In the Shadow of the Banyan (2 page)

Someone was coming. Old Boy turned in the direction of the footsteps.

Mama!

She made her way toward him, her steps serene, unhurried.
A rainbow gliding through a field of flowers
. . . Again a line fluttered through my mind. Though I was no poet, I was the daughter of one and often saw the world through my father’s words.

“Good morning, my lady,” Old Boy said, gaze lowered, hat held against his chest.

She returned his greeting and, looking at the lotuses, said, “It is so hot and now they’ve closed again.” She sighed. Lotuses were her favorite blossoms, and even though they were flowers for the gods, Mama always asked for an offering to herself every morning. “I was hoping to have at least one open bloom.”

“And you shall, my lady,” Old Boy reassured. “I cut some before dawn and placed them in iced water so that the petals stay open. I shall bring up the vase to your room when His Highness finishes composing.”

“I can always count on you.” She beamed at him. “Also, would you make a bouquet of the closed buds for me to take to the temple?”

“As you wish, my lady.”

“Thank you.”

Again, Old Boy bowed, keeping his gaze lowered until she’d floated past him. She ascended the stairs, her right hand pressed on the flap of her silk
sampot
to keep her steps small and modest. At the top, she stopped and smiled at me. “Oh good, you found your brace and shoes!”

“I’ve practiced walking slowly in them!”

She laughed. “Have you?”

“One day I want to walk like you!”

Mama’s face went still. She glided over to me and, bending down to my level, said, “I don’t care how you walk, darling.”

“You
don’t
?”

It wasn’t the pinch of the brace or the squeeze of the shoes, or even what I saw when I looked in the mirror that pained me the most. It was the sadness in Mama’s eyes when I mentioned my leg. For this reason, I rarely brought it up.

“No, I don’t . . . I’m grateful you can walk at all.”

She smiled, her radiance returning.

I stood still and held my breath, thinking if I so much as breathed, she’d disappear. She bent down again and kissed the top of my head, her hair spilling over me like monsoon rain. I took my chance and breathed in her fragrance—this mystery she wore like perfume. “It’s good to see that someone is enjoying this stifling air,” she said, laughing, as if my oddness was as much an enigma to her as her loveliness was to me. I blinked. She glided away, her entire being porous as sunlight.

Poetry is like that, Papa said. It can come to you in an intake of breath, vanish again in the blink of an eye, and first all you’ll have is

A line weaving through your mind

Like the tail of a child’s kite

Unfettered by reason or rhyme.

Then, he said, comes the rest—the kite, the story itself. A complete entity.

“
Oey, oey, oey,
there’s not a minute to waste!” Om Bao rattled on from below. “The floor must be mopped and waxed, the carpets dusted and sunned, the china arranged, the silver polished, the silk smoothed and perfumed.
Oey, oey, oey,
so much to do, so much to do!”

The branches of the banyan tree in the middle of the courtyard stirred and the leaves danced. Some of the branches were so long they reached all the way to the balcony, the shadows of their leaves covering my body like patches of silk. I twirled, arms stretched out, mumbling an incantation to myself, calling forth the
tevodas,
“Skinny One, Plump One . . .”

“And just what are you doing?”

I swung around. There was Milk Mother in the doorway with Radana on her hip. Radana squirmed down to the floor and immediately started stomping on the shadows with her chubby feet, the tiny, diamond-studded bells on her anklets jingling chaotically. It was normal for Cambodian children to be covered with expensive jewelry, and my much-adored toddling sister was bedecked in the most extravagant way, with a platinum necklace and a tiny pair of hoop earrings to match her anklets. This was not a child, I thought. She was a night bazaar!

As she toddled around, I pretended she had polio and a limp like me. I knew I shouldn’t wish it on her, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. Despite her bumbling and babyness, you could already tell Radana would grow up to look just like Mama.

“Eeei!” she squealed, catching a glimpse of Mama floating through one of the doorways and, before Milk Mother could stop her, she ran jingling through the hallway, calling out, “
Mhum mhum mhum
. . .”

Milk Mother turned back to me and asked again, with obvious annoyance, “Just
what
are you doing?”

“Summoning the
tevodas,
” I told her, grinning from ear to ear.

“
Summoning
them?”

“Yes, I’d like to meet them this year.”

No one ever met the
tevodas,
of course. They were spirits and, as with all things spectral, they lived in our imaginations. Milk Mother’s
tevodas
—at least as she’d described them to me—sounded suspiciously familiar. With names like Skinny One, Plump One, and Dark One, I’d say she was describing herself, Om Bao, and Old Boy. By contrast, my
tevodas
looked nothing like me, but were as lovely as court dancers, wearing their finest silk and diadems with spires reaching all the way to the sky.

Milk Mother wasn’t listening to me, her ear tuned to a different kind of noise.
Pchkooo!
Again, the tremor of an explosion. She strained to hear, her head tilted in the direction of the din.

The explosions worsened.
Pchkooo pchkooo pchkooo!
A series of them now, just as I’d heard in the night.

Turning to me, Milk Mother said, “Darling, I don’t think you should put too much hope on the
tevodas
coming this year.”

“Why not?”

She took a deep breath, seemed about to explain, but then said, “Did you wash yet?”

“No—but I was about to!”

She shot me a disapproving look and, nodding in the direction of the bath pavilion, said impatiently, “Go on then.”

“But—”

“No arguing. Grandmother Queen will join the family for breakfast, and you, my bug, cannot be late.”

“Oh no, Grandmother Queen! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I was trying to, but you kept running away.”

“But I didn’t know! You should’ve told me!”

“Well, that’s why I called and called—to
tell
you.” She heaved, exasperated. “Enough lingering. Go. Get ready. Try to look and behave like the princess that you are.”

I took a step, then turned back. “Milk Mother?”

“What?”

“Do
you
believe in
tevodas
?”

She didn’t answer right away, just stood there and looked at me. Then finally she said, “What can you believe in if not the
tevodas
?”

I went down the front steps. That was all I needed to hear. The rest was easy to figure out. They were things I could see and touch—lotuses opening their petals, spiders weaving tiny silvery hammocks on wispy branches, slugs slipping through watered green grass . . .

“Raami.” Looking up, I saw Milk Mother leaning over the balcony railing. “Why are you still dawdling?”

I placed one foot in front of the other, swaying my hips slightly. “I’m
practicing
my walk.”

“For what—an earthworm contest?”

“To be a
lady
—like Mama!”

I broke a sprig of jasmine blossoms from a nearby bush and tucked it behind my ear, imagining myself as pretty as Mama. Radana appeared out of nowhere and stood in front of me. She cooed, transfixed for a second or two, and then, as if deciding I didn’t look anything like Mama, bounced off.
Where are you?
I heard Mama sing.
I’m going to get you
. . . Radana shrieked. They were playing hide-and-seek. I had polio when I was one and couldn’t walk until I was three. I was certain Mama and I didn’t play hide-and-seek when I was a baby.

From above, Milk Mother let out an exasperated sigh: “For heaven’s sake, enough lingering!”

•  •  •

Later that morning, in an array of brightly colored silks that almost outshone the surrounding birds and butterflies, we gathered in the dining pavilion, an open teak house with a hardwood floor and pagoda-like roof, which stood in the middle of the courtyard among the fruit and flower trees. Again, Mama had transformed herself, this time from a butterfly to a garden. Her entire being budded with blossoms. She had changed into a white lace blouse and a sapphire
phamuong
skirt, dotted
with tiny white flowers. Her tresses, no longer loose, were now pulled back in a chignon tied with a ring of jasmine. A champak blossom, slender as a child’s pinkie, dangled on a single silk thread down the nape of her neck; when she moved to adjust herself or to reach for this or that, the blossom slid and rolled, smooth as ivory on her skin.

Beside her, in my metal brace and clunky shoes and a ruffled blue dress, I felt ungainly and stilted, like a sewing dummy on a steel post, hastily swathed in fabric. As if this wasn’t humiliating enough already, my stomach wouldn’t stop rumbling. How much longer would we have to wait?

At last, Grandmother Queen—“Sdechya,” as we called her in Khmer—appeared on the balcony, leaning heavily on Papa’s arm. She slowly descended the stairs, and we all rushed to greet her, queuing on bended knees in order of importance, heads bowed, palms joined in front of our chests, fingertips grazing our chins. She paused near the bottom and, one by one, we each scooted forward and touched our forehead to her feet. Then we trailed her to the dining pavilion and claimed our appropriate seats.

Before us was an array of food—lotus seed porridge sweetened with palm sugar, sticky rice with roasted sesame and shredded coconut, beef noodle soup topped with coriander leaves and anise stars, mushroom omelets, and slices of baguette—a dish to suit everyone’s morning taste. At the center of the table sat a silver platter of mangoes and papayas, which Old Boy had picked from the trees behind our house, and rambutans and mangosteens, which Om Bao had brought from her early morning trip to the market. Breakfast was always an extravagant affair when Grandmother Queen decided to join us. She was a high princess, as everyone constantly reminded me so that I would remember how to behave around my own grandmother.

I waited for Grandmother Queen to take her first bite before I lifted the cover off my soup bowl; when I did, steam rose like a hundred fingers tickling my nose. Tentatively, I brought a spoonful of hot broth to my lips.

“Be careful,” Mama said from across the table as she unfolded her
napkin and laid it across her lap. “You don’t want to burn your tongue.” She smiled.

I stared at her, mesmerized. Maybe I had seen a New Year’s
tevoda
after all.

“I thought I’d visit the temple in Toul Tumpong after breakfast,” she said. “My sister will send her chauffeur. I’ll go with her, so our car is free if you’d like to venture out.” She was speaking to Papa.

But he was reading the newspaper, his head slightly cocked to one side. In his usual muted attire of brown wraparound pants and beige
achar
shirt, Papa was as solemn as Mama was radiant. He reached for the cup in front of him and began to sip the hot coffee mixed with condensed milk. Already he’d forgotten the rest of his breakfast as he immersed himself in the news. He hadn’t heard Mama at all.

She sighed, letting it go, determined to be in a good mood.

At one end of the table, Tata offered, “It’ll be nice for you to get out a bit.” Tata was Papa’s elder sister—half sister actually, from Grandmother Queen’s first marriage to a Norodom prince. “Tata” was not her real name, but apparently when I was a baby, I came to identify her as my “tata.” The name stuck and now everyone called her this, even Grandmother Queen, who, at the moment, reigned at the other end of the table, blissfully ensconced in old age and dementia. I’d come to believe that because she was a high princess—Preah Ang Mechas Ksatrey—Grandmother Queen was more difficult to grasp than the
tevodas.
As a “queen” who ruled this family, she was certainly unreachable most of the time.

“I shouldn’t be long,” Mama said. “Just a prayer and I’ll be back. It doesn’t seem right to start the New Year without offering a prayer first.”

Tata nodded. “The party is a very good idea, Aana.” She looked around, seeming pleased with the start of the day, noting the preparations being made for the celebration to take place on New Year’s Day.

In the cooking pavilion, Om Bao had started steaming the first batch of the traditional New Year’s
num ansom,
sticky rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves. These we would give out to friends and neighbors during the coming days as each batch was made. On the balcony of the master house, the servant girls worked on their hands and knees waxing
the floor and railings. They dripped beeswax from burning candles and rubbed it into the teakwood. Below them Old Boy was sweeping the ground. He had dusted and wiped the spirit house so that now it stood sparkling on its golden pedestal under the banyan tree like a miniature Buddhist temple. Several long strands of jasmine adorned its tiny pillars and the spire on its roof, and in front of its entrance, a clay pot filled with raw rice grains held three sticks of incense, an offering to the three pillars of protection—the ancestors, the
tevodas,
and the guardian spirits. They were all there, watching over us, keeping us out of harm’s way. We had nothing to fear, Milk Mother always said. As long as we remained within these walls, the war could not touch us.

“I couldn’t sleep a wink.” Again Tata spoke, spooning brown sugar from a small bowl and sprinkling it on her sticky rice. “The heat was awful last night and the shelling was the worst it’s ever been.”

Mama put down her fork gently, trying not to show her exasperation. I knew, though, what she was thinking—
Couldn’t we talk about something else?
But being the sister-in-law, and a commoner among royals, she couldn’t speak out of turn, tell Tata what to say or not to say, choose the topic of a conversation. No, that would be graceless.
Our family, Raami, is like a bouquet, each stem and blossom perfectly arranged,
she’d tell me, as if to convey that how we carried ourselves was not simply a game or ritual but a form of art.