Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand by Jim Algie

Author:Jim Algie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780804843881
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

BENZ TOLD HER that she’d talked to the doctor from the clinic and he’d recommended a temple where they could have the fetus cremated. All she had to do was make a decent donation to the abbot of the temple for “renovations” and he would arrange for the cremation after it was dark and the temple was quiet.

By the time Ying arrived, after having more arguments with her mother and her boyfriend, she felt more liquid than flesh and bone: a witch’s cauldron of antidepressants, tranquilizers and diet pills laced with amphetamines. She would try to say something but Benz would snap, “What’s that supposed to be? Sanskrit? Could you please get it together? You always fall apart in crisis situations and I need you to be strong right now.” The snotty aristocrat was talking to her like a servant again. Had Benz already forgotten the other night and what they’d done together? Did it not mean anything to her?

Ying sulked and pouted. She would have to revise her opinion of Benz again; she was a bitch and a narcissist who used people as secondary characters and foils in her little dramas. When they no longer amused her, she banished them to the sidelines.

Even though Ying was wearing her contacts, the temple, with its colored glass mosaic of the Hindu god Indra riding a three-headed elephant, the golden statues of the bird-woman Kinnaree, the main altar with its jumble of Buddha images (dark now except for the candles), and the whitewashed crematorium with its single smokestack, were as blurry and soft around the edges as if she was not wearing her contacts at all.

Benz was too distracted to notice Ying’s state of distress. She kept going off on angry tirades, “I made the right decision, but if I’d gotten better medical care, if the doctor hadn’t been distracted by the police, then this never would have happened.” But then she’d look at the tiny white coffin and turn her head away to dab at her eyes with a tissue. The coffin was gilded with decorative swirls and crowned angels in flight as if ready to spirit the dead person’s soul away to its next reincarnation.

The abbot sat on a dais beside the coffin. As the two women knelt before him with their heads bowed, hands raised and palms pressed together, he intoned baritone blessings in Pali, wishing the infant a safe journey to heaven and a good rebirth as a human being.

As far as Ying could remember, this was almost exactly like going to a real funeral—except the undertakers did not open the lid so the relatives could crack a coconut and pour the water on the face of the deceased as a purification ritual. Instead they slid the coffin into the oven and invited the two women to drop tiny flowers made of sandal-wood on top of it. Benz shook her head and dabbed at her eyes again.

Ying could not work out why there was another big white coffin inside the oven and two smaller ones as well.

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