Their parents were dead; the cremation ceremony was over, and life
went on: he internally recited, swallowed his whispered whit of air,
and regurgitated the aphorism. Its cold, laconic and impersonal
meaning was assumed an efficacy to change on this propelling Earth like
the odious taste of medicine and so he could not fail to believe that
it was true since there was nothing to his knowledge to replace it
with. The present moment ravished and trashed all former beings and,
like a mountebank, sold its new products as the true goods. To Jatupon,
the youngest, there was a vermilion color to the day. It was no
wonder. The present had come upon him as inconspicuously as the gait of
the monk's orange robe in the subtle movements that philosopher made
during their time of mourning.
Carrying suitcases and bags with his brothers and a woman of
Chinese complexion, he sensed the rapacious discord of Bangkok--
virulent and paralyzing as ennui for the rich and servitude for the
poor--and so he lagged behind them. There had been a time that he
would have sniffed at this new city like one of the myriad crazed but
gently starving dogs (after all, in certain areas of the streets,
pheromones and urinary molecules dominated over the odors of car
exhausts) but, as he guessed, Bangkok was always more tempting from
afar. Even though he had repined for a more promised land he did not
expect that even if he were to live somewhere in "Euro-American
Bangkok" (Banglampool, Silom, and Sukumvit roads with their seven day a
week travelers check cashing windows) his life would be any different
than his situation at present; nor would it be any worse than his life
in Ayutthaya unless he were to starve.
Still, he felt apprehension; and like a restive boy he slowly
dragged his suitcases. He imagined remote Hill Tribe villages on the