On the long shadow of the teak house
Three weeks along the Bangkok Noi canal, sleeping under a roof my grandfather oiled in 1958, trying to understand why the wood keeps darkening long after the carpenter has gone.
The house I am writing this from has been darkening since 1911, the year my great-grandfather paid a Mon carpenter from Sam Khok to raise it on twelve teak posts over the Bangkok Noi canal. The boards arrived almost golden, the carpenter told him; within a decade they had settled into a colour somewhere between river silt and steeped tea, and they have continued, with a stubbornness that interests me, to deepen.
What the oil remembers
The boards are sun-cured mai-sak, ten centimetres wide, joined to the posts with wooden pegs no thicker than a finger. Twice a year, in the dry weeks before Songkran and again after the monsoon, the family rubs them down with a mixture of coconut oil and powdered indigo. The indigo is what gives the older planks that faint, almost plum cast you can see along the western gable at sundown — a colour no paint chart in Bangkok will sell you, and one I have stopped trying to photograph.
"A teak house is not finished when the carpenter leaves," my aunt told me. "It is finished, perhaps, on the day no one is left to oil it."