Getting a Drink in a Civil War Getting a Drink in a Civil War Every man, woman, and child on earth drinks the equivalent of six liters of pure alcohol a year. The biggest drinkers, as far as I can tell, are the weary Moldovans, with eighteen liters a year, followed by the far less weary Czechs at sixteen. The Moldovans can rarely be sober, and in fact they should all be dead. But all the nations of the Eurasian northern hemisphere consume more than twelve liters, and according to various professional health bodies they should all be dead by now. The Balkans, though, drink less than the Finns; the Italians and Spanish are outdone by the Germans and the French. In Russia one in every five male deaths is by alcohol. Two and a half million people die every year, we are told, because of drink. Alcoholism is now classified as a “disease.” It is like cancer or rabies. Its sufferers are helpless as its pathogens rage through their bodies; their sickness is passed on genetically from generation to generation.
Besides the toll it takes on the liver, there are aspects to this disease that can never show up in medical statistics. There is the yearning for conviviality, for the breakdown of a loneliness that otherwise cannot be so easily dodged. The transcending of the self. There is the unhappiness that comes with mundaneness, with normal life, which after all—and without undue exaggeration—leads to old age and death. So the departure from the self makes sense, and it’s as easy as walking away from a mask and leaving it useless on the ground behind one.
The drinker is not adrift from normality because he wants to escape the mundane. He is the side effect of an insane belief that the mundane is all that there is. He is like the asylum inmate in Fellini’s Amarcord, the mad uncle who climbs into a tree and refuses to come down, who beats his chest and shouts that after years in the asylum he wants a woman: “Voglio una donna!”
Yet stuck in that metaphorical tree, alone and frustrated, he will also want to climb down eventually. Terra firma beckons.
On the landing of the Pink Lady’s eleventh floor in Hat Yai, seven Malaysian tourists, all men, stood among discarded drink trays, indolently looking down at their overpolished shoes. The landing was strewn with emptied vodka bottles, and there were little images of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej in white regalia pinned to the room doors. The walls shook with techno music. The Malaysians were waiting patiently for the elevator that would take them to the Relax Club downstairs.
Through a window spanned with chicken wire, we saw the night vista of Hat Yai: rusted tin roofs, warehouses, a fragment of a decaying mosque with moss spreading along its walls. Expert punters, the Malays discussed the price of Black Label shots at the Pink Lady bar. It seemed like the shots were pricier than the girls, given that the girls could be had for about thirty dollars. I asked them, as we came into the Pink Lady’s lobby, if they came here for booze or for the Thai girls. Booze with girls, they said with grim practicality. Why one without the other?
The lobby of the Pink Lady is not lacking in temperamental religiosity: grandfather clocks, mystical paintings of shrines in lakes, haloed Buddhas, and photomurals of saints. A talisman store stood next to two karaoke lounges, and girls floated past with trays of tequila and ice buckets. The Muslims seemed to find this mixture of religious kitsch and merry whoredom as irresistibly seductive as it was inconceivable. They blinked nervously. In the main hotel nightclub there was a “fishbowl,” a seating area with benches raised like a small amphitheater, where numbered girls in togas awaited their customers, who merely had to call out her number to the mama-san. It’s a familiar system in Asia. The painted background here was a scene of jungle ponds and shrubberies, a corner of a primeval forest. It looked like a panorama in an ancient Parisian zoo.
That night, however, there was only one Thai girl there. She was doing her knitting and didn’t even look up. The Malaysians were disgusted and decided to go to the bar. We sat in the suffocating cocktail lounge and compared our phallic-shaped plastic room keys decorated with the words Hot Pink. I picked up some Malay sexual slang. “Cock” is burung, or “bird.” “Pussy” is nonok. “Copping a feel, a grope” in the bars is known as raba raba. The noble act itself is merodok. It might come in handy one day.
They were professional white-collar types from Kota Bharu who had driven up together in a rented minivan, passing through the border at Sungai Kolok, a rancid village also famous for its liquored-up brothels. They were at the Pink Lady for the whole weekend, during which they expected to get laid at least five times apiece and to drink at least a whole bottle of Scotch each. That was not including the gin fizzes, the Royal Stag Indian whisky, the rum and Cokes, the Sex on the Beaches, and the Grey Goose shots en masse. The idea was to fuse sex and booze in ways that only a Buddhist country would permit.
“Then what?”
“Go home to Malaysia and sleep it off, la.”
It seemed like a system. The cabaret started, and a few girls came prancing onto the stage in top hats and Moulin Rouge feathers. They held up gold amphorae to no effect. It was quite mysterious. The Malaysians seemed indifferent. They asked me instead what a farang like me was doing in Hat Yai, and I said I was traveling through the Deep South of Thailand in order to sample its nightlife. I was, in effect, traveling from Hat Yai to their own hometown of Kota, and I was doing it to see what made men like them tick. I was curious about the way they drank and the way they found their amusements. This made them roar with something that I took to be laughter, but that on second thought I was sure was its exact opposite.
It is sometimes hard to unravel the quasi-mystical workings of Thai politics, or to fathom why it is that this otherwise pleasure-driven nation should be plagued by the largest Islamic insurgency outside Iraq.
The Muslim insurgents of the Thai Deep South have never made intelligible demands, other than to evoke the possibility of a nostalgic resurrection of the Sultanate of Pattani. The Sultanate was a small Islamic state of prior centuries erased from the map when the British, then masters of Malaya, donated the three southern states to the Kingdom of Siam in 1909. The British, as no one now remembers, got trading rights from the Thais in return for the three hapless provinces. The Thais got a hundred years of fatal resentments, though they themselves had tried to dominate the region in the eighteenth century.
While the West has been focused on the recent political struggle in Bangkok, the longer struggle for the soul of Thailand has been evolving in the south. But the two are connected. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted by a bloodless military coup in 2006, is the éminence grise behind the faction known in rather Dr. Seuss fashion as the Reds, who recently brought a near-revolution to the streets of downtown Bangkok. Before 2006, however, Thaksin was in charge of the war in the south. He took it personally. When the violence became savage, he took much of the blame for the army’s reprisals against Muslims: the festering war may have done much to delegitimize, and ultimately fragment, his government.
No one really knows who the insurgents are, nor how many of them there are. For almost forty years up until 1998, a variety of guerrilla organizations operated in the south, committing sabotage, assassinations, and kidnappings in the name of creating a separate Muslim state. A group calling itself the BRN had formed in 1960 after the Thai government imposed a secular education system in the South. The BRN were anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and “Islamic socialist” in the manner of many movements in the Muslim world at that time, and they talked openly of rejoining Malaysia as part of a pan–Southeast Asian Malay-Muslim socialist union. They rejected the Thai constitution and proclaimed the supremacy of armed struggle.
By 1998 the Thais had suppressed the insurgency, but serious violence erupted once more in 2001 when Thaksin took power. He transferred security arrangements to the police, who are mistrusted and hated for their corruption; the insurgents meanwhile simply regrouped. By 2004 the violence escalated to sinister levels. Buddhist plantation workers and monks were shot, beheaded, machete’d to death. To this day the perpetrators remain, like criminal secret societies, eccentrically enigmatic: they include the Mujahideen Pattani Movement, PULO, and its military subgroups like the Ma-ae Tophien group and the ultraviolent Runda Kumpalan Kecil, or RKK.
In 2006 Wan Kadir Che Wan, the leader of Bersatu, one of the separatist groups, claimed to Al Jazeera television that the Indonesian terror network Jemaah Islamiyah was helping to launch violent attacks inside Thailand. It was the same group that bombed bars in Bali in 2002 and 2005, killing hundreds.
Now, as a Buddhist army occupies a Muslim land, the war seems ever more futile and obscurantist, more random in tone. It is, deep down, a cultural struggle with no possible resolution, an impasse that will never dissolve.
In the Pink Lady, meanwhile, my brothel punters were all too aware of the irony in their coming across the border to get away from sharia laws while the Thai Muslims were bombing everything in sight to get sharia law imposed in that same place. Irony is perhaps not quite the right word for dogged awareness of so ham-fisted a paradox. They pointed out, also, that even Hat Yai has had its share of malignant detonations. In 2006 bombs went off at the Ocean department store and at the Brown Sugar Pub, killing four. One of the dead was a Malaysian tourist, and one assumes he didn’t enter Paradise. The scrofulous old farangs who used to come here for the girls got the message, but the Malaysians kept coming because they had nowhere else to go. It was their cheapest quick fix for sex and affordable Johnnie Walker. And what would they do without Johnnie Walker?
We drank it now with piles of off-tasting ice, and the men seemed to go into a state of catatonic contentment that derived as much from the brand name as from the alcohol itself. It was the partaking of a forbidden fruit, the quiet cocking a snoot at a taboo, a group transgression, and an escalating mind-alteration all at once. There is something undeniably fraternal about getting drunk in a group, particularly when the disciplines of family life and religious custom are absent. I asked one of them why drinking like this was so much better than boozing in their homes in Kota Bharu. “We not hiding inside,” he said. “Total sharia almost in Kota, la.”
Kota Bharu is in Kelantan, the easternmost state on the Thai border and the stronghold of Malaysia’s most radical Islamic party, the Parti Islam se-Malaysia, the PAS. The party’s leader, and the chief minister of the state, is Nik Aziz, who has pushed for full sharia law to be implemented. This includes amputation for theft and stoning for adultery: the standard civilities of hud law. The federal government has obstructed the outright imposition of sharia, but the PAS has won control of five of Malaysia’s thirteen states.
I heard about the recent sensational case of the Malaysian model Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, who in 2009 was sentenced by a sharia court in the state of Pahang, one of the five PAS-controlled states, to six lashes of a cane for drinking a beer in a hotel bar. The sultan of Pahang commuted the sentence to community service the day before it was due to be executed, but had it been performed, it would have been the first judicial caning of a woman in modern Malaysian history. In February 2010 three women actually were caned for sex outside marriage, and most people think canings for drinking alcohol will now begin to rise as Islamization sweeps across the country. Drinking will become increasingly dangerous. Its allure will soar, and the border will boom.
Only half of Malaysia’s twenty-six million people are Malay Muslims. The rest are Chinese and Indian and could not be covered by the laws anyway. “Islam is a soft, gentle religion,” the redoubtable Nik Aziz has said. “We want sharia adopted across the country by consensus.” Thailand, meanwhile, has the most radical Islamic state in Malaysia right on its border. It’s both a curse and a grotesque business opportunity.
A few days later I took a private car from Hat Yai to Pattani. It’s a two-hour drive to the coast, passing estuaries clogged with spike rushes, rice paddies, and orchards, the flimsy houses ringed with bamboo birdcages hung on strings: the ubiquitous, sad songbirds of the south. A hot, flat land with an exhausted lushness to it, a feeling of ebb and no flow.
Halfway to Pattani the road signs begin to be in Arabic script, and the first roadblocks appear. Thai Army units in their jungle camouflage helmets lounge under café parasols armed with M15s or sit with expressions of exasperation behind walls of sandbags. By five o’clock the roads are empty. After nightfall insurgent gangs roam them with opportunistic ferocity. Even at three in the afternoon my driver was eager to be off the highway. The minivans that are the usual transport between towns in the south have often been stopped, the travelers ordered out and shot on the spot. Local police stations have been hit with rocket-propelled grenades, and Buddhist roadside food stalls sprayed with automatic gunfire.
Few people come to Pattani now, though there’s a sizable university, and its riverine neighborhoods of old Chinese shop houses used to draw Thai artists and bohemians. The city is under a hit-and-miss military curfew, and the only unrepulsive hotel is the now-ghostly CS, a mile out of town. It, too, was car-bombed (in 2008, two hotel employees killed) but was restored with Malay decor and Malay piped music; it now sits mostly empty at the end of a cul-de-sac behind armed guards, sandbags, and tired security cameras.
When I arrived, a few Muslim businessmen were on the outdoor terrace, drinking tea with Tea Pot brand condensed milk, the only thing served there. Tea, condensed milk, and sugar. With my cranky Thai I was able to persuade one of the hotel clerks to lend me his motorbike for cash. Taxis in Pattani are virtually nonexistent. They protested that it was suicidal for a farang to ride around on a bike, but it seemed a reasonable risk to get a cold Singha. Why would anyone shoot me anyway? It was Buddhists and other Muslims they hated.
I soon got lost, speeding through the Pattani hinterland, alongside the sleepy canals, warehouses, and rice paddies stilled within an unnerving calm. I was stopped by heavily armed Thai soldiers at a roadblock. They came out with their cameras to snap me astride the dirt bike, and I was high-fived: Buddhist recruits in complicity with the six-foot-five Englishman mistaken for an American. I asked them in Thai where the bars were, then how they felt to be posted here to Pattani, the most feared city in Southeast Asia, unable to even go to a bar when they were off duty. They were lackadaisical. The southerners were backward bastards, that was all. They were dying to get back to Bangkok for a weekend. We chatted about our favorites among the 120,000 watering holes in Bangkok, exchanging cigarettes, and I realized that our political complicity relative to the insurgents was centered on what the latter loathed most: drink.
That night there was a Chinese New Year festival in Pattani’s old town. I rode there on the bike, through alleys where the lamps had been cut off, lit by overhead strings of red Chinese lanterns. A whole small city without neons, submerged in an atmosphere of latent violence and paranoia. Nocturnal running gun battles between police and insurgents are hardly uncommon in the streets of Pattani; nor are assassinations, executed with a chilling casualness from the backs of mopeds. Circling the town for an hour by myself, I didn’t see a single night spot or bar, and not a single Malaysian tourist either. This is now by default an Islamic city that has stepped back from participation in modern Thailand. But the New Year festival had a rock concert and a dragon dance: I wandered through it with an iced litchi juice, while the girls in headscarves at the food stalls told me shyly that they didn’t even stock Coke. Was it disdained in some way?
The Deep South does indeed feel like a place that has slipped away from modernity. The go-go bars, the obsession with technology, the raucous sex, and—perhaps above all—the relative freedom of women in the workplace? For Thai Muslims, one might say, it’s Thai Buddhists with their easygoing tolerance who are “the West,” the Dar Al Harb, the realm of infidels. The people who permit everything.
Back at the hotel, the lobby was a morgue, and the terrace wasn’t even serving Tea Pot. It was nine-thirty. I wandered out into the grubby plaza beyond the security barriers and noticed a rose-lit establishment of some kind where the usual Thai waitresses in slit dresses were lounging about at sticky tables. An astonishing sight. Sure enough, it was a modest one-room karaoke lounge of some kind, and I was able to order a Singha beer. It was clearly set up for Chinese businessmen staying at the CS or the occasional naughty Muslim willing to brave death, but there was no one there. I asked the girls where they were from. Unsurprisingly, they were Buddhists, some of them from the north, and they were uneasy working at perhaps the only bar in Pattani and so close to a hotel that had already been bombed. But business was business.
“The Chinese guys will come down bored out of their minds and order ten rounds of beer. The Muslim guys are like alcoholics. Drink, drink, drink. It’s not our fault. We just hope they don’t do a drive-by shooting on us. They love drive-by shootings down here.”
They said it with contempt. They also said they had heard all the gossip being spread in Bangkok about the funding for the insurgents. Both local police and insurgents are suspected of being deeply involved in the drug trade. As in Pakistan, a country with four million drug addicts, narcotics are acceptable, but a sip of beer merits death.
Thais are also often convinced that the money comes from tom yam kung soup restaurants on the Malaysian side of the border. Since tom yam kung (a hot and sour clear soup with lemongrass, Kaffir lime leaves, and shrimp) is Thai cuisine’s most recognizable tourist dish, that means a lot of restaurants funneling money for the terrorists. I had heard this same story many times myself in Bangkok, but these girls seemed totally convinced of its truth. Insidious soup sellers were fueling the beheading of Buddhist monks. It made them say cruel things about their Muslim cocitizens. It seemed so unfair, they said. Tom yam kung is a lovely soup, beloved of all patriotic Thais. The only thing harmful about it is its heat.
The following morning I walked into Pattani and bought a ticket for Narathiwat at one of the minivan transit companies. Narathiwat, two hours down the coast toward the Malaysian border, in the state of the same name, is another troubled Muslim city but with a much shorter history—it was founded only in 1936. It sits by a wide river and is known for its bellicose mosques. Ironically, the province’s name is Sanskrit for “the dwelling of wise men.” Eighteen percent of its population is Buddhist, and the more ardent Islamic persons wish them gone.
In April 2004 a group of thirty-two guerrillas in Narathiwat attacked a Thai Army outpost, killing two soldiers, then retreated to a sixteenth-century mosque named Krue Sae. After a seven-hour standoff, the Thai Army destroyed the mosque and killed all 122 people inside it. Thaksin was blamed by Thai liberals and reformists for excessive use of force. However, since 2006 the Thai government has been more conciliatory, apologizing for incidents like Krue Sae and promising to look into local grievances. This tone of contrition and apology, admirable in itself, has been greeted by the insurgents with an irresistible rise in violence. This has, to put it mildly, bewildered those who believe in the power of conciliation.
I fell in with one of the religious students who always seem to throng these collective vans moving from city to city. Hakim was studying in Yala and wanted to know if I could speak Arabic as well as Thai. No? He seemed mystified. He wanted to go study in Pakistan and, even more ambitiously, Saudi Arabia. We had a conversation about Islam’s distaste for alcohol during the ride, and he made the delicate and sensible point that alcohol was forbidden by Islam because under its influence we are not “true to ourselves or our relationships.”
Drink, in other words, distorts the individual’s relationship to himself, or herself, and therefore our relationship to everything else. It was very like the conversation I had had in Solo in Java. Hakim was studiously compassionate and calm on this point.
“Have you ever drunk a drop?” I asked.
“Never.”
“Then how do you know how bad it is?”
“The Koran has described it.”
I said the Koran was quite vague on the issue.
Hakim did not see it with such equanimity.
“The ones who drink,” he said, “should be flogged in public. What use is there for them?” Then, realizing that I might be some kind of Christian lush, he toned it down. “Of course, I mean the Muslims.”
I asked him if he thought Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno should have been caned for a sip of beer.
“Absolutely, absolutely. Was she not aware of the law? It’s not important that it was just a sip. It’s symbolic.”
“Symbolic of what?”
“Of letting Satan into the picture!”
The minivans here take everyone to their front door, and our driver let Hakim off in front of a well-tended suburban house. He wished me luck in his “beautiful town” and gave me a friendly, masculine handshake that was intended to reassure me that nothing of what he had said was to be taken personally. Deep inside him, there seemed to be a dreadful innocence combined with a delicious sarcasm that was only half-conscious. Was he serious about whipping the Malaysian model?
I was dropped at the Imperial Hotel, the only habitable place in town. It was empty. The room was gloomy and bare with a black qibla arrow stuck to the ceiling indicating the position of Mecca. Nonalcoholic bottles filled the minibar, as accusatory as they always are, and the curtains smelled of thirty-year-old cigars. I didn’t mind. I went out for a walk after dark, as the loudspeakers from the mosques began to bray. In hotels like this, one is always forced out onto the street sooner or later.
The Friday-night sermon in the mosque across from the hotel was in Yawi, the variant of Malay spoken in the south, and after every furious phrase, the imam paused and sighed a long, exasperated aaah. Men stripped to the waist in the cafés, watching Manchester United games with plastic mugs of litchi juice mixed with green gelatin, paused between goal kicks to lend an ear, and the boys lounging on their motorbikes by the river glanced up as the aaah echoed across the night.
I failed to find a single outlet for alcoholic pleasures and, defeated, slogged back to the Imperial and the prospect of a long night of orange juice and Malaysian Koranic TV. As I was going through armed security, however, I saw a tall kathoy or “ladyboy” (technically a hermaphrodite, but usually a man who has had surgery) clattering across the plaza. When in joyful hedonistic Narathiwat, I thought to myself, always follow a ladyboy. She went to a “saloon” that I had not noticed earlier.
The saloon, however, only contained the ladyboy, and she looked at me shyly before asking me what I wanted. It was a good question. I had the feeling then that asking for sex with a transsexual hooker might be less dangerous than asking for a Stella Artois, and the transsexual hooker knew it. She confronted me playfully along these lines, and I stuck my neck out and ventured for the beer. She went into a back room and came back with a Chaang, a local brew, and then turned on the karaoke screens. I had to be entertained.
“Me and you?” she finally said in English, turning a long painted fingernail upon herself, and then upon me.
Refusing gallantly, I asked her if drinking a Chaang was safe. Those aaah sounds coming from the mosque did not sound friendly.
“No,” she said in Thai. “He is talking about the importance of washing. Washing your feet.”
“Nothing about drinking?”
“That was last week.”
What about ladyboys, I wanted to ask. What does the Koran say about them?
It’s a sad fact that life by and large would be endurable, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis once said, were it not for all the pleasure we have to endure. That night I had a nightmare and woke up convinced that, as far as I could see, a giant beetle was walking across the ceiling. It was, however, the humble qibla. In the morning, either way, they politely and apologetically informed me that a bomb had gone off in Narathiwat the previous day. No one seemed particularly surprised, but a generalizing, cosmic apology was nevertheless offered.
I rode in another minivan down to the Malaysian border, to the raffish and unstable town of Sungai Kolok, which sits insalubriously along a narrow river (sungai in Malay means “river”) that is, in effect, the border. How sweet life would be if one could, at all costs, avoid Sungai Kolok. One could grow old and happy and hale without Sungai Kolok.
It is here that most Malaysians furtively come when they need a break from the sharia regime of Kelantan, and there are special all-in-one hotel brothels that cater to their urgent and time-constrained needs. Chief of these is the Chinese-style Genting Hotel, named for the hill region of Malaysia where the British once had their charming stations. The Genting is only a hundred meters from the border, and you can walk if you don’t mind the heat. You can pay here in Malaysian ringgit, and the second-floor cabaret and lounge is a source of local girls who eagerly await the flow of Muslim men. Frequent bombings and shootings in Kolok have only temporarily dampened their ardor, and it is remarkable what men will brave to get laid and to sip a tumbler of Sang Thip whisky, preferably at the same time.
The Genting specializes in dance parties, and that night one of them was in full swing. Unlike the Pink Lady, the Genting is also a merry family hotel, and its restaurant doubles as a nightclub where six-year-old children dance between the tables to wildly out-of-tune middle-aged Thai crooners singing luuk kruung country music ballads. The girls from upstairs sit around in their fringed white boots holding teddy bears and halved pineapples, eating dishes of kaeng som, and among them move the slightly uncertain, slightly tense Malaysian visitors who never seem to smile and whose eyes look subtly hunted. It’s a ragbag crowd, and there is nothing very louche about it. Even the massage parlor upstairs seems laid back and wonderfully unrepentant.
At the bar next to it, I sat talking to a sixty-year-old engineer from Kota who said he had just scored a cut-price haul of kanagra, the generic Thai version of Viagra that retails for about five dollars for a blister pack of four. He had a glass of Mekong Scotch on the bar, and the girls were telling him not to drink the fearsome Mekong and take kanagra at the same time. He was tiny, bald, and slipping off his stool. His name was Yussef. He was protesting that the symbiosis of kanagra and Mekong was perfect bliss.
“You bad man,” they said in English. “You come here boum-boum lady. You die heart attack.”
“Wonderful ladies, la,” he said turning to me. “So graceful.”
“I’ll buy you a drink,” I said. “Mekong again?”
We talked about Kolok. It was a fine enough hellhole, he said in English, thinking the girls wouldn’t understand, but the insurgents liked bombing it, perhaps because they thought it was a haunt of Satan.
Wasn’t that a little ironic, I asked, given that it was a Muslim town filled with Malaysian tourists?
“Yes, but we are sinners to be here in their eyes. We deserve to be killed with shrapnel.”
“Are you their ideal target then?”
“I am not sure they are trying to kill Malaysians. They are trying to intimidate the Thais. But many Malaysians have been injured by bombs in this town. It’s a tiny town, too.” He smiled. “They can’t miss us.”
The bombings of coffee shops, bars, and ATM machines had indeed mutilated a fair number of Malaysians. Yet still they came.
At night, though, most of Kolok was quiet, and the trees in February swarmed with thousands of chattering birds that yielded its only nocturnal sound. The streets were deserted after the food stalls closed down, and it was only the hotels and their surrounding dives that seemed to remain alive. The Marina, the Sum Time Bar, the Tara, which housed the Narcissus massage parlor, the Mona Lisa Massage at the Marina, which sported a large image of Leonardo’s dame with bared breasts. Downstairs at the same hotel the Malaysian men crowded around the plasma TV to watch English Premier League games. “Liverpool!” they cried, as if in anguish, raising their fists. The Chinese temples, on the other hand, and the lanes of red lanterns and metal shutters remained darkened. The pendant birdcages had their birds removed. There was a strange charm to the place. The mixture of Chinese, Thai Buddhists, and Muslims was not dead or fossilized. It was the public space of the hotel, however, that kept it humming after hours, even if none of the bars appeared to be open.
I got up early to get some cash from a nearby ATM machine and had breakfast at the Genting: Nescafé, oranges, and congee. I was joined by some of the Kota sex tourists who insisted on recounting their conquests of the prior night. They seemed immensely pleased with themselves and were going back to Kota with a measure of decent, glowing satisfaction that needed an audience. Super Premium model good, la?
I listened to them dutifully and then left the hotel a few minutes later. As I walked through the windless heat to the ATM machine, I noticed that the street seemed uncommonly deserted. It was about eight a.m. Suddenly there was an ear-splitting detonation, and a puff of smoke appeared above the roofs. When I got to the ATM machine, it had been atomized by a small bomb. The local police later identified the culprits as members of the RKK insurgent group, headed by the splendidly named Wae-ali Copter Waji.
As I took a taxi across the border to Kota Bharu after lunch, I pondered the inherent glamour of being murdered by Wae-ali Copter Waji for the sin of using an ATM machine. Would Mr. Copter slay me, too, for watering my lips with fermented barley?
I wanted to see Kota at long last because it seemed to me that in some way it was a version of what the insurgents in Thailand were fighting for: a sharia way of life, at least partially; an Islamic city free of the scourges they associated with the corruptions of Thailand. Not only no girlie bars, but no bars period. I also wanted to see where Malaysian sex tourists came from.
Nik Aziz’s capital, as it turned out, was a pleasant city. It was calm, orderly, and mild, with air-conditioned malls like the KB Trade Centre, little red phone boxes with the word Helo written on them, branches of EONCap Islamic Bank, and neoclassic cream-white emporiums dating from the British 1930s like the Bangunan Mawar. It was a much nicer city than Sungai Kolok or Hat Yai. It was cleaner, more salubrious, more familial. I saw signs for Frost Rut Bir but, as expected, no vestiges of nocturnal social life. I had expected a version of Tehran, or even worse, a dark and dingy pile terrorized by loudspeakers, and lo, it was more like Elizabeth, New Jersey, a slice of imitation America influenced perhaps by the aspirations of Singapore.
As the sun fell and dusk came on, the mosques sprang to crackling life, but the streets began to die. Between the mosque and the mall—our version of the souk—there was nothing but domesticity, a guarded privacy. The city was closed against outsiders, against visitors. While Malaysians flocked to Thai cities, clearly no Thais ever came here.
Roger Scruton, in his book The West and the Rest, has described this bipolarity of the traditional Islamic city:
The mosque and its school, or madrasah, together with the souq or bazaar, are the only genuine public spaces in traditional Muslim towns. The street is a lane among private houses, which lie along it and across it in a disorderly jumble of inward-turning courtyards. The Muslim city is a creation of the shar’ia—a hive of private spaces, built cell on cell.
But is Kota such a traditional city? That may be what it increasingly aspires to be, but it is also a place where the malls are chilled and the infidel brands proliferate merrily enough. It is certainly comforting, provincial, domestic. One misses at once the garish, insolent public space that is the bar. An idle reflection: if a town cannot have opera houses, theaters, art galleries, or sports stadiums, the bar is the simplest, the most universal, and the most accessible public space. As I walked through Kota’s delicate quiet, under its trees heavy with birds, I thought nostalgically—but also incredulously—of the scores of mobile bars that line Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok every night, little more than motorized wheelbarrows that appear at dusk and are mysteriously driven away at dawn. It’s a brilliant concept: a temporary occupation of a piece of sidewalk, a row of vodka and Scotch bottles, a line of chairs open to any stranger. It’s part of what makes Bangkok feel so free in its earthy, immediate, open-to-all way, and I’ve noticed that the mobile bars are much loved by visiting Malaysians, Arabs, and Iranians. But they are not here and never will be.
It is not just the booze and the loose women, however, that draw the men of Kota north of the border. It’s public spaces where anything can be said without fear of misappropriation. The things that cannot be said in the mosque or at home, in other words—the humble subversions of the spoken word that have been lubricated by alcohol. Or set free by it. In the West the bar began as the coffee shop and café in eighteenth-century London and Paris—it is where modern politics was born. Its absence in a large town or city strikes one as a repudiation of sorts, a turning back. Though it is a repudiation that is not without its reasons or its charms.
Kota was the first place in the region I visited that did not live in daily fear of assassinations and bombings. Perhaps the absence of any trappings of contemporary urban life was the reason. The Islamic warriors did not see anything to enrage them. The bar did not exist. The women were not “exposed.” There was just the mall, where I sat down at last to eat an ice cream under the smiles of the headscarfed girls who served them. Ice cream. Isn’t ice cream always the substitution for a nice beer, from dry Islamabad to dry Ocean City, New Jersey? A good ice cream lulls the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue.