When both Martiya and the children grew restless in the mornings, and the children, long since bored with the name-a-thing game, started throwing clods of dirt at one another, Martiya would check in with Lai-Ma, her hostess. In Berkeley, they had been agreed: fieldwork should be done in the fields. Only after a long day of shared labor would a villager ever really look upon you as a sister, a goal which was already seeming to Martiya less desirable than it once had. Nevertheless, every morning Martiya would seek out Lai-Ma and make her ritual offer to help with household chores or work with her in the fields. The first dozen times Martiya offered, Lai-Ma had looked shocked. "But it is so boring to work in the fields," she said. "If I were rich like you, I'd never go into the fields." A few times, Martiya had insisted, and discovered immediately that Lai-Ma was right: working the fields was boring. It was hideously boring. It was backbreaking, slow, agonizing labor. Martiya spent a few days hunched over a hoe, and gouged a nice chunk out of her foot, which only through the grace of God did not become infected. Martiya came back to the village muttering that she'd never try that again, a decision widely approved of by the villagers: if there was any one point on which the people of Dan Loi were agreed, it was that field labor was strictly for the birds — or for the Lahu monkeys. There was a Lahu village just an hour's walk from Dan Loi, and all the villagers of Dan Loi who could afford it, rather than go into the fields themselves, tended to hire Lahu day workers. This was Martiya's first ethnographic discovery. As a Republican, Martiya thought this an eminently sensible system. When Martiya asked why the Lahu were willing to work the fields, she was told that it was because they were stupid, like monkeys; when she came to know the Lahu better, she agreed. She wondered how these observations would be received by her dissertation committee.
Lai-Ma was a thin woman with a lined face and a slight limp; her nickname, apparently acquired in a more agile childhood, meant Fast Feet, a fact that Martiya found intensely sad. Lai-Ma was the hardest-working member of the household — indeed, as far as Martiya could tell, the only worker in the household, Farts-a-Lot never seeming to employ his well-honed machete — and she induced in Martiya a considerable sense of First World guilt and discomfort. (This discomfort was intensified by Lai-Ma's habit of taking Martiya aside and saying, "Oh, am I tired! How my bones ache! How I wish I were rich like you and could do nothing all day!") Hauling just one plastic petrol-jerry of water up the hill was enough to exhaust Martiya, but Lai-Ma would inevitably carry two, one in each hand, and on her back in a plaited basket, a dozen hollow bamboo tubes each overflowing with water, the whole heavy load held in place with a tumpline across her forehead. Thus burdened, Lai-Ma would move along the muddy path like a turtle or an elderly yak, taking slow, heavy steps, grimacing slightly. Martiya felt like a freeloader every time she saw her in the course of the day. When Martiya had left California, with the very first installment of her grant money, she had bought herself a pair of expensive running shoes, and she had imagined loping along mountain trails at dawn, as the silver mist broke over the valleys. The sight of Lai-Ma working was enough to make the idea seem vaguely obscene, and the shoes stayed tucked away in Martiya's backpack. If Lai-Ma was not carrying water, she was carrying on her back an enormous pallet of lumber for the fire, or she was stooped over the washing pit scrubbing wet clothes, or hunched over a hoe in the garden she kept beside the house, or limping off to the fields, or pounding rice. Martiya was not a large woman but she felt clumsy and awkward in Lai-Ma's presence.
After Lai-Ma had indicated with an inhibited, anxious smile that no, she really didn't need a large, clumsy farang trailing after her all morning, Martiya liked to take a little stroll about the village. This was the counting hour. Before leaving Berkeley, Joseph Atkinson had given her a piece of advice. "When in doubt, count something," he had said. Martiya spent her first months in the village ferociously counting everything. She counted the number of huts in the village, and she counted the pigs, which was actually quite tricky, she discovered, given that the pigs tended to look alike in her eyes and, being free-roaming in a Dyalo village rather than penned, would move about in the course of a porcine census. There were fourteen pigs per household, on average, and the chief purpose of the pigs was not, as might be expected, to augment the village supply of chops and bacon, but rather to provide sacrificial victims for the spirits, should the need arise; that the pigs were so tasty was considered a fringe benefit. There were a number of households segregated from the rest of the village and down the ridge: these households, which were all associated with the accursed Vampire clan, did not raise pigs, Martiya noticed. When she asked why, she was told that it was because they were poor; when she asked why they were poor, she was told that it was because they had angered the spirits, hence the accursed status of their clan; and when she asked in what way these households had angered the spirits, she was reminded that these people could hardly expect spiritual favor, not having sacrificed any pigs. She wrote all these details down in her notebook.
Counting the people of the village was rather more difficult still than counting pigs: the Dyalo, too, were inconveniently free-roaming, and also unfortunately tended in Martiya's eyes to look alike. The simple question "How many people live in your hut?" admitted no direct translation. For one thing, the word "people" was typically translated into Dyalo as "souls" — but the Dyalo believed, very generally speaking, that women had seven souls, and men nine. If you have no idea what this means, neither did Martiya, who was accustomed to the occidental notion of one man, one soul. The Dyalo were deeply confused by the question "How many souls live in your hut?" Souls to the Dyalo were fragile things: a soul might well be lost, or have wandered off, or a foreign soul might have come to roost in the hut. Martiya wasn't sure why souls would get lost or where they went or what it meant that they had gone. More bewildering still — and here again, I will summarize briefly in lapidary ethnographic fashion what Martiya herself summarized for Karen in rapid epistolary style, but what in truth was only teased out of the Dyalo gradually, like a sliver from a calloused foot, question by delicate question, oblique hint by oblique hint — was the Dyalo belief that the souls of the recently dead, rather than going to the place where the souls of the dead go, would for a time enter and possess their best beloved. Where else would they go? the Dyalo asked. It's so lonely to be dead. So a husband who recently lost his wife would be reckoned to possess both his own nine souls and the seven souls of his wife. For this reason, the Dyalo gave the grieving wide latitude for eccentric behavior. Martiya learned this when one of the village women — someone from the far side of the village, whom Martiya didn't know well — began running through the village naked at night. Martiya naturally asked why she did this, and it was explained to her that she had recently lost her small child. Running naked through the village was the expression of her dead child's souls. This, too, went in the notebook.