Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides)

by James O'Reilly

  “Wait and see,” came the driver’s response. “The song will make you a believer.”

  The song came down the front steps of his house to meet us. He wore a sarong and an undershirt. A large, vigorous man with shiny black hair, a large nose, deep black eyes, and a wide, easy-going grin, he welcomed us in a friendly, loud voice and led us upstairs. His spirit room was large and bare except for an elaborate shrine that covered half the floor. In the center hung a portrait of a Thai army officer in traditional uniform. Plastic flower garlands framed the painting. Small idols surrounded it like a miniature spirit army. The perfume of wilting flowers was mixed with thick incense from twenty glowing sticks planted in a brass urn. Next to the shrine was a chair with rows of steel blades on the back, seat, and arms; the sharp edges pointed toward the flesh of anyone who would sit in it, ready to slice a victim like a loaf of bread. At the front was an altar. On top of it lay a pile of red silk and a sword.

  Our host explained apologetically that the spirit had been uncooperative in recent weeks, refusing to possess him. Candidly, he admitted that the spirit felt that the song had been taking advantage of his position, misusing the offerings of devotees for personal gain. But wait and see, he suggested. Perhaps for a foreigner the spirit would make an appearance. The song’s wife brought us plastic cups of cold water. Before leaving, she placed a spittoon by her husband’s side. For an hour our host chatted amiably about the spirit—the best way to attract his attention, he whispered slyly. The spirit had been an aristocrat and a general during the ancient Burma-Siam wars, a brilliant strategist and a fierce warrior. Royal blood flowed through his veins, and he could command a thousand men to fight to their deaths just as blithely as order breakfast. Not an easy spirit to work for, the song complained.

  Mid-sentence, our host gagged and let out a strangled moan. He leaned over the spittoon and dribbled into it. A spasm shook him. His eyes bulged and his face reddened as if he were choking and about to vomit. The cabby glanced at me and nodded. He smiled and began to arrange an offering of cigarettes, incense, and flowers on a tray. When the song stopped shaking, he stood up and put on the red cloth from the altar. It was a loose, flowing silk robe with trousers. He picked up the sword, stuck out his tongue, and pressed the flat of the blade against it. He rubbed the steel up and down until his face was smeared red with blood.

  “The spirit likes a little blood,” Tham translated the cab driver’s whisper.

  With mechanical, trancelike motions, the song then wiped the blood across several sheets of yellow tissue paper and laid the red-patterned prints on the altar. Finally he turned to us and spoke, a black blood crust darkening his lips. His voice was high-pitched and effeminate, devoid of the warmth and good humor of our host. His face seemed to have changed, becoming pinched and angular, the eyes squinty and darting.

  “He says some of us are unbelievers,” said Tham, “so he will prove himself to us before answering our questions.”

  The song marched to the throne of swords and sat down firmly on the steel blades. At his beckoning, we gathered around to watch. He smashed his arms against them and wriggled his back, bouncing up and down on the seat. Then, solemnly, he returned to the front of the altar. There was no blood, not even a rip in the silk. Before following him back, I pressed one of the blades with my thumb. It was no sharper than a dinner knife, but I would not have wanted to sit on it and bounce.

  The song sat in a chair looking down at us, frowning. He crossed his legs. One foot jiggled up and down with a nervous twitch. His hands fidgeted. He lit a cigarette, blowing out smoke in quick little puffs. His voice whined peevishly as he received his offering from the driver, who had crawled close on his knees. The spirit seemed angry, for the man had not followed through with his previous advice on some matter. The cabby bowed low in repentance. The song stood up and retrieved the bloody sword from the altar. He dangled it point down over the devotee’s head, then brought the point of the blade to rest on his crown. He chanted in a high-pitched, nasal drone, while the steel tip pressed against the thin flesh covering of the man’s soul. I felt my palms sweat, fearful that we might see more blood. The driver knelt, motionless, until the point was removed without breaking the skin, then crawled back, humbly, to his place, his palms pressed together in thanks for so great a blessing. The spirit called me forward.

  “Foreigner, what do you want?”

  “For myself, nothing but to understand. Your host has told us you are a great Thai general. I’d like to ask, why have you troubled yourself with this world you have left behind?”

  The song sat back, the spirit seeming genuinely flattered that someone had come to ask about him, rather than for favors and advice.

  “You see,” the spirit replied, “in the spirit realm, one sees many things clearly which cannot be seen by the living. A lot of misery is caused by lack of understanding. In past lives, I have caused a lot of killing—not that I regret killing Burmese. It was my duty. But now I like to help set people straight.” The song looked around at us with a squint. “Of course, despite my wisdom and the difficulty of entry into the human realm through this lump of selfish earth, most visitors are too stubborn, too deep in the muck of their own ignorance to do as I say.” He jiggled his leg and sucked on his cigarette.

  “Now, foreigner, since you have come such a long way, here’s some advice—something that may help you overcome your doubt: Your biggest problem is your mouth. Learn to think before you use it. Keep it shut, or it will soon get you into big trouble.”

  Tham asked if I should stay in Thailand longer.

  “Only if he goes back to a monastery. Otherwise, there will be some danger! Now for your blessing.”

  Before I could move, the song’s hand flew up toward my head. I caught the gleam of a metal spike concealed in his palm, I felt the steel point of it press against the top of my fuzz-covered skull. I held still, sweating in the heat, my heart pounding in my ears while the possessed and possibly crazy man chanted his ritual blessing through to the end. He pulled back the spike without drawing blood, a slight, superior smile curving on his blackened lips. I crawled back to my seat, grateful mostly that I had not wet my pants.

  He spent twenty minutes with Tham, whispering in her ear. He pointed at me and when she shook her head, he scowled at her. When we left the place, her face had turned gray. On the ride home, she refused to talk.

  That night in the upper bedroom, while the family lay asleep below, she confided that the spirit had accurately described her misery, the ugliness of her marriage, and her inability to find happiness despite her determination. He told her that her bad luck would never end until she removed the cause of it: a mole on the lips of her genitals.

  “He’s right,” she said, almost weeping. “I don’t know how he knew I have such a mole. It’s Thai superstition. Sometimes a mole is lucky, sometimes a very bad curse. He says he wants me to come back, alone, so he can remove it with magic. But I can’t, I won’t, not alone with him.”

  “Well, can’t a doctor remove it?” I said, reaching to put my arm around her.

  “Surgery can’t remove a curse,” she shot back angrily, pushing me away.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in superstition.”

  She looked at me coldly. We sat on the bed in wretched silence. Outside the window, we heard a car roll over gravel. Tham moved to the latticework and peered down.

  “It’s James!”

  “I thought he was in Taiwan!” I fought down panic. A fist pounded on the front door. Sleepy voices murmured below.

  “He’ll kill you if he finds you here. Into the closet, quick!” She threw my bag and clothing, then shoved me in with her old dresses sheathed in plastic.The door shut out the light as I crouched next to the box of photo albums. I heard Tham straightening the covers as footsteps were coming up the stairs. My time spent in Buddhist monasteries had ill prepared me for this. What if James, enraged, strode into the room and tore open the thin divider between us? Would we flare fi
ns and spill each other’s blood? Or would the former CIA man merely pummel my face as if it were a ripe papaya? Frantically I searched for other scenarios: he opens the door. I smile up at him and say, “Hello, I’m a closet monk. Been meditating in here for the past forty years.” No: as soon as he enters, I spring out of the closet, tell him I’m with the CIA and he’s under arrest. No: he enters, I open the door, speak in a calm voice, and say, “Look, this woman you once loved, she’s hurting badly from how you’ve abused her. All she needs is some caring, some affection.” He’s enlightened. We all hug each other and cry, then join a monastery together and devote the rest of our lives to cultivating compassion. Yeah, that’s the Buddhist way to escape being murdered by an angry husband.

  But the peevish spirit’s advice rang in my ears: your biggest problem is your mouth. Keep it shut, or it will get you into big trouble. So I held my breath and tried not to rustle the plastic sheaths around the dresses. James burst into the room.

  “What the hell are you doing out here in Petchaburi?” he demanded angrily. “You got an office to run. I’ve been calling the last two days going nuts with no answer. A big client’s coming to town. This could be the meeting that makes it, and there’s no one to set it up! I had to cut short a deal in Taiwan, fly back here early, and what? You’re on holiday!”

  “It happens to be your son’s birthday tomorrow,” she replied icily. “I’ve come to arrange a party.”

  “Uh, damn,” he faltered as if skewered by a lance. “Okay, so come on, let’s get your things and go,” he said brusquely.

  I heard footsteps move toward the closet.

  “Don’t tell me what to do. Sammy’s expecting a party tomorrow. We’re staying.”

  “I need you.”

  “Oh.”

  “I need to use you to interpret.”

  “Need to use me to interpret?” She spoke the words slowly, her voice getting husky, coming from the back of her throat.

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Don’t touch me!” Her voice cracked into a raw shriek. “Use me?—you whoring bastard! You get out of my house and hire a slut from Pat Pong to interpret for you and your goddamn meeting!”

  I heard the sound of stumbling footsteps as her rage increased. James was retreating, grunting as if being hit, backing out the door as Tham’s screaming continued down the stairs, until I heard the sound of his wheels spinning over gravel.

  I sat in the dark, between Tham’s picture albums and dresses, not yet ready to come out and face the woman who had probably just saved my life. Was this outburst the end or just a particularly effective technique for managing a business partner? It was easy to tell who wore the fins in the relationship. Forty years in the closet seemed a mighty wise idea. I decided to heed the rest of the spirit’s advice and get out of Thailand, quick. Sammy whimpered in the room next door. I heard Tham’s gentle footsteps on the stairs.They headed towards Sammy’s bed to comfort him.The family below us was settling back to sleep. I imagined them lying on their mats on the linoleum, looking up at the ceiling, Thai smiles covering their faces.

  Tim Ward is a Canadian journalist who spent six years in the Orient. He is the author of What the Buddha Never Taught, Arousing the Goddess, and The Great Dragon’ s Fleas, from which this story was excerpted. He lives in Maryland.

  Miraculous stories about the supernatural powers of amulets grace the pages of half a dozen magazines in Thailand devoted solely to these charms. One story from an amulet magazine shows a pickup truck riddled with bullets, the body of a man riddled with bullets, and an amulet from Wat Paknam in Bangkok. The amulet was a gift from husband to wife: he was killed in an attack with high-powered weapons; she escaped with bruise-marks where she was supposedly hit by bullets which did not pierce the skin. After the attack, she recovered and drove her husband to the hospital, where he died. Different issues of Wat Paknam amulets are said to be very powerful—some commanding extraordinary prices.

  Amulets are made from a variety of materials—shaped from precious stones, or carved from bone, tigers’ teeth, or from lucky trees like the sacred fig. The most common form of amulet, however, is a clay tablet bearing a seated Buddha image in shallow relief, and produced from a mold. These amulets are often designed and stamped out at monasteries. The special power of the amulet comes from the blessing by an important abbot or ruler; amulets are said to be ineffective if the wearer has a malevolent mind or does not believe absolutely in their power. Perhaps for this reason, amulets may demonstrate their powers for some, yet not for others—no matter how long they may have them.

  —Michael Buckley, “The Arcane Power of Amulets”

  KAREN SWENSON

  Roaches and Redheads

  A poet roams the days in a fishing village.

  THE TAXI DRIVER WHO HAD BROUGHT ME HERE FROM HAT YAI, the sin city of southern Thailand, carried my bags to my room upstairs in the tiny hotel. He then tried to insinuate his way into the room. This should have told me something, since neither of these are typical Thai taxi driver actions. However, either due to the cold that was causing me to suppurate in my own juices or just the daze one gets into coming to a new town, it wasn’t until the next day that I realized I had booked myself into a brothel. It was a little like living in a girls’ dormitory, particularly on Friday night, when a number of them came home drunk and threw up in the bathroom across the hall.

  There are essentially two attractions to Songkhla, a small fishing town on the east coast of Thailand: 1) there are practically no tourists, and 2) there is a museum created from a renovated governor’s mansion. With a wad of tissues in my pocket I left my shoes at the front door of this large house and glided about rooms with floors of hand-hewn teak that have been polished by a hundred years of bare soles. The rooms are large and cool because of deep eaves over the windows. Standing in a shadowy room, where the gleaming floors repeat the forms of museum cases holding Buddhas, one looks out with a sense of indolent elegance through tall windows, closed across the bottom by a Chinese red fence, to brilliant sunshine and startling acid-green trees. The museum collection is eclectic—Khmer statues, Thai Buddhas, Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god, with a sweeping arch of trunk, Ming pottery, the silver G-strings that little Thai girls wore three generations ago, betel boxes, and bronze jewelry from an archeological dig. Outside in the courtyard there is a shadow-puppet theater equipped with its regiment of lacy dramatis personae. The stair that leads down is being, literally, eaten by a tree that has already consumed the balustrade into its trunk.

  Walking around the town buying oranges in the market, the only other non-Asian I saw was a big-bellied redhaired man who pointedly ignored me. After a nap in my oven-like room—which had two windows looking directly into the rooms of other people’s houses and walls decorated with pale geckos—I went downstairs to find the redhaired man sitting in one of the lobby chairs slinging Old Testament quotes at the little whores as they scurried up and down the stairs. His name was Kevin, a born-again Christian; he had come to Thailand from Alaska. He was working for a man he knew only as Jack, a ’Nam vet, who had a boat in the harbor that was used to rescue Vietnamese boat people, or so Kevin believed. He told me about a doctor down the street who spoke English.

  I found the office easily since it was the only house with a Mercedes in front of it. Never have I been so totally chastely examined. I removed nothing and he listened to everything through walls of clothing, giggling all the while. Instead of getting formal when embarrassed, Thais giggle. This causes them trouble with Westerners, who are always sure they are being made fun of. He prescribed, giggling some more, a sufficient number of pills to make my luggage overweight if I didn’t take them all before returning home. He also directed me to a pharmacy.

  Coming into the pharmacy from the bright sunlight it was difficult to see, but I threaded my way between cases filled with Chinese nostrums—boxes of antlers, jars of roots, boxes of fish skeletons, dried fungus—toward the back. There, among more boxes, I found my
self to my surprise looking into a pair of blue eyes, belonging to a very pregnant redhead standing next to, as it became apparent later, her wizened Chinese mother-in-law, who looked as though she had been constructed out of the compounds in the Chinese section of the pharmacy.

  “Good heavens! How did you get here?”

  “I married a Thai my last year at the university,” she said with an Irish brogue and a smile.

  While my prescriptions were being filled I asked how many children she had while her mother-in-law watched us benignly.

  “Oh, this is number three and I think it will happen tomorrow.”

  I met Kevin for dinner lugging my pills along and swilling them down with Coke. He proudly took me to a stand that he said made wonderful shrimp. The owners certainly knew their customer. The shrimp were Pregnant women may not go to a cremation and may not go to visit persons seriously ill. This is probably protection against thinking too much, which might cause fear and loss of confidence. They are also forbidden to go and see other women give birth, because it will make delivery impossible, the children in the womb being embarrassed by one another and so refusing to be born. There is another belief connected with pregnancy. If she would like to rear her child easily, a pregnant woman must seek an opportunity to walk under the belly of an elephant, but is necessary to choose an elephant with a kind disposition. If she has passed under the belly of an elephant, the child that is born will be easy to rear.