In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “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

  It 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.

  From her corner, Tata watched the whole scene with wide-eyed dismay, as if death, like a stranger uprooted and misplaced, had appeared out of nowhere and taken up residence with us, competing for its shared space in this refuge already haunted by so many ghosts. “This can’t be real,” she murmured to herself. “I can’t be here.”

  A crowd had gathered. Mr. Virak crouched in the back corner of his room, his head in his arms, his body curled into a ball. Papa and Big Uncle had tried to take him outside, get him away from the screams of his wife, the stillness of his dead child, but he rejected them, with a silence so resolute that it now hardened him in his corner like an immovable boulder. He wanted to speak to no one. No one could possibly understand his grief. I wanted to tell him I understood. Not his grief, but the cruelty of the gods. How could they give a gift they themselves couldn’t bear to part with?

  There was a stir from the crowd near the doorway. The musician, dressed in black pants and the white shirt of an achar, came into the room holding not his bamboo flute but three sticks of incense and a large bronze bowl filled with water and lotus petals.

  “It’s time, my dear,” he said, kneeling down on the mat beside Mr. Virak’s wife. “It’s time to let him go.”

  As one familiar with all the rituals of death, he would be the funerary achar. He would give the baby the ceremony he hadn’t been able to hold for his own wife when she died on the road. “We must free our ghosts,” he murmured softly, more to himself, to the ghost of his wife sitting beside him, perhaps. “May you find peace in your journey.” He then turned toward the doorway, nodding at Papa and Big Uncle.

  They came in, carrying a coffin, so small it looked like a desk drawer. The crowd moaned, letting escape what the baby had swallowed in half a breath.

  • • •

  His was my first funeral. The elderly women washed and dressed him, wrapped his tiny body in one of Mr. Virak’s white dress shirts, which, in the absence of a proper cotton sheet, served as the baby’s funerary shroud. The women combed his hair, wetting it with water from the bronze bowl the musician had brought in, rewetting it several times more so the downy tufts would stay in place. But at the crest where two topknots whorled like a pair of snails, the strands kept springing up like young rice shoots. How strange, I thought, that his hair seemed the only part of him still alive, still fighting to live. Stranger still that a person’s breath, indiscernible and weightless, should wield such influence over the body, that it had made the baby shake his legs and his arms in delight at the sight of his mother’s face, and that without it, he should lie unaffected by her immense grief, rigid in his breathlessness, eyes staring past this world to another.

  When the women finished preparing him, they gave the tiny white bundle to Mr. Virak. He cradled the corpse and, sprinkling it with water from the bronze bowl in a symbolic ablution, murmured, “I, your father, who have loved you in this life, cleanse you of your karma, release you from your suffering, so that you may be free to choose your own path.” He handed the baby to his wife and she repeated his gesture and words.

  Tears welled up in my eyes, and I remembered Om Bao, how I’d wondered what it was like to mourn her absence, what mourning was. A lifetime of sorrow and regrets, expressed in this single moment, in a mother’s hiccupping sob that echoed her child’s dying breath.

  The musician took the baby from Mr. Virak’s wife and placed him in the makeshift coffin, fashioned out of the wood from a desk found among the piles at the back of the temple. He closed the lid. I saw the words scratched on top in a child’s handwriting: Knowing comes from learning, finding from seeking.

  What was left to find? Everything was lost in that coffin. I began to feel anger at the gods for grabbing the smallest person they could find and claiming him as theirs. Who said they alone had the right to love a child? Who said they alone could love? Even a person as small as Radana could love another. She blew kisses at the coffin as it was being carried from the r
oom, wondering, “Baby? Mama, baby?” Mama, nodding, replied, “Yes, darling. Baby’s sleeping. Say goodnight to baby.” She held Radana tighter in her arms, as if to say no gods or ghosts, however powerful, could ever match a mother’s fierce attachment to her young.

  Outside, a mound of twigs and palm fronds was set up in the middle of the school grounds. It was an unusual spot for a funeral pyre but, earlier, from his depth of silence, Mr. Virak had emerged and voiced this one request—that the corpse of his baby be immolated here—as if by witnessing it burn in front of him, in the very place where his child had lived, he would finally be convinced of the baby’s death.

  A monk who could no longer be a monk presided over the funeral. I remembered he’d arrived that same day with Mr. Virak, and how the others had moved around him with deference, how the elders had called him “Wise Teacher,” even though he looked to be no more than thirty. He wore now what he’d worn the day of his arrival—a shirt and a pair of trousers, layman’s attire—and his once smoothly shaven head bristled with new growth. Without his saffron robe he seemed naked, vulnerable, stripped of the invincibility I’d always thought monks possessed.

  “Even as a lotus, endowed with beauty, fragrance, and color must fade,” he intoned, his left arm cradling the bronze bowl the musician had given him, his right hand stirring the water with a sprig of jasmine blossoms, “so must our body wither away, become nothing.” He sprinkled the water on the small coffin. “Anicca vatta sankhara; impermanence is the condition of all sentient existences. Nothing stays, nothing lasts, and we who cling and desire, we are caught in an endless cycle of births and rebirths, in the wheel of samsara.” He circled the funeral pyre, sprinkling water on the closed coffin, the ground around it, the bowed heads of mourners gathered in small clusters around him. “Cattari ariya saccani . . .” His voice took on the resonance of a hundred monks chanting.

  When he came to the grieving parents, he hesitated, the corner of his lips quivering, as if unsure what to say. Then he did something unusual, forbidden of a monk—he reached out and touched his worshipper. “Your grief will fade,” he said, his hand on Mr. Virak’s shoulder, speaking to him not as a monk but as a sharer of this sorrow. “It’s hard to believe this now, my friend”—his steady gaze held Mr. Virak’s glistened one—“but it will wither and, like a flower, leave behind always a seed of possibility.”

  He gave a slight nod to the musician, who with a lighter from his pocket knelt down and lit the funeral pyre. The desk-coffin, with the baby inside, burst into flame. Mr. Virak and his wife fell to the ground, weeping over the hopscotch board, one silently, the other loudly. A chorus of mourners joined them. An endless lullaby of tears.

  • • •

  The funeral fire was still burning when a group of Revolutionary soldiers came and called an evening meeting. Some of the children asked me to play hopscotch with them, but there was no room to play. The funeral mound had covered up the hopscotch board. Embers glowed and sparks flew about in the air, like fireflies gathered to mourn as we did. Only the Revolutionary soldiers seemed enthusiastic, fervent. “The Organization knows who you are! Who did what, who was rich and who was poor, who lived in a villa and who lived on the street, who is Cambodian and who is a foreign spy! The Organization has eyes and ears like a pineapple! There’s no reason to lie, to hide! You must come out! Reveal yourself!”

  The Organization was blind, I thought. Deaf even. He threatened and commanded, sent his shadows to enthuse and proclaim when he ought to tell them to weep and mourn, or, at the very least, be silent. Did he not know this was a funeral?

  “Give yourself to the Revolution! Army officers, engineers, doctors, and diplomats! Those who held positions of any kind in the old regime! Come forward!”

  Only the voices of ghosts were more ubiquitous, insistent. I heard them commiserating all around me. They must have come out of the cheddays. I looked up at the stupa, its long golden spire that in the porous light of dusk resembled a fishing rod dropped from the sky. We got another one! Is it a fish? A tadpole? No, a seed. A seed of possibility . . . They sang and chanted, welcoming the baby back to their world. We, who mistakenly gave you away, now reclaim you as one of our own.

  “You must come forward! You must give yourselves to the country! To the glorious cause of the Revolution! Come forward!”

  No one went. A baby had died. It was enough leaving for one day.

  • • •

  “Look, Raami,” Papa said, pointing at the moon high above us. “It’s the second moon of the Lunar New Year.” He counted the dates on his fingers. “And a full one, no less. No wonder it’s so bright. Indeed, the Tiger must retreat and make way for the Rabbit.”

  We’d come out to sit on the exposed roots of the banyan in front of our room, and even though it was late, the night was luminous, as if in mourning it had abandoned its habitual black and swathed itself in funerary white.

  “It wasn’t full last night,” I mumbled, feeling listless and hollowed, like I’d been on a long walk to nowhere. Inside, everyone had collapsed in exhaustion and numbness. “Is it even the same moon?”

  Of course it was. I knew this, but it didn’t seem right to say what I really thought—that the night was awash with light not from the moon alone but also from the funeral pyre, which had settled now into an ashen glow, as if a star had fallen and landed in the middle of the school grounds, incinerating everything in its path. The air, tinged with an acrid odor, reminded me of one time in Phnom Penh when a chieeng chock lizard had fallen from the wall of the cooking pavilion into Om Bao’s earthen brazier, scorching in flames, and for a whole day I hadn’t been able to eat because everything had smelled of charred flesh.

  “Doesn’t seem like it, does it?” Papa murmured, his eyes still on the moon. “Things are moving so fast, Raami, it hardly seems like the same day, the same world we woke up to.”

  Yes, it was hard to believe that only a single day had passed since we last looked at the moon, when it played hide-and-seek with us as Papa told me the story of his friend Sambath, and in that short span a child had lived and died, his death more felt than his life. I marveled at how so little a person could leave a void so huge as to make it seem like whole weeks had been sucked away, burned to cinder inside that coffin.

  “But yes, it is the same moon,” Papa continued, his voice as distant as that bright white countenance staring down at us. “Always, from wherever we look, it’s the same moon.” He paused, swallowing. “You know, I was born in the Year of the Tiger, 1938. Now I’m thirty-seven—an old man to you, I’m sure!” He let out a soft chuckle. Then, turning to face me, he said, “In one of his countless reincarnations, the Buddha was Tunsai Bodhisat—a bodhisattva, an enlightened being, in the guise of a little rabbit.”

  A rabbit Buddha?

  “One night during the full moon”—Papa’s voice wove a wispy trail around my head, the contour of another tale—“Indra decided to transform himself into an old Brahmin and test Tunsai Bodhisat for his kindness to determine whether the rabbit would merit a better rebirth. I’m so hungry, little one, he said to the rabbit. Would you not offer yourself as food to me? Tunsai Bodhisat, filled with compassion for this emaciated ascetic, agreed. He built a fire, shook his body free of all the tiny fleas and insects that clung to his fur, and jumped into the roaring flames. But just as he did so, Indra rushed to save him, seizing his spirit, and flew him off to the moon, where he carved a figure of Tunsai Bodhisat on its luminous surface. Henceforth, Indra told the rabbit, the world shall know of your kind deed.”

  Papa smiled and lifted his gaze to the sky again. “That’s why, Raami, when we look at the full moon, we see a rabbit!”

  I searched now for the filmy rabbit-shaped etching Milk Mother had taught me to decipher in that orb of light. She had her own story, though, for why the rabbit was there, why it always looked like he was bending over a fire, tending it. He’s the keeper of the Eternal Flame, she told me. Now I wondered if the rabbit wasn’t tending his own
funeral fire.

  “When the sky is dark, when all around us is black and hopeless, the moon is our only light,” said Papa, cutting into my thoughts. “I should like to go to the moon. Raami . . .” He lowered his gaze to me, his lips parted as if he was about to say more.

  I waited. He blinked and turned away. I kept quiet, sensing what he couldn’t explain—that death is a passing, a journey from here to there, and sometimes it can lead us to a better place. The baby’s body may have been eaten away by flames but his spirit had gone to the moon, and there, high in the sky, he would be out of harm’s reach. Papa needed not explain everything to me. Some things are obvious, like wanting to escape, to be free of pain and sorrow. I wished him to know this, to know that I understood.

  “Me too,” I said. “I should also like to go to the moon.”

  But my unease remained. Something was not right. When I looked up at the sky again, I realized I couldn’t see what Papa wanted me to see. I was no poet. I didn’t have his vision to divine in the illuminated sphere of the full moon a metaphor for hope. I saw instead a huge, gaping hole in the sky into which he might disappear.

  • • •

  The moon came and went, but we remained where we were, bound to this enclave of the disappeared. I began to cling to Papa, terrified that somewhere glowered an untrusting Indra, who would indiscriminately pick him from a crowd and put him through some vague trial, which would inevitably result in me losing him. I’d trail his every step and watch his every move, wary of those who might be sent to whisk him away. When he got up to go anywhere, I’d rush to accompany him, often clutching his hand so tight he winced, perhaps regretting he’d told me too much too soon, or perhaps too little too late. One day when I accompanied him to town, we learned that the old sweeper, along with a truckload of Rolork Meas’s more affluent residents—landowners, former town officials and bureaucrats, petty merchants—had been relocated to another place. Where exactly our friend was relocated to, or why—since he obviously did not belong in any of these categories—no one knew for certain, and none of the townsfolk were willing to say out loud what they felt or knew. Perhaps they were afraid the same fate would befall them. We could only speculate. When Papa tried to find out more from the Revolutionary soldiers doing rounds at the temple, one of them told him matter-of-factly, “If you’re too rooted, you must be yanked out and planted elsewhere.”