Chapter 1
Shipwrecked in a Sea of Blankets
Waking up gives a feeling like plunging, tumbling, or falling, but not downwards. It’s more like rising upwards from the bottom of the black depths of sleep into a world of murky blue. It was the place where Yiwa found herself every morning in the same position, lying still on her side like a sunken ship in the shape of a twelve-year-old girl abandoned on the shore, one side of her face and one eye submerged beneath the tangled ripples of an ocean of blankets and the other gazing straight ahead at the thin curtain that hung from the ceiling to the floor, which sometimes made Yiwa think of someone pouring syrup into a glass of lime juice. Other times, it was the nameless river that had flowed hidden within another river for thousands of years unknown, which she had heard about in a documentary.
But sometimes, she thought of the dream she’d just dreamed, hazy, disjointed, and completely unrelated to that moment, or to the lime juice, or to any river at all. Once she even saw the flamingo from her dream perched in lonely solitude on the rail of her balcony, and another time she saw the gentle swish of a
blue tail through the gap between the curtains slipping out the window and it took a while for her to remember it was the tail of a fighting fish that had swum through the air above an empty street with thousands of other faded fighting fish in a dream she’d had several nights earlier.
And sometimes, although it was only very occasionally, her mother whispered from the hazy background, If I didn’t have you.
She’d turn to look and see the empty bed and would realise it was her mother’s voice speaking from her memory. She still hadn’t come back, and it was in moments like these when a chill out of nowhere would engulf Yiwa from head to toe, frigid, arid and sorrowful, like that boy in the story might have felt when the Snow Queen kissed him to protect him from the grievous injury of the glass shard lodged deep in his eye and turned him into a statue of ice, unable to feel for all eternity.
Once she was certain she was actually in the real world and not still stuck in the fragile junction between sleep and waking, Yiwa would rise from her bed, glance left and right to make sure her cat, Bo Be, was not there and relinquish the stiff waves of the blankets before leaving her room to go downstairs, so skinny it was impossible to tell if she was a boy or a girl, half-running, half-jumping, pink hair bouncing above the steps as she descended like a cue mark dancing above the lyrics on a children’s television programme.
And it was in those moments that the chilling curse pursued her, perhaps clinging to her ankles and knees before gradually falling away, and by the time she’d reached the bottom of The Curious Construction, Yiwa would no longer feel the sorrow of the boy with the shard of glass in his eye.
The building was a seven-storey structure built on such a tiny piece of land that each floor had only one room. It stood awkward
and alone at the end of an alley packed tightly with one or twostorey houses that spread out horizontally. People said the original owner had dreamed of living in a tall building like those in The City of Glass, and he gradually added rooms, stacking one on top of another, floor by floor by floor.
But the reason Yiwa named it The Curious Construction was not because of its towering smallness akin to a miniature skyscraper, but because of the assortment of rooms, which were all different in shape and appearance, some wooden, some brick, some igneous rock, some corrugated iron, and some glass framed with rusty green steel specked with scorched orange rust. Otherwise, they were made of concrete.
Besides that, the insides of each room were painted different colours, betel red, kalavinka egg green, the deep blue of a stormy sea, dusty rose petal pink, ripe lemon yellow, the purplish grey of evening mist, and mandarin orange that made you feel as if its tangy scent was wafting out when you looked at it. Sometimes. Some rooms were larger than others with the walls protruding, making some of the other rooms look smaller or sunken in. Some rooms didn’t have balconies, while some did, jutting out into the air or cutting into the room. In the same way, the balconies were all different from each other – some enclosed by iron railings tinged with bluish-green rust, and some by intricately carved wooden panels that were so damaged that the patterns were no longer visible. Others were crumbling concrete pillars with statues of women with tilted heads holding lanterns with dimly flickering lights at one corner.
In truth, it didn’t look much like a building. It was more like a giant stack of boxes that someone had randomly collected from different places and carelessly piled into a strange tower, wobbly and crooked with a black iron staircase zigzagging down the side
like jagged teeth, which Yiwa half-ran and half-jumped down every morning, holding everything in place and keeping it from falling apart.
And Yiwa’s room was the one that was the purplish grey of evening mist on the seventh floor. In front was a wooden frame around cloudy glass like a greenhouse, and a balcony enclosed by delicately patterned greyish-green iron railings, jutting into the air. One end was broken off, leaving a gap for Yiwa to sit with her legs dangling over the edge. Some afternoons, it became a seat for scattering cosmos petals, or for blowing rainbow-tinted soap bubbles that drifted through the alley, causing passersby to look up, wondering where the delicate petals or floating bubbles had come from.
The other end of the balcony was occupied by Uncle Banyan, an elder relative who had been blown from his pot on the roof by a storm and got stuck on the railing when he was still a sapling. Since then, his roots had gradually reached down in winding brown strands like rivers on an old map all the way to the ground below and grown into an enormous banyan tree with sprawling branches.
And it was those sprawling branches that blocked Yiwa’s view and forced her downstairs every morning.
To watch the sunrise.
Chapter 2
The Triplet Dogs Under the Kalavinka Egg Green Window
Every morning, as soon as Yiwa reached the ground floor, she would pause for a minute to breathe the fresh clean air into her lungs before tiptoeing towards Grandpa Rose Apple, another elder relative, who could be seen standing as a looming dim shadow at the end of the alley, past the triplets lying side by side under the window of Grandpa Saprang’s kalavinka egg green room as quietly as she could.
The triplets were dogs – three dogs with narrow heads, upright ears, jet-black eyes, and dark brown fur, identical in size, shape, and face as if they had come from the same factory, but that wasn’t what made them seem like triplets as much as how they were always seen together doing everything in unison.
They would step out to run with the same front and back leg and suddenly stop together, flicking the same side ear together, sticking their tongues out and drooling a string of saliva together, tilting their heads back and swinging their noses through the air
Chapter 17
The First Day of Life-Long Friendship
Grandma Laila was almost at the bauhinia tree when she had to pause and wave the bougainvillea that was floating in the air out of her line of vision to make sure she really was seeing two children under the bauhinia tree, and she wasn’t just imagining things. One of them, who was lying on the sofa with her eyes halfshut, she recognised, but the other, sitting on the ground looking up at the fluttering butterfly-shaped leaves, was a stranger to her.
Anil, this is Grandma Laila, an honorary member of The Secret Society. Grandma Laila, this is Anil, our newest member, not yet honorary, Yiwa introduced them as she scooted closer to the tree, making space for Grandma Laila as she always did, and even though Anil wasn’t sure what honorary meant, he assumed it must be an important position in The Secret Society.
Sawasdee, Anil, Grandma Laila greeted him with a grin and didn’t ask questions as usual, always waiting for others to speak first. In time, we learn about a person anyway, little by little. We shouldn’t be in a hurry to get to know them by asking questions. It’s the time spent together that makes friendship valuable, she’d said, but
Yiwa, who was eager to show off the new arrival, couldn’t resist telling her more about him. Anil’s just come to live in the pink pipe in the garden of cosmos.
Then Grandma Laila, who was unhooking the leash from the smiley-faced goose, guessed at once that Anil was without a home, but when she glanced at his clean skin and his still intact clothes, she realised he probably hadn’t been homeless for long, and couldn’t resist feeling as excited as Yiwa at the thought that the new arrival had seen the world beyond the narrow alley where she and Yiwa lived.
But she feigned indifference and simply nodded and smiled at Anil again before handing Yiwa a bag of snacks and discreetly watching the two children, who both appeared to be halfway between a girl and a boy, biting into the crispy rolls of thong muan that they’d placed on their fingertips, and when they’d bitten them down to stubs, they burst out laughing, causing Pui Fai the goose, who was already excited at seeing a new face, to get even more excited until it couldn’t sit still and waddled up to Anil, twitching the triangle of black feathers at the tip of its tail and blinking its round eyes simultaneously.
But then it took a few steps the other way before coming back to stare at Anil, wheezing raspily, and walking off again, only to come straight back and stare at him like before, full of curiosity about the child it had never seen before. Pui Fai, this is Anil. Anil, this is Pui Fai, Yiwa introduced them.
Sawasdee, Pui Fai, Anil greeted the goose, and for a moment, he thought back to the house with the goose at the end of the beach. It had been a black one, which a nasty old man had kept to guard his house, that barked like a vicious dog and chased after anyone who walked past, just the opposite of Pui Fai, who was the kind of pet you could put on a leash and take anywhere with you, and the
moment Anil touched its little face, Pui Fai nuzzled his hand like a cat, smiling and blinking its big round eyes to show it wanted to be friends with him.
Bo Be the cat, on the other hand, ignored him, padding over and lying down on the other side of the bauhinia tree, refusing to come any closer, the green eye on the side without markings staring straight ahead, while the brown eye camouflaged by fur remained fixed on him as was natural for a cat who liked doing the opposite of how it felt, and the more curious or excited it was, the more indifferent it appeared.
But after only a few minutes, curiosity got the better of it, and little by little, Bo Be inched closer when no one was watching, nose in the air as it traced the trail that only cats can sense in the faint scent of everything Anil had ever known, from his loveless home to the fields of cosmos and the scent of loneliness that had clung to him his whole life, since the last black night he’d spent with his mother until the evening he discovered the meaning of the word friend for the first time.
Grandma Laila had wanted to welcome the new arrival by taking The Secret Society for a run through the cosmos field, but then she remembered that Anil lived only a few steps away from the pond and would probably not be too excited by it, and she still had pressing work to finish that night. It was an honour to meet you, Anil, Grandma Laila said softly before leaving, and as she said it, with humility, Anil felt that the older woman was indeed honorary, just as he’d thought.
What a special day it’s been, Grandma Laila concluded, and with those words unwittingly established another special day in Yiwa’s life.
Should we give today a name? Anil asked after Grandma Laila had walked away. What about Friendship Day? Yiwa replied with
Chapter 27
The Street of Bungur Trees
Anil... Fireflies, Yiwa whispered before tiptoeing to the corner of the space where she saw the flickering light. Anil got up after her to give Khun Kru Kamthorn some time alone with his feelings, but after a few steps, they heard a chaotic sound, and Anil recognised the beautiful cacophony he had missed so much at once. The Song of the Storm.
Without a word, Anil followed the sound in another direction and found himself in a room the colour of vanilla ice cream. It was another room behind the rust-coloured Galactic Chandelier room, where people were steadily entering another dimly lit concert room inside. Anil decided to stand, hidden next to a wall that held the faint sweet scent of vanilla. He reached into his pocket and clutched The Universe Marble. It was as cold as ice like it was in his first memory of it.
Then the sound of instruments being tuned went silent and was replaced by murmuring. Then the murmurs disappeared, and there was the sound of muffled footsteps, not the footsteps of Khun Kru Kamthorn, but another sound of footsteps that had once faded
into the cold darkness long ago, step by step, as they got farther and farther away.
The difference was that this time, they were retracing their path, moving closer, closer, and closer. The music began and drowned out the footsteps, and the goldfish spun in a tornado in his stomach. Then a woman stepped out, but before Anil could see her face, she turned and closed the door, trapping the music behind it, and slowly, very slowly, turned back around. Anil bowed his head and closed his eyes, and even long after, he never understood why he’d closed his eyes at that moment.
And for a second, he couldn’t help wondering if he was still trapped in the glass dome, or if he’d come out as he couldn’t be sure if what was happening was reality, a memory, or a dream. But then he heard the footsteps again, coming closer like a ticking clock, a beating heart, or the journey of a tear on a dark night, coming closer, and closer.
Then there was silence in front of him. The show has begun. Ah… that voice. Did you bring your ticket? He slowly opened his eyes, his head still bowed. That voice. Anil recognised that voice. The voice that used to call his name. Tenderly.
But in that moment of desolation, all Anil could do was stand with his head bowed, glancing at the small torch in the woman’s hand – the torch that was used to guide people to their seats –and breathing in her scent that he couldn’t remember, slowly, and the picture before him became blurry behind a curtain of water. He dared not look up, not knowing what he was supposed to do, but in the end, instead of presenting the ticket he didn’t have, he held out the hand that clutched The Universe Marble. A gentle melody drifted from the concert room, and the woman took the marble from his hand.
Without knowing why, and unable to control himself, Anil
began to tremble, and his eyes burned as if the tears brimming inside were boiling, and he continued to bow his head, not knowing what to do or say, knowing only that if the woman failed to recognise him, he’d fall apart, and that his life, and everything would end there. Without question.
Then he felt a soft palm touch his cheek. It was cold and trembling slightly, and Anil remembered that touch well, and the starlight eyes that gazed at him when he looked up. Anil, she whispered before she surveyed his face through the drops of travelling tears. And her face was like the one Anil had seen in his reflection when the working girl had made up his face and done his hair, and then he understood his mother had never gone anywhere. She had always been a part of him, in the blood that ran through his veins.
Anil, she whispered again. Anil, my son. It’s you. Then she pulled Anil into a tight embrace as if she too, had been waiting for the moment she’d always known would arrive. Someday. Mother, was all Anil could say before he broke down and sobbed. I’m sorry, Anil. I’m so sorry. / Never mind, Mother. Never mind, he choked. We found each other. And he wanted to tell her what Yiwa had just said in the ruined room, that they would always find each other, even if they lost each other again, but before he could speak, he turned and saw Yiwa and Khun Kru Kamthorn standing with red eyes in the distance.
Yiwa didn’t speak any words of comfort but chatted about Anil to his mother and Khun Kru Kamthorn all the way back to the alley, but when they got back to the office of The Secret Society, beneath the bauhinia tree, in the dim light, they saw three bodies sleeping on top of one another. Grandma Lailah was asleep at the bottom, with Pui Fai on top of her like a fluffy blanket, and Bo Be was lying on the top like a cat-shaped pillow.
And Yiwa knew at once that The Secret Society members had been waiting for her and Anil from evening until night and had fallen asleep.
Bo Be was the first to hear their footsteps, leaping up and spinning around on Pui Fai’s stomach to wake it before it stumbled toward Yiwa and Anil, and let out a piercing screech that woke Grandma Laila, and while the two children were caught up in a whirl with their non-human friends, Anil’s mother stepped aside to sit on The Wonky Bench, leaving Grandma Laila and Khun Kru Kamthorn alone together, but neither spoke a word and they simply gazed at one another in the darkness.
And it was then that Anil and Yiwa learned that sometimes words aren’t necessary at all.
That night, after almost ten years, Anil fell asleep in his mother’s arms again and for the rest of their lives after that, Anil and his mother, who had a new family with a daughter that Anil counted as a sister who he gave another Universe Marble from inside the dome to, were together again.
The Secret Society of the Bauhinia Tree gained a new member – Khun Kru Kamthorn, who was none other than the young man from Grandma Laila’s novel who’d never forgotten the woman he loved with all his heart as she’d written in her tragic story, but the two lovers were separated for half a lifetime for a reason even more tragic than the one in the novel.
Khun Kru Kamthorn hadn’t gone back to the bungur tree at the time he’d promised to meet Grandma Laila.
One afternoon, after the rain, the day before they were to meet, Khun Kru Kamthorn was sitting reading under a giant tamarind tree next to the glass dome in The City of Glass and had fallen asleep and woken up to find himself beneath the same tamarind tree, but as a child in The Deep Dark Forest inside the glass dome,
and after wandering through the Forest of Memories for almost a year, he’d found his way out by following a young woman in a multicoloured, multi-patterned hijab who’d appeared under the bungur trees.
And he’d found himself in a street full of bungur trees, but no matter how hard he searched, he could never find the bungur tree where he’d promised to meet Grandma Laila because the typing school that had once been there had closed and been replaced by a chemist’s shop while he’d disappeared. Worse still, being lost in the Forest of Memories surrounded by hundreds of bungur trees had made him so confused that he could no longer tell which tree was which on the street full of bungur trees.
For a year, Khun Kru Kamthorn had waited hopelessly under one tree after another until eventually, he gave in to the notion that Grandma Laila had forgotten about him after he’d broken his promise, so he decided to become a teacher in a distant land. Twelve years later, when he’d come to terms with his fate, he returned to the city to teach, and because he was the only person who’d ever entered the glass dome through a dream and come out though a memory, The University of Science invited him to help them research the link between dreams and memories outside his regular work hours in The City of Glass.
On that magical night, Khun Kru Kamthorn had meant to attend a concert at the theatre in order to study the ancient art of transforming memories into dreams, but in the end, he’d missed it because of meeting Yiwa and Anil who’d led him back to the woman he’d lost, who’d never been more than a few steps away, without him having the slightest inkling that the faint scent of her body, which some nights he caught a whiff of on the air, was not just his memory playing tricks on him.
Chapter 28
The Heart of Broken Glass
Many years later, after everyone had moved out of The City of Glass, leaving an abandoned city with nothing left but dilapidated buildings and streets strewn with broken glass after the trees had grown and shattered the glass dome before spreading into a vast forest that stretched as far as the eye could see, Yiwa and Anil could still remember every detail of what had happened after that night.
The members of The Secret Society had held a celebration the next afternoon to welcome a new honorary member and to commemorate the special day when Grandma Laila was reunited with Khun Kru Kamthorn, and Anil was reunited with his mother. It was another important day, which Yiwa named The Day of Reunion, when they also celebrated the arrival of two fireflies that had secretly left the glass dome, hidden in Yiwa’s rose apple blossom hair.
As twilight faded, Yiwa, Anil, and Bo Be the cat went to buy balloons as usual, but this time, Yiwa didn’t stop to write a letter to Junjaridit as she used to, and from that day, she no longer wrote to her every day but only occasionally.
It’s time, Anil, Yiwa whispered softly, as she looked down and untied the balloon string, as Anil stood hugging himself in silence for a moment, before he reached out to take the balloon from her hands, and blew into it gently, releasing the magic goldfish into the balloon. Then he tied the end of the balloon and held it up before him, watching the fat orange fish flip and swim inside the thinning air inside.
Until it stopped swimming and floated upside down, looking him in the eyes. Thank you, Anil whispered. Then he began to gradually release the string until he was gripping it by the end. Goodbye Goldfish, he said, looking up at the immortal goldfish as it flicked its tiny fins and whispered its last goodbye, and let go.
Emptiness stabbed him in the heart, no different from the time his blue balloon had burst, but by now, he no longer minded. He finally understood that growing up didn’t mean feeling less pain. It meant understanding that pain, no matter how deep, will pass. Then Anil lay down next to Yiwa and Bo Be, watching the balloon float higher into the sky until it was a white dot shimmering like a star.
Grandma Laila married Khun Kru Kamthorn the following week beneath a bungur tree that Yiwa and Anil had helped each other to dig up and replant after finding it on the way to The City of Glass and moving it to the windswept field, so that Grandma Laila and Khun Kru Kamthorn would have a new meeting place, in case they ever lost each other again, instead of the bungur tree on the street full of so many bungur trees that you couldn’t tell which was which.
After the wedding, Grandma Laila moved into Khun Kru Kamthorn’s house. She stopped mending clothes, sold the smallest shop in the world, and published her first novel the next month, working full-time as a writer from then on, her knack for blending
fabrics of different patterns making her a unique storyteller, and often, she would hide the members of the Secret Society in the lines of her stories without anybody knowing, as she’d hidden Khun Kru Kamthorn in the strange footsteps from her first novel.
How did Grandma Laila’s novel get inside the glass dome? Yiwa asked. It was inside your memory, Wa. When you heard the novel in Grandma Laila’s thoughts, it became your memory without you knowing. / And what about the typing school? / That was a memory from the novel, or it might have been Khun Kru Kamthorn’s memory that he left inside the glass dome / Do you mean memories can combine? / Lots of your memories that you told me about became my memories. / Or they might have been memories from Khun Kru Kamthorn’s dreams. / Maybe. Dreams love to escape, after all.
Yiwa nodded, as if she understood, but she didn’t really, and it didn’t matter anyway. There are so many things that we know but don’t know, hear but don’t hear, and understand but don’t understand.
Anil moved into the lavender grey of twilight mist room on the seventh floor of The Curious Construction with Yiwa, leaving his happy pink home for Pui Fai the goose to live with Bo Be the cat. Every morning, the two strange pairs of lovers would sit on the branches of Grandpa Rose Apple together and watch the sunrise, while the dog triplets, still indifferent, sat in a line beneath Grandpa Saprang’s window as usual, without the ferocity they’d shown inside the glass dome.
Even though they still got kicked by Uncle Chit every day for a long time afterwards, eventually, he began walking past them without doing anything, which was after Yiwa had glued the glass heart she’d found inside the glass dome together and given it to him, inspiring him to mend his heart again, and even though it still had cracks, the next year, he fell in love with a woman whose
heart had also been broken, and although they sometimes cried over their memories of past loves, at least they no longer had to cry alone.
Grandma Nu Daeng opened a small wig museum near the train station, so people could go and see the most bizarre hairstyles in human imagination, among them the pipe style that emitted billows of smoke from dry ice, which was Yiwa’s favourite, the Bo Be the cat’s ears style, which had to be worn with a pair of round glasses, one lens brown and the other lens clear, and the Pui Fai the goose style, which was white hair sculpted into a smiley-faced goose’s head with bulging eyes in the middle and a triangular tail with a motor that wagged. The museum attracted a constant stream of tourists from everywhere until Grandma Nu Daeng passed away at the age of a hundred.
Aunt Omra resigned from her job as an accountant to help Khun Kru Kamthorn calculate the refraction of the billions of light rays that crossed The City of Glass in a web, causing people to lose their vision and themselves, and to suffer from the forgetting sickness, which was one of the reasons they were leaving The City of Glass and going to live elsewhere. Besides that, she also conducted her own research on the link between the increasing weight of memories and the diminishing mass of dreams, which in time, became an important academic study facilitating methods for dream loss prevention.
Uncle Nom and Aunt Duangdao moved to work at a factory that produced plant-based chicken meat, and still went everywhere in the same shirt, as if they were a two-headed creature until Aunt Duangdao finally succumbed to her determination to end her life and simply stopped breathing before she’d even finished her meal. For a long time afterwards, people saw Uncle Nom going out with Aunt Duangdao asleep beside him inside the same shirt until he