The Wet and the Dry (19 page)

I got up early to get some cash from a nearby ATM machine and had breakfast at the Genting: Nescafé, oranges, and congee. I was joined by some of the Kota sex tourists who insisted on recounting their conquests of the prior night. They seemed immensely pleased with themselves and were going back to Kota with a measure of decent, glowing satisfaction that needed an audience. Super Premium model good, la?

I listened to them dutifully and then left the hotel a few minutes later. As I walked through the windless heat to the ATM machine, I noticed that the street seemed uncommonly deserted. It was about eight a.m. Suddenly there was an ear-splitting detonation, and a puff of smoke appeared above the roofs. When I got to the ATM machine, it had been atomized by a small bomb. The local police later identified the culprits as members of the RKK insurgent group, headed by the splendidly named Wae-ali Copter Waji.

As I took a taxi across the border to Kota Bharu after lunch, I pondered the inherent glamour of being murdered by Wae-ali
Copter Waji for the sin of using an ATM machine. Would Mr. Copter slay me, too, for watering my lips with fermented barley?

I wanted to see Kota at long last because it seemed to me that in some way it was a version of what the insurgents in Thailand were fighting for: a sharia way of life, at least partially; an Islamic city free of the scourges they associated with the corruptions of Thailand. Not only no girlie bars, but no bars period. I also wanted to see where Malaysian sex tourists came from.

Nik Aziz’s capital, as it turned out, was a pleasant city. It was calm, orderly, and mild, with air-conditioned malls like the KB Trade Centre, little red phone boxes with the word
Helo
written on them, branches of EONCap Islamic Bank, and neoclassic cream-white emporiums dating from the British 1930s like the Bangunan Mawar. It was a much nicer city than Sungai Kolok or Hat Yai. It was cleaner, more salubrious, more familial. I saw signs for Frost Rut Bir but, as expected, no vestiges of nocturnal social life. I had expected a version of Tehran, or even worse, a dark and dingy pile terrorized by loudspeakers, and lo, it was more like Elizabeth, New Jersey, a slice of imitation America influenced perhaps by the aspirations of Singapore.

As the sun fell and dusk came on, the mosques sprang to crackling life, but the streets began to die. Between the mosque and the mall—our version of the souk—there was nothing but domesticity, a guarded privacy. The city was closed against outsiders, against visitors. While Malaysians flocked to Thai cities, clearly no Thais ever came here.

Roger Scruton, in his book
The West and the Rest
, has described this bipolarity of the traditional Islamic city:

The mosque and its school, or
madrasah
, together with the
souq
or bazaar, are the only genuine public spaces in traditional Muslim towns. The street is a lane among private houses, which lie along it and across it in a disorderly jumble of inward-turning courtyards. The Muslim city is a creation of the
shar’ia
—a hive of private spaces, built cell on cell.

But is Kota such a traditional city? That may be what it increasingly aspires to be, but it is also a place where the malls are chilled and the infidel brands proliferate merrily enough. It is certainly comforting, provincial, domestic. One misses at once the garish, insolent public space that is the bar. An idle reflection: if a town cannot have opera houses, theaters, art galleries, or sports stadiums, the bar is the simplest, the most universal, and the most accessible public space. As I walked through Kota’s delicate quiet, under its trees heavy with birds, I thought nostalgically—but also incredulously—of the scores of mobile bars that line Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok every night, little more than motorized wheelbarrows that appear at dusk and are mysteriously driven away at dawn. It’s a brilliant concept: a temporary occupation of a piece of sidewalk, a row of vodka and Scotch bottles, a line of chairs open to any stranger. It’s part of what makes Bangkok feel so free in its earthy, immediate, open-to-all way, and I’ve noticed that the mobile bars are much loved by visiting Malaysians, Arabs, and Iranians. But they are not here and never will be.

It is not just the booze and the loose women, however, that draw the men of Kota north of the border. It’s public spaces where anything can be said without fear of misappropriation. The things that cannot be said in the mosque or at home, in other words—the humble subversions of the spoken word that have been lubricated by alcohol. Or set free by it. In the West the bar began as the coffee shop and café in eighteenth-century London and Paris—it is where modern politics was born. Its absence in a large town or city strikes one as a repudiation of sorts, a turning back. Though it is a repudiation that is not without its reasons or its charms.

Kota was the first place in the region I visited that did not live in daily fear of assassinations and bombings. Perhaps the absence of any trappings of contemporary urban life was the reason. The Islamic warriors did not see anything to enrage them. The bar did not exist. The women were not “exposed.” There was just the mall, where I sat down at last to eat an ice cream under the smiles of the headscarfed girls who served them. Ice cream. Isn’t ice cream always the substitution for a nice beer, from dry Islamabad to dry Ocean City, New Jersey? A good ice cream lulls the mind in the same way, almost, and there is about it the sweet intoxication of virtue.

Usquebaugh

                                  
Often when I am in a bar in the
East—at the bar on top of the Baiyoke Tower in Bangkok, for example, whose exterior skyscraper is draped with a vast image of a striding Johnnie Walker—I will think back to days spent on the island of Islay in the Inner Hebrides.

Scotch has a special place in the Asian heart, and for that matter in the heart of virtually every non-Western country. It is a strange drink for the world to have adopted so vigorously. Its appeal is a mystery. The obsession with Johnnie Walker, for example—that fetish brew that is without fail produced after dinner at affable and affluent tables from Cairo to Seoul to Bombay. Status, refined manliness, colonial-officer-class panache—all are rolled into the amber fluid. And while Johnnie Walker is the preferred whisky of palateless businessmen all over the East, the more refined single malts of Islay and elsewhere have also begun to make their way into the haughtier bars. The affair with whisky is only beginning.

Islay. It’s a place I used to visit to pick up odd bottles and to explore, to lose myself for a few days. And in fact Islay has always drawn me to her. I used to go there in the early summer, when the winds abated a little, to walk about like a penitent with my umbrella and my
Whisky Bible
, alone and subtly distraught, abstemious on many fronts but thirsty for a new Scotch I didn’t yet know. I took buses in storms of salted rain to distilleries as white and pure and remote as monasteries. It was like Greece in winter.

As with wine, a drink cannot be understood without seeing where it comes from: here, a speck of peat in the Atlantic a forty-minute plane ride from Glasgow. A place as remote from Bangkok or Tokyo as you could imagine. Yet the threads of a thousand and one drinkers bind these places together. In Japan, Islay is more known than Budapest, Kiev, or Glasgow.

Islay is a landing strip in the ocean. It is only thirty miles by thirty, with a population of three thousand and an airport that looks like a gardening shed. Does the rain seep into Islay’s whisky, too? When does it not rain on desolately weird Islay? So it seems, as you make your way past Morag’s Caf, an airport lounge glittering with display bottles of local single malts. You step out of the airport into
Wuthering Heights
.

The bartenders, sent all the way from Tokyo to learn about Islay malts, wear a look of dismay as they clutch their Burberry raincoats and venture outside into those unforgiving gales. Everything is slanted, horizontal, wind-bent. “A bonny day!” the craggy locals cry at them. Across from Islay lies the island of Jura, inhabited mostly by deer, and from here comes the humble but supple Jura malt.

I drink Jura in New York at the Bridge Café on Water Street; it’s the oldest bar in the city and a temple to the single malt, stocked in ten- and fifteen-year editions. To sit on Water Street, in a designer mall where history has been rekitted for urban tourists, and sip Jura fifteen-year single malt is to be saved for half an hour. There are Scotches like this, delicate and brooding at the same time; Dalwhinnie and old Port Ellen, which Diageo now puts into its Johnnie Walker Blue Label, or Talisker’s Anniversary Edition. I used to go to the Scotch tastings held by master distiller Evan Cattanach of the Classic Malts Collection. They were held in the Chairman’s Office room inside the Palace Hotel on Madison and East 50th Street, that bustling grand dame hotel that no one seems to go to for a drink. Scotch dinners at which rare malts were served with seven courses, Evan dressed in a kilt and courting the ladies and digging into his reserves to make us taste twenty-five-year Brora, the loveliest of all single malts made by a distillery on the wild east coast that no longer exists. Here was the place to take old Islay malts, served at the end of the meal, the quarter-century editions of Lagavulin and Laphroaig and the occasional Caol Ila and Ardbeg. During Prohibition, Islay malts were the only liquor you could legally buy in the United States. Their iodine content was so high, they could be sold as medicine in pharmacies.

On the Islay municipal bus that runs between Bowmore and Ardbeg, you pass along the southern coast road through peat heaths, crofts of twisted trees. The two distilleries sitting side by side like the seafront castles of rival clans—Laphroaig and Lagavulin—have their whitewashed walls built right on the water. The black letters of their names are written across
them, making for photo ops that the Japanese have captured a million times.

On the headland by Laphroaig stands the actual ruined castle of the Lords of the Isles; I was shown around Laphroaig—which means “beautiful hollow by the broad bay” in Gaelic—by its master distiller, John Campbell. We went up to the cement-floored malting room, where Laphroaig’s barley is rolled out and dried. Malting is the process of flushing barley three times with water to make it germinate over a period of fifty-two hours. The husks are then dried three times as well. Laphroaig is one of only five distilleries in Scotland that “floor malts” by hand—that is, they expose the grain to natural air by opening and closing windows. Enzymes pour through the tiny acrospire at the barley husk’s core, and at its tip an embryo begins to emerge. Campbell split one and showed it to me, adding that this means the barley is getting ready to produce sugars. But before this germination actually occurs, there’s an intermediate step: the husks are shoveled into a kiln room for the process known as peating. A peat fire belches a perfumed smoke into the kiln for fifteen hours and saturates the dried-out barley with its aromas.

Laphroaig peats intensely. Most Scotches are said by connoisseurs to boast half a dozen smoke flavors, while Laphroaig yields at least fourteen. Laphroaig’s seaweedy taste comes solely from the peat. But this makes sense: Islay’s peat is formed from iodine-rich seaweed, while Highland peat comes from wood.

Whisky’s amber color, however, comes from cask wood and nothing else: usually either old recycled Bourbon barrels or sherry vats from Spain. The former produce a lighter potion,
the latter a richer, darker Scotch. Ian Hunter, the legendary owner of Laphroaig until 1952, scoured the West Indies for rum vats that would give soft aromatics of banana and coconut, and I have often noticed in older Laphroaigs—a sixteen-year-old, for example, has a subtle taste of orange rind and lemon—a whiff of subtropical sun. Mysteries of the “water of life,” then, whose background odors are not entirely of the North. The Islay malt, lightly diluted by a single cube of ice (which is too much), is southern and Mediterranean as well. It has a dry heat in it. It is a
whisky di meditazione
that puts the drinker in a perilous relation with his own morbidity.