In the end, counting the villagers of Dan Loi, a fact which would eventually occupy only one sentence on the first page of Martiya's proposed ethnography of the Dyalo, took six months, as Martiya was forced to record the villagers in her field notes one by one, often lurking like a private detective outside certain huts to count just how many children went in and out. With Vinai's help, she grouped the villagers by age, by clan, by gender. She counted the calories ingested by an average Dyalo family, and tried to estimate protein intake. She counted chickens and bullocks. The average distance of the walk to the rice fields was somewhere between forty-five minutes and an hour. Opium fields were slightly farther away.
Yield from an acre of rice paddy? Average number of hours of rain per day in rainy season? Distance mold travels per day in rainy season on the pages of your notebook?
Done, done, and done.
Weeks until she could go home?
"I propose fully immersing myself in Dyalo life for at least two years," Martiya had written in her grant application, "but comparable expeditions have lasted as long as four."
The word "expedition" had rung so nicely in her ears when she had written it.
Farts-a-Lot's peculiarities made for some great letters home, but the truth of the matter was that as the months passed, Martiya wasn't sure how much more she could take of the man. The way he hawked up looghies right on the floor of the hut. His cruel, stupid laugh. Those interminable grunt-a-logs which he conducted with his wife. His nighttime scratching, twitching, barking, schnirfling, sighing, and farting; his sneezing, snoring, and mumbling. His teeth and lips were black from chewing betel, and he ate with his mouth open, little balls of white rice mashed up by that big pink slug of a tongue. He was the kind of guy, she wrote to Karen, who laughed when she stubbed her toe. He just stood there when his wife's shift caught on fire once while she was making tea. That greasy, rancid smell of sweat and alcohol and pig fat — he was the only one in the village who smelled that way. The others smelled nice and earthy. Even the little kids understood that when Martiya was typing up her field notes in the evening, she needed to concentrate. It wasn't easy to transcribe Dyalo. The others might not have understood exactly what she was doing, but they let her be. But old Farts-a-Lot, he'd come over, plop himself down, and start poking at the keys on the typewriter and giggling. Once before going to bed, when she had been in the house about three months, Martiya hung her pants from a peg on the wall. She was just trying to keep things neat. The next thing she knew, it was the dead of night, and Farts-a-Lot was kicking her in the butt. It seems that he'd gotten up in the night to make the monsoon off the porch, saw the pants, and flipped. The guy could have just lifted the pants off the peg, dropped them on the floor, and explained to her in the morning that it was way-bad jungle ju-ju to keep anything that had ever touched a lady's nether regions above a man's head. Fair enough. But no, the guy had to wake her up in the dead of night, wake up the whole hut, including the kids, and have Martiya fold up the pants and put them on the floor. At first, Martiya thought it was just her, that she must be the most insensitive anthropologist in the whole wide world, but as the months passed and Martiya came to know the other villagers, she decided that she wasn't the problem here and that it wasn't just a cultural issue. Farts-a-Lot really was a creep, and she didn't want to spend another two years in his house.
Martiya broached the subject of a new hut with Farts-a-Lot several times. It was an immensely tricky point in etiquette, because it was chiefly to get away from Farts-a-Lot that she wanted a new hut. But Martiya was intensely mindful of Eskimo Kathy's story. Farts-a-Lot was an important man in the village, and Martiya suspected that if she offended Farts-a-Lot, her work in Dan Loi would soon be effectively over. It sometimes seemed to Martiya that half of the village was involved in bitter quarrels with the other half, and Dyalo feuds ran deep: there were people in the village who had no idea that a new baby had been born just one hut down, despite the agonized howling that accompanied Dyalo childbirth, so deep did their antipathies run. Watching the Dyalo snipe and bicker had disabused Martiya of the naïve notion that tribal peoples would live in peaceful harmony with one another, just as watching the villagers hack down virgin forest and set it on fire for their fields had disabused Martiya of the notion that the Dyalo would live in placid harmony with nature. But as an anthropologist, she couldn't indulge in such diverting pleasures as blood quarrels. She needed to be a neutral Switzerland, an unencumbered Sweden. Farts-a-Lot was a leading member of the largest clan, the clan of the Fish, and Martiya suspected that if Farts-a-Lot felt in any way slighted, she'd never swim with the Fishes again. Martiya could imagine the moment when she was called upon to defend her doctoral thesis and she explained to the esteemed and august members of the examining board, men who had collectively spent half a century in the field, that she had failed to interview half of the village because she had found her host irritating.
Karen wrote to Martiya, "He's baiting you. Don't give in." But every time Martiya gave in. She didn't know why Farts-a-Lot wanted to make her life miserable, but she was sure that was his intention. There was one little incident after another. The time that Farts-a-Lot rolled a cigarette with a page from her copy of Anna Karenina—and an important page, too, just as Anna was arriving at the train station. Why couldn't he have used Paradise Lost? The time that Farts-a-Lot put red-hot chili peppers in her tea. This was Farts-a-Lot's notion of humor.
"Did you do something to offend him?" Karen wrote.
"I could not care less at this point," Martiya wrote back.
She talked the matter over with Vinai, who assured her that what she was proposing — simply moving out of Farts-a-Lot's house — was, indeed, downright offensive in Dyalo terms. When Martiya had first arrived and declared so winningly that she was but a child in the ways of the Dyalo, Farts-a-Lot had taken her at her word, and although reluctant to take on so great a responsibility at his age (he was almost forty), he had nevertheless agreed to the headman's request that he look after her. The headman had chosen Farts-a-Lot to look after Martiya because Farts-a-Lot had twice in his life been as far as Chiang Mai and had seen other white people; from these experiences, Farts-a-Lots was reckoned something of an expert in their weird ways. Farts-a-Lot, Vinai said, had done his best. Farts-a-Lot had repeatedly sought out Vinai to make sure that there was nothing Martiya needed, and to ensure that Martiya realized that she was free to sample from his selection of rice whiskeys, a generosity that he extended to no one else at all, not even his wife's eldest brother. Farts-a-Lot had asked his wife and his wife's sister to accompany Martiya in the forest when she went to defecate, so that she did not mistakenly relieve herself near a snake, or worse, right on top of a bad spirit; and feeling certain that she must be lonely so far from home, Farts-a-Lot had sought her out whenever she was alone. The villagers thought Farts-a-Lot had been an admirable foster father. Furthermore, Martiya's arrival had naturally affected Farts-a-Lot's status in the village. Martiya was, after all, the only farang in Dan Loi, and her arrival was an exciting event. Nobody could quite figure out what she was doing there, and the villagers looked to Farts-a-Lot to explain her presence. It had been a long time since Farts-a-Lot had had such prominence in the village. Now, if she left Farts-a-Lot's hut precipitously, he would lose face; and if he lost face, Martiya's position in the village would be compromised as well. It was a delicate situation.