Tonight, you’ll have to take shelter here – my husband will return in the morning. Her voice floated above the roaring of the storm and the ceaseless pelting of sand on the roof and walls. Uncle Thanit had heard about the ruthless sandstorms in this part of the world, and knew he had no choice but to nod and murmur his thanks to the woman. She didn’t say another word but got up and poured him some hot tea. Then she sat down across from him and started cooking.
The temperature dropped quickly. The wind was strong and seeped through the invisible gaps around the door and window, making the lamp flame flutter. Uncle Thanit sipped his tea silently. Without uttering a word, he stole glances at the woman’s shadow dancing around the room in the light of the trembling wind-swept flame. The sweet aroma of the incense had gone and been replaced by the acrid smell of the spiced vegetable soup bubbling over the stove.
Without rhyme or reason, Uncle Thanit thought back to a lonely street in Kyoto basked in the pale blue evening light of summer. Back then, he would take out a chair, sit in front of his shop as night set in, and watch pedestrians amble along over his memory of a woman’s back, a woman who had once walked away from him on that same street. And he had a sudden realisation: the longing that had tormented him in the depths of his heart – a longing for something he couldn’t identify – was about to come to an end.
Night crept over the house in darkness and during the eye of the storm. As he lay next to the stove, listening to the wind and the sand continue to crash mercilessly against the house, he heard the door of the room slowly being pried open. Seconds later, he heard the jingling of the beads woven through her hair bumping lightly against each other. This was followed by the rustling of silk, ever-so gentle, as she came closer and closer, and stopped in front of him.
The moment he heard the sound of skin the colour of a twilight cloud softly unfurling over his body, Uncle Thanit became aware that this moment had existed since time immemorial, since before he was born, and that it would remain for all eternity. It was this very moment that had drawn him to this region in search of a small piece of cloth that no one knew for sure really existed, and to make a detour to this village to see a man he had never met, on an afternoon when a storm hit, and to be imprisoned within the perfume of tea leaves amidst a maddening maelstrom of sand, and, finally, inevitably, to succumb to the embrace of a woman who had come to him in the dark. After the moment passed, if he could turn back time and return to this place, in all certainty they would still be in each other’s embrace.
Uncle Thanit slowly opened his eyes. He looked at her long black hair draped over his face, darkness descending upon darkness. And everything else that existed was shut out by that cool black curtain – the roar of the storm, the whole world, the life he had lived up to that point, even time itself. Uncle Thanit drew in air from her breath before relinquishing himself to the sovereignty of love – maybe it was love, if not something more – and he felt as if he had known the woman, whose name he didn’t know, his entire life.
At the darkest hour of the night, before dawn broke, the storm subsided, leaving only the soft wailing of a placid wind billowing past alien grains of sand that had been blown from another planet. Uncle Thanit lay awake as she whispered through the darkness that blanketed his heart: In one life… She paused. In another life, a man accidentally killed a boy in a war. The guilt bound him on a never-ending journey to find the boy in subsequent lives in order to repay the debt he owed. The boy who was killed also found himself stuck, waiting without end, for the killer to return and repay him with life. The wind wailed and whistled. This is our story.
Uncle Thanit slowly closed his eyes and could see her shadow dance around the room in the flickering lamplight. He felt surprised that he didn’t find any of this at all surprising – not the story she told, not its surreal simplicity, not even the sordid savagery she claimed was hidden beneath what he had been about to believe was love. He grew calm inside. Or, to be precise, he was made to feel calm yet couldn’t understand how. Tomorrow, when my husband returns, he will kill you.
In that silence, as sand fell from the sky as slowly as sediment collecting at the bottom of a river, Uncle Thanit could saw everything with great clarity: the fragile love he had experienced so fleetingly; the woman who had run from the love she had for him and fled to the end of the world; the evening when pikul flowers had fallen down like rain; the golden flame of the kanok* motif in the hazy light; the long, empty journey he had undertaken though he had no clue what he was really looking for; the crows flying home against the pale moon while he and his sister lay on their mother’s lap, drifting out onto a river of uncertainty.
At that moment, there was a loud explosion and a flash of blinding light that left behind thick smoke hanging like a cloud in the still darkness. He couldn’t hear a thing; his ears had stopped working and everything was quiet, black and motionless. Then someone ran out of that cloud. He pulled the trigger… No, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure if he had fired the shot or if it had hit someone. He couldn’t hear anything. The person stopped in their tracks, as if the bullet had pinned them down in the dark. Another flash of light in the distance. Yes, he wore a soldier’s uniform, a gun in his hand, and then the dark, the cloud, and… Shit. He was just a boy, a young boy with the delicate face of a girl, pallid and puzzled and fragile, unable to comprehend where the blood spurting from his chest had come from. And he spoke… No, his ears weren’t working. The boy didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t fall. He was just standing there, staring straight at him, and he would keep staring at him for
all eternity.
In that peculiar moment, without any warning, Uncle Thanit foresaw a day when the sky would be bright and an hour when all things would be basked in a balmy sun and his journey would finally come to an end. The boy with tender eyes would be born from him, from her, on a winter’s day when this village would be abandoned, on a night when it would be buried beneath another sandstorm. Three children who loved each other would hurt each other at the inescapable hand of fate, and he foresaw the fading final moon cycle of his life. Everything had been predetermined. Everything. And he didn’t feel bitter about it, not at all.
Grains of sand poured down from the roof like water and the last star was about to disappear from the sky when she put the necklace around Uncle Thanit’s neck. It was made of silver threads entwined, one over the other, and resembled the sign of infinity, layer upon layer. This is the eternal knot. It has no beginning and no end but twists around and around forever. It is a symbol of the cycle of life – samsara, the interwoven journey of life on this earth and in the world of spirits. The space in the middle is the void, the emptiness, the nothingness…
The first light of day was brightly mirrored in those tender eyes as she softly ran her hands over his face, his eyelids, his lips, his cheeks, and then held his hands in hers and placed them on her heart. Uncle Thanit then cupped her hands and held them to his chest. He bowed his forehead until it touched hers and remained there for a long time. Forgive me, he whispered, eyes closed. I forgive you, she replied. Never before in his life and never again would Uncle Thanit feel the void of emptiness he felt in that moment.
Go, before my husband returns. Go as pure as when you came. For the last time, Uncle Thanit looked into those eyes, etching them onto the deepest part of his soul, and then walked away. Anil… she said softly behind him. Uncle Thanit paused. I will call our son Anil. That was her goodbye. Anil, he knew that word; it came from Sanskrit and meant wind. And he thought about another son he never had whose name also meant wind. Uncle Thanit smiled, nodded, and walked off without turning back.
Two days later, Uncle Thanit looked up at an ancient temple perched atop a precipitous cliff shrouded in mist. To reach it, he had to climb a rugged, steep and treacherous path for five more days. A soft wind caressed his body and warm sunlight fell upon him in that moment when he came into possession of the last piece of fabric he would acquire in his life. It was not the Khata sca
rf with its apocalyptic prophecy, the desire for which had enticed him to trek through the land of the thirteen lakes to begin with; it was the crimson robe of monkhood, which he wore on top of the symbol of nothingness that would hang over his heart for the rest of his life.
Uncle Thanit never came down from that mountain again, not until his death thirty-one years later, under the hazy shadow of the moon.
…The same moon he had seen on the night when he was caught in the eye of the storm.
XX
The Twins from the Land of Tears
P ran, I’m sorry.
The alley behind the Bleeding Heart bar on the night of the waning moon was damp and choked with a burnt smell. Pran’s eyes were fixed on the ground. He said nothing. When he looked up, he averted his gaze. I didn’t mean to. In the distance was the intersection where she had often paused to watch the lights change colour and several cars were waiting for the light to turn green. It would be hours before this night ended. I’m sorry, Pran, Chareeya said again. Without meaning to, he happened to glance in her direction and noticed the gleam in her eyes. It was the same gleam she had when her floating basket had capsized in the river, a gleam of irredeemable sorrow.
It’s all right, Charee, he said, still not looking at her. Does your mouth still hurt? Her fingertips touched his lips. Pran turned his face away, his insides twisting into a coil. He didn’t know how to tell her that it still hurt; not there, not on his lips, but somewhere deeper. He didn’t tell her how much he hurt, or what he had done to soothe that hurt, or how, for a time, he had forgotten who he was, or how lonely he had been as he hacked through the rough thickets of his life, or what he had gone through before he had ended up so insane and so broken. Or who he had had beside him…
He didn’t tell her that in that despair and unforgiving loneliness, he had set out to find her, staggering into the ruins of ragged memories and falling into sweet and warm embraces he knew he shouldn’t have fallen into, and wandering into places he knew – with absolute certainty – he shouldn’t have wandered into, only to find that she wasn’t there. He didn’t tell her that he always felt like crying, that he had nowhere to go. And he didn’t tell her about what had happened between him and Chalika, that he hadn’t meant for it to happen, that he hadn’t meant for anything to happen the way it had.
Chareeya still came to the bar every Friday evening with her friends and Pran still walked her home late at night as he had always done. They walked together mostly in silence, exchanging barely a word. An air of loneliness trailed after her. She didn’t tell him anything, and he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to know. Still, from his usual spot he would watch her scoop the cat into her arms, weed out the nut grass intruding on her garden, plant new flowers and trim old ones, and then whisper to them, one by one. He would watch her drink her coffee in the tea-coloured sunshine, watch her reading…
And he remembered small details from their afternoons together as he pieced together the unfinishable jigsaw of the Andromeda. He recalled mundane moments from their Mondays together, or the conversations they used to have late on Friday nights. He remembered the movies they had watched and the music they had listened to on weekdays. These stories and details gradually faded into the past, hobbling away at the end of the day, as he kept searching for a white smile that was as dazzling as a solar eclipse on the faces of the people he encountered. Some days he lay on the floor in his room with the tissue that had been touched by her kiss over his eye – placing it on the same side as Chareeya’s permanently fissured eye – and gazed at the ceiling in the dark through his remaining eye. And sometimes he tried to deceive his own heart by telling it that the Monday when he had seen the red praduu tree against the sky had never happened.
When she asked him to have lunch with her again one Monday, Pran replied politely that he was busy. Chareeya didn’t press him, as if surrendering to the distance that now separated them like a curtain of fog. He didn’t tell her that he had already given his Mondays to Chalika.
Every Monday, Chalika hung a “We’re Closed” sign outside her dessert shop and devoted her entire day to him. Pran would catch the first bus from Bangkok to the house by the river, spend the night there and leave in the late morning or afternoon of the following day. They would eat dishes cooked from simple recipes, nothing as sophisticated as Chareeya’s international repertoire, and they would sit and talk about nothing in particular in that living room that Pran had hoped for much of his life to return to. In the afternoons, he would fall asleep without dreaming. In the evenings, they would go out on the rowing boat and drift into the familiar scent of the river he had longed for, where he would salvage fragments of memories scattered around its bends and reconstruct them in his dismal heart, and later in Chalika’s embrace.
I talked to Charee on the phone about Uncle Thanit becoming a monk. I also told her about us, Chalika said. She didn’t seem surprised at all, Pran. Pran lowered his head and went quiet. But maybe she already knew, she smiled. Did you know we have a telepathic connection? Like twins. We’ve always known each other’s thought without having to speak them, ever since we were kids. We used to pretend we were real twins. We stole Aunt Phong’s skirt to wear. You remember Aunt Phong, don’t you? Pran nodded. And we tied ourselves together with a belt, pretending to be Eng and Chan, and we hobbled together around the house like that. Chalika laughed her crystal laugh. Pran pictured the two girls and couldn’t help but chuckle.
Only Uncle Thanit doesn’t know. He didn’t say in his letter which temple he’s staying at – there’s no return address. I didn’t know where to write back to. She paused. Maybe he doesn’t want to be bothered. He said he’ll never leave the monkhood… Chalika’s eyes reddened. Pran ran his fingers along her arm in a consoling gesture. She pursed her lips and nodded. Well, he’s already given us so much. I just miss him. If he were here, he’d be so happy to see you back taking care of us… Just like the old days.
In the same way as she had viewed the army cadet who hadn’t been a cadet for a long time, Chalika saw Pran as a man from another world and not the flesh-and-blood Pran who lived in the here and now. Her Pran was a mongrel of heartthrobs bred from a million romance novels, though, in reality, he was nothing remotely like any one of those heroes in movies or books. He might be kind, but only to Chareeya and Chalika. He went along with other people’s wishes, but he never sucked up to anyone. He acted in accordance with his feelings, but he didn’t feel that much. He didn’t assign any importance to his own feelings because that would have intensified his sense of bitterness in a world where nothing went the way he wanted it to. Pran wasn’t sweet, neither was he sensitive, vulnerable, or obsessive, and nor did he have a head full of dreams. He didn’t have inspiring life stories to share with others. And he never told her he loved her.
But Chalika never asked him either. She never demanded to hear anything from him. Not only was she a beauty who glowed with the hallowed aura of a heroine, over the years she had grown into the archetype of a leading lady. She was neither demanding, nor intrusive. She was reserved and she kept her feelings to herself. Whether he loved her or not, Pran nonetheless came to see her every Monday, and Chalika was happy to have him to herself for one whole day a week, to watch him sleep and dream through the night all the way until morning. Compared to the life she had spent all alone up until then, it was more than enough for her.
Though Pran wasn’t trying to sort out his life or find any order in it at that time, she believed he would soon change. A hero in a novel was never the same person at the end of the story as he was at the beginning of the book, was he? Once Pran got older he would think about settling down, and then he might want to move back and find something to do there. Right now he was still young; still enjoying his work, wanting to make music, wanting to be the way he had always been.
Chalika’s only older family member was Uncle Thanit, who had become a monk and abandoned all worldly demands. But, even if he had been present, he wouldn’t have obje
cted. And people in the neighbourhood weren’t interested in gossiping about this household where unusual people had lived together – from masters to maids – for as long as they could remember. In this age of globalisation, as they called it, where the most private stories about celebrities became topics for public discussion on a daily basis, who would have any spare time to gossip about a dessert vendor like her? To live together without getting married might be a little too progressive, but it wasn’t such a huge deal either in this day and age. She didn’t see the necessity of a wedding, of wasting time and money on it. A marriage registration didn’t guarantee an eternal union – just look at her parents as a prime example. And Chalika had known Pran since childhood. He wasn’t a lady’s man, and all heroes and heroines were bound together by a feeling in their hearts above all else. But…
Pran, I want a child. They were sitting on her mother’s bench under the pikul tree. It was evening and Pran was looking out at the river. He didn’t answer. You don’t have to live with me forever, but I want a child / I’ll always be with you forever, Pran finally said. But I’m not sure about a child / I understand. No, you don’t, Lika; he knew she didn’t understand. I’m not sure I can take care of it – I can’t even take care of you / I know, I can take care of myself, Pran, I can take care of a baby too – the shop is doing well and I get money from the rentals.
Pran became silent. It wasn’t that, it wasn’t about the money. He had never had a proper parent before, and neither had Chalika and Chareeya. They had grown up, yes, but look at what they had become. They were eternal orphans: lost, isolated, estranged, different, living in the solitude of their own worlds, pursuing their own paths, and too desolate and lonely to be healed as they strayed into the black voids inside their hearts that could never be filled. Soon, Lika, give me some time, Pran pleaded. He had nothing to give anyone; he knew that for sure.
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth Page 15