Bangkok Wakes to Rain

by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sudbanthad, Pitchaya, author.

  Title: Bangkok wakes to rain : a novel / Pitchaya Sudbanthad.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042208 (print) | LCCN 2018045835 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525534785 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525534761 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.U346 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.U346 B36 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042208

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my family, for all time

  CONTENTS

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Visitations

  Arrival

  Cadence

  Birthright

  Outpour

  ☐

  II

  Falling

  Uprising

  Monsters

  Flight

  Impasse

  Heirloom

  Far

  ☐

  III

  Deluge

  Becoming

  Sons

  Possession

  Birds

  ☐

  IV

  Netherworld

  Crossings

  Partings

  Return

  Upstream

  Home

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I

  VISITATIONS

  Always, she arrives near evening. The last few children in blue-and-white uniforms have finished their after-school work and are plodding along in small gangs or, like her, alone. They don’t take notice of her; they have screens in their hands, shoves and teasing to repay, snacks bagged in newsprint to grease up their fingers. In their trail, sparrows tussle over fallen fried crumbs and biscuit sticks trampled to powder by little shoes. A pearl-eyed lottery seller, sensing passersby from footsteps and the clap of flip-flops, calls out over an opened case of clothes-pinned tickets to whoever craves luck.

  Her nose picks up the ashen smell always in the air. Somewhere, a garbage heap incinerates underneath a highway overpass; in temples, incense sticks release sweet smoke to the holy and the dead; flames curl blue in the open-air gas grills of shophouse food stalls.

  She is a child or a few thousand years old. Would it ever matter? The city will stay this way for her. When she was a uniformed primary schooler herself, walking home along these very streets, she liked to make believe she was a bewildered traveler in a foreign city, drawn forward by alluring strangeness. She couldn’t have known then that there would be years ahead when she didn’t have to pretend, and years still further ahead when pretending was all she could do.

  Fresh, fresh, hot, hot, good for kids, delicious for grown-ups, twenty bahts, twenty bahts. She counts on hearing the soy milk lady’s singsongy cry ahead of the others. The thicker the crowd on the sidewalk, the louder the hawkers call out. Stampedes of dusty shoes and shopping bags and stray dogs crisscross near the ground; canopies of sun-shielding umbrellas and twisty headphone cords drift above. The fruit sellers have laid parrot-green pyramids of pomelo on their tables. They holler, “Come, pretty young sister! Come sample this!” and she tells them maybe tomorrow, knowing they’ll be at the same spot to greet her the next morning as she hurries to catch the 6:45 at the Skytrain station. Auntie Tofu, Uncle Big Mouth, the Egret: she doesn’t know their real names, only the monikers her mother mentioned when boasting of discounts negotiated at the produce scale. The vendors pick up halved mangosteens to show off the white flesh balled inside like an unbloomed flower. It’s about the time of the year when these particular fruits become more plentiful, though that wasn’t always the case, especially during the calamitous years—lifetimes ago it seems—when orchards drowned and few trucks dared brave watery roads to deliver what little of the crop had been saved. Those days are hardly worth remembering, are they? Everything is now back in its place.

  The asphalt before her darkens in the shadow of the building she thinks of as home. The usual guard salutes her from the gatehouse, a walkie-talkie raised to his forehead. When building management first upgraded the security setup to attract higher-paying tenants for the rental floors, she thought the cameras were turning to follow her. She’d find out that the motion was simply an automatic preset and the feeds went to backroom monitors attended by no one. She was young then and didn’t realize that there was already scant escape from being watched, camera or no camera.

  Eyes are everywhere, pointing down from balconies and windows, through the iron fencing and palm thickets that separate the building’s grounds from the unruly street. She can feel eyes on her skin, even now. It won’t surprise her to turn around from this walk up the driveway and find the guard peeling her with his stare. Where the building’s communal shrine stands, a sun-reddened European family, probably one of the short-term renters, is clicking selfies in front of the week’s offerings—oranges and bottled cola—for higher entities and land spirits. The pudgy-faced father turns in her direction, eyes widened, before resuming his pose for another shot.

  In the lobby, chilled, purified air welcomes her. How many times has she walked over these granite tiles? Always in a rush, out and in. No letting up the pace. There isn’t need for any hurry now. She can take the remainder of her life, if she wants. As she passes, the receptionist behind the front desk barely glances at her, occupied by the telenovela playing on a small tablet that slides out from under her folders when the manager isn’t around. There’s no customer at the coffee nook, where the receptionist also triples as barista and cashier should someone obey the beckoning paw of the Japanese porcelain cat on the counter.

  The coffee venture was part of a flurry of renovations management had embarked upon after she left for abroad. One year, she’d returned to find the lobby’s gray walls covered up by prefabricated panels of exposed brick and the waiting area’s threadbare sofa replaced by sleeker Scandinavian-by-way-of-Thai-factories chaises and sectionals. Another visit, a spa meant for expats and tourists had opened on one end of the ground floor, and the music from the lobby’s overhead speakers had switched from Thai pop hits to rain forest sounds laid over tinkling chimes. Even the elevator bank had gotten a makeover, with footlights installed along the walls and the nicked beige doors refashioned with a few coats of auspicious firecracker red for the Chinese renters.

  She stops in front of the call button, her hands clenched. Maybe this will be the time she gives in to the temptation to push it and wait for the arrival bell, a sound she has heard thousands of times. It’s near
ly seven o’clock. Both her parents should be home from work. Her father’s probably watering the plants on the balcony and doing his evening calisthenics routine—arms swinging and legs lifting—in the Premier League T-shirt and shorts he has changed into, and her mother’s probably in her favorite chair by the window, arms spreading and folding the day-old newspaper that she always forgets to take for her train commute. Soup is simmering on the stove in the alcove kitchen. It’s either the lotus stem curry that her father brings home twice a week from his favorite shop by his office, or the clear tofu soup he likes to make with vegetables left over from other dishes. The TV is on, as it usually is. To break the silence, as her mother says. The evening news anchors—always the genial pairing of a delicately featured woman and a bespectacled man—are at their desk, pitying the fallen and wounded in the day’s roundup. At some point, her mother gets up to knock at the windows to tell her father to come inside. Her father pretends to ignore the knock, and her mother knocks again, with louder authority.

  The ding of the bell stiffens her back. The elevator has arrived on its own. Its red doors slide open with no one inside, and her own eyes return her gaze from the mirrored wall inside. She dares herself to step through.

  She should have known this already: she won’t. She’ll turn around and walk out the door at the rear of the building and onto the covered walkway leading to the pool. It will already be growing darker out there, no one to look up at the scatter of lit windows. She’ll just slip out and leave, as she has always done.

  Before she can decide, something interrupts her. She can’t say what it is—not a thing she can see, but different from a mere thought, and more than a feeling. It approaches her, cresting forcefully like a wave that has rippled across oceans. It wakes her, as if she were being shaken out of a dream. This is no dream. It’s gathering outside of her. It speaks and says without speaking. A dreadful thing’s about to happen.

  She squints out the lobby’s windows. A dry-cleaning delivery van cruises down the drive, the hanger bags having been dropped off. That’s all it probably was: a noisy engine startling an anxious woman. She wonders if any of the others also felt it. In the lobby, the receptionist sits undisturbed, her attention still with the telenovela. A tenant stands at the wall of mailboxes, flipping through envelopes. From the speakers, recorded jungle birds squawk out over a synthesized human choir. Her steps clap forward across the marble floor. She pushes the glass doors into the remaining warmth of the slow-boiled day.

  It is only so. Many times exiting through these doors, she mumbles the words: It is only so. It’s a phrase she’s said since she was barely more than a child, to steel herself for the unknowable day. A swim teacher first said it to her during a lesson, after a sparrow that had broken its neck against a sky-filled window fell dead into the pool, and she clung to the words as if they were a lifeline thrown to her. It is only so. She repeats the phrase three times, out of habit and a need to calm herself, not knowing why she’s pacing the circular driveway, looking for what she can’t even say.

  She suspects the guard is watching her again but doesn’t turn around to check. Following the seeming tilt of the land, she lets her feet pull her like hounds toward the garden by the garage entrance, where drivers wait their turn to whirl down the window and tap their entry card. She has long avoided this area for the good chance of running into one of her parents behind the wheel of a car.

  The garden is nothing more than a square of yellowing grass and concrete planters. The air here feels thinned out. Her own footsteps, echoing back one, two, one, two, feel faded against an intensifying gradient of sensation.

  She’s suddenly reminded of the few minutes before a concert begins, when musicians run through their warm-ups onstage. She loves hearing those first discordant notes climbing and collapsing in their collective routine as much as the program to come. What are these instruments that now play for her? She hears the flapping of a buzzard’s wings, monsoon rain tapping on window glass. Song of harvest sounding across rice fields. Monks’ prayers enveloping a hall of mourners. A hand bounding sharply past middle C.

  Some uproar above compels her to look up. She sees only the infinity of the bluing cloudless dusk and the darkened rise of the building, but her instincts command her to cross her arms overhead, turn away, and brace.

  ARRIVAL

  Three weeks after the disappearance of his steamer trunks somewhere between the Siamese port and Singapore, Phineas Stevens still held hope for their return. He dearly missed his medical books, drawing supplies, and clothes. The reverend had lent him two sets of shirts and trousers, and each day he washed one in a pan of boiled water and wore the other. It was necessary that this chore be performed daily; here in the Siamese capital, one could sweat oceans in an hour. The heat and the gelatinous air sent his thoughts to leisurely summer swims across Archer’s Pond. How he longed for those New England waters—cold, clean, without crocodiles.

  At the river port, the Dutch shipping company clerks shook their heads. They assured him that their most diligent men would continue to retrace ship manifests and turn over their warehouses. He suspected them of uproarious laughter as soon as he left.

  Outside, he could see that Winston had had better luck at the customs house. At his feet lay a wooden case that looked to hold some mechanical part or another for the crumbling printer, and two small crates—likely pamphlets from the Society to stock their diminishing stacks, which the reverend would claim as proof of interest from the Siamese, ignoring that most had no knowledge of English and that the cooks were using them as kindling.

  Winston handed him a yellowed envelope scalloped at a corner by rodent bites.

  “For you, Dr. Stevens.”

  “I’m surprised it has journeyed this far,” Phineas said before tucking the envelope into his satchel.

  “From your love?”

  “My brother.”

  With the reverend, he spoke freely of his home life at Gransden Hall, but with Winston, who derived uninhibited amusement from the very thought of estate balls and carriage rides through the countryside, he barely mentioned it. Only this morning he’d said, as they set out, “Dr. Stevens, if a sojourn on foot isn’t to your liking, you’re welcome to ask the reverend if he would hire us sedan chairs, preferably attended by nubiles tickling the air with fronds.”

  He didn’t take Winston’s jabbing to heart. Howbeit, he had no choice but to rely on Winston’s familiarity with this alien city. The few Westerners he’d encountered were European—Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch—drawn to the country’s material riches. The reverend counted no more than one hundred Americans in the capital. The number included some fellow missionaries at Reverend Jones’s Baptist mission in the Chinese section and at Dr. Bradley’s Congregational mission on the Thonburi side. Then there were the sailors, traders, saloon keepers, and various personages of uncertain character. None made a habit of attending the mission’s services.

  The sun began to set, the darkened streets readying for thieves. They followed the east bank of the Chao Phraya back to the mission station. The sight of the gates always heartened Phineas. They entered to see again the main edifice, which had been constructed in an indeterminate European style but with much Siamese influence—a high triangular roof for venting heat, and stilts for weeks of flood. Worship took place in the first-floor chapel, an assembly area furnished with rudimentary pews; most days, two of the other lay missionaries, Miss Crawford and Miss Lisle, used it as a classroom for native children. A large tile-roofed veranda that jutted from the room on the south side served as the mission hospital and dispensary where Phineas worked. In addition to the main house, there was enough land for a small orchard of Asiatic fruits that the reverend tended, and a smaller house for the Siamese cooks, who ignored requests for more Occidental meals with winsome smiles. Here good wheat competed in rarity with gold. They tasted bread only in their sleep.

  “A fruitf
ul venture, I hope,” the reverend said, locking the gate.

  “It could have been better.”

  “In no time, you’ll have adjusted your expectations.”

  It was the reverend who had urged him to accompany Winston on trips outside the mission compound, to “understand the local superstitions for the benefit of our efforts.” He had observed how, most days, Phineas sat mute at supper, unable to muster much interest in the others’ banter. Miss Crawford and Miss Lisle echoed the reverend’s concern, worrying that devotion to work had taken a toll on him. Miss Lisle made him promise that he would commit to some period of rest. He tried to evade her pleas, but she remained insistent. He acquiesced.

  Aside from infrequent call to the homes of local merchants, Phineas had spent the greater part of the weeks since his arrival fulfilling his duties at the mission hospital. He attended to the endless circulation of market peddlers, fishermen, opium addicts, whores, and day laborers, dispensing packets of quinine and acetanilides, purgative oils, and remedies for digestive ailments, conditional on a translated Society pamphlet tied by string to each. There had been a few minor surgical procedures, most to deal with knife-inflicted wounds from skirmishes over wagers on caged cricket fights, and one to address an assault by a mongoose. He cleaved and mended as best he could, given septic conditions and few available instruments.

  “We need more medical supplies,” he’d said to the reverend, worried about their stock.

  “Feel free to send another letter, Dr. Stevens, if you believe yourself more persuasive than I.”

  The Society historically sent less than what was required. Funds tended to flow more easily to other stations, like the one in Guangzhou, where demonstrable advances of the faith had been made with the local population as well as in the study of regional diseases. Phineas recalled an exhibit at New Haven when he’d been doing his medical training there, of Dr. Parker’s studies of tumor pathologies in the Chinese population and the paintings of men and women with bulbous, flowering flesh. These had played no small part in motivating Phineas’s own travels to this far-off post.