The Man Behind the Coconut Face

A man carves a face out of a coconut shell, upturns a sticky-rice steamer for a hat, sews a robe of patched bright cloth, and puts the whole thing on — and now he is Phi Ta Khon, an ancestor spirit called back to the town to watch over its people. That is what the town of Dan Sai will tell you, up here in the Loei hills where the road climbs in and the temple holds the center, and I believe the town means it. What I keep circling is the smaller matter it does not mention: the moment before the mask is lowered, when the man is still only himself, holding a face that is not his and about to answer for it.

For the crowd, the festival is a single spectacle, and a fine one — the drums, the laughter, the whole reticent town turning its oldest and most alive face outward at once. But a spirit is not put on by a crowd. It is put on by one person, alone inside the cloth, in a privacy the noise cannot reach. Everyone sees the mask. No one sees the small deciding that happens under it, in the dark where the breath is loud and the shell smells of the man's own sweat. That is the part I could not stop thinking about, and it is exactly the part no photograph holds.

There is something almost comic in it, which I think is the honest way in. A grown man on a mountain morning ties a rice-steamer to his head and becomes an ancestor; you could laugh, and you would not be wrong to. But the laugh is a door, and behind the door the thing is entirely serious. He performs nothing; he stands in front of the thing, the way one stands at the edge of something one cannot see the bottom of, uncertain whether one is held. The town has done this for generations; the man does it, each time, for the first time.

By daylight Dan Sai gives none of this away. The lanes are plain, hot soup and grilled things on the market's edge, the mountain in no hurry and the faith in no hurry either. Then the festival turns everything out — color, drum, the mask's queer grin — and turns it back in again. What stays with me is the turning back — the town folding its most fervent hour away as easily as it opened it, keeping the intensity where it lives, which is nowhere you can point to.

After the crowd had gone, an old man crouched against the temple wall with the mask he had just untied laid across his knees. He wiped a streak of sweat from the coconut shell with his thumb, unhurried, and slid it into a cloth sack for next year — and in that one motion, with no one watching him become no one again, he was more alone, and more himself, than any spirit on the street all day.