Halfway through the party, when everyone was drunk and a female singer was in the middle of a haunting love song in the Isaan dialect, there was a great commotion at one end of the compound. It seems a young man named Lek had insulted an older man, something you simply do not do in rural Thailand. Perhaps the older man was eager to be insulted that fetid night, for he was carrying a machete that he used to slash open the young man’s face, across his left eye. The band and the singer were immediately told to go, the party cut short. Nong tried to call the police, but they would not come unless someone guaranteed to pay them. I said I would do so, but the desk sergeant was not sure a farang (Westerner) really understood the system. Somebody took Lek to hospital, where we went to see him the next day. I was amazed at how cool everyone was, especially Nong. Lek’s injuries were extremely serious, of a kind that we in the West would probably see as life-wrecking, but I could not detect any shock at all. People kept repeating the phrase jai yen yen : Keep a cool, cool heart.

Young Lek’s face was a dreadful mess with no more than a socket where the left eye had been (the surgeon in that country hospital had simply scooped it out rather than try to save it). But he was jai yen yen , too. Nong told me the Buddha had provided him with a great opportunity. Since he would never be able to find a wife now, there was no point in his leading a normal working life. As soon as they let him out of the hospital, he would be ordained as a monk. He would no longer be imprisoned by mundane continuums; his parents would be able to hang on to the skirts of his robes when they died and thereby enter Nirvana with him. Meanwhile, Lek’s father was looking for the culprit in order to kill him, but the culprit’s brother took him to another part of the country, and he was never found.

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