The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen

by Paul Sochaczewski

  Near the end of my visit to Rangoon someone calls to me as I walk down a market street. It is R., my friend from the guest house.

  “Did you find Moses?” he asks, a bit breathless after having run across the street. R. listens closely to my tale, and nods. “I was just in the mosque,” he explains. “I said a prayer for both of you.”

  I’m touched. Nobody has prayed for me for a while, at least not that I know of. I certainly don’t mind. And Samuels, I’m sure, could use a bit of help.

  Chapter 12

  WANT A BUSINESS BOOST? MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE DRAGON PRINCESS

  Komodo dragons, woodcarvers, and the princess who controls them all

  KOMODO VILLAGE, Komodo National Park, Indonesia

  It never hurts a wannabe businessman to have the support of the Dragon Princess.

  Aside from several high-powered local businessmen who allegedly made their fortunes selling rare and illegally-obtained reef fish to Chinese middlemen, Ishaka Mansur is far and away the most prominent businessman in Komodo National Park.

  Ishaka, 54, carves wooden sculptures of Komodo dragons, the world’s largest lizard, which is only found in this area some 500 kilometers east of Bali.

  I found his house easily – after all, his name is in the tourist guidebooks and Komodo village is a tiny place. He has enough business to sustain a workshop of some ten carvers, who whittle under his tutelage, much like the assembly-line studios of the great Renaissance painters. His statues sell for US$15 for a dragon not much bigger than your hand, up to more than US$250 for a full-size two-meter replica. That’s good money in a region where poor fishermen are lucky to break into the cash economy at all.

  And Ishaka owes it all to a special woman.

  Like many romantic mysteries, the tale began on a tropical beach at night.

  “It was in November, 1982, at the beginning of the rainy season,” Ishaka remembers. “I was alone, and suddenly saw a beautiful woman came down from the mountains behind the village.”

  Ishaka’s wife sits nearby and listens, with no obvious reaction. Undoubtedly, she’s heard it before.

  Wearing a “Dragon Princess” T-shirt and a green sarong, Ishaka continues.

  “This beautiful woman – much prettier than any movie star, suddenly said, ‘Marry me’. I told her ‘I have a wife’.”

  “She isn’t as strong as me,” the beautiful stranger replied.

  Suddenly, Ishaka remembers, his pressure lamp went out. The beach became dark.

  “I’m original Komodo,” the strange woman said, switching from the national language of Bahasa Indonesia into an archaic form of the local dialect.

  According to Ishaka, she urged him to go with her to her home in the mountains, but he refused, not wanting to worry his family by not returning to the village.

  Nevertheless, they made a date for the following night. Ishaka was to come alone, and follow the river to the top of the mountain. She gave him an egg-shaped gray rock to show him the way.

  “When I returned home that first night my wife was angry,” Ishaka says. “She didn’t believe my story. Then I took off my shirt and had naga, sacred dragon, markings all over my neck and chest.”

  Ishaka explains this while sitting in his village home, decorated with a few old Dutch plates, Muslim prayers, and photos pasted on the wall showing him with the American ambassador, taken during a cultural exhibition in the distant Indonesian capital of Jakarta. A small crowd has crowded into his home to gawk at me, and perhaps sell some pearls. Outside, under a shade tree, Ishaka’s carvers continue a gentle chatter and soft chopping while they turn logs into souvenirs.

  Ishaka explains that when he reached the summit a large stone suddenly turned into a palace. Then the woman appeared. “She told me to call her Ratu Puteri, Princess,” Ishaka says. “She wore a fine silk sari, like an Indian, but she was a Komodo woman.”

  “It was strange and scary and I pleaded with her not to kill me,” Ishaka recalls.

  Instead, the Dragon Princess caused a door to open and Ishaka was ushered into a huge room with a table laden with all sorts of delicacies. “We sat on cushions on the floor while we ate. She explained that if I had a problem I should make an offering and she would appear to me as a naga,” he explained, referring to the Hindu dragon based on the king cobra. “She said that if anyone in the village killed a dragon they would become crazy.”

  Then came the vocational advice.

  “You must leave your job and start carving dragons,” she instructed him.

  And the rest, as they say, is history.

  I examine his carvings. His statues are even sold in the United States through the assistance of The Nature Conservancy, which tries to develop income-generating activities in Komodo as a means to promote nature conservation.

  I compliment him on the fluid nature of his sculptures, which are quite sophisticated compared to the clunky efforts of other Komodo carvers.

  “All my wooden dragons are alive,” Ishaka explains. “They have the Dragon Princess’s essence.”

  Chapter 13

  LIGHTNING TEETH AND SORCERERS

  Ready-to-use potions are big business in the Philippines

  SAN ANTONIO, Siquijor Island, Philippines

  Forget “eye of newt” and “toe of frog”. The main ingredient in a magic amulet in the Philippines is much more exotic.

  “Lightning teeth,” Juan Ponce, a sorcerer on the tranquil Philippine island of Siquijor answered when we asked what was in a sumpa “protection” amulet.

  His daughter, Tata, reluctantly showed us a cuspid-shaped chunk of basalt. The tip of the rock had been broken off, making it look like a prehistoric tool. “Very rare,” she said. “These lightning teeth mysteriously appear at the base of the tree where lightning has struck.”

  Juan Ponce’s house, in the mountain village of San Antonio – ground zero for sorcery in the Philippines, certainly had the allure of a sorcerer’s residence. Set up on a hill away from the road, his wooden house, overgrown garden and outhouse evoked a vaguely uneasy feeling in otherwise sunny Siquijor Island.

  Ponce isn’t a talkative chap. Actually, he was borderline rude, but perhaps that’s due to his age – 80 – and to his adherence to what seems to be an unwritten international traditional healers code of behavior which stipulates “keep things close to your chest.”

  Ponce is one of some 50 mananambal, or traditional healers, who live on Siquijor, a 343 square kilometer island 45 minutes by ferry from the Negros Oriental city of Dumaguete, in the center of the Philippines.

  Sorcery, magic and things that go bump in the night are part of Siquijor’s allure, along with lovely beaches and a down-at-the-heels mid-19th century Catholic monastery, claimed to be the oldest in Asia.

  My son David, my friend Bill and I were obviously not the first charm-shoppers the Ponce family had encountered. In their simple house, decorated with a poster of Senator Juan Flavier (campaign slogan: “Let’s do it…in the Senate”), a Tanduay rum calendar showing a bikini-clad girl near a waterfall, and a picture of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, Tata laid out a selection of quick fixes.

  She offered us glass vials of herbs. These were gayuma, multi-purpose good luck charms. Put a few drops of gayuma on your cash box and your store will prosper, or touch a drop of the concoction to a girl’s forehead and you will win the heart of your beloved. Ponce did not react to the suggestion that if you already know a girl well enough to massage her forehead then you have a running start.

  “More than a hundred” herbs marinated in coconut oil in a giant Johnny Walker bottle. This was haplas, a healing ointment.

  “And these are sumpa,” Tata explained. Sumpa is literally an antidote, a combination of acrid, sweet and earthy-smelling herbs which are mixed with lightning teeth and placed inside blue and gold wooden amulets. For a few dollars I figured it would be a prudent investment. After all, you never know.

  And that’s the lure of magic, as indeed it is with religion. You never know
. Who has the ultimate truth? Basically everyone with a religion is betting that the Gospel according to Whomever, whether it be the Hairy Thunderer or Cosmic Muffin, is accurate and absolute, and that by following certain behaviors in this life you will be rewarded in the next. Certainly this works in medicine; if you believe that a substance is going to make you better than you have a better chance of recovering. People need things to believe in, especially when the wisdom is delivered by someone with perceived power and insight – a doctor, a magician, a religious leader.

  Buying amulets in Ponce’s home was the rural Philippines equivalent of spiritual fast food – make your choice and take it home. I didn’t like it. It was too easy, all cash and no soul. My experience with healers and magicians in Kenya, Madagascar, Indonesia, Thailand, China and India usually called for at least a cursory discussion of my needs, at least the pretence of giving me something specially concocted for my situation. I found I missed the “blessing” aspect of acquiring something mystical. I wanted a human communion, not a retail transaction.

  “There are two types of traditional healers,” Marlon Caracol, a headmaster at a secondary school in Siquijor, explained. “The ‘good side’ healers treat sick people with traditional medicine. The ‘bad side’ mananambal put spells on people. Be careful.”

  Marlon took us to see a “bad-side church”, an eight-meter wide banyan tree accessible by walking a few hundred meters up a village path and then another 50 meters through overgrown scrub. “The local village council closed the path,” Marlon explained. “Too many visitors coming for the wrong reason.”

  Stay a few days in Siquijor and you’ll hear tales of “bad side” healers making unsavory pacts with evil spirits and roaming the forests on dark nights, looking for powerful plants. Headline-famous politicians and businessmen come from Manila to either put the hex on enemies or protect themselves from the evil eye, a sort of supernatural Asian Star Wars defense.

  Inside the banyan tree that served as the road-side shrine, we glimpsed empty bottles, incense and cigarettes, common detritus from ceremonies I’ve seen held in similar shrines throughout the tropics. The banyan tree is a common symbol of fecundity and spiritual power, and the local term used for magic, diwata, refers to “bribing the spirits”. It’s awfully close to the Sanskrit word for deities, dewata, a common term in the Hindu-oriented societies of Asia. But 86 percent of the people of the Philippines are Catholic, and in Siquijor, at least, it seems that people’s Catholic faith is built on varying degrees of animistic respect for the spirits of the trees, waterfalls and rocks.

  Monsignor Julito Cortes, a friendly Catholic priest in Dumaguete who has studied the magic of Siquijor, sees the animistic inclinations of the healers as “a manifestation of the wrong practice of Catholic religion,” although he admits “sometimes I find it difficult to separate what is religion for them and what is cultural behavior.” He says the message for the Church regarding magic is simple – “it’s a rationale for more catechism.”

  Some Siquijor healers prefer to gather plants and brew their potions only on Black Saturday, believing that with Christ dead, other unknown forces are free to add healing powers in the medicine.

  Kazutoshi Seki, a Japanese anthropologist who studied the mananambal of Siquijor for five years, recounted how Catholic beliefs are intertwined with healing powers. One healer said “I dreamed of San Antonio who instructed me to get stones and a prayer book at midnight. I told the saint I was afraid of witches and asked him to give those things to me personally. San Antonio agreed, warning that if I refused them I would go blind. The following morning the items were on my mat. I memorized and recited the oraciones every morning and evening. Three weeks later my niece had diarrhea. I applied herbs, said a prayer and she was cured two days later.”

  Another healer said, “I dreamed about the Sacred Heart of Jesus holding some leaves which he then told me to apply to patients. I was also required to recite ‘Our Father’ and ‘I Believe in God’ nine times every morning and evening. I gather materials for healing during the Holy Week.”

  I asked Marlon the headmaster if I could buy him a charm. “No, I can do better,” he said. “I pray to God.”

  The bottom line: does this stuff work? I rubbed some haplas ointment on my chronically sore back and felt fine for the rest of the day. And my sumpa filled with lightning teeth? It’s sitting on my desk back here in Switzerland, nestled next to my Ganesha statue from India, a crystal from Brazil, a fossil from Alfred Russel Wallace’s house in Wales, my hole-in-one golf ball and a magic feather I found near my favorite waterfall. Plenty of good vibes. And it seems to have kept away disaster, knock on wood. And the gayuma love potions taken home by my son and friend? My pal Bill claims he hasn’t had a chance to try it yet, but my son David is walking around with a big smile.

  Chapter 14

  DRAGON’S BREATH

  It’s not such a good idea to get too close to a Komodo dragon

  KOMODO NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia

  In one of the best examples of bad judgment since General Custer declared “let’s head out to Little Big Horn and teach those renegade Sioux a lesson they’ll never forget,” Sharon Stone’s husband, Phil Bronstein, was induced to enter the Los Angeles Zoo cage of a rare Komodo dragon.

  The zookeeper had told Bronstein to take off his shoes – the cautious zookeeper, using zookeeper logic, thought that the dragon might mistake Bronstein’s white running shoes for big white rats. The quick moving dragon, using reptile logic, instead chomped on Bronstein’s big white toe, sending him to the hospital for major surgery.

  Bronstein is executive editor of the San Franciso Chronicle, and some of his opponents reacted with rather vicious schadenfreude. A Bay Area political consultant suggested that a trust fund be established for the dragon, which he speculated had suffered food poisoning. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, oft-criticized in Chronicle editorials, said “I wish the person who suggested Mr. Bronstein remove his shoes had advised him to go in naked.”

  Although I have never had the pleasure of marrying Sharon Stone, my life parallels Bronstein’s in one sense – I too have had a run in with a Komodo dragon.

  My encounters with Komodo dragons took place in the wild. The animals are found only in Indonesia’s Komodo National Park and parts of neighboring western Flores, some 500 kilometers east of Bali; approximately 2,500 dragons remain.

  Some 30,000 annual tourists come to isolated Komodo, one of the hottest and driest parts of Indonesia, to see these giant lizards.

  Although park officials have stopped the practice of hanging recently slaughtered goats at a dried riverbed to provide easy viewing of the reptilian carnivores, Komodo dragons are still easy to spot.

  We saw our first dragon, a juvenile about a meter long, soon after we alighted at the National Park’s dock.

  A few steps later we encountered a bunch of adults – lazy, nasty looking brutes which can reach a length and weight similar to an NBA center – lounging around the staff quarters of the National Park station, attracted to the smells of lunch being cooked. “Don’t get too close,” Abdurrahman, the park ranger, said. “They look slow but they can move quickly.”

  Komodo is a World Heritage site, not only for its dragons, but also for its coral reefs, which are among the most exuberant in the world. The day before our dragon encounter we had dived and gaped at fish, coral and nudibranches that took on the undisciplined colors of a child’s paint box. There was little subtlety here, just nature designed by God during Her Salvador Dali phase. We saw meter-tall vertically-ridged barrel sponges, pink-gray like ancient amphoras, with technicolor feathered crinoids on the sponges’ edges, waving in the current like tiny underwater prayer flags. We saw dozens of hard and soft corals, sea snakes and turtles. Even the names evoked exotic extravagance: damselfish and anemones, clownfish and fire urchins, zebra crabs, nudibranches and fan corals.

  Diver and writer Kal Muller described an Indonesian coral reef as a “time machine, ten million y
ears out of synch with land, a reminder of the time when all the life on earth existed in shallow tropical seas, soup of creation.” Corals first appeared on earth some 240 million years ago, roughly about the same time as the ancestors of Komodo dragons. I had come to Komodo from Bali, and remembered the Hindu mythology of that wondrous land – the earth was formed when the Naga, the cosmic dragon, churned the sea of milk. It seemed appropriate that the Komodo World Heritage site combines these yin-yang archetypes – coral and dragons, ocean and earth, wet and dry, sea of milk and Nagas.

  On the narrow trail we crept up on a dragon. We were already too close for safety, about two meters away.

  The dragon was a female, and she was guarding the mound of leaves and detritus behind her that indicated a nest full of dragon eggs.

  “Can we look at the nests?” we whispered, pointing to the nests that lay in a protected cul de sac behind the dragon.

  “Okay, but don’t startle her,” Abdurrahman cautioned. We left the half-meter-wide path and scrambled, not too daintily, around the half-sleeping dragon. At one point we were just a meter away. In hindsight, this was a Bronsteinian-scale stupid idea.

  The dragon flicked her forked tongue at us as we clambored past; one of the Komodo dragon’s several snake-like characteristics. Abdurrahman stood guard with a flimsy stick, ostensibly so that we wouldn’t learn more about her other snake-like attribute – the ability to disjoint her lower and upper jaws in order to swallow large chunks of prey – the dragon’s prehistoric prey were pygmy elephants called stegedon which were as short as a child; today the dragon thrives on deer and goats. The dragon doesn’t even have to disable its prey. Even a slight nip will work – the animal’s highly-septic saliva will kill a wounded animal within hours and all the dragon has to do is follow the trail of its rapidly-weakening prey.