Word: slumming
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...everyone in Jacky's neighborhood is as badly off as Jacky and Bing. And even the slum has its nicer alleys, where the huts are made of finished wood and there are flush toilets and the skittering rats don't root through piles of festering garbage. The teens and twenty-somethings in these parts of the slum also like to smoke yaba, but they look down upon Jacky and Bing and their flagrant, raging addictions. Sure, the cool guys in the neighborhood, guys like Big, with a shaved head, gaunt face and sneering upper lip, drop into Jacky's once...
...another, Big points out, Bing hasn't left the slum neighborhood in a year. He doesn't work. He doesn't do anything but smoke. (Bing just shrugs when I ask if it's true that he hasn't left in a year. "I'm too skinny to leave," he explains, "everyone will know I'm doing yaba.") Big has a job as a pump jockey at a Star gas station. And he has a girlfriend, and he has his motorcycle, a Honda GSR 125, and this weekend, like most weekends, he'll be racing his bike with the other...
...same word used to describe the motorcycle rallying the boys do every weekend. Their lives revolve around these two forms of keng rot. They look forward all week to racing their bikes against other gangs from other neighborhoods. And while they profess to have nothing but disgust for the slum's hard-core addicts, by 4 a.m. that night, in Big's room in his parent's house, on a mattress laid on the floor next to his beloved Honda, Big and his friends are smoking yaba and there suddenly seems very little difference between his crowd and Jacky...
...Ranong avenue next to the Klong Toey slum, they meet up with hundreds of other bikers from other slums like Makasan and Suan Phloo. They have been holding these rallies for a decade, some of the kids first coming on the backs of their older brother's bikes. Ken rot is a ritual by now, as ingrained in Thai culture as the speed they smoke to get up for the night of racing. The street is effectively closed off to non-motorcyclists and pedestrians. The bikers idle along the side of the road and then take off in twos...
Private memories are a different story. I get a final glimpse into Gujarat's wounded psyche on my last night at Girishbhai's camp. Most of the people?mainly slum dwellers?seem in good spirits. Women gossip and giggle as they help the volunteers cook up a fresh batch of khichdi, a nutritious mixture of rice and lentils. The men are kept in splits by a barber's risqu? jokes. "Our homes were not worth much, so it will be easy to rebuild them," says 60-year-old Haji Aftab. "We feel sorry for the rich and the middle-class...