by Alex Gunn
It was easier the second time around because, not only did I know where I was going, but I had a vague idea of what I was looking for. It was also late January; the middle of the Dry Season and the weather was cooler and made everything a lot easier. In the evening it was so cool that I even had to wear a jacket on my motorbike, some people even refer to it as cold.
Also, unlike last year, I didn’t have to write phone numbers down on scraps of paper and dash back to the public phone in a hotel lobby. I now had a brand new phone of my own, ingeniously designed without any wires which enables me to pop it in my pocket and take it with me. I am the last person in Thailand to own one. It’s the cheapest and most basic mobile phone you can buy (800 Baht in Big C supermarket if you’re interested). I don’t know how to change the date or time, it can’t take photos or access the internet but, wonderfully, in compensation for these deficiencies, it can be used as a torch. Who would have thought it! And anyway, as far as I am concerned I’m happy with it permanently being 2009.
I soon found a suitable house, on a sleepy gated village, with a club house and swimming pool (an instruction from my children) and about a dozen feral cats in a garden that was rapidly reverting back to its natural jungle state. The house was set back from the road and clearly hadn’t been occupied for ages.
Bougainvillea had gone crazy and was rampaging its way across what had once been a lawn, and a huge Tamarind tree and Jack Fruit tree were rapidly staking a major claim on the side garden. Dead palm leaves covered the drive in a thick spiky brown carpet and cats lazily chewed the heads off geckos in the shade of a dilapidated Spirit House.
I phoned the number that was hanging on a plastic “for rent” sign on the gate. I could, if I wanted, wait until it was dark and use the torch facility on my phone to illuminate the number, but thought this would be a pointless waste of time, besides which it would run the battery down super quick. I made the call. A woman’s voiced shrieked back at me… “ten minutes…you stay…no go…you no go mister...mister no go.”
“Okay, okay, I no go,” I replied.
While I waited I leant over the fence and reached into the Spirit House to stand up the tiny broken china figures of an old man and woman.
I’m sure you know all about Spirit Houses since David Beckham popularized them by importing three of them back to his vast house in England. But, just in case you don’t, they are, as I’m sure David would tell you in his high pitched dreamy voice, little highly ornamental houses that you will see all over Thailand, in homes, shops, gardens, hotels and even next to trees, where,the spirits live (where did you think they live then). The spirits within these little houses are revered and worshipped on a daily basis by us earth bound mortals. It’s important to keep the spirits happy, and most bad things that happen in the world, big or small, are usually down to the spirits not being particularly chilled out. Spirit Houses are also very pretty and over the last year I had come to like them a great deal.
This Spirit House was badly neglected, and unusually, the china figures inside were still there. The last inhabitants must have left in a hell of a hurry or mysteriously never returned or unexpectedly evaporated, or something. The old woman’s head had broken off, probably, when the figure had been blown over in a storm. I tried to balance it back on her little chipped china shoulders but my hands, at full stretch just couldn’t reach. The more I tried to balance her head back on her shoulders the more it fell off and tumbled into her chipped little lap. It began to feel like the beginning of a children’s horror film. I tried a few more times, I just didn’t like to see these little figures, the physical symbols of real spirits (real spirits?) neglected and battered.
In growing desperation I managed to balance her head sideways onto her little broken shoulders, so her neck connected with her ear. It looked a little macabre but I guess better than completely headless. Perhaps somewhere in another dimension there was an irate headless spirit who now had to suffer the indignation of sporting a sideways head.
I’ve probably set the relationship between Chiang Mai and their spirit world back several thousand eons and created untold bad luck for myself in several lifetimes. Still, if it were me, and I was a spirit, I’d rather have a sideways head than no head at all. I think?
While I was imagining what it would be like to be a spirit with a sideways head it slowly began to dawn on me that I probably shouldn’t be leaning into another person’s Spirit House, fiddling around with the sacred figures, as though it was nothing more than a child’s play thing. It was probably the ultimate spiritual faux pas, if not a downright insult to the spirit world. For all I know, it may well be one of the worst things you can do in Chiang Mai, along with pointing your feet at a Buddha statue and high fiving a monk (how was I to know, he seemed so friendly).
It would probably be tantamount to running into a church during a christening and piddling into the font.
I moved away from the Spirit House to demonstrate that I was, in fact, normal and had no interest in fiddling with sacred little figures. I casually walked down the road and waited a good respectable distance from the Spirit House.
I guessed the key holder would be an agent. I think she said her name was Fang or Flan or Fran or something like that. Eventually a new silver Toyota Vios screeched around the corner and out got a young Thai woman talking animatedly into her expensive looking phone. She was all legs and heels and make up and sun glasses pushed up on long swishy black hair; an aspiring upwardly-mobile socialite. What I’m sure she would call High So. You know the sort, and she was, indeed, a real estate agent. She continued talking on the phone as she unlocked the gate and ushered me through with the weakest of weak smiles.
The cats scattered, leaving the twitching remains of headless gecko bodies as Fang/ Flan/ Fran picked her high heeled way through the thick carpet of dead palm leaves. I made sure not to look at the Spirit House, or the china figure with the sideways head. She unlocked the front door still jabbering into her phone and waved me through. She stood on the doorstep, in the shade, screeching into her phone.
I respectfully slipped off my flip flops before I entered the house and immediately wished I hadn’t. There was dust everywhere like a thin layer of greasy black snow. My nice pink feet turned grey at the edges. I walked through the cavernous hallway and into the kitchen. There were three huge dead cockroaches on their backs in the middle of the floor and thick black grease stains that rose surprisingly high up the side of the wall by the cooker. Inexplicably the pipes under the sink had been disconnected and the wooden shelving underneath had rotted away as a result of water damage.
It was like that scene in the film Aliens where Sigourney Weaver and her team explore the deserted space station; there was evidence that something bad had happened here, something that didn’t make sense, but it was impossible to tell what it was. Perhaps the last inhabitants had tried to flood the kitchen to drown the cockroaches or burn them to death with hot fat.
I picked my way gingerly through the house to the backdrop of high pitched Thai shrieking on the doorstep.
The once white sofa in the living room looked like an old street drinker had exploded on it and slowly decomposed. The armchairs looked like throw outs from an intravenous drug users drop in centre and bare bulbs dangled from dirty wires in the centre of every room. Upstairs there was another dead cockroach in the bath tub and the remains of a dead pigeon on the balcony of the main bedroom. It felt like the house of death.
This time last year I would have made my excuses and left. I would have rushed out and crossed it off my list, along with the house with the landlord who lived in the garden and the house that was only half way finished.
I would have described this house as “the house of horrors” and would have made jokes about the cockroaches, the dead pigeon and the jungle garden. I would probably not have noticed the Spirit House or the cats chewing the heads off geckos or that Fang or Flan was an aspirin
g High-Socialite.
I would have only been able to see the bad things, the things obvious to a foreigner, but, Thailand does change you. It enables you to see things in a different way. This year, a whole year on, I knew this house was perfect.
It was perfect because I had changed and learnt a few things over the past year.
One thing I’d learnt is that manual labour is dirt cheap, especially in contrast to the high rent that disoriented rich foreigners pay. It’s part of the economic dynamic which is allowing Thailand to develop so rapidly; blink and a new shopping centre has sprung up.
Most manual labourers here are from over the border in Burma or from distant hill tribes. I see them early in the morning as I’m going to work; men and women, standing shoulder to shoulder, packed like sardines in the back of 10 ton dump trucks being transported from their slum village to construction sites, with no pretence that they are anything more than a cheap commodity, as dispensable as slaves, tough as old boots and enduring as the earth itself. They hang onto the sides and hang onto each other, spending their entire lives building the shiny new Thailand and hanging on. As I pass by on my little motorbike they stare at me with blank dusty faces, still full of sleep, still wearing the same ripped and ragged clothes they wore the day before and still hanging on.
Some of these workers are here illegally and some aren’t, but right now they’re all willing to work hard 10 hour days in dangerous conditions for what you or I might leave as a tip in a cheap pizza restaurant.
Another thing I had learnt is that Thai people are obsessed with things not only being new but also being hygienic.
The photo display in the supermarket, next to the meat counter, does not show pictures of happy chickens foraging freely on a farm, but the bleak clinical interior of a chicken meat processing factory. It looks like a picture of a hospital operating theatre that has been invaded by chickens. It looks like chicken hell. But it is undeniably clean, which the house, in which I was standing, was blatantly not.
It would be impossible to rent this house to a Thai person; it’s old, it’s dirty and it’s jam packed with someone else’s spirits, one of which doesn’t even have its head on round the right way.
The house had clearly not been occupied, or even visited for years, which means the owners would be desperate not to let a potential tenant slip through their fingers. Also, I know that for the price of the first two weeks rent everything could be fixed; no leaky pipes, no cockroaches, no dead pigeons, decorated from top to bottom, air cons serviced, garden manicured, spick and span, inside and out…“BOOM,” as Thom might well say at this point.
“BOOM” he would probably shout again in an even louder voice.
Somewhere in between booming and high fives he would almost certainly shout out the words “HOME RUN,” and if he were really excited would probably yell at the top of his fog horn like voice, as though he were trying to communicate with people in outer space “TOUCH DOWN.”
For reasons best known to himself, at times of great excitement he also shouts out “GO BOBCATS,” the volume being such that I am sure every bobcat in a hundred mile radius would indeed go and probably not come back.
The calls were made. The deal was done. The house was ours.
“BOOM,” and a couple of “TOUCH DOWNS” and “BOBCATS” as well.
Chapter 3
Pleasing The Spirits
Early February: Still no rain but getting hotter at night and the swimming pool is heating up nicely.
“Mister Ting Tong….why you have turtle?” Monk Supply Shop Proprietor
The “new” house was great, and by the time we moved in it actually felt like a new house. It smelt of freshly decorated house. The old stained furniture had disappeared, there was a new sink unit, and everywhere was spick and span. It no longer felt like the film set for Day Of The Living Dead.
To celebrate we went “down the market” to the monk supply shop with my wife to refurnish the Spirit House. Us ex-pats know how to whoop it up.
For those of you who do not have a monk supply shop down the road, or even know what a monk supply shop is, your life is about to expand and become enriched by several grams, if not at least half a kilo, or a couple of pounds, or a good few yards.
Okay, imagine the scene. You are a respectable Thai business man or woman, you choose. You can be both if you want, it is Thailand after all. In order to increase the size and prosperity of your business it is essential to keep the local spirit community happy (of course). But, how do you do this? How can you ensure that your message will get across to the other side; to the other dimension? How can you be sure that your wishes are not misinterpreted and cause the mighty wrath of the spirit world to come crashing down upon your brush factory with furious anger? Or even worse, somehow get mixed up with Evil Neddy your nemesis, who runs a rival brush making factory in Chiang Rai who somehow manages to cream off all your good luck for the next hundred years.
Clearly you need the help of mediators, in other words, monks, whose job it is to pass on your wishes and to chant prayers on your behalf, ensuring that the spirit world knows that you are responsible for all these good vibes (and not Evil Neddy).
But now you have another problem; how can you curry favour with the monks in the local temple? How can you make this happen without seeming like a money grabbing cheapskate who wants to railroad a load of innocent spirits into creating untold good luck for you whilst at the same time shafting Evil Ned? In short, how can you get the perfect gift to encourage monks to pray on your behalf without looking like you are simply bribing holy men? And so the monk supply shop was born.
Imagine another scene if you will…
Poor old aunty Maud has dropped dead. This is a sad thing of course. According to religious custom, her husband, has decided to join the temple as a monk for the 3 day funeral and a couple of weeks beyond. As a dutiful relation you are obliged to visit your uncle in the temple. You don’t know him very well, but, of course, you need to take him a gift. You don’t want to buy things that the temple disallow, like most things, but at the same time want it to be practical and meaningful. You are understandably stumped for ideas, but I know a shop that isn’t. So, again, another monk supply shop is born.
Imagine, if you will, another final scene. Don’t worry, the rest of the book isn’t going to be me just asking you to imagine various monk shop related scenes. Just this last scene, if you will be so kind:
Imagine that you have opened a modest boutique in the Airport Plaza Shopping Mall, and have decided to sell cheap clothes as you have noticed that there are not quite enough of these little shops down there and there might just be room for one more. While you are busy arranging the clothes in your little shop your other uncle comes round to fix a small shrine on your wall to ensure good luck. You need to get the shrine stuff like a tiny set of bowls and cups to hold your offerings, a figure of the elephant god Ganesh to ensure good luck, and a few incense stick holders. But, where can you buy such a strange assemblage of articles? I expect you can guess.
Needless to say that monk supply shops are all over Chiang Mai, often conveniently situated near temples, and do a roaring trade throughout the year but especially around religious festival days and important auspicious temple days, of which there are at least five every week.
Around the time of the major festivals like, Loy Kratong and Songkran, these shops are the busiest places on earth, stacked to the rafters with lanterns, fireworks, candles and customers.
The monk shop that I go to at the market is divided into two sections. The back of the shop is stocked with all the shrine and Spirit House articles, and the front of the shop is stocked with the latest gifts for the modern day monk about town.
When we arrived, my wife was very impressed, and somewhat surprised to find that I was a known regular customer.
“I didn’t know that you have been coming here,” she s
uddenly said accusingly.
“What?” I said, ever the raconteur.
“I didn’t know that you have been coming here,” she said again in a slower measured voice that she used to reserve for telling off the children after they had spent all morning smearing Nutella over themselves and the kitchen floor.
“But, it’s only a monk supply shop,” I protested.
“Well, what monks have you been supplying?” she said.
“It isn’t like that, it’s just a bit of fun,” I said.
“Fun?” There was a pause.
“Yes, just fun, nothing else,” I said weakly.
“You call this fun, do you, creeping off to some squalid little shop round the back of the market?” she said with increasing tension in her voice.
“But, but… it doesn’t mean anything.” I felt panicked. My secret had been found out.
“Doesn’t mean anything, what are you talking about, doesn’t mean anything?” She said.
“It’s not like that, it’s not what you think,” anxiety rising in my every word.
“Oh no…?” She yelled realizing that I had been involved in a secret casual relationship with a monk supply shop.
I was speechless. I fell silent with guilt.
I didn’t really. I just made this bit up. But she did say “I didn’t know that you have been coming down to a monk supply shop” in a slightly accusatory way, which I thought was very funny. Thinking about it, I guess monk supply shops are not usually the kind of businesses that foreign men secretly, and not so secretly, frequent in Thailand.