By Carol Miller
She was tiny, as perfectly proportioned as the doll she appeared to be, and as she walked toward me I could see she was also beautifully outfitted in a two-piece short-sleeved Thai silk dress of reserved color in a conservative Western design, with a gold-and-pearl brooch at the neck, and unobtrusive gold earrings set close to her smiling face.
Her hemline ended below the knees of short, rounded legs encased, despite the heat, in silk stockings. Her feet were neatly enclosed by simple black leather pumps with a moderate heel, of the sort often described as “Belgian.” Her graying hair was cut short and combed straight back, from her wide, smooth forehead to the nape of her delicate neck. She spoke with a palpable accent, yet her English was soft, comforting, even enticing. “Do you like it?” she asked, indicating the Ganesh in my hand.
“I love it,” I replied, “but what is a Hindu god from South India doing in a shop in Buddhist Bangkok?”
The little Ganesh was no more than three inches high, mounted on a small tiered base, meticulously cast in flawless bronze, the color of browned butter. Also known as Ganapati, Vinayaka and Pillaiyar, he unties knots, she explained, he is the Lord of Lost Causes. “He is benevolence and generosity,” she said, in her warm voice, “and he is worshipped in Northern India, but he is also beloved beyond India and Nepal and devotion extends to Jains and Buddhists. He is the Remover of Obstacles, he is the Lord of Beginnings, patron of arts and sciences. He also watches over writers and inspires their words.”
I was a journalist from Mexico, and any inspiration was welcome. “In that case,” I replied, “I must have him,” as I caressed his small but well-proportioned elephant head, his dainty bronze trunk, the miniscule flapping ears, and a pointed cap– his crown of enlightenment– rising four layers like the levels of a stupa, topping his otherwise completely Indian figure.
Though ubiquitously adored, the stories of his origins vary. In a number of texts Ganesh was born with his elephant head and rounded belly, in others he appeared as a normal human, yet Shiva, his father, grew jealous of Parvati’s affection, and cut off his son’s head. Moved, however, by Parvati’s sorrow and dismay, he restored the child to life, but replaced the human head with that of an elephant. In his haste, or perhaps to assure that his rival for Parvati’s affections would never be perfect, or conceivably as an origin for the weakness known as “the sweet tooth”, one tusk was broken off. Another, less aggressive version, claims the child was created from Shiva’s laughter, but I think we can discard that one.
In still another version Parvati, enthralled with her baby, boasted of her beautiful child to her fellow deities, but Shani, an Indian manifestation of the Roman Saturn, endowed with the gift of the evil eye– acquired from the Turkic tribes he had encountered on his way across Western Asia–stared at him so intently his head was burned to ashes. Pushing Shiva aside, his avatar as Vishnu came to Parvati’s rescue, and replaced the missing head, but since Parvati found her son so “alluring,” the jealous Shiva surfaced again; he substituted the head of an elephant, and disfigured the body with a glutton’s bloated belly.
The bronze figurine has four arms. Ganesh holds his own broken tusk in his lower right hand and in his lower left he holds a sweetmeat, that he samples with his trunk, which turns sharply to his left. He typically holds an axe or a goad in the upper right hand and a noose in the upper left, the accoutrements of a mahout for the handling of elephants.
°°°
“Where are you from?” asked the kind lady, introducing herself. She was Connie Mangskau, owner of the Monogram Antiques Shop in what was then the Erawan Hotel, named for the mythological three-headed elephant, emblem of the Thai monarchy, known in Sanskrit as Airavata.
Connie was born in 1907 in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai to an English father and a Siamese (Thai) mother, and educated by Europeans in Bangkok. Later, she told me, she studied nursing in Singapore. At age eighteen she married a Norwegian rubber planter. Her first daughter, Greta, was born on their plantation a year later, the second, JoAnna, followed two years after that in Bangkok, but Connie was soon widowed and found a job as a secretary in order to support her daughters.
Just prior to the outset of the Second World War, Connie was working for the British American Tobacco Company, which was nationalized as Thai Tobacco Monopoly. Her boss turned out to be Jewish, an agent of the Seri Thai or “Free Thai Movement,” who put Connie and her sister Jean to work for the Underground. Older daughter Greta reached Norway, where she was raised by her late father’s family. Younger daughter JoAnna, who had remained in Bangkok, in order to distance her from the inevitable Japanese invasion, was sent to a boarding school in Da Lat on the Lang Biang Plateau, a prewar summer resort in what was then French Indochina, tentatively intended as the new capital to sidestep the radical political ferment coming out of Hanoi, fomented by militant Maoist factions. Connie, meanwhile, was arrested by the Japanese as a spy and sent to a prison camp in Cambodia.
Initially I was impressed with her story though it might have been told by so many women in Southeast Asia, a chronicle by Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene perhaps, but when I heard of her arrest I was horrified. I asked how she managed to survive, or escape, but she evaded the question by asking where I was from.
I explained I had come all the way from Mexico City, back then, in 1962, a very long way. “I write the publicity for Mexicana Airlines,” I told her, “the first commercial airline in Latin America, a subsidiary of Pan American Airways System, and with a discounted employee’s ticket I hopped and skipped across the Pacific—Los Angeles, Honolulu, Guam—in a Boeing DC-8, the latest achievement in aviation, bound for Hong Kong, in those days very much the World of Suzie Wong, of noisy markets and rat holes, junks and sampans crisscrossing the harbor and freshly washed clothes hung out to dry on long bamboo poles that reached out the windows of miniscule apartments in ragged tenements and adorned the streets like Buddhist prayer flags. I was on my way to attend a convention of PATA, the Pacific Area Travel Association.”
On the way, I told her, I stopped in Japan. The company’s regional director in Tokyo, David Jones (“Don’t call me Davy!”), invited me to a dinner at his home and the guest on my left, delighted at my audacity and envious of my adventure, urged me to continue my journey to Bangkok. I wish I could remember his name. He talked a blue-streak and I was spellbound, listening to every word. He was an old hand in Southeast Asia, had worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the pre-Cold War antecedent of the CIA, and seemed to know all there is to know. “Every Wednesday and Saturday,” he assured me, “at precisely three in the afternoon, a train departs Bangkok Station, moving down the Peninsula until it stops at the Malay border. There you have to change trains, because the railway gauge is different, but before you go on to Kuala Lumpur, the capital, you must visit the island of Penang. It is paradise, and completely unspoiled. After Kuala Lumpur you go on to Singapore. This is the route the Japanese took during the Second World War. The British were waiting with their guns trained on the harbor, and the little buggers just marched down from Burma and took them from behind. James Clavell is my best friend. He’s writing a great book called King Rat, about the Japanese occupation and their notorious Changi prison camp. I did a stint there myself, and I know it well.”
°°°
Connie Mangskau insisted I have the little bronze Ganesh. She pressed it into my hand, despite my objections refused my money, and by so doing became a long-time friend. On that trip she also invited me to dinner, at her extraordinary Thai house, next to one of the klongs or canals, that in those days divided Bangkok into districts and neighborhoods. She had created the house under the guidance of her close friend Jim (James Harrison Wilson) Thompson, the enigmatic American businessman from Delaware, actually an intelligence officer who had been assigned to Southeast Asia during the war and who had found himself in Thailand when the Japanese surrendered.
“You might say he burned his bridges,” Connie explained. “He went back to the States to arrange with his wife to move to Thailand and she divorced him. He decided to stay on anyway, and had already gone through the experience of assembling and restoring a traditional teakwood house. Jim was a Bangkok landmark by that time,” Connie continued. Initially he had assembled investors to restore the beautiful Oriental Hotel, where Connie had another shop, and then he founded the famous Thai silk company, to revitalize a cottage industry. Together they traveled to the country’s former capital, Ayuthaya, or Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, at the juncture of three rivers, the Chao Phraya, the Lopburi and the Pa Sak, just north of modern Bangkok, to acquire four suitable teakwood structures, which they then dismantled and freighted downriver by boat.
With Thompson’s supervision, and avoiding a number of the problems he had encountered in the assembly of his own house (which carefully maintained, still stands today) Connie erected three of the traditional structures inside her private compound.
Though Connie had made few modern concessions in her Thai houses, rather than regard them as a museum she was living happily among the Southeast Asian arts she had collected, dating from the time she opened the first Monogram Antiques Shop in 1951. The pieces I saw not only served as the merchandise for her stores, but consisted in choice items as well for special collectors (who in time included John D. Rockefeller, William Holden and Stephanie Powers, Roger Moore, Henry Ford, Pierre Salinger, Jacqueline Kennedy, visiting royalty, anyone important who happened to be around), as well as the very select pieces she would later provide for Stanley Marcus, when she became the representative for his Oriental Arts shops in the Neiman-Marcus Department Stores in the United States.
The light and airy rooms, though crowded with art objects of all kinds, the polished teakwood floors, walls and furnishings, assured an island of elegance in noisy, crowded, jostling Bangkok, with shuttered windows, devoid of glass in the equatorial heat. A pair of gilded Burmese Buddhist monks caught my eye on that trip; they looked out from a large, lavishly carved coffee table, and they were still there (or an identical pair) when I returned the following year, when I had them packed, paid for them in cash, and took them home with me. They, like my little bronze Ganesh, have watched over me ever since.
°°°
Though travel in later years would take me to the temples of central and northern Thailand and Laos, ancient Lan Na from my point of view more interesting, it was the lush and verdant south that I saw from the train window during my first trip, following to the letter the detailed instructions of my companion at that dinner in Tokyo. I was in first class, where the other passengers, all Europeans or very light-skinned Eurasians, were unimaginably staid and reserved. It was considered poor form to attempt conversation.
I never really tired of examining the faces of the barefoot women in sarong, their hair tied up with fresh flowers on top of their heads, their dark eyes staring, looking back at me from each ramshackle wooden platform as we pulled through towns and villages. In the background I could always see the glittering peaks of temples, adorned with scraps of mirror and brightly colored tile, looming over the thatched roofs of huts, not unlike the jungles of Mexico, the temples a substitute for the cupolas of churches.
Yet there was no one inside the train to talk with. The other passengers read their newspapers or feigned interest in their own affairs, avoiding my attempts at chatter. Second class, with the Indian salesmen or Thai civil service bureaucrats, seemed equally unpromising, so I started spending more time in third class, entirely Chinese. The cook, in his modest and steamy galley, gave me a demonstration on preparing broth (twisting the neck off a chicken and heaving the still-flapping bird into a kettle of boiling water), for the benefit of the Chinese passengers in black pajamas, who gathered in family groups in bare and grimy compartments without any furnishings, playing cards, or sipping watery tea from well-worn Thermos bottles; and like a pantomime of Chinese feeding, stretched with their chopsticks into their braziers, their backs and shoulders arched and straining above hips squatting on the floor, their rubber or plastic sandals tossed near the sliding wooden doors.
°°°
Then we were ordered to get off the train. We had reached the Malay border, and Thai garb changed to crisp uniforms, despite the heat, which no one else seemed to notice. There was a change of gauge. We filed onto another train, awaiting us just down the line, and soon reached the connection to Penang, where I temporarily abandoned the railway, planning to return to take the next train the following Saturday.
I wish I could remember how I reached the island. Did I take a boat or was there a bridge? I think I crossed the narrow straights in a launch, and climbed up a wooden ladder onto the wharf of a British colonial enclave with Dutch and Portuguese overtones, a trading port, a slaving port, with white houses, graced with porches and balconies, a church or two, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple, a mosque, shops manned by Indian storekeepers, warehouses, the occasional Chinese restaurant, all facing the Indian Ocean, but in back of them, on the lanes leading up the hill behind the town, a maze of huts.
In those days, like Singapore, it was scruffy, unpaved, with a penetrating aroma of spices and warm sea, carts on the lanes and bundles stacked on the wharf. When I arrived with my bags at the entrance to the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, with its low-lying white main building and a scattering of villas among the rubber trees and palms, I was overwhelmed by the scent of nutmeg, until I realized we were in the middle of a plantation. These were the spice ports pursued by Magellan and Elcano, Bougainville and Cook, Roggeveen and Tasman, the stuff of legend, exploration and discovery, just as my magical dinner companion in Tokyo, a Southeast Asian Pied Piper, had described them.
Thus began a systematic series of wanderings, on foot, often guided by boys in colored sarong and dirty white shirts, their faces brown as the nutmeg of the plantation, and their mouths red with paan or betel as they smiled at me, urged me on, taught me a few words of Malay, until I had explored the entire island. The fishermen in the villages along the coast taught me to make curry, the best I’ve ever eaten, and to this day I follow their example. There is no recipe. Mostly instinct, experience, and available ingredients
°°°
When I returned to the train not that Saturday but the next, an eager and garrulous American couple were already on board, fussing over their bags, changing seats, looking for the best view. He was stocky, perspiring, mopping his face with a small towel he had taken from a hotel somewhere, somewhat bewildered, but she was slim, smart, with an electricity about her that comes from genuine enthusiasm and inner magnetism. They were newlyweds, she said, mature sweethearts on their honeymoon journey, after raising the children of their former marriages, and sending them out into the world.
When I reached the lobby of the Merlin Hotel in the center of Kuala Lumpur, there they were again, ecstatic that I could communicate with the desk clerk and anxious for rooms. It seems the only ones available were the three bedrooms in the Royal Suite, at a ridiculous price, which we agreed to share. We had the hotel nearly to ourselves, despite the claims of full occupancy. Al and Geri Lieboff, as they introduced themselves, were less than resourceful. When I emerged from my room, freshly bathed and ready for dinner, they were sitting stiffly in the tall hand-carved hardwood chairs in our suite’s parlor, waiting for directions. They would accompany me anywhere, but wanted Chinese food, as opposed to Thai or Malay or European. The concierge recommended a restaurant, and it was superb.
We teamed up for the rest of the trip. After wandering among veiled women and serious men with downcast eyes through the streets of Muslim Kuala Lumpur, visiting the mosque, the bazaar, a South Indian temple, and admiring the façade of the Anglo-Asian railway station, we continued our rail journey to Jahore Bahru, and from there crossed the causeway into Singapore. This was the route taken by the Japanese, our conductor told us, echoing my dinner companion in Tokyo, who forced-march down the Peninsula while the British had their ships lined up in the harbor, their canons trained on the sea. (The Japanese prison camp, the notorious Changi described by James Clavell in King Rat, would later become the Singapore International Airport).
The Singapore of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, which a Mexican friend of mine claims rivals New York for crystal skyscrapers and luxury hotels, back then was still a maze of street stalls enveloped in clouds of smoke from the meat roasting on the satey sticks, greasy bars for tipsy sailors, sweaty brothels in noisy alleyways, gloomy antique shops, surely before Lee Kwan Yew an opium den or two, and the rattan elegance of the original Raffles’ Hotel, with its whirring overhead ventilators and the fan palms in the lobby, orchids in the garden, and none of the steel-and glass that came later.
My new friends decided we should spend our evening at the Country Club, for which the concierge had obtained a guest pass. I protested. I had nothing suitable to wear. Geri, shushing me, flung open a suitcase and pulled out a spectacular dress of slinky white jersey with a halter top, cut on the bias, so it had a sensuous, whirling movement, something Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth would wear. The three of us, like the obnoxious Americans in a Maugham story or a John Huston movie, too visible and dissonant in an otherwise harmonious setting long honored by the Colonials with their self-conscious good manners, completely dominated the quiet, respectable Country Club with our boisterous delight at simply being there, with our demands on the captain for a perfect meal, our haggling over the really awful cocktails (in actual fact invented by a bartender named Ngiam Tong Boon at the famous “Long Bar” at Raffles) called “Singapore Sling,” and getting up to dance, all three of us, so my sumptuous jersey dress could whip and twist, and under no circumstances would I have traded places with anyone else on earth.
Al and Geri ultimately moved to Singapore. They established residence in Southeast Asia after a long life in Las Vegas, where they had formerly owned a prosperous real estate business. I visited them there, as the dinner companion for the Sultan of Jahore, who was going to sponsor or authorize or somehow participate, in their A&W Root Beer concession. They were blissfully oblivious of a small but effective war in the neighborhood, and soon all of Southeast Asia was caught up in it. Al and Geri nonetheless remained, and when they had transferred the root beer concession to Geri’s son and his new wife, a Chinese girl born in Singapore, they started an antiques business. Obviously, I put them in touch with Connie Mangskau.
When I left Al and Geri in Singapore, in order to continue my trip in 1962, I flew out of the existing airport to a stop in Phnom Penh, capital of war-torn Cambodia, but was shifted back aboard by Australian soldiers, flying shuttles to Saigon. “Off you go, Love, this is no place for the likes of you.”
The Pan Am DC8 overflew Vietnam, stopped briefly in Manila, then Guam, on its way back to Hawaii and Los Angeles, where I stayed with my grandmother. But when I told her of my trip there was nothing she could relate to, so she never understood where I had been, or what I had seen. And though she had the TV on behind my back, and glanced surreptitiously at the screen from time to time, she nevertheless paid me the compliment of listening.
°°°
The PATA conference was held in Djakarta the following year, 1963. After duly visiting Borobudur, then, before restoration, incrusted in stone rot, I again boarded the train in Singapore, making the run to Bangkok Station but in the opposite direction. Penang was still beautiful and Connie again had me to dinner at her Thai house. I bought my pair of Burmese Buddhist monks. Thereafter we remained in touch through elaborate, detailed letters, a Victorian sort of correspondence, in praise of the literary art of the missive, I with my little Hermes portable typewriter, she in an ornate script with pen and ink on fine, creamy British paper which arrived in tricolor-edged airmail envelopes.
And so it was that I was informed of the hair-raising story of her trip into the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, still Malaya back then, with Jim Thompson, during Easter weekend in 1967, an excursion on which he apparently set out for an early Sunday morning walk, and never returned. And while Thompson had been a U.S. military intelligence officer and had worked for the Office of Strategic Services, antecedent of the CIA, and had possibly, most certainly, been a cohort of my dinner companion in Tokyo, no reason has ever been given for his mysterious disappearance; despite all my prodding, even Connie herself had nothing to offer. “It should be obvious,” was all she had to say.
°°°
It was not until 1981, having recently seen The Man With the Golden Gun and unable to resist, that I returned to Bangkok, this time with Tomás, my husband, and my two children, then quite young. My daughter was twelve, my son nine.
Connie was by then living in a Western style house inside her compound, and the Thai houses had become, in effect, showcases, but she nonetheless, though she had visibly aged and her hair was now snow white, had us to dinner. Stanley Marcus was with us. As the liveried help appeared with platter after platter and bowl after bowl of unsurpassed Thai food, I urged the children to taste everything and insisted, in impassioned tones, that they must become accustomed to unfamiliar fare, but when the crisp, deep-fried miniature fish arrived, their eyes still glinting, and I refused to taste them, my daughter, knowing I had an aversion to them, set a trap. “Oh, Aunt Connie,” she gushed, “my mother adores little fish fried like that. In Mexico we call them charales.” A waiter then piled a generous serving on my plate. When we left I promised never again to insist on their tasting “exotic” food.
°°°
When Tomás and I found ourselves back in Bangkok with another couple, after a junket through Burma in October of 1984, we stopped at the Monogram shop in the lobby of the Oriental. Connie was very frail by this time yet she invited us to tea at the modern, westernized house in the compound. It was JoAnna who actually took charge, with her estranged but still resident husband, Barry Cross, a New Zealander, to our delight, more handsome than Roger Moore. She asked if I still had my little bronze Ganesh. Her mother had told her the story and she remembered. Connie, reclining in a corner on a chaise longue in her Thai silk kaftan, just smiled, but she was making an enormous effort.
Tomás and I were back in Bangkok, just the two of us, in 1995 and again in 1996, making time while our visas for Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam were processed, and then we had the leisure to more thoroughly explore central and northern Thailand, the many temples, the hotel in Phitsanulok that kindly sold me a teapot with its silk cozy right off the breakfast table for only five dollars, the hill tribes with their rough linen shawls woven on back-strap looms, the crafts center in Chiang Mai where we bought a massive silver ceremonial rice server with a repoussé legend around its sides illustrating the battles with the war elephants between the Siamese and the Burmese, even the bridge over the river Kwai, but I missed Connie. The diminutive Thai musicians, in white dress with Western violins, were still playing Bach at teatime in the lobby of the Oriental, but Connie had died in 1990 and JoAnna was nowhere to be seen. I had lost the last of the threads that tied me to Connie Mangskau, though my Ganesh remains on my desk and my gilded monks reside in the dining room.
*
The author was born in Los Angeles, has lived over 60 years in Mexico City, is a sculptress, journalist, writer, translator and researcher into comparative religion and mythology. Follow her on this unlikely journey through Southeast Asia, accompanied by a Jewish couple from Las Vegas.