Whose bomb is it?

Our intrepid reporter lands in Bangkok and sets off to investigate local rumours instead of bargaining for cheap fakes.

I hate holidays in places like Switzerland and Mauritius. The picture book sweetness grates on the nerves. There's nothing to do after you've admired the mountains and the scenery and sampled the outrageously expensive local cuisine.

Swiss music appears to comprise largely of sounds made by the bells cows wear. In Mauritius indecently thin young women jiggle their body parts in a dance called sega which is faintly distasteful to one as rotund as myself.

Boring, boring, boring "" and it makes me feel guilty as well. Give me a place like Colombo or Turkmenistan or Myanmar where bullets can whiz past your cheek as you sip your passion fruit cocktail and you can listen goggle-eyed to stories of tyrants while drinking local beer in dark taverns frequented by the Resistance. Now that's local colour.

It would have been entirely fitting therefore, if we had arrived in Bangkok to the sound of bombs going off.

If there had been no fog in Delhi, if Indian had taken off on time and if we'd landed in Bangkok early in the morning on New Year's Day we would reached in the middle of the bloody mayhem.

But we reached Bangkok a day later, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (on account of a night's rest at home because flights were rescheduled) and well informed about the state of the world. The fauji husband swore at Indian the entire way.

"We might as well have travelled PIA," he snarled at me. The flight was dry because, with the merger of Indian and Air India, the liquor contractors' terms were also being renegotiated (Travellers on Indian beware, that situation is going to obtain till April.)

The upside was that we didn't totter off the plane and into our room to fall into an alcoholic stupor but were able to conduct a reasonable conversation with our neighbour, a Thai. We had much to talk about. Who could have been responsible for the explosions?

Well, he said, it could be the work of southern Muslims; or it could be Thaksin's people; "It could also be an inside job "" elements in the military who wanted to discredit the present regime," he added judiciously.

Right. That covered all the bases. Which one of them was it? "You'll know when you reach. In Thailand most rumours are usually true. And what is told to you officially is usually wrong," he said and laughed uproariously, slapping his thighs. I wiggled my toes in delight and waited for the plane to land.

One thing was clear. The explosions had done no good to the reputation of the baht. The exchange rate was around 68 baht to the pound the day before we landed. It was 70 to the pound when we reached. The speculation was that after the markets opened two days later (Thais like to enjoy their New Year) the baht might slide further.

This was one reason why Pratunam, the area where we stayed, which houses small garment export shops, was the only happening place in the city.

"Business very good," beamed a young lady entrepreneur wearing a mini skirt as she deftly fended off a young Malayali's entreaties to cut the price of a fake Patek Phillippe from 75 to 70 baht (these watches are exported to darkest Africa).

But there was gloom elsewhere. Hypermarkets that had proudly advertised that their store had the highest Christmas tree in South-east Asia had to cancel the festivities because of the explosions.

The Christmas tree, which should have been a brilliant blaze of several thousand white halogen lamps, was a rheumy torchiere glowing tiredly. On 2 January, the famed street vendors of Bangkok began packing up their wares by late evening following a rumour that another set of bombs had been discovered in a downtown shopping centre.

A day after New Year, most of the major shopping areas were deserted by the evening, the roads free of cars in a world capital infamous for traffic jams.

So who did it? Enquiries from the bellhop and the taxi driver "" the two universal sources of foreign journalists all over the world "" indicated no one really believed the blasts had been the work of southern Muslim insurgents.

Further enquiries revealed opinion was divided on Shinawatra's complicity. He faxed two handwritten notes from Beijing, one of which read: "I swear that I have never even thought about hurting the public's happiness or destroying the country's credibility for any political gain." Right.

"Thaksin very popular in village," explained a young man who squeezes oranges for a living. That is probably the reason the government of the day made it clear it was ruling out no one, including elements in the army that might have had connections to Shinawatra and who might be entertaining ideas about a countercoup.

Maj-Gen Vinai Thongsong, Shinawatra's nephew by marriage, who was in charge of the Crime Suppression Division, was questioned by the Council for National Security (CNS) after the explosions. CNS runs Thailand after Shinawatra was ousted.

It was clear that Thailand was perturbed and anxious. Though no single event betrayed this, 22 per cent fewer people visited Chatuchak, the vast and wonderous weekend market where you can buy anything from puppies to steelmaking equipment. Armed police, roadblocks, patrolling...Bangkok has not seen such scenes recently.

What was interesting was the number of people who seemed to want to publicly proclaim their loyalty to the king. They stood out by the lemon yellow shirts they were wearing with the royal crest embroidered on their chest pocket.

The explosions have stopped. But until those who planted the bombs are found, public mood will be jumpy. "Bangkok khatam bhayo," said a Nepali of Burmese origin "" the community owns most of the tailoring establishments in the city. Not yet. I don't think so.