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

by James O'Reilly

  The family doted on Sammy, who stood out from his older cousins with his freckles and green eyes. Despite his mixed blood, Sam’s character seemed totally Thai. He was quiet, polite, observant, and, like almost every other male child in the country, spoiled by his mother. He delighted in the attention paid him in the village. In the city, he spent his days alone with a nanny in the apartment while his mother worked and shopped. At eight, he could speak both Thai and English fluently, and I found his company a delight. Many things puzzled him, though. His mother’s responses to some of his questions merely schooled him in the Thai art of indirect answers. At times he withdrew, watched, and listened, brow furrowed and lips tight, as if sensing all too clearly that everything around him was laced with lies.

  When we returned home from a late afternoon walk, Tham’s mother and one of the women of the house were on their way out to visit a local healer to have pains in their legs cured. Tham suggested we go with them, thinking the encounter would interest me. The woman in question was called a song, the Thai word for spirit medium. She would go into a trance and the ghost would possess her, then offer advice and heal those who came to her.

  The song greeted us at the front door. She was a soft, grand-motherly woman, well into her sixties to judge from her white hair and fleshy wrinkles that surrounded her gentle face. We followed her padding bare feet through the wooden house to a large central room, where three grandchildren sat watching a color TV in one corner. An elaborate spirit altar covered the far wall. Instead of the tranquil and sleek gold Buddhas I had seen in Thai temples, jungle-like wildness flowed from this multitiered shrine. It held over thirty miniature statues of monks, guardian deities, old bearded men, and tiny spirit beings with eight or more arms. A wooden sculpture with an elephant’s head reminded me of the Hindu god Ganesh. Incense curled from a hundred lit sticks. Purple and pink flowers garlanded several of the larger figures and hung in streamers from the rafters. Vases containing both real and plastic flowers covered in the dust of burnt incense had been placed between the statues like faded trees.

  The old woman shut the windows, darkening the room. She turned off the sound of the television set, but left the picture on for the children; it threw flickering colors across the gloom, reflecting off the altar. The song bowed before the altar, then put on a white linen shirt and a white sarong over her own clothes. She parted and combed her short hair back like a man’s, then took a seat cross-legged in front of the altar. She closed her eyes. We waited in stillness until the woman gave a sudden violent shudder, bouncing a foot or more off the floor. Her eyes opened. Her hands reached down and put on a pair of heavy dark-framed spectacles. Looking up, she spoke to her guests in a male tenor’s voice, strong and clear. The old hands unscrewed the top of a Coke bottle that smelled of whiskey and took a large swig of it. Pulling out a cigarette and lighting it, the song spoke to me directly. Who was this foreigner, and for what purpose had he come?

  Tham explained that I had wanted to meet the song and although I didn’t have any questions about myself, I did want to ask the spirit who it was, and why it came to possess this woman. The spirit seemed pleased. Through Tham’s translation the spirit said he was a Brahman god, a being from the heavenly deva realm who had been allowed twelve human lives to speak through over a period of three hundred years. This woman was his twelfth and final channel. For the past twenty years he had been working with her and had found her very cooperative. She donated money wherever he guided her, not thinking of herself.

  I asked why the spirit came into the human realm like this. He replied that the human realm was his special interest; he liked to help those stuck in it. Through this woman, he was able to give advice, heal the sick, and encourage respect for the gods. He talked about his studies of religion and spiritual languages in his last earthly incarnation as a Brahman priest, before he ascended to the deva realms.

  The song motioned me to come closer. The old woman’s hands took my own. Through her thick glasses, the song squinted at my palm. “You’ll succeed at whatever you try hard to accomplish,” Tham translated. “But money slides through your fingers. I see a lot of travel ahead, but don’t leave Thailand too soon. Don’t be hasty! But do be careful or you may not be able to avoid a terrible accident.”

  The spirit said he wanted to talk more with me, but others had come to him with pressing concerns and he needed to attend to their needs. I moved back and watched Tham’s mother walk to the front on her knees. The song probed her sore leg firmly; Ma winced under pressure.

  “Something in your leg is twisted. It needs to be set straight,” the spirit spoke.

  Ma nodded, her face contorted.

  The song breathed deeply several times, then took a large gulp of whiskey-cola. The old woman bent low to the knee, then sprayed the drink from her mouth all over Ma’s leg. Ma crawled back from the altar, bowed gratefully. She rose shakily to her feet and limped home to prepare dinner.

  The woman who had come with us from the house complained of a sore ankle. The song gave it a similarly rough probe, but no anointing with whiskey and Coke. Softly, the woman asked about her future. The spirit’s palm-reading contained no encouragement. She had no job, only delays and disappointments, and was in love with a man who didn’t love her. All true, Tham confirmed. The woman was in love with Tham’s younger brother, who had fallen out of love with her and gone on to someone else. At least he’d been honest about it. But she had become a part of the family. While her ex-lover had moved to Bangkok, she still spent most of her time with his family. Nobody stopped her from trying to hang on.

  A villager entered, interrupting the audience to ask the spirit for one piece of urgent advice. He had built a new house, and needed an auspicious date, quick, for the move.

  “But your new house is not yet ready,” said the song sternly. “How can you move, when you have not built a home for the spirits?”

  The man’s eyes fell to the ground. He stuttered. In many parts of rural Thailand, households keep a miniature spirit shrine outside, usually on top of a short pole. They look rather like bird-houses for the gods. Daily offerings to the local spirits are left at the door. By appeasing them, one ensures domestic good fortune. Ignoring them invites their neglect or even ill will. The man apologized profusely for his lack of spiritual etiquette.

  “And in your present home,” the spirit continued, “I see the inside deva shrine covered with dust, the fruit rotting, the candles unlit, all pushed into a small corner in a side room, instead of in the center where the gods can bless your family with good fortune….”

  The man was sweating now, bobbing his head in meek agreement. When the spirit finished speaking, he bowed deeply, then rushed out, presumably to build a home for the gods as quickly as possible.

  When Tham’s fortune had been read, the spirit asked me to come forward again and ask more questions. I inquired, as politely as possible, why the Brahman-god chain-smoked and drank whiskey. Was this not hard on the old woman? The song nodded sagely. Such possession was indeed most taxing to the mortal body. He had to be careful to put just a tiny bit of himself into her. Even so, her body needed the tobacco and booze to stay calm and relaxed. In fact, the spirit announced, today’s possession had gone on longer than usual. It was time to depart. He needed to take good care of her, the spirit said with a smile, one hand affectionately patting the other. We said cordial goodbyes. The woman shuddered as if having a violent fit. She removed her glasses, took off her white outer garb, and asked in her timid, grandmother’s voice if we’d had a good conversation with the spirit.

  “So what was your fortune?” I asked Tham that night while the family slept below us on mats in the common room. Tham had given me her old bedroom and had arranged a cot for herself beside Sammy in the room next door. She came in and sat beside me on the bed that night, wearing a Chinese silk robe that came down to just above her knees, deep blue with a red dragon embroidered on the back. The dark wooden walls blended with the screened wooden windows
and the black sky beyond; moist night air blew in, filled with the nectar from the blossoming trees that surrounded the house.

  “I don’t believe in fortunes,” she said, gazing out into the darkness. “I make my own fortune.”

  “We sure go to enough fortune-tellers.”

  For many Thais, spirits, or phis, both good and bad, figure prominently in everyday life. Homes, farms, rice paddies, offices, government buildings—even night clubs in Bangkok’s red-light district— sport tiny doll-like houses where good spirits are said to reside. “In Buddhism, there is nothing against this kind of belief,” Mr. Chatsumarn says. “Before I go out, I tell my spirit to please take care of my house and kids for me. It’s a kind of living together.” To avoid trouble, a spirit must live in its own abode, called in Thai phra phum, and not in the real house.That means the spirit house, which usually sits atop a pole, must be comfortable and not fall in the shadow of the main structure. In crowded Bangkok, the spirit house often ends up on the roof. If the main house is enlarged, so is the spirit house. Among the status-conscious middle class in Bangkok, no longer is a spirit satisfied with only a one-pole house. Keeping up with the Joneses —Bangkok-style—means luring the spirit with a four-pole abode.

  —Sheila Tefft, “Thai Spirit Houses,” Christian Science Monitor

  “It’s for your interest,” she shrugged. “If I believed in fate, I’d still be in this village. You don’t know what it is to be a Thai woman. You get two choices: you can be miserably married or a whore. Nobody needs a fortune-teller to tell them that. But I escaped.”

  She opened her closet door and rummaged through old plastic-covered dresses to a box at the rear. She came back with a black-and-white photo album. We flipped through, looking at her girlhood pictures. She had always been gorgeous, the darling of the family.

  “This is my first boyfriend,” she said, pointing to a fleshy young Thai wearing dark sunglasses and smiling gallantly. A willowy young Tham pressed against his side. “He helped me move to Bangkok, away from my parents. They would never let me see him. He was several years older than I was, but I was in love and he meant the world to me. I worked in the city and never saw enough of him. I was glad to be free, but sometimes I wondered why we only made love in my apartment, why he never stayed all night, why I never knew where he lived. So one day I followed him from work, back to his house, back to his wife. I watched the children playing out front, and I knew my parents were right about him. But I knew he loved me too….”

  She flipped the pages. I stopped her at a photograph of her and her boyfriend kneeling before a Buddhist monk in the middle of some kind of ritual. The boyfriend’s smile had been replaced with a sullen, fearful look.

  “Father insisted. It was never legal, only religious, for the sake of saving face in our village. It’s not against the law in Thailand for a man to have two wives. They said I was lucky. But I could never…You don’t know what happens to women in my situation. Usually the man gets away and the girl goes home to live with her parents. She doesn’t care what they do with her anymore. They arrange a marriage to a nice neighbor boy. Soon the boy discovers her heart is broken, so he goes off and finds a pretty young girl. The wife has a baby, gives him all her love, spoils him, and he grows up just like his father.”

  I moved to put my arm around her in comfort. She played idly with my fingertips, gazing out the dark window.

  “Some girls, the families don’t take them back, or they’re too ashamed—they run away to Bangkok and can only find work as whores. But not me. I made it to America, where you can build your own life. I had my own business. Sure, James Bond is a jerk, but I had lovers and I did as I pleased. They treated me well, they treated me well…”

  “Mommy!” a small voice whined.

  The door pushed open. I pulled away from her. Sam came in, rubbing his eyes.

  “Sammy, what are you doing up?”

  “I had a dream, Mommy. I was scared.”

  “All right, lover,” she rocked him in her arms. “Now you go back to bed. Mommy will be in in a few moments.”

  At dinner the following night I met Tham’s father for the first time. He’d taken early retirement from his job as a police officer to devote himself full time to alcohol. Ma had kicked him out of the house almost a decade ago. For years the family saw next to nothing of him. Recently, however, he had come wandering around again, sometimes appearing regularly for meals for weeks at a time. He looked half emaciated, with clawlike hands and thick nails yellowed by tobacco. Some of his teeth were broken or missing. His level, bloodshot eyes looked like those of a sick old lion slinking around the edges of the pride. After introductions, he pointed to my near-shaven head, then stroked his own naturally bald dome. When Tham explained I had recently been in a monastery, he grasped my hand warmly and pulled me to sit by his side. He grabbed Tham roughly by the arm, commanding her to interpret. She shook free and sat down, graciously, on the other side of him.

  “You see,” she explained, “when Father was young, he spent three months in a temple. Oh, it’s nothing special. At that time, every young man had to do it, just to become respectable. A way of showing self-control and maturity. It showed you were ready for marriage. I can hardly believe it—now he’s saying he’s been thinking of going back to the temple for the rest of his life! He’s the meanest son-of-a-bitch I know, and he’s thinking of becoming a Buddhist monk! He says he wants to go there with you. I don’t know. It’s probably the whiskey talking.”

  “Tell him thanks for the offer, but I’ve just gotten out of one temple. It’ll be a while before I’m ready to go into another.”

  “He says he’ll wait for you, patiently.”

  Pa raised a glass of orange soda—he was forbidden whiskey in the house—and downed it with a wince. My interest in Thai trance channelers intrigued the old man. He recommended I visit a song several villages away who was so famous that believers came from Bangkok to have their fortunes told. He said a drinking buddy of his, a taxi driver, was a devotee of the song. He’d send him around in a couple of days, to take us for a visit.

  Tham stood up to help with dinner preparations. Pa clutched her arm and tried to force her back down. He was clearly far from finished with our conversation. She tried to pull free, but he tightened his grip. Tham tore loose with a short, savage yell and glared at him, breathing heavily, her eyes filled with undisguised hatred. Ma stuck her head in from the kitchen, a carving knife in one hand, and a headless, bleeding chicken in the other. She hollered at the old man, pointing to the door with the red tip of the blade. He curled his claws into fists, made as if to stand, then fell back, staring glumly at the lines of the green linoleum. He looked over at me with doleful eyes, tried a weak smile, muttered something in Thai, and shook his head. The rest of the family smiled and resumed talking as if nothing had happened.

  The cabby was an oily-haired man with a puffy face and polished white dentures. On the ride out to the famous song’s place, he asked Tham for my opinion of spirit mediums, perhaps somewhat ill at ease about bringing a foreigner into the spirit’s presence. I said it seemed quite logical that beings from another realm could speak through chosen individuals in this one, although in our society when a different personality, or multiple personalities, took over somebody’s body, this was usually diagnosed as a mental disorder.

  I sensed that much of my explanation was being left out of Tham’s interpretation. It was hard to get across to the cabby just what I thought. If there were no truth to the song’s predictions, the superstition would have died out long ago. That trance channeling occurred across many cultures seemed to me to indicate that something extraordinary was indeed going on. But maybe spirit mediums just tapped into our collective mind. Perhaps subconsciously they saw things that our societies had taught us to ignore. Some intuitive people may have been driven crazy by not being able to express what they perceived, especially in Thailand, where peace and harmony were valued much more highly than confronting the truth. Only
a spirit from another realm, someone powerful and with lots of status, could speak some things out loud. A song’s words thus became sanctified and mystical, and made the individual worthy of respect for his or her gift. At the same time, the medium was free of blame for his or her intuitions and their consequences. They didn’t even remember any of it—a kind of socially useful, controlled craziness.