Just southeast of Thong Lor lies the neighborhood of On Nut, a sprawling no-man's-land where the servants and chauffeurs who service the Thong Lor palaces have their lodgings. Early in the morning you see these darker-skinned armies of help disembarking from the windowless buses which roar down Sukhumvit Road all the way from On Nut. They look like a slightly different race and in them I recognized the staff of our house on Soi 51, wide and copper-hued, wearing pro-Thaksin T-shirts that winter to remind the upper middle classes for whom they worked that they, at least, were in favor of the flamboyant crook who showered them with government favors.
As they poured down the leafy soi where their employers' mansions stood, they sometimes raised two fingers to me in a V sign. It was a proletarian code for "Thaksin Number Two," for the prime minister was listed in the second position on the national ballot sheets and that flashed sign was a defiant insubordination toward their enlightened masters. The latter would often say, at luxurious parties in luxurious gardens, and speaking in English so that the proles hovering nearby with the trays of canapés and champagne flutes wouldn't understand them, "You know, the ordinary people are so appallingly stupid. Thaksin gives them money and government assistance and they all adore him." And I would think, "You mean, they're dumb for taking the money instead of knowing their place in your fête champêtre, where they're paid a dollar a day?" And because they all lived in On Nut, which was convenient for the buses down Sukhumvit, the masters themselves rarely ventured into On Nut unless they had to buy a Christmas tree at the giant Tesco there, or make a foray to the equally giant Carrefour which had opened nearby in recent years. But I of course began to walk there frequently when I was tired of Thong Lor.
It's a long walk to On Nut, but you pass through places like Ekkamai, where the great bus station stands and where a number of secretive streets turn themselves into pleasure gardens at night. Sukhumvit turns quiet and brooding after Thong Lor, more Thai, and its exhausting, repetitively asphalt nature comes to the fore. Small hardware stores alternate with showrooms, bathroom equipment outlets, and pharmacies. At night the sidewalks look black, like flows of lava, and halfway to Ekkamai you pass a massive head with a spiked crown, a Greek titan of some kind who announces the Coliseum Club—he is holding a tankard of beer.
"Tartarin," wrote Joseph Roth in his travel book about France, The White Cities, "found Marseilles more perplexing than Africa," and this was why. For elsewhere Roth writes something delicate as he explores "the white cities" of southern France: "I won't live to see the beautiful world in which every individual can represent in himself the totality, but even today I can sense such a future as I sit in the Place de l'Horloge in Avignon and see all the races in the world shine in the features of a policeman, a beggar, a waiter."
I thought of that as I hobbled down Sukhumvit beyond Ekkamai and entered the edges of On Nut, where the hypermarkets are alive at dusk, their acres of floor space shining with waxed grapefruits and mango clones, the avenues around them bursting with neon. The feeling of anonymity is intense, but the faces possess the same possibility that Roth saw in Avignon seventy years ago. All is hurly-burly, motion, greed for life, exacerbation, cynical wonder, eloquent haste, precipitation toward nothing.
By the On Nut station there was a long wall and revolving ads for Titus watches that I had seen that month all over the city: Fun Without Reasons. From there I could walk slowly up to Soi 79 and the Sukhumvit Garden City. The side streets on the way were cramped and hard, but down one of them one can find an old school called Saint Michael's, now a kindergarten for the upper middle classes, with a geometric glass dome and a colonnaded rotunda with Corinthian capitals. Dead trees all around, old Thai houses and spirit houses, a fishing tackle shop at the corner of 77 1/2, the old TOT telecommunications building peeling in relentless humidity. Saint Michael's, in particular, is one of Bangkok's more mysterious edifices, for there is such a wide discrepancy between its architecture and its function. It looks like a Masonic temple, an observatory, a bombastic hospital, and its grounds swarm with black butterflies. Standing at the end of this cul-de-sac, I would wait for the dome to revolve, to part and reveal a giant gun or antenna. One thinks: What was this forty years ago, fifty years ago, sixty? Were there jungles all around? Gigantic takian trees of forgotten forests?
The largest street in On Nut is Soi 77. You can walk for miles down Soi 77 without knowing where you are. The ground floors of the tenements are filled with courtyard markets swarming with plastic and bright things, with basil and cilantro. I sometimes looked in those crowds for our maids and groundsmen, because this was where they doubtless shopped, and near Soi 7 and 77 I thought I saw them making their way to the Wat Mahabute temple which sits there alongside a dark canal. Half-familiar faces among a multitude, tensed in an act of homage.
The Mahabute, after all, is the most famous place in On Nut and occupies in the imagination of the Bangkok working class an incomparable place as the site of Thailand's most famous and gruesome ghost story, that of the female spirit Mae Nak. On Soi 7, the supernatural suddenly erupts, taking the accidental pilgrim back to a past which can only be remembered with the greatest difficulty.
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If Bangkok has renounced her past, physically destroying it in the process, it is the supernatural which holds her to it again. There are shrines in the city which are so intense, so passionate, that they bend time backward and bend us with it. They are irresistible for this reason, and they remind us that faith is not merely an entering into superstition, into a landscape of fear, but a longing for the dead, for the past.
The Mae Nak shrine is draped with khanom garlands, submerged in incense smoke. Into the canal that runs beside it pilgrims liberate the eels and fish which they buy as karma-improving offerings from vendors nearby. It is lovely to watch them kneel by the water's edge and pop open the plastic bags containing the animals, then watch them swim away—the latter startled, probably, and confused by their sudden good fortune. For a few baht you are given a devotional package to dispose of while you are in the temple: a card with a stamp-sized gold leaf, an incense stick, orchids, yellow candles, and mangos. The shrine itself is piled high with toys, diapers, candies, shampoo bottles, model fire engines, teddy bears, lipstick, and at its center is a gold figure of Mae Nak, its skin -like surface softened by constant applications of oil. Devotees kneel before this figure, then gingerly approach to apply small patches of gold leaf to it. A television set, turned on around the clock, faces her, bathing the gold leaf face with electronic light, though it is not clear why Mae Nang needs to watch TV.
More than twenty films have been made of Mae Nak's story, as well as a major opera by the Thai composer Surwong. Believers claim that she is buried in the wat, though they are not sure where. And though Mae Nak is supposed to have been a real person, no one knows quite which part of the mid-nineteenth century can claim her. Some say that she lived during the reign of Rama IV (1851–1868), others that she died during that of Rama V (1868–1910). Mae Nak, the daughter of a village chief in this suburb of Bangkok (it would have been farmland around 1850) falls in love with a commoner named Nai Maak, whom her father despises. Overcoming all obstacles, she manages to marry. Nai Maak, however, is then conscripted into the army and is forced to leave. While he is away, the teenage girl dies during childbirth, and her unborn baby perishes with her. When Nai Maak returns from his military service, the ghost of Mae Nak is there to greet him, weaving a supernatural illusion around their destroyed family life. The illusion is shattered only when one day Nai Maak sees his wife reach for a fallen mango on the earth beneath their house by passing her hands through the floorboards.
It's a theme common to Asian folktales: the dead wife who greets her returning husband as if she were alive, reminding Westerners of the ghost sequences in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, or the first tale in Kobayashi's Kwaidan, in which an impoverished samurai's wife, abandoned by her social-climbing husband for a great lady, haunts the house they once shared. Mae Nak also haunts her husband, pursuing him with a mix of desperate love and vengeful jealousy until her spirit and that of her dead child are finally laid to rest by a Buddhist holy man. Nai Maak had taken refuge in the Mahabute temple in what is now On Nut, and the harrying ghost had followed him there. In some versions it is the venerated Somdej Phra Puttajan of Thonburi who seizes Mae Nak's tormented spirit, seals it in a ceramic pot, and throws it into a river.
But Mae Nak sightings do not stop there; she is seen all over Bangkok by the faithful, and it is widely believed by those who play the lotteries that she is an infallible guide to success. The temple is full of fortune-tellers and lottery hopefuls who crowd around the two sacred wax-spotted takian trees there, searching for mystic signs that will point to combinations of numbers. Come here on the day before the national lottery is drawn and you will be unable to get in. The takians (Hopea odorata) are mobbed, their surfaces smoothed by dried latex which has oozed out of a hundred cracks in the bark, and it is by rubbing this arboreal surface that lottery aspirants hope to be informed of winning numbers by Lady Takian, the female spirit who inhabits takian trees.
It shouldn't be surprising that tree spirits are worshiped alongside the spirit of a tormented village girl of the nineteenth century. There are Chinese gods here, too, and a glass coffin bearing a figurative "golden child," or kuman thong, a spirit who is thought to be a reincarnation of fetuses aborted in previous lifetimes. These charms used to be made of actual dead infants preserved in glass bottles (other, manmade, figures of the kuman are shown sucking their own placenta). The kuman thong spirit can possess little girls and make them speak for it, and the charm itself can be carried around like a real infant; it whispers into your ear. In the papers you will find occasional stories of mentally disturbed people being arrested for stealing or procuring fetuses in hospitals in order to turn them into kuman thong. The dutiful are supposed to appease this spirit and send it back to its rightful mother, the river goddess. They do this by means of a ceremony called "bury with love." The effigy is buried with flowers, and told lovingly that there is no more use for him on earth. There is a charming variation known as "float with love," where it is sent off down a river like a boat. Animism swirls through the city's undergrowth, feeding it from below.
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What is this mood that takes us as we cut through streets subtly infected with the spirit of Lady Takian? For one thing, the genders seem less divided here than elsewhere in the world. More artfully blended into each other, as if everyone is subconsciously aware that you can be reborn, reincarnated as either gender. Indeed, the very word "gender" seems like a mistake.
I feel Si Ouey snapping at my heels, and I feel the forests of the last century hiding just behind the ubiquitous Dipterocarpus trees. These are forces felt only deep inside the body. It is like the force field of a woman who passes you in the dark, like magnetic disturbances that alter a few molecules deep inside your liver.
My walks through On Nut late at night are like séances. In the house on Soi 51, I will hear the banana trees flapping slowly against the double glazing as the servants' table is being set up under the oil lamp slung from a pole where they eat gai massamam every night with tin bowls of kao suay. A terrible sadness comes over me as I hear those leaves and glimpse the twinkling spirit house through the trees, the crumbling marigolds laid there, and the incense sticks trailing wisps of smoke. The mood suddenly changes. As the spirits move, a supernatural breeze stirs a chime, a bough, or a piece of grit against my tongue—and there for a second I feel them, shrilling like pipes in the distance, flickering in the dark with the mosquitoes.
Thais are never surprised when I admit these feelings to them, since they themselves accept them as perfectly normal. For them it would be abnormal not to feel the closeness of the dead, to search for another past vastly different from the physical one.