Catching

Hello folks. A month has passed since I wrote my last entry and I doubt I'll be able to catch up. But herewith a few random notes that may account for some of what's transpired.
I like to think of myself as adventurous, for haven’t I spent so much of my life in the antipodes? But I have never been a backpacking, roughing-it sort of traveler. I have always traveled in comfort, sidestepping public transportation and market food and native hostels and all the rest of it. There’s this Viceregal part of me from my New Delhi boyhood that is affronted by any manifestation of obliviousness or disrespect, and he’s at odds with the democrat who wants everyone to love me. (Love me? They hardly know me.)
I am elaborately courteous, almost magnanimous, like a politician on a poverty tour, even when I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying. Did I just tell the tuk-tuk driver “hello,” or “Thank you” or “Just looking”? And did I append the feminine or the male sobriquet to the end of it? I’m afraid I try to puff up my significance by playing on my enormity in this nation of small, slight folk. (My shoes alone, left by the steps to a temple, look like the Frankenstein monster’s next to the little scuffed chappals of the faithful, but unless there's a flood, I don't fear anyone taking them while I'm wandering around the wats.)
In any case, Debbie and I moved into a large apartment next door to Kadsuankaew, one of Chiang Mai's principal shopping malls. It's pronounced Gad-swan-ghee-ow, or at least we think so until we try to tell a siilaw or tuktuk driver to take us there. The cognitive dissonance of even the most correct Thai pronunciation of anything issuing from a large, parboiled Caucasian face is too much for some drivers who, even after getting out and conferring with his passengers, to whom we are asked to repeat the address, have to simply drive away. Mysteriously, while Casey was here, she was always immediately understood, a testament to the slightly oriental cast of her eyes, perhaps, or her sheer benignity.
Our first few days in the apartment were unnerving, at least for yours truly. Maybe Janet's death, Dad's death, and Catherine's illness finally caught up with me, but I suffered a bout with the black dog whose dissociative influence was much compounded by the strangeness of this place and by coming to rest after so much forward motion. But I have almost entirely emerged from my sputtering funk and in the meantime have enjoyed many glorious days of sightseeing, marketing, and squiring Casey around.
Chiangmai is a vast improvement on Bangkok, although I fear it could become Bangkok in another twenty years. For now it has a provincial feel, lots of greenery, and hundreds of curious little shops and restaurants. The old town is demarcated by 700 year-old walls flanked by a moat, within whose boundaries development has been kept under pretty good control. But beyond the old town, where we live, high rises loom and multiply. There's an enormous condo market here, with units being scooped up by Aussie and Japanese investors.
The expat community here is a study. In my boyhood, Europeans greeted each other in Asian countries no doubt out of an unconscious nod to racial solidarity. Now they scowl at each other, as if each were spoiling the other's illusion of uniqueness. The Thais are far friendlier. I get this feeling of unseemliness about expats, the vast majority of whom are male and middle-aged to elderly. I suspect them of all kinds of things: of being fugitives from justice or, in any case, alimony payments; of sheer parsimony; of a taste for young boys or only slightly older girls; of being drug dealers or Viet Nam vets come to re-experience their first sexual forays. But then I catch a reflection of myself in a tea shop window and there walks the very spit and image of the aging, hoary, oversized men in their Hawaiian shirts who, at least when Debbie's isn't with me, very likely make the same dismal assumptions about me. Nonetheless I've seen couples consisting of such men and much younger Thai women and girls, most of them rather unprepossessing compared to the run of Thai girls, an enormous proportion of whom are beautiful. They do not seem blissful, and it occurred to me that old men who come to Thailand in hopes of finding a dazzling submissive wife -- especially men who have escaped unhappy marriages back home -- are apt to end up with a companion who is neither dazzling nor submissive but assertive enough to bully him into a relationship and aggressive enough to take him for all he's worth. "You buy for me, I do for you," I overheard one of them tell her middle-aged American companion at the walking market a week ago, which seemed to sum up the arrangement pretty well.
Casey arrived a week ago and hit the ground running. Jet lag did not seem to be in her vocabulary, and no sooner had she landed than we were off and running, racing through the night bazaar buying up all and sundry, dining on Thai street food, inspecting Thai groceries, joining Debbie's class at an AIDS clinic, driving south with her father to visit various furniture markets and silk outlets, riding up to Doi Suthep, the hilltop wat overlooking the city, venturing out to the elephant farm, and on and on. She was like a beacon shining her light on everything she passed and reawakening her father's enthusiasm for this lovely city.