COMMENT The ghosts of tsunamis
past By David Simmons
BANGKOK - One year ago, on the day after
Christmas, an enormous surge of water crashed into
the resort island of Phuket, shattering boats and
buildings, killing hundreds, and devastating
Thailand's tourism industry.
Days later,
the driver of a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi made
his way along a darkened island road, and was
flagged down by a group of foreigners. They
climbed silently into the vehicle. But when the
driver turned to ask their destination, they had
vanished. Or so went the story, and there were
many others like it doing the rounds of the local
rumor mill in the weeks after the tsunami. It is
the widespread belief in - and fear of - ghosts
that to this day
prevents many Thais,
including my wife, from visiting Phuket, Phang Nga
and other areas hit hard by the great tsunami of
December 26, 2004. And so I went to Phuket by
myself late this year to see how the island had
recovered.
The cheerful Thai who drove me
from Phuket International Airport to my hotel on
Kalim Bay, north of Patong Beach, proudly showed
me the new buildings that had sprouted up all
along the island's west coast, replacing those
that had been flattened by the wave. Then we came
across a group of older buildings.
These
buildings, the driver explained, had been "spared"
by the tsunami. Some residents who had been out
late at Christmas parties the night before
actually slept through the mayhem of the next
morning, and were shocked to see the death and
destruction just a few meters to the north and
south of their neighborhood.
The passive
term "spared" is more useful to us sophisticated
Westerners than it is to Thais, who still have a
concept of some sort of deliberator behind what we
prefer to term "the unexplained". Spared by what,
or whom? It is a question we would rather not ask,
let alone try to answer.
Minutes after
that cluster of homes on the west coast of Phuket
was spared, the tsunami proceeded across the
strait toward the Thai mainland, and the province
of Krabi, where my wife and I were enjoying a
Christmas vacation with friends. News came to us
as we were sitting at brunch in the outdoor dining
area of our hotel, a hundred meters or so back
from the beach, that some sort of natural disaster
had happened in the Andaman Sea, and a giant wave
was heading our way.
By the time I had
grabbed my camera and approached the beach, the
first wave had already hit, strewing debris across
the beach road. The second wave was bigger, and
washed across to the gravel side road where I was
standing, thinking I was safe. The gravel road
turned into a river, and the warm Andaman waters,
now a raging soup of sand and surf and sea
creatures dredged from the depths, pulled me
under.
Unlike several hundred thousand
other people that day, however, I was "spared"
(for a more detailed account, see Of heroism and cliches,
Asia Times Online, January 4).
Solitude
and family The bartender at my hotel on
Kalim Bay in Phuket took me into the lounge, where
photographs of the post-tsunami devastation
suffered by the hotel hung on its renovated walls.
The wave had crashed into the building's
ground floor, causing 9 million baht (nearly
US$220,000) in damage, and forcing the hotel to
close for months. Tourists stayed away from the
island, finally trickling back around mid-year,
first the South Koreans and Japanese, other
Asians, then Europeans. The hotel's British owner
said he finally started to make money again in
October.
I asked the bartender if he had
been in the hotel when the tsunami hit. No, he had
not been employed at this hotel last year, but at
a different hotel elsewhere in Phuket. It too had
been wrecked by the wave, but his shift was
scheduled for later in the day, and he had not
been in the building - he was "spared".
Then his face clouded over: "But my boss
was killed."
In my hotel room the next
day, my mobile phone beeped. A message flashed
across its screen: "Gordon was killed last night."
A Scot who had been living in Hua Hin, a town on
the Gulf of Thailand, Gordon had been found dead
beside a road near his home, the victim of a
motorbike accident.
I went to Hua Hin for
Gordon's funeral; there was a good crowd,
comprising the motley multinational "family"
typical of Thailand's expatriate community:
hoteliers, retirees, tourists, journalists,
golfers, bar owners, barflies and bargirls. After
the Buddhist ceremony we went to Gordon's favorite
bar to eat and drink to his memory.
It had
been Gordon's habit to sit at the bar's computer
and compile a playlist of his favorite songs and
save them to the hard drive; those songs played as
we sat there that evening. One day during the
previous week, as his body had lain in his coffin
awaiting cremation, the bar was empty except for a
few Thai staff standing behind the counter
watching television. The TV was situated on a
stand above the computer.
Suddenly, the TV
switched itself off, and the computer switched
itself on. Just a glitch, the sophisticated
foreigners said - it had happened before. But the
Thais knew different: Gordon's ghost had come into
the bar, looking for his music.
Who was
right? Who turned on that computer? Who were those
mysterious taxi passengers on the darkened Phuket
road? No one really knows. All we - Thais and
foreigners - really knew as we sat listening to
Gordon's tunes during his wake, enjoying one
another's company and remembering our departed
friend - the gentle, good-humored, solitary Scot
who somehow managed to touch many of us deeply
without our realizing it - was the one immutable
truth: life goes on and then, perhaps in the
biggest cataclysm of the century or on a lonely
road in the middle of the night, our luck runs
out, and we are not spared our ultimate fate.
David Simmons is a Canadian
journalist based in Thailand.
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