Last Sunday I celebrated my fourth wedding anniversary, and by a twist of fate, my wife Mem celebrated hers on the same day. To mark the occasion I invited myself to enjoy a cigarette and a beer in my hammock on the porch; Mem invited nine monks and everybody we know to come drink Chinese tea out of jelly glasses and chant the dharma in our living room. There’s a word in Thai for people like Mem. My wife is "wer", or "too much".
All day Sunday I moved furniture, scoured floors, swept cobwebs from ceilings, brushed grime from mosquito screens, washed windows, and stretched a piece of cotton string all the way around the house. Mem supervised. You can’t imagine how much work is necessary to make a room look empty and plain. You also can’t imagine how much lizard dung is hiding in the corners and crevices of the average Phuket living room. Finally we set up a large Buddha shrine, borrowed form the local temple. We laid a series of nine cushions on the floor in front of it, placed an enamel spittoon next to each cushion, and we were ready.
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Shortly after 7 am on a Sunday morning the monks arrived in a brand-new Isuzu van. The edges of the living room, all the dining room and half of the yard rapidly filled with kneeling neighbors and relatives, hoping to earn a little good karma at my expense. Our front porch was covered with a knee-deep drift of shoes. As Mem lit the candles to begin the service, I took my place next to her, and as the first words of namoddhassa filled the house I realized to my horror what a predicament I was in, seated cross-legged in front of the monks, in the center of the first row of worshippers.
And thus began my time in hell. Chanting in Pali is no great feat; anybody can rattle off phutham saranan gachami after just a few minutes of study. It’s sitting on the floor that separates the monks from the boys, and within five minutes I was numb from the knees down. My thighs, hips and latissimus dorsi were pure fire. Being in the front row, there was no way I could get up and stretch without ruining the mood for everybody in the room. I’m not sure it it’s a sin to walk out on the dharma because your feet are turning purple, but embarrassing my wife while she’s showing off her piety and profligacy definitely is. I was determined to suffer mortification of the flesh, and possibly gangrene, rather than spend the next month sleeping on the sofa.
The monks were droning, the neighbors were wondering what the bedrooms look like, Mem’s aura was disrupting local radio and I had developed a twitch in my left eyelid when whatever Gods there be must have decided that I was an evil old sinner, because they knocked me another circle deep into the abyss. My son Andy, fruit of my loins and light of my life, escaped from the nursery and came toddling into the living room. Clutching his stuffed clown he snaked his way through the crowd to where his father’s head stuck up like a bespectacled sunflower in a sea of black poppies and plopped himself down into my lap. He got Mr. Clown comfortably settled into his own lap and stared seriously at the wall of orange and brown cotton sheeting in front of us.
Suddenly, there was feeling in my feet again. Not a good feeling though, more of a first-step-into-the-Jacuzzi, walking-on-coals, we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk feeling. I wanted to scream, I wanted to throw my son out of the window, I wanted to die. But out of the corner of my eye I could see that Mem was watching me, with a fierce maternal pride shining through her religious ecstasy. In fact most of the people I could see were watching me, and despite the Buddha’s tenant that emotion is illusion, they were all smiling as they chanted.
I guess we must have made a pretty heartwarming sight, the sort of thing that Norman Rockwell would have painted if he’d been Thai. The tableaux had everything that makes a good Christmas card; family bonding, religion, a rosy-cheeked child clutching a plush toy. Only the inside of this card would have read, "Please, kill me now! For the love of God, stop the pain!"
The sweat was rolling down my back and my triceps were shivering with the strain of holding up my two hands. I realized that my palms were pressed together so hard that there was no blood left in them; when I relaxed all the knuckles popped at once. Andy seemed happy where he was, and in no hurry to move on. The numbness had progressed as far as my coccyx, and the pain was shooting straight up my neck. There was a singing in my ears unconnected to the chanting on the material plane.
And just as I was sure that I was going to pass out, proof of the loving nature of the almighty came with the words "satu...satu...satu" and around me the crowd rose elegantly to their feet. Andy jumped up and I began trying to massage some circulation back into my legs without pointing my feet at anybody in the process.
Finally I was standing erect, wobbly but not in imminent danger of collapse thanks to a firm grip on the front door frame. I was going to wade through the shoe dunes out onto the porch for a smoke, but Mem called me into the kitchen instead, where she handed me two trays. "Time for the monks to eat," she said. "Start taking these into the living room."
I spent the next half-hour moving back and forth from the kitchen to the living room on my knees, balancing trays of boiled rice in one hand and dim sum in the other. Mem tells me it’s an honor to serve the monks. If I were any more honored, I’d be crippled for life.
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