What every granny knew
There were no shops either, but anyway the land provided everything you needed. In this Isaan Eden in the age before Krispy Kreme, the sugary doughnuts grew on trees, or at least toothbrushes did - on the Toothbrush Tree, in fact, otherwise known as the khoi, the Siamese Rough Brush and Streblus asper. Science eventually figured out that the twigs contain a bacteria-killing chemical.Ban Lao Pa Sa near the Lao border in Uttaradit had no electricity until 1984. In fact it had next to nothing apart from frequent use for the word "anyway". Granny Say didn't attend school as a child, didn't go out on dates as a young woman and never rode in a car, but anyway there were no schools, no places to go on dates, and no roads.
Granny already knew that, of course, as did everyone else who'd ever lived in Ban Lao Pa Sa and its environs back in the good old days, remembered as such because they were simple, inexpensive and had a communal sense of responsibility that made crime an almost alien peril.
Our guide to those days, Sorasing Kaowai, is still just a youngster at age 30, but it was his precocity that got him out of the remoteness and into university, thanks to a British monk named Phra Peter Pannapadipo and his scholarships for poor kids.
They met in a monastery, both in robes. Sorasing had ordained so he could keep learning for free. Phra Peter's educational foundation was enough of his success that he left the monkhood to run it full-time, and in the process turn Sorasing into a nuclear physicist.
Sorasing never forgot the quantum mechanics of the rice paddy, though, and returned to his village to recapture his youth. It's still sleepy, despite having shops now. His mentor, back to being Peter Robinson, has helped him tell its story.
Sorasing's grandmother spoke only Khammueang - Lanna Thai - and was more or less high all the time on betel and areca, but she was the village matriarch and as formidable in her command of the community as she was in her knowledge of nature. Thanks to Sorasing's own memories and the recollections of the late Granny Say's friends and neighbours, this is a book of wisdom.
It's an extraordinary read, a charming campfire narrative full of important things you probably don't know. While many of the old ways described remain common knowledge even in Thailand's big cities, there is much that's been left behind in the rush to iPods.
And if it's largely steeped in animist superstition, the superstition, birth to death, was steeped in reality.
Sorasing describes his elaborate post-natal care, a lot of it designed to ward off covetous spirits. When he was a little older, they had someone else's newborn baby as an overnight guest, and Phi Khru-Suea came for it. Anticipating the ghost's interest, Granny had ringed the place with spiky plants, leaving the phi to shake the house in vain fury.
Sorasing remembers that night, but not even the scientist in him is prepared to pass judgement.
The book weaves from the purely supernatural to the commonplace by way of the efficacy of spitting medicine and the various village healers - the Mo Ya, Mo Phi and, for busted bones, the Mo Kraduk. Their and Granny's cures are often exotic and fascinating, like crunchy roast tarantula to stop a toddler dribbling.
Sorasing says a friend from Si Sa Ket told him they used to swallow live jingjok to cure stomach aches. "To my friend," he writes, "swallowing a live jingjok or drinking snail juice was simply an everyday cure for everyday ailments, and he thought nothing of it. Now, with a university education, health insurance and living in a big city, he finds the idea as disgusting as you probably do."
The Tourism Authority might balk at promoting gecko cures, but it could spread the strange tale of the Maeng-an-lom, the forest pygmies who Sorasing believes may have been unique to the immediate vicinity.
Word of a lost tribe last seen in Siam in 1926 is curious enough, but these people had no heels, the better to spring through the woods.
"Granny has never forgotten her own brief encounter with [the pygmies] and longed all her life to meet the Maeng-an-lom again, to try and talk to them and learn about them. She told me, very sadly, that she thought they had probably all died."
The more mundane stories are, in truth, not mundane at all, like how to deal with the inexhaustibly have-a-go Red Weaver Ant. Cooking pots were scrubbed clean with charcoal ash or sand. You used coconut matting to scour the dinner plates, buff your body while showering, and wipe your bum in the outhouse (or the bushes).
Granny made all of their clothes on an intricate loom, matching cotton pattern to function. She dyed them black with mango root, green with hog-plum leaves, blue with shards of the indigo shrub, red with the secretions of an insect and yellow with jackfruit core.
After she died the loom was sold to a Bangkok antique dealer for Bt200. "When the other women heard about it, they were quick to sell their own looms too," her grandson reports. "There are no looms in the village anymore, and the weaving skills have been entirely lost."
And consider this: As a baby, Sorasing was rocked to sleep in a hollowed-out hardwood cradle that had also been the nesting place of his mother, his grandmother and his great-grandmother.
Newspapers, let alone television, were superfluous when the news made no difference to you at all. Sorasing's grandparents were married in 1941, the year the Japanese army occupied Thailand.
"After I started going to primary school I asked Granny what she knew about the war. She said she had heard there had been a war but she didn't know which countries were involved, why it started, when it ended or who had won."
FOLK WISDOM
"In Grandmother's House" by Sorasing Kaowai and Peter Robinson, is published by Monsoon, 2011. It's in shops for Bt495.
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