When The story begins, I've been traveling with my nephew, Torin Riddle, for about 3 months. In late May, we met in Nepal, traveled for 3 weeks in Tibet, and then spent 3 weeks in a Zen Temple in Southern India. It had been a tremendous trip.
The last part of our trip was going to be in Thailand. I'm very familiar with Thailand, having lived there for more than 10 years. The main idea was to do a meditation retreat in the south of Thailand in a well-known meditation center called Suan Mokh.
Thailand was also going to be the place where I was going to fulfill a promise I made long ago to two Indian sisters.
I first met the older of the two sisters, Jyoti, 10 years ago. I was in Bodh Gaya making a promotional video for a school there. I spent a few days interviewing different students trying to find someone who spoke good English and who would look good on camera. Finally, I found her and indeed it was the right student and together we made an outstanding video which raised a lot of money for the school.
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| Jyoti age 14 is in the middle. Her mother is on the left and her younger sister Deepa is on the right. |
We stayed in touch. She, Jyoti, would constantly beg me for money but I only gave her money once. A German lady had decided to pay for her tuition in a school to study German. But, as women sometimes do, the two women didn't get along and the funding was cut. I thought that was horribly unfair to cut the funding halfway through, so I chipped in. And indeed, she did learn German and has spent the last few years working as a senior customer representative for Amazon. She only typed responses to queries from Germans about their products - she didn't actually speak to them. Still, learning another language even to type responses is quite an accomplishment.
I also saw her a few times in India. She would always beg me to take her with me on one of my trips. And finally, a few years ago I told her that I would take her to Thailand. I decided to bring her younger sister to stop any ugly rumors and to try to expand the world of the young sister, Deepa.
Jyoti decided that she wanted to join Torin (whom she had never met) and me on the meditation retreat. Deepa was studying in university and could only join us after the retreat.
Dao Jyoti night arrived in India I got a big surprise.
I met her at the airport, and by the time she got to my hotel and met Torin, it was about 4:00 and not 7 hours later she was in bed with him.
I'm not making that up. She met him at 4:00 p.m. and by 11:00 p.m. they were sharing the same bed.
This was quite a shock to me. We had been out drinking, and after two beers she made it clear to us that she was stuck on him. And he responded.
When we came back from our night of drinking, I realized, that even though I wasn't sure how the trip was going to go, it was going to go much differently than I had imagined. I did some meditation and in an almost mystical experience, all expectations vanished. It was kind of magical. I just felt something shift deep inside in a very pleasant way.
So the next day, I encourage them to pursue their relationship and I stepped into the background.
Together, they looked like two teenagers on their first date. They couldn't stop public displays of affection every waking moment. They seem to be taking infinite delight in the pleasure of each other's company and I found different excuses to let them be with each other as much as I could.
Time passed two days after she arrived, the three of us took the 12-hour train ride to the south of Thailand, and got off in the little town of Chaiya which is just a short taxi ride from the meditation center of Suan Mokh.
The conditions for the retreat were quite basic in that we were expected to sleep on a straw mat on top of a concrete bed. The heat and mosquitoes were virtually unbearable as well.
Jyoti lasted 7 days of the 10-day retreat, but I didn't know that she had left until the retreat had ended. Only then did I learn that she had quit the retreat, going into town, up taking a bus and then a train across the isthmus of Thailand, and proceeded to spend 4 days in the resort city of Phuket at which time she spent her money like a drunken sailor on various expeditions, shows, hotels, and good eating.
When my nephew and I checked our phones at the end of the retreat and learned what she had done we were both completely dumb struck. We couldn't have been more surprised. We both wondered how she could possibly have done that? She had told us that she was virtually penniless. And indeed she hadn't spent any of her own money while the three of us were in Bangkok. Indeed, she had pretended like she had no money at all.
Torin and I then had 10 hours to wait before our train was going to take us back to Bangkok from the train station in Chaiya. We had no idea what was going to happen to Jyoti.
It took us about 15 minutes in a taxi to be back in Chaiya. We didn't know what to do, so we found a swelteringly hot coffee shop and had an iced coffee.
As we sat there Jyoti sent us a message saying that she was going to take a bus and train to meet us later that day so that the three of us could take the 12-hour train ride back to Bangkok.
Meanwhile, Torin and I finished our coffee and wondered what we were going to do all day. As far as we could tell, there wasn't a single air-conditioned restaurant or bar in the town and it looked like a long hot day. After an hour or so, I decided that the two of us should get an air-conditioned hotel room for the day so that we could spend the afternoon drinking beer in relative comfort. So I got the hotel room for about $17 and the two of us started drinking.
After just one beer, Jyoti showed up and immediately fell into my nephew's arms. He had completely forgiven her for the deception of pennilessness and for running away from the meditation retreat that I had paid for.
That night, the three of us rode the train back to Bangkok. It was a sleeper train with three berths. We put our luggage on one berth and the two of them shared a single berth. She told me later that she slept with her head on his chest.
Arriving back in Bangkok, my nephew had just a few hours before his plane was going to leave for the United States and the younger sister of Jyoti, Deepa, was going to arrive. What this meant was that in one trip to the airport we were saying so long to my nephew and hello to the sister.
At this point, the dynamics of the trip changed immensely. I was now the leader, tour guide, and funder of two women in Thailand for about 10 days.
The two sisters come from what may be the very poorest part of India. They come from a place where about 50% of the women are illiterate. Their own mother gotten married at 16 and had her first child. I don't know if the mother can read or write or not.
Anyway, I took them into some of the luxury department stores of Bangkok which rival anything in New York City or Paris and they didn't seem to have the slightest interest in anything. They didn't want to look at the watches, the jewelry, the clothes, etc. At one point I took them into a massive English bookstore. They sat outside on benches, as I browsed the books.
I shortly came to realize that they were interested in two things. One was Indian food. If they weren't eating Indian food, it was if they weren't actually eating. Fortunately, Bangkok has many Indian restaurants and we found an inexpensive one which they seemed to like.
The other thing they were interested in was having their picture taken. Everywhere we went they had no interest in anything except having their picture taken. They had no questions about the history, the culture, the art, or the people.
Everyday, I'm not exaggerating, they probably took 100 pictures of themselves. Frequently, I would be the photographer. Only a few times did this become irritating. Most of the time I rather enjoyed posing them and seeing their reactions to the pictures I took. They seem to think that I was an excellent photographer.
Things went reasonably well because I knew the scenic places to take them.
The Indian State of Bihar where they are from, is known to be one of the most corrupt places in India. Various development organizations have pulled out of the area because they just couldn't deal with the corruption. I slowly realized that the two women I was hosting embraced that corruption. When they first arrived, I gave then what I thought was a generous amount of money to buy little things when I wasn't around. A few days later, they didn't tell me how that money was spent but that it was gone. I think they pocketed it.
My salvation was that they didn't need a fancy Indian restaurant, and any Indian restaurant would do. It also helped, that staying in a very simple hotel was fine with them. Indian hotels tend to be incredibly dirty; Thai hotels are clean.
In Bangkok, we had one remarkable evening. The younger sister, Deepa, said that she wanted to see the dancing girls. I did a little research and I was able to take them into one of the most notorious night spots in Bangkok, Nana Plaza. There, much to my delight and their surprise, a few of the women were dancing topless. Meanwhile, Deepa, who had never tasted alcohol in her life, had two beers and by the time she finished her second beer she was vomiting in the bathroom.
That was the fun part. The not fun part was that after the bars, Jyoti decided that she had to have Indian food. So we walked the streets going from Indian restaurant to restaurant looking for the exact Indian food that she wanted. We never found it, and against my good advice, even though the public transportation was shutting down for the night, she insisted we go back to one of the Indian restaurants that we had earlier passed up. She then ordered a large amount of food, half of which was eaten because your sister couldn't put food in her mouth. The sister also managed to vomit in the bathroom of the restaurant. We ended up taking an expensive taxi back to our hotel.
After Bangkok, we went to the Beach resort city of Pattaya. There we stayed with an old friend of mine, Dean, and his wife Dao. My two companions couldn't figure them out at all. Dean does not speak much Thai and his wife does not speak much English. Jody was completely baffled as to how they communicated.
Dean explained that they didn't have to have much communication, he simply told her when he was hungry, when he wanted to go someplace, or what he wanted to drink and it would appear. He had no interest in having any kind of intellectual relationship with her.
Fortunately, his wife, Dao, liked the two women. She couldn't remember their names so she called them "sexy lady number one" and "sexy lady number two." That seemed to please everybody.
On one night, all the women got drunk. I had urged Dean to give them each a spoonful of whiskey which soon turned into a shot. Jyoti had a total of eight shots of various liqueurs after drinking two bottles of beer. The women danced and talked late into the night.
While we were there much to my surprise, Jyoti cooked them Indian food which was actually pretty good. She made them some kind of spicy Curry which everybody liked.
Our third and final stop before returning to Bangkok was to go to the island of Koh Samet. There we stayed in a small resort that had two swimming pools and was a short walk from the beach.
Our rooms were a suite with a view of the ocean. It was really pleasant but as soon as we arrived there, I knew that they were going to want to be entertained and there was nothing in the way of entertainment other than walking to the beach.
So I rented them a motorcycle for less than $10 a day. They seem to think that was a lot of fun and raced around the island on it.
Meanwhile, I had taught both of them how to use a mask and snorkel and together we went to the ocean and actually looked at fish. They thought that was about the most fun a person could have. And of course, all this time they were taking endless pictures of themselves and asking me to take pictures non-stop. I think I photographed them in every possible light and in almost every position that a human being can get into.
Meanwhile, there was no Indian food on the island. Their only solution was to request food with absolutely no Thai spices in it. To me. It looked pretty plain but to them it was better than eating food that had a horrible smell.
After three nights we went back to Bangkok. As we were checking out of the hotel, I remember one incident that summarizes the relationship I had with Jyoti.
As we were checking out, the man at the front desk, with Jody and Deepa standing by me, asked if everything was okay in the room.
"The bathroom door is broken and would never shut properly," I said.
" Oh," the man said, "I'm sorry about that, we'll have it fixed."
" No it was okay," I said, "I enjoyed looking through the crack and watching them shower naked."
Jyoti picked up on that one very quickly and shouted, "You wish!"
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