Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach

Australia, watched a lifetime of American movies, and fell in love with Clint Eastwood. And what good did that do me? Here in Maprao, even my Thai was a mystery. Southern Thai dialect was like listening to sausages popping on a grill, and now I learned there are more people here speaking Burmese than standard Thai. I was a minority.

'Can I help you?' came a voice.

I turned to see a dark-skinned man in shorts. Only shorts. His torso was decorated with grease smears, but that was a body without a gram of fat. A worker's body. On top of it was an untidy head; hair sheared and uncombed, a wispy haphazard beard, a recent scar dividing his left shoulder in two. But, my word, he was adorable. His smile went straight to my womb.

'I'm Aung,' he said.

He put down his spanner and wai'd me. I wai'd him back.

I said, 'Ming ga la ba,' the only Burmese I knew. I hoped it meant good day. He probably didn't even know I was speaking Burmese because he continued in Thai.

'How can I help you?'

'Your Thai is very good.'

We said that to Westerners all the time, but we didn't really mean it. We didn't really expect that much from the wealthy whities. But we tended not to compliment menial day laborers from neighboring countries, even if they were fluent. But Aung was fluent and gorgeous.

'I've been here twenty-four years,' he said, and smiled again. 'I must have picked it up.'

I'd obviously reached that hormonal juncture in my life when every second man I met was a sex object. Aung conjured up feelings in me I hadn't felt since university. I wished he'd put on a shirt so I didn't have to stare at his pectorals. But he continued to stand there, sweating wonderfully.

'I…I…' I said.

'Yes?' He smiled.

'I'm a journalist. I was hoping I could interview you about the problems the Burmese community faces in Pak Nam.'

'No problem,' he said, which surprised me for some reason.

'Really? When would be a convenient time?'

'I work till seven,' he said. 'Any time after that is fine.'

'Would tonight be too soon?'

'No.'

'Sissi, he's so…'

'Yes?'

'So natural.'

'Jimm, we're all buds of Mother Earth.'

'No, we're not. We start off natural, then we're tutored in the arts of pretense and deception.'

There was a pause, and I wondered whether we'd been cut off.

'That comment wouldn't be directed at me, by any chance?'

Damn. Why was everything about her?

'Shut up, Siss. No. It's him. He's raw. If he'd hit me over the head with his spanner and dragged me off to his cave, I wouldn't have made a whimper.'

'OK. So you've got the hots for a Burmese. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel. I'm happy for you.'

I wondered when the Burmese stopped being equals. Everyone hated them. It was as if you got yourself a shitty junta government and it was a reflection on the whole population.

'I'm going to marry him,' I said, just to be cantankerous.

'Yeah, right. So do you want information about your Honda City, or do I have to listen to tales of migrant lust all night?'

'You already found something?'

'It's not that hard.'

'What do you know?'

'The car was registered in the name of Anand Pany-urachai. I looked him up. They're not an online family at all. No Facebook, no Twitter, not even e-mail accounts, as far as I could ascertain. That's really odd for a young girl in the dot com age. So I had to go down the slow track. The prehistoric route. National records. A program put together by orangutans. I started with the census and found where they live, and I worked outward from there. There's a program that allows me to align and cross-reference the-'

'Sissi, I've got to meet my Burmese in ten minutes. Can we just cut to the chase?' I'd always wanted to say that.

'All right already. I just wanted you to appreciate how much love I put into this assignment.'

'I appreciate it.'

'Father, Anand. Owns a small engineering company. Some gambling problems. Rumors they were living beyond their means. He seems to have sorted that out. No outstanding debts. Mother, Punnika. Middle school principal.'

'Any political connections?'

'He's a registered democrat. He's helped with campaigning. Nothing fanatical. Couldn't find anything for the wife.'

'And the daughter?'

'Right. Now here's where cross-references went bananas. Once I put in her name, I was bombarded. Daughter, Thanawan. Twenty-four. Nickname, Bpook. Number two in the nation in 2003 in high school mathematics. Number fourteen nationally in chemistry. Top fifteen percent in English, History, Thai language, Physics and Geography. Girl's a genius.

Who'd have thought it?

'Didn't you have to be overweight and dowdy to excel in high school?' I asked.

'She won a scholarship in 2004 to study in the U.S. Georgetown. Washington, D.C. And in the sciences, no less: they have very high standards.'

'And she got through the course?'

'Barely.'

'What?'

'It's really odd. She squeezed through on Cs and Ds. It was as if they were carrying her for four years. Every year the faculty had to get together to decide whether to kick her out. She was the class dunce. Some of her professors tried to convince her to save her money and go home. They were certain she'd bomb her finals.'

'And did she?'

'Straight As. A-plus in four subjects. A-minus the lowest. Top scorer for the year for that program. It pumped her GPA up to somewhere approaching respectable.'

'How?'

'That's what the faculty wanted to know. Clueless for four years, then a sudden spurt. The university didn't like it. They convened the Honor Council and interviewed our girl. They hired a private detective to investigate.'

'Wasn't that a bit excessive?'

'They had a reputation to maintain. They take academic dishonesty very seriously. They were sure she'd cheated, but they needed to prove it. She was interrogated. There may have even been a lie-detector test at one stage. I accessed the personal files of the detective. In the end they decided to give her an oral test in the subjects she'd excelled in. A sort of resit of the examinations and thesis topic, but with a committee asking the questions. They checked for bugs and transmission devices and put her in a soundproof studio and bombarded her for three hours.'

'And?'

'Got 'em all right. Nobody could understand it. Given her high school results, they had to assume she'd been suffering from some mental disorder for four years and then suddenly got over it. But whatever the reason, she's kept her mouth shut. At the end of it, they had no choice but to give her a degree.'

'Happy ending.'