Oliver Benjamin
CHAPTER 8
It is devilish to suffer from a pain that is all but nameless.
Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable
diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in
love, for at least other people know what is the matter
with them and will listen to their belly-achings with
sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands
the pain of exile?
GEORGE ORWELL, Burmese Days
There is no consolation when you have lost that which
has seemed to you the infinite.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC,The Girl with the Golden Eyes
1. Loro Kidul
During Roy’s banishment to Asia he drank no coffee. Though coffee
was the second-most traded commodity in the world after oil, more
tea was imbibed by more people simply because of the vast
population of Asia, a continent largely quenched by tea.
There in the Orient, Roy initially employed tea and solitude to
wash the ink from the pages of his life story. But in Asia it was easy
to purchase far stronger solvents. The exposed nerve endings that
screamed at him through rice paddy and smoky streetcorner could
only be quelled by a veil of silken smoke. Tea showed him the world
as it was. He did not want the world as it was.
In order to support himself in exile, Roy hooked up with a ring of
drug smugglers. It had been an effortless affair. On his first night in
Bangkok he was spotted and roped in by the local Thai hoods. There
were hardly any African tourists in Thailand, but there were plenty of
Africans. The majority were employed in the grayer markets:
exporting phony merchandise and more commonly, drugs.
He ran errands, worked as a bodyguard, helped transport
supplies and ultimately sampled them. It was in this way that Roy
stumbled into the perfumed bosom of the white dragon. Still, it had
been profitable. Once he accrued enough to support himself for a few
months, he broke with his employers and embarked on a series of
slow switchbacks southward.
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