FEW WERE SURPRISED when Khun Lung was felled by a stroke, fewer still when he died. It was his lifestyle, they told one another. His three younger sisters had been warning him for decades. Other family members, too. That Khun Lung was an intensely private person, discreet almost to the point of secrecy, and that they could only guess what he got up to, was irrelevant. At family gatherings and social functions, the mere sight of this aging, unmarried dandy enjoying the earthly pleasures with such relish provoked a disagreeable reaction among them. It was not that they disliked him; everyone acknowledged his generosity and kindness. No. Slim figured and elegant though he remained, it was generally agreed that Khun Lung led an ‘unhealthy’ life for a man in his sixties and was an embarrassment to their good family name, smoking fine cigars and drinking expensive whiskey, and almost certainly taking drugs and fornicating. ‘He is destined to fall,’ they’d say without prompting. It became over the years almost a family mantra, born from that mixture of moral indignation, hypocrisy and well-disguised jealousy that is among the least attractive qualities of the Thai character.

     Khun Lung did have allies, and one who felt genuine concern for his well-being was his youngest sister, Pim, a devout Buddhist in her late forties; she included him in her prayers when she went to the temple in Ayudhya once a month to make merit. After lighting the candles and incense and before putting the envelope into the donation box, she would pray her brother would change his ways and, instead of continuing to live only for the senses, find sobriety and solace in Buddha’s teachings. Out of love and decency she continued to defend him to the family, some of whom were prone to exaggerate their pious condemnation of Khun Lung’s behaviour, as though they needed a focus to vent their frustrations on. This was especially true of Chada, the middle sister. Still, even Pim privately agreed with the others sometimes, and she wondered when his decadence would eventually catch up with him, and so she too awaited his fall, though with compassion rather than anticipation.

     There was an appropriate show of grief at Khun Lung’s passing, but behind this mask of tears the sharp observer might have detected an impatience among relatives to get on with the business of exposing the truth about him, in the strictest confidence, of course, so that they could feel vindicated in their judgment. As with most things in Thai society, this was by no means a straightforward exercise.

 

*   *   *

 

Khun Lung was the eldest child and only son of a surgeon who, after much consideration, decided against sending the boy abroad for his education, concerned that the offspring of friends sent down that path were, on returning, unable to readapt to Thai culture and take up their allotted positions in society. At any rate this was what Khun Lung’s father told anyone who cared to ask. The truth was more selfish: surrounded at home by women, whose company he often found irritating without knowing or caring to understand why, he wanted to keep Khun Lung by his side. He made sure the boy was pampered by his nurse and his mother and free to do as he pleased from an early age, unlike his sisters who, in strict Thai tradition, were brought up to be proper, obedient and modest. Khun Lung was a princeling, blessed with lean, good looks and natural charm. To the annoyance of those who would have taken pleasure in seeing him spoiled, he grew to be an easy-going, considerate and unassuming young man.

     Lacking for nothing, he enjoyed his life. He attended a private day school and never envied the friends sent off to England or Australia, who would return each summer with complaints about the weather and their foreign guardians and the food and the weirdness of boarding schools. During the long months of the rainy season he would take his companions around the parts of Bangkok he frequented and show them what they had been missing. Far from feeling deprived, he considered himself lucky.

     By the age of fifteen, Khun Lung realised he was committed to a life of sensual gratification in all its aspects, and the slippery shadows of the City of Angels became his domain. Finding he could separate his private self from his public persona with an ease that came naturally, he vowed never to bring shame on his parents, who had not the least suspicion of how he spent his spare hours in the afternoon, or the nights when he slipped through the gate at the back of the garden and onto the leafy, dark path along the canal. By the time he was in university, Khun Lung was well acquainted with all Bangkok had to offer the sensualist. A veritable banquet to the American soldiers on leave from the war in Vietnam, it was a city throbbing with lust and desperation, where everything and anyone was available for a price.

     His father, as if in compensation for not having sent him abroad, gave Khun Lung a generous allowance to use as he wished and he was able to taste Bangkok’s delights, always taking his pleasures with moderation and self-control. Only during his second year of university, when he was experimenting with opium in a small private den in Thonburi, did he feel himself losing control, but, with the self-discipline that would serve him throughout his life, he regained his balance.

     After graduating as an architectural engineer, Khun Lung joined a firm that would, during the boom of the late 1980s, grow to become one of the largest property developers in Thailand. He commanded a high salary, augmented by fat annual bonuses. Khun Lung had inherited a conservative streak from his father, which meshed neatly with his own instincts when it came to risk, and by mid-life he was financially independent. He was one of the few to emerge unscathed from the speculative crash of 1997 that began in Bangkok and swept across Asia. When he took retirement at the age of sixty, Khun Lung was a wealthy man.

     If his professional career followed the sure and steady course through the calm waters of material security that was familiar to the privileged, his personal life reflected no less commitment to tranquil conservatism. He came early to the conclusion that it would be impossible for him to be faithful to one person; he saw the exhausting turmoil of dishonesty and furtiveness that dogged the married men around him who sought to maintain a mistress. Khun Lung decided not to marry or to have children, thereby avoiding the householder’s dukkha – that especial suffering Buddhists must live through on the path to enlightenment. In any case, he enjoyed the single life and, despite moments of pondering the benefits he may have gained by having a companion at his side, he never regretted his decision. He was a bachelor, and that status gave him licence to play the field, he would joke, but though his elegance and wealth allowed him to choose freely from the beautiful men and women who came into his orbit, he was neither promiscuous nor greedy. Khun Lung had many affairs but was never possessive and always made clear to his partners that they should not expect any greater involvement than he was able to offer. As a consequence he was rarely the subject of bitter accusations, and never the target of jealous husbands.

     He was often bemused by the importance many of his contemporaries, particularly those educated abroad, attached to civic affairs and the need to leave a mark on society. Khun Lung was a sceptical observer. He did not expect Thailand to change in any meaningful way during his lifetime. His youthful illusions were shattered when the brief experiment with democracy in the mid-1970s ended with the massacre at Thammasat University and he had no desire to endorse the benevolent and not-so-benevolent dictatorships that came and went over the next decades, or the cynical demagoguery that filled the intervening periods – and certainly not the culture of corruption that underpinned political life.

     Khun Lung’s obituary was, by comparison with the dearly departed others of his generation, rather dull – where were the public accomplishments, the fame that might normally attach to wealth or power? To the close observer, his was the charmed, casual existence of a man devoid of ambition, one who stood at a distance from his social environment, who held back from becoming too deeply involved in personal relationships, who was so private as to be scarcely knowable. Yet while not going out of his way to do good, he could nevertheless claim to have done no harm.

     To acquaintances, Khun Lung’s life was normal, correct and well-starred, and this was put down to good karma left over from a previous incarnation. Those old lovers who attended his funeral at Wat Tadtong knew a slightly different Khun Lung. And there were others who were by nature suspicious of a life too ordinary and uneventful. Behind the silk fans that fluttered in the afternoon to combat the sweltering heat, gossip was exchanged. But there was nothing sensational about Khun Lung. There was no mud that would stick. His passing provoked neither reverence and admiration nor the retrospective condemnation that had accompanied the recent deaths of certain powerful personalities. Like most committed hedonists, Khun Lung lived his life in a world shaded from public scrutiny, in those private moments of delicious satisfaction to the eye, or the tongue, or the nose, in the touch of soft skin, the colours and visions that come with drugs, the shiver of a blissful orgasm at dawn. No one could have written of these things in the thin booklet that accompanied his cremation, nor would they have, if only for the sake of decorum.

     The living have no right to judge the dead. Yet, thumbing through those few pages of eulogy composed by a cousin, a retired professor of literature who thought herself the authority on family members, those who suspected that Khun Lung’s life had been far richer than it appeared sat in stiff silence, eager to speculate about what he had been doing all those years.

 

*   *   *

 

One of the discoveries that slid like a snake from its hole was that Khun Lung’s death had not, in fact, come as the result of a stroke, but from a subsequent heart attack in a hospital bed during a visit by Pim and her daughter, Nong Fon. This detail, and issues concerning his will, set tongues wagging and provoked not a little speculation as to the precise nature of Khun Lung’s relationship with these two close relatives.

     It was common knowledge that during his final year Khun Lung had begun to spend more and more time at Pim’s house. In itself this was nothing odd; Pim was his favourite sister, and it was natural that he, being single, should feel the need for her company at this point in his life. Pim was joyful to see more of her brother, if only because it fed her hopes that he was showing signs of reforming. Although she did not expect Khun Lung to ask her to direct him to a temple retreat, she was sure that he was heading for some kind of spiritual awakening. After all, she reasoned, he already had so much experience of the world. At his age it was time to prepare for what lay ahead and to begin building up a store of good karma for the coming journey.

     Pim had always admired her brother, who was fifteen years her senior, despite her opinions concerning his lifestyle. When she was a little girl, he had made time to play with her and shown her more affection than he had the other sisters. The bond they shared endured into adulthood. On the rare occasions that Khun Lung confided in somebody, it was always  Pim. He had, for example, announced to her his decision to give up taking drugs. This was when he turned fifty-seven: he felt he no longer had the stamina for them. ‘I’m going to cut out smoking altogether. It just makes me cough,’ he told her, though she later surmised he was only talking about opium. Two months later, she saw him on the terrace puffing happily on a thin joint of marijuana. He was constant in his inconsistency and while many who knew him found this aspect of his character annoying and deemed him to be a selfish degenerate who refused to grow up, Pim saw in him a cheerful authenticity and freedom of spirit that others around her lacked. ‘He is who he is,’ she would chorus, although no one quite knew what this meant.

     Khun Lung did not like to speak about himself. He thought the western obsession for delving publicly into the interior world crass. He said he disliked New York because there was always someone at the next table whining about their neuroses, and preferred the reticence of Londoners. His fondness for Paris, he said, was enhanced by not understanding a word of the language that sounded so elegant and enchanting. When a friend pressed him to clarify his personal philosophy, Khun Lung merely shrugged and said, ‘I have none, except to extract as much pleasure as possible from life and to do no harm.’

     A word often used in connection with him was ‘generous’. As a young man, he helped a colleague who was in the debt of gangsters. Perhaps it was this incident that gave rise to his reputation, but his acts of generosity were always performed quietly; he did not like attention.

     At first, his visits to his sister’s house in a peaceful lane in the Bang Lampoo district were preceded by a telephone call to enquire when it might be convenient to join Pim and her daughter for dinner, or lunch on a weekend. Pim never said no and, gradually it was accepted that Khun Lung would drop by unannounced. Soon her house became his second home.

     Pim’s husband had died early and she had not remarried. She did not care to have a social life, nor did she have a close relationship with her sisters who, in any case moved in different circles. Ladda, the eldest, was married to a police chief and Chada to a businessman who was never around and was rumoured to have several nubile mistresses. And so she lived with a bitterness that jaundiced her opinion of the younger members of her sex. Pim, for her part, accepted the role of single mother as both a sacrifice and a blessing, devoting all her time and attention to Nong Fon.

     The year Khun Lung began to become part of the household, Nong Fon was twenty and studying sociology at Bangkok University. She was what others called ‘a quiet girl’, her shyness ascribed to the deep suffering inflicted by her father’s death when she was eight. She grew almost unnoticed from gawky child to attractive young woman. Her style of dress was modest, unlike many of her contemporaries, and her behaviour was reserved. Her aunts liked her for this and praised her for not being drawn into the excesses of her generation, though Auntie Chada would wonder, always out loud, if Nong Fon was really happy and balanced as she did seem unusually introverted.

     Khun Lung was proud of this niece. He had been vaguely interested in her welfare as a child, but it was when the butterfly began to emerge that she became a real presence in his life. This, he admitted to himself, was in part because he was charmed by her looks. Khun Lung had a carefully cultivated appreciation of beautiful women and beautiful men, and he referred to his love of sex as ‘the thrill of the skin’. But love itself had eluded him. He had watched friends falling in love and heard their excited, rambling descriptions, and he had recognised glimmers of tenderness with a few of his lovers, but he had never felt the love others described and he had long ago concluded that, for whatever reason, its pleasures and pains would elude him in this lifetime.

     This was to change in a quiet though radical way during the year of his frequent visits to his sister’s house. It was not that he fell in love with his niece; there was no physical desire on his part, no impulse to possess her on any level, nor did he accord her a special position that might entail some kind of reciprocation. Yet, little by little, he found himself connected to his heart in a way he had not known before. Whenever he was in Nong Fon’s company he felt a warm wave of delight flow through him and an interest in her more intense than he had experienced towards any other human being. He reasoned that these feelings were inspired by her mixture of shyness and ease around him, which he found highly attractive, but also by the manner in which she conducted herself without any apparent concern for the effect a gesture or a phrase might have; in other words, he saw in his niece an innate, shining innocent purity, and it was this that captivated him.

     Khun Lung’s love for Nong Fon was so fresh and surprising to him that, disregarding his usual discretion, he discussed it with Pim, who seemed genuinely amused.

     ‘But of course, dear brother,’ she said, ‘it is because she’s the daughter you never had.’ Then she laughed and added, only half in jest, ‘Why don’t you adopt her?’

*   *   *

 

Towards the end of that year, during which he floated in a cloud of bliss and contentment he owed entirely to the pleasure he derived from his niece’s company, an incident intruded on Khun Lung’s happiness. One morning in the month of October – shortly before his death – he was awakened by a phone call from Chada, who asked if they could meet for coffee. She would explain her reasons later, she said. Khun Lung had never gotten along with Chada and was annoyed both at being woken so early and by the air of mystery she managed to contrive. But he was curious; apart from the occasional family gatherings, they didn’t speak much. Chada wasted no time getting to the point: she was concerned about Nong Fon.

     ‘You never know what these young people get up to nowadays,’ she said by way of invidious preface to her description of an incident she felt Khun Lung should know about. On the previous Thursday, Chanda said, at about three in the afternoon, she had been sitting in her car idly looking out the window – traffic was bad and she was watching the busy pavement scenes outside one of the shopping malls. A mere arm’s length away was parked a shiny dark blue Japanese car, the latest model, the kind that young people liked, the kind old lechers buy for their little mistresses. She followed this comment with a sarcastic laugh. Imagine her surprise, she said, when she observed through her discreetly tinted windows a young woman dash out of the entrance of the mall carrying a shopping bag in each hand and get into the very same parked car. Chada could not believe her eyes – it was none other than Nong Fon. And instead of the usual demure style they all associated with the girl, she was wearing a red dress and shiny high heels more suited to a night out at a disco than an afternoon’s shopping. Chada was so shocked that, as the traffic began to move, she told the driver to stop and lowered the window for a better look at her niece, who was now at the wheel and gazing vaguely in her direction. She waved, she said, expecting Nong Fon to wave back, but instead the girl looked right through her as if she was not there, and, with the road ahead now clear, slipped into the flow without so much as an acknowledgment. Chada, now indignant, and annoyed at the cacophony of car horns urging her to move, would have told the driver to catch up with Nong Fon, but she was already late for her hair appointment and let the matter go. But it was her ‘duty’ as a sister to tell her dear brother what she had seen.

     Khun Lung’s first reaction was that Chada had been mistaken, and he said so.

     ‘I saw the girl with my own eyes,’ she insisted. ‘It was Nong Fon. There’s no mistaking her. Now it’s your duty,’ (and here she stressed the word, as though it was a concept alien to her brother) ‘to get to the bottom of this. If our niece is going astray then we must save her.’

     Entirely aware that far from saving anybody what his sister wanted was some juicy gossip to share with her card-playing circle and to use in a personal attack on Pim, Khun Lung took a slow sip of his coffee. Setting the delicate porcelain cup back on its saucer, taking a moment to listen to the pleasing ‘clink’ of fine china upon fine china, he promised that if there was anything in what she had told him he would deal with the matter without delay.

     Khun Lung felt vexed. Having had no experience of parenting and averse as he was to awkward situations, he determined that he lacked the necessary skills to achieve a diplomatic solution. The best approach would be to confront the problem head on and, that evening, as he, Pim and Nong Fon were having dinner, he asked his niece directly if she had been at the shopping mall the previous Thursday. Khun Lung was an astute judge of character and knew the subtle but unmistakable signals of a lie being told. He had not decided, however, what exactly he would do if she lied to him and all through the day he had been anxiously debating the issue without coming to any conclusions.

     He was relieved to find that his intuition had been right. Nong Fon, without so much as a blink, replied that she had been at a friend’s house studying for the coming exams.

     ‘But Auntie Chada says she saw you in a red dress and high heels getting into a car,’ Khun Lung said, making plain the accusation that lay behind this statement.

     Nong Fon was silent for a moment, then, lifting her hand to her mouth so as not to appear impolite, giggled. Pim caught on and began to laugh, and soon the two of them were laughing as if Khun Lung had told the funniest joke they had heard in a long time, and he, with a sense of utter relief, joined them.

     As they recovered, wiping at the tears in their eyes, Nong Fon said quietly, ‘Uncle, if you have any doubt, please call Pi Daeng, or her mother.’

     ‘No need,’ Khun Lung said. ‘Your Auntie Chada has always had an over-active imagination.’ And with that remark, they burst out laughing again.

     Khun Lung was annoyed at himself for having listened to Chada.

     He knew the game, and over the years had played it as patron to some hard-up girl or boy looking for extra pocket money to indulge an addiction to the vacuous consumerism that had sunk its claws into an entire generation and made a mockery of dedication and hard work; they were not much bothered by what they might have to do in return.

     But Nong Fon was not in the same category. She lacked for nothing and displayed not the slightest interest in the material or the fashionable. He was angry with his sister for having put him in such a delicate and disagreeable position. And his anger led him to resolve that if Chada had acted with malice, either towards himself or to his beloved niece, then she had no place in his life. But the seed of doubt had been planted and, in the flow of his thoughts that night as he lay in bed, Khun Lung pondered what he might have said had Chada been right. He rarely had to offer advice to anyone. Had Nong Fon been the girl in the red dress, what would he have said then? Given that he had devoted his life to the pursuit of pleasure, what could he say about ‘morality’ that wouldn’t ring with hypocrisy? His guiding principle was that everything is permissible ‘so long as you do no harm to others’. It now sounded more than a little hollow.

 

*   *   *

Khun Lung slept badly, his dreams crowded and troubling. Just before dawn the sound of a siren in the distance sat him bolt upright in bed, a minor illumination flashing him into consciousness, and he uttered, ‘No harm!’

     Buddhists believe Death sends out signals before its eventual arrival at one’s door. Sometimes these are clear signs visible on the physical plane. Others appear in dreams that hint at departure. It is widely held that if one cultivates a sense of awareness and does not cling so much to continuity in this existence, such signs are quite obvious.

     Khun Lung could not attribute a physical or psychic experience to the realisation that he was entering the slipstream of death. That he was on the verge of some significant transformation came upon him as an understanding that he was lonely. He looked for another word to explain what was happening to him, but ‘lonely’ persisted and he came to comprehend in those last few months that it was a loneliness without context. It did not come from a need to make contact with others, to have company or be surrounded by people. It was not about solitude at all, but rather a sense of being isolated from the business of living, and a sense of pointlessness and deep, visceral regret that his life had been wasted – that his preoccupation with the sensual would count for nought.

     His love for Nong Fon was real and pure, he reasoned, but this was not enough to dispel the increasingly frequent bouts of desolation, nor could the whiskey he once enjoyed, or the marijuana delivered to him each month by the farmer from Korat. And he had to admit that, for the past several years, his drinking and smoking had become more habitual than pleasurable and lately served only to worsen his loneliness. Even sex had lost its thrill.

     His last affair ended shortly after his fifty-ninth birthday when his lover, a diplomat ten years his junior, was posted to one of the more pleasing European capitals. He felt relief rather than regret when she left, and told himself he no longer had the energy for fresh emotional entanglement. Professionals were easier, but the thought of venturing into even the most luxurious massage parlour or bordello appalled him, and he settled on exploring the refinement of select private clubs reserved for the wealthy and the cognoscenti, where there was at least the illusion of social as well as sexual intercourse.

     Khun Lung chose a club with no name, housed in a three-storey colonial-style mansion in a narrow lane off Sukhumvit Road. Members, both men and women, were driven through high metal gates and, by a winding, shaded path to a discrete garage, entered a world where anonymity was preserved with the greatest care. There was no limit to desire: private dining rooms; a library; a small cinema; a spa; luxurious bedrooms. A nod to one of the managers and a male or female in the exquisite bloom of youth would appear. Suites were available for group entertainment. The wine cellar was well stocked. The finest drugs, both local and imported, were close to hand. Here he felt life ebbing through his fingers like so much fine coral sand.

     It was Christmas Eve when Khun Lung paid his last visit to the club, in an effort to escape the crass Christian commercialism that crept into every corner of the beloved Buddhist Bangkok of his childhood. He wanted an oasis of calm, if only for a few hours. He had thought to spend the week at a Hua Hin beach resort, but Pim had insisted he come for Christmas Day – Nong Fon would be cooking turkey for Pi Daeng and her parents. It was a holiday, and there seemed no harm in indulging that western wish – he winced at the hypocrisy – for peace on earth and goodwill to all men. So he stayed in the city and at the club ate a solitary light lunch. The maître d’ told him there was to be a lavish private party that evening. With the food he ordered a half-bottle of white wine, though he almost never drank at lunchtime, and afterwards, feeling groggy, he had asked for a room for the afternoon. The manager smiled and said Khun Lung’s usual room on the second floor was prepared. ‘Will you require anything else?’

     Khun Lung told him no, but the young man was insistent: ‘I do think you will like our new part-timer – just out of school.’

     ‘No. Thank you. I’m tired and want a little rest before I go home.’

     The siesta did nothing to revive him – two hours and he felt wearier than ever. A long soak in the sunken marble bath didn’t help either. He wrapped himself in a bathrobe and called down for tea to be sent up to his room. Khun Lung slumped into an armchair. His legs felt as heavy as tree trunks. Shortly, there came a knock, but he found difficult the four or five steps to the door. Reaching for the handle, he heard voices, one that was familiar, another that was not, and then a peal of laughter. A uniformed maid with a tea tray and service smile stood in the hallway. As he observed the stark contrast of her starched white collar against her dark skin, his eye was drawn to a couple beyond and, with the clarity of slow motion, he took in the handsome, angular face of an aging actor-turned-chat-show-host and his cream linen suit, his arm around the waist of a thin, beautiful girl in a short, white satin dress cut low to reveal the tops of her young breasts above which was the face of Nong Fon, eyes frozen in shocked recognition, a hand covering her mouth. She was saying something – perhaps she was calling his name – but Khun Lung could hear only a roaring in his ears and when he tried to say her name managed only slurred syllables, as if his mouth had been stuffed with cotton wool. There was a blinding flash. The maid reported thinking she heard him say ‘no harm’ before dropping limp to the floor.

 

*   *   *

 

Samitivej Hospital is just a couple of laneways from the club, but no ambulance was summoned lest the commotion disturb members gathering for the evening’s festivities. Khun Lung was lifted onto the broad back seat of a limousine and Nong Fon, who had quickly changed into modest day clothes and checked twice that she had removed all traces of make-up, accompanied the chauffeur on the short journey. She held tight the clammy hand of her ashen uncle and speed-dialled her mother.

     An emergency-room doctor met the car as it arrived. He diagnosed a stroke and nurses began inserting tubes into Khun Lung, administering medication that would prevent further clotting. Khun Lung’s condition was not critical, the doctor told Nong Fun, but the probability of complications was high and her uncle should not be moved. Nong Fon insisted that nothing be done until her mother arrived and paced the private room in a worsening state of distress. Her eyes betrayed her panic as she scrambled in her mind for an explanation of what had just taken place. How and where had she found her uncle? She had no doubt he would, when he recovered, vouch for her story, however implausible it might be. And, gazing at his inert form, surrounded by machines and dressed in a sage-green cotton smock, she sent silent prayers. Khun Lung watched his niece from the corner of his eye, unable to tell her to come sit beside him.

     Since the initial searing flash, which he found an entirely unpleasant experience, he had been in an otherworldly twilight: sound was intermittent, coming all at once then suddenly not at all, and he tried to filter the noise to just this well-appointed hospital room as he struggled to recall how he got there. He saw rather than felt the hands of the club staff as they clothed his naked body, as though he were already a corpse, and carried him down the back stairs – how careful they were not to bang his head against the wall. He wanted to tell them he could walk, if they would only give him a little support under the arms, but he was unable to speak. Nong Fon was at the bottom of the stairs, wringing her hands, frightened, like a little girl. Once the furious activity at the hospital abated and a measure of calm restored, Nong Fon approached the foot of his narrow, utilitarian bed and looked at her uncle for a few moments. Then she was by his side, bending towards him. Khun Lung could see that she had been crying. He saw her fingers touch his face, but it was numb, as was the whole of his right side.

     ‘I’m sorry, uncle,’ she said, her hands together in obeisance, her voice barely a whisper. ‘Don’t think badly of me. I … I just wanted more.’

     Khun Lung managed to close and open his eyes, trying to communicate that he was okay, that he understood.

     He first heard, then saw Pim. She took his hand in hers and began rubbing it as though this act alone would revive him.

     ‘The specialist will be here any moment,’ she said to him, a quiver in her voice, a trembling smile on her lips. ‘They want to do some tests. You’ll be all right.’

     He tried to focus on Pim, on Nong Fon, but the machines around him began beeping wildly as he experienced what felt like a series of electric shocks run down his left arm and there was a sudden sharp, unbearably brutal stab in his heart. His body convulsed several times.

     Pim and Nong Fon held each other in grief and tears as doctors and nurses flurried around Khun Lung in futile activity. Pim could smell a strong perfume on her daughter, a scent both subtle and sophisticated. Nong Fon did not wear perfume. Pim had questions, many questions.

 

*   *   *

 

It was not until after Khun Lung’s cremation that Pim felt she could look for some answers. The ‘official’ version was that Khun Lung had come to the house, interrupting Nong Fon’s study, and they were about to prepare tea when he suffered a stroke. She had rushed him to the hospital in a taxi and the doctors were hopeful, but he had a heart attack, which proved fatal. Pim saw the holes in the story only after it had been made public, and it caused raised eyebrows among a few, not least Auntie Chada: ‘But why all the way to Samitivej Hospital? It’s on the other side of town … and with all that traffic on Christmas Eve? Did the poor girl want to make sure her uncle died?’

     Mother and daughter stuck to the story, and in their sadness at the loss of Khun Lung it was felt neither kind nor polite to press them. Pim, too, kept her own counsel, for she had difficulty formulating a scenario that cast Nong Fon in a favourable light. She felt that she no longer knew her daughter and searched her memory for the signs she had so wilfully ignored. She could press for the truth and live with its consequences, or remain silent and trust her.

     It was Nong Fon who ultimately took matters into her own hands.

     ‘You must not ask me about the past,’ she told Pim one evening as they sat together in the quiet time before dinner. ‘I have done wrong, and I am sorry. But if we are to carry on loving each other you must let it go. Know that, for me, everything has changed. It is aniccam. But know also that I will never again put you in a difficult position, nor give you cause to be ashamed of me.’

     Pim was left with no response except to say she hoped that what her daughter said was true. A good Buddhist, she let her questions drop away and through prayers offered up at the temple sought merit for Nong Fon’s decisions and expressed gratitude for the wisdom she had found.

     Nong Fon hoped, too, that she was speaking the truth. She had enjoyed the thrill of a rarefied world of desire, serving the rich, the powerful and the famous, and knowing that men were at the mercy of her charms. She had made a good deal of money, and it had afforded her a lavish lifestyle, with all the trappings of fine clothes and shoes and jewellery. Would she, could she, give all that up?

 

*   *   *

 

About a month after Khun Lung’s death, Pim and Nong Fon were summoned to the offices of his lawyer to hear the fate of his assets. The short, bespectacled man behind the desk informed them in a brittle tone of voice that it had been his client’s stipulation no one else be present when his material intentions were revealed. Khun Lung’s reasoning soon became clear. Everything – his condominium by the river, properties in Chiang Mai, Phuket and Khao Yai that yielded a considerable yearly rental income, two vintage cars and the garage in which they were stored, and a lucrative stock portfolio spread across only the best Thai and foreign companies – now belonged to Nong Fon.

     Auntie Chada was, of course, furious and tried to stir suspicion in the family that Khun Lung and Nong Fon might have been more to each other than just uncle and niece. ‘She must have been very special to him,’ she said. But it was known that Chada had resented her brother when he was alive, and she clearly intended to go on doing so in death. Khun Lung was a generous man, it was generally agreed, and his decision was entirely in keeping with his eccentricities. It was a time for mudita and they celebrated Nong Fon’s good fortune, sharing in the joy Khun Lung bestowed.

 

*   *   *

 

Nong Fon never again spoke of Khun Lung’s death, only of his life, and in the contented years that followed she would cover her mouth with her hand to hide the smile that played on her lips as she told her children tales of his escapades. In doing so, she hoped to pass on a little of his belief in the independence of the spirit – in finding one’s own path in life and not being constrained by the words and thoughts of others. And she would remind them to be thankful for the inheritance he had left to her. What she never revealed to anyone was his greatest gift of all: that he had taken her secret with him when he died.

     She would simply tell them: ‘He was a most generous uncle.’