knowledge beyond ordinary ken, questions of the future. My principal curiosity concerned the cricket score, but while the Buddha was undoubtedly wise and good and even fun-loving, there was no suggestion He was a cricket fan.
âWhat can I expect from the new year?â I asked instead. The head monk looked at me narrowly, and pulled his saffron robes close about him. âIs it new year already?â he said. He was perhaps 60, but his muscles were taut and alive, like a school of fast-swimming ocean fish in a surgical glove. He was a persuasive advertisement for the clean life, or at least the life lived far from other people. He placed a hand on my upper arm and frowned. âBeware,â he said, âof lawsuits.â
It was an alarming thing to hear, so far from Jani Allan and the SABC, but southeast Asia is a place of surprises. It is also a good place for Yule-phobes such as myself to spend the season. The only sign of Christmas against which I stubbed my toe was a tinny album of carols playing in a department store in Kuala Lumpur.
The album was recorded by a Thai pub band specialising in Western music, which perhaps explained why it sounded as though a plantation of annoyed dwarfs were yelling âSirent night! Hory night!â I bought my souvenir gift hamper of Malaysian rubber and fled. Behind me the dwarfs were building to a frenzy: âIâll pray my dlum for him, pa-lum-pa-pum-pum!â
It has been quite some journey to the east, but by the time you read this I shall be home. As I write, a water buffalo grazes in a rice paddy outside my window, and if I look to the left I can see a clipper in white sail following the current down to the Straits of Malacca and into the China Seas. I came in search of television, but I found the footprints of authors.
In the Bangkok Oriental hotel I took tea in the suite in which Somerset Maugham nearly died of malaria, and stood on the spot where Joseph Conrad slumped to the ground after too many rum toddies. In Singaporeâs Raffles I drank a gin sling on the porch where Noel Coward sat shuddering with dengue fever. I rode the same rails as Graham Greene up the Malaysian peninsula, and slept in the same compartment of the Orient Express that Wilbur Smith once infested. I tried to change compartments, but nothing doing.
Which is not to say that I entirely neglected my television duties. TV, unlike the portions served in local restaurants, is big in the Orient. On the River Kwai, barely 500m downstream from the infamous and strangely unimpressive bridge, a nearby settlement is visible only by the tangled thicket of television aerials rising above the bamboo and banana fronds. In the villages and farmsteads lining the railway through the Malaysian jungle, every small stilted shack housing rubber tappers and dirt-scrabble palm growers has a rickety aerial receiving all that local television has to offer.
In Thailand, that consists principally of the same overpitched game show that followed me about like a hungry mutt. Wherever there was television, there was that green and purple stage design, those seven Thais in animated conversation, that cheering, whistling audience. I spent many hours trying to puzzle it out, but I still havenât any idea how the game is played. All I could gather, by the succession of groans and crumpled facial expressions, was that no one had yet triumphed. Finally, after 10 days of such torture, the grand prize was won. I wasnât watching when it happened, Iâm happy to say, but Dam, my driver, told me it had been a motorbike.
Dam was a font of invaluable information. When buying cobraâs blood from a street vendor, he cautioned, always make sure itâs fresh. âWatch the snake be kill,â said Dam earnestly, âwith own eyes.â Apparently unscrupulous cobra-blood merchants will substitute the pre-packaged blood of the more common tree snake. Dam tutted at the depths of manâs