Call of the Bell Bird

by Jennifer Kavanagh

  We enjoyed another spell of tranquil idyllic living on Ko Wai, one of the southern islands that was as yet unspoilt, though development in the area was, we were told, encroaching every day.

  A spacious rattan hut on a glorious island. There was little beach at high tide and a lot of flotsam from the recent high winds but a very beautiful shore line, irregular, occasionally rocky with palm trees waving in the breeze and a dense forested hinterland. We were served at meals by three transsexuals in long flowing skirts and cracked voices. We wondered whether they were in this out of the way place because it was hard for them to be accepted in mainstream Thailand, or whether they would be part of the scenery anywhere we went.

  We had been shocked on the way to Chiangmai a couple of weeks before when the train attendant collected up all the rubbish and calmly threw it out of the window. We saw something of the results of such actions on a windy day on the island as the stormy seas brought ashore not shells and starfish as in Tonga, but shampoo bottles and plastic bags. How will this country be in a few years’ time?

  We walked one day in the interior of the island on a thin path through tropical undergrowth, I nervous about snakes and wearing socks with my sandals, Stephen with boots and stick, every inch the intrepid explorer. When we reached the other shore we came upon a windless calm lagoon. We had been told that there was no indigenous population but we were pleased to find a couple with a dog living in an isolated little house. The man was not very friendly – I doubted they saw many visitors let alone falangs like us. Real jungle and our first sight of a rubber tree, slashed to collect the latex. I was reminded of my childhood in the Malaya of “the Troubles” and how dangerous the word “jungle” was when my father went out in it to find insurgents.

  It was a good time on the island. And I was happy again, singing on the beach in the dark.

  Back in Bangkok, on Sunday morning we congregated at Don’s penthouse apartment, which had a fine view of the city from windows on both sides of the sitting room. Crammed full of art and antiques, it was a luxurious place which he shared with his Thai partner, a young man whose family he had befriended. We had also invited a couple from the American Friends Service Committee, whom we had discovered were based in Bangkok. Karol too was due to join us from the north, but her car had broken down on the way.

  Don, a man in his sixties or perhaps seventies, had had a fascinating career, working with anti-poverty and drugs programmes in New York and New Jersey, then running a restaurant in New York and a guest house in Northern Thailand. He had been in Thailand for 14 years, and told us of the great poverty he had come across, though more hidden than in India.

  It was an example of the contradictions at the heart of Thailand that Don lived in this flat in a smart area largely inhabited by expats. In the shops near by could be found many of the foods without which Europeans and Americans feel deprived: Camembert, baguettes, smoked salmon and so on, and the meal we had in a nearby restaurant cost ten times what we normally paid at our noodle bars, though still only about £4 per head: a sophisticated meal of giant prawns and subtle spices. It was thoroughly enjoyable, but a million miles away from our little soi and Madam’s Guest House.

  It was miles away too from Klong Prem men’s prison, in the outskirts of Bangkok, which we reached the following day, ironically, by skytrain and taxi. Linley had given us names of prisoners asking to be visited, and we also had a list of British prisoners given to us by the British consul. We put ourselves down to visit Joe, our first prisoner, went through the security processes, leaving our bags behind, and sat down to wait. Inside the gates, the surroundings of the prison buildings were pretty, with benches in spacious gardens, and there were a number of other people, mostly women and children, some with large bundles that they gave to the guards to take in to their relations.

  We met two remarkable women there. One was a Thai prison visitor, working on behalf of a priest, Father Olivier, and the Catholic Church. She asked us if we would also visit an Algerian who had no contacts in the city – she had too many on her list for the day. The other was Debbie, a young Englishwoman living in Perth, Australia, whose brother was in the prison, serving ten years for passing a dud travellers cheque. We caught sight of him fleetingly: he was a handsome blond young man, who had now contracted TB. I felt an impatience with him, a man from an affluent background whose action had not only ruined years of his life but meant that his sister and mother had to make the expensive journey from Perth every six months to visit him.

  However, the experience has certainly opened Debbie’s eyes. She now visits other prisoners when she is over, and brings boxes of books for them. She is also collecting reading glasses – the extension of a scheme in Australian prisons. We were drawn to each other, and have stayed in touch.

  The visiting area itself was outside an L-shaped building, with a long line of seats in front of meshed windows behind which the prisoners filed in to sit, some of them in chains. What must it be like for a small child to see his father with chains on his legs? Apparently the conditions in the prison, despite recent improvements, are pretty grim: four to six in a cell, sleeping on the ground with a blanket. Very little food unless they can afford an extra payment.

  All the men we visited were reasonably sanguine, the least being Joe. He said he had been tortured in Burma, and did not get the medication he needed. He had one year of his sentence to go and was seeking asylum. We spoke to the Catholic visitor, and asked if she could help – she said that Father Olivier did arrange for medicaments to be brought to prisoners and was fairly sure Joe was on his list.

  We were concerned to find that we were officially only allowed to visit one prisoner a day, but as the staff had changed when we went back to reception we went ahead and registered to visit Iyke. He is a Nigerian who has served twelve years with another eight-and-a-half years to go, unless his country signs a treaty with Thailand. Intelligent and articulate, he said he had learnt a lot in prison, and was attending English classes run by Debbie’s brother. Iyke felt very cut off, as his family was too poor even to buy stamps to write to him. We promised to write but urged him not to spend his money on writing to us. However, when we arrived in India a month later, my son brought a letter from him in which he said that our visit had made that day the best in the whole time he had been in prison. One hour’s visit had meant so much in a life of such deprivation. There is now some chance that he will be repatriated to serve the rest of his time in a Nigerian prison, but he needs money for the fare and some clothes.

  When we went back to register a third time, we were told we could not. I pleaded – we would not be coming again; this was our one chance- and in the end the official relented. Tewfiq, the Algerian whom we visited next, said he had been mentally ill with the shock of being imprisoned, and had been badly beaten by the guards when he was unable to work. He was very bitter about the Thais and their inhumanity – called them animals. He had not yet been sentenced, and had been waiting for 18 months. Father Olivier is going to look into his case – we seemed always to be referring problems to him: our only contact with enough power and know-how to get things done.

  I think the prisoners welcomed our visit. It was hard to relate, the mesh through which we talked hiding the face of the man opposite. Only when we stood up to leave did we see him clearly through the glass. We ordered some food and toiletries for each of them, then went to eat in the canteen which had a voucher system that we simply could not understand. My inability to make myself understood brought tears of frustration to my eyes. Having missed breakfast, and having been at the prison since 8.30 a.m., we were tired by mid-afternoon, and Stephen was not at all well.

  Complaining of back pains as well as a sore throat, he had asked me to massage him the previous day, and I had found a big rash. It looked like shingles to me, but the doctor he had seen thought differently and had given him some pills for the different symptoms. He was later diagnosed with shingles, warned that he would be in great pain for months, given the
right drug immediately, and – to our amazement and relief – the disease did not develop.

  The following day we left for India.

  I had never quite managed to come to terms with Thailand – perhaps we didn’t manage to get to the right places – but in a way I think my unease was a response to a country itself ill at ease with its own development, with the gulf between rich and poor, and between traditional Buddhist culture and its increasing Westernisation. A small minority of the population has moved into another century, leaving the vast majority behind. The gap between rich and poor exists in most countries of the world, including the UK, but seems particularly stark in this half-way house between first and third worlds. The tourist trade is more established here than in other parts of South-East Asia, and it has had a deleterious effect, challenging the traditional ways of its own people. We were of course aware of the iniquities of the sex trade, and were made aware of a strange discrepancy between a perceived latitude about drug taking, and the draconian punishments meted out to those who are caught.

  Although we did not encounter examples of the sex trade, there was an undercurrent we had not come across before, and the general type of tourists that we met there seemed quite different from those we had encountered in other parts of the world. In Latin America, we had met delightful young people searching for authentic cultures, many of them volunteering for schools, hospitals and orphanages; in India we were to meet people on spiritual quests, moving, as we were, from one ashram to another. Here, however, there was more a sense of people out for what they could get, living off people poorer than themselves. In Bangkok, the guests in the hotels near ours were older and often longer-term, somewhat louche. I heard one such, a Frenchman, accost the owner of “Madam’s” in broken English: “You people, you make all your money from beer and people fucking little girls and boys.”

  Chapter 11

  India: Converging Paths

  The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers

  Wm Penn, 1693

  How can one begin to write about India? For me, from the kaleidoscope of experience during the three months that we were there – the travel by train where every moment outside was a snapshot of vivid varied village life or glimpse of landscape; all the colour; the dignity and beauty of the women, however poor; the cows wandering nonchalantly through the traffic, the beggars, the smells, car horns, swindling auto taxis, earnest conversations on trains – from all this richness emerged the deep spirituality of the country which imbues it at all levels. I had never understood why people felt they had to go India to find their spiritual identities; more appropriate, I have always thought, to find a faith that related to their own culture.

  That said, we only visited one Quaker Meeting in India, a gathering of two or three souls in a central YWCA in Delhi, keen to expand its outreach and its attendance. As we travelled round the country, we returned often to Delhi, and its Meeting became a focus for our worship. An oasis of stillness in the clangour of the city.

  What I had not understood before coming to India was that it was not necessarily a particular religion that people go to find, rather to breathe in the spiritual oxygen. I had first come across this phenomenon in Bangladesh three years before: where eye contact with women I was visiting in the slums became a wordless exchange of common humanity and womanhood. India is a more sophisticated country but religion still pervades daily life and governs the way people live.

  For me there were two important affirmations in India – two areas of spiritual life that touched closely my own beliefs and practices. The roots of Quakerism are in Christianity but many of us feel that we have moved away from calling ourselves Christians; that we do not wish to assert that any path to God is superior. We have a strong tradition of welcoming people from all religions. We have Jewish Quakers, Buddhist Quakers, Quakers from all the major faiths, and joint membership is not unusual. My own faith is strongly universalist: for me, as for many, what religions have in common is far more important than their differences, which are often the externals, rituals or cultural accretions. There was a current running through our encounters with both Indians and those who have chosen to live there, of a willingness to combine the best of faiths, to borrow from other faiths, most of all of a recognition that all faiths resemble each other at their mystic core, in those things that are eternal.

  Stephen’s main desire in India, indeed almost in the whole trip, was to visit Saccandinanda Santivanam ashram in Tamil Nadu, south India. It was one of the first Christian ashrams in India, originally set up in the 1950s by two Belgian Benedictine monks, and taken over by a British monk from Prinknash, Bede Griffiths, by whose name it is generally known. Christianity is widespread in India: in fact there are more Christians – some 20 million – than Sikhs. What made the founding of Santivanam (“Sacred Mango Grove”) exceptional was that its mission was not to impose Catholicism on Hindus, or an English style on an Indian community, but to bring together the different traditions; unconventionally, especially at that time, to absorb much of Indian and Hindu into what is essentially a Catholic monastery. Reading Bede Griffiths, seeing him on video, I identified with his movement away from a particular faith to one embracing all. He saw in a strand of modern Hinduism a universal truth to which he could relate, and we found the same.

  Father Bede died some years ago, and with him has gone some of the depth of spiritual ecumenism, but the ashram still retains enough of a mixture of cultures to be inspiring. The Benedictine monks dress in the clothes of saddhus or holy men; the church is designed like a Hindu temple, with brightly coloured statues on top, but of Christian figures, not Hindu gods; the services include Sanskrit and Tamil chanting as well as the psalms in English, the Eucharist and other Catholic features. We spent two weeks there, eating simple and delicious vegetarian food communally and in silence, sitting on the floor and eating with our right hands.

  Santivanam: graves of the founders, including Father Bede

  Even with the constant flow of guests that come from all over the world, Santivanam is a quiet, reflective place that Stephen in particular found enormously enriching. I found myself often dry and frustrated in attempting to fit into a religious life that was not mine. Believing that all of life is sacramental and that no particular time or season is more significant or holy than another, I found myself resistant to attending regular services in the church. I did however attend the meditation periods at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., though the mosquitoes, at their peak at those times, made concentration in that open-sided church difficult. I often migrated to the meditation hall, which had a cool marble floor and – oh, wonder – a fan!

  As I increasingly realised, it is often by the natural world that my spirit is liberated: I wrote in my journal on January 2nd:

  We have been given a hut, as we are staying for a while. I feel very privileged. It is set apart a little with its own bathroom, facing on to a field of trees and across a lane along which people cycle to other fields and, in the distance, other trees. A little porch where I sit on a wicker chair in a cool evening breeze. What more could one want? (Except that I have just been bitten by a ferocious red ant.) There’s even a welcoming chalk pattern at the entrance, though not, I gather, specifically for us. But it feels as if it is.

  Here, at the edge of the ashram, I saw just now a tussle between a tiny striped squirrel and a pair of handsome squawking birds, big, nut brown with white stripe. The squirrel, same size as the birds, won.

  Oh such a kingfisher! I looked up from my chair and there he was, sitting on a little branch. Brown with a white bib and a slash of brilliant turquoise at the side. I looked for many minutes. Then he turned, briefly showing a breathtaking turquoise back, swooped to pick up an insect and flew off, so brilliant, such a gift. I had been feeling cross and, as so often, I felt as if I had been sent a messenger, a present of
beauty.

  Such experiences were a confirmation of my ministry being in the world, in allowing my spirit to expand into the whole world; confining it in highly disciplined rituals of meditation had a depressing effect, did not make use of all of God’s grace. Uniting with the created universe is heady, liberating, enabling. I had felt it in the desert, in the Andes; I felt it daily on this journey when I allowed it to happen. It was good to recognise it in myself – each path is different, and we need to find our own.

  One day, Stephen and I went for a walk after breakfast along a woody path parallel with the river. It was a walk, as often, punctuated by the bodily functions of local inhabitants: a pungent smell and a man appearing out of the woods; another standing in the river in his underpants, soaping himself; a third pedalling purposefully towards the river, toothbrush between his teeth. Beside the path an abundance of butterflies came out to sun themselves and drink from the white flowers: a large pale blue and black, many varieties of smaller orange and two large black ones, one with deep velvety red, the other an equally opulent blue. And last of all came a tiny jewel with rich blue crosses turning purple as its wings closed. I felt such a thirst for this beauty, and a need to adore in silence.