The man who died was named Somchai. Perhaps it was murder; nobody knows for sure. He died from a hard blow to the head. He had been drinking a bit of the Eleven Tigers, a tonic made with rice wine, so some people assumed that he just fell down and hit his head, but the police investigator said that the wound was too deep for it to be a fall, that he had to have been hit with something.
Somchai was a street person who lived under the Memorial Bridge. It’s a pleasant spot—a grassy island in an ugly neighborhood. The city won’t allow the street people to build shacks on this site, so they sleep on the island wherever they can; sometimes on the bridge itself, sometimes in nooks and crannies in the span’s supports. It’s not comfortable, but it’s a shelter of sorts, except when it rains sideways as it often does. In the most severe weather, they have friends nearby who provide them shelter.
There’s a statue of a horse near the bridge. When the street people who live there can afford it, they put garlands of flowers on the statue to bring them luck. It doesn’t seem to work very well. Everybody stays poor and drugs are part of everyone’s family life. A child fell off the bridge a few weeks ago when he was sleeping and drowned.
Somchai’s autopsy took five days to complete. This delay meant that without a body, his children couldn’t pray for him at the temple. Local custom and lore say that for the life to come full circle, the body must be present at the time of prayer.
We prayed anyway. Somchai was not the best dad but he was their dad, and the kids needed to feel that there was a proper ending, both for now and in the future, to be able to say, “I prayed for my dad. We had a ceremony. We did what we could.”
Those in charge of the case at the police hospital probably didn’t think the autopsy was important. What if it takes a few extra days? Who would even consider that a street person has a family who needs to pray for him? How could such things be crucial to anyone?
Somchai was self-employed. He collected used bottles, newspaper, cardboard, empty aluminum cans and other recyclables for resale. Lots of people in Bangkok do that. They’re called saleng men (saleng means “three wheels”) and they can take credit for removing thousands of tons of trash from the city’s overflowing landfills.
Some claim to make as much as 500 baht a day. I don’t want to call anyone a liar, but none I’ve met has ever come close. Certainly not those who push the three-wheel carts. Upper-class saleng men have motorcycles with open wagons attached. Their vehicles hold more stuff and get them around the streets a bit faster and more efficiently. Still, never 500 baht in a day.
Memorial Bridge street folks discovered Somchai’s body beside the pushcart he had rented for ten baht a day—a blue three-wheeler, the kind with the wheels that don’t always move in the same direction or speed. Neighbors pooled their money for a tuk-tuk to bring him to the hospital. The driver wanted to make sure he was still alive; it’s bad luck to carry dead bodies in your tuk-tuk.
Somchai died three baht in debt. He had only seven baht in his pocket and owed ten baht for the cart rental. But the lady who owned the cart said it was okay. She would take the ten-baht loss. Debt forgiven. Sometimes that’s about as generous as life gets here.
Somchai was forty-two when he died but he looked much older, probably from the booze. Eleven Tigers mixed with rice wine. Six baht a double shot. Those who mix it use two bottles of rice wine with one packet of bitter Eleven Tigers. They let it settle for three days before imbibing. Serious folks drink half a bottle in the morning and a half a bottle at night. It’s supposed to help alleviate aches and pains. Helps you feel strong and gives you an appetite.
Folks on the street and hardcore tuk-tuk drivers know the Eleven Tigers well. These are the same guys who smoke the seventeen-baht-a-pack cigarettes that are way down on the lower end of the smoker market. The roll-your-own, ya sen, is cheaper, of course, but indicates very low status in Bangkok slums. Rolling their own cigarettes marks slum dwellers as hicks, upcountry bumpkins.
We first came to know Somchai from the flower market near Chinatown. He dumped his two young daughters there about four years ago, around the same time he figured life had beaten him and most of his chances were used up.
His daughter, Mai, is twelve and her sister, Bik, is eight. Someday I’ll tell you another story about them—how Mai and Bik wanted to rent a mom to take them to school on Mothers’ Day and then take them shopping in the afternoon so that they wouldn’t be so ashamed. Embarrassed for not having a mom like most of the other kids. Most don’t have a dad, in any case.
Come Mother’s Day and your mom or grandma doesn’t come to school for you, it burns a scar so deep, some kids never get over it. Never again will they dare call anyone “mom,” even if their father remarries and the woman cares for them.
Somchai kept his son to live with him under the bridge even after he had dumped his two daughters. People think boys survive better on the street but over time, the streets beat them up just the same. He is not mentally impaired but slow and impoverished from birth. Loyal and kind by nature, he went with his father every day on his rounds.
The two girls lived in the marketplace for a year. Women in the market fed them and somehow, the children survived the scary nights. Finally, a Catholic sister from a local convent met them while she was buying flowers for a church feast. They told the sister their story, the sister told us, and Mai and Bik now live with us as family in Mercy Centre. Mai has actually turned into a scholar. She gets nothing less than As and Bs in school.
Bik, however, has a violent streak. Throwing tantrums. Always getting into fights. When she was nine, she was put into a detention home to teach her some discipline. It didn’t work. The other day, Bik got into a fight and nearly put another girl’s eye out. We took her aside and talked to her: “How much trouble is enough? Your father’s dead, you spent six weeks in a prison, you lived more than a year with your sister on the street, your mom’s somewhere else and she’s married again, you have a brother who’s not put together well. Now there’s you, and your sister who’s trying to take care of you.” She collapsed in tears and we held her for half an hour. Maybe she’ll go on. Maybe she won’t. I’m afraid there’s little hope for the girl.
Somchai and his family are upcountry folk of Lao descent—landless rice farmers from the province of Yasothon in the Northeast. He brought his family down to Bangkok in search of a better life doing unskilled day labor and construction work. Moving from job to job, he and his family lived in the tin shacks you see all around construction sites in Bangkok.
Mai, the oldest daughter, pestered her parents to let her go to school because her best friend was going. So they bought her two school uniforms, her first pair of shoes, and enrolled her in a government school that didn’t require an entrance exam. She was eight years old and starting first grade.
Her birth certificate and her parents’ residency documents were still in the village. Her family never formally moved to Bangkok because that entails a level of sophistication and bureaucratic skills that village folks don’t usually have. But a sympathetic school principal decided to let Mai begin classes and worry about the paperwork later.
This all happened before Somchai broke his leg on a construction site.
The day he broke his leg, he was taken to a hospital, x-rayed and had the leg set in a cast. Less than a week later, a fast talking man persuaded him to cut off the plaster cast and rub the broken leg every day with a special healing balm he just happened to be selling. (Snake oil salesmen still thrive throughout Southeast Asia.)
The bone healed crookedly and the construction company would pay only for hospital costs, not for any quackery post-medical care. With a permanent bad limp, Somchai could no longer carry the heavy bags of sand and cement required of him at work.
He lost his livelihood and a place to live. After a few months without a home, his wife ran out of courage and returned to her province, leaving Somchai and his three children to wander the city. Eventually, they stumbled into a small community of like-minded street squatters under the Memorial Bridge.
Somchai started to rent his cart about that time. His daughters slept in the cart at night while Somchai and his son slept on dusty straw mats on the ground beside them. Mai told me that the family had adopted a junkyard dog to watch over them under the bridge. She said that sometimes, when the family had little food to feed themselves, she shared her own bowl of rice with the dog.
Mai suspects that on the night her dad died, the junkyard dog wasn’t there. Her father or brother stopped feeding him, or forgot to, or they were hungry themselves. That’s how somebody was able to hurt her father. The dog wouldn’t have allowed it.
They finally released the body this Friday afternoon. No sala was available at the temple, so we asked to use an untended space in front of the crematorium.
When we opened the casket, as is the custom, Somchai’s youngest daughter, Bik, who had not previously shown great interest in her father on his visits to Mercy Centre, now cried for him with such passion and thunder that even the monks skipped a beat as they chanted their prayers.
Prayers were followed immediately by the cremation. I then took the dok maijan, a flower configuration made from candles, incense and scented wood, up the steps to the crematorium and said a final prayer for Somchai before placing it in the flames and hurried down the steps, away from Somchai’s daughters, where they wouldn’t see me cry. I cried for Somchai, the girls, their brother and the mom who ran out of courage, and my tears wouldn’t stop. The girls saw me in spite of my efforts and ran over to hug me. I don’t know if it was a case of the strong consoling the weak or the weak consoling the strong. Nor do I know which one of us was which.
The next morning, we carried Somchai’s ashes to the river not far from the Memorial Bridge, and the girls threw them into the canal. Somchai’s son did not attend.
We suggested to him later that he could enter the Buddhist monkhood, as is common for a son after the death of a father. He was shy, reticent, unsure of himself and didn’t think he could be a monk; said he didn’t know anything about it. We said they would tell him what to do, but he said he wasn’t sure.
Last we heard, he was pushing a ten-baht cart, a blue three-wheeler with creaky wheels, searching for bottles and cans.