Josh O'Connor would visit Martiya a decade later at the new prison just past the ring road. But the old prison, where Khun Vinai saw Martiya, was an altogether tougher place: Khun Vinai had never been in prison himself, but he knew women who had, and they talked about crowded cells, sometimes filled with upwards of fifty or sixty women, cells so small that the inmates were forced to sleep on the floor in shifts. The toilet was just an open trough along the far wall. The women cooked for themselves over a kerosene stove in the corner, and daily life was a constant battle against fleas, cockroaches, lice, and rats.
On the first day that he was allowed to see her, Khun Vinai went down to Chiang Mai. The prisoners entered the visiting room on their knees. It took Vinai a second to recognize Martiya, although she was the only farang: the prison authorities required that the women shave their heads for the first five years of their incarceration. She was "thin as a snake," Khun Vinai said, and her face was lined. She had very large ears. She recognized Khun Vinai, however, and her face flushed. She crawled in his direction, and as she crawled, she began to cry. Then she arrived at the table and lifted herself up on the stool, carefully keeping her head below his.
"Vinai," she said, after a moment. "Oh, Vinai."
Khun Vinai forced himself to smile. He had no idea at all what to say.
"Vinai, it's not your fault."
"No," he agreed.
"It's just that when they said there was a Dyalo man, I thought you were … I thought he had come."
Vinai didn't understand. "Who?" he said.
"Hupasha."
Vinai let her cry. He wasn't offended. The Dyalo have no taboo on staring, and he examined her strange, bony skull; her pale, thin face; her ruined hands. Only her eyes were familiar: when Martiya eventually wiped aside the last of her tears, her light blue eyes met Vinai's. No Dyalo woman in a Thai prison would have met Khun Vinai's gaze so fully.
Sang-Duan had prepared a box of food for Martiya, and Vinai was glad for the distraction. "This is for you," he said.
Martiya accepted the gift gravely. She examined the fresh mangoes, the bananas, the bag of mountain rice, and the six-pack of Coca-Cola. "These will be wonderful," she said. "Thank you."
Martiya was no longer crying. She even smiled, and there was something protective about her smile, as if Khun Vinai had just come out of the prison cell on his knees. The two sat without talking, neither knowing just where to begin.
"How are your kids?" Martiya finally asked.
Khun Vinai seized on the topic gratefully. "They're fine," he said. "My little son, he loves elephants too much. The other day …" — and as Khun Vinai talked, Martiya grew increasingly agitated. She began to shift her weight from side to side and to nod her shaven head. The corners of her eyes narrowed. Then she interrupted him. She leaned forward and laid her pale hands on his forearm.
"Vinai, tell me — is Rice happy in Dan Loi village?" she said.
"Rice is happy in Dan Loi village," he said.
"And the people still make dyal?"
"Yes," he said. "They still make dyal."
She closed her eyes and exhaled. Her shoulders slumped. "Good," she said. She relaxed. She sat without moving. She didn't look at Vinai. They sat in silence for a few minutes. More than once, Khun Vinai started to speak — and then checked himself. Martiya didn't move.
Twice in my life I have seen a ghost.
The first time was in South India, in the holy city of Gokarna. Every morning I took my chai at a stall near the temple, where I exchanged smiles with the same gentleman, a gray-haired man in a loincloth. Once I mentioned this elderly figure to the chai-wallah. He asked me to describe him, and when I was done he roared with laughter. That man had been dead some twenty years. I thought that perhaps the chai-wallah was only teasing me, but others in the village confirmed what he had said.
The second time I have been in the presence of a ghost was that night on Khun Vinai's hammock.
Khun Vinai told me that he ended up spending several hours with Martiya in the visiting room of Chiang Mai Central Prison. The guards allowed them all the time they wanted, and Martiya spoke at length.
The night was so dark that I couldn't see Khun Vinai's face. But there were two voices beside me, and one of them was the voice of a dead woman.
"I didn't have a choice," she finally said. "Vinai, if I hadn't done something, they would have taken the dyal away. They wanted to take Hupasha away. What else could I have done?"
She looked at her hands.
"Hupasha came to me one night. I was in my hut, but I wasn't expecting him. I hadn't seen him in a week or two. He'd go away, and I'd miss him so much. That's when I knew he had my souls, because I missed him so badly. So when he came that night, I was very happy.
"But Hupasha wasn't himself, I knew right away. We always had a little game. He'd shout, ‘Tie up your dog!' when he came to my hut, and that made us laugh, because I didn't have a dog. But that night he came and he didn't say anything, he just came up to my hut and asked if he could come in. I asked him why he was talking to me like a stranger, and he didn't say anything. So I asked him if he was going to talk to me or if he was just going to sit there like a rock all night long. And he told me that he had decided to become an Adam-person.
" ‘You too?' I said. And I started to laugh, because, well, I had thought it was a big deal what he was going to tell me. I thought his daughter had died, but this just didn't seem to me a terribly big deal. People change, even Dyalo men, although I wish they wouldn't. But he was very interested always in what the Adam-people said, and he always liked to hear David Walker and the others preaching, talked to them about their ideas. Good for him, I always said. I mean, it would certainly be wrong if I was interested in the foreigners and he wasn't. He wants to read the Bible, that's fine. I never wanted to control him or tell him what to do. He was far too smart for that, far too strong for that. So I just said, ‘Congratulations. Don't scare me like that next time.'
"But I thought about things for a moment, and I asked him how was he going to keep Rice happy if he didn't make dyal. He said that he wouldn't keep Rice happy. And I said, ‘You aren't? What are you going to eat?' Because that's such a basic Dyalo idea, that you need to keep Rice happy. And he said that now he would ask Ye-su-tsi to make the fields grow. ‘What does Ye-su-tsi know about Rice?' I said. But he didn't say anything.
"I asked him why he was doing all this, and he said he no longer wanted to be a slave to Rice. That he wanted to be a free man.
"Then he said he wouldn't see me anymore in the fields because it would make Ye-su-tsi angry if he made dyal. He said that Adam-people don't make dyal. So I said, ‘Okay, we won't make dyal,' but he said that it didn't matter, that I was still his gin-kai. That they only give honor to Ye-su-tsi, and sing Ye-su-tsi songs.
"I asked him who taught him this, and he said it was David Walker.
"So he went home and I went back to work, and I waited for him to come back to my hut again, because I figured this all would blow over, and one week went by, and then another. I started to feel a little worried, and then another week went by. I decided I would go up to Wild Pig and see him, and talk to him again.