In the Shadow of the Banyan (25 page)

“That old man is always doing something,” Mae said, reaching over to tuck in the edge of the mosquito net under the straw mat. “He can’t keep still. He whittles and carves and chisels till he falls asleep and sometimes that never happens, and he’ll end up staying awake till dawn. If you watch him, you’ll never get any sleep.”

“What’s he making?” I asked, turning over on my back.

“A little calf for my cow,” Mae said. “It died a couple of weeks ago. The calf, I mean. Poor thing. Now the mother pines and pines. Listen, you can hear her . . .”

I listened, and sure enough, from somewhere behind the hut, came the sound—
Maaw, maaw, maaw
. . . I’d met the cow earlier when it roamed over to the edge of the property while we were washing inside a nearby roofless thatched enclosure. It was the thinnest-looking cow I’d ever seen, and I’d thought it was going to eat the thatch. But it just stared at me, moaning, as it was doing now,
Maaw, maaw
. . .

“Pok thought he’d make her a little carving. To hang around her neck.”

“You mean like a charm?” I felt certain that even an animal as dull witted as a cow would know the difference between her real calf and a miniature wooden replica. “Why? What for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mae said, closing the front door. “I suppose he just wants to give shape to her sorrow.”

“Oh.”

Mama pulled Radana closer, sharing one blanket with her, while I shared the other with Mae. I lay sandwiched between Mae on my right near the door, and Radana on my left, next to Mama by the wall. Mae yawned, mumbled something or other, and then, after what seemed like a few short seconds, fell sound asleep, as though knocked out cold by the night.

Soon, she and Radana were snoring back and forth, like a pair of whistles answering each other’s calls, while Mama and I searched the dark for the shapes of our sorrows.

•  •  •

Translucent drops of rain clung to the leaves and grass, like ladybugs whose vivid colors and patterns had washed away during the night’s torrent. I lingered in the doorway, wrapped in Mae’s blanket, my legs stretched out in front of me, yawning, waiting for sleep to leave my body, for dreaming to subside. Before me the quilted landscape of rice paddies and sugar palms unfurled as the sky peeled back its gauzy tier, revealing nearby tree-shaded huts standing much like ours on slightly elevated
land and, at farther distances, the dark green silhouettes of neighboring villages rising like burls and whorls in an otherwise smooth fabric. Rainwater brimmed the paddies, and the slender green stalks appeared much taller than I remembered.

In one of the paddies closest to the hut, partly shielded by a screen of tender blades, a brown-speckled duck—female, I guessed, from her muted coloring—plunged into the chalky water, wiggling her tail in the air, then popped back up, shaking her head, burrowing her bill into her feathers. A private morning ablution.

On a strip of inundated land, a water buffalo stood swishing its tail, grazing the tufts of green flecked with lavender blossoms—water morning glory, judging by its elongated leaves. Nearby a man—the buffalo’s owner, I assumed, from the ease with which the two kept company—with a
kroma
wound tight like a pair of boxers around his hips, plodded with careful steps, holding up a cone-shaped fish trap, which he suddenly plunged into the shallow water, his whole being riveted by the thrill of a catch. A
naga
serpent! I imagined something spectacular, my mind ever leaping toward a story, the possibility of escape, freedom.

How strange, I thought, that everything seemed so different. This place, which only the day before had felt like a chasm of stillness and silence we’d fallen into, now burgeoned with activities and sounds.

The water buffalo let out a loud snort, nostrils flaring, its huge head swinging in annoyance, its curved horns like a pair of sickles slicing the air. A flock of birds burst from a nearby bush, shocked into exhilaration. The man with the fish trap looked up, hand over his forehead, shielding his eyes from the hardening sun, as if contemplating the possibility of his own flight. Papa, I thought. He’d always wanted to fly.
Be as free as that hawk!

A rooster crowed, followed by another, and another, setting off a chain of cock-a-doodle-doos that echoed from hut to hut, from one village to the next.

I went down the steps and walked barefoot across the wet ground. From somewhere high up, a man’s raspy, reedy voice crooned,
Oh,
sarikakeo
bird, what are you eating?
. . . whistling when the lyrics eluded him.
I turned my gaze skyward and there was Pok coming down the trunk of one of the Sweethearts, a stringed bamboo flask swinging from a leather strap around his waist.

He looked down and, seeing me standing below, greeted, “You’re up!” He hopped onto a patch of grass, agile and light. “Just in time!” He nodded at the bamboo flask. “Want some?”

“Palm juice?” I’d never had it for breakfast before.

“Ah, not just that, but the nectar of youth!” He smiled, his face all crinkly, his teeth so stained he looked toothless, a hundred years old. “Heaven’s gift to us mortals! It keeps us young!”

“Does it?”

He laughed. “Well, maybe not.”

I looked away, embarrassed by my slip, and tried to change the subject. “Where’s everyone?”

Pok nodded toward the back of the house. “They’ve gone to the river to wash.” He unhooked the flask from the handle of his sheath knife and hung the flask on the bottom-most notch of the bamboo pole snaking up the full length of the palm, like the vertebrae of a long-ossified dragon. “At this early hour, the juice is as cold as . . .” He seemed at a loss for just the right word.

“Ice,” I offered, thinking maybe the day before I’d misperceived his reticence just as I’d misperceived everything else.

“
Clouds,
I was going to say.” He grinned. “But yes, ‘ice’ is more fitting.” Then, his brows furrowing, he added in an apparent tone of interest, “You know, I’ve never seen it. Ice, I mean. I’ve heard people talk about it, but I can’t imagine this ‘solid water.’ Made by a machine no less, is that right?”

I nodded, thinking of the small refrigerator we had back home where we stored our supply of imported cheeses and pâtés, the little freezer up top with its metal trays for ice.

Pok shook his head in amazement. “No wonder these Revolutionary soldiers are so fearful of machines. What power indeed to turn water solid!”

I kept silent, letting him find his way.

He began to undo the leather strap that held the sheath knife and several pairs of bamboo clasps I recognized were the kind used for squeezing juice from palm flowers. “I can’t say I understand what’s happening,” he went on, avoiding my stare. “What grace or misfortune has brought you here, to us—we who have nothing to give you.”

It hit me what he was doing—he was trying to be a parent, to talk to a child as a father would. He must’ve guessed what we’d lost, for here we were, a young mother and two little girls and no father to speak of. He must’ve sensed how far we’d been flung, for there was a world that he, who’d lived through countless moons and seen just about everything, didn’t know, couldn’t possibly imagine, a world of “solid water.” I wanted to describe to him this world, my whole life there. But tightness swelled in my chest, and when I opened my mouth to speak all I could muster was a muffled choke.

Pok stood still and observed me, as one would a bird, afraid of making a wrong move. After a moment, he said, “Let’s have some palm juice.”

I followed him to a stout young palm a few feet away. He cut a section of its frond with his knife, ripped the pliant part from the hard spine, and, with quick, deft movements of his hands, magically whisked it into a pair of cones. He poured some juice from the bamboo flask into the cones and handed one to me.

We strolled to the edge of the rice paddies, climbed onto the dike, and, as we stood there drinking our breakfast in companionable silence, more comfortable now without speaking, I thought maybe it wasn’t necessary to explain anything at all. Maybe it was enough that I knew I was not alone, that, at the very least, standing here beside me was this one person, who, unbeknownst to me till now, had all along been journeying this same journey with me, only from the opposite direction.

I can’t say I understand what’s happening
. . . Had I owned the words I would’ve told him what my heart intuited—that joy and sorrow often travel the same road and sometimes, whether by grace or misfortune, they meet and become each other’s companion. But again I couldn’t express what I felt. So I told him what I could—“Maybe we are
pok thor koan thor.
”

Thor
comes from the Sanskrit word “dharma,” but to me it meant simply loving someone you did not expect to love, and thus
pok thor koan thor
was a bond between a parent and child who were not related by blood.
They’re not ours to keep,
Pok had said, cautioning Mae against becoming too attached to us. Looking at him now, I knew we’d fallen into good hands. I knew also that like Papa, like any parent who understood the brevity of his role, the pithiness of parenthood, Pok was going to care for us as best as he could, teach us how to live like
neak srae,
how not only to plant the rice but to
imitate
it, to firmly anchor ourselves in ever-upturned ground and, at the same time, sway in the direction of the wind.

“Maybe we were supposed to meet,” I said, sensing the possibility of my father everywhere.
We are all echoes of one another, Raami.

Pok looked at me. Silence seemed to have overtaken him again. Then his face broke open like the morning sun.

seventeen

S
o began my education, with Pok as my guide and guardian, this gentle soul who called himself
neak prey
—a “man of the forest”—because he’d never seen a refrigerator or known the taste of ice, but who, with quiet patience and
thor,
would help us to withstand the rigors of our reincarnation from city people to peasants. To begin with, that morning, after we’d finished our second helpings of palm juice, Pok directed my gaze to the rooster weathervane turning at the top of the hut. Here, he explained, our lives were ruled by the seasonal change of the monsoon’s breath, which when blowing from the southwest brought rains and rice, and from the northeast dryness and scarcity. He described in detail the layout of Stung Khae and its neighboring villages, dotting them on his palm with the tip of his finger in an S-shaped curve from north to south. Together there were twelve villages in the commune. Stung Khae, the fourth village from the north, was cradled right at the crook of a small river, the one Pok had just pointed out to me. The river, also called Stung Khae, threaded its way between ours and the third village, connecting up with Prek Chong, a large tributary of the Mekong, somewhere in the distant north.

At the mention of the Mekong, my heart went aflutter, my mind became distracted, and I asked Pok if he could take me there, to which he replied, “Oh, child, it’s many forests and rivers away!” He admitted he’d never seen it.

“Papa said—” I stopped.

“Yes? Your papa said . . .”

I couldn’t tell him. Couldn’t bear to say more. Not yet. Pok understood. The newness of my loss was apparent to him.

“Come,” he said and led me across the vast green expanse, to where a group of farmers were busy preparing the paddies for planting. The men, each in a field with his plow and water buffalo, churned the flooded ground, turning the turbid water and earth into thick, doughy mud. Nearby, on a patch of land where two dikes met, the women hoed dirt from a termite mound into rattan baskets for children to scatter in the paddies. The dirt full of termites—
dey dombok,
Pok called it, teaching me the proper names of things as he went—would get ground up by the plows and become potent fertilizer for the soil. Then, after another rain or two, when the upturned soil had settled and evened out but was still soft enough to push one’s thumb through, tender rice seedlings would be brought from the village’s
thnaal sanab
and transplanted into the paddies. The rains would continue, nourishing the rice as well as providing sanctuaries for minnows, tadpoles, snails, crabs, and countless other tiny creatures we could collect for food, for our own nourishment.

“What about leeches?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, they’re everywhere!” He lowered himself on one knee, dipped his arm into a rain-flooded paddy, and pulled out a cylindrical bamboo trap—
troo,
he called it, which was different from
angrut,
the cone-shaped trap used for ensnaring larger catches, like catfish or eels. Inside the
troo,
a thick colony of gravel-sized snails clung to the bamboo strips, and, like a giant sentry keeping watch over these minuscule prisoners, a lone crawfish the size of my thumb scuttled from one end to the other, fearful of our presence. “It’s your lucky day, little fellow!” Pok exclaimed and, sliding open the small woven cover at one end, let the panic-stricken animal go. “Come back when you have more meat!” He returned the
troo
to the water, his arm lingering near a thicket of grass.