead of “Hello” or “What’s up?” when they greet someone in the street, and the most usual answer, the “Not much” reply, goes, “To eat rice/food.”

Thailand is an unquestionably touristy place—as much so, at first glance, as Disneyland or any theme park. Once you look beneath the surface, however, by a little patient observation or humble questioning, there remains in the jean-wearing, mall-shopping, apparently Western culture of Bangkok much to assert that This is Asia.

[Something about Thai tattoos will appear here at a later date; but for now know this—there is a certain tattoo, a gridwork written in Pali on the shoulder, that imparts the invulnerability; and Thais under eighteen years old are not allowed to wear it, because they often have it applied and go pick fights with the cops, because they are invulnerable.]

Take, for example, the Thai prostitute: the bargirls lining Pattaya and Khausan, the choir of, “Wel-come! Thai massage!” as the single farang male walks down those streets, the small Thais supporting the arms of a crusty European deviant, sad an image as Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid.

And yet I tell you this, Reader, with absolute confidence: The principal client of the Thai prostitute is not the salty British shipwreck, but the Thai!

Interestingly, and unknown to me until a recent elucidation by an American who studied in Bangkok, most Thais, be he university student or businessman, see regularly a woman of ill-repute, in addition to any unpaid relationships he may have. This is intentionally plural, as most Thais, in addition to wife or girlfriend, maintain a gik or two.

Gik (noun): Something like a sex-buddy, or a friend-with-benefits, though traditionally it was very platonic, and still can be in these libertine days. Well-dressed Thai boys prefer the modern definition, and Thai girls prefer foreign boys for this reason—they do not cheat around. Don’t think, though, that the Thai girlfriends are entirely monogamous. By no means exclusive to men, Thai girls can also have several gik, in addition to their declared boyfriend, though they do not necessarily take these men to bed.

In other ways the Thais demonstrate a strange conservativism: It is considered improper for a Thai lady to be seen about town with a gentleman who is not her husband, boyfriend, gik, or of some family relation. It is simply not done—unless the gentleman is leaving money on the dresser on his way out the door.

Like the Russians, most Thai girls bear children when they are very young and then send them back out to Mom and Pop on the farm to raise, while the girl works for her living in Bangkok, a custom which tends to lead Thai girls towards the same profession as the women of the cold north—that is, the first profession of the human race.

Ah, Bangkok! Debauchery is cheap here, and all things are cheapened by it. I returned to the Bamboo Guesthouse, where I had stayed during the Red Shirt strife three weeks before, and returned to my favorite food stalls, and nearly returned to my old schedule of late hours:

That night, America played England in the World Cup qualifiers. Whoever led the bracket would face the second-place team from another, and whoever got second-place would inevitably face the dreaded Germans. “Football goes like this,” quoth the Brit who explained it to me,—”You kick the ball, you shoot at the goal, you score, and then Germany wins.”

Thanks to the miracle of Time Zones, the game started at 1:30 am, so I went off to Soi Rambutri, because that’s where they play the blues, had some noodles at my old favorite place and saw the card trick the boss had been perfecting—Red Jacks, he called it. Then I went over to the blues bar and watched the second half of South Korea and Greece on the flatscreen hung over the singer and the guitarist, with a sweet harmonica in the back, and I sat with an Argentinean who was all nerves and cigarettes because of his team’s high hopes.

There were plenty of Argentineans out that night, and plenty of Brits, and only a few Yanks, which had me excited as an underdog. We all expected Big Things as we watched our two teams play. Something had to happen, someone had to win; both teams had chances and both teams scored, and in the end it was a draw, but a draw where the drunken Brits could walk down the street and mutter, “Yeah it was a tie, but it was on such a bullshit goal, ya?”

The reason I was in Bangkok was that I wanted a suit—a good tailor-made suit, that I could wear with pride back home, as some sort of trophy of my travels. So I went to the commercial district of Bangkok, to a clothier called Rajawangse, a well-known label under two master tailors, father and son, Jesse and Victor—Punjabi Sikhs who had been handling needle and thread since adolescence.

Their business was a narrow cubby, the walls lined with bolts of European cloth, with a table running down the middle on which they would work. Victor was on a computer there, and Jesse was in the back, gray-bearded with the gentle stoutness of happy prosperity, checking the fit on a jacket that was all whit seams, chalk-lines, and pinned on sleeves, telling the farang wearing it that he looked good. The shop was crowded and busy on that late afternoon.

I told this figure of twilit skill, “I heard about this place through a friend, Sam from Seattle,” and received no pleas or bargains, as would be common in most Thai tailors, only an offer to glance around the shop. I picked, by gut feeling, a dark gray pinstriped cloth and had the Thai apprentices pull it out so I could check it over. And the price? Twelve-thousand baht, nearly $400. I asked for a deal, throw in a few shirts maybe, but Jesse intimated, with professional courtesy and justifiable curtness, that it was not that sort of place.

Well, I was about to politely leave when I noticed the Secret Service ash tray on the desk. “You treat your customers well,” I remarked,—”Even the Secret Service comes here?” Jesse said yes and waved at some photos and clippings on the wall—and what’s this? He had made suits for both President Bush and President Bush, for spies and diplomats from the embassy around the corner, for CEOs and generals. There were autographed pictures of Barack Obama and Nancy Reagan. In the dressing room, their prestigious cards were pinned to the glass, and running around the ceiling of the store there were badges for governments, agencies, and departments of the law.

This man was a royal tailor. I knew I needed to have a suit of my own.

And so I passed a week in that city, waiting for the Sikhs to craft my suit, and reading and writing and eating and watching football in between fittings at Rajawongse, where I was royally treated.

Victor would ask me pleasant questions in a business-like way, and Jesse would offer me a beer and who am I to refuse? Yet with my arms pinned at my side, as the clothier marks runes on my jacket with his chalk, how can I drink it? And my business is concluded, and there is that cold beer on the table, still more than half-full! Do I wait and finish it, do I take it with me—do I leave it there? A wasted beer! Luckily, a real aristocrat, or maybe a bureaucrat, is standing by, who haughtily leaves his beer barely sipped, so I know what to do. I abandon my unfinished beer with a tragic sorrow, go back onto the humid street, and walk a mile to the bus stop where I can get a lift back to my humble little neighborhood.

I saw a few movies at the Bangkok theaters, stood up with the rest when they played the anthem of the king before the show began. I celebrated my birthday, though I was too modest to tell any of my few acquaintances there. I listened to the blues in the street cafes on Soi Rambutri, where the waiter had more card tricks, and I watched the games and talked to strangers.

I picked up my finished suit on Saturday, and I stayed in Bangkok on Sunday, to Make a Plan. I had an old China Lonely Planet from my guesthouse, and a few bits of paper on which other travelers had written recommendations for the region, and using these I marked in broad strokes a route across the geographies of a map totally unfamiliar to me—up through Laos to Yunnan Province in China, and thence through Guilin to Canton, north to Shanghai and Shandong, to Beijing, and then by boat from Tianjin to Incheon in South Korea or Kobe in Japan.

Too many wonders here: I have to be exclusive! Only the future chapters will tell how closely I stick to the rough guide I recorded in a little notebook (my netbook being at this point destroyed). It’s always better to show some adaptability.

A crowded day followed this planning: I mailed my suit and some other things and took a number of buses to the edges of Bangkok, and then a final bus out west.

Before heading north I detoured to a town called Kanchanaburi, sprawled amidst hills of limestone and jungle, around a Bridge over the River Kwai.

I walked from the bus station, along the main road and past the new bridge, then swerved off around the cemetery, where the prisoners of war await judgment, past their museum, and on to the traveler’s ghetto—a street with a bend, lined on the right-hand side with bars and restaurants and pool halls, and on the left with alleys running down to guesthouses on the Kwai that look east across lily pads and a humid shimmer to the old Bridge—to a famous guesthouse.

Down a back alley between a bar and a bookstore, past a few tourist agencies and shanty houses, you come to the gateway and its sign: the Jolly Frog, with a cardboard cutout of Wolverine to one side.

Entering there is the restaurant, which is fair-priced and generally full of travelers and Thais. The acrid, throat-burning scent of frying chilies comes out from the kitchen, and waiters in Kermit-green shirts watch television in the corner and occasionally slink out to throw a menu at someone. Music plays on the speaker, an endless tape of the same five sappy Thai hits, playing over and over, so that by the end of a week I could sing the obnoxious songs.

Out in the back, between two wings of rooms, is a wide riverside garden, with hammocks strung between the coconut trees and a pleasant quay down on the Kwai, where one can see the sun set over the Bridge, dimming the karst hills and making rainbows of the clouds. It’s easy here to slip into a coma of loafing and reading and meeting travelers—the old “sublime uneventfulness” of Melville’s topmast—and it was this very chain of relaxation that had arrested Tobias the Bavarian and Francesco of Padua for nearly a week.

I had met Tobias (the Reader will recall) in my last days in Yangon, and met Francesco on my first arriving there three weeks before. Some chance brought them together on the same flight to Bangkok, and they came upriver to Kanchanaburi. By yet more chance, they were still there when I arrived, in rooms just down the hall from my own monastic accommodation in a wing of the inn.

This Hallway was on the second floor and ran from a treacherous scaffold staircase on one end to an open balcony on the other, with a half-dozen rooms on either side, and I describe it because of how much time I spent out there—a group of us sitting in deck chairs and smoking and chatting and watching the lizards hunt and fornicate on the ceiling, because it was too hot to stay inside, in those days before the monsoon cools the world—too hot to do anything, in the sun-rain lands.

Well the day I arrived was, by a final happy chance, Tobias’ birthday. We grabbed a German woman Tobias had met, Elke by name, and asked an English lass, Charlotte of Devonshire, who happened to be in the Hallway, to join us, and went to the Kanchanaburi night market, just outside the tourist ghetto.

Now the Thais are very Western in their love of three things: sex, bad music, shopping, and cheap food. The latter two can be found at the night market, where even on weeknights, so long as it is not raining, crowds of Thais stroll through racks of cheap clothes and non-functional Chinese electronics, and long rows of vendors selling fruit shakes, pearl tea, grilled meat and fish, old sushi, spicy green papaya salad, and heaps of noodles, in wasteful Styrofoam containers and plastic bags, the whole complex set up in the hour of sunset in a parking lot, and removed by ten that same night.

The foremost of Thai loves—sex and bad music—can be found on the street to and from the market. “Welcome!” they shout, the bar girls, splayed languidly on stools in the empty bars, five girls and no customers, or perhaps a dirty old Saxon buying them drinks. It sounds like “whear-KUM—” and is cried out of every bar as one walks past, by at least one girl, so that we wondered if the girls are paid by the Welcome.

These bar girls, as far as I can tell, do not work for the bar: they are prostitutes in a symbiotic relationship, bringing in customers to buy drinks in exchange for a place to sit, and there are more of them than the Reader would care to believe.

“Welcome!” is their mantra, “Thai massage!” their motto. They add more if a passer-by looks their way— “Where you go? You look for boom-boom?” “Hey, I know you. You boom-boom my friend. Why you no boom-boom me?” “Good drinks, good price. Hey— hey!”

After dinner, and after running back through the gauntlet of girls, the five of us ended up at a pool hall where the waitresses offered us a birthday discount on Tobias’ account. The meditative Bavarian had not had a drink in over a year, but he accepted gracefully the shot of sambuca that our hostess brought him, along with a bit of cake they had scrounged up somewhere.

They had Nevermind on repeat, and Charlotte succeeded in explaining to me what the hell “off-sides” meant, and some Thai professionals were playing pool in the midst of a crowd, and the waitress brought out Jenga for us from her collection of games. We made it a condition that whosoever toppled the tower had to buy Tobias another sambuca, and proceeded about our turns with that style of intense concentration that accompanies drinking. Eventually Tobias left, and the two girls, and Francesco and I stayed to play a bad game of pool and have another beer before going back to the Frog.

The Reader may be familiar with Thailand’s best and tastiest rice beer, the exported Singha, and there is another local brew called Leo that is similar; but were drinking Chang, cheaper and with less taste and more alcohol. The cheapest label, at a buck for a large bottle, is Archa, which can only be found in 7-11. Singapore is making a big push with its Tiger beer, as they are in most of the region, but the import remains prohibitively expensive. Another Singapore beer available everywhere, ABC Stout, is a disastrous attempt at breaking away from the Asian trend of beer types, generally limited to Premium and Extra-Strong.

The worst thing about Chang is that it gives the ardent drinker an awful hangover the next morning—as good an excuse as any for an uneventful day.

I read the Bangkok Post over breakfast and read a book in the garden until it began to rain. At night I went with Elke to a very local restaurant I’d found: three carts, one with noodle soup, one with boiled chicken or pork and rice, and one with a wok, lined up side-by-side on a patio of plastic tables and chairs, in front of a small convenience store, where the diner can buy a beer to go with the menu. I had found the place the night before, since it was still open at two in the morning.

I ordered some spicy dish from the wok and added generously to it from the ubiquitous Thai condiment tray—chili oil, chili powder, chilies in water, and sugar, with bottles of soya and fermented fish sauce—and Elke and I made plans to go to the Erawan Waterfalls the next day.

There are seven of these, running down the forested hill in picturesque teirs of cerulean pools and lyrical falls, each of a different height and character, be it snaking stream or boulder-wide cascade or ridge-high cataract. Elke and I followed the shady path up past Lai Kuen Kung and Wang Mancha, to Pha Nam Tok, where there were monkeys in the trees and Thai boy screaming in alcoves under the waterfall and a snake in the thatch roof of a structure.

We swam in the pool beneath the fourth teir, Oke Nang Phee Sue, diving into cool clear water from the rocky and root-columned shore. Schools of Tor Soro nibbled at the feet, overanxious for dead skin. At Bue Mai Long the water slid down a gentle sloping boulder, slick with algae, and two Irish girls and an English one were climbing up the tangled creepers on one side, to slide down into the pool. We were at this for some time. Dong Pruk Sa was the sixth tier, and Phu Pha Erawan the seventh and last, where the water fell from the top of a high ridge, and the pool was sky blue and slick with white moss.

The three Islander girls rushed down from there to catch the last bus back to Kanchanaburi, but Elke and I proceeded at a more leisurely pace and succeeded in missing it. I proposed hitchhiking, and some adventures later, and after waiting out a monsoon deluge under the eaves of a police station by the side of the highway, we found ourselves in the empty truckbed of a Chang delivery truck. Elke was ecstatic.

“Have you read Into the Wild? This is like what he does. Getting around by hitchhiking, riding in the backs of trucks. I can’t believe it.”

The beer truck dropped us off near the night market, and we sated ourselves on street food before heading back to the Jolly Frog. I left a few hours later with Jarno, a hacker of Amsterdam, and Francesco and Tobias, to Tai Thai, a favorite place of the Dutchman, who had been in town for some time. They had a flatscreen television at Thai Thai and a projector that Jarno had fixed, and they were showing the England-Slovenia game on both. At my lone request, they changed the television to the USA-Algeria match.

Both England and America needed a win to advance from the qualifiers, and I watched intensely through two halves of close misses and bad calls until Donovan scored a goal in stoppage time for a last-gasp victory that called for celebration at the Ten Baht Bar out in the street. This was a lemonade stand with a line of local liquor bottles, most of them costing ten baht or thirty cents a shot, and a few paint buckets in front for stools. The bar across the street usually had a lonely Thai bard wailing Western covers, but nobody ever sat in there when they could get such cheap drinks outside.

We talked about football a lot, sitting out in the Hallway, with citizens of Holland, Germany, and Mexico, and always a few Brits around, all intimately and animatedly involved with the sport and its World Cup.

The Mexican had his whole heart in the contest. “We’ve done well in our group, but we play Argentina on Sunday. It will be close.”

“Come on, you guys can win.”

“I don’t know man. I hope so. Jesus Christo.”

The Mexican was supremely vexed, because his flight back home was on the same night, and unless they showed the game on the airplane, he would miss what could be a supreme moment in the history of his nation.

That possibility kept people watching and talking about it. Who would win? Who would go home? America and England could both be knocked out. The French team was falling apart in a ridiculous farce of Gallic proportions, bickering and going on strike. Italy, who won four years ago, was not doing well. And it was a different intensity in the Jolly Frog than at home, because all the tribes were represented.

Francesco was brooding over Italy’s chances, and the Germans were anxious for their skillful team. The Mexican had been traveling with two tall Dutch girls, Caren and Leonie, who had orange shirts to wear when Holland played the next day. The Lowlanders revere their football players more than their royal family, and the fairer sex is no exception to the rule.

We all sat in the Hallway, that night the American team won, and I was flush with victory and Ten Baht whiskey. Jarno brought out his laptop, which routed a European satellite network through a server in Amsterdam, and turned on German-Ghana game at half-past one in the morning. Everyone leaned over his shoulder to watch it; and Elke cheered the sole German goal, and even Tobias was not insensate to the sport fervor. We watched it until the end.

The following evening, Italy played Slovakia in a desperate match—only the victory would advance from the group stage. I met Francesco and Jarno at Tai Thai just after it ended, in a 2-3 loss for the champions of yesteryear. The Paduan was shell-shocked. “You should have seen his face,” said Jarno, “when Slovakia made the first goal.” The Italian team finished last in their group, heralded as the easiest.

“I think I need a drink,” said Francesco.

We went to the Ten Baht Bar and ordered rice whiskies with ice. Jarno went back to his new guesthouse—he had moved to a nice one with clean sheets and air-conditioning, since his Thai girlfriend would come from Bangkok the next day to meet him—and we sat with a Quebecois and talked nonsense.

Francesco had worked odd-jobs in Italy and wanted to live somewhere else. He said he was looking while he traveled for a place to establish a hostel. He liked Laos in particular, for its natural beauty and its relaxed mood.

“So you’ll settle down there, marry a Laotian girl?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said in his slow measured way, with only a trace of the Latin accent by which he had won over so many German girls on holiday in the Adriatic nightclubs south of Venice,—“I don’t know if I like the girls in Southeast Asia. They are very bubbly.”

I knew what he meant: the high-pitched voice, the Jezebel smile, boiling over with bawdy humor and an ebullient interest in fun, and the skin-deep sense of themselves and the world.

“Then which girls are best?”

Francesco bashfully confessed, “I think the best girls come from Italy. They are very passionate, very beautiful.”

“They’re classy,” I added.

There are flavors of home you cannot deny. I have seen all manner of beautiful geographies all across the map of continents, and would chose over any the endless forests and rough-sketched grandeur of my Pacific Coast. As for women, I file that as a Mediterranean prerogative, a loyalty not shared by this man of grizzled Oregon.

Well, Francesco would leave the next day to meet a Canadian girl in Bangkok. I had to stay, because the US was playing Ghana.

“So I’m lucky Italy is out,” said Francesco. “Now I am free.”

We talked football and we talked nonsense, and this old Irishman was telling me about SETI, on the night when the USA played Ghana in the Round of Sixteen.

“All I’m saying is who put these guys in charge? Who elected them to beam out messages to outer space? All this whale song and Beethoven and paintings and flags—and directions straight to Earth. It’s like an advertisement. Come on down, it’s great here! But who decided that aliens are going to come and be all friendly and helpful. Do you really think that? We’re nothing. We’re an inferior species. They’re going to look at us same as we look at cows or ants. What did you have for dinner tonight? That’s what I’m saying. We’re nothing, just meat, just a resource.”

It was after midnight, and all my friends had gone to bed. I’d met two American girls whilst walking down the street after Uruguay crushed Korea earlier that night—West Coasters like me, teaching in Bangkok, and here to have a Good Time, as advertised. They bought buckets of whiskey and coke at the Ten Baht Bar, and we sat with a big group of young and dressed-up British volunteers, who thought I was a marvel for traveling for so long (and one girl later told me, “I thought you were weird”).

I asked my American compatriots about the Bangkok uprising, as they taught there and not far from Rajprasong, but they had fled at the first stroke of revolution. They were my age and three times as lost in the world, still all song and dance and let’s just have fun, but spoke of getting Old and Settling and Marriage, as if time was short between now and dying alone.

I let the girls wander off down the street with the Brits, singing “I Gotta Feeling” and haggling with a tuk-tuk driver to go to some club, and went back to a bar we’d passed along the way that was set up in front of a bookstore and crowded with the shipwrecked forms of expats, bent masts in a marina after a storm; withered souls suffering from the tropical fatigue of hard-boozing and whoring and excessive lethargy—and I preferred their company because at least they know what they’re about in life.

One was a San Franciscan whose distinguishing features were his big gut, his stars-and-stripes bandana, his white walrus whiskers, and his way of speaking with that muttering sailor’s talk of the crazed, like, “Yeah we’re gonna fuckin’ beat ’em tonight, you know what I’m saying, we’re going to fuckin’ beat those pussies if our boys can keep together and pass the fucking ball, right Martin, right, yeah, fuck, let’s get another beer.”

Another was the Irishman with whom I spoke, of history and cycles of empires, of global warming and technology. Like most Catholics, he saw the world coming to an end—in carbon fire, genetic modification, and nanotechnology—and I saw these as shifts in the pattern of life on Earth, and some would adapt to them and some would be left behind. It’s as scary as all change is, but it had happened a million times in human history and a billion times in the history of the planet. That humans as a race would stop evolving, that’s the real horror.

I told this to the Irishman and he said, with that good-natured ribbing natural to the Irish humor, “You know what I think you are Jon? I think you’re a peacenik. I think you’re a liberal. Oh, it’ll all work out, I’m sure. Well you know what Jon? It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes life is focked, and sometimes we have to do something about it.”

That’s when the Irishman started talking about SETI, “And I’m sick of them sending those messages out. If aliens come here, it’s because of their damn peacenik messages.”

Generally when people tell me crazy things I let them talk and ask a few questions, but at this I couldn’t help but laugh and say, “No aliens are going to come here!”

“Oh yeah? And how d’you know that Jon? How d’you know there’s no life out there? Stephen Hawking says there’s life out there. Are you smarter than Stephen Hawking?”

“Well,” I said, thinking for a moment, first about how I always ended up in these weird conversations, and then about the question at hand,—“yes, there’s most likely life elsewhere in the Universe, probably in our galaxy, but the nearest potentially habitable worlds are hundreds of light-years away, in distant solar systems. If there is an alien race with the technology necessary to transport out of the heliopause of their star system, to shield themselves from all the cosmic radiation of interstellar space, to travel faster than the speed of light, and to breach our heliopause—and as far as we know this is all beyond possibility— Well, I’d say if they could do all that, they could find us without the help of whale songs.”

The Irishman said they’d need our resources, and I said they had asteroid belts and keeper belts and hundreds of unspoiled worlds and moons at their disposal; and he said I thought it was crazy, and I did, but I was interested enough in the conversation.

Anyway, I watched the game at half-past at the Pizzeria. It was up on a projector screen, and the French owner served me a beer, and served the few other Americans present: three teachers, one of the West Coast girls from earlier, and the curse-muttering San Franciscan.

“Just shoot the fucking ball, it’s easy, you run and you shoot, don’t stand around. Come on, come on.”

Ghana can run, and America excels at the underdog roles. Boateng scored a goal in the first five minutes, the US team rallied after halftime, Donovan got a penalty kick, and it’s 1-1. The Irishman came in after a while, and we started talking about Islam. I drunkenly defended the faith, which I admire, and he had been to Saudi Arabia once and called me a peacenik and punctuated it with, “And you know what? I don’t like talking with you Jon.” I said, “Alright,” and the Irishman went over to mutter about me with the San Franciscan, sending over sideways sneers.

Asamoah Gyan scored in the third minute of the extra fifteen. The Americans seemed to give up after that, taking the ball into the box without the resolve to shoot it home. Come on, come on. But it was over, and the next morning I had a horrible hangover and a disillusioned sense that was worse.

I went to the street cafe that Tobias had showed me, an outdoors kitchen cart wedged in an alleyway and a few tables with a tarp for a roof, and got some rice and chicken and coffee. There was a man sitting in the corner near the sunshine, with bandages thick around his bald skull and a forearm and a calf, the cloth wet with blood and scarring fluid.

He shouted, “Hey man, you have a cigarette?” He had a strange accent, almost British and half-gone.

“No,” I said. “Don’t smoke.”

The man shuffled around and said, “I’ve got nothing now. I got a lady last night. I was kind of drunk. Took her to my room, fucked her, fell asleep for about half an hour, and when I woke up, she was gone, with twenty-five thousand baht from my wallet.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. I’ve got nothing man. Twenty-five thousand baht is a little money. So, man, can you help me out, give me twenty baht?”

Despising all Westerners who beg for cash in Asia, when they have things to sell and while maintaining their room and appetites, when there are people sleeping and starving in the streets, and despising pretty much everything worth the effort that morning, I said, “No,” and went back to my food.

We talked nonsense and we talked of politics out under the bare light bulbs and hunting lizards in the Hallway.

One night, sitting in our circle of lawn chairs, there was a Canadian girl who worked upriver at a house for children—not always orphaned, for some had mothers who had remarried and forgotten them, or fathers who could not afford to keep them; but they were all Karen refugees of the violence in Burma. Some had walked out of the blood swamps into Thailand when they were five-years-old. Some had not left the town for seven years, since the house was founded.

“It’s crazy!” the Canadian exclaimed,—“Most of them don’t have an identity. They left Burma when they were two, or they were born here in Thailand. But they’re not Thai, and Burma doesn’t recognize them. They’re not allowed to leave the camps.”

“So they’re just swept under the rug. Everyone ignores them.”

“Yes, exactly. It’s crazy. How can you children go without any identity. They’re completely innocent, and it’s like they’re being punished for some crime.”

She added that many of the Kachin refugees, who had fled into China, were deposited in Himalayan concentration camps or sold as slaves by the indifferent Chinese. At least her kids could go to school.

Although these citizens of nowhere had been through the Thai education system, getting identity papers to work or study outside their little town required a considerable donation, grease for the wheels of benevolent bureaucracy; and the house did not have much. It was an independent charity, and most of the funding came from ex-volunteers, a network that always responded to pleas.

“One year we had rabies in the house. We always have a few dogs that sleep inside with us, and we all sleep together. Two of the dogs had rabies and had to be killed. Then all of us, over fifty kids and volunteers, had to get shots, which are really expensive. We sent out an email to everyone telling them what happened, and pretty soon all this money came in. We were fine. It was close though.”

The house has investments in a few acres of rubber tree plantation, which take seven years to mature. When the first are ready to go to market, it should cover the college tuition for some of the older kids. In the meantime, they get by. Most of the locals think they are rich—all farang and all charities are rich—and try to send their children there. Even the well-off families try to get their daughters in for free schooling and one less mouth to feed, but the house turns them away. Some mornings, though, they wake up with a bundle on the doorstep, and then it cannot be helped.

Yet though the house was crowded, though its inhabitants subsisted on meager helpings of rice, sometimes with leaves and grasses they had gathered, and though there was sorrow behind them, it was always full of light and laughter and music. All the children were learning to play at least one musical instrument, and one of the veteran volunteers donated the equipment for a recording studio.

One of the kids called the Canadian while we talked. She laughed when she hung up. “They’re playing some game, and he wanted to call me. They’re good kids.”

We talked of the violence from which the Karen fled. The Karen are a Christian ethnic minority in Burma and, like most minorities, are brutally opressed by the ruling Burmese junta.

I mentioned Rambo 4, and the Canadian told me that parts of the movie had been filmed in her village (and the children of the house put on a musical performance for the film crew). Much of the graphic violence—peasants herded across minefields, villages razed, grown men killed and women and children sent away as if we still lived in the days of Assyrians and Huns—was true to life, she was sad to say. Yet things were changing.

Last year the Burmese generals commanded all the insurgent armies around its borders (the Karen National Liberation Army, the Shan State Army, the Kachin Independent Army, etc. etc.) to contribute troops for policing political prisons, or risk a renewal of violence with the state. Universally, the armies refused.

There was some startled looks around the room, for none of these armies had ever agreed on anything before, and were as used to killing each other over opium profits and old revenge as they were to fighting off the Burmans. The army of the oppressor—called Tatmadaw—having lost much face, quickly revised its manifesto, demanding that the insurgents contribute only a few guards for these prisons in a few months time. Again the answer was no.

Oh, sayeth Tatmadaw, well in fact we meant to say at the end of the monsoon season.

Oh yes, sayeth the armies, I’m sure you did.

Meanwhile, from their swamps and forests and mountains, they correspond with each other for the first time—

We’ve always been enemies, you and I, but is it possible we could be friends? And if we were, imagine our strength! Alone, we are like solitary sticks, to be stepped on and broken in two at the leisure of our common enemy, but bound together: they will not break us again! Yes, when the monsoon rains have ended, there will be a reckoning, and we will liberate our people.

Now of course nothing may come of it, O Reader, as nothing came of the successful revolution in 1988 but a change in name for the military dictatorship and a tightening of the chains with which the junta has bound up their country. China benefits too much from the kowtowing generals of Tatmadaw, who send gifts of oil and natural gas as tokens of vassalage, to permit them from being overthrown; and India would be terrified of a minority uprising in a country so close to the seven states of Assam, already wracked with ethnic violence. If violence broke out, Thailand would at least permit all the refugees encamped just across the border to enter the country, but Thailand has enough on its plate to worry about neocon crusades.

Who knows what will happen, a truce or a war; but if anything can be learned from the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or from the peace process in the Middle East, it is that change in a country has to come from elements within. No outside force will ever, ever force a change. So, American, watch what happens in Burma, and hope that the same will happen against the dictators of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the same realizations will strike Palestinians and Jews, and be safe in knowing that the USA will never get involved—though China might.

We talked politics and we talked of home, trying to translate foreign mysteries known only to those who have lived in a place.

Immigration has become a universal issue— The French can’t decide on a suitable definition of “French”; half a million Anglos voted for the British National Party to keep Britain British; in Holland, the xenophobic politician Geert Wilders, who has been banned from entering the UK, won over fifteen per cent of the country with his agenda of ejecting all foreigners and Muslims from the Lowlands. My own Union was not lacking in such news, as anyone who looked un-American was now legally suspected of being an illegal immigrant in Arizona.

And we smoked cigarettes and cheroots and sat in lawn chairs out in the Hallway, and the same sappy songs floated up from the restaurant, and the sun colored the karst hills, and the Kwai was brown with silt washed out by the monsoon.

Francesco scoffed at the news from northern Italy, one nationalist party blaming the immigrants for their poor performance at football: “Good,” say the racists, “next year it will be Italians playing for Italy.”

Once I asked Francesco about Berlusconi and the habitually incompetent politics of his Italian Peninsula.

“If you want a job, a contract, a position in the government, you have to know somebody—a patron—and get it from them. They all put their friends or family in power. Some offices, everyone is cousins. It is all about favors.”

“My history professor showed the first scene in The Godfather to explain Roman politics. Some bad boy is messing with the undertaker’s daughter, and Marlon Brando gets rid of him in exchange for a favor from the undertaker later on. It’s all about patron and client.”

“Yes, it is like this. And people just accept that it is like this. It has always been like this. Nobody thinks this can change.”

Another time, Tobias and Elke told me about this series of child mystery books they remember from the eighties, titled with “Alfred Hitchcock” and three question marks like ???, wherein three teenage sleuths—two boys and an intelligent girl—would solve mysteries in Rocky Beach, California, not far from Hollywood. Sometimes they worked with famous actors, especially Hitchcock, who was a sort of Mentor or Dumbledore to the gang. They called the Director when they needed a hint, and he appeared at the end of the chapter to say: “Reader, did you notice this clue?”

I wondered with exceeding wonder at this. Later I learned that the series came from America, where it was called The Three Investigators, but was always more popular in Germany. In the US, the series ran from 1964 to the late eighties, with 48 books published; and in Deutschland, translated versions of Die Drei Fragezeichen, or The Three Question Marks, continue to be published, while German writers add six new ones each year, bringing the 2010 total to 152. The radio-dramas, or Hörspiele, likewise remain popular.

“They were really very smart,” said Tobias,—“very clever crimes and clues to find.”

I watched the game between Germany and England in Tai Thai with Tobias and an Israeli flight stewardess named Meira. The whole place was full of English, so we took a table outside the wide door and watched the game proceed on flatscreen and projector screen. Tobias became increasingly animated, as Germany scored goal after goal, until he was jumping up out of his chair, saying, “Oh, wow!” Other than the Thai commentators, his ejaculations were the only noise in the bar, for the English had grimly lowered themselves into their bottles and no force in the world would coax them back out.

No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.
—Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”

My backpack is strung with talismans. There’s a Shiva bead in an orange thong hanging from one of the side straps, a small disco ball from a Tel Aviv bar in one of the pockets, and on one of the zippers a key chain that used to dangle a Taj Mahal snow globe, though now it looks like a half-finished game of Hangman—one more guess.

There’s a Bedouin braid hung off the middle that’s red, white, and black, the strong colors that herald Nazis, Coca-Cola, the White Stripes, and wine. I have another braid tied around my ankle with cool Rasta hues, for a balance of color, and wear Brahmin strings around one wrist, all the yellow faded so they are just white and red and frayed at the ends. Around the other wrist is a bracelet of wooden blocks, each with a sticker of a Hindu god—monkeys, elephants, blue people, and too many arms.

There’s a string of Turkish beads on my knapsack with the Evil Eye in the middle, and inside are some Greek worry beads that some girl gave me. Somewhere around there’s a Buddha coin, a pregnant woman, an Egyptian scarab, an old drachma, and a Shiva shell with a whorl on the back. This completes the catalog of my talismans.

Everything becomes something of value on the road—a red stuff sack, a Ziploc bag, a clothes pin. I’ve scoured the hotel room for a missing rubber band, and know how many I have, and I’ve ran half a mile back down the trail for a pair of drying socks that fell off my bag on a trek. Money changes value. It becomes the local price of a beer, the local cost of lodging. A hundred rupees, that’s a lot of money, even if it’s only two dollars. People become treasures. In these quick and passionate days, you appreciate with reverence the chance encounter, the friendly face, the restaurant where they know you.

And there are the people and places that you can never, never know, because there are too many and the world is too big, and they will always be faces in a crowd, names on a map, full of mystery and the romance of hearsay. It is better that way. If ye knew it all, ye’d be mortal no longer.

Ron and I sat on the balcony, smoking cheroots and feeling very colonial. Through the bars of the white banister all the brightly-colored longboats were moored for the night. The canal water was low, like a taught muscle, in anticipation of the rainy season. Across the canal stood more stilted shanties, deep earthen brown with porches and tin roofs, looking very Mississippi, and there were palm trees and pines and a rolled-out line of hills and clouds scorched autumnal and a single early star.

Two women walked past in the street below, balancing baskets on their heads. The men wore Kachin bags slung over their shoulders. One zipped by on a motorbike with loaded baskets burdening the back. Down to the left at the teal-painted ferry dock some coolies loaded boxes of green tomatoes from a sampan onto an old half-ton truck, with much clatter and shouting. To the right a girl chased a dog with a stick, and men in longyis smoked cigarettes under the eves of a grimy riverside tavern, stilted over the muddy banks. They had not yet switched on the generators, and the quiet air felt cool after a dense, hot day.

The streets of Nyaung Schwe had a frontier flavor—dirt streets and wooden buildings, opening onto boardwalks on the ground, with banistered balconies where you half expected to see lacy painted whores coo-cooing for customers. The Shan locals posted their bikes and motorcycles at the hitching posts out front and the presence of carts in the street and parked in the weeds, and the girls sitting side-saddle, and the lawless chaos of traffic, and the patched darkness of the unpowered night all added to the cowboy feel. All the light came from the drinking holes.

I wandered the streets, with Ron and a Swiss Kurd named Julian, in the warm lively night.

“I want to go into one of these whiskey bars,” Ron was saying, “and order a bottle of whiskey. I’ve never done that in a bar. Have you ever done that in a bar? It’s only two dollars here.”

“Yes,” I said, romanticized by the notion,—“yes, we have to do this, at that Western bar. Not the Western bar, the Wild West bar, with all the liquor bottles on the wall and the old men sitting around and the busted television. We go in, music stops, record scratches to a halt. Everyone looks up—who are these strangers? Push through the saloon doors. Piano player looks, and all the poker players look up from their hands. Then they all say, It’s just a couple of chumps, and go back to their cups and cards. And we take a seat and order a bottle.”

“Good luck with that, man,” said Ron.

The bar so mentioned was a caricature, though without the gramophone and gamblers. The sky blue paint peeled off the walls in strips, and posters for old Burmese movies covered up the patches. We had some beers and later went out to find some barbecue in the street, and to meet the American and his Chinese mother, mentioned in the previous chapter.

The next day I wandered around the town some more. Away from the main streets, the homes were stilted, and bridges led up from the road to the front door, across weedy marshes of front yards. I sat on a Shan fellow’s porch, overlooking the canal, and we were smoking cheroots and watching the gentle onset of dusk. His wife was fussing over his young daughter, just a few months old and turning her head all around to take in everything.

“She is like a fan,” said the Burman, rotating his head back and forth.

I told him about what I had heard in Kalaw, about the Burmese playing guitars in front of the girls’ windows, and he laughed and said, “That is how I met my wife. I would play my guitar just over there,” and he pointed across the canal. “She lived here, with her father,” who was also fussing over the infant.

In the morning of that same day, after breakfast, Ron and I went looking for the pickup taxi to Taunggyi. We waited a long time at a spot where it supposedly stopped, and only after some inquiry found the “bus station,” which was a dusty yard between some buildings. Ron became incensed when nobody seemed to know when the next taxi left, raging about and saying, “Speak English? Anyone speak English? You should fucking learn. All idiots.”

I was happy to sit there reading an Orwell novel, with my legs folded under me so the flies couldn’t get at my feet. When Ron asked, “What should we do?” I shrugged and said, “Get a beer?” Said the Israeli, “Alright, let’s get a beer,” and he stormed off to the adjacent bar, saying, “Let’s see how much it is.” As I made to follow him, I glanced up and saw all the Shan looking at me coolly, a look that grumbled, “Asshole.” Among the Shan, as with most people on this half of the continent, to lose the temper is to lose great face.

The pickup taxi started rumbling, and we skolled our beers and hopped on the back and sped off through the midday sun, through the oak-lined streets outside of Nyaung Shwe, and through a golf course where Shan locals in rice paddy hats played caddy to rich Burmans in polo shirts, and we jumped off at the fancy Aythaya Vineyard, a setting that would not look out of place in a 1980s gangster film—a classy place. We tasted the wines and toured the facility but could not afford anything else, and so headed back, encountering much of the same difficulties as on our way out there.

Unless you live in Burma, you can’t feel the hand of the regime, but it is always there, a tightening fist. In the morning in Shwe Nyaung, just north of Nyaung Shwe, the traffic police officer sits under a peepul tree on his motorcycle. When a car passes he blows his whistle and the car stops. A boy runs out, collects 500 kyut from the driver, and brings it to the officer.

Well, the next day Ron and I rented bikes and rode them out into the rural countryside, and up a steep hill to the Ruby Mountain Vineyard. There we could sample nine wines for two dollars. It was owned by a Burman, who visited twice a year, on his way to a summer home in Taunggyi, but the winemaker was French. The vines had been planted six years before, the first batch bottled in 2008.

I knew nothing about wine, I said, except I had seen Sideways once. Ron explained about the flavors of wine—how the palette tastes strawberries in white and earth in red, how the air and soil impart these flavors and the winemaker brings them out; how the “legs” dripping down the side of a sloshed glass tell the alcohol content, and how to sniff and check for clarity. I felt like I was in Sideways, and I felt fine, and it was a beautiful place, sitting on wooden chairs looking out over the hills and rice paddies to the lake, ten miles off.

A Canadian girl named Kaylin arrived after a while and moved over to our table, since the rest of the place was empty. We all rode back to town, to the restaurant near the docks where we had been having lunch. They had just opened five days before, and that day received their Myanmar Beer propaganda—ashtrays, napkin holders, and posters, so that their place looked just like all the others.

After lunch she was off to Mandalay and Hsipaw. Ron and I rode across the canal and smoked cheroots and fell asleep in the shade of a pagoda, a lone white pinnacle in the green fields. Then we returned to town and had dumplings and coffee, barbecue and Tiger beer, and I bought a bus ticket and arranged for a moped to the station, to leave the next day for Bagan. Ron left Burma a few days later for Thailand and Laos, and I felt like I had to see all the wonders I could with the time that I had.

The bus to Bagan was a long, jostling, crowded, hot, dusty affair, first down the mountain switchbacks from the Shan heights, and then across the dry plain of central Burma, to the ancient capital on the banks of the Ayeyarwady. The monsoon had not yet come to Bagan.

I stayed at the Golden Myanmar Inn, kept by the Chinese friend of the owner of the Gypsy Inn, and was the only guest. It was cheap and had air-conditioning to ward off the horrible heat, and so after a big thali sort of meal and a stroll around the town, smiling at the Burma girls, I came back and read and fell asleep early, so early that I woke up the next day at 6:30.

That day I did the obligatory bike ride around Bagan, with plenty of water, since I knew it would be horrible, sweaty, dusty work. What is there to see? A hundred Buddhist cathedrals, high brick pagodas and golden pinnacles, solitary structures, as all the thatch cities have rotted away, like the flesh of some ancient beast, leaving these fossils sticking up high over the arid plain, where only shrubs and scanty pines grow.

I rode out of the new town toward the Old. The road was crowded with cars, trucks, horse carts, and tourists on bikes just like mine (no local would ride in that heat), so I took off onto the sandy snake trails that led unto the most isolated and romantic of the pagodas—dark mysteries, Stygian wonders, constructs of an unknown age! Some of the shrines are still in sacred use, and I wandered the outer courtyards, and took the circuited hallway within, past gilded Buddhas facing the four points of the compass.

Monks wander around, and trinket stalls line the covered walkways up to the entrance of the pagodas. Even in the cloisters, local women sit with their infants or old women sit with huge cigars, and they say, “Picture? Picture? You want picture?” and will ask for money if you take one.

In an outer building of the Anando Pagoda, still a very holy place, I went into one old outer building full of painted scenes in pink, cobalt, and white. The son of a family of painters explained to me the Nat spirits, the Romances, and the Customs displayed there—here a Romeo and Juliet on their wedding night, their eager expressions unmistakable even on those alien-looking figures; and there they take offerings of food to the monastery on the following day. I took a nap in the shade of a tree, getting as much sleep as the flies would allow me, and then wandered off out of the Old Town, in search of more isolated and decrepit structures.

A young Burman on a bike rode up next to me, and he stuck by me even as I turned around and around, and as I tried to sneak into the Museum, and even as I rode down the long straight highway into the desert. He had slung over his shoulder a Kachin bag full of paintings that he wanted to show me. I refused in every possible way, without being impolite, and finally said:

“Alright, if you can show them to me while we ride—just go no hands and pull them out—I will look. But I will not buy.”

“No buy,” he said, for the hundredth time, “only look,” but my request was impossible.

I saw a massive red-brick structure off to the south and rode towards it down a sandy track. The painter followed. I got off along the way to walk out into a dead, dusty field and look at the colossus over the pale-green boughs of a line of golden mohurs. It was called Dammayangyi. I drank some water and gave some to the painter, who started muttering about his paintings.

“You know Conan the Barbarian?” I said, giving voice to the fancy stirred up by the sight of ancient temples,—“He goes around Hyborea, stabbing people, getting drunk, picking up girls. Anyway, the last Conan story ever written was called Red Nails. Conan finds this huge brick structure”—I wave at Dammayangyi—“out in the southern desert. He goes inside and there’s a whole society. There are two families fighting each other, and their fathers fought each other, and their grandfathers, and so on. Conan solves the problem by killing everyone. This reminds me of it somehow.”

I considered it some more and then rode on. The painter silently followed. Gradually he told me his life story, sitting in the shade like a parent as I climbed around on the walls—of his sister at school, his mother in need, his education in the family profession, and of what passed from first to last.

I entered Dammayangyi through the main gate, past a group of Burmans playing a rowdy card game in the shade, and told another vendor about Conan and the Red Nails as he stalked me through the high-arched halls and gothic vaults. The boy thought I was crazy and left without a word. I climbed up into the side passages and dodged a crippled bat that nearly fell on me and explored every corner. The painter was lurking around, and eventually he found me reading “Benito Cereno” in a windowsill. He sat still for a while, then said, “You see paintings?” “Not interested.” So he left.

On the bus to Mandalay there was this French girl, or rather two of them, traveling with two French boys—but this French girl, this image of Blaas’ water carrier, sat and chatted with me when we stopped at a teahouse for lunch. She had an altogether, almost obscenely enticing habit of dropping open her small mouth whenever I said something of interest, and because the French tend to enjoy boring detail, much of what I said was of invaluable, open-mouthed interest to her.

These four French also stayed at the Mandalay hotel where I found lodging, and the next day they took the same bus to Hsipaw. Let me describe this marvelous bus:

It is rather short, with boxes and all sorts of jetsam contained on the roof under a blue tarpaulin. All the seats have been raised roughly to the level of the window sills, so looking in you see lots of legs, and under the benches has been installed a raised floor of cardboard shipping boxes. The aisle is even higher, with first a stratum of rowed canisters of oil or battery acid, and on top of these some sacks of cheap plastic, full of who-knows-what, that the passengers duck walk across and fall from into their benched seats. More passengers sit in the aisle, crammed together, like hypothermia victims entangled for warmth, though it is warm enough.

Something on the bus stank like rotten fish (I think it was a durian fruit), and whenever the bus stopped so the conductors could throw water on the asthmatic engine and shout at each other, everyone would pile out to escape the sauna heat and the junkyard scents, starting with those lying in the aisle. It took six hours for the bus to cough up the serpentine road into the mountains, and then we arrived in Hsipaw.

Hsipaw: A small mountain town of fifteen thousand, popular among travelers for its charm, though most Burmans have never heard of it. The trees are lined with golden mohurs, and the marigolds and orchids and frangipani are in bloom. It is a town of lazy routines. Mr Book sells a rusty library, Mr Charles runs a fine guesthouse, and Mr Food has cheap beer and satellite television, though I preferred a small place nearer my lodging, with white picnic tables under the vast canopy of a banyan tree.

The premier and cheapest Shan dish is kao soi, or cut noodles. It is a soup of rice noodles, with tomato and pork broth, herbs and sesame seeds and chili powder, pea shoots and maybe some rice noodles, and the Shan eat it and serve it everywhere, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

In the morning the Shan peasants come in to trade by the riverside. In the evening they pan for gold in the shallows. In between they work in the shade, doing as little and napping as much as possible. It is very hot. I liked it and resolved to do nothing but look around.

On the second day it rained, then the sun returned. The kids in the school next to Mr. Charles’ Guesthouse were chanting and it sounded like African music, and there were noises of construction and motorcycles and chattering Shan and chattering insects. I chattered with a Seattleite named Sam, a recently graduated economist, about stateside politics and Thailand, and we went out to eat a few meals of Shan noodles, the portions being very small.

That French girl was there in Hsipaw, and this Mormon chemist, Dale of Texas, and a German couple, Mort and Carolina, working in Vietnam, this ambiguously gay San Franciscan, this Russian woman named Mascha, and this Swiss beauty named Colette. I ate rice and drank tea with one or more, or made jokes over beers at Mr. Food, or played pool on a huge snooker table in one of the pool halls.

Sam and I went off north of town one day, wandering through the alleys and looking for a place called “Little Bagan” with a bad map. Eventually we found it—a few overgrown temples, very picturesque. On the way back on muddy roads an old woman working in her garden called us over, and we talked for a long while. Her house was on the map as “Popcorn Factory,” and many tourists call her Ms Popcorn.

She used to make popcorn and sell it to the school nearby for 1000 kyut a bag, but the Chinese can do it for 500; so she grows vegetables in her dead husband’s garden in the summer and makes potato chips in the winter and tutors a few kids in English, since she used to be headmistress of a school. She told us about this and her family—her six daughters, living and working all over, and all their children, some of whom rushed about the yard where we sat, chasing a puppy or skirmishing in some war game.

Sam had got a job with a fellowship, researching the economics of health, hard questions—how many children will die if this country does not get a new vaccine? how much will it cost?—expressed in numbers, which he says are often flawed, though they are always taken as canon law by policy-makers and companies.

He asked one of the Burmans at Mr. Charles’ place about illness in the country. Dengue fever was common, especially further north, but Malaria was not so bad; many villagers had tuberculosis, from fueling smoky fires in their longhouses to keep away the mosquitoes. We asked about politics and the Shan candidates for the government, but the Burman had no idea and did not really care—what did it matter?

Well, Sam and the German couple came south with me when I left, almost a week after arriving in Hsipaw, for Mandalay, and I was there for a few hours before taking a night bus further south on the Ayeyarwady to Yangon.

I arrived in Yangon and it was raining. I took a bus in to Sule Square and went back to the Okinawa Guesthouse and got a bed in the air-conditioned dorms for one night, since my flight back to Bangkok left the next morning. I had breakfast there and watched it rain and met a Bavarian Buddhist named Tobias, who had studied physics and worked for Mercedes for a few years, but he was as unsatisfied with that as Prince Siddhartha. He took a vipasanna class a year ago and found a new calling. He had been in Burma for six months on a meditation visa, studying in monasteries in the south.

Tobias told me about the Buddhist teachings as we wandered around later, looking for Fuji Sushi and a place to watch the World Cup opener. South Africa tied Mexico, and I had a few beers, and all the while my brain was roiling with thoughts totally foreign: Should I continue on?

My plan was to go from northern Laos to the south, into Cambodia and then scaling back up Vietnam, when I feel sated with this Southeast Asia, and yearn for China. It would take six months if I wanted to see it all, all that these countries have—

Cambodia, where Angkor Wat covers miles with temples, and the schools became Khmer Rouge murder houses, and the killing fields have been dug up, and the prostitutes follow you down the street on motorcycles and cling to you like drowning victims; and the coast has islands like Thailand used to have, and there are dolphins in the Mekong, and they use US dollars because their currency is bunk.

Vietnam, where they eat anything with four legs, more-or-less, and they sell cans of beer in the temples, and they burn fake dollars and Euros for their ancestors, and the roads are clogged by fleets of scooters, and you see an accident every half-hour; and where the museums celebrate their victory over American “imperialist pigs,” with pictures of the girl who killed six GIs and dog tags for sale out front, and they celebrate victory over Chinese dynasties, Cambodian empire, and Mongol hordes, though the people will welcome everyone with a smile.

It is far better, I decided, to let these wonders remain spoken mysteries for now, reasons to return later amidst life’s travails, than to hasten through them with eyes unseeing, and miss the grandest gift that travel bestows—love for a place, a people, a family, a culture, a religion, a style—a love that only comes with patience and time.

He says, ‘I’m only stopping here to get some gasoline.
I guess I’m going thataway just as long as it’s paved,
I guess you’d say I’m on my way to
Burma shave.’
—Tom Waits

The morning sun shot off like a firework over the hills. Ron and I took our backpacks to Sam’s trekking office, where from a painted portrait, three feet across, the old gopher-toothed Burman explorer looked out from under his rice paddy hat to the narrow room and the street beyond. Naing Naing, Sam’s nephew and our guide on the trails to Inle, was there waiting. He tagged our bags and sent them to Nyaung Shwe, on the northern bank of the lake, where we would proceed, in a meandering way of hills and vales, over the next three days.

Naing Naing kissed his little daughter goodbye and shouldered his knapsack, and we followed suit, with only the bare necessities. We walked south out of the Kalaw valley, on winding ways cut into the hills, past groups of novices in burgundy tunics, with metal dishes for their monastic meal. None of the monks ate after noon. Naing Naing stopped us in the shady path to squat and smoke a cigarette—I think we walked too fast for him—and he told us about Buddhism: its six senses, eighteen elements, twelve causes, and four noble truths.

We continued on through hills and forests of spare dry pines, past the army camp, and came out onto a long unnamed valley east of the Tong-La that Robin showed us, opening south to the plains, and to the north hemmed in by the hills of Kalaw. The trail zigzagged along the tops of the eastern hills, turning from forest to glade, where smiling children in rice paddy hats and rubber boots with Shan knives in bamboo sheathes shepherded herds of stupid cattle, shooting them straight with slingshots. Bullocks carts went off the other way, making for the market day in Kalaw.

Across the valley we saw a train snake down the tracks, and the Knuckle Mountains, sloping above, and not a river in sight, but plenty of green fields and white stupas. The monsoon irrigates the highlands, fills the paddies tier by tier, but then it was still early in the season. The hillsmen, mostly Danu tribesmen where we were presently, grew tea and vegetables in gardens of rich earth and waited for the rain on which they were completely dependent. They prayed to the thirty-seven nat nature spirits, and they shot rockets into the air with messages for God.

At that time the farmers would sow their rice in a well-tilled field, and in August, when the rice paddies become full and smooth with gray water, they plow the ground there and transplant their crops. Households owned certain sections of the nearby paddies, and most of the rice they grew was for their own consumption. In the highlands, they also grew brown mountain rice, which is more nutritious and does not require standing water; and this, along with their vegetables, they sold at market.

In Lupyin, Naing Naing, Ron, and I stopped for tea in a dirty bamboo bungalow that housed ten Danu. Most everyone was a farmer, but we met a man who traveled through the villages selling lottery tickets for a living. They bet on the last three numbers for the Thai lotto. There was also a monastery in each village, with a few monks and the abbott, who was the de facto village headman. Some monasteries had televisions where the village could come to watch football. Boys ran around with water tanks hanging from bamboo staves, a wheel at the bottom end and the top across the shoulder.

Here, as my group came to the village of Lupyin, is a good time to present the map, the making of which occupied my voyage, secondary in importance only to an active marveling at my ancient surroundings. Behold! my journey, from beginning to end:

As the Reader can see, we three lunched in Shar Pin and passed through Lin Pan, a Paoh town where a half-dozen kids waved and screamed, “Bye-bye,” the only English phrase known to most of Burma’s peasants, and they screamed it after us until we were out of sight, calling across the hills. We walked on through wilderness, beneath pines and oaks, banyan trees and the Flame of the Forest with its red flowers, and passed phloxes, ninnias, marigolds, pale orchids, and frangipani: the temple flower, bells of white and gold with a sweet musk.

We arrived, around four in the afternoon, at the village of Kyaut Su, where there was a secondary school for 250 Paoh students. I saw a few primary schools on our trek, and only this one secondary school outside of Kalaw. The students must either lodge in the town or walk several hours every day, and it is prohibitively expensive for most families. So the children go and work in the fields, with no time for politics or revolution, and when their children grow up they will do the same. A few go to high school and college in government-sanctioned programs, and they graduate to government jobs. The government likes it this way.

Our road climbed up a hill, with two banyan trees guarding the top, and we began our descent when the rain started coming down. The trail turned to sticky mud and the rain blew at us in torrents and weighted us down like seas. I unfurled my umbrella and Naing Naing and Ron donned their jackets, and we marched on through wind and rain for some time, through wet hills and bamboo groves, until we came to another part of Kyaut Su where we would spend the night.

Leaving our muddy kit at the porch, we climbed up to the top floor of the thatch longhouse, by way of a bamboo ladder. It was constructed in the same way as the house of the medicine man, mentioned in the preceding chapter. There were two rooms: a kitchen and a hall; bare walls, bamboo mats, ratty blankets, and a smoking firepit set on a round stone, where the husband of the Paoh family made our dinner from things Naing Naing had bought in villages along the way.

I took a twilight stroll through town before dinner. Round brown faces peered out at me from the windows and balconies of their thatched longhouses. They stared shyly, with only an occasional “bye-bye,” as I walked between the dozen homes, the rain cisterns and latrines and bamboo stands, and looked out into the valleys beneath Kyaung Su.

Sam, when we met the old trekking guide, sold the untouched rural culture as a commodity—we would see so much more culture and so many fewer tourists on his trip than the others, he said, knowing by a decade of experience what all tourists want to hear. “Stop,” he had said,—“Look, at the people. Look, at the villages.” So that’s what I did.

I saw simple people, uneducated and modestly dressed and modestly content, going about the routines of homecoming and story-sharing and meal-taking. I saw boys playing checkers with bamboo tabs, white on one side and green on the other. They saw me as a stranger, white and round-eyed and big-nosed, and they were not aware of much outside Kyaut Su.

Eighty per cent of Burma lived in the countryside and worked on the farms, a pristinely pre-industrial way of life. They were not stupid: they could read and write and criticize politics, but the circumstances of life and labor meant they had no time for any of that, not when they had to fight every day for a living. So they keep their heads down, occupied with matters of surviving. This served those men in power very well.

Ten other villagers turned up in the kitchen of the house where we stayed to watch Ron and I eat our supper. They sat cross-legged around the firepit, observing over the flames and the cauldron as we ate plates of rice, meat, and vegetables, with soup and tea and chilies. We finished and sipped our tea while our audience waited, and we asked each other, “Should we do something?” but eventually they departed and we moved to the main hall to let the family eat their meal. We rolled out our bedrolls between the drying garlic and the Buddha shrine and went to bed at eight.

On the second day I rose early and washed my face with rainwater from a cistern and considered the misty morning over the vegetable fields. We had breakfast and coffee, filled our bottles with boiled water, and turned east. We hiked through rolling lowland of dry paddies and barren grazing land, Poah territory. Blocks and cliffs of limestone stood in the vales: huge rocks like Crusader fortresses, overgrown with shrubs and pockmarked with the nests of birds.

We came to and crossed a railway, a highway, and a power line from the hydroelectric plant that the Japanese built in Kirin state, siphoning power north to the rest of Myanmar. All Burmese attempts at damming tributaries of the Irrawaddy have met with disaster, and this Japanese dam is a primary source of electricity for the country, though the towns along the lines are not even wired to them. The town through which we presently passed, Bow Nin Gone, was all turned out, with all the men and women working outside the schoolhouse, building new furniture and planting new gardens, and the stores were filled with donated notebooks and pens—but Reader, they need more!

Beyond the straight lines of civilization, we came to low hills like a heath, with young crab apple trees between the planted fields, grown not for their sour fruit but for the firewood. Paoh girls in long, loose tunics and trousers of orange-trimmed black, with orange turbans on their heads, swung hoes at their bare feet, in furrowed fields of soy and ginger and potato. The women worked and the men watched the home and the children, because the wives could not trust them to stay away from other women if they get out of the house—or so I am told.

I’m not sure what the men do. What I saw was a lot of men gambling and smoking, and a lot of working wives with babies slung under their arms from shoulder holsters or playing around in the bushes next to the rice fields. Older children work alongside their mothers and sisters. However the men do cook the morning and evening meals. Once the wife returned home, the husband lost much of his depraved independence, as is true of every human society.

Under the gray sky, the earth was red as Mars with iron oxide, and the farmers have to sprinkle the fields with lime to balance the acidity. We walked single-file on a raised path between the deep ruts that cart wheels had carved out of the muddy clay, and we passed through only a few villages, built on higher hills, with bamboo thickets around the perimeters. It was quiet out there. Near the villages there was the whimpering protest of a bullocks-cart’s axle, the munching and breathing and ringing bells of cattle, the chattering of Paoh women in the field—but only rarely. Mostly there was only windswept silence and birdsong. It sprinkled a little, but the real rain missed us, and we were usually alone on the road.

Soon we came out from the heath and into a much hillier region, with the arid rocky land good only for soybeans and grazing. We crossed a line of hills and came out into another valley of this infertile stuff, with a few deep mud gorges along the southern end of the path. Twice we had to cross these, once by winding down and up, and again by crossing a creaking bamboo bridge. Ahead and growing closer there was a high limestone ridge, very picturesque, with hills steep as Roman columns in the south. Rice paddies ran up the slope to the base of the limestone, and they also grew mountain rice.

Eventually we came right up to the ridges on a steep, winding trail and passed through a niche in the stone, like a niche in the blade of an axe. There were shines carved into the walls on the side of the trail, which then opened onto a wide valley, hills in the distance, the cliffs spreading out to either side, and directly beneath us, surrounded by bamboo stands, the Paoh village of Pat Tu, where we would spend the night in the local monastery.

Naing Naing had us halt at a store on the main road, and Ron and I sat on bamboo benches, smoking cheroots and drinking rice wine. A Frenchwoman stopped there but would not sit with us, but an American traveling with his Chinese mother heeded our call to company and conversation. He had been working in Beijing, and his mother, a meditation instructor, had been abroad for twelve years, and was presently taking courses in Burma. I got in her good graces by saying I wanted to go to her home island of Taiwan, so she whispered to me of her son:

“You know he just broke up with his girlfriend. Eight years they are dating, six years living together, and then they break up, and he goes back and she already has another boyfriend. He says, ‘I’m going to win her back,’ but I think someone needs to tell him he needs to move on.” She kept on telling me her son’s problems, wishing on me the position of role model, as he kept glancing up nervously, as if at something that was about to explode.

There was also, drifting around this store, a cute moon-faced Paoh girl with earth-brown skin, and every time I caught her bright eyes looking over at me across the yard, she would smile. She lurked around the washing station, clicking her gum and rolling her eyebrows, and Ron would look back to see what the hell I was smiling at.

“You had better stop that,” he decreed.

“What?”

“You had better stop.”

“I like these peasant girls.”

“You’ll get in trouble.”

“Knifed by her brother.”

“Yeah, they’ll find you hanging in one of the houses, next to the garlic.”

“Good thing we leave early tomorrow.”

“They’ll be waiting for you in Inle. You touch her, you have to marry her. That’s how it works.”

“Machete wedding.”

“I’m serious.”

“Well,” I said, leaning back and puffing my cheroot,—“let’s see how she cooks first. Slowly slowly.”

I spoke only a little with the girl—“What is your name?” she asked, and I complimented her English and winked at Ron, who was just then coming around the store—whose name was approximately Zumeeing, and then our romance was interrupted, as Ron and I took an after-dinner stroll through the town. There were many more Paoh peasant women coming home with hoes or umbrellas over their shoulders, orange-turbaned and sun-wizened. They watched us with the guiltless, bold stare, and well-meaning, and humorous, of one who works hard for a living.

Naing Naing took us up to the monastery, a tall, sloped, stilted building in a wide gravel field between the trees and bamboo. Our guide procured bedrolls from the half-deaf master and laid them out in the wide wooden hall. Ron and I sat on the balcony, as a monk and a girl spoke quietly in a columned nest under the monastery, until it got too dark to do anything but sleep. We were asleep in the hall when the rain started coming down, loud on the tin roof. A monk sat against the wall, meditating matins. The only light came from his candle and through openings high on the wall that let in some silvery moonlight.

We broke our fast in Pat Tu at Zumeeing’s hut, then headed east along muddy roads. Our soles turned to platform shoes in the muck, and every ten minutes we had to scrape off an inch of it on rocks at the side of the road. Between the ridge and Lake Inle were many rows of hills, and most of the day we spent crossing them. We had tea at a motorcycle repair place in the hills past Nan Yoke, and past another line we climbed down onto the plain of rice fields, all reeds, canals, stilted houses, and green a vibrant jade.

The road followed straight along the canals, shallow at this time of the year, and all through the rest of the monsoon this place must be navigated by boats. Shan kids played in the water around the dams, and peasants in rice paddy hats worked among the fields. Past a monastery, stilted above the marsh, we stopped in a store in Taung Bo Gyi to take our lunch, and near there we met our boat driver, who took us on down the canals, through a forest of bamboo poles marking out danger spots or watery garages, under bamboo bridges, over little dams, and past the peasant women, bearing loaded baskets on their backs.

We came out onto the lake, which is tall and thin. Strands of green tomatoes float in the shallows, and there are stilted hotels and temples standing out over the water. One of these was named the Jumping Cat Monastery, as they had a dozen cats that the monks had trained to jump through hoops, but it was too hot that time of year and all the cats were too lazy to jump—is what I heard. One sunburned hour of this brought us to the northern shores of Inle, and up a canal to the docks of Nyaung Shwe.

This is how the world will be,
Everywhere I go it rains on me.
—Tom Waits

The monsoon works like this. During the wet season, which follows the hot, humid season and occurs at a different time of year depending on where you are, but generally in the summer, and in Burma between May and September—during that wet season, it is perpetually cloudy, and for about fifteen minutes every day there is a biblical deluge that floods the fields and roads, raises the rivers and sewers, and washes up everything in the world. Then the rains soften to a sprinkle, and then they cease entirely, and the world is a muddy wreck, though the air is much cooler.

In the heart of the monsoon, in August, it rains perpetually, but I was there during the time of the daily deluge, which caught me nearly every day in a place of some fascination. It is worth surveying the montage of them, with some necessary digressions, and so I will proceed.

I am in the home of Mysande when the rain starts coming down. She is a pretty Muslim girl, almost nineteen and studying Chinese at the Foreign Language Institute in Yangon, and she approached me in the road near the river in Bago and invited the three of us to her home, to practice her English. Ron, Gina and I sit around a table in a room in that oriental style, with packed earth just inside the entrance and a raised wooden platform beyond.

A grandfather slumbers soundlessly in a chair in the corner, halfway decomposed already, withered skin on a skeleton. Above him there is a shelf with some family photos, and on the back wall is a picture of the Kaaba and the name of Mohammed.

Myusande asks whatever questions she can think of—How old are you? Where are you from? What is your job? Where do you go in Myanmar?—and always her reply to our answer comes, “Ooh, hmm,” as the wheels of Babel turn in her head. We ask about her family, her school, Yangon and the friends she lives with there, speaking Chinese over dinner,—“but I miss my mother,” she says, looking towards the old mam with a sly whimper.

“Gina,” she says,—“you are very beautiful.” Gina says, “Oh, no, you are very beautiful.” ”Thank you,” says Myusande—that is, Theankh yeu. “You are very beautiful. I have gift for you.”

From the rooms behind the curtained portico, Myusande produces a section of branch from the thanakha tree. She brought out a round grindstone from near the door and spread some water round it, then ground down the branch until she had a circle of khaki-colored paste. “It is for absorb moisture,” Myusande explains when we ask,—“keeps your face clean and safe from sun.” The girl sat Gina down in front of her and painted her face with a standard Burmese design: Pikachu circles on the cheeks, and lines smeared around the bone lines and across the forehead. “There,” she says, “now you can go in the sun.”

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it began, and the sun is out again and low, so we bid farewell to Myusande and her family and accept the gifts generously bestowed, regretting that we had nothing to give her in return but a promise to visit when we returned to Bago some lucky day.

There is no time for dinner. We get our bags and speed off to the bus station on three scooters, and our bus to Mandalay leaves at six, a nice coach with leg room, and I sip out of a flask of Mandalay whiskey to while away the hours, as the Burmans turn out all the lights soon after departure and start exhibiting slapstick soap operas.

Around nine, Gina asks when we will make a rest stop, and the driver and the two ushers say, “Don’t worry, in a few minutes.” By half-past ten, my flask empty and my bladder a stretched balloon, I ask when do we stop, and the lords of the coach, as omnipotent as the captains of sailing ships at sea, say, “In a few miles.” At eleven, Gina is up there, and they are saying, “Just around the bend,” and I have a Hindenburg of urine and defy my better nature by demanding of the captain, “Stop now. Stop now. Stop the bus now.”

The bus stops at the side of the road. I would have felt bad about this, even with the tremendous rapture of my liquid relief, if half the bus had not gotten off with me to use the bushes and ditches at the side of the road. We arrived at the first rest stop a half-hour later, almost six hours after departing Bago.

I am in a beer and barbecue when the rain starts coming down. It had been a hot day in Mandalay until this started, and Ron and I are happy to sit there with our glasses full and watch the streets go to hell.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, but I say water would also suffice. Weighed down like Atlas by the oceans that the clouds disgorge, the Burmans rush to and fro across the street, seeking shelter in storefronts or restaurants, covering their wares or their trishaws with tarps. Half a minute passes, and then the hurrying stops, though the cataract continues. Everything is already soaked, so why bother? A dripping Burmese girl with a miserable look pushed her bike slowly down pavement wet as the sea.

The gutter begins to flood, turning earth to mud, and carrying some horrible sludge into the beer hall. We retreat back as the whole front is filled with gray-green water, back to the inner depths of the place, and Ron and Gina and I sit at a table and watch it come down. After a while I put my head in my arms and fall asleep.

It had taken us all morning to find the Mandalay Beer brewery, and we found it closed. None of us knew it was a Sunday. (Later we learned that you need a government permit to enter the place—are they brewing secrets down there?) First we three tried to enter the Mandalay Palace complex, two miles square and ringed by a moat and wall, but foreigners can only enter by the eastern gate and must pay $10. We were at the western one, and anyway did not want to pay to see something that was rebuilt 15 years ago by forced labor, so we argued for a long and fruitless time with the palace guards.

“Why not?” we demanded on being barred. “You, different,” said a little Burman in a checkered longyi,—“You tall, me short. See skin?” He held his arm to mine. “You very white, me black. Different.”

Having failed to see both palace and brewery, while the clouds hung low and dark, we settled down in one of the open beer halls—a roof, three walls, and a stove—on the dirt road between the three. Gina went off to find a market, and Ron and I lowered ourselves into forty cent cups of fresh beer and big plates of noodles fried with sausage and quail eggs. The cook’s son brought out pannikins of green chili peppers, onion slices with sweet chili sauce, and chicken broth. “It’s good,” we said, and I sent the kid off to bring me more beer. A soap opera was running in the corner, and all the Burmese were watching it.

Gina arrived just before the deluge on the back of a bike pedaled by a slim girl with a black face. “I told her I wanted noodles, and she took me back here,” she said with a laugh. She ordered food as the sky cracked, and the bar boy ran over to get his pay before the rain began.

A few hours pass, cradled in the crook of arms, and then I wake up and rouse Ron from his own slumber. Gina is already gone. We hop out across the gray puddles and the wreck of the sideway, and the sky looks as dark as a death shroud and is as quiet as an executioner. We hail down a pickup truck heading south and stand on the tailgate, clinging to a rollbar and looking over the canopy roof, as all the benches beneath are full. On the sides of the road, vendors bail out their stores, drain their canvas roofs, and remove the plastic sheets from their displays of comic books, watches, sunglasses, and fruit. They retract their umbrellas and start their motorbikes and leave whatever temporary shelter they had found. Birds start to call out again, to fill in the startling silence, and the air is as cool and clean as the ground is wet and filthy.

When the truck stops a block from the hotel, the conductor tries to charge us a dollar a piece, and then to refuse us change, but the other Burmese yell at him and shame him into treating us fairly. We have a fine night of beer and barbecue, and Ron goes out to haggle rudely with the tuk-tuk drivers, to get one of the to take us to the ancient capitals that ring Mandalay. The next morning we leave north into a strange lowland country—scattered trees on the floodplain, spread out all the way to the creased mountains, and Reader, you never knew about these shades of green!

I am in a horse-drawn cart when the rain starts coming down. It is a jostling, two-wheeled affair on a road of rutted mud across the Utawei River, and that means “Small,” but the rains have bloated it wider than its name. Tonton, the driver, stops briefly under a tree next to an old palace tower. Two Burmese girls run up to us with baskets of rusted bells and elephant statues and a desperate slant to their squinting eyes, halfway to weeping, but we do not buy anything. We urge Tonton on, and with a small whip he urges on Lamomere the horse, as the rain comes down harder.

Tonton goes up the road a ways and then stops in the shade of a banyan tree, and Ron stays in the cart but I run out with Tonton and Gina, through a gate in a stone wall and into a small sloping white stupa. The interior is under renovation, with a central sanctum and four anterooms pointed out at the jungle and road. I sit on a mat in one of these as the rain fell and write about what we had seen so far, the snake monastery and the temple, and the river-crossing to old Inwa.

In the wake of the downpour, when it becomes a gentle shower, the jungle erupts with two-hundred sounds—chirps and clucks and whistles and squawks, singing and chanting carried across the plains from distant speakers, the slow rumble of single-cylinder engines, the giggling chatter of children. It was a land of willowy firs and solitary palms and sacred banyan trees. Corn grows in some places, low and densely planted, and elsewhere herons pace the low water of the rice paddies. We stare out in wonder as Tonton drove us and Lamomere pulled us down the muddy channel of the road, lined with trees. Wheels and hooves sink inches deep but do not stick, as Lamomere pulled us on to Bagaya Kyaung.

There in the heart of a bamboo grove, the monastery is a stilted old teakwood fortress, black-walled with many roofs of red-tiles and upturned eaves. The floorboards creak, and dogs lounge in the resurgent sunlight. Inside, a sleepy young monk teaches a class of eight novices, their heads newly shaved, lined up on benches under a window, through which the jungle announces itself. The song of bird and cicadas and crickets drowns out the noise of children playing in the brick courts. Black wood columns reach up into the cavernous heights of the main hall, where three golden Buddhas oversee their disciples—columns big as any Olympian marble and carved from a single tree, so they resemble a dark primeval forest, there in the creaking, dusty monastery.

As we leave the monastery, an old Burmese woman, shaped like a sunken ship, accosts us on the wooden steps, a peddler of souvenirs with a basket of trinkets: long-stemmed opium pipes, old temple bells, Victorian coins, black statues of elephants and lions the size of a fist, emblems of Buddha and his Bodhisattvas, knives rusted into inlaid sheathes, and rings and chains, all dark and gritty as the sea-drowned sky. Ron and I refuse, and by the time we find Gina and rouse Tonton and Lamomere, the peddler has already walked to our next stop: basket slung over her back as she walks down the road, her face hidden under the low brim of her rice paddy hat, a keen-eyed girl following close behind.

We come to a broken brick structure under an open sky, a few cracked stupas and their fallen walls. A pretty girl with a round brown face waves us in and points the way. She has on a denim skirt and a wicker hat, and she is deaf and dumb. Her mother, the peddler, has laid out all her wares on top of a broken column. Ron and Gina start looking around and rebuff the trinket seller’s hassling, and I look over at the girl and see her wave me back into an old hallway.

I follow her along a brickwork wall that retains some of its plaster. The girl waves through an open door, the Vanna White of Burma, and I look in on a strange jungle scene: all the floor growing up wild between four pillars, evenly spaced, and three Buddhas at the far end, the center one of a magnificent size, meditating in the lotus position with his eyes half-sealed, his ears stretched long, and beyond the statue the fields wet with rain and patches of palms and misty mountains and a shredded sky in gray and white.

Ah, I remunerate, so like an epic of the jungle; and the mute girl waves me out of my reverie and gestures at the nearest of the columns, which is broken in half. A shattered brick wall runs along between the columns, all the way to the Buddha statues, and she points at these emphatically. I start groping along the wall of the open doorway for a handhold, but that short peasant girl brushes me aside and leaps ably and barefooted in a skirt to the broken pillar. She turns back on me, grinning wryly. I wrap up my scarf and follow her agile bound, and follow her on down the wall—such a strange scene we made—all the way, twisting around the remaining columns, to the great Buddha. I look up at his great and tranquil face and down at the girl’s beaming round one, and I catch her dark eyes and her smile and I laugh. We turn and scrabble back along the wall and leap into the hallway and return to the others.

Tonton takes us back the way we came, and we cross the river and rendezvous with our tuk-tuk driver. After a stop at Sagaing, and a walk up a covered stair to the pagoda-encrusted top of the hill, from which vantage one can see 600 more pagodas in the hills around the Utawei, including one shaped like a woman’s breast, for when the king wondered at design, his wife pulled back her robe and showed him something worth his worship—after all that, we proceed in our tuk-tuk to Amapurana, “City of Immortality,” once a capital and now a little monastery town. It lies on a wide and shallow river, very low now, so that the Burmans grow corn and wheat and poppy on the exposed shoals, and U Bein’s Bridge sits high on its stilts, which in coming months will all sink under a rising tide, and they will plant rice and bamboo in the pools.

The teakwood bridge is more of a catwalk: a long wooden way, spanning nearly a mile between Amapurana and the island of Taughathaman. Maroon-wrapped monks stroll back and forth across the bridge in the day’s waning hours, between the monasteries on either bank. They stop on occasion to sit on benches in the covered rest stops, where women sell shrimp and peanuts and strange fruits, and the monks, Ron and I notice with delight, stop often to chat with girls also taking an elevated stroll. Most of them are only inmates of monasteries for a few weeks or months, wherein feminine contact is forbid. Why not have someone waiting for you on the day of your release? Some girls had come dressed up for the occasion, and some robed monks sit on the benches of the bridge, looking at forbidden videos on a girl’s cell phone.

Two monks approach we three as we start across the bridge, over the line of beached longboats, gaily painted and eyed. One speaks very good English and asks if he can join us and practice it. The other, much older monk speaks naught but a few memorized phrases, which he mispronounces so completely that we can not decipher them. Soon both are walking with Gina, who was talking with the clever young monk about education, and soon she has an entourage of six monks around her, though she does not think it strange.

Gina and I are just leaving the hotel when it starts raining a little, and it only rains a little this day. We walk to the little breakfast place near Royal Hotel while the rain prickles on our shirts and on the skin of our arms. Ron happens to be there and waves us over. The cooks are making something like French toast in their big wok, and we each have four of them, and I have fried rice and coffee, too. By the time we are smugly finished, the rain has stopped.

We take a bicycle rickshaw on the road around the palace walls to where twin lions, thirty feet tall, guard the entrance to Mandalay Hill, and we scale the covered stair to the top, stopping in temple halls along the way to see the Buddhas, statue tableau, and viewpoints, and to eat deep-fried crickets, which taste as empty as overcrisped French fries. When we have got back to the bottom, the sun has got its fingers through the cloud cover.

Gina and I wander around the temple district between Mandalay Hill and the moat and wall of the palace, walking through one containing the world’s largest book, inscribed on 729 stone pages like huge gravestones, each housed in a separate stupa of white stone, lined up in perfect rows around the Kuthodaw Pagoda. Gold bells crown the stupa of each regal page, tinkling merrily in the wind.

We are trying to find another teakwood monastery in the area and are going the wrong way until an old Burmese woman rides up to us on her bicycle to tell us so. “I thought you were going there,” she says, “but it’s this way!” Her English is perfect. She teaches it privately, having learned from her father, who was some combination of Scotch, German, and San Franciscan—“He met my mother during the war. He went to her village, and they took one look at each other, and that was it. They had eight children.”

Her name is Cherry, and she believes in love at first sight. Gina and I sit down with her on the squat stools of a teashop on the corner, and Cherry produces from her notebook an old sepia photo of a pretty young woman in an old-fashioned dress, wearing a sash and crown. “When men see this,” says Cherry in her husky voice, “they fall in love with me, so don’t you fall in love with me.” Cherry’s hair is tied back, and her face is shriveled and the color of raw pork, with a mole on her chin sprouting three hairs, half a foot long, but I can see some vestige in the square form of her features and in her dim eyes of the woman in the tired old photograph.

“My friend from Germany sent that picture,” Cherry is saying,—“We knew each other in the beauty contest. I got second place in the contest for all of Burma. I also did Thai boxing. In a big tournament for all of Burma, I got second place, again. Then we went to Thailand for a competition, but I broke my hand in the first match, so I had to stop.” She waves her hand as if to say, And that’s that.

Cherry had been in the army for eight years, had married and had some daughters, and now she had her English students and the money her children sent, and she seems very happy, with all that freedom and unconventional vitality that sometimes possesses the elderly, and none of the bitter malignancy that often takes hold of aging beauties. She is past all worldly concern and ready for the hereafter.

Though not a Buddhist, Cherrye asks Gina on which day of the week and hour was she born, and says Gina is a white elephant, an elephant without tusks. I guess Tuesday morning for myself, and Cherry says, “Yes, you are the lion. Very quiet with a big imagination.” Gina agrees with this, and I do not mind, but say, “Lion is very fierce.” “But he can also be very timid,” Cherry corrects,—“When the lion is timid he hides under the cot. When he is fierce he runs up the tree.”

She waves at a trio of children on a blanket on the curb: two toddlers and a swaddled infant, playing in a pile while their mother works in the teahouse. “Everyone loves that baby,” says Cherry. “She is the reincarnation of a man who lived in the neighborhood, who everyone liked. He was reborn in her. You can tell already. Watch. Everyone who comes up will say hello to her.”

“Hey, you hear that?” says Cherry, and we hear a shrill whistle,—“That means it’s going to rain. You have to know the birds here in Burma. You know the bird, hoo-hoo—yes, the owl! In Burmese, you say zee-gwat, because he makes a noise like zee-gwat, zee-gwat. There is another bird whose call in Burmese sounds like, ‘Get the cart, brother-in-law. Brother-in-law, get the cart.’”

We have to hurry back from that end of town, all the way round the palace, on the back of a guy’s scooter, and I do not have time to get dinner before our pickup to the station. I am mortified. Luckily the drivers are trying to fit all the luggage in the bottom and bodily push a parked truck from in front of the bus. I scurry across the muddy junction to a teahouse and get fried noodles, covered in egg, and broth and onion with chili sauce from a grinning Burmese girl. Then I have to stop the bus from leaving without Ron, who is off looking for potato chips.

The bus drops us off in Kalaw at 2:30 in the morning, and we sit there watching the local scooter gang and befriending stray dogs until 4, when we walk up the hill to the Golden Kalaw Guesthouse. It is late enough, or early enough, that we can get a room without paying for that first night.

We are in the lounge of the Golden Kalaw when it starts coming down. Ron and I wait it out in the wide common room, full on breakfast, seated on the couch to watch the news on TV. The old man sits in the back and his wife in a corner, and their granddaughter with her cropped-hair waits for it to end so she can shuffle off to school in rubber boots. The downpour sounds much more pleasant when you’re somewhere like home. From the balcony up above you can see it, running like a veil over the valley of the town.

The rain stops, and we walk out onto Kalaw’s straight streets, along their plank sidewalks and past the sundry businesses and workshops that open onto the road, through the market, which is lively even when it’s not market day, and we stop in teahouses and at the beer halls, with meat grilling out front and a karaoke video on the television.

The town is full of soldiers, grunts uneducated and unheralded, uniformed at sixteen and brainwashed into thinking highly of their Buddha-sanctioned state service, thirty years for which they are paid fifty dollars per month. They wear Nazi helmets with swastikas and eagles, out of deference to the strength and unity of the German people and their similarly fascist state. “They don’t know what it means,” says Ron as we inquire about it.

There are five camps around Kalaw and an officer’s academy on the hill, though that is shut down this year—all the colonels are busy working for the upcoming elections—and it’s impossible to get a map of the area. The military does not want any strategic details slipping out in the hands of trekkers. So foreigners have to get a guide, and the guides only have their walking knowledge of the country and their hand-drawn maps.

Tourists can only go to thirty per cent of Burma without a permit. These are the “white zones;” the “brown zones,” including the northern hills, require government permission, and the “black zones” are impassable places, ruled by state-sanctioned opium warlords. If a stranger wanders into one of these places, such as the vast stretch of Shan Army territory along the eastern border with Thailand, an observer will make a call to a nearby rifleman, who will shoot the stranger from ten kilometers away and ask questions later—or so I am told.

The Brits started the opium farms in Burma and Bengal to sell to the Chinese, and everyone was rich. Now in the Kalaw highlands they grow tea, vegetables, and rice. The families keep most of the rice they grow and sell most of the produce at the local markets, although they also make an interesting tea leaf salad in this part of Myanmar. The land is not so good for grazing. We passed a Nepali ranch where the Hindu family, following their traditional trade, maintained about fifty cattle, including thirty cows, though the milk they produced was hardly worth the expense and effort.

Most of the water buffaloes, stupid animals with their long horns curved back in a useless way, and the brahmin bulls, which bear a camel-like hump above their strong shoulders, were skinny things used mostly for carrying bullocks-carts down the rutted dirt pathways that thread the hills. Sometimes a Burman will take a herd of emaciated cattle out east, fattening them up with mountain grass along the way, and at the Thai border will fill their mouths with opium from the Shan warlords, and make a killing off meat and drug on the other side—at least that’s what I heard.

The next day we leave for a trek with Robin, a stooped Sikh with a graying beard and a green turban, son of a large and prosperous family of Sikhs running the Golden Lilly Inn, who had been in Burma for a century. We had met Robin in the street before the rains, as we sauntered around town, a brown and black-snouted dog guiding us in, running ahead to chase motorycycles and smile at pedestrians, and leading an altogether fine and sunny life, in spite of the floodtide of blackened clouds.

Anyway, the most appealing part of Robin’s offer, other than all the culture we would see, was the attendance of three girls from Spain. “Young or old?” queried the Jew, and the Sikh replied, “Young I think.” My eyes were wide and I said, “Three young Spanish girls? Yes, I think we should go.”

I am very excited as we go over to the Golden Lilly. Then I meet this fabled triad of Spanish girls, and it turns out that they are all around 30. One woman is Catalan, one is Mexican, and the third is just a Frenchman. The three of them are studying development in Beijing and wear trekking shoes they had bought in Kalaw. It is with inestimable disappointment that I set off behind them and our guide for our loop through the southern hills.

Kalaw is the Burmese word for wok, and the city is so named for its bowl-like appearance, surrounded by pine-clad hills with further valleys beyond. Our road takes us up switchbacks past homes and monasteries, vegetable gardens and mango trees, and a house where one of the Burmans hands Robin a big bunch of bananas.

As we come out of the hills and the pine woods, into a valley floored by rice paddies, now dry, we come across five veterans sitting scattershot and slipshod across the sunburnt hillside—ex-rangers, hired by a Bavarian hotel owner as keepers of the forest. They are all in their fifties, though they look much younger, and are lean and narrow from mountain campaigns. They wear their old uniforms but can no longer carry firearms. Instead they have long Shan knives, radios, and cameras slung from their belts.

Robin gives them the banana bunch as a gift, and the veterans survey us with grizzled curiosity and ask where we are from. They are impressed by Ron’s origins and compliment his country on the Uzi. In the army, they had used smuggled German G3s, Russian Kalishnakovs, Swedish artillery, and a few M16s abandoned in Vietnam, but those aren’t very reliable. We greet them politely and go our own way, leaving them to their business of checking on the water supply for the resort of their Bavarian lord.

Robin is honest and awkward, the kind of man who embarrasses easily and talks a lot anyway, and he forces a laugh every few syllables, as he points out all the plants he knows—some edible, some medicinal, some poisonous. Now he prides himself on knowing all the plants of the Shan hills, with as much pride as a man of his quiet nature can express, but once he had been a mechanic like his father and his father’s father, who came to Burma with the British Railway Company in the 1880s. Robin’s father worked privately for the British and then, during the Second World War, for the occupying Japanese.

Kalaw was sometimes bombed by B-52s returning from Japanese targets in the north. The bombers were required to return empty and would let loose their extra ordinance over the quiet hill station. Robin’s aunt was killed by one of these, and his uncle injured, when it swooped out from the formation they had been counting and bombed the empty field where they stood.

After the war, Robin’s family ran a transit company, moving material for the public works department with heavy Buick trucks. A financial crisis hiked up the oil prices in 1979, and Robin’s father sold the whole gas-guzzling fleet. Robin told his father to buy Japanese cars, but his father said, “I don’t trust them. Unreliable.” Rather they became mechanics, and later opened the Golden Lilly.

There are only a handful of Sikh families in Myanmar, the relics of the Raj, and they are slowly dying out to emigration and mixed marriage. To the distress of his parents, Robin refused an arranged marriage and married for love, to a Myanmar girl from Kalaw. They have been married for twelve years, and he is happy even though she did not like to make him Punjabi food. Ah, what we sacrifice under love’s humbling spell!

You would never guess the Sikh was so romantic, as he stoops up and down the rolling hills with their dead green color, past tiered rice paddies, thirsty for the endless rains that come in August, because there’s no irrigation here in the hills, no other source of water but the monsoon. The area outside the Ayeyarwady would look like Egypt outside of the Nile if it were not for the seasonal rains swept northeast from sweltering India.

Hillsmen squat around pots of tea in the shade of a wooden shack, halfway up the slope of one of the hills, and one girl works in the vegetable field in peasant clothes and a rice paddy hat. They kindly share their tea with us and ask, through Robin, where we are from. Robin tells us that these are people of the Danu tribe that lives in the hills near Kalaw, one of the four tribes in the area, who speak different dialects and keep their own villages.

The Palaung tribe also lives near Kalaw, and unlike the others, they must marry within the tribe. Everyone in a village is related, and there is a high level of inbred deformities, especially polio. They have a strange marital custom where, after the wedding, the teenage bride goes back to her own longhouse for a month, after which time she is called out by her husband. The newlyweds go off to a distant field and live for a month in a shack, working in the day and sleeping in the shanty at night, when it earns its name of “Honeymoon Shack.” After that month they go live in the husband’s family’s longhouse, sharing space with the extended family and the animals, and set in for a long life of marriage.

The Pao tribe lives further south of Kalaw, and we will come to them another day. Most of the villages we see—Hinkagore, Myinsanggone, and Myindaik, a few dozen houses shrouded in bamboo groves, in the hills on the western side of the Tong-La Valley, with the Knuckle Mountains to the east—are those of the Danu. Of the Taung U, with their long dark faces and natural houses, we see some, passing through a Taung U village of sixteen families called Bawninnkone, but a medicine man lives there who is one of the Pao.

The medicine man’s house looks like most of the tribal homes—a two-storied long house of woven bamboo, the bottom floor on a raised dirt foundation used for cattle, tools, and drying garlic, and the top floor, reached by a slanted bamboo ladder, for the family. The tin roof is slanted against the rain. Only the rich have tin roofs rather than the equally waterproof bamboo sheets, and despite the noise and the heat, they are a source of inestimable pride and prestige. We come down a steep hill over the stilted home and crossed a dirt yard where squares of turmeric dry in the sun. The brown roots look like ginger, and when broken open they are orange and smell like India. When properly mixed into a potion, they make good treatment for stomach ailments and Alzheimer’s. Passing them, we climb the bamboo ladder and enter the house.

There is an open room with a floor of bamboo mats that has the unstable feel of walking across an attic. A few posters of pop stars and Buddhas decorate the thatch walls, a few shelves with old pop bottles full of strange brown mixtures, and a shrine of gold and glass on a far wall, with offerings of flowers, candles, incense, and food arranged around the statues of Buddha and the local nat spirits, a sort of dryad. An open door leads into a kitchen area with a stone hearth, where a fire smokes under a kettle, and there is an open balcony off the far end where the family would wash dishes. It is a dark and smoky house, with only one window in the corner of the main hall, and seated under that window on a bedroll, the only item of furniture other than a round table—there in the streaming sunlight sits the medicine man.

He is eighty-four, as dried as the turmeric in the yard, as brown as a cigar, and he considers us with lugubrious eyes, lying there like an invalid. He wears loose Shan trousers and a baggy shirt, and on his head a green and yellow towel wrapped up in a Chinese turban, open in the center to reveal his bald pate. An ashtray next to him is full of reeking palm-leaf cheroots, and though he no longer smokes fourteen a day, he is still a considerable smoker. He has a whiskey flask full of mountain goat blood and wild honey, his own medicine, and Robin says, “It’s why he looks so young.” There is also a spittoon, a ledger, and three of his ten Pali spellbooks with runes and candle templates, potion recipes and tattoo designs. The medicine man is not just a shaman and alchemist, but also a tattooist, an acupuncturist, and a masseuse, and he has been in his life a farmer, hunter, and an instructor of a martial art called Bang.

We walk back along the train tracks, keeping our cameras hidden as we pass the fence of a military base. Burman peasants go the other way with loads balanced on their heads, and the hills turned green and gold in the slanted light.

Ron and I went out to the Chinese hangout for dinner. All these flying ants have hatched after the rain, and they fill the street thick as falling ash. They start coming into the restaurant through cracks around the window and suiciding into the food on the table, so the Chinese turn off the lights and bring out candles.

The topic of discussion is international support for Myanmar: China has a good deal with them, exchanging political legitimacy and UN support for dirt cheap commodities, especially metal, oil, and natural gas, and gas-starved India is looking for the same—but what about our mighty Western Powers with their moral agendas? The US and UN boycott Burma, spend a lot of time talking about it, while Western multi-nationals sweep in and get a great deal to extract resources and send them back to the eager markets of Myanmar’s enemies.

Ron remarks, with typical Israeli cynicism, “But it’s like that everywhere. One hand says no, and the other takes. That’s how it is.”

We stop at a street grills on the way back, to eat some grilled something from a goat and some pancake filled with mixed banana and egg. At Golden Kalaw we sit in the lounge with the last of the whiskey and looked for a movie. The Untouchables ends and there is only some Russian news and Al-Jazeera. After a while the owner gets out a DVD that reads “Sharon Stone Sexy Goddess” and says, “Very good movie.” We say, “Okay.” He turns on Basic Instinct, and several Burmans sit around watching it intently with their legs crossed.

Several sex scenes later, I hear some drunken wailing from out in the street, and I shoulder my bag and say, “I’m going to see what’s going on.” Some distance down the street there are four Burmans sitting on a concrete divider on the side of the road. One of them is playing guitar, and they all know the songs—Burmese recuts of Western and Japanese hits, with Burmese lyrics substituted in. I had met one of them before and say hello. Then I am seated next to the guitarist, with a cigarette and a glass of rum—they only had the one glass.

“In Myanmar,” says the Burman with long hair, “we mix the rum with water.”

I say, “Sounds good,” and soon there are five cigarettes burning in the dark, everyone drunk and howling at the moon.

They play the kind of ballads you play at the end of the night, loud and noisy and never in harmony. The long-haired Burman flails around in the street and sings in a high-pitched voice. The man with the guitar is some sort of contest winner, they try to tell me, and is very good. Presently he sets his instrument in his lap and wants some rum, but long hair has misplaced the glass. He waved his lighter around the grass to find it and laughed. The guitarist takes a swig of rum from the bottle, then some water.

“You’re a champion,” I say.

“Not Inter Milan,” says the Burman.

“Ha ha,” says long hair,—“You hear? He is not Inter Milan. He is very clever, with the joking.”

The four of them are tour guides, relatives of the owner of the Golden Kalaw, and so they speak good English. They ask me if I can play anything, and I wave my finger like, wait a second, and dig my harmonica out of my bag. “Oh, harmonica!” I tell them I am not very good, but I can play some melodies. The guitarist start tuning their guitar. It is ninety-years-old, passed down from a teacher who was a grandfather to one of them, and they love the instrument like a little sister. They have to tune it with a pair of pliers because it is missing the pegs.

“You can wait?” the guitarist asks,—“you wait one year, okay?”

It is related that eighty per cent of Kalaw can play the guitar (and that 100 per cent likes to drink). The town is famous for its schools, and students come from all over the countryside to study there. When the locals find a pretty girl in one of the dormitories, they go out in a small troupe and play guitar in front of the dormitory windows. When more than one group wants to play, they take turns and compete to see who could play the best. For the most talented wailers, the girls would open the door of the dormitory and invite the boys closer for tea or coffee.

I wave at the guitarist and say, “The girls always give him coffee?”

“I’m not as he says,” says the guitarist, offended. “I am not as he says.”

We talk about girls for a while, and I ask the guitarist if he has a girlfriend. He mumbles something. I ask, “She is a Thai?” but the Burman says, “No, she is die.” I am shocked, in the way that only an utterance of mortality can shock, as if it were an invocation of the hooded one himself. “Oh, she died?” I say,—“My God, that’s sad. What happened?” The guitarist answers, “Cancer. She die three years ago. Now I am alone since then.” He seems like the sentimental kind of guy who will love only once in his life, as he tunes his ancient guitar and looks sidelong into the past.

He starts playing again, howling loud down the empty streets. Other drunks show up. One lays down in the road, waving his arms in the air and singing along. Another invites me to his apartment—“Only joking!” he adds. I play my harmonica along with the Burmese songs, the stolen Rod Stewart ones, and then we sing Country Roads in English. They howl out a final barroom dirge, beautiful in its drunken candor, and then I say goodnight and refuse all demands that I must stay. It is already late, and we leave the next day for Inle Lake.

END SCENE.

Rise up and take the power back, it’s time the
Fat cats had a heart attack, you know that
Their time is coming to an end, we have to
Unify and watch our flag ascend.
—Muse

A trash fire burned outside Lumpini Park. It was a desolate scene, with a line of soldiers visible in the smoky and seething distance, and the boom of gunfire seemed to come from every direction. A man rode up on a motorcycle, his face masked like a highwayman, and in one hand he carried a huge Thai flag that nearly touched the ground. Expertly he steered his motorcycle around and around the trash fire, and the flag waved quietly in the smoke. Plumes of it—a fog of war—rose into the air all around Rajprasong, from piles of tires set afire to keep back the soldiers, on that first day of the siege.

Security forces moved to tighten their cordon. They built walls of sandbags and razor wire and pointed their rifles out from the rubble. Weighted in battle armor, they thudded across the highway overpass that runs along the southern end of Lumpini Park. Traffic still crawled behind them, and a local audience turned out to stand along the pedestrian overpasses near the battleground. They came in spite of the government’s warnings, in spite of the echo of gunfire and crash of explosions, and even though it was a Friday. They had to see it.

The Red Shirts hid behind their tires and spears, a space between soldier and rebel, a desolation of stones and broken glass, which closed suddenly, capriciously, violently, at several points along the circuitous front. Red Shirts mounted on motorcycles and scooters formed a rebel cavalry that rushed in squadrons at the army barricades, and then lurched back around into the encampment, with a Parthian shot of bottles or fireworks. In one place the mob overran some of the security forces and captured three army trucks. The mob pulled out the drivers and held them and beat them, and the mob set fire to one of the trucks, and the mob cheered in a lustful frenzy, a cheer that became a solid drone, as the soldiers watched from some cold distance through the transparent screen of their riot shields, through the leveled scopes of their rifles.

A squadron of mounted Red Shirts formed outside the protest area, and in the afternoon they made a desperate charge to enter it, carrying food and water and more makeshift weapons. They rode straight at the police barricades near the Victory Monument. People went out onto the balconies of their gentrified apartments to watch the smoky tumult, like the balconies of an opera house, running up a wall of the Coliseum. Gunshots! Five observers knocked down on the lower balcony, some screaming, some still. Lo, the soldiers shout, “Get off the balcony!” metallic over the loudspeakers.

A bomb exploded in the rally site just after six. It sounded like someone had dropped a dumpster out the window of one of the skyscrapers that surrounded Rajprasong—the Intercontinental or the Grand Hyatt or CentralWorld. The captains jumped down off the stage and were dog-piled by their bodyguards. Everyone was terrified, and justly, for sixteen people were injured in the blast. Another 21 were poisoned by some mysterious player handing out cups of free coffee. And another 141 people were wounded and sixteen were killed in the fighting. The security forces had their orders to start with rubber bullets and with shots over the heads of the rebels, but most of them were recent conscripts from the provinces, and the only order that mattered was the one authorizing soldiers to use their weapons in self-defense. Well, what do orders matter anyway?

Both comrades and medics feared the government’s snipers and left dead and wounded lying in the streets for hours untended, as the battle lines ebbed and flowed. The military prevented ambulances from entering the arena. Emergency medical technicians had to shuffle out in a duck-walk and carry the wounded on stretchers to the perimeter, from whence they could be driven to any of Bangkok’s fine modern hospitals. One EMT was shot off his motorbike by a soldier, and he later died.

Four journalists were also wounded in the first three days. Two were Thais and one was a Canadian, who was shot several times but survived. The Red Shirts told other journalists and photographers to come back—they would be safe within the rally site, and surely someone had to see this. Someone had to watch. Where would Jesus be, if not one Evangelist had attended the Crucifixion?

So ended the first day, though the war continued into the night. Spats of gunfire in the alleyways. Explosions in Lumpini Park. Cries from all quarters. A woman’s broadcasted voice, tinny and uncertain: “For your own safety, please stay indoors.” Thomas Fuller, the man who saw Seh Daeng die, lay flat as an eastern supplicant on the deck of his apartment. He wore body armor and a Kevlar helmet, relics from his coverage of the Iraq War, and watched as the city he thought he knew descended into madness. He wrote this as he lay there:

A city with floor-to-ceiling windows is a confident city. Sheets of glass, unlike the thick walls and tiny windows of centuries past, send a message: We are not worried about what lurks outside. But from my desk, it seems as if Bangkok’s architecture has outpaced its political maturity. Who in Bangkok today would feel confident behind a wall of glass when explosions rip through the night?

Bangkok today has many more high-rise condominiums and much more luxury than the city I knew 15 years ago, but is plagued by its dysfunctional politics. Is there any other city in the world today that has so many cloth-napkin restaurants, spas—and periodic grenade attacks? How many other world capitals have streets filled with fleets of luxury cars and armies of protesters apparently willing to die for their convictions?

By morning of the second day the protest area showed all the signs of medieval siege: confusion, bickering, and pestilence. Trash piled up, and flies descended on Rajprasong thick as doom. The government did not withdraw its portable toilets, for the noble cause of sanitation. As for the workers assigned with cleaning and maintaining them, they came back bruised after being assaulted by the Red Shirts, as servants of the tyrant, and could not be made to return. Imagine a frightened child in red, shielding his eyes with one hand and waving a stick with the other.

“We are afraid for the soldiers, too,” said a nurse at one of the Red Shirt first aid stations, a tearful old woman named Jenny Tan, expressing the saddest sentiment of a nation divided. “The soldiers are our sons. We are mother, father, sister, brother. So we don’t want any of them to die. Very, very sad. Very, very sad for Thailand.”

Women and those too young or too old to fight huddled in the guarded center of the intersection. They would not leave, though the Thai Red Cross and Unicef pleaded with them. The captain Nattawut moved the children and their families into the grounds of a nearby temple, but the women who wanted to fight remained before the Pratunam stage. One old woman said, “No matter what happens, I’ll never leave the rally. Our friends have died for us, so we’ll never leave others for the sake of personal safety.” In the temple another old mother named Sangwaan said, “Everybody is united. Nobody wants to back off. I don’t fear death.”

What do you say to that, Reader? What do you say to a mother when you tell her, Death is coming for you and your child, and she replies, I’m waiting—what can you possibly say?

I visited the area around Rajprasong, blockaded at every street by policemen, the streets empty. A family crept up to one of the security stations and reached over the barbed wire to hand the soldiers bags of food. It was a dead place. There was trash piled on every corner, oozing out into the gutter. All the long lines of stores were closed up with steel shutters, except for one curious stall which continued putting together altars of Buddha in crimson and gold as if nothing special were happening within a hundred miles.

The government continued to wail about harder stances. “We cannot turn back,” quoth Abhisit, slick as ice on Thai TV, “We cannot let the country remain in this condition, where people do not respect the law. Ending the rally is the only way to prevent calamity.” Hello, calamity? Calamity is upon you, Prime Minister! Your city burns! Your nation is disgraced! Even if you ordered all your soldiers back and sent the Red Shirts such an appeasing offer of peace that only a fool would refuse it, the soldiers would not move and the Red Shirts would refuse, because this is mightier than thee. The king is on his deathbed, and the nation crumbles!

The military was committed. On Saturday eight more people were killed and nearly 60 injured, but the soldiers had anticipated blood. There would be no retreat as there had been after the skirmishes of April. This was an all or nothing effort. Somewhere along the line they posted up a banner proclaiming a “Live Fire Zone;” and all along the line the security forces closed in on the barricades, and the Red Shirts fought back with their slings and arrows, and with pipe bombs and improvised flamethrowers. They kept their bags of fish sauce and chili paste in reserve, since food was running low. They began to loot the grocery stores and 7-11s in Rajprasong.

“You are being used as tools,” said Abhisit, but none in Rajprasong heard his words. They heard only the great harangue of Nattawut and Jatuporn and the rest, were too occupied by the desperate struggle to consider the metaphysics of their predicament.

The army called for reinforcements as the battlefield expanded, for more Red Shirt heroes rode to rescue their brothers and sisters. Residents woke up to find their neighborhood a war zone, as the Red Shirts assaulted the cordon along its perimeter, desperate to take supplies into the besieged captains, or to simply join them in their dying agony, for all rebels are born to be martyrs, and what a chance this was! The whole lot of wretches wanted a fight to the death, which was the only topic they could agree upon.

The divided captains held as hostage the commerce of Bangkok, but had issued no demands. Some still wanted to surrender, some to fight to the death. By Saturday they were all terrified. One captain, the man they call Rambo, was seen wearing a woman’s wig in the camp and avoiding photographers. They no longer appeared on the Pratunam sound stage to embolden the battalions with their rousing Mussolini manifestos. The cameras hung loose as abandoned artillery, and the plastic chairs stood empty. The crowds had thinned out and lost their passion to a famine and fear, timid and capable of anything. They fought on the barricades or huddled within and wondered when the snipers would take them.

Nattawut hosted a small council of journalists. He said that it was no longer possible to control some of the protesters, and the journalists duly wrote this down in their notepads, as if it were news to anyone.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and in a hospital bed across the city, Seh Daeng lay dying. Surgeons removed a blood clot from the cerebrum but said that the brain was inflamed—surely with rage!—where the bullet had passed through it, and Khattiya could die from his injuries. The papers call it “critical condition.” The doctors said things like “almost nil.”

Seh Daeng’s wife had passed away many years ago, but his young daughter Khattiyaa sat by his side, fearful and tearful. With her wide-set eyes wet with tears, she told reporters, “I’m now trying to be as strong as my father.” The major-general’s old classmates from Class 21 of the Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School arrived to see him, as did Bangkok officials. Seh Daeng awoke for none of them.

MONDAY. The words linger in the corner of the movie screen, filled by the horrible site of a smoking city after four days of war, and it could be your city, Reader, it looks so familiar, with its glass towers and shopping malls and fancy cars. The commercial heart of the city was a warzone of ash and noise. The five-star Dusit Thani Hotel belched smoke from its wounds of a midnight grenade attack. A hundred of its guests cowered in the basement. It was atop this very building that the sniper took aim at Seh Daeng, and it had been used as a base for hundreds of government forces for weeks.

Gunshots and explosions came more frequently. Schools and businesses were closed, the government was shut down, and embassy conferences were cancelled. All over the area, Thais were trapped in their homes. They rushed to the supermarkets and hoarded food. It was not safe anymore. The troops and snipers surrounding Rajprasong had begun to fire with live ammunition at anything moving within the haze of the camp, and the “terrorist element” fought back with lethal force. A soldier was shot and killed near the Dusit Thani, the first soldier to fall in the skirmishes. Thirty-five people had died and 266 had been wounded since the fighting began on Thursday, and on that Monday, the Red Commander, five days wounded, made it thirty-six. Seh Daeng was dead.

The major-general died before he could be stripped of his rank. His body was redressed in his camouflage and taken to a Buddhist temple, where it would lay out for three nights, as Red Shirts tumbled by, shouting, “Seh Daeng, our hero!”

Alas, what fear and panic must wreak, and alas, the careless murder of war, which strikes so random and so rarely pegs the culprits—Apollo’s arrows in the Achaean camp. The bullets take foolish men with wooden swords and greedy hearts, caught up in a conflict too real for them. If he could but speak one last time, if his wounds could ope their ruby lips, I’m sure the Red Commander would have channeled the words of Shakespeare’s noble Brutus, who also fought against tyranny in spite of his love. I know in my heart that Seh Daeng would have said straight from his:

___________________Countrymen,
My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.
I shall have glory by this losing day,
More than Octavius and Mark Antony
By this vile conquest shall attain unto.
So fare you well at once, for Brutus’ tongue
Hath almost ended his life’s history.
Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest
That have labored to attain this hour.

Alas, that they did not listen, that the rebellion climaxed as tragically as it did! Not in any Rapture did it end, but in the worst sort of blood orgy imaginable. O God!

There had been so many suggestions of renewed negotiations, shot down each time by the dogs of war who said they would fight to the death. You cannot argue with a battle cry, nor with men incensed beyond reason. Things had gone too far. On Monday the government issued an ultimatum: Leave by three or else. Helicopters dropped pamphlets on the encampment with the news, and the protesters responded with bangfai rockets. Some of them left, escorted out by “men in black.” Of the 100,000 that once packed the intersection, perhaps 5000 Red Shirts remained when the clock struck three. They were mostly men of grim severity, wearing black shirts and red bandanas, the new uniform of the guardsmen.

And there we see one of the grandest tableaus of the campaign: While a few Red Shirts filled small bottles with gasoline and practiced the new tack of hitting them with a golf club, and while small cabals looked up at the department stores where the snipers hid, and while some handed out balls of sticky rice that was the last of the food, and as a monk in saffron led a congregation of guardsmen in prayer, and as trucks full of tires raced out to the perimeter to toss more rubber on the burning pyres while onlookers cheered, the great majority of Red Shirts gathered in the center of Rajprasong and they danced and sang as if it were the end of the world—for all of them knew that the end was nigh and that victory was impossible.

Then the crackdown fell. On Tuesday the army mustered its armored personnel carriers, great wheeled slugs of steel. They overran some of the outlying barricades, and the soldiers dismantled them. Two Red Shirts were shot dead as they tried to set fire to the kerosene-soaked walls. Others were successful, and the day ended with smoke.

A full assault came the following morning. The war engines pushed forward through more barricades, through volleys of grenades, rockets, flamethrowers, petrol bombs, and whatever else the rebels had conjured in their laboratories. They battled under the eaves of luxury hotels and shopping malls and conference centers. They advanced between the Royal Bangkok Sports Club and the Four Seasons. They shot at men under the Holiday Inn.

Four Red Shirts died on Wednesday, as did an Italian photographer, Fabio Pohlengi. The government said that a grenade slew him as he stood next to a policeman, which does not explain the bullet wound through his gut. Witnesses said that he was shot in the back while fleeing with a mob of rebels.

The Red Shirts gathered in Pratunam—what should we do? Jatuporn took the stage in answer. He wore his Gandhi shirt and bore a defeated look as he told the crowd that he would surrender himself—“We cannot resist these savages anymore,” said the captain, and they booed him, the coward. After all his proud words, all his words of blood, Jatuporn now pleaded over their cries, “Please listen to me! Brothers and sisters, I will use the word ‘beg.’ I beg you. We have to end this now,”—but they booed him: they booed him because they knew that to surrender meant to lose everything, meant that they would be dispersed back out to their northern farms, where their children were starving and their fields were dry and there were no prospects, where they would wait for the government to come to arrest them, and then they would vanish and none would ever hear from them again; the urban rich would win, and the haves would take more from the have-nots, and things would go on as they always had, but worse than before because they had failed. They booed, and they began setting fire to Rajprasong.

Just next to the Pratunam stage there was one of the largest department stores in Southeast Asia. Lonely Planet says, “Central World Plaza (cnr Th Ploenchit & Th Ratchadamri) Formerly known as World Trade Center, Central World is Bangkok’s glass-paneled embodiment of consumer excess, complete with eight floors of restaurants, beer gardens, cinemas—even an ice-skating rink. The plaza’s lifeblood is the Zen [World] department store, which is dotted with high-end fashion brands. Skytrain to Chit Lom.”

Zen World! What a wonder was this six-story lifestyle megastore! Level one was titled “The Beauty of Luxury.” Level three was “The Casual Woman’s Zone.” The fourth floor was the destination for metrosexual men, and the sixth floor had a doggie spa and hotel. The peasants of Thailand can barely feed their children with white rice, and they live in bamboo shacks, and somewhere there are Thais who care for nothing but “ultra-chic fitness and aerobic wear” and “non-chalantly stylish smart-casual fashion,” and who are not only unembarrassed by all this, but who cannot understand what these stupid northern rebels are doing in the middle of their metropolis! Aren’t you sick, Reader? Can’t you see why these men and women were mad enough to die?

It was unto this very Zen World, this highest jewel in the crown of capitalism, that the red mobs applied the torch. They stormed it, as the French stormed the Bastille, stormed through the trendy stores—Playground, Manga, MUJI, Flow Now, and Q Concept—and emerged with cell phones and jeans, even as the Parisians emerged with guns from the arsenal; and they set fires behind the gleaming glass facade, doused piles of “ultra-chic” clothes in kerosene and set them ablaze, so that even as the war engines closed in on them, rumbling like the wheels of doom, they could all look up, as the whole emblem of the shopping mall and all its wasteful chic horror was consumed in red flames! Libertas, Fraternitas, Equalitas!

All around the city, all around the nation, Red Shirts responded to the crackdown by lashing out in a similar manner. Thirty-five buildings were ignited, including the Thai stock exchange, two banks, a cinema, and a television station, which was forced to stop broadcasting. In the provinces, they set fire to two city halls, as fresh protests erupted and were summarily crushed. There was a curfew in 24 of Thailand’s 76 provinces. The government broadcasted a calming music video on television: Thai flags, rice paddies, and the beloved king, set to the pop lyrics, “We have to love each other. / We want to see Thais loving each other again, / just like we used to.”

And in Rajprasong, as the suave window displays of Zen World went up in flames, the Red Shirts scattered, frightened children shocked by what they had wrought. The army’s war machines had stopped the advance, but the Red Shirts fled as if routed by pursuing hordes. They left behind bedrolls and slippers and pots of food. They left the generators throbbing, the spotlights shining on the Pratunam stage, the speakers broadcasting noise. When the soldiers and journalists arrived, Rajprasong was abandoned. The uprising was over.

The captains surrendered one by one, or they were captured. Jatuporn turned himself in around noon, along with Nattawut and five other captains. Arisman, who had led the assault in the Battle of the Overpass, and who had previously eluded his captors by jumping out a hotel window, escaped from Rajprasong in a disguise. He was captured Wednesday night and taken to a military base outside Bangkok. Fifty-one people had died in the last stand. Total casualties since April stood at 85 dead and 1,378 injured. As with Black May in 1992, when 52 people died, many others will vanish without account. The government has their pictures and has their names and will visit them later at official convenience.

Abhisit expressed his sorrow over the deaths, though he never apologized for his methods. Those against the Red Shirts called the crackdown legitimate. The Red Shirts themselves were caught up in a fury of just revenge—cries of “Bring down the dictator,” echoes of the slogans that initiated the Bangkok rebellion. Young Khattiyaa Sawasdipol, only daughter of Seh Daeng, said she would take over leadership of the fallen hero’s Khattiyatham Party and make her dad’s dream come true. Once she had supported the Yellow Shirts, but now she was all Red.

Thai Financial Minister Korn Chatikavanij held a much more revealing conference where he discussed the impact of the protests. Politics, he said, had not risen along with the wealth, and this was the result—the rebellion that had clipped Thailand’s 10 per cent economic growth by 1.5 per cent. “A company is a country, a country is a company,” Thaksin once said, and all that spilt blood can be reduced by his successors to 1.5 per cent—to a fraction of a number, fifteen in a thousand, a mere factor of greater finance, a little spasm of a muscle, easily ignored; a blip on the radar and nothing to worry over, the ministers think, just as the early warning signs of cancer are nothing to worry about. Meanwhile the thing goes from benign to malignant, and the fatal danger grows.

Conflagration in the provinces. The curfew must go on for another week. The old firebrand words are revived—terrorist, criminal, Thaksim!—and Seh Daeng is worshiped in his tomb. No noble heart was he, just a poor wretch with a crooked chivalry, but by God, a modern folk hero is born before our eyes. Burn the joss sticks and raise the red flags! The rebellion lives on, because it is impossible to destroy a culminating feeling, especially one so powerful as the fear and rage of the oppressed. Now the class divide is a scar. There will always be poor men in Thailand, and they will always have a reason to fight.

To this conclusion, I am obliged to add another, for three weeks after the crackdown, I returned to Bangkok and revisited the site. Rajprasong was restored to commercial grandeur. Fresh flowers were planted on the median where the Red Shirts had laid out their bamboo mats for two months of residence. A sign on the skyway said, “Amazing Thailand, Grand Sale 2010, We Love Rajprasong!” What better excuse than class warfare accompanied by horrific massacre to hold a sale? Traffic flowed where the crowds had stood, as oblivious to irony as traffic always is, and Louis Vitton and Burberry and the bank and the cinema had restored their claim to the intersection.

But up on that skyway crossing the busy street, people stopped and stared—wealthy Thais in suits and visiting farang. They leaned on the banisters and stared longer than they had at any piece in a museum, though what they saw eluded meaning as much as a sculpture of pain. Art students sat around in circles doing creative things with their cameras, and all the others just stared out over the cleanup and construction crews. The wall before them was in ruins, the ochre remnants of a sign—“ZEN WO D” with the O hanging down—and the broken glass of a gutted building, full of ash and glory.

FINIS.

Sam asked me one day, as I told them all the story of the end, with wide eyes and a shaking voice, for I had become too invested in this struggle—she asked me, “Which side do you support?” And I got this horrified look and answered, “Neither. The whole thing is a tragedy.”

Four of us were in Bago then. The night before we left I had stayed up until five in the morning talking to Guillaume and Ron, and at eight I had to get up and go. Sam was leading a group of us—Gina of Minnesota, Ron, and myself—to a town just sixty miles northwest of Yangon on the road to Mandalay, a small and busy trade town called Bago. The San Franciscan had only a few days left before her flight out and wanted to spend them seeing something new. The only impediment was the difficulty in moving anywhere in Myanmar.

The trains were government-owned, sold tickets to foreigners only at an inflated price, and took forty hours, anyway. It took us until noon to get out to the Yangon bus station, and there we sat on the kid-sized stools that the Burmans prefer and eating cold noodles and liver while we waited for the next bus to Bago. This took another two hours through arid plains, but the roads aren’t that bad. Most every journey by bus compares well to my time in India.

We arrived in Bago and wrestled our bags out into the muddy station, with some difficulty. Now Gina had backpacked Asia before, but this trip she had these two big rollerbags, one of them heaving with school supplies. She had seen a rural school on a previous visit to Myanmar where the kids were writing their homework out in the dirt, and this time brought pencils and erasers and crayons and notebooks for them. She was herself a teacher, like her mother, who discouraged her from entering such a trying trade as education, but Gina liked teaching kids too much.

Before taking a position at an international school in Saigon, which was her job up until recently, leading field trips into the Cambodian jungle and joining the scooter flotillas of Vietnam—before that, Gina spent two years in the Peace Corps. They dispatched her to Kiribati, a country that nobody has heard of, and which only rarely features on maps of the world, somewhere out in the South Pacific, where the Micronesian islanders live quiet lives, fish the oceans, worship avidly their Jesuit Catholicism, and sometimes ferment toddy from the young coconuts. The men laugh with a swaying, big-bellied bombast, arms waving, mouth open so wide the wisdom teeth show; and the women wail at funerals with a sensational melodrama, fainting across the coffin, tearing their hair and rending their clothes in grief.

Gina worked in an elementary school on Arorae, an island where nothing ever happens, so people retell the old stories over and over again. Remember the time when that man got drunk and rang the village clock in the middle of the night and was kicked off the island? When the fisherman’s son got his wrist caught in the line and the shark pulled him under? When that Western woman sheltered the bloodied wife of a fisherman and shouted at the husband, though he had a knife and was in his right, and made him go away? This, of course, was Gina.

One day a Kiribati lad climbed up to the peak of the school roof and dropped his pants and defecated right there. The teachers were horrified, and they brought two suspects into a backroom for punishment. Corporal punishment was outlawed in Kiribati, but the teachers sometimes forget. When Gina arrived a teacher told her what was happening, and she rushed into the darkened teacher’s lounge. All the other teachers were sitting around the room in a guilty circle. The principal had the two boys suspected of the fecal crime at a desk in the center with their hands out, and he held the long spine of a palm frond, which he would have used as a whip if Gina had not raged into the room and commanded him to stop.

“No you do not!” she cried, all that Minnesota modesty forgotten, as the principal quivered in rage and the teachers looked on with hidden glee,—“You do not touch those kids. I don’t care what they did, you do not touch the kids. If they pooped on the roof, then you make them climb up there and clean it up. Do not lay a hand on them!”

So anyway Gina had this big rollerbag full of school supplies set there in the Bago bus station. A Burman named Aung with an oily, used-car salesman air about him approached me and gave me the card for the Mya Nanda Hotel, which turned out to be recommended in the Bible, so what the hell. Aung agreed to drive us down the road to the hotel free of charge. For that purpose he organized a gang of four scooters. Gina balanced her heavy rollerbag behind the driver of one and sat on the back end of the bike. The rest of us took spots on the backs of other scooters, and we all set off racing down the Yangon – Mandalay Road, weaving past grumbling semis and chugging one-cylinders and top-heavy Joad-wagons and all the flurries of Chinese scooters.

We haggled a long time at the hotel for a triple room with an extra bed. All of us knew what to do and did not say, “Oh come on, take it, it’s only a few dollars,” until the good deal was won. The room had air-conditioning, but the power grid only runs for six hours a day in most Burmese cities. The Burmese say that you cannot be shocked by touching an electrical wire, only by reading the newspaper. Everyone had a generator but gas was too expensive to run the air-conditioning off that. So most of the time we were stuck with a single rotary fan, shaking its head No on the dresser. The lowlands were a heat-drenched hell unless it rained, and then the air cooled off nicely.

Aung hung around the hotel like a job applicant, straight-backed and politely insistent, as we washed our faces and some of our clothes and kept on saying, “What are you going to do? I would like to know your plan. I can arrange a tour, if you like,” but we did not have a plan. On that first day we just wandered through the wonderfully Asian marketplace, all dirt roads, canvas awnings, and wicker baskets full of things you’ve never seen, and we were the only foreign faces in town. We found an open restaurant and ate some food and talked about schooling.

We had made it back to the hotel when the rain started coming down. It lasted only a few hours, and that night we wandered out into the drenched black town, crossing lakes and rivers in the dirty roads. The power was out, as usual, and the only light was the scooter headlights and the excess that spilled out from the teahouses. We stopped in one that was making something like Indian food and ate greasy chapatis and potato curry. There were a lot of men and families sitting there with cups of tea watching the movie on the television in the corner. We followed a trishaw driver with a flashlight down black alleys and along the highway to a beer hall and had a few 50 cent cups, talking about what blame we must sometimes endure, we Americans and Israelis abroad.

Oily Aung woke us up the next morning, knocking on the door and turning on the lights like a summer camp counselor. He sat there off to the side as we ate breakfast. We talked noisily and I slurped down coffee and then we slouched around getting ready for the day. Aung kept sidling in on our nerves and saying, “I’d like to know your plan for the day.”

“We’re backpackers,” said Sam, finally fed up with him,—“We don’t have a plan.”

“Well if you would like to do a tour, I can arrange. There are many sites around Bago. Reclining Buddha, Shwemadaw Pagoda, Hintha Gon Pagoda, Kyaik Pun Pagoda. All around Bago. If you want to see them all, you must have motorbike.”

Eventually, after a great burden of haggling, we got Aung to rent us two of his scooters for $15. Ron drove one and Sam sat on the back, laughing at me because I did not know how to drive a manual bike, and Gina had driven one through the flurry of Vietnam, and so I sat on the back of hers. We drove off east first, around the hundred meter gilded umbrella of the Shwemadaw Pagoda, which required a government ticket, to the Hintha Gon, and we took off our sandals and walked up the covered stairway to the temple, where there was a great statue of Buddha, still and erect as a Pharaoh of Egypt, and smaller ones of the Bodhisattvas, surrounded by mountainous offerings—plates of rice and sweets, flower garlands, bottles of whiskey, and cans of beer. Pictures from the story of Buddha ran all around the ceiling like a comic book.

There was a room off to the side and lower than the sanctum sanctorum, full of musical instruments and musicians warming up, men encircled by drums or cymbals or fiddling with long-stemmed horns. Four dancers in strange garb entered the room, though we could not tell if they were women or only dressed like them. The musicians began a wild cacophonous noise, and the dancers wove their way with waving arms across the room and past the statues. They danced all together and then one at a time, and then a man pinned thousand kyut notes to their dresses and they danced more.

We wandered out after a while back down the stairs and drove across town. We had tea and steamed dumplings full of meat and onions or bean curd at a teahouse by the side of the busy road, then turned off down a side road. After stopping at a quiet wooded monastery, where I smoked cheroots with some Burmans while Ron and Sam taught their kids the “rock on” hand sign, we drove down past the Four Figure Pagoda to a massive reclining Buddha, a hundred meters tall, with a toe as big as me, lying sideways in a field with his head set on his elbow. There was another more famous one, the Schwethalyaung Buddha, housed in a huge tin building, at the end of a long hall full of vendors, but it was all covered in bamboo sheets as it was repainted.

The last place we visited was the Shwegugale Paya, at the end of the road that curled past that lethargic giant and off into the bamboo. The pagoda curved up to a high golden peak, and a courtyard ran around the white limestone base, with bamboo stands and muddy fields further out, and the road going off into the countryside. The sky looked like an apocalypse. I knew it was going to rain, as we went over to inspect the building, so I found a dry place for my Calcutta loafers and kept my helmet with me.

Sure enough, even as we neared the door, even as we leapt within it, the rain swept down on us in increasing torrents, which became like cataracts of the Nile, billowed out over the plains. Sam and Gina went out to dance through it, and Ron and I sat sensibly in the cavernous interior, beneath the three meter high Buddha, gold and enlightened. Soon the women came back, and we all sat there on the bamboo mats listening to the monsoon. What else could we do?

I know I am a scout
And I should find a way out
So everyone can find a way out.
—Modest Mouse

The man they called Seh Daeng, “Red Commander,” known otherwise as renegade Major General Khattiya, sat down for a hasty last meal in Siam Square. Lower lip jutting, eyes tight as Lee Van Cleef’s, a cowlick plastered to his forehead where his hat had been, aggressively spooning fried rice into his mouth. The Defense Minister had recommended that Khattiya be dismissed from duty for his support of the Red Shirt rebels, had forwarded the papers to Prime Minister Abhisit, but Seh Daeng still wore his army fatigues on the field of Rajprasong.

He said that if the other rebel commanders, the “cowardly idiots,” gave in to government demands, that he and the “hardcore” members would take over and would never give up. “We will fight until we win,” he said, gleeful and animated before the journalists and admirers. “We will use the trucks as barriers and we will drop firebombs on the armored vehicles.” He had trained his guardsmen to use pipes and spears and bangfai rockets, and he would lead them to victory.

They asked him, Seh Daeng, will you not remove your uniform, which makes you stand out in a crowd? Will you not wear a bulletproof vest? A helmet instead of that cloth hat? Anything?

“Such dress would make me feel like one who fears death, and would prevent me from leading others who do not have protective clothing,” quoth Seh Daeng, pulling his special forces hat closer down. The brim was tied up on the side, and metal rings ran along the front. “I’m a commander-in-chief, I can’t fear anything.” He said, “All I have on me is a small pistol and a stick. If anyone comes to arrest me, I can assure you I’ll shoot and fight to the end. Soldiers are on to me. There are snipers out there. But they’ll never get me.”

Seh Daeng’s stick was a long wooden staff he always walked around with. He used it in his training exercises. Some Red Shirts would dress up as riot police, with helmets and wooden shields that looked more like something from the Battle of Hastings than anything in the panoply of a modern police officer. The mock riot police lined up on one side of the street, Seh Daeng’s guardsmen on the other, and the Red Commander ran up and beat at the shields with his staff, harmless and smiling, to show them how it was done, this business of resistance. He went with reporters to a rebel workshop and drew back the string on a longbow they had made out of a bent PVC pipe and some fishing line. Seh Daeng approved.

The day was Thursday, May 13, the day of the Royal Plowing Ceremony in Thailand. Early in the morning two sacred white oxen were tied up to a plow on the ceremonial grounds at Sanam Luang, in a custom seven centuries old. The Crown Prince and his Royal Consort were there, as was Prime Minister Abhisit. Soothsayers presented the oxen with seven bowls of food and drink, and the oxen chose grass, signifying a normal water supply and an abundant rice crop. Thousands of farmers cheered the answer.

Next the Lord of the Plow, otherwise Secretary of Agriculture Yukol Limlaemthong, wearing gold and white robes and a plumed golden crown, chose one of three pieces of folded cloth of different lengths, and chose the longest of the set, thus acting as harbinger of a season of limited water supplies, high rice yields in the lowland areas, and low yields in the highlands. He threw out handfuls of rice, and thousands of gathered Thais scrambled to pick up the auspicious grains.

Thus the plowing season began, and on that same day, at 6 p.m., the rebel camp at Rajprasong was cut off. The security cordon blockaded the supply lines, the truckloads of food and water, and checked the identity of anyone trying to enter the intersection. The initial plan of the Center for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation was to cut off water and phone and electricity at sunset, but the residents and businessmen of the area complained and that plan was canceled. Still the soldiers moved into position.

Convoys of army trucks and armored vehicles plowed into the capital, and soldiers in their full kit marched along the freeway shoulder. They set up checkpoints, with barricades and armored vehicles, along the four roads leading into Rajprasong to keep more protesters out. They put snipers on the rooftops to protect security forces from the “men in black,” the “terrorist elements” of hired mercenaries that fought amongst mobs of unarmed Red Shirts. The streets were closed to traffic, public transit halted, and the government discussed a curfew. Abhisit brought another fifteen provinces into the state of emergency to prevent fresh rebel uprisings in the countryside. It was the most ambitious effort to end the rebellion since the stalemated crackdown on April tenth that first brought the Red Shirt movement into the international spotlight of uninformed sympathy.

And the heart of the movement, which encompassed the country, was the square mile around Rajprasong intersection, the commercial heart of Bangkok, a shopping district with enough floorspace to paint the walls, floors, and ceiling of the Mall of America—there in Rajprasong, where thousands were gathered in spite of the high temperatures and monsoon rains that threatened their crops, and the impending violence and starvation that threatened their lives—men and women and children, poor and hopeful and ready and waiting to be dealt with, one way or another. Some Red Shirt leaders wanted to break camp; others announced on the Pratunam stage that they would fight to the end, to the wild cheers of the mobs. It no longer mattered what the leaders decided. The movement was more than that.

What were they fighting for, those thousands of wretches besieged amid the malls and plazas of Bangkok? For justice against the tyrant, for the restoration of the people’s constitution, for the defense of Thaksin. Some of them were fighting for money, for a share of Thailand’s growing wealth. All of them were fighting for fear. They saw the urban middle-class of Thailand moving ahead and leaving the poor rural farmers behind, as if all the third class carriages had been detached from the train and were left to roll to a stop in the middle of nowhere; they saw this, and they were so terrified that they were willing to sacrifice or destroy everything on the slimmest chance, because they were absolutely unwilling to accept it. The country’s poor had risen up against its wealthy, and there would be wrath and ruin before the end.

An hour after the blockade began, Seh Daeng went with a group of foreign reporters to survey his people’s barricades along Lumpini Park and outside Chulalangkorn Hospital. He was a man who reveled in attention, and here he behaved the bravo, pointing out the better parts of his barricades and boasting of how they would turn back the dictator’s forces. Then the other reporters went off on their own to compare notes, leaving Seh Daeng alone with a journalist from the International Herald Tribune, Thomas Fuller.

The commander talked easily about his uniform, the same uniform he had worn during a campaign against Maoists thirty-odd years back, and about working with civilian troopers, and about the coming crackdown; and as he strolled along the lines of bamboo spears and piled tires and petrol bombs in the early twilight and said gruffly, almost absently, to his companion, “The military cannot get in here,”—he was shot in the head.

Fuller, who was not two feet away, heard a staccato snap over his shoulder, a bang as loud as a firecracker, and saw Seh Daeng’s eyes go wide with awe, his tight countenance slacken, and then the renegade general fell to a heap on the ground. His hat tumbled away, and blood spilled out from his temple. The journalist whirled around, by instinct, and saw nothing but the shocked faces of Red Shirt guardsmen, no assassin; and in the southern distance, away from Rajprasong, an overpass and a nest of skyscrapers.

The bullet had come from a high-powered rifle. It entered near Seh Daeng’s right temple, passed through his brain, came straight out the nape of his neck, and vanished into the pavement. The snap that Fuller heard was not the report of that rifle, but the sound of the bullet passing within inches of his head, faster than the speed of sound.

Imagine the howling and chaos. Alarums, cries within, fly, fly, fly! The other reporters closed in quick as vultures with cameras for beaks, and several Red Shirts snatched up the fallen general, Achaeans clutching at a disemboweled captain on the fields of Ilium. His black blood covered their clothes and arms, as it had already covered his face, and they stared down at their cradled charge, and they could not open their mouths or their eyes wide enough. Others cried out, “Seh Daeng has been shot! Seh Daeng has been shot!” and they moaned his name, but those bearing the body were funereally silent as they struggled to carry him to a nearby hospital.

The commander was still alive—Seh Daeng was not so easy to kill—but comatose, and he could not breathe for himself. He was attached to a respirator and moved into surgery. Because of the general’s earlier assault, the hospitals near Rajprasong were almost completely abandoned, and later that night he was transferred to Vajira Hospital, away from his Red Shirts and his battle lines. Ah, the irony! His own ungovernable fear had seen that hospital shut, and it was that fearful act which sent him away to a distant infirmary, that fear which tore him away from his comrades. Alas! for Seh Daeng, the fight was at an end.

The Red Shirts around Lumpini Park became grim and quiet, breathing a grudge. Two guardsmen whispered, “Why did they shoot him? He was always in the open. They knew where he was. They could have arrested him at anytime. Why shoot him?” They looked out past their piled tires to the security forces sitting there beneath the underpass, riot shields leaned against the walls, shotguns loaded with rubber. The two guardsmen looked out, and a thousand Red Shirts looked out, and they saw in their mind’s eye everything that would occur.

Shortly following the assassin’s bullet there came the sounds of explosions and gunfire. Around 10, the Red Shirts packed around the barricades of Lumpini Park and threw rocks and fired slingshots at security forces outside and received a hailfire of rubber bullets in reply. They no longer wore red; they just looked like lost people. Comrades helped to carry away the wounded. One 25-year-old man was hit in the face and died. Five others were wounded that night, and four went to the hospital.

At the Red Shirt stage at Pratunam, the rebels in their thousands whispered fearful and confused and vaguely determined, cornered animals now, starving and wounded. Their remaining commanders huddled near the stage in a hasty council of war. Seh Daeng’s shooting rattled them, and it came in the wake of news that Veera Musikhapong, the movement’s chief, who had accepted Abhisit’s “road map”—he had quit the Red Shirts and was to flee the country. Now leaderless, the old division between those would talk and those who would fight exploded into argument. The remaining members of Veera’s factions, Adisorn, Visa, and Phaijit, wanted to disperse the mobs and talk to Abhisit, maybe revive some of the Prime Minister’s previous concessions, but without the chief’s support these commanders fell by the wayside.

A commander named Jatuporn took the stage, surrounded by guards, and said, “The protest will not end as long as justice is not delivered.” He was one of the “hardcore” Red Shirts, along with Arisman, Kwanchai, Payap, Suporn (better known as Rambo), and the fallen Seh Daeng. “If death can bring democracy and justice,” said Jatuporn, “we are ready to die. We are ready to face it. We are here to take the bullets!” The crowd roared up, completely consumed by some fire greater than speeches and speakers, and Jatuporn found himself wrapped up in the energy of the people he ostensibly controlled. There would be no surrender, no compromise, nor sober judgment, now that Seh Daeng had been martyred.

One of the “cowardly” commanders of Veera’s shattered faction, a certain Nattawut, told them all, “Those behind the attack wanted to tell us that even Seh Daeng could be shot, so other Red Shirt protesters can be harmed, too.” We are all in danger of death, he said. The crowds muttered. It was not what they wanted to hear. Nattawut added hastily, in the voice of dictators: “They are tightening a noose on us, but we will fight to the end! Brothers and sisters!” Ah how they cheered! Twas not the words that moved them, but they that moved the words! The drums of war beat in the hearts of every man and woman.

The Red Shirts prepared to fight, and I see it in a montage. They doused Seh Daeng’s barricades, all stone and tires and sharpened bamboo, in gasoline. They splashed oil in front and scattered pellets for the advancing soldiers to slip on. The rebel guardsmen armed themselves with bows and arrows, PVC crossbows, slingshots, bamboo spears, and with crowbars and hatchets and iron poles. They propped their bangfai bamboo rockets in traffic cones, a new trick that allowed them to aim better at soldiers and helicopters. The people filled plastic bags with fish sauce and chili paste to throw at the soldiers. Read that again, O Reader, and wonder.

This is no joke, Reader. The soldiers were conscripts with assault rifles and banana clips, a month of training and a license to kill, and the rebels had bags of fish sauce and a high tragedy in their glance, a readiness to die; and they had that feeling, that afterbirth of glory and honor, a feeling that only humans can show, and only in the rarest and least scientific circumstances of history—that feeling that says, Let’s take as many of them with us as we can. Is it high and noble, or is it the lowest vengeance?

Alas! the clouds had burst, and the fighting would not stop until all was ended.

INTERMISSION.

As my plane landed in Rangoon, I looked out the window on a brown patchwork landscape. The canals of the Irrawaddy zigzagged all over it, snaking lines of green trees and white houses and temples in gold and blue, but most of the land was a deep rich ocher brown, a carpet of scorched earth.

Of course it’s not called the Irrawaddy anymore, but the Ayeyarwady, and Rangoon is now Yangon, and this country is now Myanmar. The British called it Burma after its principle ethnicity, the Burmans, and the generals changed it back in 1988, because even though only the Burmese purebloods can be generals or ministers, there is still a wider country of seven major and 127 minor ethnicities, all living under Burman rule. Many minorities of southern China ended up here, pushed out by Han expansion, as we see modernly the Tibetans pushed into India. The Burmese inhabit the Ayeyarwady plains, and the other populations live mostly in the jungle highlands around the periphery, near Bangladesh, Assam, China, and Thailand.

A coupe brought the left-wing army of General Ne Win into power in 1962. Three thousand people died in the monk-led rebellion of 1988, the military government collapsed, and lo! from the ashes, the Slorc was born—the State Law and Order Restoration Council! The Slorc held elections and duly imprisoned all the winners, famously including Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the general who united Myanmar against the British Empire; and a woman who, after several instances of liberty, remains under house arrest. The country operates under the martial law of the Slorc, without a constitution; a country of 52 million with an army of 15 million soldiers; embargoed by the UN and the USA, though close friends with India and China.

The Slorc dropped its local fuel subsidies in August of 2007, and heightened prices were the proverbial last straw. There was a second rebellion. Again monks went on the march, and again the military cracked down hard. Unknown hundreds, and perhaps thousands of protestors died by the bullets and clubs of their own army, including fifty monks, an irredeemable crime to the pious Burmans, but the Slorc remained in power. Under international pressure, the regime has planned elections for the tenth of October this year—10/10/10, an astrologically auspicious number which should ensure a Slorc victory—and the people say, “No election, only selection.”

Given these dire straits, I prologue my account of Myanmar with a defense of my going there:

I initially got the idea in a town in the Albanian hills, an old Turkish town called Berat, at a table in an inn where I ran to escape the rain. I found myself at dinner with a Canadian named Frederick. I told him I would go to Southeast Asia eventually, and he said that he enjoyed Thailand, Laos, Vietnam—but that his favorite place was Burma, “and hear me out on this.” A lot of people questioned his decision to go to a country that was the origin of such horrible news, where his presence and his tourist dollars would go to support a much (and justly) maligned government, but Frederick said that he went anyway.

“I spent my money at local places,” he said, “at hotels and restaurants and family stores. It went straight into the hands of the people. No charity can say that. Half their money disappears into the pockets of the government. And anyway, most people give more money to the Myanmar army when they fill up their tanks than I gave to them in my whole trip there,”—and it’s true, Reader, and you should be more aware of where your money goes. Tourism brought in $164 million in 2006, the majority of which went to the private sector; natural gas took in $2.16 billion, and then there’s oil, minerals, teak, timber, and heroin to consider. No wonder China and India are such close comrades of this rich little neighbor!

By going there, by talking to people, the Canadian learned what was really happening, and told people of the freedoms he enjoyed, which is exactly why the imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi endorsed foreign tourism. Frederick said that Myanmar was a bewitching and rewarding country, with an untouched and unexplored character, and that its people were impossibly nice, generous, and welcoming.

I was sold. I heard much more praise for Myanmar as I neared its borders, and never a word of criticism, and that only cemented my resolve to see it. So I overcame the process of attaining a visa in Bangkok, and I filled my wallet with the familiar faces of dead presidents. There was no way to withdraw money within Myanmar, it being unsupported by international banks; and the government changed at an extortionate rate, and the black market moneychangers demanded dollars. Really, they were connoisseurs of the bills, demanding the most recent models, uncreased and unbent. Some serial codes were preferable, and some were unacceptable, although this was generally some bullshit they concocted to swindle the foreigners out of their money.

Contrary to the Bible’s sound advice, and without knowing the exchange rate, I changed money with the first trader I met outside of the airport. I was standing there in the shade of the new arrivals zone with a Chinese woman, and we were going to share a cab, and she seemed to think that this was a horrible idea as she thumbed through her own Lonely Planet, but she did not say anything. I gave over $50 to the moneychanger for an equivalent amount of kyut (that’s chut, as “k” in Burmese produces the sound of “ch”, and also “th” is “t-ha” and “ph” is “p-ha,” and if the Reader finds that confusing, wait for Pinyin). A good rate would be 1000 kyut for one dollar, but you will only get this from sneakthieves who have many tricks up their sleeves to part you with your money. I changed mine for 950, received my kyut, counted it, and said, “Thanks.”

Everything worked out, with the proper amount, and I was very grateful, given the horror stories I heard later. Sometimes it is good to trust people and sometimes it’s stupid and you just have to be lucky, and sometimes it is best not to question the difference.

Anyway, the Chinese woman and I took a taxi into downtown Yangon, past the towering golden bell of the Schwedagon Pagoda, surrounded by smaller pagodas like the ancillary towers of a citadel, to Sule Square and, just around the corner, the Okinawa Guesthouse. The city reminded me immediately of India, in its smell and its squalor. There was a greasy reek with a fragrant overlay, an unbathed scent masked by too much of some fascinatingly exotic perfume, a smell of cooking and frying. Geographically and culturally, Burma lies right between three tectonic cultures—India, China, and Siam—and its position combined with its isolation and backwardness has made it a fascinating blend.

The streets of Yangon differ from the streets of Calcutta or Benares: not quite so oppressively filthy or trafficked, more lively and cheerful, and with little noodle stalls and squat chairs and tables with teapots set up here and there on the sidewalk (in India the streets are for walking and nothing else, and there are no streetside cafes), and Yangon differs in the proliferation of great gilded bell-shaped stupas and monks and nuns.

Many monasteries had been moved outside of the capital after the monks went on the march during the protests a few years ago, but most religious communities remain in the cities, where the laity has more to give. Maroon-wrapped monks and pink-cloaked nuns can be commonly seen walking from storefront to storefront making noise and asking for alms. Women would come out and put a spoonful of rice in the black alms bowls of each of a string of novices, who proceeded smiling as if it was Halloween.

Myanmar is predominantly Theravada Buddhist and profoundly pious. Merit is the supreme consideration, won by rituals and good deeds—merit to improve the karma, thy fate in this life and the next. The rich build stupas and hope for Nirvana, or at least rebirth as a man, and not some lesser thing on the wheel of life, like a rat, a snake, or a woman. The common people engage in simpler rituals within the pagoda. Most families pay hundreds of dollars to have their sons don the maroon robes and move into a monastery for a few weeks, first as a teenage novice and sometime later as an ordained monk. This brings the family great merit.

The Burmans, mostly dark-skinned with East Asian features, dress in a sort of long skirt called the longyi, made of cotton with dark checkered patterns, which they wrap up in a bundle at the front of their waist, so that it looks like some samurai garb. Conical bamboo hats and paper umbrellas are also a common sight. If the Reader wishes to pretend to be in a Kurosawa film, apply for your visa today. An honest and trusting folk, the Burmans often stick their wallets in the back of their wrapped up longyi, so that half of the leather pouch sticks straight out from the small of the back. Most of the men go clean shaven, but the Muslims, making up one in twenty of the population, often wear beards on their chins.

Burmese women are very beautiful, oval-faced and long-eyed with straight black hair and the same cheeky cheer as the Thais, and almost tragically intelligent, given their common fate as housewives, day-laborers, and sore-footed farmers. On the Buddhist hierarchy of reincarnation, women occupy the same tier as rats—they cannot achieve enlightenment, and must instead aspire to being born a man in the next life. They sometimes wear the longyi and sometimes a simpler skirt, and always keep their shoulders covered. Rice paddy hats and smiles half simple, half sly complete the peasant attire. During the monsoon season, most of the Burma girls paint demon lines across their face with khaki dust from the thanakha tree, to absorb sweat and keep clear their dusky countenances.

After checking into the guesthouse I wandered out to a street corner for some cold rice noodles, hand-mixed with sauces and spices in a metal bowl and served with a cup of chicken broth, a common street meal in Myanmar. Then I crossed the busy roundabout of Sula Square into the pagoda, or paya, of the same name.

Cool stone walkways circled the golden umbrella at the center, winding under smaller shrines and spires and past rows of Burmese in everyday clothing, praying or meditating before statues of the Buddha and his saints. I circled the complex a few times in great wonderment, and then was approached by a young Burman learning to be a travel guide and out to practice his English. He told me a little about the pagoda and showed me which statue to douse in 24 cups of water (one for each year of life, with a hopeful extra, that I may see my next birthday, I suppose). The post depended on what day of the week I was born. This was the simplest and most common ritual to receive merit. A Buddhist monk told me a little more, as I sat in the shade to cool off from the heat and humidity, and then I walked back to the guesthouse.

Then it started to rain. Dark clouds had been sliding back and forth across the sky all day, and now they burst with bucket-fulls of rain. It came quick as an earthquake—a moment of sprinkling drips and then the high tide of the downpour—and lasted only a little longer. Twas the monsoon! It was the second rain of Burma’s wet season, which came late that year. All the farmers had been praying for it, shooting fireworks up into the hundred degree sky and offering gifts at their animist shrines. They had no other way but rainfall to water their tiered fields, and for the last ten years have had to deal with incessant drought. May that 2010 be a better year for it, however much it inconveniences the unwary traveler—for I was caught in the middle of it!

The Burmans and monks took cowering refuge in alcoves and alleyways along the main streets, which were reduced to rivulets by the diluvian rain; but I’m an Oregonian and used to this business. Of course this was much heavier than the rain of my home, and I was so wet when I got back to the guesthouse I might as well have swam the last block.

I went upstairs laughing, to change my clothes, and there met a San Franciscan girl named Samantha, who had been on the road about as long as me, which was true of many of the Myanmar travelers—they were long term, and despised the Anglo-drunks in Thailand. She was copper-skinned and almond-eyed, with bundled hair and a long-traveled look, not dirty but self-assured and self-contained, and with the energy of someone who could spend six hours at a nightclub.

Well we talked for a while, and after the rain ended we went out to find something to eat on the street. We had some greasy flat-rolled pancakes with vegetables and sauce, very like the Indian dhosas, and some rambutan, red and egg-shaped and covered in green hair like stalks of grass, and white and sweet on the inside; we asked at the trinket stores if they were government owned, and shouted hello back at the grinning children; and we looked all over for some man who made wafer sandwiches that Sam had found a few days before, and ended up instead at a hotel with a mummified gym and a swimming pool full of screaming, writhing Burmans.

I did not ask Sam where she was really from, which is a question without much relevance in this cosmopolitan world, a question that she said she had to answer far too often. She was born in California and very much a Californian, but her parents were from Vietnam and had fled to the States by way of Hong Kong. I also did not ask her if she was in Asia to discover her Chinese roots, which was another question far too often put, even in India. “I’m here for the same reason as everyone else,” she said, and I knew what she meant. Her parents did not understand it, she said, and would have preferred a stable job, a cultured life, and a permanent home, but they accepted that Sam was different, that she preferred teaching at an Ethiopian grade school and wandering India with a chain-smoking Swede and milking goats in Laos.

“Travel is difficult,” she said as we frowned at the prices in the menu of a sushi restaurant,—“that’s what they don’t understand. Finding a bus to somewhere, arriving in the middle of the night, lost in some town, haggling down a hotel, trying to find something edible.”

“Washing clothes in the sink,” I added. “Learning the language.”

“Right. Arguing forever over the price of a bike rental, trying to meet the locals—it’s a lot of work.”

“It’s a pain in the ass. But it’s worth it.”

Sam had been to a lot of the places where I was going, so I quizzed her experience as we went back to Okinawa Guesthouse, without having sushi, and sat around for a few hours. An Israeli named Ron arrived and joined us. He was short, but in a sort of coiled spring way that made him look average height. He had the Ashkenazi features of his ancestors: victims of the Polish Holocaust, survivors of Auschwitz, partisan fighters on the Eastern Front, who had fled by way of mistrust to the Promised Land—but those stories unremarkable in Israel. He was very typical of the Israelis in his cynicism and sturdiness and in the frank manner in which he dealt with people, a no bullshit approach. Ron was on his obligatory post-conscription year abroad, although it had been three years of school and work since he left the Israeli Defense Force; and three months in India, Nepal, and the Thai isles had brought him to Burma.

He sat with us in the air-conditioned dorm and counted some money he had traded. “Fuck,” he said after a while, “Fuck, I got ripped off!” He had traded $300 and lost $170 in the business. Here is what happened:

Ron haggled out a good rate of exchange for $200 then handed the moneychanger his two bills of exchange. The Burman said, “This one is good, but this one no good,” and pointed out some crease or bad serial number or other bullshit flaw that made one of the notes invalid. Alright, fair enough—Ron handed the moneychanger a different hundred dollar note, and in the heat of the black market exchange did not realize that he never had his flawed bill returned! The moneychanger now had $300, though Ron only meant to change $200.

Then came the second scam. The moneychanger counted out somewhere around 200,000 kyut, having offered an unreasonably good rate, but he did it in a card-trick way where he double-counted many of the notes, so in the end he put only but about 130,000 kyut in Ron’s hands. Ron went to count it himself, but the moneychanger stopped him saying, “No, not here, the government watches us! No, cannot count! Quick, quick, police!” I have heard that if you insist on counting out the bills at this point in the scam, the moneychanger will find some other flaw in one of your dollar bills and will call off the whole deal. But Ron listened to the thief and rushed away, having given the moneychanger $300 and received $130 in kyut in return—a most unreasonable rate, though still better than the one the government offered at the airport.

Well we talked and raged about it in the air-conditioned room of the guesthouse. Sam had also lost some money in an exchange and wanted to go take retribution on these moneychangers. I thought, “How did I not get ripped off?” but got worked up with the rest.

Ron went out to find his man, who was of course long gone. The Reader may not be able to appreciate how much $170 amounts to in Burma, but if we say that a beer costs fifty cents, a bottle of whiskey is less than two dollars, a filling plate of noodle is a buck fifty, and a brand new motorcycle costs $200—well, $170 is a lot of money here. However, Ron did find one moneychanger who was apparently offended at the crime committed, and who had a cousin or some relation in the police force—it’s all about family connections in these martial countries—and who vowed to help Ron find the culprit.

First we had sushi. We went to a small restaurant with a Nipponese woman with a shaved head who had been in Yangon for nine months on a meditation visa, learning from the monks to improve her own instruction back home, and in that time had found a very nice Japanese place. We stuffed ourselves on nigiri and maki, tempura and miso soup, and we marveled at the bill—$3 a head. The staff saw us out with a cute kowtow and an, “Arigato gozaimasu,” and we left with that good feeling that can only come after a meal of sushi.

The next day, Ron, Sam, and I went out looking for this noble knight of a moneychanger, with an air of high adventure. Sam was carrying this lacy yellow umbrella, which she planned to wield against the Burman who had stolen from her. Ron only had his fierce Israeli expression, a hundred times as deadly. I was along for the ride, “for the adventure of it,” as Tom Sawyer says. Well, we didn’t find anything and went home disappointed.

But I must add—before we left I had to change more money. Ron went with me, and we walked out to the corner of the square with all the noodle shops. After a while of standing there, a man approached us, and this is how these things work. He was a mustachioed Burman in a soiled longyi with the sallow features of a drug addict, and Ron said to me, “That’s the guy—that’s the guy who wanted to help me catch him,” then he turned to the moneychanger and said, “Hey man, I look all over for you yesterday.”

“Where are you yesterday?” said the man with some concern. “You find the guy?”

“No, I don’t find him.”

“Well I have the police. You tell him about the man who stole, he finds him, gets your money back.”

“Look,” said Ron, “we leave tomorrow, I don’t know. Just forget it. It’s only money.” Sometimes it’s not worth fighting criminals who wouldn’t think twice about killing a man over a few dollars, we had decided earlier.

We told the moneychanger that I had money to change, and he seemed agreeable. He led us into the backroom of a paint-peeled house near the corner and sat us down in plastic lawn chairs. We talked rates for a while and agreed on 950 kyut to the dollar. Anything more and I would have been suspicious. There were a lot of Burmans lounging about, and it was actually very suspicious, but I was too busy reveling in the scenario to notice—a backroom, black market deal!

Well the man with the money showed up, and he had $100 of kyut in a brick, like some mafia payoff. He disapproved of the serial code on one of my American bills but eventually found one that suited him, and he waited while I counted out the kyut to verify it. When we were all satisfied I shook hands with the two moneychangers, said a thankful, “Chezube,” and sauntered off with a secret smile. How I have such luck with these criminal transactions, I will never know.

Let us travel back in time, not on some Vonnegut highway, but only a little up the track—to the day I arrived in Burma.

That day I got very drunk. Sam led Ron and I down to a local place near the guesthouse, a place with tables and chairs in the street and cups of some local beer called Dagon for fifty cents. We sat at a table with some Burman whom Sam had met, and who was sitting with a woman from Minnesota named Gina, who had been a teacher in the Peace Corps and at an international school in Saigon—and we’ll get to that later.

Well Ron drank a reasonable amount, and Sam and I drank most unreasonably, and I was the least reasonable of the lot. We drank and began to discourse, Sam and I, about kung-fu movies, the philanthropy of Jackie Chan, and about who would win in a brawl, Bruce Lee or Tony Jaa. If the Reader is unfamiliar with this issue, an advised education would include Bruce Lee’s Return of the Dragon and Tony Jaa’s Ong Bak 2, though Sam would recommend the first Ong Bak, which is an overdrawn mess. Obviously this issue got us very fired up, I for Bruce Lee, Sam for Tony Jaa—and it perplexed everyone else at the table.

And I drank beer very fast, and every time my glass was empty I waved at the Burman waiter and said, “One more,” until I was very tight, and eventually there came one of those vast confusions that sometimes take us, and Sam was giving me the Heimlich Maneuver on the side of the road, though she doesn’t remember it, and shoving fingers down my throat, to save me of the ills of drunkenness, on the not-so-long road back to Okinawa Guesthouse—but we’ll skip all these unsavory details, because what can more mere words add to the imagination, anyway?

After some debate we went back to the same bar the next day. I had spent the day with Sam, Ron, Gina, and a tall Italian from Lombardy named Francisco, wandering around Chinatown and looking at all the strange things for sale between the warehouses. We stopped for a drink at one of the beer and barbecue places on a long street of them. These places were very common in Myanmar—a few picnic tables in the street, a keg of beer in the back, a case of raw meat on wooden skewers, and a hot grill, and sometimes a TV in the corner showing American movies from some hijacked Indian channel.

Myanmar only had eight stations, all state-owned and awful. At seven the government showed a South Korean soap opera that the South Korean tourists say is for old people, but all the Myanmar girls watched the trash in unison each evening and discussed the junkyard of it the next day. At eight came the national news, which closely resembled what you would expect an American public access channel to broadcast if Nazi Germany had won the war.

Anyway we had more sushi, then went back to the site of yesterday’s drunken escapades, along with a Frenchman of Strasbourg named Guillaume his girlfriend, Selene of Normandy. The Burman waiters only laughed when they saw us and showed us to another table. They came over whenever a glass was empty and asked, “One more?” with a great, grinning guffaw, too good-natured and good-humored to hold a grudge against something so innocent as drunkenly keeping a bar open until two in the morning.

The Burmese are the kind of people that, if you compliment them on something more than once, they will gift it to you with a smile. Good deeds matter for the merit of them. Buddhism teaches the Burmans to live not through an acquisition of material possessions, which leads only to yearning and loathing, as we Westerners well know—but by fostering a tranquil complacency, a satisfaction with aught that God has seen fit to bestow. Anything else is out of the mortal hands and surely nothing to worry about. Because they understand these basic truths of the world, the Buddhists are the happiest, most generous, and best-humored of folk.

Later that night I turned my consideration to a people much better off in some ways and far worse in others. Ron, Guillaume, and I stood around talking at the foot of the steep stairs to the dormitories for a few hours, and then we went out and sat on the stoop while Guillaume smoked cigarettes. We talked about dealing with cheaters in the Asian countries, about traveling with girls, about global finance, and always we came back to the topic of America.

Guillaume had been to America, first when he was sixteen, as part of a homestay. The company sent him to an engineer’s family in Sacramento that apparently signed up for the program only for the money it dispatched alongside the foreign ward. The Frenchman did not think much of them. The mother and father were always out of the house; the daughter had fallen in love with him long before he boarded the plane, though the romance lasted only until she emailed a picture of herself to France, for there was no concealing or repairing that kind of ugliness; and the son was about Guillaume’s age but would never leave the suburban house.

“He was such a lazy bastard,” said Guillaume. “I would ask him, ‘You want to go play tennis?’ and he would say, ‘No, it is too hot.’ So I would ask him, ‘You want to go swim in the pool?’—everyone had a pool there, you know—and he would say, ‘No, it is too cold.’ That lazy bastard!”

Once the engineer dad came to Guillaume and asked him, “Do you want to go to the mall?” “Yes!” said Guillaume in his retelling,—“anything to get out of this house!” So they drove off to the shopping mall, which the host father revealed with a sort of showman’s flourish. Guillaume had to explain, to the engineer’s great confusion, that they had malls in France. They had the small boutique stores and markets that sell wine and cheese and croissants, and they had malls, too.

The engineer then brought his ward to a bank to make a withdrawal from an ATM, and he showed to Guillaume with an eager glee and narrated all that was involved—the debit card, the card slot, the PIN number, and the security of the transaction. Guillaume then explained that the French also had ATMs, that a Frenchman had invented the credit card, and that France was not some medieval backwater, as his host seemed to think.

At a university in Fort Myers, Florida, a few years later, working towards his MBA, Guillaume saw more of America and was arrested several times, for crimes such as drinking beer in the park, throwing rocks at his roommates window to get him to open the door, and smoking a cigarette outside late at night, a few blocks from an apartment where a man had knocked on the door and ran away a half an hour before. Each time the officers rushed at him screaming nonsense from a cop movie and shining a Mag-light in his face. Once the arresting officer, seeing Guillaume’s French identification, wrote down his name as “Praenom Guillaume” and had his home address as the French consulate.

Guillaume began to reflect very carefully about what made America so different from Europe. Americans, he decided, were too restricted by rules to have real freedom. Everywhere there were stupid laws against trivial things, and there was no common sense or leeway in the law’s application. Guillaume decided that he was far freer in France to live his life than in the land of liberty. A French couple will not be arrested for drinking wine on the banks of the Seine, and teenagers can buy cigarettes for their parents, despite all that the law says, because the law is made to protect people and not confine or moralize them.

Americans are good at making speeches, said Guillaume. They are dangerous in commerce: the Americans always act like your buddy on the phone and made it impossible to tell if they plan to do business or if they are uninterested. The girls are bold and oversexed. Once an American girl sidled up to him at a bar with this obvious look and said, “I’m demanding.” And the Frenchman wondered about the simple nature and the lack of awareness he saw in most Americans. American knowledge of geography and international politics is a great global punchline. Why did so few of those people look beyond the borders of their town or borough, much less their state or nation?

Guillaume experienced a revelation later in his stay, while riding a Brooklyn subway with some other international students. He spotted across the aisle a black man reading a book of French poetry. The French love to speak their lingua franca, and Guillaume approached the man and asked him, “How do you know French?” The black poet turned up from his book with a taciturn, contemptuous expression and said that he was from an old French colony. Which one? He would not say. Guillaume kept up the conversation, even though the African kept muttering under his breath, “White people don’t know anything,” because the Frenchman was curious and pressed him, “Which colony are you from?” The African would not say. Instead, he drew a map of France in the air and marked out the ten largest cities. Then the African got off at his stop, leaving Guillaume with his questions unanswered.

“After he left,” said Guillaume, “I kept thinking, I wonder what colony he is from. Then I asked myself, Do I even know all of France’s colonies? We had a big empire. Forty-nine colonies, all over Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific. I thought about it, and I could only name ten of the forty-nine. Then I thought, Could I name the capital cities in them? The ten largest cities in any of them? The black guy, he knew all of France and all of its cities. I did not know the colonies of my own country.”

Now, France was the world’s fifth largest economy, and Guillaume realized he knew all about the four above it, knew their basic profile and their place on the map, and that he knew next to nothing about all the multitudes below—why should he? How could that help him in business? So it was no surprise that the Americans at number one knew nothing about these lesser economies. Even Britain, Russia, and China warranted little attention from the top dog, other than the sidelong glance that a winning runner casts fearfully back at those who might overtake him.

When he returned to France, when he heard his countrymen laugh about American stupidity, Guillaume would ask them how many countries were in the European Union, and what were their names, their capitals, their major cities; and what were all the colonies of the French Empire; and the French did not know. He asked his sister, who brought out a blank map of Europe, and Guillaume found that he himself could name all the countries but not all the capitals.

And so it was revealed that the Europeans were not so canny as they thought, and knew about as much of the world as any American could be expected to know—not nearly enough. On that note we return our attention to a country of rather small economy and to a conflict that was secretly great.

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet,
Cause summer’s here and the time is right for marching in the street.
—The Rolling Stones

I had heard that the Thais transport tourists about like cattle, but did not know what this was about until I arranged through my hotel to take a bus to Krabi, a jumping off point for many of the islands. A group of us were shuffled on and off to different buses with no notion of why, and at several points asked to wear a sticker. “Yellow stickers, get off here!” cried the Thai drover. “Where the hell are we?” demanded this one, dropped off at one tourist office and then another, always trying to get somewhere warm and cheap and complacent.

I vowed from this point on to only take the local buses.

I was looking for the cheapest place to stay on a beach somewhere and finding that the fabled $3 bungalows of Thailand no longer existed, or were at least very difficult to track down. There was a secret island community in Thailand, devoted to discovering the undiscovered spots, not in any guidebook, the little bungalows with a mosquito net and no power, the islands with just a restaurant and a paradisaical beach and no qualms about free-camping. The sunny cabals meet on a secret island, and they whisper to trusted friends the secret names of the places they have found—but regarding this, I will say no more, for I am self-sworn to secrecy, that I may preserve these unmapped places for those who truly deserve to find them.

I ended up on Koh Lanta, a happy little couple’s paradise, a song of the southern isles. It was a sublime, surreal place of high jungled ridges, steep and slim as lined up dominoes, like the oriental altars of some jade empire; coconut palm forests abutting silky sandy strands, gravelly with sea shells, romantic bungalows and cheery people, and magnificent sunsets, the star swimming through ranks of clouds and down past rocks and islands, to sink through the clear air past the end of the world. It was kind of expensive, but I still had a very nice place to stay for $10 a night and decided not to spit in the wind.

At night, bartender Bau would sometimes call Mister Noodle, a stocky man in a long Muslim sherwani and cap, who staggered around the beaches with a sort of barbell across his shoulders, bags of noodles and bags of chicken or duck soup and bags of spices hanging from either side, gleaming greasily in the moonlight. The bar speakers played Bob Marley and Tracy Chapman, and old ’80s hits.

The clouds had gathered all day, and after dark the thunderheads burst and collided, though usually at a safe distance offshore, providing an empyrean light show for all those nestled safely in the cocothatch bars, gambling twenty baht on games of twenty-one with a clatter of dice in cup and a Van Halen squeal from the Thais when they win. The firmament echoed with the cracks and boom of God moving carts across a tiled floor, electrons by the cartload, tripping them down Jacob’s ladder. One night as I sat on my terrace the lightning burst just overhead like a strafing run during the Blitz, so close that I wondered if I had been struck, and neighbors came out shouting from their bungalows.

It was strange that I had just read a short story by Melville about this very insolent fear of nature’s wrath, and as the narrator of that tale, I humbly cast aside my existential terror and surrendered to the imperceptible will of the universe. “The hairs of our heads are numbered,” writes Melville, “and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, away! See, the scroll of the storm is rolled back; the house is unharmed; and in the blue heavens I read in the rainbow that the Deity will not, of purpose, make war on man’s earth.”

In the morning all was fresh and beautiful again by the washing of the rain. When the tide was high there was warm cerulean swimming, and when it lowered down you could walk along the rocky reef and examine the strange life of the tide pools—black and white eels, long black worms, side-stepping crabs, and little two-legged saurian things that scuttled away as soon as you saw them. The dark-skinned islander children swarmed across these pools, all laughs and smiles and diving hands, filling plastic bags with clams and muscles.

Koh Lanta’s 20,000 permanent residents are 90 per cent Muslim, happy in their big families, sometimes interfaith. The women don’t let their headscarves stop them from joking with foreign men. Most of the best and longest-inhabited islands of the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Thailand are inundated with tourists and their ways: toast and eggs and coffee, sex shows, cheap beer, and English-speakers. Koh Lanta is trying to keep foreigners away, but their legislation has only making the island’s tourist business expensive, as none of the backpacker businessmen can afford to work around the steep Lanta proscriptions. As a result, the island was being steadily annexed by resort communities and was growing in expense, like most of Thailand’s nicest spots.

It was especially popular among the Gallic tourists, as it was used in the first season of France’s Survivor, just called Koh Lanta. Tourists sat on the beach eating burgers and watching the isolated castaways cast out desperate lines for fish a few hundred meters from the bungalow hotels, which all the cameramen turned tactically away from, before retreating to the same hotels, restaurants, and internet cafes at the end of the production schedule.

It was a beautiful place. I rented a scooter and drove up across the picturesque hills in the island’s jungle core, to the long wharves and tidal plains around the Old Town on the island’s far side; stopping in local cafes for cheap seafood and noodle soup and local interactions. The Thais are always politely hilarious and interested.

One of the workers at the bungalow camp where I stayed, a lad my age named Pill, was married that same week to a pretty nineteen-year-old girl from a wealthy family, who had leased out some property for foreigners to build nightclubs on. Pill’s own family had arranged the match. They had a big outdoor ceremony, groom and bride seated like king and queen to receive everyone’s obeisance, great tureens of curries waiting for consumption, and a box for guests to place their donations. While presents were technically not allowed, donations were encouraged, and were to be placed in an envelope with the guest’s name on it.

Rajprasong was under siege. Police took up positions all around the Red Shirt encampment in that intersection, their only protest site since they abandoned the Phan Fa Bridge after the April 10th battle that killed 25 people.

All Heaven seemed arrayed against the rebels. Plague struck their camp, sending six Red Shirt guardsmen to the hospital with H1N1. The wearying heat would not let up into cool monsoon rains. Prime Minister Abhisit rejected their proposed compromise, and further began to harangue an uncovered plot amongst the Red Shirt leaders to overthrow the monarchy of the beloved King Rama IX. The accusations, even without evidence, and the persistence of the rebel disruption, which nobody expected to last beyond Songkran, and which would have collapsed if the Phan Fa Bridge stalemate had not revived morale—all this turned popular opinion back against the Red Shirts.

All those businessmen and businesses halted by the demonstrations demanded that Abhisit take immediate action to remove the Red Shirts from the commercial quarter, and accepted that violence may be necessary. The Thais were used to that necessity—in the past it was common, jab-tai or “targeted killings” a usual term, and they wondered why General Anupong had been so slow to use force except in self-defense. Some cried out against the “watermelon army,” green on the outside and red within. Meanwhile more colors gathered, the Shirts of Yellow and Pink and Blue. A revered monk led 1000 Thais dressed in white to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha to chant the phahung-mahaka, a prayer for phutthakhun, the blessing of the Buddha for king and country.

From the headquarters of the 11th Infantry Regiment, Abhisit plotted with Deputy Prime Minister Suthep, the malevolent chairman of the Center for the Resolution of Emergency Situations, and with the patient, passive General Anupong. They knew that time was on their side, and that more violence could only damage their cause and destroy young Abhisit’s political career. Yet more trucks of police and soldiers funneled into the capital. The convoys no longer tolerated Red Shirt blockades but arrested any attempts, in Bangkok and in the provinces—the Emergency Protocols banned meetings of more than five people. Only Rajprasong with its tens of thousands could hold out. They expected, even dreamed of, another gloriously martyring battle like that which rattled Phan Fa Bridge on the tenth, and as if to hasten its arrival became ever more militant.

There was a Red Shirt hero at Rajprasong, a renegade major general named Khattiya Sawasdipol, though the rebels called him Seh Daeng, “Red Commander.” As a symbol of rebel lawlessness and government impotence, he was a principle character of the unfolding drama, and perhaps its most tragic. The army had suspended the major general’s salary after he called General Anupong nhom nam, “childish and weak,” when noble Anupong allowed Yellow Shirt leader Sondhi Limthongkul to offer insult several times without response, but Khattiya retained his military rank. He went around the Rajprasong encampment in army fatigues he had worn in the ’80s, the only soldier permitted freedom of movement.

“They believe that because Seh Daeng is here they won’t die,” he said of himself. “That’s why everywhere I go people cheer me and ask for my autograph.” And everywhere he went, along with a knife and a canteen, Seh Daeng carried a blue marker pen to write his name on scarlet shirts and crimson caps. He posed for photographs alongside his eager admirers, a short, slight man with the chockablock phrenology of a boxer and a smile on his energetic jowls, and he was a hero especially among the more “hardcore” of the rebel element.

Against the Damoclean sword of attempted dispersal, Seh Daeng had his Red Shirts construct barricades. Rajprasong was a perfect location for a rebel camp, a “dragon’s stomach,” its tight avenues surrounded by buildings of such height and importance that the government would have to take care in the event of an assault—the poor red wretches taking solace in the unassailable might of the rich they warred against, skyscrapers worth more than human lives.

Observe the strategy: Of the four intersections around Rajprasong, the western Pathumwan intersection at Siam Square has a palace and a department store and the massive MBK Mall; to the east the Phloenchit intersection hosted several embassies, including the British and American consulates, whose staff could be seen fleeing the area; and at the northern end the Pratunam intersection was the primary gathering place of the demonstrators, invariably blockaded by the Red Shirt crowds, cameras, and stage.

Seh Daeng built barricades on all these approaches, ten foot walls of tires and nam-prik bags and sharpened bamboo staves, as if to repel a cavalry charge, and reinforced by bricks that doubled as weapons when throne, and doused in fuel so they could be set aflame during the last stand. One suspects that the Red Shirts had other weapons concealed behind—slingshots, iron rods, petrol bombs, and worse. “The walls are built according to the local wisdom of the people,” said the hero Seh Daeng, who based them on the bulwarks used to repel a Burmese invasion during the eighteenth century.

Two-thousand Red Shirt guards, including 200 of Seh Daeng’s ex-rangers, manned the barricades, and a thousand new guards joined the rosters on April 30, all trained by the renegade general. He taught them to use bamboo spears and slingshots and rocks, and to shoot down helicopters with bangfai rockets, all bamboo and fireworks. Seh Daeng said the government would need at least 40,000 men to overrun his forces.

The commander’s barricades guarded Pathumwan, Phloenchit, and Pratunam, but the largest and strongest of them defended the southern entrance at Lumpini Park, a wide open area of green hills and placid lagoons that was the most vulnerable entrance to Rajprasong. Here the walls circled the whole park, and the scarlet legions gathered around the statue of some older King Rama, waiting; and hither on one evening came a counter-protest gathered of anti-reds, who called themselves “multicolored shirts.”

About a thousand of them took up signs on Silom Road, across the street from the park, on Friday April 23rd, mostly office workers and salesmen and tailors from the area who wanted to go back to work and wages, worrying the rebels with their shouts. Some of those in red whispered that the new protesters were Yellow Shirts in disguise—that is, members of the pro-government People’s Alliance for Democracy, who wore the gilded hue, and had temporarily suspended their involvement. They say that soldiers also wear yellow when it suits them, and in this guise they shoot unwary rebels with slingshots. The Red Shirts feared and hated both, and they feared and hated these businessmen who opposed the cause to which they had committed their lives.

A Red Shirt commander named Arisman took the stage at Pratunam, and he told the rebels not to worry, that help was on the way to their brothers in Lumpini, in the form of “men in black.”

These black-clad bravos, the most devious and mysterious of all those colors involved in the war, arrived at Lumpini Park that night, and with M79 grenade launchers and from near the old king’s statue fired seven grenades into the thousand protesters gathered on Silom. The ordnance fell in among people in the street and in the Sala Daeng skytrain station and exploded on hitting the ground, leaving one woman dead and 87 protesters injured, including foreigners. Bloodied and terrified masses rushed this way and that, and in minutes of havoc the whole crowd had dispersed.

Soldiers took up positions in the streets behind walled riot shields, like the Roman legionaries at Carrhae, but by then the attack had ceased. A few hours later, 300 of the anti-rebel protesters returned to Silom, but the Red Shirts routed them a second time with petroleum bombs. At Pratunam, another commander took the stage and said the Red Shirts had nothing to do with it, blaming terrorists, “and we hope the attackers get arrested.” As for the woman who died, Abhisit was there at his funeral on Wednesday, being photographed in an embrace with the woman’s youngest son. Politics first.

Since the bridge battle, Abhisit and especially General Anupong had been uncompromisingly non-violent, while everything the Red Shirt commanders did was designed to bring about a second conflict. They selected Rajprasong for their last stand so that businesses would put pressure on Abhisit to bring about a quick conclusion (“A company is a country, a country is a company,” as Thaksin had said), which could only be a violent confrontation. Commissars stormed their hatred over the camp speakers, about the tyranny of the government, the oppression of the poor at the hands of the elite, and how they would never give up without a fight, and the rebels grew dangerously desperate. They antagonized the police and used the “men in black” to bring down vengeance on the red swarms, to turn disparaging rout into rousing martyrdom.

Even their proposed compromise was a joke. The Red Shirt commanders said they would disband and retire at once if Abhisit agreed to dissolve the House of Representatives within 30 days, rather than immediately, with an additional 60 day “caretaking” period until fresh elections could be held; but the government had yet to pass next year’s budget or to make the changes to the 2007 constitution that the people clamored for. Dissolving now would mean chaos.

It was impossible for Abhisit to agree to such terms, and the rebel commanders knew it, though publicly they decried the tyrant’s intransigence. They knew they needed more deaths to bring Abhisit down and to keep hold of their movement so that they could take advantage of the ensuing power vacuum to put their own in power—they could only keep the arm by sacrificing a finger.

Morale had waned since the unifying excitement of the Phan Fa Bridge skirmishes. The red march grew bored and agitated with the lack of progress, with none of their interests being addressed, and with the unconstitutional government gaining ground even after two months of marching and so many deaths; the heat wave and unseasonable rains sent many protesters fleeing home, ostensibly to take care of their crops; and the commanders knew they needed a renewal of violence to restore the movement’s soul. No revolution can survive if it is not oppressed. Some more Red Shirts had to die! So the rebels set about stirring up the hornet’s nest that had penned them in.

Things went no better on Abhisit’s side, with his vague and unproven accusations of a conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy, a conspiracy which happened to include all his enemies, including Red Shirt leaders, members of the Puea Thai Party, academics, journalists, the hosts of community radio programs, a few critical generals, and exiled Thaksin himself. Most of those charged with treason expressed a laughing incredulity, and Thaksin filed a lawsuit for defamation of character from Montenegro. Abhisit was not amused! Wielding his emergency powers like a truncheon, the man they call a tyrant closed down ten satellite, cable, and radio stations and 36 Web sites, then 190, and eventually 420, without explanation. He then appeared on his own stations to stress the sanctity of law and how his enemies defiled it.

The government released the names of top Red Shirt leaders implicated in the monarchy plot—and this after Abhisit and General Anupong had said their strategy was to isolate or eliminate the commanders without casualties among the great unwashed. The tactic was comically obvious: recall the term jab-tai, “targeted killing.”

Pitching like a boat on the feelings of the vulgar, the Prime Minister called every Red Shirt a terrorist and promised just revenge, and then asked for compromise and negotiation and stressed his nonviolence. We’ll crush them immediately, he said, and then, Crushing them would not solve the political crisis. He bandied around the term “parallel solution,” military and political. No matter what the eventual resolution, Abhisit could say he was at the head of it. Meanwhile Deputy Suthep went one way, General Anupong another, as the forces around and against the government proceeded towards a seemingly inevitable conclusion.

A monsoon cloud swept in from India, hot and full, on northwestern thermals, right as I decided to transfer from Koh Lanta to Au Nang, though I had not really settled on Au Nang until I got there. It rained on and off on the bus ride to Krabi, and the gray skies had quieted when I got off in the station. I asked some other tourists what their plans were, trying to form my own. They said Krabi was expensive and Au Nang cheap, so I got in a tuk-tuk with four Austrians on their way there. I riding shotgun and they were on benches in the back.

We were halfway there, chugging up a hill on empty, when the gas really ran out. The Thai driver told us to wait and ran off down the highway. It started to rain, first a trickle, then a storm. I collected my things from the open back and sat them in my lap. Water pounded on the roof and poured in through the cracks in the door, and I hunkered down in the middle, holding all my possessions, and just sitting there thinking, “Yep, that’s about all I can do.”

One of the Austrians banged on the window and said, “We’re getting out of here.” I didn’t know what the hell he meant until I saw another tuk-tuk behind ours, and our same driver behind the wheel. I ran off to the front seat and hunkered down again, the whole rainy way to Au Nang, coming up with contingency plans for how I would get myself and my things from the cab to some shelter with minimal damage. My bags were cheap made-in-Asia things and not made for this sort of weather.

When we parked next to a guesthouse on Au Nang’s main drag, all of us rushed out into cover. I haggled with the owner for a while but couldn’t get a good price, so when it stopped raining I went off down the street looking for somewhere better. The town looked like any beach town in the US, all Italian and seafood restaurants and travel agents and bars. Eventually some guy offered me a room at some dingy place behind the laundromat and got a woman to show it to me. The room had clean sheets, mosquito nets in the windows, a small safe, and a fine bathroom, but at that point I was more looking for a reason to say yes than for anything in particular—so of course I accepted.

Au Nang was a central location. Boats came and went from the beach to the islands, to famously expensive Koh Phi Phi and Phuket, to James Bond Island where Roger Moore dueled Christopher Lee as Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun. Just south of Au Nang, around the high-rising headland, was an isolated cove called Hat Ton Sai, completely enclosed by limestone cliffs which were themselves covered in bolts and rivets for rock climbers. It was famous—I’d heard about it from climbers in Wadi Rum and Hampi. To the north there was a beach famous among with the Thais, and you could get there by driving. A solitary island stood out past the surf, shaped like a tortoise shell and shaggy with trees, and very surreal looking.

It rained often. The monsoon downpour descended in sheets, obscuring the limestone rises around the town with a grim gray aurora; rain forming rivers in the streets and streamlets in the alleys outside my small room, sandals swept away from the doorsteps.

I looked everywhere for fresh newspapers. The chaos in Bangkok was only a little matter internationally, without relevance abroad. I knew it would be resolved soon enough, that the Red Shirts would collapse and that Abhisit would lose the next election, but I had taken a great interest in it. Not only was it an unreal story, but it spoke to me of that old Themistoclean theme, of what dangers fear can wreak on mankind. There were heroes here, and villains, painted in all the shades of gray. It was a story of democracy at its noblest and meanest, of political passions and national hopes, of a nation’s poor fighting the established order, and of how neighbors can learn to hate each other. Alas, what fear can wreak!

More than a week passed and I felt like I should go back. The bus to Bangkok was an air conditioned double-decker that showed two films, Ninja Assassin and Land of the Dead, censored only for the breasts visible at one point during the zombie movie, and not for any of the bloody violence.

The siege closed in on Rajprasong, with six security checkpoints set up by police and soldiers at the entrances to Seh Daeng’s “dragon’s stomach.” Gunmen stood all along the nearby streets and bridges, leaning rifles on their shoulders and shields against the wall, or they sat in lawn chairs waiting for something to happen.

Deputy Suthep told the security forces he would transfer out anyone reluctant to use violence. “Those who believe they cannot do this should come forward and let it be known,” proclaimed the Deputy,— “you will be moved out and replaced by those who can carry out the task.” An army colonel commented, “At present we are ready in terms of manpower, we are only waiting for a suitable time.” Some sources numbered the soldiers at 65,000, including 50,000 conscripts.

When the Crackdown came, Abhsit’s forces would come in by armored car and by helicopter and skytrain, behind walls of shields, with snipers on the rooftops—yet it seemed the gathered clouds would never burst. Strategists said wait and see, time and patience. The Chinese call it wuwei, or inaction—wait for the rebellion to collapse of its own accord, to choke on the slightest pressure of the army at its throat and the increasing apathy of the whole rest of Bangkok to the rebel cause. General Anupong played the role of Kutuzov or Fabius Maximus, the Great Delayer—We cannot win a confrontation, he seemed to think, as any casualties will make the reconquest of Rajprasong a Pyrrhic victory. Time will give us victory, not a fight. “Politics must be resolved by politics,” the General said on television.

Abhisit, always swerving between the non-violent peacemaker and the tough constitutional combatant, confronted his commander-in-chief in a sidelong way during a press conference on Sunday May 2. The square-faced premier with his symmetrical features and mail-ordered hair, his casual finger-taps on the glass table, always facing the camera with a halfway smile and eyes like a snake’s; and the rather plain-looking general, hair receding back from his sloped forehead, hands in his lap, metal stars and birds all over his jacket, turning towards the Prime Minister with an exasperated look. Abhisit spoke cool and confident about resolving the issue, easily articulate, and said, “You can ask the army commander yourself if there will be a dispersal or not.”

General Anupong slouched, calmly complacent in his own upbraiding, and stayed unwaveringly noncommittal. “If our actions can bring back law and order and end the problem,” said Anupong, “I would be ready to follow what the government orders, within the lawful framework of the CRES.” A load of nothing—ah, you noble man!

The Red Shirt commissars knew what General Anupong knew—that in time they would lose their loyal multitudes, as they had already lost everyone else. They said they would sally forth from Rajprasong to start new protest bases, like the Trojans fleeing Ilium to found Rome and London and Paris, but the Great Delayer caught wind and ordered his soldiers to stop any such attempt.

Nevertheless, at 1:30 p.m. on a gloomy-skied Thursday at the end of April, 2000 Red Shirts, led by a commander of Seh Daeng’s camp named Kwanchai, rode out on motorcycles and in pickup trucks towards the Talad Thai market. It looked like an old cavalry charge, all jousting spears and fierce figures. They no longer wore red shirts, so they would be harder to identify, so they could slink away into the city if necessary, as the commissars had told them to, but they wore headbands and bandanas and carried flags. An orange-robed monk carried in a sharp bamboo spear with a red bandana at the tip. They could wear anything except yellow, pink, or blue, as those were the colors of enemies.

General Anupong set up a hasty security cordon of army and air force soldiers and police officers on the Don Muang Tollway, next to the National Memorial, and at 1:50 the rebel mob dismounted from their vehicles and charged straight in, to break through the blockade, and so began the Battle of the Overpass.

They rushed down the median, in the dirt between the hedgerows that divided the traffic lanes. A man ran ahead of the others, his face a devil’s mask, all teeth and shadow and hard-edges, and he had a sledgehammer in his hand. He ran completely erect and smiling, while those behind him sulked low with terrified looks on their faces as if they had already been shot, as if waiting for this madman to be tumbled over so they could turn back and tear off their red bandanas and run for it. Two journalists lay down in the same dirt trail, over by the police, a cameraman with his free hand covering one ear and a woman screaming into a phone.

The security forces formed phalanxes, walls of translucent shields in the old Roman testudo, with ranks of shotguns loaded with rubber bullets. It looked like an old Napoleonic fusillade, a lineup of grenadiers, a shout and a crackle and a cirrus cloud of blue gunsmoke as they fired a volley. Some had live ammunition, and they fired over the heads of the Red Shirts. Snipers on the pedestrian walkways kept an eye out for “men in black.” Soldiers in green army helmets used slingshots, and rebels in red motorcycle helmets used slingshots right back. The rebels fought with sticks and stones. They lit and carefully aimed their homemade bangfai rockets, which guttered out on the pavement.

By 3 p.m. the fight had spread. Red Shirt detachments split off from the main group to try and rush around the security cordon, and a mobile task force of sixty officers on thirty motorcycles spread out to stop these small groups. One driver was shot in the back of the head by his own partner while heading towards the National Memorial. It was the only fatality of the day. Meanwhile, a thousand Red Shirt protesters mustered in front of the nearby Zeer Rangsit shopping center to come to the aid of their comrades, but the troops blocked them in.

Ten minutes later it began to rain: a drenching, crushing deluge that quelled everyone’s spirits and took the gunsmoke right out of the air. It had become too much. Red Shirt commanders in Rajprasong ordered a retreat. Hundreds and hundreds of motorcycles and trucks revved up and swarmed off through the rain back to the commercial district. The raid commander, Mr. Kwanchai, who was already facing arrest, managed to evade capture and return to the Rajprasong stage.

During the rainswept rout, somewhere on the freeway’s inbound lane, a motorcycle skidded to a halt in front of an air force checkpoint, and the rider jumped off and ran down the freeway. The troops searched the cycle and found 63 grenades and a few M79 launchers. They laid these out on a table after the battle for the press to photograph, yet the officers at the triumph couldn’t take their eyes off the little bombs, which looked like lightbulbs. The authorities later found out that the motorcycle and the ordnance belonged to a police sergeant involved in an arms trafficking gang, who was selling to the Red Shirts—grenades for 1200 baht a piece, or $40.

Other than the tragic death of the motorcycle driver, two soldiers and 16 Red Shirts were injured in the battle, many of them hospitalized.

After the Battle of the Overpass, the police sealed off Rajprasong. Of course the blockade was ephemeral. Traffic in the area had slowed to a crunch, but Rajprasong remained packed with vendors selling all kinds of hot food and ice cold drinks, plus clothes and CDs and everything else you can find on a street corner in Bangkok. Tourists could wander in, although the guards of both sides would ask a few questions. The officers might check arriving Red Shirts for weapons if they were not busy.

The people of Bangkok and many of the generals wanted to make it a real siege in the medieval sense of the word—cut off their food, water, and electricity, then see how long this lasts. The Red Shirts said if that happened, they would burn Rajprasong to the ground. It was a collective feeling. The leaders didn’t matter any more. They were as caught up in rage and wrath of fear as everyone else, pushed ahead at the front of the storm, all itching for the fight that the government refused to give them.

If you cross the Bang Lamphu Canal just north of Khausan, you arrive on quiet pleasant Samsen road, with six side avenues of tightly spaced houses. Flags hang from streamers overhead, and there are flowers and motorcycles and food stalls against all the walls. It sometimes seems that everyone in Bangkok eats takeaway, brings home curries and soups and chili oil in little bags to mix with scoops from the rice cooker. There is always a place somewhere around Khausan serving rice and curry or fish noodle soup, and on Friday and Saturday there is music everywhere—Thai singers with a guitar and a mental library of Zeppelin, Floyd, Dylan, and AC-DC classics, or blues bands that know how to knead the strings for all they’re worth.

Actually, there is always music—a radio somewhere blaring Thai songs (the Thais are still caught up in a romance with electric rock ballads that are very fun to listen to even to those who cannot speak Thai as long as they understand the language of Whitesnake and the Eagles); the monks practicing on xylophones and horns in the temple halfway down the alley; a few neighbors around a table, sometimes around midnight, playing guitar and harmonica and singing songs they all know.

Away from the drunken tourist ghetto and the gleaming commercial blocks, Bangkok has a lived in feel, like a house with a family too big for it, warm and happy and lively with friendly faces everywhere. A sort of squalor that is not squalid, like an old pair of jeans, tattered and torn, but clean and loved at the same time.

It was always hot. Some days it rained, a heavy sky-cracking downpour that washed all the heat and humidity into the gutter and pounded on the tin rooftops and blurred all the streets. On the days it did not rain it was so hot and muggy you felt compelled to take your shirt off wherever it was appropriate. All you could do around noon was sit under a fan and sweat. In the cooler mornings or, more commonly, the afternoons and evenings, I sauntered around, talking to people, observing things, eating food in the alleyways, buying random things from street stalls and pointing at half-done dishes and saying, “One of those, please, same same.” I picked up the papers and read them at tables by the side of the road, making sense of the war.

I stayed in a guesthouse in an old wooden mansion, a creaking place that smelled like an open bottle of whiskey, and as I left one day I saw a mass of Red Shirts on the television and some manner of chaos.

“What’s happening?” I asked the owner’s wife, a small Thai woman, old but straight-backed. Her husband was a cantankerous old man who bought a bottle of whiskey every other night and spent most of his day in a rocking chair watching American war movies and History Channel specials on TV, but whenever it was just his wife around she would turn on the news.

She told me, “They attack hospital. Red Shirts run inside.”

A hundred of them had stormed Chalalongkorn Hospital, just next to Lumpini Park, on the suspicion that the government had posted snipers in the upper stories, though they only found the infirmed. The hospital staff stopped receiving outpatients while the rebels roved around, and later the staff moved most of their patients to other facilities in Bangkok.

I saw Seh Daeng’s blocky face in the middle of it, a palette of IV bags behind him, and he was pointing this way and that as he set up more of “the people’s barricades”—tires, razor wire, and sharp bamboo spears, all along the front of the hospital. He put guards there to check everyone coming in for weapons and charged the hospital’s director with serving the government.

“This is crazy,” said the owner’s wife, “even in times of war, armies trust the Red Cross.” She muttered about how it was all northerners.

The next day the more sober of Red Shirt leaders apologized. “On behalf of all leaders, I apologize to the public and Chulalongkorn Hospital for the incident,” said Weng Tojirakarn,—“The situation got out of control.” Only he did not speak for all the leaders. Already there were hints of the factions that would later tear the Red Shirts apart, the peaceful and the “hardcore.”

The sober leaders negotiated with Seh Daeng and got him to take down some of the barricades, but the hospital had already ceased functioning. Then Seh Daeng and his hardliners scorned the hospital’s overreaction to their raid and continued presence. The evacuation of the hospital, said one leader, was “too strong a measure against the Red Shirts.” It was obvious to him that the hospital was being used as a propaganda tool by the government, that the government would stop at nothing to crush the rebellion.

It was obvious to me that the whole thing was coming apart at the paranoid seams.

Then Abhisit offered a compromise. He would dissolve the House of Representatives in September, giving them enough time to pass a budget for the new fiscal year in October, and to legislate reforms that balance between the popular 1997 constitution and the new one of 2007; he would hold a general election on November 14, and he would not declare martial law.

His five conditions were that: (1) the monarchy must not be used as a tool in political conflicts; (2) the country must be reformed by tackling economic disparities and inequality; (3) the media must refrain from reports which exacerbate social or political conflicts; (4) an independent fact-finding panel must be appointed to review fatal incidents involving security forces and protesters; and (5) the reconciliation process must be carried out with the cooperation of all sides.

“This road map is the country’s future but the government will not grant amnesty to the terrorists who hide among the Red Shirt rally,” said Abhisit, as conciliatory and accusatory as ever. “I do not receive any personal benefit from the road map, as it is intended to bring about peace in the country.”

His “five-point national reconciliation road map,” announced the first week of May, had the support of Abhisit’s coalition, his generals, the private sector, and the acceptance of the leaders of the UDD, who said they would turn themselves in to fight the terrorist charges.

There was a collective sigh. Though only a few thousand Red Shirts remained in Rajprasong, of the 100,000 that had at one point laid claim to it, those weary wretches cheered and put on Thaksin masks and danced around the commercial district in the wake of their leaders’ acceptance, for they had won. Abhisit smiled at the cameras and watched his popularity rise like floodwater. The good General Anupong, le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, he had won as well. There had not been a crackdown, politics had resolved politics, and he would be released from his position in September, along with all the rest.

Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya called in the US ambassador, who on Sunday breakfasted with several Thaksin supporters, and he called in an assistant US secretary of state who had lunched with a few old Thai Rak Thai members, and he chastised them both—“Stay out of Thai affairs!” Then he called in representatives of 41 embassies and international organizations and harangued the lot of them for getting involved. “We are not a failed state!” shouted the minister.

There was such a tide of feel-good summary headlines that, if this were a movie, it would be the part when newspapers fly at the audience. It appeared to be the end, and nothing remained but that little concluding text at the end, where they say what happened to everyone after the main events.

But—O the mighty threats thrown around, the blame and the sorrow! For where there is compromise, where everybody wins a little, many feel they have surrendered everything. There were factions within factions, and they were not happy. They blamed Abhisit for his sins of weakness, they blamed noble General Anupong for forcing Abhisit to compromise by his Fabian inaction, and fractionalized Red Shirts blamed their cowardly leaders for surrendering without securing all their extraneous demands.

Far away, somewhere on the Adriatic, a little dictator cried out with all Napoleon’s bombast. Exiled Thaksin had lost control of his “red tiger” and it had left him behind. He said that September was not early enough. “If we cannot find justice in the country, we will need to use an international stage to fight for justice,” said the forgotten exile, with no seat in the negotiations, his $1.6 billion in confiscated assets recently transferred to the state treasury. “But the more I demand [for reconciliation], the more I become a target.”

O thou poor martyr, thou lost cause! Such sufferance in thy Montenegrin estate. And now the foreign minister of that country says to keep thy mouth shut, that it is not any business of a citizen of Montenegro what happens in Thailand. Good riddance to you!

Another of those flying headlines proclaimed, “Seh Daeng to be stripped of his rank,” the first major general of the Royal Army to suffer such a fate. A tribunal concluded that “he had repeatedly defied orders from his superiors to not get involved in political movements, particularly with the red shirt United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship,” reported the Post, and he had met twice with Thaksin without informing his superiors and was suspected of involvement with the “men in black.”

The Commander of the Red Shirts was incredulous. “What have I done wrong?” he asked. “I’ve protected the army chief from being verbally attacked by the Yellow Shirts, and now I am protecting the lives of innocent people. No, I don’t feel sorry at all—they can fire me while the judicial process is still pending. Then I will be able to work full time to help the Red Shirts.” Seh Daeng would fight to the end, because the end meant a military tribunal and most likely a jail cell.

(As for the “men in black,” it seems that after Khattiya’s salary suspension in January, the Defense Ministry and the Royal Thai Army Headquarters were bombarded by the same type of grenades used by the mysterious mercenaries—you do not trifle with Seh Daeng. When asked about this, the lively general cried out in English, “I deny! No one ever saw me.”)

More serious a threat were the Yellow Shirts, utterly deprived by the compromise. In an editorial, Bangkok Post editor Voranaj Vanijaka wrote of “the tangled web of political intrigue,” that Abhisit’s road map served some more than others:

The prime minister wouldn’t have offered the Nov 14 compromise if he wasn’t confident that the Democrat Party can win the general election in six months. After all, over the past couple of weeks, through shuffling, transferring and appointing, many of the right people have been put in the right positions in the civil and police bureaucracies in the north and northeastern provinces of Thailand [the Puea Thai heartland]. That’s the way politics goes.

The UDD and Puea Thai Party wouldn’t have accepted the compromise if they weren’t confident that they can win the general election in six months. After all, despite the shuffling, transferring and appointing by the government, the Reds must be confident enough that they still have plenty of their own right people in the right positions. That’s the way politics goes.

So that would leave one key player out in the cold: Sondhi Limthongkul of the Yellow Shirt PAD and New Politics Party.

The New Politics Party needed the same middle-class base as the Democrats. If the Democrats win in November, it’s four more years of waiting and campaigning. If the UDD’s Puea Thai party wins, then the New Politics Party is really down and out. So Yellow Shirt commander, Major General Chamlong Srimuang, condemned Abhisit’s plan, called the Prime Minister weak and selfish, more interested in saving himself than the country. He demanded that Abhisit resign, called for the other generals to declare martial law on their own and to destroy the Rajprasong camp, as they should have done all along.

Meanwhile the Red Shirt captains met in council to set a date to abandon that very camp, but they were split: some wanted to disband, and some wanted to fight. General Chavalit, chairman of the Puea Thai, asked his mobs to dissolve their protest as his birthday present. Seh Daeng laughed at the idea that the protesters would just walk away. They argued, those who would accept peace and those who would accept only victory.

The sober ones suggested May 5, Coronation Day, the sixtieth anniversary of the crowning of the beloved Rama IX and also the beginning of the bangfai fireworks festival, an auspicious day when everyone would want to go home. But that day came and that day went and the Red Shirts did not say their intent. The King’s celebration lasted five days, where Thais turned out in droves to wave flags and cheer for the world’s longest reigning monarch, and the sky echoed with the sound and noise of colorful artillery, and the Red Shirts remained in Rajprasong.

They argued and argued, and on Saturday, May 8, were supposed to make a final declaration. Over 5000 fresh rebels poured in from the poor northeastern provinces of Udon Thani and Khon Kaen, filling Rajprasong to its skyscraper walls, rebel hordes jammed around the stage to clap and cheer. There was an energy there, a sulky expectation, a cusp of victory feel and gleam in the eyes that looked like a parking lot brawl after a game. They all wanted to be there for whatever was about to happen. Some did not want it to end.

The night before there were two attacks on the security forces around Lumpini Park. Rifle fire and grenades killed three officers and injuring ten, as well as three civilians. Elsewhere a UDD radio DJ’s truck was torched outside his house. Red Shirts and Yellow Shirts pointed fingers at one another, and Saturday came and Saturday went and the Red Shirts did not say their intent.

Abhisit remained committed and demanded an answer. “Schools are about to open. Parents are concerned about their children’s safety,” he said on national television. “There should be a clear answer by tomorrow so that cooperation on the reconciliation plan will go ahead.” Deliver an answer by Monday, he said, or else.

And Monday came and Monday went and the Red Shirts did not say their intent. On Tuesday Abhisit said the Red Shirts must surrender and disperse by Wednesday or else. Seh Daeng laughed and kept piling up tires, and Wednesday came and Wednesday went and the Red Shirts did not say their intent.

Finally Abhisit received his reply: the Red Shirts will surrender when Deputy Suthep submits himself to police justice! For ordering the crackdown a month ago that killed 25, he must be held accountable. What heavy words, and what secret purpose—for if the Prime Minister’s principle lackey was arrested, surely he would be granted bail and judicial leniency, and so too would the Red Shirt leaders, the churlish brigands. All the while they had been riding on the feelings of their mob, and now they saw where the mob’s weary willingness to compromise would land them—in a jail cell. While the Red Shirts sauntered home and the Puea Thai party prepared for the November elections, the rebel leaders would all be sitting in a courtroom somewhere, being made examples of by tactical Abhisit, and blamed for far more than they deserve—and really they don’t deserve much, those figureheads, those Mouths of Sauron.

Well, Suthep submitted himself to police custody, and the captains said it was the wrong precinct; and because of their heavy greed and postponement, waves of violent emotion crested once again, and the “road map” fell by the wayside.

Abhisit had had enough. The cool opportunist dropped all the auspices of peaceful negotiation. He became consumed by the popular vexation, like a shark smelling blood, became its spokesman, and he went back on his word. There would be no more bargaining with the Red Shirts! No more November 14th elections! The “road map” would proceed without them both! And now—now the siege is real!

Abhisit shouted the angry words, Deputy Suthep wrote the plans, and poor General Anupong issued the orders he had long feared to give: “Operation Rajprasong.” In the middle of the night he bolstered the number of troops around Rajprasong to 32,000 and sent in 120 armored vehicles from their base in Saraburi. He set snipers and their weapons on the high places. His aides assured the press that machineguns and grenades would not be used, and that live ammunition would only be used as warning shots, fired into the sky, and in self-defense against the “men in black.”

Anupong fortified the roadblocks around the camp. Red Shirts would be allowed to leave, but no one would be allowed to enter, including the regular supplies of ice and food that had before made camp life tolerable. And at 6 p.m. on the 13th, all water, telephone, bus, electric train, subway, and boat services to the area—an area of residences, businesses, and schools—would cease. The power might be cut in the future, depending on the rebel response. This promised to be profound.

The rejuvenated commanders, no longer in danger of imminent arrest, said that if the elections were canceled they would continue to protest in Rajprasong until Abhisit “steps down or is toppled,” thus securing at the same time their own future. Abhisit’s threats of violence kept all the mobs on their commanders’ cornered side, fortified everyone’s resolve. After six weeks of fighting, renewed hardship and oppression would unite them much more fully than any promise of peace. And God-willing there would be blood in the streets!

People are too chicken shit to travel to Asia.
—Maddox

I came to Thailand on the eve of civil war, amid an exclamation of headlines and bloody photography.

The Red Shirt rebels had massed their ranks in the Rajprasong intersection, the center of the Bangkok commercial district, to protest what had happened in their country. They came down from the northern hills, from the city slums. Tens of thousands gathered around the crimson banners—urban and rural poor, living and sleeping on concrete steps under the brassy megaliths of corporate greed, the concrete citadels of modern consumerism, in a country where economic progress has left many behind. But this happens every year in Thailand. Last time it was the Yellow Shirts (the People’s Alliance for Democracy), who blockaded the airport and demanded political succor. One of the chief commandants of that campaign is currently the Thai’s foreign minister, one of the many officials that the rebels want removed.

At issue today is a resurfaced discord, this recent activity only an eruption of pent up tectonics like Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, a clearly foreseeable violence and destruction, little squiggles on a seismograph somewhere, and perhaps not preventable, in the way that most human history is inescapable.

In 1997 Thaksin Shinawatra, businessman of Chang Mai and then prime minister of Thailand, passed a new constitution, “the people’s constitution,” the first not drafted under military supervision—that opened up access to political involvement, information, education, and especially commercial opportunities for the masses, allowing them to grab at some of the staggering profits just then pouring in through exports of agricultural and industrial goods, and especially from Western tourism, which today makes up forty per cent of Thailand’s commerce.

The country took off like a roller-coaster under Thaksin’s businessman guidance. The prime minister famously said, “A company is a country, a country is a company.” Thaksin especially profited: he amassed a huge fortune by various corrupt means and, rather than face a court decision over it, absconded into self-imposed political exile to Montenegro, where he is now a citizen.

A supreme court removed Thaksin’s allies from power—the Red Shirts call it a coupe, looking back to the old days of military involvement, but who can say?—and installed the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva—aliases: the tyrant, the dictator, the murderer. The Red Shirts (their full group title is the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, or UDD, and they are aligned with Thaksin’s old Puea Thai Party) demand the dissolution of parliament, a fresh election, and a return to the 1997 constitution. Abhisit and his allies demand the Red Shirts dispersal. Two sides, each a magnet for fearful ideologues. And in the way of fearful ideologues, neither side appears willing to talk or compromise, and the situation threatens to burst like magma into mob rule or violence.

Same same but different, as the Asians say. All this happens with horrific regularity in Southeast Asia, even in Thailand’s model democracy, so that it is rarely reported. Yet in April the skirmishes near Phan Fa Bridge dragged open the lidded eye of the world onto the Thai struggle. The ministers dubbed it Operation “Ask For A Return of Public Spaces.” The colonels then asked their soldiers, stationed around the bridge encampment like a besieging army, to march on the rebels with riot shields, without having a clear idea of the Red Shirt numbers and organization or responding to any of their demands.

The Red Shirts fought back as cornered animals, with hands and rocks and signposts and the improvised urban weapons of mobs. From among their rabble stepped men in black, entirely covered but for a slit of the eyes, a cool glance of professionalism; men without faces or names or provenance, experienced and armed with assault rifles and worse, who slipped out from the red waves and shot down police and soldiers, then blackly stole away into the crowd. They say that the men in black were mercenaries hired by the exiled Thaksin to bolster his northern rebels, but no one knows for sure. Abhisit calls them terrorists, calls all the Red Shirts terrorists, just as the Red Shirts call the Democrats dictators.

The violence escalated. An actor named Methi Amornwutthhikul and a company of Red Shirts tried to retake the neighborhood around the Satriwitthaya School, and he was one of the rebels who managed to tear weapons away from the security forces. The rifles were later found in the trunk of his car. The soldiers started to use real bullets, first to fire warning shots in the air, and then lowering their guns in self-defense, against the men in black, and neither side backed down. The fighting went on into the deep dangerous black of night.

In the morning there was the most unexpected result: a complete stalemate. Twenty-five were dead, twenty civilians and five soldiers, and over 800 wounded. Streets full of wreckage and carnage and casings. On Khausan, the principle road of Bangkok’s thriving tourism, travelers stepped out of their hostels to survey the broken cars, the blood splatters, and the bullet holes. The hospitals ran out of transfusions, but most of the Red Shirts had already donated during a campaign two weeks before to carmine the cars of certain politicians with their own blood.

The international press caught wind of the carnage and swooped down like vultures, but in Thailand, and I here quote Suranand Vejjajiva, relative of Abhisit and ex-minister of Thaksin: “no one in the government ever apologized. Instead, state-controlled media bombarded the audience with one-sided stories of what happened. Some Web sites posting video clips of the shootings and beatings, other than the official versions, were blocked.”

The television stations showed footage from years ago of the army crackdown on protests against Thaksin’s government, full of violent beatings and horror, and said, “Remember what it was like under Thaksin?” The Red Shirt television station was shut down. Rumors spread that Thaksin had hired the black mercenaries with his extorted wealth, and that he paid most of the Red Shirts 500 bhat a day to come into Bangkok from his strongholds in the north. The Red Shirts denied everything and said that they were the victims—a fair statement, though perhaps not in the way they mean it.

Who can tell what is happening here? Yet the confusion of the violence appeared to exhort both sides to more, to exasperate their hatred and their sense of being wronged, and to strengthen their moral convictions that only their way was right for Thailand’s future. The southerners and the workers of Bangkok grew to hate the Red Shirts, for their violence and backwardness and their “men in black,” and for the excesses of Thaksin, revived by the media. The pro-Democrat Yellow Shirts, who had suspended their involvement, promised to resume it by Sunday the 25th. The government promised a crackdown.

And the Red Shirts cried injustice. Abhisit’s tyrannical government was against the people and the monarchy, the good King Rama IX—disband the parliament! restore the 1997 constitution! revenge the fallen! Their dead were martyrs, the “men in black” irrelevant. They hunkered down, those vast and wretched ranks, a grassroots army muscled into the political trenches by the rich and the powerful—they abandoned the Phan Fa Bridge willingly and concentrated all their forces in the Rajprasong intersection and made speeches and flew crimson signs and banners that said, “Truth today,” though truth has never felt further away.

Some pleaded for discourse, but most demanded blood and more blood. They would not reconcile or compromise, not when they knew that everything was at stake, not when they feared for their very survival.

In his appeal, quoted at the chapter’s beginning, Suranand Vejjajiva also wrote (and take heed of this, America), “If this were a black-and-white world, right and wrong would be easy to determine. But we live in a world with shades of gray. Behind the scenes, the power play and the issues at stake re intertwining threads of public interest and private ambitions—no-one has a monopoly on morality, be they the red, yellow, military, elite, businessman or politician,” and dare I add, Democrat or Republican? “Sometimes we just have to muddle through the gray world and make deals to move the country ahead rather than to embark on killing each other until there is nothing left to deal with.”

And I had not heard anything. The battle of the bridge happened on April 10, three days before my flight to Bangkok, to the terror and confusion of my mother. “Do you really have to go to Bangkok? Sounds just great there,” and soon after she wrote, “The NYTimes is reporting that Bangkok airports are closed. Could you let me know that you are safe and what you plan to do? Yes, I do worry. Mom.” I hastily looked this up, and finding only confusing reports, and with my visa expiring the day my plane left, I accepted that I would just have to go to the airport. Whatever happens, happens.

I was out of the loop. I had not even heard of Songkran, the water festival held on the Thai New Years, until an American named Tucker, from Santa Rosa, told me about it at the Calcutta airport; and I did not realize how big a deal this festival was until we took a cab downtown and saw trucks driving around, Thais crowded in the truckbeds like Somalis at the Battle of Mogadishu, but armed with super soakers instead of Kalishnakovs, with a great 40-gallon drum of cold water weighing down the middle. In the north, especially Chang Mai, Songkran takes on a more spiritual significance, but in Bangkok it’s really just a three-day water fight, a way to cool off at the end of the hot dry season.

Our cab driver Reggie, who could not understand Tucker’s name and called him Tiger instead, so we called him Reggie—Reggie would not go into the worst of the fighting around Khausan, where we hoped to find a place to stay, so he dropped us off at the entrance. The drive in was interesting, seeing all the huge glass skyscrapers and clean highways that did not match with my mental picture of southeast Asia, but here we saw thousands massed in the streets, all shooting each other in total anarchy. Some huddled around makeshift bases on the curb with buckets or coolers full of water, which they threw by the bucket at passers-by. Skirmishers rushed up to these to replenish their empty canisters with ammunition, and the Thais cried, “Five bhat!” Some of them were making a fortune, selling guns and beer and water, with signs that advertised such a strange combination of merchandise, and their profits presumably made up for getting constantly sniped at.

Indeed no one was sacred. Camera, book bag, baby stroller, leather purse, fine dress, or that you were currently driving a motorcycle did not exclude you from becoming some laughing gunner’s target—nor did backpacks containing everything you owned in the world! And this had me saying, “We should really find some place to put our stuff. Really.” Tucker and I dodged past the hooligan mobs, who seemed unaware of terms like noncombatant or friendly fire. We walked with a purpose, not too slow and not too fast, not trying too hard to avoid getting noticed or splashed, because that would only invite greater volumes of aimed water.

Getting to the Lonely Planet hotel involved walking down one of the worst streets, Soi Rambuttri with all its backpacker hostels, where every storefront had a big barrel of water with a hose stuck in it and a group of laughing Thais gathered around with buckets, and people sitting at the streetside cafes kept their guns on them and shot at those going by. Eventually we made it to a place called My House, checked into our room, took things out of our bags to dry, then went out and got guns and water and beer.

Pumping our squirt guns—therein lies a test: if you did not giggle, or even crack a smile, I’d say you are admirably innocent—pumping our squirt guns, Tucker and I wandered down through the press of the crowd on Khausan, everyone having a really good time of it, laughing and shooting each other in the face. There were girls dancing on top of the ice boxes where the big restaurants kept beer, music blasting, and everyone shot water guns at them. Those without guns had little buckets of talcum powder and water and they would rub this on your face or chest and say, “Swadi-pimai!”—Happy New Year!

There is a Thai word and custom, nam-jai, which means “kindness,” and is amazing to see in effect. The Thais see thousands of tourists a year, all these drunken Brits haggling for their women, and are still overjoyed to have a foreigner talk to them, curious and complimentary and fascinated, though always easy-going, always with a winsome sense of humor. Tucker and I fought alongside Thais using ice chests as cover, coordinating our fire on some tall guy with a gun or some pretty girl. We shot at girls and then went and talked to them, and found the Thai girls were all charmingly cheeky, even saucy, in their conduct.

Women are the aggressive sex among the Thais. A man in a crowd or club can expect to be grabbed or captured, or to bear the brunt of lewd or obscene comments and looks. This sociability does not apply only to the prostitutes and lady-boys, though it certainly facilitates their careers. Thai men are naturally reserved and require or are accustomed to such goading, taking on the seducee role of Western women. For one as myself unused to such earnest female attention, and doubly so after fearing it in India and Islamdom, Bangkok was a pleasant if sometimes disorienting surprise, and I heartily took advantage of it.

Now as for the famous Thai hookers, there were many in that city of sin, latitudes apart from shame and guilt—young and vacant-faced sylphs on the arm of some sex-slick bastard, experienced prostitutes at the corner of tubetop and miniskirt, and lady-boys that laughed and joked and groped. It is big business. The old men head straight to well-known establishments of ill-repute, or they come here on organized sex tours. The young blokes of vague intentions wander into nightclubs where every cheap drink puts them closer to taking up one of the working girls on her offer. A row of five Thai girls danced on ice boxes on the curb in front of a bar, and a sitting farang there, a Caucasian snake, pointed out one of the gyrating nymphets with a pretty face and called over the owner, presumably to negotiate a price. Prostitution is not a clandestine business here, even though it’s illegal.

One custom the Reader may not be familiar with is the paid girlfriends, essentially a concubine for a week. I had it explained to me, by someone in no way averse to the custom: “You pay them maybe $100 a day, and you get a girl to guide you around. She is like your girlfriend. She shows you around, translates for you, and you take her shopping, and then at night you have sex. What’s the problem? It’s not so bad, I can say.”

The interested party—I would not go so far as to call him a gentleman caller—makes arrangements with his little lover’s agency beforehand, including how many girlfriends they will have and setting a quota for how many times they will be “serviced”—but how just detailed are these girlfriend arrangements? Are there clauses contained for hand-holding? You see many of these old bachelors holding hands with their little Thai sweethearts as they walk down the road, glaring at everyone who wets their stupid shirt.
Does he establish beforehand how much he will spend on a cell phone? How many times he has to take her out to dinner? For how long he will wait for her to pick out a dress? I wonder, just how pimp officiated, how governed by contract, is this relationship?

One night as we rambled back with our heavy ordnance, water tanks empty, shirts soaked, we passed going the other way an Old Cantankerous with two vernal caryatids supporting either flabby arm, and then twenty paces later, a block-headed Brit, young and stupid-looking, also walking along with a little Thai girl in hand.

I said, “I know the old men with the Thai girls are paying them, that’s why they came here—but what about all these young dudes?”

“Yep,” said Tucker, “I think they’re all paying them.”

“I don’t get it. These Brits just out of high school, coming here to pick up hookers.”

“Probably all came here virgins.”

“I don’t get it. There’s got to be a few real couples here, a few dorky foreigners working here who have just picked up Thai girls.”

“Probably a few.”

“Maybe one in twenty,” I guessed, “but ninety-five per cent are with hookers. What the fuck? I just don’t get it. There’s got to be easy tail on the beaches for these idiots. I talked to like three girls tonight who were totally trashed. I told this one girl who wanted to buy my water gun, I said that she should just spit on people. We talked about it for a while.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. Would you pick up a hooker here?”

Tucker looked away to think about this and answered, “Maybe when I was younger, if I was really drunk and my friends were like, Let’s get hookers! But I wouldn’t come to Thailand for it.”

“Yeah, exactly. Everyone comes here for the same reason.”

Yet I for one had not come for the bacchanalia. I was still seeking a romance of adventure and far-away fantasy, rather than one of hookers and drunk Brits. As I wrote in a message, “I feel half isolated from all the weekend campers in this part of the woods. It’s all little kiddies having their first sip of beer and taste of sex, couples out of Old Europe who have booked all their accommodation, and salty British perverts.” It was difficult to find anything of Thai culture not already debauched and mapped out in a vacationer’s brochure.

But Thailand is a place where many worlds coexist—lust, debauchery, tourism, alongside earnest spiritualism and politics. Approaching Bangkok or looking down Khausan’s line of clothes stalls and crowds of farang or passing the third 7-11 on the block, it seems at surface level like any city in California, yet as soon as you talked honestly to any of the Thais, even the ones gracelessly screwing around with tourists, you learned that underneath the jeans and Hawaiian shirts they are still Thais, affectionate and superstitious, devoutly Buddhist and adamantly political.

The second day was a second offensive, and we proceeded more tactically. Tucker and I moved up the lanes in a SWAT team crouch. We took cover behind beer coolers, street stalls, or plants, and worked with random arrangements of people who happened to be shooting at the same other random arrangement of people as us. We rushed down the covered alleys between Khausan and Soi Rambuttri and charged out into the light. Once a whole team of us assaulted this high platform on Khausan where a girl stood firing a pressure washer at a low setting so the mist came out like the blaze of a flamethrower. We advanced under covering fire, knelt in the street, and created an enfilade, all shooting at the face of the poor confused Thai girl at the top of the platform.

All along the street there were venues set up, playing music and selling beer. Thais and Anglos danced wildly in front of them, and sometimes a few danced up on a stage. At night, flesh-seekers crept in and pointed out one or the other of the girls, then negotiated her price with a nearby pimp, but during the day things were fine and sunny and wet and only vaguely sexual. Between the stalls there were vendors selling noodles or spring rolls or barbecued pork on sticks, water guns or plastic bags to hold valuables, and often cold water for ammunition. They charged 5 bhat for this, but we always managed to get it for free.

Some skirmishers wore costumes: business suit and tie, Mexican wrestling masks, frog suits, SCUBA masks, etc. The girls all wore clothes that clung to them as soon as wet. Some of them screamed very satisfyingly when you shot them, especially with cold water, which I preferred for the reactions it brought. Cold water also kept them from retaliation: a target hit with lukewarm tapwater will just turn and fire straight back at the shooter, unless the shooter hits them in the eyes first thing and keeps them blinded, then runs off to better cover while the target reorients. I became very good at hitting people in the eyes straight off.

Ah, the liberty of it! All those crusty Brits there to rape children, with one girl under each arm; those buzz-cut GIs with a gun slung over each shoulder; those stuck-up princesses with raised noses and a fearfully quick gait, lest they get their fine dresses wet; those swaggering broad-chested ignoramuses on a gap year and a drinking binge; those effeminate, squealing Thai boys—what a joy it is to shoot these stereotypes in the face with a water cannon!

Sometimes we stopped and stayed somewhere for a while—at the end of an alleyway where a man was sitting with a hose, at a beer stall where the long-haired Thai in the Hawaiian shirt gave us free ice water so long as we helped him shoot girls with it—and ambushed anyone who passed. Great skirmishes were fought, all the combatants smiling and laughing with each other. Is it Mars or Bacchus who is king of this war?

There were dozens of Red Shirts gathered around the Democracy Monument, a few blocks from Khausan. The government had expected most demonstrators go to home to be with their families for Songkran, but the stalemated violence a few days before had given them all fresh resolve. The movement stayed strong. They set up a poster-board at the end of Khausan with gory pictures of some of the protesters who had died on April 10, as martyrs, and they had some of the coffins there, inside big cases with Buddhist carvings, Thai flags laid over the top. Clever propaganda showed an arm-wrestling match between a general and a man of the people, the general’s hand weighed down by tanks and divisions, the man’s hand barely supported by the combined efforts of a dozen Red Shirts.

A few days later I surveyed the Rajprasong intersection and found the rebel camp organized and relatively apathetic, discouraged by the heat and the long period of inactivity. Red Shirt commanders took the stage to sing patriotic songs and deliver manifestos about the injustice of the Phan Fa Bridge battle, to keep their spirits up, but only a few gathered around the stage. Most of the rebels sat around on mats in front of the commercial high-rises or in the shadows of the overpass. They snacked or read the paper or gave each other massages. The camp had areas set aside for showers and offered free lunches—a good way, perhaps the best, to move the masses. Guardsmen in red swaggered around, making sure things stayed ordered, and there were only a few tourists. Leaving the area I came to the police blockade, the armored cars, the lines of soldiers, smoking cigarettes with helmets at their feet and riot shields close at hand.

Around midnight on the second day of Songkran, a detachment of fifty Red Shirts, some walking and some riding in three pickup trucks, red flags and Thai flags hung limply over their heads, came from the Democracy Monument down the street toward Khausan, where the Thais were dancing and laughing and spraying water. One went ahead, red bandanna about his mouth like a mask, shadowed by the brim of his hat, and his shirt said, “We Want the Truth.” Some of the Thai revelers, the wet shirts, turned on this Red Shirt with a drunken anger and began throwing curses and then bottles at him, hating him for disturbing their celebration, for disturbing the peace of their city and politic. Few southern Thais empathize with the mostly northern Red Shirts, and many openly despise the rebels for causing chaos and carnage and commercial strife.

The Red Shirt so attacked retreated into the midst of his gang, suddenly energized, as they had been waiting for a fight with police or whoever they could find, and a gang formed of wet shirts as well. The Red Shirt commanders started grabbing every rebel they could find and shoving them forward, like the Soviet commissars at Stalingrad, saying, “Go, go, go! Forward!”

The crimson wave charged like blood right down Khausan and stopped in a stumbling mess twenty paces from the soppy revelers. The rebels threw some bottles at the crowd, the crowd threw bottles back, and then the Red Shirt mob retreated, as if thinking, “What are we doing? These aren’t our enemies.” The captains crushed them back. “Run, run, move, move,” they cried, grabbing anyone that appeared to be stationary and shoving them back into the breach. This happened a few times, the Red Shirts moved forward and backward with the collective will of an army or a wave and threw bottles whenever it got close enough to the revelers, without doing any damage. Eventually the mob of revelers grew, and they advanced fearlessly so the Red Shirts had to run, leaving their vehicles behind.

In the morning we saw these cars, or what was left of them. The windows all broken, the tires smashed, dents everywhere, red flags waving like torn banners over some fallen war host. Wrecks, just waiting for a tow truck to take them away.

While all this was happening, I was a long way away, sitting on the fifth floor balcony of our hotel with an English couple, listening to the wet chaos of the streets compete with a set of iPod speakers. My hamstrings hurt from running around the city in a tactical crouch, and I didn’t want to go anywhere.

Lee and Kelley, the two Brits, were childhood friends from the small isle of Jersey in the English Channel, a peaceful idyl eternally warmed by the Gulf Stream, yet Lee’s father’s family originated in Bengal, or rather in today’s Bangladesh. They were in the line of succession for the Bengali throne, at some distant branch, had the partisans not interfered. One of Lee’s cousin nevertheless fashioned himself Shah or Prince. Lee could do the same, but he chose not to.

Growing up in Jersey, Lee never believed the stories his father told him of his great-grandfather, who was the fakir or shaman of their village in Bengal. As fakir, he would pace around the town at night, pounding his staff into the ground to scare away the wild animals. He also performed miracles. One year when the rains did not come, the fakir had all the village children go out and play in a stream. The very next day it poured. Lee did not believe it, until one night something happened that shook young Lee’s confidence in the rational world.

When he was thirteen he woke in the night to a sound in the kitchen of footsteps and tapping: two steps, one tap, two steps, one tap. Anticipating an intruder, he got a pool cue from his closet and went out, searching the benighted house. “I know you’re there,” he called into the deep, dangerous black, “and you had better come out.” But there was nothing, and he went back to sleep. He woke again to a strange sensation. It was as if someone was holding his ears shut with gnarled fingers and driving thumbs into his eyes. This grinding screech pierced his eardrums. Lee tried to move, to scream, but could do nothing except lie there totally paralyzed. And then all the force and noise was gone, and the boy bolted out of his sheets, grasping at his pounding heart in confusion and terror.

He ran upstairs to his sister’s room and pushed open the door. Now on the floor was a fiber optic light, and when Lee crashed through the portal, the light exploded from its dim glow to a blinding white, and then burned out to nothing. The boy curled up in his sister’s bed and stilled his beating heart and went back to sleep.

“The next day I told my dad what happened,” Lee explained, “and he said, ‘What did you do wrong?’ I told him, ‘Nothing, I didn’t do anything wrong,’ but he just asked me again, ‘What did you do wrong?’ I only realized it a few years later. My great-grandfather was protecting our house, and I ran out with a pool cue and threatened him. It changed me,” he continued. “I used to be a little shit, a bastard, a real cunt to everyone, for no reason. I was always bad. After that, though, I started being a little better. I kept having dreams like I was suffocating, but as I got better, they came less and less, and then not at all. Now I am very different than I was before. I was a little shit! Now I know I am where I should be, where my great-grandfather wants me to be.”

I listened with empathy and fascination and believed every word. It’s not in my nature to doubt what someone else says, no matter how far-fetched, because there’s something to be learned from everything. Lee said, “Thank you for believing me. Most people hear this story and they say, ‘Bullocks, that can’t be real,’ and I say, ‘Sit my dad down, he’ll tell you the same thing.’ It was real. I feel changed because of it.”

That was when the Belgian girl Zaza returned, and friend Tucker soon after, with the same look of animal terror on their faces. They had been in the streets when the skirmish began, with Red Shirt band leaders howling battle cries as they shoved everyone forward into the bottle storm, but this was all happening a long way away from our happy gathering. We listened with a passing interest, without being able to make sense of it, and unworried.

Lee got out his guitar and started jamming, then playing along to Tenacious D. He and Kelley had nearly finished their rum bucket, and Kelley stood up and started dancing around the hall, inviting Zaza to join her. A big-chested, long-haired traveler from Baltimore and of the tribes of Israel, named Hellal, came and sat with us. Just that day, some thief had picked from his pocket both wallet and passport, and he was looking to cure his grief with our merrymaking—an osmosis of moods.

At first I said I would not go to The Club, despite Kelley’s extensive descriptions of its chairs and decorations and high urban ceiling, but eventually I complied. Tucker was smitten with young Zaza, and when she said she was too tired to go, he volunteered to stay as well. The rest of us ducked through the streets to a 7-11. Lee and Kelly got more rum for their bucket, and I bought a Singha for Hellel and myself.

“This isn’t how I expected my trip to go,” he said, “getting other people to buy me things. I saved for months for this.” I told him a story of when I was down and out in Odessa and how someone helped me because it was the only thing to do—thank you Honore.

We went to the Club with a bare minimum of splash damage, chugged our beers, and entered. I danced with Thai girls in the dim light who all asked for drinks at the end. They tipped their cupped hands back and waved to the bar to show me what they wanted, and I demonstrated some excuse and went off to dance with someone else until this was no longer feasible. Tired, I said goodbye to the others and went home. Street food stalls still sizzled, and trash piled in the gutter, and the wet street of Khausan reflected the sleepless neon, red and blue and purple.

Such a picturesque setting reminded me of an old movie, a cult classic called Blade Runner. It has always been a dream of mine to replicate, as much as possible, the first scene, where Harrison Ford/Deckard Cain eats a bowl of noodles from a stall on the side of a Chicago alleyway drenched with rain and neon. There are people around, but he’s alone in a city of millions. The deluge hangs down in curtains behind him, and he runs through it with the futile gesture of a newspaper over his head.

I don’t know why I hold such an affection for this scene—its film noir romance, or perhaps the bleak urban wasteland, the cosmopolitan confinement of a Chinatown alley, the power of nature—but there’s nothing I wanted more than to eat noodle soup from the alleyway counter of a dim little kitchen, lit within by a charming crepuscular glow, and with the torrent at my back, flooding down the edges of the awning like Niagara Falls, and beyond that the hostile streets, gray rapids in the gutters, shadowy figures in long coats with purposeful strides, women with umbrellas stumbling by the passages in the wall and their menace, a slosh of cabs that look empty, and the ghosts of neon signs float overhead like words from Poe in the narrow and not-quite-exact reaches of the urban canyon, the criss-cross of escape ladders and the lifeless windows, and the neon casts down a spectral illumination that befriends the blackness rather than shuns it; my meal is but a respite, the stall but a warm waystation before I must venture out into cold dark midnight danger.

The reflective streets of Bangkok made me remember this fatal yearning, though it wasn’t raining, and though I couldn’t see any noodle stalls that exactly fit what I needed for my reenactment. Still the food was delicious. A principle aspect of my travel, ever in my mind and on my itinerary, was cuisine, and this was available on every Bangkok street corner. From push carts or kitchenettes mounted on scooters like sidecars, the greasy cooks fry pad thai and spring rolls or served sausages in bags with sweet chili sauce. They serve noodle soup with chicken and dumplings, or with big platters of squid and seafood to choose from, or cold noodle salad with pork sausage, or they had big tureens of homemade curry and a full rice-cooker.

The Thai food of Thailand’s streets was very similar to the Thai food of back home, though simpler in composition, and often spicier. Asking for a dish to be “Thai spicy” was asking for as many chilli peppers as noodles. The story goes that a long time ago, when the Thais were an impoverished people, a meager meal consisted of a bowl of rice, one of soya sauce, and one of chilli peppers. The Thai ate a spoonful of rice, with a little soya sauce, and then two full chilli peppers.

Today the chilli is ubiquitous as table salt. Indeed you might say that noodles and chilli are the Thai’s bread and butter. Most restaurants provide trays of chilli oils and powders, plus jars of ground peanuts, sugar, fish sauce, and other condiments preferred by the Thais. They serve cucumber slices with chilli peanut sauce, and pineapple or grapefruit with chilli salt. Restaurants also serve a cup topped off with ice alongside each meal, to be filled with soda or water or instant coffee or just snacked on, depending on preference.

On the last night of the festival, Tucker and I went to a supermarket that carried Tim-Tams and Oreos, Nutella and peanut butter, and bought some bread and tomatoes and cucumber—but no cheese! Then we went outside to a street-corner noodle soup stand. The portly cook served out pork soup from his steel cart, and we sat on plastic stools around plastic tables; and with a little suspended belief, I could imagine this present scene as the opening of Blade Runner, though the skies were clear, the streets not rain-slick but spray-slick from thrown buckets and emptied super soakers, but that sinister element was in the air, a human danger worse than any jungle beast.

Songkran had lost some of its interest and was even weighing on my nerves. We had not participated much that day, and it was frustrating that you could not go out and walk around, at any time of day or night, without expecting to be soaked. Tucker was on his way out, on a night bus, to the diving mecca at Ko Tao, and he would wear his swim trunk on his way to the station. I tried to conjure my own plan. I wanted some islands and beaches, but also thought, “I should come back to Bangkok for the monsoon. It’ll be pouring and I’ll find a good noodle stand. I’ll have a good opportunity then.”

That’s assuming that Bangkok yet stands!

Prepare to meet Kali—in Hell!
—Indiana Jones

Once I heard a story of a lone Brit astride a Royal Enfield Bullet, a classic motorcycle, the chassis unchanged from the ’50s, and he was driving along India’s highways, fulfilling some post-colonial dream, when somewhere ahead of him on the dusty highway that runs between jungle and mountain he encountered what appeared to be a wall of oncoming traffic, an impossible and anachronistic vehicular rampart.

At the far left of the road, in the slow lane, limped two heavy-humped oxen, long horns painted blue, pulling at a cart loaded with hay; a Hindu in a collared shirt riding a bicycle past this, a tuk-tuk ripping past the bicycle with a whole tangle of tied-upped chickens squawking on the back bench, then a half-rusted car with those old voluptuous streamlines around headlights and taillights passing the tuk-tuk, and finally a huge Tata truck, the king of the road, its bed weighed down with cardboard boxes, boxes piled so high they stood above the cabin and had to be tied down, looking like some Dust Bowl refugee, this Tata truck overtaking them all on the far right—all these vehicles, of various eras and velocities, happened to align like the planets do sometimes, so as to form a solid Indian phalanx, from one shoulder of the road to the other, as the Brit on his motorcycle approached.

This is the best analogy for the state of India: contradictory and anachronistic, pre- and post-industrial, and dangerously, prolifically out of control. A swarm of humanity steers this thing, not some face of politics. Gandhi understood this better than anyone. He never tried to control India, merely to make himself a cog of cogs that would set the swarm to the real work.

There is progress, and there are those left behind, those who have to swerve into the ditch to avoid what’s overtaking them. Men lying face down under the curb, men with sores on their features, with bleeding bones sticking out from amputations, skeletal old women with no one to help them, and filthy children who don’t deserve it. Gutters and begging bowls are India’s welfare network, and charity is their universal health care. The poor put ads in the paper. “My child needs an operation, please help him!” And in the same streets the other billion-plus of India’s swarm go about their business, with a blind eye to the down and out. Rich Brahmins glide by in their rickshaws, their salientian faces each a study of the lion in repose.

It takes brute cunning to survive in India. The best word to describe the country, encompassing all its vast disparities and cultural, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and geographical distinctions—the word is wild. Wild, from the Mumbai slums to the tribal hills, from the Backwaters to the Himalayan plateaus, from Tamil fire temples to Assamese Baptist churches. The only order and direction is natural selection. Caste is a food chain, and the cities are Darwinian pits, where the ruthless flourish and the rest sink to the slummy bottom and into extinction. Indian history is that of a thousand vying kingdoms, a disunited country, oblivious to the lesser masses. It is free market corporatism to an unholy degree.

Progress of the kind measured in three-letter acronyms by statisticians is quick for the wild nation. The laborers toil ceaselessly for nothing and sleep on the factory floor like slaves. The rich grow richer off ghetto sacrifice. Extortion is common: sometimes outlawed, sometimes permitted, and sometimes sponsored by the state. Cruelty is a virtue.

Yet for every mean generalization there is a good one. Look past the ruin and rubbish to the beauty of the country, and be numbed by the complexity of the city. The multifarious Indians are curious and childish and cunning. For every one that offends, ten will surprise and spoil with thoughtless generosity and fraternal humor. Here men and women preach and practice and sing of love and broken fetters. They crusade for the Untouchables, for women, for the poor. Saints and poets flourish as they only can in a wild chaos: Gandhi, Amma, Teresa, Tagore, Narayan, Ray, Mehta, Shankar, etc. The cultural atmosphere at once classical and progressive.

There is life and noise and warmth in every corner, an ancient heart beating in every city, and spirituality under every tree. The oldest stories and customs survive here, customs not seen in the West since Rome, Greece, and Babylon, graced by modern innovations. The story of Rama as told by television, novel, and comic book, and Bollywood-invented gods, worshiped by the most ancient rites of man.

She is a work in progress, this India—grand in scale, elusive in spirit, and willfully, wonderfully wild. I have known a little of her, and will return to see more of the north, and the mountains and deserts and jungles I missed, each land different than the rest, and to see where she will next steer her ancient patchwork self.

Each Bengali village orbits a pond called the pukur, where the villagers bathe and wash their clothes and water their animals. Holy men called fakir tend to the villages spiritual needs. The fakir brings rain when it is dry, and at night he paces around the village, hitting the ground with his staff to scare away the wild things. There are Muslim fakirs and Hindu ones. At one time in Bengal, the Muslims were as common as the Hindus, and they lived together very peacefully, though the Partition changed that forever.

The principle heathen deity among the Bengalis is the Mother Goddess Devi, usually linked to Parvathi, and with ten avatars of her own. Among these are benevolent women like Annapurna, goddess of food and plenty, and bloodthirsty terrors like Kali and Tara, who appear as mad and black-skinned horrors with lolling tongues and sharp teeth. Their dozen hands hold a dozen blades, and they wear the severed heads of men around their necks.

The Kali worshipers of Calcutta feed their goddess with the blood of sacrifices, and the devotees of Tara drink from skulls and practice Tantric rites on the new moon. In Tarapith they live in the ash of cremation grounds and throw bones at those who come to interfere in their inverted society, which refutes all the order of Hindu caste. To these heathens, even the malevolent aspects of the Devi are goddesses of love, personifying the intimidating courage of a mother’s devotion.

The Bauls of Bengal also throw off the chains of Hinduism, and society in general. They are wandering minstrels who sleep under trees and wear long shifts with checkered patterns and play the ektara, a single stringed instrument shaped like a gourd. Sometimes they stop in a small village, and all the Hindus come out to hear their songs of love, though the Baul creed forbids them from staying in one place for longer than three days and soon they must move on. They play on trains and on street corners and are the happiest of men.

In Bengali, their name means “mad” or “possessed,” for they yield to personal passion, to inward need. The Bauls say that God does not exist in Heaven but inside each man. “Seek truth within,” they say—within, rather than outside in the Hindu world of temple rituals and temporal masters. Seek God in love and music, passion and pleasure. Thinking this, they live like Krishna, traveling from place to place, singing their love songs and practicing their arts of seduction, and never tying themselves to anything.

“This is the best life. The world is my home,” said one of these minstrels in William Dalrymple’s new book on the Indian sacred. “When you walk, you are freed from the worries of ordinary life, from the imprisonments of being rooted in the same place.” Ah, what happy example for an unattached rambler like me!

While in Calcutta for the second time, and with an interest in all this Bengali mystique, I went to see the Temple of Kali in Kalighat, the holiest of that black goddess’s shrines. The story goes that when Kali was murdered, for being vicious bloodthirsty or for whatever reason, her husband, Shiva the Destroyer, was raised to such angry heights that he nearly destroyed all the three planes, Heaven and Earth and Hell. Vishnu only quelled his world-burning revenge by dancing on and disintegrating Kali’s corpse. Bits and pieces of her flew all over India, and now reside in her temples, like the saintly relics of European cathedrals. Calcutta maintains Kali’s big toe.

So I went to the Temple of Kali one sweltering afternoon with James of Edmunton, the deer hunter I had met in Kodaikanal who had just arrived in Calcutta from the steamy south. The Traveler’s Bible warns not to follow the Hindus that approach outside of the temple, who show you around in the friendliest way and then ask for an obligatory donation, but I’m in the habit of spiting these people, especially when they come from a priestly caste with a tenet that forbids begging. So when one Brahmin named Babu approached James and I on our way into the temple, we willingly allowed him to guile us through the market of holy trinkets and into the crowded temple courtyard.

Babu showed us the Barren Tree, the flowerless arbor where women pray for healthy grandchildren, and took us to a stand in the back. He got us us garlands of the Akanda, a flower holy to Kali, and two hoops and some incense, and he showed us the cupboard where we could put our shoes. Then he took us past the normal line to a secret entrance into the prayer chamber. This was a relatively small room packed full of worshipers all jostling for a space in front of a square hole in the wall that looked on the malicious, simple idol of black-faced Kali, shrouded in cloth of gold and surrounded by gilded offerings. They pushed and shoved against each other until they could see the goddess, and then threw in some Akanda flowers and managed a quick prayer before being forced away by the tumult.

This rite observed, Babu took James and I out into the courtyard on the other side of the temple. A few priests were preparing food under the colonnade there. Some 1200 of Calcutta’s poor come to the Temple of Kali every day for a free lunch, made up of rice and vegetables and the seared produce of sacrifice, for like those of the ancient Greeks, the Hindu sacrifices are in truth a ritualized excuse to barbecue a goat. Knowing this, I asked Babu, “Where does the meat come from?” and after he had answered, I asked, “Where are the sacrifices?” and led our guide towards them. I wanted to see some blood.

In the stone pavilion that Babu had indicated, two priests brought out a small screaming goat, its legs tied, and the knowing natives watched on. It was not the first—the block was already wet with blood. At half-past seven in the morning, when the head priest beheads the first goat, he takes up the severed head that he may bathe his face in its blood. The sacrifice we witnessed, one of the sixty sacrifices performed each day, was no less sanguinary than the first, and was performed by the head priest’s disciples. Placing the tied and squealing kid between two wooden boards on an uneven rock already carmined with blood and Akanda petals, the priests then ran a dowel through holes in the boards so it held the kid in place by its neck. Now the device was arranged like a guillotine and with a similar purpose. One priest hefted a massive blade with a reverse-curved edge. The kid issued one last bleat and was silenced.

The priests tossed its body into the corner of the pavilion, where it bucked as if trying to run, creating a circle of gore, and they took the severed head from under the dowel. They walked it around the circle of shouting pagans and drew blood from its neck with two fingers to paint the mark of Kali on rapturous foreheads. This poor goat, now reduced to paint and twitching meat for the spit, was one of fifty or sixty killed that day. The blood goes to Kali, the meat to the temple kitchens to feed the poor, and all the blessings of charity to the rich castes who fund it.

Babu took us out to the Shiva pool, where there was a stone idol of Kali’s vengeful husband. One at a time he took us down to the statue and guided us through a solitary ritual of puja. I went first. I lit my incense and circled it around three times, saying, “Om shanti,” put my hoops around the god’s elbows, lay my Akanda garlands over Shiva’s crowned and grinning head, and placed a pile of the flowers in his lap one by one—the first for myself and the others for my parents, my love, my sister, and my travels.

Then Babu brought out his ledger and asked for a donation for the poor. He showed me how people from other countries had donated between 2000 and 4000 rupees (that is $50 and $100), but told me that 1000 rupees would be sufficient. I expect that some of these philanthropists were fabricated, or otherwise I severely underestimate the common sense of people. I replied that I could not afford a donation and was only there to learn, but I thanked him for showing me around his temple. I would certainly consider donating money to a charity or donating my time to service when I someday returned to Calcutta with more of both. Brahmin Babu had ways of dealing with those reticent to donate—this was his job, after all—but I resisted them all with stupid stubbornness and gratitude.

Angrily did Babu dismiss me, and as I left he pulled the last of my flowers, the blessing of travel, from Shiva’s lap and returned it to me without comment, and never told me what I was supposed to do with it. While I waited in the shade, James came down for his puja, which did not last very long, and then refused the donations in much the same way I had. Babu led us back to get our shoes and pay the woman for our ritual items, and then he asked for a tip, which we also refused.

Money can procure anything in Calcutta, but the City of Joy is especially good for leather. Knowing this, I went around a few showrooms and to the Hogg Market, a mixed up bazaar with a meat market full of yet-living flesh, a dusty produce warehouse, and a maze of random stalls, including one that seemed to deal entirely in American country music. In the basement are the luxury crafts stores, the artifacts and apparel, without brand stamp but of excellent quality nonetheless, and into this subterranea I followed a guide who approached me in the street. These take you to shops for a commission, and are sometimes worth following.

He wound me around the cool and sleepy hallways to a shoe store. Six salesmen lounged about the room, and one of them approached me while the others watched. My guide waited at the entrance, hunched over and expecting his payment.

“I look for leather shoes,” I said casually, in the broken English that anyone can understand, gazing around at the store, as if the thought of footwear had suddenly sprung upon me and I had wandered in without any anticipation of buying something.

Crieth the salesman: “Sit down!” and he slapped a couch in the center of the room, but I ignored him and browsed the shoe racks. It is a constant power struggle in these equations. Allow yourself to be served, or put yourself in a situation where you need what is offered (i.e. it’s raining and you need an umbrella, or it’s late and you need a room), and you are sure to receive the bad end of the math. So I browsed the shoes calmly and picked out one I didn’t really like. “Very nice one,” said the vendor, and he told me a little about it. I put it back with disgust, then picked out the pair I really wanted and considered them with the same expression. They were black and long with crinkled leather and flat toes and were very rock and roll.

“Real leather?” I asked, not really knowing.

“Of course,” said the salesman. “From baby cow,” and he stroked the shoe as lovingly as he might the real animal. He then selected an ugly pleather thing from the rack and said, “This fake, you see? No good. This real leather, very good quality, baby cow, embossed leather. No wrinkle. You bend, no wrinkle. It will last seven years, no problem, guarantee. Here, try on.”

The others had brought out a pair in my size (and there are few of those in India), and I slipped them on and looked for things to complain about. “They don’t fit here,” said I, running my hand around the space between my ankle and the shoe. “It will fit with sock!” the salesmen protested. “Look at these wrinkles,” I whined, and the salesmen assured me they would fade. Make them desperate! and then you ask, “What’s the price?” I had asked around at a few stores earlier, so I already knew what would be fair and what would be an exorbitant demand in that market.

“For these,” said the salesman, pursing his lips as if in deep thought, “One thousand six hundred fifty rupees.”

“One thousand six hundred fifty!” I echoed, and I melodramatically reconsidered the shoes as if he had told me they were cobbled from gold.

“You have discount,” stammered the salesman. “First customer today, first customer discount. Ten percent off.” On a calculator, he showed me this meant 1500.

In an affected rage I informed him, “I go to store earlier, all real leather, air conditioning, nice showroom. Their shoes are only seven hundred rupees, fixed price.”

“Yes but this good quality,” pleaded the salesman. “Much better than other shoes.” Again he made a comparison between the ones I wanted and pleather shoes. “See, very good quality, baby calf. Embossed leather.”

I looked entirely unconvinced. I studied the shoes, bending them around as if they were worth nothing.

“In showroom,” said another salesman, “These cost three thousand rupees. Good quality, good brand. Only here, no air condition, good price.”

I became forgiving: “Yes, it is good quality. Very nice shoes.” The others thanked me. “It’s just more than I wanted to spend,” and I put them on the floor with high tragedy and brought around my own lesser shoes, dejected.

“What price you offer?”

“It was seven hundred at the last store.”

“No!” said the first salesman, exasperated, “seven hundred so small. These good quality,” and he pointed out many of the shoes’ fine features once more.

“I know, very good quality, I like them.”

“So say price.”

“They are good quality, so I’ll give you more than at the other store. Eight hundred is a good price.”

“Last price?”

“Eight hundred.”

“You pay eight hundred, I make nothing. I pay more than that,” said one of the salesmen, I’m assuming the manager or merchant.

“I’m sorry, I’m on a budget,” I said, full of morose self-blame, “It’s more than I want to pay.” I got up to leave— the bargainer’s ultimate weapon, though it must be used at the proper moment and not too soon.

The merchant got out a piece of cardboard and wrote down 1650, then 1500, and then had me write down my price—that is, 800—and then he said, “This is how much I pay,” and put 1150, “I will give you for this price,” and put 1250. “Very little profit, but you are first customer.”

I considered this, as a dictator might consider the truce offer of some lesser nation, and then told him, “Last price, one thousand.”

The merchant sighed. “One thousand fifty. I take hundred rupee loss. You are first customer.”

To these generous terms I agreed. My guide took me to a leather merchant down the hall, where a repeat performance of all this act—I was very patient that day—got me a red leather satchel and a jacket of supple sheep’s leather, for 1200 and 2800 rupees, that is $24 and $70, respectively.

For travelers, India is as rewarding as it is difficult, and on my last day before leaving, and the last day of my visa, I faced down all difficulties with a tremendous morale, which stemmed from a vague feeling of homeward bound. I joked with the touts and on one occasion pulled a rickshaw-wallah around a block in his own vehicle, saying, “You need rickshaw?” to all the incredulous locals, and fulfilling a lifelong dream. I bought what I needed (or rather what I wanted), mailed it home, and met my friends, all successfully in the face of wild challenge and complexity. “A cheerful man does best in every enterprise,” as the blind poet wrote.

That morning I walked down through the clean-swept cobblestone alleys, tile eaves low and wide against the sun, to the mission of Mother Theresa. Indian nuns in their two-toned habits, in wimple and guimpe, sat prayerfully in the vestibule, and I went past and through to the courtyard. I saw her marble tomb, her barren room: a small bed (she was very short), a writing desk, and a table with a bench; no comforts or conveniences, only the appropriate ornaments: a statue of Mary, a Crucifix, photos of her and the Pope, and a sign, written in red ink on a strip of masking tape, that said, “My Vocation is Love.”

Now to take up an unrelated subject, the people of Calcutta have another custom of interest called adda, which is a daily meeting of minds in some venue—porch step, park grass, restaurant, or living room; over coffee or cards or in the ticket line for a show—for discussions of art or politics or sports, or of spiritual or philosophical matters.

Regarding the more esoteric topics, please afford me the following rant:

If you have never heard an Indian wax philosophical, count yourself lucky—it is the most irrelevant and impractical bunk, all meaningless metaphysics and quasi-esoteric pathos. Not that it’s hard to follow the train of thought. This is a theoretical subject being wrestled with, something never before considered, and the thought train really never leaves the station. Rather what comes out is a cerebral miscarriage. Shapeless and figurative of opinion, the Indian debater worms around the most general of subjects, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing with his own point of view, as he change topics and refuse to accept evidence unless it’s worded as some worthless romantic imagery, which causes him to coo in self-satisfied delight.

It often aggravates, this faux-intellectualism, reminding me of the nonsense rhetoric of the old Greek sophists, rambling wordy circles around tight-lipped men of action with no patience for it. Would that Socrates were here to reveal their tangled illogic and strangle them in it, or otherwise I prescribe a good punch in the jaw.

As for an elucidating example, I could never reproduce this tendency towards abstraction. The best way to understand it is perhaps by browsing some online message board for politics & philosophy—amateur scholars of pop culture in a grand arena of ad hominem and ego, spouting nonsense and trying to sound smart. Or read the first paragraphs of high school essays, e.g., “People everywhere have always liked to build tall buildings. Is this because people are short, or is there another reason? We may never know the answer to this question,” or, “Throughout time man has wondered about the meaning of life. Sometimes they think and talk about it, and sometimes they fight wars about religion and things.” Now spread this out to book length and you have an idea of the simple-minded torture of Indian philosophy.

To afford a taste, an article I read about adda begins: “It is possibly worth a thought as to whether man created adda or whether adda maketh a man. The truth must be that both are correct.” To which the only reply can be, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Rant ended.

The same author of this article, a certain Nondon Bagchi, writes, “The hallmark of a good adda is that those conversations are of the finest quality, and, had they been recorded over the years, there is no doubt that it would have made for enjoyable and stimulating reading, listening or viewing.” Some adda, the article continues, regards the trivial philosophies mentioned above, and is a way of cementing ones own opinions through fluid debate, while adda can also inform on practical matters, such as current events or horse racing, though the proliferation of the Internet is quietly usurping this role.

Indeed adda, this important toe on Calcutta’s cultural footprint, is in danger of amputation in our Age of Information. Older Bengalis are too busy for it, and the idle young take their discussions online, where anonymity allows them their self-conscious fear of being assertive and opinionated in public.

Yet I was lucky enough to engage in some adda during my last days in that sweltering city. James of Edmunton had met two gruffly suave Londoners, Fran and James (who I’ll just call James II, with apologies), and a sweet Danish girl named Nana. Our adda venue alternated between Khalsa Restaurant, with its Punjabi kheer pudding that I insistently proselytized, and the rooftop terrace bar of some skyscraper in front of the Hogg Market. We ordered Kingfishers and upended them into a glass of water. The beer stayed in the bottle, but the headache-inducing glycerin, which the Indians use as a preservative, flowed out in oily waves.

Our topic was chiefly travel, the places we wanted to go and the beauty and charm of the places we had been, though we often ventured out into the alien issues of our respective nations. Fran said that she had heard my own Portland compared to East London, which I took as a compliment. We also digressed to complaining about India’s low points, a necessary and therapeutic venting of frustrations.

And really Reader, if you plan on living abroad, or spending any length of time in some foreign corner of the wide world, I heartily recommend you do so, but don’t forget to find some corner where there are other internationals, a foreigner support group of people from the same generic Culture, who understand just how crazy it is here, who you can complain to at the end of the day about the incessant honking or the weird looks, who will understand your reminiscences over good burritos and nacho cheese—because sometimes that just needs to come out, and we need a taste of the Western roots.

On this note, that same day that James and I went to the Temple of Kali to receive pagan blessings and observe a ritual sacrifice, we went on to an air-conditioned mall, an upward spiral of trendy storefronts and trendy people, for a completely diametric experience. We went up to the food court, fully stocked with fast food embassies, and as appetizing as the Indian varieties looked, I relished a Subway chicken and ham sandwich with honey mustard and a chocolate chip cookie. Fran and James II met us there around one, and we went in together to see Clash of the Titans in 3-D, savoring the Hollywood cheese, the predictable plot, the clich・dialogue.

Don’t take this for granted, Reader, lest you be stuck someday with interminable and nonsensical Bollywood dance numbers, a broken speaker bombing the bus with music and static, and ridiculous kung-fu fights where the hero wields two umbrellas hooked together—but enough ranting! It is as rewarding as it is difficult, this India. Strange things try every traveler, mentally and physically: horrors seen, difficulties encountered, the long days, the crowded streets, so much that it seems unendurable at times, but adventures, real adventures, always seem that way.

Each leaf on the tree is a holy scripture when you have to teach the soul how to read.
—Martin of Bolivia

I left the City of Joy for the City of Lights: Benares, the Holy City, nine millennia old. I had heard legends of the corpse fires, the septic River Ganges, but very little of the culture and warmth and energy I found there. The City of Lights is also called the City of Learning, for both Indians and foreigners come to Benares to learn to play the classical Indian instruments—sitar, sarode, tanpura, tabla, harmonium, and their human voice—so that, unlike most of India, every foreigner who lives in the city seems to be there for a reason. The sounds of their rehearsals echo through the alleyways and sing out over the river.

I took an overnight train to Benares from Calcutta. I was glad to be on the top bunk, since my feet always stick out and that way nobody trips over them. Still it was difficult to sleep, as my bed smelled like rotten vegetables, and the chai-wallahs walked up and down the aisles all night shouting for any sleepless business. There was another outlander a few rows down, who was curled hermit-like in a blanket since when I boarded the train, but I met her the next morning.

She was a Greek named Effi, and her friend Jenny, both of them from Thessaloniki, was in a coach a ways down the train; and they were on their way to meet a man named Jacques who was known by two or three degrees to all the Hellenes, it seemed, though neither of the women had met him before. Effi had been living in Goa for a decade. She bought shirts in Thailand and sold them to Indian tourists, and she loved the country and its ways, though the food didn’t agree with her. “I can’t eat spicy food. I just don’t like it,” she said.

We agreed to split a cab on arriving in Benares. On the platform, Effi got a porter by shouting, “Coolie!” and turning to me said, “I love India. Where else could you do this.” We met Jenny a few cars up, and then Jacques, a high-cheeked Asian with his long hair tied up in a ponytail. His father was French-Chinese, his mother one of the Hmong people from Cambodia, and Jacques himself had been raised in Australia, though I think he identified closer with Greece. He usually spent six months in India, mostly in Benares, making jewelry, and then six months in Greece, seeing friends, free camping on Samothrace or in one of the other places frequented by his circles, and selling his stock of jewelry to wealthy tourists from Germany and France.

Some force attracted Jacques to Benares and kept him there. Once we had made it back to the guesthouse where he lived, in an ashram next to he Hanuman Temple on the ghats—and this was no mean feat, because Benares is overcrowded and frenzied as a bee hive, and the alleys around the temple were very confusing, so it took me a few days to get used to finding the place again—once we made it there, Jacques showed us a room in the guesthouse where we could stay, for the Greeks had invited me to keep with them.

Jacques and the Greeks talked of something rotten in the of Hellas, penniless Hellas, its people impoverished by bad governance and poor alliances with the rest of Europe. Effi and Jenny said the only way out was a rebellion to overthrow the government. They talked about the “energy” of the place, a product of its past and its people, and I listened avidly. I supposed I sensed a power, what’s the verb?—lurking, hungering, meditating—a power in old Varanasi, especially at sunset, when the electricity goes dead and the old rites echo down the water and the musicians practice and the smoke of the corpse-fires fill the air. The wind carries sweet melodies and deathly horror both. You feel a cold shift in that weird air at nightfall, a reversion to a primordial era, as if history refused to release this one spot of earth.

This city I speak of can be found on one of the only bends in the Sacred Ganges that generally flows from west to east, and here from north to south. The stone stairways and temples of the ghats line the west bank, each donated by some regime seeking religious legitimacy, like the treasuries at Delphi. A few hotels and the great pink pillars of the water treatment plant poke through the ancient facade, which itself is really only a few hundred years old, the Holy City having been dismantled by the Mughals. Some of these hold great puja ceremonies at dusk, and at two, the Harischandra and Manikarnika Ghats, funeral pyres burn day and night to cremate the bodies of those who would pass into the next life from this place.

Across the river, there is nothing but a barren floodplain of crystalline sand, like jagged glass in the sun, that spans for a mile or more between the river and a line of trees. On a clear day one can see the forest there, and to the north the railroad bridge, and to the south the pontoon one. Thankfully, the monsoon rains fill in this plain when they come in July, and they clean the river and the ghats as only nature can. Last year the monsoon did not come, and all of Uttar Pradesh suffered from the drought. The people of the Gangetic Plain prayed for rain and tended to their old rituals.

Bodies commonly wash up on the eastern shore. Pregnant women, children under ten, Babas, lepers, and those who have been bit by cobras are all too holy or unholy to be burned and are instead tied to rocks and sunk in the river. When the hawser lines rot, the bodies float up, bloated and putrid, and sometimes beach themselves there. Flocks of vultures and packs of wild dogs like jackals wait there to gnaw on the bones. No one lives there, though a few quays and thatch huts mark the eastern bank where the ferries debark Indians set on picnicking amid the Stygian horrors of that hellish, shadeless desolation.

O Charon, pilot me back from here!

Returning to the saner side of the Mother Ganga: just behind the temples there is a network or warren of alleyways, too tight for vehicles and barely wide enough for two lanes of foot traffic, called the galis. This is a fascinating place, resembling an Arab souq or Turk bazaar in the overwhelming multitude of sensations.

Dirty restaurants fry samosas and cook dhosas on hot gas grills, and chai-wallahs heat tea over coal fires. Storefronts sell cigarettes and cookies, pharmaceuticals, pan leaves with narcotic betel nut inside, and incense sticks, with sweets lined up on racks. There are workshops in niches where the craftsmen repair shoes or shirts. Cloth merchants sit on clean white sheets, surrounded by libraries of folded fabric, with wardrobes hanging outside over the alleys. Grocers lounge among their fruits and vegetables on wooden shipping crates, with scales and weights to figure the price. Music stores play their albums and instruments and show Asian girls how to pluck the sitar.

Running along the tops of the wall, the power lines are as incomprehensible in function as the neurons of the human brain. The temple stupas loom over corners, and the alleys ring with puja bells and mantras, and with the life of shuffling crowds. Westerners lounge with books and coffee in the many German Bakeries. Monkeys play on the bannisters and jump from sign to sign overhead, and the Sacred Cows shamble through, eating garbage from the gutter piles. Motorcycles race through the crowds with horns blaring. There is a constant chatter, and the noise of children playing and heated haggling and oil frying, and always from somewhere there is music.

Ah, the markets of the Orient!

When the power is out, and that is as often as not, some turn on chugging generators and others put out candles amid their piles of flowers or fruit. The alleys gleam in this magic, medieval light, and the stars come out in full. Look down the river and it looks as it did a hundred years ago: a few lanterns amid the formless mass of temples and fortresses, and on the banks the flicker of the eternal funeral pyres, for death never slumbers.

The city does nap during the hot afternoon, and resurrects at dusk. On the ghats, kites flutter overhead. Touts deal hand massages, but only to men. They offer a handshake and don’t let go. Vendors sell ferry trips and puri snacks and ghunga boats: palm bowls with roses and daffodils and a candle. Priests set up altars with yellow cloth and scattered petals and ritual equipment, and the crowds find seats up and down the ghat steps. Strings of lights stir overhead, and the ghunga boats float out between the gondolas. The candles flicker off the waves like refracted stars. Song erupts from the south, and the generators rumble to the north. The power is unreliable, the spirit unquenchable.

At seven on Dasaswamedh Ghat, the puja begins, with seven liveried Pujarees performing the ceremony simultaneously, synchronized to music. The seven Pujarees went through all the rituals of the puja, waving censors and hurling petals and oil in all directions, accompanied by much chanting of mantras, beating of drums, ringing of bells, and hammering of plates—a sublime cacophony of life. Aides brought out great oil lamps with curving handles to each of the Pujarees, who hefted these in blessings to the four directions. The crowd clapped and prayed and stared and photographed.

It is nothing like the rites of the rest of India, and not ancient at all. Fifteen years ago, two hotels convened to try and give tourists some reason to take boat tours at night and not just at sunrise, resulting in this extravagant puja. Yet Hindus took to it as much as foreigners, and the righteous compete for the honor of tugging on the string of one of the many bells.

On my first night in Benares, after having lunch with the two Greeks, I lingered on the ghats to watch the preparations for the ceremony, and a German girl there whom I had previously met in Kodaikanal. I ran into many people I knew in Varanasi—Sebastian the Swede from Bombay, the Vancouver kids from Kochin, Isabelle and Cecile the Quebecois who cared for me in Vadakanal, Cullum the Irishman who celebrated St. Patrick’s Day there, and his Welsh girl, and once again Morris and Tora, though not till a few days later.

Evi and I got some chai, then went down to the docks when the ritual started with a British Columbian named Jerry and a Finn named Walter from her hostel. “It’s weird,” said Walter, “but after these are over I always think, ‘Why did I go through with all that?’ and before I go I ask myself, ‘Why am I going to this?’ but I still always go. I don’t know why.” I told him, “My friend always called it Phomo: fear of missing out. It’s what makes you go out drinking when you’re tired from an all night train, and go to a monument even if you don’t want to see it, and go to religious events even if they don’t mean anything to you. Fear of missing out.” The Finn thought this a perfect diagnosis for his condition.

This night was especially auspicious for me: exactly seven weeks had passed since I met the fortune-teller Rabi Kumar in Hampi and received my blessed mantra. At the end of seven weeks, the fortune-teller said, I was to throw the charm into a holy river, and what holier river is there than Mother Ganga? As the puja commenced, I cut the string necklace from my neck and wrapped it around the metal capsule of the mantra, and from down on the docks I threw it into the black water, where it splashed amid the gondolas and the candles of the ghunga boats and was gone. Now I could leave India.

Jacques served us breakfast the next morning, of curd, dried rice, peanuts, and a few kinds of fruits, with honey and tahini from abroad. The Greeks delighted over it.

“It’s good to eat simply,” said Effi. “Organic food is better for you, and you get more full from it. The fruit is so good, so fresh. It’s always better to eat the food that grows in your area. If you are in India, you don’t need stuff from the north. If you are in Greece you should not buy mangoes or whatever. Buy local things, not from South America.”

“Except coffee,” I slyly added, knowing well the Hellenic, or really Mediterranean, addiction to caffeine.

“Yes,” the Greek conceded with a laugh, “except coffee. I could not live without coffee.”

That day was very hot, so I lingered in the room reading or went out to the wide terrace, which looked north and south all along ghats and Ganges. Around four we went back to the Dasaswamedh Ghat and wandered around separately, taking in the different pujas, one on each ghat. I sat with Jenny for a while and she told me about herself: of her marketing career, which managed to be both brilliant and unrewarding, how she could not decide what to do with her talent—there are things she enjoys, but so unambitious that they make her feel useless—and of her spontaneous and unsatisfying marriage to a Siwan Berber.

Her New Age parents had been very supportive. Hearing that it is an Egyptian custom for the bride’s parents to give a gift to the groom, and vice-versa, they asked, “Well, what does he want?” Jenny told her parents that recently her betrothed had been looking all over for a chainsaw but could not find one, so that would be a nice gift. Her doting parents duly bought one of these and took it with them to Alexandria, where there was a big scuffle over the chainsaw in the luggage claim. Ah, the devotion of parents!

When it was dark, we bought some fruit and vegetables from the Dasaswamedh market stalls and went back to the guesthouse. Jacques had prepared a big meal for us and some other Greek girls, Natasha and Helene. He seems a magnet for the Greeks, his house their consulate. It was a good and simple meal, mushrooms and rice, salad, and even cooked paneer with tomato sauce, similar to the Greek fried cheese. In the words of the Indians, “Same same but different.”

Jenny was an expert in a kind of massage, and she offered to give us all one after dinner. When I received mine, I lay down on the bamboo mats away from the others and told her, “I’m going to be paying attention, I’d like some good massage tips,” but Jenny was silent. This was a different kind of massage.

Now Jenny was carrying around in her bag a number of Tibetan cast bronze bowls of different sizes that produce different pitches when struck. The night before I had seen her and Effi use them in some weird ritual out on the terrace, which involved incense and flower petals and a lot of waving things around while chanting, and Jenny also used them for her massage.

“Everything in the universe vibrates,” she said, laying out the bowls on the ground,—“even though we might not understand it. These vibrate at a high tone, and it shakes all the cells inside you. It is massage through sound.”

I lay on my stomach while Jenny put the bowls on certain points of my back, legs, and feet and rang them with a baton, sometimes one at a time and sometimes with two or three of different sizes, delivering a relaxing resonance to my cells. She listened carefully to the sound produced, putting her ear inside the upturned bowl. A dull or deadened sound marked a damaged equilibrium. Over my feet the ringing bowl stopped as if stilled by a hand. “I’m not surprised,” said Jenny, who had been fussing over my feet earlier, as they had a few open sores and I didn’t have any shoes. After I had moved to my back she noticed a difference between the left and right sides of my body, the right being dominant, but by then I had already fallen asleep.

I woke a while later and went over to the group very sheepishly. Natasha said, “What happened? What did you do to him? His face is different. You look so cool now.” I felt relaxed, but probably for the nap and the fruit. I ate more and watched as Natasha ran her hand slowly up and down Jacques’ chest, a few centimeters from the skin. He said it was warm, with his monkish politeness, and the Greek noticed some problem, which Jacques attributed to an accident, very mysteriously, in which his lung had collapsed. Eventually he pressed his palms together to stop the healing and said, “I am too tired for it.” It was very late.

The next day was as hot as the first, but I wanted to see the city. I left the guesthouse and jumped over the cows crammed into the alleyway.

A small herd of Sacred Cow commonly parked itself out there, at night and during the day’s hottest hours. I sometimes avoided them by coming up the stairs from the ghats, or went around the other side of the building, through a pack of stray dogs I had befriended; but otherwise I had to shuffle, charge, or leap past the tightly nestled cows, as they swung horned heads about with a curiosity that would arrest my passage and knock me down. They had more power than they realized and commonly bowled people over. Jacques still suffered a back ache from when a cow had kicked him.

The beasts were even more of a burden in the narrow crowded market warren of the galis. They stopped for no one. Families scrambled out of their way, and children climbed up onto porches to avoid them. Sometimes one thing or another would set the cows off, and one or more would come charging down the gali. I myself was nearly kicked by a bucking calf, and once I saw a cow nearly miss an old woman as she padded across the lane, apparently oblivious to the bovine threat. I have heard stories of cows charging into the merchant stalls and devastating the lists. During such rampage, most people dive into stalls and shove against the wall. There is nothing to do but watch the cattle stampede about until they have exhausted their fearful energy, and then to clean up the mess.

A much more constant reminder of the bovine presence were the cow pies in every corner. Everything about the cow is holy to the Hindu, including its excrement. Stepping in a moist pie with the left foot is considered very good luck. The most devout Hindus will touch the backside of a cow as they pass, and the Brahmins have been known to make holy ash from burning the product and to wipe it across their walls and look for runes in the way of asylum inmates. Innocent to all their significance, the cows wandered around the galis of Benares, snacking on garbage, defecating where they would, and having a good time of it.

Anyway, I got some masala dhosas from a dingy restaurant we had found that made them with apple slices, raisins, and nuts—very delicious! I was wracked by indecision: having exactly two weeks left on my Indian visa, I could not decide what to do. I wanted to see the Himalayas and Tibetan temples of Sikkim, and to cross the chicken neck around Bangladesh to go to the jungles of Assam, and both these sounded very romantic; but in two days the Sangeet Samaroh would begin, a famous festival of Hindu classical music in Sankat Mochan Temple of Varanasi, one of the greatest cities of music in the world. The festival would highlight all the masters of India.

I thought, “I will come back to Calcutta and see all that and more, but this may be my only chance to see such a music festival!” And so I would leave India, having spent three months there, without seeing the Taj Mahal or the Himalayas, but condemn me not!

Travel is full of such decisions as I made in Benares. Often you must prioritize a few days in a city like Paris, or must chose a route through a country with things to see and do all over. You can’t see it all, and that’s difficult to accept. Moreover, anywhere you go, at any time, you will see or do something that made the trip worth it, so it’s important not to worry too much and to just enjoy wherever you happen to be.

One of Jacques’ friends in Benares was a Bolivian musician named Martin, friendly and talkative, tall and lanky, with curly hair and hard-edged Andean features. They had been brushing elbows in the galis for a long time as members of the city’s foreign crowd for a long time, but finally met along the highways of Pakistan, where they both happened to be hitchhiking. Martin was there learning, playing, and listening to the intoxicating Sufi melodies, though now he has turned his attention to Indian music, particularly the twanging tanpura and melodic Hindi vocals.

The day before the festival began we met Martin and his friends Nadj and Yogesh—names equally intoxicating, though Nadj was a French girl volunteering there and Yogesh was a string-wearing Brahmin tabla drummer from Benares, full name Yogeshwar—in front of the Haifa Hotel for an excursion into the hills. The three arrived late and tired, as Martin and Yogesh had been jamming and drinking a red tea preferred in Tibet until the exhaustive hour of five in the morning. We broke our fast at the Maya Cafe, on the top floor of an apartment building, in the living room of the resident family that also provided the chefs and servants, and ordered something called kichari.

“It’s very nice,” said Martin with his methodical energy, kissing his fingers before forming them into an okay sign. “You have this in the morning, you are full all day.” It took a long time to arrive, and Martin had no trouble filling the gap with his colorful stories and descriptions of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Hindustan. The kichari came in a Jethro-sized glass bowl, full of rice, dhal, and vegetables, and fulfilled its promised role. I had the honor and glory of finishing mine first.

Martin had arranged for a friend’s car to take us the sixty kilometers to the River Lakamiandry for about $12. He had been there about a week ago with two friends. After swimming in the lagoon for a while, a Baba came down from an ashram that was hidden in the hills above and invited them to visit for dinner and stay the night. They had hearty ashram food—“It’s really good, really filling, very natural,” said Martin, making the okay sign with his fingers—and left in the morning, well-rested on cots placed for them in the yard.

The car dropped we six off at a chai shop on the side of the highway, where we had some clay cups of tea, archaically heated by a coal fire in a fireplace made of mud. Very slowly, after much slow conversation, we turned and marched up the rocky Lakamiandry gorge, a barren riverbed surrounded by scanty trees, with only a few stagnant pools left in the rocky plates of the torrent that follows the monsoon; and we followed this gorge to its end, where there wallowed beneath high encircling cliffs a jade-green lagoon. The waterfalls were dry, but we found shade and good rocks to sit on and found the water welcoming cool. We slipped happily into the lagoon, and otherwise chatted, read, smoked, and sang the afternoon away.

We were the only ones there in that isolated spot except a small group of American girls whom we found already relaxed by the pool, but they left after a while, leaving us to our very satisfying company. Martin told many stories, including this one from the Afghanistan-Iran border, possibly the least world’s least touristy border, and the furthest from Western culture and its greatest culinary blessings:

“I was in shop and said, ‘What is this?’ They gave me some to try.” Martin pantomimed putting a bit of food in his mouth, and then his face lit up with a revelation. “Cheese!” he cried. “I bought the whole thing,” said Martin, holding his hands out to show that the cheese came in a block a foot wide. “It was very expensive, like, twenty dollars. I had it with me, snacking on it on the bus. Then we got out at the border.”

Martin had a few hash joints with him, and rather than putting them in his bag, which would be searched, he left them on the bus at his seat. “I thought it would be very nice. I would go back on the bus, there is my cheese, my hash. But then the bus left without me! I am, “No, my cheese!” He seemed to feel anew all that ancient rage, and he waved his hands like a superhero villain, eyes raised to heaven in condemnation.

Once in Iran, Martin called the bus company and went all over the place trying to track down his lost cheese, but it was impossible. It may be difficult for you, Reader, with your well-stocked supermarket and well curdled milk, to empathize with poor Martin, but I felt keenly his pain. Cheese is woefully hard to find in Asia! They say that the Laotians still make bread and cheese as the French taught them to, and that the baguette is a prized commodity there, approaching a currency. I am excited to invest in some, although the returns will be minimal to all reckonings but my hungry tastebuds.

Meanwhile, Yogesh called over a dog with some cookies and by making the noise, “Ah, ah, ah,” by which the Indians call dogs. He could be called a very Westernized Hindu, and often criticized the Indians, especially those we saw in their collared shirts who had climbed up to the lake to look at white girls in their swimming suits. However, I could not understand what he intended with the dog. Luring it by the water’s edge, he grabbed it by the hind legs and threw it in with a big splash. The dog scampered out and looked at us pitifully. It was nearly sunset then, and the European girls cooed over the dog and bemoaned its frozen state. Yogesh insisted, though, that the shock of water was good for it.

“I threw him in last time,” said the Brahmin, “and look how healthy he is. Cold water is good for him.”

Yet the Reader will see how foolish we Westerners later looked when we turned another blind eye to Yogesh’s advice.

We did not ascend to the Rama Ashram until near sunset. Martin led us clambering up a rockslide to the flat, dry plateau at the top of the ridge, and then along the path the Baba had shown him that led to the ashram. It crossed the pillars and platforms of the dried up river and went on past a few isolated farmsteads. When it grew dark, we followed the sound of the generator until we reached the mud walls of the ashram compound.

Now when we were down by the lagoon, Jenny had diligently filled up two plastic bags with the trash that surrounds everything worth seeing in India, and she had these with her as we approached. Yogesh told us, apparently uncomfortable with the situation, “You should leave the garbage outside. Do not take it into the ashram.” We replied very rationally that, “No, no, come on, animals will get it.” Of course the monks would appreciate that Jenny had cleaned up the ecosystem, we insisted.

We entered the compound through the small northern gate, and Martin had us wait there like the dwarves at Beorn’s house whilst he and Yogesh met with the hosts. Jenny asked one of the monks at the gate, “I collected this trash around the lake, where can I put it?” The man looked in the bag and cried, “What is this? Why bring this here?” “I collected it from the lake,” replied the Hellene, “to clean it up.” Crieth the monk: “It is garbage! Get out!” Word reached the Baba talking to Martin, they began to argue, Martin using his knowledge of Hindi and Yogesh his knowledge of etiquette, often more useful and more difficult to understand. You see, the monks thought our innocent mistake very rude and wanted us out. “It’s too late for you to be coming here,” they said, “but too late for you to leave.” The sky was dark and the stars out in full.

In the end Yogesh helped smooth things out, and we were accepted, though not so warmly as on Martin’s first visit. The monks arranged six cots and blankets for us in one of the courtyards between the little buildings.

“I told you,” remarked Yogesh, “but you did not listen. I know India. When you go to an ashram, you bring sweets and flowers, not garbage.” Martin said, “We’ll come back next week, with some gifts for Babaji. We’ll bring our instruments and play for the ashram, show some respect. That will get his favor again.”

Having been settled, we washed our hands and went in to see the Babaji, the principle authority of the Rama Ashram in all matters. He was a well-fed old man with a long frosty beard, dressed in yellow and reclining silently on a yellow couch in the temple courtyard. His twinkling eyes observed our approach. A television was turned on and broadcasting dramatizations of some old Hindu epic, Ramayana or Mahabharata. The gurus used to tell those stories aloud, not so long ago.

I was the first to approach the Babaji, and I did not know what to do. As the old autocrat watched me, I performed the namaskar greeting, making a small bow with my palms pressed together in front of my chest. “Namaste,” I said, and I was surprised to see out the corner of my eye Martin and Yogesh prostrate themselves like the subjects of Persia, bowed over their knees with their heads to the floor. Confused, and reluctantly, I did the same. When all of our group was abased in this way, the Babaji considered it merrily and waved us on to the temple, to the shrine of his father or grandfather who had achieved enlightenment and founded the ashram. We paid our respects to this ancestor’s statue, and on emerging received a burfi milk treat, by way of Communion.

We sat down on a strip of carpet on the dirt of the courtyard for dinner with about a dozen monks. They served hearty wheat roti, mixed vegetables, sweet kheer rice pudding, and a very good pickled something—food for men to do work on. After dinner, we threw our palm plates over an ashram wall and left the inner court four our outer one. On the way we passed the Babaji, now lying on a bed and being massaged by three monks, and bent a head his way.

Back at our beds, we sat and talked. “Westerners do not like to do this,” said Martin of our ritual proskynesis,—“They want to hold their heads up always. But it is good to show pranam, respect; to show that some things are greater than us. The Babaji is a wise man. You can feel it. He is like a king here. They all do what he says. Foreigners come and pay him respect, and it makes him happy. I felt good energy from him.”

“Of course he was happy,” said Effi. “If I had three people giving me massage, I would be happy, too.”

At ten the generator went off and all the stars and noises and silences of the mountains could be appreciated in full. One of the monks woke us rudely just after sunrise We received fried dough and puri rice by way of breakfast, prostrated ourselves before the Babaji, and were shown the door.

The festival would begin that night, but the best acts did not start until midnight or so, which gave us plenty of time. We spent another afternoon lounging by the lagoon, adding two long-haired Germans from Stuttgart named Benny and Nina, then took the crowded buses back into Benares, which was dark by the time we arrived. Martin invited us all to his apartment, a cool and quiet place on the ground floor of a building near the Assi Ghat, for tea and music.

“It’s nice to practice,” he said, “but it’s good to play for other people sometimes.” He and Yogesh actually earned plenty of jobs with their skills. Martin planned on going to Thailand or somewhere in Southeast Asia to chant his melodies around a touristy beach and earn some money, though Jacques later warned him, “They’re not that kind of tourist.”

The tea Martin made was pu-erh, a leaf from Yunnan, and it was the favorite choice of the Tibetans and his Korean girlfriend, a Sinologist translating classic texts into modern Chinese. The Bolivian put a spoonful of this precious stuff into a tiny clay pot and poured in an iota of water, then poured this first blood into three cups and, with a pair of chopsticks, dumped each out onto a little rock, so that it drained off the palette and into a water bottle through a tube. Ceremony complete, he now filled the teapot and immediately emptied it through a filter into a glass pot that he redistributed among eight tea cups. The tea was strong and did not need much steeping.

Then came the music. Turning on a drone machine, which produced a constant harmonic resonance to the same purpose as a metronome, Martin took up a synchronized melody on his tanpura, a sort of fretless lute. This was shaped like a sitar, with a gourd body, a long neck, and four strings that made twanging, meditative noises like bee-ow that added only a little to the static undulations of the drone machine, and was a perfect accompaniment to vocals.

Yogesh set out the two drums of his tabla, each held on the floor with a cloth ring. The smaller teakwood drum is called the dayan (meaning right in Sanskrit) or just tabla drum and makes a sort of snare sound, while the large brass dugga (left) drum makes a deep bass resonance, sometimes sounding like a deep pool of water. Ropes zigzagged from the top to the bottom on each, with a sort of cork clamped down on the middle, which Yogesh adjusted by pounding on it to get the tone right, like guitarists adjust their strings. He put some baby powder on the drums and began to play.

Yogesh said the tabla was one of the most difficult instruments in the world. “Some people practice tabla for decades,” he said, playing his right hand all over the tabla in a gentle rhythm, and pounding the dugga with the bunched up fingertips of his left, “and still they cannot play. I have played twelve years, but do not practice much, only play a little sometimes. They say it requires full mental focus to play, but I still have ninety-five percent of mine. I look around the crowd, think about things—it just comes naturally.” His fingers took off and the percussion got much harder, so I understood why he needed the baby powder.

Martin announced the raga, literally “color” but better translated as “melodic mode.” Most are about the time of day or the season of the year, and changes therein. The raga allows for improvisation between the lines, that they would play, and they set into it. Over tabla and tanpura, Martin sang long, drawn out notes, with sudden, sometimes erratic shifts in pitch, sliding up and down or vibrating back and forth. The style emphasized vocal technique more than tune, was more demanding than soothing. As he sang, he moved with the music—his face contorted and his eyes closed tight and his hand waved about as if casting a charm.

The raga they played, while only loosely defining the song that emerged, did have a writer: an almost mythical Persian named Amir Khusrau. Under the medieval Mughals, the legend goes, Khusrau invented the sitar, sarode, tanpura, and a thousand other instruments; he made the tabla by splitting one drum into two, and wrote a thousand Sufi songs, combining Indian temple music with Middle Eastern melodies, and this is the basis of Indian classical music. Many of the performers at the festival played improvisations of his ragas, the singers especially.

Classical Indian vocalists sing in syllable-notes, the equivalents of the Western do-re-fa-so-me-la-te-do. Each syllable-note means something and must be interpreted by the audience. One famous raga, often played at this time of year, is about the changing of the seasons, and the notes represent colors, like the colors provided on a painter’s palette. Only a real artist can apply them in the right way.

“It starts,” said Martin, as we waited for breakfast in Maya Cafe one of the mornings after the festival, “with black and blue. Seh—seh—seh—,” he bellowed, “then the morning comes. The sky changes to blue. It is the same, but different. Seh—seh—,” (dragging it out longer) “then the sun comes, red, Rah—rah—rah—!” and he waved his hand as if painting the sky and threw his fingers forward like the sun’s rays, and suddenly I saw the deft purpose to his movements, which I had noted too in all the performers: not the erratic forms of some melodic ecstasy, but the language of the story he was telling through noise. There were no lyrics to read, only sounds and rhythms and the motions and expressions of the performer.

Vivaldi might shake his head, but this is something different.

The first night of the festival coincided with the first hours of Easter, which happened to bless both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity on the same day, and which the Greeks realized after we had returned to our guesthouse from Martin’s performance. “Happy Easter!” they cried, hugging each other and me in an effusion of national spirit. For the Orthodox Greeks, Easter is a time of going to Church for a hasty blessing, and then turning off to other pursuits: feasts of pig and lamb, family reunions, egg fights. “Please,” begs the priest of his congregation as he nears the end of the first round of prayers,—“Please stay for the whole service,” but nobody listens—food and fine company await!

A few days later at dinner with Jacques and the Germans Benny and Nina, they explained the rules to this egg fight. Rather than hiding their hard-boiled and crimsoned eggs, the Greeks take them in hand and hit them together. Pointed top hits pointed top, convex bottom the same, and whichever combatant’s egg does not break, he turns to the next challenger and repeats the brawl. Jenny got six hard-boiled eggs from the kitchen and gave one to each of us, and we performed this tradition, moving around in a circle. My egg first quashed Jacques’, then the Saxon ones, and even those of the Greeks, so that it was proclaimed champion and, tenderized by glory and combat, devoured with relish.

Jenny told this story: “My brother was in the military. It is compulsory in Greece. I visited him on Cyprus to spend Easter with him, and my mother sent me with all these dyed eggs. My brother had a degree, so he was an officer in the military. He and all the other officers had on their full dress uniforms, looking very smart and clean, and they took all the eggs—only my mother had not boiled them properly, so when they hit the eggs they exploded. The eggs got all over their uniforms, their only ones. They smelled like rotten eggs all through the service.”

But on that night after returning from the lagoon, even as Effi and Jenny spoke excitedly of these customs and more, they were too tired to consider a trip to the festival, which I was eager to make. Departing from the guesthouse around one, alone into the Stygian depths of benighted alleyways, I hired a bicycle rickshaw to take me to the Sankat Mochan Temple, a few kilometers away. It was a temple to Hanuman, the ebullient monkey god, and one of the oldest and holiest in Benares. That night, the music that had been going since six that night and would go on until six that morning could be heard from a mile away: the watery percussion of the tabla.

Having run the gauntlet of the security details out front, I followed a covered arcade into the temple. The marble floors were scarcely visible, being covered by a horde of Hindu men, most of them sprawled supine across it, asleep or halfway there. They slept between the columns and in the open courtyard at the center and on the platforms around the shrines. At one end of the temple there was a raised dais, as in where a medieval king would sit at the feast, where the performers, also sitting on the floor but higher than everyone else, plucked expertly at their instruments, producing a wonderful, improvised sound. Next to them there was a roped off area for the VIPs. The Mochan family that owned the temple sat there, as did some of the other classical grandmasters, and some foreigners and agents of the press.

I noticed Martin and Nadj between one of the columns, eyes drooping, and went to sit with them. Martin told me that the tabla player on the stage with the bowl haircut was one of a famous Benares musician clan whose father had just died, and he played in the rapid, frenetic Benares style, jolting and shaking to the beat. (I’m afraid that the program was written in Hindi, the names hard to discern from others, so only a few are presented, and only a few of those are spelled accurately. Ah well! most of the names of pharaohs and Arab kings and Chinese emperors are the same phonetic garbles, so I can’t feel so bad, amid this company of eminent and error-prone historians.)

The tabla player and his band finished their performance, which had lasted over an hour, and prayed for blessings. There was a short intermission, and then a sitarist, Rara Krishna, a disciple of Ravi Shankar, and a tabla player named Kumald Kubla took the stage. After Rara Krishna, Martin and Nadj left for home. An old man, venerable and apparently very famous, began to chant some mantras, with harmonium, tabla, and two tanpuras, and I slept for an hour. At 4:30 and again at 6 they shouted out to Hanuman for the early morning pujas, and I left after the second of these.

The banks of the Ganges in Benares is the holiest place for a Hindu to die, allowing liberation from moksha, the dharmic cycle of rebirth, and good Hindus must be burned within a day of their passing. Thus, the fires on the ghats consume 210 corpses daily. The details of the funeral rites are fascinating, and the business. It costs at least 1200 rupees, or $24, for a pyre. For 500 rupees, poor men are often burned in the Harischandra Ghat, close to my guesthouse, that has in addition to its fires two electric furnaces that can reduce a man to carbon in twenty-five minutes, the length of a fair nap. But the well off will be burned at Manikarnika.

Usually friends and family came to see it done, all of them men, though sometimes the Untouchables who work in the cremation grounds handle the ceremonies involved. The devoted help to carry the wood from the great piles down to the cremation grounds and bear the body to its last bed there. It comes down the steps on a litter, cloaked in colored cloth. Orange or red marks a young girl, blue a boy, and gray an old man.

The closest living relative, a brother or father, takes the body into the river for a last bath, and then they all place it on the piled pyre and sprinkle it with gee and sugar and cover it with more wood. The wealthy can afford to be sprinkled with sandalwood powder as well. Then someone lights a fan of special grass in the eternal fire and takes it smoking around the funeral pyre. The smoke will guide the dead spirit beyond the veil. With his smoking grass, he lights the pyre, and they all watch as the wood goes up.

It takes about three hours for a body to burn, but the funeral disperses before then. Those who came will bathe themselves in the Sacred Water before leaving, even in Winter when it is very cold. Most deaths and burnings happen in summer and winter, but it is only in winter that the poor warm themselves by the corpse-fires and steal coals to cook with. By leaving early, the loved ones avoid such sights, and the gruesome process of cremation.

After a half-hour the sheet has burned away and the body is there with blackened skin and a distinctive odor. The feet often stick out the back, and sometimes a stray dog will steal one. After an hour the skull bursts. After two there is only coals and bones and a pile of ash, and after three all that is nearly indistinguishable. With the industry of a death camp, the Untouchable laborers at Manikarnika shovel ashes into the Ganges. Other workers sift through the silt with pans, looking for the gold teeth or jewelry that the dead wear to their cremation. A white suited man hovers nearby in a rowboat to buy any treasure.

A Hindu silk merchant pointed him out to me as we overlooked the ghat from a tower twenty feet above, which the Ganges sometimes covers in the monsoon season. I had taken a ferry there from the Assi Ghat, a required passage for all visitors to Benares, in the early hours of the morning, just after the conclusion of the festival’s first round. It was not yet seven but already too hot to be in the slanting sunlight.

“Women are not allowed here,” said the merchant,—“do you know why? They would cry and throw themselves in the fire. Suttee. See only men down there. Men do not cry.” The silk merchant took me up into another abandoned tower where a squalid crone, surrounded by the rotten instruments of witchcraft, blessed me and the names of all who love me, though I could not make any donations to her cause.

I wandered back through the galis, stopping to see a few places of interest and to eat some dhosa and idli, and then followed the ghats, crowded with Sunday throngs. Men huddled around dice mats, families shared packets of puri, boys flew kites, and children scraped down the concrete slope as if it were a slide. There were the shouts of hawkers, the splashing of bathers, the chugging of generators, and the distant music of a band playing at Dasaswamedh Ghat. I tossed balls back to the cricketers. It was Easter, and I made my way home.

That night Effi and Jenny brought back another Greek girl, Maria, and the long-haired Germans Benny and Nina came, and Jacques and Helene were there, and Martin and Yogesh brought their instruments and a French girl named Vanessa. We all had a good time of it out on the terrace in the warmth of the evening, which made the place feel alive in an upside-down, underworld sort of way. Martin and Yogesh played and Jacques brought out papaya, peanuts, grapes, and bananas.

Just around midnight Maria said she wanted to go home to her guesthouse near the Lalita Ghat; she had just arrived that day to Benares and was really tired, and I offered to guide her. Of course I didn’t know where the place was in the mazy alleyways, but she said it was near the German Bakery and I knew that. We walked the ghats to the Dasaswamedh Ghat, and we crossed the deserted market and entered the northern gali. The alley turned dark, with shadowed porches and portholes suggesting twilight terrors beyond our vision. In the distance a swinging light illuminated a mess of closed shops and a nest of random signs and dangling wires. Two dogs fought over a sandal, and two figures drifted towards us, moving in and out of the shadows.

“This is such a spooky alley,” I remarked. “This is like a Hollywood set of a spooky alley.”

“I’m not going to say anything,” said Maria.

The two figures in that fantastic scene were soldiers—night watchmen!—and we begged directions from them and a few other people in the yet darker alleys. Soon we were stepping lightly over molding trash and dodging stray dogs and other perils, but eventually found the Hotel Puja, and I set out back into the maze, looking for the Lalita Ghat so I might walk back along the river.

“That way and right,” said a Swiss drunkard, pointing the route with a whiskey bottle. The first right went down into a subterranean tunnel. A lamp, twenty yards away, flooded the immediate hallway with light but left all that was beyond an abyssal black square. A gurgling growl emerged from that unknown, but whether it was animal or machine I never knew. I shook my head fearfully and left that passage for the alley.

When I finally found my way out from the warren, I was overlooking the Manikarnika Ghat. The corpse fires and their attendants looked especially sinister and cultish at night. Coming through the infernal smoke, I followed the ghats until I came to the Dasaswamedh Ghat and on an adventurous whim again entered the warren of alleys. Here the galis were much darker and weirder. The silhouettes of beasts sulkily raised their maws from horrid feasts to consider me with eyes that I could not see. They made no sound as I flitted past them in the moonless black.

After many trials of courage, which I cannot help but remember with a tempered glee, I came back to the guesthouse. My friends, however, were nowhere to be found. I went back down and began walking towards Sankat Mochan, dealing tersely with the sly rickshaw-wallahs. Eventually the blackness deepened on the benighted street and shadowy forms emerged before me, six in number, lowered heads growling softly, a heavy prelude to battle, and I had to get past them if I wanted to proceed, and I thought, “This is what I get for walking a girl home. This is the hero’s reward. Alone in the dark with a pack of rabies.”

Hark! the small engine rumbles just behind, the stirring sound of a tuk-tuk, whose headlight illuminates the street and blinds the vicious hounds, who scatter before the little vehicle. To my very rescue came this tuk-tuk. “Namaste,” says the driver, “where you go?” He says, “Fifty rupees,” when I tell him. “Twenty,” say I. The hounds reconvene in the street, and I hear their low growls, wicked as death. The driver goes to forty, and I suggest thirty. “Twenty-five,” he says for some reason. Dogs come closer, no longer fearing the headlights or the gently throbbing engine. “Okay,” I concede, “twenty-five.” The driver looks bemused for a moment, but I get in and we speed off into the night, scattering the beasts with our charge.

Now we come to the rest of the festival’s five nights.

On the second night of the Sangeet Samaroh, I came in late with the others to the temple of the monkey god to see a few singers and instrumentalists. Most were duos. They would come in and sit down, lotus-like as yogis, with a bow to the gods and a prayer and a few words of introduction, and then the instrumentalist would start on sitar or sarode, guided in their improvisations by the “melodic mode” of the raga. For a half hour the instrumentalist would play to set the theme, and then slowly work down to a mere melody, permitting the tabla player to make an entrance. The tabla player finds the raga and splits off it into a frenetic solo, and it’s unbelievable how fast that fingers can hit the drum’s stretched skin. Then the instrument and the percuss play variations on the raga, diving in and out of each others’ themes, always coming back to the main melody, and they jam like that for an hour.

Most notable of the second night, where most musicians came from Benares, was a skilled player of the sarode named Chowduri, accompanied by flute and tabla. The tabla player was the grandson of the grand master: Kishan Maharaj, of whom Martin related the following story:

Once Kishan was to play in Switzerland. They had an auditorium for the performance, with stands and a stage for him to play on. When Maharaj saw the arrangement, he declared, “I will not play to men seated over me. They must all be underneath.” (Nadj asked, “Was it acoustics?” “No,” said Martin, “he was just the master.”) The Swiss removed all the stands from the auditorium and had everyone sit on the floor, with the Maharaj on a dais—the classical setup, like that in the Sankat Mochan Temple.

Now before he died, Maharaj gathered all the other master musicians around his deathbed and said to them, “You must do one thing for me—watch over my grandson!” Some of these masters stood on the side of the temple stage that night, observing their student, and young Maharaj continually looked to them for criticism—the slightest nod, the subtlest frown.

This music festival was serious business, as the Reader will perceive. The grandmasters of India all wanted to perform there. The Mochan priests permitted only those performers who in style and instrument complied to the strict standards of tradition, to the definition of pure classical music, and because of their rigidity barred a number of prominent and accomplished contemporary musicians from the festival for their bold departures from the old ragas of Amir Khusrau. And still only the best could play. There was once a law in place banning all those who made a single mistake for twenty years of future festivals.

As Martin said, “That’s the way they keep their culture.”

On the third night, we arrived in force during the performance of Chamla Mishla, the best singer of the energetic Varanasi style, accompanied by tabla, harmonium, and tanpura. That night I had seen a priest in a strange costume out among the crowd. He wore an orange peaked hat and a long yellow cloak with all sorts of strange charms attached, and with many trinkets and devices around his neck, so that he looked like a wizard. He had a pouch full of ash at his waist and kept smearing it on people’s foreheads. Halfway through Chamla Mishla’s piece, the priest and his disciple walked onto the stage uninvited. The disciple carried a load of flower garlands, which the priest placed around the singer’s neck before giving him an ash mark. The crowd clapped piously, not knowing what else to do. Then the priest blessed the tanpura player, and seemed likely to bless the whole band before an usher ran out to shoo him off the stage. The priest and his disciple sat in a corner and would not be moved.

After the performance, the priest was unceremoniously ejected from the temple. I saw him in the parking lot, shouting at everyone and smearing faces in a malicious way, while the Hindus stood around watching mirthfully.

The other noteworthy act was a local woman named Gamala Shankar who played a mohan veena, a Spanish guitar strung sitar-style with twenty strings that produced a strange twanging noise. She played it across her lap in such a slow and melodic way, more zither than guitar, that reminded me of some avant-garde or post-rock guitar work. There was also Vikku Vinayakram of Chennai, world-famous, who sang in his own distinct, energetic, and vaguely African style and played on a sort of water pot called a ghatam. He performed with his grandson, I think, who also sang and played a small hand drum.

Yet the highlight of the festival, for me and anyone else who was there, came on the fourth night. I arrived around one, as usual, and saw Pandit Vishmanith of Delhi, a fat and bearded singer with a harp, accompanied by a harmonium and two dunpulas. The place was packed. Everyone knew that the last hours of the last nights of the festival, those were the best. My group found a spot in the open courtyard before the stage, wedged in between a hundred Indians, and watched. Then Niladri Kumar took the stage. He was the son of Kartick Kumar of Calcutta, who was a famous disciple of Ravi Shankar, and was himself a doughy and pampered-looking minstrel concealed under what most people would call a mop of black hair. His face was too narrow for his round head, and the loose white shirt he wore could not hide his softness.

Poor Niladri receives such an unflattering description only because he was silent at the moment. When his hands, not pudgy as the rest of him but calloused and fine-tuned masterworks of machined precision; when they reached for the familiar limbs of his long-necked sitar and took gently to the strings, and the minstrel began to play, and when the sounds came out like two sitarists playing at once, he changed entirely. He closed his eyes and swayed as if mad or possessed by the music. Sometimes he grinned, flashing white teeth. Sometimes he looked up as if he saw an angel and played as sweetly, and at other times it seemed from his face that some devil was torturing him and he played with such a fire as only the devil could dance to. Such is the magic of skill and passion.

The sitarist set the raga, and then in the usual way was joined by the percussionist, who happened to be Vijay Gartel of Mumba: big, bearded, red-haired, and resembling a Viking in most every way but attire and subtlety, as he was an excellent tabla player, and by then I had listened to enough to know the difference. Niladri’s playing was almost folksy at times, almost rock and roll, but with the twanging impulses of Indian music blended in perfectly. He kept up a steady tune and at the same time squealed up and down on the strings. He would play quick as Rachmaninoff and then crash his fingers across in a measure of discord. At the conclusion of each cacophonous discourse, sitar player and table player would look at one another like lovers, then set into it again.

At the end, at the climax, Niladri began playing two notes very fast, growing steadily higher and higher on the scale, with the tabla following along, curious, excited as all of us. People clapped at the impressive speed, as they had at many feats that night, but this time Niladri raised a hand to still them. He still had a ways to go. And we tried to follow. A minute went by. Higher and higher he got, playing fast as a fiend, and when he had got as high a pitch as the instrument would allow, he added in a few heavier notes to the two alternating one, cymbals to their tinkling bells, building up the rhythm bit by bit.

We had all been following him raptly, every head in the crowd, and then with a few slides of his hand the sitarist on the stage just slipped away from in front of us and reappeared at every angle at once. His hand stroked up the neck, squealing along the strings like a rock star, and he set back into the impossibly quick theme, jamming a gamut of strings with every other verse—a clashing tumult and a virtuoso finger-picker all at once.

The temple went mad. Hindus jumped up screaming and clapping so you could barely hear the tabla bursting out all the bombast of an urban drum circle, but Niladri rocked with thunder and lightning that no one could take away from him. They cried out to him, “Hara har maha Deva,”—In the name of God, you are good. Some just held their heads, and their mouths hung open as they rocked up and down. To quote an author, “There are people with their hands in their hair, holding in their brains.” All of us, we knew we would remember it as a moment of history, not one of those powerful events shared by nations and announced to the world by some tepid broadcaster, but an intimate sparkle of the eye as we later share the wordless remembrance of Niladri Kumar’s flood tide overdrive.

“Wow,” said Martin, and then he dragged it out into, “W—o—w.” I felt the same way, only I swore.

Other acts followed, but even Pandit Jasaj of Mumbai, who is called India’s greatest singer, could not compete in my mind. Other musicians touched his feet. He was a venerable old man who appeared to have no eyes, only deep brows, and though old he still sang with skill and energy—just not the adrenal kick of Niladri.

On the final night I arrived around 11:30 with Jenny and Helene (Effi had flown back to Goa), and met Martin, Yogesh, Nadj, and Jacques at a chai shop out in front of the temple. Interesting sounds lured us inside: the band included a saxophone, the sound strangely skewed so it sounded Indian, and a woman on a violin. These two played around each other, and from outside it sounded as if the two instruments were one strange one. Why the Mochan priests allowed these foreign devices to elude their moratorium, I cannot say, but the band was Tamil, rather than from the principle musical metropoli of the northern river plains, so maybe that explains it.

Saxophone and violin had as accompaniment a tabla player, a mouth harpist, and a bakhawas drummer, his drum having two sides that he played at the same time. The percussionists sat aside as the violin and saxophone dueled, each challenging the other to a particular set of notes, which was impressive to see by the differences of their instruments. Then the percussionists dueled. At first each performed a solo, and the drummers did admirably. Then the mouth harpist took up his little twanging device, commonly associated as an instrument with harmonica or washboard or perhaps whiskey bottle. The large man started with a few notes that had me wondering if he could produce a solo at all, but then he began to rapidly sling them out, making sounds that I can only compare to the Transformers, and I cannot understand their provenance. It was very impressive.

There was also a beautiful sitarist whom Martin said he would marry. “It’s obvious she wants to marry some foreigner,” said the Bolivian. “If she marries an Indian, no more making music. Just making chapathi.” Then a singer came in, and entirely exhausted, I lay down and slept for a few hours.

When I awoke, two famous brothers were singing, Rajan and Sajan Mishra. They sang the sunrise raga, a raga about gods and the struggle of good and evil. They kept going in and out of the jittery vocal elevations that I had begun to find very annoying, but then something strange happened. The brothers made way for their student and their patron, a wealthy nobleman of Benares, who sat down and began to sing with his famously-trained voice; only he was very bad and kept slipping up, missing notes or screwing up those same vocal elevations that the Mishra brothers had mastered, reminding me how technical was this art of Indian song. On his severest mistakes, he would turn about to his masters, as if to say, “Sorry guruji!”

As for the audience, those pious classical purists, they despised this rich and otherwise unable songster. “They’re very radical people for the music,” said Martin. “Some people that go, go just to wait for mistakes.” They hollered and waved their left hands, a most obscene gesture.

After the noble student had left the stage in shame, Martin went to the back of the temple to spit. He had been chewing some pan leaf, containing tobacco and betel nut, which acted as a minor narcotic. Jacques knew where to find Varanasi’s best pan and had brought some to stay awake. As Martin reached the open door, his mouth full of yellow spit, he saw, occupying the space through which he must pass, lest he dribble pan juice all down his front, none other than brother Sajan and the son of Mochanji, chief priest of the temple—for the Mochan clan own and operate the Sankat Mochan temple, as most Indian temples are owned by a Brahmin family.

“Why did you bring him here?” asked the Mochan prince of the brother, who was suitably cowed, all waving hands and bowing head. “Why? He is inexperienced. He ruins the mood of the performance.” Quoth Sajan, “I’m sorry, Mohanji! He is still learning,” to which the priestly prince replied, “You shouldn’t have brought him.”

But the lanky Bolivian shoved his way past this epic conversation, spat out gouts of yellow pan drool into a flowerbed, and returned by the same way, avoiding the stares of a famous singer and a patron of the art as he went. Martin told of us this when he returned, and reminded us of the old rule: one mistake and thou art barred from the festival for twenty years. Though this Draconian law no longer applies, said Martin of that poor failed student, “He will probably never sing in Benares again.”

Such is the way of the Sangeet Samaroh, and following another duet of the brothers Mishra, so did it end. I now had five days remaining until my visa expired, and not many options.

On our way back that morning, or maybe one of the others, Jacques asked me where I would go next, and I told him to Southeast Asia: Thailand and Burma, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. “Ne, ne, beautiful countries,” said Jacques, using the Greek word for yes, “but Burma is very expensive. I heard the visas are very expensive now.”

“How so?”

“They slapped on a higher visa cost, and you have to pay one-hundred dollars a day, or something like this,” said Jacques. Then, seeing the rickshaw-wallah struggle up a hill, he patted the man on the back and told him, “Bas,” meaning “enough,” and sprang out of the couch gently as a cat. The rickshaw-wallah kept huffing though, apparently wanting to accomplish his goals, so Jacques veered over to walk along my side of the carriage, for I had not been so noble—or was I more noble, for nobles tend to weigh on others? Anyway, my host continued, “Ne, many countries are like this. Burma, Venezuela, other countries in South America. Many have slapped on higher visa costs, especially for USA.”

Eventually the road evened out, and the rickshaw-wallah cried, “Chello!” and Jacques leaped ably back into his seat as if nothing had happened.

Jacques always seemed to belong wherever he was, or to be doing exactly what God or karma intended him to do, whether it was drinking chai on a street corner or sitting on the rail of a balcony, observing the world. He applied a maximum of focus to every bit of jewelry produced and to every conversation, listening to others patiently and delivering wise verdicts and earnest sympathy; and always cool, calm, and collected, and positively zen.

He told me some good places to go in Thailand, “Very nice, very shanti,” and I wrote them down to remember.

I lingered around another day in Benares, getting over my exhaustion with one night of good sleep in a bed, for the days are so hot that afternoon naps are not sufficient; and I bought a ticket for a train that left the next evening. Before this joyous night of uninterrupted sleep, Jenny, Jacques, Nadj, Martin and I went to a very high-class restaurant called the Crystal Bowl, which Martin had discovered by the recommendation of some local. “I used to hate it in this city,” he said, “but then I found all these great restaurants. Benares is the best city in India for food, I think.”

“And now you will never leave,” said Jacques.

O Annapurna, Indian food is truly great! That goddess of culinary delights was the favorite of Yogesh, though he did not join us at the Crystal Bowl. Martin complained that his Brahmin friend was always coming along on things, and that Martin always had to pay for it. On our trip to Lakamiandry and the Rama Ashram, we had divided all the costs by one less than our number, each sponsoring a fraction of Yogesh. “I can’t buy him dinner,” said the Bolivian.

We had tandoori tikka masala with chicken, tandoori aloo masala, and kaju curry, a specialty made with cashews, plus plenty of naan and roti bread. The masalas were red as blood, just as they should be, the bread freshly cooked, the cashew curry rich and delicious, and we followed that feast with a strange desert that Martin calls the cornerstone of the menu: a stack composed of pineapple slice, brownie, and ice-cream scoop, all laid out in one of those sizzling cast iron plates they normally use to serve chicken and prawns and things, and sizzling like normal, though by miracle of science the ice-cream does not melt, and then they pour chocolate over the top of it which steams and bubbles in the pan.

“Wow, perfect,” said Martin, and he kissed his fingers and formed them into an okay sign.

Jacques and I would both leave the next day—his visa expired just before mine, and he was also going to Bangkok via Calcutta—though on separate trains, and so we said goodbye and see you soon to everyone and each other, since who knows what travel has in store?