In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  “Raami,” he said, kneeling on one knee. “Listen to me, darling. I never lied to you. I will not lie to you now. I know you are only a child, but I have no time for you to become an adult. It’s too late for me.” He paused, looking at the ground. “Even when my heart hurts, I must go. I . . . I wish I could make you understand.”

  “But you’re my papa,” I cried, unable to say what I felt, what I understood—that in a world where everything real could disappear without a trace, where one’s home and garden and city could evaporate like mists in a single morning, he was my one constancy. That he was my father and I his child, that he had incarnated first, from whatever previous existence he had lived, to lead the way, to love and care for me, was proof enough of some logic in this universe. The rest, however senseless and confounding, was allowable, even pardonable. But now I was to be without him? My eyes flitted from one soldier to the next, searching for one who would understand, who would know how I felt, but none glanced our way. I turned back to Papa and demanded, “Tell them you’re my papa!”

  He did not respond, his face still lowered, his eyes hidden from me.

  “Tell them! You’re my papa—I want you here! Tell them.”

  He looked up, his eyes brimming with monsoon rains, like the inundated rice paddies surrounding the temple. He dared not blink or say more. I had never seen him so sad, but I couldn’t comfort him. I felt only my own sorrow. I thought only of myself. “Take me with you then,” I pleaded.

  “Raami, my temple—,” he started to say, but stopped, his voice choked.

  “If you leave me here,” I reasoned, “I will suffer, my heart will hurt.” Yet I couldn’t imagine my heart hurting more than it did now. Still, I tried to hang on. “Don’t go yet—I want to hear another story. Tell me a story!”

  He flinched and turned away, his whole body shaking.

  “Please—one last story. Please, Papa.”

  • • •

  I seized the fire of grief and flung it in every direction, at every person who came near me. I refused to speak to Big Uncle because it was he who had held me in place that morning when I tried to run after Papa as the caravan of oxcarts started to move away from the temple. Mr. Virak’s wife had done just that—she ran and pleaded with a young soldier who, whether out of pity or impatience, stopped the oxcart her husband was in and allowed her to join him. But not Big Uncle. His powerful embrace had borne me back to the classroom, undeterred by my tears and pleas, my kicking and screaming. I want to go with Papa! Let me go! I hate you! I hate you—you big yiak ! Even as I bit and scratched him, he would not let me go. He’d only held me tighter. Now I resented his enormous presence, which, I felt, was somehow supposed to make up for Papa’s absence. When the others—Tata, Auntie India, and Grandmother Queen—tried to comfort me, I turned my back to them, shrinking from their caresses and tender words, ignoring their shock and pain, unable to admit they might be reaching out to comfort themselves as much as me. I kicked and elbowed the twins when, wrestling on the floor, they rolled too close to me. I whacked Radana’s arms when she extended them out in an offer of a hug. Only Mama left me alone, as if sensing that something ductile and tender had broken inside of me.

  Words gave him wings, he had said. Not solace. Wings. These, I realized, he’d severed and handed to me so I could continue my flight.

  Without Papa, I was suspended in numbness, drifting to and fro, as if this sorrow, which was like no other I’d known, had weight and mass exceeding my body. It was a complete entity, a shadow-like presence that sat and walked beside me, assuming its place as my new and abiding companion.

  I went on, anguishing against the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, while holding on to my father the only way I could—by believing that his spirit had soared to the sky, and there he resided, ethereal and elusive as the moonlight. Eternal, free. At last.

  fourteen

  The following weeks passed in a blur as the Kamaphibal fervently sought to destroy our old world in order to create a new one, as they sent soldiers to unmask people’s backgrounds—their education, jobs, social milieu—and decided who was good and who was bad, who would merit induction and who elimination. I didn’t understand the reason for all the coming and going, the endless summoning and separation. No one did. No one saw through the coded rhetoric of solidarity and brotherly love to a deeply indoctrinated belief that anyone could be an enemy. At first the enemy was the intellectuals, diplomats, doctors, pilots and engineers, policemen and military officers, those of rank and reputation. Then the enemy was the office clerks, technicians, palace servants, taxi drivers, people with mok robar civilai—“modern professions”—which would include almost everyone at the temple, as the majority of us were from the city. Those who didn’t lie and assume a new identity were called and brought out into the open, like rabbits forced from their holes. Then their families were given the choice to either follow them or remain at the temple and wait for their return. But because it was never clear when that would be—this “return”—or what it meant in the first place to “join” the Revolution or to be “wanted” by the Organization, most families chose to go, believing that, whatever fate had in store for them, at least they would face it together.

  As they left, others came, not just from Phnom Penh but from all over the country, sometimes in a convoy of trucks, sometimes in a caravan of oxcarts. Each time I’d rush from the room or wherever I happened to be hiding and elbow my way through the throngs, hoping I’d find Papa among the new arrivals. My heart would leap when I caught a glimpse of a shirt that looked like one of his, hair that greyed at the temples, shoulders that seemed capable of bearing the weight of a mountain. But it was never him. No one had news of him. No one cared. Everyone had their own losses to tend to.

  As for the new arrivals, each group seemed more dispossessed and desperate than the last. Their ordeals seemed to have hardened them, clouded their vision, and numbed their sensibility so that sometimes they appeared not to know right from wrong. They pushed aside statues of gods and guardian spirits and laid claim to the prayer hall, the monks’ sleeping quarters, the dharma pavilion, and even the heretofore unviolated sanctity of the meditation pavilion. No place was off-limits, no nook or niche sacred, left untouched by needs. Two families fought over the ground directly beneath the Walking Buddha near the entrance, each pushing for a share of the space, while the statue remained upright, staring peacefully ahead, indifferent to the squabble. Once a haven, the temple now looked like a dumping ground, littered with trash and tragedies. People exchanged personal stories of loss and death as they would food items and articles of clothing. Our home was torched. My parents were old—the journey was too much for them . . . One ordeal gave companionship to another, and in this way everyone accepted the fact that they were not alone, that this awfulness was universal, inescapable.

  As for our family, we kept to ourselves. We never spoke of our loss to anyone. We had a sense—a need to believe—that Papa hadn’t entirely disappeared. His presence, amorphous like water from a tipped glass, seeped into everything, into all we said and did, into our stillness and silence, our split and splintered selves. Big Uncle became almost like two people, one smiling and lighthearted when he was with the family, and another grave and introspective when thinking himself alone, unobserved. He would play with Radana and the twins, rousing them from sleep with tickles, letting them bounce on him among the pillows and blankets. He’d give them rides on his back until the sound of their laughter filled the room so that for a brief second or two I forgot where we were, thinking ourselves safely back home. He would joke during mealtimes about giving up coffee, abstaining from this or that food he knew we didn’t have. Or he’d contemplate fasting a whole day at a time, like a monk would when taking on certain precepts. Once, feeling the overgrown thickness of his hair, he pondered out loud, “Do you know why monks and nuns shave their heads?” When no one responded, he went on obliquely, talking to himself, “If one begs the gods for a miracle, I was
told, one should do so with naked humility. Stripped of any human pride. Vanity.” He ran his hand through the disheveled mane. “Maybe I should shave my head. Offer my humility for his return.”

  Mama got up and left the room.

  I glared at him. What are you waiting for then? Do it! I raged in silence. Shave your head. Bring back Papa! I didn’t know if I was angry at him for his useless pondering or astounded by the absurdity of a god who could be so easily coaxed into returning my father with a simple offering of his brother’s hair. Papa was worth more than that. Big Uncle, blinded by his sadness, could not see my anger.

  “I should at least learn to pray,” he concluded gravely, absentmindedly.

  Auntie India, unconvinced of her husband’s sudden piety, gazed at him with quiet alarm, as if she thought him crazy, behaving one moment like his usual self, the jocular jester, then another like Papa, the silent, solemn thinker.

  Tata, at once severely pragmatic and childishly naïve, intervened. “It’s not the gods you need to appeal to, Arun. Talk to the Kamaphibal. Explain who we really are. Maybe we could still join him.”

  In her corner, Grandmother Queen, who had been observing this whole exchange, let out a rueful sigh and murmured, “The worst irony of motherhood is when you outlive your children.” Then, just as suddenly, her expression dulled once more, without a clue as to why. A funerary silence fell in the room.

  Tears welled up in Big Uncle’s eyes and he fought them down with a smile. Later, behind the school building, thinking himself alone, he cried into his hands, unaware that I was watching.

  • • •

  Gradually things seemed to get better, or at least settle down. A new group of Kamaphibal, drawn mostly from the local peasantry, emerged when the former went on to other areas to sniff out more educated people like themselves to “recruit” to the Revolution. A sense of order took shape as the local Kamaphibal began assigning families more permanent shelters: those who wished could now go live in town, either by sharing houses with the townsfolk or by occupying the ones emptied by recently deported local families. Priority was given to those camping on bare ground, or to those—it wasn’t openly discussed but everyone knew—who had bribed well-connected residents. A hut was given to a family in exchange for a watch, or a wooden house for a traditional women’s belt made of pure gold. The yellower the gold, the more coveted it was by the town’s peasants and the bigger the house it would fetch. A rumor went around that one of the wives of the Kamaphibal was willing to give up the villa she had “inherited” from an exiled Chinese merchant in exchange for such a belt. When Tata heard this, she reminded Big Uncle that we had gold—plenty of it. Maybe we could barter a belt or two for more suitable shelter.

  Big Uncle said we couldn’t trust anything or anyone—a rumor or a local resident. We had only to look at the Kamaphibal, he pointed out, whose members were always changing. Nothing remained long enough for us to rely on. We might be given a house one moment, he reasoned, but deported the next. So, after much discussion, we agreed the best thing to do was to stay put and, above all, not draw attention to ourselves.

  As for our claim to be mango growers, the soldiers never returned to pursue further interrogation. Whatever the reason, for now at least, the disguise worked, kept us safely stationed in our classroom, which, as Big Uncle explained, would cloister us better than a house in town, where we’d be under the constant watch of the Revolutionary soldiers and the Kamaphibal and their conspiring relatives.

  But the real reason we stayed, I sensed, was simply that we couldn’t bear to leave the place where Papa had last been, where the ground echoed with his footsteps, the trees heaved his sighs, and the pond mirrored his tranquility. Here, we could still be with him, and, as much as we wished to free his spirit, to let it travel the invisible universe and look for a new home, we were not ready to let go. We clung to it—the possibility that he existed among us, even as a ghost, even as an echo or shadow—because to let go was to relinquish our hope, to admit and submit to utter, irreversible despair.

  So, even as more people were leaving to set up a new life in town, we continued to stay at the temple, and, instead of bartering for an unfamiliar, ghost-free shelter, we traded our gold for food. A necklace fetched us a pillowcase of rice to supplement the sporadic rations we received from the Organization via the Revolutionary soldiers or the Kamaphibal. A pair of earrings would get us a block of palm sugar that we’d use sparingly, as a special treat now and then for Grandmother Queen and the little ones. A bracelet bought a slab of beef that Mama and Auntie India salted and sun dried and portioned out to last us a whole week.

  Everyone—no matter where he lived, at the temple or in town—was now expected to work. Big Uncle would leave every morning with a group of men to dig irrigation ditches and canals to channel water from the rain-flooded marsh to distant fields. Mama and Auntie India were assigned to gather rice shoots from nursery beds along riverbanks or on hills and bring them to the plowed paddies for the rice farmers to transplant. Tata, because Mama had convinced the Kamaphibal of her chronic poor health, and I, because of my polio, stayed behind to take care of Grandmother Queen, the twins, and Radana. I would’ve liked to get away from the temple, but this was our assigned work—to care for the aged and young—so others could do theirs. We each must contribute our worth to the Revolution, so said the Kamaphibal.

  Work, the rhythm and routine of the day’s labor, the physical exhaustion at night, kept us from disappearing completely into our private grief, and when the Revolutionary soldiers started to bring rice and food at more regular intervals, when the Kamaphibal began to relax their control and stopped asking who was who, when no truck or oxcart appeared to haul anyone away, hope began to emerge that perhaps the worst was over.

  • • •

  “Get your belongings! Out!” There were ten, twenty soldiers—maybe more. They stormed onto the temple grounds and ordered everyone outside. “You, you, and you over there!” They pointed with their guns as if selecting animals for shipment, separating large families into smaller ones. “Only immediate family members together! The rest divide up!” Big Uncle, shielded by a crowd, quickly gathered us around him. “We’re one family—a single unit. All children of Grandmother.” He fixed his gaze on me as if I alone held the key to our unity. “‘Grandmother,’ no more ‘Queen,’ understand?”

  Yes, I understood. We were no longer who we were. How could we be?

  A couple of soldiers broke through the crowd and headed straight for us. Mama grabbed Radana and held her tight. One of the soldiers pushed her aside and, in a single long stride, cut across to Grandmother Queen. He demanded her to identify only her koan bongkaut—children she’d given birth to. Grandmother Queen pointed to Tata and Big Uncle. Auntie India, seizing the twins, rushed to Big Uncle’s side. “I’m his wife—the boys, our children.” The three of them clung to Big Uncle like buckets to a bamboo yoke. Alone, Mama stood frozen in place, Radana pressed to her chest, a bundle of clothes on each shoulder.

  The soldier pushed her and Radana to the left, Grandmother Queen and the others to the right. Panic and confusion ensued. Big Uncle tried to say we belonged in one family. The soldier swung his rifle like a bat and struck Big Uncle across the face. Big Uncle faltered, blood gushing down his nostrils, his nose broken perhaps. The crowd divided and all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of an aisle between two throbbing masses: on one side, Mama and Radana, just the two of them, desolation; on the other, Big Uncle and the rest of my family, safety in numbers at least. I could choose. But which? Tears stung my eyes, clouded my vision.

  “Raami, come,” Big Uncle whispered, one furtive hand out to me. I stared at it, wanting to be held now in his strong embrace. “Come.”

  I turned the other way and saw Mama, her lips parted but unable to speak, to say my name, to make any claim whatsoever. I blinked.

  She needed me, and I needed her. I flew to Mama.

  Big Uncle closed his eyes at the same moment
that Tata and Auntie India broke into sobs, while the twins looked on helplessly. Only when the Revolutionary soldiers pushed us toward the entrance did Grandmother Queen blink in realization of what she had done—by forgetting to claim us, she had, in essence, thrown us away.

  A row of dust-covered army trucks lined the road, a convoy of metal carcasses. I spun around, suddenly regretting my choice, searching for an escape route, but before I could even take a step a throng came at us, pushing forward at the command of a soldier. I heard Big Uncle’s voice above the crowds, “Raami, Raami!” I looked around, but I couldn’t see him through the sea of arms and hips around me. There was only his voice, desperate, despairing. “Aana! Aana!”

  Mama did not stop or turn back to look. She held my hand firmly and, with Radana on her hip, pulled me along.

  “Oh, Aana, where are you?” again came Big Uncle’s breathless voice.

  Madness surrounded us on all sides. The only direction we could move was toward the exit. Our exile.

  • • •

  On the truck, I stood on tiptoes and searched the crowds, gripped by the feeling that I was leaving behind some essential, irrecoverable part of myself. I had believed we were led to sacred ground and thus would be protected, never suspecting heaven and hell could coexist in the same space. I lost my innocence, and with it the illusion that I was safe. Now there was no Big Uncle, no Grandmother Queen, no Tata, no Auntie India or the twins. There was no Papa. Whichever way I turned, I was faced with the same stark reality—my family was gone. Without my spirit, my pralung, my untainted hopefulness, I felt like a kite with its string severed, drifting, drifting.