In the Talmud and the Kabbalah are accounts of Lilith, the first wife of Adam. She had been made of the dust of the earth, as Adam had been made, and he was not pleased. He commanded her to lie beneath him, as a sign that she was inferior to him. But they said she refused to lie beneath him, insisting that the only love she would have was love with mutual respect. Angered by her pride, they began to deride her, and spread stories about her, insisting that she was the demon of the night, encouraging men to spill their sperm. She, the woman with strength, was transformed into a temptress of men.
(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)
He was 47 years old, and he was about to take his first prostitute: she was coming up to his room, as arranged, in half an hour.
The thought amused him and brought on a slow ruminative smile. The amusement was not in the contemplation of an absurdly long postponement of a necessary rite of passage (“What? Never had one in your life? What sort of man are you?” Benny had said), or of the much-vaunted insecurity of the middle years, or even of the need of a virtuous man to take a break from virtue. Indeed, Andrew Chin was not sure why he was feeling so amused. Perhaps the word did not sufficiently describe the whole complex of pleasurable thoughts and sensations he was experiencing as he sat on the bed in the hotel room. Perhaps it was no more than the schoolboy’s sense of self-gratification at a first prank about to be carried out.
“Bye! Be good!” his wife had said at the airport. The parting advice was more in the nature of the teasing raillery between husband and wife completely at ease with each other, than of any serious admonition to a departing spouse.
“Bye,” he had said cheerfully, adding, “I should not be good in a place like Bangkok, no man’s supposed to be good in Bangkok,” echoing the irrepressible Benny who visited the city at least once a month and made no secret of it. His wife, laughing good-naturedly, kissed him and he was off.
And now the teasing words were about to become fact, for he was about to have his first prostitute. It had not been intended this way. He had planned, in the one day left after completing the business for his company, to explore the city’s famed temples, markets and shops and pick up the obligatory Thai silk for his wife, gifts for his daughters and souvenirs for his secretary and the other girls at the office. The brochures at the hotel hinted of more exotic enjoyment, but these were not part of his world (“What!” Benny would have expostulated. “Go to Bangkok and not see these? What sort of tourist are you? Why, when I was there the last time, I went to the – Go, man. You won’t believe until you see with your own eyes. My God! You know what the dancing girls do? They have these bottle caps, see – It’s incredible, man – ”, finishing with his famous guffaw). So it was to be innocuous temples, markets and shops. But entering his room after lunch, he noticed a slip of pink paper under the door. He picked it up and read with increasing amusement: ‘Virgin Prostitutes. Genuine. No Fake. With Good Proof in Certificate of Virgin, has signature of 2 doctor. If not satisfy, can refund.’
Andrew put the pink slip into his pocket, intending to take it home to show his wife who was an English Language teacher. But the little advertisement had a curious power which began to work on him, so that as he sat on his bed, he began to think strange thoughts which translated into strange sensations.
When he was a little boy of eight and staying with his grandparents, he hid himself one day behind the curtains when he heard his grandfather come in from the rain and speaking to a bondmaid who happened to be the only one in the house then, apart from himself. He knew for a certainty that his grandfather had never intended to go out at all, and would be back as soon as the others were out of the house. He also knew that his grandfather’s curt order to the maid to take up a cup of hot tea to him in his room was no routine instruction.
Something was about to happen, and as soon as he heard the door softly closing after them, he darted out from behind the curtains, climbed the stairs noiselessly, then lay flat on his stomach outside the locked room to peep up through the convenient slit between door and floor. He watched, fascinated, and was later to connect the intense pleasure, approaching ecstasy, that he had seen oil his grandfather’s face, with the appropriation of virginity. A physiological intricacy beyond his little mind to grasp, he nevertheless understood its tremendous value through listening in on the many adult conversations in that large household of women. The knowledge, with the myriad trivia of childhood, had faded away as he grew up, but now in the tantalising pronouncements of the pink paper slipped under his door in the Bangkok hotel, it came back with vividness and power and insinuated itself into his very being, climaxing always with the recollection of pure ecstasy on his grandfather’s face.
Andrew paced the room with the pink paper in his hand, his face mobile with a hundred flitting expressions. He was interested, awed, fascinated, alarmed at his own daring, and so curious about an experience at once commonplace and unique that no less than direct personal experience, he decided, could satisfy that curiosity. The realisation that he was 47 years old and with perhaps but a short time left for initiation into that experience, contributed to the decision. Having made up his mind, he was aware of a new lightness of being and of his whole body being suffused with a tingling glow of most delicious anticipation. He looked at the telephone number on the pink paper and realised that the simple act of his picking up the phone would be his induction into a totally new world. He wondered what he should say and how he should react if the pink paper people got crude or demanding, and as if to spare him all the hassle, a polite knock was heard on the door and a very polite-looking young man appeared and asked if he could be of any help.
So the girl was to come in precisely half an hour. And she was to spend the night with him.
Like the prankish schoolboy who longs for an audience, Andrew wondered, “What would Benny say?” He knew what Benny would say: The coarse, florid face with the raucous laugh loomed before his eyes, and made him shake his head and smile to himself. What would his wife say? The thought was totally irrelevant to and therefore had no place in this unique, tantalising, once-in-a-life-time, just-for-the-experience adventure, which of course he had no intention of repeating.
There came a very timid knock, and the girl was admitted.
She was very young-looking, was probably no more than 16. She stood before him uncertainly, then took out a roll of paper from her pocket to give to him; it was the Virginity Certificate, attesting to her pristine state, signed by two doctors, one signature beside the other, in a corner of the gold-bordered scroll.
Andrew looked at her with increasing curiosity, then pleasure. A grotesquely made-up harridan with jangling earrings, low-cut skin-tight dress and stiletto heels and working the chewing gum endlessly in her cheeks (a portrait he derived exclusively from American TV) would have repulsed him. This girl who stood before him was young and pretty and innocent-looking, with a round face, large round eyes and a small mouth. Her abundance of dark curly hair was swept back and kept in place by a yellow head-band from under which a cluster of small tendrils escaped to frame her face in the most appealing way. She was wearing a frilly yellow dress which was one or two sizes too large, and high heels too high, so that she tottered a little as she walked up to him to show him the virginity certificate. He suddenly had a fleeting vision of her in another setting, her native village, divested of make-up, frilly dress and high heels, wearing the native sarong and walking barefoot with a water-pot on her head, a pink frangipani in her hair.
He gestured to her to sit down and she sat in the chair opposite him, balancing on the edge, in continuing deferential timidity. He began to speak to her slowly and gently, in English, asking simple questions. In response, she rattled off a string of rehearsed sentences in English, the only intelligible ones being “My name Porntip” and “I am virgin”, the second followed by what sounded like a statement of a virgin’s fee. They smiled continuously at each other and now and then laughed with shy amiability.
The sense of exhilaration on the approaching consummation of the ultimate frolic could not be resisted any longer and shedding whatever remaining tentativeness, Andrew got up, walked to Porntip and led her decisively to the bed. This was the cue, clearly, for her to initiate the process of disrobing: she pulled down the back zipper of her dress, stepped out of it and out of her high heels, in one movement of practised efficiency and ease. Then with the same sense of purpose, she lay down on the bed in her black lace bra and panties, watching him closely for the second cue as to who should be the one to effect the last stage of the disrobing, for a more enjoyable preliminary. He watched with mounting excitement and interest, all the while marvelling at the novelty of the experience. He was 47 and about to take his first prostitute, and so far everything had been exactly as he would have wished.
The girl looked at him, then decided to take the initiative, unclasping her bra, pulling down her panties and coming close to him in the full warmth of her naked beauties. He immediately pulled her down with a grunt of intense desire, rivalling even his grandfather’s.
At the moment of the breaking, she gave the inevitable sharp cry, then when he had rolled off her and was quietly contemplating her from his easeful position on a mound of pillows, his arms behind his head, she pulled up from somewhere under her body the proof of the stained white cloth, and showed it to him, smiling. The crude contrivance, not just of the cloth, but of the practised sharp cry of pain, and of the forced orgiastic contortions of face and limbs irritated him. The irritation was not directed at the girl but at the whole set-up of parasites intent upon living off her, from the manager of the hotel to the young polite-looking pimp who had come to his door, to her parents who had probably already sold her, body and soul, to the hotel. The girl’s total naturalness and simplicity left her untouched in any way by the sordid business so that whatever she did from obedience, no matter how crude, only enhanced her appeal.
He wanted to talk to her, to find out more about her, but her ability in the language had ended with the rattled off string of sentences and now, having been previously instructed to be with the man throughout the night, she settled compliantly by his side and watched for his every wish. His last thought, before he finally fell asleep, with the girl nestling against him, was of a very satisfactory first adventure and of the possibility that it need not be the last.
He woke up in the middle of the night with a start, thinking he was at home. Then he remembered and stretched out his hand to touch the girl beside him. He propped himself up on his elbow in alarm, for she was no longer there. He stretched out his hand quickly to feel for his watch and wallet on the beside table (“Never leave your watch or wallet or other valuables lying around in the room,” Benny had cautioned, “And never accept any drink from a prostitute. It’s sure to be spiked, and you’ll wake up to find yourself stripped bare.”) They were there, intact. Where could Porntip be? He had paid for a full night. She should not have left. He would have to complain to the manager.
He noticed the light in the bathroom and heard some very small sounds coming from it. Getting noiselessly out of bed, he padded across the room to peep through the imperfectly closed door.
Porntip was squatting on the bathroom floor, playing ‘Five Stones’. She scattered five small pebbles on the floor in front of her, picked one up, threw it high into the air, scooped up the remaining four from the floor in one swift sweep, and was in time to catch the falling pebble, to complete the set of five in her little palm. She repeated the process, scattering the pebbles yet further apart, to challenge herself to higher levels of dexterity. With each success, she laughed softly to herself, with each failure, she frowned and muttered scolding words to the errant pebble that had not allowed itself to be scooped up in time with the others, or that had perversely slipped out between her fingers. With a child’s total absorption at play, she did not see him watching her.
She was just that, a child. She was a child forced into an occupation that she understood only in terms of what she must do and say to please men and what she must not do and say to avoid the beatings from managers, pimps and parents. Her childhood had been stolen from her, but she stole back whatever bits of it she could, waiting till the men were asleep and snoring, to go into the bathroom, bring out her five stones and play by herself. While the men mauled her in bed, she pretended to smile and giggle and let out pleasing cries of pleasure, but all the time she was thinking about the five little pebbles hidden in the pocket of her dress.
A sickening sensation of the hideousness of it all condensed into a tight constriction of throat and stomach, and he leaned against the wall, to steady himself. He had paid for a child and taken her to bed. The child was probably no older than his younger daughter, Adeline, aged 13. He and his wife escorted Adeline to her school parties, forbade her to stay late and watched over her with greatest parental care and tenderness. If Porntip had been his daughter, she would have had the same loving protection. With his money he had made this child, working as a prostitute in a hotel, do unspeakable things for his pleasure, and she had complied fully, smiling, knowing that any complaint from him would mean the whip and lash. He had noticed a healed scar on her left thigh, probably the price she had paid for a flare of the child’s rebelliousness that was never repeated.
She was singing a song softly to herself and he thought he understood the words.
Stones, pretty stones
Bright stones
Fingers, nimble fingers
But why did you have to open
Like legs?
He moved; he was not sure what he was going to do or say, except that an overpowering feeling of compassion for her and loathing for himself needed expression. The involuntary movement caused the child to look up with a start; she saw him and let out a loud gasp. The stones fell from her fingers and she stood up trembling, staring at him with the terror-stricken look of someone caught in a heinous act and for whom escape was impossible. He pushed open the door, said “Porntip” and she fell down on her knees and began to cry, rocking her small body to and fro in her terror. He tried to touch her, to say comforting words, but the child’s panic had gathered into one obsessive thought, that here was another thing done wrong, for which punishment would be immediate and painful, so that all his efforts to calm and reassure by tone or touch were futile and washed uselessly over her. She became hysterical, speaking very rapidly in her own language, still on her knees and alternately holding out her hands pleadingly and wringing them.
“Oh, please, please – ” cried Andrew, and then thinking to get her out of her hysteria more effectively, he said, in a sharp voice, “Now, now, no need for all this,” at the same time firmly gripping her shoulders to pull her up from the absurd kneeling position. She screamed, and began struggling with him as with an adversary, finally breaking free and running out of the bathroom and out of the room, in choked sobbing.
“Oh my God,” cried Andrew, pale with shock at this sudden turn ofevents. He sat down on the bed, breathing heavily, in a turbulence of emotions from which two, guilt and fear, detached themselves to shape into an overpowering certainty that this would not be the end of the adventure, that something was about to happen to him soon. The sense of dread overcame him, and he fell back on the bed, gasping.
He jumped up upon hearing loud shouts coming from the street below, and without understanding what they were all about, he knew they were in some way connected with him. He listened, horrified. The shouts grew; he could visualise a massing of people in the scene of the tragedy, whatever it was, in the light of the street lamps. He put on his shirt and his trousers and heard a soft polite knock on the door. It was the young polite-looking man again, and this time the man’s smile was strained by the seriousness of the news he had come to give, and by his earnest desire that his valued guest should not be at all inconvenienced by it. The girl, Porntip, in a quite unaccountable fit of madness, had run to the hotel balcony and fallen over a ledge. Quite unaccountable, the young man emphasised, and smiling reassuringly at Andrew, repeated that he was not to worry about it at all, as these things happened. It was best that they kept quiet about it and went on as if nothing had happened. Andrew rushed past him through the open door and he said, “Sir, but – ”
Andrew stood with the cluster of onlookers, but the body on the wet road was already covered with a piece of canvas, a small foot peeping out from it. He felt a tide of nausea rising, and returned quickly to the hotel to throw up in the bathroom. He saw the five stones still on the floor and he began to cry. The next day, he left for home.
“You what – ” Benny was aghast. He repeated, “That’s utterly crazy, Andrew, and I advise you not to do it.” For Andrew had told him the whole story and confided to him his decision for reparation. Guilt needed reparation which was its only solace.
When he was a very small child, probably no more than five or six, he suffered enormous guilt over the death of a sister. He had nightmares of his little sister’s ghost coming to haunt him; it did not help that one of the bondmaids who took care of him, a young spiteful woman, often told him the story of how he was responsible for the baby’s death, embellishing her narration to frighten the little hypersensitive boy into a state of sheer terror. What had happened was that during the post-war years when he was a mere toddler, milk was scarce, and whatever milk could be obtained was first given to sons, then only to daughters, if there was any remaining. He being the only male child had first preference; while he grew sleek and chubby, his sister dwindled away and finally died from an illness brought on by malnutrition. He had a recurring dream in which he saw a pan of milk being heated on the stove, then poured into a bottle, then put in a bucket of water to cool. His little sister cried for the milk but each time she tried to reach it, she was slapped down and finally pulled away. He saw himself drinking from the bottle of milk and being carried in a bondmaid’s arms, and urging the bondmaid to take him to the window to look out upon the yard outside where he was sure his sister had been taken. Still drinking his milk, he looked out and saw her dead on the hard earth of the yard, like an enormous insect on its back, her arms and legs stiffly sticking out.
When he was older, he found out that there was a way by which the living could feed the dead and thus make atonement: every year, during the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, people went to the graves of their relatives and laid out enormous feasts of food and drink.
His grandmother, taking him with her on her rounds of the graves, was surprised to see something drop out of his shirt and fall clanking to the ground where it hit a stone. It was a tin of condensed milk.
“Why, little grandson!” she had laughed. “Whatever have you got there?” He did not tell her, but it was an offering of propitiation to the dead sister who had died because of him.
The frightening dream disappeared. The ghost must have drunk the milk and forgiven him.
There was to be more guilt and more need of the solace of expiation.
His mother employed a servant, a remote relative who had a little adopted daughter. The child must have been about eight then, but was very small for her years, looking no more than five or six, and he was 12. The Clever Scholar, the women in the household called him as they looked at him with pride, and all their energies were put to the service of his comfort and pleasure, he being the sole male child. Their attentiveness embarrassed him; their readiness to punish the servant’s child on his account embarrassed him even more. Thus if the child followed him around in hopes of being given some of the bread-and-jam he was eating, or stood and watched him while he was doing his school homework and he frowned for her to go away, her mother would appear in a noisy display of the deference expected of the poor relative, shrilly scolding the child or slapping her till she cried. Between his genuine pity for this unfortunate little girl who was always sickly and never without scabs on her spindly legs, and his utter revulsion at her idiotic adulation of him, he grew irritable and difficult, often locking himself in his room for hours. One day he lost a favourite colouring pen, and was certain that the girl had taken it because he had seen her looking at it with intense interest. He asked her sternly, if she had taken his pen; the child blubbered, and immediately the incident was taken to a high level of adult antagonisms, his mother making insinuating remarks and the relative responding by beating the child in a frenzy of transferred hate. The child began to vomit and the distressed relative would still go on with the beating, until his mother coldly went up and removed the piece of firewood from her hand. He had meanwhile found the missing colouring pen; he had put it away in a drawer and had forgotten about it. Lacking the courage to tell the truth, he brooded in his room for days. The child was taken ill, and he remembered that his guilt was so keen that he emptied his money-box of its coins and went out to buy an enormous packet of biscuits which he hurriedly left beside the mattress on which the sick child was lying. He never saw her again and was told that she had died in hospital.
He did not tell Benny of these two childhood incidents, but he said, running his fingers through his hair in his deep distress, “You know three females have died on my account, and they were all children. I have been responsible for the deaths of three innocent children. How can I forgive myself?” Ignoring the histrionics, Benny said, “But Andrew, listen. You can’t go to the family and offer money. They would fleece you dry. I know their kind; you would be a heaven-sent opportunity to them.” For Andrew had told him of his secret intention to return to Bangkok and get the help of the hotel manager to locate the girl’s family. He would then visit them and offer to pay for the funeral expenses and for whatever else was needed.
“That’s the least I can do,” said Andrew sorrowfully. The incident had changed him drastically. His wife wondered and agonised about this sudden change in her husband – his hair was greyer and he had aged overnight – but he would not tell her.
“Listen,” said Benny again, with greater urgency in his voice. He worried about Andrew being mercilessly exploited by ‘those people’ and tried to dissuade him with all the horror stories he could muster: the American engineer who befriended a Thai bar waitress, sent her money faithfully for three years, only to be dumped by her; an Englishman who was cleaned out by his Thai wife and her family; a Singaporean businessman who returned from a trip totally disoriented and was later found to have been the victim of a magic potion administered by his Thai mistress.
“Don’t,” pleaded Benny, and this time there was exasperation in his voice: here was a guy making a big to-do over nothing and possibly ruining it for the other guys.
“Planeloads of Japanese go there every day,” he said, still trying hard to dissuade Andrew from a patently futile mission, “and planeloads of French too. You only have to read the newspapers to know. It happens everywhere in the world. Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that each and every one of us should come home weeping with guilt and sorrow?”
It was with great difficulty and a considerable sum of money that Andrew managed to persuade the polite young man at the hotel to take him to see Porntip’s family. He looked around at the squalor of the huts clustered on the muddy banks of a river; they seemed to be constructed of the same foetid substance as the debris washed up by the river. A group of small children with large, round bellies, matted hair and dirty faces gathered round him, giggling, and he began to dispense coins from his pocket. The group rapidly swelled into a crowd, and the children, jostling with each other, and tugging at his hands, shirt and trousers, clamoured for more. The young man shooed them off with both hands and led Andrew hurriedly to a small, ramshackle hut some distance from the river. Porntip had no father; he had died in an accident in a stone quarry a year back. Porntip’s mother, a thin, dried woman with a grief-pinched face pointed to a table on which stood a picture of Porntip, smiling, with a frangipani in her hair, side by side with a picture of the dead father, and in front of the portraits, a saucer with flower petals and a lit candle. Porntip’s mother began to weep; the tragedy of her life condensed into a long, thin wail as she sat beside the pictures of her husband and daughter and began beating on her chest. Pale with shock, Andrew drew out from his pocket some money, handed it to the young man beside him and requested him to explain to the woman that he would be grateful to be allowed to help out in the funeral and other expenses. The woman looked up sharply, looked from one face to the other and stared at the wad of money which represented remission from years of back-breaking work at the quarry; her cluster of children, similarly attracted, gathered round her to watch silently.
“It’s the least I can do,” said Andrew gently, and the young man translated. Andrew’s eyes wandered and rested, with horror, on a young girl by the side of the hut, visible from the doorway, squatting on the hard earth, playing Five Stones. It was the same round face, the same abundance of hair, the same dexterity of hand in the sweeping up of the four pebbles to catch the falling fifth. Andrew stared, and a strangled sound came from his throat, as he raised a finger to point at her. The mother, following his finger, raised her voice and called shrilly. The name sounded like “Porntip.” The girl heard, looked up, gathered her five stones and came in. She stood shyly before Andrew. The mother, smiling through her tears, introduced her. Her name was Wantip, and she was Porntip’s younger sister. She smiled shyly and looked on the ground. The mother said something to the young man and he translated: “She says that you are a good and generous man. You can have Wantip. She is a virgin and will be a very good woman to you. She says she knows you will treat Wantip very well. She says – ”
“No, you don’t understand,” blurted Andrew. The woman who understood very well, again said something to the young man who translated: “She says another man has already come to ask for her, and if you don’t take her now – ”
Wantip, on cue, walked up to Andrew, and stood before him, head bowed, hands reverentially clasped, then looked up at him with that mixture of pleading and promise in her large eyes and soft mouth.