“Mother is so lucky to have you. I’m here, useless,” Nok said.
“Are you in one of your moods again?”
Nee reminded her of the reasons. Maru. Perfectly surfaced asphalt roads and supermarkets selling foods unvisited by orchestral flies. When Nok and Maru had children, they would never have to wade through a flooded city to get to school or stop their cars to let armored trucks pass on their way to an appointed coup. Their children would be Japanese and Thai and have a clean, ample chance to be the better versions of both.
Nee didn’t know Nok’s other reason: she didn’t want the burden of choosing to stay in Bangkok. Nok would have had to answer to her duties as eldest child and devoted herself to the care of her elderly parents. Her acceptance into the graduate program in Tokyo gave her an out. After her father passed away, and with Nee inclined to take charge, Nok felt she had leeway to shrug off her karmic balance sheet. She loosened the grip that had held her and flew off to a new, separate life. Nee would take her place.
Nok now knew that while Japan let in foreigners, it was only by so much. After years spent circling an invisible fortress, thinking that if she searched hard enough, she would uncover a way inside, she had realized that her place would always be across the moat. She didn’t know if she’d ever have children here.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Deeper into the semester, fewer students made the trip from Bangkok. The importer’s documents should have gone through, letting them buy all the dried chilies and canned quail eggs they needed. But there were new delays.
“What do you mean it will be another month?” Maru yelled into the phone.
Nok looked in the pantry and regretted having thought it safe to use up the good fish sauce. She mixed what was left with the most pungent shottsuru she could find. If all else failed, she knew Nee would rather have her sink all her pots in the bay than further desecrate their mother’s recipes. Thankfully, no one who’d tasted her mother’s dishes was there to taste what she was making.
“Your sour curry. Did you change the recipe?” asked Khun Chahtchai after a sip.
Nok clasped hands at her chin and asked for forgiveness.
“We had to use Japanese fish sauce. It’s all we have right now.”
“Actually, it’s the sourness that’s different.”
“We’re also low on tamarind paste. I’m so sorry for such an abomination.”
“Still having trouble with the importer?”
“It’ll be yet another month, they said, but we don’t know for sure.”
“All right, this is getting serious. Do you want me to help?”
Nok checked to see that Maru was safely back in the kitchen. She nodded.
Khun Chahtchai got up from the table and knocked on the window. A middle-aged man in a gray suit appeared from a parked sedan. His pale face, wide and pockmarked, floated in like the moon.
“Khun Nok, this is Gahn. You can tell him what you need.”
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Nok said, and made a list on a notepad.
Gahn read it and chuckled.
“This? Trouble?”
Nok was hopeful, but she was also used to men from her country talking big and not doing much. That night, she scanned the papers, circling housekeeping or office cleaning jobs for herself and draftsman positions for Maru. She imagined what she would tell Nee: that the restaurant was doing well enough, but they had decided to close it because they missed architecture too much.
One morning not a week later, Gahn knocked on the restaurant window. Maru went with him to the van parked outside. It took those two men five trips to carry in the boxes. There were so many, they had to stack some in the bathroom.
“How much do we owe Khun Chahtchai?” Nok asked Gahn.
“Him, nothing. But how about a glass of olieng for me?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Khun Chahtchai’s supply chain lasted as long as it took for the import licenses to clear. Subsequent shipments arrived via a deliveryman wearing a sweaty hachimaki around his forehead as he pushed a handcart from the supplier’s truck to the door.
To atone for her subterfuge, Nok came up with new specials—curried banana flowers, lime-drenched seafood salads with fresh fish roe. She started making for Japanese guests desserts that had been offered only on a secret menu to Thai students, meant to ward off homesickness. She perfumed coconut milk with pandan leaves. Customers’ eyes widened when they held the bowl to their nose and smelled sun-warmed fields.
“We’re in your debt,” she said to Khun Chahtchai. He waved his hands in front of him before she could say more.
“Khun Nok, you and I are not strangers. This is what we people do. And your dishes are treasures that must be protected.”
“I’m only cooking my mother’s recipes. She’d be mad at me for ruining them.”
“She’d be proud to know her daughter is more than worthy.”
Nok tried to dismiss Khun Chahtchai’s commendations as flattery, but it felt better to see them as earned praise from an elder. She looked forward to his visits even more than those of the students. When he came for his early lunch every week, she made sure to be extra mindful in the kitchen to deserve his compliments.
Khun Chahtchai told her that he had chosen to retire in Japan because his most fruitful business investments had been made here. He had grown up in the Ayutthaya countryside, not far from where her father had, it turned out, and had worked his hardest to defy his birth-given destinies: a lifetime bent over, calves muddied, hands clutching stalks of rice, or, at best, trapped in decade-long waits for minor promotions as a guardian of civil office forms. She wanted to know more about his life but didn’t feel it appropriate to pry further. Sometimes, his eyes drew closed as he chewed, and she left him to that ceremonial state—serene and monklike, her food necessary.
That same year, with the restaurant saved, she and Maru moved to a larger flat in the Aoba Ward, not far down the Blue Line. The first day there, they celebrated in their new living room by walking side by side, arms and bodies stretched as far as they could, until they sailed into the opposite wall. She took photos, so that Nee would see her and Maru standing on the sliver of a balcony, similar beige-colored buildings behind them. On the street, schoolchildren shuffled homeward in orderly clusters under the curved sag of telephone lines that carried voices across the sea.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
At first, Nok thought the students were horsing around. Maru was taking orders at a table and she was deveining shrimp at the counter when one of them got up and walked over to Khun Chahtchai, who had arrived later than usual for his lunch and was still finishing off a bowl of noodles. The student stood over the older man and asked for his name. Khun Chahtchai didn’t tell him and instead asked the student to go back to his own table.
“It’s almost October,” the student said, and then leaned over Khun Chahtchai’s bowl and curdled a ball of spit into it. Gahn, after seeing what had happened through the window, rushed in, fists clenched. The student’s friends started yelling about who was tougher. Everyone except the lone table of horrified Japanese customers rose to their feet.
“You water buffalo, sit back down right now,” yelled Gahn.
“You think we’re afraid of you? You think you can sit here and scarf down your food?”
Maru stepped in and begged for calm, exerting his authority with deep bows in every direction.
“We don’t want any trouble! Please!”
Khun Chahtchai got up and leafed through his wallet.
“Khun Nok, Khun Maru. I apologize for the disturbance. The kuay tiew was very delicious.”
After Khun Chahtchai and Gahn left, the students returned to their seats. Nok stood fuming.
“What happened? Do you guys think this is a Muay Thai ring?”
“Sorry, Sister N
ok,” a student said. “We didn’t meant any disrespect, but it’s him, we’re sure of it. It’s the colonel.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
The colonel. She had nearly thought he was a myth.
When it happened in 1973, she was already in Tokyo. When it happened again, three Octobers later, she and Maru and had just opened Erawan, and Nee was studying nursing at Thamassat. Nok knew Nee would be at protests against the field marshal’s return from exile. Nee had told her over the phone how she had fallen for one of the leaders of the campus activist groups and that she would be joining him at the university rallies. Nok told herself that she couldn’t have stopped her sister. Nee took after their mother, who, pretending to sell fruits on the street, had monitored Japanese troops for the Thai resistance. After the war, Thais would no longer need foreigners to hold guns to their country. Prime ministers and parliaments lasted as long as afternoon rains.
At that time, the Yokohama National students at her restaurant had begun to follow a new soap opera, with many villains, no VHS tapes needed. There were rumors of paramilitaries and armed scouts trucked in from the border. Talk of CIA involvement steamed over plates of basil chicken.
Nok couldn’t say where she was or what she was doing when the 1976 crackdown happened. She was probably, as usual, letting days lap against her life. She got up early in the morning to prepare broths and curry pastes. She helped Maru haul trash bags to the curb and sweep the sidewalk. At the old flat, they made love, their bodies framed by the padded mattress that they would fold away in the morning. She showered before bed, and then sometime too soon after, the alarm clock would wake her to open the restaurant again. How could she be expected to do anything else?
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Later that week, the students who had confronted Khun Chahtchai returned with proof that he was who they’d said he was. They showed Nok a Xeroxed newspaper photo of a uniformed man with an eye shut and an elbow steadied on a campus wall. The arm ended in a pistol. The gray-haired man firing it looked like the one she had known to compliment her on her broth.
He was Khun Chahtchai. He was the colonel, the man responsible for training and organizing the paramilitaries who’d joined that morning attack on the football field, seven years ago. He’d been exiled after the coups and countercoups that followed. He was said to have left the country with a good deal of offshore money, origins unknown.
Nee was alive, though, wasn’t she? Was there any reason to be personally upset at Khun Chahtchai now? Yet Nok also knew that Nee had escaped a horrific fate only by luck, or destiny, or karmic currents like the one that eventually brought the colonel to savor meals in Japan at a restaurant owned by her sister, of all people, of all places.
Khun Chahtchai didn’t come back. Instead, in the following months, Gahn returned every other week, late in the morning, before other customers arrived, with a stack of steel bento boxes. Maru took them to the kitchen and lined them up at the prep table for Nok to fill, the orders written in marker on the lids. Most of the time, she didn’t even see Gahn. He waited outside, sipping his customary olieng, until Maru came out to the car with an armful of meals. When Nok went out to the car to talk to him, he bowed to her with clasped hands and complimented her on the last batch of dishes. She made no inquiries about his boss.
“Aroy-mahk,” he would say, and pat his belly, before walking back to the driver’s side with the assured gait of a former soldier.
One day Gahn showed up late, close to noon. A student, the very woman who had first delivered suitcases to the restaurant that summer of need, stepped out to yell after him, “Go serve your murderous master, you tailless animal!”
Then she looked at Nok with accusing eyes.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
When she was young, her mother had taught her to never forget generosity. If you did, in the afterlife, you were destined to become an abominable creature her mother claimed to have seen in her youth. It stood as tall as palm trees. Out of a mouth as small as a needle’s eye, it whistled its eternal torment. When she grew older, the threat no longer worked.
“He’s not Pol Pot or Idi Amin, but do you think cooking for him is on the same side of disturbing?” asked Maru.
“Please go to sleep.”
“I mean, you’re okay with it?”
“He was good to us, remember.”
“I know, I know. It still feels strange, though. At least, to me.”
Maru didn’t know that Nok had felt unwelcome in her own restaurant, even when no one else was around. She regretted not having let it close that summer, although that would have killed them financially. On subway rides, she flipped through Japanese women’s magazines picked up at the station kiosk, as if there, between the how-to pictorials of women joyfully baking danishes and making seaweed soup, she would find a solution for this exact predicament.
Nee called very late one night.
“What’s the matter? Is everything all right?” Nok asked.
“Did you think because you’re over there I wouldn’t find out?”
Nok could have admitted it. She had counted on Sagami Bay and, beyond that, the long fractured curve of the archipelago and its flowering of islets, and then the sea, vast and all-dissolving, to protect her.
“Is it true?” asked Nee. “And with Mother’s recipes?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
What happens when a woman does something unforgivable? That woman might set out to repair her wrongs.
Nok told Gahn that she wouldn’t be making food for his boss anymore. He laid crisp bills on his empty glass for that last order and drove off. To whomever of the students would listen, Nok offered her deepest apologies. She hadn’t known who the colonel was. She was only a cook, and she’d understand if they refused her food. Most eventually came back.
With Nee, she didn’t know what to do. Nok called and began speaking as soon as Nee picked up the phone. Whether Nee listened or not, she couldn’t tell. Nok spoke into a long, hollow silence, the loudest sound she’d ever heard, and after a while, the dial tone came on. She took it for granted that, in Thai, to say sorry was to ask for punishment that wouldn’t ordinarily be meted out.
The next day Nok called, and Nee didn’t answer. The next week Nok also called, and again Nee didn’t answer. Things were busy at the restaurant, and so Nok resolved to wait for a month and let Nee calm down before calling again. She came up with new specials for the Thai students’ version of the menu. She rearranged the kitchen equipment and tools, to the annoyance of Maru, who couldn’t find what he needed anymore.
When it was time, she picked up the receiver and dialed. As if she were there in Krungthep, she could hear the phones ringing in their house, first in the back room where they used to eat meals at a circular table overlooked by a framed photo of their father, and also upstairs in the hallway between their bedroom and their mother’s, the phone and a notepad the lone occupants of a small side table. Nee didn’t pick up.
During their grade school breaks, she and Nee used to stay at their grandmother’s house. The water out in the provinces was cleaner than in Krungthep, and they spent many afternoons swimming in the nearby canal. It was there that they visited the nagas. They would duck underwater for as long as they could and come up to talk about the wonders they’d seen in the serpentine world below their kicking feet. They told each other of the giant snakes who came to greet them at a great city built of gold and jewels, and how the nagas would let their guests ride on their outspread hoods. Nee could stay under for longer than Nok could and always had more to say. Nee asked Nok if she had met the Cobra Prince with the chariot pulled behind a giant school of catfish or if Nok had visited the cave where eels played music by plucking their stretched bodies. Nok affirmed that of course she’d seen these things, days ago, but wanted her sister to see them for herself. Then Nok lifted hersel
f onto the steps, saying that she was sick of swimming.
One time, Nee came up from a dive to find Nok teary-faced. Nok had been treading water and watching the cranes land in the nearby fields, afraid to move. Her sister had been gone for so long. She had called out Nee’s name and nothing answered her but the stray dogs across the bank. The next minute went by, and then another. She really thought she was never going to see Nee again. “That’s nonsense. I’ll always come right back,” Nee promised her.
Did Nee really mean it? Nok held the phone closer to her ear. She heard it ring for the fifteenth time, and then a voice cut her off in Japanese to say that the call couldn’t be completed.
She hung up the phone and turned off the lights. She lay down next to Maru, who was already asleep, and listened to herself breathe in the immense dark—awake and alone.
FLIGHT
Up they woke from their blue-lit sleep to find their houses in shards. Stunned by the brightness, they cried out of pain they would come to know as hunger. Crying was all they could do, and it seemed that nobody would answer their pleas, until large shadows landed over them to drop gifts into their waiting mouths. They tasted what they would all their lives go on to seek. Wet bits slid down their throats and satisfied their bellies. Their knowledge of this mysterious place came through whatever they tasted: the slick limbs of frogs, still-writhing bugs, the head of a minnow.
The large shadows hunted in the wide watery fields beyond the colony. Throughout the searing day, they followed the wake of creatures larger than themselves. They waited patiently near gray, horned behemoths at rest in the water, and sometimes even stood on the expansive territory of those behemoths’ bodies to pick off small snacks for themselves. The real bounty came when the behemoths roamed. Wherever the behemoths stepped, smaller creatures scattered out of the way. It took only a quick lunge with a ready beak to capture those small creatures. For the winged hunters, their prey’s final dance in their grasp satisfied the overwhelming commands they felt they had to answer. These commands were simple: seek enough creatures to feed the young and themselves, and protect the young from harm.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 12