We were both under the weather. We had packed the kids off to stay with friends and my Cambodian partner had decided to celebrate moving house by spending the night trawling bars, thoughtfully taking my keys with him and leaving me outside with the guard until the small hours of the morning. A whole dead chicken complete with head and legs on the doorstep was the last thing I needed, but there it was. Roasted, Chinese style, its eyes staring and looking a little rancid already in the morning heat and no more attractive for the fact it was reclining on a bed of fruit.
"This house has been good to us. We wanted to make one last offering to its spirits," our old landlord and his wife said. After nearly three years in his house, he had found a buyer, and it was time for us to move on.
We found a truck and removalists, agreed on a price per trip, and started out for the new house. Unfortunately on the last trip, the removalists decided to mutiny, threatening to dump everything in a sewer unless they received a bonus. Muttering derogatory things about their mothers and their province, my partner sorted that out. That was no job for a foreigner. Only Cambodians can say those sorts of things to each other and walk away smiling.
But even after we arrived and paid everyone to their satisfaction, there was still more work to do. To avoid any nasty supernatural incidents, we had to burn incense and ask the spirits of the new house for permission to stay. It's a normal practice. When traditional Khmers picnic, they put a small offering of food at the edge of the mat to placate the local spirits. Some people even make a small offering when they take a hotel room. My partner describes being chased out of his own home by a spirit and her "body guards" once because he slept there without asking first. Everyone nods sagely. They totally believe it.
That done to everyone's satisfaction, we slept, and there was great excitement in the morning when someone described how the spirit of this house had appeared to them in a dream, sitting on the window ledge - "a fat, black woman who likes drinking". She sounded like my sort of spirit. I was confident we would get on fine. "She wasn't scared - no body guards. She filled up the window all by herself," I was told.
The house is new, so it had no spirit house for her to live in. Outside Wat Than on Norodom Boulevard are a row of shops selling various versions of the spirit house which is a common feature of homes around the region. The miniature homes are made of concrete and sit on concrete posts. The Chinese-style ones are squarer and less ornate, although they can come in garish gold and yellow all the same. The Khmer-style ones are quite beautiful, with tiny nagas decorating their roofs and intricate motifs painted on their walls. The larger the home or villa, the bigger and more ornate the spirit house. We chose a modest one in chocolate brown with gold trim in Khmer-style, since the Cambodians had held a confab decided from her description that our spirit could not be Chinese.
There was still the blessing of the house to do. One woman was dispatched to enlist a monk, a yay-gi (Buddhist laywoman) and an atchar (layman), and to find pots big enough to cook an enormous quantity of chicken coconut curry and rice. A whole Chinese-style roast pig was ordered, complete with head and tail still attached and laid out flat on a table staring into the street. And of course beer was procured. A ceremony is not a ceremony in Cambodia without that item in generous quantities.
The monk arrived early, and chanted in Pali as he sprinkled perfumed water thick with jasmine flowers over the house, the inhabitants and a display of fruits and flowers. Food and money was donated, and he was done. Outside, large incense sticks burned over offerings of food, soft drinks, beer and the pig. A beer was opened and left untouched on the table for our spirit, since she had gone to all the trouble of appearing in a vision to make her preferences clear, and when the incense was finished the food was ready for the mortals, which included most of the neighborhood but almost no foreigners, as I had neglected to specify 9am on the invitations and foreigners tend to think of housewarmings as nocturnal events.
But something strange was happening outside, and it was very much of this world. First a single police officer on a motorbike passed the open gate and doubled back. Then it was a pair. Then four, and five. I thought there must be trouble down the street.
But as if obeying an inaudible signal, they suddenly congregated and zoomed up to my house in a raid formation that would have done a drug bust on a major gangster proud. They were all waving pieces of paper. Disconcerted, it took me a few moments to focus, and then a few more to comprehend. They were brandishing fire extinguisher brochures at me and yelling "42 dollar, 42 dollar" and "compulsory, compulsory" in chorus.
I knew some of them as regular patrons of a dancing restaurant joint down the road. "Always wondered how they financed those nights," I thought. The locality and the district were equally represented, as was the Municipal Fire Brigade, which comes under the Interior Ministry and is a branch of the police force. This was a pickle. The fire extinguishers they were hawking for 42 bucks were only $10 at the market, but they had the light of determined men in their eyes. Tentative shaking of full cans of beer under their noses didn't daunt them. Cambodian police declining beer? I almost panicked. Once their fire extinguisher was inside, there would be inspections, and within a year I knew their extinguisher would fail an inspection. The dancing restaurant was only a block away, and Khmer New Year is in April.
But then, one cracked. He glanced at the beer, and his resolve melted. When a huge plate of roast pig appeared on the table, their resolve completely evaporated, and they put their brochures away and sat down to enjoy our hospitality. Our spirit, and the spirit of Anchor, had smiled on us. Everyone was happy. We parted with an exchange of business cards in case we ever had a problem and promises of jugs of beer next time we met.
All this seemed to point to our household spirit being satisfied. We had, it seemed, finally successfully moved in.