The Niece

I never thought that I would be writing crap like this. At least I thought of it as crap until it actually happened to me. Now, it is a clear and frightening memory. And it’s not crap, it’s a scary truth.

In 1996, I lived and worked in Thailand, I even married a Thai woman called Toy (but that’s another story), and to tell the truth, I went a little bit too close to the edge of reality. I was not quite the ideal husband, I played up something terrible, had girlfriends that I didn’t really need, and generally was a bad boy.

Toy can’t be called the paragon of the virtues; I got her out of a bar. I don’t believe that she played up on me while I was playing up on her, but she had her faults. However, I am happy to let that sleeping dog lie.

At the start of this short episode in my life, I had acquired a mia-noy. That’s a second, or minor wife. She was Lek from Buri Ram, and she performed all expected functions.

I sometimes have visions, usually in the form of vivid dreams, and I had been having repetitive dreams about a small and very dark-skinned Thai girl. This girl had an incredibly clear complexion, and was a striking beauty. In my visions, she and I would have conversations, and I came to know her as “Tuk” – pronounced to rhyme with “book”.

This was unusual, because my visions had never before been repetitive; they were previously once-only events.

Tuk and I may have met 15 or more times in my visions, and we conversed freely. She seemed to know a bit more about me in these visions than I expected, but I just went along with the flow, never worried about the situation.

One day, Toy came to me and told me that she wanted to visit a particular Temple to get help from a particular Monk who resided at that temple. I asked her what was the problem, and she told me that she had been seeing glimpses of a small dusky girl in the apartment where we lived. Further discussion told me that Toy was seeing flashes of Tuk, where I was seeing Tuk for longer periods of time, and having interlocution. When Toy realised that we were seeing the same “vision”, she became insistent that we see the Monk as soon as we could get there.

This Monk, Toy told me, could “fix the situation”. So it was off to the Temple to visit Monk ”X”. Our visit lasted about 4 hours; Toy had to explain the problem to the Monk, the Monk consulted several books, finally ascertaining the solution, and I eventually wandered outside the temple and relieved my boredom by downing several small bottles of Heineken. I returned to the temple, and soon after, the Monk pronounced that he had decided how to solve our “problem”.

Toy and I were given a wrap-around tube of cloth each, and told to use changing-rooms to remove all of our regular clothes and wear only the tubes. We were then to go to a high area of the temple complex, where the monk was waiting for us.

This Monk had a large earthenware container of water close by, and when we sat in the area indicated, he began to chant. After perhaps 10 minutes of him chanting, he started to splash the water on us, and that water, while fairly cool in temperature, it stung my skin.

Eventually, the monk came close to us and poured a ladle of water over my head, and a smaller quantity over Toy’s head. All of the time, he was chanting. Toy told me to remain still until the chanting was ended, so I went with the flow and sat there.

When the “ceremony” was all over, we showered, dressed, Toy paid the Monk a sum of money (in an envelope, I don’t know how much), and we returned to the apartment.

My visions of meetings with Tuk ceased.

A few days later, I had a “meeting” with the mia-noy, and she informed me that her oldest sister would be visiting Bangkok and sharing the mia-noy’s residence, but I was still welcome to pay my regular visits. About a week later, I visited the mia-noy while her sister was there.

Sister-of-mia-noy had not come alone, she had brought her 8-years-of-age daughter, named Tuk.

Tuk and I looked at one another in recognition, and I was dumbstruck. Tuk said something in Thai, and mia-noy translated: “Why can I not talk to you any more?” The significance of this question escaped the spectators – Tuk and I had been communicating in thought with no language barrier, but the Monk had broken that link.

Seems that mia-noy had told her family about her western boy-friend, and that Tuk has some way of... doing something “different”. It also seems that Monk “X” had some formula that satisfied his customer(s). Whatever.

What did I learn from these loosely-connected events? Never close your mind!

I don’t subscribe to 9-11 conspiracy theories, to theories that the moon landings were faked/staged, or anything like that. Neither do I smoke any substances.

The big lesson was that there is more to Thailand than first meets the eye. Just keep those eyes open.

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