The living room was abandoned. The fountain out front dried up, leaving only the moody plaster swan, its skin peeled off at random spots, amidst the thorns of pygmy roses long devoured by weeds. The banana grove metamorphosed into a forest teeming with one hundred and eighty identical frogs that all had round warts on the tips of their fingers and sentimental eyes; as indistinguishable from one another as if they had been produced under strict quality control in a factory. The vegetable patch once tended by Pran became a metropolis of field mice, while the lost Dvaravati city Chareeya once set out to discover was buried forever, even deeper, under a new concrete road.
XVIII
The Colour Blind Painter
T he extravagant luncheons at Chareeya’s house had become a permanent fixture every Monday. Pran would arrive late in the morning to help her clean vegetables or pound curry paste, stealing glances at her as she shed tears for the death of an onion and being entertained by the spectacle of her bare-knuckle wrestling match with a salad. Her complicated cooking regime was dictated by a rigid protocol; the precise measurement of ingredients, like a scientist in a laboratory, alternated with the casual simplicity of a painter’s final touches. Then they would sit down and eat slowly and talk as time wore on and the afternoon turned into evening. Like good Italians, Chareeya said as she waved her hands in the air.
Despite the cosmopolitan exoticism of many of the dishes, there was also a homey, small-town sensibility manifested in Chareeya’s meals: a tom yam soup* ( Tom yam is a clear soup, usually seafood in a broth made from lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal or ginger, and chillies.) of various aromas and tastes that was unbound by any fixed routine, one bowl never the same as another, sometimes flavoured by tamarind leaves and other times by okra, bilimbi, madan, depending on what was flowering in the garden or available at the fresh market; wondrous chilli pastes concocted from an ever-changing list of ingredients, which made Pran wonder if there was anything in the world that couldn’t be ground into Thai chilli paste; and big plates piled with unidentified leaves that Chareeya would pick up and chew throughout the meal, like a giraffe.
After lunch, they would retire to the house and lounge on the peony-patterned cushion, listening to music, reading, or teasing the cat until he lost his temper so they could appease him by stroking his soft belly until he meowed. They would play board games or, if Chareeya happened to fall asleep, Pran would sneak into her bathroom and sniff each of the fragrant oils in coloured glass bottles lined up on the rim of the claw-footed bathtub, relishing feminine perfumes he hardly had a chance to smell these days. Come late evening, they would be out in the garden again, each with a glass of sangria or a mojito as refreshing as if they had just been drenched by a tropical monsoon, and they would watch the last light of the day slip away from the sky before saying goodbye with a promise – See you soon – made under the light of the first stars.
On Friday nights, Chareeya and the Witches would show up at the Bleeding Heart. The Witches still took turns crying, but Pran would never see Chareeya shed tears again. After the bar closed he would walk her home. They would pause at the crosswalk, watching the movement of emptiness that left no trace on the city, or laughing at a drunk repeatedly telling his own shadow to stop moaning. Once, they heard the stars blinking as starlight spilled down onto the damp streets.
On a free weekday, she might ask him to go out with her to a bookstore or a movie. Once she took him to a European film festival and Pran, who had come from a long night at the bar, kept dozing off in different cinemas as they watched three movies in a row. In his mind the plots bled and blurred into one long narrative that began with an orphaned boy who envisioned himself as Laika, the dog the Soviet scientists put in a spacecraft and launched into a perpetual orbit, then the boy grew up to become a legendary lover who could sate the desire of the entire female staff of the Italian court, before he became a colour blind artist who painted by reading the colour labels on his tubes of paint. In fact, his imaginary film wasn’t bad, Pran thought, except for its length, and don’t all the stories in our lives bleed and blur into one chaotic narrative anyway?
Or sometimes she would take him on a culinary expedition, leading him on foot around some fresh market on the city outskirts to look for dried red cotton tree flowers, or horseshoe crabs fermented in fish sauce, or southern budu sauce* ( Budu is a southern style sauce made from fermented anchovies, also part of Malaysian cuisine.), or salted baby shrimps. Or they would hang around a Pakistani rug shop trying to buy sumac powder, as violet as potassium permanganate and as delicately aromatic as rain carried on an Arabian wind. Once, she took him along a squalid alley in Chinatown so she could beg an old, hostile Chinese grandmother to sell them peanut oil, and then onwards to buy egg noodles from a shophouse factory hidden so impregnably within a maze of nameless alleys that they had to walk through three houses belonging to people they didn’t know, then zigzag some more before reaching shuttered doors through which white clouds of steam billowed when opened and behind which a dozen muscular topless workers were violently flinging dough into long strips – an image that reminded Pran of Shaolin monks in a practice session.
But most of the time their weekday hangouts were no more thrilling than a trip to a café that smelled of loneliness, where they would plunge into heated conversations about nothing remotely world-changing, or an hour-long bus journey to some temple where they would spend a few precious minutes looking at a painting by Krua In Khong* ( Krua In Khong was a Buddhist monk who introduced western painting techniques to Thai temple murals in the 19th century.) from the late 19th century, or a sojourn in Lumpini Park, where they would lie on the grass as the sun took a break and watch clouds slowly materialise from nothingness into a variety of shapes – first in hygienic white, then a lovely cotton-candy pink – before drifting into the desolate twilight. Once, he saw two cranes flying across the sky: Cranes, did you see them? Chareeya whispered, Like us, two cranes braving the world. And sometimes, many times in fact, they would just wander aimlessly in the city of broken dreams amidst the heaving throng of strangers. Yes, two of us, braving the world.
All of this meant that Pran began to have something to long for as he spent each night putting together the unfinishable jigsaw puzzle of the Andromeda Galaxy and waiting for the sun to rise – that moment when he could watch her from the safe distance of his window and mumble to himself before going to sleep, What’s up, Charee? He began to dream of the next Friday and Monday and the occasional weekdays to come. Dreaming, yes: something he hadn’t done since Paradorn’s death.
That Monday was the turn of Hungarian mutton goulash with bay leaves and dried chilli, simmered so expertly that it nearly vapourised in their mouths. Plus sundried snapper, sliced and put out in the sun for a whole day before being soaked in olive oil and sprinkled with fragrant basil, and eaten with rice pilaf and Israeli tabbouleh salad. Then canned peaches topped with passion fruit juice and cream, washed down by Darjeeling tea seasoned with orange skin and kaffir lime leaves.
Chareeya set the table outside the house as usual. When they started eating, she turned on Bacalov’s Misa Tango, which Pran considered it to be the most hot-blooded hymn to the glory of God he had ever heard. It made him feel as if he had been chosen to join the Last Supper with Jesus Christ in Argentina – a thought that left him wondering what would have happened had the world’s three feuding religions been born in vivacious, love-soaked Latin America instead of the parched Middle East. This is what he was thinking about when Natee walked in.
I happened to be in the area… was his casual greeting as he flashed a smile. Chareeya smiled back but didn’t say a word as she poured him a glass of water and disappeared into the kitchen. I’m Pran, he said first, and was suddenly put-off by the way Natee lifted his glass with his pinkie finger raised – though it was bent and not pointed Pran found the gesture affected and pretentious. Finally. I’m Natee. Charee has talked about you. The hint of some emotion appeared at the corner of his mouth as
he spoke, a smile that threatened to become a scowl before quickly disappearing. Pran told himself it was all in his mind, and yet he couldn’t resist the thought that Natee was being condescending toward him. There was something in his tone: in the way he gently tugged up his trousers as he lowered himself to sit and eased his way into a cross-legged position like a pampered gentleman; in the way he glanced sideways; in the buzzing of a goddamn fly that circled the air somewhere near him; in the heat; in the glare of the sunlight.
Chareeya returned with a plate of food for Natee. The godly tango still spilled out from the house. This stew is fantastic, you should open a restaurant. Natee complimented her, affectionately running his palm up and down her arm. Where would I find the money? I spend all I’ve earned on what I want to eat myself. Chareeya laughed, looking cheerful, shyly raising her hand to tuck a few loose strands of hair behind her ear. There was a gust of hot wind, that stupid fly still buzzing somewhere, and Pran thought he should just finish whatever he was eating and get out of there.
If it’s only for what you want to eat and not to feed others, what you earn is more than enough. Pran stopped short, then resumed eating, slowly chewing his food and unconsciously clenching his jaw so tightly that his cheeks bulged. He hated Natee’s melodramatic sarcasm – the kind you only heard in soap operas on TV – and his tone of playful disdain. I made the fish myself, I had to put it out in the sun for… Chareeya tried to change the subject but Natee wouldn’t stop. Not just you and me, sorry what’s your name? Pran. Chareeya is such a charmer, today she’s treating you, tomorrow it will be another man, and then another… His tone again choking with sarcasm. Pran didn’t look up, his eyes were fixed on his plate and he clenched his jaw until it creaked.
They all come to feast on the cook, not the food. Natee laughed a brash laugh. She can expertly switch tracks like a busy train junction. Asshole, shut the fuck up, Pran shouted in his head. When he looked up again Natee was already down on the ground next to the table; Pran wasn’t sure when he had struck the man. Shut your filthy gob, prick. She’s mine, get that into your head. I didn’t snatch her from death so that an asshole like you could insult her. Waves of anger from the past consumed him, rolling in from distant days: from the empty chair in the dining room of the house by the river, from the bench outside the ER, from the loneliness that had ravaged him until his soul was frayed like a torn cloth, from all the times Pran thought had already been forgotten.
Without knowing what he was doing but knowing only that it would make him feel better, Pran closed in with the intent of striking one more time. But he didn’t get the chance. Chareeya knocked him down and swung a punch at his mouth. Stop, Pran, she hissed and pressed her hand on his chest with all her weight until he couldn’t breathe. She stared straight into his eyes like a cat. The image of her slowly getting up with her eyes fixed on him then moving to help Natee up was filtered by a mirage of tears that suddenly flooded Pran’s own eyes.
Pran left, scrambling out in terror, through the hazy heat and shafts of sunlight piercing the foliage like the light of burning stars that dotted the shapeless stone path. But halfway through he stopped in his tracks when he looked up at the flowers of the red praduu tree interspersed among the blooms of pu-jormpol flowers, so magnificent he couldn’t move his legs and was compelled to look at them through a curtain of tears, through the bitter taste of blood still salty and wet in his mouth, though the pangs of hurt that had spread throughout his throbbing heart. How is it possible, he thought, that something so breathtaking could appear before him at this very moment?
Hours later, the image of the red praduu tree against a blue sky was still etched in his mind when Pran found himself sitting mutely in front of Chalika. His blank eyes were fixed in the direction of the stacks of vinyls against the wall, though he couldn’t really see anything. Pained and bewildered, he felt something weaken inside him. He had always faced the world alone; in solitude, incomplete, desiccated and abandoned, and, yet, he had survived. He no longer knew what hope he had ever had that it was possible for him to feel this hopeless now. On top of the anger, there was the feeling of being betrayed, the feeling of someone with no home to return to. What was it that kept churning madness and heat inside him?
Chalika sat down beside him and patted a warm towel over his cracked lips. She was silent, as usual, and didn’t ask him anything. She unclasped his tightly balled fist and held his hand in hers, then put her other arm loosely around his shoulder and started to rock him gently, a tender consolation, before lowering her head to whisper something in his ear, a barely audible whisper. Once again, time stopped.
Sucked into a black hole that asserted itself from the-devil-knows-where, Pran lay his head upon the sanctuary of Chalika’s shoulder, in silence and stillness, for a long time. He felt like crying when he thought of the solitude in her eyes that was the same solitude he saw in Chareeya’s eyes, when his face touched the smooth complexion under which coursed the same blood that ran through Chareeya. And the urge to cry grew more powerful as he pulled her body closer and, clumsily but firmly, put his lips – still smarting with pain – on hers, on those lips that showered the same lonely smile as Chareeya’s lips.
The desire to cry became irresistible when he realised the true devastation of his feelings, how the remains of his shipwrecked heart had led him on a desperate search to find Chareeya inside Chalika, and to make love to her.
XIX
The Eye of the Storm
O ne quiet afternoon, as he was walking down a winding village road somewhere in Xinghai, Uncle Thanit had no way of knowing that the next piece of cloth he was about to procure would be his last.
Of all the textiles he had set out to pursue, this millennium-old Khata scarf was not only the most special, it was also the most magical. No one knew who had made it or when. It was known only as a rare treasure passed down through generations of an ancient Tibetan dynasty before being entrusted to several lamas who had kept it safe for centuries. When China seized Tibet, the scarf was lost. Legend had it that it had wandered around the globe in a peripatetic odyssey before being smuggled back into the land of its origin.
The scarf was small and had been woven from a white Himalayan silk yarn writ with a prophecy of the apocalypse that was hidden beneath another layer of white thread originating in Peru, which had, in turn, been suffused with an occult substance believed to have been concocted by the great Persian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan. When exposed to sunlight, the scarf appeared completely white but, if immersed in a spiritual lake on a full-moon night, the apocalyptic divination would shimmer and rise above the black waters to reveal text in Devanagari script that appeared in reverse and could only be read using a mirror.
Uncle Thanit had first heard about the scarf many years ago in Andalusia. And in all the places he had been since then, he kept hearing bits and pieces of its legend – in Rome, Doha, Marrakesh, Jerusalem, the Tonle Sap, Petra, Nazca, Kalimantan, Paraiba, Ha Long, Samara, Rajasthan, Lhasa, Varanasi, Paris, Buriram, Champasak. It was as if the scarf was actually pursuing him, rather than the other way around.
When he reached the house of an antique merchant at the end of the village road, he saw a woman who had been watching him come down the path. Before he could say anything, the woman – whose eyes were kind, whose face was as beautiful as a goddess, and whose skin had the golden sheen of a twilight cloud – spoke first: Please follow me inside. Through the rarefied climate, through sunlight as white and cold as a sheet of ice, through the itinerant wind that blew in from thirteen lakes five times a day, through one layer after another, and another, her voice reached out to him, and it was as if she had been there waiting for him all along.
Uncle Thanit had never met this merchant before and hadn’t shared his itinerary with anyone. He was just passing through this village on his way to another, where he hoped to meet a young monk who might have a clue as to the whereabouts of the Khata scarf. He happened to hear about this merchant, who was reputed to own an inv
entory of fine cloths, so Uncle Thanit had made a detour to visit him. A storm is coming, the woman said. Puzzled, Uncle Thanit looked up at a bright cloudless sky that showed no signs of an approaching tempest. Without knowing why, he followed the woman into the house.
Coming from glaring sunlight, Uncle Thanit was immediately blinded by the interior darkness and could hardly see a thing except for a faint glimmer reflecting off a few copper pots that hung from the ceiling, and, through a window, a lush green mountain upon which an arrangement of big and small rocks formed the wording of a mantra: Ohm manee padme hum. At that very moment, right before his eyes, a storm of dark-brown dust from god-knows-where tumbled across the mountainside. It was so violent and sudden that it didn’t look like an avalanche of sand but like a malevolent implosion that was reducing everything to dust before crashing with thunderous fury onto the village.
Uncle Thanit rushed over to help the woman close the door and window. The room was plunged into absolute darkness. There was only the deafening echo of raining sand, furiously beating against the outside walls, and the sound of rustling silk. There was a delicate scent of tea and a sweet fragrance of incense that had been lit the previous night. Shortly, a speck of light burned in the dark and the woman appeared like a flickering shadow in the dim light, her hand cupping a lamp as she led him towards a raised platform at the centre of which was a burning stove.
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth Page 14
