Bollywood in the South China Sea
By KorskiThe story I am about to relate actually happened off Tioman Island, Malaysia. One of the endings that can be stitched together from the information I provide is absolutely true. It is up to you, the reader, to decide which of the many possibilities add up to the true ending.
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There are a number of resorts on Tioman Island, and in addition to scuba diving and snorkeling, tourists are offered for a small sum a day traveling around the island. The trip takes most of a day and entails five stops: one for lunch, one for a walk around a village, one for a short hike to a waterfall where you can swim, and two stops for snorkeling. Although the day tour which begins about ten in the morning is advertised as taking place on a large boat, in fact it is almost always done on a quite small long boat, with room for a maximum of twenty people, all tightly packed together. The boat on the particular day this story unfolds is manned by Artiff, a young Malay kid in his early twenties who has the appearance of being carefree and reckless. He sports three gold earrings, has a couple of prominent tattoos low on his legs, and he has a trimmed and narrow ponytail that hangs to mid back. He has a broad and toothy smile and wears a visor cap front to back, on which are sewn the words: Billabong. He moves the throttle handles standing, one-handed, and loves to shoot for a pier as if he’s going to fly over it, only to make an almost ninety-degree turn at the last moment.
The day before one of these trips around Tioman Island was to occur, an American by the name of Jack Bodie walked seven kilometers from where he was staying to a hotel resort on the other side of the island. While walking about Jack noticed a Malaysian woman of uncertain age who was standing at a small porcelain sink that was sitting by itself about fifteen feet in front of a general store. The sink was connected to a pipe visible on the ground. Something about the woman and her apple-green and black sari caught Jack’s attention, in particular what she was holding in her hands. A little uncertain what it was at the distance he first saw her, he approached, and as he did so it became apparent that the woman had four eggs in her long slender hands. Two of them were light brown chicken eggs, and the other two that were somewhat larger and white and completely covered with what looked like black sand were duck eggs.
Jack introduced himself to the woman, and as he did so he took note of the fact that she had luminescent brown skin, sharp clear eyes and good teeth, and that she was wearing scarlet lipstick on gorgeous large lips. He could not judge her age, but he guessed she could not be more than twenty-five. He would soon learn that she was much older, and that she had four children, the oldest of whom was sixteen and the youngest just a little over a year old and asleep in a basinet on the ground in the nearby general store.
They talked for a short while, mostly about the eggs and where the ducks laid them, and as they continued to talk the woman asked Jack what he did for a living. He said, “Nothing, really. Or nothing that takes much of my time.” And then he added, “I travel a good deal of the time and I look for stories to write. But the sad fact is I find it hard to find anything to write about. I also am not a very good writer, so I guess it really doesn’t matter that I can’t find good material for stories.”
This bit of the conversation began while the woman was carefully washing the second of the duck eggs. As she finished doing so, having put the two chicken eggs to one side, she rolled each cleaned duck egg around in her right hand. When she had finished doing this with both eggs, she then smiled at Jack Bodie and said, “I feel tomorrow you will find a story.”
He said nothing, and the reason was that he felt himself getting hard. It was her seductive lips and light brown skin that was working on his imagination, and now this prediction about a success he rarely had. (Or rarely had as measured by the all-knowing gods who measure such things.)
He sensed that the woman was being kind, and he felt a little confused with this sexual urge for a woman much older than he judged her to be, and with four children. He forced himself to imagine that beneath the saggy sari the woman’s stomach looked like a badly corrugated highway, a web of ugly and deforming stretch marks.
Jack thanked the woman for her words about finding a story, and as soon as he had turned away to find a cafe where he could get something to drink, he dismissed her prediction as so much nonsense. After all, duck eggs are duck eggs and they cannot possibly reveal anything about a human who lives halfway around the world and has a hard time seeing a good story when it slaps him in the face, a person about whom this mother of four knows absolutely nothing.
That evening, Jack had a dinner of fried noodles and chicken by himself, and rather than return to his room and try to write a few words that might be enough to generate a story, a hope that never dies for him, he drank several beers. In fact, he drank so many that he was barely able to make it up the stone steps and along the shadowy path to his room at the very top of the hill. A room, as it so happened, that he had been renting for several days and that made him laugh when he brought it to mind because in all of his travels, the room was like none that he had ever known. He could lock and unlock the door from the outside with the simple unsubstantial key he had been given, and he could lock it from the inside with the key. But he could not, no matter how hard he tried, get the door back open from the inside, with or without the key. Which really left him with only a single option. That option was to crawl out the window every time he wanted to leave, to then be able to open the door.
This small digression is not without purpose, dear reader, for Jack Bodie, our American hero or anti-hero—the reader will decide when the choice of story ending is put together—did not want to tell the resort manager about the door problem he was having. For he entertained the vague conceit that this problem would have something to do with his next story, an idea that came to him several days before meeting the woman with the chicken and duck eggs. But what that connection might be, Jack Bodie, our American traveler in search of stories he could rarely find, did not know. He had only gotten as far as thinking that it all had something to do with how his next story would either begin or end. This, of course, was in fact just another diversionary way of wasting good mental energy rather than imagining a story based on something he had seen or heard. Or, were he really talented, coming up with one based almost solely on what the queered ways of any mind allowed to wander would offer up as story.
Jack had a dream that night after meeting the woman with the eggs. It was a rather unusual dream in that he remembered several details; remembering almost anything in a dream was a rare occurrence for him. One detail he remembered in this dream was that he should pay attention to numbers in the next couple of days, and in particular his lucky number, which was the number three. The dream told him that the number would not have a neutral meaning; however it expressed itself it would portend something good or bad. Another aspect of the dream was that the woman he had seen earlier in the day was in it, and he knew this to be a fact because when he woke from the dream he had an enormous hard-on of the sort he rarely experienced. There was nothing in the dream that he could remember about the duck eggs and the woman’s prediction.
When the boat arrived for the day tour around the island that he arranged to take, Jack Bodie noticed that, based on what he had heard, this day’s tour would be a little unusual. There would only be six people going, a young Swedish couple and their three young children and himself. Ah! he immediately thought on seeing the three beautiful young children--two boys and a girl, all under ten, and all with proverbially blond hair. If the dream meant anything with regard to the number three, something good or bad would happen this day, and presumably, he also surmised, whatever happened would be the basis for a story that he found so hard to come upon or imagine.
The six of them got in the small boat, put on orange life jackets, and sped out into the bay. Within minutes, the parents were looking at one another with considerable anxiety. Jack had a look of equal concern on his long face. He thought, as did these Swedish parents, that these were rough waters, especially for the size and nature of the boat. He said to the Swedish father, “Aren’t you concerned? This is not the place for young children to be.”
“I am very much concerned,” the father said, tightening his arms around two of the children while the wife did the same with their daughter.
“Can the children swim?” Jack said.
“Yes,” the father said. “I should say they can swim good enough for their ages.”
“These rough waters really do not look good,” Jack said. “I certainly can’t imagine how we’ll do any snorkeling, or even get all the way around the island. We’re still in the bay, and my guess is that the water is even rougher farther out and around the windward side of the island.”
“I am very unhappy about all this,” the father said. “We have been here two weeks and we picked the wrong day for this trip. We should have stayed home.”
Ten minutes later, and to the surprise of Jack Bodie and the Swedish couple, the boat stopped at another wharf that penciled out into the bay. Here there was yellow sand and some small restaurants and bungalows in the near distance. On the wharf were eleven young people, all wearing orange life jackets. Backpackers, Jack thought on seeing them.
The Swedish couple and their young children got off the boat, and that was the last that Jack ever saw of them. The backpackers, laughing and cracking jokes, piled into the boat and fiddled with their life jackets and went to their bottled water and small snacks they had brought along. The last of the backpackers to get in the boat were three Indians, all Jack judged to be in their mid-twenties, perhaps a bit older. Of the three, two were obviously a couple. One of the couple, a woman, heavy in the thighs and already showing signs of jowls, was wearing a large diamond ring that caught Jack’s attention because it was so gaudy in design. Before the boat even left the pier, the wife put her arm around her husband’s shoulder and loud enough for everyone to hear said, “Oh, darling isn’t this going to be the most exciting adventure possible!”
“It would be better if you knew how to swim and weren’t so afraid of the water,” the husband said. He reached down and stroked the diving knife strapped to his right thigh. Jack, who had been watching them—and now fascinated by the stone in one of the wife’s incisors and the diamond pin near the base of her nose—raised his eyebrows. What possible use could a diving knife have? he thought. We are only going snorkeling, and that’s if the water calms down.
“Darling, you know, we aren’t all as talented as you are,” the wife said after a measured silence. “I shall do just fine no matter what.”
“Yes, I guess you will,” her husband said, his dark face revealing a familiar resignation.
“I am so sure I will have so much to tell all our friends when we get back home!”
“They will hardly care.”
“Oh no, darling, I mean it! This adventure will be marvelous, and I will tell everyone at work and they will want to come here just as we have.”
She pinched the left side of his cheek between two fingers and moved closer and kissed him. The long narrow boat slowly pulled away from the pier and headed out of the open bay and north, and toward roiling whitecaps. Jack scratched a few notes in a small notebook, then stuffed his camera in a plastic bag before putting it in his daypack. He checked the straps on his life jacket, thought about taking off his running shoes, and decided not to do so. He wondered if Artiff, the skipper, would hug the shoreline or head for open water and a very rocky and wet ride.
Artiff hit the throttle hard and veered the boat toward large whitecaps. Water sprayed from stem all the way to stern, and one young kid behind Artiff smiled and wiped the water from his face and the tattoos on each side of his neck, and then stood and shook and said, “Fuckin’ something this trip! Anyone got some ganja to make this even better?”
The Indian wife’s face began to change noticeably. Her eyes grew large and she pursed her lips and she threw her head onto her husband’s chest when water splashed her from behind. “Darling! Darling! Where are we? Where are we going?”
He said nothing and cracked a small smile and stared at Jack, who smiled back. Jack thought: it’s only going to get better so relax.
Suddenly the boat’s Yamaha motor sputtered, and the boat slowed, and more water poured in and rolled left and right and every which way in the bottom of the boat. Then the motor went dead, and the Indian wife shouted, “Oh, no! What will we do now?”
Artiff turned around and fiddled with his visor cap, then lit a cigarette. He looked at no one in particular. He said not a word, and took a long drag on his cigarette and held it in. He exhaled and slowly made his way to the stern and went right for a large plastic container full of fuel. He switched the hose from the empty container to the one he’d just uncapped.
The Indian wife looked on intently, obviously worried, one finger now nervously rubbing her huge showy diamond ring. Her right hand trembled and she reached for her husband’s bare hairy leg and squeezed it so hard he grimaced. He pushed her hand away and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be on our way soon.”
“Oh, Oh, I soooo hope so, darling! This is not the adventure I so wanted.”
Artiff tried several times to start the motor. It sputtered, and it screamed and sputtered more. At the fourth or fifth attempt to get it going, a large wave slapped the Indian couple from behind. They were doused, and so was Jack who was sitting directly across from the terrified and very wet wife. She yelled something Jack could not understand. Her mouth opened in a full circle as the boat kicked back and forth. Jack squeezed with both hands the long bench-seat he was sitting on.
“No, no, no!” I have to get off right now, the wife screamed. “We are all going to die!”
Her husband brought her closer and put both arms around her head and kissed her forehead and held her tightly. His wife was now sobbing, her legs visibly shaking.
Artiff turned briefly to look at the scared woman. He reacted by inhaling deeply on the cigarette, then nonchalantly exhaling almost perfect streams of smoke from his nostrils. He turned back to the engine, tried four or five more times. He got the same result he’d gotten previously. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then like a high-wire acrobat who had performed his act hundreds of times made his way back to the wheel without effort. He grabbed the wheel and looked out to the far horizon. The other passengers, all young, talked among themselves. They brought out snacks and went to their bottled water. They had no apparent sense of danger. They behaved as if they had experienced something like this many times before.
Presently, the backpacker with prominent tattoos on the sides of his neck made his way toward the stern. He put his hand on a leg here, on a shoulder there, and each time he did so he asked, “Got some ganja? Time to really let it go!” Jack pretended not to hear him, his stash was running down.
The Indian wife was now screaming while pinching her husband’s arm. She shouted, “We are going to die! Then they will put us in a movie and make us all famous like Tom Hanks. We are going to be stranded on the island! All of us will die!” She dropped to her hands and knees and was facing the motor, praying as if beseeching the Hindu elephant god. Jack took notice of the woman who was now rocking back and forth as if inhaling the few petrol fumes that lingered around the gas cans and the exposed motor. He stared at her, and he felt amused. He tried to bring to mind the Tom Hanks movie where he’s stranded on an island. The name of the movie just wouldn’t come to mind. He had not in fact seen the movie.
And now, dear reader, I must turn to what happened next, and let you decide which of the various possible endings to this story is true. And one of them is true, most assuredly, for as you might have guessed by now I—Korski—am in fact this character called Jack Bodie, another one of my pen names. Yes, it is true that I, Korski, am the one who got the very considerable hard-on over the Malaysian woman with four kids whose name, I forgot to mention, is Tylani. Oh yes, Tylani! What a beauty! But before we get back to Tylani and how she finds herself in the ending to this story, I must turn in haste to the pressing matter of how Hollywood came to Bollywood—or was it the other way around?-- in the South China Sea one lovely day in...well, there is no need to know the exact date, dear reader. Suffice it again to say that everything I have thus far revealed is absolutely true, and that one of the endings that I present in pieces that you can have the fun of putting together is also true.
Ending No. 1. The absolutely scared and terrified wife, now back beside her husband, and crying as only an Indian woman who has been betrayed by her one and only lover can cry, threw herself backward into the roiling water. And as she did so, her husband stood and watched, and just could not decide what to do. He froze. But I, Korski, mad to the core of my soul most of the time as all who know me will attest, stood and took one large step onto the wooden plank when the woman had been seated and jumped into the water. I grabbed for the straps on the front of her life jacket, and as I did so one of her arms came around and slapped me hard in the face. I reacted instinctively by slapping her on the side of the head, then paddled furiously to get behind her. I put an arm around her neck and choked her a good one, then dragged her the fifteen or twenty feet to the boat where her husband and the ganja kid and Artiff were waiting with extended arms, first to pull the coughing and absolutely scared wife into the boat, and then to grab hold of one of my hands and help pull me up.
The wife was soon lying on her back and still coughing up water, her head on her husband’s leg. Her whole body was trembling, and she was mumbling, but not softly, “I shall never ever forget this experience! It is the best thing that has ever happened to me. But imagine darling if we had suffered the fate of finding ourselves on that island!” An island, I thought, now trying to dry myself off, that’s mere a forested promontory of an island full of tourist resorts and backpackers walking the beach and smoking ganja. And somewhere over there and out of sight Tylani.
Artiff got the engine started, and we got on our way, and the Indian wife, wrapped in some dry towels that Artiff had beneath a bench near the wheel, had her face buried in her husband’s lap. From this point on, she did not say one more word for the rest of the trip. And she made every effort to hide her face and her person from everyone, no doubt, I concluded, from the embarrassment she felt over her behavior.
Not long after Artiff had gotten us on our way again, I took out my last bag of ganja and rolled a joint and then passed it down the line of backpackers. I needed to cool my nerves, because I now realized that the six hundred dollars in one hundred dollar bills I had inside one of my running shoes were soaked, and I had no idea whether I could dry them out sufficiently to be able to pay the hotel and meal bills I had run up. But by the time I’d rolled a second joint and took several hits, I got philosophical and concluded, Fuck it, they don’t take my wet dollars, they don’t get paid.
Two nights later, the Indian couple and the whole incident more or less history in my mind, I was in my room with three beers I’d bought at the restaurant. I simply wanted to find some quiet in my mind before calling it a night. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, and yes, to my utter astonishment it was...I swear it was! But I could not open the door! Now for all kinds of reasons, some reasonable and some not, I am not, dear reader, at liberty to say what happened beyond that point after I went to the window and did what I had to do. This part of the story I will leave entirely to your imagination.
Ending No. 2.
The Indian wife did not, in fact, throw herself backward and into the water, as described in Ending No. 1. What she did was much more dramatic, and would perhaps make for an even better Bollywood movie produced in Mumbai. She precipitously grabbed the knife attached to her husband’s right leg and pulled it out and raised it high in the air and screamed, “I will never ever find myself stranded on an island and die! I would rather die here before all of you!”
Her husband look stunned. And frozen, yet another Indian without the balls of a bullock. Sensing that the woman was utterly mad, worse than I have ever been characterized by my worst detractors, I jumped up and lunged for her wrist and as I did so she came at me with the knife. The blade nicked me on the top of the shoulder. Before she could raise the knife and either stab herself or me, I hit her square in the mouth with my open palm. She screamed and dropped the knife and fell backward into the water. And then I quickly, as I noted in Ending No. 1, went in after her.
The events that follow are as I narrated them in Ending No. 1, all the way through to what happened two nights later, and what, as I said, I must leave to you, the reader’s imagination.
Further Ending Permutations. One of the two scenes that led to the wife finding herself in the water and I, Korski, coming to her rescue, actually happened. But which one?
After one critical choice is made, it is then all about what happened two nights later. That is, whether there really was a knock on my room door and all that followed. Or whether this part of the story was just my imagination being fueled by alcohol and some ganja. Or whether there was a quite different scenario that unfolded two days later with regard to the beautiful Malay woman and me, and now I do not feel I am at liberty to tell what happened, being willing to admit only that something did indeed happen! Though whether it would be appropriate to a dramatic Bollywood ending I have no idea since I have never seen, nor have I a desire to see, a Bollywood movie.
Stickman's thoughts:
Talk about mysterious!
I think ending #1 is most likely.
I have to say I loved your description of Artiff. I have always been perturbed by the glossy photographs and brochures travellers get of these excursions and day trips only to discover when they get there that they are on rickety vehicles or sea vessels that seldom resemble the photos one saw at the point of sale and are so often run by these reckless individuals you so well describe.
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
