“I have to go,” she said, turning to the children in the pool.
“Come see me,” he said, and left the pool area. He genuinely wanted her to come upstairs after the class. It was important to him that they not part on bad terms.
He waited that afternoon and evening. She didn’t come. He looked for her at the management office the week before he was due to leave, but she was nowhere to be found. When he finally resorted to calling, the office assistant picked up and evaded his questions of Nee’s whereabouts and return. That his flight was in less than a day did not soften her guard. He packed and left for the airport.
He wouldn’t see Nee again. He instructed the executor to price his mother’s condo and the other units that he had inherited for a speedy sale. He would be relieved of the onerous past that was the cradle of his life, finishing what his mother had started years earlier.
The executor said on the phone that a nice young woman in the management office had been of great assistance with the paperwork, performing her duties flawlessly.
FAR
What could happen at a restaurant over two days? Or the next decade? Nok kept to her routine. She rolled up Erawan’s steel shutters. She rolled them down. She kept the sidewalk clean.
The Nikkei would fall off its stilts in the early 1990s, but not before financing a second Japanese landing in Thai cities. Customers started coming into Erawan asking for spicy squid salads and reminiscing about elephant rides across mountain jungles near Chiang Mai. They talked of sacred golden temples and shapely female caddies. Nok and Maru bowed, laughing, and then brought up the day’s specials.
Maru’s cooking improved. A newspaper took a picture of Nok and him cradling their large mortar and pestle for a food feature. They hired Thai students part-time. New tables and chairs replaced ones coming apart at the legs.
They trained some staff to cook and trusted the restaurant to one of the hostesses a few days a month. They boarded trains and vanished into long straight lines and then reappeared at beaches and mountain towns. At the height of festivals, they lingered in crowded lantern-lit streets and nibbled on skewered takoyaki. Nok waded into the women’s side of the hot springs and let steam fill her lungs.
At home, she washed clothes with her favorite detergent and let them dry on the balcony. She wore comfortable pants and open-back shoes bought at a nearby Seiyu.
Maru had an affair with a waitress. Nok chased him out of the apartment with a spatula and changed the locks at the restaurant. They didn’t speak for a year. He came back, remorseful. She could have left him as he was, a ruin.
They soon had a child together, to her surprise. She was forty years old, and the thought of becoming pregnant had long left her. When Riku was born, she thought he looked perfectly Japanese. He also looked perfectly Thai. She thought the same as he learned to ride a bike at Yamashita Park and when he said he wanted to grow up and become a pilot.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
One night, Nok picked up the phone and heard Nee’s voice for the first time in a decade.
“It’s me,” Nee said, but Nok didn’t need to hear it. She’d recognized her sister’s voice at the first word.
“Hey,” Nok said, and then added, “it’s been a while.”
“Yes, it has.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you.”
Nok didn’t believe her but left it at that, not wanting to pry any further and risk pushing Nee away.
They now talked nearly every week. Each call, Nee fed Nok’s hunger for the most ordinary details about anything happening in Krungthep—updates on the neighborhood stray cats, which fruits were in season at the market, how hard the rain had fallen that week, or whether she’d visit a temple to make alms for their mother. Nok told her about the exquisite gift-wrapping at the department store or how crowded the train had been that morning or how Riku liked to watch nature shows about crocodiles. They had veered farther in their own directions across land and sea, but little embers like these were enough to light up the shape of each other’s life.
Nee flew to visit twice over the next year, each time by herself. Nok and Maru took her to Tokyo Disneyland and drove with her to beaches in Chiba, places Nee thought Riku would also enjoy. Riku called her his Thai aunt. They figured out games to play, even though she spoke no Japanese. Nok came home to find Nee hiding underneath the dining table, a finger over her lips.
Evenings, Nok cooked their mother’s recipes. She fed her sister as their mother used to, though without four or five dishes on the table, that overpowering show of love.
“You have everything figured out, Nok.”
“I get up and cook at the restaurant and sleep. It’s nothing much at all.”
“It’s not nothing,” Nee said. Nok thought that Nee wanted her sister to feel proud, but Nok ended up saddened. Nee would soon return to Krungthep and problems she didn’t care to discuss. Her job was fine, no cause for concern. She kept mum on the state of her romances. Nok had no idea if her sister was happy or, at least, fine. It is only so, Nee would say when Nok asked if something was wrong. She thought there was nothing that Nok could do to help. Nok didn’t disagree.
How could she have? Nok hadn’t lost Nee to a bullet or the Chao Phraya’s currents in 1976, but having chosen this life in Yokohama, she could claim no part in helping her sister in the years after. Given their estrangement of several years, Nok hadn’t even been a spectator. Nee had survived the loss of her lover and of many friends as well, but only to endure a city that barely remembered the events that had caused it—an unpublicized ceremony once a year, a small plaque there. Did that make Nee cling to her horrors even harder? That was very much the kind of thing that Nee did: taking on what no one else wanted to do—this remembering.
In her kitchen, Nok kept a framed photo of Nee, one of the few that showed her smiling. It was taken at the condo building where she worked. Nee posed on the balcony of an empty apartment. Below her grew a garden of TV antennas and soot-blackened roofs, and, beyond them, skeletal towers crowned with cranes, and farther still, the river.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Not long after Nee’s visit, Gahn came to the restaurant. He had gained weight, his face even fuller than before. He called out to Nok and lifted clasped hands to his forehead.
“I hope you don’t mind that I’m here.”
“Khun Gahn, it’s been a very long time. Please, sit.”
Nok asked one of the waiters to bring him olieng.
“Look at all the Japanese here. They can handle the heat now?”
“More than you’d think.”
“And Maru, is he well? I expected to see him here.”
“It’s his day off. He’s taking our son to a BayStars game. Do you follow baseball at all?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. So many years here and the game still confuses me.”
Nok laughed the way she now laughed, mouth covered with a wrist. For a moment, Gahn seemed familiar, but only because he no longer resembled the Gahn she remembered. With his receded hairline and plain long-sleeve dress shirt, he could be any one of their middle-aged Japanese regulars.
“And how’s the colonel?”
Gahn sipped his olieng before answering.
“He’s the reason I’m here, Khun Nok.”
As Nok looked away, Gahn said, “Please. He isn’t well, and all he has been asking for is your food.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
She could just fill the bento boxes and hand them to Gahn. But no; she helped him carry them out and then got in the car with him. The ride took them south to a nondescript neighborhood in Naka Ward. High gates drew open with a remote to reveal a two-story house taking up a small lot, barely enough for a corner garden on one side. She followed Gahn up a concrete ramp with stainless-steel railings
into the house. On an upright bed in the main room, a man lay motionless except for the slow heaving of his chest.
“The second stroke really did it.”
“Does he have children?” Nok asked with a lowered voice.
“They’re in Krungthep. They came last year for a week, to shop.”
“And he’s not going back? Haven’t others like him returned to their families?”
“He could have, but like some of us, he has chosen not to go back.”
Nok nodded, to convey her understanding and also to acknowledge who they both were. She picked up one of the bento boxes that Gahn had set on a table. It could still warm her cupped hands.
“Will you be the one to feed him this food?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t mention it to you sooner, but he can’t really chew. The nurse usually feeds him some kind of slush.”
“What good is all this then?”
“Their smell.”
Nok understood. This food mattered less than the ghosts it would channel.
She stepped closer to the bed and clasped her hands to her forehead. Up close, she noticed the paleness of his flesh, which draped like silk over his bones. The air around him hung salty, putrid—a rotting sea. She breathed through her mouth, as little as she could.
The old man’s eyes widened.
“Hello, Khun Chahtchai. Remember me?”
He nodded, his mouth emitting an unintelligible rasp.
“Of course, he does,” said Gahn, as he wheeled a small table to the side of the bed and began laying out the bento boxes. “He’s still sharp. If his hands were better, we’d be playing cards all day like we used to, isn’t that right?”
Khun Chahtchai didn’t move or say a word.
“Go ahead, Khun Nok. He’d love to hear about the food you made.”
A window by the bed let in pale white light. Here he was in full, a monster, a man. If Nok reached out, she could easily crumple his neck the way she wrung her kitchen towels, for Nee.
“I brought sour curry. I remember you liking it. And you asked for chicken-fat rice. The soybean sauce is in this bag.”
Nok gave up on holding her breath. She breathed in.
“I brought hor mok,” she said. “My mother used to make it with river fish she bought at the market. It steams well in porcelain, but I wish we had banana leaves like ones from the tree in my grandparents’ garden. My sister, Nee, was really good at weaving bowls with them.”
Nok let the stink fill her lungs. She picked up a bento box and angled it so that he could see inside it. As she opened the lid, vapors curled out.
She hadn’t paused when she’d written down Gahn’s requests. She went to the kitchen, took what she needed out of the pantry, and put pots on the range. She thought of Nee, who would find out over the phone from her and not anyone else.
Nee and her dead classmates and their families. Nok couldn’t hope to measure their grief with what little she knew of her own. She wanted them to somehow understand that this wasn’t forgiveness. She had no right to that. Any punishment owed was theirs and would always be theirs.
Who could say what hers would be?
III
DELUGE
The snakes were the first to seek higher ground. The people of Krungthep began finding them in places they weren’t often spotted before—curled around roof antennas or slithering up parking garage ramps. Remnants of the unlucky ones lay on busy roads, cut and flattened where tires hadn’t veered away. In one suburb, broods colonized tree branches and replaced leaves with their wriggling bodies, prompting gamblers to bow with a clasped stick of incense, for good luck in their football bets. At a high-end shopping mall, the sighting of a cobra in a dressing room evacuated an entire department store. Nobody was hurt, except for the snake. A country-born security guard found it coiled in the corner of the women’s wear section, bludgeoned it, and took home the carcass as an ingredient for a spicy salad. When a boa with the girth of a man’s thigh wrapped itself around the head of a revered Buddha, photos traveled fast, phone screen to phone screen. The superstitious declared it an omen. Fortune-tellers and astrologists predicted varieties of calamity, from stock market tumbles to plane crashes to the death of movie stars.
Not too many took notice of news that the rivers flowing through Greater Krungthep were rising. It was another wet season, and who should be alarmed by small pools that had begun to form at drainage gutters? Old memories of the flooded city had faded. It was simply raining hard, like it had always rained around this time of the year. Rain came in the midafternoon and once more at night, and the city woke up to wet, darkened sidewalks and damp air, but the sun would soon appear and steam the roads dry, as it had always done.
Except the city wouldn’t be rid of the puddles. The puddles soon turned curbs into ankle-deep streams, rushing toward any outlet or low ground. Some spilled across major intersections, where cars and motor scooters rode over one another’s widening wakes, and traffic officers took to directing rush hour standing on borrowed chairs.
Along canals, stilt-house dwellers nervously eyed the waterline. Marks from previous years disappeared into the murky, dirt-stained flow beneath their homes. Newly built waterfront promenades closed, after the Chao Phraya began to wash over seawalls. Condo owners, who for years had listed a view of the river as a feature that buoyed their property value and their daily well-being, lost sleep over the likelihood of evacuation and the potential sell-off that could follow.
News trucks arrived with crews of reporters and cameramen wearing hip-high rubber waders. Officials dropped by affected neighborhoods to survey the damage. The people of Krungthep could rest assured that all necessary measures were being taken to alleviate the flooding and help those who’d been displaced. Videos of a teenage boy going about his daily routines—waking up, eating his rice porridge breakfast, folding his laundry—gained hundreds of thousands of viewers within a few hours, for the floodwater sloshing against his living room walls.
Everyone in Krungthep was watching the TV screens that covered the approaching flood day and night. Somewhere upcountry the water was lapping on the steps of thousand-year-old temples and forcing saffron-robed monks to camp on highway ramps. Produce markets turned into shimmering, rectangular pools. Entire industrial complexes seemingly went undersea. Airports closed due to submerged runways. The people saw clips of politicians rescuing nearly drowned grandmothers and celebrity-filled rafts bringing food and supplies to families waiting on roofs for extraction.
When the rain fell, people panicked. When it stopped, they hoped to hear that water levels had lowered. Phone calls between those who claimed to know and those who also claimed to know gave varying reports. The water could arrive to their neighborhood in a week. The water would come tomorrow. Shopkeepers began laying cinder-block barriers in front of their stores. Predictions were grim. The sea rose higher than it had during past floods. Only mere trickles of river water could drain out.
The most popular online search term for the city that month was “How to fill a sandbag,” and when nobody could buy sand due to the inevitable shortage and price gouging, popular questions included “Can I waterproof my house with plastic wrap?” and “highest ground in Krungthep.”
Where water had yet to come, still most of the city, shelves at food stores emptied. Frenzied shoppers swept packs of instant noodles into their carts and hauled multipacks of bottled water out to waiting cars. Hotels and resorts within Krungthep shut down due to canceled reservations by foreign tourists, but those beyond its limits saw an uptick in reservations by city dwellers who could afford to make an involuntary vacation out of the impending ordeal. Highway overpasses and parking lots in more elevated provinces filled with cars from already flooded or threatened parts of the city.
Those whose lives had not yet been breached watched the news. When they saw an alert about newly flooded areas, they looked up
the approximate cross streets on zoomed-in maps and guessed where the water would flow next. When it came to their own homes, they touted reasons for optimism. There were underground sewers that would pump excess water elsewhere. There was a sacred shrine nearby that would safeguard the surrounding populace from harm. The water would overtake another neighborhood before theirs, which would then act as a dam, and they would be able to watch the flood end its approach there, feeling lucky for the close call. The water was far away until it wasn’t.
Some found that the flood management system did not equally favor neighborhoods near its waterways, sparing one but letting lakes be made of others. There were whispers of so-and-so influential persons diverting the water to flood otherwise safe homes to save their own. At more than a few floodgates, rioting crowds reopened the sluice and flooded their neighbors to correct unequal fortunes.
There were public apologies and heated debates on nighttime talk shows. Angry swarms favorited scathing postings. Who would be held responsible for this catastrophe? After the previous floods, why wasn’t the flood management plan more robust?
As more of the water swelled into the city, supposed photos of crocodile sightings began to appear on network feeds. A crocodile farm outside the city was said to have been flooded, and escapees were leisurely swimming everywhere. Reports told of creatures darting out of the water to snatch abandoned pets and strays. A man claimed a crocodile leapt out of the water in an attempt to devour him as he stood peeing into the water outside his bedroom window. Children were disappearing midswim in flooded streets, some swore, and the tale spread of a heroic woman who’d managed to wrestle a dropped phone from the jaws of one ferocious beast.
The floods would recede, but not until nearly two months later, with the return of pacific conditions in the Gulf of Siam. The sea relented, slightly.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 17