Ploy's tree

There is a tree in Phimai. It stands in the middle of a derelict paddy field near the bank of the river called the Lamjakarat, just outside the town. Not far from the southern city gate.

The Lamjakarat is a tributary of the Mun, one of the five strong rivers that flow through Thailand.
The tree is Ploy's tree. He too is strong.
Ploy is hardly ever there, not in town, not by her tree. He mainly lives in her heart.
Now and then, exceptionally, she comes to see him, when her strange affairs are going through her head. From the road she walks down the stiff dry grass, stands under his crown for a while. The ground is fallow. Playful shadows seem to sing like songs of the fields. Ploy hears the sound of the stream, drowning out all other noise. She is a slender figure, her skin white as the color of a fish in untrodden caves.
The tree has grown into its field. He can't leave. That is typical of trees.
Its roots are in contact with the phi, the spirits, its branches seek an agreement with the wind. They let in some cool light.
When the rainy season rushes through his crown, a kind of shapeless pond forms at his feet, where small turtles tumble one by one from the overflowing river with clumsy scrambling. In the hot season, its bumpy roots emerge from the bone-hard clay of the former paddy field, drawing pale, incomprehensible patterns around its trunk. Vague shapes. The tentacles are the color of something that has been hidden for years.
Ploy's tree must be very old.
It is too large for the piece of land, its crown completely covering the plot on the left and the plot on the right, supporting the whole sky, which is colossal in Phimai – several feet wide and several fathoms of bright blue.
The span of a kingdom.
When the lot fell into her hands, those two rai with the tree, she had just reached the age of seven. It had a reason it was due to her, a sense of guilt.
You never ask a tree how old it is unless you kill it. Everyone said he was as old as the world, everyone said that. If you cut it down, you could trace hundreds of growth rings per millimeter with your fingernail. Each ring per year holds stories, clandestine secrets, hopeful voices, local mysteries, family dramas of passion and deceit.
Leave his stories to the imagination!
A tree that preserves so many lives must be a special tree.
I can watch for minutes, he is always unusually green. Its leaves never show weakness, they never loosen, they never shrivel, they never lose their crown. His foliage is everlasting.
It's a chacha.
It is no coincidence that he owns the girl Ploy. She got it in writing when her father walked away from her mother with a deep sigh after seven years of marriage.
"I can't live with that woman," he said. 'Stupid and short-sighted as she is. I tell her ten times how to do something and that she should do something. And she, she does it in her own way. Most of the time she does nothing at all. She always knows better, although she doesn't know it at all. She's a disaster. She's lazy. Beauty is much forgiven.'
Even now, Kasemchai, Ploy's dad, cannot laugh about it.
The local residents are equally hard on his ex-wife. They label themselves selfish and quarrelsome, especially quarrelsome. All wives of police officers. Isn't it jealousy? A significant regional police headquarters is located in Phimai. Each of the women is afraid that Mai will run away with their husbands. Ploy's mother has an irresistible attraction to the opposite sex, it's a natural gift.
Mai just laughs about it. Sometimes mockingly. She knows herself too strong. So her name is Mai, Ploy's mother and she is still relatively young. Her buttocks dance under the dust of her squeezing hot pants and she wears coarse white muslin shirts that seem too tight and make her nipples hard.
Beauty is fickle, just like truth.
Warentig, the chamcha is really the tree of Ploy! I don't doubt it when I see him. With every passage he overpowers me with his presence. I look up and am perplexed. He shows off. He's up to heaven.
Its leaf is a multitude of small leaves, pinnate and set in a smooth edge, which is how it forms its foliage. The leaves show a white powdery down, I gently stroke them with my finger and it gives as if they are hairs.
To my surprise, I cannot estimate its size. Its branch system is sovereign. The beauty that orders its structure silences me.
Speckled pearl turtlenecks – their loyalty to a single partner is proverbial – plunge into it with reckless wingbeats, as if diving into another dimension of time. Whether they slide through wormholes to another universe.
They also fly out unpredictably. I love that. I love the clatter of their wings in twigs and leaves.
The story is like this…
Throughout the town of Phimai, Mai is known for her distinct beauty. A real city lady. She comes from Bangkok, has Thai-Chinese ancestors and therefore has snow-white skin. She's had handfuls of suitors since she was twelve.
You gasp as you pass her.
All men bow to her knees. Ploy's dad did that too, she was fifteen and pregnant with him.
Mai has round shapes, round shoulders, round thighs, a tender tummy, muscular calves, I understand that men want to fuck her. All men. She appeals with her soft lips, her trembling raised breasts, her tense thighs to a primal force that every man instinctively stirs up when he can no longer take his eyes off her. She has flesh shining with receptivity. She is a votive. It's not about love, it's about lust when men see Mai.
The sensation that you can escape your own limited self with lust. That you get to heaven. That you touch the deity. That you become a nameless identity, an elongated spasm, is what makes you capable of that.
Mai herself is a woman who always keeps her wits and senses.
She is a cool mistress.
She didn't just get Ploy. She has two children from two other men. Guys this time. Ploy's half-brothers. Mai is a winner in the evolution rally. The genes of at least one will last for several thousand years.
When Kasemchai, Ploy's dad, shot, he felt guilty. Soon after the breakup, a woman came along with whom he wanted a new life. Ploy didn't fit in. But Mai also did not want her daughter. Out of remorse, her father gave Ploy his plot of inheritance land that had belonged to the family for hundreds of years. That was a gift from a late Khmer king, whose ancestor was once a councilor of state. Kasemchai's sisters caught the child. That's how it worked.
Ploy was on her own two feet when she was fifteen. In turn a beauty. Small and slender, but strong as her tree. A skin fresh as a leaf full of morning mist. Receptionist at the Amanpuri in Phuket. She closed a dense canopy on all those greedy men who wanted the key at the counter. And so it is that Ploy, who lives somewhere far away in Thailand, keeps her tree rooted in Phimai.
Yet he is in the heart of Ploy. She takes him everywhere.
It's a chamcha, the tree of Ploy, I told you.
Just at the start of the dry season, it completely overwhelms itself with blushing panicles of flowers, in the shell-red color of a young girl's breasts, breasts that glow and blush shyly as she timidly rustles her sarong from between her fingers for her first lover.
Ploy's tree is big as a Khmer kingdom. Just as only one king can rule a Khmer empire, only one chamcha can rule the realm of her heart, That is an old law.
Let's face it: her mother, Mai, remains a serpent. Mai barely went to school, but she knows she's smarter than the whole town. With her sharp tongue she bends the whole world to her will. At the moment she is without a husband.
"Daughter Ploy, you must give me your plot of land," she says rebukingly on the phone. "Give it to me, I still have your two brothers to feed."
Why give as a gift? asks Ploy.'
'Just like that. You have to show respect to your mother,' says Mai.
"Why should I," says Ploy.
That's one reason.
What do we know about trees, if we pay attention to them at all? In the sky, high above our heads, they have their own freedom. Who can say that? No one else can say that. Nothing or no one can prevent it.
In return, the chamcha has feet that it cannot use. In our world on Earth, he cannot run, jump, or dance. But he cheers every day. Its many branches twist and turn like the fingers of Thai young women in classical dance, or like young girls raising sweaty, slippery arms high in the chorus of the mor lam singers.
With its root system, a tree may creep forward a bit. He may be making contact with a congener. I read that fungi pass chemically coded messages in the dark as couriers.
I have never met a tree that felt lonely. At least not one who told me. I listen carefully to trees. It seems to me that they lack caresses. Do you know such things? For me, touch is a necessity of life. I faced that I couldn't be a tree.
Ploy has been arguing and bickering with her mother ever since Mai greedily runs her eyes over the two rai of ground.
'No ground? Then you should give me money. Rami has too much money.'
Ploy stands her ground, she has the strength of the chamcha in her soul. She argues about her two little brothers going to school sloppily, about all the casual men who walk through her mama's life, about her vicious, persistent manipulations.
Actually, Ploy was too young for the tree when she got it, but it was no different. And actually Ploy is too young for Rami, he is a lot older. She married him when she was seventeen, but she still wants a lot that is part of being young. Ploy wants to see the whole world. She thought she was buying freedom by getting married. She now has her husband Rami for several years, followed by a daughter, Angelica. Little has changed. She is no longer allowed to work or go out alone.
It's a circle.
With uncles and aunts, all in Phimai, Ploy received security. The world is cold and hard. The field and the tree connect her to her native village.
It seems that her husband Rami has taken a mia noy. That's not an eternity perspective for the mishmash of love she feels, very young as she is. She wants eternity to exist in love.
The chamcha loves her unconditionally, that's for sure, he is in her heart. He is waiting for her at home. The sight of his glory gives her courage.
Its black seeds are hard as stone, the husks so strong that they roll far and sprout everywhere. Children like to play with it, such as with marbles. Shiny beetles that thunder across the earth at lightning speed.
Rami, her Russian-Israeli husband, leads hackers from Moscow to his den of robbers. They set up fake companies and financial constructions, buy and sell shady companies that are facing bankruptcy, give orders for shady money transfers day and night. He constantly lives in secure condos with high fencing, security, camera surveillance and steel sliding gates that only open with codes, lives in the places where many wealthy falang reside in opulence, Bangkok, Phuket, Hua Hin, constantly changing addresses.
So it looks like Ploy is a fragile pearl necklace in a golden cage. She cannot escape. She barely coos. It looks like she has no feet anymore.
She can no longer run, jump or dance. It does seem, however, that every day she makes the chamcha in her heart rejoice, makes its branches twist and turn like dancing fingers in a heavenly kingdom.
I see her capable of that.
Only her chamcha knows how it will really work. He carries the darkness of the secrets.

Phimai, December 2018