PHUKET: It began with a drum beating inside her head. She was 13, and she didn't know what to make of it.

The family lived in Phuket Town and an aunt had passed away not long before the drum beats began in her head.

For Kanlayasinee ''Nut'' Singkarangrang, now 22, it was a frightening time.

''I hid in my room,'' she said. ''But the drum beats did not stop. After two hours, I told my sister.''

Nut's sister, older and more aware, knew what was happening. Her younger sister had been chosen.

The pair went to Phuket's Jui Tui temple that morning. Nut's life as a possessed ma song had begun.

The beat for Nut goes on. It will continue this year and every year as she finds herself inhabited by a spirit and controlled in ways she still struggles to understand.

THE PHUKET Vegetarian Festival remains the island's most unusual cultural event. It prompted one expat resident to say: ''Just when you think Phuket people are like everybody else, along come the yellow flags and the parades.''

The media mostly depict the nine-day festival in the same formulaic way each year, highlighting the sometimes grisly piercings and the noisy parades, filled with fireworks.

Yet there's a subtler, far more significant meaning that transcends superficiality. A spirituality that is pure Phuket.

FRIGHTENED as she'd never been before, Nut met an old man at the Jui Tui temple in Phuket Town. He explained what was happening to her.

''You are being invited to become a ma song,'' he said. ''If you say Yes, you will have to change your life. It will take three years.''

Until that day, Nut had been a girl enjoying fun beyond her years, drinking and smoking and sometimes staying out late.

The change was immediate. For the next three years, she became a penitent. She led the life of a righteous person.

And when the drumbeats came again, Nut followed them to the temple and on to her first Vegetarian Festival parade as a ma song.

Those who have seen Phuket parades know the shaking of the head and body and the eye-rolling that sometimes accompany a possession.

Although every possession is different and the invading spirits show individual characteristics, the ma song are all bent on purification, contrition and the expunging of all of society's ills.

Phuketwan reporters recollect a ma song who was invaded by the spirit of a Muslim imam, and who could recite texts in Arabic, even though he had never learned the language.

Between festivals, he would go into trances and fortell the future of believers, guiding them whenever they needed help.

For most ma song, though, it's a once-a-year occupation, quite literally. Yet if they do not behave with moral correctness for the entire year, they may not be chosen.

Nut says she is told by the spirit in her body each year what she should do and how she should behave during the festival.

From the time the go heng lantern poles are raised, as they will be at all temples on Phuket this evening, her behavior will be governed by the spirits.

In nine days, the spirit inside her will depart with the festival's noisy, firecracker-filled ending.

And for another year, Nut will return to working in the family shop, as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary ever happens on Phuket.


Parades and Places to Beat the Traffic
LEARN where the parades are each day to go to watch or to avoid Phuket traffic hassles.
http://www.phuketvegetarian.com/phuketvegetarian2012_en.pdf/