In the Shadow of the Banyan (17 page)

eleven

I
n the stillness, I woke to find Papa gone. Mama was also gone, her blanket gathered in a pile at the foot of the straw mat. I sat up, letting my eyes adjust to the dark that felt as thick as ink, becoming aware of the sound of a bamboo flute playing outside. A familiar melody. It weaved through my mind and I recalled the words that went with it:

Since I was a little girl, I’ve never been so scared,

As when Your Highness took hold of my hand.

A passage from a
lakhon
drama. But a
lakhon
out here? At this hour? There was a faint orange glow coming through the front doorway. In the room, no one but me was awake. I could easily make out who was who from the silhouette each person formed on the floor: in one mosquito net, Big Uncle a mountainous bulk, the twins a pair of nautilus-shaped knolls, Auntie India a slender hill of dips and curves, and in another net, Tata long and straight like a pestle, Grandmother Queen globular and malleable like a clay mortar in the process of being molded. No sign of Mama or Papa anywhere. Where could they be? I wasn’t alarmed. On the contrary, I felt strangely subdued, calmed by sleep that hadn’t quite left my body and by the music of the bamboo flute, which sounded more like the trill a bird would produce than anything a human being could conjure up with his lips.

Beside me Radana snored gently, hugging her small bolster pillow, her face squashed in doughy bliss, completely ignorant of Mama’s absence. I pulled the blanket from the foot of the straw mat and covered her with it, gathering the edges in around her so she would be secure and safe within its soft enclosure. Then I let myself out of the mosquito net and went to the doorway. There I saw them.

They were sitting outside by a small fire, their faces turned so that I could see only the slight curves of their chins glowing like two quarter moons. She was in the middle of dressing the wound on his hand, with a strip torn from the
kroma
on her shoulders. She felt the bandage and, seeing that it could use one more layer, ripped another strip from the checkered scarf, Papa contemplating her every gesture and movement. Neither one noticed my presence, absorbed as they were in each other, their minds wooed to stillness by the bamboo flute. I wanted to say something to let them know I was there, but as my voice hadn’t yet come to me, I swallowed my wordlessness and lowered myself to the floor, my senses slowly awakened by the cold air, which had set in after a night of pouring rain.

Please, Your Highness, I beg you let me go
. . .

I belong to another, he who is humble as I.

I glanced in the direction the music seemed to be coming from and saw in the surrounding dark another shadow crouching in the doorway of the building across the school ground from ours. It was the old musician, the elongated silhouette of the bamboo flute extending from his lips. His fingers moved over the instrument’s air holes, weaving a refrain:

Please, I beg you let me go
. . .

Your Highness, please let me go.

He paused, played a couple of notes, and slowly moved into a tighter, more controlled piece. Again, I heard in my head the words that went with the music, the insults thrown back and forth between two adversaries, the thievish prince and the impoverished perfume seller:

O, you minuscule animal of the savage world,

Seeing a fire flaming hot, you imagine it a game!

O, mountain, you tower over all
. . .

Your name places you in the family of gods—

Yet, you stand lower than grass!

It was from
Mak Thoeung,
a beloved Khmer classic told in verse. I knew the story well. I’d seen several
lakhon
performances of it and heard it read on the radio. It tells the story of a perfume seller and his beautiful young wife. One day while they are at a market selling fragrances and oils, a young prince spots the wife and takes her for his concubine. The perfume seller goes to the king and informs him what the young prince has done. The prince denies it. The king, on the advice of his most trusted senior court minister, orders the two men to carry a large, heavy drum to faraway fields and back, as punishment for their insolence. Unbeknownst to them, inside the drum crouches a little boy who is to note the conversation between the two offenders and report it back to the king. Thinking themselves alone, the perfume seller and the young prince begin throwing insults as sharp as blades:

Your race is heavenly,

So priceless and beautiful, as no word can describe.

Yet, you show not even human understanding,

But ignorance of the creatures below!

How dare you speak of me in such a manner!

Your Highness, I am speaking

Only of the one who has stolen my wife—

You ignorant fool—I am the one who stole your wife!

Papa said he loved
Mak Thoeung
for its poetry. But the real reason, I suspected, he cherished the story above all others was that its performance
at a theater many years before had brought him and Mama together. They’d come separately to the theater to see the
lakhon,
but by some chance, they were seated next to each other and, during the performance, found themselves whispering back and forth the lines the various characters spoke or sang, behaving as if they’d known each other all their lives. While Mama was there with an aunt, her chaperone didn’t discourage her from what would normally be considered highly inappropriate behavior for a young, unmarried woman. Instead the aunt pretended she didn’t see or hear what was going on, knowing that the man sitting on the other side of Mama was none other than the Tiger Prince himself. If anything, she seemed to encourage the liaison, and when a year later Mama and Papa were married, the aunt claimed she’d brought the two together. Once when I asked Papa to clarify
which
—the story or the aunt—brought him and Mama together, he had responded, laughing, “Ah, Raami, the whole evening conspired to bring us together!”

Now I wondered if this night wasn’t conspiring also in some way. I felt—even as I couldn’t articulate it—this music, emerging through a husband’s grief for his dead wife, seemed intended for my parents. As if by magic, the poetry they loved had found its way to them even in this dark hour.

I looked again across the school grounds toward the old musician. The next piece he played was so sorrowful I wanted to weep: the perfume seller and his wife are given the same punishment with the drum and, while carrying it to the faraway fields and back, they bare their souls to each other. I closed my eyes, hearing the lyrics in my head:

A flower of fallen petals cannot bloom again

Life once sprung forth is fated to pass away.

My life has ended for me already
. . .

The music stopped. I opened my eyes and saw another shadow emerge in the doorway and hover over the old musician. It was his daughter. She bent down and tenderly touched her father’s shoulder, her
long hair spilling over him like silk. She said something, and I imagined her urging him to rest. He nodded and allowed himself to be led back into the room. My gaze came back to Papa and Mama.

They seemed unaware the music had stopped. They continued to sit there, holding each other’s hands, ensconced in a sphere of light cast from the fire like an aura of protection. If I were Indra, I thought, I’d build them a world and keep them swathed in their solitary love.

Suddenly I remembered the dream I’d had before waking. Papa was a being much like that mythical Kinnara, at once human and divine, helpless and brave, who, unable to bear the pull of competing existences, impaled himself against lightning and fell to the ground. His wings severed and bleeding, he cowered in the rains, alone and unprotected. Having chosen a mortal life, he traded his immortality for a flash of hope in the darkness of night. The images circled my mind like strands of musical notes, and I knew then I hadn’t woken all on my own. The bamboo flute had called out to me, drawn me to the door. There was no doubt in my mind now that the music was intended for
me.
It was trying to tell me something. A story I already knew.

A familiar refrain.

Just then the kettle gurgled and spewed steam through its spout. Surprised, Mama pulled her hands away and lifted it from the fire. She poured some water into the lid of the thermos beside her, handed the lid to Papa like a cup, and poured the rest of the water into the thermos to keep warm for later. Papa cupped the lid with his bandaged hand, breathing in the steam, as he waited for the water to cool.

Mama watched him and, after a moment, said, “It isn’t too late. I can’t let you believe that it is. The soldier’s notebook could’ve gotten lost. We don’t know with these soldiers—they may have not shown it to their superiors. It’s all an act. You could invent another story. Give yourself a new name, a different identity.” She tried to joke, “A perfume seller or
something.
”

Papa remained silent, blowing on the water. He took a tentative sip and, looking at her, said, “You know, I am both the perfume seller and the prince.” His hand holding the water shook. He stilled it with his other hand.

“No,” she said, her voice taut with grief. “No, to me you are more. Always, you
strive
to be more. They must know this.” A muffled sob. “They can’t take you from me.”

He put the thermos lid on the ground and, taking her hands in his, pressed them to his cheek. His body quaked and sobs escaped his throat. I suddenly recalled a photo on their bedside table back home in which they’d struck a similar pose: her hands in his, their foreheads touching. A wedding picture. For the longest time I had been jealous of it—the captured intimacy that, inside the glass frame, had seemed impenetrable—until one day Papa explained it was taken before I came along.
When it was just the two of us,
he’d said. That unsettled me even more, as I hadn’t been able to imagine a time when it was just the two of them. But now I saw it. How it must have been when they were Ayuravann and Aana, not Papa and Mama, these two people whose togetherness had brought me.

“When they come,” Papa said, looking into her eyes, “I ask that you let me go.”

I should have recognized it right away, the bamboo flute’s ghostly voice warning me in the dark, reminding me of the story’s ending: back at the palace, the drum is opened and the little boy inside is revealed for all to see. He recounts every word he overheard, and the entire royal audience now knows the truth. The prince, angry, demands all must be killed and rushes toward the most frightened of them all, the young wife. But before he reaches her, she plunges her long hairpin deep into her chest, taking her own life. In the mayhem, the king, fearing a popular revolt, sees that everything must end here, once and for all. He orders the immediate execution of the perfume seller, the senior minister, and the little boy. Justice, as Papa had explained the tale’s senseless conclusion to me, could be found inside that drum, but when we murder a child, we murder our own innocence.

“I ask that you give me your blessing,” Papa sobbed.

My parents’ love, it slowly dawned on me, this tenderness I now witnessed in the shadows, faced the threat of being stolen, and, despite my very grown-up desire to protect them, there was nothing I could do to prevent it, for outside their small sphere of light existed a greater
incomprehensible darkness conspiring to tear them apart, and, like the little boy inside the drum, I would suffer their demise.

“If not that,” Papa said, swallowing tears and sorrow, “then your forgiveness. I ask for your forgiveness.”

Mama turned away from him, her face a full moon now, aglow and streaming tears. She saw me but did not attempt to hide her grief.

I went back inside and waited for the sun to rise.

•  •  •

The wind gave a long, drawn-out sigh, and from the giant banyan by the temple’s entrance, a flock of birds flapped their wings, echoing the exhalation. A new day’s radiance greeted us from every direction as we made our way across the temple grounds. Water lilies and lotuses threw splashes of color—yellow, pink, purple, indigo—across the verdant landscape. Gold and silver flashed off the roof of the prayer hall and the giant dome of the stupa, turning the temple into a miniature bejeweled kingdom. Above us the sky stretched high, blooming with thick white clouds, like a wide blue sea cradling floating gardenias. I marveled at how the sky imitated the earth and the earth imitated the sky. Pockets of rain dotted the ground, and each held in its reflection the possibility of another world much like the one welcoming us now.

We received greetings from those we passed: “Good morning, Highness! How are you? A day worth writing about, isn’t it?” Papa nodded and smiled, acknowledging everyone, and by now everyone seemed to know who he was—a prince, a poet.
How could he change his name, his story?
The thought flitted through my mind, a night moth confused by the light and gaiety. I shooed it away. From the steps of the prayer hall an elderly woman remarked, “You make a handsome peasant, my young prince!” A gaggle of her toothless friends giggled coyly. Papa paused, bemused, then catching his reflection in one of the rain puddles—the rolled-up pants, the
kroma
around his waist, the buckets swinging on the bamboo yoke from his shoulder—threw his head back and laughed out loud. I recalled his quiet words—
I am both the perfume seller and the prince—
the desolation with which he’d uttered them hours earlier. Now
he laughed, his happiness imitating the morning’s brightness, renewing itself, as the day always seemed to renew itself.

We crossed the dirt road, on our way to collect drinking water from the town’s well. But first we would pay a visit to the old sweeper and thank him for the eggs he’d brought us the night before. Papa led the way, whistling as he went, the buckets swinging from the bamboo pole on his shoulder squeaking companionably as he meandered around the rain-filled ruts that the wheels of the camions had gouged into the road. I followed at a leisurely pace, circling gaping tracts of water, jumping over smaller ones, leaping onto patches of grass, pausing now and then to observe the invisible gradually becoming visible.