Poon Pid Thong : Gold-Pasted Cement (P)

    In person, Krisna Asoksin could be your average retiree or kindly aunt. She moves briskly and speaks at a measured pace. She likes indulging in the past and insisting that everybody is fed. Now and then she throws out a poetic phrase, something that could have come from one of her novels. This happens when she is less aware of those around her, as when staring out through the glass into her garden, at the butterflies and sparrows that have flown in before the coming storm.

    It is easy to embellish a myth around Krisna. Honoured as National Artist in Literature in 1988, the 82-year-old author has published close to 150 novels over a 62-year career. It is a staggering output, conjuring bestsellers out of tales of domestic drama. Over the years, her novels have acquired the status of social artefacts. Adoring fans pore over them, scriptwriters turn them into popular soaps and scholars study their protagonists for insights into the traditional role Thai women play in society. Collectively these paperbacks encapsulate modern Thailand.

    Krisna attributes this to youth. "I had a lot of drive. My head was spinning with ideas. All I needed was some paper and a pencil." After 17 more years in the civil service, Krisna decided she had had enough. She was ready, she felt, to embrace a career as a full-time author, replete with its attendant struggles. The struggles, however, never came. That same year she was awarded the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) Literature Award for Rua Manud (The Human Ship), and four years later for Tawan Tok Din (The Setting Sun). Both became bestsellers.

    And then came the tome which sealed her reputation. A stark and delicate portrait of "broken" homes, Poon Pid Thong brought her the much coveted Southeast Asian Writers (SEA Write) Award. For someone who grew up in 1930s Thailand, Krisna was very progressive in many of her novels, and in Poon Pid Thong she had found a theme well worth tackling.

    In the latter half of the 20th century, caught in an early wave of modernisation, urban Thailand was undergoing its own identity crisis. The family was no longer sacred. Children from broken homes were playing "catch-up" with their parents' problems. And all was being quietly swept under the carpet.
Seeing so much surrounding discontent and misconduct, Krisna wondered why these children went off the rails. She had hit on the seed for Poon Pid Thong. In seniority-driven Thailand, repression and denial eclipse all else in unhappy families. "We fail to realise that parents and children can both be in the wrong," says Krisna. "If we expect an apology from our children, we must give the same in return." 

    , the storm has subsided. The trees are wet with rain. Krisna's study seems bright and airy in the late afternoon sun. Holding the manuscript in one hand, Krisna pauses. Something has distracted her. On her lips a sentence is forming. It will perhaps be poetic.