by Various
Arriving at the riverside, Tangmoo spotted his little brother Nataphun vacantly digging holes in the sand.
“Hey, Tangmoo,” Nataphun said.
“Aren’t you going to watch?” Tangmoo asked. “The wishes are here.”
“Nah, don’t wanna. I’m hungry. I wish time would go faster so I could have supper.”
“M’okay,” Tangmoo said, shrugging.
A bit farther down, where the tranquil Mae Ping River was now the scene of a splashing and churning bustle, Tangmoo picked a butterfly orchid, merely on impulse. As he did so, the orchid’s calyx shook, causing minute grains of pollen, invisible to the naked eye, to drift into the air and be carried upstream by a sudden gust of wind. A tremor went through the village. Those who peeled rice looked up from their work. Lovers fell silent. And the pollen? It landed on one of bored little Nataphun’s nostrils. As soon as the boy took a breath, a rare allergy made him fall asleep instantly, only to be woken by the chirping of crickets about an hour later. Surprised by the swift fulfillment of his wish, Nataphun ran home to fill his growling stomach.
But this, the same as with the dragonflies, was purely coincidental, and nothing should be read into it.
By now the surface of the river was teeming with krathongs. Like any other boy in Doi Saket, Tangmoo had been told the tragicomic story of Loi Krathong’s origins countless times, and so he was aware of the invaluable influence of the village he called home. Seven hundred years ago Neng Tanapong, daughter of a Brahman priest in the kingdom of Sukhothai, had been playing on the riverbank. The wench was so startled by the appearance of river goddess Phra Mae Khongkha (who by coincidence had picked the exact same spot to take a bath) that she made an unfortunate tumble into the water and drowned. Everyone knew that, in death, she read the wishes in the lotus boats passing above her dead eyes and made them all come true. And everyone knew that this event in honor of the river goddess was reenacted in Doi Saket every year, and it was they who granted the wishes with their ceremony.
Oh, the festival! All over Thailand people drank themselves into a stupor on cheap whiskey, sang their throats sore at moonlit karaoke parties, and made love, night after night, beneath fireworks and lantern lights. Everyone, everyone launched krathongs on the water and floated khom loi10 into the air. Everyone made wishes.
But while the people in Chiang Mai partied, the villagers of Doi Saket set to work. Under guidance of the wayward harvester driver Sungkaew, they strung nets across the river and caught the krathongs. Men rowed to and fro in tiny boats while women waited on the bank to unburden them. Burnt incense sticks were tossed onto a pile of smoldering embers, spreading a fabulous aroma that the sultry breeze carried across the rice fields like a whispered message. Candle stubs were melted down, the wax used as fuel for the khom loi. Money, jewelry, and other valuables sacrificed to the river goddess were collected by the Puu Yaybaan and pinned to the timber tree frame standing beside the stone phallus outside the temple, so that all could follow the example of the generous ones. Woe the mortal who tried to steal: a night of dangling upside down from the holy daeng tree would await him, and a next life as the larva of a dengue mosquito.
“Filthy thieves,” the Puu Yaybaan would fume.
But the wish notes were what mattered most. If they were still legible they were collected in a pile: a life filled with love and happiness here, a new hip joint for my mother there, and sometimes entire wish lists: 1) A fair amount of luck; 2) 20,000 baht11 (that ain’t too much, is it?); 3) A bit more headway with my neighbor girl Phailin, though rumor has it that just recently she spread her legs for chicken farmer Kai, and if that’s true then never mind; 4) A new screen door, which I would have bought ages ago if my boss Kemkhaeng wasn’t too bloody stingy to give me a leg up from time to time; 5) A broken leg for Kemkhaeng; 6) …
In other wish notes the ink had run so much from the journey on the water that special Ink Readers, initiated for the occasion, were sent into the river. Two monks, Sûa and Mongkut, were given the task of interpreting the running tendrils of ink beneath the water’s surface. For three days they swam back and forth, dragging themselves ashore, watery eyed, to reel off their messages to the scribes on the riverbank before they submerged again. If no note was found at all, the krathong was taken to the Exalted Abbot Chanarong12, who would metaphysically distill the intended wish from its little boat.
Everyone in the village would tell you that they had once seen the Exalted Abbot floating a meditative little bit over his prayer rug, a krathong in his hands and mountains upon mountains of them beneath his exalted bare feet. All of them had been told the story so often in their formative years that they firmly believed it to be true. Yet no one had seen it with their own eyes. In fact, the Abbot was a senile old man who had trouble reading the verses and, more important, who drooled a lot. If at some point he had been able to levitate, he had forgotten how ever since his first walker. Still, after much heated debate, voting, counting, and recounting, the village council had decided that clairvoyance was more sacred than dementia and therefore should always be given the benefit of the doubt. And so they unscrambled the Exalted Abbot’s inarticulate prattle, and every single wish from northern Thailand was read in anticipation of the ceremony to be performed on the final night.
And the wishes?
They came true. At least, some of them.
Because in the dead of night the Puu Yaybaan, accompanied by his monks Sûa and Mongkut, drove his rickety pickup truck to the village of San Phak Wan. On the way over, they spotted a water buffalo in radiant health and coaxed it from its rice paddy. While Mongkut kept watch outside the hut of sleeping Bovorn S., the other two swapped his terminally ill buffalo, more dead than alive where it lay tied to a rope, for the perfectly fit animal. Downstream, they tossed the weakened ox off a bridge. It resurfaced only once, mooing, and after that nothing more was heard besides the cicadas.
“SUCH GOOD FORTUNE!” the Puu Yaybaan declared when the new day dawned. “BOVORN S. FROM SAN PHAK WAN FILLED HIS KRATHONG WITH ONE HUNDRED BAHT AND HIS WIFE’S GOLDEN RING, AND HIS WISH CAME TRUE! HIS BUFFALO IS SPRY AS A JUMPING MOUSE! DO AS HE DID, DONATE GENEROUSLY, AND YOUR WISHES SHALL BE HEARD! OH, AND PLEASE SPECIFY YOUR NAME CLEARLY ON YOUR WISH NOTE—BUDDHA IS NOT A MINDREADER, YOU KNOW.”
The rumor spread like wildfire through the PA systems of the surrounding villages and the villages beyond, and it was not long before the miracle was confirmed by a rapturous Bovorn S., who wept tears of joy on the hide of his bewildered buffalo.
Huh? some people in Doi Saket thought. But the ceremony isn’t until tomorrow night. We haven’t even granted his wish yet.
Sûa, however, stated that the ritual in itself was purely symbolical and that granting wishes is about karma (of the wish granters, of course, shrewdly leaving aside whether he was referring to the gullible villagers or the flaccid monks), and that was the end of it.
More riches than ever before were piled onto the krathongs. From far and wide, people flocked to the temple to donate money, which looked very handsome on the money tree (making it increasingly healthy) and then looked very handsome in the Puu Yaybaan’s bank account (making him increasingly wealthy). The temple didn’t see a penny. A shamefully puny amount was budgeted for granting a wish here and there, just to keep the legend alive. The Exalted Abbot invariably mumbled a thank-you and would have no part of the deception, for if there was anyone who would not take the old geezer seriously, it was the Puu Yaybaan.
Of course, the villagers themselves had their wishes too. Countless wishes. Widely varying wishes that would be floated into the air on wish balloons during the ceremony. And even though they were adept at granting wishes and so, at least in theory, should be able to reshape their own lives, every man needs wishes to be able to believe in something.
The well-bellied weed exterminator Uan wished for love, and if that wasn’t in the books, the idea of love, and if that wasn’t in the books, a cursory embrace.
The mournful neig
hbor Isra had been wishing for a letter from her grandson Om for six years, as he had gone to study “computer” in Singapore and never wrote.
The well-mannered crab huntress Kulap wished for a gong, just because she loved the sound.
Tangmoo’s benevolent father Gaew wished for a good life for his children, Singha, Nataphun, and Noi, and of course for Tangmoo himself.
The philosophical irrigator Daeng wished he were dead.
The adulterous rice peeler Somchai begged for potency in her husband’s ever-failing manhood so that she could finally, after all these years, take his virginity.
Even the corrupt monk Sûa had a wish. He wished that, just for once, he could set eyes on river goddess Phra Mae Khongkha, even though he did not believe in her.
Only young Tangmoo wished for nothing. He had never wished for anything. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I had something to wish for? he often thought. Tangmoo approached the world in all sincerity, always searching for something worth wishing for, but he never found anything that moved him sufficiently to engender a desire. All the things that occupied the other villagers, their disputes and worries, their questions and futilities, their dramas and embraces … nothing felt like it was more than what it seemed to be. And so Tangmoo’s life became a string of pure experiences that he endured, and in which he performed no appreciable miracles.
But on that first night of Loi Krathong he could not sleep. Silently, he padded outside. Farther down, by the river, the night shift and the Ink Readers continued their work, but here in the village only the chichaks13 were awake.
Tangmoo looked up. Thousands upon thousands of khom loi floated like swarms of fluorescent jellyfish against the nocturnal canopy. The sky was laden with wishes. The closest ones seemed to be moving more quickly, drifting southward. When they reached higher altitudes they veered west, toward the mountains. Where are they going? Tangmoo wondered. They all drifted past steadily, purposely, aiming for an unknown destination. They flew toward the edge of the universe and then beyond.
Next morning, Tangmoo set out at dawn. He walked all day, for miles and miles, and when evening fell he reached the golden temple of Doi Suthep, situated on a hilltop with a view of Chiang Mai. The Gentle Abbot gave him a small bowl of rice to eat and sat beside him on the steps.
“Why have you come here, my son?” the wise man asked.
Tangmoo nodded at the purple sky above the city and said, “The wishes. I want to know where they’re going.”
The Gentle Abbot had an exceptional talent for invoking Buddha’s teachings on all relevant and irrelevant matters people came to him for advice on. Even when a dilemma seemed nigh on impossible to solve, he would astound his audience with the only correct and always uniform answer: that the question was confusing and therefore by definition irrelevant, as the purpose of any spiritual life is to avoid confusion. And this was why the Abbot of Doi Suthep was the most beloved man in northern Thailand: he made everything seem so conveniently simple.
“Oh, no one knows,” the Abbot enlightened in this case. He smoothed the wrinkles from his robe and smiled politely.
Is that it? anyone else might have thought, affronted. Is that what I trudged up this bloody mountain for? Barefoot? But not Tangmoo. Tangmoo looked at the confusion of fireworks over Chiang Mai and the procession of lights in the Night Bazaar, reflecting on the surface of the river that was or was not to take his life the very next day. The burning water, the whistles and bangs, the partying people, they all created a disorder so consistent that it reverted back into order. And everywhere, everywhere khom loi rose up into the air, as if the city were weeping inverted tears of fire.
“Chiang Mai consists of three worlds,” the Abbot explained. “The first world is the one you see before you. A world that is vibrant; living and partying and wishing. Then there’s the world above it, a world of serenity where people can rise above the mundane. By releasing their wishes, people try to reach that higher world, to become a part of it. They are two layers, sliding across each other.”
Tangmoo gazed at the khom loi, steadily drifting past above the chaos.
“But then there’s another world below,” the monk continued. “A world of alleys, of darkness, of backstreets and corruption. The world of the blind. You see? The surface, wild and light; the dark side below; and finally, above, the serene, the transcendent, wishing to do good. Looking at it like that, it’s very much like a human being. Chiang Mai, the Rose of the North, is a living, breathing person.”
“But what does that tell me about where the wishes go?” Tangmoo asked.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter where our wishes go,” the Abbot said. “Maybe the question should be how we ourselves can get there. Look over there.”
He pointed toward two khom loi rising up into the air with incredible speed, overtaking all the rest. Suddenly one of them started glowing more brightly and veering sharply to the west, while the other flickered, fluttered down, and fizzled out. “What do you think was the matter with those two wishes? Why did they ascend more rapidly than the others?”
“Maybe they were really burning wishes,” Tangmoo guessed.
“Love? Happiness? Money? What could be worth going so fast for?”
“The wish to desire something…”
“Or maybe the wish to release all desire.”
But … Tangmoo thought. But …
“And why is one wish so strong and sure, while the other extinguished like a candle?”
“Maybe it was a bad wish, a wish for revenge, a death wish…”
“Or maybe it was simply a matter of sloppy fuel distribution,” the monk said, shrugging, and then he smiled. “It’s time for you to go home now, my son. Your parents must be worried.”
The boy has a good heart, the Gentle Abbot thought benevolently after they had said goodbye. He ordered a tuk-tuk to be waiting for the boy to take him home as soon as he reached the last of the three hundred steps leading down. When the wise man entered the temple, carrying Tangmoo’s empty rice bowl in his right hand, he tripped on his robes and landed flat on his face. The rice bowl shattered on the floor. Miraculously, the Abbot himself was unharmed. However, while sweeping up the shards he was soon overcome by a long-nourished but diligently repressed desire to express his creativity, like fashioning pretty little mosaics. All night long, the monk worked with the shards and felt happier than he had in a long time. And so the Gentle Abbot, not nearly as far along on his path toward Enlightenment as young Tangmoo himself, saw his fondest wish fulfilled, smashing all of his china in the process.
But this, in all probability, had nothing to do with the boy’s coming.
The next day all the dirt roads of Doi Saket had been strung with lanterns. In every color and size they dangled from branches, electric wires, and scurrying chickens. More had been placed on walls, in gardens, and around the temple square. The well-bellied weed exterminator Uan busied himself with the table setting at the west end of the square, making sure that everyone he disliked would be seated far, far away from him, directly beneath the booming speakers of the karaoke set. All the villagers were busy preparing delicacies or setting up the thousands of khom loi so they could all be lit simultaneously that night—a logistical nightmare of incredible proportions.
When evening finally fell, after the exhausted Ink Readers had returned from the river with dripping robes and a last handful of wishes and the Exalted Abbot had fallen asleep on his meditation rug … that’s when the party started in Doi Saket. People sang and stuffed themselves like there was no tomorrow. Boys caught lizards and bet on which one would run fastest. Girls tied strings to brightly colored atlas butterflies and led them around like kites. Men and women lasciviously tore at one another’s clothes and limbs beneath the bewitched phallus.
“ALL RIGHT, FOLKS. THAT’S ENOUGH,” the Puu Yaybaan broadcasted around ten o’clock that night. “LET THE CEREMONY BEGIN!”
The Exalted Abbot (still asleep and therefore perfectly resigned to his role) was
carried outside in his seat to lead the villagers in meditation. The silence that descended on the crowd was so deafening that even the crabs in the rice field looked up in surprise; this was the only time of the year when all the villagers collectively kept their mouths shut (because even at night most of them never stopped talking in their sleep).
Only Tangmoo was no part of this communal introspection, just like he had been no part of the communal festivities. After shoring the dead branch on the teng-rang tree with a fresh piece of wood, he had retreated to a quiet place behind the temple. He had been sitting there for hours, his back resting against a wheel of the giant mechanical replica of river goddess Phra Mae Khongkha, which would be rolled out into the temple square during the ceremony. By releasing their wishes, people try to reach that world. Tangmoo felt like a drowning person, flailing. If releasing desire was the pinnacle of achievement, how then was he supposed to justify his own existence?
A portentous shrew taking a nap on the wooden axle of the river goddess suddenly pricked up its ears. A second later it scurried off, squeaking. It seemed spooked, Tangmoo thought, as if it had spotted a tiger. Then he heard approaching voices. Suddenly, Tangmoo felt afraid, as he was not supposed to be here. On an impulse, he dove into the same bushes the shrew had disappeared into and hunkered there silently, unaware of his right foot balancing on a dry twig on the verge of snapping. (Ironically, the confounded twig came from a teng-rang tree; a much smaller specimen than the one threatening his father’s house, but with much more far-reaching consequences.)
From his hiding place, Tangmoo watched as the generally respected Puu Yaybaan and the monks Sûa and Mongkut appeared. The threesome stopped beside the wooden construction of the river goddess, not two feet from where Tangmoo was concealed. He was afraid to breathe. The men were engrossed in a heated argument, of which only snippets reached Tangmoo’s ears: “… mustn’t raise suspicion…” and “… didn’t dive myself silly for nothing, dammit…” and “… six wishes granted, that’s more than…” and “Fine! But it’s going to come out of your share…”