Well we survived that. Even managed to eat before the heavens opened. How I love hot rain.
Thank you to everyone who sent nice messages
Now back to what passes for reality here: Maybe this should be in the Bangkok Diary

Family Tales 1
All of what follows is , I think, snatched from the speed of the days. I know that seems unconvincing and silly in a country where, mostly, time appears to move more slowly, and sometimes appears not to move at all; and where people have reduced the speed of activity to something approaching perpetual inertia. I must not get distracted by speed. I have learnt many things in the East. I have even learnt to walk more slowly, eat more slowly; yes, I know, think more slowly. Indeed activities that I used to dash off in a few minutes, with a carelessness that now seems criminal, I have learnt must be accorded possibly a whole morning's attention. Nail cutting, cat grooming, purchase of shampoo, eating of noodle soup, have all been known to last three or four hours; while major activities such as the purchase of a new two dollar T Shirt may well take the whole afternoon and evening . Even soap operas, while short by English standards in that they are finished in a few weeks, nonetheless manage to cram extended periods of inactivity into the evening's schedule. This is of course more than made up for by the acres of coverage the stars manage to be accorded in the TV gossip magazines. However all this seemed to happen with vertiginous speed.

It is nearly five o'clock in the morning. This is a moment between the departure of drunken boys, revelling in an unlikely and unconvincing victory by Manchester United over some Greek outfit and the arrival of my brother in law.

Leaving aside the somewhat perplexing obsession with English football in this country (-is it side-betting, is it neo-colonialsim, is it homo-erotic?) the arrival of a true blood relative-even at 5.00 am is not to be trifled with. I did suggest that he could have caught an earlier bus, a later bus, or even a plane, but no: the 21.30 from up country had been the only option.

I then, foolishly, suggested that maybe it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that a male, aged 30, in possession of a small handbag and funds, could negotiate the securing of a taxi from the bus station to the house. A suggestion dismissed with derisiveness by wife and sisters. Phi Chat* had only been to the capital city a few times. He would be as an innocent in the jaws of wolves at the bus station; he would have to be met, it appeared, by a gaggle of relatives, all female. He was, after all, the only son among five children. I wondered whether one taxi would be sufficient and, further, given that it was deluging, what excuse could be dreamed up to avoid the inevitable-that it would be I who had to walk the streets in search of one-or more.

The circumstances of his visit, which had of course been announced after he boarded the bus, were rather unusual. So it was not without interest that I looked forward to his visit. I had met him only once before, when he arrived at the airport-at 2.00 am of course, and had got to know him a little when he stayed what was left of that first night. Though he and my wife had talked the remainder of the night I had gone to bed fairly soon.

He was shorter than my wife, about five feet two inches I should say, and slightly built, like her. He had rather bowed legs like a football player and a fine square head with the delicate features of the mother. They did not share the same father. His hair was thick and curly and I should have said he was probably some seven or eight years her senior, which would have made him thirty or thirty one. Coming off the plane from Taipei he walked with a jaunty air, wearing new silver Nike trainers, new denim shirt and jeans, and with a small electric blue knapsack over his shoulders. He looked like any young man with a reasonable job.

He had come that time to bury his father.

The currently fashionable word for their family is, I think, blended. It was by far from an unusual arrangement here. Phi Chat had tried to tell me as much of the story as he could.

"My father", he said, " was a man of some substance. He had two children by my his mia luang*, though not much has been heard of them for years and I suppose they must probably be in their fifties. I do not know if they will come to his funeral."

The father, when I met him a couple of years ago was well into his eighties then. So his death was no surprise.

Chat went on. " He took a fancy to Pui, our mother, when she was only sixteen or so. It was a fancy I suspect fuelled by the fact that she was the village headman's daughter. He did not bother to observe formalities or niceties. He just climbed through her bedroom window and raped her.

Some three or four years after the birth of Nui who was her sixth child- Orn as you know died in infancy-she got bored with his indifference to her children and everything about her, except presumably her sexuality, and, to everyone's amazement and condemnation, left him. Two of us, Twm, who is the eldest of us , and I went on living with him for some reason, while the others decamped with her some three kilometres to a small house in the next village. Before not too long mother had a new admirer and a seventh child, the girl who is now your wife. My father in the meantime, not to be outdone, had acquired a new consort and set about constructing a further family. By this time of course the eldest children had children of their own; so children and their uncles and aunts or nieces and nephews are many of them all the same age. Indeed your wife is younger than most of her her nieces and nephews."

"How," I asked him, " did he support all this clan?"

"Oh," he replied," in the usual way. He was quite wealthy in the beginning. He was Chinese Khmer you know."

"When did he go to Takua Pa?" I asked.

" I am not sure", he said. " You know that there is a big Chinese community there. Indeed our mother is mostly Chinese, though she prefers to ignore the fact. Her maiden name is Saetang, so her ancestry seems pretty certain. Anyway, as far as I can gather, in the beginning he had a rice mill and quite a lot of land; about four or five hundred rai I should think. He had income from rents and the rice business. He had a lot of land, too, down beyond Chantaburi and I think in Cambodia itself, which was where his mines were, if you can call such hunting and gathering mining!"

Chat smiled.

"Why do you smile?", I asked?

He did not speak for a moment.

"I will tell you in a minute," he said.

He went on. "Later he had durian orchards as well, also in Chantaburi, l which were, I think, pretty lucrative. He had a business selling farm equipment and machinery and later, when I was small, a motorcycle dealership. As you know he then had the Toyota garage."

" It sounds a more than averagely successful story of Chinese business," I said.

" Well, it would have been," Chat replied slightly sharpishly, " had it not been for his cock."

I raised an eyebrow at this somewhat unusually crude expression by someone whose style of speaking was rather elegant.

"You probably do not know the whole saga," he went on. " Indeed, neither do I. But after Pui left I suspect he felt rejected, his manhood impugned. I should think that as of last Friday when he died he must have fathered about thirty children. Most of those have either dunned him for money, or their mothers have, or he felt sorry for them or he was attracted to the girls if they were pretty. He used to give the most amazing presents to the daughters he liked."

"Like Toyota dealerships," I said.

"Quite." He said. "And ruby mines." There was a much sharper edge to this.

I looked up from the whisky I had been nursing.

"All of the mines were given to girls. You asked me why I smiled. I think one can only smile when one thinks of the amounts of money that have run through his hands and gone who knows where."

"That seems a very philosophic approach," I said, smiling too. "Especially as it would seem no-one has much money now, as far as I know."

"Indeed," he said." I don't think there is much left. You know he used to hold up his hands in front of my face, with the palms of his hands facing me and make me look at them."

"Why did he do that?" I wanted to know.

"He wanted me to look at the spaces between the fingers at their bases. He said that a Soothsayer- had told him that unless the spaces filled up money would run away through the gaps all his life. Did you notice them," he asked.

I hadn't

"And indeed the gaps between his fingers were large and the money ran away. And," he added, " I don't suppose when I see him tomorrow they will have gone either."

He smiled again.

"Talking of spaces; Mother in law used to say that your wife had such a large space between her legs an elephant could walk through." He grinned. " I bet she never told you that."

I had to agree!

"Though," I said, "that would explain why she is sensitive on the point. I happen to think," I added, "it is particularly attractive. I don't like legs that are so plump they squish together like ill grown parsnips".

"I don't know the ins and outs of how the money all came to disappear, " he said. " Though I know he got on the wrong side of a lot of people. He wasn't that particular about whether the girls he liked were married already or not, nor about whose daughters they were, nor how old they were. I suspect he had to buy his way out of many an indiscretion."

There was much more that I had wanted to know, but I was tired. It was already four a.m, though we often did not go to bed before then. He had to go to the North later that day and would not go to bed. I wondered if I would hear more when he returned.

While he was gone, (indeed I realise now that I did not know if he was coming back; people here are not much up for revealing plans), I quizzed my wife on some of what he had said, but she was not very forthcoming.

"He was not my father," she said. "And though as a child I was fond of Phi Chat and he of me I never liked the house in Takua Pa and my mother would not go there. And it was only when I was grown up that I began to hear much of what you have heard."

I had wondered whether she would go to the funeral.

"Not likely," she said. " I don't want to see my father"; Which hardly sounded logical to me. But I was used to these kind of explanations.

"Will Chat come and stay again before he goes back to Taiwan ?" I asked.

"I doubt it", she said. "Anyway we won't know until he is on the doorstep I shouldn't wonder."

We thought not much more about it. We were busy with the businesses and my wife was pregnant too. On the Saturday she wondered aloud if the father was already made away with and rang her mother. After one of those interminable conversations that girls and their mothers have in every culture in the world she said

"Phi Chat is coming back, but I don't know when. He's had a bit of trouble."

"What kind of trouble."

She grinned. "To use his phrase-cock trouble!"

"Go on."

"Well," she said, "he told me a bit about what was going on. He has as you know been married to Tu in Phayao for ten years. I don't think it has been a great success, but they have rubbed along and he has sent her money all the while he has been away. But I think they were both fed up with not having children. Anyway he met a girl called Jak in Taiwan. She comes from Sa Kaew. And what with one thing and another they got fond of each other-so he says. She has two children already and said that she would have more with him when they come back from Taiwan. Apparently they have agreed to go and live in Sa Kaew with her family and Chat has bought land and put money into the bank there." She looked quizzically at me.

"What do you think," I asked.

"I asked him to tell me all about it. It turns out that the land is in her name, the money in a bank account of her name and the children are six and ten with the same father."

"How much money has he given her?" I asked.

"About 200,000B*
," she said.

"If it was a European who had done this," I said, " we would be saying there goes another stupid man throwing away his money on some Lao pussy who turns out to be happily married."

"That is exactly what I said to him," she continued. " I told him fairly straight that I was pretty worried by what he had told me. I don't trust Lao girls, particularly ones aged thirty with two children who want land and bank accounts. Apparently her brother is a policeman".

I laughed.

"Or the husband is. Where is he?"

"In Chonburi, so he says."

"Sounds pretty bad news."

"It gets worse. Apparently on Thursday Jak rang the house and asked Nut, Tu's sister if Phi Chat, her husband, was OK."

"What on earth did he give her the number for, " I said, "Couldn't she wait ten days?"

"I think she just wanted to cause trouble. Which makes me all the more doubtful. Anyway the upshot of that has been that Tu has burnt Chat's passports, airline ticket, bank book and ID card. So he has to come and try and get new ones."

"I should think that might be difficult," I said. I knew only too well the bureaucratic nightmare that might follow such an event. "Passports, plural?" I enquired

"It certainly will," she said, " the ID card and the passport that he was travelling on were, of course, fake. If you want to work in Taiwan for as long as he has you have to get false documents to keep going back."

Chat duly arrived and went off again quickly to the passport office.

"I should think you might have to go and bail him out," I said jokingly." He will probably get arrested."

About four o'clock in the afternoon he sloped home.

I heard my wife laugh as she talked to him in the garden

"You are a mor doo, are you?" she called indoors.

I went into the garden.

"What do you mean?"

"Chat had to give the police money to let him go," she said. " They have computerised the passport application process. You remember when I went to get my passport they took my photo with a digital camera. The picture on the ID card Chat was using no longer matches the ID card on file. Since Chat got this passport the real person to whom the ID card belonged went and got himself a new one and his photo is on file!"

"So what happens now?" I asked.

"I can't go back to Taiwan," Chat said.

"Surely you can go on your real passport? Even if you cannot work. Can't you buy another false one anyway?"

My wife smiled. "Tu burnt his real passport as well and his military exemption certificate."

"She says she does not care if I cannot go back" he said.

"What even if she gets no money because you have no work?"

"Yes."

"Doesn't sound like a normal outcome of these kind of things here," I said.

"Oh she just wants to win," said my wife, "Can't say I blame her." She looked at Chat. "Have you rung Jak?"

"Not yet," he said. "I will talk to her after work tonight."

I went out later and when I came home I asked my wife what happened.

"Jak is staying in Taiwan." She said!

"You're joking?" I said.

"No. She told him that he was stupid to let Tu anywhere near his documents. When he pointed out that, if she had not rung, nothing would have happened, she put the phone down. He rang again to ask her to come back and to propose that they would go and live now in Sa Kaew rather than next year. she refused point blank and asked him to send 10,000B to her mother!

The story, of course, has a twist in its tail. I wrote about all his some six months ago! In the meantime Chat lived with us and was good company for the little baby. He died his hair blonde, went to work in a fashionable night club and earned a pittance. One day he said to my wife. "I am going to Taipei tomorrow."

"Oh yes, she said. What happened?"

"Jak sent me 100,000B. Her mother sent me another 100,000B and I borrowed 100,000B from your sister. I have a new ID Card and passport, not so expensive!." We have bought some more land. So I will go back for a couple of years; and then I should think it will be time to become a farmer and father."

 Phi is the appellation for an older sibling
 Mia luang is a major or first wife as opposed to your mia noi-minor wife- or indeed your mia kep and mia chow-rented wives!
 100,000B is about $2,500. A normal monthly wage is about 6000B or $150!