The Ink Readers of Doi Saket by Thomas Olde Heuvelt Read online

  The Ink Readers of Doi Saket by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

  Illustration by Victo Ngai

  People send their dreams and wishes floating down the Mae Ping River with the hope that those dreams will be captured, read and come true. It is a surprise what some wish for and why. One can never know what’s inside someone’s heart—what they really truly want, and those dreams sometimes reveal our true selves.

  This short story was acquired for Tor.com by consulting editor Ann VanderMeer.

  http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/04/the-ink-readers-of-doi-saket

  It was during a night in the twelfth lunar month of this year when two strong hands pushed young Tangmoo down into the bed of the Mae Ping River, and by doing so, ironically, fulfilled his only wish. Tangmoo flailed his arms wildly, churning up the swirling water. The whites of his eyes reflected flashes from the fireworks as his smothered cries rose in bubbles to the surface, where they burst in silence: help, help, help, help!

  These filtered cries of alarm were mistaken by a pair of dragonflies fused in flight, their only wish to remain larvaless and so prolong their love dance endlessly, for the dripping of morning dew. So unsettled was the pair that their breaths caught, and for a second, just when the male ejaculated, they separated. Force of habit subsequently incited them to repeat this in all their future climaxes, making their fondest wish actually come true.

  But this was a chance circumstance. The point here is that young Tangmoo screamed, and his lungs filled with water, and please, he did not want to die this way.

  In order to fully grasp the tragedy of this drama, we’ll have to flash back a few days and take a peek at the village of Doi Saket, situated on the exact same river shore. Late one afternoon, about an hour before it was time for his third bowl of rice of the day, the well-bellied weed exterminator Uan[1] came running into the temple square. Winded as a consequence of the oversized behind that had given him his name, he stopped to catch his breath, leaning against the enormous stone phallus outside the temple (though not on the temple grounds themselves, since Buddha doesn’t approve of that kind of non-Buddhist folly), before wheezing, “Come see, come see! The first wish has arrived!”

  “Watch out!” cried the malodorous lampshade maker Tao[2], whose nickname did not spring from his shell head or his tortoise appearance, but from his extreme robustness, and he nodded toward the phallus.

  In his frenzy, Uan had forgotten all about the general consensus around the ancient fertility symbol. The adulterous rice peeler Somchai[3] had once cheated on her husband with three neighbors and a shopkeeper from a nearby village after she had been spotted on the phallic altar, touching herself and wrapped in nothing but silk ribbons. As a penalty, Somchai was buried waist deep in the rice field so that her excess fertility could seep into the crops, and it was decided that the bewitched phallus was never to be touched again, and was only to be greeted by passersby with a brief nod of the head, something that was ardently copied by the villagers and which consequently led to an abundance of oral sex. (There were rumors that the stone was not in fact bewitched at all, but that lustful Somchai suffered from some type of obsessive exhibitionism. Nonsense, of course.)

  Quick as lightning, Uan let go of the stone (but he was too late: in the following year his wife would give birth to triplets) and yelled, “Come to the river, all of you! The first wish is arriving—I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”

  “So soon?” said the well-mannered crab gatherer Kulap, just returning from the rice field with her basket. “I don’t believe it. It’s way too early.”

  Inside his house the generally respected Puu Yaybaan, chief of the village, heard the commotion and came running out the door. “What’s going on?” he shouted, scattering chickens in his wild dash. “What’s all this racket?”

  “Uan says the first wish is here,” Kulap said, crinkling her nose in a way that was all in contrast to her gentle nature. “But I don’t believe it.”

  “Is this true?” the Puu Yaybaan asked.

  “It’s as true as me standing here,” Uan insisted, and indeed, there he stood.

  “Well . . . so did you retrieve it?” Tao asked, placing his lampshade at his feet.

  “Certainly not,” Uan responded. “I can’t swim, I’m too heavy to stay afloat. Come on, everybody! To the river!”

  The hubbub caused many a window shutter to open, many a cell phone to ring, and many a banana leaf to furl bashfully back into its tree, as curiosity was the one thing that could mobilize all the villagers in unison. And sure enough, when they arrived at the riverside, they all saw it. A trace of brilliance on the tranquil stream. A floating lily made of plastic and crepe paper. A pearl inside a lotus blossom. The first wish of Loi Krathong.

  The philosophical irrigator Daeng[4], named after the blood that covered him when he was born, waded through the shallows saying, “Is it a wish for happiness? A love wish? A last wish? Wishful thinking?”

  The short-spoken restaurant owner Sorn[5], named after some curious agricultural mishap that no one remembered, pointed his stone pestle toward the brilliance on the water and said, “If we don’t do something, it’s going to float right past.”

  “Someone needs to go get it!” the Puu Yaybaan cried, shushing the onlookers. Men hesitated on the shore, children waded into the river until their mothers whistled them back, and the scrawny frog catcher Yai[6] took off his clothes and dove into the deep green water.[7]

  “What is it? What’s the first wish?” the people shouted when Yai finally resurfaced and reached the little boat. “Does it have a note inside?”

  Treading water, Yai unfolded the lotus leaves and produced a moist piece of paper. “Wait. I’m having trouble reading it. The words are smudged. But it says”—dramatic pause as the river held its breath in anticipation—“‘I wish for my dying water buffalo to get well —Bovorn S. from San Phak Wan.”’

  “LOI KRATHONG HAS STARTED!” the Puu Yaybaan declared over the PA system, used for announcing all important and unimportant news in the village, and his tinny words were greeted by cheers from the crowds on the riverbank. The cunning monk Sûa[8] broke into the traditional Loi Krathong song, soon joined by the village elders clapping their hands and the children splashing one another with water, while miles upstream, in the city of Chiang Mai, thousands upon thousands of wishes were being launched onto the river.

  November full moon shines

  Loi Krathong, Loi Krathong

  And the water’s high in local river and the klong

  Loi, Loi Krathong, Loi, Loi Krathong

  Loi Krathong is here and everybody’s full of cheer

  We’re together at the klong

  Each one with his krathong

  As we push away we pray

  We can see a better day

  Young Tangmoo[9] heard the noise from where he was perched in the crown of the slender teng-rang tree, slinging a piece of plaited cotton around a broken and dreadfully sagging branch. The tree had been struck by lightning the previous summer. No matter how Tangmoo propped, nailed, tethered, or jiggled the dead wood, every day around noontime it produced a loud crack and the infernal thing sank down a little closer toward his father’s house. Every day Tangmoo climbed the tree with new boards or ropes, and every day the proportion of natural versus artificial outgrowths in the teng-rang tree shifted a little more in favor of the shoring material. His mother kept her tip money in an old wok, saving up so she could one day afford to call in a landscaper to eliminate the danger. But Tangmoo did not mind his daily chore. It somehow reminded him of a sacred ritual. The crown and leaves of the tree triggered a subcon
scious memory of the hollowed-out watermelon after which he had been named; a crib that had afforded him many sheltered days and nights when he was a baby.

  “EVERYBODY DOWN TO THE RIVER!” the Puu Yaybaan’s voice rang across the fields. “THERE ARE WISHES TO BE GRANTED! OH, AND REMEMBER TO PIN PLENTY A PENNY TO THE MONEY TREE OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE. WE WILL SEE A BETTER DAY!”

  Tangmoo climbed down. He stopped to leave an offering of fresh oranges and cigarettes in the little spirit house and say a prayer, to thank the tree spirit for blessing them with a still-uncrushed house beneath the dead branch. (While Tangmoo naturally believed in Buddha and his lessons and rebirth and all, it didn’t mean he had no room for spirits. And in fact the branch’s benevolence had nothing to do with the tree spirit—so traumatized by the lightning strike that it had long since gone to live in another tree—but was closely related to young Tangmoo’s own exceptional karma.)

  Arriving at the riverside, Tangmoo spotted his little brother Nataphun vacantly digging holes in the sand.

  “Hey, Tangmoo,” Nataphun said.

  “Aren’t you going to watch?” Tangmoo asked. “The wishes are here.”

  “Nah, don’t wanna. I’m hungry. I wish time would go faster so I could have supper.”

  “M’okay,” Tangmoo said, shrugging.

  A bit farther down, where the tranquil Mae Ping River was now the scene of a splashing and churning bustle, Tangmoo picked a butterfly orchid, merely on impulse. As he did so, the orchid’s calyx shook, causing minute grains of pollen, invisible to the naked eye, to drift into the air and be carried upstream by a sudden gust of wind. A tremor went through the village. Those who peeled rice looked up from their work. Lovers fell silent. And the pollen? It landed on one of bored little Nataphun’s nostrils. As soon as the boy took a breath, a rare allergy made him fall asleep instantly, only to be woken by the chirping of crickets about an hour later. Surprised by the swift fulfillment of his wish, Nataphun ran home to fill his growling stomach.

  But this, the same as with the dragonflies, was purely coincidental, and nothing should be read into it.

  By now the surface of the river was teeming with krathongs. Like any other boy in Doi Saket, Tangmoo had been told the tragicomic story of Loi Krathong’s origins countless times, and so he was aware of the invaluable influence of the village he called home. Seven hundred years ago Neng Tanapong, daughter of a Brahman priest in the kingdom of Sukhothai, had been playing on the riverbank. The wench was so startled by the appearance of river goddess Phra Mae Khongkha (who by coincidence had picked the exact same spot to take a bath) that she made an unfortunate tumble into the water and drowned. Everyone knew that, in death, she read the wishes in the lotus boats passing above her dead eyes and made them all come true. And everyone knew that this event in honor of the river goddess was reenacted in Doi Saket every year, and it was they who granted the wishes with their ceremony.

  Oh, the festival! All over Thailand people drank themselves into a stupor on cheap whiskey, sang their throats sore at moonlit karaoke parties, and made love, night after night, beneath fireworks and lantern lights. Everyone, everyone launched krathongs on the water and floated khom loi[10]into the air. Everyone made wishes.

  But while the people in Chiang Mai partied, the villagers of Doi Saket set to work. Under guidance of the wayward harvester driver Sungkaew, they strung nets across the river and caught the krathongs. Men rowed to and fro in tiny boats while women waited on the bank to unburden them. Burnt incense sticks were tossed onto a pile of smoldering embers, spreading a fabulous aroma that the sultry breeze carried across the rice fields like a whispered message. Candle stubs were melted down, the wax used as fuel for the khom loi. Money, jewelry, and other valuables sacrificed to the river goddess were collected by the Puu Yaybaan and pinned to the timber tree frame standing beside the stone phallus outside the temple, so that all could follow the example of the generous ones. Woe the mortal who tried to steal: a night of dangling upside down from the holy daeng tree would await him, and a next life as the larva of a dengue mosquito.

  “Filthy thieves,” the Puu Yaybaan would fume.

  But the wish notes were what mattered most. If they were still legible they were collected in a pile: a life filled with love and happiness here, a new hip joint for my mother there, and sometimes entire wish lists: 1) A fair amount of luck; 2) 20,000 baht[11](that ain’t too much, is it?); 3) A bit more headway with my neighbor girl Phailin, though rumor has it that just recently she spread her legs for chicken farmer Kai, and if that’s true then never mind; 4) A new screen door, which I would have bought ages ago if my boss Kemkhaeng wasn’t too bloody stingy to give me a leg up from time to time; 5) A broken leg for Kemkhaeng; 6) . . .

  In other wish notes the ink had run so much from the journey on the water that special Ink Readers, initiated for the occasion, were sent into the river. Two monks, Sûa and Mongkut, were given the task of interpreting the running tendrils of ink beneath the water’s surface. For three days they swam back and forth, dragging themselves ashore, watery eyed, to reel off their messages to the scribes on the riverbank before they submerged again. If no note was found at all, the krathong was taken to the Exalted Abbot Chanarong[12], who would metaphysically distill the intended wish from its little boat.

  Everyone in the village would tell you that they had once seen the Exalted Abbot floating a meditative little bit over his prayer rug, a krathong in his hands and mountains upon mountains of them beneath his exalted bare feet. All of them had been told the story so often in their formative years that they firmly believed it to be true. Yet no one had seen it with their own eyes. In fact, the Abbot was a senile old man who had trouble reading the verses and, more important, who drooled a lot. If at some point he had been able to levitate, he had forgotten how ever since his first walker. Still, after much heated debate, voting, counting, and recounting, the village council had decided that clairvoyance was more sacred than dementia and therefore should always be given the benefit of the doubt. And so they unscrambled the Exalted Abbot’s inarticulate prattle, and every single wish from northern Thailand was read in anticipation of the ceremony to be performed on the final night.

  And the wishes?

  They came true. At least, some of them.

  Because in the dead of night the Puu Yaybaan, accompanied by his monks Sûa and Mongkut, drove his rickety pickup truck to the village of San Phak Wan. On the way over, they spotted a water buffalo in radiant health and coaxed it from its rice paddy. While Mongkut kept watch outside the hut of sleeping Bovorn S., the other two swapped his terminally ill buffalo, more dead than alive where it lay tied to a rope, for the perfectly fit animal. Downstream, they tossed the weakened ox off a bridge. It resurfaced only once, mooing, and after that nothing more was heard besides the cicadas.

  “SUCH GOOD FORTUNE!” the Puu Yaybaan declared when the new day dawned. “BOVORN S. FROM SAN PHAK WAN FILLED HIS KRATHONG WITH ONE HUNDRED BAHT AND HIS WIFE’S GOLDEN RING, AND HIS WISH CAME TRUE! HIS BUFFALO IS SPRY AS A JUMPING MOUSE! DO AS HE DID, DONATE GENEROUSLY, AND YOUR WISHES SHALL BE HEARD! OH, AND PLEASE SPECIFY YOUR NAME CLEARLY ON YOUR WISH NOTE—BUDDHA IS NOT A MINDREADER, YOU KNOW.”

  The rumor spread like wildfire through the PA systems of the surrounding villages and the villages beyond, and it was not long before the miracle was confirmed by a rapturous Bovorn S., who wept tears of joy on the hide of his bewildered buffalo.

  Huh? some people in Doi Saket thought. But the ceremony isn’t until tomorrow night. We haven’t even granted his wish yet.

  Sûa, however, stated that the ritual in itself was purely symbolical and that granting wishes is about karma (of the wish granters, of course, shrewdly leaving aside whether he was referring to the gullible villagers or the flaccid monks), and that was the end of it.

  More riches than ever before were piled onto the krathongs. From far and wide, people flocked to the temple to donate money, which looked very handsome on the money tree (making it increasingly
healthy) and then looked very handsome in the Puu Yaybaan’s bank account (making him increasingly wealthy). The temple didn’t see a penny. A shamefully puny amount was budgeted for granting a wish here and there, just to keep the legend alive. The Exalted Abbot invariably mumbled a thank-you and would have no part of the deception, for if there was anyone who would not take the old geezer seriously, it was the Puu Yaybaan.

  Of course, the villagers themselves had their wishes too. Countless wishes. Widely varying wishes that would be floated into the air on wish balloons during the ceremony. And even though they were adept at granting wishes and so, at least in theory, should be able to reshape their own lives, every man needs wishes to be able to believe in something.

  The well-bellied weed exterminator Uan wished for love, and if that wasn’t in the books, the idea of love, and if that wasn’t in the books, a cursory embrace.

  The mournful neighbor Isra had been wishing for a letter from her grandson Om for six years, as he had gone to study “computer” in Singapore and never wrote.

  The well-mannered crab huntress Kulap wished for a gong, just because she loved the sound.

  Tangmoo’s benevolent father Gaew wished for a good life for his children, Singha, Nataphun, and Noi, and of course for Tangmoo himself.

  The philosophical irrigator Daeng wished he were dead.

  The adulterous rice peeler Somchai begged for potency in her husband’s ever-failing manhood so that she could finally, after all these years, take his virginity.

  Even the corrupt monk Sûa had a wish. He wished that, just for once, he could set eyes on river goddess Phra Mae Khongkha, even though he did not believe in her.

  Only young Tangmoo wished for nothing. He had never wished for anything. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I had something to wish for? he often thought. Tangmoo approached the world in all sincerity, always searching for something worth wishing for, but he never found anything that moved him sufficiently to engender a desire. All the things that occupied the other villagers, their disputes and worries, their questions and futilities, their dramas and embraces . . . nothing felt like it was more than what it seemed to be. And so Tangmoo’s life became a string of pure experiences that he endured, and in which he performed no appreciable miracles.