3 The Rain (Ao Nang)

High above the streets of Ao Nang this story begins. Perched up along the rooftop restaurants, looking down at the sounds from below which come up to greet: tooting horns, tuk-tuk sounds, traffic moving, traffic swerving, big trucks, motorbikes, laughter and language. Words are heard expressing worlds in every sound and syllable. Something heavy is being dragged across the floor. Knives and forks twang, clang and chime in the way that only cutlery can chatter. Glasses chink at the bar. White paper napkins flutter in the breeze. Waves roll ashore. Rushing waves roll ashore. There’s a faint wind blowing in off the sea; moving air inland. A large full moon begins to rise over a giant monolith of limestone rock towards one end of this town (dropped down in the soft sand at the far end of the beach). A string of coloured lanterns dance in the darkness, lighting all along the way there, all the way until the eye can see no more.

Unaware of bearings and landmarks, there is no comprehension of where lies North, South, East or West. Dislocated from familiarity, there is no Pole Star for guidance, only the sounds of this night can reassure. Waves rolling ashore.

Occasionally a solitary raindrop falls. Skies were clear a few moments ago.

Apparently there is a big storm elsewhere. Somewhere far away – far out at sea. It has made lots of smaller storms, lots of other rain. This was on the news, so I was told. With these other rains coming, there will be no customers in town for this week. The tourists will stay away. Shops can sell no goods. Yesterday there was no electricity here. One of the 7/11 supermarkets had to close for the day (electric doors, electric tills). Even though power was back on by the evening, the customers still stayed away (stayed indoors, stayed in their hotels). I was told for my safety, do no boat trips: stay on land (for my safety, you understand, for my safety).

A nearby table of three French girls leave. They sound so happy – laughing and singing together. We are literally eating up in the rooftops among treetops. Steep steps had lead up here; I had no idea there was even a restaurant up here. And I’ve found it – on Day One. The now vacant table is quickly cleared by staff and transformed into a space to eat again. There is a lull in service. And for a moment – the briefest of moments – a waitress looks down at the passing traffic on the Beach Road. She has a black ponytail, soft shoes and stands with her hands behind her back. The neon signs all around cast changing colours onto her face. Green palm trees light up the darkness of the night behind her. There is no light beyond them (only stars). There is no light beyond the crashing foam washing ashore.

My food arrives.

Morning. And so the rain fell last night. It rained heavily throughout the night. And it kept falling. It must have started around 3 or 4am. The sound of the rain hitting the banana palms and frangipani trees woke me from the deep. In my room, around that time, as my eyes rolled around in the unfamiliar surroundings of a new room everything illuminated suddenly with a quick, white flash, followed by silence. The low, slow bellow of thunder staggered through the darkness soon enough. Briefly there is respite. The green of the mountains and trees take on a vibrancy with this weather. Everything feels alive. A wind blows colder across this Andaman Sea, dispersing the hot, thick humidity which stuck to the night sky. Another storm is moving closer. At the beach, along the horizon, all is black. Incoming. Thunder booms like slow, approaching canon-bangs. The sand physically shudders and vibrates as this sound hits dry land. Warm rain occasionally falls, causing large, flat puddles to become pockmarked with moving circles on the water’s surface.

The air is still again; thick with moisture and fragranced with jasmine from burning incense lit at a nearby Buddhist shrine. A family of mynah birds swoop down from some pencil thin palm trees and look for food in the wet grass. An olive stray dog sits under cover waiting for someone or something for breakfast. White butterflies, unfazed by the weather flit about their business – followed by two small children mimicking their flight before being quickly called back into the dry by the grownups.

A leaf falls from the Holy Almond tree and the sea breeze gathers pace again. The ocean had been flat moments earlier, from shoreline to the edge of the world, flat glass water now rippled with rushing winds. Brightly coloured long-tail boats float on this endless sea – their painted hulls shine as they emerge up into the morning light, lifted by growing, shoreline waves. At the far end of the beach, two people swim in the emerald depths of the Andaman Sea (their heads visible only as small, round silhouettes). I watch another large brown leaf fall from a giant overhanging branch – it flutters and tumbles, curling through gravity’s downward pull. It seems to take an age to fall. But here, time lives within Time and plans reside elsewhere. The wind is now a steady stream of warm and cool air. The sea changes colour: blues, grey, green and teals. A bank of cloud hangs along the horizon. Partly grey, partly white, partly black. Thunder booms somewhere out there, its muffled rumbles carried here on the breeze, audible and loud. A bird the size of my thumb suddenly alights near my table. I move only my eyes to look at it. It chirps and darts off. Time to move, time to be, time to meet what the day will bring…

And when the rains came there was nothing you could do. They came in the late afternoon. The building bubble of humidity finally burst and the sky fell open. At first, big flat splats of raindrops, then long sheets of vertical downpour lasting hours at a time. Daylight dimmed. Umbrellas and ponchos lined the streets. Everything shone with a sheen brought down from the skies. I hid and huddled under tarpaulin canopies all along Walking Street, unable to get back to my room. Until I found a table at Sitti Café and ordered water spinach, chicken and rice. They gave me a cup of lemon tea for free. Next door, at the Boogie Bar, a band was playing Bob Marley’s ‘One Love.’ I listened and ate and watched the massage girls try to coax rain dodgers into the shelter of their shop. A large white butterfly with black polkadots flew past me in the rain (it had been flying about me the whole day… or so it seemed… either way it was good for the story). On the Beach Road, there was a man in a blue Pepsi Cola t-shirt, trying his best to thread himself between the falling raindrops and passing tuk-tuk taxis; he moved like a blur through the kaleidoscope of shining neon reflected on a gloss of coloured puddles captured in potholes and flat tarmac.

At the hotel earlier in the morning, I saw a poster advertising something that said, ‘Take time to do what makes your soul happy.’ And so I sat at Sitti Café until evening and I wrote about how happy I felt, about how I loved what I was feeling at that time, about what the place was beginning to mean to me and how I enjoyed it. I wrote about how much I was falling in love with AoNang, about how I felt it was a special place with such special people living there, happy to share it all with me. And there I was writing, watching people, listening to rain. And it felt good – it felt meaningful. And I thought that maybe one day, I would look back at this moment and realise I was doing things that made me happy, and I would bless these moments again and again and again. It was one of those rare epiphanies when you knew you doing what you were meant to be doing, that Fate had really intervened. Rainy days are made for writing. And so I sat and I wrote until I heard the Maghrib Prayer in the distance, sounding down from the Mosque at the top end of town, by then I knew the day was around sunset.

And all the while, the waves kept rolling ashore, rolling in foam over jade green waters. The long blue stripe which sits between the worlds of heaven and ocean had long dissolved into a misted grey of heavy rain.

And all the while, the waves keep rolling ashore.

And I kept writing.

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