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Laos: The Phantom Forest Thief
Our host in Muang Ngoi had been acting strangely. Twice or thrice daily she peeped into our bamboo rooms to ensure we had shut and bolted the windows. In the evenings she endlessly paraded the grounds of the Vita Guesthouse, an extension of her own house, warily and territorially. Late at night, once we had retired to our rooms, she walked from room to room nudging the doors to check that we had bolted them from the inside. And in the mornings we would find that any clothes we had left on the washline had been taken into her bedroom for safe-keeping. Such paranoia seemed incongruous in this forest village on the Nam Ou river in northern Laos, a village of one hundred households and one street, a community whose inbreeding made it virtually an extended family, and whose collection of bamboo houses on stilts were a haphazard and undefined jumble, without fences, without boundaries. This behaviour - in a place where travellers, lodging in simple bamboo rooms and eating in wood-fire restaurants, came for the backward milieu: the fairy tale mountains, the eerie limestone caves, the charming jungle waterfalls, the remote treks - was further proof of her eccentricities.
And then my money was stolen, and her pedantic vigilance suddenly made sense - there was a thief on the loose. It happened one night after the electricity generator - which was put on from 7-10pm daily - had been switched off. My companion, Angel, was already in bed, and I had been at a restaurant chatting to two Australian travellers. It was a cloudy night, and on the way back to our guesthouse the darkness was so complete we could feel it closing around us, like ominous fog. At one point I felt the sense of a presence behind us, and, whirling around, the beam of my torch picked out a boy who might have been eighteen. He caught up with us, and the Australian women greeted him with their sing-song Saa-baay-deeee, but there was something shifty and nervous about the way he flinched away from the torchlight. We lost him then, and at our guesthouse we sat in the candle-light in the Australians' room. The door was open, and my shoulder bag was on the hammock on the terrace, ten paces away.
I remember hearing the flick of a lighter and the bamboo floor creaking. Our host, I thought smilingly, must have run out of torch batteries. A moment later I heard the flick of the lighter again. Now I became suspicious, and when I shone my torch, it revealed the boy we had met in the street, stooped over my bag. I gave chase, but I lost him in the forest. I hastened back and checked my bag: all was intact except my cash. Instead of taking the whole bag, the boy had unzipped my money belt and picked out the cash (about œ30, almost two months salary here, for the lucky few who had a civil service job), then zipped it shut again. Meanwhile, the commotion had woken Angel up, and she reported her own strange happenings as she was falling asleep that night; she had felt something pushing against the window and when she shouted out, she heard the receding snaps of twigs outside our room. So the boy had been attempting to break into a room before we disturbed him earlier.
The next day the robbery became The Big News. By 8am, when the roosters had stopped calling, everyone in the village had heard that the completely bald farang had become the latest robbery victim. The proprietor of the restaurant where I had breakfast mentioned the robbery, and so did the owner of the shop where I bought cigarettes. All day, while hanging around, villagers approached me to offer empathy and condolences. Their lingering, kind smiles were meant to reassure me, and perhaps reassure themselves, for they were shaken and worried. The trickle of backpackers that had started coming through in the previous five years had injected cash into this formerly subsistence village. Instead of growing rice or raising water buffalo, the village boys could now make money organising treks and boat-trips, and their sisters could make money washing the farangs' dirty clothes and cooking in restaurants. Now this sudden prosperity was threatened. The villagers all assured me of the one outcome: the thief will be caught and punished.
The thief had eluded capture for a year. He had carried a spate of robberies on farangs. Every guesthouse in the village, all four of them, had been subjected to three or four robberies each. In the face of such a slippery and persistent thief the villagers had turned to religion, not the Buddhist monks dawdling outside their small jungle temple, but an older, more potent force - the powerful spirits that are inherent in all sentient beings and inanimate things. The spirits are the guardians that maintain balance and order and justice. Some villagers made fervent offerings (pineapples, fishes, and other produce) to the spirits, all in the hope that, duly pleased, one of the spirits might intervene: the thief might trip on a fence and knock himself cold, or a cobra might bite him, or the river might engulf him. It hadn't worked. Now, finally, a breakthrough. I had seen his face. I could identify him.
The Village Chief sent for me that afternoon. I was herded to him by Vita, our host's son, and we found him at his usual spot loitering outside the government-run Pharmacie, which doubled as the health clinic. A nurse was shooting a plum-coloured liquid into an old woman's arm, and the chief brought some chairs out on the terrace. He was a small middle-aged man with impassive eyes and a slight frown, and he spoke with quiet and rapid authority. Vita translated back and forth. The chief said, "My people are poor, so it's unlikely that you will get your money back, but you can help us catch the thief." Then he outlined his plan: the next afternoon he would round up all the boys in the village that fitted my description, and then I could identify the thief.
"But I am leaving tomorrow morning." There was one boat out daily, at 9am.
"I plead you to stay one more day. This robber is the rot of our village. One day the tourists will stop coming if this goes on."
The Village Chief was the judge and prosecutor, the arbiter and unchallenged executioner of the law. I asked him what justice awaited the boy.
"I'll put him in prison for one month or two."
The boy's deftness and fearlessness had given him a reputation larger than himself. He had been known to climb through the open 2-by-2ft windows into farangs' rooms at night while they slept, take any money and valuables, and slip out through the window again. The occupants in the morning would be disturbed by the fact that they had heard nothing, as if the thief had been a phantom. Which, in a way, he had been taught to be. I had seen the young men stalking monkeys and squirrels in the jungle, and their gait was soft and light, as though walking on hot coals. By contrast, Westerners clomped awkwardly, slipping in the mud and crashing through the undergrowth. Now the boy was using the hunting skills of his ancestors on a more lucrative and altogether easier prey: the fat wallets of farangs in Muang Ngoi. But ending the thefts would be simple, I told the chief: if the guesthouses put up written warnings, farangs would be put on a cautious footing that would outsmart the thief.
© Victor Paul Borg
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