The Celadon Bowl

The Celadon Bowl

“Come, quickly!” she called to me. “I think I’ve found something.”

         I hurried to where she was kneeling, crouched over a ceramic bowl about ten inches in diameter that was protruding from the ground. I bent down and carefully pried it out of the dried earth.

         “Oh, no,” we both cried; it was only half a bowl.

         We’d been searching for hours in a field near Si Satchanalai, an ancient city in the Yom River valley in Northern Thailand. This area had, for hundreds of years, been the center of a thriving ceramics industry up until the sixteenth century. Scores of ancient brick kilns dotted the site. Then, for some unknown reason, the kilns had been abandoned. Built underground, with only the roof and chimney protruding as an oval mound, they had been left undisturbed for hundreds of years, many with pottery still stacked inside ready for firing. The entire area round about was covered with dark green shards. Treasure hunters had scoured the area and had even broken into the kilns looking for valuable antiques; thus, there was little chance that we would find any whole pieces just lying around. A good specimen of Sangkhalok celadon, as the green-glazed porcelain is called, fetched a high price on the antique market.

         “Let’s call it a day,” I said. “We’ll just have to buy a souvenir.”

         We drove back to the little village where there was a museum and, across from it, a row of open-fronted shops displaying both genuine and imitation Sangkhalok celadon. I parked the car and we walked across to the largest shop. There were rows of garishly decorated plates, bowls, vases and other utensils imitating the Sangkhalok style, which didn’t appeal to me. But there was also a small collection of what the shopkeeper claimed to be genuine specimens. These had a characteristic dull green glaze. There was a bowl about ten inches wide that attracted my attention.

         Meanwhile my girl friend, Poorika, had struck up a conversation with the shopkeeper, a dark, middle-aged man with most of his front teeth missing.
“What were these used for,” she asked, indicating small, animal-shaped flasks with snouts for spouts.

         “Oh, probably for holding some kind of alcoholic drink,” he said. “People drank through the spout like it was a straw.”

         “Ancient people found so many uses for celadon. It’s incredible.”

         “Yes. For example, here’s a flask shaped like a woman’s breast,” he said. “I suppose originally it was used as a container for human milk.”

         “Highly unlikely,” I said, contradicting him. “Thais didn’t drink milk, let alone human milk. Couldn’t the flasks have been used to hold wine, but were just shaped like breasts?”

         “That’s possible,” he conceded. “You’re probably right. Even today, potters like to fool around and make lewd things. Certainly the ancient people did, too.”

         “Such as?”

         “Phalluses. Some men wore them on a string round their waist to enhance their potency or to induce a woman to fall in love with them. He smiled, displaying his sole front tooth which jutted out at an odd angle. “When they walked, these celadon phalluses would knock against each other and go clink, clink.”

         “Did the charms work?” Poorika asked.

         “Oh, yes, definitely,” he said. “At least people believed they did. I once bought a phallus from a farmer that he’d dug up in his field. I gave him thirty baht for it. I concealed it from my wife.” He pointed to a plump woman sitting some distance away. “She wouldn’t let me keep anything like that in the house.”

         “That’s right,” the wife said, as if on cue. “They’re bad luck. I told my husband never to buy or sell such things.”

         “Anyway,” the shopkeeper continued, “I threw the phallus into the river, not wanting her to find out. Not long after, a collector from Bangkok came looking for such a phallus. He’d pay any price for one. Just my luck. I could have sold it to him for thousands of baht.”

         “When I was a young girl,” the wife said, “when a man came courting and we suspected that he was wearing these phalluses, we warded off the charm by wearing our wraparound tucked up between our legs, covering our cracks.” She laughed.

         Hardly listening to what they were saying, I asked the shopkeeper:
“How much is this bowl?”

         “Six hundred baht.”

         “Was your antidote effective?” Poorika wanted to know.
“I don’t suppose it was,” the woman said, laughing. “After all, I fell in love with my husband and married him, didn’t I?”

         “Once, an uncle of mine came to see us,” the shopkeeper said. “He was expert in the black arts. Food was put in a bowl before him, and he transformed it into charcoal. Right before our eyes!”

         “Yes, I’ve seen that done, too,” his wife said.

         “Could it have been hypnosis?” I asked.

         “No. No such thing.”

         We let the shopkeeper go on for a while longer, telling us more of his bizarre stories. Then I paid for the bowl and he wrapped it up for me with wads of newspaper.

         “Now, take this bowl,” he said to me as we were leaving. “It must have belonged to someone, probably a woman, who loved it and used it everyday.”

         “Yes, so?”

         “Now you’ve got it. Well, she might want it back.” He laughed heartily at his own joke.

         Back in the car, I said to Poorika: “Don’t believe anything he tells you that isn’t scientifically proven; or that you haven’t seen with your own eyes,”
“Of course not,” she said. “I was just humoring him.”


         When I got home, I put the bowl in a small dish rack and placed it on the nightstand next to my bed. The bowl was rather crude, by today’s standards; it was coated with a dull green glaze and had a lotus blossom motif on the inner surface. But the fact that it was hundreds of years old fascinated me.

         That night I had trouble getting to sleep. As I lay in the dark trying to make my mind blank, I suddenly recalled the shopkeeper’s words: “She might want the bowl back.” Oh, yeah. Let her come and get it, I thought. To lull myself to sleep, I started to imagine what the woman who originally owned the bowl might have looked like. The person I saw was tall, dark-skinned, had long hair and round, laughing eyes. She wore a wraparound but was bare above the waist, except for a small shawl which she draped over her shoulders to cover her breasts. The more I kept imagining her, the more unsettling the bowl’s presence became. Whenever I heard a creak or a knock, which normally I’d never have noticed, I’d peer into the darkness in the direction of the bowl, half expecting to see a shadowy form there. I was being stupid, I fully realized. But look at the bright side; if she did come to retrieve her bowl, I would be one of the very few people to have actually met a ghost. Having arrived at this conclusion, I fell asleep.

         The next day I told Poorika what had happened the previous night.

         “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Aren’t you the one who says, ‘Don’t trust anything that isn’t proven scientifically’?”

         “Yeah, I know. Silly, isn’t it? Don’t know what got into me.”
Poorika is a nice, smart girl, but she tends to be a little unimaginative. We’ve been friends for a long time and I tend to take her for granted.

         That night I was tired and fell asleep almost right away. But I woke up at two o’clock and remained in my bed in the dark. Once more the presence of the bowl made my mind work overtime. I glanced in its direction several times. It had an almost palpable effect on me. It was the illogical, heart-gripping fear of the dark and unknown of childhood. Finally, I succumbed to the power of suggestion and took the bowl to another room; only then could I return to bed and get some sleep.


         Irrational as it may sound, I felt that I had to return the bowl to its former owner. I made up my mind to throw it into the Yom River, symbolically returning the ceramic to its mother clay. The next morning I drove to Si Satchanalai, reaching there in the afternoon, and headed straight for the bridge. I parked the car, got out, walked onto the bridge, and dropped the bowl straight into the lazy river.
I stood for quite some time gazing at the spot where the bowl had hit the water and disappeared under. I felt relieved after having done this and felt the matter was now closed. Then I drove to the shop to buy a brand new ceramic piece in place of the bowl. The shopkeeper recognized me and was surprised to see me back so soon.

         “Where’s your lady friend?” he asked.

         “She didn’t come today.” I wasn’t going to admit I’d driven all the way from Bangkok just to throw the antique bowl into the river. He’d laugh at me. “Just browsing; this garden lamp looks nice.”

         I saw a car drive up and a tall, dark-skinned woman with long, black hair got out and came into the shop. The shopkeeper went over to serve her.

         “I’m looking for a Sangkhalok bowl, a particular kind of bowl,” she said. “Please show me what you have.”

         The shopkeeper indicated the antiques and then came back to where I was standing. “Genuine Sangkhalok wares are now hard to come by,” he said to me. “Collectors have snapped them all up, and no new ones are coming onto the market.”

         After a while, the beautiful woman came to us and said: “I’m looking for a bowl about this size,” she raised her hands, palms about ten inches apart. “You don’t seem to have any here. If you can find me one, I’d be willing to pay a good price for it.”

         “I sold the last one I had to Khun Jatuphat a few days ago,” the shopkeeper said, looking at me. “Perhaps you can buy it off him.”

         She looked at me with her warm, laughing eyes. I felt, momentarily, bewitched. “What about it, will you sell it to me?” she said.

         “I can’t, even if I wanted to,” I said. “I just threw it into the Yom.

         “What!” The shopkeeper looked at me as if I was mad. “You should have sold it back to me.”

         “No, you did the right thing,” the woman said.

         “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want it, so I just threw it away. But I’ll show you where I threw it, and you can pay someone to retrieve it for you.”

         So we got into my car and I drove the short distance to the bridge. I parked at the same place as I had earlier in the day and we walked onto the bridge. I took her to the spot where I had dropped the bowl into the water.

         “Right here,” I said. “Look. There’s a couple of fishermen over there. You can pay them to recover it for you.”

         “All right,” she said. “I’m very grateful.”

         “Don’t you want to know why I threw the bowl away?” I asked her. “And why did you say I’d done the right thing?”

         “You’re looking for a precious antique,” she said. “You think you’ve found an common kitchen bowl.”

         We hollered for the fishermen to come to us and she asked them to dredge for the bowl. There was nothing more I could do, so I wished her luck and left her on the bridge.  I drove back to Bangkok and dropped by Poorika’s house. I was glad to see her pretty, welcoming face again.