As if in endless replay before their eyes, a giant blue-coloured whale launched itself from the water’s surface and crashed down on a European junk next to a flock of kinnarii swimming languorously amidst an effulgent sea of stars. Above a window, Jatayu – half-garuda, half-eagle – woke from his slumber, flapped his wings twice in preparation then stretched them, magnificently, full span, and fluttered across the prayer hall to the Himaphan Forest.* ( In Buddhist cosmology the Himaphan Forest exists on the slopes of Mount Meru, the axis of the universe, and is home to mythical creatures that include the kinnarii (half-bird, half-human), the garuda (king of birds and mount of the Hindu god, Vishnu), the deer Marica (a powerful ogre who disguises himself as a golden deer), and the naga (giant serpent). The apsara (female celestial beings) and the ghandarva (their companions and heavenly musicians) reside in the heavens above.) Sometimes, if they were lucky, the children would spot the golden deer Marica ambling about in the bushes. And, once, they bore witness to a sacred manifestation when Lord Buddha opened his eyes under the Great Bodhi Tree as he attained enlightenment.
Basking in the jingling of the brass bells hung from the eaves, Chareeya and Pran would sometimes hear the whispers of little novice monks trying to placate the howling of ravenous ghouls, stuck in hell for centuries, or be terrified by the hissing of the naga, breathing fire as it swam atop the roaring waves of the Great Ocean, or hear the growling of the great lion Singhakunchorn. Sometimes, if they listened carefully, they could hear the harp song of the celestial ghandarva serenading the apsara in heaven.
Sore from sitting too long, Uncle Thanit and Chalika would lie down with Chareeya and Pran. One time, a pale Norwegian tourist walked in on the four orphans lying in the middle of the prayer hall and snapped their picture, to be taken home and shown to his family. Years later, when she was an adult, Chareeya would imagine the image of her family lying next to each other at the edge of the Himaphan Forest in the album of a stranger who lived somewhere distant and cold.
The excursions to the capital concluded with dinner: a European, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian or Middle-Eastern restaurant; or a sampling of neighbouring Burmese, Lao or Cambodian cuisines; a vegetarian meal during the Vegetarian Festival; turkey and stollen bread at Christmas; as well as the occasional spiritual meal in accordance with macrobiotic principles.
Food is mindfulness and spirituality. It tells stories that aren’t just about human life. When you encounter a new kind of food, try it. If you like it, have more. If not, give it a rest. But when you have a chance, try it again, and soon you’ll learn to enjoy it, Uncle Thanit told the children as they experimented with snails, jellyfish, sashimi, fermented shrimps, sea urchins, silkworms, stinky natto beans, live oysters, stringy seaweed. To Chareeya, Uncle Thanit had the most curious mind when it came to exotic culinary culture, unrivalled by anyone she would meet later in her life, except herself, since she had caught the epicurean bug from him.
Chareeya slowly cut back on her adventures in the neighbourhood wilderness. Instead, she spent more and more time listening to music, which took up hours every day. She beseeched Pran to take her to buy a miniature fountain with a frowning swan as the centrepiece. She grew pygmy roses in a rainbow of colours in a pocket garden in front of the house. She learned to play the violin with Uncle Thanit and assisted Nual in the kitchen, where she discovered her unique talent: Chareeya could instinctively identify the ingredients of any dish in their exact measures and was able to emulate its flavour after just one taste.
Chalika, meanwhile, grew more silent as her beauty grew more intriguing and this was the cause of Pran’s constant scuffles with unruly teenagers from the other side of town. The second-hand bookstore she found during one of the Bangkok trips was a treasure trove of old novels and she kept to herself even more, spending hours reading into the night. Still, she had time to emerge from her solitude to bake cakes made from local fruits (santol, zalacca, pomelo, mango, bael, or even mouse-shit chilli), using just a small, basic oven. And, like Chareeya, she had a knack for it. She knew the right moment to take the cake out of the oven without having to time it, and it would be just perfect; not one second too soon or too late. Also, she still had a secret crush on the military cadet who lived down the street.
Pran, who was the same age as Chalika, had by that time started painting, teaching himself by copying pictures from imported books he found at second-hand stalls. He didn’t know if it was his calling, but at least images gave him a substitute for his verbal indigence. Not only did he hardly speak, but Pran’s footsteps were also soundless, and so mute was his presence that Chareeya thought of hanging a cat’s bell around his neck to signal his approach so they wouldn’t have to endure mutual shocks when he appeared suddenly behind her. But, in actuality, Chareeya always knew when Pran was within a ten-metre radius; in the same way that laundry hung on a line to dry outside retains that halo of balmy sunlight, she could sense an ethereal, tender aura, invisible but perceptible, almost like a fragrance pasteurised in the air.
Slowly, Pran transformed from a boy into a man. It happened without anyone in the living room and the vegetable garden by the river even noticing. Lanky, awkward, his face all ridges and squares, his mouth curved. The only feature that remained unchanged was the harsh, penetrating gaze he had inherited from his great-great-great-great-grandfather, a rebel who had been executed and whose name was erased from the family tree. No one ever told him about that great-great-great-great-grandfather. In fact, no one ever told Pran anything about his ancestors or anything about his genealogical past.
Then, there was the day when Uncle Thanit walked past a crummy antique shop and didn’t realise that his fate was sealed from the moment he turned and saw the shop owner unfurl a roll of ancient silk on a table. As soon as the light from a corner lamp illuminated its hem and the gold damask lit up as if in a dance of flames, Uncle Thanit had no faculty to shield himself from the irresistible seduction of the ancient fabric; it was a temptation that he barely understood and that would lead him on countless more journeys. But that would come much later.
Until the last day of his life, under the glow of the moon on the other side of the earth, Uncle Thanit would still remember these happy days at the house by the river, days of bliss that would have lasted forever had a certain man not arrived.
Her palms didn’t become clammy, her heartbeat didn’t quicken, and there was no tornado whirling around her as had happened with Chalika. There was just a conviction, profound and silent; the conviction that no matter what happened, regardless of where he went, she would follow him. It was as simple as that when love found Chareeya.
Thana was from Bangkok, a cousin of Earn, Chareeya’s close friend. He was one of the democracy activists who had survived the violent crackdown, fled into the jungle and later returned. She overheard him speak to a neighbour with a vigour that she’d never heard in anyone before, about subjects she’d never heard from anyone before; social oppression, injustice, feudal capitalists who trampled on the poor, and the struggle for rights and freedom.
The massacre of 6 October* ( On 6 October 1976, government forces and a right-wing mob attacked student protestors at Thammasat University in Bangkok; though the official death toll was 46, survivors believe it was much higher. )was twelve years past and its memory had begun to fade. People were no longer even sure if it had actually happened. Besides, Nakhon Chai Si was a rich town that had known no hardship so the issues Thana raised were misunderstood or completely ignored. But his lonesome eyes, hair grazing his shoulders, the Che Guevara beret, and his passion for justice attracted her.
The third time they met, Thana talked to her about youth power, the dream of a land where everyone was equal, about the high mountains and his noontime treks through the clouds. The next time, he sang her the anthem of the Left, “Starlight of Faith”: The sparkling tiny stars lit up the skies as far as the eyes could see… His head coyly lowered, his voice croaky, and still Chareeya thought it was the most beautiful so
ng in the world. And it was. That night, the memory of her skin glowing in the late afternoon deprived him of the calm of sleep and almost drove him into a fit of tears over an unfathomable longing he had never felt before.
For no obvious reason, Chareeya began waking up when the sky was still dark. Everything was peaceful, except for the fluttering in her stomach when she saw Thana’s face without opening her eyes. While everyone else in the house was still asleep, Chareeya would lie down on the sofa, her right hand on her heart, and put Brahms’s Symphony No.4 on repeat, before getting dressed for school. On their eleventh date, when Thana told her he was moving back to Bangkok, Chareeya, with the same fierce conviction her mother had, got up and ran away with him.
Her mind is set, what’s the use? He wasn’t the expressive type, but everyone knew how distraught Uncle Thanit was, and how much strength he had to muster in letting Chareeya go her own way. Chalika wailed and sobbed and blamed herself for spending all her time reading novels and failing to notice her sister’s furtive romance. Meanwhile, Pran said not a word. The tumult in his young blood told him that the day he ran into that man would be the day he committed murder.
Three months later, Chareeya called and then she kept calling every couple of weeks to tell everyone she was fine. But she never said where she was or showed any sign of wanting to see anyone. Not long after that, she got a job at a CD shop on Silom Road. She was just sixteen years old but her knowledge of classical music impressed the shop owner. Working there also guaranteed her an endless supply of music.
Go on, enjoy the feudal music, climb the ladder and pretend you really enjoy it. You don’t realise, do you, that the toffs look at you and see a country bumpkin! Thana shouted at her. What toffs? What’s that got to do with anything? Music is music and I like this kind of music / Don’t play it around here, it riles me.
The couple didn’t listen to music together. Neither did they go to the cinema and nor did they eat together. They didn’t even have conversations with each other. Each morning, Chareeya got up and went to work, and later she came back to her boxy flat and listened to music written centuries ago to soothe the haute bourgeoisie. For his part, Thana spent time with his friends at labour union meetings, unable not to feel embarrassed by his unintellectual girlfriend. The only activity they still shared was sleeping together and Chareeya continued to long for the carnal epiphany she had once read about in books even though what she actually experienced was mild pain, a suffocating clasp, being pushed around the bed, and the heavy panting of a locomotive hurtling into the dark.
After watching a French film at the store where she worked, Chareeya thought the opening song was the most beautiful song in the world. It also contained another piece of music, an aria from La Wally, from the scene in which a woman sang a mournful farewell to her sleeping father and eloped with her star-crossed lover into the snowy mountains where no one had ever ventured or returned from so that they could spend the brief remaining moments of their lives together. The film told the story of a young postman who fell in love with an opera singer and the characters spoke in singsong melodies like musical instruments, so captivating that Chareeya decided to take a French language class after work to cure her loneliness and compensate for her lack of education.
What nerve, to learn that imperialist language / It’s the language of the first revolutionaries / What do you know about revolutions? You’re so dense, your mind has been enslaved by white feudalists – you know nothing about anything.
It was true. Chareeya knew nothing more about the French Revolution than what she had heard from Uncle Thanit’s synopsis of the musical Les Misérables, which was truncated from a novel based on slices of a real account. She knew nothing about mental enslavement, or about white feudalists. She had never read Marx or Gorky or studied the critical theory of materialism. She had no understanding of those convoluted terms printed on the covers of the books Thana was always reading. In fact, she understood nothing except that she loved a man. Less than a year later, Thana broke up with her and left behind a scribbled letter with only a few words: You stood between me and the people.
For the rest of his life – either when he had a great mass of people beside him as they dodged bullets on the streets four years later in the Black May democracy uprising* ( The large-scale protest in May 1992 triggered by the appointment of a military general as Prime Minister is remembered as “Black May” after a government crackdown resulted in an official death toll of 52; as was the case in 1976, many more were reported missing.), during which he was shot in the leg and left lurching ever since, or ten years later when he abandoned his people to become a right-wing politician and eventually threw his weight behind another violent crackdown against democracy protestors who had taken to the streets – Thana would never meet anyone who loved him with such purity, untarnished by any ideology, as Chareeya had loved him.
IX
Starlight River
T he following Friday, and every Friday after that, Chareeya and her friends returned to the Bleeding Heart to clink tequila glasses, laugh for no reason, sometimes whisper into each other’s ears in the dim light and stroke a girlfriend’s shoulders and back as she cried – the same melodrama that played out on repeat at any bar anywhere in the world. Then the girls would implore Pran to play the same corny, schmaltzy songs – Without You, I Will Survive, or anything else along those lines – so whoever’s turn it was to cry could cry even harder and infect the rest of the gang with blotchy eyed sentimentalism. But, whether they were laughing or crying, her friends always left Chareeya at the door so that Pran could walk her home every time.
On the drizzly second Friday of that year, Chareeya didn’t let Pran return to his room in the rain, and brought out a blanket and pillows for him to sleep with the cat in the room that was filled with everything in the world. But before the clock struck three, she got up and made him sangria as sublime as the kind served at temple fairs. She served apple slices and chilled cheese as snacks, and when they got pleasantly groggy they saluted life by shouting above the rain, Frida’s last phrase emblazoned on the wall – Viva la vida! Long live life! – whilst playing music that had journeyed across time from the house by the river. They ended up talking until dawn.
Stories, old stories of days gone by: about the fountain with the moody swan statue that Pran had spent months looking for because he couldn’t find one in a colour she liked so had ended up buying one in bare concrete, which turned out to be much more attractive; about the Loy Krathong ceremony* in which Chareeya put lampu seeds in a floating basket in the hopes that the Goddess Ganga would bear them across the oceans to the faraway Pacific islands, but it barely made it past the gazebo before capsizing and Chareeya entreated Pran to make her another one. He succumbed to her pleas and defied the darkness of the banana grove to cut a fresh shoot when Chareeya promised to place only her bad karma in the vessel, even though she ended up smuggling a few lampu seeds in anyway.
The never-ending stories of the Himaphan Forest on the wall and the extra ring around Saturn at the Planetarium, which no one else saw except them. And there was the time when Chareeya became obsessed with assassinating Pran using ripe ivy gourds as bullets so that she could later transform from sniper to field nurse and rush to bandage his wounds. Or the time when she hid in a corner and ambushed him from behind before rolling on the ground, eyes gleaming and laughing uncontrollably as if it was the funniest thing on earth.
Stories about what happened during the time that had gone missing between them: Chareeya going so far as to shear off most of her hair so she would get the role of a Vietnamese boy in a foreign movie being filmed in Kanchanaburi, only to appear for a fraction of a second on the screen; Pran getting high on weed, alternately breaking down in fits of laughter and tears, and slamming his fists against the floor until dawn; the sad story of Uncle Yellow the cat; the three Witches and their complicated love sagas; and Pran’s friend, Paradorn.
Stories about how Uncle Thanit liked to put
on a wedding ring though no one was sure which of his marriages it had come from, and how he would fall silent for days after receiving a postcard with a short note in Japanese; Chalika and the military cadet to whom she never uttered a word and who only came home once in a long while; and Chalika’s secret habit of rereading Rose Laren’s novel Shadow, and how she still cried in anticipation before one of the characters died on the page.
Stories about Grandpa Nong who lived around a bend in the river and was so madly in love with his own daughter that he tied his hands and feet together and plunged to his death in the river on the day his daughter ran away with an outdoor cinema projectionist; how Grandpa Nong returned at midnight, his feet and hands still tied, dripping wet, his body transparent in the beam of a flashlight, to sit crying beneath the sugar palm tree behind his house; and how Chareeya had been compelled to drag Pran out not once but twice to verify the mystery of Grandpa Nong’s spectral presence, though they didn’t find anything but a grey dust, like ash, covering everything inside his house, untouched since the day he died.
Stories about Uncle Poj, the son of Grandma Jerd from next door, who had never shown any feminine proclivities until the day his mother died when he suddenly turned into a drag queen, and yet the longing to see his dead mother was so strong that he put on the clothes she had worn when she was a young woman and cried his heart out at her funeral until his eyeliner melted into rivulets of tears, alarming the neighbours who couldn’t wrap their heads around Uncle Poj’s transformation and assumed that he was possessed by the ghost of his own mother – a perfect opportunity for them to ask for lucky lottery numbers.
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth Page 6