My Driver Tulong: And Other Tall Tales from a Post Pol Pot Contemporary Cambodia

By M. P. Joseph

The author, M P Joseph, a Civil Servant from the distant Indian state of Kerala spent many delightful years in Cambodia working for the UN when the country had just morphed from a war-torn Communist moth into a fascinating free market butterfly.
Through mesmerizing characters who personify the ancient soul of Cambodia and epitomize its modernizing mind, the author conjures up a vision of contemporary Cambodia and its people. Their lives and loves, their joys and tribulations, their hopes and their anguish, and most of all their innocence is captured in these delightfully inter-connected stories. The characters come alive to etch a never-before known Cambodia.
Written with a Maughamian touch, the book delves deep into the soul of Cambodia, a soul moulded by the ancient culture of Angkor and shaped by the more recent excesses of Pol Pot.
The fortitude of its people, their pluck and their courage in the face of adversities, their survival skills, as well as Cambodias Indian past - both Hindu and Buddhist - and its present Indo-Chinese zest are woven seamlessly into the stories.
The book is an amusing essay into the modern soul of this ancient land. Now populated by a GenNext, who cannot yet forget their chilling past, the book is a journey into the heart of its people. A heart of innocence.
The authors Valentinian love for Cambodia, his honed observation and delightful humour makes this fictional stretched-travelogue a genre apart.
A must read for everyone - whether a traveller or not interested in South East Asia, Indo-China or Cambodia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Feb 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781482886689

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by M P Joseph.

ISBN:      Hardcover           978-1-4828-8670-2

                Softcover            978-1-4828-8669-6

                eBook                 978-1-4828-8668-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/india

Contents

Prologue Coming to Cambodia

Chapter 1 My Driver Tulong

Chapter 2 Driving Me Crazy

Chapter 3 Riverside

Chapter 4 Protection Money

Chapter 5 Workshopping

Chapter 6 The Khmer Kya-tho-lick Church

Chapter 7 Rajah Curry

Chapter 8 What’s in a Name… ?

Chapter 9 Vathana, the Fixer

Chapter 10 Lin Lin Sim, My Nea Kru Khmer

Chapter 11 Damu, My Cook

Epilogue Leaving Behind in Cambodia

This book is a work of fiction.

While the book is largely based on the author’s travels and experiences in Cambodia and while some complex combinations of the personalities and people that the author met in Cambodia and elsewhere during his travels through more than sixty countries have shaped the characters of this book it is affirmed that except for geographical references and references to historical figures and events all the characters in this book are fictional, purely imaginary, unreal and a mere figment of the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarity of any character in the book to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.

Though the narration is in the first-person singular, it is reiterated that except in those parts that refer to his childhood in India etc. the narrator who uses the first-person singular in the narration, is also a fictional character and any resemblance of that character to the author is purely coincidental.

The Sole Author M P Joseph affirms his copy-right to the book, and to all the chapters and pages therein.

To

Cambodia

and its

Wonderfully Charming People

To my daughters, Nidhi and Swetha who through their comments and critique brought precision and quality to the book. This book would not have been what it is, without their time, ardour and labour of love.

To my niece Navya who gave me the confidence to go ahead with its publication.

And to Rushabh, my son who set aside his Christmas and New Year holidays to proof-read the final text of the book.

A big thank you to all.

Map of Cambodia

ThinkstockPhotos-545441918.jpg

Prologue

Coming to Cambodia

T hough it is more than a decade ago now, I remember it as clearly as if it were this morning.

It was the day before Christmas, 24th December.

It was my birthday.

There was an email from my boss, the guy in Geneva to whom I reported. I had not expected any. It was Christmas and I had presumed that everyone in Switzerland would have gone skiing. But not that guy.

His email simply said that I should stand by to receive a phone call from him at six that evening, Indian time. He said, he had a birthday gift for me.

I could not believe it! After working in the International Toilers’ Organisation, the ITO - a UN agency - for about a decade and half, the Organisation was giving me a birthday gift.

I picked up the phone before it rang.

My boss wished me a happy birthday. I thanked him. He then announced my birthday gift.

‘Joseph, we are posting you to Cambodia’

Cambodia? Now where on earth was that?

The Internet was fairly new then, and Google was yet in its childhood. So I made enquiries amongst my friends.

‘Where on earth is Cambodia?’ I asked.

A close friend, who knew his geography well, told me that Cambodia was in the heart of Africa.

Another said it was in the Heart of Darkness.

A very dear friend, more knowledgeable than the rest, was emphatic that Cambodia was in the US.

‘Cambodia,’ he said with finality, ‘is right next to Virginia.’

For good measure, he added that it was one of the first thirteen colonies of the United States of America.

Cambodia vaguely rhymes with Virginia; but that was the closest that it had ever got to New England.

******

But, they had all misunderstood me.

When I had asked them where on earth Cambodia was, mine had been merely a rhetorical question.

Of course I knew where Cambodia was.

It was a country that had fascinated me since childhood.

Cambodia was the land of the Killing Fields, of the Year Zero, of Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot.

It was the land of death; the land of lifeless infants lying limbless on dusty roads.

It was that heavily mined country which Angeline Jolie had made famous by raiding the temples that its Hindu kings had built over a thousand years ago. And later by campaigning against the mines there.

Cambodia was the country with flat brown land stretching endlessly and indistinguishably into the horizon; the country where old-fashioned bullock carts trundled lazily over rutted tracks on muddy paddies, where one was not quite sure which was the lazier: the bullocks, the man sleeping on the cart, or the land itself.

The land whose people had built the Angkor Wat a thousand years ago. And then, a thousand years later self-destructed.

Or as my friends in Hyderabad, where I was working then would have said, had committed ‘self-suicide’.

******

Hun Sen, Cambodia’s Prime Minister had been one of my boyhood heroes. I remembered his photographs from the early 1980s, boyish, young and looking so vulnerable. And yet there he was, already at that age, the leader of a country that he had helped liberate from the Khmer Rouge.

I had idolized the man; but was certainly not keen to live in the country that he had freed.

For I did not want to be a smelly corpse floating down the Mekong, or an amputee hobbling on one leg, the other blown off in a land mine.

I felt miserable. How could my boss think of posting me to Cambodia?

I said thank you to my boss, but no thanks, I was not going to Cambodia.

I told him over the phone, ‘Send me to Timbuktu if you want, but not Cambodia!’

My boss tried to sweet talk me into accepting the death trap. He had been my boss for God knows how long and in those long years when he got promoted every second year, while I had remained where I was, he had also become a sort of a friend and mentor.

He could be very persuasive when he wanted to, this guy, and was at his winning best just then.

He said Cambodia needed me. He said only I could do the job of the International Toilers’ Organisation in Cambodia. It needed the type of energy and understanding that only I could bring to ITO’s work to end child labour in Cambodia.

Over the phone from Geneva, he oozed occidental reason and Flemish charm. He told me how much Cambodia had changed recently. He explained that when he had first visited Phnom Penh, its capital, seven years earlier, life there had been terrible. But the place had undergone a massive transformation. It was now, in 2004, a vibrant bustling place, full of life. A very modern city, he said.

‘Phnom Penh is any day better than many of those filthy cities you have in India,’ he touched on my sensibilities. ‘You will love the place, Joseph,’, he added.

I looked up the Internet and managed to download a few photographs of the new vibrant Phnom Penh that he described. All I saw were potholed roads, old tuk-tuks, and old white men walking down dirty streets with young local girls.

I did not want to spend my life in that godforsaken country.

I stood my ground. I said no to him. I said, no way, I will not go to Cambodia.

End of argument. Stop.

******

My boss called me on phone a couple of days later, to persuade me once again to take up that Cambodian posting.

‘Of all possible places, why do you want to send me to Cambodia?’ I asked the guy.

I offered to go to Niger, or Burkina Faso, or Vanuatu instead.

He said, ‘Joseph, you would not like Niger or Vanuatu.’

‘I will not like Cambodia.’

‘You will like Cambodia,’ he said.

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Yes, you will.’

We were getting nowhere.

******

And then from somewhere up his sleeve, he produced a trump card.

‘Let us strike a deal then, Joseph,’ he said. ‘I will send you on a mission to Phnom Penh. You can go there for three days and spend your time there as you like. After your three-day mission in Phnom Penh, if you still don’t like the place, then I won’t ask you to move there.’

And he threw a bonus. He said I could travel on my mission from Hyderabad and Delhi to Cambodia, through whichever city in the region I wanted, Singapore, or Bangkok, or Hong Kong, or KL, or Manila, or Seoul whatever and spend an additional five days on ‘mission’ in any of those cities.

A paid holiday! That was him, through and through – the eternal negotiator. What a guy, my boss!

I agreed with alacrity. Who wouldn’t like to go on one of these UN missions where one is paid US$350 a day as Daily Subsistence Allowance? Yes, that was what you were paid even then, ten years ago. Never mind that in Phnom Penh, the average person lives like a king on $2 a day.

The US$350 is yours even if you stay in a dirty little guest house paying US$5 a day and save the rest of the $345 dollars you get each day.

I was not complaining.

And the guy had also given me the choice of travelling through any one of East Asia’s fabled cities. So here was a chance for me to have an East Asian holiday, all expenses paid by the UN.

I chose to go via Hong Kong.

******

When the International Toilers’ Organisation sends its officials on missions around the world to end poverty, uphold human rights, promote decent work, protect labour and end child labour, they send us Business Class. This is to ensure that when we have to spend those horrible three or four days with the natives, we get back all in one piece.

What we, the UN missionaries had to do in return, was to write out a nice mission report of the immensely important work that we did during the mission. Such a report is where we explain the earth-shaking impact of our three days ‘work’ there.

We write in the report how timely and useful our mission turned out to be, how the three days we had spent in that country had changed the course of the country’s development destiny, how we have persuaded the corrupt decision makers of that miserable place to change their ways, how we have persuaded them to agree to end poverty, ensure human rights, promote decent work, protect labour, and immediately end all forms of child labour.

In the ninety-five years of its existence, no ITO mission was ever known to have failed.

In fact, the more experienced amongst us wrote out our mission reports even before we left on our mission.

I had been in the ITO long enough to know how to write my mission report before I had boarded my flight. I would then upload it on our website first thing on my return. This, so that all the world would know how I had changed the course of the world’s development history through that mission.

I was par for the course. I was not the one to let my organisation down.

******

That’s how six weeks later, I found myself seated Marco Polo Business class on a Cathay Pacific flight from Delhi to Hong Kong, en route to Phnom Penh.

PS. For those who do not like to check Google Maps, Phnom Penh is half-way between Delhi and Hong Kong.

******

One of my friends had previously lived in Phnom Penh for a couple of months, and she had come back to describe the loneliness she felt during her two months there. No place to go except dingy bars and pubs. No one to talk to, except backpackers on the cheapest trip out east, or the bevy of consultants on fancy consultancy fees all engrossed in trying to change Cambodia into a Singapore at the speed of light.

The consultants in Cambodia were a special breed. They range from the hard-of-hearing, senile, seventy-year olds, to the twenty-somethings, just out of the university (and sometimes just out of high school) on a sabbatical, volunteering in between terms.

All of them were advising the Cambodian government and its ministers and secretaries of state on how to fast forward the country into the future. They had come reading up the latest development theories and had the latest advice on how to develop the country’s economy, how to set up social safety nets, prevent malaria, sell mosquito nets, distribute condoms, prevent tsunamis, secure human rights, promote decent work, ensure press freedom, and guarantee judicial independence. They knew the answers to all the problems and the Cambodian ministers and their secretaries of state listened to them attentively, hoping that doing so would bring in a couple of million dollars in donor funds to their ministry, or more importantly bring in an invitation to attend a workshop in Paris, Zurich, or Washington DC.

My friend had told me that no one seemed to speak English in Cambodia, and even if they did, you would not understand what they said. And if she was ever with a male colleague in restaurants or pubs or tuk-tuks, they would always be interrupted by someone asking if her male colleague would like a massage. And when he declined, they would come right out and ask him whether he would like a ‘boom-boom sir?’ Sir, nice lady, sir, very nice, lady very young sir, boom-boom for you sir. . .

I would soon come to learn that in South East Asian English, a ‘boom-boom’ (which when pronounced locally would sound more like a buum buum, with the air thrown out forcefully from the lips) is one of those words that can be simply understood from the sound it makes. It is what it sounds like: sex.

******

With her warnings ringing in my ear, here I was, having spent a pleasant five days on a paid holiday (mission) in Hong Kong, now on a late-evening flight from Hong Kong to Phnom Penh.

I had chosen a window seat. As the plane was descending into Phnom Penh, I peered out. I could see, I could see….

…well nothing.

It was a blanket of darkness down there, no lights, no traffic, no movement, just blackness.

I remembered my friend who had described Cambodia as the Heart of Darkness.

******

I had not taken my visa before leaving for Cambodia. Indians, I had been assured, could get a visa on arrival in Phnom Penh.

As the plane landed and came to a halt, I prepared myself mentally for that inevitable long wait for the visa on arrival and all those vexing questions that the officials would ask me, and for perhaps a few dollar bills kept discretely between the pages of my passports to speed things through.

I had therefore chosen to be seated in the first row of the plane to be at the head of the Visa-on-Arrival queue. I was ready to make a quick exit when the flight landed.

I stood up and made for the door, ready to run down the stairway and to the terminal building.

The front door opened. But there was no ladder to run down.

Instead, to my surprise was a very modern aerobridge connecting the plane to the airport terminal.

******

The airport was different from everything I had expected.

It was cute and modern. Small, no doubt, but clean and very neat, with polished floors, Khmer motifs and a distinctly pleasant South East Asian air about it.

I went up to the visa queue and stood in line.

Surprise, surprise. My visa application was taken from me as I stood in the queue, the fee of US$25 collected, my passport taken, the visa stamped, and the passport returned to me all in a matter of a few minutes. No questions asked. No bribes sought. No bribes paid.

I moved on to the immigration desk. There was a board in front of the desk saying that the Immigration Department was testing a new electronic immigration clearance system and asked us to bear the consequent delays.

I knew from travelling the world that I would now be asked all those questions about why I wanted to come to the country, what the purpose of my visit was, what would I be doing in the country, how long I planned to stay there, and all those other vexing questions immigration officers ask, especially when they see a brown Arab-looking Indian with a very Christian name.

I reached the new electronic system which seemed to be working perfectly.

The immigration officer stared into me, looking as serious and nasty as immigration officers are wont to, and only they can.

He looked at my UN passport.

‘Where you from?’ he asked.

‘India,’ I said.

‘From Inde?’ he asked, in half French and half English.

I nodded, pleading guilty.

The official’s face seemed to light up

‘Inde? Good. Good. Good, he said. Indya good. Good country. Ba, ba, ba.’

And for good measure, he declared India to be his friend.

‘India, my friend,’ he said.

The rest was easy.

My mugshot was taken by a tiny camera, my passport stamped, all in a matter of seconds, and no questions asked. And by the time I had reached the modern meandering baggage belt, my suitcases had arrived.

I collected them and I was out in Cambodia.

******

There were the usual touts at the airport asking me whether I needed a taxi, a place to stay, and so on. I negotiated a price with a young seemingly bright driver who spoke English quite well. He drove me through the darkening streets of Phnom Penh into town.

I loved that drive.

Phnom Penh surprised me as much as the airport. It was a charming little town, clean and neat.

There was a certain colonial air about it, with a distinct French flavour. Graceful buildings, their facades visibly French. Wide tree-lined boulevards. Sparse traffic. No honking, no one desperately trying to overtake you. There was a certain placidity about everything, the people, the traffic, the building, the trees.

This was the kind of town I had always dreamed of living in. It felt like the kind of town I had lived in one of my past lives and had dearly loved.

******

In my hotel, the first thing I did was to call my boss. It was well past nine in the evening in Phnom Penh and it must have been around 3.00 p.m. in Geneva. He would have just got back to his office from lunch. Long lunches that began at 11.30 and went on till 2.30 or 3.00 were the norm at the ITO. The world’s problems cannot be solved on an empty stomach.

He picked up the phone himself and instantly recognised my voice. He was surprised that I was calling him so soon. He would have expected my call only at the end of my mission in Phnom Penh, not at the beginning.

‘Hi Joseph,’ he said. ‘Where are you? Where are you calling from?’ he asked.

I took a minute to reply.

A doubt crossed his mind. I could hear the apprehension in his voice. ‘You did not go on your mission to Cambodia, n’est-ce pas? You returned to Hyderabad from Hong Kong, is it not?’

He thought I had returned to India and was calling from there.

‘No, no,’ I interjected. ‘No, I am in Cambodia. I am calling from Phnom Penh.’

That relaxed him a little bit. But the tension crept into his voice again.

‘When did you reach there?’ he asked.

‘Just now’ I replied, ‘just now.’

If I had only just reached, and I was already calling him, then things could be bad. There must be some problem. Was I planning to go back immediately?

‘You are okay?’ he asked.

And he added half seriously, half-jokingly, but with an audible tinge of anxiety and nervousness in his voice, ‘You are not planning to go back already, are you?’ he asked.

I said, I am not going back. No way. I am staying here. I love this place.

‘I am taking up the job,’ I added for good measure.

Across the oceans and the mountains, I could see Guy smile.

******

That was the 14th of February 2005, Valentine’s Day.

It has been a curious love affair for me with Cambodia ever since. A love affair with the country, the land and its people.

Chapter 1

My Driver Tulong

A couple of months later, I was back in Phnom Penh, this time not on a mission but on a regular ITO posting.

Phnom Penh. The town continued to surprise me no end. It was very different from the little town with dirty mud roads and ox carts and donkeys and mules that I had expected. Quite the opposite; it turned out to be a charming town.

There was an air about the town, a je ne sais quoi, an indescribable quality that was a throw-back to the elegance of the Fifties and Sixties. Graceful boulevards, wide and tree lined. Sparse traffic; polite traffic.

Phnom Penh seemed the sort of place that I had always known somewhere in my sub-conscious. It was as if I had lived a previous life there and that eternal soul in me had always longed to come back.

Everything about Phnom Penh surprised me.

And the airport was no different. It was cute and modern. Uncrowded. Not the potholed Khmer Rouge relic that I had once condescendingly imagined it would be.

There were the usual touts of course, seeking custom. But there was also a prepaid counter for taxis to the city and once you paid the US$7 (they love US money here, it is legal tender), a driver would come up to you and politely take your luggage and lead you to your car. None of the endless queues that you see at the prepaid counter in Bangkok, the hustling and the bustling of taxi drivers at Cairo, or the disdain of Hong Kong’s taxi drivers when they see a Kipling’s browned Aryan skin.

They love Indians here in Cambodia. And the more petit amongst us could pass off for Khmers. And vice versa. Many of the burlier Khmers could pass off as Indians.

******

I had caught a taxi from the airport. My driver was young. But unlike the rest of Phnom Penh, my driver was not serene. He kept fidgeting and looking at me through the mirror. He was sizing me up. I hoped he would not entice me into some sort of a trap or mug or rob me. Or worse, try to lure me into a rendezvous with some girl (they called them ‘lady’ there: Want lady sir? Nice lady? Young lady sir?) for the night. I hoped he was not a pimp.

However, all he did was lure me into a conversation. He asked me whether I was a tourist.

‘You tourist?’ he asked.

I was not in a mood to talk. The placidity of Phnom Penh permeated through me. I was for quiet and calm. I did not want that serenity and the images of my previous life in Phnom Penh distracted by a conversation with a stranger.

‘Tourist?’ he asked again.

‘Sort of ...,’ I said.

He was not dissuaded.

‘Whe you from?’ he asked.

‘Antarctica,’ I replied.

That quieted him for some time. He was not quite sure where Antarctica was.

‘Antactica?’ he asked, dropping the r.

I did not reply.

He thought I had not heard him. He turned around to look at me, the car still moving at a steady 50 kilometres an hour.

‘Whe Antactica is?’ he asked again, this time a little louder and looking me straight in the eye and for good measure adding a verb.

‘Near Arctic,’ I replied.

He was not one to give up easily. He had seen so many like me before, and had melted them all down into sharing their deepest darkest secret desires with him.

He asked me how long I would be staying in the country.

I said, ‘Some time.’

He got down to specifics. ‘Maybe how many yea?’ He meant years. Cambodians, I learnt quickly, drop not only their r’s but also their last consonants.

The French who had colonised Cambodia and most of Indo-China for about 100 years had taught them to drop that last consonant while pronouncing any word in the Latin script.

I did not reply.

He said, ‘Maybe for one wee.’ More a statement than a question.

I said maybe.

‘Maybe, three or four wee?’

‘Maybe. Maybe a year,’ I added. I do not know quite why I divulged so much.

The thought of me spending one year in Phnom Penh perked up his interest immensely. I could become a regular customer. He switched over to the respectful mode.

‘You wok here, sir?’ he asked.

I pretended to be checking my cell phone.

‘You wok for Onkah, sir?’ he asked like a defence lawyer leading his reluctant witness on.

I had no clue what an Onkah meant.

He clarified, ‘Wok for NGO, Sir?’ I noticed that the sir had now switched from small to a capital S. His respect for me was obviously growing.

Onkah I learnt was the generic term for a NGO in Khmer.

I did not want to dilute the status of the UN by reducing the UN to an NGO. I said no, I did not work for an Onkah.

He lost steam.

In Cambodia, the Onkahs or NGOs came on top of the pecking order. If you worked for an NGO, you were on top of the local social and economic hierarchy. Only a job in the UN gave you a status higher than that. But the UN employed ‘foreigners’, meaning whites and I was certainly not a ‘foreigner’. So it did not cross his mind that I could be working for the UN. Within the caste system of jobs in Cambodia the topmost caste I could have possibly belonged to was of an NGO.

The caste system went something like this:

Those employed by the UN, the ‘foreign’ employees occupied the highest of that caste hierarchy. They were the Brahmins.

After the Brahmins of the UN, came the Kshatriyas of the NGOs, and down the line came those who were employed in universities, or as schoolteachers, or in businesses or were self-employed, in that order.

And then there was the hoi-polloi of course, who did not matter.

My driver was still curious. But more than that, he was commercial.

‘How you go to work for, Sir?’ The r’s began to creep back in. This man had driven taxis for English speaking expats.

I did not understand.

‘How you go for to work, Sir?’ He corrected his English.

I did not understand.

‘You need caa, Sir?’ he asked, and quickly elaborated, ‘for to go office?’

His brother had a car, a Camry, in very good condition, he said. With a driver, he added, in case I needed a car to go to my office.

Which model I ask. New, he says. No, I mean which model, I ask. New, he confirms. Which model, I ask. 1997 model he adds, but new, he confirms as if to say he was not lying or trying to mislead me.

It took me a month to reconcile the contradiction. The model is 1997. But the car is new. It would have done over 100,000 miles in Canada or New Jersey or wherever in North America it came from. Second-hand cars that had no market there, would have been shipped to Cambodia, redone and sold as new.

It was then for all purposes a new car here. At least a new used car, as most new cars were in Cambodia then.

‘You need caa, Sir?’ he repeated, ‘for to go to office?’

I thought that was a good idea. It would be good to have a car to pick me up and drop me to the office.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘’Only 125 dollaa Sir,’ he replied.

The US dollar was and still is the currency of choice in Cambodia. It is legal and unless you specifically ask to be given in the local currency, the riels, you only get dollars when you take out money from banks or at shops. Donor budgets on which the country had long survived is of course always in dollars, and so is the government budget.

But contradictory as it may seem, while you can find the dollar everywhere in Cambodia, you cannot, however, find a cent in the country. All change is given in riels, 4200 of them to a dollar, last heard.

Neither can you find coins in Cambodia. Riels come only in paper currencies. So while you might carry a lot of poorly printed riels in small change, you would not need to carry coins in your pockets.