The driver’s tooth

“Where’s the star of the show?” I asked my secretary, Jun, as quietly as I could. She looked over her shoulder and shrugged, “I don’t know, maybe they’ll bring him later.”

We were sitting in the open air at the end of a line of plastic chairs. Most of the other guests were in front of us, some on chairs like ours but most sitting cross-legged on woven reed mats in front of the monks. I recognised a few members of his family from our previous visit, some of our own staff sat among them and fussed to see they were comfortable. There were nine monks, as custom required, in their saffron robes, their shaven heads reflecting the early morning sunlight. The oldest and most wizened of them sat in the centre and led the low-pitched, rhythmic chanting.

Our sad little group was framed by young saplings with their light green and yellow leaves, the main temple building and its sloping orange roof behind the line of monks and farther away the crenellated wall of the temple compound with its stone plaques recalling worthy dead ancestors. At the back of us was the convoluted trunk and brooding mass of an enormous bo tree, and to its left the bright white-painted concrete platform of the cremation furnace mounted on steps up from the pale, sandy leaf-strewn soil and topped by a tapering chimney stretching away above the trees.

But the main attraction was nowhere to be seen, which was perhaps just as well considering he was more than a year dead. It had been a freak accident. One weekend Sakhon, part of our team of seven drivers, was cruising in the family pick-up along a narrow country road and passed too close to an approaching truck piled dangerously high with ten-foot long sugar cane stems. One stem was hanging loose on the side of the truck, it pierced the windscreen and went right through Sakhon’s neck, pinning him inside the cab as the vehicle slewed around out of control and skidded into a flooded ditch.

It was a tragic end to a life of, mostly, failure. I did not know Sakhon well, he had driven for some of my colleagues more than for me, and in any case most people found that he did not have much to say. Our most memorable meeting occurred when he had shown up one morning late, drunk and incapable, and made things worse by insulting the girls he was supposed to take out to one of our villages.

I summoned him to my office and he sat in front of me shaking with fear and expecting to be fired. The odd thing about it was that his wife, Kanok, who worked for us as a janitor, came with him while their two surprisingly well turned out, good-looking pre-teenaged children waited downstairs. Firing him would have destroyed the family and I couldn’t do it, even though this was far from his first encounter with trouble. So I gave him a stern warning, made him solemnly promise to stop drinking and had him write a little report every Friday confirming his good behaviour and signed by his wife. This regime worked for a few months and I dared hope he had genuinely transformed himself. But I had started to hear tales of slippage shortly before the rogue sugar cane stem struck, and it seemed one tragedy had averted another.

Thai people cremate their dead, but not always right away and the length of the delay depends on a mysterious mix of considerations decided upon by the village elders. A group of them would sit around in the evening with a few glasses of home-brew, weighing up the possibilities and comparing this case with others from as far back as they could remember. Sakhon was neither elderly nor in line for sainthood as far as I could tell, but he had died suddenly and time should pass to allow an orderly exit for his spirit.

So there had been a funeral not far from where we now sat. Kanok presided tearfully, her face still bearing deep purple and blue bruises from the accident, and their children processed around the compound with sad, frightened eyes and each holding a large, black-framed photograph of their father. In the end the elders wrapped Sakhon in a canvas burial sack and ceremoniously laid him in a shallow grave, later concreted over the top, where he would have waited for three years had it not been for Kanok’s indiscretions.

Her life, too, seemed to have consisted mainly of a slide down the social ladder. By all accounts her parents had raised her well and sent her to train as a teacher, still an honourable profession in those days, but for some reason that I did not know she failed to graduate and eventually the best job she could find was to keep our premises clean. This she did more or less reliably although I noticed she did not earn much respect among our team. Perhaps their contempt ate into her self-esteem or she might have been provoked by Sakhon’s behaviour, but once, long before the sugar cane incident, I came back to the office late after being out in the field all day and surprised her and one of our other drivers under a desk in the administrator’s room.

So after her bruises from the accident had long healed it was no great surprise when we learned that she had a new fiancé and planned to marry him. He was a soldier, already married by the way, a mere detail apparently, but it now became important for Kanok to have a complete break from Sakhon. The final moments for his mortal remains could no longer wait three years, which is what brought us back to the temple this morning. He would be exhumed and incinerated, with the chanting that we were now witnessing and a few other ceremonial steps in between.

The chanting ended and after some shuffling and re-positioning the chief monk started a homily, this time in Thai instead of the Pali of formal Buddhist ritual so at least I could understand it. Death can come at any minute or any second so we had better be ready, he said, with another ten minutes of around the bush repetition that made me glad to be on a chair instead of on the reed matting. When he finished he stood slowly and walked around and between us, flicking water over our bowed heads.

I followed the others towards the platform where I now saw the coffin waiting on a pair of trestles. I climbed the steps a little nervously, not sure what to expect. A dozen people had arrived before me and were milling around stoking up the fire and lighting candles on long holders set into the balustrade. Two women hovered around the widow, their salacious gossip long-since replaced by forgiving tolerance and sympathy in the Thai manner, while her two children walked about somehow managing to look purposeful.

The coffin was open and all I can say is that Sakhon looked far beyond his best. Well, but for the curled hair, to my eye he could have been anybody. A man was leaning over him and fiddling about near the mouth, I could not see what he was doing and did not want to look too closely. In fact this was not at all a sight I was used to and I soon turned away and rejoined Jun at the bottom of the steps where some villagers were handing out cookies and bottles of Coke.

“He really wasn’t looking well at all,” I reported to Jun. My poor attempts at dry humour were not new to her and she rolled her eyes without smiling. “There’s the soldier,” she said, indicating a middle-aged man in camouflage fatigues who was hanging around Kanok, though in his defence I should say he kept a respectful distance.

There was a commotion above us and I saw they had moved the coffin from its stand and were sliding it into the open furnace. Sparks snapped and flew, and the men standing nearby suddenly shouted full-throated nonsense words and set off fire crackers to startle Sakhon’s spirit into leaving in case it had not already done so. The furnace door clanged shut but I could still see the flames underneath and the plume of smoke rising from the chimney thickened and turned black. The drama came unexpectedly and seemed not to fit the sedate pace of events up till then, but the noise quickly subsided, more soft drinks appeared and conversations resumed.

As the family came down the steps I noticed the elder daughter clinging to her mother’s skirt with one hand while clutching something close to her chest in the other and, incongruously, smiling radiantly. She saw me watching her and as she passed she looked up triumphantly, her smile bursting with pride, and opened her fist to show me all that remained of her father, a long, curving, nicotine-stained tooth, now to become the treasure of a lifetime.