by John Burgess
But I am getting ahead of myself. There is one other thing I must tell you of that time, back before I was trading in honey, repairing my roof. Too many days passed before I thought to remember the person who was the reason why my life and my daughter’s life were getting better. I knew I must give thanks. So shortly afterward a hired boy appeared at his house, carrying a gift of ten duck eggs in a basket decorated with pink lotus blossoms. With them was a note. I had spent a long time thinking out what it would say.
Dear Mr Narin,
Through the help of the novice priest, I have written those first three words. The rest is written by a man in the market who earns his rice doing such things. My brain is weak, my concentration short, I am unable to finish it myself. But because you have shown faith in me, I will continue the lessons and I hope that one day I may write a complete note of thanks in my own hand. Toward that time, please accept these eggs, as a token of my gratitude to a man whom Heaven has sent to show the path to happiness in this new life.
May the spirits protect you and your family and bring health and prosperity always.
With deepest respect and gratitude, this comes from Sray, the market woman
15: A clearing in a forest
It is time. I am ready to tell you.
But, but…let me begin at the proper place. The story has its origins at a temple that took in girls who had no parents. That is where I grew up. I was not born there, of course, but it is there that my recalled life begins. My very first memory? The scent of the cheap matting that was my bedding. Each morning, I would emerge from my dreams with its scent in my nose. Like many of the girls, I also awoke with its mark on my cheek, the kiss of its rough reed, on which my head had lain all night.
We were always roused by the voice of the old priest who ran the place. Holding an oil lamp, he would poke his head into our sleeping pavilion before sunrise and with sympathy that somehow never flagged call out that it was time for his group of very fine ladies to get up. We would stir, scratching at bites the mosquitoes had left. There was no netting. It’s too expensive for a humble place like this, the priest told any girl who asked, and he would point to the red spots on his own arm. In any case, he would say, a bite or two from these little creatures that are Heaven’s creation just like you will help build character that you’re going to need for the life ahead. Now hurry along, please! Our friends the ducks are awake already. Don’t you hear them quacking? They’re already out there foraging and you girls haven’t even sat up yet.
The orphanage existed because three reigns earlier, after another of the wars with the Chams, the King of the time was inspecting this province. His procession passed a child begging at roadside in front of a temple. He stopped, took pity and ordered the creation of an orphanage in this very place. Normally, of course, other families in a village take in children if their parents die. But war produces orphans so fast and in such numbers that in that year the traditional way was not sufficient.
There were about forty girls in residence in my day, and each morning after the priest’s call we lined up and went to a pond to bathe. Back in the pavilion, we rolled up the mats and stored them to the side. Then we were led in chanted prayer by the priest or the designated Leader Girl. Afterward, we gathered in a dirt courtyard and waited, the day’s first tentative rays of sunlight peeking through a palm grove. It was never clear how long the wait would last, only that it would end when a village woman retained by the priest emerged from the kitchen hut in the back, pushing a cart bearing a large pot of rice soup. With a coconut ladle she scooped the breakfast into our bowls, paying little attention to who got how much. That is another very early memory for me, joining the line behind whichever of the older girls was being kind to me at the time. Often I would offer a silent prayer that this morning there might be a bit of fish or meat for me. I would glance from time to time toward the reassuring sight of the old priest, who stood to the side, bantering with his girls, and keeping order if there was a need, which sometimes there was.
Later in the morning, we all did cleaning jobs. My favourite was sweeping the leaves and footprints from the dust in the courtyard. I liked the patterns I could make in the dust, and if there weren’t too many leaves or grass fronds to sweep, I did the job two or three times over, because it was fun and because it was always said at the home that an idle girl was a girl unloved of Heaven or humankind. Some mornings the work was followed by a bit of formal learning in the pavilion. We memorized fragments of verse from the hymns and epics, or we heard a sermon from a visiting priest, a long one full of big words. This was rather unusual, of course – normally girls of our birth would grow up knowing only of village spirits, or perhaps the deity who inhabited a small roadside shrine. But here we got a small view into the realm of the royal gods, through the whiskered mouth of this visiting priest. Still, much of what was said in those sermons and those prayers I couldn’t understand. When I could, the message often seemed to be that we girls should avoid the kind of lives our parents had lived, because if those lives had been upstanding, we would not have met the tragedy that brought us here.
There was another meal, a small one, past midday, with any leftovers from the morning thrown into the pot. In the afternoon, we worked with our hands, back in the pavilion, piecing together cheap charms and trinkets. These were taken away by cart once a week, for distribution to vendors who sold them at the gates of far-away temples.
The day’s only real freedom came after the evening meal, when for an hour each girl could go her own way. Sometimes the priest came from his quarters to pass time in the cool air with whichever girls chose to join him. I was always one of those, and I would sit close and try for his attention. If he didn’t appear, I followed other girls to the open area beyond the walls, where we played. Often the ducks were there. I would bring whatever scraps of food I could find. They waddled up and ate from my hand.
At planting time, the routine changed. We girls were hired out as day labourers to farmers in the area. The work was hard and hot, but we all welcomed it as a break in our routine. We lined up, we waded our way across a flooded paddy, pressing the delicate roots of seedlings into soft submerged soil. It was fun making a row all your own, a row as straight as you could manage. As I grew older, I became aware that sometimes more flirting than planting went on – village boys always managed to assign themselves to jobs alongside us girls. Sometimes the local mothers were mean, keeping a close eye, accusing us of having designs on their sons, though I thought that with some of these boys, at least, we were their only hopes of marriage. At other times, the women showed the deepest kindness. Once a young wife whom Heaven had given no children of her own took me into her house, babied me for a whole afternoon, and gave me sweet things to eat. At day’s end, I was sent on my way with a final snack. As I walked off, my eyes were misting at the impossible thought of staying the night, of having this would-be mother and her love all to myself. But once I caught up with the priest and the other girls, who were making their way by moonlight along paddy dikes back toward the home, I cheered up. The priest was in the middle of a story that had everyone giggling, but he stopped and smiled in relief on seeing that I’d re-appeared. We all walked on, beneath the bowl of the firmament, the priest going on with his rather long and amusing story, the distant lamplight of the home coming into view. I felt entirely contented when we passed through the gate. I settled in for sleep at the pavilion’s south edge. From the darkness outside came soft quacks of the ducks. This was my place.
Once a year, we girls washed our sampots with extra care and gave the entire home a thorough going-over with rags and reed brooms. Then we took places just inside the gate, the priest displaying some uncharacteristic abruptness if our lines were not exactly straight. On his signal, we knelt and the gate opened, and a man in costly silk sampot and silver armlets walked in. He was known to us girls simply as the rich man. Following behind him were a half dozen servants and a cart loaded with sacks of rice and bolts of the sturdy
cloth of which our garments were made. Later he presented a sampling of these things in the chapel, and the priest gave a blessing that seemed to all of us waiting in the sun outside to be the longest we had ever heard. Then the rich man was shown to a wooden dais that had been polished and placed in our pavilion. For an hour, girls sang and danced and recited from the texts for him. I was sometimes one of them, dancing with three other girls. He watched, a look of approval on his face, and I felt, despite the vanity of the thought, that he was watching me in particular.
By my thirteenth year, I had left behind the body of a girl, and become the official Leader Girl. I welcomed the new arrivals, played mother as best I could and led the chanting of prayers and the settling of disputes. Smaller girls wanted me to move my sleeping place, to take the one of honour at the east end of pavilion. But I always pretended to forget to move. My place was by the south edge, where I could hear the ducks as they settled down for the night. I was in charge of them now too, gathering their eggs every day. They all had names, my private names, and I could sense the spirits that lived within them. When their time in this life was up, I prayed over them and saw to a clean and dignified butchering that turned them into a meal for the health of us all.
One afternoon – it was shortly after I turned fifteen – I was told to go see the priest. This was very unusual. I found him on a mat at the foot of his temple’s steps, waiting. He wore a long face. With some apprehension, I knelt, hands together, but he motioned that this time I should not bother.
‘I’m afraid the day has come, Sray. Our patron has called for you...’
Some girls became maids in the towns and cities. Some went into nunneries – there was one a half day’s walk away that seemed to regard the home as a recruiting station. Some were married off to those local farm boys, and some became minor wives to prominent men. The rich man had always seemed good-hearted, sitting on that dais as we girls performed, never letting his attention wander. But the thought of him with his garment off...
‘But please!’ said the priest. ‘Don’t look so sad. It’s not what you think.’
‘Sir?’
‘He has called for you as wife for a young man on his estate. His name is Koy. That’s a very nice-sounding name, don’t you think? He is eighteen. He’s an apprentice blacksmith. I’ve made some inquiries about him. There’s a priest at the temple down the road who knows him – this Koy was a novice there for close to a year. He is strong, his health is good and he’s never been married. Everyone says he’s a very fine young man. You are to be married two weeks from now and our patron will provide a house as a wedding gift.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sray – you should be happy! Most of my girls don’t do nearly as well.’
‘I will try, sir.’ What else could I say? ‘But I will miss you...and the other girls.’
‘As all of us will miss you, Sray. To be truthful, I’m having trouble feeling good about this too.’ He paused. ‘But, let’s keep our spirits up! In each life, nothing is permanent. Change begins setting in from the moment that something is created and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. But you’ll come and see us sometimes? You won’t be so far away.’
‘I’ll come often, sir,’ I replied, though something told me I would not. ‘But, sir…I’d much rather remain...’
‘My dear Sray...’
I was crying now and had he not been a priest who had taken vows never to touch a woman, he would have placed an arm on my shoulder for comfort.
‘I’ll be all right, sir,’ I said after a bit, still sniffling. ‘I’ve known for a long time that one day I would leave here, but now that I have to...’
‘You’ll be fine, Sray. You are a beautiful young woman, whose real life can now begin. When you were born, I’m sure that your parents said the traditional prayer – may you have a hundred, a thousand husbands. Now you will have one, which is really all that any woman needs. You have graced this place for fifteen years, and that’s all that Heaven will allow. It knows you deserve something better. You’ll have a husband, children, your own house – you’ll forget this place.’
‘I won’t forget it, sir.’
‘I hope not, I hope not.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Now, Sray, there is a practice here, that when a girl leaves, we tell her how it happened that she came to live with us, if she came here too young to remember.’
‘Yes?’
‘You were brought to us when you were not more than a few months old. There was a war at the time. Many villages in the frontier districts were razed, many people were killed. Your parents and all your brothers and sisters – I don’t know how many there were – died in one of those raids. It was a terrible thing. But you were the one whom Heaven chose to preserve. The soldiers who found you said it was a miracle that you survived. Everywhere were bodies and smouldering debris, but then they heard a baby’s cry from the ruins of a house and they began to dig, and they discovered you there, under the house’s mother beam, unhurt. The house’s spirit, or perhaps some larger god, had created a space in which to save you.’
‘Sir, I don’t know that I deserved to be saved, when my mother, my father...’
‘You did deserve it – otherwise Heaven would not have arranged it. Now, you were brought here. We had no idea what name your parents had given you. So – and it was I who chose – you became Sray. There are fancier names, of course, with all sorts of meaning about flowers and jewels and beams of light. Sometimes I feel that these names are given in desperation that they will somehow make the child measure up to such things. But with you, even as a baby, I could see that you would have no need of such help. Sray. One might think it’s too simple a name – it just means girl, after all. But how can it be simple when it sums up the essence of all things female and feminine. Softness, strength, renewal and birth, whether here on earth or in Heaven.
‘Sray, you have always had the character of one blessed. For a long time I believed that you would take vows in the holy orders. But as you have grown, I have seen that it is instead your place to move in the secular world, to carry with you the grace of one so favoured, and to share it with people, not by instruction, perhaps, but by example.’
‘Sir,’ and now I wanted to cry again, ‘I am nothing like what you describe. You frighten me.’
‘That is not my intention. My intention is only to send you on your way with encouragement to accept the path that Heaven has set for you. I know you will. You will be kind to those whom you encounter, whether they are sick or hungry or unstable of mind. You will go to the shrine and burn incense and give offerings. When it is necessary, I think, you will stand up against injustice and violence. You will find that in this life men too often act under self-delusion. They tell themselves they are following Heaven’s will, but in fact they are following their own. Your family died in such a war, Sray. Whatever we are told, what happened is that the King of the time began the war saying that our Lord Shiva desired an expansion of the Empire’s borders; in fact, it is said by people who know that our monarch had heard that the enemy King had a boar-hunting ground like no other and he wanted it. Can you imagine? For that, ten thousand people died. And in the end, our King did not even get the hunting ground. The enemy was too strong that time.’
I thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Sir, how could I...?’
‘Have an effect on something like that? I don’t know, but who can say? As your life unfolds, you will be surprised at the places where fate places you, at the people with whom it brings you together. When the time comes, you will know what is required.’
‘I hope so, sir.’
‘Well! I had not meant to make you cry, Sray.’ In fact, it was now he who was misty-eyed. ‘This is a day for celebration. You are going to married, and to a very fine young man!’
Two days later, I stood at the gate, my possessions packed in a single straw basket. With me was every girl of the home and, of course, the priest, but still I felt alone. An oxcart had arrived, driven by a man i
n his middle years. He was given water to drink, my basket was placed in the back. There was no way to delay now; I got aboard. Then the priest pulled himself together and gave a blessing. The cart rolled off, the new Leader Girl leading a chant of farewell. The words carried to me even as I passed far across the rice land. I could not bear to look back.
The driver saw my tears, and looked away, finding no words. But when we came to a small market at a crossroads, he stopped the cart. He jumped down and returned with a coconut, freshly opened. ‘Drink this down, young lady,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel better.’