Funeral for a friend

A middle-aged near-neighbour of Temporarily Thairish’s was tragically killed in a motorbike accident recently and, having unfortunately missed the funeral, I paid his wife and family a visit to offer my condolences and bag of mixed fruits.

They seemed quite pleased to see me and, with the entire family wearing those ubiquitous Thai grins, you’d never think that they’d just lost a loved one – not to mention their chief ricewinner. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost have thought they were happy about it.
Although there was a bit of a language barrier, we were all able to make ourselves understood well enough. Not that there was all that much to say anyway. I was sorry for their loss, and they were grateful for the fruit. There were lots of smiles and nods. I didn’t really want to stay, but to refuse a drink would have been construed as rudeness. It wasn’t long before we were all sitting comfortably cross-legged on the floor, and the widow was showing me photographs of her late husband.
I mean that literally. She wasn’t showing me pictures of him in happier pre-crash times. The shots she handed me had been taken by the police directly after the accident. By all accounts, it had been a high-speed crash and his skull had been cracked wide open, spilling his brains out onto the road. It really wasn’t a pretty sight. Even so, she handed me each one separately and obviously expected me to examine them closely. He had been photographed from every conceivable angle, and she must have shown me 20 pictures in all (which was about 19 more than I wanted/needed to see).
I didn’t really know what to say. “Shame he wasn’t wearing a crash helmet,” didn’t seem appropriate. “He was a very good-looking guy,” didn’t quite correlate to the graphic images either. Fortunately, I was able to get away with a series of sympathetic smiles and some unintelligible platitudes.
Of course, they were Buddhists, and followers of that faith believe in reincarnation. As far as they were concerned, he had made good merit all of his life, and so would be reincarnated as someone of at least the same station and social standing as he’d held in this existence.
He definitely wouldn’t be reincarnated as a cripple, queer or ladyboy. Therefore his untimely demise wasn’t necessarily anything to be seriously unhappy about. Even so, keeping the photographs of his battered and bloodied corpse seemed a little strange.
Or maybe not. Although known for their modesty and sensitivity, the Thais are not a particularly squeamish race when it comes to death. Or quite a few other things for that matter. Nudity is frowned upon, but everything else is fair game.
This is most obvious in their media.
I recently spotted an odd-looking picture on the front page of one of the main Thai tabloids. It showed a shaven-headed, handcuffed and decidedly unhappy-looking farang on his knees with a large rag doll lying between his legs. He looked like he was fucking it. There was a stern-looking cop in the background, overseeing proceedings.
When I asked someone to explain the picture to me, I was told that he was a 32-year-old Australian who had just been arrested for raping his Thai girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter. The police had forced him to re-enact his crime for the media’s cameras, using the rag doll as a prop. You’d never see anything like that in the Bangkok Post or The Nation (the only two English-language national papers).
The Pattaya press is a different matter, however, as I discovered during a visit there last December. There are two English-language newspapers covering the seaside resort city, and they hold absolutely nothing back. Here’s a page three story from the Christmas Eve edition of the Pattaya People (and no, I honestly didn’t invent the headline).

BACKDOOR MAN GETS STABBED
At 11pm December 22nd, Police Mayor Pratheep Thongdee, Investigation Officer of Pattaya Police Station, received a call that a Thai lady and a foreigner had stabbed each other at Sawatdee Mansion Hotel in Soi Honey Inn off Second Road.
Police went to the scene immediately and found two wounded persons in Room 212A on the second floor. The room was in a mess and it was obvious that fighting had been going on. The name of the woman was Khun Wilai Graho (36) from Nakhon Rachassima. She was stabbed with a knife on her left arm, face and stomach, and sustained several wounds, some up to four inches.
The name of the man was Rahim Ashmany (56) from Iran. He got stabbed in his stomach, sustaining a one-inch wound, and was screaming loudly, and both were taken to Hospital.
After that they were interrogated and the lady explained she met the man on the beach and they agreed to have sex together for 500 baht per time. He then did so, but not in the conventional way, causing the lady to go through a lot of pain, and she begged him to stop but he only got wilder and that’s when she decided to use a knife to stab him. He then managed to get hold of the knife and stabbed her several times.
The reporter of Pattaya People found out that the man brings in ladies every night, but before now there were never any problems. Police will continue their investigations.
The story was illustrated with an on-the-scene photograph of the Iranian guy holding back the blood flowing from a gaping wound in his fat stomach, watched over by the blood-stained prostitute. Apparently the local TV news made it to the scene as well, and broadcast live footage from the hotel room.
A bar-owner told me that the newspapers and TV stations pay the local cops handsomely for tip-offs. Apparently, on more than a few occasions, suspects and victims have actually been kept at a crime scene to wait for the media to arrive.
A couple of pages on in the same edition, the following story was featured ...
STRANGE DEATH OF GERMAN
In the evening of December 17th, police received a call from Mr. Peter Escrade (58) telling them that he had discovered his friend dead, sitting on a piece of reclining furniture in his house.
Police went to the residence behind the Rungrod Markets Naklua, to find the deceased, Mr. Frank Peter Griester (50) from Germany on a reclining table wearing a night gown with no underwear and traces of semen running down his inside leg.
Police checked the scene and found no sign of injury and no disturbance around the room. It was estimated the man had been dead for approx eight hours. Medics took samples of the semen and other DNA specimens for examination.
Mr. Escrade told police that his friend had been in Thailand for eight years on retirement, and had always been in good health. He liked to live alone but the two of them often went out for social drinks to a local beer bar and when he did not see his friend on that particular evening, he became suspicious and went to his house, finding the body.
At this stage authorities have no conclusive evidence regarding his untimely death.
Once again, there was a photograph taken at the scene. It showed the body of Mr. Griester lying on a couch, his modesty barely covered by his loose dressing gown. Obviously enough, though, in this case nobody was detained at the scene unnecessarily. Griester definitely wasn’t going anywhere.
After all, he’d only just come.