In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “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

  It 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 n
ot 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.

  “So when Radana got sick, this was all I could think of—she did not have your strength, your resilience. She had never been sick, really sick. I didn’t know if she would survive malaria, as you had survived polio. Watching her, seeing how she grew weaker and weaker, I believed she would die.

  “In this sense I’ve loved you more than I loved your sister, because even though you are broken and imperfect I never wavered in my belief that you belong only to me. You are mine to love and hold even as my world breaks around me, even as everything is ripped from my heart.

  “I have no stories to tell you, Raami. There is only this reality—when your sister died, I wanted to die with her. But I fought to live. I live because of you—for you. I’ve chosen you over Radana.”

  A lump formed in my throat. For so long I had envied her closeness to my sister, believing their bond stemmed from their physical resemblance, their shared loveliness. Now I saw her beauty for what it was—a forbearance against loss, her own stolen childhood. All these years she had drawn strength from silence, while I’d sought solace in words. I swallowed my remorse and held her tighter.

  “There may be times when I cannot look at you, speak with you. But you ought to know that in you I see myself, in you I see my horrible grief. We’re not so different, you and I.”

  How could that be? She’d lived a whole life already—at eighteen she married Papa, who was ten years older, then gave birth to me and Radana, mourned the death of my sister, and now faced the possibility of losing me. Had she really suspected all along my sister would die?

  I remembered that shortly after Radana was born I’d accompanied Mama to see a fortune-teller who told her Radana wasn’t meant to be. What? Mama was flabbergasted. The fortune-teller, unperturbed, went on to suggest that we give Radana away temporarily to relatives to fool the gods—to protect my sister. Mama, furious, stormed out of the parlor, forgetting to take me with her. She came back soon after, but in the brief time she was gone, the fortune-teller had turned to me and said, You are the daughter closest to your mother’s heart. I was only five then, but with the indignation of a grown woman, I’d responded, You are lying! We will not pay you!

  But now it seemed to me the fortune-teller had glimpsed something we couldn’t have seen—the nearness of Mama’s grief to mine.

  • • •

  One day out of the blue, we were called to Bong Sok’s house for a meeting with the head of the Kamaphibal himself. As we entered the compound, I imagined the landowner’s ghost walking beside me, taking in every detail of his erstwhile existence. Coconuts and freshly harvested sugarcane stalks and kapok pods sprawled across the ground beneath the house, resembling disembodied heads and limbs. Sacks of rice and corn and cassavas lined the stairway like squat headless sentries. Amidst the chronic scarcity and deprivation, this concentrated cluster of abundance seemed grotesque and filled me with nausea, and I had the distinct impression I was walking into an open grave where the ground was strewn with the belongings of the dead. From somewhere behind the house, among the trees and bushes, I heard the murmur of small voices—a boy and a girl laughing, whispering back and forth, watching us perhaps, discussing what would happen—but I dared not look for fear of seeing the ghosts of the landowner’s children. I kept my gaze on the open doorway and followed Mama up the stairway, swallowing nervously, pushing down the urge to lean over the wooden railing and retch from fear. Mama’s well-paced steps, her practiced calm, as if she knew what was coming, frightened me even more.

  Inside, ruffle-fringed curtains, once perhaps a beautiful deep red but now dulled to an earthy brown, draped the latticed windows. Bong Sok and the Fat One stood barefoot on a straw mat in the middle of an otherwise empty room. Dressed in the usual Revolutionary black, they resembled a pair of statues that only came to life in the presence of another human being. Upon our entering the house, they stirred, moving their shoulders and limbs ever so slightly, but their postures remained erect, faces expressionless. They both acknowledged Mama with a solemn nod. Then Bong Sok bent down so that his head was at the same level as mine and, with his hand resting on my shoulder, examined me with his hooded eyes. “What is your name, little comrade?” he soughed.

  “R-Raami,” I stammered.

  “What a pretty name. I’d like to remember it. Can you spell it for me?”

  Before I could open my mouth, Mama cleared her throat and asked, “May I have some water?”

  Bong Sok signaled to the Fat One. As she disappeared to the back of the house, he sat down on the straw mat, gesturing for us to do the same. “You know, often children make better Revolutionaries than we adults. They are honest. Isn’t that right, Comrade Raami? Could you spell your name for me? It’s very unusual. It doesn’t sound Khmer. Perhaps it’s French? Or maybe English.”

  I opened my mouth, but once again Mama cut in, “They are good storytellers.”

  “Excuse me?” Bong Sok raised an eyebrow.

  “Children are good storytellers.” Mama forced a smile. “Like this one. She has a story for everything.”

  “You must know a lot about stories then,” the Fat One said, coming back into the room, bearing a coconut bowl of water, which she handed to Mama.

  “Thank you,” Mama said, and, instead of drinking it herself, gave it to me. I drank and handed the bowl back to her. After all the trouble of asking for it, she herself barely took a sip.

  “Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, Comrade Aana?” said the Fat One.

  “I’m a Revolutionary—”

  “Don’t play games with us, Comrade. Really, where were you educated, abroad or in our country?”

  “I never had any schooling,” Mama answered calmly. “I was a servant.”

  Bong Sok signaled his wife with a look for her to stop with the questioning. It was his job to interrogate and instill fear. “You don’t know how to read or write then?” he aske
d.

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Yes—I mean no, not at all.”

  “Comrade Raami, is this woman your real mother?”

  I looked at Mama. Yes, she’s my mother, and she’s real. I nodded.

  “Was she a servant—a nanny?”

  I nodded again. Lie even when you’re scared—especially when you’re scared.

  “What did she do?”

  “She fed us milk.”

  “She fed who milk?”

  “Us—me and Radana.”

  “Don’t you mean them—the children your mother looked after?”

  I nodded. “Them too.”

  “I nursed my mistress’s children as well as my own daughters,” Mama explained.

  Bong Sok took something out of his pocket. It was the Omega. He pushed it toward Mama. “Can you tell me what this all means?”

  “If I knew how to read a foreign language,” Mama said, without so much as a glance at the watch, “perhaps I could.”

  “And you know this is a foreign language?” he asked.

  “No, I assumed it is since . . . since I can’t recognize any of the letters.”

  “Let me tell you then what it says: Omega, Automatic, Chronometer, Officially Certified, Constellation, Swiss Made, and, as you told my wife—but for the life of me I can’t find it written anywhere on the watch—Nothing can penetrate it, not water, not tears . . .” He paused, observing her from beneath his hooded lids. “I wouldn’t know, but I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. After all, it’s your watch, and you should know whether or not it’s water resistant. You should also know that a servant couldn’t possibly have owned such a valuable foreign instrument.”

  Again, he observed Mama, then after a moment, “Do you know how to read and write Khmer, Comrade Aana? You certainly know some English, may even be fluent in French, as often is the case with people of your class.”

  “No, I . . .,” Mama stumbled.