Incensed

Café Nhan is my new hangout. It's the closest spot with free Wifi I can depend on—until closing time, anyway. The café nestles in the bend of a quiet L-shaped backstreet full of tiny cafés and small hotels. Its three floors, connected by narrow staircases at each end of the café, include both indoor tables and outdoor tables, some downstairs on the brick terrace adjoining the street, some upstairs on narrow little balconies overlooking the terrace. I'm usually there in the evening, but I went down there first thing this morning to send an email to Thu, one of my CELTA course students who has offered to tutor me in Vietnamese.

After an iced coffee and a quick email session, I packed up my laptop and headed back to the apartment and then suddenly remembered I had intended to get some incense to counter the rather strong dog odor that seeps into the apartment whenever Kiki is hanging out in the living room below. I had looked in several souvenir shops earlier with no luck so now I asked somebody. A young woman with fairly good English directed me to the nearest Buddhist temple. "They'll give you incense for free!" she enthused.

"I'd like to buy some to burn at home," I explained. "I need a shop that sells incense and incense holders…and matches."

She didn't know of such a shop but thought a Buddhist monk might know. She offered to write a note in Vietnamese explaining what I wanted and I let her write one in my notebook. "What does it say?" I asked.

"It's written in a very particular way," she warned me. "Don't show it to anybody but a monk. They'll think you're…" She couldn't think of a suitable word.

"Crazy?" I suggested. She didn't look as if that was the word she was looking for, but she accepted it with a nod. I thanked her and hurried off to Ba Da pagoda, just a couple blocks away.

Ba Da turned out to be small and unassuming as temples go. There seemed to be nobody about except a young man in the forecourt hand-painting signs or posters of some sort. He didn't look like a monk, so I circled the temple looking for one. In a room off a back passageway I saw a young man with a shaved head slumped on a desk fast asleep. I thought he might wake up if I stared at him, but he didn't. I poked my head through a few other doorways that looked out of bounds before I discovered a monk sitting in a small room on a wooden sofa. He waved me away with his hand, but I waved back at him with my notebook until his curiosity got the better of him and he came to take a look.

The monk, a man about forty years old clad in shorts but no shirt, read my message several times and seemed puzzled by it, which puzzled me. I tried repeating a couple of the key words: 'huong' (incense) and 'o dau' (where?) but that didn't seem to help him at all. He gestured for me to wait, disappeared behind a partition, and reappeared moments later dressed to go out. He grabbed me by the sleeve and started for the front gate. I thought he meant to take me to an incense shop. After a few steps, though, he stopped, turned around and led me back to the room where I had found him.

He escorted me inside and had me sit beside him at a small desk upon which he placed my notebook and the tourist map I was carrying. Switching on a desk lamp he proceeded to examine the map with great intensity. Then he wrote into my notebook what appeared to me to be a list of all the Buddhist temples within a twenty block radius. I didn't see exactly how this was going to help me, but I thanked him several times in Vietnamese and backed, bowing politely, out of the room.

I thought the episode was concluded, but no. He followed me out into the passageway holding a key in his hand. Hurrying past me, he unlocked a padlock securing a side door of the temple and ushered me into the temple where he spent a few moments switching on lights within and around the shrine, which featured four banks of large Buddha figures gazing down at a wooden prayer platform. Grasping a large bundle of incense sticks, he drew out three pencil-thick sticks and handed them to me. If he had hesitated, I would have thanked him again and left with the free incense, but he immediately picked up a box of wooden matches and struck a flame. I fanned out the sticks of incense, but he impatiently took them back, and holding them in a tight bundle, lit all three from the same match. He didn't mess around. He had a nice big flame eating up the ends of the sticks before he blew it out with a quick wrist snap and stuck the sticks one by one into holes in a nearby grate.

The monk nodded at the platform, so I slipped off my shoes, set down my laptop case, and stepped onto the platform. At the front of the platform was a foot-high wooden lectern with a dozen long incense burns across its top. I sat down cross-legged here and closed my eyes. The monk left me a minute later, but before he left he did one more curious thing: he picked up my laptop case and set it on the platform beside me. Then he picked it up a second time and set it directly in front of me, leaning against the lectern. I had no idea if he was safeguarding the laptop against temple thieves, satisfying some idiosyncratic penchant for symmetry, or following some feng shui-type cosmic precept.

I meditated there peacefully for about 30 minutes, hearing in the distance some Buddhist chanting which I took to be a recording, but who knows? Then I stood up, turned off the lights, and let myself out. Maybe I'll go looking for an incense shop again tomorrow.