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

by James O'Reilly

  We settled ourselves, Katai kneeling, the spirit-man sitting cross-legged, me off to one side fiddling with my tape recorder, the women in the background on cushions, ready to enjoy a morning’s entertainment. Porn’s husband, who I had not seen before, turned up. He greeted us all courteously, and hovered at the back of the group. He looked like he had recently woken up. I saw the old wedding photo of them on the wall, he with his hair slicked across from a dead-straight parting, Porn with her veily little hat on, the signature of the photographer almost faded out in the bottom corner.

  The pha khwan, laden with offerings, stood between Katai and the spirit-man. Everything looked neat and succulent and glossy on the silver tray. The bottle of rice whisky had been opened. All was ready for the calling of the khwan.

  The ceremony began quietly at first.The spirit-man asked Katai to say her name, though he knew it already. He asked her about herself, her place and date of birth. He noted she was born in the pee katai, the Year of the Hare. He ran through the circumstances in which her khwan was lost. When he spoke it was partly to her, partly to the rest of us. The tone was one of exposition, very matter-of-fact. He might have been opening a meeting of the local PTA.

  He touched all the offerings on the pha khwan: gentle, fussy movements. A silence fell. Dust moved through the sunlight. He opened one of his exercise books. The pages were filled with neat handwriting, Thai script, on alternate lines. He began to chant. The chant had no tune, just a couple of tones, up and down, a soporific slow-motion sirening. His voice was catarrhal. He stopped to clear his throat. He had the look of someone pausing after effort. When he settled back into the chant there was no sign of that effort, but you felt it was there.

  I didn’t understand any of it, and a lot of it was unintelligible to Katai when we played the tape back a few hours later. She said that some of it was in Pali, the old ritual language of Buddhism: she recognized a common Pali formula, Namo tassa sammasam buddhassa, which means, “I worship the enlightened Buddha.” Some of it was Burmese, and some a language she didn’t recognize at all. Some of it was obscured by the noise of trucks and motorcycles on the street below, so much louder on tape than they had seemed at the time.

  The preamble went as follows: “Glory and greatest prosperity. Today is a day of great auspiciousness and purity. On this day the garuda will roar. On this day parted families will see one another again. On this day we will recall how King Asoka bestowed the seven blessings upon the people. On this day little children will learn to speak the tongue of their forebears.”

  He spoke of the 32 khwan, which are really 32 mini-khwan, each a part of the khwan, residing in different parts of the body. He spoke of creatures called ngueak. These are apparently river-spirits, in serpent-form like the naga, but lacking any of the latter’s beneficent aspect. They are wicked, predatory creatures, and were doubtless involved in the incident in the river. Any appeal to them would be useless—a different and more difficult rite must be performed to reverse their influence—so the spirit-man was appealing to the higher authority of the naga to get the fled spirit back. He spoke of “Lady Coconut Flower,” a kind of wood-nymph, to whom Katai was likened. It was for Lady Coconut Flower that the first soo khwan ceremony of all was performed, by Grandfather Tanha and Grandmother Maya, when she was sick and her khwan hung outside her.

  Then he invoked the khwan itself. “Come, O khwan. Let not the khwan of the head be discouraged, nor any of the thirty-two khwan of the young girl’s body. You may return here safely. Be content. Look, we have prepared a feast for you. We have laid out pretty robes for you to wear, a mirror for you to see yourself, though we cannot see you.” (These items were represented in banana leaf: a rich man’s soo khwan would have real little clothes and mirrors for the khwan.) “We have prepared a splendid feast for you.” He enumerated the tempting goodies on the dish: chicken and whisky, white rice and sugar-cane, betel and frangipani….

  This went on for about a quarter of an hour. All the while Katai knelt, head bowed, her right hand touching the pha khwan. The spirit-man cleared his throat one last time, concluded the chant, and we all sat in silence, a deep silence, for maybe two minutes, like Remembrance Day. I didn’t seem to hear the trucks and motorcycles rolling down the street below. They’re on the tape, together with a bird that sounds like it was singing straight into the mike, but I didn’t hear them then at all.

  The spirit-man sat looking thoughtful.Then he gave a little nod, signifying completion of some sort, and everyone shifted and relaxed, and the normality of the room closed in over the silence, like water over sand. The spirit-man was cheerful, as if the difficult bit was now done with. Katai explained to me later that it was at that point during that silence, that her khwan returned, enticed by the spirit-man’s chant and by the knick-knacks of the offering. “It came into the pha khwan then,” she said, “though not yet into me.”When we played the tape, it was the silence that she wanted to hear again, and the singing of the bird that sounded like it was inside the room.

  Next came a very elegant bit of the ceremony. The spirit-man took one of the flowers from the pha khwan, dipped it in a bowl of water, and dabbed Katai’s hands with it. He repeated the motion several times, sprinkling a bit of water on each of the principal offerings. Then he took a few choice morsels—a bit of chicken skin, some boiled rice, some sugared marrow, a quid of miang—and put them in her hand.

  This was food for Katai to give to her khwan to encourage it on the last leg of its return. Here the spirit-man recited three brief verses.These are called kham jam, “feeding words.”They are spoken while the khwan “feeds” on the morsels in the supplicant’s hand. The word jam is used in Thai to refer to the old-fashioned pre-utensil way of eating, by dipping balls of rice into a central bowl of food. Earlier in the ceremony, the spirit-man had invoked Khao Jam, a minor spirit with special responsibility for “feeding” khwan.

  One of the kham jam went: “Come, O khwan, feed at her hand. Let her be strong and daring, let her be free of illness, let her open her palms and gain what she wishes. Come feed.”

  Finally, to seal in the returned khwan, the spirit-man tied the “auspicious thread.” He used a Muang term for this, faay mongkon, but the Thai generally call it sai sin. The auspicious thread is simply a length of string tied, with appropriate blessing, around the wrist. Its most important use is in rituals like this, but the sai sin can be done in a casual way by anyone with the wisdom or status to do it—a parent, an older person, a monk. The tying of the auspicious thread around the wrist is a tying in of luck, health, and happiness, and in this case a sealing in of the khwan, without which these attainments are impossible anyway.

  This wound up the ceremony, but, good to her word, Katai asked the spirit-man to do the sai sin for me too, because I had been in the Mekong as well. I knelt before the bespectacled shaman, trying not to dwell on his headmasterly aspect. He spoke a couple of brief formulae, dabbed my hands with petal-water, and tied on the white threads. One of them fell off a couple of weeks later, but the one on my left wrist remained for months, yellowed and tattered, and one night in Bangkok I actually patched it up with sellotape for fear of what might happen to my luck, health, and happiness if it broke.

  Katai was congratulated, the spirit-man was thanked, Porn was paid, and we went on our way. The day had hazed over. If felt like we had been at Porn’s for a long time, though it was little more than an hour. Katai was full of energy, greeting strangers. By chance or design we passed the gates of Wat Pa Sak, and there was Moonsong, sweeping the path to the sala with a besom broom, near enough to the road to talk with passers-by.

  He greeted me with the words, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

  We talked about the morning’s ceremony. I asked him if, as a monk, he disapproved of the old cults like the soo khwan. He said no, on the contrary: at certain times, for instance during ordination, a kind of soo khwan was performed by and for monks.

  He asked me what the English word for
khwan was. I said I supposed it was “spirit.”

  “And do you believe in your spirit?”

  I burbled a bit about “life force” and “psychic energy.” I observed that the state of khwan hai, spirit loss, is probably what we in the West would call “depression.”

  Moonsong is a monk and former tuk-tuk driver who makes an appearance in Charles Nicholl’s “Moonsong and Martin Luther” in Part One.

  —JO’R and LH

  He leant on the broom handle, nodding sagely. “Hmmm, depression.” He sounded dissatisfied by the word. It seemed like a narrow, stingy sort of word the way he said it. He composed himself, a scholar settling into his subject. “The word khwan, I believe, is from the Chinese word kwun, which expresses much the same meaning.” He turned the broom upside-down and traced some lines in the dust with the handle. “This is the character for kwun,” he explained. “It is composed of two characters: that one means ‘demon’ or ‘spirit,’ and this one means something like your breath, or the mist on the river, I do not know the right word. Also when water boils.” His hand trembled in imitation of something light and floating: we settled on the word “vapour.”

  “So, these are the first meanings of khwan. It is a spirit, it is a breath or a vapour, it is something inside us that is always ready to fly away. There are also some Thai words that belong with the word khwan. One is ghwan, which means ‘smoke’. Another is phan.”

  Here he turned to Katai, as if she could better explain. “The phan is a dream, Charlie.”

  “Sometimes when you dream,” said Moonsong, “you go off into the world of the khwan.”

  Katai said, “Also phan is the word for our sweetheart. When we are in love with someone we say khwan ta: you are the khwan of my eyes.”

  Moonsong stared monkishly into the middle distance, into some space where the meanings and memories of the sensual world lose their awesome power, then he continued, “When the khwan is gone, yes, you feel…depression. But look where it goes. It crosses a border, into the spirit-world. And when it comes back, when it is called back in to soo khwan, it brings back the air and the touch of the spirit-world. We cannot go across that border yet, but our khwan can. To lose your khwan is very difficult, very dangerous even, but you must lose it. You must let it go, and pray that it will return.”

  His hands motioned the freeing of a bird into the air, and his eyes seemed to follow it into the tall canopy of the teak grove.

  Charles Nicholl also contributed “Moonsong and Martin Luther” and “Poppy Fields” to this book.

  It has been said that ignorance is to Buddhism what original sin is to Christianity. By ignorance, the Buddha did not mean merely absense of knowledge, but an erroneous point of view. He particularly urged a new approach to the question of the nature of the self. To the Buddha the idea of a separate self was a mere intellectual invention, corresponding to no reality at all. The self, he argued, was plainly “a process in time,” not a single solid “thing” or “fact.”

  —Nancy Wilson Ross, Three Ways of Asian Wisdom

  PART FOUR

  IN THE SHADOWS

  DIANE SUMMERS

  Dark World of Gourmet Soup

  They climb bamboo poles 300 feet into total darkness to look for bird nests. But now the birds and a way of life are threatened by poaching and habitat loss.

  I LOOK UP INTO THE DARKNESS. THE CAVE ECHOES WITH THE twittering of birds. It’s damp and reeks of guano. Cockroaches and beetles crawl in a seething carpet over the cave floor. A scorpion scuttles up the rock wall into blackness. It’s my worst nightmare come true. Even my husband, Eric, who has climbed in the Himalayas, looks nervous about tackling this place.

  Ip, a 45-year-old Thai who climbs here daily, points upward to a flimsy tower of bamboo that reaches hundreds of feet into the blackness. With a boyish grin, Ip says to Eric, “Ma [come with me].” It is a challenge.

  We are in a vast cavern called Rimau, the Tiger Cave, on an island in the Andaman Sea off Thailand. Here erosion has sculpted caverns as large as cathedrals and labyrinths of winding tunnels. In these protected spots, edible-nest and black-nest swiftlets, about the size of sparrows, weave the nests that have been sought after for centuries to make bird’s nest soup. In Hong Kong, the world market for birds’ nests, one kilo sells for up to $2,000.

  Nest collectors report that swiftlet colonies are shrinking, perhaps the fault of poaching, perhaps of cutting the forests where the swiftlets feed. Dwindling bird populations may lessen the demand for the ancient skills of nest collection and extinguish a way of life along this coast. Before the birds and traditions disappear, Eric and I want to document the lives of the men who spend ten hours a day in caverns working by torchlight, scaling cliff faces hundreds of feet high and trusting their lives to a slender scaffolding of aged bamboo poles.

  Most fishermen of the Phuket Islands are either descended from Muslim wanderers who drifted north from Malaya and Indonesia over the ages, or are one of four distinct races, each with its own language, who are collectively (and I think wrongly) known as the “Sea Gypsies.”This appellation stems from their habit, before the tourist boom, of shifting their abodes from island to island, from beach to beach, with the change of monsoon seasons and with the movement of the fish.They would be better termed the “sea nomads,” for even today the sea people of Rawai herd the fish into nets on the bottom of the sea by walking along the sea bed at depths of 60 feet or more wearing only a mask and supplied with air by a decrepit compressor on board their longtail craft.

  —Tristan Jones, “An Island Between Two Worlds”

  No one before us has scaled the cliffs and photographed the Thai climbers from the heights, and the men are not accustomed to Westerners. They are a proud and independent people, descendants of Malay Muslim fishermen from the south. Their craft has been passed down from father to son for generations. If we are to win their respect, Eric cannot refuse to go up the bamboos in Rimau.

  Ip leads the way with two companions: a 55-year-old climber named Sahat and his 22-year-old son, Em. Eric follows, climbing barefoot like the Thais, without the security of ropes. Yet he weighs 30 pounds more. Bamboos that scarcely move under the nesters’ feline motions shudder and groan under Eric. Quickly, shadows envelop all four men, and only the red flames of their torches mark their progress. I stand below, wondering if I will see my husband again.

  For the nest collectors, the darkness and danger are just part of a day’s work. But in the climbers’ own way they do not take chances. In the cave they never speak words for fall, death, blood, or fear, in case such powerful words incite demons to cause an accident. Workers use a special vocabulary inside the cave. If a flashlight falls, it has “gone down.” A “slippery” bamboo is “wet.” If a vine breaks, it is “torn.”

  At one time the wives of the collectors did not oil their hair or sweep out their houses while their husbands were at work for fear the men would slip or be swept off the bamboo. Now many of the old beliefs have been replaced by pragmatism. Ip says, “You can judge the length of a man’s life by the way he maintains his bamboos.”

  Good bamboos are critical. The collectors’ determination to find nests takes them into many dangerous situations. In one cave, the birds enter through passages high in a cliff inaccessible to humans. Nest gatherers swim into the cave through a passage completely submerged in the sea. Another cave is accessible only to the slimmest of the collectors. Holding their breath, they slide through a narrow shaft that opens into the top of a chamber 600 feet high. No wonder the passage is called Rapo, “Born a Second Time.”

  The nests that drive men to such risks come from two species of swiftlets, distinguished from other swifts by their ability to form nests from strands of saliva. The birds regurgitate a long, thin, glutinous noodle from a pair of salivary glands under their tongues, winding it into an opaque, half-cup nest. The nest-building substance bonds quickly to the cave wall. Occasionally nest gatherers find a swiftlet that has died a prisoner of its own sal
iva, its claws or feathers caught by a strand that hardened like quick-drying cement.

  Swiftlets build their nests on a vertical face close to an overhang, or sometimes as far as two miles into underground tunnels. The birds navigate through the blackness of the caves by uttering a rapid clicking call. Scientists have found only one other group of birds, the unrelated oilbirds of the American tropics, with this echolocation ability.