In the Shadow of the Banyan (18 page)

On a bed of thorny weed, a spider peered from beneath her dew-glistened web, as if trying to decide whether to come out and search for food or stay in and cast her net from afar. Nearby, an unsuspecting praying mantis rocked on its hind legs on a long blade of grass, serene as a diver contemplating an early morning plunge into the cool sea. To my left, a dung beetle buzzed with the aplomb of a seaplane as it shook specks of clay and pollen off its wings. And directly beneath it, a pair of backswimmers scurried across a wide pool like circus acrobats daring each other to a magician’s feat.

The ground was animated with these infinitesimal beings, and I remembered what Papa always said whenever we went out for a similar walk—“If you pay close enough attention, Raami, you’ll realize that a single leaf can contain myriad lives imitating our own, and you’ll know that there are always others traveling this world with you.”

There was one now faithfully accompanying me—a dragonfly with yellow-and-black wings, the kind that came out after the rain. It flitted this way and that, sometimes leading me, sometimes trailing behind. Then as we neared the old sweeper’s hut, it flew off, having seen me safely through my journey.
If you pay close enough attention,
I thought,
you know you’re never alone. There’s always someone or something guiding you. Tevodas,
it was clear to me now, were not celestial beings at all but earthly things,
beautiful
things I saw every day, and what made them beautiful was precisely
that they were momentary, just a glimpse here and there before vanishing again.

I looked for the dragonfly but saw instead a butterfly with similar coloring—with black-and-yellow wings—flitting over Papa’s head. Another god, another guise. Even the tiniest creature was capable of transformation.

•  •  •

At the old sweeper’s hut only his hen greeted us, clucking in distress, scratching the dirt in a panicked search. Papa and I caught sight of the empty nest by the doorway. We looked at each other and shrugged, attempting to rid ourselves of guilt. The hen came near us, a gurgle of discontent escaping her throat, as if saying,
Your Highness, I’m speaking only of the one who’s stolen my eggs!
I suppressed the urge to giggle. Papa tilted his head questioningly, not quite sure what was amusing me. I thought of telling him but didn’t, afraid it would remind him of the sadness of the earlier hours. Instead I wondered aloud where our old friend had gone, and silently, apprehensively to myself, why everything was in such disarray, why the door of the sweeper’s hut was left ajar and hanging askew on one unraveled rattan knot, as if something enormous had burst through. “Maybe it was a dragon tail,” I offered, imagining that a
naga
serpent had risen out of the marsh during the night’s storm and scoured the land, its tail whipping the air into a funnel that earned the monsoon whirlwind its funny nickname.

Papa made no reply. Instead he scanned the hut. The new coconut fronds he’d helped haul from the temple grounds one afternoon and put over the deteriorating thatched walls—in spite of the sweeper’s insistence he was adequately sheltered—had not kept out the night’s howling rain. Everything was drenched, a soggy mess, and there was this feeling of abrupt abandonment, as if the old sweeper had been sucked right out of bed by some force hurling through the front door.

“Maybe he’s gone to find shelter in town,” again I offered, more to calm my own worries than Papa’s. Circling us, the hen gurgled indignantly, pulling her neck in and out, strutting with the air of one who’d been left high and dry:
You don’t say, that old scoundrel ran off with my children! Still in their shells, I’ll have you know
. She dipped her beak in a puddle and drank from it, throwing her head back every so often and gargling as if her throat was hoarse from having to explain her losses to a couple of two-legged carnivores.

Papa was oblivious to the hen’s distress. His eyes lingered on the gaping doorway, then traveled slowly to the clay vat pressed against the front wall, under the lip of a bamboo trough. The vat was the only durable, solid form, while the old sweeper’s few possessions—the soaked straw mat on the bamboo bed, a pair of frayed twig brooms nestling by the door, a threadbare shirt hanging on one wall, a discolored
kroma
on another—seemed on the verge of evaporating as their owner apparently had.

“He never spent the night here,” Papa finally said as he walked over to the vat and, using his bandaged hand to lift the wooden cover, looked inside, his expression pensive as if working out some great mystery. “It’s not full. You’d think he would’ve left it open to collect the rainwater.” He turned to me. “I think our friend left before the storm came last night. Strange, though, that he went without saying good-bye to us first.”

“Maybe when he brought the eggs, he came to say good-bye.”

Papa attempted a smile, and as if to assuage his own worries, said, “He’s probably out and about somewhere nearby.”

“We can come back this afternoon.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea.”

As we made our way along a dike toward the well, I scanned the area, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sweeper’s curved silhouette gathering twigs under a tree or collecting wild herbs along a grassy patch among the rice paddies. But there was only the tattered frame of what looked like a scarecrow from last season in the cornfield to the right of us. I blinked, willing the scarecrow to straighten up and wave. If it did, it would confirm my suspicion that the old sweeper was a spirit of some sort, a
tevoda
in disguise. But it didn’t move, not even when a flock of sparrows settled upon its stick arms, from which dangled strings of rusted cans. A breeze blew and the cans clattered, sending the sparrows fluttering like snippets of a lost lyric:
It’s true mine is a life of poverty . . . my home a half-built thatched hut
. . . Papa said that some mornings he would
wake up with his head full of words and images and the only way to still them was to write them down. It’d been like this for me since waking, my head full of half-remembered lines.
Its walls the winds and rains
. . .

•  •  •

“Well, did you ever finish it?” I asked, looking into the opaque water below, my chin resting on the edge of the well.

Papa didn’t hear me. His head followed the flight of a hawk circling above us, its wings straight as metal.

“Did you finish that poem you were working on?” I asked again.

“Hmm . . .,” he replied, still watching the hawk.

“Is that yes or no?”

“Do you know why I write?” he murmured, smiling to himself.

“You can’t answer a question with a question!”

He looked down into the well, and his blurred reflection said to mine, “I write because words give me wings.”

“Wings?” I felt the palpitation of my heart but did not tell him about my dream.

“Yes, wings! So I can fly!” Laughing, he spread his arms and circled the well. “Be as free as that hawk!”

“You can’t be a bird!” I shouted, my fear resurfacing. “You can’t! Stop it!”

Papa stood still, surprised by the volume and harshness of my voice. He looked at me and then, as if coming to the same conclusion, said despondently, “Yes, you’re right, of course. I can’t be a bird.” His gaze went back to the hawk, which was now circling the golden spire of the stupa. “‘
Upadana dukkha,
’ the Buddha told his disciples. ‘Desire is suffering.’”

“What’s desire?”

“To want something so bad your heart hurts.”

“What’s suffering?”

“When your heart hurts.”

“Well, my heart hurts because I desire to go home.”

Papa laughed, pulling me to him. He wrapped his arms around me, and they felt, I thought, as safe as a pair of wings. In the sky, the hawk circled the stupa a few more times before slipping into the white expanse.

Papa picked up a pail made from a carved-out palm trunk and
dropped it into the well, holding firmly on to the long bamboo pole fastened to its handle. He flicked the pole around until the pail began to submerge, filling up with water, like the funnel of a sinking ship. Then he pulled it back up and poured the water into one of our buckets, repeating the steps until both buckets were full.

We were ready to return to the temple. But instead of going back in the direction of the old sweeper’s hut, we took a shortcut across a series of rice paddies that bordered the dirt road. Papa balanced himself on the narrow dikes, the bamboo yoke on his shoulder now bent like a large bow from the weight of the water, his body swaying left and right, his arms stretched out to steady the buckets so the water wouldn’t spill. He looked more like a chicken trying to fly than a bird that could soar. I followed close behind, running, skipping, hopping, imagining the rice paddies a giant hopscotch board. Papa pointed out the different families of rice, reciting the names like a line from one of his poems. “Long grain short grain, fat grain sticky grain, grain that smells like the monsoon rains,” I mimicked, singing it out loud.

“Sometimes when you look at the sky, you’ll see
tevodas
bathing. The water falls to the earth and makes everything grow.” He paused for breath, adjusting the bamboo yoke on his shoulder, and then moving again, said, “Yes, I did.”

“Yes, you did
what
?”

“I finished the poem.”

“I thought you never would!”

He laughed. “You have so little faith in me!”

“Hmm . . .”

He laughed again. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Of course!”

I kept pace with him, my steps following the rise and fall of his voice:

They say mine is a ravaged land,

Scarred and broken by hate—

On a path to self-extermination.

Yet no other place

So resembles my dream of heaven.

The lotus fields that cradle my home

Each flower a reincarnated spirit—

Or perhaps, like me,

A child who wishes to be reborn

Should dreams become possible again.

It’s true mine is a life of poverty

My home a half-built thatched hut

Its walls the winds and rains.

“Yes,” Papa admitted when I pressed him, “the poem is about the old sweeper. But, you see, it’s also about Sambath. Myself. You, darling.”

As he spoke, I turned and looked back at the abandoned, rain-soaked hut across the road. I realized with a start how the sparseness of one existence mirrored another, how an old man’s poverty gave a glimpse of the hardship he must have endured when he was a boy, must have suffered his whole life, and that small, forgotten patch of ground, with its dilapidated hut and drenched belongings, held in its reflection the deprivation of Papa’s childhood friend. It was clear the old sweeper was a version of Sambath, and just as I saw a manifestation of my father in everything that was noble and good,
he
saw a manifestation of his friend everywhere, in every poverty-stricken person he met, and tried to do for each what he hadn’t been able to do for his friend.

“We are all echoes of one another, Raami.”

twelve

I
t happened in half a breath. One moment he was alive and the next still, his silhouette faint on the straw mat, more like an incomplete thought, a tracery, than an actual person. It seemed no one expected him to die. It was just a fever, everyone said. He should’ve gotten over it. But I’d known since that day Mr. Virak arrived at the temple and I first laid eyes on the delicate form beneath the folds of his wife’s
kroma,
like a partially unwrapped parcel, their baby was more spirit than flesh. And like all spirits, he belonged not entirely to our world. “The gods have reclaimed him, Raami,” Grandmother Queen said of his departure. She was adjusting well to the change, never complaining about the diminishing food or the hard floor we had to sleep on. Once in a while she would ask for Om Bao or Old Boy, but when we explained that they were not with us, she would nod, as if suddenly remembering. Then her expression would become vague again and, as usual, her mind would wander to the otherworld. “In the blink of an eye,” she whispered in my ear now, “in half a breath, he went, surprising even himself.”

I wasn’t sure if this was possible, but it did look that way—his tiny mouth still agape, his eyes refusing to close even after the adults’ repeated attempts to shut them. Looking at him now, I couldn’t help but think that maybe he wasn’t ready, that, although infantile and knowing nothing of the world or himself, he was shocked by the swiftness of his own death.

I tried to imagine how that would feel, to die swallowing air, instead
of letting it go. “He looks like he’s yawning,” I whispered, leaning into Grandmother Queen. “It must be horrible to choke forever.”

“He’ll be spared from a lifetime of sorrow and regrets.” She nodded and kept nodding. “Yes, a lifetime of sorrow and regrets . . .”

She was the only person among the grown-ups not shocked by this sudden loss. Instead she observed it with the impartial gaze of one preparing for her own departure.