It was around seventeen or eighteen years ago that I first noticed him, this aging man. Quite exactly how old he was, was hard to tell as he had the start of a curved back and looked constantly at the floor with his bewhiskered jowls hanging from each side of his mouth. His hair was white or silver, but not in a distinguished looking way, but more in a mop of short but unkempt hair hanging over his head and flopping down onto his forehead as he shuffled forward with his brown scuffed sandals around his brown feet and his blue fisherman pants swaying with movement and breeze. His arched back inside his plaid long-sleeved shirt was letting out a little perspiration as he lugged the wide basket containing his collection of about thirty boiled eggs. He manoeuvred from table to table along the stretch of seawall at Laem Than where the young people sat and drank and chatted trying to sell an egg or two or three at each table for the drinkers to snack on. Occasionally he was even successful in getting someone to buy three eggs in a little plastic bag with a small sachet of sauce as he maneuvered surprisingly rapidly between the jovial groups.
All night he would ply the pavement stretching along Laem Than with its couple of small bars, such as Sin’s, right up to the vendors on the corner at the cape, where the cacophony of the birds grew immense at dusk, and through the car parks where people sat and ate a mixture of what they had brought with them, bought from the vendors and could buy from people like the old man. The car parks were where they sat in families, couples, friend groups on the floor and felt the fresh sea breezes that cooled the heat of the tropical dusk and night as they ate and drank and talked and whiled away time, hardly noticing the rhythmic rotation of the old man trying to empty his basket before heading off home wherever that may have been.
Over those years I saw this scene repeated again and again right up until the completion of the third car park, and right through the rise and fall of the seafront Japanese seafood restaurant and the collection of boutique pub restaurants that would spring up before fading back into oblivion, or a new facade with new ownership. And always the old man would be there on his tour with his aim of selling just one basket of eggs. At some point I stopped going to Laem Than. It had become less fashionable except with the aging Bangkok visitors, and the young crowd had moved to the Wannapha end of town with its multitude of bars, restaurants and potential for beach front partying to unknown morning hours, not that I was part of that crowd. I just stopped going to Laem Than.
This morning I was sitting with my wife ay Click Café, which had formerly in a different time of our lives been Mr. Coffee, on the roundabout at Bang Saen where Wannapha, Long Haad Road and Beach Road all meet. It is and has been for a an unfashionably long time, a place no longer too popular for the space and number of chairs and tables, with young people and all the businesses. A place where the mix of alcohol, coffee and assorted blended drinks, ample parking, sea breezes and an opportunity for those sitting there on the deck, outside the air conditioned inner sanctum, to be seen from multiple directions by each other and passersby no longer was unique, in vogue or even desirable and had been long since passed by. It was the no longer the perfect place for beautiful young people, who created through the low volume music, a mixture of laughter and high pitched women’s voices overshadowing the more bassy men’s voices, and all the sound mingling with smells of cigarettes, barbeque chicken from the nearby vendor and that salty sea smell that is so difficult to put your finger on. It had all long been surpassed by the far from dulcet tones of a few aging foreign retirees with blood red faces discussing the rugby, and the inability to afford a three bedroom one… I failed to catch the ending. A place where the strident male voices of opinion mixed very rarely with a woman’s voice and the sounds of Stand by Me regaled the few drinkers of coffee and early morning beer A place, now, where aging locals with bicycles, or oversize motorbikes would meet in ever decreasing numbers on the weekends.
My wife and I were enjoying a little time together after her sickness was ending, a quiet time now alone and retired. A time we regularly got these days, and one we both cherished and enjoyed as ever. The sun was weaker today as it gets in the tropical rainy season, hanging above the sea and land and leaving the coconut trees in full colour allowing a highlighted view to the distant horizon where the sea intersected with light and a touch of dark giving a mere hint of overbearing heaviness and impending gloom, a hint where nature and feeling merge to leave a sensation of loneliness and impending change to which you are just a forlorn observer.
Among the retiree crowd sat at one end of the deck as the sea breezes rose, came a shuffling old man. He was moving very slowly with one of those nondescript plastic bags, with maybe five or six small plastic bags of yellow mango inside, swinging from his black clad arm. The mango looking as tired and old as he. His back arched to ninety degrees with his stare fixed constantly down on the ground with his surprisingly short cut neat silver-white hair lining his forehead and in places joining the grey and silver and white whiskers that ran down his sagging jowls. He slowly manoeuvred between unoccupied tables oblivious of whether the mango bags came into contact with anything hard, and his bare legs up the knees where his crimson pantaloons ended and rose to the hem of his black long sleeve jacket, while his ripped and faded sandals seemingly too small for his feet now as toes protruded on both sides at seemingly impossible angles from his feet. Feet which now seemed to match both the colour and texture of the cement on which he spent so much of his time walking and that colour and texture now percolating up his legs. And moving between the empty tables and occasional coffee or beer drinker, but today avoiding the inner sanctum, he slowly ambled to the end of the deck. This time not a single bag of mango was sold.
The sun and light had receded now and had been replaced by a sudden darkness. A darkness which had won its battle with the light on the horizon and chosen to visit. My wife and I sat together not saying anything but just taking in the scene. A scene we had known so well in the past, and yet one which was so different this time. And as the sun and light were gone, we began to talk about times years ago on Laem Than and at Mr. Coffee. As we talked the sounds of old men suggesting “if he runs, he will be president” and “who sang this?” scudded around combining with claps of thunder and the sound of swirling coconut branches as the wind rose. The first breath of the cool damp rain-wind crept across us. It was a cold breath and one that drew a sudden shiver. And as we reminisced an old bent man hobbled on a slow waltz up Long Haad Road towards the steps of the convenience store and away from us. My wife said, “the Eggman no more; now the Mangoman.” Somehow it did not seem apt. I noticed the first slow heavy drops of a tropical rain darken the cement outside.
*****
The Eggman was first introduced in an Eastlit editorial I wrote in April 2013. The Eggman LIves is based on sighting today – over ten years later!
