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He still needs a guide. He still needs me. I stand, holding my breath, more out of habit than necessity. I clutch a camera in my hand. I have taken twenty-three pictures, and one remains.
Nok ceremoniously removes the clothes he wears. I watch him as he, with intense deliberation, first strips his tight, neon shirt. Then he unfastens a dog-collar around his neck. He piles these on the floor. He stumbles while removing baggy red pants.
Nok stares at himself in the full-length mirror of the bedroom, solemnly regarding his well toned body. He is naked, except for his boxers.
He reaches for a suit lying on his bed, immaculately ironed and new, tailor-made. This he dons eagerly, seemingly delighted at the new countenance he finds in the mirror.
A hat lies on the table, its edges crisp and sharp. Nok lifts the hat off the table and places it on his head, admiring it from different angles in the mirror.
'It's time for a new life', he says, winking at himself. 'I'm Mafia, now'. He playfully cocks a finger at himself in the mirror, and says 'bang'.
'Gotcha.'
A whirring of winding film accompanies me as I walk out onto the street. Sukhumvit road is, despite being straight, also a maze. The walls of the labyrinth are the crowds that walk down the footpath. They are lost when they stare at the food and wares that are spread about the road on bamboo mats, stalls, and staircases leading into air-conditioned buildings. The cars are a noisy moat - few venture to wade through the fog of exhaust fumes. Most cross to the other side on strategically placed bridges. Some of the street hawkers see me. They stare long and hard, and then caught by a scent of burning squid or chicken, return to their grilling with a slight shudder. Some beggars look straight past me. Some recoil from asking alms and eye me suspiciously, words hanging midway between their jagged teeth and the street.
I died one year ago. At my cremation Nok looked shattered. The drone of monks chanting coaxed my soul from my body under the whirring of a ceiling fan. 'Namo Tasa Pakawatto Alahatto Sammaa Samputh Thassa.' Nok and my mother sat side by side, and prayed for my spirit to be delivered into a new body with swiftness. Both wept into their palms. Later, my body went up in flames, but I could not leave my heartbroken fiancée to find himself again, so I stayed.
When I found him, Nok was an abused soul. I had seen him take on a new personage with each changing season, the hot, the rainy and the mild season. With each new character he sought to entreat as his own, he changed his friends, deleting old contacts, searching for new. Only I remained permanent to him. My heart was the beacon he followed, and through it, he was led to his own self, and gradually, he stopped searching for an escape.
***
I walk down a small alley, until at length, I pass a temple. Stopping to gaze at the ancient granite and rotten wood of the old edifice, I am still for a moment. I raise my two palms together to my face in respect. A fireback rooster approaches the red gateway of the temple, pausing for a moment, then turns its bright-blue tail feathers to me as though beckoning me to follow. I walk on. At the end of the path stands an unobtrusive warehouse with no windows. On the white door, carved roughly, is 'The Guild'.
The size of the hall amazes me, as it always does. The walls, the chairs, everything is soft white. The tables that stretch from end to end of the hall glow colourless. Multitudes of ghosts, somberly in black, sit in those rows of benches - some talking, some eating. A line of vendors, also in black, stretching as far as the hall, make their business in this strange setting. I adjust the turtleneck of my envious green sweater.
At the very end of the hall, there is one office. Everyone is here to seek assistance from 'The Management', but there is never a line. I walk in without knocking.
To the whitewashed walls of the empty room, I say 'I have a roll'.
***
I sit outside the hall, on the balcony of 'The Guild'. The tables here are rough, grey and deep-grooved from years of weather. On the other bench, closer to the door, sit a man and a woman, heads nodding in animated conversation. The last scorching rays of the late-summer sunset catch the outline of my long hair and stencil it on the coarse wood in front of me. I hold a black leather folder.
I am in Bangkok, but the air from the balcony is not like that of the city. There is no hint of hawkers shouting their wares. Sporadic honks of cars stuck in afternoon traffic do not invade the atmosphere. The air here is like the ocean, and, I realise, that is what I see. 'The Guild' is gone. The hue of the water is made electric by the setting sun. It reminds me of the blue-tailed rooster at the crimson gates of the temple. I will throw the folder into the waves. I will scatter his dreams where he scattered my ashes. A feather like a glint of sapphire blows past me on the sea breeze. I will.
I take a deep breath and apprehensively open the folder. It contains a neat row of pockets on either side. The edges of pictures protrude from each, twelve to a side. After my death, Nok again began morphing at each opportunity. The year had seen a new mask for each calendar month.
I reach my hands slowly to pull out the first, but I am interrupted by a voice at the other table, breaking the unobtrusive rhythm of the conversation between the man and woman who I had forgotten were there. The intruder wears a suit. I stare. It's as though I know him.
The sun is behind me and he squints hard from underneath a tattered hat. Recognising me, he approaches. I am too stunned to close the folder in time.
I sit silent.
'You won't find him there. Come, sit here with these two.'
He takes the folder from me, and I, still reaching for words, follow him to the other table. I look at the man and woman, failing to find the animation of the earlier conversation on their faces. They stare at me, blankly. The old ones lose their way, gradually, when they are on the earth for many years. The white hall is behind them. It is filled with ghostly diners - an unrelenting assembly line of mouths and spoons.
'The pictures. I know. He's there. He needs me. I'll find him in each picture. I can guide him.'
He sighs, a gradual smile on his face. His hands move to loosen his bright orange tie.
'See these two here? He gestures at the two pale spirits. 'They've been dead for over fifty years. They died around the same time. But they haven't yet realised the other is dead. Both of them haunt the same place, thinking they are somehow looking out for the other. In their minds, the other still lives in that house. Each believes the other is overcome with grief at the death of their lover. In truth, that house lies unused, and the family can not sell it. It's haunted, after all. The irony of it is that here, they do not know each other. But they invariably find each other day after day. It's the arrangement ‘The Management’ has made.’
I look at him, still unsure how I know him. And then I see. The hat he was wearing is gone. His head is shaven and he wears an orange robe, that of a monk.
Tears find my eyes, and I take the folder from his hands. The pictures inside are not the ones I have taken. I spread them before me, looking for the 12 escapes that Nok flew through in a year. The pilot, the raver, the rapper, the chef. They are not there. Yet, the face in all the photos, the bodies, they are all unmistakably him.
In the first picture, my mother stands beside him, in the pitch-black of the first month in mourning. She watches Nok's head as his hair is being shorn off by an elder monk.
All the pictures are of him in the ancient temple I passed earlier. It is the same one in which I was freed from my body, but not from the world.
In the second photo, he is alone. The old temple looms behind him, and he leans against a jasmine tree, reading a ragged book. His face is worn, but serene.
The final photo shows him cross-legged, in a line of sitting monks, each with their eyes shut in meditation, chanting. Namo Tasa Pakawatto Alahatto Sammaa Samputh Thassa. Only he is looking straight at me.
Now, his eyes are deeper than the ocean that surrounds us. They are his, yet they are not the eyes I remember. A picture is picked up in a gust of wind, and I watch it fall into the waves. My fingertips trail the surface of the water as I watch the memory sink into the engulfing blue. Nok takes my hand in his. 'Let go.'
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