Wet

The signs posted around our hotel gave notice:

"Dear Value Guests,
"As you may be known that on April 13-15, 2008 is 'Songkran Day' (Thai Traditional New Year). We will celebrate throughout Thailand!
"During this period everywhere throughout Thailand will get WET! As Thais are enjoy with this festival.
"Whenever you decide to go outside! Please keep your Valuable Things i.e. Wallet, Mobile Phone, Money inside the Plastic Bag (or wherever away from water!)
"Happy New Year and Best Wishes to you and your family!
"The Management
The Pinnacle Lumpinee Hotel"

The only factual inaccuracy in the signs was the time period. (With my pathetic six words of Thai, I am not about to correct any Thai's English.) The "Songkran Day" is really about five days, or maybe six. Another sign at the Pinnacle warned that three to four hours might be needed to get to the airport (instead of the normal one hour) on the first and last days of the annual water festival, on acount of "BAD TRAFFIC"---unwelcome news for those fleeing the country.

A significant portion of Thailand's tens of thousands of foreign residents leave during Songkran, viewing it as a good time to, say, fly back to Birmingham and check up on how mum is getting on. Others stay, however, and, between dashes out to the pubs or noodle stalls and back, compose letters to The Bangkok Post. One on April 14 read as follows:

"SPARE US THE POETRY
Once again the Bangkok Post publishes another stomach churning eulogy fron the king of pap, Glen Chatelier, director of the Office of International Affairs, Assumption University (PostBag, April 13).
"Whilst I do value the right to freedom of speech, I also value, and would like to defend, my own right to the freedom to read without puking.
" 'Of sprinkling lustral waters into the hands of elders... Of the harmony of music emanating from simple hearts...' Alternatively read: 'Wet through to my underpants... Four thousand decibels booming from speakers the size of townhouses...'
"Please Glen, the amateur poet lives within us all---and that is exactly where it should stay.
"Hopefully your words don't reflect the teaching content of the Assumption University curriculum. However, if your intent is to ingratiate yourself enough to qualify for that elusive Thai residency visa, it might just work!
"Daniel Cox"

The onslaught, it has to be said, is relentless in some unavoidable locales---hotel entrances, the sidewalks in front of every 7-Eleven, main intersections. And the water-weaponry is impressive---buckets, hoses, waterguns with the thrust of bazookas. Some of these are wielded by kids and young adults with backpack refill tanks. Rummy, eat your heart out! Joe, with his arm in a sling, has been spared on some occasions. I have not. Yesterday I thought I had found a safe route through one area. But the teenaged water-hooligans giddily drenching tuk-tuk passengers as they rode by had unxpectedly split up and opened a second front on my side of the street, and I got it good.

Songkran has its deficiencies, including the occasional over-aggressiveness by both some Thais and some participating foreign tourists. And the drunk-driving rate goes way up, mostly in rural villages. Today's headline in the Post read "Death, injury toll soars above last year's figures."

But overall the highspiritedness is harmless and really quite wonderful. Last evening, Joe and I managed to make it into a taxi un-drenched and rode over to Central World, one of Bangkok's biggest and most chic shopping malls. The vast complex is a marvel of modern design and anything-your-heart-desires consumerist excess, with cinemas and food courts and big atriums for exhibits and performances.

In one atrium, Songkran's origins were on captivating display. Thais were queued up by the dozens to purchase garlands of flowers and colorfully wrapped monks' robes (with the proceeds going to local temples, we think). Four praying monks knelt on a carpeted platform to receive the gifts. Then all the earners of karmic merit moved to another queue, where cups of water scented with hyacinth blossoms were sprinkled on an array of golden Buddha images. This ritual of cleansing, remembrance and appreciation---for the Buddha, his teachings and the monks who preserve his teachings---is what Songkran was before squirt-gun mayhem pretty much took over. And it's probably not a farang's wishful thinking that in most Thai hearts and minds this is what Songkran still is.

We ambled around the mall through the happy crowds. No water was being tossed inside, though plenty of people strolled about blase-ly soaked to the skin. One display had mannequins in fancy gowns made entirely from hundreds of small twisty-balloons. In a performance space, appreciative audiences enjoyed jugglers, and then a brilliantly funny reenactment by three young Thai actors, using music, lighting and frenetic pantomime, of all the fight and chase sequences in a James Bond movie.

On the big outdoor plaza in front of Central world, we stopped to watch a spectacle that struck us as one of the things that makes Thailand Thailand. Thousands of young people had gathered for what the signs said was a "Wet Party Free Concert." The high-decibel music from the onstage band was alternately hip-hop, punk and some local hybrid we didn't quite get. There were the usual rock-concert smoke machines, too, and flashing lights---and water!

Joe and I stood off to the side with the other unwaterlogged wimpsters, but the entire cheering and arm-waving young audience in front of the stage was being sprayed almost nonstop with undulating waves and sheets of water!

It helped, of course, that the air temperature at nine at night was in the high 80s. This type of New Year's celebration wouldn't work in Times Square at the end of December. But it wasn't just the climate that made this succeed. There is a gentle-spiritedness in the Thai people that made it possible for a raucus rock concert to come off with not a single cop or security guard anywhere in sight. There was exuberance with no loss of control.

I hear American voices asking, but then, was this really a rock concert? Rock is ABOUT rebellion, defiance. Minds keener than mine will have to sort that out. But I'm telling you, what we witnessed we thought was very fine and satisfying, and the Thais seemed to think so, too.

I should add that we have no illusions that Thailand is Shangri-la. The political system here is rotten, the cops can be brutal, and the greed and carelessness of the upper classes in this essentially feudal society would make Dick Cheney weep with envy. It's a shizoid society that I know I will never really understand. But every day we see things about Thailand that are deeply lovely, and rarely is that loveliness more vividly on display than during Songkran.

(Footnote: Joe and I wondered if the Burmese water festival might be subdued this year, in the wake of last fall's violent government crackdown on protesters. A wire-service report from Yangon today said the New Year's celebrations there were actually wilder than anyone could remember.)