In the Shadow of the Banyan (21 page)

I didn’t understand. What had he done now? Then it dawned on me—Papa had sat beside Mr. Virak. He’d raised his hand.

“There’s a way out of this, don’t you see?” Mama cried.

Papa took her hands and clasped them in his. He looked at her as if they were alone in the room, as if this were a private moment just
between them. Then he spoke. “I know I’ve not always been present when you need me.” He held her still, pulling her to him now, her arms trapped between his chest and hers. “Often, I lose myself in the constellation of my own ideas, forever searching for points of illumination. But no matter where I look, I find you, shining and bright, offering me whatever it is I seek. You are my one single star. My sun, my moon, my guide and direction. I know as long as I have you, I’ll never lose my way. Even if I cannot touch you, I know I will see you, feel you, from anywhere. If I need you, I know where to find you.” He brought her hand to his heart. “Here—you are always here.”

Mama pulled away and ran out of the room, her long hair soaked with tears. Papa stood there, trembling, looking at me.

When I lie buried beneath this earth, you will fly
. . .

I should have understood. Even now, he didn’t attempt to hide his sadness or fear from me. He stood there swaying slightly, hand clutching his chest, lips parted, as if wanting to explain all that he knew, only to hold his tongue in the realization that no words or story could ever prepare me for his departure, elucidate his broken heart.

I know you don’t understand, but one day you will. Forgive me when you do. Forgive me that I will not be here to see you grow up.

I didn’t know that day would come so soon. That it was now. I understood, but I could not do a single thing. I could comfort neither him nor myself.

Getting his bearings, Papa turned to the others and explained what he’d already revealed to Big Uncle the other night—that he’d disconnected himself from the family and rewritten our story. “Look after them,” he said to Big Uncle. “My children are yours.” Big Uncle opened his mouth to protest, but seeing the look in Papa’s eyes, he lowered his head in helplessness.

I didn’t know so much sadness could exist in so small a place.

•  •  •

Mama slept with her back to us, hugging Radana to her chest. Tears had drained her, hardened her body like a board. Beside her, Papa lay so still that for a moment I’d thought he too had fallen asleep. But now
I saw that his eyes were moving, following the leaps of a small
chieeng chock
lizard on the ceiling. I didn’t know why, but the lizard made me think of the baby. Maybe because of its smallness, the way it made that
tsssk tsssk
sound with its tongue, as the baby had done when he got ready to sneeze. I wondered if the baby had come back, reincarnated as this tiny lizard, its limbs trembling with the desire to live as it scaled the ceiling and walls looking for food, playing with the sphere of light cast by the kerosene lantern. Round and round it went. A thought slowly took root in my head. It had the feel and shape of a bird’s flight, weightless and elliptical. It circled my consciousness like the hawk we’d seen circling the stupa a few days earlier when we were at the well. Round and round it flew, carving a moon, full and bright. “Papa?” I whispered, cautious with my discovery. “Will—will your spirit go to the moon then?”

He seemed to still himself completely. Finally, he said, his voice quivering, “Yes . . .” He steadied and continued, “I will follow you, and you’ll have only to look at the sky to find me, wherever you are.”

“Papa?”

“Hmm?”

“I wish in your next life you’ll be a bird so that you can fly away, so that you can escape when you need to, and come back when you want to.”

Silence.

Then he pulled me closer, his lips on my forehead, his tears on my skin, warm and overflowing. I hugged him until I could no longer feel him, feel his heart breaking against mine.

•  •  •

That night I woke up in the middle of my dream. I saw Papa’s lips on Mama’s, their bodies wrapped around each other like two snakes.
I want to swallow you, to hold you . . . keep you forever to me
. They were feeding each other poison, I thought, but I couldn’t stop them, I couldn’t speak up. It was only a dream, I told myself. A dream. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep. Sometime later I heard the sound of paper being ripped, slowly, cautiously. I opened my eyes and saw Papa bent over his pocket notebook by the doorway, in the partial light cast by the stars in
the night sky. He was writing, or perhaps folding the torn page, I couldn’t tell. Sleep was stronger than curiosity, locking me in its embrace, and I fell back into oblivion.

•  •  •

When I woke again, it was morning. Papa wasn’t beside me on the mat. I ran outside to look for him. At the gate of the temple, a group of Revolutionary soldiers stood guarding a row of men—Mr. Virak, the musician, the monk, and others whose faces I knew—as they climbed into an oxcart loaded with belongings. Papa stood beside it, getting ready to board as well. I pushed through the crowds and found my way to him. “I’ve changed my mind,” I blurted out, my arms around his waist, pulling him away from the oxcart. “I don’t want you to go to the moon.”

“Raami,” he said, kneeling on one knee. “Listen to me, darling. I never lied to you. I will not lie to you now. I know you are only a child, but I have no time for you to become an adult. It’s too late for me.” He paused, looking at the ground. “Even when my heart hurts, I must go. I . . . I wish I could make you understand.”

“But you’re my papa,” I cried, unable to say what I felt, what I understood—that in a world where everything real could disappear without a trace, where one’s home and garden and city could evaporate like mists in a single morning, he was my one constancy. That he was my father and I his child, that he had incarnated first, from whatever previous existence he had lived, to lead the way, to love and care for me, was proof enough of some logic in this universe. The rest, however senseless and confounding, was allowable, even pardonable. But now I was to be without him? My eyes flitted from one soldier to the next, searching for one who would understand, who would know how I felt, but none glanced our way. I turned back to Papa and demanded, “Tell them you’re my papa!”

He did not respond, his face still lowered, his eyes hidden from me.

“Tell them! You’re my papa—I want you here!
Tell them
.”

He looked up, his eyes brimming with monsoon rains, like the inundated rice paddies surrounding the temple. He dared not blink or say more. I had never seen him so sad, but I couldn’t comfort him. I felt only my own sorrow. I thought only of myself. “Take me with you then,” I pleaded.

“Raami, my temple—,” he started to say, but stopped, his voice choked.

“If you leave me here,” I reasoned, “I will suffer, my heart will hurt.” Yet I couldn’t imagine my heart hurting more than it did now. Still, I tried to hang on. “Don’t go yet—I want to hear another story. Tell me a story!”

He flinched and turned away, his whole body shaking.

“Please—one last story.
Please, Papa.
”

•  •  •

I seized the fire of grief and flung it in every direction, at every person who came near me. I refused to speak to Big Uncle because it was he who had held me in place that morning when I tried to run after Papa as the caravan of oxcarts started to move away from the temple. Mr. Virak’s wife had done just that—she ran and pleaded with a young soldier who, whether out of pity or impatience, stopped the oxcart her husband was in and allowed her to join him. But not Big Uncle. His powerful embrace had borne me back to the classroom, undeterred by my tears and pleas, my kicking and screaming.
I want to go with Papa! Let me go! I hate you! I hate you—you big
yiak
!
Even as I bit and scratched him, he would not let me go. He’d only held me tighter. Now I resented his enormous presence, which, I felt, was somehow supposed to make up for Papa’s absence. When the others—Tata, Auntie India, and Grandmother Queen—tried to comfort me, I turned my back to them, shrinking from their caresses and tender words, ignoring their shock and pain, unable to admit they might be reaching out to comfort themselves as much as me. I kicked and elbowed the twins when, wrestling on the floor, they rolled too close to me. I whacked Radana’s arms when she extended them out in an offer of a hug. Only Mama left me alone, as if sensing that something ductile and tender had broken inside of me.

Words gave him wings, he had said. Not solace.
Wings
. These, I realized, he’d severed and handed to me so I could continue my flight.

Without Papa, I was suspended in numbness, drifting to and fro, as if this sorrow, which was like no other I’d known, had weight and mass exceeding my body. It was a complete entity, a shadow-like presence that
sat and walked beside me, assuming its place as my new and abiding companion.

I went on, anguishing against the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, while holding on to my father the only way I could—by believing that his spirit had soared to the sky, and there he resided, ethereal and elusive as the moonlight. Eternal, free. At last.

fourteen

T
he following weeks passed in a blur as the Kamaphibal fervently sought to destroy our old world in order to create a new one, as they sent soldiers to unmask people’s backgrounds—their education, jobs, social milieu—and decided who was good and who was bad, who would merit induction and who elimination. I didn’t understand the reason for all the coming and going, the endless summoning and separation. No one did. No one saw through the coded rhetoric of solidarity and brotherly love to a deeply indoctrinated belief that
anyone
could be an enemy. At first the enemy was the intellectuals, diplomats, doctors, pilots and engineers, policemen and military officers, those of rank and reputation. Then the enemy was the office clerks, technicians, palace servants, taxi drivers, people with
mok robar civilai
—“modern professions”—which would include almost everyone at the temple, as the majority of us were from the city. Those who didn’t lie and assume a new identity were called and brought out into the open, like rabbits forced from their holes. Then their families were given the choice to either follow them or remain at the temple and wait for their return. But because it was never clear when that would be—this “return”—or what it meant in the first place to “join” the Revolution or to be “wanted” by the Organization, most families chose to go, believing that, whatever fate had in store for them, at least they would face it together.

As they left, others came, not just from Phnom Penh but from all
over the country, sometimes in a convoy of trucks, sometimes in a caravan of oxcarts. Each time I’d rush from the room or wherever I happened to be hiding and elbow my way through the throngs, hoping I’d find Papa among the new arrivals. My heart would leap when I caught a glimpse of a shirt that looked like one of his, hair that greyed at the temples, shoulders that seemed capable of bearing the weight of a mountain. But it was never him. No one had news of him. No one cared. Everyone had their own losses to tend to.

As for the new arrivals, each group seemed more dispossessed and desperate than the last. Their ordeals seemed to have hardened them, clouded their vision, and numbed their sensibility so that sometimes they appeared not to know right from wrong. They pushed aside statues of gods and guardian spirits and laid claim to the prayer hall, the monks’ sleeping quarters, the dharma pavilion, and even the heretofore unviolated sanctity of the meditation pavilion. No place was off-limits, no nook or niche sacred, left untouched by needs. Two families fought over the ground directly beneath the Walking Buddha near the entrance, each pushing for a share of the space, while the statue remained upright, staring peacefully ahead, indifferent to the squabble. Once a haven, the temple now looked like a dumping ground, littered with trash and tragedies. People exchanged personal stories of loss and death as they would food items and articles of clothing.
Our home was torched. My parents were old—the journey was too much for them
. . . One ordeal gave companionship to another, and in this way everyone accepted the fact that they were not alone, that this awfulness was universal, inescapable.

As for our family, we kept to ourselves. We never spoke of our loss to anyone. We had a sense—a need to believe—that Papa hadn’t entirely disappeared. His presence, amorphous like water from a tipped glass, seeped into everything, into all we said and did, into our stillness and silence, our split and splintered selves. Big Uncle became almost like two people, one smiling and lighthearted when he was with the family, and another grave and introspective when thinking himself alone, unobserved. He would play with Radana and the twins, rousing them
from sleep with tickles, letting them bounce on him among the pillows and blankets. He’d give them rides on his back until the sound of their laughter filled the room so that for a brief second or two I forgot where we were, thinking ourselves safely back home. He would joke during mealtimes about giving up coffee, abstaining from this or that food he knew we didn’t have. Or he’d contemplate fasting a whole day at a time, like a monk would when taking on certain precepts. Once, feeling the overgrown thickness of his hair, he pondered out loud, “Do you know why monks and nuns shave their heads?” When no one responded, he went on obliquely, talking to himself, “If one begs the gods for a miracle, I was told, one should do so with naked humility. Stripped of any human pride. Vanity.” He ran his hand through the disheveled mane. “Maybe I should shave my head. Offer my humility for his return.”