Songkran

by Urte Laukaityte (Lithuania)

Making a local connection Thailand

‘First, I cut your nails. And then I kill you,’ – these are not exactly the words I expected to hear from my sweet local Phuket host who I was sharing a small room and, in fact, a mattress with. A young Buddhist woman in her early 30s who wrote her master’s thesis on Thailand’s gypsy communities, she went from one of the most self-possessed and controlled people I have met to one of the least in a matter of days. I was driving around with my host peering at hundreds of cheerful people with water guns and buckets lining every road in town in anticipation of the world’s biggest water fight to mark the solar New Year. Some families had converted their trucks into water tanks fitted with huge tubs of water to douse anyone within reach of the narrow streets. Colourful T-shirts, flip-flops, and mischievous smiles all around. The name of the annual Songkran festival denotes astronomical passage, transformation, and change. We spent the first two days waking up early to make sweets for the Thai shop, above which we lived. My toothpick-placing attempts to hold the coconut sticky rice inside the banana leaves paled miserably next to her seamless proficiency. She would then rush to her day job and I’d stay behind helping out around the house, nursing my foot infection. She’d come back and do more work in the sweet shop while taking care of the family’s two year-old toddler till late evening. I had assumed the household consisted of a father and mother, their daughter with her husband and child and another daughter – my host. On the third day she discovered the word ‘lesbian’ on my online profile. Slowly navigating the language barrier, a different story started coming out. My host was caring for the child as if it were her own not because she was a relative to the baby girl. Instead, it was because in another world the toddler may well have been hers. The two women who I had deemed to be sisters seemed so close for a different secret reason altogether. And yet within a couple of years my host's lover decided it was high time she found a husband in accordance with her Muslim faith. Within a few weeks, she succeeded. The child was conceived soon after. My host had been living with the family of her beloved for five years at that point. With the husband sleeping in till afternoon and going out with his friends in the evenings, my host had served as the household’s de facto son-in-law, not a daughter, all along. I had admired the impressive amount of self-control, sacrifice, and care in my friend even without quite being able to put it into words. Pent-up frustrations, long-held secrets, and censored emotions finally found an outlet for the first time in years and were rushing out freely. Together we discussed our complex family dynamics, shared stories of trauma, fear, rejection, and pain. That year the overarching theme in my life was abuse. Not in the sense of experiencing it but in the sense of obsessively researching everything I could find about it. Coming out of homelessness, a mental breakdown, a failed relationship and grappling with the notion of childhood abuse, my solo travels around Southeast Asia were bound to be eventful. And yet I couldn’t have predicted the spillover effects this newfound vulnerability may have. By the end of the day my host was crying. It’s as if once the floodgates had been opened, the whole of the carefully held exterior just gave way in the name of balance. She told me she loved me and was going to move to my country to be with me. I gently tried to point to the value of friendship. She cried shaking all night and the next day. She insisted on cutting my nails. She said she’d kill me and didn’t mean it. Some months after I went away my host left Thailand. She volunteered in refugee camps in Turkey. She took up marathon running. She planned on doing her PhD in India. Sometimes I wonder what else she may have finally allowed herself and been able to pursue.