The Spirits of Angkor – Part Two

“Little Cambodian girl at an ancient temple at Angkor Wat”. Siem Reap, Cambodia. © Ishu Patel

“Mony, like every day, crossed the forest that from the small village in Kouk Chak reached the river Siem Reap, where she spent a few hours washing clothes. Most of the time she went with other women of the village, but she also happened to go alone.

She walked out of breath, holding her belly swollen like a watermelon with one hand and the copper basket with the clothes in the other. At that hour the forest was a concert of bird sounds and monkey screams; she saw them leap from branch to branch above the head with a shower of green leaves glinting in the sunlight.

Mony was now intent on returning to the village, among the shrubs and hanging vines, when she saw the sky suddenly turn black. With anguish, she looked up at the sun and her breath died in the throat as she watched Rehaou swallow the golden star.

The girl tried to quicken her pace, shrubs snapping and scratching her legs and feet, but now there was hardly a sword of light falling through the canopy.

Suddenly it was all dark as night; the forest also became silent.

Mony gripped the belly with both hands as her tears rolled down the cheeks. She sat down at the foot of a large tree and waited for the light.

 

When she reached the village, the husband Salto ran to meet her worried.

The days that followed were sad and full of restlessness.

Mony lay on the bed stroking the belly continuously while her mother and her husband tried in every way to get her to eat.

Everyone knew of the misfortune that had fallen upon her family. The husband offered rice and rice wine to the spirits every evening. He also called the village kru for him to create amulets for his young wife.

Her son was born prematurely a few weeks and they called him Kosal, which means magical.

Siem Reap, Cambodia. © Ishu Patel

It was not long before they realized, seeing him grow up, that he was not like all the other children. His mental retardation worsened with each passing year.

Mony couldn't rest, knowing that she had been the cause of this misfortune. Salto tried to calm her, he called the kru of other villages and the darkest thmup*, but Kosal was now mocked by all the other children.

Mony also sought, alone, an elderly thmup who lived isolated in the heart of the forest. Old Kae Yaw lived in a cave full of snakes and no one knew his exact age: the stones in the cave were smoother than his skin. Poor Mony begged the old sorcerer to heal her son, she offered him rice, sree tram, but when she saw Kae Yaw's greedy eyes devour her with hissing breath like the snakes at her side she understood that she had to offer herself to him. The desperate young mother wasted no time, she opened the sampot and lay down on the floor while the old sorcerer possessed her among the snakes that hissed in the ears.

When she returned, Kosal was gone. Her husband told her that most likely he was playing in the forest; now that no other child wanted to play with him, as he was unable to speak and with the face contracted like a mask, the child loved to spend his solitary time in the forest. Mony ran to look for him. Nothing.

The men of the village, the whole family searched for him for two days, until one morning his body was found, further downstream, wedged between the stones of the river, now lifeless.

Mony's agony was impossible to tell.

She cursed herself, the husband who had not protected her child, the village who mocked him, the old thmup who had abused her to no avail.

She began to wander through the forest, without eating. Her husband called the village kru again but Mony got short-tempered when she saw the healers and started yelling at everyone and everything.

By now she was unrecognizable: the beauty of her that it was recognized by every man in the village had given the place to a haggard face, sunken eyes rimmed in black, dirty, and greasy hair.

One afternoon she disappeared.

Salto had to look for her alone, with the help of her mother and some of his brothers.

As a premonition, he left the others to look for her in the forest as he headed for the river, along the downstream bank. After a few miles, he found his wife's body floating like a white water lily among the rocks, lulled by the current. In his heart, he knew that this time it had not been an accident like their son: the agony of his wife had corroded her soul like a woodworm devouring wood.

Her body was burned, with the flames high in the sky reddening the foliage of the trees as prayers chanted in a circle to the fire.”

“Poor Mony,” Bopha said to her grandfather as her mother brought them both two plates of prahok*, with rice and beans.

“Aren't you tired of hearing these old stories?” Ly Mut asked of her granddaughter as he stuffed a nice portion of food in his mouth.

Bopha shook her head hungry more for her grandfather's words than for the good dish prepared by her mother.

“You said it doesn't stop there, right?”

The elder nodded his head. He drank his beloved rice wine again and embraced, for a moment, the whole village in front of him with the eyes. He puffed out his chest and sighed.

“Now comes the time for Chhanny's story.” Ly Mut said softly. Bopha looked at him and with her mouth full she exclaimed: “I know a lot of people with this name, tha!”

Grandpa nodded yes as his eyes became two intense slits like distant stars in the night sky.

“Chhanny is a beautiful name that means moonlight, from the fusion of chhan, moon, and ny, light. That's why many women have this name.”

Then he set the empty plate on the mat and took a betel leaf to chew. He grabbed the tro and started plucking the three strings as if to give himself a background to his words.

“Chhanny was born in the same village as Mony; certainly, many years had passed by now: it was about 1950. The dark period that would upset our country was still far away.

She was a beautiful little girl your age. Introverted and very sensitive. She was not like all the other girls of her age.

As soon as she could she went into the forest, she could walk for hours.

She had a kind of intuition about it that guided her through the thick vegetation, without ever getting lost.

Her mother Raskmey only asked not to come back in the evening.

“Yeah, mak*, don't worry,” Chhanny reassured.

But more than the forest what gave her the most pleasure was enjoying the mystical solitude of Angkor Wat.

Every time the vegetation opened up revealing the sight of that temple, she felt like a shiver that went up from the feet to the base of her neck.

At that time it was not as popular as in our day. It was still like a huge elephant lying by the river, sleepy in its eternal solitude.

It was the time of the great rains, when the snows of the Himalayas melt and swell the waters of the Mekong, swelling its two branches. Every afternoon the clouds opened up, spilling oceans of rain – always at the same time, like a verse from a song.

The little girl knew this so she always arrived at Angkor Wat slightly early. When she began to see the five towers that overlooked the temple, her heart began to beat with emotion; they no longer had the gold of devaraja Suryavarman's time, but Chhanny didn't care, she could still see its immense beauty.

She crossed the stone bridge over the sparkling moat of the water, almost greeting the cobras and lions carved on the side balustrades, and each time she paused in front of the three doors, choosing whether to enter from the small central or from the two huge side ones that were once for elephants.

She walked with bare feet on the stones, between the corridors in the shade, and the spaces open to the light that filtered like a sharp sword through the leaves.

Chhanny felt like the protagonist of one of the episodes of the Ramayana carved in those millenary stones. Not only did she enjoy it with her gaze but also with touch: she had learned to recognize with the eyes closed the difference between the rough figures carved in the rock and those covered with a glossy patina, due to the habit of the simpler faithful to glue small pieces of gold foil on the good characters depicted, stroking them constantly.

Sometimes she felt an icy breath behind her. She knew it was normal in those stone labyrinths, but it left a feeling uneasy, like a snail's saliva. then the girl went out into the open, she sat back to the stone and tasted the rain pouring noisily on the temple-mountain, while the monkeys leaped screaming from vine to vine.

 

Angkor Wat. © Jaroslav Poncar

Sometimes strange events also happened that troubled her.

One afternoon, as she was crossing the stone bridge, Chhanny leaned over the balustrade to look at the stretch of water in the moat, smiled at her face rippled by the movement of the surface when suddenly a woman's face appeared instead of hers, without that she was able to read the features as the water became cloudy and dark. Chhanny screamed in fear and looked away from her; then she took courage and looked down, where her face as a child had returned to the clouds reflected from the sky.

With the months these unusual events intensified, but she did not speak to her parents because she feared that they would forbid her to go to the forest.

Instead, like every day, the little girl quickly ate the prahok prepared by her mother and she went into the trees.

But she was starting to get the impression that there was someone or something following her.

Chhanny was a deeply courageous little girl, but when one evening she was coming back late, she noticed that the whole forest went silent, as if someone had blown on the flame of the lamp and suddenly silence fell; she had a shiver that froze her in the heart of a small clearing. Chhanny looked around, raised her face to observe the tall foliage of the thousand-year-old trees, but not a single leaf moved, not a cry of a bird or a monkey to shake its branches. Everything was silent in an unreal way and it seemed that the light of the setting sun could not penetrate the blanket of leaves and branches.

Rather than run the girl stopped stiff like one of the figures carved in the stone of Angkor.

She felt that something was moving quickly in the vegetation around her, but as she turned towards that shadow it vanished and floated in the opposite direction.

Chhanny wondered where the birds, river frogs, butterflies, and snakes had gone.

Then the darkness disappeared and the forest came alive with the sounds of the animals and the rustle of the leaves shaken by the wind.

Chhanny took a deep breath and she went home but it was not easy for her to fall asleep – she started to sleep with the light from the fish oil lamp near her head.”

 

“The forest was possessed, tha?” Bopha asked with a faint voice rippling with emotion.

Grandfather pressed his index finger to her lips and with a smile, he said to her: “Listen...”

Then he resumed plucking the strings of the tro and continued the story.

 

© Aishwarya Arumbakkam

“Chhanny had almost forgotten what happened in the forest.

Months had passed and she was once again the lone princess of Angkor Wat.

She had walked every corridor, climbed the trees that grew on the roofs of the shrines, enveloping the stone with their bark as if they had always been part of each other. She plucked the orchids that adorned the sculpted apsaras to beautify her hair and she counted the prickly pears growing among the huge square stones tinged with lichens and moss.

The girl wandered around the long tunnels that smelled of bat dung, staring one by one at the enigmatic faces of the apsaras with their earlobes stretched out to touch the shoulders and pointed headdresses, all with their eyes closed until at the end of the corridor one of the sculpted images opened her eyes in a flash. Chhanny let out a scream that it echoed throughout Angkor.

She ran out of one of the doors surrounded by the thick, gnarled roots of the tall trees. The sun was gone: the whole temple was drowned in total darkness.

“Mak! Mak!”

Chhanny screamed as she ran towards the stone bridge. The forest seemed thicker than usual, she found it hard to make the way through the vegetation, as if the whole flora were closing crushing her.

Among the trees, a white patch appeared and disappeared running parallel to her. The heart had gone mad and her face was wet with tears and sweat.

Chhanny knew she had other miles to go before getting out of the forest so as the girl ran she started screaming at the dark vegetation like the sky: “Who are you? What do you want from me? Leave me alone!”

She could no longer run, her lungs were swollen like buffalo breasts.

The girl stopped behind a log to catch her breath with the hands on the knees, doubled over by fatigue and fear.

When she opened her eyes she saw the toes of a wrinkled black foot in front of her toes. Chhanny jumped straight, petrified with terror. Ahead of her a woman with long, frizzy hair more than mangrove stared at her. She could not see her face because everything was dark and of the face could only be seen the eyes looking at her.

Chhanny felt her legs go limp worse than soup; she tried to run away but the woman stopped her with the hands on her shoulders.

“Where are you going, my daughter? Finally, I found you. Stay with me... don't go away too...”

The little girl screamed at the top of her lungs trying to free herself.

“You are not my mom! Go away! Leave me!”

But the demon was holding her hands tightly on the child's shoulders.

“I know, srey*, that everyone teases you. They mock you. Nobody wants to play with you, my poor baby. But I am your mother, I love you. I will never let you go away, get away... Stay...”

Her voice could be said to be feminine but it was as if it came from a distant time; she seemed to resonate in the stone labyrinths of Angkor Wat.

“No! No! I don't want!”

Chhanny, stamping her feet, cried out until the veins in the neck swelled, which looked like the branches that surrounded her.

“Leave the village... Stay with me in the forest...”

The demon whispered to her with words becoming a hot, sticky breath on the little girl's face. Then Chhanny gathered all her remaining strength and pushed both hands on the woman's chest and screamed like thunder and her face redder than blood: “Go awayyyy!”

The demon suddenly vanished and the girl fell unconscious to the ground.

 

Her father found the girl at night, after hours and hours of searching with the other men of the village.

Nobody could figure out what had happened to the daughter. They were unable to wake her: she slept for two days and two nights. The family gathered around her bed prayed continuously and made offerings to the spirits and monks, but Chhanny's eyes remained closed; her body stretched out, motionless, only the chest moved slightly in her breath. Even the village kru tried to cure her but the girl did not wake up.

They then decided to call a group of Pleng Arak from a nearby village. Five of them arrived, some of the musicians were very young, the tro player seemed to be a few years older than Chhanny. The older man leading the group sat with his Chapei Dong Veng* at the child's feet and the others arched to either side of him.

They played many ancient songs more than the statues of Angkor Wat, for hours on end, chanting “Reamun, reamun ey – Spread your magic. Invite your spirit friends to join us tonight” – lit only by the flame of the lamp, praying to the arak spirit to forsake that innocent young body.

At the fourth hour of music, in the middle of the night, Chhanny finally opened her eyes, amid the tears of joy of her mother and father. She saw in front of her one by one the young musicians who had interceded for her with life-beyond.

Finally, Mony had returned to her world between the forests and the river in search of her son.

From that day Chhanny and the young tro player became inseparable; he no longer let her go alone to Angkor Wat and she loved describing to the young man the hundreds of stories of the Ramayana carved in stone. Together they climbed trees and plucked orchids.

After two years they got married with a big party in the village.

As per tradition, to prepare the spouses for life as a couple, their hair was cut symbolically to represent a new beginning of their new relationship together as husband and wife. The master of ceremonies performed the first symbolic haircut; the parents, relatives, and friends of the spouses then took turns to cut the hair of the spouses in turn, giving them the blessing and best wishes. Then, family and friends took turns to tie the left and right wrists of the bride and groom with “blessing ropes.” The praises and wishes of happiness, good health, success, prosperity, and lasting love were sealed by the sound of the gong and the joyful cheers.”

 

“Luckily it ended well, tha,” Bopha said heaving a sigh that was held back for a long time due to tension.

“What happened to Chhanny then?” She asked him.

Ly Mut smiled as he chewed on another betel leaf, squinted through the wrinkles, and looked straight into the eyes of Bopha.

“Oh, she was a happy woman. She also managed to survive the dark period of the Khmer Rouge. And then... You also knew her”, said the old man, enjoying the confused and amazed gaze of his granddaughter.

“Me? When?” Bopha exclaimed looking naively all around as if she were right next to her.

“Chhanny was your grandmother,” he revealed chewing the red leaf between the teeth as he plucked the strings.

The little girl realized and opened her eyes and mouth wide as she clapped her lap with palms.

“So you were that young tro player!” She exclaimed loudly, proud to have understood an important secret for her age.

Ly Mut nodded with a smile, stroking the little girl's hair, and said, “Yes, it was me, and the senior leader of the group was my father. So don't make fun of the spirits and our traditions. They are part of your family. We also survived Pol Pot's criminal design and his delirium to erase the history of the Khmer people altogether, but he vanished like ashes in the jungle while Angkor Wat still rests immutable in its glory and beauty.

Always remember this story and when you are a mother tell it to your children.”

Bopha nodded convinced to the core of every word of the elder.

Then he pinched her on the cheek and said, “Now go get me a glass of sraa tram that my mouth is drier than a cornfield after a year of drought!”

He continued to play as the gaze followed Bopha skipping up the wooden stairs into their house.

Then Ly Mut put his ear to the strings and sighed with a smile. “Of course, the silk ropes were another thing…”

 

*Thmup, sorcerers who always existed in Cambodia, over time began to be isolated from the community and to live in the forest, which in the Khmer belief is the symbolic and dark place (brai) opposite the field, the village (sruk). There have also recently been cases of thmup hunting and killing.

*Prahok is a fermented salted fish paste (usually mud-fish) used in Cambodian cuisine as a condiment. It originated as a way to store fish during the months when fresh fish was not available in abundance. Due to its saltiness and strong flavor, it is used as an addition to many Cambodian meals, such as soups and sauces. A Cambodian proverb says “No prahok, no salt”, referring to a dish with a poor or bland flavor, thus highlighting its essentiality in Cambodian cuisine.

*Mak, mother in Khmer language.

*Srey, a term used to refer to girls in general.

*Chapei Dang Veng is a Cambodian two-stringed, long-necked guitar, it's used in Arak and Pleng Ka orchestras.

Post Scriptum.

Certainly this was the most difficult story to write, not only because I have never been to Cambodia but also because I knew almost nothing about its history and millenary culture.

It all started with a book I read and I wanted to deepen to write the new history of Asia. I spent three weeks studying.

The figure of the grandfather is taken from the real life of Ly Mut, a still living legend of music Pleng Arak, who inspired me thanks to his interviews. I didn't want a story about Cambodia to necessarily talk about Pol Pot, but I liked to talk about the ancient cultural tradition and its strong connection with the spirit world.

I could never have written the story in this way without the help of a young Khmer friend, Rorthanakdara Run “Dara”, to whom my deep thanks go, and Visell, the founder of the Facebook page “Khmer Culture” who  loved and encouraged this story.

Wim Swaan's book on “The Lost Cities of Asia: Ceylon, Pagan, Angkor” (Res Gestae) and, as usual, Ishu Patel's evocative photographs were of great help to me.

Dedicated to the millennial Khmer culture.

The story of Ly Mut:

Forgotten melodies of Pleng Arak 

A quest to document the sound of Pleng Arak 

Italian version