Fifteen
“ If you don’t stand for anything, you don’t stand for anything! If you don’t stand for something, you don’t stand for anything! ”
We arrived at Lang Suan at eleven thirty. Meteors had landed, dinosaurs had turned into goldfish, sprouted legs and become presidents, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Lieutenant Chompu drove us directly to Sugit’s house. The lieutenant assured us that the old politician was in the hospital on a drip, milking all the sympathy and press attention he could get.
“So, why are we here?” I asked.
“We’re taking his daughter out for lunch,” he said. “I called to make a date while you were off partying with the Chainawats.”
Upmarket dining wasn’t easy to find in Lang Suan. You could forget French, Japanese and Italian, even American, Vietnamese and German. It was all too fancy for the locals. Even the new KFC had been empty since its launch a month earlier. So, we took the ex-minister’s daughter to a tiny place beside the Uaychai Department Store. It was owned by the minor wife of a propane gas tank baron who didn’t really care what she cooked as long as she turned a profit. The food was cheap but tasty and eclectic and the service was so slow it gave you plenty of time to chat.
The daughter, Mayuri, was indeed the crimson-haired servant I’d met, but not been introduced to, at the house. She’d come with us without protestation or fuss, just walked out past the camouflaged gardeners and climbed into the truck with a friendly smile. She seemed truly delighted to have an excuse to leave the property. She was funny and as colorful as her hair, but she seemed to be sadly lacking in instincts. She had no apparent fear that we complete strangers might have motives for this lunch other than food, and no sense at all that our questions were leading. It didn’t take a great mind to deduce that Mayuri wasn’t the brightest squid boat in the sea. I felt no pressing need to be discreet.
“A VW Kombi…” I began.
“I read that” — she thrashed into the gap. “Can you believe that? Buried. Unbelievable. Those poor people.”
I had no idea where to go from there.
“But you knew what a VW Kombi was before you read about it?” Chompu asked.
“Oh, yes.” She grinned. “They were so ‘it’ back then. They said there were more VW vans criss-crossing the world than there were in the whole of Germany. And that’s where they were made. Imagine that. A flock of, like eagles flying out in a fleet of Kombis all round the world. Wow!”
“Did you ever see one?” Chompu asked.
Mayuri was sitting next to him and she leaned close and cupped her hand around her mouth as if she were about to impart a deep secret.
“Not only did I see one,” she whispered aloud, “I rode in one. That’s why it was so awesome when I saw it in the newspaper.”
She had my undivided attention. There weren’t that many VW Kombis around.
“When was that?” I asked.
“Nineteen seventy-eight,” she said.
She’d hammered the year. Put herself right there.
“How old were you then?” Chompu asked.
“Twenty…what? Twenty-two?”
“How did you get to ride in a VW Kombi?” I asked.
She tutted and sipped her Coke.
“The things you do,” she said. “The things you do when you’re young.” She looked around at us all staring at her and decided it was probably no big deal to go on. “The seventies were crazy,” she said. “This army coup and commies everywhere, and government spies, everyone suspicious and blaming each other. It was a really hard time to grow up and, you know, believe anything. Some of us headed down to the beaches where the backpackers were. We had these wild times down there. We met this crazy Thai guy who’d been living in the jungle hiding out from the junta, and he had this family land outside Surat. He asked us to live with him there. There was like a group of us. We thought we were flower children but I think we’d been just pretend hippies till he came along. This Thai guy gave us a chance to live a real alternative lifestyle, you know? We set up this, what do you call it? This cooperative farm. He’d lived on something similar in the States, he said. We were trying to do it all without money. We grew most of what we needed, raised animals, cut wood for cooking, you know? It was this very simple, like, beautiful life.
“But there were needs, you see? The bigger our commune got, the more we needed — petrol for the pumps, you know, a truck, a little tractor — but we weren’t making anything from the stuff we produced. We were just, you know, surviving. And we needed money. I guess, when I think about it now, that means we weren’t very good at being self-sufficient. The whole point was that we…Anyway, I had this father, of sorts. I hadn’t spoken to him for years but I got in touch and asked him if he could let me have some money. He wasn’t into it but he said he had a few odd jobs he could let us do to earn some bread. He told me about this car rental deal. He’d front the rental money and arrange IDs. Two of us would hire a rental car, drive it to this friend of my father up the coast, and leave it there. His friend would take it to Hua Hin and sub-rent it to foreigners at three times the price. Then he’d drive it back.”
“What makes you think that’s what they did?” Granddad Jah asked.
“What else would they do with them?” she asked.
“Steal them.”
“Ooh, do you think so? That sounds a lot more dishonest than just borrowing, doesn’t it?”
“You don’t think it odd that they didn’t have you drive them back to the rental firm?”
“Right. I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Right,” I said. “And how long were you and your friends involved in this rental scam?”
“I don’t know. Three months? About that. It was a nice easy income. And we didn’t see it as illegal, you see? Just sharing rich people’s wealth around. That was our philosophy, our mantra.”
“Rob from the rich and give to yourselves?” said Granddad Jah.
Mayuri missed the point.
“We’d have nice cars to drive, look at the scenery, take our time and come back on the bus. And we had money for the commune.”
“So, how did the VWs change things?” Chompu asked.
Two of our seven ordered dishes arrived on the table. We didn’t know whether to tuck in or wait for the rest. Mayuri solved the dilemma by dipping a spoon into the prawn fried rice and ladling a good helping onto her plate.
“There were two or three couples renting cars, I remember,” she said. “They were mostly, you know, Fords and Austins, that kind of thing. Nice cars but nothing exciting. Then we were told to go to this company and they had two VW Kombis. They were, like, these chariots of the flower gods. We were awestruck. Dad wanted sedans but we couldn’t resist it. We rented one of the two VWs. It was a gas. We were so close to heaven we lost it.”
“The van?”
“Our minds. We’d wanted that life. That VW nirvana. Once we were driving around in a Kombi it was better than drugs.”
“Which you also had,” I threw in.
“Mostly ganja. We grew it in the hills around the commune. It was a sin, of course. But so was beer and swatting flies so we ignored that. Religion was one of those strangling, you know, doctrines we were anti at the time. So we all traveled with a stash of dope for the journey. We found somewhere secure to hide it ‘cause the cops were even more Bolshevik then than they are now.”
