In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

  I stayed mute. I could not find the voice to share with Mama what I understood.

  She let out a rueful chuckle. “You know, I’d heard the story of the rabbit and the moon from my own father when he was a monk, during one of my visits to the monastery where he lived. Every child, I suppose, is familiar with it. It’s a tale you hear often at a temple. But it’s only now that I understand it—this creature whose humble form belied its noble spirit, whose action your papa emulated when he shook himself free of us so that he alone would suffer.”

  I’m the only Sisowath . . . I’d mistaken his words and deeds, his letting go, for detachment, when in fact he was seeking rebirth, his own continuation in the possibility of my survival.

  “We will live, Raami,” Mama went on, sensing what I couldn’t express, speaking the words I couldn’t form with my lips. “I’m certain of this now. As for your papa, he lives in you. You are him. I’m certain also that one day you will speak again.”

  I let out a sob. It was not speech. Nevertheless, it was an expression, a voice of my deepest sorrow. I mourned him aloud, even if only with this single sound.

  Mama pulled me to her. I let her hold me until she fell asleep. Then, taking Papa’s notebook from our bundle of clothes and slipping it into my shirt pocket, I walked over to a clearing where it was brightest, where I could see in all directions. To my right, in the distance below, a river glimmered like a road, a moving pathway. Light blinked across the inky surface. A cluster of fireflies, I thought. Always somewhere there was light, and, though transient, it flashed all the more brilliantly because of the surrounding dark.

  I took the notebook from my shirt pocket, its leather cover Mama had caressed to the softness of Radana’s skin. I opened it to the last page, the letter inserted back along its torn edge. In the likeness of the predawn tranquility that inspired my father to write every morning when we’d lived at home, I held it to the moonlight and read the part I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read in front of Mama:

  Do you remember, Raami, you asked me once what that circle on your shoulder was? A birthmark, I said. But you were not convinced. You told me instead that it is a map. Of what, I never asked you. But now I know. It is the contour of your footsteps’ journey. Life, I believe, is a circular path. No matter what misery and awfulness we encounter along the way, I hold out hope that one day we’ll arrive at a blessed moment on the circle again. It is my dream that I live beside you always.

  It wasn’t a dream, of course, that image of him sitting in the doorway of the classroom at the temple ripping out the page of the notebook. In my stupor, I’d believed he was tearing up what he’d written, destroying evidence of himself. Another sob escaped my throat. This time I cried openly, loudly. I allowed myself to wonder what his last moments might have been. Was he murdered right away? Or perhaps, like Big Uncle, taken to some camp for reeducation, beaten and starved? Or perhaps, like Radana, he was claimed by disease, his body afterward left to rot in the forest or thrown in some rice paddy. I gave him the solace of death, myself the consolation that wherever he might be, he was suffering no more.

  Following the same creases Papa had made, I folded the paper back into the shape of a small boat. Then, wiping away the tears, my eyes strayed to the inside of the back cover, to what he wrote on the last available space:

  Bury me and I’ll thrive as countless insects

  I bend neither to your weapon nor will

  Even as you trample upon my bones

  I cower not under your soulless tread

  Or fear your shadow casting upon my grave.

  A funerary prayer he’d written for the repose of his own soul, I thought. Some kind of chant—a requiem—to give him courage to face his own death. I looked up at the full moon, its blank and luminous surface. There was no face smiling down at me. Bury me and I’ll thrive . . . I read the entire passage again. Then it hit me what it truly was. An incantation. To bring him back into the world of the living. I reeled from the realization. All these years I’d thought he’d lived in the moon, distant and elusive as light, when in truth he’d hidden in these pages, tangible and tactile, a poem all to himself, with lines and stanzas, a rhythm that was all him.

  Dawn was breaking. I looked up, dazed by my discovery, the sight before me—a lotus field at the river’s far edge, like a dream reincarnated, each flower a rebirth in this early light.

  Even as I could not see his face, hear his voice, I knew I had not lost him.

  • • •

  We descended the hill and resumed our journey, following the curve of the river. Soon after, we slipped across the border, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell that we were in Thailand had our group leader not said so. We were not safe yet, however. No sooner had he told us this than we heard a loud, prolonged rumble resound in the air above us. I was certain it was the sound of guns firing at us. Everyone stopped walking and looked up. A black dot appeared on the horizon straight ahead. The dot became a dragonfly, then a helicopter, rushing at full speed toward us, and before we had time to run and hide, it descended to the ground, its heart beating with our hearts. A barang stepped out and, amidst the wind and dust stirred by the helicopter’s blades, waved and spoke, shouting to be heard. We watched him, stunned, unable to move or respond in any way. Once the noise of the helicopter subsided, he spoke again, in a language that sounded to me now like French. He gestured with his hands, eyes searching for someone who understood him. To my surprise, Mama stepped forward and began to translate, at first haltingly, then more fluently—“He said he and the pilot are with something called the United Nations—an organization.” For a brief minute panic broke across the haggard and hungry faces at hearing the word “organization.” But she quickly added, “No, no, a different organization. They’ve been on the lookout for fleeing refugees—us. They’ve heard of our plight. There is a camp being set up that we could go to. They’ve radioed for trucks to take us there. But now they’ll take the elderly, injured, and children first.”

  “Yul?” the barang asked, his one word of Khmer. “Understand?”

  We nodded, and he grinned happily, seeming more grateful than we that he’d found us. He paused now to stare at us, allowing shock and horror to rise to his face. He told Mama that we were not the first group he’d discovered, and that stories of our suffering had filtered across the border, but still his eyes had not grown accustomed to seeing such evidence of inhumanity.

  Mama, because she spoke some French and thus was needed as a translator, and I, because of my polio, were among those scurried into the helicopter. It all happened so quickly that we had no time to protest his decision. That we had been spotted and discovered out here, in the middle of nowhere, gave everyone the assurance that the world had not forgotten us.

  As we ascended, my gaze leapt ahead to the vast expanse where the river we had been following met up with two others, reminding me of where the Mekong, the Bassac, and the Tonle Sap rivers converged in Phnom Penh. Even as I had no idea how far it was or in what direction it lay, my mind flew there now, toward an image, a stilled memory of my father and me standing on the balcony of Mango Corner, our weekend house, talking about the reversal of currents and fortune. I closed my eyes, letting the past and the present and the future join. I told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything—your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world’s suffering . . . Indeed I was flying. I could leap into words and stories, cut across time and space. Like Papa, I’d become a kind of Kinnara, that half-bird creature, escaping from this world to another. I could transform myself. I could transcend boundaries.

  I opened my eyes just as the pilot was pointing back in the direction of Cambodia to a distant border village surrounded by verdant rice fields. Through the heart-pounding din, he shouted, “Cambodge!” Everyone burst into tears. Feeling safe in the cacophony around me, I said his name aloud to myself—“Papa.” Mama heard me. She brought her hand over her mouth, as though to
hush herself so she could better hear me. But it was all I needed to say to call him forth and take him with me. Papa! Again and again, I uttered this one-word incantation, the first note to break my silence.

  Suddenly, the pilot tilted the helicopter in the opposite direction, and with one quick last glimpse, we left this land, Mama clutching a paper boat and a book of poetry, and I the mountains and rivers, the spirits and voices, the narratives of a country that would in turns shade and shadow me on my journey.

  Its prophecy has become my story.

  Author’s Note

  Raami’s story is, in essence, my own. I was five years old when on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge stormed into Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh, and declared a new government, a new way of life. For centuries before, the country had been ruled by monarchs who styled themselves as devarajas, descendants of the gods. The last to hold that mythical stature was King Ang Duong, whose sons King Sisowath and King Norodom gave birth to the two contending lines of Cambodia’s modern royalty. My father was a great-grandson of King Sisowath, who reigned in the early part of the twentieth century, when Cambodia was a French protectorate. Like many of his contemporaries who were educated abroad and exposed to the ideas of democracy and self-determination, my father was a member of the intellectual class that became increasingly disillusioned with the corruption and inequity of Cambodian society in the decades after independence. For my father and his peers, this was not only a social critique but also an inward questioning of the foundations of their own privilege. In 1970, when a coup brought monarchal reign to an end and established the Khmer Republic, he and many of his countrymen saw it as the advent of a bright new era in which a democratic system of rule would address the ills of feudalism. Yet this putative democracy failed to bring stability to a country now engulfed by the war spreading from Vietnam. Corruption deepened further still, and in this climate of growing turmoil, a heretofore marginal guerrilla group known as the Khmer Rouge gained strength in the countryside. Its leaders, from the same intellectual class as my father, were equally idealistic but steeled with a radicalism that even the most politically astute could not gauge.

  From 1975 to 1979, as the Khmer Rouge leaders attempted to realize their vision of a utopian society—one of the most complete social transformations in modern history—families were separated and put into work camps, systematically starved, and executed. As the regime became more ferocious in its need to rid itself of “enemies,” those perceived as politically, ideologically, or racially impure were murdered in vast numbers. Already severely weakened by this internal purge, the regime was finally overthrown by the Vietnamese military in January, 1979, bringing the revolutionary experiment to an end. While the true number can never be known, scholars estimate that between 1 and 2 million people died, perhaps as much as a third of the total population.

  Like Raami, I was tormented by my father’s disappearance shortly after the Khmer Rouge takeover, his summoning by the regime’s leaders for who he was—a prince, a member of the “enemy” class. The losses and the brutality in the ensuing years deepened my desire to understand what happened to him, to my loved ones, and to my country. In writing I have chosen the medium of fiction, of reinventing and imagining where memory alone is inadequate. The broad brushstrokes of this narrative trace my family’s journey, set within the context of actual historical events. I have taken literary license to compress time and incidents, collapse places and characters to simplify and give distinction to each, and alter the names and backgrounds of individuals in my family as well as those we came to know during our journey. The one name I have retained is that of my father. While he was a pilot by training, it was the “poetry of flight,” I remember him telling me often when I was a child, that took him to the sky. Thus, Raami’s father not only bears the various names and titles my own father held—among which was the affectionate moniker Mechas Klah, or the “Tiger Prince”—but also embodies my father’s hopes and ideals, his fervent wish for my survival. He is imbued with the memories of the man I loved and love still to this day.

  It was this love that led me in search of him again and again. While the present Cambodia is far from the paradise of my childhood home, or the sacred land my father once believed it to be, it is the burial home of those sacred to me. In 2009, I was invited to the palace and granted my first audience with His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni, to be formally reintroduced into the royal family. I was presented as Neak Ang Mechas Ksatrey Sisowath Ratner Ayuravann Vaddey. Sitting in Khemarin Hall, with my hands pressed together in front of my chest and speaking the royal language, I told the king I came as the daughter of the Tiger Prince, son of His Royal Highness Prince Sisowath Yamaroth, son of His Royal Highness Prince Sisowath Essaravong, son of His Majesty King Sisowath. I’d brought a gift of three tons of rice as donations for the poor, in my father’s name. His Highness Prince Sisowath Ayuravann—I stopped. I could not say more. The silence I’d known as a child took hold of me again, and I fought back the tears that threatened to rush forth as the full realization of this visit hit me, what it meant that I was now taking my father’s place, sharing his name.

  I remembered once my father tried to explain to me what that was—what it meant to be royalty. I was perhaps four. At a marketplace in the city, we encountered a beggar on a street corner sitting cross-legged on a torn burlap bag that looked to be his entire home and only possession. The beggar was blind, so that as he looked up, the cloudiness of his eyes seemed to reflect the white of the sky, and as he lifted his hands beseeching passersby, he seemed to implore the gods. This gesture—his whole being—moved me deeply. If the gods couldn’t grant him sight, I thought, I wanted to give him something. So we bought rice wrapped in lotus leaf, and just as I was about to take it to the beggar, my father stopped me and told me not to forget to take off my sandals. I didn’t understand. Removing one’s shoes is only done when giving alms to Buddhist monks, to show respect for their spiritual path. We are all beggars, my father said. It doesn’t matter what we wear—rags, a saffron robe, or silk. We each ask the same of life. I may have been born a princess. But that beggar, that blind man, who was probably born poor and no doubt had suffered greatly, discerned enough beauty to want to continue living. He deserved our highest respect. His life had as much nobility as ours, as anyone’s, and we ought to accord it dignity. I cannot recall my father’s every word exactly, but as young as I was, it was clear what he wanted me to understand. His gesture and words resonate with me to this day. For all the loss and tragedy I have known, my life has taught me that the human spirit, like the lifted hands of the blind, will rise above chaos and destruction, as wings in flight.

  I wanted to tell the king this, to intimate who my father was, but it wasn’t a time for stories. Instead I spoke what I felt most immediately—that however my father died, however his last moment might have been, I wish he could’ve known that one day I would sit in this same hall where he sat countless times in his short life, that his name would be invoked again and again, that he would not be forgotten.

  As my father’s only surviving child, it is my endeavor to honor his spirit. This story is born of my desire to give voice to his memory, and the memories of all those silenced.

  V.R.

  Acknowledgments

  My profound thanks and gratitude:

  To my editor, Trish Todd, for her astute critique and calm guidance. The quality of her questioning allowed me to bring to the surface what was hidden. To Jonathan Karp and the team at Simon & Schuster, for all the support they’ve given to this book.

  To my agent, Emma Sweeney, for the sharp eye and honed instincts she brought to her comments on the manuscript, and for her diligence in finding it a home. And to Suzanne Rindell, for rescuing me from the slush pile!

  To Gillian Gaeta, for her timely advice.

  To Jane McDonnell, my dearest friend and mentor, for seeing the storyteller in me even when I had neither language nor voice. To Penny Edwards, for her enthusiastic r
eading. To my best buddy, Neil Hamilton, for his belief in me, and for many moments of revelation. To my darling friend Maria Herminia Graterol, who always saw me as a writer.

  To my family, for their gifts of love: my sisters, Leakhena and Lynda, who mean the world to me; E. K. Kong, a father to the three of us; Ann-Mari and Mitchell and Juliana, who have always supplied me with great books; Ann-Mari Gemmill, Sr., and Henry Gemmill (Mormor and Morfar) and Melvin and Ida Ratner, in memory of their generosity; and Joann and Patrick, who have followed me around the world, arriving at moments when I needed them most.

  To my husband, Blake, for his immeasurable support, for taking on the burden of work and caring for our family to give me the stability and comfort of a writing life. Your love transcends all boundaries and I feel I have traveled with you many lifetimes.

  To my smallest but most magnanimous supporter, our daughter Annelise, for her wisdom and patience, for mothering me when I exhausted myself with writing. You are the reincarnation of so many hopes and dreams.

  To my mother, who gave me life, again and again. To you, I owe everything.

  In the Shadow of the Banyan: A Novel

  Vaddey Ratner

  Introduction

  “To keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss.” For seven-year-old Raami, the collapse of her childhood world begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours, bringing details of the upheaval that has overwhelmed the streets of Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh. It is April 1975, and the civil war between the U.S.-backed government and the Khmer Rouge insurgency has reached its climax. As Raami plays in the magical world of her family’s estate, she is intrigued by the adults’ hushed exchanges that pit hopes for the long-awaited peace against fears that this might be the end of the life they know, a life protected and cushioned by their royal lineage. On the morning of the lunar New Year, a young soldier dressed in the black of the Revolution invades that world of carefully guarded privilege. Within hours, Raami and her family join a mass exodus as the new Khmer Rouge regime evacuates Cambodia’s cities.