Don't Hang Your Soul on That, page 12
“I am not really talking about grey hairs,” she says. “Just as you were not really dreaming about Sutum. You might think you were but in fact you were dreaming about yourself. Perhaps you were here in another life and Sutum is just the catalyst to connect you with that. We are only ever dreaming about ourselves. Everyone in our dreams is a version of ourselves even when we dream about our parents, children, or lovers.”
He wonders how she can know such powerful things but understands that she does.
He asks her if he is dreaming not about Sutum but himself how does that mean they are making progress?
“Because of the chickens in your dream. You are feeding monks and feeding monks is making merit. A good thing.”
He scratches his ear and says: “Should we chant more?”
“Yes, that would be a good idea and after that we must call Run and tell him about your dream. We should chant outside though so that we get fresh air and more oxygen.”
When they are sitting out front an animal, the size of a rat, scurries from the tall grass and straight across a patch of moonlight. It doesn’t stop long enough for him to recognize it but vanishes with scurrying noises in the grass. He wonders if it is the same rat that has been burrowing in the roof but doubts it. That rat stopped as soon as Nan arrived. There are no coincidences. He closes his eyes and chants.
He wakes at first light the next morning. They’d made love late into the night and at one point a sliver of bamboo scratched his leg and he yelped. She’d covered his mouth although there is no one nearby to hear.
Earlier when they’d called Run, he’d chanted first and then prayed silently for a half hour as Ed held the phone. The only sound on the phone’s speaker was a continuous static.
Several times, he’d wondered if Run had hung up or the call had been dropped but Nan shook her head whenever he went to end the call. After a half hour Run’s familiar chanting started again and he ended ten minutes later with: “Satu, Satu, Satu.”
Run then told Nan that he’d learned more about Ed. He’d lived in Thailand near the end of the last century and his father had many other enemies in the lives before that one and those enemies had wanted to hurt both of them. Some of those enemies have now gathered around this hut and he suspects that Sutum in a past life was one of those as well.
It rains now, lightly at first and then two loud claps of thunder shake the ground and wake Nan. She smiles at him and a few minutes later there’s a heavy downpour.
“That’s too much rain. We’ll have to wait for the rice to dry before working,” she says and slips from the covers and goes to the sink for water. She brings him back a full glass.
“I didn’t dream about Sutum last night,” he says.
“I know,” she says.
He believes her and wonders again about all those outside the hut. Once he might have wondered why they can’t just come inside, but now understands that ghosts see different walls than the living do.
Sutum could come inside because he’d most recently died, but he can’t go back outside. The logic of that evades him but he’s learned to set aside his western reliance on the physical evidence for every truth. He understands now that truths are not bound like that. They simply exist and are. There is much that isn’t readily perceived. What Nan knows extends beyond the senses.
Run can see the ghost world but can’t describe it. Knows it and who is there and can even communicate with them but he can’t speak very specifically about it.
The layers of time are significant and bend and weave. They join and then snap apart again. None of this is recorded or made real in the ways he’s considered matters to be made real before now. But even if all this is new to him, they are ancient truths passed down through generations.
An hour after they eat their morning meal the sun comes out, but Nan says that it is still too wet to harvest today, and they’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
“Let’s go for a ride instead,” she says.
When he asks where she’d like to go, she says to the caves near Udon Thani. That is over an hour away but he says okay even though it means he must ride there on the back of her motorcycle.
He’s nervous at first but soon adjusts to it and takes in the passing rice fields between uneven rows of trees. Most fields are deserted today because of the rain. He sees a few huts similar to theirs and he suspects that each of those has ghosts too. Until now he hasn’t known the responsibilities that the living have to ghosts.
Hot, moist air blows around him, and as it does, he realizes how little of this world he really understands, how much he’s simply taken for granted without taking the time to think deeply about it or to truly inspect all that requires inspecting. For most of his life, he’s lacked spiritual curiosity.
After a half hour, he closes his eyes and meditates which he’s never done before on the back of a motorcycle. As he meditates, he sees a kaleidoscope of colours in his head. This is new and perhaps triggered by the motions of the motorcycle in the bright sunlight. The colours collide and blend in his head and briefly he hears colours and sees sounds.
He keeps his eyes closed and but senses Nan lean into each curve and how that alters slightly the steady vibration and noise.
Much later, the motorcycle slows up a hill and she shifts gears abruptly. He opens his eyes then and it’s too bright at first. When his eyes adjust, he sees that they are on an oiled road and that is causing the motorcycle to vibrate more. He grips Nan’s waist tighter and she lifts a hand off the handlebars and squeezes his arm.
Riding here with her, he wishes he could see more the way she and Run see. He used to think that such visions weren’t possible, and that any such perceptions were beyond his limited command of his senses, but on the back here he understands for the first time the full impact of their karmic predicament.
Nan parks the motorcycle at the front of a large paved parking lot that is less than half full. The caves are not as busy this time of year. At the entrance they pay for a guided tour and the female guide is close to Nan’s age and speaks Thai to Nan who then translates for Ed. The main entrance to the cave is noisy with bats and that noise is amplified when they step into the cave. A million bats exit the cave at exactly this time each day. When the guide tells them this, he realizes that Nan has made sure to arrive in time for him to witness the magnificence of their exit. Inside, the cave smells of bat guano and reminds him of his grandparents’ barn.
Before they make it even 200 metres in, Nan gets down on a knee and says that she can’t go any farther. She turns around and runs back outside. He’s close behind her, and she stops next to her motorcycle and heaves into the tall grass. Then she belches loudly five times and vomits more into the grass.
“Too many ghosts in there,” she says. “And black magic. Did you notice how the tour guide waved her coffee cup and touched the charms around her neck? Those are black magic tricks to attract business. Many people use black magic.” She takes out her cell phone and calls Run. She talks to him for a while and then she holds the phone close to Ed so he can listen to Run chanting.
He closes his eyes and focuses on Run’s voice. Most of the words sound familiar by now even if he doesn’t know their precise meanings. Run ends with: Bowel Mai Krup.
Nan puts the phone into her purse and then hugs him for a long time.
“Run said that two women attached themselves to me and would not let go. One died horribly, he said. Someone murdered her in the cave and she’s trapped there.” Nan shivers then and belches loudly twice more.
“That’s the bad energy leaving me,” she says.
He feels several sharp jabs in his side but doesn’t tell her about those nor does he ask her if Run saw anyone attached to him. She would have told him if he had.
On the drive back they are in full sun the whole time and he’s thankful for being on the motorcycle as the wind cools him. She drives so expertly he closes his eyes for longer durations. In time, he sees Sutum sitting at the table in the hut as he walks in. Sutum turns toward him and smiles and waves as though he can see him but likely he is waving at someone else.
Nan parks next to the hut but doesn’t go inside right away. Instead she sits in a chair out front. He joins her and it is soon raining again, the clouds forming quickly. They are under the protection of the overhang and thus stay dry although it rains so forcefully that many rice plants are flattened.
When the rain lets up, she leans toward him and whispers: “We have to be good signals so we can help Sutum.”
Later as they eat dinner, he realizes that he met Nan exactly five years ago today. He’d been on his way to Udon Thani to visit a monk that he had heard many good reports about in Bangkok. He took the bus but got off at Khon Kaen, deciding to explore it before going on to Udon Thani. On his second day in Khon Kaen his cell phone stopped working so he went to Central Plaza to get a new one. Nan had a cell phone kiosk on the third floor where there were many such shops. He liked the phones she had. He tested a number of them. Her English was so clear that they talked for more than an hour.
She told him how every night she packed up her most valuable phones and brought them home with her. She owned a Honda Wave motorcycle then and had a safe in her apartment and locked the phones in it every night. In the mornings she’d retrieve them and drive them back to her kiosk.
She would tell him after they were married that some days she sold one or two phones and other days she sold none. But every day she sold a case or set of headphones or a charger, so she was able to get by. She never brought those accessories home and didn’t worry about them being stolen.
She started the kiosk with money her brother lent her but never dreamed it would be where she’d meet her husband. “You can’t plan that,” she’s said. “That is proof of the law of action.”
In all the years she had her kiosk she always dealt honestly with people. She would buy phones from those in need of cash and sometimes paid more than the phones were worth.
That first day they met he’d stopped at several other kiosks first, but she’d had the fairest prices and knew more about each phone. The one he’d settled on had lasted for the first three years they were married. He never did make it to Udon Thani. Today at the cave has been the closest he’s ever been to there.
As he eats, he thinks about how, until he met Nan, he’d mostly journeyed sideways in his life. Now he understands how to bend and not break, how to sense what lingers in the gnarled centre of his being. His soul contains all his journeys tightly packed together and it goes on collecting them life after life.
Five years later he is grateful for that broken phone but believes now that there are no coincidences and that the phone had been destined to break on that day so that he could meet her.
She doesn’t say anything about any of that now but instead tells him a story about a monk that makes him think again of that day five years ago and also more about today. The monk had gone into the countryside outside of Ayutthaya to chant and meditate. It started to rain so he looked around for shelter and spotted a cave nearby. He hurried there and arrived just before a heavy downpour. He sat on a large rock just inside the cave and continued to chant and then meditated. In all that time it didn’t stop raining. He waited until nightfall expecting the rain to stop but it didn’t. He looked around and decided he’d have to spend the night there. While he sat cross-legged on a rock listening to the rain, he heard animal noises behind him in the cave. He listened closer to determine what animal it was. At first, he thought it was a mouse or rat or very large gecko. Soon after, though, a cobra slithered very close to the rock where he sat. The snake took more than a minute to pass by, which meant it was very long.
The monk thought how unfortunate it was that he’d taken shelter in this cave, but he then reminded himself that there are no coincidences.
The snake didn’t stop near him nor attack him but moved to another part of the cave and curled up. The monk decided that meant that he and the snake didn’t have any karmic grievances between them so there didn’t need to be any karmic balancing. He returned to his chanting and meditating. He stayed on the rock, though, just to be safe and slept there in the lotus position. It continued to rain all night and when he woke in the morning it was still raining. His legs were numb, so he had to unfold them slowly to let the blood flow properly to them again, and at the same time, not to disturb the snake, which had spent the night curled up in a corner of the cave. It didn’t budge when he got up to stretch and had his morning pee.
It rained all that day and the next. He spent seven days in the cave with the snake. Not once did the snake approach him or attempt to harm him. He knew by then that they truly hadn’t crossed paths before in any other life and this was likely their very first encounter.
On the eighth morning it stopped raining and, when he rose, he didn’t move as cautiously as he had the first few days. By now he and the snake had grown accustomed to each other and had always maintained a safe distance from each other. He gathered up the small bag he had brought with him and hurried on his way before the rain started again. The snake slowly moved from its corner as he left but didn’t come to the edge of the cave to look out. To the snake it was just another morning and the cave was its home.
The monk soon caught a bus and was back in the city in a mere hour. He was very hungry by then and ate two bowls of warm rice. He didn’t think of the snake as he ate or for a long time afterward, but years later, he thought of it nearly every day for he’d learned a very powerful lesson during those seven days trapped with that cobra.
After telling Ed this story Nan says that was the first time the snake and monk met. They met many times after that in various future lives but not as a monk and snake and not in a cave. In time they fell in love and married. And that love carried forward into other lives. Love has many origins, she says, and many agents including the rain and caves.
He recognizes this story as her way of assuring him that what happened to her in the cave today was very real.
CHAPTER 7
Chum Phae 1970
AHEAVY RAIN wakes him at first light and his room is muggier than earlier. He lies in his cot and feels so lethargic in that stalled air that all he can manage to do is listen to the rain slap against the tiled courtyard outside his window. When the rain slows and then stops, the room finally cools, and he slips from the cot and puts a cushion on the floor and sits there in a lotus position. But the heat soon swells back in and makes it difficult for him to meditate.
He closes his eyes but his mind flits from thought to thought. Soon many voices in his head are speaking at once. In this gibberish his father’s voice rises louder than the rest. What is the hurry? Rushing will ruin you. You need to let go of selfishness and impatience, if you are to have any chance.
He snaps his fingers and counts to twenty and that quiets his father’s voice. His head stays quiet for a few seconds, but his father’s voice returns. Think of me and this busyness, this chatter, your noisy thoughts, as a monkey mind. You must give it a simple task to distract it. Do that and you’ll quiet all the noises in your head. It will get very quiet in there.
He remembers his father saying those exact words, as he lay in bed unable to move his legs. His father had then said: “Look at your toes and concentrate on moving them. The more you imagine them moving the more likely they will move. Remember how easily you once controlled them, without even needing to think about it. They just moved when you needed them to move. So it will be again. And soon after, your legs will move just as your arms do now.”
Tuum had done exactly as his father instructed and in time, he could move them. He remembers that first morning vividly. A loud clap of thunder and a noisy rain woke him and he sat up in bed as he did every morning and tossed off his light sheet and stared at his bare toes. He propped himself up against the pillows and without realizing what he was doing, his toes wiggled. And so it progressed.
His father’s voice stays quiet in his head and he finishes his meditation and unfolds from the lotus position and stretches. Two hours have passed and outside his door he hears the shuffle of many feet as the day is underway. Some hurry past and others move more slowly, each footstep hisses on the tile as they pass.
It is the time to join the other monks as they line up out front of the temple for morning alms. He grabs his alms bowl and hurries to join them at the main gate of the temple. He stands with Pon, Win and A who are lined up behind Kay and twelve other novice monks.
More than thirty villagers have come to give alms to the monks. Many are women Roong’s age or slightly older. The oldest ones are close to his father’s age and they smile often and their outward display of happiness improves his mood. He doesn’t make eye contact with any of the women for to do so would be to break one of the five rules he must live by while in the temple. His bowl is filled with warm rice first and then large chunks of pork and chopped broccoli and onions.
All the monks return to the main dining area and none of them speaks as they eat. Tuum is one of the first to finish and he goes to the porcelain sink at the back of the room to rinse out his bowl. Pon joins him there. Tuum dries his bowl and carries it with him back to his room. He angles the hardback chair away from the desk and sits in it and keeps his back perfectly upright, his head straight in line with a dot he imagines on the plain white wall.
He recites a different chant from the one he did first thing this morning and this one begins with “Pben Dukkang Aniccang Anatta.” (It is suffering. It is impermanent. It is uncontrollable.) He repeats this chant many times to himself. This is to ward off any evil spirits lingering from the food he just ate. Although those who brought it for morning merit came with good intentions, sometimes, they may have unwittingly brought dark forces with them. The chant nullifies those.
An hour later there is a soft knock on his door and, when he opens it, his father is there. He is wearing a white robe.
