Thick, sweet, smoke encircles the Erawan Shrine, where Thais have placed incense and strands of white, yellow and red flowers to ask the Indian god Pratprom for good fortune. A Burberry’s advertisement picturing two models gleams from the sleek white edifice of Erawan Mall, one of Bangkok’s elite shopping malls, just behind the shrine.
Above the center of the road, a twinkling blue sign reads “Amazing Thailand Grand Sale 2010.” It is affixed to the walkway towards Skytrain—an above-ground metro built to relieve traffic congestion in downtown Bangkok in 2003.
Across the street a blackened building smells of a different kind of smoke—like burnt rubber. The cavernous shell of Central World, Thailand’s largest shopping mall, has a gauged out center that exposes blackened concrete floors and fallen metal pipes. Busted triangular windows run along its intact southern face.
Anti-government protesters torched it along with 30 other buildings on May 19th, when government forces evicted them from their downtown encampment.
I arrived in Bangkok almost two weeks after that final clash, which put an end to ten weeks of street fighting that left almost 90 dead and more than 1000 wounded.
I had postponed my flight for about two weeks, also, on urgent advice from my boss here. Walking around, I feel almost silly for it. Business people walk to work, buy lunch, go shopping. Working class people drive motto-taxis, sell street food, build buildings. Police and guards blow their whistles in a losing battle to impose some order on the traffic. No trace of the supposed class war, haves v. have-nots, the rural urban divide, the implacable conflict that the international media had assured us of.
But the evidence is there, it is just subtle.
At first it came up in practical ways, unemotional to the point of cynical. “The worst thing about the protests” my coworker said, “is that now there are no more trash cans so you never have anywhere to throw stuff away.” Soldiers and police worried that trash cans might conceal bombs, she said, so they removed them. Another coworker said he was overjoyed when flames from Central World leapt up to the nearby Skytrain station and torched the huge outdoor screen there that blasts advertisements. Now he can wait for the train in peace.
But it’s far more momentous than that. In the morning rush hour trip to work aboard skytrain, most passengers stair fixedly at the still-intact advertisement screens. But when we pass Central World, those at the window seem to stair at it thoughtfully.
It’s more momentous for my coworkers too. Heading out in a taxi to cover some event, one says, “see that fort? This is where the protesters first set up their camp.” Or walking back from lunch, someone remarks: “you know, during the protests, you couldn’t even get through here.” They’re bearing witness, in a sense, to something that must be as surreal to them as it is mysterious to me.
Surreal, because, as another says, “The real heroes of this story are the waste management department.” Just after the final crackdown, they moved in, removing the garbage and urine smells that apparently pervaded the area. So heroic were they, in fact, that they only stopped collecting trash in the first place when the protesters commandeered a garbage truck.
But the big question remains—what next, will it happen again? I don’t know much, except that bloodshed has a way of polarizing things—launching neutral people who see things in a nuanced fashion towards the extremes. And if Prime Minister Abhisit Veijjajiva’s seven-point reconciliation plan does not allay grievances, while the government continues cracking down on red-shirt leaders, the protests could easily reignite.
Cool pictures!
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