The Disallowed

1 MR. LEE’S PREDICAMENT Mr. Lee, or Old Man Lee, as he was known locally had been feeling strange for weeks and, because the local community was so smal and isolated, everybody else in the vicinity knew about it too. He had been to seek the advice of a local doctor, one of the old kind, not a modern medical doctor and she had told him that his body’s temperature was out of balance, because something was affecting his blood. The woman, the local Shaman, Mr. Lee’s aunty, in fact, was stil not quite sure of the cause, but she had promised that she would know in about twenty-four hours, if he left a couple of samples for her to study and came back when she sent for him. The Shaman handed Mr. Lee a clump of moss and a stone. He knew what to do, because he had done it before, so he urinated on the moss and spat on the stone after hawking deeply. He handed them solemnly back to her, and, being careful not to touch them with her bare hands lest she contaminated them, she wrapped them separately in pieces of banana leaf to preserve their moisture for as long as possible. “Give them a day to rot down and dry out, then I’ll have a good look and see what’s the matter with you.” “Thank you, Aunty Da, I mean, Shaman Da. I wil await your summons and return immediately when you call me.” “You wait there, my lad, I’m not finished with you yet.” Da reached around behind herself and took an earthenware jar from the shelf. She uncorked it, took two mouthfuls and then spat the last one al over Old Man Lee. As Da was incanting a prayer to her gods, Mr. Lee was thinking that she had forgotten about the ‘cleansing’ – he hated being spat on by anyone, but especial y old ladies with rotten teeth. “That alcohol spray and the prayer wil tide you over until we can sort you out properly,” she assured him. Shaman Da stood up from her ful -lotus position on the earthen floor of her medical sanctuary, put her arm around her nephew’s shoulder and walked with him outside, rol ing a cigarette as they went. Once outside, she lit it up, took a deep draw and felt the smoke fil her lungs. “How’s that wife of yours and your lovely children?” “Oh, they are well, Aunty Da, but a little concerned about my health. I’ve been feeling a bit dicky for a while now and I’ve never been sick in my whole life, as you know.” “No, we Lees are a strong lot. Your father, my dear brother, would stil be fit now, if he hadn’t died of the flu. Strong as a buffalo he was. You take after him, but he never got shot. I think that’s what has caught up with you, that Yankee bul et.” Mr. Lee had been through this several hundred times before, but he couldn’t win the argument so he just nodded, handed his aunt a fifty Baht note and set off home to his farm, which was just a few hundred yards outside the vil age. He was feeling better already, so he put on a jaunty pace to try to prove it to everyone. Old Man Lee trusted his ancient aunty Da completely, as did everyone else in their community, which consisted of a smal village of about a five hundred houses and a few dozen out-lying farms. His aunty Da had taken over as vil age Shaman when he was a boy, and there weren’t more than a dozen or so who could remember the one before her. They had never had a university-qualified medical doctor of their own. That was not to say that the vil agers did not have access to a physician, but they were few and far between – the nearest permanent doctor was ‘in town’, seventy-five kilometres away and there were no buses, taxis or trains in the mountains where they lived in the very top north-eastern corner of Thailand. Besides that, doctors were expensive and prescribed expensive drugs, from which everyone assumed they earned high commissions. There was also a clinic a few vil ages away, but it was staffed by a ful -time nurse and a part-time circular doctor who worked there one day a fortnight. Vil agers like Mr. Lee thought that they were probably al right for rich city-dwellers, but not much use to the likes of them. How could a farmer take a whole day off work and hire someone else with a car to do the same to go to visit a city doctor? If you could find someone with a car that was, although there were a few old tractors about within ten kilometres. No, he thought, his old aunty was good enough for everyone else and she was good enough for him and besides, she hadn’t let anyone die whose time wasn’t up and she certainly hadn’t kil ed anyone, everyone would swear to that. Everyone. Mr. Lee was very proud of his aunty, and anyway, there was no alternative for miles around and certainly no-one with al her experience – al …? Wel , no-one knew how old she was really, not even she herself, but probably ninety if a day. Mr. Lee reached his front yard with these thoughts in mind. He wanted to discuss the matter with his wife, because although he appeared to the outside world to be the boss in his family, as was the same with every other family, that was only show, because in reality, every decision was made by the family as a whole, or at least al the adults. This was going to be a momentous day, because the Lees had never had a ‘crisis’ before and their two children, who were no longer children either, would have to be al owed to have their say as well. History was about to be made and Mr. Lee was well aware of it. “Mud!” he called out, his affectionate name for his wife since their first-born had not been able to say ‘Mother’. “Mud, are you there?” “Yes, I’m out the back.” Lee waited a few moments for her to come in from the toilet, but it was hot and stuffy indoors, so he went back out to the front yard and sat on their large family table with its grass roof where the whole family ate and was wont to sit if they had any free time. Mrs. Lee’s real name was Wan, although her husband affectionately called her Mud, since their eldest child had called her that and the name had stuck with Mr. Lee but not with either of the children. She came from the vil age, Baan Noi, as did Lee himself, but her family knew nowhere else, whereas Mr. Lee’s family had come from China two generations before, although that home town was not that far away either. She was fairly typical of the women of the area. In her day, she had been a very pretty girl, but girls were not given much opportunity back then and nor were they encouraged to be ambitious, not that things had changed much for her daughter even twenty years later. Mrs. Lee had been content to look for a husband on leaving school, so when Heng Lee had asked for her hand and shown her parents the compensation money he had in the bank, she had thought that he was as good a catch as any other local boy she was likely to get. Neither did she have any desires to wander away from her friends and relations to a big city to increase her scope. She had even come to love Heng Lee in her own way, although the fire had long gone out in her short love life and she was more of a business partner now than a wife in the family firm dedicated to their mutual survival and that of their two children. Wan had never sought a lover, although she had been propositioned both before and after her marriage. At the time, she had been outraged, but now she looked back on those moments with a degree of tenderness. Lee was her first and only, and now would surely be her last, but she had no regrets about that. Her only dream was to see and take care of the grandchildren that her kids would surely want in the ful ness of time, although she didn’t want them, especial y her daughter, to rush into marriage like she had. She knew that her children would have children as sure as eggs were eggs, if they were able, because it was the only way to provide some financial security for themselves in their old age and have a chance of developing the family’s status. Mrs. Lee cared about family, status and honour, but she did not want any more material things than she already had. She had learned to do without for so long that it didn’t matter to her any more. She already had a mobile phone and a television, but the signals were poor to say the least, and there was nothing she could do about that but wait for the government to get around to upgrading the local transmitters, which would surely happen one day, if not any time soon. She didn’t want a car because she didn’t want to go anywhere and besides the roads weren’t very good anyway. However, it was not only that, people of her age and station had thought a car so out of reach for so long that they had ceased to desire them decades ago. In other words, she was content with the bicycle and old motorcycle that formed the family’s fleet of transport. Neither did Mrs. Lee hanker after gold or fancy clothes any more, as the realities of raising two kids on a farmer’s wage had knocked that out of her many years ago too. Despite al that, Mrs. Lee was a happy woman who loved her family and was resigned to staying as she was and where she was, until Buddha called her to go home again one day. Mr. Lee watched his wife walking towards him, she was adjusting something under her sarong, but from the outside – something wasn’t sitting right, he supposed, but would never ask. She sat on the edge of the table and swung her legs up to sit like a mermaid on a Danish rock. “OK, what did that old crone have to say?” “Oh, come on, Mud, she’s not that bad! OK, you and she have never hit it off, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes, isn’t it? She never speaks a bad word about you, why, just thirty minutes ago she was asking after your health… and the kids’.” “You can be such a fool sometimes too, Heng. She speaks nicely to me and about me when people are around to hear, but whenever we're alone, she treats me like dirt and always has done. She hates me, but she’s too devious to let you see that, because she knows that you would take my side and not hers. You men think you are worldly-wise but you can’t see what’s going on under your own noses. “She has accused me of al sorts of things over the years and many times too… like not keeping a clean home, not washing the children and once she even said that my food smelled like I’d used goat droppings for flavouring! “Bah, you don’t know the half of it, but you don’t believe me either, do you, your own wife? Yes, you can smile, but it has not been very funny for me these last thirty years, let me tell you. Anyway, what did she have to say?” “Nothing, really, that was just a check-up, so it was the same old routine. You know, pee on some moss, spit on a stone and then let her spray you with alcohol from that toothy old mouth. It makes me shudder to think of it. She said she’d get word to me tomorrow, when she could let me know the outcome. “Where are the children? Shouldn’t they be here to take part in this family discussion?” “I don’t think so, not really. After al , we don’t know anything yet, do we? Or have you got any ideas?” “No, not really. I thought I might have a massage off that Chinese girl… that might help, if I ask her to go easy on me. She learned her skil in northern Thailand and she can be a bit rough, can’t she… so they say.