Nury Vittachi - The Feng Shui Detective

‘What about the bag? With samples and cash?’

‘Bag never had samples and cash. Always was full of bricks. To prop him up. Keep him straight in taxi.’

‘You think his partners killed him? But why? What would they have to gain from it? He was the only one with no money.’

‘They are venture capital people. He is ideas man. They don’t want his money. They got money. They want his idea. Maybe they don’t want to pay him.’

Kwa turned to his colleague: ‘Tell the prosecutor to approach the judge. Ask for an adjournment. We’re not ready.’

Joyce McQuinnie, who had been talking to Winnie Lim on the phone in another part of the court house, arrived in the corridor. ‘Hi. Winnie says you got a call this morning from Madam Fu again.’

‘More rubbish in garden?’

‘No. Her cousin came for morning coffee, stayed an hour. The old bat reckons her cousin left some bad vibrations there sort of thing. Wants you to come and do her house again.’

Wong nodded. ‘Better go. Just in case. We can take taxi again. Singapore taxis quite safe.’

Five hundred years ago a great spirituality came to the west of Beijing. This was a time when tangible gave way to intangible. There was much magic.

Every day a bowl would fly from the holy temple to the Imperial Palace. Spirits would carry it. They were unseen. Empress Li would put alms in it. It would fly back to the temple.

One morning the Empress was not ready. She was in her nightdress. The bowl came into her room. She was half-awake only. She covered herself up. She made a joke.

‘What do you want so early? Five hundred girls for your 500 monks?’

The bowl flew back to the temple. It did not come the next day.

The Empress realised she should not have made this joke. She wrote a letter to the head of the temple. His name was Tao Fu. She told him what she did.

Tai Fu said: ‘There is only one thing you can do. You must send 500 girls for the 500 monks. Then you will not have insulted the spirits. There will be no untruth.’

So she sent staff to find 500 girls. After a long time they found enough. The girls were sent to the village of Shih Fu. This is near the temple. The 500 men and 500 women could not stay so close together without sin. They were tempted. They came together.

Tao Fu did not know what to do. The punishment for this sin was death. He decided he had to do it. He took the 500 monks and 500 girls and surrounded them with fire. They lit the fire to burn them to death.

But the Immortals were looking. They lifted the 500 couples straight to the Highest Heaven. They became saints. Tao Fu took the bed of Empress Li and made it into an altar.

Blade of Grass, from this incident a great truth became understood. The holy man who gives up love for his whole life is a pleasure to Heaven. But the holy man who gives up his whole life for love is also a pleasure to Heaven.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

by C F Wong, part 287.

CF Wong put his journal away and picked up the day’s mail, which consisted of a single letter. As usual, there had been an armful of communications jammed into the C F Wong & Associates pigeon-hole downstairs. And as usual, most had been envelopes with windows (put into a drawer to await the weekly accounting session), phone number cards from taxi companies (binned), and items of junk mail (ceremonially burned in a bid to wreak a small karmic vengeance on the senders).

The geomancer examined the outside of the single example of genuine correspondence and gave an unhappy sigh. This, surely, meant trouble. The envelope bore the crest and marks of Master Dinh Tran of the Buddhist Vihara of St Sanctus, a man whose oddly cross-cultural title bore witness to the mixed history of his temple, built in south Vietnam on the site of a former Roman Catholic church.

‘Oh well, better eat the bullet,’ Wong said half out loud before tearing open the envelope and scanning the contents. The lines around his eyes grew visibly deeper as his gaze rolled down the page. ‘Aiyeeeaa,’ he breathed. ‘Terok-lah! AiyeeAAA.’

In the letter, Master Tran, a friend of Wong’s late father, requested the feng shui master’s urgent presence to deal with a complex problem. He must come now. The temple was willing to provide a fee equivalent to one day’s consultation to East Trade Industries. No mention was made of air tickets or accommodation. Presumably he would be housed in a Spartan room inside the temple complex. The offer of payment was academic anyway, because East Trade Industries would gallantly refuse to take any money in a case such as this. There were enough superstitious people on the board to ensure that, as Master Tran well knew. All in all, it was almost guaranteed to be a tricky and unprofitable way to spend a few days.

Wong tossed the letter to his assistant, Joyce McQuinnie, who was watching with curiosity.

‘I’m going to walk the streets again,’ he said.

‘Hit the road again,’ corrected Joyce, after a moment’s thought. She looked at the stamp on the letter. ‘ Vietnam! I’m coming with you. If Daddy lets me.’

‘Yes,’ Wong said absently, his mind already travelling. It could be all right. There was something other-worldly about Vietnam that sometimes uplifted his spirits, although Saigon itself could be depressing. And he had a cousin in Cholon he could see. Perhaps he could take a day or two off, do some meditation? It had been, what, eight or nine years since he had spent any serious time in a temple? He recalled how refreshed he had been after a week of quiet contemplation in a temple lodge in Chiang Mai. Or hang on, was he thinking of the free holiday he had received while doing the feng shui for that new five-star resort in Nusa Dua?

Master Tran did not have a phone or a fax machine, so Winnie Lim had to use the temple’s agent, a Thai import-export man carrying the unmelodious name Porntip, to inform the holy man that the geomancer would arrive on the Tuesday of next week for one day and one night, and would be accompanied by an assistant.

‘Didn’t know temples used like, feng shui guys,’ said Joyce.

‘Why not? They are buildings too.’

‘Yes, but they are a different type of thingie, I mean, well, a different type of-I don’t wanna say superstition, but you know what I mean.’

‘Different mumbo-jumbo,’ said Wong, recalling the word she had used on her first awful day in the office. It had a nice sound. He must look it up. Derived from the English slang word for the Boeing 747?

‘I mean, can’t they, like, just pray to God and stuff and get him to fix whatever their problem is?’

‘They are Buddhists. They don’t believe in God.’

‘Well, Allah or Buddha or the Great Pumpkin or whatever they worship, you know.’

Wong nodded. He didn’t know how to explain it to her in English, but this was exactly the reason why he disliked doing feng shui readings in temples or churches or any holy places. They were already so full of unseen influences that his job was infinitely more difficult. An altar which had been worshipped by thousands of souls over tens or hundreds of years, might have a great deal of stored ch’i energy, despite being in entirely the wrong place in feng shui terms.

Another difficulty was that holy men of any sort generally imagined themselves to be highly advanced in the spiritual arts, although many were extremely shallow. This meant they rarely paid more than lip service to the advice of masters of what they thought were lesser arts, such as geomancy. It was true that Master Tran had always had a healthy respect for feng shui, but Wong feared the existence of hostile skeptics among other temple personnel.