When the story begins, I had been traveling with my nephew, Torin Riddle, for about three months. In late May, we met in Nepal, traveled for three weeks in Tibet, and then spent three 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 over 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 where I would 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, India, 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, she was the right student. Together, we made an outstanding video that raised a lot of money for the school.
We stayed in touch. She, Jyoti, would constantly ask me for money but I only gave her money once. A German lady had decided to pay for her tuition to study German. But, as women sometimes do, the two women didn't get along when the funder felt that Jyoti wasn't subservient enough and the funding was cut. I thought that cutting the funding halfway through the term was horribly unfair, 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 types responses to queries from Germans about their products - she didn't actually speak to them. Still, learning another language, even just well enough to type responses, is quite an accomplishment.
After our 2013 movie, I saw her a few more times in India as I traveled around Asia. She would always beg me to take her with me on one of my trips. Finally, a few years ago I told her I would take her to Thailand. I decided to bring her younger sister to stop any ugly rumors and, equally, to try to expand the world of the young sister, Deepa.
Jyoti decided that she wanted to join the meditation retreat in Thailand with Torin (whom she had never met) and me. Deepa said that because she was studying in university and could only join us after the retreat.
The night Jyoti night arrived in Thailand 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. Not seven 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 all expectations vanished in an almost mystical experience. It was kind of magical. I just felt something shift deep inside in a very pleasant way.
The next day, I encouraged 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 at every waking moment. They seemed to take infinite delight in each other's company, and I found different excuses to let them be with each other as much as I could.
Two days after she arrived we left Bangkok for the meditation in the south of Thailand. To get there the three of us of rode on a very comfortable train for 12-hours, 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.
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| Here you can see the famous wooden pillow at the far end of the bed. People are offered mosquito nets. I slept on my yoga mat. |
Jyoti lasted 7 days of the 10-day retreat, but I didn't know until the retreat ended. Only then did I learn that she had quit the retreat, gone into town, and then taken a bus and train across the isthmus of Thailand to the resort city of Phuket, where for four days, she spent her money like a drunken sailor on various expeditions, shows, hotels, and good eating. (We looked at the pictures on her phone to see the highlife she led there.)
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 for our train 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 to return to Chaiya in a taxi. 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 she would 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 would do all day. There wasn't a single air-conditioned restaurant or bar in the town, and it looked like a long sweltering hot and sticky 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 they 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.
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| Jyoti and my nephew on the way to the airport to see him off and meet Deepa. |
At this point, the dynamics of the trip changed immensely. For about 10 days, I would be the leader, tour guide, and funder of two women in Thailand.
The two sisters come from what may be the very poorest part of India, where about 50% of the women are illiterate. Their own mother got married at 16 and immediately had her first child. I don't know if the mother can read or write.
I had assumed the Deepa and Jyoti would be impressed by a clean, well-run city, modern city. So on day one of my new job as a tour guide, I took them into some of the luxury department stores of Bangkok, which rival anything in New York City or Paris, only to find that they didn't 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 soon realized that they were interested in two things. One was Indian food. Deepa had never tasted Thai food, but she said that she had smelled it and the smell was repulsive. Jyoti had tried it once and hated it. Fortunately, Bangkok has many Indian restaurants, and we found an inexpensive one that they seemed to like.
The other thing they were interested in was having their pictures taken. Everywhere we went they had no interest in anything except having their pictures taken. They had no questions about the history, the culture, the art, or the people. If my memory is correct, the only question I was asked in ten days was by Jyoti. She asked me if mermaids were real. I told her that, to the best of my knowledge, they were not.
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| The Thai Royal Palace is in the background. |
I'm not exaggerating: they probably took 100 pictures of themselves daily. They would photograph themselves as soon as they stepped out of their room and then each other. If the scene had the potential to be photogenic, frequently, I was asked to 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 seemed 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 couldn't deal with the corruption. I slowly realized that the two women I was hosting embraced that corruption. When they arrived, I gave them 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 the money was spent but it was gone. We were together virtually every waking moment so I have no idea what they did with it.
My salvation was that they didn't need a fancy Indian restaurant; 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 to 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.
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| I didn't take this picture, but this is what Nana Plaza looked like on the night we went there. |
That was the fun part. The not-fun part was that after the bars, Jyoti decided to have Indian food. With our usual place closed, we walked the streets going from one Indian restaurant to another 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 that 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 her sister couldn't put food in her mouth. The sister also managed to vomit in the bathroom of the restaurant one more time. We ended up taking an expensive taxi back to our hotel.
After Bangkok two days in 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 Dean and Dao out at all. Dean does not speak much Thai and his wife doesn't speak much English. They were completely baffled as to how they communicated.
Dean explained that they didn't have to communicate much. He simply told her when he was hungry, when he wanted to go somewhere, 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 pleased everybody.
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| Dao, Dean, Tom, Deepa (Sexy Lady number 2) and Jyoti (sexy Lady #1) |
On one night, Jyoti and Dao got drunk. After we started off with beer, I had urged Dean to give Jyoti and Deepa a spoonful of whiskey each, which quickly turned into a shot. After that Deepa quit but Jyoti downed a total of eight shots of various liqueurs after drinking two bottles of beer. The women danced and talked late into the night.
The next day, Jyoti claimed that she didn't have a hangover and proceeded to cook all of us Indian food. She made us a spicy curry, which everybody liked.
Our third and final stop before returning to Bangkok was the island of Koh Samet. There, we stayed in a small resort with two swimming pools, which were a short walk from the beach.
Our two rooms were one suite complete with a refrigerator, a microwave and a view of the ocean. It was really pleasant but shortly after we arrived, I realized 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.
Our room had a view.
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.
After every day of taking pictures, they would demand that I give them the pictures. They would then stay up late into the night sorting through them and posting selected pictures on Instagram. Once I looked up on the Internet why using Instagram is bad for the mental health of young women and girls. I read that to them. Deepa answered, "You can understand because you are old."
Meanwhile, there was no Indian food on the island. Their solution was to request food with absolutely no sugar or fish oil 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, something happened that summarizes the relationship I had with Jyoti.
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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