Bathing Elephants

By Leela Devi Panikar

A collection of six short stories:

Bathing Elephants – Suchin Srisai breaks away from her traditional moneyed family in Bangkok and sets up her own orchid business in Chiang Mai. On one of her frequent holiday trips to Phuket she meets Michael. Then the tsunami hits.

Inshallah – Will the future of Iraq be fear and widows? Jamilah is orphaned after a terrorist attack and is taken in by an old stall-keeper. The story follows the adventures of one day in Jamilah’s life and the love she brings to the old man.

Sequined Slippers – An orphaned sister and brother, 16 and 14, end up living alone. When the sister is working as a waitress and looking after her brother who is still in school, it works well. But he leaves and mysteriously turns up in a rich woman’s home.

I Was Killed in a Car Accident – Betrothed at birth, artist Xiao’li runs away from her home in Beijing when her marriage day approaches. She meets a man who makes her happy but is broken-hearted when she learns the fate of the man she was supposed to marry.

Stone Breaker – Rai trains to be a Nepalese Ghurka but ends up in the hot swamps of the Terrai. He becomes a wealthy landowner and his arranged marriage is a success ... until the Bhutanese authorities make him a refugee.

Wild Orchid – Love at first sight threatens to tear a family apart – but the two marry and are gradually accepted. Then the young husband’s discontent with life in Myanmar and his struggle for a better future for his family sets a new course for everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leela Devi Panikar
• Release date: Apr 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9789889994174

Leela Devi Panikar

Leela Devi Panikar is a fiction writer currently living in Penang, Malaysia. Her passion for writing clearly shows in her short story collections -- The Darjeeling Affair, Bathing Elephants, and Floating Petals -- that reflect her extensive travels and knowledge of various cultures. She has won awards from the BBC and Turner in the UK, and the South China Morning Post and Radio Three in Hong Kong. Individual stories have appeared in various journals and periodicals.

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Bathing Elephants

Leela Devi Panikar

Copyright © 2010 by Leela Devi Panikar

All rights reserved.

Enquiries for usage other than brief excerpts for review may be emailed to [e-mail]

Cover photo by author.

Smashwords edition published in 2018

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For all those

we shared the tsunami with,

here and gone.

The title story Bathing Elephants

was inspired by our experience

in the 2004 tsunami.

Leela’s Tsunami Diary

www.leela.net/tsunami.htm

And Don’s

www.kleptography.com/gallery-tsunami.htm

Contents

Bathing Elephants

Inshallah

Sequinned Slippers

I Was Killed in a Car Accident

Stone Breakers

Wild Orchids

About the Author

Other Books

Bathing Elephants

‘Take off your clos ... I fie mini back.’

A request, but it sounded like an order, gruff, impersonal.

I am at the healing spa.

Light subdued.

I take off my clothes and lie face down as requested by the masseur. Soft towels soothe my skin, give off a whiff of lavender. Meditative music – ocean waves barely audible – sweeps over me, takes me back to Kitaro’s God of Thunder, to the night when Michael and I lay naked together for the first time, alight with love, anticipation and future.

The scent of warm oil, wild ginger-lily, invades. Within minutes, Jack’s confident steps approach. He’s familiar with the corridor now, a path well-trod. His sharp hearing makes up for his disability. Being blind hasn’t hindered him much. They said when he first came to the Centre three months ago, on an exchange programme from Taiwan, he spoke neither Thai nor English. Now everyone understands his Thai and he practises his English with me. The staff lovingly call him hu chang, elephant ears.

Staring into nothing, he feels me, shares my tragedy. Palms cold, not having absorbed my warmth, softly caress. Fingers, stubby and firm, probe for stress points, remind me of other fingers – long, tapered and sensitive. Fingers that explored me and shattered me into shards of pleasure with each touch. Jack’s cold hands soon warm and pick up a rhythm. Light touches whisper across my back.

Softly, ‘Where you pain today?’

‘No pain,’ I mumble. How can I explain to him I’m ‘all pain,’ pain that cannot be teased out?

More drops of warm oil trickle on my back. Scent seeps through, taking me back to Michael and our first night at the beach bungalow in Khao Lak. A throbbing hum replaces the present, the ocean music. A dizziness overtakes me as I remember ...

Suchin Srisai + Michael. Forever.

I am in our space. Michael unravels my knotted hair, flowers tumble to the floor, he buries his face into the warm flower scent, my musk. I feel his hands all over, feel him on and in me. I drift to ...

Space invaded!

‘Okay, you turn over,’ says Jack, bringing me back to now, to the massage table. He dribbles more warm oil. The music changes to Cosmic Thunder and Michael is gone in a flood of memories ...

Bangkok Visit

On my way to Khao Lak, I stop in Bangkok, call on my parents. I visit them frequently, but these days I enjoy the visits less and less. My mother knows the only time I see them is when I’m on my way to somewhere else – ‘Only when convenient,’ as she puts it.

‘How is your business, darling?’

‘Great, Father, busier than ever.’

‘Good clients?’ says Mother.

‘Yes,’ I say.

Mother and Father look at each other, exchange glances, which speak so well. Twenty-four and still unmarried. When? her eyes ask him.

I’m tanned a fashionable brown, but mother doesn’t think so. Too brown for an unmarried Thai girl from a ‘high’ family.

‘You are so black. You should not work so hard in the sun,’ mother says.

When mother sees me, she thinks improvements. She sees a body too thin. Hair too straight, too long, not properly styled. Clothes too revealing, skirts too short, trousers too tight. The list is ‘too’ long but mother manages to tick off every one. She studies me; she thinks, When did this child become so un-malleable, where did I go wrong?

Father dislikes Mother nagging. He dislikes confrontations and he sees one looming. Before Mother can erode me further, he invites me to his warehouse. We enter the familiar vast grey cave.

‘See the changes we have made?’

I see no changes.

The same subservient staff follow us around. I see shipments ready to go, the same bale upon bale of raw silk wrapped in cheesecloth, and the same musty perished silkworm smell embraces us. The hovering manager pulls out stools and we sit at the old round teak-and-marble table for tea. Father is kind, never brings up the subject of my joining him. He does not try to tempt me with virtues of a family business. He does not mention my growing too old to marry and bear children. I am still a child to him.

After talking to a few staff who are genuinely interested in master’s daughter’s well-being, we move on to warehouse number two, the rice warehouse. Father has employed two new men, educated men with ‘rice’ qualifications.

‘We are branching out,’ he says proudly. ‘Keeping up with the times,’ he tells me.

‘People’s tastes are changing. There is a big demand for new types of rice. We have added new varieties, even wild rice.’

I see lacquer bowls of samples on the side table: brown, black, purple; long grain, short grain; rice of different fragrances; and some bear labels – Organic, Wild. Childhood memories and the aroma of rice and gunny sacks tempt me to linger. I breathe in my fill, enough to last until my next visit. As we leave I almost hear the servants whisper, ‘Like father. Business, business! Beautiful girl wasted! No time to marry, raise a family. Pity!’

Much of my two day-visit is spent with a suspicious number of drop-by visitors, curious relatives and friends who examine me carefully during their witless chatter. They own overseas eligible sons. The local sons are already married to younger women. We sit down to meals of good food to be shared with mothers of unmarried sons.

My mother says, ‘You cannot expect to eat such good food in the north; northerners don’t really know to cook.’

‘But, Mother, Sukhon ...’

‘Yes, I know Sukhon is from here but she is not really the best cook. She is only a good housekeeper.’

It was mother who insisted that Sukhon and her daughter, Suri, go with me to Chiang Mai to our family home when I moved north. Mother’s intentions were good. Sukhon and Suri would take good care of me, and report to her my daily happenings. Much to Mother’s disappointment Sukhon did not turn out to be a dedicated spy. She is a good housekeeper and excellent cook and has taken on the role of an un-interfering mother.

On the morning the chauffeur takes me to the airport for my flight to Phuket, mother confirms my return date, which is only two days away and which I am not apt to forget. She reminds me of the social commitments she has arranged for me.

And she says, ‘Be careful ... a young girl, alone in a hotel.’ She forgets that I have been ‘a younger girl, alone in hotels,’ many times before.

‘What are you doing in Phuket, anyway? Business meeting?’

I don’t reply, let her assume it is.

Fate arranges a blind date

At Khao Lak, I am alone, at peace and in love with life.

I choose the quieter side of the beach, to the right of the hotel, close to the mouth of a stream. Guests avoid this area. The rich damp flora here attracts birds and beetles, raucous rasping. Water insects and mosquitoes abound.

I am only occasionally disturbed, not by fauna but by young Thai girls, beach vendors, who mistake me for a foreigner.

‘Madame, beautiful hair, you want I plait?’

‘Manicure, pedicure, Madame?’

‘Shoulder massage, foot massage?’

I answer them in Thai. They look at me suspiciously and not getting any business from me they walk away surly, spitting Thai curses.

A beach umbrella, wide straw hat, dark sunglasses and a generous application of anti-burn lotion do not protect me enough. Sun swelters down, almost singes.

From my left, not too close, family and fun noises reach me. I close my eyes, let tension flow out. I drift off in a waking dream. A flurry of hot sand drags me out of my reverie. I push my sunshades down over my nose. A hat scuffle. A man runs after an errant straw hat blown by the wind. He almost manages to grab it. It teases him, stops, and when he gets close, moves on, rolls towards me. He finally grabs it, trips and falls at my feet, hat firmly clutched.

‘Is this yours?’ he asks, on his knees, proffering the hat.

I smile, ‘No,’ peer from under my hat and point to mine on my head.

A child comes up and grabs the hat from him and, looking at me for an instant too long, says a shy thank you and scrambles away. The man does not know he has let go of the hat he’d been chasing. He stands before me towering, bikini briefs bulging, body sand-covered and chest hair gold. His eyes echo glinting waves. His shadow falls on me, comforts me – a whisper of a kiss hotter than the Khao Lak sun.

‘Oh, sorry,’ he says, realizes that perhaps he has stood too long, mesmerised. He walks backwards clumsily, stumbles. A dance of love, a foreplay? He continues backing away, eyes still on me. Abashed, I look away. He is gone.

I cannot relax any more. The gurgle of stream, bird trilling, insect thrumming and family sounds are all gone. The heat of the sun is replaced by a flame. Energised by one flirtatious look, I am now assailed, bombarded by different sensations.

Later that day, I walk along the beach to the left of the hotel, avoiding the cacophony of throngs by the pool below my window. Tide is low and sand bleached white reflects the froth of waves. I pass the hotel villas and private terraces, hammocks, rockeries, fountains and pools. When I reach the rocks below a cliff-hang, I stop to watch sand crabs, translucent, as they sidle into their home-holes. I do not see the man sitting on one of the rocks until he talks to me.

He stands up, smiling.

Second collision!

‘Remember me? Hat-man?’ he says, raising his hand to lift an invisible hat. ‘May I join you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I say on impulse. Watch out, says my conscience.

He and I laugh, simultaneously, for no reason. Oh, oh! says my conscience.

‘On holiday?’ he asks, stating the obvious.

I nod. A single Thai woman on holiday at a Thai beach resort must seem unlikely but I have also been taken for a foreigner many times.

A cool and gritty wind whips around us, balloons out my loose caftan. I’m embarrassed by the comical picture I must present. The draft plays havoc with my long hair which comes undone, flies towards his face. He comes close to touching, to arranging. Such proximity. I flush. I grab my hair, twist it into a loose bun try to keep it under control.

‘I’m from Hong Kong. Michael,’ he says, loud above the gyrating whine of cicadas.

‘Suchin Srisai.’

We’d like to touch, shake hands as people do at introductions, but we don’t: we’re not strangers or friends, we are more.

As we walk on, he stops from time to time, stoops to pick up a shell or stone. He tosses them into the surf, trying to make them skim. There is something very reassuring about his back. His slender neck, where hair meets skin, invites a touch, a caress.

‘I love it here, beautiful place,’ he says, shattering my imaginary touch.

‘Yes,’ I say, echoing my thoughts of him, not the place.

We continue to walk. He accidently brushes against me or perhaps it is merely his