Bangkok Wakes to Rain

by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

  They rode the elevator, which the woman pointed out as being very speedy, never any long wait to hear that arrival bell. The unit was on the south wing of the tower, at the far end of a hallway, nice and quiet, and well lit throughout. Inside were two bedrooms, each at opposite ends of the hall, for maximum privacy, and a high-grade kitchen with Japanese appliances, an oven optional, as not many Thais wanted them but the expats expected one, and, true, only one bathroom, but more than sizable and well equipped with hotel-quality fixtures in fine porcelain and polished brass.

  “The best part is this view,” said the woman, her hand sailing across the living room windows. Out there, the city crawled and rose and stretched and liquefied into the horizon. They could see the creamy body of a river in the far distance. A wind blew through a slit of open window and whistled its uneven song.

  “To be honest,” Mohd said, “I hadn’t ever thought I’d live this high up. What if there’s a fire?”

  It was Mehta who thought they should look at moving into one of these newfangled condo buildings. They had visited housing developments, those they could afford an hour or more outside Krungthep proper, even with willing traffic, and laid in rectangular plots, each house a few arm’s lengths’ away from identical neighbors. His mother wanted them to continue living with her, but Mohd had tired of the power struggle, every conversation a careful play of diplomacy, every silence an occasion for sharpening blades in their minds.

  “I understand your concerns,” said the woman. “That’s why we’ve installed sprinklers and a top-of-the-line alarm system, just like ones they have in Tokyo and New York. Only the best, let me tell you.”

  “This is Krungthep,” said Mohd. “Will they work? Will the firemen make it in time at rush hour?”

  Her husband glared at her. It was so like Mehta to be mad on behalf of a stranger, especially one with makeup caked on her face. Didn’t he notice? Could he even tell?

  “Mohd, just look out there,” he said, walking to the window. “Khun Duang, you really have this view doing all the work for you.”

  “Khun Mohd, I have to ask,” said the woman. “Do you have any children?”

  “Not yet. We will.”

  She hadn’t yet told Mehta. This certainly wasn’t the right time for that kind of announcement. Still, her hand reached up to touch her waist.

  “Let me tell you, when you do, you’ll love the kids’ activities scheduled in the common garden, with the playground soon to be finished. Also, our new office girl is going to start teaching children’s swim classes on weekends.”

  “Forget about kids,” Mehta said. “With a pool like that, I’d go for a dip every day.”

  He giggled with the saleswoman, who made it seem like he had said the funniest thing she’d ever heard in her life. Harmless, he’d say later.

  “This building,” said Mohd. “It’s where the young worker fell off, isn’t it? It’s the one people are afraid would be haunted, so the prices came down, which is the reason we’re here.”

  She remembered a reporter donning an orange hardhat in front of a construction site. She had been watching the late-edition news, alone in her bedroom and Mehta away at some work meeting. Just a few more hours, he’d said on the phone. All the bosses are here.

  “Mohd, so many new buildings have gone up recently. Why would you think it’s this one?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a thought that came to me.”

  “I have to apologize, Khun Duang. My wife can be so superstitious for such a well-educated, professional businesslady.”

  “Actually,” the woman said, “the prices are down because the owner of this unit is someone who owns several units here, and she is superstitious about having an even number of units rented.”

  Mohd turned away from the two of them to restrain herself from slapping Mehta. No, she wouldn’t explode on her husband, whom, she knew by now, and should have always known, to be a man who felt he had to be adored by everyone, especially those taking advantage of him. She walked to the window to leave him and the woman to their enthused admiration for the bright wood floors and the built-in AC or whatever.

  From somewhere outside, a sound clapped against the window. The glass hummed. Not far off, a white helicopter sliced across the sky with blurred rotor blades before diminishing into an insectile speck as it wove behind mirror-skinned towers. There was something in the choppy noise that helped calm her: the assured steadiness powering the uplift of the machine. It occurred to her that the pulsing of her own heartbeat, sending life to her womb—more forceful than she’d ever felt it—had the same rhythmic shudder.

  She felt a tap on her arm. It wasn’t Mehta but the woman, whose eyes had softened as if ropes behind them had been cut.

  “Don’t worry, Khun Mohd. Let me tell you, no one has died here, and there are no ghosts.”

  “Yes, I’m probably mistaken.”

  Of course this was the building. The view was the same as from the news segment when reporters went up with police officials to inspect the scene. What haunted her most was the blank expression of one of the boys, seen in a cropped and magnified family photo, the nickname captioned in white letters: Gai. Before seeing that dead boy, she had considered giving the same name to her child, were she to have a son.

  By the time they left the building, it was nearly dark, and they had signed themselves to a down payment amounting to the entirety of their savings. Mohd asked the woman if they could see the unit again on their own, and they were given a key they could slide under the office door afterward. Up again they went, to survey the fractional share of the city they would claim as theirs. They flushed the toilet and flicked the kitchen lights off and on to make sure the place was all there, as if it might have fallen apart the moment they’d agreed to lease it. Let Mehta have his roosting place, she thought, tracing a finger on the bathroom grout. Here, she would make sure he gave their child the vigil of his love.

  Down they returned to walk on paved ground releasing back the warmth of the afternoon’s sun. She heard again the street song of taxi horns and motorcycle sputters and hawkers calling out their goods. She would not miss it at all.

  MONSTERS

  It was morning, and the breeze blowing from the direction of Osanbashi Pier still smelled faintly of the bay. Nok and her husband were clearing the airborne sting of chopped chilies through the restaurant’s front door when a familiar white van pulled up at the curb—the ingredients supplier, but two days earlier than scheduled. Instead of the usual Japanese man who sweated like he’d stepped out of a hot spring, Khun Ubol walked in with the pushcart. He’d come himself, he explained, because he had decided to pack it up and return to Krungthep.

  “Don’t worry, Khun Nok, Khun Maru,” he said. “You’ll soon see this cart, as full as it is today.”

  Nok knew too well the easy assurances of her countrymen. Maru, born here in Yokohama and accustomed to fulfilled obligations, didn’t understand her doubts, not until he talked to Khun Ubol’s successors. From them they learned that their deliveries would cease while very specific import licenses were being transferred. This meant the licenses would enter the backlog at the customs office, a month could pass before shipments resumed, and none of the other importers in Chinatown would deal with orders as small as their restaurant’s.

  This was 1983. Thai food wasn’t very well known then. They’d be lucky if the Chinese grocers stocked enough Thai fish sauce to last a week. Khun Ubol was the supplier for those places, too.

  “First, we’ll run out of galangal,” Nok said to Maru after Khun Ubol left. “This is the end of tom kha gai.”

  “This isn’t the end of anything. We’re going to find another supplier. Close your eyes for a minute and breathe.”

  The door chime rang. Nok pushed Maru back into the dining area, so he could greet the arriving customer. It was Khun Chahtchai, one of the regulars. He was a Thai man in
his sixties who came to the restaurant every week for an early lunch right when they opened and left well before other customers arrived. As usual, Khun Chahtchai seated himself at the table next to the corner window. As usual, Maru greeted him in rudimentary Thai but with a customary Japanese half bow.

  Before Khun Chahtchai could get a good look at her, Nok went into the kitchen and brushed away tears. Unlike with Maru, she couldn’t make problems go away by closing her eyes and believing the best would happen. Instead, her worst fears tended to become more and more vivid. She saw their menu at Erawan—basically a photocopied page inside a plastic sleeve—with half the dishes crossed out, the remaining clinging on like animals on an endangered species list, begging for survival.

  * * *

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  “Nok, I can look into how much shipping container space might cost you,” said Nee. It was midevening for Nee, the time for their usual telephone rendezvous. Nee had been running the sundries shop, now that their mother could only float in and out of medicated sleep on her wicker chair, and Nok knew her sister was trying not to sound tired.

  “But, Nee, I’m not Khun Ubol. I would still need licenses. Everything’s going to get stuck at the port and spoil.”

  “Can you grow some of what you need?”

  “Like the chili plants barely sprouting on my windowsill?”

  “How much of anything do you still have?”

  “Nee, I think I’m going to have to close down Erawan.”

  “Nonsense. You’re going to get your hands on whatever you need.”

  Her sister’s words always calmed Nok. Nok had been a sixth-year and Nee only a third-year when they swam at secondary school meets, but Nee wasn’t afraid to go up to older teammates and show ways to push off and angle stroke. For Nok, the purpose of her own swimming was to impress their father, most of all. Nee swam because she thought they had a chance against the schools with their own pools. She trained them better than their coach.

  “An airlift is what’s going to happen,” Nee said. “How many students do you know?”

  They gambled that Thai students at nearby universities couldn’t bear to see the restaurant close. Returning to Japan from their summer break, the students would act as couriers. Nok would make the pleading phone calls, and in Bangkok, Nee would deliver ingredients to the students, even help pack to make sure suitcases filled up. Nok never fully believed the plan would work, but what choice did she have?

  * * *

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  The morning the first suitcase was due, Nok developed a sudden routine of grabbing the broom and stepping outside the restaurant. She brushed it over bare spots on the sidewalk she had swept an hour earlier, her eyes on the intersection closest to the subway station. It was a familiar view. Store signs jutted from the side of low-rise buildings. Office workers walked unhurried beneath wide-leafed trees spaced apart at exact intervals. Sidewalk tiles gleamed white, like teeth. She had told Nee that this part of Yokohama had the cleanest streets on earth. Just walking on them cleared minds and absolved sins.

  Standing there outside the restaurant, Nok felt her heart leap at the sight of anyone who remotely looked Thai. She felt sure that the airport customs must have seized everything. When she spotted a figure rounding the corner, wheeling luggage, she dropped her broom.

  “Sawasdee ka!” she yelled out, and waved with an outstretched arm.

  “Sawasdee ka!” the young woman called back. They both clasped hands to their noses and bowed their heads.

  “Come in,” Nok told the woman. “I thought you might come sooner, but never mind, you’re here.”

  Maru opened the door. Nok rolled the American Tourister suitcase to a corner, laid it flat, and opened it. In the still-empty restaurant, she felt free to laugh and clap at the jars of fermented fish. With careful hands, she helped Maru lift out bricks of tamarind pulp as if they were newborns. She had been so eager to do away with weeks of improvising what they could—yatsufusa pepper powder for Thai roasted chili powder, dried fish flakes standing in for cured Thai prawns. They’d even had to reduce the palm sugar in her mother’s recipes by half, and then by half again.

  Nok thanked the woman while Maru carried their bounty to the pantry. If careful, they could make it last a week and a half.

  “Do you know anybody else flying back?” Nok quickly asked.

  Through summer’s end, more suitcases arrived at the restaurant, with Nee’s help. Nok no longer felt ashamed serving food below her expectations. Still, with what they paid the students for each bag, costs at the restaurant doubled. Many nights, Nok couldn’t sleep. While Maru snored, she lay there and tortured herself thinking about how she’d ever gotten into this situation.

  * * *

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  She had met Maru some years before, in 1972, when she was hired as a grad student trainee at the Tokyo architecture firm where Maru was a senior draftsman. They married before her visa expired.

  Few companies would hire her, a non-Japanese and a woman, after her program ended. Maru, never quite suited for desk work, also wanted a way out of architecture. So they moved to Yokohama and with the small sum left to him by his father opened Erawan, the only Thai restaurant in the area, as far as they knew.

  That year, before Thailand’s tourism boom, most Japanese had yet to dust their feet with the beach sands of Koh Phangan or walk across fairways carved into valleys where their forefathers had succumbed to malaria and Allied bombing raids. Passersby, if they stopped at all, peered into the windows with shaded eyes before stepping back. The restaurant survived on the few who didn’t, and the shifting mass of Thais—students, immigrant workers, and women whose occupation they left unasked.

  Late afternoons, Nok’s favorite time of the day, students came by after classes. She lingered in the dining room and listened to them douse each other with Thai curse words and exchange nam-nao soap operas on static-scarred VHS tapes.

  Maru watched the shows with her. If he didn’t understand what was being said, he could guess it by the actors’ disregard for subtlety. The students loved it when Maru updated them on a storyline. They asked with wide smiles, “Big Brother Maru, did you like what happened in the House of Golden Sand finale?”

  There were months when they scraped by, their profit margins as fine and thin as their slivered shallots, but Nok resisted the thought of giving up the restaurant. Where else could her people go to taste this food? What would she do without them here?

  * * *

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  “Khun Nok, did prices on the menu jump again?” Khun Chahtchai said one morning. “And the hor mok tastes different to me. It has a strange saltiness, a sharper kind, and it’s less fragrant than usual.”

  Nok had said the same thing to Maru the night before. Student travel delays that week meant that they were down to the last jar of kapi. They’d resorted to diluting it with pulverized fishmeal and heaps of salt.

  “We’ve had a problem with getting ingredients and had to adjust. I’m sorry if it’s a complete failure. Consider this one on us.”

  “No, it’s actually delicious in a new way. But you’ll have what you need soon?”

  “Yes, our new supplier should get their act together by the end of the month.”

  “Well, let me know if I can help in any way. I have associates who can probably get you anything you want.”

  “Thank you, but we wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

  “It would be no bother. We have to help each other, Khun Nok, especially here.”

  Nok knew what he meant by here. She nodded as she clasped her hands to thank him for the thought and then returned to the kitchen to check on a pot of seafood stock for tom yum goong.

  Maru cleared the table after Khun Chahtchai had left. He held up the blue fan of thousand-yen bills left as tip.

  “What did you say to him?”

  She
shrugged. Maru, always prideful, would have chided her for revealing their situation to an outsider. She put the money in her pocket and told him the grease bins needed to be emptied.

  * * *

  ☐ ☐ ☐

  When asked why she had chosen the name Erawan for the restaurant, Nok talked of how traders brought the elephant god to Thailand from India by way of the Khmer empire. Erawan stood as large as a mountain and had thirty-three heads, each with seven tusks. The god Indra rode him into wars against demons, but in peaceful times, Erawan nourished the world by drawing water to the sky and returning it as rain. The story delighted customers, but the real reason Nok chose Erawan was that she had been to a Thai restaurant with the same name while visiting cousins in Los Angeles. She learned about the myth only after Maru found it in a Japanese guidebook. Eh-rah-wun, he said, the same way the local customers did.

  She used to interrogate Maru about why he married her instead of a Japanese woman. Maru shook his head and mentioned love in a blur of words, maybe thinking it was what she wanted to hear. He didn’t realize that she was asking him to accept blame: for his family’s treating her only with closemouthed politeness, for confused department store clerks’ apologetic bowing and slowed words, her fluent Japanese secondary to the fact of her darker skin—the color of delicious pad see-ew noodles, as Maru had put it.

  Those early years in Japan, Nok called Bangkok every night. She asked Nee about their mother’s diabetes and visits to the doctor. At some point, Nok would notice her own voice faltering, a signal that tears were brimming at the corners of her eyes, her lips tucked in, the way she had often seen them in the mirror in the middle of a cry.