In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  This morning, along with some grasshoppers, I found an egg—a duck egg it looked like, white and large—in the sand along the river. Deliriously happy, I ran back to the villa, started a fire, and perched the kettle on top to boil. While waiting for the egg to cook, I skewered the grasshoppers on a bamboo stick and held it over the flames. Critters like these were plentiful in all seasons. They hopped around wildly everywhere and belonged to no one in particular. I could cook them in the open.

  The water gurgled and, several minutes later, I decided the egg was cooked. I tipped the kettle, spilling some hot water onto the ground, and rolled the egg out with a stick. Then, once it’d cooled enough, I peeled off the shell and carried the steaming egg—hard and polished—in the hem of my shirt, climbing the stairs to Grandmother Queen. I sat her up and handed her the egg. But she seemed unable to discern what it was. She stared at it.

  “It’s food,” I whispered. “Eat it.”

  She looked at me, wincing, from hunger or memory I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps, I imagined, she was remembering a time when we had plenty, when every meal was a feast.

  Again I told her, “You have to eat.”

  She blinked and her eyes clouded over, pain and memory dissolving into blankness. I sighed and began to feed her, starting with pieces of rubbery white. When I got to the beautiful, almost saffron yoke, I hesitated, imagining its rich velvety texture coating my tongue, melting in my throat.

  I swallowed hard and, gathering my resolve, popped a roasted grasshopper into my mouth instead—wings, legs, and all.

  Just as we finished eating, the bronze bell sounded, echoing through the town, announcing work time. “I have to go now,” I said, laying her back down on the mat. “I’ll be back in the afternoon. I’ll bring you your meal then.”

  This time she seemed to understand and nodded. I dashed off.

  At the town center, I met up with other children, the few who remained in town. They were all small, all under the age of six, assuming they or their parents hadn’t lied. Anyone older would’ve been placed in mobile work brigades or sent to work alongside the grown-ups. I was the exception because of my polio, which, time and again, had proven a blessing in disguise. I could stay with the group or go off on my own. As long as I worked, it didn’t matter.

  The work itself varied throughout the day: collecting sticks and kindling in the morning, gathering plants and vines for weaving in the afternoon, beating palm fronds into pulp fibers for rope making in the evening. This morning the group would be picking wild morning glory, said the soldier in charge of us. The communal kitchen needed more of it to feed everyone. “To feed all of you,” he emphasized, scowling at the tiny faces looking up at him. “So you should gather as much as you can. The more you pick the more you’ll have to eat. Understand?” Little heads nodded in response. The soldiers then led us down the incline behind the town center and told us to disperse along the shore of the river.

  Like critters and crickets, wild morning glory existed in abundance, even in seemingly dry soil, as long as there was a hint of water underneath. I found a patch of it growing in a crater of rainwater, snapped off a few stems at a time, and stuffed them in a kroma slung across my chest like a satchel. The smaller children followed my example, pinching the plants where they broke most easily and naturally. A little girl with wispy reddish hair began stealing bites of the tips whenever the soldier wasn’t watching. Her older brother, who didn’t seem much bigger, came across a leaf full of tiny snails, plucked it, and furtively pushed the whole thing into the little girl’s mouth. Tears stung my eyes as I thought of Radana. I turned away from them and kept working.

  Seeing that we didn’t much need his guidance, the soldier went to sit under the shade of a tree, pulled his cap down over his eyes, and, in no time at all, dozed off, lulled by the cool breeze from the river and the growing heat of the sun from above.

  Around noon the bronze bell rang again, signaling our first meal of the day. We tightened the kromas across our chests, now weighed down by morning glory, and, with as much speed as we could muster, propelled ourselves up the incline.

  The town center also served as the communal mess, with bamboo tables and chairs in the front and the roughly constructed giant earthen braziers and soot-blackened cauldrons in the back. We dumped our loads into a pile on the ground, quickly lined up in front of the serving table, and were each handed a plate of rice soaked in muddy-looking broth and overcooked greens. Again, it was morning glory soup. But we were too hungry to care. Besides, the alternative was nothing.

  I brought my plate to the children’s table and, under the soggy mess of the stringy vegetable, found a fish the size of a child’s palm! I looked up, my heart palpitating wildly. The other children saw it and licked their lips, but the expression on my face must have told them if they dared touch it, I’d stab their hands with my spoon.

  I broke up the rice and spread it out in my plate to make it look full. I put the fish to one side, saving it for last, and began to eat the soaked rice first. When I felt the others still eyeing the fish, I pulled my plate close to my chest and put my arm around it, while I continued to eat the rice in silence, head lowered to avoid their stares. Finally, after realizing they weren’t going to get any, the others quickly finished their food and sulked off to wash their plates and spoons. The last person to finish was responsible for cleaning up the table and benches. That was the rule. But I didn’t care, as long as I could eat in peace. I finished the last spoonful of rice.

  And now the fish! Suddenly I felt a pair of eyes on me. I looked up and saw a woman sitting one table over. She looked like she had a watermelon hidden inside her shirt. She stared at my plate and swallowed, stared and swallowed. I didn’t like it.

  “Are you going to eat that?” the woman asked, caressing her pregnant stomach.

  I made no response.

  Noticing me staring at her belly, she said, “I’ll be glad when the child is born. He’ll get his own share. Right now we’re counted as one person, and he gets all the food.” She smiled, and a tear rolled down her cheek to the corner of her lips. She quickly wiped it away. “Sorry.” She tried to laugh it off. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Still I said nothing.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  My heart felt weak, and my stomach started to whimper. Hers was moaning. I knew the sound. I remembered it. It was Radana the night before she died, wanting my sugared cassava.

  “Here I am a grown woman trying to lure food from a child.”

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got up and left the fish for her, all the while hating myself for doing it.

  As I walked back to the villa to bring Grandmother Queen her ration, I realized what it was that had prevented me from keeping the fish for myself—the thought that if hunger could endure even in death, I never wanted it to reincarnate, to repeat itself in anyone.

  • • •

  Life went on, even as food diminished. Harvest came and I was assigned to be a human scarecrow. “You seem old enough,” Mouk said at a meeting one evening, targeting me. “You can tend some fields on your own. How old are you?”

  “I-I don’t know,” I stuttered and, wanting to convince him I wasn’t lying, I almost blurted out, Before the Revolution I was seven, but thought better of it.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re the one with the pretty mother,” he said, his scar twitching. “Where is she?”

  “You sent her away, her and my father. I-I don’t know where they are.”

  He sharpened his gaze.

  “Can I go now?” I asked, my back breaking into a cold sweat.

  He waved me away.

  The next morning, I got up at dawn and caught a ride in an oxcart to the rice fields on the outskirts of town. The driver dropped me at a tiny hut, said he would be back to pick me up in the evening, and then set off to where groups of people had begun harvesting the rice, their dark silhouettes scattered across the vas
t expanse.

  I lowered myself onto the dirt floor in the middle of the hut, like a guardian spirit looking out at the world, this abundance I’d procured. Before me the rice rippled and rolled like a sea of liquid gold, chanting, Long grains short grains, fat grains sticky grains, grains that smell like monsoon rains. In the distance the black figures rose and bent, rose and bent as they harvested the rice, moving farther away. “They look like animals,” I mumbled to myself. “Like water buffaloes roaming the fields.”

  A squawk suddenly rose from the middle of the paddies. I stood up and hollered, more to keep myself from being frightened than to frighten: “I’m a scarecrow! Shoo, shoo, go away, you stupid crow!” I gave a thunderous clap. “I said go away, you stupid bird!”

  The crow squawked again, followed by another and another, and soon it became obvious I was outnumbered. “They’re everywhere,” I gasped. “Now what?” I asked and answered my own question. “Go chase them. You can’t just stand here and holler.”

  I ran along the dikes, throwing sticks and pebbles into the fields, making all sorts of noise. The crows squawked and flapped their wings angrily as if I were the intruder. I ran this way and that. One flock flew up and another settled back down into the fields. It was impossible to keep them away. They kept coming, whole platoons of them.

  After a while, I gave up. I’d had enough! Who cared if they ate all the rice? It wasn’t as if I would get it by keeping them away.

  Huffing and puffing, I lowered myself onto the dike and tried to catch my breath. In front of me, a crow was pecking at a cluster of grains, not a bit afraid. “Thief!” I hurled a pebble at it. It squawked and flew to another part of the fields. “I’ll fry you alive!”

  A warm breeze blew, and the rice swayed and danced. It became quiet, peaceful. I closed my eyes and imagined I had the world to myself . . .

  When I opened them again, I saw my opportunity. I walked into the middle of one of the paddies, into the soft golden stalks that came up as high as my shoulders. I looked around to make sure there were no Revolutionary soldiers or Secret Guards pacing the dikes anywhere nearby. Far away, black figures continued their work, bending and rising, bending and rising, like insects on the horizon. “Go ahead,” I whispered to myself. “No one will see you. Eat some.”

  Head lowered, I began nibbling the rice right off the stems. I spat out the husks and chewed the tender raw grains. They tasted chalky but sweet, a little like stale sugar. I thought of Mama and Big Uncle. Where were they now?

  A squawk from somewhere above me interrupted my wandering. I tilted my head back, expecting to see a crow. Instead, high in the clear white sky, a vulture was circling above a lone palm tree several yards away at the dike junction. I thought of Pok and how he had said that vultures could smell death long before it happened. I thought of Radana and the vultures that circled Pok and Mae’s crisscrossed palms. I wondered who this vulture was coming for now. Me?

  I didn’t care. I was enjoying the rice. I watched the giant bird, following the circular path of its flight. I thought of Papa. His death. What it might have been like. It was the first time I’d permitted myself to think of his absence as such. A death.

  Suddenly the vulture swooped down and nestled in the fronds of the palm tree. I could feel it watching me. But I wasn’t scared. I stuffed some more grains in my mouth. I looked for young, unripe grains that tasted soft and sun toasted, like green rice flakes, harvest’s first ombok. I should pocket some for Grandmother Queen.

  I kept eating until my stomach started to bloat, until it hurt as if I had eaten a handful of pebbles. If that vulture was coming for me, I thought, I was well fed. I was ready.

  twenty-seven

  The last of the cool dry wind blew, faint like a sigh, and it was gone. All the rice was harvested and every able body was sent off to build embankments and dig ditches in preparation yet again for the rainy season. The only ones left were people like Grandmother Queen and me, who were broken or damaged in some way. We were the leftovers, Mouk said. The useless odds and ends.

  With the rice cut and collected, I was no longer needed as a scarecrow. I returned to my duties around the town. The work of the Revolution was never done. There was always something—vegetables to plant, animals to raise, baskets and straw mats to weave. Even as my body dwindled to skin and bones, I was told I’d become big enough to work alongside the adults. In the mornings, I tended the communal garden, watering the vegetables and pulling out weeds. In the afternoons, I went from house to house and counted the animals, keeping track of every chicken and egg, making sure none was missing. I was a secret Secret Guard, Mouk said, and my main duty was to report everything to him. On the rare occasion when there was no spying to be done, I went along the shore of the river cutting bamboo and collecting vines for the weavings. Sometimes I would go with a small group. Other times I was allowed to wander by myself. Alone, I would sneak away to check on Grandmother Queen, making sure she was still moving and breathing, even as I knew the end was near.

  At the villa, a young woman—herself gravely ill but assigned to look after my grandmother during my absence—said she could no longer get Grandmother Queen to eat. “She just lies there. Still as a cor—”

  Corpse, she was about to say, but caught herself in time.

  She turned Grandmother Queen on her side to show me the huge festering welts on her back and buttocks. I held my breath, trying to keep the miasma of rotting flesh from entering my nostrils. She didn’t need to show me. I’d known of this decay, lived with it every day, slept beside it every night, grown used to it by now. Grandmother Queen’s clothes, the straw mat on which she lay, the pillow and blanket, the entire room reeked of it. Now I knew what it was—the odor of dying. Not of death, but the act of it, of your body giving up even as your mind fights to stay alive.

  The young woman stood up and said, coughing, “I’ll let you have a bit of time with her. Then we’ll have to let her go.” She left the room, heaving with her own sickness.

  “Grandmother,” I said, speaking into her death-embalmed face. She didn’t stir. I leaned in and whispered, “Grandmother Queen, it’s me.” Still no response.

  I tried again. “Mechas Mae”—speaking the royal language, testing the weight of it on my tongue—“it’s me. Arun . . . your son. I have Ayuravann with me.” I placed my hand on my heart. “Yes, he’s here with me. He’s safe.”

  She opened her eyes, just a sliver. “I know,” she murmured. “I see him.”

  “He’s come to take you back home.”

  She raised her bony hand and cupped my cheek, her thumb grazing my lips, wet and salty, and it was only then that I realized I’d been crying. My tears soaked her palm, and, as if she’d waited for this moment, for my tears to send her home, she pulled her hand back and, hugging it to her chest, closed her eyes.

  I scooted to the foot of the mat and, bending down, touched my head to her feet, the way my father would’ve done, the way we’d all been taught, bowing to the life that gave us ours, laying bare our gratitude. Three times—for Papa, for Radana, for the rest of my family. Finally one last time for myself. Then I got up and left.

  I went down to the river. I slept on the shore, covering myself with a banana leaf. When I woke again, the morning sky was burning, scathed with streaks of red as angry as the wounds on Grandmother Queen’s back. She was gone. She’d died sometime in the night, and by the time I returned to the villa, Mouk had sent his soldiers to cart her body away and dispose of it somewhere in the rice fields. She, like Radana, would fertilize the ground.

  All along I’d expected her death, but that she had died this way—without the comfort of her children—made me rage against her demise, against those who’d prolonged her suffering.

  • • •

  The next day I found Big Uncle waiting for me on the front steps of the villa. The sick young woman had sent him word to come and fetch me. I didn’t have to tell him what had happened. He knew. He’d seen Grandmother Queen’s death
long before it arrived.

  • • •

  We hitched a ride on a series of oxcarts we encountered along the way. In the late afternoon we arrived at the work camp, a remote and barren place in the middle of nowhere. Before us stood a naked mountain ridge, holding the sky on its back. Silent black figures weaved their way up and down the long, jagged slope, like ants building a giant anthill in expectation of a great downpour. At the bottom, more silent black figures rose and bent, breaking the earth with hoes and shovels. A funeral, I thought, feeling dizzy. Something must have died. I turned to Big Uncle and asked, “What are they burying?”

  “Everything . . .” he said, his voice muffled, faraway. “Everything . . . a whole civilization. Yes, that’s what we’re looking at. Buried civilization . . .”

  There was a ringing sound in my ears, and I wasn’t sure if I heard him right. “I thought it was a dragon,” I heard myself saying. “A dragon yiak.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Big Uncle murmured. “Or else we are burying ourselves. A people digging its own grave.” He gave me his hand. “Come, we have work to do.”

  • • •

  Thick curtains of dust rose up everywhere. All around us people had their heads and faces covered with kromas. I couldn’t tell who was who. There was no time to waste. No time to even look for Mama. A soldier handed Big Uncle a hoe and me a bangki, one of those bamboo baskets shaped like a half clamshell. While Big Uncle hoed, I pushed loose chunks of earth into the basket with my bare hands and feet. Workers came and traded their emptied baskets for the full ones. Revolutionary soldiers kept a close watch, making sure every hand and foot was moving, occupied in some task. No one looked up. No one talked. The sound of metal banging against the hard dried earth echoed across the sky.

  It was a sick sky. A sky burning with welts. Angry and red. The colors of rotting flesh, of dying and death, of one heaving last breath. Of rains that hadn’t come, and rains that came a long time ago.