Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

I stayed at a little guest house near the river where the floors were polished and clean and girls cooked, cleaned, and played pranks. They’d sneak up with cups of water and pour them over one another’s heads, then squeal with laughter.

  There’s a Thai word for this sort of nutty behaviour: sanook. All elements of life are suffused with it. Sanook roughly translates as “the fun factor.” Few enterprises are undertaken without first asking how much sanook will be involved, how much fun will that be? And if there won’t be fun, is it really worth doing?

  Those are all good questions. Thailand, unlike the other nations of Southeast Asia, was never under the thumb of a foreign power, a fact that has given Thais a confidence that doesn’t exist among the citizens of its neighbours. Despite Thailand’s penchant for sponging up Western culture, everything here retains an essence of the Thai way of doing things.

  There are exactly five first-person pronouns in English. Unfortunately, this is the kind of linguistic fact that bores most people, but bear with me. I have a point to make. The first-person pronouns are me, myself, and I, as well as two more, my and mine, the possessive first-person pronouns. Five. Count ’em. Exactly five.

  In Thai there are seventeen of these pronouns. I won’t pretend to understand the deeper intricacies of the language, but apparently these pronouns vary according to who’s speaking, whom they’re speaking to, and the relationship between the two. What I’m getting at is that language marks, very carefully, the social situation in which it takes place. It describes the amount of respect given by the one who’s talking, and the degree of respect for the one being spoken to. It’s another way of defining territory, I suppose, or at least making clear who wields the most power. In linguistic circles that’s known as pragmatics. For my money that’s one of the most interesting and subtle fields in the whole science of human relations.

  We tend to be a bit oblivious of social stratification in English because that language is one of the few tongues in the world that doesn’t directly mark it. Most Indo-European languages have familiar and formal pronouns. In French someone is addressed as tu or vous, depending on whether the situation is friendly or formal. English once had thou as opposed to you, but except in school studies of Elizabethan poetry, one doesn’t come across that distinction anymore. Sometime over the past four hundred years the familiar thou vanished and everyone in English became a little more equal — at least in everyday speech.

  Don’t get cocky, though. English doesn’t entirely lack such quirky pragmatic structures. We tend to define our relationships in a more underhanded and sneaky manner. Take a simple sentence such as “Open the window.” In real life we would rarely say something so bluntly. “Open the window” sounds like a command. In fact, it is a command, and we would only use this direct form in, say, yelling at a particularly out-of-control child, as in “Go to your room.” By itself these forms are almost rude in their directness, so we soften them with a politeness marker: “Open the window, please.”

  But that’s not really a whole lot better. What would really be heard in a true conversation is probably: “Would you mind opening the window?” or “Do you think you could open the window a smidgen?” Those sentences are already two levels of directness away from the simple request, “Open the window,” and that’s only the beginning of pragmatic complexity. A person could say, for example, “Do you find it hot in here?” which sounds suspiciously like a question. There’s no reference at all to a window or the opening of it, and yet to a native speaker of English (or a native speaker with some sensitivity), the meaning would be fairly clear: “Open the damn window.” That’s linguistic pragmatics at its finest.

  So what does all that have to do with Thailand? Actually, quite a lot. Thai is at the extreme other end of the spectrum. The pragmatic structures in Thai are overtly marked. The seventeen first-person pronoun markers I mentioned earlier are all about defining, very exactly, the relationships between people.

  In Thailand I’m a farang, a “foreigner.” It’s not a derogatory term. It’s just like calling the sky blue or water wet. That’s what I am — a pasty-faced foreigner. I’d left Bangkok behind and come down to Koh Samui in the Gulf of Siam. It’s one of a string of islands off the southeast coast of Thailand.

  In 1981 an airport runway was laid down through the palm trees here, and the little island has never been the same. Tourism took off. I wasn’t at all surprised to see a McDonald’s. But Starbucks? And yet there it was two hundred metres from the beach. Step right up and get your half-caf soy macchiato. Weird.

  Thailand is a country that’s never been occupied, except briefly by Japan in the Second World War, so its people don’t have a bad taste in their mouths about other cultures and ways of being. They seem to soak everything up and even delight in it.

  Out in front of the Starbucks was an old man with a dark, weathered face. He’d been a fisherman, I guess, once upon a time. When he turned, though, I noticed that he had English printing on the front of his T-shirt: LAUGH WHILE YOU CAN, MONKEY BOY. I had no idea what that meant, but it became a sort of motto for the rest of my trip. It was sanook again — laughing like a Monkey Boy.

  I was looking for something a little less touristy than Koh Samui. Thailand has a legendary farang beach culture. Remember the movie The Beach? Leonardo DiCaprio’s character sets off to find a beach untouched by commercialism — a hidden shore where a small community of travellers have set up camp, leaving the world behind. I wanted to discover something like that. Something pure. Something that matched the picture I had in my head of a perfect tropical paradise.

  So I took a long-tailed boat, in a rather jaw-clenching passage, over the open ocean, up to the next island of Koh Phangan. People had told me Koh Phangan was what Koh Samui had been thirty years ago, but with one big difference. Koh Phagnan has become world-famous for its full moon party. Every month, a few days before a full moon, thousands of young backpackers descend on Haat Riin Beach, turning it into a madhouse.

  Once upon a time the scene on Koh Phagnan was probably pretty cool — a big bonfire, some guitars, a lot of intoxicants under the starry dome — but now it was just crazy. The long white beach was transformed into a sea of bobbing human flesh. Ten thousand people raved all night long, spilling into the water under the greatest disco ball of them all — a tropical moon.

  It was already dark when I arrived at Haat Riin by boat, though the moon had yet to rise above the hills. No matter. Coming into shore was like a scene out of Apocalypse Now. Strings of lights were draped across the buildings that fronted the beach, and already the music was thumping so hard that I could hear it far out to sea over the rolling waves.

  The throngs were mostly the young über-cool from around the world, sporting uniforms of tattoos and coloured hair. They danced until daylight, roaming from bar to bar, buzzing on whatever they could find.

  The Dutch couple I’d come over with got themselves revved up with diet pills and Red Bull. It sounded a bit dodgy to me, so I stuck with green-brown bottles of Singha beer. I lost the Dutch couple for a while but found them again later, faces laughing through the crowds until eventually everything became a tremendous blur of limbs, grins, and bass lines. Here and there girls whirled balls of fire on long strings. The fire drew looping lines though the darkness around them — an effect I’m sure the diet pills enhanced.

  By the time the sky lightened, announcing morning, I was wet and tired and caked in sand. I’d had enough and made my way to the boats bobbing just out from shore. Soon I was skipping across the waves in the pink dawn, wishing only for a warm shower and a soft bed.

  Way up on the northeast coast of Koh Phangan I found a terrific beach in a double bay called Thong Nai Pan. I rented a thatch hut on the sand for $6. A plate of pad thai, a full meal in itself, cost fifty cents. I figured that if I sold everything I had back home, I could live on the beach for another twenty or thirty years.

  There was a neo-hippy air to the place. Cushions and low tables on bamboo platforms crea
ted little chilled-out cafés where, as in Amsterdam, you could get almost anything. One afternoon I glanced at my bare feet and realized I hadn’t seen my shoes for a couple of days. Later I found them outside a restaurant where I’d left them several days earlier.

  On one of my last days in Thailand I was walking on a distant stretch of beach, completely by myself, when I heard a crash in the nearby foliage. Right in front of me an elephant lumbered out of the palms, thundered onto the beach, and waded almost delicately into the surf. When the beast was about knee-high in the surf, it knelt and wallowed in the water.

  Then a man, the elephant’s handler as it turned out, came out of the trees. He stood beside me and watched the magnificent grey colossus gambol in the water. The handler had a long barbed stick to steer elephants. The hook would snag the beasts’ ears and turn them in the desired direction. I figured the elephant frolicking in the sea was employed to move the trees cleared for more hut enclosures. Still, as I drank in the spectacle before me, I realized how strange and surprising this world was — as unpredictable as a giggling Thai girl dumping cold water on a smug foreign head, or an elephant thumping out of the bush to take a bath.

  The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. “If you look out the left side windows, you’ll see Gunung Agung.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Boy, I never get tired of that.”

  I peered across the aisle. Framed in the airplane window was the largest volcano I’d ever seen. I had left Thailand, flying south, and was now somewhere over Indonesia, a chain of ancient volcanic islands. The most famous Indonesian volcano is Krakatoa between Java and Sumatra. It blew apart in 1883, causing the Earth’s weather patterns to change for several years.

  Gunung Agung was on the next island over. It shone in the morning sun, standing head and shoulders above the intricately terraced rice paddies of the incredible little island of Bali. “I fly over this all the time,” the pilot continued. “But I never get used to it. Look at that. It’s beautiful.”

  And it was.

  Our plane touched down at Denpassar Airport in the south of Bali. We were mobbed by touts as soon as we got out of the terminal. Most of them wanted to take us to Kuta Beach. That was where most of the tourists went; the place was a sprawl of partying Australians, drinking and surfing and then drinking some more.

  I’d had enough of beach life at the Full Moon Party in Thailand. To me Kuta isn’t what Bali is all about. If you get beyond the ravages of tourism, Bali is a tiny jewel and houses one of the world’s most remarkable cultures. So I managed to ward off the insistent young men tugging at my sleeves and boarded a minivan inland to Ubud, the centre of cultural life on the island and home to artists, dancers, and woodcarvers working at the very peak of human inventiveness.

  Most of Ubud gathers around a central street. At the top of it is the highway leading south or north, while at the bottom is the Monkey Forest Sanctuary. There’s not really much of a forest left, but there certainly are monkeys — nasty brutes that snap at your fingers. A roadside stand outside the sanctuary sells bananas to feed the simian brigands.

  I saw one girl hide a few bananas under her shirt, thinking the monkeys wouldn’t notice. She figured she could hand them out gradually. Big mistake. They were all over her. My method was to chuck all the bananas I had and take a quick step back. It was like witnessing a shark feeding, or mauling. The greedy little creatures stole from one another, bared their fangs, and exhibited the most appalling manners.

  A little deeper into the sanctuary is the first of three Hindu temples. Out in front are statues of lions and wild boars. Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, is there, too, as well as unfamiliar dog-faced demons and fat little gods. Around each of the midsections of these stone gods the villagers have draped black-and-white-checkered cloths representing the duality of good and evil. Red hibiscus flowers are tucked behind their stone ears, and offerings are placed in front of them: fruit and more flowers generally, but sometimes, inexplicably, full bottles of Coca-Cola or Sprite. Thirsty business, this being a god.

  Of course, the monkeys clamber all over the temples. We watched as one smart little thing bashed a coconut on the stone walls in a vain attempt to get it opened. Beside the temple, workers were mending a fence, and one of them had to halt work frequently and yell at the monkeys. He had parked his bicycle beside the trees, and the monkeys, one in particular, kept climbing up to chew on his bicycle seat, taking great chunks out with relish, chewing the foam, and running off when the poor man desperately attempted to stop him.

  Where, I thought, was the god of bicycle seats and why couldn’t he fight off these almost human-faced little devils?

  Indonesia is one of the great land bridges of the world. More than seventeen thousand islands are strung like a necklace in the sapphire waters on either side of the equator between Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. When Krakatoa exploded, an intense interest was focused on Indonesia and something quite unexpected was discovered. An ancient skull cap was unearthed on nearby Java in 1891. Tests showed it to be seven hundred thousand years old, and it captivated the scientific world. Was this the missing link? The flat plate of bone (and a femur that turned up later) is still hotly debated in the anthropological community. Creationists cry out that it’s only the skull of a gibbon, though most serious scientists have now classified the remains in the rather nebulous category of Homo erectus. This was a stage that preceded us — Homo sapiens — so it seems “people” have been wandering across the Indonesian archipelago for a very long time, since we first stood on our own feet.

  The indigenous people of Australia are believed by many to have migrated to their current location about seventy thousand years ago when the water levels of the world’s oceans were lower and they followed game across a land bridge connecting New Guinea and Australia. Still later, Indonesia was likely the launching pad of Polynesians sailing into the vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean.

  The Indonesian archipelago has always been a great crossroads, a bridge across worlds, and Bali sits in the middle of everything. The earliest writing in Bali is carved into a stone pillar near the village of Sanur on the east coast. It’s Sanskrit and dates to the ninth century A.D. The pillar was left by traders from India making their way across the islands, and it must have been these first merchants from the subcontinent who brought the first glimmers of Hinduism, a religion that took root a thousand years ago to form a great Hindu empire known as the Majappahit Kingdom.

  Eventually, however, a tidal wave of Islam swept into Indonesia from Malaysia. The Hindu dynasty faltered, and the last Majappahit king, with an entourage of scholars, artists, and intelligentsia, quietly slipped away to little Bali. There they set up the odd mix of religion and customs that is Balinese Hinduism. Agama Hine Dharma, as it’s properly known, focuses primarily on balancing the good and evil spirits of the world. It’s a tremendously complex system that addresses itself especially to the calendars and rituals involved in the planting and harvesting of rice.

  Rice cultivation is crucial to the Balinese way of life and has shaped the island both geographically and socially. Where it was once thick jungle, the quintessential Balinese landscape is now terraced with rice paddies. Each community has a subak or rice-growing organization that manages work, allocates the use of water, and plans irrigation schedules. What’s more is that all these schedules are arranged around a highly developed set of rituals based on the whims and acts of Hindu gods and goddesses.

  Everything is calculated from the various transportation systems of these deities (some fly on birds, others hitchhike on snakes) to their emotional colours and even to their associated compass directions. It’s tremendously elaborate, obtuse even, and it’s just the sort of menial job for which humans, always fiddling with numbers and schedules, are perfectly suited to undertake.

  I suppose that here I could come up with another bizarre linguistic fact, such as that the Balinese have one hundred and twenty different words for rice. That sounds plausible. In tru
th, though, it’s blatantly false.

  I have a problem with this idea of counting words. It’s said that Arabic has five hundred words for sand, and of course everyone knows the story about the Inuit and their many words for snow. That’s all wrong, of course. And even if a particular language has an overabundance of words for a specific thing, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In English there are a considerable number of words to describe the properties of light, far more than other languages. We have shine, sparkle, and twinkle. We have unbelievably subtle distinctions such as glimmer and glitter but, really, it doesn’t mean we see light better than other people. It doesn’t mean we’re the world’s authorities on the properties of light.

  So, no, the Balinese don’t have an especially large number of words for rice (and I doubt they have a word for snow at all). Practically speaking, there are only three categories referring to rice: padi, from which English gets the term paddy, as in rice (though the word here actually only refers to a growing rice plant); nasi, which is cooked rice; and beras, which refers to the harvested but not yet cooked rice.

  The real story of language is, as always, far more interesting. In Bali the people actually have a number of completely different languages to talk about rice. Remember that stuff about Thai pronouns and English indirectness? Well, that’s peanuts compared to what goes on in Bali.

  We’re into the territory of pragmatics again, and the languages of Indonesia contain some of the most interesting structures I’ve ever come across. In Bali there are five almost completely different forms of the language, depending on who’s speaking to whom and what the given situation is. To provide a simple example: on Java, the next island over, they speak in two forms:

  High Javanese: Menapa pandjenengan badé dahar sekul kalijan kaspé samenika?

  Low Javanese: Apa kowé arep mangan sega lan kaspé saiki?