"Sure, why not, thank you" said the man.
Nawin felt satisfied by his decision to give little. It was a compromise between wanting to ignore the sotto voce of thought that told him to give what he had and that which made him into a culprit for wanting to keep it for himself. And yet between both extremes there was the constant cynicism that the poor were merely pigeons and the more one threw crumbs to them the more they would come to eat. It was a way of not examining that the years of his life were pyrrhic: that they had given to him affluence but at the cost of diminution of his humanity—that each year he was becoming more pachydermatous than before with an inability to empathize with others which made them as disconnected to his life as a passing cumulous cloud. Only the storms, the headlines of the masses that he read in English from the Bangkok Post, would get his attention. A female beggar on an overpass with a child that she nursed under her shirt was no different than someone sitting on a fire hydrant as he waited for a bus. Still, he thought, this was what he would try to correct by a solitary wandering into Vientiane.
He noticed some lint on his shirt and flicked it off but really it was the stranger whom he now wanted to flick away.
"What will you do?" he at last asked.
"Starve," said the Laotian. Nawin saw envy and resentment in the stranger's face even though few things were absolute when being conceptualized upside down. If his were envy and resentment it was no different than the way many of his Thai friends often looked at him when finding out that he had an American passport. But then, everything was relative. Perhaps a Somalian would look at a Laotian in the same way.
"How did you hurt your paw," asked the Laotian
"An old war injury," sighed Nawin.
"In Thailand?' That sounds a bit peculiar. You are a bit peculiar, aren't you? An accident that you don't want to talk about—some type of fight with a guy where you acted like a coward or a civil war in your own home that-"
"Hard to explain," interrupted Nawin.
"Okay, whatever. Now tell me what you are going to Laos for."