City of angels and demons

You can leave the place where you were born, but it never truly leaves you. It's always there, calling you home.

But returning isn't as easy as leaving. After we leave, fuelled by nostalgia, our image of home becomes a fantasy. So when we do return, we come back to a place we don't recognise, with many questions, old and new, left unanswered.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad's debut novel, Bangkok Wakes To Rain, attempts to say what is often left unsaid about the place we call home. Bangkok, where he grew up, provides the background for this ambitious, complex novel where multiple characters lead different shades of life in a busied, bruised and deluged city. The narrative spans generations, with time overlapping and not always sequential. Poignant tales interweave with silhouettes of rain -- lots of rain -- and the rain has its own story to tell.

In 19th century Siam, Phineas Stevens arrives to take his job as a missionary doctor. To his occidental eyes, this is a primitive land. He reports to his brother in New England that the Siamese "live as if they have been born sea nymphs that only recently joined the race of man" and they "have neither the capacity nor the desire for literacy". This attitude towards the Siamese changes very little, yet he follows his God and turns down an appointment in China to stay in Siam.

In Edward Heath's England, an ailing father, Apirak, awaits his son in London. When Sammy arrives, the story flashes back to Apirak's younger days, when he is first posted to London as a Thai diplomat. There he meets his new love, Helen. When grown-up Sammy takes over the narrative, we learn how his parents fell out of love, leading to a broken home and a resentful Sammy being sent to boarding school in Surrey. Pitchaya skilfully evokes Sammy's melancholy as he wanders aimlessly around the world, not committed to anything, save his 35mm camera.

Around the same time in Bangkok, Sammy's mother Pehn lives alone in the grand Sino-Colonial house she received in the divorce settlement. Bored with solitude, she hires a veteran jazz musician to perform for her and the house spirits.

In the 1970s and 80s, sisters turn against each other in the wake of the Thai state forces and far-right paramilitaries' brutal crackdown on student protests. Nee, the younger sister, is training to be a nurse when the student demonstrations of 1976 begin. Her lover, Siriphong, is shot dead, in what is probably the most vivid account of the brutality of 1976. Bangkok Wakes To Rain is a rare work of fiction in that it dares to document this brutality at large. In her old age, Nee still remembers the horror of how her young lover died.

Nee's sister Nok marries Maru, a Japanese businessman. They open a Thai restaurant in Japan, where an unknown colonel starts coming to lunch every day. Soon, it becomes clear that the he was one of the key perpetrators of the 1976 massacre, now living in self-imposed exile. Over the phone, Nok tells her sister the truth. They do not speak again for almost a decade. Nok refuses to serve the colonel until she finally relents when he is near death.

In the mid 1990s, we encounter university friends Pig and Mai. Pig is a self-assured young woman. Her wealthy parents marry her off to a young man from a well-connected banking family. A few chapters later, she is a middle-aged woman with a troubled son who locks himself in his bedroom for half-a-year.

Mai lives in the condo block built on the grounds of Pehn's Sino-Colonial complex. Nee has an office job in the building and also works as a swimming instructor. She obsesses about cool water, hiding her sorrow in the rain. She teaches children and youngsters, including Mai, a teenager who is unhappy with her face and determined to have plastic surgery. Her neighbour is a doctor with a little girl named Juhn.

In the 2010s and 2020s we see a new Bangkok arise with a new generation, the offspring of the characters we met in earlier chapters. New technologies spring up across the city, but the rain continues to pour and the old Bangkok is sinking. Juhn, the little girl who used to swim with Mai, grows up to be a doctor like her father. From time to time, she hires a boat to take her to the old parts of Bangkok where she used to live. There, she lets her imagination run wild, but like any of us, her childhood home is something she only vaguely remembers or understands.

Throughout this book, which spans more than a century and three or four generations, characters come and go, leaving behind footprints to trace and puzzle over. The narrative criss-crosses but doesn't confuse. The stories overlap and sometimes lapse altogether. But the thread that pulls them together, Bangkok, city in the rain, is ever-present. As the name of the novel indicates, Pitchaya's narratives are fresh and exuberant. The most sublime work of fiction on Bangkok has arrived.