In the Shadow of the Banyan (32 page)

“My baby!” Mama screamed again. “Give me back my baby!”

Pok came in and pulled me away, his body shielding my body, blocking me from Mama’s screaming—her shattering.

•  •  •

Later, I found refuge under the Sweetheart palms. I wanted to be alone, to hide from everyone, from the world. Pok came walking up the dirt road from the river, a fishing pole in one hand and two catfish strung on a leafy vine in the other. When he passed the cow by the haystacks he gave her a pat. She let out a plaintive “
Maaaw.
” She appeared like any other bovine, witless and uninterested, until she mooed, and only then you realized she was still grieving, capable of sustained sorrow, as if death, the awareness of it, is a universal consciousness, the
thor
that allows us to empathize with another that’s not of our own kind. The wooden charm Pok had carved and fastened around her neck with a rope hadn’t done one bit of good. It hung there, a constant reminder of the baby she’d lost, and, looking at her now, I wished for this grieving beast of burden a human disease—forgetfulness.

Pok nodded and moved on. I pulled back, pressing myself against one of the palms. I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to be with the palms. Their solitude spoke to mine, my sense of isolation. But Pok saw me. He came and sat down, his back against the other palm. For a minute or two we kept silent and avoided each other’s eyes. Then he tilted his head back and, looking up, said, “Do you know which is
thnoat oan
and which is
thnoat bong
?”

I said nothing.

“One morning that one grew out of a seed,” he went on, nodding at the palm I was leaning against. “Several mornings later this one peeped out.” He turned and tapped the one he was leaning on. “Also from the same seed. We separated them and planted them in these two spots, with enough distance between them so that when they got big their fronds wouldn’t overcrowd and they’d more likely bear fruits. But, the funny thing was, as they grew they kept leaning into each other, each year a little closer, until their trunks crisscrossed, as they are now. You see, we thought
of them as our children. Or at least, the spirits of the children we could’ve had, wished we had, and that’s why we called them
thnoat oan thnoat bong
.”

All this time I thought they were “sweethearts,” when I should’ve known
oan-bong
also means “younger-older siblings.”

“Now, it seems, one has stopped giving juice, and from the look of those fronds, it isn’t going to make it.” He paused, swallowing. “But the other, we hope, will push on.”

He let some minutes pass in silence, then, looking up again, said, “Those vultures! I’ve seen them for days now.” He untied the
kroma
that belted his shirt and swung at the air above us, as if this was enough to chase the vultures away. “You and your sister will always be connected. You were her older sister. You watched over her, you protected her—you did—the best you could, and now she will watch over you and protect you.”

“She’s dead.”

He got up and, with his trap and fish, went on his way. I felt worse. It wasn’t his fault. He was only trying to help.

I lay down on the grass and watched the vultures circling above me. I closed my eyes and imagined what it would feel like to just slip away and float to the sky.

•  •  •

Where’re you running to?

“Wake up, child! Wake up!”

I felt a hand shaking me. I opened my eyes and saw Mae’s face looking down at mine. “You could’ve been bitten by an animal,” she said, holding a torch. “You see how dark the night is? What are you still doing out here?”

I looked around, not knowing where I was. “Where is she?”

“What are you talking about? Where is
who
?”

“Radana.”

“You must’ve been dreaming.” She helped me up.

Where’re you running to?
That’s what her name sounds like in Khmer when you say it really fast—
Rad’na. Where’re you running to? Where are you hiding?
I’d dreamt we were playing hide-and-seek.

“Come, let’s get you inside,” Mae said, taking my hand and pulling me home.

I looked up at the night sky and saw a shooting star, and then a blinking one. Somewhere out there a child died and another was born.

•  •  •

Mae soaked a washcloth in a bowl of water and put it in Mama’s hand. Mama looked at it, as if not knowing what it was. Then slowly she brought it up to her face and rubbed her cheek with it, in the same spot again and again. As I prepared for bed I tried not to make any noise changing my shirt and pants. The last thing I wanted was to remind her I was here instead of Radana. She dropped the washcloth to the floor and lay down beside it. Mae felt her forehead. “You’re on fire,” she said and handed her a tiny yellow pill. “I found it among your clothes.”

Tetracycline,
I remembered.

Mama stared at the pill, whispering, “It was my hope till the end . . .”

“Take it,” Mae told her. “Maybe it’ll help you.”

Mama laughed. Mae lifted her head up, pried her mouth open, and placed the pill inside. Mama swallowed. She turned away from Mae and, seeing me, said, “You were my hope till the end, my hope till the end . . .”

“Let’s finish washing you up,” Mae said. “Here, lift your neck.”

“Please, leave me alone.”

“All right, child, I’ll let you be.”

“I want to die.”

•  •  •

In the morning Mama looked better. Her fever was gone. Outside on the bamboo platform, she stared at the porridge in front of her, stirring it with the spoon. Mae tried to get her to eat. “If you’re going to the fields, you need your strength.”

Mama began to sing softly to herself, the words unintelligible, but the melody was a lullaby, the one she’d often hummed to Radana when putting my sister to sleep. At the other end of the bamboo platform, Pok looked as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t. Mama’s pain muted him. It cut off his tongue.

“It’s a small village,” Mae finally said. “Someone might have seen where . . . where she was buried.”

“I don’t want to know!” Mama cut her off. “If I do, I’ll bury myself right beside her. I
don’t
want to know!” Then she went back to her singing.

It was the most sense she’d made since Radana died. It shook me to the core.

•  •  •

At the fields, the Fat One came up to her. “What does this say?” she asked, holding something out.

Mama looked at it. “Omega Constellation,” she said, her voice far away. “Once he left it in the rain and I worried it might’ve got ruined, but it’s water resistant . . .”

“Water resistant? What does that mean?”

“Nothing can penetrate it . . . not water . . . not tears . . .” She walked away from the Fat One, drifting past me like a column of smoke.

twenty-two

I
t was planting season again and, like waves rolling across the landscape, the rice paddies turned from ocher to jade. An eternity had passed since Radana’s death. While most people grouped themselves in teams of three or four as they planted, taking comfort in one another’s company amidst the vast expanse, Mama worked alone, cutting herself off from others, from any attempt to comfort her, as if her grief was her memorial to Radana, the stupa she’d erected in defiance of this renewed greenness. No one could reach her. No one could break through her hardness. She’d float from one place to the next, inaccessible inside her harvest-colored sorrow, like a dragonfly beautifully preserved in amber.

One evening, hoping to break through to her, I decided to run away. I hid in the bamboo groves behind the hut. I wanted Mama to worry. I wanted her to think I had fallen into the river and drowned. She’d be sorry. She’d cry, as she never could for Radana, with tears that, if collected, would run deeper than the river in front of me. I comforted myself with the thought of her inconsolable sorrow over me, wrapping it like a blanket around my body.

The sky darkened and my heart grew weak with the knowledge that I missed Mama more than she probably missed me. Night came. I got too scared. I abandoned my resolve to make her stop grieving and returned to the hut.

Mama was waiting on the steps. But when I came near her, she didn’t ask where I had gone. She wouldn’t even look at me, and her refusal to do so, her unbreakable silence, her every movement and stillness, confirmed my worst fear—that I was the child who lived, not the one she wanted. She got up and went inside.

I followed her into the hut, and when she lay down on the straw mat, I lay down beside her. I put my arm around her, just beneath her breastbones, where I felt her heart beating like a small bird throwing itself against the bars of a cage. I wanted her to feel love, its weight and touch, even if it was only mine, not Papa’s or Radana’s. “Mama?” I whispered.

It was the word that opened the floodgate.

“Like you, Raami, I grew up listening to stories. Every night my father would tell me the story of the Buddha. The Buddha was just a man, he said. A prince who one day left his wife and children to seek the answer to why things are the way they are, why people get sick and die and so on. My father told me that great learning comes at great cost, and sometimes you have to give up the one thing that is closest to your heart. One day, when I was nine or ten years old, my father left our family to become a Buddhist monk. He left my mother with seven children to care for and a huge land of coconut orchards to look after and maintain. My mother was overwhelmed. She was miserable, to say the least. One afternoon she took a torch and burned the whole land and, afterward, set herself on fire.

“Her death confused and angered me. I didn’t understand why she’d killed herself. I went to the temple where my father was a monk, to seek comfort in a father’s embrace. But my father held himself back, as a Buddhist monk was forbidden to touch a devotee, even if she was his own child. I turned my anger at him. I wanted to know why he’d left. ‘Remember the story of the Buddha,’ he said. That was it. That was all he said. And I was sent back home.

“For years, I tried looking for the answer in my father’s story—the answer to my mother’s unhappiness. Her anguish and pain. I didn’t understand. How could she have done this to herself, to us, to me? In the blink of an eye, it seemed, I lost everything—my home, my parents, and
my brothers and sisters, who were divided and sent to live with various relatives. Everything and everyone gone.

“When you were born, I wanted something different for you. I wanted to give you a reality that was magical and lovely. A reality different from mine. So I created for you a world rich with things you can see, touch, feel, and smell—the trees, the flowers, the birds, the butterflies, the carvings on the walls and balcony railings of our home. These things are real, Raami. Real and concrete. Stories are not. They’re made up—so I thought—to explain what is too painful to say in simple, plain language.

“I remember my parents fought all the time. They were not angry people but they were always angry around each other, with each other, and, as a child, I always thought it was because they were different from each other and they wanted different things. My mother wanted a life in the city among shops and restaurants. She wanted to be surrounded by countless neighbors and friends. My father was happiest when he was alone, away from everyone and everything. This was what I saw. What I didn’t see, and what my father could have told me in simple, plain language, was that he and my mother didn’t love each other. They never had, and this not only destroyed them but it destroyed us children, ripped our world asunder and tore us apart.

“So love, I decided, would surround my own children. I tried to build for you and your sister a world where everyone loved one another and where you both were loved in equal abundance. Love was your reality, and you should never have to make it up, search for it in obscure words, such as those uttered by my father—
Sometimes you have to give up the one thing that is closest to your heart.
No, these words didn’t mean anything. They didn’t tell me how much he loved my mother or how much he loved us children. Love should be plain and clear. It should exist in the everyday things you touch and see. At least this was what I thought . . .

“But love, I know now, hides in all sorts of places, exists in the most sorrowful corner of your heart, and you don’t know how much you really love someone until that person is gone. I realize, to my regret, that all this time I’ve loved one child more than I did another. No, not love in the sense that I would exchange you for Radana or the other way around. But
love in the sense of believing. You had polio and survived. You never got sick again, as if polio had given you immunity against all other diseases. Since then I’ve never wavered in my belief that you were born to live.

“But Radana was different. I secretly believed the gods lent her to me for my sorrow—the sorrow of seeing you walk and knowing that no one, no mother, will see you as beautiful as I see you, that your beauty was in your strength, in your ability to pick yourself up from a fall and walk again, as I’ve seen you do again and again, with the polio and with other things.