My name is "Mobi"; I'm an alcoholic

A Lustful Gentleman – some more of Chapter two…

15 Dec 2011 Comments Off

by mobidark in Uncategorized Tags: a lustful gentleman

As mentioned in yesterday’s blog, I will publish the latest completed bits of my novel on different days to my normal blog days.

So here is some more of chapter two; sections, i, ii, & iii.

Section iii is completely new, and sections i & ii have had some more of the Mobi-editing treatment.

I hope you enjoy it.

A Lustful Gentleman

Chapter Two

i

Ying turned her little Jazz into her driveway and drove slowly up the long driveway and under the carport. The car stereo was blaring out so loudly that when she opened the front door of the car, it sounded like one of those mobile discos; the ones that drive along Pattaya’s roads at night, blaring out music with such ear-splitting intensity that bystanders can barely even think, let alone hear themselves speak. The deafening pop music reverberated harshly across the peaceful, still night.Until Ying’s abrupt arrival, the only sounds to be heard were those of the toads in a nearby pond, emitting their repetitive mating calls.

She cut the ignition and suddenly the world returned to its state of somnolence and once more the toads held pride of place in the humid night air. Ying unlocked the side door to the house, dumped her handbag on the dining table and then summoned up one last burst of energy to climb up the central staircase, enter her enormous bedroom and collapse, fully clothed, on her bed. She lay there for a few minutes, unable to move. She had been drinking but was not wholly drunk – she had drunk just enough to make her woozy and very sleepy.

It had been a very long day. She had been woken before 8 a.m. that morning by the girl who usually opened her hair dressing salon, with the news that she was sick and would not be able to make it in to work that day. As a result, Ying had only had about four hours sleep and it had taken all her will power to drag herself out of bed, take a quick shower before jumping into her car and make it to her salon before the regular opening time of 9 a.m.

She had spent the whole day there and at around 8 p.m. when the final customer had finally left, she had driven to a friend’s house where they had spent the next seven hours playing cards and sipping Bacardi Breezers. By three a.m, Ying was down about three hundred baht and she decided to call it a night. She would have to get up early, yet again, to open her shop in the morning.

She roused herself briefly – just long enough to pull off her jeans and top before collapsing once more onto her bed in her underwear. She lay there for a few minutes with her eyes closed, but for some reason sleep wouldn’t come, a problem she often encountered when she was over-tired and feeling tipsy. She was so tired but her mind kept going round and round.

What sort of life was this? Living in this huge house virtually all alone? It was far too big and it was a daily battle to keep it in in a half way decent state on a minimal budget, while at the same time trying to start a business that was struggling to break even. It was all a bit of a nightmare; now that her assistant was ill, so she wouldn’t even get a decent night’s sleep.

But the longer she lay there, in her heart she knew that on this day she would never make it to her salon much before noon. She was just too tired. She idly speculated on how many customers she might lose if she had yet another unscheduled closure. It had been difficult enough to attract customers in the first place, and for sure, if any of her regulars came in the morning and found her closed, they would not come back. There were simply too many other hair salons in the vicinity for them to remain faithful to a place that kept closing without warning. What a mess!

She curled up with her favourite cuddly panda in the enormous four- poster bed, but still she couldn’t sleep. It was a strange journey indeed that had brought her to this point in her life: thirty four year’s old, living in a huge house, with a nice car in the driveway, but almost perpetually broke. Her estranged husband, Toby, barely sent her enough money to cover the utility bills; she knew that he was also financially distressed and very soon, even that cash stream would probably dry up. There was no way they were going to be able to sell their jointly owned house in the foreseeable future. The market was dead – no one was buying. It was a veritable ‘albatross’ around both of their necks. If they succeeded in selling it, they could both move on with their lives, but as it was, they were both broke and unable to make the clean break that they both yearned for.

Finally, she dozed off. She drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep for a few exquisite minutes when she was rudely awakened by the screeching sound of a Thai rock song, piercing the blessed silence of the early morning. She slowly regained consciousness, wondering for a moment where the music was coming from. Then she knew; it was coming from her phone – her mobile phone was ringing.

She reached out blindly, grabbed hold of the phone and without looking at who was calling, she put it to her lips. ‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Khun Ying?’

‘Yes. Who is that?’

‘This is Pattaya Police station, I am Lieutenant Somkid. We would like you to come here immediately.’

‘Why? Why? What is it? What have I done?’

‘You have done nothing – it’s your husband. We want you to come here and see us about your husband. He is in a lot of trouble.’

‘My husband! He doesn’t live with me anymore. He left me ages ago! I can’t come – I’m not free!’

‘Khun Ying, if you don’t come here and help your husband, he will be in very serious trouble. He will go to jail.’

‘I don’t care! I don‘t care! Fuck my fucking husband! I don’t care what happens to him. I told him! I warned him! I don’t care what happens to him!’

‘Khun Ying, if you don’t come down her immediately and help him, your husband might even die.’

‘I don’t fucking care!’ Let him fucking die!’

She cut off the call, turned off her phone, and closed her eyes, praying that sleep would come back again and blot out the images in her mind.

‘Fuck Toby. Fuck him…fuck him… fuck him…’

Despite the air-conditioning, she suddenly broke out in a sweat. ‘Oh No, not again!’ she said out aloud. ‘Please not again…’

In spite of her antipathy, she suddenly worried about what horrors may befall her errant husband… her fucking husband. Surely that fucking cop didn’t mean it literally? Why should Toby die? But she continued to fret. Die ? No, surely not…she had already seen too many deaths in her life to contemplate yet another one.

***

ii

Ying was sitting cross legged, at one end of a huge, roughly hewn wooden table cum workbench, which served as part cooking area, part sleeping area, part drinking area and part part living area; which has such a ubiquitous presence in  Thai rural life, so popular in the poorer Thai villages. It was the central meeting and gathering area for the occupants and friends of any particular abode.

This particular ‘family bench’ was probably around two meters in length by about one and a half meters wide and covered the entire shaded area in front the modest, two room single storey wooden house that had been the only home Ying had known for the entire eight years of her young life. It was a home that she shared with her mother, younger sister and two younger brothers.

Barely ten minutes ago, she had arrived home from her long, daily walk from school; but already she was hard at it, preparing the vegetables for the family’s evening meal which she would soon start cooking for the five of them – possibly six, if her father decided to stay and eat with them.

She looked across to the far end of the table where her father was also sitting cross-legged in an alcohol-fuelled conversation with one of his drinking cronies from the village. Both of them were well into their ‘cups’. Ying had noticed one empty bottle of Mekong whisky on the ground near to them and a second bottle was already half empty. The two men sat facing each other on the table, the space between them occupied by the whisky bottle, along with a dirty ice bucket and some empty soda water bottles.

Her father snarled at his daughter, ‘Ying! Get me another bottle of soda!’

She jumped up and ran to the side of the house where a half empty case of soda bottles was standing and grabbed a couple of bottles and quickly delivered them to the two men.

The drunken man barely acknowledged her existence as she put down the bottles and returned to her cooking chores. Mama would soon return from the rice fields where she toiled daily at her back- breaking, twelve hour shift in the flooded paddies – up to her chest in the warm, mosquito-ridden water. Ying’s two brothers and baby sister were inside the crudely built house, watching a small black and white television in the corner of the room. They would all be very hungry.

As poor as there were, there weren’t many families in her village who enjoyed the luxury of a television, and on most evenings, a large crowd of villagers would descend on their humble abode for a couple of hours to watch the nightly ‘soap operas’ put out by the only two Thai Channels they were able to tune into from their somewhat isolated neck of the woods.

Ying wasn’t sure whether she should be grateful or resentful of the fact that her father was one of the ‘big wigs’ in the village and had been able to provide them with a coveted TV. She knew well enough that there were many occasions when they wouldn’t see him for days – sometimes weeks – when he would disappear, without warning. On such occasions, the sparse food money he occasionally gave her mother would dry up completely. Sometimes, they wouldn’t eat for several days and it was for this reason that her mother had recently started to work in the paddy fields, as a sort of protection against the vagaries of her common law husband’s largesse.

One of Ying’s friends from the village had told Ying that her father had several other ‘wives’ in a nearby village and that when he disappeared, he would go and stay with them. She wasn’t sure of the truth of these stories, but suspected they were probably true. She did know for sure that her father was not a very nice person. Often, he would return home very drunk and pick a fight with her mother, beating her mercilessly. On more than one occasion her mother had been so badly beaten that they had to call for a doctor to treat her injuries. He had even hit Ying and her brothers on the odd occasion, so whenever they realised that he was particularly drunk, they would do their best to keep out of his way. But no one would dare to say a word to him about his brutal behaviour. He was a very powerful, well-connected, ‘mafia-type’ figure and everyone seemed in awe of him. No one had the courage stand up to him.

Ying could see that her father was getting very drunk and feared that it wouldn’t be long before trouble started. She wanted to warn her mother to stay away but she didn’t know how to go about it. If she left off from her food preparation, her father might get angry; he was so unpredictable. In the end she did nothing; she just sat there, working away and hoped that something would happen to take her father away from their home before her mother arrived back from work.

She couldn’t believe her luck. Almost at the very moment that she wished something would happen, a motorbike drove slowly down the narrow track which led to their house. She could clearly see one of her father’s friends driving the bike but she didn’t recognise the young man on the back. She assumed it was another member of her father’s ‘criminal-gang’. ‘Good,’ she thought, ‘maybe they are all going off to do a ‘job’ somewhere.’ That’s what usually happened when his low-life friends came to see him in the late afternoon.

The bike came to a halt outside the house, less than a meter from where her father and his drinking companion were sitting, but they didn’t get off. In fact, both men remained seated and the engine remained running. As Ying watched, she heard the man on the front yelling something angrily at her father, but he behaved as though nothing had happened. Deliberately ignoring the shouts from the motorbike driver, Ying’s father picked up his whisky glass to take another sip. As he put the glass to his lips, the angry driver shouted something to the youth behind him, whereupon the young pillion passenger lifted his right hand to reveal a handgun; the dark metal glistening in the late afternoon sun.

Although Ying hated her father, she suddenly felt a jolt of panic and revulsion at what was about to happen. But before she could even shout out a warning, the youth fired three shots – one after the other – at almost point blank range, into her father’s head and body. Her father had been so drunk that he hadn’t even seen the shots coming. The smoke was still clearing as the driver snapped his bike in gear, raced the accelerator and skidded his tyres on the dusty ground as the two killers sped away, out of the village.

She instinctively rushed over to her father’s slumped body, hoping against hope that he might have survived the violent attack, but one look at his head told her that it was all over. The bullet had taken half of her father’s face away and Ying stood transfixed, aghast at the grizzly sight. She started screaming, becoming hysterical as the villagers emerged from their nearby homes and rushed over to see what all the noise was about.

Into the midst of this commotion arrived Ying’s mother. Quickly taking in what had happened, her mother grabbed hold of her, and led her towards the house, just as her other children were emerging to see what was going on.

‘Go inside! All of you!’ her mother shouted, ‘and stay there until I say so,’

‘But Mama…’ Ying started to protest.

‘No, Ying, go inside and look after your brothers and sister.’ She shouted loudly at her.

Although Ying knew her mother to be a kindly woman who loved her children dearly, her hard life and difficult circumstances had given her a nasty temper. Woe betides anyone who tried to cross her or gainsay her when her ire was roused – except of course, her now deceased husband. But Ying always did what she was told when her mother was in this kind of mood, so she led her younger siblings back into the room and back to the television, dreading what disastrous effect this tumultuous event may have on their family’s fortunes.

*

In her wildest dreams, Ying couldn’t have imagined quite how catastrophic the after effects of her father’s untimely death would actually turn out to be.

She stayed away from school on the day following her father’s killing, as had her mother from the rice fields. There were many things to sort out, least of which was the cremation of her father’s body. Her mother had no money to pay for a funeral and was wondering what on earth she was going to do when the problem was solved for her by the appearance of her husband’s elder brother and sister, who lived in the next village.

Ying had only seen her ‘in-laws’ once before – when her father had invited them to a big party he held in the village. She doubted her mother had seen them very often either, as on that occasion they had been very unfriendly and had virtually ignored them. So she had expected the worst when they suddenly turned up, but her misgivings were soon assuaged when she heard the brother tell Mama that her father’s family would assume full responsibility for her father’s funeral arrangements.

‘Mama, that’s god news. Now you can stop worrying about it.’

‘Ying, go inside the house, I have some things to discuss with these people,’ she told Ying who once again felt aggrieved at being dispatched away from the centre of action.

She reluctantly walked into the house and tried, without success, to overhear what was being discussed. But it wasn’t long before she realised that whatever they were talking about, it wasn’t good news. She could hear her mother’s raised voice and the responding loud voices of her father’s relatives. She knew that things were not going at all well.

At length, she heard her Mama shout out in anger and after a long pause, she started to cry. She heard the man bark something back at her mother and then there was a long silence. Ying sat, waiting for somebody to say something, becoming ever more fearful at what might have transpired between them, but no sound could be discerned. Eventually, she gingerly peered out of the house; all she could see was the sight of Mama, her head in her hands, weeping quietly to herself. There was no sign of the others. They must have gone.

‘Mama, what has happened? Where have they gone? Did they refuse to pay for father’s funeral after all?’

Her mother looked up bleary eyed at her daughter – incredibly mature for her young years. ‘Funeral, my love? Why yes, child, they will pay for the funeral, don’t worry about that.’

‘Oh that is good news Mama,’ Ying said with a smile. Isn’t it?’

‘Yes, my child, it is good news. But I’m afraid that we have to stay away. They have told me that we are not allowed to go to the Wat. If we do, then they will refuse to pay for the cremation.’

‘That’s terrible Mama, why won’t they let us go to father’s funeral? I don’t understand.’

The tired woman looked at her eldest daughter. She wasn’t sure if Ying would understand. ‘They don’t want us there, my child, because they say that I am not his real wife and that you and your brothers and sister are not his real children. They say that his real wife lives with them in the next village and it would bring a big shame on his family if we go to the funeral. They said that nobody wants us there.’

Ying tried to absorb all this confusing information. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked herself. ‘Why can’t Papa have two wives? I don’t understand. What does it matter if we go to the Wat and pay our respects to our father?’ She considered everything for a few moments, before finally speaking, seeking to reassure her mother.

‘So we can’t say goodbye to Papa. Never mind, Mama, please don’t cry. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, he wasn’t a very nice man, was he?’

Her mother looked at her daughter, lovingly. ‘No Ying, you are right; he wasn’t a very nice man,’ before bursting into a new flood of tears.

‘But Mama, Mama, if he wasn’t very nice, why are you crying? We don’t have to go to the Wat. It’s not so important. Please Mama, please don’t cry.’

Eventually, her tears stopped and she dried her eyes. ‘Ying, my child, I am not crying about your father’s funeral. Yes I want to go. He was an unkind and selfish  man, but  he was the only man I ever loved and her bore me four beautiful children – but that is not why I am crying. You don’t understand.’

‘Try me Mama, try me. Why then?

There was an even longer silence before the distressed woman finally explained the bombshell news to her daughter. ‘Because, my child; because Papa’s family have told me that we must leave our home. They say it belongs to them and they want it back.’

‘Leave our home! They can’t do that! Where will we go? Surely Papas’s family wouldn’t be so cruel to us…’

‘Yes, they would, my love. It belongs to your father and I wasn’t married to him – not properly – and they want it back. They don’t care about us. They hate us.’

‘Oh, Mama, why are people so bad? When must we leave?’

‘Tomorrow!’

‘Tomorrow! We can’t leave tomorrow! Where will we go?’

‘I don’t know, my love, I don’t know where we will go. I have no money to go anywhere.’

‘Then you must refuse to leave Mama, you must tell them we have to stay here until we find somewhere to go.’

‘I already told them that. That man – your uncle – he said if we don’t leave by tomorrow evening, he will bring the police and have us thrown out; and he means it, I know he does.’

‘But Mama, where will we go?’

‘I don’t know, Ying, I just don’t know…’

***

iii

Ying sat with the rest of her fellow-villagers on the hard benches at the village Wat and stared at the ground.  Around her, the adults held their palms together in prayer and joined in the resonating incantations being chanted by the saffron robed monks, who were seated in front and to the left side of them on a long bench. The somnolent drone of the incomprehensible Pali prayers had almost caused her to drop off to sleep, but without warning, the chanting momentarily stopped and she looked up, wide awake once more.

At the centre of her deeply tanned, Issan face that was already showing signs of promised beauty to come, her cavernous, deep brown eyes, were transfixed on a point several meters in front of her. She stared at the raised plinth at the far end of the temple grounds, where, hidden from view, her beloved grandfather was lying in a large casket dressed in his finest traditional Thai clothes, awaiting his journey to the next life.

It was just yesterday that she had arrived back from school and was in the process of getting changed to join her mother for her late afternoon session in the nearby paddy fields, when her brother had come running into the house, with a message for her to go quickly to her grandfather’s home. Her worst fears had been confirmed; Granddad’s disease-ridden body had finally given up the unequal struggle  in his seventy fifth year on this earth – a worn out, skeleton of a man, who had lasted a lot longer than anyone could have reasonably expected, for he had been sick and infirm for several months.

To Ying, he was one of the few souls who had shown her kindness during the past few years of her brief but careworn life and although she had been expecting his death for some time, it came as a huge shock when she had rushed into his primitive room and found the poor old man, stiff and cold, lying on his dirty worn out mattress, his tattered, soiled clothes reeking of death and decay.

The next twenty-four hours had passed in a blur, and now here she was, at the village Wat, attending the last rites before her poor Granddad’s body was incinerated in the primitive crematorium.

She remained seated as the as the villagers around her rose to walk over and form a line in front of the plinth to pay their respects to one of the doyens of their humble village. ‘If it hadn’t been for Granddad, God knows what might have happened to me and my family when we arrived here from our previous home, some four years ago,’ she pondered to herself,

*

She would never forget that long journey of some twenty kilometres from the village where Papa was viciously murdered, to the village where her mother’s father – Ying’s grandfather – still lived. It had been in that village, some twelve years previously, that Ying’s father had first met her mother and had taken her away to live in his own village near to the Cambodian border, where his four children were subsequently born.

It seemed only yesterday that they had made that long, arduous trek, the five of them dressed in tatters, carrying all their worldly possessions, either balanced on their shoulders or piled perilously high on a primitive, two-wheeled cart, which they had borrowed from a neighbour. The trip took two exhausting days to complete, and at long last, the family had made it back to the place where Ying’s grandfather had made his home and where, some twelve years ago, Ying’s mother and father had first met.

Ying knew from her grandfather that Mama was originally from Chaiyaphoom, in the North-east of Thailand and that being desperately poor, she – along with many other Issan folk – had migrated to Sa Kaeo province to find work and start a new life. Thus, many villages in the area had become almost entirely populated by ethnic Issans, who all spoke Issan in their daily lives and had brought their Issan culture with them to this little part of Sa Kaeo province. But Ying’s father was an ethnic -Khmer, as were a majority of Sa Kaeo residents, given its proximity to Cambodia.

Ying then started to realise that there was another, more sinister reason why her mother and her family had been so hated in her father’s, Khmer-centric village. Who knows? It might have contributed to the reason he was killed, such was the hatred and distrust between the two cultures.

When they had arrived back at Granddad’s village some four years ago, they found him still in reasonable health, but eking out a poor existence as a field labourer. However, he did own a small plot of village land, which he had been smart enough to buy at a give-away price some years ago, when the previous owner had been desperate for money. Ying’s Grandmother had been dead for many years, and since then, he had lived alone in a small, makeshift house on stilts, which he had built himself. After his wife passed away, his needs were modest and he informed his daughter that she was welcome to take the remaining part of his unused land for her family to live on.

*

Ying was still rooted to the bench, now the only one left seated. ‘Come on Ying’, a village elder called out, breaking her reverie, ‘Come and pay respects to your Grandfather before we burn him’.

She rose as if a trance, without offering a word of acknowledgement, and joined the end of the line; but her mind was still in the dreams of yesterday.

*

The very next day after their arrival, her mother had gone to work in the rice paddy fields from dawn to dusk to earn sufficient money to feed her family. They now had to fend for themselves for much of the time; they had no money to build a house, and for many months the family had to make do with a few rusty sheets of corrugated iron, kindly donated by neighbours, which was fashioned into a lean-to.

Ying had returned to her village school and despite the harsh conditions under which she lived and the responsibilities she had to endure during the evenings and weekends, she continued to make good grades. Not only did she have to look after the family but she often had to join her mother working in the rice paddies to supplement their meagre income.

Ying’s mother may have been illiterate, but she was a canny woman and she soon realised that the land given to her by her father was worth more to her than just a place to build a home on.  So after months of battling through frustrating, bureaucratic ‘red tape’ at the local government offices –  particularly problematic given her illiteracy – and with the help of some village elders, the desperate mother finally succeeded in transferring Granddad’s parcel of land into her own name. 

She was then able to borrow some money from the local government bank, lodging her newly acquired land as security and utilised the money to build a rudimentary house for her family to live in. It was more of a shack than a house, but it did put a solid roof over their heads, and did provide them with a proper, albeit very basic, toilet. This was to be Ying’s family home for many years to come.

Since then – several years in fact – life had settled into a hard but relatively uneventful routine. Her younger sister and brothers had started school and her mother had continued to keep the finances afloat by her daily labour in the paddy fields. She knew that Mama was for ever having financial problems and sometimes she had to borrow money from her neighbours to keep up the payments up on her bank loan. Mama’s constant fear was that the bank would seize her little bit of land and render the family homeless yet again.

*

At the tender age of twelve, little Ying, could not  devote too much of her precious time thinking about such matters. She had too many other burdens on her young shoulders: surviving day to day, keeping up with her schooling, working with her mother and having a major role in the care and upbringing of her young siblings.  Even as she stood in line at her Granddad’s funeral, she fretted that they had now taken two days off from the paddies and they must get back to work tomorrow, or by the end of the week, there wouldn’t be enough money to buy food.

At length, the formalities – unusually  brief, due to the family’s lack of funds to pay for something more ostentatious  -  drew to a close, and her dear, worn out Granddad was sent on his way to his next life with puffs of black smoke bellowing out of the tall chimney, high above her head.

She wasn’t a particularly spiritual person – what girl is at that age – but on impulse, she closed her eyes and sat silently in prayer, begging ‘whoever may be out there’ that her Granddad  be granted a better life the next time around. She felt sure that he deserved it as he had been a virtuous man and had made much merit in this  life, now sadly at an end. When she eventually opened her eyes, she looked around  and was surprised to find that everyone had gone.There was no sign of her mother and siblings, so she assumed that they had left her to her prayers and already taken off for their trek back home.

Overcome with grief but still dry eyed, Ying started to take the long, hot slow walk back to her home when just as she walked out of  the Wat grounds, she was unexpectedly intercepted by the local head man – the Kaman of the village. He was Khun Somsak, the final arbiter of all village matters and the political ‘tool’ of the provincial party bigwigs. Ying knew him to be a strict, but fair old man and she surmised that he had decided to come over and pay his respects.

‘Sawasdi, Khun Ying,’ the old man started, ‘Do you have a moment? I would like to talk with you.’

‘Yes, of course, Khun Somsak, is it about my Granddad?’

Not exactly, Ying, come, follow me to my home, and we can have a quick chat.’

Ying dutifully followed the man to his own home, near the Wat, where she was bidden to take a seat in the porch, while a maid brought out a welcome glass of cold water for her.

‘Ying, your mother has asked me to talk to you on her behalf.’

‘Why, Khun Somsak, is something wrong? Has something happened to my Mama? She seemed fine at the Wat.’

The old man was silent for a few moments; not a man for quick repartee or unconsidered responses. ‘Yes… and… no… my dear. Yes, something is wrong, and no, your mother is perfectly well, as far as I am aware.’

‘Then what, sir?’

‘Ying, you are aware that your mother has problems making the monthly payments on her bank loan?’

‘Why, yes, of course, she is always talking about it and worrying herself silly.’

The old man remained silent.

‘Oh no! No!’ she suddenly exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me we are going to lose our home again. This is too much – not now that Granddad has died. What will we do?’ she asked him, almost in tears.

‘No, Ying, the bank is not foreclosing – not yet, at any rate. No, the problem is that your mother has borrowed a lot of money from people in the village and she can’t pay it back.’

Ying thought about this for a while. ‘So what can I do about it? Why are you talking to me?’

‘Because your mother asked me to and because I think I have been able to find a solution to your family’s financial problems.’

‘So…this solution – it involves me?’ she enquired, fearing what may be coming next.

‘Yes, my child, it involves you, but please don’t be scared. We are not going to sell you to a massage parlour or anything like that. We are poor folk but we are not so bad as that.

‘Ying, my child, your mother has asked me to tell you that we have arranged for you to go and live with a family in Bangkok, to work as their as their maid and as a nanny to their children.’

‘Bangkok? I… I don’t understand…’

‘Ying, I have some friends who know a very nice family and they live in Bangkok and they need a young live-in maid. I am sorry, but it seems to be the only way out of your family’s money problems. The family will pay you a small wage and they will send it home to your mother to help with her daily expenses.’

‘But…what about my school?’

‘I’m afraid that your school days are all over, my child. You can already read and write – very well I hear – so that will hold you in good stead. Now you are grown up and you must help your family by going to work in Bangkok.’

‘But…what about my family? If I go to Bangkok, I won’t see be able to see my brothers and sister any more, will I?’

‘Well maybe one day you will be allowed to go home for a few days. You will have to discuss that with the family after you start work.’

Ying sat for a long time in silence, trying to absorb all these sudden and unexpected changes to her life. No more school – no more work in the paddy fields – no more looking after her family – no more village life with her friends…It was almost too much for her to take in all at once.

But the longer she thought about it, the more puzzled she became. It didn’t make sense – surely the money she would earn as a maid wouldn’t be that much more than she could earn in the paddy fields. And if she left home, who would look after the children? Who would cook their meals? If her mother had to do everything, then she would have to stay at home and she wouldn’t earn any money to buy food. What about the bank loan and the money she owed in the village? How was all that going to be paid back on a maid’s salary?

The canny old man seemed to sense what was going on in Ying’s young, over-active brain. ‘You are wondering how your mother will pay off her debts, aren’t you?

‘Yes, how did you know?

‘Because I know that you are very smart young lady. Well Ying, here is the crux of it all. We need you to be a very good girl and promise that you will stay with this family in Bangkok and work hard for them until you are eighteen years of age. Can you do that?

‘Well…yes… I suppose so… but why?’

‘Because the family have very kindly agreed to give your mother enough money to pay off all her debts, and in return, you must stay with them and work for them for six years, until you are eighteen. Is that OK?’ Can you do agree to that?

‘Agree? Why yes, of course. I have no choice do I?’

The man looked at her in silence.

‘But what happens… what happens if they are cruel to me and beat me and don’t feed me… what then?’

‘Don’t worry Ying, they won’t do that. They are good people, you have my word.’

‘And Mama? Will she be able to stop working in the paddy fields?’

He smiled at her concern. ‘Yes, Ying, you mother will have enough money to give up her work and stay at home. Your salary should be enough for the family’s daily needs, once she no longer needs to make the monthly payments on her bank loan.’

There was little more to discuss so she thanked the old man for his intervention and help in this matter, bade her farewells and walked slowly back to her own home.

Ying found her mother sitting cross legged on the ground outside their little home, waiting patiently for her return. She looked at her deeply troubled mother. Despite her tender age, she was not completely ignorant of the toll these past few years had inflicted on her mother; toiling in the hot, unremitting sun, up to her knees in muddy water, with her back bent at acute angles. This had left her with permanent back problems and severe arthritis. The child could see that Mama had been experiencing difficulty in getting about, even though she was still only in her forties. But to Ying’s young, but wise eyes, her poor Mama looked to be in her sixties.

Her mother looked at Ying, terrified what her eldest daughter might have to say.

‘It’s OK, Mama. You can stop worrying. I will go to Bangkok, and you can pay off the loans and stop working in the fields. I have agreed to everything.’

Her mother looked at her with tears in her eyes, and Ying knew that her Mama hated doing this to her daughter. The Kaman had told Ying that there was no time to be lost if Ying was to take up the position in Bangkok, so both of them were also distressed at the imminent departure of the family’s eldest daughter.  

Like most Thais, Ying’s family weren’t  particularly demonstrative, but on sudden impulse, she crouched down next to her Mama and hugged the disconsolate woman closely to her chest. ‘It’s OK, Mama – it’s OK; everything will be just fine.’

Her mother remained stiff and motionless; her moist, myopic eyes, transfixed on a nearby mangy dog which lay spread eagled on the hot dusty earth. As she stared, the dog’s shape slowly faded from view in the ever lengthening shadows of a fast approaching dusk.

***