Find out more from his website, www.stephenleather.com.
Thousand and One Nights
Pico Iyer
Dear Susan,
There were people coming at me from every side, more people than I can describe, from every corner of the world. Large Arab men in their smocks and gowns, teams of Japanese businessmen in suits, men who looked like they’d been left over from the Vietnam War and earringed couples who could have been from anywhere — all of them thronging down this lane of lights and looking into the entrances, into red-lit magic caves, all smoke and noise, to see if they could spot a Chinese princess. There’s one area — you wouldn’t believe it (or maybe you would; I suppose the place has become quite a legend now) — where they have whole Arabian palaces on a dark lane, furnished with great chandeliered rooms full of divans and men in gallabeahs smoking hubble-bubbles, while girls of every shape and size move among them, from one dream chamber to the next, looking for a touch of magic, a month’s salary in a night’s adventure.
Anyway, you know all about Bangkok already. And this isn’t the kind of thing one would ordinarily be telling a sister. But since Sarah went away — well, you know how it is. Nobody will listen to me, or if they do, they listen in a way that says they’re only being kind or doing their charity work for the day. You’re the only one who understands. I tell myself that talking to you is like talking to a better version of myself.
So there I was in the Arabian Nights. It sounds mad, I know, but I felt as if I’d fallen into some other kind of world that was waiting beside me the way a shadow might, like those stories Nana used to read us in the nursery. Remember Alice in her rabbit hole, ending up on the underside of the world? Or the little girl who went to sleep and woke up in another place? I suppose it’s what people get when they pop those pills you told me about in the disco, or shoot themselves full of the yaa baa, or “mad medicine,” that the taxi drivers talk about here, but for someone like me — well, it all came as something of a shock.
Plus, of course, I was jet-lagged. Walking and walking through the streets after dark and looking for lunch at 3:00 a.m. Everything took on a different aspect, as if — how can I put it? — well, as if I weren’t seeing the lights, really, only their reflections in a puddle. Everything blurred and shimmery and reflecting. I’d look at my face in the shop windows, and I wouldn’t know who it was looking back at me. As if I’d left my self — my regular daily self — in England and now some kind of outline or facsimile was playing me, off the ground and weightless, in a trance.
The noise from the bars, the boys coming up and trying to pull me into their caves. “Here, sir, very good,” “Come here, no problem, only looking.” I’d turn a corner and end up in a little lane that opened up onto the river, the shining golden pinnacle of a stupa at the other end. And then I’d stumble back, and there were all these signs — Bad Boy, Helicopter, The Alternative — and you could imagine you were in the mind of a magician. Aladdin’s cave, I thought.
So anyway, I walked and walked, all night, it seemed, and at one point I went into this little alleyway — lights, girls in bikinis, people selling elixirs of some kind in bottles — and I stopped off in a trattoria (they have everything here) for lunch. Outside, on the street, there were flocks of girls rather vamping it up: with long hair that swung below their shoulders, long slim legs, high heels, leopard-skin shorts, the lot.
They were cavorting up and down the street, having fun, really, occasionally stepping into a pool hall, red-lit, or one of the open-air bars that look out onto the street; once, one of them came and stood looking at me where I sat, eating on the terrace. Looking at me very directly, half-pout and halfcaress.
“Where you come from, mister? What you need?”
“Nothing. I’m just passing the time, really.” I sounded foolish, I knew, but I didn’t know how to sound here.
“No want la-dee?” The way she said it was itself a sort of insinuation.
“No, thank you. I’m here on business.”
“Same-same,” she said, “business,” and let out a husky laugh. “Business, pleasure, same-same. You show me good heart, I show you good time.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, as if we’d shared an illicit joke.
“You no go with ladee?” said the waiter, as the woman walked away.
“No go,” I said, and then wondered why exactly I was speaking like one of them.
I looked around me, then, and realized I’d never seen so many beautiful women in one place before; then I looked closer and realized why they were so beautiful. They weren’t real. They were real people, of course, just not real girls. And yet not not-real either. Some of them, I thought, just made themselves up as girls. But some were no doubt on the way to becoming real women, in every way. And some of them had completed the transformation and now, reborn, were more girlish than any girl could be. All the excitement of them came from this sense of ambiguity, of mystery, I suppose. I felt almost seasick watching them.
I went back to my hotel then — it was on one of those brightly lit lanes, which in the daytime turns out to be just a rather peeling, derelict back alleyway. But at night it is enchantment. They call this place the “City of Angels,” but I think that’s a kind of spell, a way of saying it’s not a place of djinns. Didn’t Nana tell us, one of those long winter afternoons — Scheherazade in Somerset — that the best devils in the world are the ones who look like angels?
I suppose you’ll say all this has something to do with Sarah, and finding myself alone again. A widower is a king exiled from his palace, I tell my friends, and they look at one another and tell themselves I’ve lost it. But it’s true. When you’re suddenly alone again, it’s as if you’ve lost not just your jewels, but yourself, your life. You’ve woken up in a strange place, and there’s no way to find the road back to the castle. Nothing makes sense, and you don’t have any money on you, and whatever past you thought you had is locked up in somebody else’s keeping. I suppose I realized that if everyone was going to misunderstand me in any case, I might as well go full hog and become someone entirely unexpected.
Which brings me to the part that’s going to shock you. I feel strange saying all this to you; I suppose if would be easier to call. But if I could hear your voice, I don’t think I’d be able to say anything at all. And anyway, with you off in Bangalore, I’d probably hear someone else’s voice, or someone pretending to be you. And you’re not who you usually are either, I imagine, in that tropical setting, with all those streets around.
Besides, there is something rather magical about coming into one of these little cafés at 1:00 a.m. — the young girl at the desk curtsies, the kids wait around in chairs, as if waiting to be claimed — and typing these words onto a screen, and then, that very minute, the same words appear on a screen in India, taken there by a genie with STD connections.
So, back to the part where you’ve got to block your eyes (or ears, or both). I asked myself, as I went out for breakfast that second night, what I really wanted here. The streets around me were thronged; they have this night market thing here which is a kind of Oriental bazaar in the dark, so mad with flickering neon and shouted prices that you can hardly walk. People are shooting numbers back and forth, or offering one another calculators on which their bids are typed. Girls are drifting out of the bars in underwear, or even less. People are selling blacklight posters, lanterns, false perfumes and little vials of something strange, bras, luminous green rings to wear around your neck and spices that are said to be love potions. All around, on every corner. And I, walking through the midst of it, thought, “What is it that I could do here that I could never do at home?”