Friday, September 13, 2013

Do Spirits really Exist?

A skeptic tells of an encounter

 with a believer


don't believe in spiritulism, fotune tellers and magic so I was skeptical when Jilly told me that a bomah had put a spell on her. A bomah is the Malaysian term for a witch doctor. At the time I was living in MIri in Sarawak, East Malayasia and I knew the Dayaks, the Indigenous tribal people still consulted bomahs but Jilly was a UK ex-pat. Still I have friends back home who visit clairvoyants so it wasn't so much the fact that she'd consulted a witchdoctor as much as her reaction to what he said.

Jilly was frankly edgy. Finally she broke down. In tears she told me the bomah threatened to curse her unless she gave him ten thousand rinngits.  I couldn’t believe that she could take his threat seriously. “Tell him that you’ll curse him back,” I joked.

Not long after Jill returned to England. I heard through a mutual friend that she had cancer. She later died. Though I believe her subsequent illness and death was no more than a coincidence perhaps I was too quick to dismiss other's beliefs. 

 

Writing is a way to reflect on experience

 

 When I constructed Roger, one of the more unpleasant characters in The White Amah I was having a dig at my own flippant attitude to unfamiliar ideas because I still feel guilty about the unsympathetic way I responded to Jilly. 

In my story Roger is having an affair with his amah, Rubiah. Hoping to become his wife, she has gone to a bomah for help.  Her plan miscarries when the bomah demands more money and threatens to put a spell on her if she doesn't pay up.

Roger is as skeptical as me. "Tell her  you'll curse him back," he says.  He then proceeds  to  mocks her beliefs calling her “an ignorant little jungle bunny”. I warned you he was an unpleasant character, didn’t I?  

As to whether spirits really exist the jury is out because as someone famously said--


"There’s more in heaven and earth than we can ever know."





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