That night, Pran almost cried when he went to bed. He thought back to his involvement in a secret mission during which he had to disguise himself as a girl, working alongside five brave, saving-the-world female spies who briefed and admired him with high-pitched voices, like those he heard in commercials. My dear Pran, my dear Pran, they kept saying and rewarded him by taking turns to kiss his cheek. But his father had used a dirty handkerchief to erase those marks of honour until there was nothing left.
And the urge to cry was overwhelming when Pran thought about the woman whose lips were glistening orange. When she sang, her moving lips reminded the boy of a gold fish swimming. In a shrill voice she had belted out, My man’s gone, it’s over… All that’s left is his lighter… Interspersed with throaty clucking that resembled sobs, she sang while gently applying powder to his face in a circular motion from his hairline to his chin. She used something that looked like a pair of scissors to squeeze his eyelashes and glossed his eyelids with pieces of glitter so minuscule that, for years, Pran would continue to believe they were the scales of a Siamese fighting fish. She smoothed his brows with a doll’s toothbrush and daubed shocking-pink powder onto his cheeks with a soft blush brush fragrant as bubble gum.
And Pran’s urge to cry eventually became unbearable when he thought back to the ephemeral tenderness of a single moment: a magical moment when the particles of cosmetic powder swirled in the air and the woman said something to him in a silky whisper. A speck of glitter shimmered at the tip of his eyelash, and then time stopped.
Pran never returned to that Pink House, as he had mentally promised the women he would. And his father didn’t take him to any other Pink Houses until his death, just a few months after that last visit when he miscalculated a jump onto a speeding train by one-eighth of a second. Pran met his grandmother for the first time when she came to take him to stay with her. Grandmother was small and beautiful, both when she was young and when she grew old. Her eyes were penetrating. The old woman rarely smiled or spoke, just like Pran, his father and Uncle Chit. Everyone in the family had inherited from her the legacy of silence.
Pran’s grandfather had been a civil servant, heavy drinker, womaniser and hot-tempered husband who beat his wife out of jealousy even though he kept mistresses everywhere. When he was drunk, he spoke in rough and vulgar language, capping it off with imaginary accusations to justify beating up Grandmother. Consumed by paranoia that his wife’s beauty would attract men, he shaved her head on more than one occasion, and Grandmother had to run away to her friends or relatives with bruises on her body and stubby tufts of hair on her head. When his senses returned, Grandfather would track her down and make up with her. When he drank, the same chain of events happened again, round and round in an endless cycle of domestic melodrama.
Once, Grandfather locked her up in a closet for three days and got too drunk to remember where he had put the key. Her screams prompted a neighbour to come to the rescue and break down the closet with an axe. Instead of feeling remorse, Grandfather accused her of having an affair with her saviour and lunged at her again. He also demanded compensation from the neighbour for wrecking a piece of his furniture. The entire neighbourhood became fed up with him and left Grandmother to her fate. After a few years, she decided she had had enough, too. She gathered her two sons and ran away to Nakhon Chai Si to live with her aunt.
But, again, Grandfather found her. She was in the kitchen when he walked in and tried to drag her away. She picked up a butcher knife and threatened to cut off her own finger if he refused to leave but he didn’t budge and kept moving forward. Just as he was about to touch her, Grandmother pushed the blade on her little finger without a gasp. Still holding the knife in one hand, she threw the severed finger at her husband. If you don’t leave me alone, next time it won’t be my finger. It’ll be your goddamn dick.
The sprinkles of blood on his face had the desired effect. Taken aback, Grandfather left and never bothered her again except for one time, when a boy of Pran’s age came to the house, called her “Mother”, and told her his father was dying and wanted to see her for the last time. Go back and tell your father, “Hurry up and die, don’t stick around – there’s no need to ask for my permission.” And don’t call me “mother”. I’m not your mother.
To Grandmother, men were selfish creatures and the begetters of all suffering. That many decent men had since approached her did not change her mind; she remained single and supported her children by tending a chilli plantation on a small plot of land with her aunt, whose husband had died years ago from smallpox. She also rented another plot by the river to grow lotuses and morning glory. She did odd jobs for people in the neighbourhood, like altering clothes, and earned enough to get by without her children going hungry. When her son, Pran’s father, found a wife and moved with her to Ayutthaya when he was eighteen, she didn’t object. It had been preordained, she said, since it was impossible to keep a man in the house forever. And when she learned of his death, there was no drama; she just got on a train and picked up Pran, who was seven, and raised him without prejudice and without making him feel unwanted. They lived a simple, quiet life.
By the time Pran arrived at the house, Grandmother’s aunt had died many years ago. The only other person living there was Uncle Chit, his father’s younger brother, whose presence came to represent the only period – however brief – in the boy’s life during which he felt that someone was there for him. Uncle Chit was a cheerful, exuberant man with an unreserved pool of energy that meant he was occupied with one activity or another at all times. He took Pran with him wherever he went and they did what male buddies do together – speared frogs, trapped birds, fished, rowed, played football, tinkered with stuff and fixed functional equipment only to make it malfunction. But the following year Uncle Chit fell in love with the daughter of the owner of a Chinese pharmacy in the market, and a year later went to work as a construction foreman in the Middle East with the hope of earning money to come back and ask for her hand. Then he disappeared.
Pran never understood how a person could disappear as if they had never existed, just like that. It distressed him and a childish impulse almost spurred him into stealing money from Grandmother so he could get to Bangkok, hide in the cargo hole of a plane and go to look for Uncle Chit in the vast desert. Sometimes, the boy consoled himself with a fantasy that one day Uncle Chit, without prior notice, would return as a wealthy man and adopt him as his son. But that dream, that hope, and everything else, slowly lost its clarity.
The last rumour they heard was of a woman whose face was covered with intricate tattoos, hidden behind a black shawl, who had spiked Uncle Chit’s drink with a love potion so powerful that he lost his mind. The last time someone ran into him, so the story went, he could neither understand the Thai language nor remember anyone. Grandmother didn’t try to look for him. To her, it had been preordained. Damn, no need to slip him a love potion – men will always find an excuse to leave.
IV
The Cocoon of Misery
U ncle Thanit arrived at the house by the river at dawn one day before Mother died, as if she had been waiting for him without even knowing whether he would be coming at all. Or perhaps it was his arrival that made her decide it was time to go. For a long time, no one had known what Mother thought, felt, or if she was still capable of thinking or feeling anything at all.
Don’t ever think you can slip through my fingers, even in death. Mother had persisted in cursing the spirit of her husband since the day he died, mumbling, sobbing, and once frantically clawing the mound of his grave like a desperate dog searching for a bone it had buried. But she stopped all that after a few months and, from then on, never spoke to anybody ever again, as if she had let everything out and there was nothing left inside her. More than that, she stopped acknowledging anyone who was speaking to her and anything that was going on around her.
Every morning Mother proceeded to the wicker chair under the pikul tree and sat there mutely. During the early days,
Aunt Phong would bring her food and water, but Mother wouldn’t touch it. Chalika had to spoon-feed her and, from that day on, the girl, who was then twelve, became her mother’s sole caretaker. She bathed her, dressed her, fed her, clipped her toenails, wrapped the piece of cloth around her head still dotted with clumps of hair, took her to bed, looked for help to put up a tarpaulin cover when an afternoon storm broke and Mother refused to budge from her seat.
In time Chalika took over the running of the household. She looked after basic chores such as preparing food, taking Chareeya to the doctor, forging Mother’s signature on her sister’s report card and assuming the role of her guardian, as well as more serious transactions like managing the daily expenses, utility payments, school fees. She paid salaries to Aunt Phong and Nual the nanny – who was then pregnant with her first child and had three men prepared to share joint fatherhood – but didn’t have to worry about Niang, who had quit right after Father died because she was afraid of his ghost. Chalika managed all of this quite simply, with income from the rented plots of land that her mother had allotted to people in the neighbourhood; the only plot the family had left was the one that circled the house and stretched from the road to the river. It was Chalika, too, who had written to Uncle Thanit and asked him to come to Mother’s deathbed.
In her last few months Mother hardly touched any food. She shrank and became so small that Uncle Thanit couldn’t help but be confused as to whether the woman he saw was actually his ten-year-old sister as she had been decades ago. As soon as he arrived that morning, he sat down beside his sister and watched the golden sunlight in wonder and disbelief while talking to her in a gentle voice under the pikul tree they had planted together when they were children.
The childhood stories Uncle Thanit recalled: the time he removed the head of her new doll to work out how it could open and close its eyes but was then unable to reattach it, sending his sister into a crying fit that had lasted for days; the time he dug a hole, filled it with sand and covered it with sheets of newspaper in order to trap a monitor lizard that often snuck in to eat their bantam chickens, only for his sister to fall into the trap herself; the time their mother took them on a boat, letting them rest their heads on her lap as she rowed out into the twilight with the sun looking like a giant salted egg, when they had watched the silhouettes of tree branches gliding past them on both sides, the birds flying home and the moon making its amorphous entrance to the sky.
He then confessed the secrets he had kept from her: the time he got up in the middle of the night to assemble model planes he had hidden for fear she would wreck them and toss the tiny pieces around; the time he stole a puppy from a store and lied to her that he had bought it for her as a birthday present; the time he had a crush on her friend and wrote her anonymous love letters for two years.
When the sun was about to set, Uncle Thanit told his sister under the pikul tree how much he had missed her. He told her how he wore two watches – one showing Thai time so he could picture what she was doing – and how he checked his postbox twice a day because he never stopped waiting for her letters. He told her he had always wanted to come home so that he could grow old with her.
After the reminiscing he sat quietly with his sister, looking serene – even when the pikul flowers fell around them like rain, even when he saw the last dewdrops of her life evaporate before his eyes, even when darkness enveloped them like ink. And he still looked serene when Mother didn’t wake up the following morning. Uncle Thanit told the workers to dig up Father’s body so they could arrange religious rites for both of them. To everyone’s surprise, the buried coffin had sunk deeper into the earth, so deep they had to spend an entire day excavating, four metres down, before they found it.
As she set out on a boat to scatter her parents’ ashes, out into the dark grey realm where the sea and sky merge, Chalika wondered where the irrepressible weight of Mother’s tears and the misery that had pushed Father’s coffin into the ground had gone. She couldn’t fathom how it was possible that the lives of two people could be reduced to dust wrapped in the two little cloth bundles before her.
My friend Sukanya told me she can’t remember her mother’s voice and she only died two years ago / We can’t remember everything, Charee / My memory of our childhood is beginning to fade / So is mine / When we forget something, sometimes it comes back in a flash that quickly vanishes, but as time passes we forget that we ever knew it / Yeah / Lika… / What? / Do you think one day we’ll forget Father and Mother and they’ll be lost forever? / No, Charee, I don’t know… There are many things I can’t remember about Father anymore.
Like someone dead and non-existent stranded in the middle of the sea with no land visible, three orphans steadied themselves in the bobbing uncertainty of life as they watched the infinitesimal dust that was once the lives of two people combine into one long, transparent strip, rippling, fading, spiralling on the surface of the water, like the Milky Way, as it floated further and further away, into a final farewell.
Uncle Thanit arrived with one small bag, inside which were some clothes, a few personal belongings, and an orange Japanese cat doll wearing a kimono for Chalika, a blue one for Chareeya. Three weeks after the funeral, sixty-three boxes followed, fifty-five of them filled with vinyl records, eight packed with books, plus a leather violin case.
Their uncle was in his late-thirties, tall, skinny, bespectacled, hair grazing his shoulders. He was a no-fuss man with a faint smile permanently painted on his face, and polite to a fault. When someone spoke to him, he’d listen wide-eyed like a child, as if it was the most interesting subject and he was hearing about it for the first time in his life. When the person had finished, he would nod once, and he punctuated his own sentences with the same gesture.
During the first few weeks, Uncle Thanit went around the orchards introducing himself to the neighbours and tenants. Some of them had met him at the funeral. Others remembered him from the time he had lived there as a child, even though he had been a quiet boy who kept to himself and he had been away for such a long time. At fifteen, he left home to study in Krungthep* ( Salee is a steamed pudding made of cassava and tapioca flour, topped with shredded coconut.), or “Bang Gawk” as people used to call it then. After he finished university, he won a scholarship to study in Fukuoka where he fell in love and had a brief marriage before falling in love again and having another brief marriage. After that, he quit his teaching job to open a record store on the outskirts of Kyoto. He had only come home once, for his sister’s wedding.
When he was done doing the rounds with the neighbours, Uncle Thanit summoned the family lawyer to the house to verify all the rent contracts and sort out the shambolic accounting Chalika had done. He divided his sister’s savings in two and placed one half each into the bank accounts of his nieces. Then he went through the income earned from the rentals and split it into three parts for school fees, household expenses, and a remainder further divided into another three portions for himself and the two girls, which would be paid into their accounts every month.
His next mission took him an entire week. Uncle Thanit went through the framed photographs adorning every vertical surface of the house. One by one he looked at them. There were photos of various scenes, each seemingly showing Father glancing at himself in the adjacent photo, always with Mother standing next to him, her eyes lonely and her smile too broad. In some they stood, in others they sat; photographs large and small, some vertically aligned, others horizontal.
The thousand photographs that bedecked the walls to declare a glorious victory over the “other woman” became, in the end, a monument to Mother’s hopeless attempts to validate a marriage that had already been shattered to pieces. It was a marriage, the depths of which she had never really been able to see, and, not only had she been desperate to see it, she had spent much of her life force trying to do so. Yet, in the end, she found herself ambushed by countless other eyes prying into her life. Worst of all, she had messed up the walls; all those faces pee
ring back at her like lifeless images from the repositories of dead people’s ashes at temples.
Uncle Thanit removed all the photographs and put them in boxes. Then he fixed up the house. He painted the rooms a pale shade of green that bled into white, threw away the wicker chair ruined by Father’s desire and Mother’s wrath, and changed the furniture. He opened windows that had stayed shut since the days when silence took over the house and let in a breeze to blow away the remnants of crystallised tears still shimmering in its nooks and crannies. He put up shelves on three walls of the living room that had once been colonised by the photographs and arranged his vinyls in orderly rows.
Of the thousands of photos he packed away, Uncle Thanit picked out just one. It was a black-and-white picture taken in a studio around the time Father and Mother had just got married. Father stood in a finely tailored cream-coloured suit, Mother sitting before him in white, with his hand on her shoulder in a touch of reassurance. They were both young with faint smiles on their faces and sparkling eyes, sweet and serene in the halo of studio lights that gave the impression of a swirling mist. The frame was white, run through with gold threads like those pictures of Catholic saints in churches. And the couple looked immaculate, pure, happy, uncorrupted – like saints, too.
Uncle Thanit hung the photograph on the wall next to the dining table so the girls would remember their parents that way and could be reassured, without any moments of doubt in the long years ahead of them, that they had been conceived out of nothing but love.
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth Page 3