The wooden coffin had been placed inside a metal sarcophagus and covered with iridescent paper to seal in the stench of putrefaction. Bouquets of plastic flowers crowned and surrounded the coffin. On the left-hand side was a photograph of the deceased woman on a gilded stand strung with blinking fairy lights. After three days of mourning rites, the body would be burnt so her ghost would not loiter on this plane of existence.
As soon as a mourner entered the big wooden sala near the temple, in this village of 100 people close to the Cambodian border, they lit a stick of incense and knelt down in front of the altar, praying for Noobin to have a safe journey to heaven and a good rebirth. The nine monks who came to chant each morning and evening offered the same blessings.
Aside from the chanting, it was not a solemn occasion. More like an Irish wake, actually. Groups of family members and friends sat on the floor eating and chatting. Some of the men drank beer; others knocked back shots of rice liquor that tasted like pickled razor blades. Behind the scenes, the women cooked and served food.
At night, men knelt behind the curtain that separated the big room (with the coffin and Buddha images) from the kitchen, to put wagers on a simplified version of roulette, using a cardboard grid on the floor. Beside them, an older relative taught a gaggle of kids how to play the same game with one-baht coins he provided—and won back from them. Noopat, the dead woman’s younger sister, told me that gambling is common at rural funerals; it helps to distract people from their grief and the fear of a possible haunting.
At some memorial services in the countryside, poor families auction off the gambling rights to local mobsters, who agree to pay for the funeral ceremony. A good send-off, which gives ‘face’ to the deceased’s family, requires an investment of at least 20,000–30,000 baht. For many rural families, that’s a crippling debt.
I’d never met the deceased, but she was the older sister of a friend’s wife. Cameron Cooper (Noopat’s husband, and the other co-founder of Farang Untamed Travel magazine) and I were the only two farang there. Stories of the dead woman’s life leaked through the Thai-English language filter: she was a hard-worker who arose every morning at 4am to hitch a ride into the frontier town of Aranyaprathet to sell vegetables in the market. Afterward, she returned home to make fried bananas or sticky rice in bamboo tubes to sell in the village. When her mother died young, she weaned her baby sister, Noopat, and her own infant son at the same time, each child suckling a different breast. Noobin moved to the northeastern province of Loei where she and her husband tended cornfields, but came back to the village to nurse her father when he was dying. Years later, her own misdiagnosed case of angina, which could have been treated with the right medicine and enough money, led to a massive stroke that left her body and mind mostly intact, but her vocal cords could only transmit whimpers in place of words. Sometimes she’d get angry and cry when people couldn’t understand her. Eventually, the untreated case of angina made her heart swell up to five times its normal size. Doctors gave her a year at most to live, but with incredible tenacity she hung on for three years. Liver failure turned her skin a yellowish-green tint and finally claimed her life. At the end, she suffered such fits of agony that death came as a tender mercy.
Sitting on the floor drinking and listening to all these stories, I kept stealing glances over at her husband of some 30 years. He’d been staring at the coffin and his wife’s portrait for hours, sitting on a dais by the Buddha images, where the monks had chanted earlier. The husband, whose face had taken on the same scorched and barren look of the province’s soil, must have been overwhelmed by the same memories everyone else was recollecting, except he had thousands more to sift through and sort out. We thought about walking over and offering him a drink and condolences, but bereavement is the most private of duties, and condolences are clichés that console no one.
***
In this village of Baan Pla Kaeng (named after a kind of fish found locally), ‘Uncle Lom’, as he’s affectionately known, takes care of all the funeral rites, ordinations and the upkeep of the one-monk temple. Now in his 70s, he first moved here from Korat province in the late 1960s, when the government was offering free land to settlers to put up a human shield between Thailand and Cambodia, where the civil war was threatening to bleed over the border.
Uncle Lom grinned. “I was greedy for some land.”
In those days, he recalled, all the roads were made of dirt. There were no cars or bicycles, and people got around by ox-carts. Most of the locals were so impoverished and uneducated that they did not know how to hold a proper Buddhist funeral. So when someone stepped on a land-mine or was blown apart by a mortar shell, their corpses were left to carrion birds and scavenging beasts.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Noopat recalled how mortar shells exploded around the village every day. Families would flee into the jungle or hide in their own little bunkers. Tanks rumbled down the roads; bombers flew low overhead; tracer bullets pierced the night skies. Defeated but not disarmed, starving soldiers from the Khmer Rouge would come across the border looking for food and valuables, stealing into people’s homes to slit their throats and rob them.
Old fears die hard. Even in Bangkok two decades later, come nightfall, Noopat still has an obsessive compulsion to check that the front door of her house is locked every few hours.
On the third afternoon, monks from a bigger village nearby came to spirit away Noobin’s soul to heaven. As they solemnly intoned their baritone blessings in Pali, all of the mourners knelt before the dais, palms pressed together at chest level in a wai. A sacred white thread that the monks held was later used to wrap the deceased’s coffin, which the pallbearers shouldered and carried towards the crematorium outside. Just in front of the plywood coffin, holding the white thread was Noobin’s son, the one she had once weaned at the same time as her baby sister. He had ordained as a monk for this purpose, which is known as buad naa fai (‘ordaining in front of the fire’). One of Noobin’s daughters held her mother’s photograph against her chest as the funeral procession circled the crematorium three times in a clockwise direction. Noobin’s husband walked beside his daughter. In one hand he had a coconut, in the other a machete.
Each mourner picked up a little brown flower with a tiny candle and stick of incense tied to it. We walked up the steps of the crematorium to pay our final respects and left the flowers in a metal tray on top of the coffin. Unsure what to do next, Cameron and I lingered around the top of the stairs, when suddenly the husband lifted the lid of the coffin—what?—so we could see the dead woman, clad in a dress and with her eyes closed, her cheeks sunken and shadowed. From her bony hands, tied into a wai with white thread, bloomed a bouquet of white and purple orchids. As the putrid smell of decaying flesh trapped inside the coffin rushed out, I veered back.
But the sight and the smell were the least of our horrors, because the men cracked open the coconut with the machete and gave it to the newly ordained monk to anoint his mother’s face and cover her body with the milk in an Indian purification ritual. The teenager then passed the coconut to his sister, who repeated the rite, and then—the real shocker—she passed it to me. Refusing would have been tantamount to disrespecting the dead, but it was difficult to look at the dead woman’s face as I poured the milk onto it.
As we walked down the steps of the crematorium, they placed the coffin inside the brick oven. As is the custom at a Thai funeral, each of the guests received a small gift. Once, at a more upscale funeral in Bangkok, I got a leather key-holder. This time, I received a red plastic menthol inhaler. Under the circumstances, it was a very welcome gift.
The following morning, the relatives congregated to pick up Noobin’s ashen remains, which had been collected on a sheet of corrugated tin inside the oven. The family members picked out the biggest bone fragments, washed them in a bucket of perfumed water, and placed them in a small vessel to inter in a concrete pagoda on the temple grounds. Using a hoe, another relative formed the remaining ashes into an outline of a human body. This is done to ensure that the deceased is reborn with all their limbs intact. Then her shaven-headed son, having disrobed as a monk and now wearing street clothes, upended the tin sheet into a hole in the ground and covered the remains with dirt.
The son-turned-monk anoints his mother’s body with coconut milk at a rural funeral near the border with Cambodia.
For a vegetable vendor and farmer who’d scraped a living from the land for most of her life, it was a fitting grave.
***
Before the funeral in Isaan, the only time I’d ever made merit for the dead was after the bloated body of my friend and colleague, Teerapong Kansatawee, was fished out of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River in 1999. He was only 33.
An elfin guy with neatly trimmed hair, Teerapong had the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen. Perhaps that’s why his parents nicknamed him Gop, or ‘Frog’. Over his shoulder, he always carried a homespun bag of cotton embroidered with Isaan or hilltribe motifs. The bag was laden with novels, heavyweight tomes on history, politics and economics, as well as cassettes of Thai folk music. He wore ordinary jeans (never torn, always clean) and button-down shirts. He had none of the derogatory qualities I sometimes associate with Thai men—the juvenile, non-sense of humour and the lust for lechery. Which made him an alien in his own country and an outcast at Hyper, the Thai alternative magazine where we both contributed freelance stories.
On weekends, most of the magazine crew buzzed around the nucleus of Bangkok nightlife—Silom Soi 4—which resembled a smaller-scale Mardi Gras. Among all the preening and flamboyant drag queens, pill-gobbling expat ravers and whore-mongering gay and straight ‘sex pistols’, under the constant bombardment of blasting dance music, Gop could usually be found outside a bar by himself, sipping a Thai (never foreign) beer while reading a book and listening to local folk music on his Walkman. Occasionally, he’d order a tequila shot and say, “I want to fly high,” before launching into another diatribe with a grin, “Western culture same as AIDS in Thailand. We have no immune.” Then he’d smile, laugh and return to his reading and protest songs. His earnestness and social autism made him the death of the party for most of the gang, who tended to avoid him.
The stories Gop contributed to magazines like Hyper and Thai dailies like Matichon crystallised his interests in rural hardships, injustice and crime. The one I remember the most vividly was about the famous Buddhist temple in Saraburi province named Wat Phra Baht Num Phru, where drug addicts are virtually incarcerated and forced to swallow massive doses of water and herbal medicine every day. On the temple grounds, they vomit up all the toxins in their systems. The monks hold them while they writhe, retch and groan. Echoing that guttural chorus line, Gop entitled his story ‘The Junkie Philharmonic Orchestra’. We had a good laugh over the title in the office. The feature was around 20 pages long. He told Mam, the female editor, that was no way he could cut it down.
Shaking her head with disbelief, she said, “But nobody runs stories this long anymore.”
Gop did not believe in compromising his features and his stubbornness did not endear him to many editors. Still, he didn’t raise his voice or lose his temper. He didn’t wear his CV on his sleeve, or brag about how difficult it was to do the story. In short, he didn’t behave (and never did) like so many of the prima-diva writers and photographers out there.
Wearing his smile like a shield, Gop cheerfully insisted, again—and again—and again—that the story had to run as it was. In the end, he eroded her resistance. When the article, with his original title in English, appeared in Hyper magazine, it ran 16 pages long: the kind of indepth feature that was the byproduct of what is now a bygone era in print media.
The magazine’s editor, Veeraporn ‘Mam’ Nitiprapha, and I talked about his famous article the night she called to tell me that he’d died. Mam thought that Gop had probably jumped off a bridge and drowned. But his family, who came from the south, would never admit that, she said. If a Thai overdosed on drugs, the family would say that he’d suffered a heart attack in order to salvage some ‘face’. Everyone would know what really happened, but nobody had to lose face.
Nevertheless, a few other rumours were making the rounds. Somebody else said he’d been HIV-positive—unlikely, I thought, given his flaccid interest in womanising. Another journalist thought that maybe he’d written a story condemning some corrupt official or gangster, and that their goons had given him a push-start into the river—which seemed more likely.
But I didn’t think that he’d even been writing much lately. The last few times I’d seen him, he’d been so depressed and drunk that he already looked like a suicide-in-progress. He would rant about how his old job as a full-time reporter only paid 7,000 baht per month and now, as a freelancer, he was lucky to earn half that much. Hyper had closed down. And the only literary magazine in Thailand where he could publish his short stories had also drowned in red ink.
Like a lot of heavy drinkers, he’d become erratic (lashing out at people one minute and getting maudlin the next, so I never felt comfortable around him anymore) and would repeat the same sob stories, “I have no money. Nobody respect me. Thai people only like cartoon. Why you never help me publish stories in English?”
Mam said that when the morgue attendants were looking for identification in his wallet, the only money they found was a single 100 baht note.
That was sad enough, but what really choked me up was when she added, before hanging up, “I just wanted to tell you because you’re the only person from the magazine who ever asked about him or tried to keep in contact with him.”
So I felt obligated to pay my final respects, but his bones had already been kindling for the crematorium. Since he’d died in a violent way, his body had been burnt within three days so the ghost would not linger or try to get back inside the corpse. Excessive displays of bereavement are also frowned upon at Thai funerals because it’s believed these will cause the dead person’s spirit to loiter.
After a bit of soul-searching, I remembered one of the most moving passages in the Dalai Lama’s autobiography Freedom in Exile, when he recounts the death of his mother. After reciting Buddhist prayers for her to have a good rebirth, he went to a place of worship to make merit for her.
So I went to my local temple on Sukhumvit Road, near Soi Ekkamai. Along the way, I stopped at the supermarket to buy an orange bucket filled with necessities for monks: toothpaste, soap, Chinese tea, canned sardines and a saffron robe. The various offerings for monks, spirit houses and temples were tucked away in the furthest back corner of the supermarket, between the shelves for children’s toys and pet food. The juxtaposition seemed like sacrilege. But it was the same at the magazine rack: all the publications devoted to Buddhism and amulets had been sidelined to the bottommost rack, next to magazines about firearms and tropical fish.
I hadn’t even made it to the temple yet and
I was already losing what little faith I had. As I walked along Sukhumvit Road,
carrying the orange bucket, I felt like a fool. I didn’t know the etiquette for
presenting it to the monks. I didn’t know any of the prayers. I didn’t even
understand any of the most basic fundamentals of making merit for the deceased.
I arrived at the temple in time for the late afternoon prayers and chanting in the main chapel. Kneeling on a dais, the monks droned like bees, turning the chapel into a hive of spirituality. The abbot sat in the front, reading Pali prayers from a rectangular, palm-leaf manuscript. Aside from me, there were only three older Thai men praying. All of them were sympathetic to my plight. One of them brought me a glass of hot Chinese tea. Another gave me an amulet from the temple, which came in a little plastic case, replete with an image of the Buddha covering his eyes.
He introduced me to the abbot and I bowed slightly as I handed him the orange bucket. Unlike many of the monks I’ve met, he was robust and handsome with massive forearms. Out of humility, perhaps, he wore cheap glasses with black plastic frames. Even though he was middle-aged, his white skin showed few lines except for a few rows of parentheses around his mouth when he grinned. As the abbot bantered with the three laymen, he kept them in stitches. One of them said to me, “He always funny.”
Between the abbot’s fractured English and my then-infantile Thai, I managed to explain that a friend had died and I’d come to tam boon (‘make merit’) for him. He nodded solemnly and pursed his lips. The abbot told one of the men to bring over two glasses, one empty, the other filled with holy water. The abbot motioned for me to kneel before him as he sat on the dais. Following his instructions, I slowly poured the water from one glass into the other while he chanted in Pali. After intoning a few more prayers in one of the deepest and most melodious voices I’ve ever heard, the abbot told me to go outside and pour the holy water on a tree.
When I came back, he smiled and said in English, “See you again.” The smile offset the irony of his words.
The whole ritual took no more than three or four minutes to complete. This must be part of the reason why Buddhism has become the world’s fastest growing religion: the etiquette is easy; the ceremonies, like anointing the tree, are both practical and poetic; and while I was there, no one tried to convert me to the faith.
Alone in the chapel, I sat before the shrine and a jumble of statues, lotus blossoms and smoldering joss sticks of sandalwood. As twilight bruised and later blackened the sky, the shadows in the corner of the prayer hall lengthened, the room became smaller and the candles brighter. But the only prayer I could think of was a Buddhist-sounding stanza from a poem by Walt Whitman, the great grandfather of the ‘beat poets’ (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, et al.), “He who walks a mile without compassion walks to his own grave wearing his shroud.” Gop would’ve liked that poem.
I went home and called Mam to explain how I’d made merit for him. She was impressed, but told me that since his death, someone else had come forward to say they’d seen him, the night before his body was found, slurring, staggering drunk, and threatening to end his life before he left some bar.
“I’m sorry to say, but in Thai belief, you can’t make merit for someone who commits suicide,” Mam said. “They’re too far down in hell to receive your merit or offerings. Thai Buddhists believe that suicide is worse than murder.”
That was strange. I’d never heard of that belief. So much for the merit-making plan. What to do now? At the time, I had a monthly column in The Nation about crime and the supernatural titled ‘Heaven Forbid’. So I figured I’d turn my next effort into an obituary for Gop while delving into the topic of Thai funeral rites.
At least that that was the plan, but the copy-editor—whom I had once dubbed the ‘Jack the Ripper of Journalism’—vivisected it. As Anais Nin wrote, “The role of a writer is not to say what we can say, but what we are unable to say.” It was the sort of grave irony which had killed Gop’s interest in print media and become a catalyst for his suicide.
In early 2010, the abbot’s ironic farewell, “See you again,” proved to be prophetic when another friend and writer, Torgeir Norling, died much too young.
On the third night of his funeral at the Khlong Toey Temple in Bangkok, nobody had anything to offer except the usual ‘rest in peace’ condolences, but it was comforting enough to see old friends, and colleagues from as far afield as Hong Kong and Liverpool had a chance to reunite and pay homage to his memory. Another friend of his lit a constant string of cigarettes that he left smoldering in an ashtray, beside a glass of beer behind the Norwegian’s portrait to appease Tor’s hard-drinking, serial-smoking spirit.
As a journalist for many years, Tor would have been touched by all the colleagues who had left messages on his Facebook page, retelling encounters they’d had with him, and recounting stories he’d written, from all over the world. For a requiem, I uploaded a video of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, a group we’d often discussed in the same reverential tones, singing ‘I Had a Dream, Joe’, except I wrote out some of the more poignant lines and changed the name of the narrator’s dead friend to ‘Tor’.
Of all the messages from friends and family members on his page, the one that struck me most came from his mother who had changed the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song into an elegy for her son. I got in touch with her through Facebook to share a few personal recollections that she appreciated.
Tor’s ability to empathise with the wounded and the downtrodden shone through his best stories about the uprising led by Buddhist monks in Burma, the genocide in East Timor and the civil war in Sri Lanka. It was ironic, everyone said, that a journalist who had survived so many danger zones would get hit and killed by a bus while crossing a street near the Erawan Shrine, one of Bangkok’s enclaves of spiritual power.
On the last night of the funeral rites, I was standing outside the hall talking to the photographer Dan White, after the monks had finished chanting and the mourners were pairing off in conversations and making plans to have a wake at a bar and restaurant. Watching these events unfold, Dan hit the coffin nail on the head when he commented, “Funerals are not for the dead. They’re for the living.”
Of all the supernatural rites at these final farewells in Thailand, one of the strangest is seeing the bereaved gather to watch the smoke rise from the crematorium’s chimney as the body is cremated and the deceased gives up the ghost. Whether it’s a human or a monkey does not matter; they wish them a safe trip to heaven and a good rebirth.
The Buddha always claimed that Buddhism is a science and not a religion. So it isn’t necessary to impart any mystical importance to this last rite. It’s all quite natural. The smoke rises into the clouds where it forms condensation and rains back down on the earth to nourish the crops and fields that yield the food and fruits on our tables.
Gop, Tor, Tiziano Terzani and Anais Nin are not really dead. They’re ghosts too. Through the lines of their stories, and between the covers of their books, where their spirits are very much alive, they inspire other wordsmiths to join the frontlines of the profession.
In Buddhist reincarnation on the Wheel of the Law—circles within circles that are forever spinning—from death springs life anew and art eternal.