Kamal Ghorui
An excursion in the time of war
By afternoon, the street ceases to exist. Merrymakers swallow it, with as much relish as their beers. A parade of performers – singing Adele to Dylan – traverse the decades with ease. Their audience – including bare-chested European and American men, with their women companions – sways from one end to another. Some hold a bottle or a joint. Khaosan, Bangkok, is unlike any other place on earth. Loud, permissive, garish, yet civilised, not letting its contradictions show an obvious edge against the other. And just around midnight, when you think it would all end, new singers arrive, at the most frequented bars.
Elsewhere, the war grows more intense. The bombing of the school in Minab is a few weeks old. Iran’s oil depots were bombed, and a Thai vessel struck. But the passionate conversation about the war in the forenoon, is over with lunch, and a glass of Chang draught, at Molly Bar. The air gets cooler as evening draws near, but Khaosan is feverish, and drenched in its sounds. The music of the eighties, nineties, and today is played by the performers, and several high-wattage concerts are held together. It matters, but not enough – not today. Away at Wat Khuhasawan Worawiharn by the canal, Monk Pramote interrupts his sermon on suffering, and says only unhappy people engage in war.
The air outside King’s Cannabis is heavy, as young and old couples sit, on lounging chairs, with long columns of weed ash hanging from their joints. After Wen closes his grocery shop, a ‘gas station’ comes up, where one can inhale laughing gas for a few Bahts, and have the laugh of one’s life.
In this amorphous island of pleasure, signboards try to touch the heart, and make the sale. ‘Get a suit before WWIII,’ says the board outside Wall Street Tailor, an overnight tailoring shop. A bar urges: ‘Stop worrying, start drinking.’ And a weed shop remarks thoughtfully: ‘Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you weed.’ The lure of Khaosan made Antonio – who is finally going home to Italy after two months – keep extending his stay.
It is a mystery that the party goes on every day with the same zest. Wen, who retires early for ‘a little quiet’, says visitors keep renewing, but for regulars, it is just a job. ‘We do survive our jobs, don’t we?’
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