Northeast Monologues

Phnom Penh, that closed and narrow bowl of heat and humidity, had drained the traveller in me. Accustomed as I had been to crowds and dust after having spent the previous five years in that definition of Indianess, Kolkata/ Calcutta, the rows of massage parlours that pit-stopped every block, the brazenness of the middle-aged male traveller and the simplicity of a population that was learning to unlearn and feel safe again, begun to sow in me seeds of anxiety. I left because I wanted something different.
We met on the most cheerful of Saturdays, as crisp a Saturday morning as any. She stared at me, focused and pristine and I would not look away. She, an immaculate expression of white and yellow, sea blue, and virgin green. I, a wearied and impressionable traveller. Would I have been as infatuated if my expectations had not been as low as they were? In hindsight, I reason and try and find that most appropriate answer.

Yet as she stood there as she does today, innocent and playful, unhindered by the smut that engulfs all around her, what marveled me most was neither her appearance of simplicity nor the contrast between what I was transfixed on and what I saw everywhere.
The first time I saw her, I fell in love. With Koh Rong, the last of the rarely visited beaches in the foreigner cesspool of South East Asia. Koh Rong, I was told by the captain of the boat, a heavily accented-white-South African who was also a deep-sea diving instructor, was as big as Hong Kong.
Koh Rong welcomed me politely. There were no screaming neon signs; no victims of the global epidemic that the slave trade and prostitution was waving and hissing at me as I walk past; no stench of the Phnom Penh that I harried from.
The four hours of electricity a day that Koh Rong allowed for were punctuations and daily reminders of a world that was not Koh Rong. Of a world that exasperated every one of your senses. Of a world that did not smell of fresh air and freedom. Of a world that Koh Rong found no reference to.
Koh Rong and its beaches of yellow and white sand, Koh Rong and its untamed greenery, Koh Rong and the sea and land breezes that cool and warm you. That’s how I remember it, the first time I saw her.