Here is Bon. She is more global than the others. She uses us as a base but prefers the more lucrative destinations of Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. She is a visa expert and offers free advice to any of the girls thinking of relocating overseas. Her English is all but perfect, and I’m told her Japanese is not half bad. She runs her own web page, which brings her a certain amount of work and enables her to keep up with her foreign customers. Way ahead of the curve, she owns her own small business in her home village that her mother manages.

Ah now, here is one of my favorites. Urn is from the poorest part of Isaan, next to the Cambodian border, a genuine country girl who will not defile her identity by learning to read and write or by learning English beyond the skeletal vocabulary necessary for trade. She is slightly flat-footed from a childhood spent in the rice paddy and likes to roll her trousers up to her calves as if she were wading through a swamp. She is reflexively superstitious and never omits to wai the Buddha or to take her shoes off when she enters the bar-for which the others never cease to tease her. She speaks Thai with a hayseed accent and a maximum of vulgarity. She also owns an exceptional figure and a brilliant smile, so she does not starve.

Su: nothing special to look at, but both my mother and I are in awe of her true Thai indolence. As an experiment the other day, I sent a missionary over to her. (We get them from time to time: white shirt, black tie with tiny knot, the sad courtesy of the professional sin-buster, Bible in quick-release shoulder holster-I’m afraid they all look the same to me, the men and the women.)

Missionary to Su: “Whatever you earn, I’ll pay you the same for cleaning my condominium every morning.”

Su (threatened, conflicted, and distressed): “Couldn’t we just fuck?”

Farang, tell your evangelists not to bundle salvation with the work ethic. It really doesn’t play in the tropics. Even the Muslims and the Catholics know better than that, and we Buddhists have bagged ninety percent of the market by peddling inertia for two and a half millennia.

Sonja: she is not with us anymore, but in her day she was quite the most beautiful girl in the street, a small star-shaped scar on her left cheek notwithstanding. (Motorbike: ninety percent of the scarring on Thai flesh is due to taking a corner too fast while drunk.) Her life changed when she saw a B movie starring Ronald Reagan in which the heroine, also scarred, came out with the immortal line, which Sonja immediately committed to memory: “Oh, how can any man love me when I am so hideously disfigured?” The ploy proved so fetching, she had to produce a short list of suitors, which consisted of an Englishman, an American, and a Chinaman.

The Englishman: “But darling, it only makes me love you all the more.”

The American: “Come to the States, I’ll have someone take care of it.”

The Chinaman: “I want a ten percent discount.”

Naturally, having been trained by my mother, Sonja chose the man most likely to make a fortune in this lifetime and went to live happily ever after in Shanghai with the Chinaman. (It’s your system, farang.)

And so on. Not a one of them whose combination of calculation and naÏveté could not defeat the hardest of asses-unless the hardass has God on his side, of course. The dark young stranger has not ceased to squirm and sneer since the girls came trooping in. The moment is saved by the Australian, thank Buddha, who trips on the threshold with his habitual curse.

Slim and wiry, about thirty-six, his inevitable name is Greg, and he has been a regular these past two months. He sits next to Ay, who immediately and expertly shifts on the stool so she can hook a leg over Greg’s walking shorts. Greg appears not to notice.

“Gimme a Foster’s, Sonchai.” A cock of the head. “Thirsty weather, mate.”

“You buy me drink,” Ay says.

“Do I know you?”

“Yes.”

“Better give her one, Sonchai.”

The young Muslim is watching.

Ay finishes her tequila in one, then sucks on the salt-encrusted lime. Nobody knows what swarthy fellow in a sombrero first introduced our working girls to tequila (okay, it was probably a Chinese entrepreneur), but history will reveal this act of marketing genius in its true glory.

“You pay bar?” Ay wants to know, now massaging Greg’s member, which has begun visibly to swell under his shorts. The dark stranger turns away in visceral disgust to stare at the wall.

“Let’s go back to my hotel-at least there’s enough space to turn around in.” He takes a five-hundred-baht note out of his wallet and holds it up to the light. “Or maybe we’ll have a few more, what d’you say?”

Ay plucks the note from his fingers with amazing speed and hands it to me. I raise my eyebrows in a question to Greg. “Yeah, may as well, the kid’s right, I’ll only be too shit-faced later, probably make an arsehole of myself.” Looking at his fly. “Christ Ay, what you been doing down there while I’ve been having an intellectual conversation with Sonchai here?”

On his slim figure the protuberance is somewhat dramatic, drawing the interest of the other girls, all of whom want to measure the circumference and check for hardness. “Big banana,” Lalita confirms among the oohs and aahs of the others. “I hope you gentle with her.”

The Muslim grinds his jaw.

“What about me? I’m just a poor little Australian farang all alone in your big hard city.”

“You hard, not city.”

Greg bursts out laughing. “You can’t win.” A quick glance at the Muslim, then away. Greg catches my eye, I shake my head. Silence.

“I go change,” Ay says.

We all watch her backside under the bikini bottom as she walks down the bar on her high heels. Except the Muslim. The atmosphere starts to congeal.

Fortunately, Ay’s “dressing” was a simple matter of slipping on a skirt and T-shirt. Now she is back, and Greg has already paid for the drinks and her bar fine. “See you later,” he calls out.

The Muslim watches the couple’s exit with exquisite disdain.

Now the bald giant and his gang burst in, filling the bar. Hardly an improvement, I guess, from Allah’s point of view.

“Hey, Sonchai, what you do to the sounds, man? That stuff is about a thousand years old.”

I switch to the Moody Blues, “Nights in White Satin.”

“Better.”

I shift my attention to deal with this gang. They are in a fairly manageable state at the moment, but old men of this tribe require ceaseless vigilance. Fortunately more girls have begun to arrive-Marly, Kat, Pinung et al.-until there is one for each old man, who feels honor bound to show appreciation and virility by cooing and slobbering all over them. The girls, laughing, hardly have time to change. Their drinks are waiting for them when they return from their lockers, and I have to make a call to order more tequila.

Everyone knocks back their drinks except for me and the stranger, who purses his lips. He has refolded the picture, and I’m wondering why he remains sitting here when the old men so obviously get on his nerves. I’m deeply worried now, because I’m having one of my flashes.

I’ll have to explain. We were teenagers when my best friend and soul brother Pichai killed our yaa baa dealer. Our mothers arranged for us to spend a year at a monastery in the far North, run by a highly respected abbot who happens to be Vikorn’s elder brother. Pichai was killed in the cobra case (op. cit.) last year, by the way.

Twelve months of intensive meditation in that forest monastery changed both of us in a way that is impossible for nonmeditators to understand. Ever since, I have experienced flashes of insight into the past lives of others. Sometimes the information is precise and easy to interpret, but most of the time it consists of rather vague phantasmagoric glimpses of another person’s inner life. This Muslim’s is something else, something so rare in Bangkok, I’m in shock. I’m almost certain of it: we met at the great Buddhist University at Nalanda, India, oh, about seven hundred years ago. I have to admit he’s kept his glow.