A Hot-Tempered Pig

My grandmother does not remember her birthday but knows that she was born on a night of the wax moon in the year of the pig. The almanac predicted she would be strong-minded with a quick temper. When she told me that she was on her seventh cycle, I calculated that she was born in 1911.

She was the only child in a family that farmed rice. Rice farming was a hard life. Rainfed rice farms without modern irrigation and technology often produced less than enough to feed the family. Yields were left to the mercy of nature and to the farmer's hard work. Still, nobody starved. The village had a system so that those who had a little extra gave to those who could not make ends meet. Children's bones did not stick out.

When she was about ten years old, my grandmother developed a high fever. There was no medical facility in the village, so her parents called on a medicine man. He prepared an herbal concoction but was unable to get it down her throat. The medicine man went out and found a vulture’s feather. Gently he cleared my grandmother’s mouth and throat with the feather and got her to swallow the medicine and fresh water. She recovered. Often when a child was seriously ill, she would be given away to different parents based on the belief that her spirit might not be compatible with her birth parents. Though my grandmother called the medicine man her adoptive father, she continued to live with her birth parents.

There were a few years of drought, and farming became even more difficult. My grandmother’s family moved south on another year of the pig. They traveled on an ox wagon and settled in Ban Krud near a thick jungle. Deer wandered through the trees, which were as big around as ten joined pairs of hands.

Ban Krud was not a new village. Many families occupied land there and planted coconut groves. My grandmother’s family built a small hut. Five months later, her mother died from dysentery after eating bad food at the temple on the ancestor day. A month later her father got malaria, known as “jungle fever.” Nobody came to help him. For people they knew—the “old people”—villagers would go out at night to fetch rare herbs and send the best herbalist to the sick. But my grandmother’s family were "new people." She watched helplessly as her father hallucinated, seizured and went into a coma overnight. He died the next morning. Within half a year in a new land, my grandmother became an orphan. She was 24.

Left on her own, my grandmother struggled. Married men came after her. The headman of the village visited and didn't want to leave until after dark. She had a hard time getting rid of such men but somehow managed to survive. She got up at dawn, never wasted what she could use and relied on her old hard-dying farming habits.

Maha Budh, the man who became my grandfather, was her distant relative. He was 45 and had been a monk for 25 years. He heard that her parents had died and came down south to check on her. When he saw my grandmother’s situation, he returned to his temple in Petchaburi and disrobed as a monk, then came back to ask for her hand. It was not romance but compassion for her that made him ask for the marriage. He did not want my grandmother to have to face her faith alone.

My grandmother’s life turned around after she became the wife of Maha Budh. She gained respect from the villagers for marrying a former "serious monk." The title "Maha" means “the great.” Maha Budh, or as most villager’s called him, “Teacher Budh,” immediately gained a high status in the village. Having been a monk for many years, he was a literate man. There was no school for girls, but he taught my grandmother to read. He was a man of many talents and fierce discipline and became a reputable healer, fortune teller, and artisan of fine furniture.

My grandmother, Maha Budh Mother, became his assistant. She had her own methods for treating illness. She lit a candle and incense and asked for the power of those who had taught her to heal the sick. After this short prayer, she prepared an herbal concoction. Then she advised the sick to avoid eating beef, egg, shrimp, and crab for the period of time and to stay away from cow dung. Her father had taught her not to charge money to monks and nuns, who renounced the world, but for villagers she charged one baht. She used the baht to buy an offering.

[Jip's grandmother was 90 years old when this piece was written. She lived to be 99.]