Dr Siri Paiboun 01; The Coroner’s Lunch

enemy for over a decade.

The elders were huddling and chattering nervously in Hmong. They were plainly confused about something, their nops still frozen in front of them.

The driver shook his head. “I’ve seen ‘em nutty before, but they’re breaking all the records today. They usually can’t wait to get all this official stuff over and done with and get back to whatever fool thing it is they do here.”

Siri attempted to move closer, but this time all six elders retreated together. He didn’t know what to make of it.

“Is there something wrong?”

“How did you come here?” one of the women asked.

“Yak-40.” There was silence. “I flew.”

The elders chattered again even more excitedly. Then the same woman boldly ventured forward from the group and reached out for Siri’s arm. Her hand was shaking. She seemed relieved when she found flesh and bone inside his shirt sleeve. She reported back to the others, and the atmosphere automatically changed.

They all gathered around Siri, touching him, smiling, asking questions in Hmong as if he was a long-lost friend. The military men didn’t know what to make of it. The captain called out to him. “You been here before or something?”

“Never,” Siri smiled.

“Mad, all of ‘em.”

The elders half-led, half-carried Siri off to the meeting hut. He was baffled but enjoying the attention. They sat him in the place of honour on the floor facing the doorway, and brought water and sweets for him to eat. The soldiers, they just ignored.

Again and again they tried to ask him questions in Hmong. Each time he told them in Lao that he didn’t speak the language. They laughed. He laughed. The soldiers yawned.

Finally the elders settled in a circle around him, leaving a few respectful metres either side of him. Their numbers had swollen now to about twenty. They all introduced themselves, but the only names he remembered were Tshaj, the headman, Nabai, the woman who had inspected him for flesh, Lao Jong, a tall, grinning, toothless man, and Auntie Suab, the second lady elder, who was tiny. She smiled so sweetly that Siri could tell she’d broken many hearts in her life. The captain sat unsmiling inside the doorway with his boots pointed at the circle.

Slowly the light dimmed as more and more villagers came to peer at the amazing sight in the meeting hut. They blocked out the light in the doorway and the windows. The eyes of the children filled the gaps between the banana-leaf walls. Siri could have led them on longer, but he started to feel guilty for taking advantage of this mistaken identity.

“This is all very pleasant,” he said. “But it’s true what the soldiers said.” He was surprised to hear himself use the Hmong word for soldiers. He must have picked it up somewhere. “I really am Siri Paiboun from Vientiane. I’m the coroner” – he used the expression ‘ghost doctor’ to help them understand – “at Mahosot Hospital. I’m sure I look like someone you know, but I’m afraid I’m not him.”

They didn’t reply, just stared at him, smiling. He wondered whether they understood.

“Just who do you think I am?”

“You are Yeh Ming,” the headman said without hesitation. The villagers all around them gasped.

“I wish I were,” Siri laughed. “He must be quite a warrior. What does he do, old Yeh Ming?” The expression quite a warrior was a Hmong phrase he didn’t remember knowing.

Auntie Suab spoke quietly and seriously, as if this were some type of test. “Yeh Ming is the greatest shaman.”

“Yeh Ming has supernatural powers,” Tshaj added. “One thousand and fifty years ago, you…he…drove back twenty thousand Annamese with just one ox horn.”

“A thousand and fifty years ago?” Siri laughed again, and all the Hmong laughed with him. They were a good audience. “It’s true I am beginning to show my age, but a thousand and fifty years? Don’t be cruel to an old man.”

Nabai spoke. “This isn’t the body you used then. You couldn’t fight off half a Vietnamese with the body you have now.”

“That’s very kind of you.” That was another Hmong expression. It was obviously a very simple language if he could pick it up just by being around these people. “But if I’ve changed bodies, how do you know it’s me?”

The captain finally lost interest in this fiasco and went off to eat with the guards.

“A body is easy to shed,” Tshaj explained, “but the eyes will always be there. You can’t replace the river-frog emeralds. Zai, the rainbow spirit, turned two river frogs into emeralds to thank the first shaman for giving him more colours. They’re passed from body to body.”

So it was his eyes. It all came down to the fact that he had green eyes. Through the course of the discussion and the meal that followed, he wasn’t able to convince them he wasn’t a one-thousand-year-old shaman, not even by showing them his motorcycle licence. Even when they’d persuaded him to stay the night with them, and the captain and the driver had gone back and left him in the charge of the permanent village guards, he still wasn’t comfortable. He felt embarrassed to be receiving food and lodging on the strength of his similarity to Yeh Ming. But he was having a good time.

The business he’d come to resolve had been shuffled to the side somehow. But he thought that as a respected imposter, he’d eventually get more answers than the captain. He was sitting at the edge of the village under a rustic pavilion with the senior men. They were into the second bottle of the most delicious fruit-flavoured rice whisky he’d ever tasted.

“I want to tell you all why I’m here,” he said.

Tshaj interrupted him. “We know why you’re here.”

“You do? Why, then?”

“You’re here for the dying soldiers.”

“That’s true. Can you tell me what killed them?”

“Yes.”

Sweet Auntie Suab arrived at the crucial moment. She was a maker and distributor of amulets and she carried a large collection to the table.

Tshaj was annoyed. “Suab, this is a men’s meeting.”

“I’m so sorry, brother. But this can’t wait until morning.” She dumped the assortment of pendulums and amulets and religious and sacrilegious artefacts on the table in front of Siri and stood back. Siri laughed.

“Oh, God. Don’t tell me I have to wear all these.” The others laughed too.

Suab shook her head. “No, Yeh Ming, only one. I blessed one of them with your spell.”

“Which one?”

“You’ll know.”

“How?”

“It’ll come to you.”

Siri raised his eyebrows and looked down at the thirty-something medallions in front of him. He’d pick the wrong one and perhaps they’d take him more seriously as a coroner. The odds were in his favour. He knew it would dispel the magic of the evening, but perhaps that was a good thing.

He reached across the table for the largest amulet. It was an ugly, dust-covered lump. He felt sure if Suab had blessed an amulet for him, she would have doused it, or anointed it, or at the very least dusted it off. This was easy.

But as he reached across, the ever-dangly button on his shirt cuff became anchored on something. He lifted his arm to find he’d hooked a small black prism on a leather thong.

The amulet was so old that any characters or images that had once been etched on it were now rubbed away.

“Yes.” Auntie Suab said with a sigh. “Yes.”

“No, wait. That wasn’t fair. Best out of three?” But it was over.

Suab gathered up the failed medallions and, with a satisfied smile, walked off to leave the men and the