Pchum Ben is finished, my host dad says. Fifteen days of parties and temple visits over.
Then why are the shops in town still closed, and the road outside my house still clotted with cars, motos and vans?
Because it’s still a holiday.
“Today people go to play everywhere,” my host dad says. “Or some, like me, stay at home.”
Like me, too — and the orphans — holed up in the playroom watching music videos and Chinese movies dubbed in Khmer.
People don’t go to the wat (temple) today, like on the holiday’s other 15 days.
The ghosts must be full. They’ve been eating for two weeks straight.
And they had better eat up. Getting enough food from their living relatives these two weeks gives these ghosts a shot at reincarnation and admittance back into the living world. But, if after visiting seven wats, the ghosts can’t find enough food, they will remain in hell, and their families will not only have bad karma, they will run out of food the following year.
I witnessed the feeding of these ghosts during three recent wat trips. The first journey was the earliest, and was during a visit with my former host family in southern Cambodia. We — my former host dad and mom and I — set off for the wat at 4 a.m. An hour so early that not even the Cambodian early-rising sun has showed. But the ghosts, who are afraid of the sun, are awake and hungry.
Inside the wat, a small crowd sits folded-leg on either side of a long row of bowls heaped with ghost food. What do ghosts eat? Mounds of rice piled with bananas, guavas and cookies, all drizzled with red goo and black ash dripped onto the food by candles and incense.
These ghosts don’t need bowls or utensils to eat. After the food is blessed by the wat’s resident monks, we lay people take the bowls outside. Around and around and around the wat we walk, throwing handfuls of rice into the surrounding shrubbery. (The handfuls are the perfect size for the ghosts and their shrunken mouths.) While we walk, monks chant, drums bang and a gong gongs. A pair of geese stand in the middle of the hubub, doing their everyday geese things.
Then the food is gone. We wash the bowls and put them in a drying rack. My host dad and mom go home, leaving me inside the wat with the yays (grandmas), who are chewing betel nuts and spitting the blood-red liquid dregs through the cracks in the wood floor.
My host parents say they will be right back, but they’re not. I start regretting my decision to stay when a yay tells me she will remain at the wat until afternoon. The roosters have just begun to crow and the sun is lazing into view. It’s 5:30 a.m.
It takes my host parents two hours to return to the wat. In the meantime, the yays and I offer food to the monks in bowls concealed by shiny homemade party hats. We raise the bowls while the monks chant. To avoid offense, I don’t look at the row of shaved-head men and boys wrapped in bright orange, burgundy and rust orange robes.
Once sated, the monks give us their scraps — fruit, plus what tastes like rice coated in sugar and sesame seeds. After eating, I retreat to the outdoor steps during the middle of a droning report on how much money each person has donated. Next to me is a man with a plastic leg and a crutch.
My host parents show up close to 8 a.m., amid a crowd bearing more food for the monks. Each donor spoons rice into big silver bowls. The rest of the rice goes to the yays.
Then it’s breakfast time for us. Rice, meat and veggies.
At 9 a.m., I think we’re finally about to leave, but it’s time to make more food for the monks. Khmer noodles with peanut sauce and sprouts.
Once the food’s made, I feign sleep, and my host parents finally get the idea. They take me home before returning to the wat for more.
I don’t return to the wat until the next week, when I am back at home. The two visits are short. One is with my host mom and sister and the other with a truckful of orphans.
Both contain the same elements: Lighting incense and praying, donating money and spooning rice and other food into big bowls for the monks, who bless the food before passing it onto the ghosts.
Now it’s been 15 days, and the ghosts have eaten enough. We the living have too. Because aside from temple visits, Pchum Ben involves a lot of partying.
“If you go around to the villages today, a lot of people are very drunk, and tomorrow too.”
That’s how a Khmer man who works at the orphanage explained Pchum Ben revelry to me.
All the parties are to pray for the ghosts and to pray for “good money, good health, good everything,” this man added.
You can’t eat too much during these parties, he told a visiting French man who complained of a full stomach.
“Not too much,” he said. “Another day, too much, but not today.”
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