Our blood runs cold in a burning sun

Our blood runs cold in a burning sun

In Truman Capote’s true-crime book, In Cold Blood, a rural town in Kansas was rattled by brutal murders. Four people killed in their own home, late at night, three shot point-blank in the face, the other had his throat slit, then shot in the head. It was a robbery turned massacre. The morning after committing the crime, the book reports, one of the two killers, Dick Hickock, went back to his house and had toast for breakfast with his family, laughing, unperturbed, as if nothing so inhuman had happened just hours before.

Thailand is not a small town in Kansas in 1959; we don’t normally have toast for breakfast, but cold-blooded are the words that keep haunting us upon reading newspaper headlines these days. There have been deaths in jail cells and explanations that, almost unanimously, made people speechless: first, Pol Maj Prakrom Wirunprapa, found hanged in a room with no bars in what looked like a suicide; then the fortune teller who forgot to read his own palms, Suriyan “Mor Yong” Sucharitpolwong, whose warm blood suddenly betrayed its own body, according to the official statement. Before that, there was a dark rumour of another high-ranking officer, believed to have disappeared.

Recall the first instant you heard the news of Pol Maj Prakorm and Mor Yong’s deaths? Blood froze in your hot veins because what you had feared became reality in that second — and you didn’t even know these two personally! Colder-blooded still, however, was how the cremation took place hours after the news broke, so fast and furious, so hastily that mourning was almost impossible, not to mention an autopsy. All becomes ashes and smoke (to be Zen about this) and this means all is permanently lost.

And yet there’s the coldest-blooded aspect to what has happened: the fact that we will soon forget about it, we will write it off and sweep it under the rug as one of those unfortunate incidents that have littered modern Thai history, a history full of blank pages and black holes that are better left unfilled. Another unnatural disaster that habitually becomes natural. Suicide, blood infection, death, disappearance — whatever it is, we share that breakfast table with Dick Hickock as the man eats toast and makes jokes, unperturbed, as if nothing has happened.

In Capote’s In Cold Blood, a classic crime reportage written in high-style literary language, we read in detail about the killers’ lives, about the victims, about the townsfolk, and about the town stunned and ruptured by the crimes. The term “in cold blood” refers to the barbaric murders by Hickock and Perry Smith (both were hanged in 1965). The term, in another dimension, also signifies the creeping chill that gathers in our hearts as Capote sketches every single detail of many lives before and after the crime, a painstaking probe into the killers’ morbid plan, their blithe ignorance of law and fate, and the victims’ gradual approach towards their merciless end.

Revisiting the incident of cruelty, Capote’s book may not solve every moral riddle. But at least by recording it, by giving a face to the crime, the death, the place, and the time it happened, the book unfreezes the icy indifference and makes the act of forgetting more difficult. When something is written about, all is not lost — all is not burned to ashes and shipped by express service to heaven or hell. 

As we have witnessed so many times, it’s too much to say, “the dead want justice”. Truth be told, even the living are still struggling for it, and justice, poetic or legal, is something increasingly elusive in this climate. But now it has become even trickier because the dead can’t even be discussed, written about, let alone questioned.

The official response to the recent deaths — and actually to other dubious deaths involving the authorities in the past many years or decades — is to wave away the doubt. With a brush of his hand, a minister or a general can reduce a human life into nothing, into something less than air, as we’re assured not to worry because things have occurred in their natural courses. All disasters are natural, that seems to be the message.

In our times of happiness and reconciliation, to mention death is to stir up the muddy water when what we all want is a warm surface and clear blue sky. Well, keep at this for long enough, and our blood will turn forever cold in Thailand’s scorching sun.


Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.

Kong Rithdee

Bangkok Post columnist

Kong Rithdee is a Bangkok Post columnist. He has written about films for 18 years with the Bangkok Post and other publications, and is one of the most prominent writers on cinema in the region.

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