Colin Cotterill - Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Most temples down here have their resident nun. Nuns in Thailand don’t get nearly the same respect as monks. They cook for and feed the dogs, clean, look after the garden…Wait. This all sounds familiar. No wonder they look so sallow, the lot of them. But it’s that unspoken animosity that makes them more likely to give up top secret information.

I found my nun whitewashing a wall, half her head and one arm.

“Would you like me to just pour the can over you? It’d be quicker,” I said.

My nun smiled. She was in her sixties, I imagined, and she’d probably been a heartbreaker when she was younger. She wasn’t much taller than me but unless she had some spare brushes stuffed down her shirt she’d been much more generously endowed. An old monk draped in a robe was sitting on a step with his back to her. There were barely breathing dog carcasses littered all around like casualties of a major canine battle.

“Some can whitewash,” she said. “Some can repair cars. Of the two, whitewashing is my strongest hand so I suggest you don’t let me anywhere near your engine.”

I liked her. I suppose I could have thrashed around in the small-talk undergrowth for ten minutes and crept up on the subject, or I could just attack. I read her as more of the direct type.

“I heard your abbot got killed,” I said.

“You did?”

She let the fat brush drop to her side where it put another coat on her already white sarong.

“Yup.”

She seemed to be waiting for something.

“So, did he?” I asked.

“Get killed?”

“Yes.”

“Should we ask him?”

“I…?”

The pretty nun turned to the old monk sitting on the step. He appeared to be composing a psalm in the air with his long fingers.

“ Jow a wat ” she said, the formal address. “This young lady was wondering whether you’d been killed.”

My facts were undoubtedly less than accurate. The abbot wheeled around to look at me. He was weather-beaten like the wreck of a small canoe. His ribcage was an old Chinese abacus whose beads had been long lost, his face a clumsily sketched grid of experiences with pockmarks. Life had apparently had a go at him but he seemed comfortable in his ravaged body.

“No.” He smiled.

“Well, you can’t win them all,” I said.

“Hoping for a dead abbot, were you?” my nun asked, still smiling.

“In a way, yes,” I confessed. “But I’m also very pleased to see that the good father is alive and well.”

“And how would a death improve your quality of life, young lady?” asked the nun. “I watched you breach the security post and jump from a car and sneak up on us. So, I have to assume the news of a killing was important to you in some way.”

You know they’re often characters with shady pasts of their own, no more free from sin than you or I, but there’s something about a figure wrapped in saffron or virgin white that makes you want to tell the truth. So we sat, the three of us, and I gave them the blog version of the saga of my current life. They smiled and nodded along the entire journey, apparently fascinated by my decline. And I arrived at the juncture at which I now stood. And there was an exchange between them. If I’d been distracted by a hornet I might have missed it. And I agree I might very well be wrong, because monks and nuns and imams and Catholic priests are nothing more than little green space aliens in my mind. I’d been far too hip a teenager and too cynical a young thing to be snared by team religion. But I sensed there was a history between these two. I visualized it as a deep crimson pool in which they’d swum together somewhere in their past lives. I believe that brief unspoken look said:

“You tell her.”

“No, you tell her.”

There was a pause during which I heard our truck start, reverse and drive away, but I was too close here to give up and chase after it. The abbot coughed and spoke.

“Two of the men you saw walk out of my office are detectives from Bangkok. One other is a local detective from Lang Suan CID. Then there’s the head of our local council. The monks are attached to the Buddhist Sangba Supreme Council, a branch called the Pra Vinyathikum . If we were police it would be known as Internal Affairs. The reason I am not down there with them, even though this is my temple — my wat — is that I am being investigated. In fact it would appear I am the chief suspect in a murder inquiry.”

Good line.

In fact it was several seconds before I realized my jaw had dropped.

“Whose murder?” I asked.

The nun had taken up a curled, feline pose on the step beneath ours. It made me feel uncomfortable but I wasn’t about to get involved in stage direction. The abbot continued.

“The monks from the Pra Vinyathikum arrived here two days ago with an abbot. His name was Tan Winai. In fact I’d met him many years before. We’d developed a friendship then but had gone our separate ways. But he had been sent here by the council to investigate a complaint — about me. Before he left Bangkok we had spoken on the telephone so I knew he’d be coming. I told him he was welcome. They have the power to disrobe monks, but there is nothing they can do to an abbot apart from put in a report to the RAD: the Religious Affairs Department. The RAD would then conduct an inquiry of its own. So, this was a very initial investigation and none of us thought too seriously about it.”

“So the visiting abbot gave you details of the complaint against you?” I asked.

“He was very open. We discussed the matter at great length.”

“But you weren’t able to talk him out of pursuing the complaint.”

“It was an interesting debate. A very contentious area. One that is not clearly laid out in the Buddhist doctrines. In many respects I could see his side of the matter. I was keen to hear all of the arguments and make my own.”

“And you would have abided by his decision?”

“Of course.”

“What was the complaint?”

Both the abbot and the nun smiled.

“You speak your mind,” the nun said. She got to her feet and put her hand on my arm. It was my signal to walk with her. “You could very well be a southerner.”

That didn’t automatically register as a compliment and I was unhappy about being steered away before my question was answered. But I’d always been uncomfortably aware of rituals and unwritten rites in temples. I seemed to be the only one who didn’t know all the secrets. As children, Mair had hurried us in and out of ceremonies as if some spell might infect us if we lingered too long. Consequently I always felt like a foreigner with only a basic grasp of the language.

“So?” I pushed.

We were behind the half-painted wall. The nun’s voice dropped to a hush no louder than the swish of her robe.

“Abbot Kem here was accused by one of his flock of fornication,” she said.

I looked at her and took a stab.

“With you?”

“Yes.”

Nuns and monks and fornication. Is it any wonder I avoided it all? When I was at primary school we learned the golden rules by rote. None of them came to mind right now but…abbots sleeping with nuns didn’t seem to be OK.

“And did you?” I asked. “Did he?”

“No.”

“But you used to have…something.”

“We have known each other for many years,” said the nun. “We cared for each other. Before all this, before religion overwhelmed us, we had the most beautiful and pure friendship two people could ever know. We were, and remain, as close as any two creatures on this earth. We saw through one another’s eyes, breathed the same breaths.”

Perhaps I was being a bit dumb here and this probably wasn’t the right time to ask about sex, but it was all relevant.