Storyteller

by Zoe Daniel

  I look up from the interview and see that everyone in the room is quietly weeping. There must be twenty men, women and children sitting in a circle around me. I’m struck by how powerless they are. If their children get no education, they will never escape.

  Sajedah tells me that she wants to be a doctor.

  Before I leave KL, I pop into a bookshop and grab a pile of little kids’ books, high school workbooks, and a big visual book on human anatomy. I ask our Afghan fixer to drop them off.

  I take a late Friday night flight back to Bangkok. Sometimes I feel like I’m parachuting in to my own house. This time I’m required home at Arkie and Pearl’s special request: I have to make a birthday cake.

  As a kid I spent a lot of time at my best friend’s house. Jo’s mum, known to me always as Mrs Hughes, was a traditional mother and there was always a cake tin filled with cookies or a chocolate cake ready for an after-school snack before she sent us out into the garden to play.

  Jo, her two sisters and I all grew up riding horses together, and at various gymkhanas and one-day events around Tassie, the same old dented cake tin would emerge from the car boot when we’d finished with the horses and we’d feast on whatever goodies Mrs Hughes had packed for us that day. She referred to me as ‘the fourth daughter’ up until she died of a brain tumour in 2004. I was on the media bus at the Athens Olympics when Jo called to tell me that she had gone, and I missed the funeral.

  These days, using some of her old recipes, I bake with the kids as often as I can, letting them stand on a chair and sift the flour or hold the mixer and then lick the beaters. It’s recreating a nostalgic childhood memory that I want to pass on. For me, the moment is in a kitchen in Launceston with Mrs Hughes and her aprons and rolling pins – a world away from our tropical Bangkok home, but the sentiment is the same.

  Tonight, though, I’m tired and glum after my stay in KL. I have that ‘double life’ feeling again. It seems unfair to be happy after absorbing such sadness and desperation from those families. While I spend time with my own kids, I can’t get Sajedah and her lost childhood out of my head.

  However, there’s no getting out of it: Arkie and Pearl have chosen their desired cake from the bible of baking – the Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book. Daddy is to have a cricket ground cake, complete with bat, ball, pitch, stumps and fence, along traditional lines a la the Adelaide Oval or Lords. Sounds simple enough.

  But Thailand’s supermarkets don’t match up to Australia’s, and finding ingredients and appropriate decorations is always a challenge. I drag the kids around, filling a trolley with lollies that I think will do the trick. By the time we get home we’re hot and bothered, something that’s also standard in Bangkok. Our house is mostly lacking air-conditioning, so by the time I unpack the shopping and start cooking, I’m really in a sweat.

  It’s a basic chocolate cake that I’ve made many times. I quickly mix the batter, hand the beaters to the kids, and pour it into the cake tin before realising that I haven’t lined it with baking paper. ‘Oh well. It’ll be right.’

  But, of course, it isn’t. I can see immediately that the so-called non-stick pan is getting far too hot too quickly, burning the edges of the cake while the middle remains uncooked.

  The kids come in every five minutes asking, ‘Is it ready yet?’ They’re dying to decorate Daddy’s cricket ground.

  When I take the cake out, it’s cracked on the top. I’ll have to cover it with icing. Then I try to turn it out of the tin too early, while it’s still warm.

  Before my eyes it disintegrates, just completely falls apart.

  ‘Fuck,’ I yell. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, fuck it all!’

  I throw the empty cake tin across the kitchen and burst into tears. My head is full of people smugglers and asylum seekers and poverty and desperation and the fact that I can’t fix any of it, and now also of how I’ve stuffed up our family weekend, not to mention Rowan’s birthday cake. I’m a terrible mother.

  I sit on the kitchen floor, wallowing in self-pity. Then I hear little footsteps approaching, and two little heads appear tentatively around the edge of the door.

  Arkie and Pearl are wide-eyed, regarding me with what I’d call their ‘Mummy’s lost it’ expressions.

  ‘Why did you say “fuck”, Mummy?’ asks Arkie, as if he genuinely wants to know.

  ‘Yeah, Mummy, why did you say “fuck’s sake”?’ Pearl throws in. She’s clever. It may be a cheeky question but she looks innocent.

  Rowan’s head appears too. He grins.

  ‘Um, I ruined the cake,’ I respond sheepishly. I’m still being pitiful, sitting on the floor sniffling. ‘Sorry. I’m hopeless.’

  ‘Don’t be pathetic,’ says Rowan. He pulls me off the floor and gives me a hug.

  ‘Did you fuck up the cake, Mummy?’ says Arkie.

  I almost burst out laughing. ‘Yes, but you’re not allowed to say that word.’

  He regards me with a serious expression. ‘Are you okay now?’

  ‘I think so.’ I smile.

  ‘Well done, Mummy, at least you’ve got it back together now. I’m proud of you, Mummy.’ My son is turning into my parent.

  We scoop the broken cake into the hurled tin and take it out onto the patio and eat it with our fingers. It’s delicious.

  I wonder what happened to Mrs Hughes’ old dented cake tin. In my mind it still holds all that’s good about childhood.

  NINE

  It’s been a wet year in Thailand.

  As a rule the weather’s dry and pleasant over Christmas and the New Year and then it heats up before the boiling humidity overflows into the stormy start of the monsoon season around June. But this year, 2011, it started raining around March and the grey has never lifted. For months we’ve woken to dark, damp mornings and thick clouds blanketing the city.

  No one takes much notice until it becomes apparent that the amount of rain is way beyond annual averages. Rainfall in the north is more than 300 per cent higher than normal and the dams struggle with the volume. When tropical storm Nock-ten hits the region in July, reports start coming in about flooding in the provinces, and eventually the risk to the ancient city of Ayutthaya. The old capital of the Kingdom of Siam, about an hour north of Bangkok by car, is directly in the path of the water that’s flowing from northern Thailand towards the sea – and so is Bangkok itself.

  I initially fail to get the Sydney news desk interested in the floods. To be fair, there’s some inundation every year in Thailand and neighbouring countries, all commonly hit by tropical storms. The first response is that it’s not really news.

  I accept that – until Ayutthaya goes underwater sometime in September or October, and then I start covering it anyway.

  Ayutthaya was once one of the most heavily populated cities in the world, with about a million occupants. Now it’s just a provincial town, having been conquered and ransacked by the Burmese in the 1700s. The city itself is unremarkable, but the ruins of palaces and monasteries aren’t. Tourists flock to clamber over the stone blocks and wander the roofless remnants of the temples. Rowan and I have spent some enjoyable days there with the kids, exploring the ruins and picnicking in the gardens surrounding old royal homes.

  To take a look at the extent of the flooding, David, Jum and I head out of Bangkok with Khun Tu driving. The main highway to the north is closed and although, as media, we’re allowed to pass, it’s a slow drive on through water that gets deeper as we approach the town. Large factories along the route have their staff out in force, thousands of people sandbagging en masse.

  We stop at the town hall as it’s on high ground and sits like an island in the flood. People queue for food, water and medical assistance. Volunteers are handing out baby formula and bags of rice while others fry noodles in giant woks and scoop thousands of meals into polystyrene containers. Some people have taken up residence inside the hall, having lost their homes. Shell-shocked and weary, they’re crammed into corners, under stairs and even under awnings
in the courtyard, with nowhere else to go. A woman sitting on the tiled floor with her young daughter and baby tells us that the water came so fast that they left with only the clothes they have on. Everything else is under metres of water.

  Outside on the street, soldiers are loading army trucks with supplies to take to those stranded in their houses. We catch a lift. The truck ploughs through vast tracts of water lapping the outskirts of the city until we reach the bridge that crosses the river into the main part of town. David, Jum and I jump off and walk up the bridge, passing dozens of people carrying drinking-water containers, bags of food, and a few canoes and light boats.

  When we reach the peak of the bridge and start heading down the other side, the magnitude of the disaster in Ayutthaya becomes very clear. The bursting of major canals has now totally inundated the city, and it’s obvious that it happened fast. In parts the water is five metres deep. Abandoned cars are fully submerged, but a number of trucks are still visible, poking out of the muddy water.

  The ramp off the bridge has become a working jetty. It’s crowded with boats of all shapes and sizes, and a few makeshift rafts fashioned with rope and empty water drums or slabs of polystyrene. They’re all being loaded up with bottled water and food. There are dozens of residents waiting around for a lift home by boat or army truck. The massive trucks are high enough to traverse some of the flooded streets in the city but further out, where the water is deeper, food and water drops must be done by helicopter.

  On a truck that’s taking people home, we pass house after house and shop after shop flooded to the top of the first storey. People simply jump off when they get to where they want to go, then wade or swim home. Bits of ancient ruin poke out of the flood, old stone temples are splashed with muddy water as the truck forces a path along what were once streets but are now canals. Children play in it, dunked by the force of the water as we pass, and my blood runs cold with fear for them and their parents. I wish I could speak Thai so I could scold them and send them home, but of course their houses are flooded as well.

  At times Ayutthaya and Bangkok are together referred to as ‘the Venice of the East’ because they’re incredibly low-lying cities – less than a metre above sea level in parts – and are built on complex networks of canals known as khlongs. These channels overflow from the huge Chao Phraya River and drain the massive volume of monsoon storm water to the sea. Traditionally, khlongs have been the arteries of the urban heart of Thailand. First used for boat transport, fishing and floating markets, they were critical to daily life and commerce. Many of the most charming areas of Bangkok are still crisscrossed with khlongs lined with old wooden houses, washing strung up outside and small boats tied nearby. But as Thailand has developed, many khlongs have been covered with roads. Western-style buildings have replaced the traditional stilt houses that allowed water to run underneath and escape. Highways and road dividers have in some places become dams. All of these elements will contribute to a series of major challenges in what will be a massive flood.

  Covering the flood is a long haul. The water seems to move inch by inch, each day getting closer to the greater city of Bangkok.

  The city and Ayutthaya are connected by sprawling industrial estates that house major international manufacturers. Many are Japanese companies like Nikon, Toyota and Honda, as well as the mega-firms known not so much by name as by what they produce: about a third of the world’s computer hard-drives are made on the road between Ayutthaya and Bangkok.

  As the water inches past Ayutthaya into those estates, real concern develops that the entire Bangkok CBD will go under. The city’s official population is around eight million, but that’s probably an underestimate, and fourteen million live in the greater metropolitan area. But getting reliable information about when or if the flood will hit the city is extremely difficult. Bangkok’s government, aligned with the Democrats, has one view, while the national Pheu Thai government has another. Both viewpoints are subject to change on a daily basis. Newspaper headlines swing between dire predictions and reassurances. In spite of the seriousness of the situation, the daily flood outlook becomes a bit of a running joke.

  The national crisis is a huge test for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who is grappling with it just a few months into her first term. Looking pale and stressed, she appears on television checking the water level of a large khlong in the middle of the night. Within a totally flat city like Bangkok, set on a major river that vents into the sea, managing such a large volume of water is a logistical nightmare. The flood is said to be the worst in fifty years, but that isn’t considering the population growth and urban development that have taken place in that time, compounding the impact.

  We try to assess the situation for ourselves rather than taking the various authorities’ word for it. That means we need to cover a lot of ground, no easy task when many of the roads are closed. Jum, David, Khun Tu and I head out early each morning, assessing the sandbagging operations in parts of the city’s outskirts, monitoring the water levels on key khlongs, and talking to various experts and long-term residents who can recall the history of floods in their communities.

  Our work can be difficult and risky. I recall my rural reporting days in Australia, driving white-knuckled across flooded causeways in the ABC 4WD, waved on by the SES but, in truth, way out of my depth. In Bangkok, poor Khun Tu is egged on by the rest of us to push the car to its limits. The worst moments tend to be when big army trucks pass, always too fast, pushing the water right over the top of our car. There’s a shout of ‘Whoa!’ as we lose visibility, black water washing up the windscreen and buffeting the vehicle – and then on we go. I keep expecting the car to break down, but it gets us through.

  We wade around without knowing what’s beneath the surface – a crocodile farm has warned that thousands of the creatures have escaped and are roaming the floodwaters. We also see rescue workers handling a large snake – but I’m more worried about one of us getting electrocuted.

  Power is still on to most of the flooded areas because many people are living on the upper floors of their homes. Some Thai houses have a switch that cuts power to the ground floor while supplying higher levels. But stories of electrocutions emerge every day: two brothers killed when one kicks a loose power line in the middle of a flooded road and the other reaches out to help him; a married couple discovered in a dead embrace after the husband plugs in an appliance and his wife attempts to save him.

  Jum, David and I are constantly on the lookout for hazards, and I’m quick to call a halt to our work as we visit people in flooded houses who have lights and TVs on despite water up to waist height or higher. One man sloshes to plug in an appliance as we film his shop. We run for it, Jum yelling ‘STOP!’ in Thai, and David and I bolting with the gear, wondering how far away we need to get.

  The government doesn’t switch off the grid because this would be politically damaging: it would force people to leave their homes. Shelters are bursting at the seams, and some of them also face flooding. It gets very depressing as we follow families who are displaced first from their homes and then from shelter to shelter as the flood chews up the miles between Ayutthaya and Bangkok, swallowing everything in its path. We meet one family repeatedly. Their house in Ayutthaya is underwater and they move five times to escape the flood.

  At Bangkok’s biggest industrial estates, fruitless sandbagging operations are ongoing. On one such estate, the army and volunteers are madly trying to protect factories under threat from a nearby khlong but even as we watch, water starts escaping into a culvert and pouring into the estate. Soldiers scramble to plug the leak. We return the next day to see the entire site under water. Hundreds of thousands of workers who live inside in low-cost accommodation are evacuating en masse like refugees. This is one of many estates that the government guaranteed would be safe, and its flooding is a clear example of how difficult it will be to stop the mass of water from spreading all the way south to the sea.

  We see similar scenarios play o
ut around the northern perimeter of the city. One day dry; the next, flooded. It’s heartbreaking to watch residents gradually lose hope as it becomes clear that their homes will be hit.

  David jumps into the back of a truck to get an elevated shot of a scene. A bulldozer pulls up and begins to tip a load of sandbags into the truck’s tray. David is oblivious, facing the other way as he films, and it’s extremely noisy. I scream and jump up and down and wave my arms at the driver, who stares at me vaguely but doesn’t stop. Sandbags begin to drop from the ’dozer’s bucket. I have visions of David’s body crushed under a mountain of them. I can barely lift one on my own. I yell until the driver blinks at me and stops, and David climbs down.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘It is now. Holy shit, I thought you were going to get squished!’

  It looks increasingly likely that there will be flooding in the CBD. Each day on my walk to the office I see more sandbags around condos and shopping malls. The retail centre of Siam Square has been barricaded along with the big banks and department stores. Shoppers need to walk on wooden ramps over sandbag walls or step up sandbag stairs. Smaller shops have cement walls built across their facades, which means stepping over a metre-high barrier with the help of a footstool.

  When sandbags appear in our Soi, I start to worry that our house is at risk. It’s near one of Bangkok’s biggest khlongs and faces directly onto a smaller one. When the government issues a statement confirming that Bangkok will definitely be flooded, it’s difficult to be sanguine. Sandbags are suddenly ridiculously expensive and hard to get, but Ros, the ABC office manager, manages to source some for a small fortune and they’re dumped at our front gate.

  Our landlady turns up and warns our housekeeper, Monta, to assume that the house will go under. Poor Monta’s own home on the outskirts of Bangkok is already in deep water. She and her sister and niece are living at our place.