Asia Literary Review No. 34, Winter 2017

WINTER 2017

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No. 34, Winter 2017

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No. 34, Winter 2017

Publisher Greater Talent Limited Managing Editor Phillip Kim Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Senior Editors Kavita A. Jindal, Anurima Roy, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Special Acknowledgement Ilyas Khan, co-founder of the Asia Literary Review Production Alan Sargent Front cover image ‘Holy Man’ © 2017 Sundeep Keramalu www.keramalu.com Back cover image ‘The Guard’ © 2017 Sundeep Keramalu www.keramalu.com The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited asialiteraryreview.com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Subscriptions and Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-12155-8-1 (print) ISBN: 978-988-12155-9-8 (e-book) ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2017 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2017 Greater Talent Limited ‘A Dignified Existence’ and ‘Where Do You Want to Go?’ were provided to the ALR through the generous support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea ltikorea.org ‘The Court Martial’, ‘The Poisoned Future’, ‘A Flight Path for Spiritual Birds’ and ‘The Right Answer’ are extracted from Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds with kind permission of the British Council Extract from Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ is published with kind permission of Zed Books Extract from Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia is published with kind permission of Weidenfeld & Nicolson Extract from A State of Freedom is published with kind permission of Penguin India

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Contents Editorial

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Fiction The Messenger

9

Georgie Carroll

A Dignified Existence

24

Kim Ae-ran translated by Jamie Chang

Where Would You Like to Go?

45

Kim Ae-ran translated by Jamie Chang

The Court Martial

73

Letyar Tun translated by the author

The Poisoned Future

78

Myint Win Hlaing translated by Dr San Hla Kyaw and Letyar Tun

A Flight Path for Spiritual Birds

84

Ah Phyu Yaung (shwe) translated by Khin Hnit Thit Oo

The Right Answer

89

Ahpor Rahmonya translated by San Lin Tun

Miss Space

103

Prabda Yoon translated by Mui Poopoksakul

At Loose Ends

122

Vrinda Baliga

from A State of Freedom

158

Neel Mukherjee

The Angel Tiger

177

Barrie Sherwood

The House by the Giant Teak

199

Ritu Monjori

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Non-fiction Interview: Lucas Stewart

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from Myanmar’s Enemy Within

95

Francis Wade

from Blood and Silk

113

Michael Vatikiotis

Full Everything

135

Sandip Roy

Labyrinths of Memory

147

Alec Ash

Paper Alien

190

Wen Yourou translated by Polly Barton

Poetry arnoldii | rafflesia

22

Joshua Ip

It Doesn’t Get Better Than an Apricot in Damascus A Botanist Grows Home

67 68

Ellen Zhang

A Conference of Crows The Lesson In Praise of Persimmons

118 119 121

Saleem Peeradina

Swimming Reindeer Flight Distance The Dark Hours

143 144 145

Shanta Acharya

from João

175

John Mateer

There They Blow Disenfranchised

214 215

Yogesh Patel

Contributors

217

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Editorial Edit orial

Edit orial

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his issue of the Asia Literary Review explores lives on the fringes of Asian societies. A number of our authors write about ethnic minority groups who toil against discrimination (or worse) by a dominant majority.

Myanmar features prominently: the British Council and curators Lucas Stewart and Alfred Birnbaum compile stories that illuminate the lives and frequent conflicts involving some of the 135 ethnic groups that comprise the jigsaw puzzle of this nation, while Francis Wade plunges directly into reporting on the ongoing violence involving the Rohingya. Away from Myanmar, we feature an essay by Wen Yourou, a minority (Taiwanese) resident struggling for acceptance in one of the world’s most homogeneous countries – Japan.

But the lives that we depict on the fringes are not simply about ethnic or geographic delineations and the victimisation of certain populations. We at the ALR recognise that, in our post-modern world of atomised information and perspectives, many individuals find themselves on society’s fringes through personal choice or action. Avant-garde artists, revolutionaries and innovators constantly strive to challenge social norms and express their individuality by unshackling themselves from anodyne conventions. Some people dash off to foreign lands – in certain cases to seek cultural adventure, in others to start life afresh after a personal tragedy. Author Alec Ash reminisces about his life in Beijing’s labyrinth of hutong alleys, inhabited by an unlikely mix of young foreigners and old-timer locals who collectively cling to nostalgia. Kim Ae-ran’s Korean protagonist in ‘Where Would You Like to Go?’ finds isolated refuge in faraway Edinburgh following the sudden death of her husband. Neel Mukherjee narrates a story of alienation and tragedy that befalls an emigrant father who returns to India as a tourist

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in his own country and realises too late that ‘making a life in the plush West had made him skinless’.

By far the most disturbing fringes are those consumed by darkness and violence. In too many places around the world – the Middle East, the US, Indonesia and Europe, to name a few – marginalised and vulnerable young lives are seduced by radical ideologies. Al Qaeda’s foothold in Indonesia is one such troubling case, as Michael Vatikiotis describes. More often, however, the unrelenting tide of modern life creates shadowy eddies – some squarely in the mainstream – that swallow individuals who are lonely, abandoned or mentally ill. Georgie Carroll narrates the chilling story of a psychopath who conflates romantic notions and violent acts, and who can’t help but see desire as something ‘to be pickled in generous jars, sticky, full and seedy’. In a technological age where ubiquitous social media are ostensibly meant to connect people (but perhaps achieve the opposite), the proliferation of these isolated fringes is deeply disquieting.

But fringes are phenomena that are seldom immutable. The most powerful of them defy the bounds of space or time. In fact, it is difficult to point to any significant human advancement throughout recorded history – whether in philosophy, science or art – that did not involve the shattering of an accepted reality or tradition by a revolutionary fringe idea. That idea then became the mainstream, encouraging other disruptive seedlings to germinate around the edges. From humble Palestine, Christianity came to supplant the mighty Romans’ polytheism and dominate Western civilisation. Unconventional writing voices such as James Joyce’s and Hemingway’s shook up and redefined how writers everywhere approach their craft. More recently, non-heterosexuality, which has long and broadly been considered a taboo, is gaining wider global understanding. In this issue of the ALR, Sandip Roy, an India-based writer who lived for twenty years in gay-friendly San Francisco, writes about this openness as he makes an unexpected friend in the conservative Indian Muslim community.

Naturally, there has been a price to pay for such ‘progress’. Some long-enduring traditions and forms have tumbled out of the mainstream and been relegated to history’s dustbin or, ironically, to the domain of fringe enthusiasts. In Vrinda Baliga’s poignant story, for example, an Indian katputli puppet laments the slow death of its art form, as puppeteers face a

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shrinking audience and have little choice but to perform for peanuts in remote villages at the edge of the desert, exiled by Bollywood’s glitz and glamour. ‘Tell me, O Puppet, to whom should your strings be tied? Who will you dance for?’ It would be a shame to see such subtle and timeless crafts disappear forever.

Through vehicles such as this magazine, the editors of the ALR urge constant dialogue between the fringe and the mainstream. We don’t view the fringe as the kind of disturbed world imagined by David Lynch or Park Chan-wook, populated with weirdos, misfits and malevolents. Rather, the fringe is a realm where genius, originality, and transcending beauty also abound. Its face is honestly human – by turns determined, complex or frail.

Its ground is fertile with fresh, if sometimes prickly, ideas. By not engaging with it, the mainstream misses opportunities to avoid stagnation and revitalise itself. A close-minded mainstream also imperils itself by living in a space that might be resource-rich but is starved of diversity and self-awareness.

To fail to examine Otherness, to ignore the perceived ‘enemy’ is to exist in a poorer, more fragile place, one destined to shrivel at its core. To paraphrase a wise axiom from a classic film, we serve ourselves well by ‘keeping our friends close and the fringe closer’.

The ALR Editorial Staff

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The Messenger The Messenger Georgie Car roll

Georgie Carroll

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he nail-marks on Manmatha’s neck matched his shirt – Ferrari Red. The girl could’ve been thirteen or fourteen. Her dark cheek had shone in the half-light. Hair silky, blouse torn, teeth sharp, white as jasmine buds.

He lit the gas ring.

Blue and orange flames consumed the pan in long tongues. The pleasure of the memory filled him up, creeping up his legs. He tried again but couldn’t make his lips touch without wincing. He looked into the restaurant, white kurtas blustering under ceiling fans. On the boxy screen, Zeenat Aman stood under a waterfall, nipples poking through wet, white cloth as Lataji sang Mohe natkhat Shyam sataye. . . .

The rains would come any day now, from navy clouds, bouncing off tarmac in large globules, forming deep waterways.

He made gusts of wind with the fabric of his shirt to cool himself, blowing upward, fish-like, to dry the sweat on his top lip. Today of all days he’d been made to work in the restaurant.

‘Happy birthday, yaar!’ Anu stuck his head through the hatch to the kitchen. He wore a gemstone earring and it flashed like lightning. ‘Listen,’ he said, playing with the peeling laminated corner of a menu, ‘I need a favour.’

Manmatha knew whatever Anu wanted would be something intangible – not a car, drugs or money. He’d want what he always wanted, an audience for one of his romantic dilemmas. Manmatha entertained these, imagining himself as a god, looking down on a floundering mortal, seeking with desperation something it thought it understood. He’d listen without

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response, which was fine by Anu, who’d already decided upon his preferred interpretation of events. But that afternoon, Manmatha was too enraptured by his own thoughts to humour a virgin. The air on the pavement smelt of fuel and kadamba flowers, and the beeping of cars called out like myna birds.

‘I’ve gotta go ’ack to work,’ Manmatha said, avoiding eye-contact, as was his habit. He shoved his hands into his pockets, removed them, and then put them under the armpits, where they stayed.

‘What’s up with your mouth?’

‘I can’t close it. My li’ keeps ’leeding.’

The skin was torn and the membrane exposed to the sun. Anu didn’t ask.

He never asked, because Manmatha never told. If on the rare occasion he did, Anu couldn’t be sure he was telling the truth.

‘Listen, I need your help . . . I’m begging! I need you to take a message for me, to a girl. . . .’

Manmatha half-laughed, picking at a scab on his elbow.

‘I’m totally in love with her. You’re the only one who can help me.’ ‘’e?’ Manmatha pointed to himself, unable to utter ‘m’ or ‘b’ or ‘p’.

Anu and Manmatha had gone to the same schools and lived close by.

When one was bored they’d message the other to ‘hang’, ‘chill’ or ‘do whatever’. That used to be playing kabaddi on the beach with the other boys but in recent years it’d been Anu going to Manmatha’s to watch him lie in bed or pretend to work in the restaurant. Manmatha knew Anu disapproved of the way he intimidated the restaurant boys when his father wasn’t there, and he liked that not only would Anu not contest it, but that he’d interject with unsure laughter. Once, to test him, Manmatha soiled a biriyani with his own pubic hair as an excuse to give the kitchen boy a good kicking. Anu feigned a laugh and said nothing. Manmatha had never spoken of girls to Anu, but Anu had always spoken of girls to him. Girls, girls, girls: their glances, their buttery voices, their unkindness.

For Manmatha women were private things. What you did with them was secret, to be pickled in generous jars, sticky, full and seedy. Manmatha’s jars moved other jars to the back of the shelf – ones with things in them that he didn’t want to remember. Like when his father, a hard-working and honest man, told him he wished Manmatha had never been born. Manmatha was

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disruptive at school. Then a petty thief and a liar. Then ‘hot-headed’, which meant he’d hit his mother more than once in the face. For two years his father hadn’t been able to face his own brother after his daughter told a family friend something Manmatha had done that was ‘unrepeatable’.

‘It’s a big favour,’ said Anu, eyes bulging. ‘But I have money.’ ‘’oney. . . ?’

‘I’ll pay you. For the train.’

‘Train?’

‘AC1! Sleeper service. Whole way!’

‘What ya, are you crazy?’

‘It’s Meenakshi – remember? She’s gone South with her family for two months. I didn’t get time, or . . . well, whatever, OK? I just didn’t tell her how I felt. . . . There’s this other guy and. . . .’ Anu clasped both hands behind his neck, and stuck his elbows out like two coat-hangers. ‘I love her.’

Manmatha did remember Meenakshi. He could see why his friend was getting excited. He rolled the word ‘voluptuous’ around his mouth with his tongue like a gobstopper. He remembered how she seemed to know she was attractive by the way she stood, the way she painted her nails pretty colours.

Once the little slut had pretended not to know him at a birthday party when they had been in a Lit class together for a year.

‘And where is she?’

‘Kerala. Cochin itself.’

Manmatha displayed his prominent canines, and when he stopped laughing he looked at his friend with blood-shot eyes. He pretended to walk away but the amorous Anu had got hold of a soggy part of his shirt.

‘I can’t go myself,’ he said. ‘These exams are ruiningmylife! I want to tell her how I feel in the most romantic way possible. Not a WhatsApp, not a bloody call! I want her to go to the door and meet . . . a messenger. She loves poetry. You remember Kalidas? The Meghadoot, right? From school. You’ll be the Cloud—’ Manmatha could no longer hear Anu, who had descended into rhetoric on God’s Own Country. Coconut rivers. Vast, dark back waters. Landscapes of impossible greens – parrot, jade, chartreuse – and of the message he ought to give her. He banged on about the poem, the cloud that agreed to travel across India to give a message of love to a separated sweetheart. Manmatha

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couldn’t picture Meenakshi’s face so he used the one of his first prostitute, angular with a big birthmark and long earlobes. He sucked lip-blood off his index finger.

‘How ’uch ’oney do you have?’ he said.

The train departed from Dadar later that afternoon. Manmatha had bought the worst-class seat at short notice. A laundry bag had proven fortunate beyond concealing the hand-drawn lovehearts on Anu’s ‘wooing box’ – full, he imagined, of predictable love mementos – because, at last, it had started to rain. He watched the droplets on the window form patterns like spiders’ silk. A reflection of a woman appeared in the glass. He thought about the girl who’d bitten his lip, her sounds and her silence and how easy it was.

Then the blond, smooth white girls from the three videos.

The train yawned over bridges, crossing deep black gorges as if in a dream, the headlamp drawing the nightscape as it went. Meenakshi appeared in his reverie, wearing an emerald necklace in the dead of night. Mascara tears fell from her doe-eyes onto her chest. She confessed, playing with the ruby ornaments in her ears, how she’d longed to speak to him but never could bring herself to, how, in her agony, she’d pretended not to know his name.

She whispered it now, to the rhythm of the train: Man-mat-ha, Man-matha, Man-mat-ha, Man-mat-ha.

The carriage was thick with syrupy night air. It tasted like jaggery and perfume, dates and sweat, green onions and cardamom. The round silhouette of a body opposite him gobbled yellow sweets that in the darkness looked like fireflies. The colour caught a flash of golden thread belonging to the sari of a young honeymooner whispering into her husband’s ear. A phone played a sugary Malayalam song. Its high-pitched flute blended with the howling wind, and the mandolin with the falling rain. It sounded like every love song Manmatha had ever heard.

He had so far to go. It was still three hours till dawn and then another day on top. Why was he bothering, just for some girl? Why didn’t he just leave the bloody box and go back? He could always make something up – she wasn’t home, he’d left the box with a family member, ‘maybe they didn’t give it to her?’ Who cared! Anu would be in love with another one next week. Then again, what else would I have been doing, anyway? he thought.

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He wanted to see the girl. Maybe he’d get off the train and spend a night, break up the journey? He didn’t want to meet Meenakshi looking like he’d been on a train all night – no, that was not what he wanted. He would get off at the end of the line, at Thiruvananthapuram, and find somewhere to spruce up.

In the night there was a scream, a crescendo of voices, and a loud electric screech. Manmatha felt cold metal against his face and a pain down his side.

The engine driver had slammed on the brakes. People rushed to the windows, some jumped out, and Manmatha followed them, finding his way through the dark carriage, stepping over scrambling bodies and luggage.

He wriggled along, shoving and squeezing, and then out into the night air and the gushing water and the big moon. Someone was shouting for people to stay on the train. Manmatha looked down, and there was nothing below but infinite deep. The spray from the gushing falls that passed over Jurassic rocks and went downdowndown touched his face like little watery hands.

He got back on board. Raised voices spoke in different tongues, and everyone and everything was wet. The train moved off of the bridge and stopped again. It wouldn’t move, he heard someone say, until sunrise.

Sunrise and came and went. He took a packet of crisps from his bag and placed each one, soggy, into his mouth. He didn’t look hard for the contents of the box, which had fallen and burst open. All that was left was the lid and a red rose, snapped half way down the stem. A heart-shaped helium balloon was stuck to the roof of the train. The sound of its foil could be heard every now and then when the wind blew through the window. The box had been a hindrance to Manmatha’s plan anyway. He fantasised about other ways to arrive: a man lost, wounded, in need of a telephone. Oh, yes, I’d like to come in, but where is everyone? Oh, not home? But they would be home, someone would, so he’d have to think on his feet. He liked that, liked the unknown, hated to plan, except for the little things he wanted to do, in the dark.

The obstacle from the landslide had been cleared. The train started, creaking and picking up pace. The papery palms that’d dominated Manmatha’s view out of the window flashed out of sight, revealing the theatre of the Western Ghats. Its sublime scenery called out to him like a woman in green, wanting him to look.

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He had a text from Anu: ‘All fine?’ The train flew past mangroves and paddy fields and women walking by water with coloured umbrellas, like jewels.

The phone buzzed again. ‘I’ve told her to be home, to expect a surprise.’

He still had miles to go. Every few hours he’d stick his head out of the door and watch the landscape shoot past him as if it were the train and he were standing still. He ordered a box of veg biriyani that came at Coimbatore Junction. He checked his pocket again for the address that was scribbled down on the back of a cinema programme, next to a picture of Katrina Kaif.

If the girl were expecting a surprise, he’d betterbloody arrive with something.

The lid of the box was in sight. A check under the seat revealed the rest. A little heart-shaped tin, empty. A cuddly bear holding a cuddly heart. Some heart-shaped confection in cellophane, and a book of love poetry, a small hardback, which in golden lettering read, Love Poems of Rumi. Manmatha deemed that a much better option than the wooing box, flicking through and seeing words like Ecstasy, Longing, Roses, Alchemy. Yes, that would be more useful, less ridiculous. He opened it at random: Love is the One who masters all things, I am mastered totally by Love; But my passion for Love I have ground sweet as sugar. . . . He put it in his pocket at Paravur, as the train sped past estuaries filled with fishermen, their hands full of conches and pearls.

The final hours disappeared into the lilacs, mustards and aquamarines of shrines, lemon-coloured churches, green-faced goddesses. When they reached Thiruvananthapuram Central, Manmatha awoke with a start, and felt an immediate rush of pleasure at the thought of Meenakashi. It was early evening. The song of a koel bird accompanied him to a restaurant where he ate rice and doused himself with water in the bathroom. Ko-eel, ko-eel. He blew his nose into the basin, one nostril, then the other. He looked tired but slim in the face, he thought, a glow to the skin. He was handsome. He changed his clothes and hailed a rickshaw.

A big raintree stood outside the white bungalow, like a shipwreck alive with dangling kelp. Life grew on life, and even things that weren’t alive seemed to be developing new mossy skins: roads, walls, bicycles, breathing, turning green. He walked up the path and rang the bell.

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‘Hello?’ The man looked at Manmatha, who hadn’t yet said a word, with a pained expression, suggesting already that he could neither hear nor understand a thing the stranger was saying.

‘Is ’eenakshi ho’ne?’

‘Eh?’ ‘’eenakshi?’

‘No, no, she’s not here.’

Not here? This wasn’t what he wanted. The man showed no consideration for Manmatha’s feelings. Did he know how far he’d come? Manmatha felt himself struggling to breathe, as if everything around him were stealing his oxygen in order to proliferate.

‘Do you know when she’ll ’e ho’ne?’

‘Maybe two or three days. She’s in Devikulam.’

How could idiot Anu have made that mistake? He hadn’t even heard of Devikulam. He walked out onto the road and Googled it beneath the tamarinds, using his other phone, the one for other sorts of arrangements and favours. It was a hill station en route to Madurai. He clicked on Madurai by accident and images of the vast temple of Meenakshi, the fish-eyed goddess, flashed up. Back to Devikulam – he’d come this far. . . . It was a four-hour drive with no serviced route. The photos displayed green velvet fields and misty mountains.

The rains fell even more heavily, thundering now, splishing-splashing, making the scene invisible. He walked into the nearest hotel and asked how he might reach Devikula’n.

‘Tonight?’ A plump, smiling Anglo-Indian lady whose name was Diamond laughed a big belly-laugh that rang at the end like the ‘ding’ of a triangle.

‘Stay the night!’ she said. ‘My husband will drive you in the morning. He’d be happy to!’ she chuckled.

The next morning Fort Cochin’s fishing nets disappeared behind him, the coffee colour of an old celluloid. Diamond’s husband didn’t drive Manmatha, one of the hotel boys did. He didn’t speak a lot, except to point out the odd point of interest along the way. The messenger closed his eyes and stopped responding to the boy’s invitations to look, relishing instead in what might have happened had Meenakshi been home.

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‘Meenakshi, hi, I wonder if you remember me.’ (In his fantasy, he covered his inability to say ‘m’, ‘b’, or ‘p.) ‘We were in Lit class together, my name’s Man.’ She half-smiled and swung the door in a childish way, looked back inside, and then out, up into the porch, down to the grass, chewing her lip.

‘Would you take a short walk with me?’ He smiled. ‘I’ve been on a train for over a day, and . . . I’ve only ever been to the beach in Mumbai. . . .’

He considered for a moment having her invite him in; but no, it was better that she didn’t.

He handed her the book. Her eyes widened. She held it as if she had never seen a book before, half-mocking, half disbelieving, showing the kind of innocence that made Manmatha feel powerful and the kind of affectation he couldn’t wait to take away. She flicked through the pages, and then set it at her side.

The car flung itself forward on a narrow bend in the mountain road. He drifted off again.

The pair went, just a hundred or so yards to the beach, still within sight of the house. Sunset viewers remained in each other’s arms, or chased their children, pretending to be monsters in the sand.

Manmatha stared at Meenakshi, the imaginary Meenakshi with the face he still had to cobble together. She glistened with perspiration, the iridescent colours of fish scales. She’d placed her hair to draw attention to her full breasts. Her eyes were blue lotuses that she lowered to seduce him. Almost as suddenly as the sun had set, Manmatha made everyone disappear. Her eyebrows leapt like vines as he pulled at her blouse, and she called out like a night-bird but he turned it into a moan with his hand. She ran and he caught her, and she refused and he clung to her, and she struck him and he pushed her and watched her eyes dart like fish. He made her hiss, he liked it when they hissed, but they never did, so he made them in his mind. Her red nails tried to scratch his face, she was greedy, and he put them in his mouth, the fingers of the little goddess. Her face was wet with tears.

As the car climbed the mountain, he filled it with his secret thoughts, and felt himself burning with hot syrup.

‘Why are you trying to duck off, beauty?’ he imagined whispering into her ear. ‘Don’t be so stubborn!’

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‘You say you don’t remember me but you can stop pretending. I’ve made you realise your love, now, haven’t I?’ But she tried still, she tried, with sand and a hand in her trousers, her stomach on the ground, his hand silencing her.

He conjured up the voices of the night vendors selling fruit, and the footsteps of her family and neighbours not far away on the road. He bound her wrists with some twine, and put a piece of rag in her mouth so she didn’t scream, the practicality becoming a part of the fantasy.

Then, he was back in the car. Everything had regained its former position: the sky, the road, the trees. He smelt the warm upholstery, rain on tarmac, and eucalyptus from the forest canopies.

There was something about Meenakshi, whose face he could barely picture, which seemed to concentrate the rush of a woman into a superfeeling. She was his own creation, the Meenakshi of his mind, and he had no choice but to realise her by taking the real, living, breathing entity.

Somehow, he felt, as he swigged from the bottle of whisky they’d stopped for on the way, that she was expecting him. Was it possible for him to have been turning her over in his mind for days and for her to have had no idea of his existence? Maybe. He wasn’t superstitious, but he did feel somehow spiritual now, and more so the further he’d journeyed towards her. He’d travelled across mountains and wetlands and estuaries, and with each changing landscape he felt more in need of her. He was losing himself in it all, surrendering to her, and there was no way he could turn back.

The boy drove them high over wet deciduous forest and scrub jungle, high ranges, snaking rivers. Blue clouds that hung low touched the blossoming kurinji flowers that turned the hills amaranthine, and swallowed up blue-breasted quails and imperial pigeons. Tea plantations looked like patterns on the giant hands of gods. Onyx-skinned buffalo, submerged in leafy waters destroyed lotuses with their horns. The car took a road that corresponded to the one on the map, where Meenakshi’s family name was registered to an address, according to a careful search by the messenger. The house, ‘The Turtle Doves’, was set back off the path. It was cream-coloured with an aquamarine roof and a russet balcony filled with monsoon flowers.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning, quiet. He could hear each step in the

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wet ground as he approached the house, squilch-squelch, squilch-squelch, and the ticking engine of the waiting car.

He had no plan at all. The doorbell played the first three bars of Greensleeves and the door opened. ‘. . . ’eenak . . . ’eenakshi! Is she home?’

‘Who?’ said a girl with a soft face and a chin with a dimple in it. The girl looked like Meenakshi, but it wasn’t her. She was younger, by three or four years. A few days ago, this-girl, that-girl, it wouldn’t have mattered, he wouldn’t have given a damn but now, now it had to be her, Meenakshi, not some look-a-like but the real thing. He felt the sweat on his skin turn cold.

Maybe it was her. ‘Do you mean Meenakshi?’ the girl said.

The door opened wider and an uncle appeared who made several utterances beginning with question words like ‘what’ ‘who’ and ‘why’.

Manmatha was tongue-tied and replied in unintelligible noises. He was a friend, well, no, a friend-of-a-friend, and no, he wasn’t a boyfriend of the man’s granddaughter, and no, it wasn’t strange he’d travelled almost one thousand miles to deliver a book, a book of love poetry.

Manmatha tried to look past the man and the girl, into the house.

‘She isn’t here,’ the uncle said. Manmatha felt a thump where he knew his heart was.

‘Where is she?’ he said in a new version of his voice that sounded pathetic.

‘I don’t know.’

‘When will she ’e ’ack?’

‘Can’t say.’

‘Can I wait?’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’

‘Just tell ’e when she’ll ’e ’ack! I need to see her!’

‘Whoever you are, please go.’ And the door closed, just like that.

Manmatha had thought twice about bringing the gun, but at the last minute he’d slipped it into his bag, and he only remembered it when the blood started to fill up his face. Whenever the messenger had wanted anything, he’d taken it. It didn’t feel good when someone said no and there was nothing he could do. It added up to other ‘no’s he couldn’t change, the answers to questions he asked himself, like: Do I matter, to anyone? Maybe he mattered to Anu, he thought, but look what he was doing to him – he

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Georgie Carroll

was supposed to be his friend. He liked Anu, Anu liked him. He thought about him and felt warm for a split second. Fuck Anu, he thought.

He got into the car and ordered the boy to drive. He took the hand-gun from his bag and put it in his pocket, and when they got to the top of the hill he told the boy to let him out, yes, right here! on a deserted crossroad.

He slammed the door and walked in the opposite direction, making his way to a road parallel to the house, through a field which met with the back garden, which he saw was easily accessible over a fence, where big, white Datura flowers grew in bell shapes with heart-shaped leaves. They offered him the pink-edged frills of their petals. He decided to make his way to into the town on foot, to fill his stomach and come back in the evening.

It was only when he arrived in the town an hour later and could smell the sweet cassava and coconut did he realise he’d forgotten to take his bag from the car. He’d lost his shirt, Ferrari Red, his two phones, the half bottle of whisky, and his wallet. Now all he had was the contents of his pockets: one had a gun in it, and the other a book of love poetry.

Manmatha whiled away the hours thinking about Meenakshi in abstract shapes and sounds. When he realised he had no money he’d walked until he arrived at a temple on a hill. He sat in the wet grass watching devotees going up and down the steps like toys. When it rained he went inside and feasted on the prasaad in the low light. With every gulp, he felt closer to Meenakshi, as if ingesting food from the land where she was nourished him from the inside out.

When the moon appeared, it was full and looked like the face of a woman. It watered the night-blooming flowers that made the air smell of oranges. Walking back to the house that had turned him away, there wasn’t a path, and when a vehicle came towards the messenger, like an elephant in rut, he’d press himself against the wet roadside rock to avoid being hit.

Nothing outside of Meenakshi mattered. She represented the very idea of woman to him now, the very idea of pleasure, and of feeling alive. Maybe of staying alive forever. All he needed was to touch her and taste her and make her realise she wanted him too. He hadn’t thought about what happened after.

He passed pine trees and wooden houses with smoky chimneys. When he reached the house via the garden, it was deserted, dark, no sign of life.

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The Messenger

His knees gave way and he squatted, resting his hands on his thighs, dribbling into the ground. He was muddy, red-eyed, almost mythological to behold.

He opened the back door to the house. Easy-peasy. He turned on the kitchen light, walked into a salon and fell onto a pink rug. He pressed his face against the carpety texture that smelt of chemicals. It must’ve been honoured by the touch of Meenakshi’s feet. The next moment, he was awoken by screaming and a series of sharp kicks in the stomach. He could hear himself chanting her name with his remaining breath: ’een-ak-shi, ’eena-k-si, ’e-en-aksi.

‘If you want to find Meenakshi,’ the voice said, spitting into his ear, holding his head by his hair, ‘Go to Madurai!’

The man didn’t call the police. He deemed the boy too pathetic. The messenger had a quick look for Meenakshi through the windows as he ran off into the night. Dogs barked, and the ground was wet. He fell and slid, got up, and kept running till he reached the road.

Manmatha didn’t think about it. Of course, the man was being facetious.

He was making the point that he had more chance of romancing with a goddess than his granddaughter, Meenakshi Reddy, who was nineteen, and played hockey, a top maths student, destined for big things. But if he couldn’t see her or touch her, just the idea of her was enough. He chose to believe he’d find her, if he just travelled a bit further. He already felt closer to her as he walked through the complex terrain, over sharp stone, steep crumbling hills, and wet sand. Ten miles, then fifteen, then twenty. The sky was black, then white, yellow and blue, filled with peacock clouds. The mountainous landscape lay itself out before the messenger like a living painting. Its jutting rocks and incomprehensible forest stretched and stretched, void of time and space. He kept telling himself Meenakashi was waiting for him at each new town. He walked until his feet bled through his shoes. He saw a whole night pass, then a day, another night and almost another day, passing flooded rivers, vast lakes, plantations, wiggling mountain roads, main roads, and villages of bathing women in high waters.

When the messenger finally reached Madurai, the sky was indigo streaked with fuchsia. The air smelled of milky sandalwood. His trousers were torn and covered in earth, his face marked with the mud that the rain had washed

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out of his hair. He put his head under a tap on the roadside, and saw the temple, towering sandstone gopurams growing from the earth, lit up with a million golden candles. He aimed for the temple, for her, Meenakshi, as divine and beautiful and intoxicating as he’d imagined her. ‘Meen-ak-si’ he breathed, having, at last, regained his ability to put his lips together.

The messenger walked from here-to-there-and-there-to-here. He just wanted to see and feel her, cast into plaster, her essence filling the halls and the water of the water tank. He’d made it this far. On his way into the temple, he handed his shoes to a girl who looked like Meenakshi. He asked her name but she didn’t reply.

He sat down. The messenger felt no distinction between himself and the stone floor. He couldn’t see where the temple ended and the sky began or tell between flickering flames and stars. The music of the nadaswaram struck his ears with its authoritative whine, and the thavil drums made his blood pump faster through his veins. He felt light-headed.

He closed his eyes. He no longer felt desire to see the girl. In fact, he thought, he no longer felt desire for anything. The want had transcended into something purer, greater. He left the temple. His bleeding soles didn’t hurt as he walked, and when the car hit him he turned into several clean pieces of flesh that fell onto the road. When his body was cleared away they found a composite man with a gun in his pocket. Later, after the bits of body were gone, a young girl found the book of love poetry on the road, and picked it up. That night she read one poem, and uploaded a photo of it to Instagram: Sometimes Love hoists me into the air, Sometimes Love flings me into the air, Love swings me round and round. . . .

I have no peace, in this world or any other. . . .

Constantly turning and turning, and crying out.

She got 143 likes.

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Poetry

Joshua Ip

Joshua Ip

arnoldii | rafflesia arnoldii rafflesia over there, where my local servant in the bloody heat pants – do you not see do you not smell it is past obscene a decaying corpse his expression is disdainful – unfounded

adventures lie in the forest awaiting us intrepid explorers and our unearthly ways, namely over there how vast it is its breath taking ly beautiful, smells better after time. majesty will be – the mightily impressed, not of its size alone

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i feel have a head ache oh – i feel a fever

i find, we are directed for history, i have a heart to report this to the Royal Society: this summer thrill, the throbbing of discovery

Note: This twin cinema poem (which can be read either as two discrete columns vertically, or one unified column horizontally and then vertically) recalls the discovery of the Rafflesia flower by Sir Stamford Raffles and Joseph Arnold in Sumatra. Only the former’s name is remembered now.

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A Dignified Existence A D ignified Existence Kim Ae-ran

Kim Ae-ran translated by Jamie Chang

T

he first thing I learned at piano school was how to find Do. It’s the first note, so you use the first finger to play Do. I pressed the key, and Do barely cried, ‘Do. . . .’ To remember the Do I’d just played, I pressed the key once more. Do, taken by surprise, made its ‘Do. . . .’ sound again and I watched the line its name drew as it travelled across the air. I sat frozen where a note had come and gone without a trace, stiff pinky raised. A dim afternoon light trickled in through the window covered over with sticky paper. Silence ran between the piano and me, a girl who had touched a piano for the first time. Like uttering a carefully chosen word, I quietly said to myself, ‘Do. . . .’ Placing my hand on the keyboard was deceptively challenging. I had been told to relax my hands and pretend I was gently wrapping my fingers around something, but I couldn’t imagine grasping something without using force. I practised Do-Re, Do-Re all day, using two fingers. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that if you press two keys at the same time, the lower note lasts longer.

All the keys on the piano looked the same. They were either black or white, and had the same size and texture. I often forgot the position of Do. I wasn’t confident whether a key was Do – and not Re, or Fa, or Mi – until I touched the key. The Do in question was twenty-four fingers away from the farthest key to the left. Every time I got lost on the keyboard, I had to count the twenty-four keys back to the right position. All I could do, once I’d gone to the trouble of finding Do again, was to play it. I liked the sound this hunky, introverted instrument made, the resolute, comforting ring of

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‘Do. . . .’ Re was right next to Do. Fortunately, Re was easy to find once I’d located Do. Mi was next to Re, and Fa was next to Mi, so it was important to find Do. Each practice room was named after a dead composer. I sat in the Beethoven Room and practised my scales: ‘Do-Re, Do-Re.’ I played ‘DoRe-Mi’ in the Liszt Room and ‘Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So’ in the Handel Room.

When I was playing with two fingers, I thought, ‘This is manageable.’ I found playing with three fingers an insult to my talent, and when I had to use five fingers, it was so difficult that I ran off, screaming. There was only one music school in our village. They also taught violin, flute, and public speaking, albeit not very well. Fortunately, no one signed up for flute or violin. The school would have advised against it anyway if anyone had dared to ask. The only child in town who could play the violin was the head teacher’s daughter. She would turn up at school recitals in her recital gown, complete with wings made of wire and lace, and play music that even primary-school audiences found insufferable. Listening to her mediocre performance, I was overcome for the first time with the urge to hit someone.

Anyway, the child playing in the Handel Room was far from Handel, as whoever was playing in the Liszt Room was no Liszt. In any case, I had no idea who these composers were.

When I got bored in the practice room, I imagined what expressions the notes would wear if they had faces. Re would eye you from the side, and So would be on tiptoe. Mi would be coy and, though Fa ranks lower than So, it is nonetheless outgoing. I grew accustomed to the five notes. I also began to understand that the sound comes from inside the piano when I hit a key; not from the key itself. High notes disappear more quickly, and each note has its own time. So when many notes come together to create music, the resulting phenomenon may be considered a congregation of many different times.

The trouble began with La. Before I met La, I was wary of it. Playing five notes with five fingers was manageable and sensible. But how does one play six notes with five fingers? This encounter would be comparable to that of a man who has only ever known the quinary scale and discovers the duodenary scale for the first time. I wanted to know La, but I was afraid that associating with it would turn out to be too much trouble. I don’t like

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to be challenged. There are plenty of songs that only involve the five-note scale. I would have been perfectly happy playing just five notes for the rest of my life.

The day I learned how to play La, I watched my teacher’s hand with silent concentration. The teacher sat next to me and played Do. She played the same way I did. She played Re. That was the same, too. She played Mi exactly the way I predicted. You could cut the tension with a knife. When she finally played Fa, something flashed before my eyes. Instead of using the fourth finger to play Fa, she’d twisted her hand, hit Fa with her thumb, and So with her second finger. All the other fingers fell into place – ‘La, Ti, Do. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do’ – the perfect seven-note scale. Blown away by her performance, I mumbled, ‘Now I understand music!’

I’m not sure how it occurred to my mother, the proprietor of a dumpling house, to have me learn the piano. It wasn’t forced on me in the form of blackmail or maternal ambitions. Mum’s education had been cut short, and the decisions she made regarding her daughters’ education always lacked confidence. She was probably following what was considered the norm.

According to hearsay, there were certain things one had to do at a certain age, like going to theme parks and exhibitions. Although these trips were merely part of a generic childhood experience, I see in them my exhausted mother, an uneducated woman guided by hearsay, rolling kimbap and climbing on board tour buses holding her daughter’s hand. I can still see my mother, lying on a bench with her arm shielding her face from sunlight while I sat screaming with joy on the merry-go-round pony. Mum’s face as she took a short nap with her shoes off may or may not have been as calm and low as Do. My music teacher may or may not have been as surprised as La when she found me lying on the piano bench, mimicking my mother.

That was a time when I thought, ‘Mummy, can I have a hundred won?’ was the most important task of the day. I played music in the Handel Room without Handel, and mother made dumplings like a deaf person, her short, permed hair a spitting image of Beethoven’s coiffure. The timing was perfect. Her dumplings were selling like hot cakes, and a music school had just opened in town.

Mum bought me a piano. I remember her delight when the blue truck reached our house after braving the dusty, unpaved roads all the way from

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the city. She had invested not in a new fridge or a washing machine, but in a piano. I could feel our quality of life go up a notch. The piano was made of brownish wood, much better than any piano they had at the music school. The vines carved onto the face, the steel pedal with a matt finish, the keyboard cover in scintillating red. The piano was in a league entirely apart from everything else we owned. The awkward thing was that the permanent place for the piano was not in the living room of a home, but in a dumpling place, which doubled as our house. Where the customers ate dumplings by day, our family rolled out our futons to sleep at night. We put the piano in the small room occupied by my older sister and me. My parents’ room was across from the kitchen, and the small room faced the hall.

I played piano at the dumpling house all afternoon. I played The Maiden’s Prayer or Ballade pour Adeline with my foot on the right-hand pedal to create a fuller resonance. Clouds of vapour rose from the steamers. Farmers and vendors in muddy boots munched on dumplings by the mouthful as I played music that could make anyone cry in mid-swallow. The pieces were easy and sweet yet so dramatic that anyone who overheard them might have turned red with embarrassment, while someone with a trained ear might have cried, ‘Stop that racket!’, throwing a dumpling plate at me. But once, I heard applause from the hall when I’d just finished a piece. I looked out into the hall and saw a white man clapping.

‘Wonderful!’ he said. There was an awkward silence between the foreigner and me that was broken by my painfully shy, ‘Thank you.’ Tiny specks of flour were floating in the air, reflecting the sunlight that poured into the dumpling house, and my fingertips had turned white where they’d had touched the piano keys.

I studied at the music school for two years. I went through two Bayer books and started Czerny and Hanon. ‘Czerny’ sounded like wind blowing in from foreign lands, with a ring entirely different from words like ‘pork fat’ or ‘pickled radish’. I wanted to own the word, ‘Czerny’ rather than learn the études attributed to the name.

At the end of the day, Mum would close the shop, lie down in the small room and request songs. I played folk tunes like Ddaogi or Older Brother as

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Mum tapped the air with her foot. The toes of her socks were indelibly stained with dirty dishwater. Her foot seemed like a wet piece of my mother’s heart, floating in the air. Dad was a good singer, but it was always Mum who made the requests. Dad handled the dumpling delivery. He delivered fried, steamed and boiled dumplings all over the village, sticking his nose into everyone’s business and making stupid jokes. He often took off during the busiest time of the day, distracted by a game of cards or the plush-toy claw machine outside the corner shop. Mum got furious once, when Dad disappeared for a whole day. All the deliveries were cancelled and Mum had to run back and forth between the steamer and the phone all day. Around dusk, Dad quietly peered in through the door. He stepped into the restaurant and loitered there, unable to work up the nerve to go into the main room where Mum was. Then, for some reason, he called us out of the small room, proposing to teach us a song. Delighted by this rare gesture of paternal affection, we crept out of the room. Dad began to sing, the sliding door of the dumpling place half open. He would sing a phrase, and we’d parrot. Dad’s deep voice spread through the quiet of the small village.

How far be my home from here?

Blues skies down yonder – There be my home so dear?

It was strange. Our village was the only home he’d ever known, but his face was wistful, as if he had a home elsewhere.

When the acacia petals dance with the wind. . . .

While three heads serenaded her with the same song, Mum made no response from behind her closed door. She might have been thinking to herself that her misfortunes had begun long ago, when she fell for a young man with a beautiful voice.

I was nine, and I had more time for mischief than for practising the piano.

Every time she heard shattering glass or my sister screaming, Mum would put down the dumpling skins, bolt out of the kitchen, spank us, and quickly

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disappear back into the kitchen. Mum was very busy. She had to hit us faster so her children would grow up sooner, and she had to steam dumplings even faster still. Every time Mum’s rolling pin landed on my body, a cloud of flour billowed everywhere. I knew a little about music, but when I found myself facing Mum’s rolling pin, I always cried, ‘Waah!’ with my mouth wide open. Once, when the music-stand on the piano broke off, Mum hit me with that instead of with the rolling pin. Too embarrassed to cry like a baby, I cried, ‘Sniff, sniff,’ instead of ‘Waah!’ That was the first time I saw a musical instrument as a threat to my well-being.

There was a good number of children at the piano school who could play the piano well, and there was an even greater number who could not play the piano at all. The out-of-tune pianos all sounded congested. Mozart and Beethoven sat in their portraits, looking bored to tears by the aural pollution that primary school children produced all day. The children were everywhere and the teachers taught mechanically, but I had fun learning to play. I liked the quickening of the notes as they bloomed under my fingers, and the melancholy conjured up by something flowing to and fro inside me. The odd thing is that, despite my fondness for the piano, I never felt the need to play it well. I wanted only to be average. It may or may not be a coincidence that I quit the piano school as soon as Mum had paid off the last instalment for the piano. I had not grown tired of playing, but was satisfied with my average piano skills. Considering my low standards, I probably had no talent anyway.

My breasts, raised on dumplings, were filling out beautifully and sending strange messages all over my body. I entered middle school wearing a size 75A bra. I did not play the piano as often as I used to. I maintained my not-so-great, not-so-bad piano skills by buying and playing sheet music for popular songs. Some were the themes for popular TV shows, and others were songs that ranked No. 1 on some chart on the TV pop music programmes.

When I played, I never failed to maximise the resonance by pressing the right-hand pedal. In that roaring reverberation was a sadness that comes from a fantastical feeling, and a longing regret for the world beyond the horizons of Czerny that I would never know.

I entered secondary school with no other forms of private, extracurricular education. When I asked my parents about my future, Mum and Dad

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looked blankly at each other, and made a face, like they’d done something wrong. We had no choice but to rely on the hearsay of the times. Science specialists land great jobs. Teaching is a good profession for women. A national university outside the capital is better than a third-rate university in Seoul. Every time I heard something like that, I made a serious face, as though the information would play a decisive role in my future, only to forget all about it moments later. Unlike my wavering grades, my bra size increased steadily. Neglected, the piano sat in the corner of the dumpling place, accumulating layer after layer of dust. Many years later, long after I’d left my parents’ house with my sheets and pillows, a thought occurred to me as I was navigating through a sea of people with my hands in my pockets: in this room, on this street, in this factory and that, in this alley, in that hallway, in the shadows, behind closed windows, or when no one’s looking, people in this world sometime cry, ‘Do . . . Do. . . .’ For reasons unknown to them, everyone is born with a note or two that they can make. Since I became familiar with that cry, thanks to the little music I’d picked up when I was young, perhaps I, too, owe a little part of myself to the hearsay of the times.

Dried radish was one of the ingredients of dumpling stuffing. Mum soaked the dried radish in water, wrapped it in cheesecloth and put it in the Chalsuni for a whirl. The Chalsuni was a narrow Geumsung washing machine that only had a spin cycle. The Chalsuni hose stretched all the way from the storeroom to the drain in the kitchen. Mum went into the storeroom every two or three days to spin the Chalsuni. Every time she went into the storeroom, a deluge of water came out of the hose, and that led me to believe the storeroom was a crying room. I found out as I grew older that I was mistaken, but years after I discovered what the storeroom was for, I found Mum in there with her head buried in her lap. It was in the winter holidays of my senior year, just before I went off to university. Mum was spinning soaked radish in the Chalsuni when the phone rang, and she ran out into the kitchen. On my way to the bathroom, I saw Mum on the phone. She sounded like she was explaining something, and pleading into the receiver. It was after the lunch-hour rush, and all I could hear other than Mum on the phone was the quiet humming of the Chalsuni. Mum went back into the storeroom. She squatted next to the Chalsuni and cried, Hic,

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hic, hic, hic. Dad had gone to see the greenery on Seorak Mountain, sister was taking time off from school, and I watched the water trickle out of the hose connected to the darkness at the other end as it dawned on me that our family was ruined.

Around that time, I was accepted to a four-year university course in the Seoul area. I was to study computer science. All I knew about computers was that they had a keyboard, but I applied for the course with an unfounded optimism that a computer science degree would land me a decent job. That’s how all of my friends chose their subjects. We blindly signed up for Korean literature courses, we blindly chose teacher’s college, and went to university with sense either of inferiority or superiority – both unfounded. Many of us applied for courses based more on our grades than our goals. We were ignorant to the concept of carefully laid-out life plans, and we certainly did not know what we wanted to do with our lives. My sister, two years older than me, was studying to be a ‘dental technician’ at a community college in Seoul. It had to do with making dental prostheses.

The night before her fate was to be sealed with a university application, she had no idea that she would be destined to cast moulds of people’s teeth for the rest of her life. Instead of telling my parents that I’d been accepted into university, I spent my time practising the songs I would sing at the opening ceremony.

Mum suggested we sell everything of value for cash before the creditors raided the house with bailiff ’s stickers. Dad and I nodded, and began searching the house for valuables. Ten minutes later, we were forced to admit there was nothing in our house worth selling other than the piano, and even that would be just under 800,000 won. Mum mulled it over and concluded we should not sell it. I said, ‘It’s OK, I don’t need it.’ I hadn’t played the piano for a while and, honestly, I was not that attached to it. The plush toys sat wide-eyed on the piano. They were all from the claw machine. Mum mulled over it some more and then said we should hang on to it for now.

‘How?’ After a brief pause, Mum said I should take it to Seoul with me.

‘Mum, I’m moving into a semi-basement studio,’ I said, incredulously.

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Mum, of course, knew this. I kept urging her to sell the piano. We truly had no use for it now. ‘Things might look up. . . .’ she said, as if it were an heirloom.

I wound up lugging the piano to Seoul with me. I later discovered that the day I left, Dad had torn down the highway on his motorbike, tears running down his face. When the motorcycle reached maximum speed, he popped a wheelie, shouting, ‘Never co-sign a loan!!’ He was pulled over next to a greenhouse where he hung his head in shame while the cop wrote him a ticket. Mum was working at the dumpling place when she received the traffic ticket in the post.

Unni (older sister) was horrified. I tried to explain, while Uncle took a smoke break. I thought Mum had explained about the piano but, apparently, she’d told Unni nothing.

‘We live in a semi-basement,’ she said, flustered.

‘I know,’ I whispered.

We stood in front of the truck and looked up at the piano. It was elegant and proud, like a member of fallen Russian royalty. Uncle’s truck was parked in the middle of the street. Unni and I quickly put on work-gloves. Uncle took one end of the piano, and Unni and I took the other. Uncle gave the signal. I took a deep breath and lifted it up. The 1980s piano rose into the end-of-the-millennium sky. It was so beautiful I almost cried out. We slowly inched toward the entrance. My legs were shaking as sweat ran down my spine and forehead. People began to stare. A car trying to get past from behind hooted. It wasn’t long before the landlord, in tracksuit bottoms, descended from upstairs. He was a chubby man in his fifties who seemed like the type who’d never miss his morning exercises. He looked dumbfounded. Still holding up my corner of the piano, I awkwardly smiled and nodded at him. Unni managed a short greeting, too. The piano slowly began to head down the steep, narrow flight of stairs. It wasn’t a refrigerator or a washing machine, but a piano. The embarrassment I felt for our lives rose three notches.

Suddenly, there was a loud Kung! Uncle must have accidentally let go.

Boom! Boom! Crack! The piano slid down the stairs. Unni and I lunged at the piano legs, but to no avail. The sound of many notes running into each

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other echoed, Wung! from within the piano. I noticed the grapevine decoration on the front of the piano nodding like a spring. It must have come off on impact. I realised then that what I’d taken for all those years to be an embossed pattern was, in fact, a separate piece stuck on with glue.

We beckoned to Uncle at the bottom of the stairs to see if he was all right.

He said he was fine, and we continued down the stairs. I was not worried about Uncle or the piano. I was too embarrassed by the realistic, big, and unabashed Kung! reverberating over the city in which I’d just arrived. The landlord loomed at the top of the stairs, looking peeved. He took turns taking long looks at Unni, me, the piano, Uncle, and the piano again.

‘Miss,’ he said.

Unni hurried up the stairs. I watched her diligently making excuses, surrounded by a door-shaped frame of sunlight. Unni also apologised to the driver stuck behind Uncle’s truck. We were finally able to satisfy the landlord by agreeing to pay a higher maintenance fee and never, under any circumstances, to play the piano. As he turned to go, the landlord muttered under his breath, ‘What do you need a piano for if you’re not going to play it?’

That evening, we had dumplings for dinner. Mum had packed some in an ice-box. Unni pushed one dumpling after another into her mouth and said, ‘This is so soothing!’ Unni said that every time she swallowed a dumpling, she felt she was swallowing a piece of Mum. I split open a ‘king dumpling’ with my hands. Scallions, tofu and pork burst out together in a rush of steam. I thought, Perhaps Unni and I are made out of the thousands of dumplings Mum has made over these twenty years.

‘By the way, what happened to Dad?’ Unni asked, taking a swig of her soft drink. I gave her the abridged version: Dad’s friend was opening a meat buffet and had asked him to co-sign the loan. A sprawl of factories had materialised right outside our town, and Dad’s friend had said, ‘If those people have a few company dinners at the restaurant, we’ll be in the black in no time!’

Around that time, an older man Dad had been at school with opened a karaoke bar. ‘They gotta have drinks after!’ he said. Dad co-signed for him, too. The factories started to close one by one, the meat buffet went

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bankrupt, and so did the karaoke bar. In other words, the legal responsibility fell from one person to the next and the next like dominoes, and the line stopped in front of the dumpling house. The entire town owed each other money, and the debt was like a ghost no one had touched.

‘So, whose fault is it?’ asked Unni, sucking on her chopsticks.

I said I didn’t know. ‘It’s surreal,’ I added. Like a very inscrutable misery.

I could not picture what was at the other end of the row of dominoes. If I started work tomorrow and felt hugely fatigued, I wouldn’t know whose name to curse.

‘Why’d you take time off school?’ I asked.

Unni replied, watching the layer of fizz on her drink dissipate, ‘Things are tight at home, and I didn’t know if I could keep doing what I was doing.’

I felt a sense of disappointment in Unni, who was thinking about what she’d prefer to do rather than what she should do to help out. I wanted one of us to settle down with something stable and lift the family burden. Unni said she regretted choosing a degree based on promises of a decent job market. She hadn’t thought about her aptitude or work environment. A recent explosion at the lab had left her terrified to work there, and she had back problems and coughing fits. I felt bad for her.

‘This person who’s a few years ahead of me in the course told me that what determines a person’s social status is not where they live or what they drive, but the condition of their teeth and skin.’

‘Really?’ I asked, and I thought it made sense.

‘Isn’t it a bit gross, though, that your teeth reflect your class?’

I stared off into space and pictured a farmer’s market where a cow was having its teeth inspected.

‘So, since then, I can’t help but look at people’s teeth, although the habit does come with my course. All celebrities have such neat, white teeth that it’s easy to mistake that for the norm.’

I pondered on what she’d said. Unni started talking about her boyfriend.

The age difference between the two was so great that even Mum didn’t know about him until it was over. He’d apparently dropped by a few days ago, completely drunk. They were both still trying to get over each other then, and he’d collapsed onto the floor as soon as she opened the door.

‘So what happened?’

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‘I took his shoes off and tried to drag him in, but he wouldn’t budge. So I just sat there looking at him for a while. Before I knew it, I was reaching for his lips, and pulling them back to look at his teeth.’

‘His teeth?’

‘Yes. I felt terrible about what I was doing, but I just really wanted to look at his teeth. We’d been together for over two years, but that was the first time I’d seen him up so close. I saw about a dozen little teeth through his open mouth. They were yellow, crooked, small, and old.’

I peered at Unni’s face.

‘I sat there looking at the teeth he’d used for over thirty years to chew his food, and I felt oddly sad.’

‘Were you disappointed?’

‘No, that’s not what I mean.’

Unni hesitated, searching for words.

‘When I was casting people’s teeth at university, I used to think that people are so much like animals. That day, I guess I felt like I was holding an animal that was close to me, not a lover.’

We rolled out the futon. There was just enough space in the room for the two of us to lie down. The piano served as a shelf for the blow-dryer, the radio, the iron, and other junk. I felt like I was in a flea market. Through the window, I saw our street stretch into the distance. Every time a pedestrian padded down the road, it seemed to create little waves, as the pavement sometimes seems to sink and heave when a bird takes off. It suddenly occurred to me that my sky was lower than the ceiling of those people out there.

I turned over and whispered, ‘This place, it doesn’t feel like Seoul.’

‘Seoul’s like this everywhere. The Seoul you know only exists in certain places.’

She quickly dozed off. I was lying perfectly still on my back in a basement in the city. Headlights passed across the window near the ceiling, and the shadow of the piano swept over me and disappeared. In the dark, I felt my teeth a few times and fell asleep.

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When Unni went away to college, Mum promised her a computer as a matriculation present. Unni and a friend from her department went to Yongsan, where she bought a custom-made computer. Her friend exchanged words with the salesperson that sounded to Unni like code, and asked Unni to choose a case for the system unit. Cases were stacked like crates in one corner of the store. Unni timidly pointed at one of them. It looked like a part of a robot.

‘That’s a strange choice for a girl,’ said her friend, somewhat surprised.

‘This one look most like the twenty-first century,’ said Unni, turning scarlet. So Unni wound up in a semi-basement flat with the most twentyfirst-century-looking computer. It wouldn’t be long before she discovered that the twenty-first century was all about slim electronics. The bulky machine found its lair in one corner of the room.

I started temping. I worked for a printer connected to a cramming academy, and my job was to type up tests. At first, I had thought about waiting tables at a coffee shop or a bar. Based on my eighteen-year-old common sense, temping meant carrying trays. However, I had misunderstood the meaning of the phrase, ‘decent appearance’, which often appeared in the adverts. I was borderline ‘decent’, closer to ‘cute’. I had to surrender my temping fantasy in search of other jobs in the free papers. Among adverts that offered a staggeringly large sum and others that paid unbelievably little, I found a place that paid 1500 won per page. I had no way of knowing whether that was too much or too little, but I was certain I could handle the word processor.

Work was not as easy as I’d imagined. My shoulders ached, my eyes hurt, I had to type, look for typos, insert graphs, and correctly type in alphabet and Chinese characters. The printers said they couldn’t pay me if I made a typo. The workload they gave me was impossible to handle in the allotted time, and they asked me – without batting an eye – to bring the pages back in three days. Estimating by the size of the pile how much money I could make if I were to take it, I quickly took it home and stayed up all night staring at the computer screen with bloodshot eyes. My efficiency was compromised by Unni’s malfunctioning ‘d’ key. My fingers would fly all over the keyboard until they stumbled upon a ‘d’. Like a deer in headlights, I froze every time I saw a word with a ‘d’ in it, and through this painful

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experience I discovered just how many words in this world contain the letter, ‘d’.

‘The white-black colour combination is apparently the hardest on your eyes,’ said Unni, concerned. Sitting in front of a machine so advanced it was inconceivable to anyone living a hundred years ago, I became hunched over like a caveman.

Unni was preparing for her university re-admission test. She was going to give it another shot, enrol in a four-year course, specialise in English, go abroad for language training, and land a decent job. Unlike repeating a year or transferring, the word ‘re-admission’ had a strangely impoverished feeling to it.

‘You don’t know the opportunities open to you if you can speak English well,’ Unni lectured me. I found it odd that it had taken her more than twenty years to realise that there’d be a world of opportunities open to her if she could speak English well. Unni came home with an armful of English-language books, and started to memorise words and listen to tapes.

While I typed like a crazed person, she mumbled in English with her grammar book open on the music rack of the piano. Each night, a dim light leaked from our tiny semi-basement flat, along with the never-ending sounds of typing and muttered vocabulary.

One day, Unni threw down her pen and yelled, ‘What do you mean future perfect? How can a future be perfect when it hasn’t happened yet?’

I lost the cross-section of the earth’s crust mid-drag, and banged my head against the keyboard in agony. ‘Argh! I hate science!’

It was early summer. It rained, stopped, and rained again. Outside our window, hundreds of raindrops formed pretty circles in the puddles. It seemed as though the ripples were emerging from the ground. I looked out the window as I popped a handful of raisins into my mouth. Raisins were my favourite snack. Chewing on raisins gave me the illusion of chewing on shrivelled bits of Californian sunlight. Unni was working as a cashier at a family restaurant in the nearby shopping centre. She headed over to the language institute every morning, drowsiness like a large sack slung over her shoulders, and at the weekends fell into deep sleep with her legs wrapped around that sack. Sometimes, she talked to her ex. He showed up from time

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to time, sniffling at her door. Sometimes it rained, stopped, and rained again. I sat in front of the TV and paid close attention to the weather forecasts. When Unni was out, I cleaned the house, made some side dishes and did laundry using detergent that was advertised to have beads of sunlight in it. The TV declared that the monsoon season was approaching.

I bought dehumidifying chemicals that come in plastic containers, and put one under the sink, another in the wardrobe, and another in the shoe-cupboard. I had some money saved up. I could take on a minor natural disaster.

I was anxious to get back to university. I had saved up enough money for a term, and I longed to feel the anxiety and exhaustion of human relationships. I wanted to wear clothes that made me feel anxious, make anxious faces, be conscious of other people’s opinion of me, love, suck up, joke, bash, and be a calculating or political person. I could be a good person or a bad person to someone, but here, I could not be any sort of a person to anyone because all I had around me were household appliances. I refused to suck up to the refrigerator or gossip about the electric rice cooker.

My first payslip came with the unnerving lack of interesting ways to spend it and people to spend it with. I was determined not to die a person no one had heard of, who devoted her life to temp jobs no one had heard of either. I was determined to find a place for myself in the world outside the profession of temping. I sometimes dreamt that my fingers grew out very long – like branches. I was a human being with highly evolved fingers, endlessly typing the sentence, ‘Choose the correct answer’. When I went over to the printer’s carrying a huge stack of test sheets I had finished, the printer made me solve all the questions. Chewing on raisins, I reassured myself that autumn would come soon. ‘I should pick up some clothes at Dongdaemun in August. Unni will teach me how to put on makeup, and I will find myself a temping job that keeps me out of the house for several hours a day.’ Although it felt as though autumn would come after summer just as sure as Re comes after Do, the seasons dragged on and our youths were so dazzling we could hardly see.

The room was humid. When I looked around as a break from typing up tests, I could almost see the soggy air flapping about with the texture of seaweed. Patches of mould began to appear here and there on the wallpaper.

The wall behind the piano was in much worse condition. I was convinced

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that if I pressed one of the keys on the piano, the vibration of the note would disperse spores from the wall and send them across the room. I was worried the piano would rot. I tried wiping the back of the piano with a dry rag, but the mould just kept coming back. I was ripping a few pages off the giant calendar and taping it to the back of the piano as a temporary solution when I was suddenly struck with the urge to test out the piano to make sure it still worked. It would be such a shame to have dragged it all the way to Seoul from the country only for it to be devoured by mould.

I sat down on the piano stool. I placed both hands on the piano and lifted the wooden lid. The familiar weight travelled up my arms. Eightyeight clean keys revealed themselves. The instrument was calm, as an instrument should be. I placed my fingers on the keys. I relaxed my wrists and curled my fingers as though I were about to hold something lightly in my hands. The keys felt smooth and cool. I could produce the desired note if I pressed down just a little harder. I heard construction going on outside.

The landlord had been renovating his place during the past few days. All of a sudden, I was overwhelmed by a desire to play the piano. I had not felt this way since I moved to the flat. One note should be fine. Sounds disappear soon, and no one will even know it was there. I summoned up the courage to press the key.

Do flew around the room, drawing a long line like a moth trapped within it. I thought the sound was beautiful. I felt its delicate undulation form and disappear inside me. Do cried, ‘Do. . . .’ for a little while longer than I had expected. To enjoy the sound of a note disappearing completely, I closed my eyes. Someone started banging on the door. Kungkungkungkung! With a fist, four times. I quickly closed the piano. More banging. I opened the door to find the landlord and his family. A man in sweatpants, his wife, and his two children were standing in a row. The boy looked exactly like his father, and the girl looked exactly like her Mum. They each had a toothpick hanging from their lips, as though they had just returned from eating out.

‘Hey, did you just play the piano?’ the man asked.

‘No,’ I answered slowly.

He cocked his head to the side and said, ‘I think you did. . . .’

I denied it again. He looked at me dubiously until I mentioned the mould in the basement, and he quickly went upstairs with his wife and kids saying,

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‘That’s just how it is with basement flats.’ I went back into the room and leaned against the piano. Absent-mindedly, I opened my phone. Each of its buttons had its own note, and with them I could play a simple tune. 1 was Do, 2 was Re, and to play a note an octave higher, you pressed * or 0 and the number key at the same time. I began to stumble through a melody by pressing buttons on my cell phone. ‘Mi SoMi ReDoTiDo Fa, Mi SoMi ReDoTiDo ReReRe Mi. . . .’ I thought to myself, ‘That’s just how it is.’

What an awful thing to say.

That evening, it started to pour. Unni said she would get home late. She should have left by now, but it appeared she had screwed up the accounting.

She would have to stay up all night going through the receipts and recalculating until the numbers came out right. I was at home watching a TV soap and eating dumpling ramen noodles. I couldn’t hear the actors’ lines very well, though I had turned the volume up pretty high. I reached for the remote. It felt wet. I had to stare at my hand for a while to realise it was rainwater. I sprang up. There was water seeping in through the front door.

The water was black and murky with mud. Water was coming in through the window as well, drawing streaks of black tears down the wall. In a panic, I called Unni. She answered after many rings, and was surprisingly calm when I told her what was going on. She said it had happened before and that it should be fine if I mopped up the floor. She hung up, apparently busy. Her saying so made me feel simultaneously disappointed and relieved.

I stood there dumbstruck for some time, and then took off my socks and rolled up my trousers. I put all the shoes by the door in the shoe closet, and unplugged the computer, TV, and all the household appliances. I put extra dry rags around the piano. All I had to do was mop the water off the floor.

I wiped the floor with a rag and squeezed the water into a basin, and then repeated the steps. I dumped the water in the sink and wiped the floor again with a dry rag. Unni was right. It was nothing. I felt like an adult. I put things back in their place and then rose into a stretch. I looked around the room with a sense of accomplishment. But more water had already gathered where I’d just wiped. There was more water than before. Turning pale, I called my sister.

‘Unni.’

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Unni answered quietly as though there were people around, ‘What?’

Fighting back tears, I answered, ‘It’s raining.’

Unni sighed and said, ‘Yes, that’s what you said last time you called.’

I sniffled like a child, ‘I know, but it just keeps coming in.’

Unni quietly tried to console me, ‘I will be home soon. Hang in there.’

‘When are you coming home?’

She said she didn’t know, but assured me she would be back soon. I got off the phone and wiped my tears with the back of my hand. The water had risen up to my ankles. The rainwater had the pungent and fishy smell of the city. It occurred to me to ask the landlord for help, but it was too late at night. I had to work at it again. I gathered up all the computer cables and put them on top of the dresser. I used the dustpan to scoop up water, but it kept flowing down the stairs and in through the window. I abandoned the dustpan and began using the basin instead. I could not tell if the wetness streaming all over my body was rainwater or sweat. Thunder roared outside.

A sense of futility rushed over me as I realised my mechanical scooping wasn’t making the slightest difference, but I couldn’t just let the place flood.

The phone rang somewhere in the room. I quickly opened the flap.

‘Unni?’

A quiet, low voice came from the other end, ‘It’s Dad.’ I was taken aback. He was rarely the first to call.

‘Oh, hi. . . .’ I said, wiping sweat off my forehead.

Dad asked if I was ‘doing well’. I thought for a while before answering, ‘Yes.’ Though not very good with words, Dad always made the same small talk on the phone. His next question would be ‘Have you eaten?’ or something to that effect.

‘Have you eaten?’ he asked.

I said I had eaten.

Father was silent for a while before he asked, ‘What’d you have?’

I answered half-heartedly and fell silent again. Dad asked how my job was going, how Unni was doing, and when I would come home to see him and Mum. I answered him with stiff politeness. We fell silent again. One of us had either to say goodbye or change the subject. Father spoke first.

He talked about money. He didn’t say he needed our help, but he was trying to tell us he needed our help. I listened closely for a while. The amount he

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needed was about the same as the sum I’d saved up for college. I rubbed my soaked, wrinkly sole against the floor.

‘I’ll think of something,’ I said, and hung up. The world was overflowing with the sound of raindrops hitting things. I was daydreaming in the room with the basin in my hand when I heard someone at the door. I ran to the door and happily cried out, ‘Unni, is that you?’

There was a shadow standing behind the door. It was a man with a fierce expression on his face. I fell back onto my bum. A wave of water splashed the back of my hand. The man looked at me, his eyes unable to focus.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, trembling.

First the flood, then the debt, and now assault? I was about to mourn my cruel fate when the man stared intently at me, and then doubled over next to the shoe closet. He rubbed his face against the cabinet mumbling, ‘Mi-yeong. . . .’

That was Unni’s name. It dawned on me that this man was Unni’s ex-boyfriend. He had a small frame and a gentle face. He might have been considered cute on a closer look. I carefully approached him and poked his shoulder with my finger. Instead of crying, ‘Do. . . .’ the man turned over and began to snore.

‘Excuse me.’

The man did not even stir. I shook him.

‘Excuse me.’

He opened his eyes very wide and stared idiotically at me. He didn’t seem to know where he was or who I was.

‘You can’t stay here like this. Get up.’

The man was soaked to the bones. He nodded and closed his eyes again.

I wanted to move him, but it was wet everywhere.

Should I just leave him here?

But I couldn’t scoop out the water with the man blocking the entrance.

I thought about calling Unni, but her hushed voice seemed to suggest her bosses were breathing down her neck. Anyway, she’d said she’d be back soon.

I figured she’d take care of him when she returned, so I decided to just get him out of the way. I looked around and spotted the piano chair. It would be high enough above the floor that he wouldn’t get too wet unless the water started to rise at a much faster rate. I helped him up. The man had as much

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control of his body as a dead octopus. I slung his arm over my shoulders and dragged him onto the chair. The man slipped off and collapsed on the floor.

‘Hey, mister!’

He shuddered when he hit the cold rainwater, but instantly started snoring again.

‘Look here!’ As he turned over, he began to snore again. I was angry, but I couldn’t just leave him that way. The water was up to my shins. The books on the bottom shelf were soaking up water and expanding. Among those were English workbooks Unni had not even opened yet.

I finally succeeded in laying the man down on the piano chair. He looked peaceful. His body was bent at ninety degrees, and his ankles were underwater.

I sighed and gazed at him. The rosy-cheeked man seemed a little soft in the head. Staring at his face, I was reminded of what Unni had said about teeth.

I wanted to see his teeth, too. Just a quick peek should be OK, I thought. I carefully reached for his lips. He turned, uncomfortable sleeping with his body folded over. I quickly withdrew my hand and reproached myself.

Our room was drowning, and this was no time to be distracted. The water was up to my knees. I realised that the piano was drowning. It was clear the piano would be unplayable unless something was done soon.

Suddenly, I felt as though a motorbike were tearing through my heart, laying down skid marks. Thousands of dumplings rose like air bubbles from the motorbike’s trail of dust, and disappeared. Unni’s English workbooks, the ‘d’ key of the keyboard, the phone conversation with Dad, and our summer rose into the sky and burst. I opened the piano. The clean keys revealed themselves again. I calmly placed my fingers on them. My thumb was on the Do key, the index finger on Re, and the middle and ring fingers were on Mi and Fa respectively. I hadn’t pressed anything down, but I heard a note let out a long cry. Entranced, I pressed down.

‘Do. . . .’

Do’s long sound flew around the room. I pressed Re. ‘Re. . . .’

The man turned again and resumed the right-angle position. I began to play more comfortably. Soggy notes rose one after the other from my fingertips.

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‘So Mi DoRe MiFaSoLaSo. . . .’

The pedal gurgled underwater. The notes slowly flew up, made harmony, and faded away.

‘MiMi So DoRa So. . . .’

Heat rose from the man like steam from dumplings. As the rain continued, sometimes pouring down hard, sometimes not, I played piano in the semi-basement flat sloshing with black rainwater. The man, ankles submerged, dreamt on, a grin on his face.

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Where Would You Like to Go? Where WouldKim YouAe-r Likeanto Go?

Kim Ae-ran translated by Jamie Chang

I

n the spring, I got a call from my cousin who lives in Scotland. She said she’d be leaving for a month-long holiday with her husband, and asked if I wanted to come and stay at their place.

‘A whole month?’

‘Maybe longer.’

I distracted myself for a moment, looking at my bare back in the mirror.

I had been inspecting the source of an itch around the shoulder blade when she’d called. There was a pink spot on my shoulder.

‘Do you need a dog-sitter or something?’ I rooted through the first-aid kit for some ointment. I wondered if my metal allergy was acting up because of the bra hook.

‘We can’t have pets. Dan’s allergic.’

‘Then why. . . ?’

Why me of all people? I wanted to ask.

‘Well, I. . . .’ she started awkwardly. ‘I thought maybe you should get out of there for a while.’

She said I’d just be staying in her empty house, so it would be no trouble for her at all. I didn’t have to give her an answer right away because July was still two months away. She and Dan would be in Thailand; all I would have to do is get the door code from her. She asked after our relatives and how things were in Korea, and then finally got to the point moments before she hung up: ‘How are you? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the funeral.’

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I boarded a train from London to Edinburgh. Big, fluffy clouds with clearly defined outlines floated in a sky so blue I felt it would colour my eyes if I didn’t look away. The phrase ‘calm maritime climate’ came to mind as I looked at the windmills dotting the horizon. The sky of this island reminded me of the sky I once saw in a Japanese animated film. It looked just like the sky a war-worn solider dreaming of his happy childhood might imagine.

This radiance felt like a curtain I had taken down from someone’s home and hung in my own. The pretty ‘present’ hanging before me seemed like a happy past or a future to come, but whichever it was, it didn’t feel like mine.

My cousin’s house was in the Old Town, a bit outside the tourist area.

Dragging my suitcase with one hand and holding my phone in the other, I followed the map app to her house. There was hardly anyone out. I couldn’t tell if it was because everyone had gone on holiday, or because it was after sunset. About two blocks off a four-lane street, I turned left and recognised the building I’d seen in the photographs she’d sent me. An old stone building with a conical roof on one side. Plants grew lush around it, and the layers of time and moss on the cream-coloured wall made the house look ashen.

I double-checked the address at the door and keyed in the code. A digital beep unlocked a stale darkness. I opened the door and stepped inside.

I unpacked and slept long hours for several days under the Scottish sky that rained and cleared up several times a day. My chest slowly expanding and falling, I slept like a child learning to breathe for the first time.

I adjusted to life in ‘Dan and Suyeon’s House’ in the absence of Dan and Suyeon. I felt less alone than I had in Korea. Before Dokyeong died, I hadn’t been aware of the sounds I made around the house. They had mingled with the sounds he made, so I’d never noticed. After his death, I realised I made a lot of noise when I dragged my feet across the floor, used water, or slammed the door. I made the most noise when I was talking or thinking. The intended recipient gone, the uninspired, everyday words I said hung around my lips with nowhere to go. Our inside jokes, our banter, the intimacy and insults exchanged in our bed. The nagging that seemed it would go on forever. The worries and encouragements. The words floated around the house all day long. Like a bird crashing headfirst into a window-pane and killing itself, the words collided with his absence and fell to the floor every

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time. Only then would I remember, as if realising it for the first time, Oh, he’s not here anymore.

I was making kimchi that day. I’d laid out sheets of newspaper on the living room floor, and was reading my notes on ‘How to Make Radish Kimchi’.

Like someone studying for an exam, I went over the recipe I’d inherited from my mother. I’d been hunched over on the spare bed in her hospital room as she dictated her instructions. I remember looking up at her as I’d done when I was a child because of the height difference between the spare cot and her hospital bed. Before I was fully grown – that is, at least until middle school – I was used to looking up at her like that. There was a time in my life when each time I looked at someone’s face, I saw the sky, too.

There was a height difference in the world that made children grow. But once my mother passed away, the blue sky seemed like a foreshadowing of a place where people older than me were destined to go. It was as if I’d spent all of my childhood preparing myself for this time difference between parents and children that can never be narrowed. But I thought this only applied to people who were older. I believed it didn’t happen to people my age or younger, at least not for a while.

After I got married, I occasionally imitated Mum’s cooking. My own tasted different every time. It was good sometimes, and awful most of the time. I got pretty good at noodle soup with fish broth, but that was because I made it often for Dokyeong, who liked noodles. I managed beef radish soup and marinated bulgogi, but I never dared kimchi. It seemed like a big, difficult thing only mothers could do. But that day, for some reason, I wanted to try it. It was a spring day and I felt like trying something new, perhaps in light of our long discussion and ultimate decision to have a baby.

I boiled sticky rice down to paste, ground dried pepper and onions, and chopped garlic and chives as I waited for Dokyeong to come home. Five bundles of fresh young radish sat in a pile next to the cutting board. I was almost done with the sauce when the phone rang. I was going to ignore it because my hands weren’t free and I didn’t recognise the number, but the call came three times in a row, and I finally had to pull off one rubber glove and pick up.

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That was also the day you stopped smoking: cold turkey.

I don’t have a clear memory of what happened after that. When I think back on those days, scenes recede in random order and get cut off. Even when I wasn’t feeling emotional, tears streamed like the discharge from an infection down my stony face. I was sitting blankly by the shrine during the wake when my three-year-old nephew waddled toward me. He was my younger sister’s boy. He looked at me with a grim expression on his face.

Then he, a child who couldn’t speak yet, put his cookie in my hand.

In the waiting room at the crematorium, my mother-in-law said in anger, ‘Not a single person from that family came to the funeral. Dokyeong died trying to save their boy. We’re not blaming them for anything. We’re not asking for their gratitude. No, we don’t share a single drop of blood, but isn’t it just plain good manners to pay your respects?’ She beat her chest.

‘I heard he had no parents,’ said my brother-in-law, who had spoken to people from the school who’d come to the wake.

‘How about grandparents? Relatives? Someone must have raised him.

Shouldn’t at least one of them come to look at my Dokyeong’s face?’

‘It was just him and his sister. Two kids living on their own. She’s sick, too. She had to quit school. . . .’

She tried to protest, but gave up. ‘If you couldn’t pull him out, why didn’t you save yourself! Dokyeong, my youngest. . . . My poor, sweet child. How do I go on without you? My baby. . . .’ she wept.

Three days later, I came home to the bowls and utensils I’d scattered across the living room to make kimchi. A white film of mould had formed on the sauce, and the radish was wilted and black. The house smelled musty and sour. I stared at the ingredients for a while and then went straight into the bedroom. I lay facing your side of the bed, looked at the dip in the pillow in the shape of your head, and closed my eyes.

I found the first spot not long after I’d unpacked. I was undressing in the bathroom when I noticed a red spot under my belly button. What’s this? I wondered as I turned on the tap at the sink, but I didn’t think much of it.

I’d had allergic reactions to certain metals since I was young. Must be the

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belt buckle, I thought. When I found another similar spot on my arm the next day, I absent-mindedly scratched it a few times. Mosquito bite? I looked around the room once and made myself some tea. The day after that, I found yet another spot on my lower belly and frowned. I recalled the bedbug epidemic in New York apartments and hotels that I’d once read about. I yanked the duvet off the bed and combed the sheet with my fingers. All I found was a few strands of black hair.

The Scottish skies were as depressing as rumoured. Not used to having carpets around, I sneezed often. I had to flush several times because water pressure was low, as was the voltage. Making coffee required grounds and patience. I washed my hair with hard water in the mornings and, when it rained, I stretched my hand out the door and recorded the sound of rain.

When I got bored, I conversed with Siri, like the main character in the movie Her. I took care of meals with pre-cooked food from the supermarket, or takeout. If I craved something spicy, I walked all the way downtown to the Chinese shop to buy ramen. Kebabs and curries at Middle Eastern restaurants also helped. My staple was muesli and bread. No matter how simply I ate, putting a meal together took effort, sometimes the greatest of the day.

I spend time neither sparingly nor wastefully in Edinburgh. I let it flow, like pouring rice water down the drain. The current was just right, so that it would not let me sink or sweep me away. I didn’t do any sightseeing, read the paper or take pictures. I did not make friends, turn the TV on, or go for a run. When someone from Korea called, I replied via text or email.

Sometimes not even that.

The countless stone buildings around the city reflected different colours depending on the position of the sun. The stones absorbed light all day and spat it out. Whether they were part of the cathedral, the bar, or the street, all stones did the same. When night fell, not even the dogs dared disturb the clean, spine-chilling quiet of the Old Town. Sometimes, it was as if I’d fallen into a virtual-reality game. Just as sorcerers belonged to one place and monsters had their own tasks, it seemed that immigrants belonged in certain places and exchange students were expected to behave in a certain way. And the roles seemed difficult to break away from without considerable effort.

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I wandered the streets at night, neither a local nor a tourist. I played at being invisible. The credit card receipts were the only clear footprints that proved to me every now and then that I wasn’t a complete phantom.

Every weekend, Dokyeong would lie on the sofa or the bed and play with his phone. His eyes glued to the screen like a teenager, he’d play virtual soccer and watch the news and sports replays. I wasn’t happy about it at first, but later accepted it as his way of winding down. When he ran out of things to do, he talked to Siri. Most of the things he said were pointless small talk. Not that I hadn’t talked to machines before, like the rice cooker or the elevator. But they were short acknowledgements like ‘Really?’ ‘My rice is ready?’ or ‘Is that so?’

A blue screen appeared when you pressed and held the round button on the bottom of the phone. A thin line undulated like a pulse in the rectangular frame. This meant, I am ready. Tell me what you want. The user’s speech was converted to text that appeared on the screen, provided the pronunciation was accurate. Siri drank in the user’s voice, digested it in her body, and spat it back out. Then she added subtitles to her own breath and sent it out: what we call an ‘answer’ in simple terms.

According to the manual, the user could ask Siri about today’s stock prices, the wind speed at any location, directions to a certain address, and reminders of their spouse’s birthday. You could, of course, also have conversations of no practical use. Dumb things like Do you want to sleep with me? Some people in this world can’t resist asking machines dirty questions, and my husband was one of them. But the user’s lack of originality had been foreseen and the responses were already written into the program by a designer with a good sense of humour. It was calculated in the imagination of someone imagining a pretend conversation. Each time Dokyeong asked a racy question, Siri would reply, ‘I’ll leave that for you to decide.’ Or, ‘Who, me?’ And you call yourself a teacher! I’d scold and tell him to take out the rubbish, pushing at his legs with the vacuum as he sat on the sofa.

I’d only recently started talking to Siri. I’d heard of Siri’s wit, but I had had no intention of finding out for myself. I was more comfortable typing in my questions, and I felt stupid talking to a machine. When I opened my

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eyes after several days of sleeping long hours right after I arrived in Britain, it was raining outside. I wasn’t sure of the exact time, but I gathered from the darkness that it was past midnight. I listened to the raindrops tap on the long, old windows of the stone house. I lay very still and looked up at the ceiling. Dokyeong had appeared in my dream. It had been a while. I’m late. He was running out the door on the morning of the field trip. If I’d known that would be the last time I’d see him, I’d have said, You don’t have to hurry off like that. I got annoyed at him for not eating the breakfast I’d laboured to prepare for him. The back of you as you hurriedly disappeared out the door – I saw the same back of your head in the dream.

You couldn’t turn around and let me look at you just once?

I groped around the nightstand for the phone. I pressed the home button.

Light exploded like a cough from the rectangular machine. I frowned as the light stung my eyes, and then looked at the screen. I must have held the button too long that day. The usual applications on the home screen were gone. The screen was as empty and blue as the evening sky. A familiar voice spoke. ‘What can I help you with?’

I felt oddly happy, as though I’d run into Dokyeong’s old friend. Half suspicious and half curious, I said the first thing that came to mind.

‘I’m happy.’

I’d said it to test a machine that can’t decipher complex human emotions or detect lies. Siri replied calmly in her usual wholesome, deliberate tone.

‘If you’re happy, I’m happy.’

I said the opposite this time: ‘It’s not true. I’m sad.’

Like feeding a child small pieces of meat, I spoke in short sentences to make it easy for Siri to swallow and process human language.

‘Life, as I understand it, is sad, beautiful, and everything in between.’

It wasn’t comforting. I didn’t feel understood or moved. But I noticed a special quality in Siri that I had not seen in people around me at the time.

She had manners. I decided I might as well ask her a question I was most eager to find an answer to.

‘What’s your opinion on people?’

A faint wave of intellect or soul quivered on Siri’s dark, expressionless face. Like someone answering a very tricky question, Siri offered words that sounded like giving up or giving in.

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‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.’

I heard a snicker emanating from some part of my body. It was a sound I hadn’t made in a while. It put me at ease. At least I didn’t have to laugh and then look around to see who’d heard me.

I was changing when I looked down and saw that the spot near my belly button had turned into five spots. The gravity of the situation finally sank in, and I did an Internet search. I didn’t have insurance in Britain, so the hospital would be a last resort. I opened up a search engine on my phone.

Then I sat with my chin propped against my hand and stared at the urgently blinking cursor. I had to know the name of the thing to search for a remedy, but I didn’t know what these things on my body were called. I picked a general direction that would perhaps lead to my intended destination, and typed in ‘skin conditions’. Search results came up with revolting pictures.

Psoriasis, shingles, eczema, fungal infection. . . . Whichever it was, it didn’t sound like fun. I went from one website to the next, meandering around the back roads and alleys of information and came upon a blog that caught my eye. The entries were written by someone who’d had nearly all of my symptoms. I compared her pictures to my spots, and read her entry containing jargon like desquamation and slough that I found hard to follow and had to reread several times. ‘It’s a kind of acute skin infection, like a flu of your skin. The causes are unknown, but stress is the biggest factor. A herald patch appears on the back or belly, and smaller patches appear after a two-to-four-week dormant period.’

Herald patch? I knitted my brow as I remembered the pink spot around my shoulder blade before I left for England. I retraced my steps and found a lot of symptoms that matched. I perused the blog entries she’d posted, phrase by phrase. Diagnosis confirmed, I now had to know what was going to happen from here on. Reading all her entries wasn’t sufficient to put me at ease. I found another person’s blog and then moved on to medical sites.

A long while later, I finally found the name of my condition.

Pityriasis rosea.

I’d never heard this term in my life.

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The next day, there were eight spots on my lower belly. Twelve the day after.

Twenty the next. Then it spread all over my body.

In the mornings, I got up to find white flakes of dead skin all over the sheets. My hair became frizzy and dead skin peeled off me all over. I bought a bottle of mild lotion dubbed the ‘Official Lotion of the UK’. and coated myself with dollops of it, but it was no use. The lotion disappeared the second it touched my skin, which absorbed it like water on parched land.

It was worst on my stomach, back, thighs, and buttocks or, in insect morphology, the thorax and the abdomen. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a single spot on areas exposed to sunlight, like the face, neck, arms, and lower legs.

Is it just me? I wondered, but another Internet search confirmed that this was normal. Nothing appeared on exposed skin, so you could seem perfectly fine on the outside. It was a relief that it wouldn’t interfere with everyday life and that it wasn’t contagious.

There wasn’t much I could do to make it go away. Avoid strong foods, avoid hot showers, and moisturise. I thought about getting a prescription but decided against it because it apparently came back with a vengeance once you went off antibiotics. I read it was crucial to keep my temperature from going up. Alcohol was prohibited. They said sunlight was good, but that was hard to come by in Scotland.

When the spots were pink, they just looked like a rash. But the spots turned grotesque as time went on. They ripened from pink to a deep red, and then turned maroon. When they browned, they glistened like scales.

They came in various sizes, had very dark outlines and looked like paper burnt around the edges or like glamorous flowers. The scales formed and peeled on the same spot over and over. Then dead white cells, called ‘slough’, emerged and fluttered. It was as if I’d become an insect.

So how long until it’s gone? I glumly looked it up and found it would be three months to a year. But if you’re unlucky, it can come back. Someone posted on a dermatologist’s office message board, ‘I’m going insane because his pityriasis rosea came back.’ This is a flu. In time, it’ll go away. I chanted it like a mantra, but accounts like that scared me anyway.

My time in Edinburgh no longer flowed like rice water. It didn’t fly by like an arrow, but instead skewered me from top to bottom, like a spear. I sensed that a length of time meant for something had entered me. And that

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I had to feel it every day in detail. Painfully, vividly. I was surprised to find that the body could grow layers upon layers of dead skin, like new skin coming in – as though death was the only thing that could keep blossoming on top of death.

When my cousin invited me to come stay in Edinburgh, Hyeonseok came up in the back of my mind. I hadn’t heard from him in many years, but I knew that he was doing his PhD in some department at the Edinburgh College of Art. I didn’t feel like meeting up with him or asking for help. I was simply aware of the fact that he was in the same place as me. And that awareness kept me from being swept away in the current of time. I don’t want to admit it, but it was true.

Most of my college friends didn’t know how to get in touch with Hyeonseok. I had to reach across several degrees of separation to get his number. In the end, I got it from a friend I had a falling out with in college and hadn’t spoken to in years. I went back and forth about it for several days, and then sent her a clear, cautious text message asking if she had his number. She did not text back. Of course. A faint regret and embarrassment was about to creep in when I did get a text in reply, late at night. It contained no greetings or formalities. Just a cold, neat string of numbers.

Next day, I got up late in the afternoon and took a lukewarm shower.

The shampoo would not lather in the hard water, so I shampooed twice, and then I curled up in a chair and clipped my fingernails and toenails for the first time in a long while. I pulled on a cardigan over a cream-coloured cotton dress and headed out.

We had agreed to meet at a Chinese restaurant near the University. Where do you want to meet? I had asked. Where’s easiest for you? Hyeonseok had replied. He could meet me anywhere, but I might get lost, he reasoned. I sent him the address of a Chinese restaurant with only six tables. I’d been there a couple times when I was sick of cold, dry food.

I arrived a little earlier than expected and loitered outside the restaurant.

Through window, I saw the cook having a late lunch. A plate of stir-fry, a bottle of Tsingtao, and a bottle of kaoliang. He was enjoying his break with a drink after the lunch-hour rush. At four in the afternoon, there were no

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customers in the restaurant. Under the red lanterns that hung like fruit from the ceiling, a smiling golden cat waved its left arm like a metronome.

Maneki-neko. . . .

I was smiling back at it when it occurred to me, Isn’t this Japanese? But I’d seen enough pan-Asian décor in Edinburgh that I decided to let it go.

‘Myeongji.’ Someone tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Hyeonseok. Hey.’ We quickly scanned each other’s faces and bodies for the marks of time. Being a student, Hyeonseok still had some spark left in his eyes. I was absolutely jaded from being out in the world, but I didn’t know if he could see that.

‘Some things never change.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like how you are seldom late.’

We ordered pork dumplings and seafood noodles. Chummy person that he is, Hyeonseok made me feel as though no time had passed since we last saw each other. But then, he often used to confuse me the next day by treating me like a stranger. Sitting across from Hyeonseok with a bowl of steaming noodles between us, I felt as though I were back in college. We had had our awkward freshers’ meet and greet at a Chinese restaurant like this. Hyeonseok asked when I’d arrived and what I was here for. I thought about telling him that I’d quit my job at the beginning of this year, and then told him, ‘Research.’

‘You still work at the same place?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’ve stuck around for quite a while.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How’s the work? Any fun?’

I tried to sound like an adult: ‘Is work supposed to be fun?’

Ladling noodles into his bowl, Hyeonseok asked without making eye contact, ‘When are you heading back?’

‘Next week.’

Our conversation went on comfortably in the tone of two people in their mid-thirties who were no longer easily excited. At first, I wanted to say something sophisticated. I said something like, ‘I see life here instead of routines,’ a superficial commentary Hyeonseok would have heard a million times from his visiting relatives and acquaintances. Then we talked about

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the old days, and what we’d been up to. Then I noticed the restaurant had suddenly got quiet, and I turned to see the cook asleep with his head against the wall, his drink still in front of him. He was sleeping so soundly Hyeonseok and I felt compelled to lower our voices.

‘So . . . how’s Dokyeong?’

A short silence passed between us. Only I knew what it was. The cook’s beer fizzed softly on the next table over. The only thing moving in that moment of silence was the smiling maneki-neko waving its left arm: tick tock tick tock. Suddenly, my phone vibrated on the table. Both Hyeonseok and I looked at the phone. It was a number I didn’t recognise. The phone kept whining.

‘Aren’t you going to answer?’

I shook my head and put the phone away in the pocket of my dress.

Strange numbers never bring good news. I reached in Hyeonseok’s direction with my chopsticks and picked up a dumpling. Then I gave him an answer appropriate for an old friend asking after my husband: ‘He’s great.’

I was shocked that he hadn’t heard, but I welcomed the opportunity to be free, just this once, from unsolicited pity and sympathy.

‘He’s still teaching?’

‘Yeah. He quit smoking, too.’

‘He quit smoking?’ Hyeonseok shrugged as if to show his disappointment. ‘So he’s going to be wholesome and boring, huh?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘You’re right. Next stop: babies.’

Hyeonseok asked me if I was ‘done with my food’. I nodded lightly and he looked at his watch.

‘By the way,’ he started, ‘it’s only five.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So. . . .’ I was going to say, Shall we get tea?

‘You want to get a drink?’ Hyeonseok asked as if that was the most natural thing to do next.

We found a place near St Giles’ Cathedral on the Royal Mile. It was a roadside pub with tables set up outside. We ordered two ales and a basket

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of chips. The streets were filled with the anticipation and excitement of people who’d just arrived at a new place. Lovers, families, healthy pensioners and young artists chattered in their own languages. The season of festivals had arrived.

‘You’re here on research? Have you had a chance to look around the city?’

‘Yeah. A little.’

‘There are so many things here you shouldn’t miss.’

‘Well, I’m on a tight schedule.’

Across the street, a man in a kilt was playing the bagpipes in front of the Adam Smith statue. He was wearing the same bearskin cap as the man on the bag of ‘Scotch Candy’ I loved when I was young.

‘Which one of the three Scotch Candy flavours was your favourite?’

‘Coffee.’

‘Mine, too.’

‘Adults didn’t let us have that, though. They said coffee made you stupid.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I think they were right.’

‘What?’

‘Coffee does make you stupid.’

Hyeonseok whined about his dissertation. I carefully studied his face as he sat with the clear blue sky behind him. The deep, firm sound of the bagpipes travels great distances. I’d worried that Hyeonseok would have developed the sense of entitlement, even vengefulness, that comes from studying abroad for so many years and putting off reward for so long. I was afraid the sensitivity, justice, and pensiveness of his twenties would have turned into neurosis, anger, and depression, but that turned out to be a smug thought. I was the one who’d changed.

A few beers lightened the mood. Hyeonseok and I moved on to more lively, everyday topics. Asians look younger, so I still get carded sometimes. Not so much an Asian face as a baby face. The Korean ramen here is less spicy. I think the exported ones are manufactured separately. Tofu has a later expiration date here. I think each country has a different ‘taste’. But why would someone put vinegar on potato chips? Wait ’til you try the chicken fat pie. We said things that meant nothing whether they were said or not. Words that carried no agenda or point. Words without beginning, end, purpose, or direction –

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words we exchange with spouses and friends. Our voices grew louder, and when a glass emptied, we raised our hands and toasted someone.

Around midnight, Hyeonseok offered to walk me back to the house.

‘It’s OK. Isn’t this the safest city in Europe?’

‘The city is safe, but you might be a danger to it.’

There was a park nearby with a nice path, so we took a little detour.

Buzzed for the first time in a long while, I walked in long strides, arms swinging. Fireworks popped in the distance on the other side of the slumbering city.

‘You know what?’

‘What?’

‘The day Dokyeong went to meet your parents for the first time, he stopped by my place.’

‘He did?’

‘Yes. He came by to borrow my car. I lived in a one-room studio, but my car was decent. My brother’s connection. He came first thing in the morning, so I opened the door and he was standing there, white as a sheet.

He said he hadn’t slept a wink. He was nervous your parents would say no.’

‘It was before he got his teaching certificate.’

‘Yes. And there’s not a lot of jobs for historians. Anyway, he was dripping with sweat. He said, “Hyeonseok, the anxiety is killing me,” and then he threw himself on my futon. You know I never put it away. I wash my pillow cases once a year. He lay there for a few minutes like he’d passed out. Then he got up and gave me this despairing look.’

‘Why?’ ‘He got lint all over his suit from my duvet! It was so soft and fuzzy it was impossible to get off. It was hilarious. He was dressed in this all-black suit he’d bought on his credit card. I didn’t keep a brush or lint remover around, the appointment time was closing in – in the end, he was so anxious he started hopping from foot to foot.’

‘Really? I’ve never heard about this before.’

Hyeonseok doubled over with laughter. ‘Yes, he completely lost it.’

I laughed quietly, too. I could hear his tone and see his expression without having had to be there when he was panicking. Talking to Hyeonseok, who

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thought he was still alive, I could almost believe Dokyeong was walking around somewhere in Seoul at that very minute. In the living room watching soccer. At the kitchen table ranting about the department head.

At the supermarket discount bin carefully comparing prices.

‘Hey, I have an idea.’ Mischief suddenly emerged on Hyeonseok’s face.

‘Let’s call him.’

‘What?’

‘What time is it over there? Eh, what does it matter? Let’s call him right now.’

‘Um. . . . Let’s not. . . .’

‘Why not? You two called me at three in the morning once from Jeongdongjin. You wanted me to listen to the waves. You were wasted.

C’mon, it’ll be fun. Let’s do it.’

‘Well . . . no. He’s. . . .’

‘He’s what?’

‘Sleeping.’

Hyeonseok looked at me squarely in the face, and then laughed heartily as if to say, You poor, well-behaved child! ‘So wake him up!’ Hyeonseok shouted excitedly. ‘What’s the big deal?’

I think the reason that thing happened that night had to do with my collapsing on the spot. Supporting myself with both hands on the ground, I wailed. This must have surprised Hyeonseok.

‘What’s wrong? Myeongji, what happened? What’s wrong?’ Hyeonseok didn’t know what to do. Much later, when my crying calmed to a sniffle, Hyeonseok said cautiously, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.’

‘What?’

‘Did you by any chance . . .’ he stalled for a moment ‘. . . split up with Dokyeong?’

I nodded, both amused and heartbroken by the question. ‘Yes, we split up. We split up a few months ago.’ I accepted defeat and cried with my mouth hanging open like a child.

So it very well may be that Hyeonseok helped me home, tucked me in, and held my face in his hands as truly no more than a gesture of sympathy.

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Still upset, I looked dolefully up at Hyeonseok, and then pressed my lips against his eyelid. Hyeonseok gently pulled back with a surprised look. I don’t know if it was the tears or the drinks, but his face was in layers of blurs.

Hyeonseok hesitated for a moment and gave me a calm, polite response by kissing me back on my eyelid. We looked at each other with request and consent in our eyes, and in time our lips met.

‘You taste good.’

‘It’s the alcohol.’

‘No, you really taste good.’

Hyeonseok said things he normally wouldn’t have said. In the dark, our breaths mingled. When I felt his flesh against mine, the soles of my feet burned and my body grew hot. I raised my arms over my head and tugged the dress off. Hyeonseok’s hand caressed my breast and slowly made its way down to my belly button. Then I felt him stop at one point and hesitate to go further. The moment I thought, Oops, it was already too late. I was so utterly dazed that I didn’t realise the light was off, and quickly pulled the lamp cord thinking, I have to turn out the light. The room instantly filled with light. The dry light fell on my stark-naked body. I saw Hyeonseok’s pupils and jaw slowly open. He struggled to regroup and find inoffensive words to say. But he couldn’t seem to find them, or maybe nothing could be said in moments like this that wouldn’t sound rude. He then gave up.

Hyeonseok and I had tea in the kitchen. He filled the electric kettle, took the cups from the cupboard and asked if I wanted black or green tea while I sat like a tame guest, feeling glum. We were, of course, both clothed now.

The strange peace after the sexual energy had dissipated hung forlornly between us.

‘Myeongji,’ he said. I said nothing.

‘You’re not going to smile if I ask you to, are you?’

I smiled faintly at him. ‘The older people get, the more they chew over the past. You know what I mean? Or reflect. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.

The what ifs. Don’t you?’

‘If I were a man. If I weren’t Korean.’ Hyeonseok replied as if he were playing ping pong, ‘If I hadn’t finished my thesis. If I hadn’t gone abroad

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to study. If I’d listened to my high-school teacher and applied for the business department.’

‘If the Korean War hadn’t broken out? If the Joseon Dynasty hadn’t collapsed?’

‘Those weren’t your decisions, though.’

‘There are no decisions that are entirely your own. They just seem that way in the end.’

‘There are.’

‘Are there?’

‘Yes.’ Hyeonseok wrapped his hands around his tea cup. The water took on a darker shade of brown around the tea bag.

‘Are you coming back to Korea when you finish your dissertation?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll even get the degree. There’s nothing waiting for me in Korea anyway.’

‘When you’re outside, you envy what they’ve built on the inside; and when you’re on the inside, you envy what they can do on the outside. I think that’s how it is with academics.’

Hyeonseok nodded.

‘Are you worried?’

‘No. I just wonder where I would be and with whom if I’d chosen differently then.’ He continued, ‘Remember that time you and I went to the movies together? When Dokyeong was in the army? We went to Jongno.’

‘Yes.’ ‘The buses had stopped running, so we walked a little. We walked through a park near some art gallery. I held your hand for a moment there. Do you remember?’

‘You did?’

‘Were you really drunk, or did you act drunk? I can’t believe you don’t remember. Well, maybe you’re still pretending not to remember.’

‘What does it matter anyway?’

‘If I hadn’t let go of your hand, do you think we’d have been together now?’

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I went into the spare room and lay down without taking a shower. I realised that I had used the bed in the master bedroom for the first time. A sour taste of guilt came over me. I stared up at nothing for a while and then bowed my head into the dress to take it off. Spots of white scabs covered my body. It looked like marks left behind by scores of small grenades that had detonated inside me. Like the flash of the fireworks that left an ashen imprint in the sky and froze in the shape it had as it exploded. Hyeonseok must have discovered them with his hands before seeing them with his eyes.

I stretched out my arm and grabbed the phone off the nightstand. The screen bathed my face with a friendly yet barren glow. I remembered waking Dokyeong up and blabbering nonsense at him every time I came home late from a company dinner. I said the same thing over and over. He would plead, I hate it when you drink and do this. Go brush your teeth and wipe off your makeup and come to bed. I held down the home button and summoned Siri. Like someone with multiple personalities changing expressions when a different identity is coming up, the ripple on the screen seemed to be waking Siri up. Siri asked once again, the same question she always asked.

‘What can I help you with?’

I thought about what I’d like to say, and then asked an absurd question: ‘Do you want to sleep with me?’

For some time, we had an inane, meaningless conversation on pointless, directionless topics. As always, Siri did her best to do what she could. I finally asked something I was genuinely curious about.

‘What is pain?’

Siri said, ‘OK, I found this on the web for “pain”.’ She brought the search result onto her face.

Chapter 5. The Fundamental Nature of Pain www.ccsm.or.kr What is pain? There are three main things. First, pain is “God’s test of faith.”

College Report: Pain According to Buddhism www.newsprime.co.kr www.happycampus.com

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I didn’t see any article that could give me an answer. Besides, I didn’t want a search result. I wanted to talk about it. Just the two of us.

Frustrated and disappointed, I muttered quietly, ‘You idiot!’

‘I’m doing my best,’ said Siri, sounding genuinely hurt. To give her another chance, I asked her if there was any meaning to my pain. Like she always does when she gets a tricky question, she said, ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Do you have a soul?’

‘Interesting question,’ she said. ‘What were we talking about?’

Disgruntled by the way she kept tactfully changing the subject, I asked the question I most desperately needed answering: ‘Where do people go when they die?’

A short pause. Siri replied, ‘Where would you like directions to?’

I said nothing.

‘Where would you like to go?’ ‘. . .’

‘Sorry. I missed that.’

I waited quietly. It was strange. Siri seldom responded to the user’s silence.

It was odd to hear her speak unprompted twice in a row. Perhaps, somewhere out there, someone imagining the imagination of others had programmed concern for this ‘someone’ into this pattern. But it stopped there. When Dokyeong had first summoned Siri, her voice reminded me of the subway announcements. A being that kindly informed you of the destination and recommended subway exits, but. . . . That day, Siri felt like a friend who could tell you how to get somewhere but couldn’t come with you. So I asked a question I wished I hadn’t.

‘Are you real?’

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Where Would You Like to Go?

A small silence. A thin crack appeared on Siri’s dark face. The familiar voice came a few seconds later.

‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I can’t answer that.’

The next day, I packed my things and headed for the airport. I still had time until my scheduled departure date, but I paid a fee and changed it. I had checked in and was sitting at the gate when I got a text message from Hyeonseok. It seemed he’d asked around our college friends after we parted that night. His short text contained a very complex feeling.

Why didn’t you tell me?

There was sadness, apology, confusion, and longing in his words. What do I tell him? I was thinking of an answer when the second message arrived.

Let’s get tea before you leave, if it’s OK with you.

I wrote, rewrote, and erased a long sentence.

I’m sorry. There was a change of plans at work. I’m at the airport waiting for my flight. Take care, Hyeonseok.

Outside the window, a big, heavy plane struggled off the runway.

The mailbox was stuffed with bills and fliers. I stepped into the lift, hugging the stack of envelopes with your name and mine on them. I stood at the door and keyed in the code that was a combination of your birthday and mine. The tepid air that had pooled in the apartment for a month stirred when the outside air rushed in. I left the suitcase by the shoe closet, tossed the envelopes on the kitchen table, went into the bedroom, and threw myself on the bed. I couldn’t remember when it began, but sleep comes over me at all hours of the day. The scent of ‘our house’ hung in the dimly lit bedroom. The scent you and I made together. I fell quickly into a deep sleep. I scratched my neck and belly several times as I slept. The spots had latched onto me in Korea, followed me to England, and doggedly flew back home with me. Like a plague of locusts, they tirelessly nipped at my body.

Before dawn, I came out into the kitchen for a drink of water and saw the letter. The pink envelope poking out amidst the stack of mail wearing garish or business-like faces. I thought it might be a wedding invitation – the paper was heavy stock and pretty. Glass still in hand, I walked over to the kitchen table and picked up the envelope. There was no stamp on it.

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Kim Ae-ran

No sender’s address or name, either. There was nothing on the envelope except the name of the recipient. It was in the large, crooked handwriting you would expect from a child who was just learning to write.

For Mrs Kwon Dokyeong My heart immediately started pounding. Steadying my shaking hands, I carefully tore the flap of the envelope that was meticulously stuck down.

The envelope contained letter stock the same colour as the envelope.

Dear Mrs Kwon, Hello, I’m Kwon Jieun. I’m the older sister of Kwon Jiyong from B Middle School Grade 7 Class 5. If you recognise Jiyong’s name, the student who died was my brother.

I tried calling you a few times, but I think you’re busy so I’m writing you this letter instead. I ought to visit you in person, but I can’t, so I asked Jiyong’s friend for your contact info. I’m sorry if you find this rude.

I’m sorry about my handwriting.

My right side was suddenly paralysed last year, so I can’t write well. I used to carry Jiyong on my back every time Jiyong cried for our mother who passed away, but after my paralysis, he looked after me like a grownup.

The house is so quiet now without him that I’m startled by the sound of my own footsteps.

I saw Jiyong in my dream a few days ago. I think he turned up because it’d been around one hundred days since he’d gone. ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’ he asked in his usual voice, but I was surprised to see he was taller and he had a mature look in his eyes. ‘I came to see how you’re doing. But I have to go soon.’ I was upset in my dream that he had to go so quickly. Jiyong said, ‘Thanks for raising me and carrying me on your back, Sis. Don’t forget to eat now that you’re on your own. I’ve got to go. I love you, Sis.’ I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, but when I saw Jiyong in my dream, I thought of you and Mr Kwon.

Even as I write this letter, I miss Jiyong so much. You miss Mr Kwon a lot, too, don’t you? When I think about that – I don’t know what to say.

This may sound strange, but I’m writing this letter to say thank you.

Jiyong used to get scared easily, and it makes me feel a bit better knowing that the last thing he grabbed was Mr Kwon’s hand, not just the cold water.

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I know it’s selfish of me to say.

I will of course be indebted to you for as long as I live, and I’ll always wonder how you are for as long as I live. When I think about the moment Mr Kwon grabbed Jiyong’s hand, it makes me cry. But I don’t know what it is I feel.

Don’t forget to eat now that you’re on your own. I’m sorry, and thank you.

I stood still and breathed slowly. Something doughy travelled up my throat.

It was as if I was finally meeting something I’d been wondering about since you left, But I didn’t know what it was. I reread the letter. The sentences she must have written many times to make them legible tottered precariously on the lines. I followed each painstakingly written word, and smiled sadly at ‘I don’t know what to say’. I remembered Siri saying the same thing when I asked her, ‘What’s your opinion on humans?’ My eyes followed each crooked line until my vision blurred. I saw Jiyong’s face over the stained lines. Help. I saw the eyes of the child who could barely yell for help as the water rushed into his mouth, as he stretched his hand out towards the world.

The very eyes I’d been trying not to see since you left. I was still angry with you for throwing your life away trying to save someone else’s. Didn’t you think about us, just for a moment, a split second? What about me? I dissected and weighed the heart of a person already gone. But confronted with the words before me, I could picture you at that place on that day when you first saw your student in the water. I saw the face of one life looking at another, fear-stricken. What else could you have done in that moment? Perhaps at that moment, that day wasn’t about a life plunging to its death, but one life leaping toward another. I’d never thought of it that way before.

Soon, I felt an unbearable longing for you. I put the letter down and grasped the corners of the kitchen table. I felt I had to lean against something. Was that girl eating well? How badly was she starving herself that her brother had to turn up in her dream to remind her to eat? I tried to hold them back, but thick, heavy tears plopped onto the letter. Over the spots that had scabbed over, peeled, and emerged again, over the stains that showed no sign of fading, teardrops fell. I miss you so very badly.

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Poetry

Ellen Zhang

Ellen Zhang

It Doesn’t Get Better Than an Apricot in Damascus My father recounts memories of swollen blossoms hardening into surface, secret core, hills laced with gold, assuring amber aroma feeding on the sun.

Now, my father sells apricots by the alleyway.

Constant construction: words painting over images tracing over questions spilling over crevices of sidewalks walking over my father breaking English – he is the gentlest person I know.

When he comes home his hands are stained.

Sure, he cleans his fingernails every night but some things do not wash away with the evening rain.

Sometimes I watch his neat shoulders,

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slanted wrists, manoeuvring new familiarity.

Spine arching under crates, fruits, time; he jokes I eat as much as he sells, slipping me the ripest.

Ah! – the sweet taste of summer gathering, tautness of fine skin break, burst. Never mind cavities deepening, I still dream of apricot kaymak.

My father dreams in Technicolor, reminding me that we live in some while others are planted. He carries patient yearnings in this city of soft velvet, so easy to bruise.

The meat of the fruit – chew, suck, swallow all the way to the heart. Father, it is for you. I wish that it were enough – trees do not grow far nor fast.

A Botanist Grows Home My mother’s lungs exhale her language, its syntax leaking into her dreams. Here, her home: tower block with time climbing, oak tree scars deepening into ash, lengthening branches in an infinite waltz with air, rousing kobresia and all the plants she could list because she did more than weave flowers into her hair. Candle light liquefying lines of text: she wanted to plant, so she did: flowers, trees, crops, and herself – uprooted to some new land.

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Plants acclimatise to grow but blossom, never as bright or sweet in such displaced soil.

We sit on the front porch after summer drizzle, examining childhood photos the same way I scrutinise my body every day. We are the same, but we know that she is different. This morning is the heaviest despite the luggage limit of fifty pounds. My mother folds into herself before sinking into this American soil, I am planted in this home while she grew it so.

My mother taught me phototropism: plants grow towards the light, and this must be so, auxin hormone seeping. Now, smoothness of Mandarin against cacophony of English and so my mother teaches me botany, yet in grocery stores I do all the talking.

She loves, labours this country more than I could envision but there is the pinning of silence, resting singularity: I wonder if hers is the ultimate unrequited love.

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Interview: Lucas Stewart Interview: Lucas Interview: StewartLucas Stewart

M

yanmar has been very much in the news throughout 2017. Conflicting and contradictory narratives vie for authority, and the result is a good deal of confusion about an already poorly understood country. Lucas Stewart has been working for years in Myanmar with the British Council and with Burmese writers and translators. Through examining the work both of established authors and of little-heard writers from the country’s ethnic regions, the aim was to reveal some of the country’s complexities of culture and identity. This resulted in an anthology of stories, many written in scripts that, until recently, were outlawed. The voices presented are authentic and universally human. We spoke to him about the project that produced Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds.

Hidden Words Hidden Worlds Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar

R Edited by Lucas Stewart and Alfred Birnbaum

What was your motivation in spending five years travelling around Myanmar and interviewing people about its literary heritage and the state of the art?

I’m a big fan of short fiction. When I moved to Myanmar in 2011 it was difficult to find local literary works available in English translation, other than Nu Nu Yi Inwa’s Smile as they Bow and a few books from the 1960s. Once I was in Yangon, a few more locallypublished translated collections surfaced, notably the excellent Selected Myanmar Short Stories, published by

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Seikku Cho Cho, and The Sixth Enemy and Other Stories by Ma Sandar (on the other hand non-fiction in translation is much more widely available). A post-censorship time made it easier to be in contact with Burmese writers and poets, and I came across a good friend of mine reading a Shan-language book.

In Yangon, I would ask writers and publishers if there were any works available in the ethnic languages and they would often say that no such writers or writing existed. This is no fault of those in Yangon; censorship, travel restrictions and no Internet or mobile phones made it extremely difficult to know what was happening in other parts of the country. But, I couldn’t forget that Shan book with the tiger leaping off the cover. If this existed, surely others must?

Are there any other context points that you’d like to make in undertaking this Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds project in Myanmar?

The anthology is one of many interlaced components that make up the Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds programme. Since 2012, the programme has attempted to engage with ‘talents’ across the literature community, in short story and translation workshops, public speaking, editing and proofreading, publishing in the Myanmar edition of the anthology, and so on.

Together they all form part of a broader notion of giving a voice in some meaningful way to all those involved in literature in Myanmar.

As I look back on the last five years, one thing that does surprise me is how at no point did the programme unravel. Everything the British Council was doing was in some way unprecedented. There was no blueprint to refer to. If the programme were to be run now, it would certainly benefit from the increased mobile coverage and internet connectivity, conditions that didn’t really exist when we started. At one point, I was communicating with writers in Kachin state to the north via handwritten messages passed along by students returning home on the train to Myitkyina.

What themes have the authors and poets been grappling with as the country attempts a transition to a more open society?

It would be fair to claim there are two literary realms in Myanmar. The Burmese-language writers in Yangon and Mandalay (though formal writers’ groups exist in many other towns across the country), and the ethnic language writers. For Burmese language writers, the abolition of pre-publication

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censorship in August 2012 and the dismantling of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division in January 2013 certainly allowed more freedom in terms of what could be written. But I am sure many writers are unsure of how far they can push these new freedoms and will select their words with caution. Self-censorship is just as unremitting as state censorship. I guess there is also a concern about what will happen should the transition prove unsuccessful. Would a future censorship board look back and start taking account of those who were critical?

For ethnic writers, the challenges are far more prosaic. Not being allowed to read and write in their own languages has caused a generational deficit in reading and writing skills. During the editing process of the multi-lingual Myanmar edition of the anthology, which featured twelve languages and eleven scripts, it was difficult to find proofreaders who could not only read the text in their language but also correct any errors using a computer. Many of these ethnic languages have yet to be standardised. Unfortunately, very little fiction is produced, but consistent themes can be found around poverty, conflict, drug abuse, community ties and cultural rites of passage.

Ethnic language literature also suffers from logistical barriers in terms of access to bookshops and printing facilities. The eBook revolution, at least the ePub format, has yet to make a mark in Myanmar in either realm.

What role do you think a multi-ethnic anthology like this one can play in nation building or national reconciliation? What’s your hope?

One quirk of fiction is how a personal connection can be made between the writer and us readers in which we feel the narrative speaks to elements of our own lives; and yet the same story can also touch a wider, collective audience. This is especially true of fiction that explores seemingly unrelated worlds from multiple perspectives and in different languages within a single nation, such as Myanmar. What begins as an enclosed sense of shared identity among those who only belong to that world is affected by the universal similarities between communities and peoples – those values, attitudes, experiences and beliefs that are common to us all. I hope that exposure to these affinities, through anthologies such as this, can contribute in a small way towards shaping a culture of understanding and respect.

Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds is published by the British Council (2017).

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The Court Martial The Court Martial Letyar Tun

Letyar Tun translated from Burmese by the author

T

he soldiers sat knee to knee in the back of a patrol truck heading into the capital.

‘How did the rebels get to Yangon?’ asked one of the privates.

‘Who are they?’ muttered another, nervously picking at his newly starched uniform.

The platoon leader looked at his men. ‘BCP. Burma Communist Party, that’s what we used to call them.’

A private next to Nyo Maung poked him in the ribs, interrupting his thoughts. ‘You really think these guys are BCP?’ Nyo Maung didn’t answer; neither did he listen to the chatter as the convoy continued downtown.

The name Burma Communist Party took Nyo Maung back. All things pass, but not the past. Throughout his thirty years of service in the ‘Exalted Military’, Tatmadaw, he’d been indoctrinated against the BCP, more than enough to hate them. He’d heard all about their unbelievable atrocities and the bloody purges in the Bago Highlands – or what historians called the ‘Three Ds’ of denunciation, dismissal and disposal – where they had beaten condemned comrades to death with bamboo sticks. And now, so close to retirement, he had to face them once again.

He’d enlisted at sixteen and had been sent to Basic Military Training School No. 1. He and his fellow cadets were given serial numbers, grouped into companies and issued uniforms and kit. One morning, the whole troop

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was wakened by a loud whistle before the usual predawn reveille. The drill sergeant strode over to Nyo Maung and bellowed, ‘In front of your barracks I found a pile of shit. Which one of you bastards did it?’

Nyo Maung felt the veins in his temples throbbing and his chest pounded. He answered obediently, without thinking, ‘About 3 a.m., I heard footsteps outside. I looked out the window and saw you, sir—’ Before he could finish, he felt two hard slaps across his cheeks. He staggered back, knees trembling, though his mind remained clear and calm.

The sergeant leaned in close and spat in Nyo Maung’s face. ‘Now listen up, missy. This isn’t your mum’s house; this is military training! Why would a trainer get up in the middle of the night and shit outside your barracks?

So shut your fucking mouth, you lying son of a bitch, got me?’

Nyo Maung stood to attention and shouted as loudly as he could, ‘Yes, sir!’

The drill sergeant backed away and looked across the room. ‘Fall in and count off!’

The recruits called out their serial numbers one by one. ‘One, two, three, four. . . .’ and the group leader reported back to the sergeant, ‘Aungzaya Company standing ready for orders, sir.’

The drill sergeant carried on. ‘Every one of you crybabies, clean up the shit with your fingers and dump it in the latrine. Do I make myself clear?’

The recruits dared not disobey. Years later, Nyo Maung could still smell the shit on his fingers.

He remembered the inauguration speech given by the head of the military training school to the new recruits. ‘If my sons enlisted, I’d tell them a soldier becomes a true man only through the discipline of following orders.’

Obedience became the mantra of Nyo Maung’s life in the army. Every day, his company was drilled to follow orders. Through strict discipline and corporal punishment, they soon learned that obedience was more important than survival or conscience or brotherhood. Order was to be valued above mercy or compassion or any other civilised human quality. Upon completing basic training, he was assigned to the 2nd Infantry Battalion and stationed in the remote Lwal Pan Kuk and Khan Lon regions of

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northern Shan State to fight alleged communists – ethnic brothers now become enemies.

The brainwashed mind pushed to extremes develops mysterious faculties. Nyo Maung sometimes wondered whether he felt and remembered things more than the others. He still had nightmares about places in the hills, villages razed in ‘scorched earth’ manoeuvres. Fogged-in trenches on the Shan Plateau, the smell of blood, the air thick with dust and smoke.

From day one, he was drilled in the ‘four cuts’ – deprive the enemy of food, then finance, then intelligence and finally recruits, by driving village elders, women and children from their homes – yet even in his nightmares, even when he was ill and weak, there was in him a seed of happiness.

In his first years in Northern Shan State, Nyo Maung was stationed in all three zones – ‘white’ zones under government control and ‘brown’ zones of contested authority, but most of his time he fought in BCP-held ‘black’ zones where any man, woman or child was a potential enemy to be shown no mercy. In black zones, soldiers went ‘code red’ – cruel as sun and fire – though they needed to distance themselves from their targets in order to harden themselves to their inhuman purpose.

A commanding officer gave orders to level a village in Lwel Pan Kuk. Nyo Maung’s 2nd Platoon blocked off the southern part of the village, while the 1st Platoon herded the villagers north like animals. Suddenly a woman with heavy breasts ran up from the south, and Captain Myint Zaw ordered Nyo Maung to shoot her down.

‘My daughter is still in the village!’ cried the woman.

‘Get down!’ shouted Nyo Maung.

The captain repeated his order, ‘Fire!’

Outright disgust sent a burst of adrenalin rushing through Nyo Maung’s body. It happened so very quickly; he hardly realised he’d scrambled out of the foxhole, grabbed the woman and rolled onto the ground. His chest was soaked with her breast milk.

Captain Myint Zaw ran after him, saying, ‘Nyo Maung, take her to the family barracks. After the operation, you can have her if you want.’

And so it was that Nyo Maung married Ma Nan Nwel and made a family.

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The truck halted with a jolt at Sule Pagoda and shook Nyo Maung from his thoughts. In the fading evening light, he saw students the same age as his grown children out in front of Yangon City Hall waving red flags emblazoned with the fighting peacock, wearing red headbands, holding up framed photos of the Father of Independence, General Aung San. The whole squad shuffled into a line formation, linking arms shoulder to shoulder. They aimed their loaded guns at the students before them. Nyo Maung didn’t like it: the targets were too close. The enemy was unarmed.

He was sure they weren’t members of the Burma Communist Party. Perhaps he could shoot above their heads in the dark and no one would know. He didn’t need any more nightmares so close to retirement.

His prayers, however, went unheard. At a secret signal, the headlights of the army trucks were switched on, full-beam. The students’ faces went white, squinting into the glare, perhaps realising their fate. Staring at each other in silence, the students wondered when the soldiers would shoot. The soldiers waited for orders to do so. A matter of seconds, but to Nyo Maung it was a lifetime. A bird chirped, then ‘Fire!’ resounded – and the soldiers mowed down the students.

After several months in Insein Prison, Nyo Maung was summoned from his cell and handed a sheaf of typed papers detailing his criminal breach of the military code – disobeying a superior’s command in the field. He barely glanced at the indictment before signing his name to the last page. He didn’t care what it said; he just wanted to know what they’d do to him now.

As he walked into the courtroom, he told himself, ‘I don’t kill innocent people. If I’d pulled the trigger, their faces would have haunted me. I was taught to obey orders and eliminate targets, but I’ve changed. I’m no longer the young recruit I was. I’ve seen too many targets who weren’t enemies. I disobeyed orders and failed the Tatmadaw but, had I obeyed, I’d have failed myself. What is disobedience? Disobeying the rules to appease myself may be a crime, but failing to obey my conscience only gives me nightmares.’

The ceiling fans whirred a slow rhythm. Mould crept into the corners of the whitewashed walls; the wide windows looked out onto the barren prison yard. Nyo Maung was marched up to a low, wooden dock flanked by two long tables. His feet scraping across the broken floor tiles echoed angrily

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through the colonial hall. Before the Burma Socialist Programme Party emblem sat three court martial judges – two majors and a colonel – neat and robotic in their crisp green uniforms, with pomaded hair, wire-rimmed glasses and gold stars on their shoulders. Nyo Maung knew obedience had raised them in the ranks to where they could sentence any soldier to death.

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The Poisoned Future The Pois onedMyint Futur eWin Hlaing

Myint Win Hlaing translated from Rakhine to Burmese by Dr San Hla Kyaw and from Burmese to English by Letyar Tun

T

he horizon grows dark in all directions. Thick rain clouds, drifting in southerly winds, cover the sky as evening falls and the farmers head home. To the north of town is a small hill, green with giant banyans, tamarinds and parrot trees that boast clusters of red-beaked flowers in April.

Under the trees hide dirt graves and whitewashed tombs overgrown with weeds. Through the surrounding bush a young man shoulders something rolled in a frayed palm-leaf mat. Ahead of him walk three other men carrying a mattock, a hoe and bottles of water and homebrew. Together the four men scout for a bare patch of ground amidst the dirty rags, charred bamboo and plastic rubbish.

‘In the end, all of mankind must rest here. Us too, one day. You’re not afraid, are you?’ Soe Paing asks the others.

He takes the mattock and begins to dig into the hard ground. Soe Paing is the oldest of the four. He’d dropped out of high school after his father died to support the family by working at his uncle’s bicycle and trishaw repair shop, while his friends attended university in the state capital, Sittwe.

As the eldest of the young villagers, he’s also in charge of all joyous and sombre occasions, from weddings to funerals.

‘The only difference between the town and here is life and death,’ Soe Paing continues, wielding the hoe to widen the hole. ‘Here it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor.’

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‘No, you’re wrong,’ counters Maung Maung. ‘Look over there: the rich rest in tombs, while the poor sleep under mounds of earth.’

It starts to rain and the digging gets messy as the water begins to rise.

‘Myo Lin, go fetch that scoop over by that tomb there and bail out the water, will you?’

‘OK, Ko Soe Paing, just let me drink up,’ says Myo Lin, draining his cup.

While Myo Lin and Soe Paing work, Bo Aung sits beside the mat nursing the bottle of liquor. ‘As the saying goes, “Where walks an ill-fated woman, rain follows”. This baby was unlucky. Even her human birth didn’t guarantee her a father or a long life. The rain isn’t stopping. She really does make trouble for others.’ Bo Aung takes another swig from the bottle while talking to himself.

Myo Lin throws down the scoop and shouts at Bo Aung. ‘If you’re going to drink, at least mind the corpse. I can hear the dogs howling in the woods.

Besides, the girl wasn’t so ill-fated. In the Lord Buddha’s teachings, I’ve read, it says “Manusatta bavo dullabo” – “Being born a human is precious”. It is easier for a needle from the heavens to strike a needle on earth than to be born into the human realm. If you’re born human, it means you’ve already achieved a higher life than before. Long life or short, that’s different, though.

That’s the result of your own doings in life.’

Ill-fated or not, a woman had borne her for nine months in the womb.

And despite their poverty, sympathetic souls had taken care of her for three months thereafter. Surely many babies had the good fortune to be born human like her yet did not survive; just as many unborn babies were cruelly aborted by unmotherly mothers.

After her parents died, Lon Lon Chaw moved in with her aunt. Her aunt Daw Than Mya ran a liquor joint and had a reputation in the village for brewing alcohol so strong it could burst into flames. Daw Than Mya’s husband drank the stuff all day, and walked around with red eyes and swollen cheeks.

Lon Lon Chaw had to feed pigs in the sty behind the house and clean the yard as well as working as a waitress in the liquor joint. Not as attractive as her name ‘Curvy Beauty’ implied, though healthy with a round bottom, a tiny waist, pointed breasts and brown skin, local men thought she walked

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like a young mare and they never tired of watching her. Because of her age she could meet customers far more easily than most younger teenage girls.

Her looks and the fashionable – but cheap – dresses she wore made men hungry, though normally they wouldn’t eat when drinking.

After she started working there, the liquor joint got busier than ever, and everyone knew why. She served all the men equally, young or old, and was so polite and sweet that Daw Than Mya’s liquor trade grew and grew. Every teacher, clerk and trishaw driver in the village called her by name: Lon Lon. One customer, a retired civil servant called U Ba San, came in regularly, always at the same time of day. ‘I drink, not because I like alcohol,’ he told his drinking companions, ‘but as medicine for my cardiovascular disease.’

His wife had already passed away and his adult children lived on their own, so U Ba San was free and single. A good talker, he enjoyed living without rules and obligations. Only rarely, on unavoidable social and religious occasions did he go to temple. Behind his back the villagers called him an old ox who liked to eat tender grass.

His oldest son warned him, ‘Father, you really should consider your age and take solace in religion.’ But U Ba San shouted back, ‘I didn’t raise you to preach at me. I trust my own conscience. Get out!’ After that, his children didn’t dare tell him what other people were saying.

‘A woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It’s meant to be shared.

Before one dies, one should savour it as much as possible. Who knows if there’ll be a next life?’ U Ba San told his friends, raising his glass and laughing.

‘Hey, have you heard?’

‘Heard what? The girl from the liquor joint?’

‘Yes, her. She’s pregnant.’

The gossip spread through the village to the liquor house. One by one the customers stayed away. Not even U Ba San came, despite having to drink regularly for his health problems.

Daw Than Mya couldn’t take it anymore and shouted at Lon Lon Chaw.

‘Look what you’ve gone and done, bitch! My business and my reputation are ruined. I want you gone, right now!’

‘You’re right. It’s my fault. Curse me, beat me,’ said Lon Lon Chaw.

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‘What did you say? Now you see it’s your fault, do you? Why couldn’t you see that from the start? Get out of here right this minute!’ Daw Than Mya grabbed Lon Lon Chaw by the arm and dragged her out of the house.

‘Hey, Than Mya, that’s enough. Scold her if you must, but don’t beat her,’ said her husband, trying to calm her down. ‘This girl’s your own niece.’

‘Mind your own business. She’s not my niece, she’s a whore.’ Daw Than Mya screamed and swore at Lon Lon Chaw so loudly you could hear her ten houses away.

‘I’d like to crush you to a pulp. Get out! I don’t want to see your damned face ever again.’

Lon Lon Chaw left her aunt’s house with nothing but the clothes she was wearing. With nowhere to go, she envisioned her parents. ‘Mum, Dad, help me, I’m in trouble,’ she murmured to herself.

Her steps took her to the Kissapa River, where the relentless current had worn away the trees and rocks below a small cliff. A good place to kill herself, she thought. She stood on the precipice, thinking distractedly, her eyes closed and tears streaming down her cheeks. An orphan herself, she felt only sadness for the unborn child inside her and didn’t want it to pay for the mistakes she had made in her life. Closing her eyes even more tightly, Lon Lon Chaw put her palms together and began to chant a prayer.

‘Hey, girl!’

A rough hand grasped Lon Chaw’s blouse from behind, and they both fell backwards.

‘What are you doing, girl? It’s dangerous here. Go home!’ gasped an old woman, hugging her tightly.

‘I don’t have a home to go to. This is my only choice. Don’t hold me back, grandma.’

‘Oh, it’s you. Aren’t you the girl from Than Mya’s place?’

‘Yes, that’s me, grandma,’ Lon Lon Chaw confided.

‘Oh Lord, Lord, Lord, it always happens like this,’ mumbled the old woman. ‘Come, stay with me, my granddaughter. Don’t you worry, it’s right and just to give a hand to one in trouble. And also, I get a companion.’

‘Can I really stay with you, grandma? I’m with child, not just myself.’

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‘Then I’ll help you when you deliver your baby. When I go hungry, you’ll go hungry too, but when I have food, so will you . . . that’s all,’ said the old woman, taking Lon Lon Chaw’s hand to lead her home.

The old woman, Daw Mae Kya, had lived alone in a tiny hut at the far edge of the village for more than fifty of her seventy years. With neither family nor relatives, hers was a hard and frugal life. She scraped up land crabs, netted fish and gathered leaves for salad. She survived.

Lon Lon Chaw, alone in the hut while the old woman went out to forage for firewood, groaned in agony. She knew there were people all around, but didn’t dare ask for help. The child was moving, struggling. Hearing her painful cries, a woman entered the hut and was shocked to see Lon Lon Chaw lapsing into unconsciousness. She called the other neighbourhood women, who came running to the hut. One of them took pity on Lon Lon Chaw. ‘We can’t just sit here; we have to take her to hospital.’

‘Hospital? With no money? Impossible! We have to pay for everything at the hospital, even cotton wool.’

‘We have no choice, we’ve got to take her there.’

‘Just because we don’t have money, should we just let her die?’

The neighbours argued until they reached a decision. Wrapping Lon Lon Chaw in a hammock, they carried her to the hospital where the doctor on duty, U Maung Gyi, had just been posted to the village. He quickly examined the girl before registering her.

‘Patient’s name?’

‘Lon Lon Chaw, Doctor,’ answered a woman, arms folded across her chest.

‘Husband’s name?’

No one spoke.

Dr Maung Gyi asked again, ‘Who is the husband?’

‘She has no husband,’ replied the same woman.

‘And her parents?’

‘Deceased. The old woman Daw Mae Kya adopted her.’

‘Tsk, tsk. Bring her in to the operating room,’ the doctor said, setting down his ballpoint pen on the registry.

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After a long labour, Lon Lon Chaw gave birth to a baby girl. The doctor himself assumed the charges for her medical treatment, and even bought her food and vitamins. In the recovery room, he told Lon Lon Chaw, ‘Thanks to you, this baby has been given a chance to be born a human. I do admire your courage. Please let me know if you have any problems.’

‘Thank you, doctor, I’m so grateful. I won’t forget your help.’

The four young men have dug the hole as deep as they can. As Soe Paing picks up the rolled mat and places it in the grave, Bo Aung stops him.

‘Wait, Ko Soe Paing. Not just yet.’

‘What is it, Bo Aung? We’re running out of time; it’s already dark.’

‘We haven’t seen the baby yet. Everyone knew Lon Lon Chaw was pregnant, but we still don’t know who the father was. If we take a peek, maybe we can guess, heh, heh.’

‘No, that’s not the way, Bo Aung. Everything’s already over and done with.’

Turning to Soe Paing, he says, ‘Already done? I don’t care what’s right or wrong, I want to know.’

Bo Aung unrolls the cursed mat anyway. The baby is wrapped in a thin blanket. He takes a long look at the tiny body, but in the darkness under the black rain clouds, not a dim sliver of light reaches its face.

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A Flight Path for Spiritual Birds A Flight P ath for Ah PSpiritual hyu Yaung Birds (shwe)

Ah Phyu Yaung (shwe) translated from Burmese by Khin Hnit Thit Oo

‘E

ven if they give you money for the pond, you’ll still have to buy an engine and petrol. Look at your land. It is flat, so wherever you dig you’ll need a pump. Well, let’s do it this way. Just tell them to put the pond on my land instead.’

‘But we’ll probably need a large piece of land for it.’

‘Please don’t worry about that. I’ll give you as much of my land as you need.’

I raised my eyes, spat my betel at the base of the roof post and rinsed my mouth with water. On the table before me was a bubbling glass of Red Bull.

I took a sip and looked again at the donor.

I had been at the monastery for little more than year when the foreign representatives from the United Nations Development Programme arrived with a project to improve water distribution in the village. They offered to donate for a new pond, but where to put it? The wide green fields out in front of the monastery belonged to you-the-donor, as did the banana groves to the west. The banana trees were up a rise overlooking the monastery, so it would make sense to put a pond there for drainage, but I needed to talk with the donor first.

‘My land is higher than yours, by at least eight feet,’ the donor continued, ‘so if we put the pond there you won’t need a pump or fuel. Just a pipe and the whole monastery compound will receive water.’

‘Well, yes, but. . . .’

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‘I have plenty of land, so don’t feel uneasy. But I do think we should plan things properly from the beginning. We should draw up what to build where, then fence off the site so it’s not spoiled. That’s what I think anyway.’

‘Well, do what you think is best.’

The donor thought for a minute and said, ‘The drinking water pond should be close to the street, and the bathing water tank can be, say, fifteen feet away. That way, the novices and monks’ bathwater can flow straight to the plants. The pipeline from the drinkable water pond can then be connected to your monastery and people’s kitchens. How about this? When the UNDP people come, please just send them to me.’

The donor seemed to know what he was doing, so I just nodded. Later, when the UNDP people came to the donor’s house, he donated a third of his land, and the pond was dug as the donor had suggested. The monastery received drinking and washing water at no expense.

It’s been nearly a year ago now since that first evening we met, and I have come to know you better, our generous donor. Whenever I walk back to the monastery at dusk, I see the words on the back wall of your house: Wicked people are more frightening than the Lord of Death himself.

The Lord of Death comes only once, but bad people return again and again.

The road between the monastery and your house leads to the ancient Taung Paw Kyaung pagoda built by King Alaung Sithu. Pilgrims from far away come to pray at the pagoda, so the road is well used. Everyone reads your words.

Even before I became abbot of this monastery, I was curious about you.

After the old abbot died, your name always came up in discussions about who should replace him. It seems the original name of the monastery, Shwe Zedi, faded from memory because of you and your strange vocation, making salt, on the high Shan Plateau, of all places. By now everyone calls my monastery next to your house the Hsa Hpo Kyaung – ‘Saltern Monastery.’

I heard about you from my masters, who sent me here to be abbot, as well as from the villagers who came out to greet me when I arrived. Those

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first few days when I had yet to meet you, I wasn’t sure how well you knew the Lord Buddha’s Dhamma. Some people said you were odd, and being new to the village I was afraid to be seen with you.

During one of my meditation strolls I read and admired your inscription again and I decided to visit you. You sat on a bamboo chair, reading, and said, ‘Ah, Venerable One, you have come to see me. Please come in, come in.’

I took a seat on one of two benches at your long table, and you gave me a glass of water and a glass of Red Bull. Our talk that night was so interesting I didn’t return to the monastery until eight in the evening. I came to visit you every evening after that. I once asked you about the saying on your wall, but you just said, ‘Oh, read into it whatever you want. I didn’t write it for any special purpose. I read a lot and simply copy out what I like.’

I don’t know why, but I felt you were hiding the real reason from me.

One evening, when I arrived at your house, you were writing a letter. Both benches were full of villagers who stood up and paid homage to me before sitting down on the floor.

‘We were asking Saya for advice about the road, O Venerable One,’ they explained. ‘The abbot of the eastern monastery has blocked the street, so no person or animal can get through east of the creek. We tried to negotiate with the abbot but he won’t listen. This road is a shortcut from our homes to the fields. If we can’t go this way, we’ll have to cross the creek to the south, but that means walking through others’ plots, which is asking for trouble in the rainy season. O Venerable One, we are not educated men. All we know is the soil and cows and which crops to grow in which season. That’s why we came to Saya for help, even though it’s not his problem. His land is at this end of the road, not the other like ours.’

‘But why did the abbot block the road?’ I asked.

You pointed to the big trees along the far side of your compound and the forested hill behind. I saw a new pagoda being built in the style of the Mahabodhi Pagoda at Bodhgaya.

‘Venerable One,’ you began, ‘as you can see, my compound is big. The road the villagers are talking about passes between my compound and the eastern monastery. The road is actually an oxcart track that ends at the creek,

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then turns into a footpath from there into the village. All the villagers from the eastern part of the village who come to your monastery or the ancient Taung Paw Kyaung Pagoda on the other side of my compound take this route. It’s been this way for a long time. Now that the abbot from the eastern monastery has blocked the street, pilgrims have to make a long detour. It’s possible on foot, but not with carts and cows. So, although my farm lands are not affected, this is why I want to help.’

‘OK, what have you done?’

‘Well, we don’t know how powerful this abbot is, but we do know the commander-in-chief is his disciple. The governing party is not listening either, so now I am drafting a letter to the State Monks’ Association.’

According to the villagers, the eastern monastery had once been very small, just a simple building on the slope. Then little by little the monastery grew until it devoured the whole hill.

In the teachings of the Lord Buddha it is written that all one needs is a single tree or cave. Now, in our time, everything has been exaggerated and becomes awful. I didn’t want to disturb you or the villagers with pedantry, so I returned to the monastery without our evening talk.

The next day, I saw you leaving with your little bag. In the evening, I awaited your return from town, looking over the monastery wall to your compound planted with so many vegetables and fruit trees. Flowers grew wild around your house, and like the flowers blooming in many colours, so too the villagers jostled all their many different thoughts to your house. I couldn’t wait alone anymore and so I joined them, thinking to myself, ‘If the village has a problem, then I also have a problem – even if I am a monk.’

Tin Win from the third house over saw me coming and invited me in.

‘O Venerable One, please have some tea! Saya’s not back yet. We’re all waiting for him.’

‘Yes, I know, that’s why I’m here. I must admit, he is very perseverant.’

‘Oh yes, you know, the same thing happened to him once. He used to own about four acres of land along the Shwe Nyaung-Taunggyi Road. He never got it back. He complained right up to central authorities, but he still lost. He’s tough. He works hard, he has a plantation of seasonal fruits and timber, he has an oil mill, a saw mill and a saltern. We all envy him a little,

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but we can’t work hard like him, so we “will live the simple life and be happy with the minimum”. Whenever we have problems we always come to him first; we drink his tea and discuss whatever is bothering us.’

While we were talking, you suddenly came in with your little bag. It was dark outside, as was the expression on your face. We all knew what had happened, though none of us had the courage to ask. We were all quiet. . . .

‘Venerable One, have you been here long? I couldn’t get a bus back, so I had to hitchhike part way on a lime truck and walk the rest. That’s why I’m so late.’ You then turned to the waiting villagers and simply said, ‘When you are the anvil, you must endure the hammer. Isn’t that right?’

I could not bear to see the hopeless faces of the villagers, so I walked back slowly to the monastery.

Wicked people are more frightening than the Lord of Death himself.

The Lord of Death comes only once, but bad people return again and again.

I no longer need to ask why you wrote that.

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The Right Answer The Right AnsAhpor wer Rahmonya

Ahpor Rahmonya translated anonymously from Mon to Burmese; and from Burmese to English by San Lin Tun

N

o one knows what to call the flowers. There seems to be no word for them in Mon. Small leaves, perennial green and tough, fearing neither rain nor sun, the red clusters bloom like little fists. Every house in town grows them, trimmed nice and pretty. At my aunt and uncle’s house they run along the border with their neighbour’s property, so striking that passers-by often ask, ‘What’s that flower?’

And what do they say? ‘No idea. It’s a hedge-flower.’

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would answer the same. A hedgeflower! Of course, everybody knows the Burmese name – a century hence, people will still call it ponneyeik. Or in English, wild geranium or even jungle flame. But if you told them the real name, the Mon name, they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. Just another word from our language that has disappeared. And the sad thing is, people don’t even know it’s been forgotten. It reminds me of what my aunt used to say when I was little: ‘Don’t knot your longyi too high or your bottom will show’. Embarrassing if it does, but even more shameful if you didn’t know it could. Such is the way of the world.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1995. The flowers in front of the sermon hall were in full bloom: here a single flower, there a bunch, braving the summer heat to creep around the building, though they’d been pruned back numerous times.

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The monastery compound was crowded. An unusual number of venerable abbots and monks milled about, people filling the rest house and crouching beneath the large acacia trees in the courtyard. Literature and Culture Committee members, the Mon Dhamma group, aldermen and townsfolk and everyone from the outlying villages had put aside their fears and come.

Visibly excited, they knew it was a special day and whispered to their friends, ‘What a turnout!’

Mi Shin Thant, headmistress of Than Phyu Zayat Town No. 1 Basic Education High School had been personally invited. Even she, a veteran of many public gatherings and talks, felt a chill run down her spine. But unlike the others, it wasn’t due to excitement. The large crowd, the unusual number of monks, it all unsettled her.

She’d grown up in the age of fear. She remembered when a neighbour, a kind man, had harvested that quarter’s rice crop. It wasn’t much, barely enough to feed his family. Yet he failed to give his quota to the local authorities, so they came and took what rice they could find in his barn. A rubber tapper, living at the far end of her village, was also arrested for not presenting his due to the township officer. Someone’s father went to the rice mill in Than Phyu Zayat, saying he’d return with sticky rice sweets and bananas for the village, but was abducted along with his oxcart. They never did find out if he was dead or alive. Not that it mattered – either way, he’d end up in the same place. If he were dead, he’d be buried in a hole for the rest of his days; if alive, he’d sleep in one the rest of his nights.

The worst thing about growing up in an age of fear was living like a ghost. At dusk, they’d wash quickly at the tank behind the house, eat dinner before night fell, put out the lights, and sneak out to the hole. Long and shallow, with bamboo mats crammed inside, it was their sleeping pit. There, she and her family would lie still, listening as the whole village went silent except for the inauspicious caw of a bird. And then dogs barking. Their hearts would fill with apprehension; nobody dared breathe. Oh Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha! Was it robbers, soldiers, secret police? After the barking came the bong, bong, bong of the signal gong. It was a gang of robbers. They’d hear the bad news – which house was broken into, what was taken, who was taken – but they were safe in the sleeping pit.

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Daytime was no easier. On Sabbath days when discussions on religion and community, the attainment of nirvana or construction works for the temple strayed towards talk of the government, the abbot would warn everyone, ‘Stop, stop! The walls have ears.’ Then no one dared utter another word.

No wonder Mi Shin Thant couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to happen.

The monastery courtyard was more packed than a pagoda festival. Even Headmistress Mi Shin Thant couldn’t suppress her surprise, and whispered to the man next to her, ‘I’ve never seen such a crowd before, not even in the city.’

Despite the crowd, ten men stood out. Their white cotton shirts tucked into a bright red and white checked longyi caused everyone to stare and murmur, ‘How brave they are! Nobody wears Mon garb in public.’ The ten men filed between the people and along the perimeter of the courtyard, and as the appointed time approached, they assembled next to the main stage to see that everything was in readiness. They tested the knots holding up the giant red banner emblazoned with white letters: Government and New Mon State Party Ceasefire Ceremony. They took one last look at the golden hongsa bird symbols on the stage, placed as if ready to fly away with the essence of what it means to be Mon. The men double-checked the position of the two lecterns at centre stage and cast an eye on the six rows of chairs now occupied by monks and notables from the town. Only the front row was empty, as everyone waited for the VIPs to arrive.

At 12:30 sharp, a fancy car drove up and five men in their thirties got out.

The front passenger was dressed in his finest Mon colours; the others wore plain longyi and white shirts. Four of the ceremony volunteers came to greet the front passenger. As they made their way up the central aisle to the foot of the stage, all eyes fixed onto the strangers. One man, standing beside Mi Shinn Thant, nudged his friend and jutted his head towards the men to ask, ‘Are they from Military Intelligence?’

‘No way. MI faces never look that calm.’

‘Then who are they? Reporters?’

His friend shrugged. He didn’t know. Nobody in the audience did.

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At 12:45, ten of the ceremony volunteers burst into action, rushing around the courtyard, giving signals to each other and glancing at the five men by the stage. One of the strangers pulled out a walkie-talkie, held it to his ear and repeated a message to his four colleagues who turned to face the sound of approaching vehicles.

Into the compound drove five cars, even more expensive than the first, guarded front and rear by two large trucks. The convoy stopped. Thirty soldiers jumped out of the trucks and took up positions around the courtyard and throughout the monastery compound. Eleven men, proud in traditional Mon garb, stepped out of the cars. A man of composure and dignity, aged about seventy-five, led the group towards the sermon hall, where the ceremony would take place. They paid their respect to the crowd, both monks and farmers, before taking their seats in the vacant front row.

The sight of these men, heroes forced to live in the jungle far from the towns, bowing to everyone regardless of profession or social standing, awed the crowd. These were the VIPs everyone had been waiting for, the leaders of the New Mon State Party.

The abbot of Myo Taw Oo monastery school proclaimed to the audience, ‘May today’s historical occasion be as successful as King Dhammaceti’s fostering of the Buddhist sasana.’

At that, a hush fell over the crowd.

Outside the sermon hall, latecomers stood in the afternoon sun. There was no more room inside to witness the ceremony, but they didn’t care. It gave them a chance to study the Mon soldiers. Many of the townsfolk had never seen a Mon soldier before, yet they all agreed, ‘They look more decent than Burmese soldiers.’

They were also looking for reporters. They expected an event such as this would appear on the state-run MRTV eight o’clock news, as well as in government newspapers like The New Light of Myanmar and Mirror.

Everyone knew the papers well. They often used them to roll their cheroots.

An old man, sitting away from the others under a shade tree, gritted his teeth. He’d once been a Mon soldier and, gazing on their leopard-camouflaged uniforms, memories of his struggle for the Mon cause came flooding back.

‘Ah, to be young again like them!’ he sighed.

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At one o’clock, the MC hailed the historic importance of the day’s events. A bilateral ceasefire agreement had been made between the Myanmar government and the New Mon State Party, ceremonies having already been held in the Mon cities of Moulmein and Mudon. He read out the day’s agenda, one item after another, and even the simple farmers in the crowd, far more concerned with harvests than politics, listened intently to the leaders.

Chairman Naing Shwe Kyin of the New Mon State Party was the first to speak. No one had expected him to be so eloquent. Up next was Naing Tin Aung, who explained, ‘We agreed to this ceasefire because the Party believes this is the only way to save the lives of our Mon people. If we’re mistaken, if this decision proves wrong, then we take full responsibility for our actions and will accept your judgement, however history may record us.’

At this, the crowd broke into applause. Whispers spread that he was a local man, the son of Naing Aung Tun from Pa Nga village, and the applause grew louder.

The last speaker of the day announced by the MC was a general. As he took the stage, everyone stared with interest, especially when he explained about the Mon Army. The villagers might not follow politics but everyone knew the word ‘war’, and here was a real Mon soldier, a Mon warrior. He spoke in Burmese, so all would be able to understand him.

Unlike the previous speakers, the general was not interrupted with applause. The crowd were silent in their own thoughts, attempting to reconcile the false images they had been given of Mon soldiers with the composed and proud man standing in front of them. The villagers had always been told that the Mon insurgents – the rebels, the traitors – looked like beasts with long hair and shaggy beards.

Headmistress Mi Shin Thant was quiet for another reason. Since the general had appeared on the stage she couldn’t shake the feeling that he looked familiar. The MC had addressed him as General Htaw Mon, a name she had heard somewhere before. But where could she have met a Mon soldier, to say nothing of a general? Only when the general had finished, bringing the ceremony to a close, did it suddenly come to her who he was.

Of course she’d heard that name before, though he hadn’t been a general then, just plain Htaw Mon, an old friend from her school days. So that’s

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who these Mon soldiers are, she thought, not rebels and insurgents, just classmates and neighbours.

The convoy drove away and the crowd dispersed, following the trail of flowers blooming along the monastery wall as they had always done. No one needed to know the flowers’ true name to appreciate their beauty. It made no more difference than playing a harp to a buffalo. Likewise, all the often heard but seldom understood words – Mon Front Army, New Mon State Party, Mon National Liberation Army, truce, ceasefire – meant little to the people of Than Phyu Zayat that afternoon. What did matter was the people behind the words. The Mon community, realising how they’d been deceived in the past, had seen the truth standing before them.

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from Myanmar’s Enemy Within from My anmar’s Francis Ene my Wade Within

Francis Wade

The first wave: the murder, the smoke and the ruins

I

n Sittwe, on the west coast of Myanmar, there is a road that runs out of the town centre, bound towards the vast blue of the Bay of Bengal. On either side, the road is lined with buildings, one or two storeys high, some made of brick, others wood – teashops, houses, barbers. But the road then hits a straight, and the buildings abruptly stop. In their place come fields – scrubby, and dotted with small wooden huts. They are oddly spaced apart, as if built in haste and not to last. From the road, you can look south between the dwellings to a distant line of trees that mark the neighbourhood limit.

The area is called Nasi, but it bears little resemblance to the Nasi of old.

The wooden huts, occupied by squatters and interspersed among unkempt bush, have replaced what used to be clusters of houses and shops connected by narrow lanes and alleyways. There had been eleven sub-quarters here – some housed Buddhists, some Muslims; others were mixed. In the centre, beside the road, sat a high school where students from all over Nasi would study together.

On the morning of 12 June 2012, Ko Myat had been in his village ten kilometres north of Sittwe. The forty-three-year-old was, like the majority of men in Par Da Lek, a long-time fisherman in the nearby tributaries that feed into the Bay of Bengal. He had been divorced from his wife several years before, and now lived alone in a stilted wooden house towards the back of the village, past the market and the dusty pitch where children would play football. As far back as he knew the village had been only

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Buddhist, but Muslims would come here to trade. They too fished in the nearby creeks, and would move from one village market to another each day until the morning’s catch was sold.

That month of June hadn’t thus far been what Ko Myat would describe as normal. In the days before 12 June, talk had swept through the village of fits of violence underway not so far away. These weren’t newspaper reports, but rumours that passed from mouth to mouth. They said that Rakhine, the Buddhist ethnic group to whom he belonged, were being attacked. It was the Muslims.

Par Da Lek hadn’t seen any of this violence, but nonetheless there were strange rumblings in the village. Over the two days prior to 12 June 2012, men had been shuttled on buses to downtown Sittwe. Ko Myat would watch them go in wave after wave. They were goaded onto the buses and away, he said, by the village administrator, the chief authority there. For those two days, he had stood at the entrance to the village, where the road rises up on a bank above the busy marketplace. Buses would come and go; the men who stood there waiting empty handed would be given weapons – sticks and machetes – before climbing aboard.

The village was six miles from the nearest Muslim community and he hadn’t worried about similar running battles erupting closer to home. But where these men were heading, the fighting had been particularly fierce.

Having finished lunch on 12 June he went to the village entrance and volunteered to go. A monastery in Sittwe would offer food to participants later that day, he was told. Ko Myat had been unable to count the numbers of villagers who had departed in the days before, but he soon understood the scale of the wider operation. Upon arriving at Nasi quarter that afternoon, other buses that had ferried Buddhist Rakhine into Sittwe from villages elsewhere in the area were parked near that straight section of road, like tourist coaches waiting outside a site of natural beauty. On either side, the smoke from burning homes climbed in narrow towers into the sky. He remembers a light drizzle falling that day as all around him the embers of razed houses glowed. The smoke had blanketed the landscape in a surreal haze. ‘It was like a movie,’ he recalls.

Only three days before, Nasi had been home to several hundred families; by the time Ko Myat arrived, the majority had fled, and many structures

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had been levelled, leaving him with little else to do. Even so, the men aboard the buses who had encouraged him and other villagers had divided his bus into two teams, one to steal into the quarter and torch the remaining houses and another to mass at exit points, armed and under orders to attack anyone who escaped. He joined the second group, and remained on the roadside for several hours while others carried flaming torches inside the quarter and held them to any buildings still standing. He felt tense, anxious. Five hours passed. He saw little physical violence, he said, save for the fires started by the mob. ‘Our group was standing on the road but most of the Muslims who were still inside Nasi stayed there. They were too scared to come out.’

Upon hearing a signal later that afternoon, the two teams withdrew from the area and boarded one of the waiting buses. It wound its way back through the Sittwe outskirts before heading north. Twenty minutes later, they were back at the entrance to the village. Behind them, Nasi quarter lay in smoke and ruins.

More than three years had passed by the time I met with Ko Myat. We sat together on the deck of his house in Par Da Lek and spoke for several hours about the events of June 2012. Like many communities embroiled in intergroup violence, Buddhists and Muslims in and around Sittwe immediately broke off interaction. In Sittwe town, the residents of Nasi and other Muslim quarters were either herded into displacement camps that sprang up along the coast or confined within the two remaining neighbourhoods, Aung Mingalar and Bumay, that hadn’t been razed. Police checkpoints erected at the entrances to these neighbourhoods ensured that, thereafter, they would not be able to leave. In villages to the north of Sittwe, contact between Buddhists and Muslims was largely put to a stop. Those fellow fishermen whom Ko Myat would see arriving at the village each day to trade at the market ceased coming, and across this township and beyond, the two communities retreated within themselves. The shift in the social dynamic of Sittwe and its surrounds had been radical.

The violence of early June 2012 was the first major wave of conflict between Buddhists and Muslims to strike Myanmar as it transitioned away from military rule. A second wave occurred, beginning on the morning of 22 October that year with orchestrated mob attacks on Muslim com-

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munities in nine townships across Rakhine State. As in June, these attacks focused predominantly on the Rohingya, a Muslim minority that many Buddhist Rakhine like Ko Myat thought to be illegal immigrants. In the decades past, so the narrative went, they had slipped over the border from Bangladesh at the point where it meets Rakhine State and settled on their land. They were growing in number, diluting the concentration of the Buddhist population, and providing the vanguard of a crusade to turn Myanmar into a Muslim country.

Around the same time that Ko Myat boarded the bus and made for Sittwe, I was over on the other side of the country, holed up in a hotel in Laiza on Myanmar’s north-eastern border with China. It was the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army, one of a number of ethnic armed groups that had been fighting the military on and off for nearly half a century. I had already been working on Myanmar for several years, and those were the conflicts I was used to reporting, and thought I understood.

Within them was a seemingly clear delineation between actors and their loyalties: the ethnic armed group and its constituency on one side, the Myanmar army on the other and, in between, a scattering of allies of each.

These conflicts, long running and often brutal, had been romanticised by the foreign press as a battle of good versus evil, a ‘just war’ being fought by rebels against a derided junta. And with the overwhelming majority of the population of Myanmar holding a deep disdain for the military that had ruled them for so long, there was little doubt where the broad support of the public lay: no one wished the military success in the borderlands.

But the violence in Rakhine State didn’t fit that neat, if overly simplified, plotline of bad military versus good citizenry. Instead this was the first of a number of local contestations over who did and did not belong in a country that was undergoing great upheaval. There was no one big battle, no condensed mass of fury from which a single solution emerged. Instead, from 2012 onwards, the violence jumped from village to town to city, from the western coast of Myanmar to the mountains of the northeast. The dynamics and nature of it differed as time went on. Unlike the first outbreak in Rakhine State, where ethnicity was a major cleavage, the Buddhist-onMuslim unrest that began in central Myanmar the following year often saw communities from the same ethnicity that had experienced no prior conflict

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pitted against one another. In the tumult of the transition, broader demarcations of ‘us’ and ‘them’, outsiders and sons of the soil, were forming. For a large cross-section of the Buddhist population, the Muslims of Myanmar had come to be seen as the outsiders bent on bringing the nation, and its majority Buddhist belief system, to ruin.

As I sat with Ko Myat on the deck of his house, he considered the motive for his participation. He was a timid, hesitant man. He spoke little, and rarely made eye contact. When I pictured him outside Nasi quarter scoping the lanes and alleyways for any fleeing Muslims, his face didn’t wear the expression of a determined killer. Rather, it was timorous, frightened even.

But when he outlined the rationale for boarding the bus that afternoon several years earlier he did so with a quiet conviction. As a Rakhine Buddhist, he felt threatened by the Muslims who lived in the state. ‘If I don’t protect my race then it will disappear,’ he believed. The Muslims had come here to take over the land that ethnic Rakhine had inhabited for centuries. The stirrings of democratic change in Myanmar might level the playing field, allowing communities who felt long disenfranchised by the military to assert greater claims to the nation. These particular Muslims might take advantage of this, and if they did, Buddhists would suffer, as they had elsewhere in the world – in Malaysia, in Indonesia – where Islam had taken root.

We spoke for a while about the details of the Nasi attack and the broader anxieties he felt. But the violence had come on so suddenly, and I asked him if he could locate a particular trigger. There had been an incident in late May 2012, he explained, that not just for Ko Myat but for many Rakhine I spoke with in the years afterwards, fed latent anxieties about the intentions of the Muslims living among them. ‘It started because Muslims attacked a Buddhist,’ he said.

The catalyst was the rape and murder of twenty-six-year-old Ma Thida Htwe. The young Rakhine seamstress had been walking home from work in Kyaungnimaw village on Ramree Island, a hundred miles south of Sittwe, when, according to police reports, she was gang-raped and her throat slit.

It was the evening of 28 May 2012, and her contorted body was left in long grass under a rain tree by the side of the road leading into her village. Three men, identified variously in state media as ‘Bengali Muslim’ or ‘Islam

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followers’, were arrested two days later, found guilty of the attack and sentenced to jail. But then, on 3 June, a bus carrying Muslims through the town of Taungup, west of Ramree Island, was set upon by some 300 Rakhine Buddhists, many wielding wooden poles. Ten passengers were dragged off the bus and beaten to death. Why the perpetrators had targeted that bus was never made clear. The men deemed guilty of Ma Thida Htwe’s murder were already in police custody. Moreover, those on the bus were not Rohingya. They were Muslim missionaries, from Magwe Division, from Ayeyarwady Division – none of them from Rakhine State. It appeared to be a random revenge attack on Muslims, one that, in conjunction with the rape and murder of the seamstress, would have a catastrophic effect on relations between Buddhists and Muslims across the state. Five days later, Rohingya mobs in Maungdaw in northern Rakhine State finished their Friday morning prayers and attacked Buddhist properties across the town and in outlying villages. Shortly afterwards, Nasi quarter burned.

So it had begun with a rape and murder. But in the days after Ma Thida Htwe’s body was found on the roadside, information began to circulate on leaflets and DVDs and in local and state media that framed it not as an act isolated from the broader pre-violence dynamic between the Rakhine and Rohingya, but as a direct expression of all that was dangerous in it. That particular attack would carry huge symbolic weight among Rakhine – rape is the act that, perhaps above all else, signals a bid for conquest of one group by another, and this interpretation would become a driving force in the mayhem that followed.

For Ko Myat, the decision to board the bus that afternoon in June 2012 and head to Nasi quarter had in large part resulted from the linking of an event that occurred a hundred miles away to the broader fate of his entire race. He wouldn’t be alone in doing this. Time and again in the years after, when the violence had spread beyond Rakhine State into areas where historic relations between the two religious communities had been more harmonious, small incidents were seen as indicative of a much larger campaign being waged by Muslims against Buddhists. Suddenly, the smallest disturbance injected communities with a palpable enmity towards their neighbours that hadn’t been so present before.

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I found this intriguing. Some people spoke of their fears as if they were dormant, and always susceptible to activation. At particular moments in Myanmar’s not so distant past, that dread of the consequences of its most cherished belief system coming under attack was, to many, very present and very real. Perhaps the attacks being carried out against Muslims in response to these incidents were echoes of a deeply uncertain past, one that I’d learn about only as time went on. But to others, that apprehension seemed to have arisen rather more recently. The military that took power in 1962, ending the brief spell of parliamentary democracy that the country enjoyed following independence in 1948, had used these fears of the demise of Buddhism and the break-up of the nation as a principal tool in its efforts to cultivate loyalty among a resentful population. It knew how to manufacture communal violence that appeared, from a distance, spontaneous; and that warranted the presence of the military as protector of the nation.

Perhaps this needs to be factored into understandings of what unfolded after 2012.

But there was a bitter irony to the violence of the transition, and it was this that drew me in the most. Ko Myat and his fellow villagers who descended on Nasi quarter during those early days of June 2012, turning an entire neighbourhood to rubble and sending thousands fleeing to camps, were exercising a newfound agency that arrived with the commencement of the passage to civilian rule. For some, old scores, given greater urgency in the clear light of day, were being settled. For others, heightened anxieties brought about by the political changes and everything they carried needed addressing.

But the military, in its retreat from power, seemed to have passed a torch onto the masses of people who had spent so many years opposing its mercurial rule. Its deft manipulation of lines of difference among and between the myriad communities in Myanmar seemed to have bled into the new landscape, empowering civilians to take up where it had left off.

As the transition advanced and the violence crossed the mountain range separating Rakhine State from central Myanmar, monks and their legions of followers began to preach the same message of national unity – or ethno-religious uniformity – that their jailers of old had done. Under their watch, the new Myanmar would be a nation of one religion, one blood.

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The razed neighbourhoods and the segregation of Buddhists and Muslims, physical and psychological, were the immediate results of this vision. But the how and why – the mental processes undertaken to turn neighbours into enemies, the political machinations that gave rise to the killings and everything that followed – would, in the years after 2012, only gradually come into view.

Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ is published

by Zed Books (2017).

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Miss Space Miss Space

Pr abda Yoon

Prabda Yoon translated by Mui Poopoksakul

W

hen, in my early years at primary school, I had just started learning to write, the teacher taught us to put our index fingers between sentences to ensure neat, even spaces throughout the composition.

Years later, after I’d mastered writing (or at least scrawling), the indexfinger system was ignored and eventually abandoned. The spaces between sentences were liberated from their regulator and put in charge of their own arrangement. An up-to-me anarchy prevailed. Without checks and bounds, the letters became brash – they got loose, lax and liquidy, lumped together or leaning forwards and backwards in a carefree and shameless manner.

Even so, the size of my spaces could still be described as normal. It didn’t strike the eye as odd, unlike those produced by the following person: Miss Wondee.

She was in her early twenties. Her birth fell on a hot, sunny noon. The doctor who performed the delivery was in a bad mood that day. He had diarrhoea and a backache, and his recurrent migraine was also acting up.

Yet he upheld his duty, seamlessly managing to pull out the head of a bright pink, grumpy-faced baby girl. When the umbilical cord linking mother and child was snipped, one life became two.

The baby girl screamed as if she regretted being born. Her mother gathered her strength and turned to look, with concerned tenderness, at the infant who had inhabited her body for several months:

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Miss Space

This is the first minute of life in the outside world? How miraculous and how pitiful at the same time. Baby, don’t cry. This is all there is to life: live for a while, eat, sleep, learn from books made up of other people’s ideas, meet all kinds of folks, some you’ll love, some you’ll hate. When you meet the one you hate least, you can be together, help each other along as you eat and sleep and earn baht to exchange for possessions. If you want a lot of possessions, you’ll have to earn a lot of baht. If you’re lucky (or unlucky), you’ll live to be old. Sometimes you’re tired, sometimes bored, sometimes sad, sometimes happy – that’s all life is. You won’t have to wait too long before you die.

I first met Miss Wondee on the bus. We were sitting next to each other, and she was bent over scribbling something. She had a notebook with yellow paper on her lap and a 2B pencil in her right hand. My nose and the ease with which it tended towards its adjective made me sneak a look at what she was writing, to see whether it was an object worthy of my attention.

It was then, at 4:25 p.m., to be exact, that I noticed the extraordinary size of the spaces between Miss Wondee’s sentences. The air-conditioned bus (the condition of the air went from good to bad) was turning right at the crossroads. The driver had twangy upcountry music playing faintly on the radio. The lyrics recounted the classic story of a farmer coming to the big city to look for his girlfriend, who had left the provinces to sell herself under the neon lights.

I remember all this in such detail because of the size of Miss Wondee’s spaces. They galvanised my consciousness as though it had been struck by lightning, and I briefly became abnormally perceptive, able to absorb information about my environment instantaneously and effortlessly. Thank god, I stopped just short of Nirvana.

Wondee was writing a diary entry: what she did, whom she saw, who called, when she went to bed. It was your average entry, and my staring didn’t manage to pinpoint minor details. What was more interesting than the letters that lined up to create meaning were the areas between each thought: they were about as long as the sentences themselves. It was as if they were there to provide breathing room, so that each letter could inhale and exhale comfortably.

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‘Excuse me,’ I said softly, fearing that I’d break her concentration.

She didn’t hear me, or pretended not to. Or she heard me but was afraid to talk to a male stranger on the bus. Or she heard me and didn’t want to be bothered. Or she half heard me. (She might have been prevented from hearing both words clearly by the noise from the bus engine, which cycled between loud and soft, so perhaps she was unsure whether I was talking to her or whether I was a crazy person talking to myself.)

‘Excuse me. Please forgive my indiscretion, but my meddlesome eyes happened to notice your writing. Please don’t think that I was snooping – not at all! You could’ve been writing the most intimate things about yourself, but I didn’t read any of it, and I wouldn’t dare to. And if I accidentally read some, I’ll gladly erase that bit of my memory in the next few seconds. Trust me, I don’t mean to pry into your personal business, but the reason I’m chatting you up like this is, I noticed how bizarrely you arrange your writing.

I can’t hold back my curiosity. Can I ask you a question? I hope you don’t mind.’

After such a lengthy spiel, she’d have to turn around and look at me, even if she hadn’t been able to catch what I was saying. Her irises, black as tamarind seeds, didn’t flicker. The outer corners of her eyes angled down toward her cheek bones, like the downward-curving eyes of a laughing Buddha, but one that was neither laughing nor smiling. She stared at my face before dragging out the words: ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s like this.’ I turned toward her about thirty degrees, started gesturing with my hands, making the same preparations for a serious conversation that I’d witnessed from academics on television.

‘Your spacing has left a big impression on me.’ She looked down at the notebook on her lap.

‘I don’t know if you’re conscious of it, but the way you space is extraordinary. When, in early primary school, I had just started learning to write, the teacher taught us to put our index fingers between sentences to ensure neat, even spaces throughout the composition. Years later, after I’d mastered writing (or at least scrawling), the index-finger system was ignored and eventually abandoned. The spaces between sentences have been liberated from their regulator and put in charge of their own arrangement. An up-to-me anarchy prevails. Without checks and bounds, the letters have

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become brash – they’ve got loose, lax and liquidy, and now lump together or lean forwards and backwards in a carefree and shameless manner.

‘Even so, the size of my spaces can still be described as normal. It doesn’t strike the eye as odd. But look at yours. Your spacing is abnormally large.

One might say that you give as much weight to the spaces as the letters in your sentences. Or maybe even more. When I look at the page you have there, the first things I see are the spaces, not the letters. So, I wanted to ask: is that intentional, or is it a deranged childhood habit you can’t break?

For me, I see a whole range of potential philosophical takes on it. For example, perhaps you’re suggesting that meaning and blankness have equal importance. Or you’re conveying something about intervals in the thought process and how they should contain pauses to leave room for further possibilities to develop. Or your spaces are comparable to shadows of memory, left as a hint that memory is not a substitute for the truth; not a record of history, but rather a shadow, a residual feeling left over from the past.

‘Am I getting warm with my analysis? I’d be grateful if you’d be so kind as to reveal the origins of your idiosyncratic manner of spacing.’

She sat there frozen for a moment. Her right hand was tightly clutching the 2B pencil. Her other hand was spread over the yellow page of her notebook.

Maybe she was trying to conceal the idiosyncrasy of the spaces between her sentences, out of embarrassment (or fear). The paper beneath her palm started to shrivel as the sweat seeped out through her pores.

A moment later, her lips began to part.

‘I’m sorry. My name’s Wondee. I’ve got to go – you made me miss my stop several minutes ago. If I don’t get off at the next stop, I’ll have to walk much further than I want to. I’m wearing new shoes – I can’t walk too much in them or I’ll get blisters. So please excuse me, but I have to get off.

Although I don’t quite understand what you were saying, I’m happy to talk to you, but it’d have to be another day. I’ll write my number down for you.’

Wondee looked down. Her pencil began to move. Then, with the hand that was holding the pencil, she tore off a corner from a page of her notebook and handed it to me.

Seven digits were written on the piece of paper in this manner: 6348654

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Even for numbers, she made (no) room for exceptions.

The word ‘space’ seems an architectural word. When it was adapted for use in orthography, it must have become abstracted and linked to the art of the optical – leaving blank spaces in a way that’s easy on the eyes and comfortable to read. If you were to call them ‘blanks,’ the connotation would be undesirably negative. These areas may not hold anything, but they’re not empty – they clearly have their own special function.

Even though the origin of the word ‘space’ could be considered more or less acceptable, I wasn’t satisfied with it. For me, it’s too strong a word, and lacks a creative meaning. (The word ‘space’ makes me feel like my letters could vanish into thin air at any moment. This feeling presents a major obstacle to writing.)

When I got home that day, the day I met the spacer named Wondee, I tried while sitting down, while lying down, while showering, while brushing my teeth, to come up with a more suitable word.

Eventually, I landed on the term ‘waiting period’.

Here, ‘waiting’ means waiting for the next thought. Waiting for the mood. Waiting remains a mere act of hope – what you’re waiting for may never come. The word is broad and inconclusive. After I resolved to coin a new term, Miss Wondee’s spaces became even more interesting.

At the office the next day, as I was staring into space while I waited for my lunch break (I work for an insurance company. I have to volunteer the fact that I do it only to support myself. In actuality, I have thoughts that are deeper and more complicated than most salarymen do. Please don’t judge me by my vocation. I’d suggest using other indicators, for example: I don’t eat meat; I don’t carry a wallet; I don’t smoke; I don’t support spending people’s taxes on weapons of mass destruction; I’d definitely protest against a war wherever and whenever) I pulled a scrap of yellow paper out of my trouser pocket and dialled Miss Wondee’s seven digits on my phone.

No one answered. Please leave a message.

I didn’t leave a message. How was I supposed to leave one, just like that?

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Then it occurred to me that the seven digits were probably her home phone number, and she was unlikely to be in during office or school hours.

I ought to wait and try her again closer to sundown.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait until I got home. By the powers that be, Miss Wondee and I took the same bus again. Although space was tight on the bus this time, meaning we had to chat while standing and hanging on to the rail, the overall atmosphere was not very different from the previous day. The tune playing softly on the radio was different, but it was still about a country girl who’d come to the city only to shed tears and lose heart working the bathtub at a massage parlour. You can’t help but be moved when you listen to that song. You want to be the hero who marches in and liberates these girls from the depths of hell. It’s like freeing living things from a zoo.

Miss Wondee was rather surprised to see me again. But this time she smiled. Her expression and the downward curvature of her eyes made her the spitting image of a laughing Buddha, albeit a female one.

‘It must be tricky to write in your diary when you have to hold on to the rail like this.’

She laughed, just enough to be polite.

‘So, will you tell me why you space so strangely? . . . It’s quite a waste of paper. . . . But that’s not the point.’ My academic side reared its head once more. ‘Whether or not it’s a waste of paper is an issue of conflict between capitalism and the environment. I don’t care about that. That’s a persistent issue that’s never going to disappear as long as the exchange system continues to hold sway among societies. What I’m interested in is the influence of the system of collective psychology on the structure of individual psychology, namely, a person’s psyche, which is shaped by external forces. For example, let’s say I’m A, and I obsessively rub my palms together when I’m not paying attention. When you investigate the cause of this compulsion, you discover that I was an active child, that I used to run into things and break all kinds of stuff on a daily basis. My behaviour was judged by external forces, a.k.a. society, to be annoying and exasperating: What an unmindful little monkey! The group of external people called society (‘external’ here meaning external to my conscious mind) – or one could call them the adults at home – therefore punished me by slapping my hands –

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pap! pap! – until they were red and swollen as a pair of boxing gloves. With such punishment inflicted on a regular basis, the hand-rubbing habit automatically sunk into the structure of my psyche. Out of habit, the former child continues to rub his palms into adulthood, and may keep doing so until his life is over.’

The bus jerked. Every part of my body above the belt leaned forward, almost bumping into every part of Miss Wondee’s body above the skirt.

Alas, the bus pulled itself together in time, so the collision between two warm-blooded animals didn’t happen. But at least the part of me called the nose got close enough to sniff Miss Wondee’s jet-black hair. My candid review: it smelled nice.

‘Now, back to your spacing. I’m dying to know the history of your behaviour, your way of forming spaces – which I shall henceforth call ‘waiting periods’. Did something happen to you when you were a child? Or are you intentionally projecting a certain image of yourself? Are you acting oddly to attract attention?’

Miss Wondee blinked helplessly at me as the bus decelerated.

‘I missed my stop again. Excuse me.’

Then she wedged her way through the crowd, liberating herself from the oppression of the machinery of public transportation and leaving me standing there with my tongue as dry as the Sahara.

‘Ticket, please.’

A small-framed woman in a blue uniform, who had a gift for wriggling smoothly through the push and shove, looked up at me with pity.

I didn’t have the nerve to call Miss Wondee again, but I must admit that I learned the seven digits of her phone number by heart.

Sometimes, when things were slow at work and I was just sitting at my desk, I would stare at the buttons on my phone and dial Miss Wondee’s number in my head. It was such pathetic behaviour, probably with complex origins dating back to my early infancy. I hadn’t found time to analyse it yet. All my free time was devoted to this funny feeling that distracted me.

Was I being brainwashed? Was Miss Wondee’s spacing an ingenious mechanism for staging a psychological coup? Or were her spaces really waiting periods? I myself was certainly in a fever of anticipation!

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Miss Space

About three weeks – the individual units of which were two million, four hundred fourteen thousand and four hundred seconds – later, which to me was a rather long time, the wind from the bus’s air conditioner blew Miss Wondee my way again. I saw her even before I’d raised my left foot up onto the bus. She was sitting by the window, looking down. Her hair, as shiny as if she’d put shoe polish on it, looked almost unrecognisably long. Time tends to make all kinds of things expand. If you leave them alone, things can stretch, lengthen, heighten, widen, swell and puff up.

I tried to muffle the excited boom of my heartbeat, but the pulse in my feet didn’t cooperate. As soon as I boarded the bus, I made a beeline for the space by the window. A glum-looking middle-aged woman was sitting next to Miss Wondee, so I had to perform some minor gymnastics, getting up on my tiptoes and leaning over the woman’s head, to make myself conspicuous. But Miss Wondee still didn’t notice me.

She was writing in her yellow-paper diary with the concentration of a meditating hermit. The waiting periods on the page were still as odd and interesting as when they first caught my eye.

Surprisingly, the glum-looking woman didn’t pay the slightest attention to Miss Wondee’s spacing. What can you do? Some people, even when a miracle appears right in front of their nose, remain perfectly oblivious.

What a shame.

I craned my neck awkwardly for several seconds without any reaction before I took the liberty of stretching my left hand out to tap Miss Wondee on the shoulder. I almost hit Glum Face on the temple, but curved away just in time. Miss Wondee looked up from the yellow paper, and the female laughing Buddha was back.

‘Hi. Writing in your diary again? At a quick glance, from where I’m standing, your waiting periods are still adept at keeping their special distance.’

The glum-faced woman probably couldn’t take it anymore, or maybe the word ‘period’ had offended her feminine sensibilities. In any case, she got up and surrendered her seat to me, despite the fact that I was neither a pregnant woman nor a child, an elderly or disabled person, a monk or a novice.

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‘I’ve spent the three weeks since I last saw you constructively. I’ve been analysing it in my head.

‘And referring to the textbooks I had on hand. Even Sigmund Freud wasn’t much help. Carl Jung was none at all. But don’t worry, I used my own judgment and common sense to analyse this meticulously. I believe I’ve come to some pretty decent preliminary conclusions regarding your special behaviour. First, let me say, your manner of spacing must surely relate to your family fundamentals. Even when they’re not the dominant cause, fundamentals inevitably affect secondary factors, which may be more visible.

‘I venture to say that you have a lot of siblings, all born rather far apart.

The sibling relations, therefore, developed abnormally. Even worse, I speculate that either your mother or father passed away when you were still quite young. But as I hinted earlier, these things may not be the main determinant. That, I believe, can be traced to your respiratory system. This is a bold speculation on my part given that it has to do with your anatomy, which I have no knowledge of. But let me guess first – please don’t reveal whether I’m right or wrong until I’ve finished. My guess is that your circulation system is peculiar: your heart doesn’t keep the same beat as normal people’s, and that makes your inhalation and exhalation peculiar, too. The frequency with which you expel carbon dioxide and draw in oxygen probably forms a graph with peaks and troughs that resemble a series of elongated hills. This gives you more distance for reflection, i.e., space for thought, than the average person – about ten seconds’ worth. Hence the spaces in your writing, which leave room for reflection.’

Miss Wondee appeared to be listening more intently than on the previous occasions, but when I reached that point in my discussion, she shifted, seemingly to get up from her seat.

‘We’re almost at my stop. I’m sorry.’

I leaned aside to let her pass.

Before she slipped out of my radius, I couldn’t suppress a final point of interrogation.

‘Wondee, are you wearing perfume today?’

Miss Wondee turned back and smiled. The bus was slowing down.

Passengers were flocking to the doors.

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Miss Space

‘See you.’

And then she left.

I sat still for another seven waiting periods.

And then I got off.

— The last sentence is not a conclusion. Rather, it is a waiting period that doesn’t yet have a thought to succeed it.

– With Miss Wondee’s seal of approval.

NB:

‘Miss Space’ is included in The Sad Part Was, published by Tilted Axis Press.

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from Blood and Silk from Blood andMichael Silk Vat ikiotis

Michael Vatikiotis

A

t some point in the mid-1980s, male students in the central Java city of Jogjakarta who used to wear ragged jeans and their hair long began sprouting wispy beards and wearing white skullcaps; the girls started covering their heads with the tudong, as the hijab is known in Indonesian.

By 2004 supporters of a local football club, Slemaniyya, were wearing T-shirts that sported pictures of Osama bin Laden.

‘It’s nothing to do with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We just want to support our football club,’ one of the supporters told me with a broad marzipan smile. It was like visiting a film studio and wandering off a Southeast Asia set onto another recreating the deserts of Arabia. Over coffee in a restaurant overlooking Malioboro Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, a soft-spoken Muslim scholar, Muhammad Fajrul Fallah, tried to explain these puzzling changes to me. Like most observers of Indonesia, I assumed that moderate manifestations of Islam were the norm – especially here in central Java, where the refined culture embodies a fine balance between its HinduBuddhist roots and the more recent Islamic overlay. But a lot was changing in Indonesia. I was speaking to Fajrul on the eve of the landmark 2004 election campaign, the first direct election for the presidency since the end of the authoritarian era in 1998.

‘Young people just took to adopting Islamic symbols,’ he said, so softly it was a struggle to hear him over the chaotic cacophony of cars, motorcycles and the clanging of bells belonging to the city’s ubiquitous three-wheeled pedicabs. ‘They never turned violent or anything; they just all went to the

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same lectures and prayer meetings and, because of the more open environment, they thought it was OK to change the way they’d done things before.’

I was struck by an apparent paradox: a more open political environment that leads to a closing of the mind to other views; a strict adherence to orthodoxy in a more liberal setting, which in turn breeds intolerance and hatred. Was all this numbing Islamic orthodoxy the tragic by-product of Indonesia’s transition to democracy? Understanding the changing shape and role of Islam in the world’s largest Muslim country is of vital importance to understanding a key driver of conflict in Southeast Asia. In the wider global context, we live in an era of violence associated with Islam – in the name of Islam towards non-Muslims, and by angry non-Muslims towards believers in a faith that, although forged with the sword, professes peace.

The Islamic holy scriptures contain mixed messages, what Din Syamsuddin, a former chairman of one of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisations, terms ‘ambivalent tendencies’. There are messages of peace and accommodation, but also calls to arms and exhortations to attack non-believers. This has opened the way for the manipulation of gullible minds by reckless political and radical forces. On a more mundane level, as with all Abrahamic religions, there is a tension between traditional paths to piety and modern forms of civic life. ‘Being a Muslim in the modern context creates a quandary,’ argues jailed Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim. ‘How can we reconcile modern governance with traditional teachings?’ Anwar and fellow liberals would argue that democracy is a moral imperative for all Muslims, as their faith urges engagement with society. The trouble is that this more enlightened, modernist view has been eclipsed by a much darker vision of exclusive identity that rejects democracy on the basis that only God speaks for the people – Vox populi, vox Dei. Southeast Asia suffered from the scourge of violent Islamic extremism years before the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001. One of the earliest Al Qaeda-backed terrorist plots involved a plan to plant bombs on eleven airliners flying from Asia to the United States in 1995. Operation Bojinka was foiled only because chemicals to be used in the bombs exploded prematurely. The same group of terrorists, led by a man called Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti who was one of the principal planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, considered assassination plots against President

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Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, who visited the Philippines in the mid-1990s. Al Qaeda established cells in Southeast Asia both because of a sympathetic Muslim community and free and easy cities such as Manila and Bangkok, where almost anything could be had for a price and money could easily be transferred because of lax banking rules. According to a US Navy report, Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamil Khalifa, was set up in Manila by the early 1990s.

However, it wasn’t Al Qaeda as such that was behind a series of spectacular terrorist attacks launched in the region in the first few years of the new century. Soon after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, a home-grown jihadist organisation with roots in a much longer struggle for Islamic statehood in Indonesia decided to align with Al Qaeda’s struggle against the West and target Westerners. On 12 October 2002, a powerful car bomb ripped through the popular Sari nightclub in the heart of the Indonesian resort island of Bali’s most popular tourist spot, Kuta. Two hundred and two people died, most of them Australians, Americans and Europeans, as well as thirty-eight Indonesians. Already struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which spawned the US-led War on Terror, as editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, I faced the reality of a new front, one dominated by a shadowy world of former mujahedeen from the Afghan wars and disillusioned clerics. They were people with grudges, having suffered under repressive policies towards Islamic militants conducted by the secular governments of Indonesia and Malaysia; they rode the coattails of Al Qaeda’s new violent jihad. But they were the symptoms of a far more serious problem.

One of the chief engines of Islamic extremism, fuelling much of the Jihadist violence in Southeast Asia, is the Wahhabi fundamentalist messianic sect, a social movement that grew out of the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century, preaching a return to fundamental Islamic values as determined by the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Allied with the Royal House of Saud, the Wahhabis underpin the religious basis of contemporary Saudi Arabia. ‘Born in massacre and blood,’ writes the Algerian author Kamel Daoud, ‘it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of

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from Blood and Silk

imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom.’ This seems an unlikely dogma to take root in a part of the world steeped in sophisticated traditions of art and the celebration of nature, and where women command positions of respect and even power.

Yet it has. How did this happen and what does it mean, not just for Indonesia and Southeast Asia, but also for the wider world?

Shortly after a terrorist attack in the streets of the Indonesian capital that killed eight people at the end of January 2016, a colleague sent me a short video statement by one of the alleged perpetrators that had been doing the rounds on social media. The man in the video was a good-looking youth sporting a neat beard, a headscarf and an automatic weapon, and speaking to a camera-phone from somewhere in IS-held northern Syria. The background appeared to be the ruins of a building. His voice dripped with hatred as he challenged the army and the police to come after him: ‘Otherwise we are ready to come and get you. . . .’ How did this fellow from somewhere in rural Java end up in a bombed-out Syrian town, serving an organisation that has carried out some of the worst atrocities in recent times, supposedly in the name of Islam? As a journalist in Indonesia and Malaysia, I witnessed some of the early stirrings of Islamic activism before Islam’s relationship with the wider world changed irrevocably on 11 September 2001. I wrote about the emergence of Islamic social and political awareness as the shackles on freedom of expression and social activism began to loosen. I was privy to the thinking of Islamic intellectuals and political leaders as they contemplated the implications of a more pious Muslim society. The experience gave me plenty of exposure to changes in society, the direction of which were uncertain at the time, but with hindsight were profoundly important.

The dominant narrative since 9/11 is one of the spread of jihadist ideology along subterranean networks of alienated Islamic youth, forged in the rugged mountainous battlefields of Afghanistan and the disciplined Deobandi madrasas of Pakistan. For many in Southeast Asia, this was a sudden and unexpected development.

Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, who died in 2015, had strong views on the subject, which he shared with me in an interview in 2002, a year after the 9/11 attacks. Lee typified the generation who grew up alongside Muslims who, although devout and faithful, essentially accommodated

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non-Muslims in the interests of communal harmony. Lee played golf and drank whisky with Malaysia’s founding father, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who was appointed the first secretary general of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a global Muslim body. Lee called it ‘tropical Islam’: ‘You know – green trees, green grass, no desert and a very different ethnic mix’. Then, suddenly, he said, these jihadists were making a bid to seize power and establish a caliphate. ‘It’s absurd. It’s not achievable,’ Lee told me in the sterile environment of his air-conditioned office.

Fifteen years later, nothing near a caliphate has been established, but Muslim society has become deeply conservative in Indonesia and Malaysia, and many other parts of Southeast Asia where Muslims constitute a minority. As a result, you can no longer buy beer at convenience stores in Indonesia – causing revenue for Indonesia’s primary brewery Bintang to plummet by almost 40 per cent. Indonesian lawmakers began debating a bill in parliament to ban alcohol nationally in 2015. And in 2016 the province of East Java banned alcohol sales completely. In Malaysia, there is a move to implement Islamic Hudud criminal laws in some areas of the country; Sharia law is now in force in the tiny, oil-rich state of Brunei, where Christmas has been banned. These cosmetic changes tend to draw headlines, but beneath the surface there are strong currents in Muslim society influenced by moves towards the purification of faith, stricter religious observance and, more disturbingly, appeals to lay down one’s life for the faith. Much of this can be attributed to the neo-Wahhabi movements, and similarly dogmatic Salafist ideology, that wafted through the region on a cushion of charitable donations from the Arabian Peninsula and which mushroomed after the oil boom of the mid-1970s, just as the authoritarian landscape started to change.

Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia by Michael Vatikiotis is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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Poetry

Saleem Peeradina

Saleem Peeradina

A Conference of Crows It is Nature’s charcoal sketch of a bird.

Although it sports no colourful plumage, has a raucous cry, dines on garbage and makes a picnic out of a roadside carcass, the bold intelligent, clever crow is worthy of great respect for having flourished despite human efforts to decimate its numbers. Like the House Sparrow the Common Crow is everywhere – along coastlines, on mountain tops, in deserts and even in the arctic regions.

Possessing an uncanny talent to adapt to any habitat the reputation it has earned is decidedly mixed: glorified as a trickster in one place, the all-black Raven is feared elsewhere as a bird of ill-omen. If a crow caws insistently on your window sill or balcony, you can prepare for the arrival of a guest. For the mockers of superstitions it is just a spoiler of sleep. Like the parrot, the crow is an impressive mimic able to whine like a dog, squawk like a hen or cry like a baby. It shows its playful side

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sliding down a slippery surface or harassing a flock of gulls. It struts like a klutz fancying it can waltz.

Like a monkey, it watches for an opportune moment to steal scraps from campers. Crows gather in the hundreds to hold noisy rallies. A congregation raises a parliamentary din, now recognised as a murder of crows. Yet, this pragmatic, even opportunistic bird has an almost sacred personal ethic: crows maintain loyal, lifelong pair bonds, enduring food scarcity and harsh weather to raise their young.

They live in close domestic proximity to us, but wary of human intentions, they will not befriend us.

Because their ties with us are ageless, they let us eavesdrop on their conference, so we may learn to heed the call of the crow.

The Lesson Take a sheet of paper the size of a drawing pad. The universe, as we perceive it, must be accommodated within the borders of this rectangle. Draw a circle the size of a marble to represent the earth, then hitch the moon to it. This travel companion will never leave the earth’s side. Now surround them with planets in their proper elliptical positions. Reserve a central place for the sun. Cram the entire backdrop with stars, thumbing in a smudge to mark the Milky Way. Now set the whole facsimile in motion, in perpetual Rotations and revolutions.

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Poetry

But you are not done yet. Fold this sheet to fashion an origami pigeon and release this messenger bird into the sky. It will quickly reach a vanishing point flying among billions of other winged creatures each carrying its own universe.

If your head is spinning, try this: crumple the piece of paper and store it in the black hole of your pocket never to be found again by anyone.

There is a third alternative. Place this sheet at one end of a panoramic screen and proceed to jump off the brink of our universe into neighbouring galaxies spiralling outward, endlessly. Shrunk, relegated to a corner, our universe is virtually erased, leaving us adrift.

Here, far beyond imagination’s reach, infinity unravels, leaving us speechless. But seeking solace in myths will get us nowhere.

We have to make the journey back to reclaim the earth. As we start to descend and fall towards what seems like a speck of dust, turns into a rock, then, this enormous circular globe packed with mountains, oceans, forests, all suspended, frozen at two ends, and burning elsewhere, this jewel of an earth, this blue planet escorted by clouds, which has hauled its rich load of life for millions of years, not straying from its given path, but gliding, floating, owning this alien but familiar space, returns to our side, smooth, unruffled, like the messenger bird back from its epic pilgrimage, finding the ball of crumpled paper saved in our pocket.

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In Praise of Persimmons Celebrated in Chinese and Japanese art, the persimmon grows in clumps on a canopy of branches. It is routinely pecked by parrots, nibbled by fat ants, filched by monkeys. Its smooth, orange skin distinguishes it from its look-alike, the tomato. But what sets it apart is the dry, curly, brittle, four-leaf top it wears for headcover.

The persimmon is for those who are in no hurry to attack the fruit. Like a hard kiwi, eat it too soon when it is not ripe, and your mouth will protest. With a hard persimmon, the inside of your mouth will turn chalky.

You have to wait until the fruit decides it is ready.

Then its astringency will have faded, and it will reward your patience by yielding its soft, velvety flesh with a sweetness matched only by your memory of mangoes.

Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poems is published by Copper Coin Publishing (India, 2017).

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At Loose Ends At Loose EndsVr inda B aliga

Vrinda Baliga

T

he night air outside is cold, but the tent cups its protective hands around performers and audience alike and draws us into the shared experience of the show.

Umesh Bhat sits cross-legged to one side of the stage, his dholak between his knees, narrating the opening lines of the story with practised ease. His words conjure up the landscape of Khavda – the sun-baked village, its throat parched from three successive years of drought, the emaciated cattle dying one by one, the daily quest for water. And on this wilting, withering land, a single, unlikely blossom – young love.

‘The jackals of Kalo Dungar gather around Najab’s humble offering,’ Umesh is saying now. ‘It is an auspicious sign. God smiles upon this journey.’

From my place at the centre of the stage, I face the audience. Not for string puppets the bright spotlights of the big stage, the necessary elevation over a large crowd. The katputli show, by its very nature, is for a small, intimate audience. We perform on a miniature stage, at eye-level with our spectators, close enough that each intricate move may be observed and appreciated.

‘With renewed courage, Najab mounts his faithful camel Allahrakha.’

The dholak lets loose a crescendo of beats and Allahrakha lurches to his feet under me.

‘Behind him, the distant lights of Khavda glitter and beckon in the dark.

But Najab has eyes only for what lies ahead—’

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A familiar tug of strings. I raise my hand to my forehead and squint into the distance.

A fresh sheet of painted cloth is deftly unfurled, and the backdrop of the hulking black basalt hill, the Kalo Dungar, and its pack of feasting jackals is replaced by a white, hauntingly beautiful expanse.

‘—the mighty Rann of Kutch,’ Umesh says, ‘and, somewhere within its folds, the international border between India and Pakistan. He must cross both to reach his love.’

The beats slow to a steady rhythm and Allahrakha sets off across the stage with me swaying in tandem in the gold and orange saddle on his back.

The audience breaks into spontaneous applause. This is a setting they can identify with, probably having done some of these very things themselves here at the Rann Utsav. I have seen the tourism posters fluttering everywhere, advertising camel rides into the salt flats of the Rann, tours of surrounding villages, trips to the shrine at Kalo Dungar to witness the age-old custom of feeding its famed jackals. ‘Kutch nahin dekha, tho kuch nahin dekha,’ the posters declare. If you haven’t seen Kutch, you haven’t seen anything.

With the characteristic Aara rara rara rara ra, Umesh bursts into song.

The white Rann, he sings, gleams in the night as though the moon has descended from the heavens and planted itself at Najab’s feet. But the desert is a seductress, an illusionist who shows the lonely traveller mirages of his deepest desires in her barren heart. Only the strong of mind and the brave of heart can hope to romance the Rann and survive. . . .

Every aspect of the katputli stage – the bright, embroidered cloth draped over the top of the bamboo frame, the painted backdrop, the proscenium, the low frill of the stage curtains – is designed to keep the focus on the puppet, while concealing the puppeteer. The fingers quietly working my strings, hidden from the audience, belong to Umesh’s brother Kamlesh Bhat. In his expert hands, Allahrakha moves with perfect grace, his front and back legs rising and falling in synchrony. It isn’t easy achieving this level of coordination – my own master, Mridul, would be satisfied with just having the camel hop across the stage – but Kamlesh Bhat is a perfectionist.

With his fingers pouring life into me, I feel the smooth, magic flow of energy through my being, transforming the narrator’s song to action. Every movement

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feels natural, like it’s my own. Over the past few days, on this stage, something deep within me has begun to shake off its cobwebs – the knowledge of what it is to be alive.

We reach the other end of the stage and the curtain descends for a change of scene. Allahrakha and I are hoisted over the backdrop into the backstage area where the rest of the cast await their turn: Aftab, Najab’s father; Zaman, the smuggler; Kaley Shah, the Pakistani spice-seller; and, of course, Fatimah, the spice-seller’s beautiful daughter.

The newly painted frown on Zaman’s face is especially suited to his disposition. He’s none too pleased that he, who previously had an act to himself as a snake charmer, has been co-opted to play the secondary role of the wily smuggler sneaking goods and people across the Indo-Pak border.

It doesn’t help his mood that the inconsequential camel rider, the ‘half-man’ fused at the waist to his camel, has somehow become the star of the show.

‘Hurry up,’ Kamlesh says to his nephew Abhay, who is looping Aftab’s strings around his fingers. ‘And who’s doing Zaman? Where’s—’ My master is sitting in a corner, his fingers busy with his mobile phone.

‘Mridul!’ Abhay hisses, and my master looks up from the screen, realising only now that it’s his turn at the stage.

Kamlesh’s face darkens, but if Mridul notices his father’s anger, he pretends not to. He ambles over and nonchalantly picks up Zaman’s strings.

The show is over for the day, the performance tent emptied of tourists.

Mridul and Abhay busy themselves in dismantling the bamboo frame of the katputli stage and folding up the backdrops.

Kamlesh always sees to us, the katputlis, himself, carefully packing us away each night into the trunk, our strings disentangled and rolled up in neat bundles at our sides.

Umesh comes over with the day’s collection and sits down beside him.

‘Mridul looks more like you with each passing year,’ he says. ‘Just add a moustache and turban and nobody could tell you two apart.’

Kamlesh chuckles quietly. It’s an old joke. Mridul, they both know, wouldn’t be caught dead with a handlebar moustache. Or a traditional turban.

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Umesh shakes his head with a smile. Licking his finger, he begins to count the wad of currency notes, his lips moving silently. ‘It was a good idea doing this story,’ he says at last, putting the money into a drawstring purse and tucking it into the trunk. ‘We haven’t seen ticket sales like this in—’ The lid comes down, cutting off the rest of the conversation. The dark settles around us like a warm quilt. I can feel the contours of the drawstring purse under me. The trunk also holds bits and pieces of costume jewellery, hand-painted cloth backdrops from previous shows, clothes reserved for special occasions – all the troupe’s most precious possessions. It is good to be counted among them. A welcome change from being dumped in a corner of the dingy room Mridul shares in the city with three other men.

Sometimes it feels like a dream, being in this township of tents conjured up from barren land for the annual desert festival. The stalls, the performances, the milling crowds . . . the Rann Utsav is a riot of sights, sounds, and smells that I can only process through the one medium I know best – hands. There are hands everywhere, each adept at its particular labour, fingers callused in the contours of their specific skills – imparting form to clay on the potter’s wheel; kneading dough at the chole-bature stand; darting up and down on cloth to imprison tiny mirrors and beads in colourful embroidery; squeezing henna out of piping bags into intricate patterns; morphing into birds and animals, minarets and temples on the shadow artist’s screen. And above all, there is the personal miracle of Kamlesh’s hands. I worry that, when I’m next taken out of the trunk, I will find it all gone, an illusion. But, day after day, the lid lifts and there they are again – the Rann Utsav and the katputli stage, solid and real.

When Mridul decided to take a month off from work to perform at the Rann Utsav with his family, I hadn’t expected much to come out of it. I assumed Fatimah and I would join the other puppets and there would be the usual acts – the dancer in the king’s durbar, the snake charmer, the Rajput warrior, and so on – shows in which I would either have no place or be more a part of the backdrop than of the stage.

But everything changed when, in our tent that first evening, Kamlesh pulled me out of Mridul’s bag.

Even as Umesh regaled Mridul with funny anecdotes from the troupe’s recent tours of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, Kamlesh sat in a corner by

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himself, turning my camel and me over and over, studying our joints, clicking his tongue at the shabby state we were in. We had just three worn-out strings between us, barely enough for the camel to hop across the stage and for me to stay erect in the saddle. Kamlesh untied them and began to thread new ones through every joint – hands and elbows, knees and hooves. When at last he was done, he looped the loose ends over his own fingers.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I came alive.

Energy coursed through my entire being. My arms, that hitherto had hung at my sides in a state of limp paralysis, lifted and flexed themselves.

My hands rose to my own face, then to my camel’s hump, patting, feeling.

Tentatively, I reached for the reins. My mount, equally astounded that his legs no longer flopped weakly under him, rose from his knees, one leg at a time, and broke into a slow canter. For the first time in ages, I felt like a true rider, at one with my mount.

Mridul glanced over. ‘Why all this trouble over a camel rider?’ he asked, his tone only mildly curious.

‘Haven’t you told him yet, Kamlesh?’ Umesh asked. He turned to Mridul.

‘Your father is planning a new act.’

That was when I first heard of it. Love Across the Salt Desert – a story that Kamlesh had heard tourists mention time and again, crediting it with their first introduction to the Rann of Kutch. A story that Kamlesh, with his keen ear for audience tastes, had immediately decided to adapt to the katputli stage. A story whose main protagonist was a young man who crossed the Rann on his camel to reach his beloved.

Another day, another show. I have just retired backstage after my scene and the curtain now opens on Najab’s bhunga where his father is confronted by the angry Zaman.

‘Where is your boy, Aftab Hussein?’ the smuggler demands.

Aftab looks around. ‘How would I know? He must be around somewhere.’

‘Who are you trying to fool, mian? Allaharakha is gone as well.’

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‘A man missing with his camel,’ Umesh interjects in his own voice. ‘It can only mean one thing – they’ve gone across the border. Gone without seeking Zaman’s blessings, without paying his fees.’

‘Do you know how difficult it is to cross to the other side, mian? Routes and timings have to be fixed, everything has to be arranged well in advance.

And your boy thinks he can simply stroll across like it’s a game?’

‘The tendu leaves are still here,’ Aftab protests in confusion. ‘What will he trade with if he has taken nothing?’

‘May Allah protect the fool,’ Zaman says darkly, making it sound like a curse.

Umesh makes sharp, whistling squeaks, blowing through a bamboo reed, to depict their argument, and Aftab and Zaman jump up and down comically, circling each other in a verbal duel.

It takes no great skill, this kind of thing. It can be done half-asleep, as indeed Mridul seems to be, his eyes half-shrouded, his fingers jerking the strings mechanically. I know that look only too well. That disinterest, transferred to me through lethargic fingers, is what my whole life is about in Mumbai. The dimly lit lobby of an upscale Rajasthan-themed restaurant is my stage, a single row of chairs half-filled with impatient customers, my audience. Our job is to keep them entertained, or at least distracted, till they can be seated inside. There is no dholak, nor a harmonium, just a handful of recorded tracks to which we perform.

It is usually Fatimah on stage. When there is a family or two in our transient ‘audience’, she dances to that old, benign melody Bol ri katputli.

‘Tell me, O Puppet,’ the tape recorder croons in a tinny voice, ‘to whom should your strings be tied? Who will you dance for?’

Fatimah bobs her head, one hand holding her odhni coyly to her face, then picks up the ends of her ghaghra skirts and pirouettes about the stage.

When there is a younger crowd, though – college kids, or a group from one of the nearby office buildings – Mridul will play raunchier songs from more contemporary Bollywood movies, and Fatimah will shake her hips seductively to Sheela ki jawaani or Munni badnaam hui.

As for me, I am brought on stage only when there are kids around, and made to prance and bounce about to the harsh squeaks of the bamboo reed.

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‘You’re making it happen,’ a five-year-old said accusingly to Mridul once, pawing at my strings, while his parents sat a few feet away, their fingers tap-tapping busily on the screens of their smartphones. ‘It’s not magic or anything.’

Mridul has learnt quickly enough that he only has to make an effort when someone’s watching. He leaves the music playing, but Fatimah and I lie prone on the stage while he watches muted videos on his phone using the restaurant’s Wi-Fi. Once, the doorman came up to him and hissed, ‘What are you doing?

If anyone complains, you’ll lose your job.’

In response, Mridul picked up Allahrakha’s strings, making him kick his legs, while I flailed about in the saddle, my head lolling lifelessly.

Mridul indicated the waiting customers – a group busily chatting among themselves – with a quiet laugh. ‘See, they don’t even notice when it’s the camel dancing to Sheela ki jawaani!’

There was no resentment in his voice. Kamlesh Bhat would have taken the audience’s inattention as a personal insult, but Mridul couldn’t care less.

A week has passed, and I still can’t get over the ecstasy of a hundred eyes following my every move on stage. Back in the tent that Kamlesh shares with Mridul, cocooned in the trunk, I continue to ride the wave of applause we received earlier in the evening.

‘If you want something, you ask me, you understand?’ Kamlesh’s raised, agitated voice breaks the silence. ‘There is no need to go behind my back to your uncle.’

‘At least he’s willing to listen—’ ‘Listen to what! This new nonsense about driving a taxi!’ Kamlesh’s voice trembles with emotion. ‘I put these strings in your hands even before you were old enough to walk. Someday you will do the same for your own child.

This is how it has been for countless generations. This art is our way of life!’

‘This is not life, it’s death!’ Mridul shouts back. ‘Going from one dusty village fair to another, selling tickets for . . . what? One rupee? Two rupees?

And those street performances where people slip off without dropping as much as a coin in the collection box! When will you understand, Baba?

This art is dead. It doesn’t bring home two square meals a day. Nobody

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comes to watch katputlis except in the smallest of villages. And when they get television, they’ll stop too.’

‘These very katputlis put food in your belly in that precious city of yours!’

‘I can do without that job,’ Mridul retorts. There is a pause, then, in a mellower tone, he says, ‘Baba, if you will only let me have enough for a down-payment on a taxi, there’s a lot of money in that these days—’ ‘You tell me I cannot afford two square meals a day and, in the next breath, you ask for money! Have you no shame?’

There is the sound of angry footsteps as one or the other stalks out of the tent.

When Mridul left the troupe, taking Fatimah and me with him to the city, he crossed no international borders, but ever since the rift between father and son has grown as wide as the Rann itself.

Flush with the day’s success, I wonder, for the first time, if that’s such a bad thing.

‘Aara rara rara rara ra. . . .’ Umesh Bhat’s song washes over the packed tent.

Can a clenched fist grasp a handful of sand? he asks. How, then, will an entire desert be restrained by a mere border? The shifting sands make a mockery of the prisons men build around themselves, and love slips through. . . .

We slip through, yes, but our carefully plotted path between two adjacent watch towers is off by a few metres, and, all of a sudden, the sharp sound of gunfire rips through the Rann. I spur Allahrakha to a full gallop. The sound of gunshots and camel hooves follow us in close pursuit. Then, unexpectedly, we are in the midst of a dust storm. Fighting our way blindly through the swirling sand, we stagger onward. When the dust storm dies down, we are alone in the Rann once more, the border guards nowhere in sight.

Exhausted and lost in the vast emptiness, we stumble on, step by excruciating step. It’s not the upbeat dholak but the plaintive notes of the raavanhatha that accompany our slow progress across the stage now.

My thoughts wander as the real Najab’s must surely have done. The incident in the tent last night is still playing on my mind. Never has Mridul’s rejection of me been quite so plain as yesterday when he put it into words

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himself. Yet, here at the Utsav, with my strings in Kamlesh’s hands, I can look at the whole situation with rare objectivity.

Ironically, I am perhaps the only one who truly understands Mridul. I have seen the way he looks at the city’s glittering skyscrapers, its gleaming malls, all the chrome-and-glass portals of wealth and comfort that are inexplicably, unfairly, closed to him. He craves the city’s attention much as I have craved his all this time. He is not alone. The city is full of people striving, aspiring, reaching for dreams that seem tantalisingly close, yet always just beyond their grasp. It is a true master puppeteer, the city; it has the puppets themselves fooled, even as it works their strings to some unheard melody of its own. In its crowded, roiling streets, every individual crosses his own private desert, alone and thirsty.

A new backdrop falls into place, breaking my reverie. A huddle of houses, smoke rising from chimneys. A village. I spur Allahrakha forward. Somehow, the desert has led us to our destination.

Kaley Shah, the spice seller, joins me onstage. He doesn’t look very pleased to see me. News of the lone rider crossing the border has already reached the village and the local police are on the lookout for strangers.

Allahrakha settles down on his haunches. Kaley Shah looks us up and down, his mood further souring when he sees no load tied to Allahrakha’s back.

‘You’re not a very good trader, son,’ he grunts. ‘You bring the police sniffing at your heels, and not much besides.’

Fatimah stands in a corner, her dupatta held demurely against her face.

I straighten up and look Kaley Shah in the eye. ‘You are mistaken chacha-jaan. I have come for the usual cloves and I shall pay in gold.’ I extend my hand and the thick gold bangle smuggled out of our home without Aftab’s knowledge glitters in the spotlight.

Thanks to rising demand, we have been asked to do two back-to-back shows. The second show this evening, running to a full house just like the first, is about to conclude. It has been a long day. Still, I feel the usual twinge of regret when Fatimah takes the stage alone. I would have liked to feature in the final scene. I can picture it now – Najab and Fatimah eloping into the dark night while the unsuspecting Kaley Shah sleeps; then the final,

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triumphant dash across the desert. But there wasn’t another camel-rider puppet, nor the time to make one. Admittedly, it wouldn’t make for a particularly romantic climax if Fatimah walked across the Rann while Najab rode Allahrakha.

So, it is the trusty device of the katputli dance narration that closes the show.

The dholak and harmonium accompany Umesh as he sings of fearless love, drawing elaborate comparisons with legendary pairs of lovers like Heer-Ranjha and Laila-Majnu. For Najab, Fatimah will cross the desert.

She will make her new home with him in a country so close, so familiar, and yet immeasurably distant.

It is a simple dance, with the standard katputli moves. Mridul usually takes Fatimah’s strings for this scene. But, today, he has missed the entire first show and now, at the end of the second one, he’s still nowhere to be seen. You’d think he would be more careful, given that it’s barely been a week since the row in the tent. Kamlesh takes his place once again. His face is tight with anger. From his fingers, though, you would never know it; and Fatimah dances to her heart’s content.

The lights dim and the spotlight falls on the backdrop of a rain-drenched Khavda. To this day, Umesh sings in conclusion, everyone remembers that the skies opened and ended years of drought on the day Najab brought Fatimah home.

The curtains fall and the final beats of the dholak fade away, replaced by thunderous applause.

Even inside the trunk I can sense the charged atmosphere in the tent when Mridul finally shows up, late at night. Kamlesh has been waiting up for him.

‘Where were you all this time?’ he demands. ‘How dare you not turn up for the show? Do you think this is a joke?’

‘It was just one day. . . .’ Mridul’s voice is perceptibly slurred.

‘You’re drunk. Aren’t you ashamed to come before your father like this?’

I can picture Mridul giving his casual shrug, for when Kamlesh speaks again his voice is several notches higher. ‘It’s those people you spend all your time with. One look at them is enough to know—’

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At Loose Ends

‘What I do with my time and money is none of your business,’ Mridul snaps.

There is a silence. When Kamlesh speaks, he’s struggling to keep his voice calm. ‘Look, Mridul. You wanted to go to the city. I let you go. I even used my contacts to get you that job. And now, this . . . this. . . .’ With every word, his voice gains in intensity till he is spluttering in anger. ‘Enough is enough!’ The lid of the trunk flies open and Kamlesh snatches me out. ‘I entrusted this katputli to you,’ he says, thrusting me into Mridul’s hand.

‘You must know how to handle it properly. Practise all day if you must, but you will do Najab’s part tomorrow.’

Mridul glares at me. The sheer hatred in his eyes cuts me to the core.

‘I don’t want it,’ he yells. ‘I don’t want any of this—’ And suddenly, I’m flying through the air. I hit the ground hard and skid across the rough floor, coming to a halt against the edge of the tent.

I have no idea how I got back in the trunk, but here I am in the early hours of morning when the lid opens again and a hand reaches in. It is too dark to see clearly and I’m still in a daze, but I know these fingers well. For a fleeting second, I almost believe Mridul has come for me. But the fingers continue to feel furtively around the trunk and it is not me they finally grasp. When the lid comes down gently, soundlessly, there is an empty space beneath me where the drawstring purse used to be.

Kamlesh sits on a charpoy outside our tent, holding me in his lap. The surrounding tents are empty, the central clearing devoid of life, the whole place unusually quiet, thanks to the banquet organised for artistes and artisans on the occasion of a visiting VIP delegation. Abhay and Umesh have gone as well, but Kamlesh has opted out so that he can work in private on our repairs before the evening’s shows.

There’s stuffing spilling out of my torso and one of Allahrakha’s legs is broken. Our strings are a tangled mess. But that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Kamlesh doesn’t know it yet, but Mridul is gone and he’s not coming back. There is probably a twinge of sadness somewhere inside me, but, for the moment, all I feel is relief.

Kamlesh threads a needle and begins to stitch the seam in my side.

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‘Hey, you, where is that son of yours?’

The voice startles both Kamlesh and me. For one surreal moment, I think it is Zaman come to life. Then I see the two hefty men, one sporting a menacing moustache, the other an even more menacing wooden lathi.

Kamlesh’s surprise hardens on his face. ‘How would I know? He’s a grown man. It’s not my business where he goes and what he does.’

‘Maybe so, but it’s ours. The boy owes us money. A lot of money. He was supposed to pay up today. Where is he?’

Kamlesh’s eyes widen, but he keeps his voice steady. ‘I have nothing to do with my son’s gambling.’

The man with the lathi spits, leaving a red splotch of betel juice on the ground. ‘Didn’t I tell you? He’s cut and run.’

‘Whether he’s gone or not, the father’s still here.’ The first man grabs Kamlesh by the collar of his kurta and shoves him into the tent. ‘I hear your show is doing pretty well.’

His accomplice continues casually to chew the remains of his paan as he upturns cots and empties bags, spilling clothes all over the floor.

‘Stop that!’ Kamlesh shouts, struggling against the iron grip on his collar.

The man responds by upending the trunk on the floor.

‘Don’t touch those puppets! And that money belongs to the entire troupe—’ Kamlesh stops abruptly, realising only now what I’ve known since last night.

‘Nothing here,’ says the paan-chewer, poking through the stuff strewn on the floor with his lathi.

‘Cough it up, old man.’ The moustachioed man shakes Kamlesh hard.

‘Or you won’t be doing another puppet show in a hurry.’

‘He’s taken it,’ Kamlesh says in disbelief, almost to himself. ‘All our savings—’ ‘Saala,’ the man curses. ‘The whole family is in this together.’

There is a blur of movement. Kamlesh cries out and I fall from his hands.

A foot kicks me into a corner and I cower there, trying to shut out the thuds, the curses, the muted screams.

When the men finally leave, the tent looks like a hurricane has passed through it. A few feet away, the smashed bodies of the katputlis lie scattered on the floor – Fatimah, Zaman, Kaley Shah, Aftab, all gone.

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You won’t be doing a puppet show in a hurry.

Then I see Kamlesh and realise that was not what they meant at all. He lies unconscious on the floor like a crippled puppet himself, his arms bent at odd angles. My eyes travel their battered length to the pulpy mess of blood and flesh sticking out of each sleeve. It takes me a moment to realise what I’m looking at. Battered and crushed underfoot, Kamlesh’s hands are mangled beyond all recognition.

Umesh and Abhay pack in a hurry, throwing things into bags. The Rann Utsav is over and they are here only to collect their belongings before returning to Bhuj where Kamlesh lies hospitalised, awaiting hand surgery they cannot afford. I sieve their conversation for grains of hope – there is talk of financial aid, of someone setting up a donation drive. Mridul’s name is never once mentioned.

When they are done, there is no place for me in the trunk and I am left to dangle like an afterthought from the straps of Abhay’s duffel bag. Walking towards the gates to wait for the bus to Bhuj, we see workers everywhere, taking down stages and structures, dismantling tents. I see the world collapsing around me. Soon, the tent city will be gone, vanished like a mirage.

We go through the gates and, suddenly, there it is. The Rann.

Over these past weeks, ensconced within the tent city, I have crossed the Rann dozens of times without once setting my eyes upon it. Yet, every show has brought me closer to it. I have anticipated its moods, tolerated its whims, understood its inner workings – in my mind, I have come to know the desert like a long-lost sibling.

Now, seeing the Rann for the first time, I realise how wrong I have been.

With the glare of the sun reflecting off its back with blinding ferocity, the white desert stretches away in every direction, far beyond the meagre limits of the katputli stage and a puppet’s imagination.

In its vast, terrible beauty, the Rann is truly unknowable.

The short story ‘Love Across the Salt Desert’ by Keki N. Daruwalla is included in Love Across the Salt Desert: Selected Short Stories, Penguin Books India, 2011.

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Full Everything Full Everything Sandip Roy

Sandip Roy

M

y mobile phone rang.

A man said, in Hindi, ‘Sir, this is your driver. From Lucknow.’

‘Lucknow?’ I said. ‘But I am in Sultanpur.’

Lucknow was the state capital, some three and half hours away. I was having breakfast at my ‘luxury’ hotel. It had a fanciful name like GreenView or GardenView, though the only green garden to be viewed was a ribbonlike strip of lawn in front of the hotel that looked more like a patch of bedraggled AstroTurf.

I was assured that I’d been given one of the best rooms. My ‘royal suite’ came with two slightly ratty armchairs, a couple of wobbly plastic chairs and some nondescript artwork on the walls. Their placement made me suspect they were hiding damp patches. There was a dining room that seemed to open only for breakfast, but breakfast itself came with no choices.

That day was ‘butter toast and omelette’ day. I had assumed I would get some buttered bread but I did not realise in these parts butter toast was an entity in itself – a piece of thick, slightly charred toast on which someone ladled an artery-clogging splash of melted butter from a big saucepan.

All this to say that by the time I got that call I was not in the best of spirits.

I was reporting on India’s 2014 general election, the one that would bring a tough-talking man named Narendra Modi to power. Sultanpur was a dingy, noisy town with narrow streets, filled with honking motorcycles and stray cows and donkeys eating garbage. Outside the congested lanes of the town, the country roads were potholed and meandered through villages

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with names like Teergaon and Isouli. Men here wore white turbans and women arranged their saris to veil their faces and buffalos dozed placidly in village ponds. This was what journalists always called the ‘heartland of India’. It was my first time in the heart of the heartland. Born and raised in metropolitan Kolkata, I already felt like a fish out of water here.

But this was also where the election promised the greatest fireworks. This was the region from which India’s old political royalty had stood for election for generations. Rahul Gandhi, great-grandson of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was the candidate in neighbouring Amethi. Running against him was a television star given to fiery rhetoric. Rahul’s cousin Varun, another great grandson of Nehru was the candidate of the opposition party in Sultanpur. Their fathers had also once stood in these parts.

Hospitals and petroleum institutes had popped up bearing the names of generations of Gandhis but little else for the people who actually lived here.

A little dot on the map, this region now had seven national highways thanks to its VVIP members of parliament. But it had no movie multiplex, no malls, no air-conditioned coffee shops, all part of the checklist of aspirational India. This was where that India collided with an older country where little seemed to change.

Now, as it got ready for another election, the town was filled with jeeps blaring propaganda. Candidates drove down bone-shaking rutted roads, past close-cropped brown fields and sudden green thickets of banana trees, sometimes startling a herd of nilgai antelope into flight. Agitated stray dogs chased the passing cars, barking excitedly, all the way to meetings where a local minor VIP who had been waiting for hours put a fat marigold garland around the candidate’s neck. The few passable hotels in town were all full.

My hotel’s entrance was jammed with cars mostly with licence plates from Delhi and Lucknow. Everyone wanted a local driver but the truly local ones were already booked. And that’s how I landed up with Salim from Lucknow.

Salim – that’s not his real name – was at least fifteen years younger than me. But it was quite clear very early on who was the top dog in our relationship. He needed to go shopping for underwear, he said as soon as I got in the car. ‘I did not realise this was for a week. I didn’t pack enough.’

‘What do you like to do?’ he asked me on our first day together.

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‘Sometimes I like to have a beer after a day’s work,’ I replied. This was my first time covering a big Indian election. I rather fancied myself an intrepid reporter out in the field and thought my driver, a local hand, would be my Man Friday. We could bond across class divides over cold beer and warm kebabs at the end of a hard day in the heat and dust of the campaign trail. At least that’s what I thought a correspondent’s life was supposed to be like.

Salim responded flatly, ‘I am an observant Muslim, sir. I don’t drink. I also don’t like to drive anyone home in my car who has been drinking.’

My first bonding idea just went for a toss. I was taken aback. Salim was a clean-shaven man in jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair brushed back, his teeth stained with betel nut juice, hardly the stereotype of an observant Muslim.

‘What do you like to eat?’ he asked.

‘Anything,’ I said expansively, eager to move on from my beer faux pas.

‘I like kebabs,’ I said. ‘I hear Lucknow is famous for its tundey kebabs. What’s good in this area?’ I figured that as an observant Muslim he must know his kebabs and that might be a way to break the ice. If there was to be no beer at least let there be biryani.

‘I can’t eat anywhere that is not halal,’ he replied. Salim, it turned out, didn’t even want to touch vegetables and dal in a restaurant (though in these parts we called restaurants ‘hotels’) if the kitchen also cooked non-halal meat. He told me he had a good Hindu friend who cooked wonderful biryani. But Salim would only eat it if he himself had bought the meat. On our first day together we drove for miles along dusty highways dodging trucks and cows looking for a pure vegetarian eatery that passed muster.

Starving and thirsty, I pointed at one that looked reasonably clean and served a simple menu of chicken curry and rice and dal. ‘You can eat there,’ he sniffed. ‘I’ll just wait in the car.’ We kept going.

Salim also had an MBA degree, he informed me. But he liked driving because he liked to get away. He didn’t tell me at that time from what. When I told him I had lived in America for many years, he shook his head disapprovingly. ‘They don’t like Muslims in America. America is antiMuslim,’ he said sharply. This was still Barack Obama’s America but Salim said he had read enough on the Internet.

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The campaign trail often throws up surprises but I had not reckoned on being saddled in a small town in the Indian heartland with a deeply conservative yet vociferously outspoken Muslim man who had an opinion about everything. But drivers were in high demand, much more than journalists were, and I had little say in the matter.

Though I considered myself as having had a liberal upbringing, my friends had largely been homogeneously upper-middle-class Hindus like me. India has some 170 million Muslims, second only in numbers to Indonesia. But my exposure to Muslims had been limited to their biryanis and kebabs. In the US, I’d spent two decades in San Francisco which, for all its diversity, was its own liberal bubble as well. I’d never spent a day, let alone a week, in such close quarters with a Muslim man, especially one from such a traditional family. My Muslim friends were like me, nominally religious, many of them gay. They avoided bacon but that’s as far as their religious life went. We bonded over potluck dinners and Bollywood films, often forgetting that we came from different religions. Religion played little role in our lives. I felt singularly ill-equipped to deal with Salim. If I had been a more observant Hindu, there might have oddly been more common ground of sorts. Instead, I just felt lost, my old-school secularism amorphous and fuzzy against the hard-edged contours of his faith.

The next few days with Salim were a tightrope walk. He shared fevered conspiracy theories about villainous Hindu plots and Muslim persecution in India. I nodded, occasionally demurred politely when it got too wildly fantastical but I did so nervously because he was the one at the wheel. The rallies we went to were often filled with his mirror images – Hindu patriots waving saffron flags who had come in their tractors and Bolero cars, bristling with paranoia about a ticking Muslim population bomb waiting to overwhelm India. Narendra Modi landed in a helicopter at a rally, holding up traffic for miles on the highway. A local politician who was his warm-up act read out a poem about how he would tame the Chinese dragon and teach Muslim Pakistan a lesson. A wrestler, his body painted in Modi’s party colours told me he liked Modi because he would be a strong man who would keep uppity minorities in their place. India, he said, was the Hindus’ homeland. Another man told me he liked Mr Modi because he would protect India against enemies from neighbouring countries who cut off our

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soldiers’ heads. Later as Rahul Gandhi’s motorcade passed through the streets of Amethi, a Muslim man watching asked me if it was true the media had all sold out and become anti-Muslim en masse. The religious politics of the Indian heartland are deeply entrenched, and Salim was a good example of that entrenchment. He would no more budge from his belief than he would have dinner at a random non-halal eatery. Every time I interviewed rally-goers and Salim ambled over to join the conversation, I could feel myself tensing.

But over our week together I finally started to relax around him. I stopped riding in the back seat and started riding in front with him. I even teased him about his music choices. He loved a Bollywood hit song about a four-bottle vodka habit.

Chaar botal vodka Kaam mera rozka Na mujhko koi roke Na kisine roka. . . .

I wanna hangover tonight I wanna hangover tonight (Four bottles vodka That’s my daily habit No can stop me And no one ever has.)

This was his song to start the day.

‘You don’t drink alcohol and you like this song first thing in the morning?’

I teased him.

He grinned, his teeth stained red with paan masala. That was his only vice – sachet after sachet of paan masala that filled the car with its sickly perfume.

He too relaxed around me. ‘I want to be like you,’ he said. ‘Going places, writing things. That’s the life.’

‘But you go places all the time, more than I do,’ I replied.

He laughed. ‘It’s not the same,’ he said.

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He gave me career advice. He said I needed to get into television. That’s where the action was. He offered post mortems of my interviews. He argued with eatery owners when he felt they overcharged us for a plate of dal and some hot tandoori bread. He bought me a cup of tea when I was short of change. He sometimes gossiped with other drivers and told me who I needed to interview. Sometimes he even found me candidates to interview.

‘This man works for a non-governmental organisation doing voting registration,’ he told me.

‘I don’t think I need to interview him,’ I replied.

‘But you must,’ he said, looking aggrieved. ‘I told his driver you would.

Now I will lose face.’ When I looked unconvinced, he said, ‘Just do it. You don’t have to use it.’

One night as we were coming back from yet another rally and yet another roadside dinner of dal, vegetables and roti, he said he was feeling bad about my dietary restrictions caused by his religious beliefs. ‘Next time you come to these parts, you must come to my city, Lucknow,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a friend drive you,’ he promised. ‘He will take you to bars where you can drink to your heart’s content. And we will go have the best tundey kebabs, so soft they will just melt in your mouth.’ I assured him I was doing just fine without going to a bar.

But I have to admit as our last day together dawned I was relishing the thought that I could have a guilt-free cold beer that night. Salim seemed a little pensive as he got behind the wheel. He didn’t even put on his four-bottle-vodka song.

‘I wish I could keep going with you,’ he said, as we started driving towards my next stop, the city of Varanasi, five hours away. He’d insisted he’d drop me off there though I had offered to take a bus.

‘Sir,’ he said as we sped down the highway dodging groaning trucks with their ‘Horn Please’ signs. ‘Do you have someone special in your life, a girlfriend?’

‘No,’ I said shortly. He looked at me quizzically. I was too middle-aged to be single in the Indian scheme of things.

Just to be polite, I asked him if he did, and the floodgates burst open.

With one hand on the steering wheel he told me a star-crossed ripped-fromBollywood love story. She was from a richer Muslim family but they had

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fallen in love in Koran class. They had done it all, he said much to my shock, from ‘oral’ to ‘full everything’. But when her family started looking for a husband he didn’t know what to do. Her brothers, he said matter-of-factly, had ‘done a few murders’. His own brothers weren’t too shabby either. One had taken his examinations in jail, where he was being held on a murder charge. Salim explained that he didn’t want a Montague-Capulet bloodbath. He said he’d given her a silver anklet and watched her walk out of his life.

Then he quit his job, chucked away his MBA career and became a driver to get away from it all. By the time he had finished his story his eyes were brimming with tears. A little alarmed because we were racing down the highway, I patted him awkwardly as he sniffled. He shook his head. ‘I am sure she will come back one day. That day, whether I am married or not, even if she comes with her children, that day, I promise you, I won’t let her go.’

We drove in silence for a while as I fiddled with my phone. But then I felt I had to match up to the rawness of his confession. ‘Salim,’ I said, staring straight out at the road unspooling in front of us. ‘I was not quite honest with you. I don’t have a girlfriend, it’s true. I have a boyfriend.’

‘A boyfriend? A man?’ He stared at me in silence. I wondered nervously how far we were from Varanasi in case he decided I needed to get out of his car right then and there with my bags. Then he shook his head and said, ‘I would never have guessed, sir. Chalo, at least you have someone in your life.

That’s what matters.’

He said little more for the rest of the drive. Occasionally he’d look at me and just smile reflectively. As we drove into Varanasi, where we would part ways, he remarked, ‘You don’t hurt anybody by loving someone, no? Why don’t they just let us alone?’

We parted on the banks of the river Ganga where buffalos dozed contentedly in the muddy waters overlooked by centuries-old Hindu temples. My hotel was on the water’s edge. They were sending a boat to fetch me because cars could not come up to the hotel entrance through the snaking narrow streets of the old town. Salim insisted on waiting with me until the boat arrived. As we walked around the water’s edge, he said, ‘If I come to Calcutta, will you introduce me to your friend?’

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‘Of course I will,’ I assured him. When the boat arrived, he quickly assumed a proprietary air and told the hotel porter, ‘Make sure you take very good care of this man. He is my friend.’

He did not even glance at the money I paid him. He just slipped it into his wallet. When I put out my hand to bid him goodbye, he suddenly clasped me to his chest and said, ‘You won’t forget me, will you? Save my number.’

Later that night, sitting with a much-anticipated bottle of cold beer in front of me, I called him to find out if he had reached home safely. ‘I am at a dhaba eating alone,’ he said wistfully. ‘I miss our time together, sir.’

And I realised to my utter astonishment I missed him too.

I looked at his number on the phone. To my embarrassment, I had saved it as ‘Driver’, my usual code for short-term drivers for hire. I changed it to his name and saved it. Then I drank my beer.

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Poetry

Shanta Acharya

Shanta Acharya

Swimming Reindeer After Swimming Reindeer: Sculpture carved from mammoth tusk, found in Montastruc, France and dated 11,000 BC. British Museum, London.

Slim, compact, slightly curved, carved from the tapering end of a mammoth’s tusk – a female reindeer decorated with incised lines, the male with an imposing set of antlers folded along the length of his back.

Chins up, antlers tipped back, they swim legs stretched, bodies streamlined, bones breathing unable to sleep for being alive – their pristine presence a shaft of light.

Not created for any religious ceremony, not a love charm, this sculpture with no known functional purpose conjures an image of a herd of reindeer, roaming across colourless, treeless plains in an Ice Age where time does not stand still,

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sprints like a hunter intent on surviving on an unforgiving planet.

The skill of the toolmaker turned artist – was it one or many? – evokes a vision of grace, of faces rapt in wonder, fingers chiselling, bone folded on bone, in prayer, a desire to be at home in the universe – a reaching out when nature rewired the brain and the world lit up like aurora borealis.

Flight Distance With acknowledgment to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.

Flamingos in the wild won’t mind our presence three hundred yards off.

Cross that boundary and they sense danger.

Get closer, and you trigger a flight reaction from which they will not cease until that safe distance is re-established or their lungs and hearts fail.

Giraffes will allow you to come within thirty yards of them if you are in a vehicle, but will retreat rapidly if you come within a hundred and fifty yards on foot.

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Fiddler crabs scurry if you are ten yards away.

Howler monkeys stir in their branches at twenty.

African buffaloes react at seventy-five.

Cats look, deer listen, bears smell.

Male seahorses flee, flashing a light of amber – How far or near to you am I allowed to venture?

The Dark Hours I shun your shadow as the wailing of dogs.

In the dark hours blind flapping of wings, the air fluttering wildly with a haphazard moth’s naïveté caught in the jaws of a lizard.

You eclipsed my sun in your vast shadow, cutting down my sunflower world with your rapier fingers.

Heaped on the floor I lay discoloured, your cudgelled blows of deceit convulsing:

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Feeling deep the deer against hound in my marrow.

Look stranger, you can hurt no longer.

The dappled moth escaped trembling waltz-winged.

Sometimes towards sunset I watch the embers fade my anger to indifference.

The moth shall grow wings to fly.

The sun shall open my sky.

Imagine: New and Selected Poems is published by HarperCollinsPublishers India (2017).

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Labyrinths of Memory Labyrinths of Alec Memory Ash

Alec Ash

I

met Mr Li one smoggy Beijing summer’s evening, outside a streetside noodle shop at the end of my hutong, in the city’s maze of narrow alleyways. I was eating a bowl of biangbiang noodles – a flat wide kind whose name is written with a fifty-eight-stroke character that is onomatopoeic for the slapping biang! sound they make when whacked against a kitchen counter to stretch them out. Mr Li appeared from nowhere, staring at me as I slurped self-consciously from my broth. His body was stooped and wiry, with grey hair poking out from underneath a RUDY 2008 baseball cap: presumably a made-in-China left behind from Rudy Giuliani’s misjudged presidential run (though Mr Li had never heard of him). He struck up a conversation as if he thirsted for human contact, spurred by curiosity about where I was from. ‘England is a great country!’ he flattered me when I told him. ‘The first country to have democracy!’

Mr Li grew up with the Chinese revolution. Born in Beijing in 1940, his family suffered unspeakably in the war with Japan, and his father fought for the Nationalists in the civil war that followed. Ten years after the Communists won, at the age of nineteen, Mr Li was sentenced to reformby-labour in the freezing north for a ‘bad political attitude’. Trundled from camp to camp, he was only released in 1979 when the political winds had shifted. One afternoon, in the cramped flat where he has lived ever since, he showed me his most prized possession: a single page, yellow with time, which he keeps in a clear plastic folder locked in a drawer. His rehabilitation letter, making official the restitution of his rights in a few lines typed by a

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secretary. ‘That was after I gave them thirty years of my life,’ he told me, ‘and all they gave me was this letter.’

His home was tucked deep in an alley behind a vegetable market, as if to hide its secrets behind waist-high piles of cabbage. Mr Li’s bookshelf was stuffed with banned history and politics books: one title was Death Diaries of the Cultural Revolution. He told me his wife had divorced him, that he’d had a stroke some years back and his son didn’t take care of him anymore.

But he would always return to the labour camps, to the cold and the damp.

‘They treated us like pigs,’ he said. During interrogation, they forced him to take the ‘aeroplane’ position – bent at a right-angle at the waist, arms straight back behind him – with his head held up against a heater while the guards twisted his fingers back, breaking them. ‘Mao Zedong is a murderous devil,’ he whispered.

China is a minefield of stories like this, lying around us like unexploded bombs. Most remain undisturbed, but every so often you tread on one and it goes off, reminding you of the depth of unreckoned memory that this country holds. They lie thick in Beijing’s hutongs, where residents have often lived for decades in single-storey homes packed together under a single address. Further out are high-rises for new or relocated arrivals, where the city is thin at the edges, as a pancake is spread on the skillet. But in the inner city, Beijingers like Mr Li have been here long enough to witness all the quicksilver shifts of this protean beast. And for foreigners who are passing through, we are just flies on the beast’s back, witness to a hurtling present as the past recedes ever further behind into lost memory.

Mrs Wang the widow has lived at No.19 Xiguan hutong for thirty-five years.

She’s an old Beijinger too, born in February 1951, and has been within a cabbage’s throw of the same street market for most of her life. Her childhood home was in Daxing hutong, in the same block; her primary school was in Fuxue hutong, two alleys down; her early teens were in Nanluoguxiang, back when the tourist thoroughfare was just another residential ginnel. In 1980, she married a man who owned property in Xiguan hutong (reinstated after the Cultural Revolution ended), and she worked in a small factory five minutes’ walk away, making musical instruments from flutes to French horns. When her husband died four years ago, her son moved in with his

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Mongolian wife, and she took a bedroom at the back to live out her retirement watching Chinese soaps, coddling her infant grandson, and complaining about how her daughter-in-law complains about her.

The other landlords and ladies of No. 19 – all members of the Shi family, like her late husband – live elsewhere, but Mrs Wang is an unmoving hub of the premises. The other residents change with every spin of the wheel.

There are fifteen households in the dazayuan or ‘mixed courtyard’, which bends in an L shape from the street entrance behind the public toilets just outside. Some are young Chinese graduates, living on a budget in crumbling shoeboxes with no inside loo. There is one more nuclear family, the Xis. The rest are foreigners, mostly occupying the renovated building near the front with double glazing and underfloor heating. Mrs Wang’s neighbours have variously included a Czech, a Frenchman, a Mexican, two Russians, an Estonian, and a gaggle of Americans and Brits – although I suspect it’s all the same to her.

Ever ready with a toothy smile, Mrs Wang is indulgently curious about these foreigners. She doesn’t approve that the Americans on the first floor are always bringing girls home, but otherwise finds them more polite to her than are most of the old timers in the neighbourhood. She has noticed that only she and one of the Russians keep the courtyard clean by sweeping it occasionally. When she spots the frizzly-haired Canadian coming home in the wee hours of morning, she wonders if he has been out all night, or if he in fact gets up earlier than she does. She never calls the police if there’s a late-night party. And she always stops to chat with the lanky Englishman who moved in years back, asking, with rising concern each time, how old he is and if he’s married yet.

When I arrived at No. 19 in the late summer of 2012, Mrs Wang was just another stranger in an unfamiliar land. I had lived in Beijing before – after the 2008 Olympics, I studied Chinese for two years at Peking and Tsinghua Universities in the student district – but had worked in London for the past couple of years, and on returning I found that so much of China was new all over again. I moved into Xiguan hutong on the same afternoon that I got off the Trans-Siberian train at Beijing station, having travelled overland from England, a journey that took seven weeks. I was just in time to catch the swansong of summer, and for one last mahjong game outdoors.

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My first impressions were all the colourful clichés of hutong life. The couple who sold fruit and veg at the street door, so I would have to step over a bucket of salty duck eggs to get out in the morning. The gourd melons hanging from the vine, threatening to drop and knock out unsuspecting passers-by. The pigeons circling overhead, a man on the roof across from mine signalling to them with a red flag, whistles strapped to their backs whining in the wind like a UFO. The old lady who kept a pet dragonfly tied to a piece of string, to eat the mosquitos around her. The hawkers’ cries, clanging together knife-sharpening rods and plaintively minstrelling for second-hand furniture.

Xiguan means ‘narrow pipe’, presumably after how the hutong starts off wide but tapers dramatically. Whenever a car mistakenly thought it could get through the pipe, I would silently curse it while stuck behind on my red city bike. The city outside was constantly intruding. There was a large middle school just behind my building, and the students gaped out of their windows into mine. Further down was a barracks for the People’s Armed Police, who sometimes drilled through the alleys. But on lazy Sundays, I could avoid the main street all day long and imagine that I lived in a village.

I made the effort to get my neighbours’ surnames down. The local convenience store owner was delighted at my awkwardly formal way of calling him Mr Gao, and greeted me loudly as ‘Mr Ai’ every time he was drunk, which was always.

Each day uncovered a new secret. When my landlady, who liked me to simply call her ‘Auntie’, dropped by unannounced at 8 a.m. (as Chinese landladies are wont to do), she told me about her childhood, farming wheat in north-eastern Beijing. I raised an eyebrow on discovering that she’d been a Red Guard in her teen years, and had persecuted landlords in struggle sessions. With her friends, she’d hung wooden signs over the landlords’ necks denouncing them as capitalists, and made them take the aeroplane position for hours. ‘The changes really are big,’ I trod carefully – ‘now you’re the landlady.’ But she was bewildered. ‘I’m not a landlady,’ she said. ‘I just collect your rent.’ To her it’s a social class, not an occupation, and she would always be a farmer’s daughter.

For months, I was haunted by the Peking Opera singing that came faintly through one of my walls, stirring arias floating between the construction

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drilling that is white noise for any Chinese city. On the morning of one Christmas Eve, with fresh snow on the ground, I bumped into my neighbour, old Uncle Shi, as he was taking out the rubbish in his pyjamas. I asked who the mysterious singer was. He looked at me obliquely, then broke into a piercing rendition of You and Me, the Beijing Olympics theme song, followed by Silent Night in beautiful, butchered English. Uncle Shi moved out some months after, the Russian couple moved in, and Peking Opera arias were replaced by another kind of high squealing.

Another midwinter night, winding home through the still unfamiliar labyrinth of alleyways, I came across a small bonfire on the street. Two young women fed it with old newspaper, and had chalked a circle around the open flame. I didn’t yet know about the custom of ghost days, and felt it would be intrusive to ask. I turned the corner to find another flame, and again, and an old man striking matches into the wind next to charred, dead fires.

I thought of them as cat’s eyes guiding me home. Eventually, I stopped a young man as he burnt paper money in his fire, and asked him why. ‘For the departed loved ones,’ he said. His father had passed away when he was small. I walked the last twenty yards home, and switched on all the lights.

It didn’t take long before the changes outpaced new discoveries. The cheap family restaurant at the end of the hutong transformed itself into a Korean stir-fry joint, inexplicably serving each meal with a complimentary bag of Twinings tea. A Japanese manga figurine store opened for business, and a cosplay shop opposite it, where giggles of teenagers dressed up as comic book heroines. A wine boutique open and closed within a matter of months. Even the neighbourhood sex-toy shop was converted into a flat.

Only the hair salons and migrant brothels – often the same establishment offering both services – seemed in no danger of losing demand.

Two establishments that never changed a brick were the mahjong parlour, curtained and shuttered like a front for the Mob, and the local showers, from which emerged the fleshy slaps and pops of massage and fire cupping. Opposite them was another watering hole, this one for the local foreigners. Cuju – named for the ancient Chinese sport played with a feather-stuffed ball that is not entirely unlike football – is a sports bar, rum bar and Moroccan bistro all squeezed into one, a cocktail of influences reflecting its owner, Badr. Some early mornings, while Mrs Wang was out

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buying her groceries, Americans crammed inside to watch March Madness or the World Series. I saw my first Super Bowl purely by accident, when I was going out to buy eggs for breakfast.

But the two worlds never seemed to overlap. Expats drank Negronis and vaped on the porch of Cuju, while older Chinese residents chugged Tsingtaos and sucked on Eights on the corner opposite. Sometimes the rival gangs eyed each other up, as if they were about to break into a West Side Story moment – the laowai and the laotou. There was a tangible suspicion about the influx of foreigners; the mahjong parlour installed surveillance cameras outside the week after Cuju opened. At least in those early months, I felt in the stares of my neighbours the assumption that we were outsiders who didn’t belong, as transient as the shops that opened and closed every month.

Mr Xi had been turning his home into a fortress ever since I moved in. First, he erected a steel gate outside his front door, right by the entrance to No. 19. Then he railed off the back-door staircase, to prevent others from locking their bikes to it. Finally, in the spring, he broadened his horizons by adding an extra storey (perhaps taking his cue from the famous Tang poetry lines: ‘To see a thousand-mile view / Climb a level higher’). His neighbours learned of this decision when a construction team started laying bricks, until his roof was exactly a half metre taller than my own, and blocked the once lovely scenery over the rooftops from my study window where I did most of my writing.

One morning, two very fierce looking chengguan, the urban management police, showed up. They told Mr Xi that his impromptu addition was illegal, and another team of workers tore through its roof with pneumatic drills.

Then they just left it there, for Mr Xi to take the rest down. Mrs Wang gossiped to me later that one of our neighbours must have called the chengguan since the building was blocking their sunlight. To this day no-one knows who it was. Mr Xi left the building as it was – roofless, unpainted, loose bricks lying on top of the walls directly over the street entrance – for over a year. I had half a mind to call up the chengguan to mention this, but remembered podcast host Kaiser Kuo’s advice to foreigners in China, ‘Don’t be a whiny little bitch’.

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Despite Mr Xi’s efforts to keep the neighbours out, I finally felt like I was settling in. As spring turned to summer I planted vegetables on my rooftop, and failed miserably: the pak choi was decimated by bugs, the tomatoes were scorched by the sun, the aubergines never made it out of the seed. Some mornings I did tai chi up there too, swivelling around to see hundreds of gawking faces pressed up against the school windows, underneath its Death Star–shaped planetarium. I could negotiate the labyrinth now, and became friends with our local Kuaidi delivery man. It had taken over a year, but my neighbours were finally greeting me back by name, or stopping for a chat rather than simply staring at me.

I suspect it was the mutt. James and Christina, an author and a journalist, had moved into the flat below me (we dubbed our building ‘writers’ block’).

Christina found an old stray dog on the street, flea-ridden and pitiful, and called her Ginger. They already had two dogs, Calvin and Hobbes, and I was living alone, so they deposited Ginger upstairs with me, despite my protestations that I was a cat person. Within a month I had formally adopted her, and entered a hitherto closed society of hutong dog owners, who exchanged curt nods while our pets sniffed each other’s rears in a canine yin yang. To the community, I was no longer merely a foreigner. I was a foreigner with a dog, and neither of us would be leaving anytime soon.

Between Ginger’s constitutionals and a new habit of jogging before sunset, I got to know a wider radius around No. 19. Each run excavated another new finding. The perpetually pyjama-clad Mr E and his tuk-tuk decorated with colourful stars, stuffed animals and two flags inside on weekly rotation. The pet shop owner who had fenced his store with his own paintings of classical landscapes. The old man who I thought was chirping at me until he produced a cricket from his inside jacket pocket. Another whose hobby was taking selfies of himself gurning. The lady with a pet pig bigger than her, and the hunchbacked woman who beat her dog with a badminton racket. When jogging around one block of hutongs got old, I moved on to explore the next one across, discovering hidden treasures such as a Qing-era cannon fort that is now an abandoned prison.

In Daxing hutong, on the other side of my block, is the Snail Home café.

The term originally referred to constricted urban living spaces, but Snail Home spells it a different way and has made it their own, embracing the

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hutong cramp and calling it cosy. The owner, Guo Xiaowei, was a carpenter in Inner Mongolia before he moved to Beijing, and told me he chose the name because a snail carries its home with it. Everything wooden in the café is made by him, and most nights there is live folk music. For me, it became a home away from home when my study gave me cabin fever, and I rented a desk in a back room to work in, digging my feet in for the long winter.

I counted the passing months by yellow hutong weasel sightings. The critters only come out in the dead of night or pre-dawn hours, flashing past like a gunshot, and I might see two or three a year. If they were the true long-term residents, their neighbourhood was shifting around them. At weasel number five, the stir-fry and Twinings restaurant had become a fruit stall. By weasel number six, the manga figurine store was an electric scooter shop, and Miss Muesli, a homemade granola store, had opened opposite.

The cosplay hangout became a bistro café around the time of weasel number seven. Sometimes one would get up on its hind paws and look about for a second, as if to warn us: gentrification is coming.

The foreigners came and went too, although that was as true of the young Chinese who lived in my courtyard. The Russians split up, and the sounds of Slavic coitus were replaced by a boy-band rehearsing Stand by Me and Don’t Worry, Be Happy. The Canadian moved on, as did the Czech and the Frenchman. The neighbours were changing faster than I could keep track, and each year’s summer rooftop barbecue brought new faces with it. When one new arrival in Beijing asked me about the floating fluff balls in spring, the willow catkin pollen or liuxu, I told him it was PM 2.5. Every cash-fuelled leaving party for an expat friend felt like a variation of our own ghost day rituals – burning paper money for the departed.

My neighbour Christina wrote an article about how the very aspects of hutong life that attract foreigners were off-putting to Chinese looking for more modern convenience. ‘The same old downtown area,’ she wrote of our district, ‘has become a hotspot for hipster expats . . . who ride bikes, watch earnest documentaries, do tai chi on our rooftops.’ Burn. But for better or worse, by the time my breakfast options included both doughy youtiao from the street market and custom-made granola from Miss Muesli, it was clear that Xiguan hutong had evolved to accommodate its foreign population, and wasn’t going to change back.

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A year after the roof of Mr Xi’s illegal extra storey was knocked down by the chengguan, he figured enough time had passed, hired a new team to roof and tar it over, fixed his solar power cylinders on top, and moved his mother in. He kitted out the rooftop next to it with wooden furniture, dangled vines from metal beams, grew watermelon, and put in a chicken coop. For a time, I was woken at dawn by the crowing of a rooster, who on smoggy days was confused and kept blasting until noon. By now I was used to it, and Mr Xi was used to me. He gave me the combination code to his fortress so I could lock my bike inside, and his ten-year-old son Andy waved at me when he passed outside my window.

I have lived on Xiguan hutong for five years now, and little remains. The shops still come and go, but there has been more going than coming. Cuju served its last tot of rum in September. The hair salons and hand-job shacks at the end of the street succumbed to a new campaign to clear out migrants from the city centre. Within weeks, they had been reduced to piles of rubble by construction labourers, conscious of the irony that they were demolishing the homes of migrants just like them. My local hairdresser, Mr Zhao, who had cut hair in his salon for sixteen years at twenty yuan a pop, moved back to his home province of Shandong. Even the mahjong parlour shuttered its gates, after a midnight police raid to stymie gambling. The only stalwart that has survived is the showers, from where fire-cupping and other sounds of torture still waft.

As to my neighbours, they are still here. I check in on Mr Li from time to time, who confides to a foreigner what he cannot to his society. Mr Xi has mellowed, though he is nervous about rumours that the authorities are cracking down next on illegal constructions inside hutong courtyards. Mrs Wang the widow still nags me about my unmarried status whenever I cannot avoid her. Ginger the dog died of old age last autumn; we burnt paper biscuits for her on the roof, and I remembered the first ghost day I had witnessed, each flame mourning a different departed.

Foreigners in China have always tried to romanticise the place. My go-to example is Karl Eskelund, a Danish journalist here in the 1930s (he later became famous for punching Chiang Kai Shek’s son on the nose) who wrote: ‘Peking has no tooting motorcars, no smoky factories, no ugly

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modern concrete buildings. The temples, the mysterious Forbidden City, the cosy dwelling houses with their intricate courtyards and gracefully slanting roofs, all stand today as they did when Peking was capital of the Middle Kingdom.’ Perhaps it’s that projection of an authentic past that we idealise – until we’re swept along by the authentic present, with its tooting motorcars and ugly modern concrete buildings, which is far more interesting.

When it comes to Beijing’s hutongs, I still don’t get what’s romantic about grey-painted alleyways speckled with dog poo and spit. But they do force you to be part of a neighbourhood, and to change along with it. Stay long enough, and even an outsider can become an old neighbour. Between VPN clampdowns and visa uncertainty, on a bad China day it can feel like we’re not welcome here. The government’s narrative after the century of humiliation is that foreigners only pass through China, never truly belonging. But everyone is swept along in the same flux. Like the snails, we make our own homes, and take them with us.

And when the present becomes the past at such rapid clip, it’s hard not to get nostalgic – even for Twinings tea bags with bibimbap, or cosplaying teenagers and Moroccan bistro rum-bars. But nostalgia is hard to keep up with in China. That old bar, that old neighbourhood, that old friend – memories accrue quicker than they can be processed, piling up like silt at the bottom of a swift river. You learn not to become attached, to a new place or a new person. The way we talk about last year is the way folks back home talk about last decade. Even the more unpleasant constants (rent hikes, food poisoning, smog) are almost comforting.

If to me the changes have been jolting, nostalgia-inducing after just five years, what are they to Mrs Wang after thirty-five? Or to Mr Li since his political rehabilitation? They grew up surrounded by anti-capitalist slogans; now the posters are for McDonald’s and the new iPhone. The farmland that my landlady used to tend to is now near the site of 798, a trendy modern art zone, where paintings she doesn’t understand sell for millions. One time, while chopping my vegetables for me (I wasn’t doing it right, she scolded), she told me that she missed the Mao years.

It’s a common sentiment among older Chinese, at least those of the right background who escaped persecution, and is known as red nostalgia. There is even a Cultural Revolution-themed restaurant in Beijing, far out beyond

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the fifth ring-road as if exiled to a distance deemed harmless, where waitresses perform Mao-era dances for the punters’ entertainment. Closer to home, a troupe of dancing grannies not far from where I live gather at dusk to sing red songs – such old classics as Without the Communist Party There Would be No New China – dressed up as Red Guards and carrying toy rifles, fondly remembering their rebellious youth.

The distance between fickle history and ever-moving present is stretched further with every passing year, until for many it snaps and is forgotten.

Some trumpet their memories, and in doing so alter them. Others, such as Mr Li, carry them inside like secrets that cannot be confessed. But whether one seeks connection to the past or escape from it, Beijing’s hutongs still hold those stories inside them, if only by dint of their elder residents, and can give some degree of solace to whichever outsider in today’s China seeks it. But the seeker must be warned: these alleyways of memory are labyrinthine, and it is easy to get lost.

Ten years on, perhaps the lanky Englishman will be just another memory for Mrs Wang. I like to think she’ll still be here, rooting through a box of pak choi in the market while a new batch of foreigners pass through. Much of Xiguan hutong will no doubt be different, but the kernel will be the same: a community defined by cycles of change. And some days, in the brief hiatus between summer and winter, when the first cold bites and it feels like the year has reset, there’s even a beauty to the haze of smog that disperses light evenly over the narrow grey walls and all the life squeezed in between them.

In moments like that, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.

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from A State of Freedom from A State ofNeel Free Mukher dom jee

Neel Mukherjee

W

hile trying to check the bill before settling – an old habit, inculcated by his father, of giving any bill the once-over to see that he had not been overcharged – he realised that he had lost the ability to perform the simple function of adding up the individual items and the tax that together made up the grand total. Standing at the reception desk, he tried again and again. Then he took out his wallet and tried to count the rupee and US dollar notes nestled inside; he failed. Something as fundamental to intelligence as counting was eluding him. In the peripheries of his vision he could see a small crowd gathering to look at him; discreetly, nonchalantly, they thought.

The news had spread. It was then that he broke down and wept for his son.

He had hesitated about taking the boy to Fatehpur Sikri right after their lunchtime tour of the Taj Mahal; two major Mughal monuments in one afternoon could be considered excessive. But, he reasoned, it was less than an hour’s drive and to fit the two sites into one day was the generally accepted practice. They could be back at their hotel in Agra by early evening and after an early night with the television and room service they could leave for Delhi, refreshed, the following morning. The reasoning prevailed.

When he mentioned part of this plan to the driver of his hired car, the young man, all longish hair and golden chain around his neck and golden wristlet and chunky watch, took it as a veiled order to go about the business in record time. He revelled in the opportunity to drive along the dusty, cratered slip road to Fatehpur Sikri at organ-jostling speed, punctuated by abrupt jerking into rest when impeded, and launching as suddenly into

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motion again. They passed a string of dingy roadside eateries, tea-shops, cigarette-and-snacks shacks. The bigger ones boasted signboards and names. There were the predictable ‘Akbar’, ‘Shahjahan’, ‘Shahenshah’, a ‘Jodha Bai’, even a ‘Tansen’, which was ‘100% VAGETARIAN’. There had been a speed-warning sign earlier: ‘Batter late than never.’ Not for the first time he wondered, in a country given over to a dizzying plenitude of signs, how unsettled their orthography was. A Coca-Cola hoarding adorned the top of one small shop, the brand name and shout line written in Hindi script.

‘Coca-Cola’, the boy said, able to read that trademark universal wave even though he couldn’t read the language.

‘We can have one after we’ve done our tour,’ he said, his mind occupied by trying to work out if another order to the driver to slow down to prevent the boy from being car-sick would be taken as wilfully contradictory; he worried about these things. The boy seemed subdued; he didn’t move from the bare identification of the familiar brand to wanting it. Ordinarily, he would have been compulsively spelling out and trying to read the names written in English on shopfronts and billboards. While he was grateful for his son’s uncharacteristic placidity, he wondered if he hadn’t imposed too much on a six-year-old, dragging him from one historical monument to another. He now read a kind of polite forbearance in the boy’s quietness, a way of letting him know that this kind of tourism was wholly outside his sphere of interest but he was going to tolerate his father indulging in it.

After a few questions at the Taj Mahal, which began as enthusiastic, then quickly burned out into perfunctory – ‘Baba, what is a mau-so-le-um?’, ‘Is Moom-taz under this building?’, ‘Was she walking and moving and talking when Shajjy-han built this over her?’ – they had stopped altogether. Was it wonder that had silenced him or boredom? He had tried to keep the child interested by spinning stories that he thought would catch the boy’s imagination: ‘Do you see how white the building is? Do you know that the emperor who had it built, Shahjahan, had banquets on the terrace on full-moon nights where everything was white? The moonlight, the clothes the courtiers and the guests wore, the flowers, the food – everything was white, to go with the white of the marble and the white light of the full moon.’ The boy had nodded, seemingly absorbing the information, but had betrayed no further curiosity.

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Now he wondered if his son had not found all this business of tombs and immortal grief and erecting memorials to the dead macabre, unsettling.

His son was American, so he was not growing up, as his father had, with the gift of ghost stories, first heard sitting on the laps of servants and aunts in his childhood home in Calcutta, then, when he was a little older, read in children’s books. As a result, he did not understand quite what went on inside the child’s head when novelties, such as the notion of an order of things created by the imagination residing under the visible world and as vivid as the real one, were introduced to him. He made a mental note to stick to historical facts only when they reached Fatehpur Sikri.

Or could it have been the terrible accident they had narrowly avoided witnessing yesterday at the moment of their arrival at the hotel? A huge multi-storeyed building was going up across the road, directly opposite, and a construction worker had apparently fallen to his death even while their car was getting into the slip lane for the hotel entrance. As they waited in the queue of vehicles, people had come running from all directions to congregate at one particular spot, about twenty metres from where they sat in their cars. Something about the urgency of the swarming, and the indescribable sound that emanated from that swiftly engorging clot of people, a tense noise between buzzing and truculent murmuring, instantly transmitted the message that a disaster had occurred. Otherwise how else would the child have known to ask, ‘Baba, people running, look. What’s happening there?’ And how else could the driver have answered, mercifully in Hindi, ‘A man’s just fallen from the top of that building under construction. A mazdoor. Instant death, bechara.’

He had refused to translate. He had tried to pull his son back from craning his neck, but as the queue of cars moved, and their vehicle moved forward, through a chance aperture in the hive of people around the death, he saw, for the briefest of flashes, a patch of dusty earth stained the colour of old scab from the blood it had thirstily drunk. Then the slit closed, the car started advancing inch by inch and the vision ended. He saw his son turning his head to continue to stare at the spot. But had the boy really seen the earth welt like that, or had he just imagined it? There was no way he could ask him to corroborate. Worries came stampeding in: had the child seen it? Was he going to be affected by it? How could he establish if he had,

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without planting the idea in the boy’s head? All of last night his mind had been a pincushion to these sharp questions until he had fallen asleep.

They returned now, summoned by the boy’s unnatural quietness. By the time they got out at Agra Gate, having shaved all of ten minutes from the journey, the boy was looking decidedly peaky, and he felt that his own lunch had risen in rebellion, to somewhere just behind his sternum. The driver grinned: there was just the right touch of the adversarial in the gleam of self-satisfaction.

More than twenty years of life in the academic communities of the East Coast of the USA had defanged him of the easy Indian ability to bark at people considered as servants, so he swallowed his irritation, even the intention to ask the driver to take it more gently on the journey back, in case he couldn’t control the tone and it was interpreted as a peremptory order. Instead, he said in Hindi, ‘We won’t be more than an hour.’

The driver said, ‘OK, sir,’ nodding vigorously. ‘I will be here.’

He checked the car to see if he had taken everything – a bottle of water, his wallet and passport, the guidebook, his small backpack, his phone, his son’s little knapsack – then shut the car door and held out his hand. The boy’s meek silence bothered him. Where was the usual firework display of chatter and fidgety energy, the constant soundtrack of his aliveness?

He knelt down to be on a level with the boy and asked tenderly, ‘Are you tired? Do you want to go back to the hotel? We don’t have to see this.’

The boy shook his head.

‘Do you want a Parle’s Orange Kream?’ he asked, widening and rolling his eyes to simulate the representation of temptation in the advertisements.

The boy shook his head again.

Behind him, on a grass verge, a hoopoe was flitting across. He said, ‘Look!’ and turned the boy round.

The boy looked dutifully but didn’t ask what it was.

‘It’s a hoopoe. You won’t see this bird in New York.’ He supplied the answer gratuitously.

The boy asked, ‘Is this a moss-o-moll-lom?’

‘No, sweetheart,’ his father laughed, ‘it’s not a mausoleum. It’s a palace.

You know what a palace is, don’t you? A very good and powerful king lived here. His name was Akbar. I told you about him last night, remember?’

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‘That was Shajjy-han, who built a big big marble stone on his wife and she died and he was very sad and cried all the time.’

Every time he spoke, the American accent made his father’s insides go all squishy.

‘No, this is different. Akbar was his grandfather. Come, we’ll look at it.

It’s a different colour, see? All red and brown and orange, not the white that we saw earlier.’

They passed some ruined cloisters, then a triple-arched inner gateway, solidly restored and, slightly further from it, a big domed building that was awaiting restoration work. Touts, who had noticed a man and a small boy get out of the car, descended on them.

‘Guide, sir, guide? Good English, sir. Full history, you won’t find in book.’

Not from one voice but from an entire choir.

Beggars with various forms of crippledness materialised. From the simplest pleading, with a hand repeatedly brought up to the lips to signify hunger, to hideous displays of amputated and bandaged limbs, even an inert, entirely limbless, alive torso laid out flat on a board with wheels – this extreme end of the spectrum of human agony filled him with horror, shame, pity, embarrassment, repulsion but, above all, a desire to protect his son from seeing them.

How did all these other people drifting around him appear to be so sheathed in indifference and blindness? Or was the same churning going on inside them? Truth was, he felt, he was no longer a proper Indian; making a life in the plush West had made him skinless like a good, sheltered first-world liberal. He was now a tourist in his own country; no longer ‘his own country’, he corrected himself fastidiously. He suppressed the impulse to cover the boy’s eyes with his hands and said impatiently, ‘Sweetie, can we move a bit faster, please.’ It came out as a command, the interrogative missing.

Men came up with accordions of postcards, maps, guidebooks, magazines, photos, toys, current bestsellers in pirated editions, snacks, rattles, drinks, confectionery, tinsel, dolls, plastic replicas of historical buildings, books, whistles and flutes. . . . He kept shaking his head stoically, a tight half-smile on his lips, and ushered his boy along.

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The child, distracted one moment by a tray of carved soapstone figures, then another instant by a flashing, crude replica of an inflatable Superman toy, kept stalling to stare.

‘Baba, Baba, look!’

‘Yes, I know. Let’s keep moving.’ He was so relieved – and grateful – that the cheap toys had diverted the child’s attention away from the suppuration and misery that he almost broke step to buy one of those baubles.

That small manifestation of interest was enough. The loose, dispersed assembly of touts and peddlers now tightened into a purposeful circle.

‘Babu, my child is hungry, hasn’t eaten for four days.’ The shrivelled girl with matted hair in the woman’s arms looked like the living dead; she had no energy or will to swipe at the flies clustering on a sore at the corner of her mouth.

‘Here, look, babu, babu-sa’ab, look. . . .’ A button was pressed and a toy came to mechanical life, emitting tinny games-arcade sounds of shooting guns as it teetered forward.

A man came up uncomfortably close and, with the dexterity of a seasoned cardsharp, fanned open a deck of sepia prints of famous Indian historical buildings and temples. A picture of a naked woman appeared and disappeared so quickly that it could well have been the prestidigitator’s illusion.

He was shocked; didn’t the man see that he had a small child with him? Or did he not care?

The surrounding gardens, well-tended by Indian standards, shone in the white-gold light of the January afternoon, yet, looked at closely, all that riot of cannas and marigolds and manicured grass lawns could not really disguise their irredeemable municipal souls. There was the typical shoddiness – straggly borders; lines that could not keep straight; a certain patchiness to the planting, revealing the scalp of soil through the thinning hair of vegetation; the inevitable truculence of nature against the methodising human hand . . . and underpinning all this amateurish attempt at imposing order and beauty he could feel, no, almost see, what a battle it was to keep the earth, wet and dark now, from reverting to red dust in the obliterating heat of the Northern Plains in the summer. He bought tickets and entered the great courtyard of the Diwan-i-Am. The world transformed – in the burnished gold of the winter afternoon sun, the umber-red sandstone used

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for the whole complex at Fatehpur Sikri seemed like carved fire, something the sun had magicked out of the red soil in their combined image and likeness.

He looked at his son, expecting to see a reflection of his own wonder on the child’s face, but all he could discern in that mostly unreadable expression was . . . was what? Boredom? Across another courtyard, all blazing copper in the light, lay the palace buildings. He backtracked to consult the map etched on to a stone block towards the entrance, but with no reference point to indicate ‘You are here’ he felt confused.

While retrieving the camera and the guidebook from his backpack, he said to his son, ‘Stay still for a moment, don’t run off. We’ll go to all those beautiful little palaces, do you see?’ By the time he had slung the camera around his neck and opened the guidebook to the correct page, he could tell that the boy was itching to run across the courtyard. He tried to keep an eye on him while skim-reading the relevant page. Yes, he had found it – this must be the Mahal-i-Khas, the private palaces of Akbar. His head bobbed back and forth, like a foraging bird’s, from page to surrounding environment. When he had established beyond any doubt that the two-anda-half-storeyed building on the left, which had a touch of incompleteness to it, was Akbar’s private apartments, he caught hold of his son’s hand and made to enter the building.

But he had been spotted leafing through the travel-guide, his hesitation and momentary lostness read shrewdly. A man materialised behind him and began to speak as if he was in the middle of a talk he had been giving: ‘The recesses in the ground floor that you will see were meant for his books and papers and documents. . . .’

He wheeled around. The sun caught his eyes and dazzled him. All he could make out was a dark, almost black, sharply pointed face, a human face on its way to becoming a fox’s; or was it the other way round?

‘If you go up to his sleeping chamber, the khwabgah, on the top floor,’ the man continued, ‘you will see fine stone latticework screens along the corridor leading to the women’s quarters, the harem. These jaalis protected the women from the public gaze as they went back and forth from the khwabgah.’

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The man spoke with practised fluency. If he was trying to advertise his skills as a guide to get hired, then there was nothing in his manner or his speech that betrayed this purposive bent. If anything, he seemed almost oblivious of his presence and his child’s.

The sun had blinded him so he turned his head away, both to face his son, whom he was afraid to let out of his field of vision for any duration, and to signal to the man that he was not going to be needing his services.

The buildings that lay in the slanted shade were an earthen matt pink.

Elsewhere, the red sandstone that caught the sun burned a coppery-gold.

When he turned around to see if he had shaken off the tout, there was no one to be seen.

In the rooms on the ground floor of the emperor’s private quarters he was held by the flaky painted decorations depicting flowers and foliage; these faded ghosts still managed to carry a fraction of their original life-spirit. They had been touched up, restored, but with a brutal mugger’s hand. From the vantage point of the courtyard, the interior had looked poky and pitch-dark and he had wondered about the smallness of the chambers and, correspondingly, the physical stature of those sixteenthcentury people: did they have to huddle and stoop inside? Was it light enough to see things in there during the daytime? Why were there no doors and windows? What did they do for privacy? And then, the crowning question: did he know just too little about the architectural and domestic history of the Mughals?

Now that they were inside, the idea that the rooms were cramped somewhat diminished but the feeling that they were, or could be, dark, remained. Was it something to do with his vision, or from having just come in from the brightness outside? He blinked several times. The interior seemed to shrink, expand and then shrink again, as if he were in the almost imperceptibly pulsating belly of a giant beast. In the pavilion at the top, where Akbar used to sleep, faded frescoes, nibbled away by time with a slow but tenacious voracity, covered the walls. But the fragments seemed to be under some kind of wash; a protective varnish, perhaps, but it had the effect of occluding them under a milky mist. A winged creature, holding an infant in front of a cave in a rock face, looked down at him from above a doorway.

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It looked as if it had been assembled from large flakes of once-coloured dandruff. His heart boiled against the cage of his chest.

‘Baba, look, an angel!’ the child said.

He closed his eyes, gripped his son’s hand, turned his face away, then back again and opened his eyes. The angel continued to stare at him. There was intent in those eyes, and even the very first touch of a smile in those delicately upturned corners, as if Persian artists had brought forth a Chinese angel. He shut his eyes again; the face of the fox-guide, accompanied by shifting confetti-links of floaters, flickered across his retina.

Outside, the courtyard, large enough to be the central square in a city where the crowd congregates for the beginning of a revolution, held scattered groups of colourfully clothed visitors. The spiky phalanx of red cannas blazed in their plots. A square stone platform, bordered by jaalis, rose from the centre of a square rectangular pool, filled with stagnant water, virulent green with algae. Four raised narrow walkways, bisecting each side of the square, led to the platform. The musical rigour that the Mughals had brought to the quadrangular form struck him again; he riffled through his guidebook to read something illuminating about this pool, Anup Talao.

‘Baba, can we go to the middle? There are lanes,’ the boy said.

‘I don’t think we are allowed to,’ he said, then tried to distract him by summarising the few lines on the feature: ‘Look, it says here that musicians used to sit in the centre there, on that platform, and perform concerts for the emperor and his court.’ After a few beats of silence, he added, ‘Wasn’t that interesting?’, hearing his own need to keep the boy engaged fraying with exhaustion.

‘Why aren’t we allowed to?’

‘Well,’ he thought for a second or two, ‘if people were allowed in, we would see a lot of tourists here walking in and out, posing on the platform, taking pictures . . . but there’s none of that, do you see?’

It was better outside – the relative darkness inside had, oddly, unnerved him. But the pressure of tourism was relentless, bullying. Surely they hadn’t come all this way to stand in the sun and look at pretty buildings from a distance, when they could be inside them, poring over the details, going into every room of every palace, absorbing what the guidebook had to say about each and then re-looking, armed with new knowledge?

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In the strange and beautiful five-storeyed Panch Mahal, each ascending floor diminishing in size until there was only a small kiosk surmounted by a dome on top – eighty-four, fifty-six, twenty, twelve and four columns on each level, respectively, his guide told him – arches between columns took the place of walls and he had been glad of the light and the breeze that came in unimpeded.

Outside once again, he noticed the squares marked on the courtyard, with a raised stone seat at the centre of the regular cross formed by the squares, and pointed them out to his son. ‘Do you see the squares in the four directions, making the four arms of a big plus-sign?’ he asked, tapping a few with his feet and indicating the rest with his pointing hand, ‘Here, and here, and this . . . do you see?’

The boy nodded.

‘Show me the plus-sign then,’ he asked.

The child danced around, stamping on each square, repeating his father’s ‘Here . . . and here, and this one. . . .’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Do you know what they are for?’

‘This square has X on it, and this one,’ the boy said, jumping on each of them.

‘Yes, so they do. Do you know what these squares are doing here?’

The boy shook his head and looked at him expectantly.

‘This is a board game, like Ludo or chess. It’s called pachisi. Instead of having a small board at the centre, which is surrounded by a circle of a few players, they had a big one marked out permanently in this courtyard.’

His son stared silently, as if digesting the information.

‘But do you know why it’s so big? I mean, so much bigger than a Ludo or a chess board?’ He was hoping the child was not going to ask what Ludo was: why should the ubiquitous board game of the endless afternoons and evenings of his Calcutta childhood mean anything to an American boy?

That worn question of his son’s disconnection with his father’s culture reared its head again, but weakly. He pushed it down, easily enough, and offered the answer to the question he had asked, by reading an excerpt from a nineteenth-century book quoted in his travel-guide: ‘The game of pachisi was played by Akbar in a truly regal manner, the Court itself, divided into red and white squares, being the board, and an enormous stone raised on

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four feet, representing the central point. It was here that Akbar and his courtiers played this game; sixteen young slaves from the harem, wearing the players’ colours, represented the pieces, and moved to the squares according to the throw of dice. It is said that the Emperor took such a fancy to playing the game on this grand scale that he had a court for pachisi constructed in all his palaces. . . .’

Again, that expression of wide-eyed nothingness on the boy’s face. He explained the quotation slowly, in simple words, pointing to the squares and the stone seat, to spark some interest in the boy.

The child’s face lit up for an instant. He hopped from one square to another, then another, finally sat, cross-legged, on one of them and chirped, ‘Am I a piece in this game?’

‘You could be,’ he laughed.

‘What will happen when you throw the die? Will my head be chopped off? In one clean stroke?’

Before he could answer, a voice behind him intervened sharply, ‘Get that child out of that square!’

He wheeled around. It was the man with the face of a fox. His eyes glittered. The moustache looked animal too.

‘Don’t you know it’s bad luck to have children sit in these squares? Do you know what happened here? Don’t you know the stories?’

He was sufficiently annoyed by the man’s hectoring tone to protest: ‘Show me a sign that says children are not allowed on this board. It’s part of the courtyard, anyone can walk on it. And who are you, anyway?’

‘Look around you – do you see any children?’

Almost involuntarily, he turned around: to his right, the extraordinary symmetry of the detached building of the Diwan-i-Khas; behind him, the jewel-box of the Turkish Sultana’s house; and in the huge courtyard on which these structures stood, not a single child to be spotted. All those colourfully dressed tourists he had seen earlier seemed to have vanished.

There were one or two to be seen standing in the shapely arches of buildings or colonnaded walkways, but there was no one in the courtyard and certainly no children. Incredulous, he turned a full circle to be sure he had let his gaze take in everything. No, no children. The man too was gone.

There was a sudden, brief vacuum in his chest; then the sensation left.

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‘D-did you see the . . . the man who was just here? Where did he go?’ he asked his son.

The boy shook his head.

‘But . . . but you saw him speaking to me, didn’t you?’ He was nearly shouting.

‘Speaking? What?’ the boy asked.

Of course, the child wouldn’t have understood a word; the man had been speaking in Hindi.

‘B-but . . . but. . . .’ he began, then that futility was inside him again, making him feel weightless.

He extended his hand to his son and caught the warm little palm and fingers in his grip and wanted to hold on to them to moor himself and at the same to scrunch them, so fierce was the wave of love and terror that suddenly threatened to unbalance him. He took the boy and ran into the Turkish Sultana’s house but was blind to the ways craftsmen had made every available surface blossom into teeming life with dense carvings of gardens, trees, leaves, flowers, geometric patterns, birds, animals, abstract designs.

At another time he would have been rooted to the spot, marvelling, but now his senses were disengaged and distant and all he saw was the frozen work of artisans and their tools. In one of the lower panels, the heads of the birds of paradise sitting on trees had been destroyed. An animal, crouching below, had been defaced too, making it look much like the lower half of a human child, decapitated in the act of squatting; it brought to mind ritual sacrifice. A small thrill of repulsion went through him. The mutilated carvings had the nature of fantastical creatures from Bosch’s sick imagination; left untouched, they would have been simply beautiful. Then the dimness started to play havoc with his perception. Shapes and colours got unmoored and recoalesced in different configurations. It was like discovering a camel smoking a pipe, formed in clouds in the sky, shift and morph into a crawling baby held in the cradling trunk of an elephant, except there was no movement here, no external change of shape to warrant one thing becoming another.

He forced himself to read a few lines from the relevant section of his guidebook but they remained locked too; signs without meanings. He asked

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his son, ‘Do you like what you see? Can you tell me what these are?’ He couldn’t make the words come out animated.

The boy shook his head.

‘All right, let’s go look at something else.’ No amount of beauty could counter the permanent twilight of the interiors.

The baize-table lawns and the begonia shrubs radiated light like a merciless weapon. A ripple passed through the blazing froth of bushes, as if the vegetation was shuddering at his presence. Almost dragging his son along, he ran towards a small, perfectly formed building, standing in the flag of shade that it flung on the pied stones of the courtyard. Mariam’s House, the guidebook said. It was the colour of something that had been sluiced indelibly in blood in its distant past. Under the stone awning three-quarters of the way up, the ventilation slots – surely they were too small to be windows? – looked like blinded eyes, yet the house gave the effect of looking watchful. It struck him then, suddenly, a feeling that the walls and stones and cupolas and courtyards were all, as one organism, watching him and his son.

And something was: another angel, this time above a doorway. Barely discernible through the slow, colourless disappearing act that time and the well-intentioned but wrong kind of preservative varnish had together enforced on it, it still managed, through some inexplicable resurrection, to fix him with its eye. It was like looking into the face of ancient light transmitted back from the beginnings of time.

He took hold of his son’s hand to return to the car, moving as fast as having a six-year-old physically attached to him would allow. The larger half of the site remained unvisited; he had had enough. The very air of the place seemed unsettled, as if it had slipped into some avenue where ordinary time and ordinary circumstance did not press against it. Then, with rising anxiety, he knew what was going to happen next, and it did. From the dark inside of a square building, the fox-man came out and stood under the domed canopy of a platform at one corner of the building. He could see the man so clearly, so close, that it was as if all the distance between them across the courtyard had been telescoped into nothing. Then the man retreated into the dark again. He had known the exact sequence of events beforehand, even known the bending of distance that would occur, known

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that the platform on which the man had stood was called the Astrologer’s Seat even though he had not visited that section of the palace quadrangle.

He felt himself pursued by the place as they ran out, retracing the route through which they had made their way into and through the palace complex.

While waiting for the car, he dared to look up: the sky was an immense canvas of orange and red, not from the setting sun, it seemed to him, but from the red sandstone that burned, without decaying, under it. Everything was ablaze.

On the road back, a huge, slow procession of shouting men, hundreds and hundreds of them, coming from the direction in which they were travelling, stalled all traffic. The car windows were rolled up instantly; the protestors were within touching distance. The vast, crawling snake seemed to be an election rally, although he could not tell – the posters were all in Urdu, a language he couldn’t read, and he couldn’t make out a single word amidst the shouting of slogans. They could have been in an utterly foreign country.

The boy had his nose pressed to the window; he had never seen anything like this.

‘We just have to wait until it passes, right?’ he asked the driver. A pointless question. The driver shrugged.

Time in this country flowed in a different way from the rest of the world.

It was the flow that had carried him a long time ago, when he was a boy, growing up in Calcutta, but now he could no longer step into it: he had become a tourist in his own country.

The rally seemed endless. Occasionally, it stopped altogether. After forty minutes of sitting inside the car, the driver said, ‘They’re moving.’

A brave taxi up ahead had decided to cut through a narrow lane on the left – a dust-and-straggling-dead-grass path, really – with the hope of rejoining the main road at a point further up where it would already have been traversed by the rally. Like mechanical sheep, cars started leaving the main route and entering this side-lane. Their driver was quick – he manoeuvred the car sideways with manic energy and was into the path before the rush to get in there created total gridlock. But he was still behind a few vehicles and the juddering stop-start stop-start stop-start movement

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down an unmetalled alley was the modern equivalent of running the gauntlet. Soon they came to a complete halt. The procession, well behind them, still seemed to be in full spate, but at least they were now not in the flow of something volatile and unpredictable.

He must have dozed off. The next thing he knew was a shadow blooming inside the car at the same time as he heard a timid pattering on the window next to the boy. A bear, standing on its hind legs, was looking in, its muzzle almost pressed to the glass. There was an irregular patch of mist that changed shape in rhythm to the animal’s breathing. Its pelt was a dark slate-grey shag-cushion of dust and tiny insects and bits of straw and grass. Up close, the hairs looked coarse and thick, somewhat like the quills of a hedgehog.

Behind him, a man extended his arm forward and tapped on the glass with his black fingernails. The child pushed back on the heels of his palms and moved backwards, trying to burrow into his father’s lap, but couldn’t turn his fascinated head away. The man outside looked eerily familiar – he had the sharp, pointy face of a rodent’s and a moustache that seemed alive. Surely he must be dreaming? They were still in the country lane, and the terracotta late-afternoon light had turned to ashy dusk, but that . . . that man at the car window. . . . He felt that the spinning of the earth carried him like dice in the slot of a roulette machine and delivered him to destinations that were endlessly repeatable, each ever so slightly different from the other, all more or less the same.

Encouraged by the unblinking gaze of father and son, the bear wallah tapped on the glass again, and made a shallow bowl of his palm to beg.

Those glittering, scaly eyes indicated a sickness that would finish him soon.

Inside, he was too frozen even to shake his head in disapproval. At a signal from his keeper, the bear lifted its paw and replicated the human’s begging gesture. The chain, attached to the animal and run through the space between two of its fingers, obliged clinkingly. He saw the head of a huge iron nail driven through the paw – or was it a callus? The claws at the end were open brackets of dirty gunmetal. The paw could easily smash the window, reach in and tear out the child’s entrails. He tried to ask the driver to shoo the man away but no sound emerged from his throat. He tried again.

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‘Driver, ask them to move on,’ he said in a kind of low rasp. He couldn’t bring up his arm to mime ‘Go away’ to the beggar.

The driver lowered his window and barked, ‘Ei, buzz off.’

The man paid no heed; the begging from both creatures continued.

Presumably at another signal from the man, the bear nodded, then grinned.

Where it met the teeth, the gum was a bright pink but further up the colour of cooked liver with a violet tinge. There were sticky threads of saliva gleaming whitely against all that dirty ivory and raw flesh. Then the animal started shaking, as if it was having a malarial fit. The boy screamed, once, twice.

He shouted, ‘Driver, why isn’t he going? Ask him again, now. Ask!’ The driver complied, his command issuing more forcefully this time.

The traffic unclotted. As the car moved to life, the pinning gaze of those scaly eyes receding backwards seemed to have become a solid, unfrayable rope. Then motion and the gathering dark severed it.

The boy coughed all night and kept him awake. Occasionally, he cried out in his sleep loudly enough for him to turn on his bedside lamp, get out of his bed and go to his son’s to see what was wrong, to soothe his nightmares away.

Towards the end of the night, the child woke up with what he could only call a howl and continued to cry with an abandonment that brought back to mind the inexplicable and seemingly endless runs of crying during infancy. He couldn’t establish now if the boy was still lodged in his world of dreams during this fit or whether something in the real world, colic or feeling ill or an onset of some sickness, was making him scream like this.

Questions had yielded nothing.

Should he ring for room service and ask for a doctor? Surely a hotel of this class would have access to one? The boy’s forehead and neck were not hot.

‘What is it? Tell me, what is it?’ he asked over and over again, reaching the edge of anger on the other side of his helplessness.

Then, a tiny chink in this wall of repetition: ‘I feel afraid,’ the boy managed to articulate.

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He bobbed afloat on a swell of relief. ‘Afraid?’ he asked. ‘Afraid of what?

There’s nothing to be afraid of, I’m here with you. Here, I’ll sleep in your bed, my arms around you. Everything will be all right.’

But the child wouldn’t stop. He caught something in his son’s gaze, a brief focusing of his eyes on something behind his shoulder, as if he had seen something behind his father, something that made him wail louder, before the focus dissolved.

He turned his head to look. There could be nothing outside the wall of windows – they were on the sixteenth floor of the hotel. The dark glass reflected back at him a dramatically lit-and-shadowed scene of his staring face, twisted around on the stalk of his neck; his son lying on the bed with his mouth open in a rictus of horror and pain; the white bed linen twisted and roped and peaked in the great turbulence that was being enacted upon it; the whole tableau shading off into the darkness that framed it. As his vision moved away from that sharp chiaroscuro foreground of the reflection, he could see, in the refracted light from the hotel grounds, the skeleton of the skyscraper on the other side of the road. On the very top few floors, he could make out the scaffolding – was it still the bamboo-and-coir-rope of his childhood or had they moved on to something more reliable and advanced nowadays? – and the billowing pieces of sackcloth or plastic or whatever it was that the workers had set up there. He wondered, not for the first time, what purpose those sheets served. A safety net, perhaps? They had certainly not prevented one of them from meeting a terrible end yesterday.

By the early hours, not far off from dawn, his son exhausted himself to sleep. He drifted off too, one arm around the boy. The light woke him; he had forgotten to draw the curtains in the night. Next to him, the child was dead.

Excerpted from the novel A State of Freedom,with kind permission of Penguin India.

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Poetry

John Mateer

John Mateer

from João On another day in Macau the poet was nearing A-Ma Temple.

Actually, he was stopped outside a Macanese restaurant, was contemplating the menu, wondering if he had ample time for lunch. One of the approaching passers-by can’t be Weinberger of Manhattan. . . ? There’d been a poetry festival in Hong Kong. Indeed, beside him: Gary Snyder, Bei Dao! They were going for lunch. Would João like to join them? He can’t remember the food, but João has, verbatim, some of the poets’ conversation.

Unfortunately, clearest when Snyder asked if he was Australian and he answered, ‘Do you want my passport?’ mistakenly and terribly brusque. João regretted that.

Yet Snyder afterwards, outside the restaurant, in the talk of farewell, smiling: ‘Real great to meet you here, on the Macau sidewalk!’

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The two Americans were debating civilisation, whether, as Weinberger had proposed, there ever was a great era for poetry without the era also being sensational for those angels, as João’d once nominated translators, those close-listeners. Snyder was proposing one counter-example after another, and Eliot, his long-time friend, true New Yorker, was dismissing each. Bei Dao, seemingly of even fewer words than his rare poems, had, maybe, in mind what he would later say: that Macau, always a haven from Greater China, free, was still an island of gamblers, prostitutes, poets, Portuguese, for those who no longer know how to go home. . . How could he, exiled, justify his new Hong Kong life, teaching bored spoilt students who don’t even read? This he would confess to João.

There are those old colonial cities peopled as if by ghosts, smugglers and poets, where chance meetings can lead to friendships, initiate chronicles, where hostesses in karaoke bars, possibly in silk brocade dresses, pull aside curtains to reveal, in a black suit, Carlos, who is immediately talking about Indian saints, Pessanha and reading Burton’s 1001 Nights.

Or where his friend, Anabela, insists João visit the Venetian Casino, ‘Because this is Macau!’ in the Thai restaurant where, at the end of their night, the Pinoy ladyboys go to sing and drink. Loud, festive, differently haunted, that restaurant’s scene reminds João of how little he really knows about the world. In that crowd, his innocence shows.

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The Angel Tiger The Angel Tiger B arr ie Sherwood

Barrie Sherwood For he counteracts the Devil, who is Death, by brisking about the Life.

– Christopher Smart

G

eoff spent the first two years of his life watching traffic from the windowsill of our Ang Mo Kio flat. When we moved to a house backing onto the forest of the Macritchie Reservoir, we kept him inside, afraid that he’d get one whiff of the great outdoors and disappear forever.

One Friday evening though, when we went onto the patio for a beer, he slipped out.

I went to grab him but Justus said, ‘Wait, let’s just see what he does.’

Geoff sniffed his way around the glass railing and when he came to the stairs leading down to the grass, he lowered himself to the deck and watched the trees in the garden. Ruffled by the breeze, his ginger fur glinted in the sunlight and I knew I wouldn’t have the heart to keep him inside anymore.

Still, when it looked as if he were about to venture down the stairs, I snatched him up. ‘That’s about enough excitement for one day,’ I said.

The next morning Geoff was waiting at the kitchen door. We took our coffees outside and Geoff did the tour of the patio again, and we let him go down the stairs to explore the garden, shaking his paws as he walked through the wet grass. Ours was one of the few places with a cast-iron fence instead of a solid wall around the rear garden: all he had to do to get to the forest was step through, but he seemed content for now to explore beneath the pomegranate and the frangipani. We watched him until we got bored, and around noon he came to the kitchen door, meowing to get back in.

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The same thing happened on Sunday: I let him out just before eight and he came back in the early afternoon.

Monday morning, as we were getting ready for work, he was meowing to get out again. Justus made eyes at me over coffee. ‘We’ve set a precedent, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. I’m done by noon all this week.’

So we let him out, and when I came home that afternoon and opened the back door, he was sitting on the patio looking up at me. In front of him was a bird.

I wasn’t sure how to react. I didn’t want to congratulate him. For a mouse or a rat, OK, but not a bird. He sat there as if it were some sort of offering.

Was I meant to accept it? I guessed it was a starling. It was black and glossy and, something I’d never noticed before, faintly speckled up close. The red eyes were kind of eerie. It was dead. No saving it. Geoff meowed and walked past me, headed for his bowl. I picked up the starling with a piece of kitchen towel and buried it beneath the pomegranate.

I told Justus about it at dinner. ‘It was just lying there at the back door.

I buried it in the garden.’

‘Well, well! So he’s not been entirely domesticated.’

‘Hopefully he’ll take an interest in snakes,’ I said.

That night we watched the news, then half of some American reality show about a cake shop before Justus started kissing my neck and we went upstairs to bed.

When I came home on Tuesday afternoon, Geoff was waiting for me at the back door again. Between us were two birds. He sat there behind them as he’d sat behind the starling, looking up at me for a reaction before walking inside.

One of the birds was a sparrow, its legs stiff with rigor mortis. The other was a young bulbul, still all in grey, his black and white and yellow yet to emerge from the fluff. There was no blood. Not a mark on either of them.

They looked like museum specimens. I buried them beneath the pomegranate and then went looking for Geoff. I found him curled up in my open underwear drawer, right in the midst of my panties and Frou Frou bras.

‘Two birds, Geoffrey? You think you’re clever.’

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He yawned, blinked, went back to sleep.

When Justus got home he was impressed. ‘Two?’ ‘I think we’d better keep him inside now,’ I said. ‘Singapore hardly needs our help getting rid of its wildlife.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘but it’s not unnatural. I mean, it is what his species has evolved to do.’

‘House cats are not native predators,’ I said. ‘He may be acting on instinct, but that doesn’t mean we have to stand by and let it happen.’

He shrugged. ‘Couple of birds. Just a fluke.’

That night, we didn’t last long in front of the television. Justus and I had been trying for over a year. The first time either of us actually wanted sex to do what it was meant to do, and it didn’t. In the past year we’d been strategising our love life. For a few months it was all about denial. No alcohol, coffee, eggs, kaya, chocolate, bacon, Pepsi. No excess fat or sugar at all. Lots of pickled beets and exercise. Then, when that didn’t work, wild abandon. Smoked salmon eggs Benny. Oysters on the half-shell at Jaan.

Dancing at Sky Bar. Making love like we were shooting a porn flick. Making love so drunk neither of us could remember it.

Then, when that didn’t work, another Spartan routine. The move to a real house seemed like a step in the right direction; those empty bedrooms were a statement of purpose.

On Wednesday Justus called me at two on my mobile. I asked if there was something wrong.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just had a moment of downtime.’

‘And you thought of me?’

‘Yes. And the car.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Is it still making that sound?’

‘No.’ ‘Good. Oh, and did Geoff catch any more birds?’

‘Three,’ I said.

‘You’re joking.’

‘Do you want to see them? You can take over burial duties from now on.’

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When Justus came home he put the birds – another starling, another bulbul, and an olive-backed sunbird – into a brown paper bag. I went inside to make some dinner while he buried them near the fence.

When I came back to the doorway of the patio, Justus was sitting on the deck chair, his knees up, staring at Geoff sleeping beneath the other chair.

He was on his back, his white belly all on show, front paws held up, his den of woven rattan making leopard spots of scumbled sunlight on his fur. I could tell he was thinking – Justus, that is. His gaze went from hard and critical to something more like admiration to a kind of smile. Then he looked over and saw me. He reached out for my hand.

‘What a lazybones he is,’ I said, coming out to join him. I sat on the arm of his chair and he put his elbow on my thigh, palm on my knee. Together we watched the cat.

‘He’s mesmerising,’ Justus said.

‘Mesmerising? I’ll admit he’s pretty.’

‘Nah, that’s not the word. He’s got tiger in him.’

I watched an oriole pecking at fruit in the neighbour’s palm.

‘That sleep,’ Justus said after a while. ‘No human knows a sleep like that.

The only thing close. . . .’

‘Yes?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, talking to himself as much as to me. ‘It’s a kind of selflessness. That’s not the right word. It’s absolute fulfilment of purpose.

What human being ever feels that way?’

I kissed him on his balding crown. ‘I never thought you were such a cat person.’

After dinner, Justus lay on the sofa watching sports highlights on TV: football, tennis, basketball, cricket, golf. They all looked so simplistic.

Cricket, for instance. The dedication it took to master one trick: how to hit a bouncing, spinning rubber and leather ball with a special curved stick.

You could spend twenty years practising it, just this one thing. Their white trousers and shirts were laughable, but I didn’t think Justus would see the humour. I went to the kitchen, took my things from the fridge and did my toenails with pink varnish.

It wasn’t long before Justus came in. ‘I love the smell of this stuff,’ he said, getting down to kiss my ankle and behind my knee.

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‘Mmm, that’s nice,’ I said.

‘Nice? A back rub is nice.’

‘It’s very nice.’

I went for a run afterwards. Justus called his mum.

‘Say hi to your dad for me,’ I said.

I thought about Geoff while I was running. What if we put him out at night instead? He’d sleep all day and hunt all night and maybe he wouldn’t come back with birds. Bats and snakes and shrews, maybe, but surely no olive-backed sunbirds. Then again, he’d also be hunted himself. There are owls, cobras, eagles and reticulated pythons in the Macritchie Reserve. I could just imagine a yellow python with a Geoff-shaped lump in its mid-section. I’ve seen two big pythons while out jogging in the morning.

And I mean big. One of them was crossing Thompson Ridge Road and there was a moment when I couldn’t see its head or tail. Think about that for a moment.

Thursday morning, Justus made me promise to wait. He’d come home early and we’d look together.

‘You didn’t check, did you?’ he asked once he’d pulled in.

‘You only asked me to wait for you three times.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’re in this together.’

We crept up to the back door as if we were breaking in instead of stepping out. I hung on his shoulder as he twisted the knob.

Geoff waited a moment, as if giving us time to count, then slipped past us with a mrrgrknao.

It was as if they’d been arranged, all the heads aligned in the same direction.

‘Good god, is that a parrot?’

Justus crouched and picked it up. ‘Red-breasted parakeet,’ he said. ‘What kind of cat catches a parakeet? I mean, they fly at, like, fifty miles an hour and hardly ever come out of the canopy.’ There was also another starling, an oriental white eye and, even more of a surprise than the parakeet, a nightjar. ‘They’re good and dead,’ Justus said.

I glanced over at the neighbours’ yards – I didn’t want them thinking poachers had moved in next door. ‘This has to stop, Justus.’

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‘Well, yeah, obviously. There has to be a limit to the birds one cat can kill in a day.’

‘I mean we have to stop it.’

‘The curve’s got to hit a plateau.’

‘At what? Even one bird a day is too much. How can we just stand by and witness this wanton destruction?’

‘What does wanton even mean?’

‘It’s in our power to save these creatures and we aren’t doing it.’

‘But how do we know any more are actually going to die? We don’t know.

Tomorrow isn’t yet wanton destruction. For the moment, it’s still wanton chance.’

‘Why take the chance at all?’

He looked back at the birds. As with the previous ones, none of them looked injured; they could have died of coronary complications. Justus turned them over. ‘You’d think the feathers would be ruffled or the wings broken or something,’ he said. ‘He must be really good, you know? He must get them by the throat and snap their necks.’ He picked up the white-eye but the neck didn’t really droop. ‘Or maybe he just holds them until they suffocate.’

‘I don’t want to think about it,’ I said.

That night we went out with friends to Clarke Quay and got light on our feet and when we got home we didn’t even make it to our bedroom, having sex against the kitchen counter, laughing, talking dirty, breaking things left and right.

‘Mnn you are so good,’ Justus said.

But I did. I did think about it. I lay there awake, under the cool wash of the air-con, and thought about the unlikelihood of the coincidence. The cat and us. This flurry of . . . activity. I tried to dismiss it, the idea that they were related, but if they were linked, and the cat couldn’t maintain the pattern, where would that leave us? Back where we had been before, heading towards the kind of marriage you read about in magazines at the hairdresser.

We’d had some tests done recently at Raffles Hospital but they were inconclusive. That’s what the very well-paid doctor said. So we said lots of reassuring things to each other, though we’d yet to get to the point at which either of us said: ‘What matters is that we love each other.’ Because neither

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of us was quite sure if that was true. If he knew I would never get pregnant, would he stay? If the fault were his, would I? Neither of us was ready to pitch us against dreams of family.

Geoff woke us at seven, scratching at the back door to be let out. The moment he was awake, I could see Justus was intent on the one thing. I followed him downstairs. Part way across the kitchen, Justus got down on his hands and knees. He crawled towards the cat, meowing, then kneeled and put his hand on the doorknob. He turned to look at me and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, well?

‘It’s irresponsible,’ I said. ‘He’s not going to go from four to zero.’

‘How do we know? What sort of knowledge has either of us got? We’re in totally uncharted territory here.’

‘We know he doesn’t need those birds to survive,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t make the slightest effort to actually eat them. He knows he’ll get his fill of probiotic cat food.’

‘Do you think that’s it? Maybe we’ve fed him something that’s turning him into Geoffzilla. Geoff the Ripper.’

‘Geoffrey and Hyde,’ I said.

‘Geoffrey Lecter. So what if he does bring back five today?’ Justus said.

‘Isn’t it kind of wondrous? And we’re witnessing it. Together.’

Geoff stared at us, his disdain for conversation total, his gleaming gold eyes daring us to deny him his right.

That morning at school I couldn’t concentrate. Geoff might come back with five birds. Or one. Or none. He might come back with a gecko. He might come back with five geckos – and what would that mean? I tried looking in the class material for something that would contextualise the situation and found too much. We were doing le subjonctif: ‘a verb tense used when expressing want, emotion, doubt, possibility, necessity, or judgment.’ Yeah, nothing relevant there, then.

Usually I have a nice lunch at PS Café with Linda and Xin Yi on Fridays but I begged off and went home. I told myself that if Geoff did make it to five, something, at least, would be complete. Relationships were made of these sorts of building blocks. Legends. There would be something there to take solace in, to take inspiration from. It was something for a rainy day.

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I heard Geoff meowing at the back door the moment I stopped the car.

(Strange how he would never come to the front of the house.) I didn’t try to make it any more dramatic than was necessary. I went straight through to the kitchen and opened the back door. Geoff slipped inside, sniffed at his bowl, then continued down the corridor. I opened the door wider and looked out.

The patio was empty.

Now it was my turn to kneel. Staring at the smooth plane of sanded and varnished boards where nothing lived or died. A space with two chairs facing one another, one for a him, one for a her.

Now there would be something in our past forever left incomplete. An anecdote. Good for five minutes at a party.

I went to answer the phone before I even knew it was ringing. I realised half-way there who it would be. And less daunting than what he would ask me was already knowing what he would want to hear.

I crept up on and peeked at the display. Sighed. A number I didn’t recognise. A man started talking at me about vehicles and portfolios and hedges and performance. Some investment group that got our number when we first arrived in Singapore and wouldn’t give up. I’m very polite with cold-callers as a rule. There but by the grace of God go I, right? But this time I just removed the receiver from my ear and gently placed it back in its form-fitted depression. It made the softest of clicks. I didn’t feel bad about it at all.

I started for the kitchen and the phone rang again.

Now there was no escape. I should never have picked it up the first time.

‘Hi Sweetie,’ I said.

‘Well? Have you checked?’

The chair next to the console table – a Bedermeyer his parents gave us – was not so staid that, on this occasion, it could not be of use.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I checked.’

‘And?’ ‘I think you’d better see for yourself.’

‘Really.’

There had been nothing in my tone of voice to suggest one thing or the other, but there was no doubt how Justus understood me.

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‘What kind?’

‘You’ll have to see for yourself,’ I said.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘It’s unbelievable.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s unbelievable.’

‘It’s amazing. Right, I won’t be home until around six. Don’t move them, OK? Love you.’

‘I love you too.’

This was new air I was breathing, the ions all aligned with my deceit, colder than our Panasonic Multi-Airs could ever manage. I wandered back to the kitchen, my eyes watering. I knew it was stupid. It was all a storm in a teacup. There was nothing there one way or the other. Just a cat and some birds. Cat or no cat. Birds or no birds. We were still the same people.

But I couldn’t make myself believe it. Neither of us had ever needed convincing of anything. Neither of us had ever worked to keep our relationship healthy. Now it would take effort. We would be like other perilously balanced couples, teetering and tottering, reeling into the future.

Geoff strolled back into the kitchen to his bowl and hunkered down over it.

I took him by the torso and lifted his front paws off the ground and looked him in the eyes. ‘Why? Why didn’t you just finish it? How can you go from four to zero?’ I carried him out the door and down the stairs. I dropped him on the grass next to the bushes. ‘Go on.’

He stretched and looked up at me.

‘Go on. Go!’ He slipped past me and bounded back up the stairs.

‘Damn it! Geoff!’

In the garden next door, the maid looked up from the laundry she was hanging out. As if to mock me, a koel in one of the jambu trees let out a shriek.

I got my car keys and wallet from the console.

Down Yio Chu Kang Road, where it meets Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3, the ground floor shops of one of the apartment blocks form what they call Pet Street. There are shops devoted to fish and dogs and cats, various rodents and reptiles and, at the corner, three bird shops. Each one is fronted by cages seven or eight feet high, all of them full of budgies and love-birds and

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parakeets and dozens of other ones I can’t name. I parked and walked straight down Pet Street, through the dim panic beneath the awnings drawn low to keep out the afternoon sun. I stopped where two white parakeets on a head-level perch eyed me. As if they knew already what I had come for.

But they needn’t have worried. There was no need to be extravagant. I stepped inside.

Two aisles, three rows of cages. A countertop to my right. A woman’s blue face looking up from a phone.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I – think I’d like to buy some birds.’

She stood and put the phone down. ‘What kind?’

‘Some different ones, I guess. How much are these?’

‘Munias?’ She came out from behind the counter. ‘Thirty dollars each.’

I walked down the aisle, looking at the other cages. Thirty dollars seemed about the average for birds that size.

‘Need to be together this one,’ she said. ‘Not alone.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll take three.’

‘Three ah?’

‘Yes. And two of these.’

‘Canaries.’

‘Is that what they are?’

‘Canaries.’

‘Do they come from here?’

‘From here?’

‘Are they native?’

She laughed. ‘Not indigenous. They’re from Canary Islands.’

‘Oh. Of course.’

‘You want indigenous? Yellow? How about sunbird?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Perfect. Two please.’

Goldfish are easier to transport than birds. Though it might have made things easier for me, she was not going to put my bird selection into a plastic bag and tie a knot at the top. They have cages that they let out for a deposit, but I couldn’t risk taking the time to bring it back, and I couldn’t risk Justus seeing it either. ‘I just live up the street,’ I said. ‘Up at Rosyth Road. Can’t you just put them into a box for me?’

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Her watery eyes behind their lenses would not admit to understanding my request.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘It’s just up the road.’

‘Traumatise the birds,’ she said. ‘Could die.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I mean, they’ll be fine. It’s only a short way.’

‘These ones don’t get along.’

What are they going to do, I thought, peck one another’s eyes out? But I had to wait as she went to the back for two white boxes. Then she reached into the cages and caught the birds with a deftness that belied her doughy forearms and myopic eyes.

‘You want this one? Or this one?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

She put them in the boxes and closed the lids.

‘Have you got a plastic bag?’ I asked.

‘Bag?’ she shrieked. ‘Bottom one got no air.’

‘All right, all right.’ I paid in cash, declined the receipt, and drove home with the birds in the trunk, thinking about the next step. I pulled into the carport and the gate rattled closed behind me. The birds were silent. They hadn’t let out a chirp since they’d gone into their boxes. Maybe they’d had heart attacks already.

Some hope.

I slapped my thighs and got out of the car, willing myself to act. I carried the boxes inside and set them on the kitchen island. Geoff came in pat. He stopped at the doorway, lowered himself to the floor, his eyes on the boxes, as if he already knew what was inside.

‘Scat! Get out of here!’

He scurried down the corridor.

I sat down and looked at the boxes. Then the clock. Less than two hours before Justus came home.

How did one go about it?

I had to do it gently. There couldn’t be a mark on them. I found myself staring at the microwave and repressed a shudder. Full power for, what, maybe ten seconds? Was that enough? Twenty? A minute? But what if something popped? Like an egg? And what about the munias? The box was too big to fit inside. I’d have to throw them into the microwave to be zapped

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one at a time. I thought of them flapping around in there, shitting all over as their insides were being cooked. It made me want to retch.

Nothing could induce me to microwave a living thing. I was not going to become the kind of person who was capable of doing that. Could I kill five birds? Yes, I could kill five songbirds for a good enough reason. I was already complicit in the deaths of innumerable chickens, ducks, pigs, cows, lambs, slipper lobsters, shrimps, salmon, boars and three-hundred-pound tunas. And on one occasion, in France, a horse. On another, more regrettable occasion, in Japan, a whale. For what, each time? The nutritional value that would sustain me for half a day. What were five more birds? What was the difference between this and going to the Fair Price to buy five frozen Brazilian chickens? At least this wouldn’t be turning a blind eye. At least this was taking some kind of responsibility. Maybe it would be a step forward in some way.

The freezer. How long would it take them to die? But what if they weren’t fully dead? What if they came back to life, revived in the warm air outside or in Justus’s hand? That might be beautiful, I thought, a beautiful moment, but not likely. With only two hours, what if they were still cold? What if he picked them up and they were still frozen? How was I going to explain that?

I had a momentary vision, more troubling even than the microwave, of me upstairs in the guest bedroom smothering birds beneath a pillow.

Ziploc, I thought. One bird per bag. I could put the bird inside and quickly press down to evacuate the remaining air before sealing it. Yellow and Blue makes Green.

I had tugged five bags from the box before something else came to mind.

Canaries. In a coal mine. Carbon monoxide. I took a rubbish bag from the cupboard beneath the sink and put the big box of munias in first, then the canaries. Still there was no sound from either of the boxes. I got a roll of duct tape from the bin of tools Justus kept under the stairs and went outside for one of the short lengths of hose piled with the garden tools under the deck.

The exhaust pipe of the car was still hot but I taped the hose to it, put the other end in the bag with the boxes and sealed that with duct tape too.

I put the key in the ignition and started the engine. It took seven, eight,

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nine seconds before the rubbish bag was full as a balloon, a big black balloon.

I killed the engine and the balloon stayed inflated, only gradually subsiding after more than a minute. I waited three minutes to be sure. If only the birds had been noisier I might have known when the thing was done.

Three minutes. It had to be enough.

I unwound the tape, put the duct tape and hose back where I’d found them and carried the boxes to the back door. I listened for any movement inside. There was a faint smell of something like almond essence from them, but nothing more. The lid of the first box came up and away easily. It was like opening a box of pastries from Tiong Bahru Bakery. But inside, instead of an éclair, were the bodies of the sunbirds, their citron breasts and metallic blue wings as lustrous in death as they had been in life. Then came the munias. I laid them all out in a row on the patio. Then I put one box inside another and ran them back out to the green bin.

I was drained. I turned on the air conditioners in the living room, dropped my skirt and my blouse and flopped onto the sofa. I closed my eyes and was immediately in a dream. I found a man who was Justus. I was so happy. I’d come a long way – I’d come for what seemed like years through a forest – stumbling down from the hills into a city of bazaars and then a garden with a pavilion tent like in some illustration from the Divan of Hafiz.

I lay down on the cushions and he came to me naked, his skin painted blue in some kind of ceremony. When the pavilion tent merged with the living room, I found it really was Justus there, grinning, his eyes alive, and my hands were on his hips, guiding him, urging him on.

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Paper Alien Paper Alien Wen Yourou

Wen Yourou translated by Polly Barton

I

don’t own a car, and I don’t plan to acquire one any time soon. Living in Tokyo as I do, I find that some combination of trains, buses and my own two feet always gets me where I need to go. If and when the occasion calls for it, there’s never a shortage of taxis around, and so it’s never crossed my mind that being car-less puts me at a disadvantage in any way. Whenever I do get into a car these days – not a taxi, but a regular, private car – the event takes on a slight sense of occasion.

But just a few days ago, your car-less author received a postcard from the Licence Management Division of the Police Department Driving Licence Headquarters. ‘Notification About Your Upcoming Driving Licence Renewal,’ the title read.

As it happens, I do actually have a driving licence. In the photograph, I look slightly deranged. It’s hard to think of the idea that I’m legally permitted to drive as anything but a bad joke.

I was in my third year at university when I decided it would be a good idea to get my licence. Get it now, I thought, and it will definitely come in handy further down the line. In fact, the use for it I had in mind was not as something that qualified me to drive a vehicle, but as a watertight form of ID. Years later, I am now the proud owner of that wondrous object, the Gold Licence. The reason I’ve been bestowed with this honour, signifying a faultless driving record, is that since passing my test I have not made physical contact with a single steering wheel. It stands to reason that I wouldn’t have had any accidents or violated any regulations.

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In Japanese, the expression used for people like me is paper drivers: people who are qualified drivers on paper, and on paper alone. By law, paper drivers like myself are allowed to have a driving licence with their photograph on it – so long, that is, as they keep on renewing it every few years.

And so I hand over the renewal fee at the appropriate desk in the Driving Licence Renewal Centre, have my photograph taken as instructed, and am then directed to the conference room where I will attend the compulsory lecture on road safety. The room is lined with rows of metal chairs, but with about twenty minutes remaining before the lecture starts, there are only a handful of people in the room. I take a seat in the back row. Since it’s a weekday, it seems unlikely that the lecture room will get too full. Nonetheless, someone with fiercely erect posture has taken a seat in the very front row. His hair is light brown. He must be young, I think. Still, that’s a very laudable attitude, going straight for the front row. As all this is going through my mind, the man turns his head and I see the long, straight line of his nose, the deep contours of his face.

Ah, it’s a foreigner, I think immediately. Then I catch myself, and the ridiculousness of my own thoughts comes back round to strike me. After all, I remind myself, so am I. It’s not something I go around thinking about much from day to day. In fact, it’s fair to so say that most of the time, I’m oblivious to the legal fact that in Japan, I am a foreigner.

I look down at my Alien Registration Card on the desk in front of me, with my name, my date of birth and my nationality printed on it. Just minutes before, I’d handed this card, issued to me by the district office in the area where I live, to the clerk behind the renewals desk. Glancing repeatedly between the card and her computer screen, she’d typed something into the computer. The procedure took less than a minute. Then she handed me a long, narrow slip of paper.

‘Could you please check this for any mistakes?’

I looked down at the slip of paper to see the words: Name: Wen Yourou Nationality: Chinese

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‘No, no mistakes,’ I said, but my voice caught a little in my throat. The woman promptly handed me back my Alien Registration Card.

On my Alien Registration Card, too, my nationality appears as Chinese.

Of course, the slip of paper had been created by directly transposing the information from said card, so I could hardly complain that the Chinese part was a ‘mistake’. First and foremost, you won’t find the nationality ‘Taiwanese’ on official documents issued by the Japanese government – it just doesn’t happen. Japan doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the nation of Taiwan and, accordingly, all Taiwanese people residing in Japan are deemed to be of ‘Chinese’ nationality. (Owing in part to the valiant attempts by Taiwanese residents of Japan and the supporters of their cause who have protested about this, it is now possible for Taiwanese people to have their nationality listed as ‘Chinese (Taiwan)’ if they so desire.) And yet still, it feels weird to me to see it written there, right beside my own name.

Chinese or Taiwanese: of the two, Taiwanese definitely feels closer to the truth. But there is a problem antecedent to that one. The fact that I own an Alien Registration Card at all is in itself hard to stomach.

So it’s true, I felt as I looked down at it. I really am a foreigner.

In fact, it was all because of this licence-renewal rigmarole I went through periodically that I’d first started carrying my Alien Registration Card around with me in the first place.

Back then, instead of this renewal centre where I am now, I set out for the so-called Driving Licence Test Centre in Samezu, Shinagawa. Yet, despite the name of the facility, it wasn’t a test I was going for but a renewal, my first renewal – and so I made my way there with a spring in my step.

At the reception desk, I stated my purpose. The woman behind the counter ran her eyes across my licence and said, ‘In that case, could I see your Alien Registration Card?’

‘Sorry?’

At first, I literally couldn’t understand the words she was saying to me.

The clerk lifted her head and repeated the instruction, slightly more slowly.

‘Please show me your Alien Registration Card.’

I panicked.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I’d need it. I haven’t got it on me today.’

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There wasn’t anything remotely intimidating about her manner – in fact, if anything, she seemed almost apologetically kind.

‘I’m afraid you can’t renew your licence without your Alien Registration Card.’

As I hung my head, she leant in and added, ‘You do know that foreign residents are legally obliged to carry their Alien Registration Cards with them at all times. . . ?’

She wasn’t blaming me. It was her duty to pass on the correct information – that was what her tone of voice said. I lifted my head. Her expression had grown slightly pained. I looked at her and opened my mouth to ask, ‘Why do I have to?’ but, at the last second, I swallowed back the words.

This had been just before my twenty-fourth birthday.

So where was my Alien Registration Card, then? The truth was, my mum kept my and my sister’s cards safely stored away, together with our passports, because ‘losing them would be a real headache’. Until that day, the Alien Registration Card had belonged in the same mental category as the passport for me: an important document you weren’t supposed to take out of its place of safekeeping unless strictly necessary. Thus, the idea of carrying it around with me like my student ID had never even occurred to me – because losing it would be a real headache. And now I’d been told it was something I had to have on my person at all times. As with most things in life, I was sure that I wouldn’t get to the bottom of things by asking my mum, so I started researching the situation for myself.

According to the Alien Registration Act #125, 1952, foreign residents aged sixteen or over are legally required to carry their Alien Registration Cards on their person. Those found violating this rule are liable to be fined up to 200,000 yen (or 100,000 yen for those granted special residency status under Act #71, 1991.)

1952, the year the Alien Registration Act was passed, was also the year of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. As a result of this treaty, a number of people (mainly Taiwanese and Koreans), who had previously been deemed Japanese citizens by law, ‘lost’ their citizenship. In other words, the Alien Registration Act was a law to help establish rules for keeping control of the sudden glut

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of people who were no longer deemed Japanese citizens, and had instead become foreign residents.

To make things worse, until 1993, those foreign residents were forced to carry their fingerprints on their Alien Registration Cards.

‘I had no idea,’ I found myself whispering, and my voice cracked again.

The phrase maintaining public order popped into my mind. I remembered, too, the words of the woman back at the test centre: ‘You do know that foreign residents are legally obliged to carry their Alien Registration Cards with them at all times. . . ?’

What had risen up in me back then was sheer rebelliousness. I wanted to look that woman in the eye and ask her point blank, Why do I have to carry it around with me? It was an almost reflexive response.

The truth was, I had no knowledge on the subject whatsoever. Until that point, I’d never even thought about trying to find out more. In fact, I couldn’t even remember applying for my first one. I guess my parents must have told me to do it, and I’d followed instructions – exactly as I’d done when renewing my passport. I’d never once suspected that I was engaging in an obligatory act that would ensure I was permitted to carry on living in this country. In our family, the Alien Registration Card paperwork was a kind of ritual which we performed every few years.

Thinking about all this, I began to wonder what my parents felt when they applied for or renewed their cards, so I approached them about it and asked them. My mum looked completely at a loss for words at my question.

Impatiently, I prompted her: didn’t she feel reluctant in some way to submit to it? She looked me in the eye and asked, completely straight-faced, ‘But why?’

Then, cutting off the answer I was in the process of formulating, she continued, ‘It’s just the rules, right?’

And that, of course, was the truth of the matter. In order to get by in Japan as foreign nationals, both my mum and my dad had gone about simply abiding by the rules they had to abide by.

‘Yes, but, the law propping up those rules was brought in so as to keep control of foreigners, you know!’

But even my indignation didn’t succeed in bringing my parents around.

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‘Why on earth are you getting so heated up about it?’ my mum asked.

She genuinely seemed to find my reaction bizarre.

It seemed possible that my words had touched something in my dad, though, and he wasn’t as dismissive as my mum. Instead he offered, with absolute composure, ‘It’s not just Japan, you know. Every country has to do something along those lines in order to protect its citizens. Taiwan is just the same.’

At his words, I fell into silence. There was no denying that, just as he had said, many countries around the world required foreigners to carry identification on them when they were out. Maybe such a situation could even be called the norm. I recalled the way I’d behaved back at the test centre, and the troubled expression on that woman’s face. Was it me that was ‘mistaken’ in all of this?

For the record, the rule-breaking I’d been guilty of for all these years hadn’t been deliberate. Though I was well past the age of sixteen, it had somehow slipped my mum’s mind to hand my card over to me. In fact, it seemed more likely that age had nothing do to with it – that, as I myself did on a daily basis, my mum had managed to forget that her own daughter was an ‘alien’. And she wasn’t the only one – my dad also viewed me and my sister as being entirely at home in Japanese society. I’d been on the cusp of turning twenty when I’d overheard him proclaim to a Japanese acquaintance, ‘My wife and I are from Taiwan, but our daughters are both Japanese.’

Until then, I’d had no idea he thought that way, and the discovery had a big impact on me. According to my mum, my dad believed that his two daughters were living free and happy lives in a foreign land (Japan) and that was a fact about which he felt a good deal of pride. But what significance did Japan have for my dad, then? In the beginning, I suppose, it couldn’t have been anything other than a strange country where he’d been posted for work. Yet as the days and months had elapsed, he must have gradually come to think of it as his daughters’ nation.

Oh yes, my daughters are Japanese – but really, Dad? Staring down now at the card on the classroom table in front of me, I objected: if I were really Japanese, I wouldn’t have to carry this thing around with me wherever I went.

I’m a foreigner, I reminded myself again. I’m an alien.

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By the time the lecture was due to start, there were about fifteen people assembled in the classroom – and a real mixed bunch they were. There were young men who looked like students alongside women in their forties. One young mother had brought her toddler tottering into the room with her.

There were a few suited men who must have come straight from the office.

I guessed that at least some of them must have been real drivers – people who actually drove vehicles, and not just paper drivers like me. And yet they’d still managed to get away with no violations or accidents. It was impossible to tell who were the real drivers – about as hard, I suppose, as it would be to single me out as a foreigner.

I’m pretty sure that most people who pass me on the street assume I’m ethnically Japanese. The same goes even when they hear me speaking.

Unless I reveal the truth of my origins, people have no reason even to imagine I might not be Japanese. And yet by law I am, beyond any shadow of a doubt, a foreigner in this country.

To me, the fact is about as strange and faintly absurd as the idea that I can actually drive.

By law – which is basically the same as saying, on paper. In other words, I am not only a paper driver – I am also a paper alien.

My daughter’s Japanese, my dad had announced with great certainty. But I couldn’t go proclaiming that about myself with such assurance. If I were ever made to say I’m Japanese, I’d be overtaken by the feeling that I was lying.

Ah, but my non-Japaneseness only exists on paper! I’d say, resolving privately to laugh the situation off in that way. But the reality was, I found that the task of ignoring what the paper said entirely was beyond me. It might just have been a line of letters printed on a piece of paper – paper that the wind could have blown away – but they could still set my real, flesh-and-blood feelings into disarray with astonishing ease. Where did it come from, this hold that they had over me?

In that case, why don’t I just become Japanese on paper, too? I try to picture this eventuality, over and over. If my nationality really were Japanese, would I then be able to proudly declare myself a Japanese citizen? Even if I could, the sense would still linger with me that I hadn’t been Japanese from the beginning. Even if I acquired Japanese citizenship, I would never forget the fact that I was actually Taiwanese. Why should I have to forget it? I can’t

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speak for what will happen in the future, but at the moment I have no plans to return to Taiwan. If possible, I’d like to live out the rest of my life as a Japanese person who also happens to be a Taiwanese person. That’s why I want to maintain my Taiwanese nationality.

Strangely enough, just a few days after I’d renewed my driving licence, I received a letter from the district office. I opened the envelope, which had the words ‘Contains Important Documents’ emblazoned on it in red, to find two separate sets of folded papers. I reached first for the thicker one, and spread it out in front of me. The letter informed me that on 9 July 2012, the Alien Registration Act had been abolished, and an amendment made to the Basic Resident Registration Act. (When I checked this out later on the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications website, I discovered that, with the numbers of foreign nationals entering and residing in Japan increasing every year, the decision had been taken that municipal offices should offer foreign residents the same administrative services as those available to Japanese citizens.) As a result, the letter announced, ‘foreign residents could now be issued a Certificate of Residence’.

A Certificate of Residence? I felt my heart rate start to rise a little. I’d never had one until now. Of course, whether or not I was permitted to own one of those slips of paper, I still ‘resided’ in Japan. It was nothing but a sequence of words on a piece of paper. I hurriedly unfolded the thinner piece of paper to find a letter detailing the information that would be featured on my Certificate of Residence: Name: Wen Yourou Alias: None Date of Birth: 14 May 1980 Nationality/Region: Chinese Residence Status: Fixed Resident Article 30, Clause 45 Classification: Mid-Long-Term Resident

So this was how it would look. The expression ‘mid-long-term resident’ was especially new to me. There’d been no such notation on my Alien Registration Card. This was how I was classified according to Article 30, Clause 45 of the Basic Resident Registration Act, a category which encompassed

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foreign nationals married to Japanese people (those whose residency status was ‘Dependent’), foreign nationals employed by companies (those whose residency status was ‘Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services’), technical interns, students, permanent residents and fixed residents. It appeared that that was the category to which I had been deemed to belong, and thus I was categorised as ‘mid-long-term’. And yet I had lived in this country for thirty years. I had spent over ninety percent of my life so far in Japan. That was a pretty long spell ‘abroad’, if you asked me. I found it ridiculous, funny even – and yet my hand trembled as it held the piece of paper. I knew it was only a classification on paper and yet that string of words – the official notation – had shaken me. The way it made it sound like I would someday return to my home nation. The idea that here, in my own country, this was my status. For the first time in quite a while, the words had got the better of me.

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The House by the Giant Teak The H ouse byRitu the Monjori Giant Teak

Ritu Monjori

L

isten to me, Nobi. There are things I have done that I’m not proud of, but I was very young then.

As far back as I can remember there was always a wall separating you from us. Sometimes I wonder which day it was you drew up that wall?

Ma said that when you came to live with us, you were three and I wasn’t born yet. On her deathbed, your mother, my father’s sister, Minoti Pehi, asked my father to look after you as his own flesh and blood, and father had promised he would. Minoti Pehi was father’s only sister and it felled him when she had eloped with the alcoholic Nripen; but when Nripen died of cirrhosis of the liver, father made peace with your mother. Clobbered by her death, father announced he would not procreate and for a year my mother was on the pill. Then one evening, watching your little feet play hopscotch in the back yard all alone, father changed his mind. I was born because father wanted a playmate for you, Nobi. After that, my parents had Dhan, not because you refused to play with me, but because I think they wanted a boy. Those days everyone wanted a boy if they had only girls.

With your raven hair bunched high in a ponytail, you climbed into a yellow school bus that honked unceasingly at our gate whenever you were late, (and late you always were, weren’t you Nobi?) and went to an expensive English-medium school while Dhan and I walked to a ramshackle school a few blocks away where the English teacher taught English lessons in Assamese and where Dhan, with other children in the kindergarten, sang: Humpetty Dumpetty sat on a waal; Humpetty Dumpetty had a get phol. What is this deal about English anyway, most people unaccustomed to how we

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grew up where we grew up, might ask. But you, like me, knew you earned respect if you spoke English fluently, without stammering or gasping for word or air. That made heads turn. Heads turned when you spoke, Nobi.

Even father, who wrote applications in English for our neighbours, when it came to speaking the language, faltered, stammered and flapped his tongue in search of the right word. There was something he saw in you, Nobi, which he did not see in us, for that lacuna in his own education that he sought to fill through you. In the rest of his free time, which was very little, he laboured with the Oxford English Dictionary, noting down the meanings of every difficult word you encountered in your textbooks. These words and their winding meanings you memorised in the morning just as Dhan and I memorised the multiplication tables.

You were steadily climbing father’s ladder of hopes. What you were on your way of achieving through books, I sought to achieve through housework. I cleared the cobwebs, washed the dishes, ironed the clothes, scratched at the rings left behind on the table after tea, and once made egg curry to surprise Ma. What a fool I had made of myself! I had made the curry without removing the egg shells. How it became a tale Ma narrated to everyone who visited us! But that didn’t stop me until one evening when Deepti Mahi, who often visited us in the evenings, made fun of me: ‘Now that you are an expert at keeping a house in order,’ she said, ‘we can marry you off. Shall I look for a groom for you?’ Furious, I ran inside, thinking if nobody would dare say such a thing to Nobi, then why me?

You would return from your fancy school with a head full of fancy ideas.

Do you remember the time when you sat sulking on our front veranda and, after Ma asked you, like ten times, you muttered sheepishly that you wanted to eat an apple pie? Ma, who made cakes in the pressure cooker – cakes with a deep brown crust that stuck to the bottom of the cooker, the crust that Jaan and I scraped and filled our mouths – had no clue what an apple pie was. Never seen or heard of it. But Ma had to make it for you so she asked a few neighbourhood aunties but they all shook their heads. Afterwards, when she leafed through the picture dictionary and chanced upon a picture of an apple pie, she concluded that an apple pie was just some bits of cooked apple stuffed into a malpua. What a fancy name for an unassuming malpua!

She’d sounded so relieved. You see, my dear cousin, you had a head full of

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elegant ideas and a temper if these failed to materialise. Once you didn’t speak to any of us for two whole days because father said your idea of a summer picnic was impractical. Summer is forty degrees where we live and who goes for a picnic in July? Father reasoned with you. But you wouldn’t listen. The English girls in the English books you read ate apple pies and picnicked in the summer, you replied, and you origamied your body back into your favourite foetal position. Between Dhan and me, we had a nickname for you – dontia do, that letter of the Assamese alphabet shaped exactly like a sleeping baby.

When we read our lessons after evening prayers at home, you would sneak up quietly behind me like our cat Meru waited to pounce on mice, to catch me mispronounce a word. ‘ “Water”, not “waatar”!’ you’d say.

Belittled, I’d stop reading aloud and later stopped reading my English lessons at all. I began failing in English. When I failed a fourth time and father said I had a thick donkey’s brain, I cried and asked Ma why they wouldn’t send Dhan and me to your school. The fees for Nobina’s school were beyond father’s schoolteacher’s salary, Ma reasoned. Why does Nobina get to go to the expensive school then? I argued. Because, mother said, unfazed, turning the rotis, smearing them with a little oil, her mother left her money. I didn’t know what to make of that, Nobi, but it answered the questions rattling inside me. Why, for instance, if I accidentally broke an egg, Ma wouldn’t stop ranting about how overpriced things had become, whereas father would write to publishers in Delhi and order costly books for you? It became clear why you had an air about you, walking as if a few inches above the ground, ahead of us; why you never joined Dhan and me in the playground in the evenings; why you never helped in any household chores. All along I had convinced myself that you’d inherited your mother’s illness, that you were dying, because only in the light of your imminent death did the preferential treatment you received at home, your being above admonishment, the relentless fulfilment of your demands, the air of tragedy about you and your lack of interest in us make sense. The thought of your death had allowed me to be tolerant, even sympathetic towards you. But I didn’t know any more and, because I didn’t know, I began to hate you.

Do you remember the house we grew up in? A small, yellow house under a giant teak tree. Every morning you’d fling open the wooden shutters,

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scaring away a flight of screeching parrots that feasted on the guava tree in our backyard, their beaks rubies against the emerald fruit. It delighted you.

At night, the teak shed its dead leaves and littered our front yard. Ma had divided the task of piling up the dead leaves between you and me but you would never show up in the morning. To escape sweeping the yard, you’d wake up late and spiral through your morning chores, like the goddess with six arms Ma prayed to, an arm each to brush your teeth, gulp down the milk, pull up your long dark hair, put on your uniform, pack your bag, tie your shoes. The mornings were always about you: the school bus honking, you running to the gate then running back in for something you’d inevitably forget, the school bus honking and honking, Ma with your lunchbox in hand – ‘Krishna Prabhu! The bus won’t wait every day!’ – Ma waving at the bus window framing your sad face slow-gliding past our front gate. If only you had turned back, you’d have seen me. In the yard. Thin arms protruding from an oversized nightshirt. Taming unruly dead leaves hovering in the wind.

In my mind I cried foul, planned elaborate scenes where I’d expose your true nature. I couldn’t bother Ma, though. She always had too much to do and, what with the maid absconding for days and father not lending a hand, there was a good chance she would trick me into doing the dishes for her.

I couldn’t go to father either, for he had a story for every occasion. Once he narrated Tom Sawyer and his tryst with fence painting, but there was no fooling you into believing that sweeping the yard was as interesting as fence painting, for you had already read Tom Sawyer, like you had read every damn book in the house.

Bitterness propelled me to continue sweeping the yard with zeal, arduously, and I swept for so long, for so many weeks and months that it became in my family’s memory my job alone. I began to see myself as a child discriminated against, and nursed in the length and breadth of my body a mossy hatred that wouldn’t stop spreading. The embittered soul of a neglected child, like some ever-hungry vermin, needed to be fed. That I swept the yard alone while you played the princess fed that anger.

One evening, the sight of you curled into a dontia do on the sofa, reading into the fading evening light, ignoring our calls to play, drove me mad.

Anger sluiced through me. To see you read like that, your soft hair draped

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about your shoulders illuminating your tender, angelic face in the purple evening glow that stole through the window, your face so pretty I caught myself staring. All that crap Victorian fiction, all that tragedy you borrowed from its sad heroines, all that sadness that somehow lent you beauty. Who did you think you were?

Because I believed all that reading made you smart; because it was clear my parents held you up so high in a place I could never aspire to reach; because I realised that no matter what I did I would never be allowed into the inner sanctum of your heart and mind; and also because standing in that room that evening with you, you oblivious to my presence and I so utterly aware of you, I ran out to the gate, tears smarting in my eyes. Then without thinking, I pivoted around, ran back inside, cruel as heartbroken children are, and as the sun streaked the western sky orange, I burst out into a loud song to insult you, my voice shrill and giddy in anticipation of the violence it would inflict on you: Dontia do is sick Wants to eat some sweet seera Wants to sit in a golden peera Turn her upside down, and lo!

She is nothing more than a dead kauri mura Kauri mura! Kauri mura! Kauri mura!

Nobi is a dead crow’s head, dead crow’s head, crow’s head.

In the playground, darkness crept on us sooner than usual. Knowing perfectly well what awaited us at home, Dhan and I delayed our return.

Eventually, when we finally got home, father made me kneel on the front veranda for being rude to you. The colony children skipped past mocking and hooting at me. How you stood vigil and tapped my head if I as much as took my hands off my ears to pound a mosquito! How pleased you were!

Hatred seared my insides and wouldn’t let me cry. That night, I dreamt a dream where I cast a spell on you. In the dream, we lost our way in the woods. Even in my dream, I knew it was your trick. You didn’t want me to return home. I turned towards you, red eyes rimmed with tears, and cast a spell, in a voice otherworldly. Just as nobody loves me at home, nobody will

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love you in life. In the dream, my face was no longer my face and I woke up frightened, heat pulsing through me, the voice resounding in my heart.

Sometimes that voice comes back to me, careening through all the years that have passed since then, but I have always managed to push it back, push it under the many layers of what I call my professional obligations, the duties of my married life and motherhood, my little sicknesses, my insecurities. I have often thought of that dream too, Nobi, and especially now after Ma told me you had inherited your mother’s illness, the dream has become an obsession with me. Many nights, I have turned the dream upside down, looking at all its angles, shredding it into pieces, trying to remember what colour I was wearing in the dream, for different colours would mean different things in its interpretation. In the dream, did my tears stream down or form a lake in my eyes? Then, one day, a healer of energies I often visit to purify the air surrounding me, told me that the dream was indeed an indication of negative energies within me that I projected onto you. It was my evil eye, Nobi. My evil eye that was your undoing.

On Fridays, returning from work, I drop by our old house. The house is no better than a graveyard now. The teak tree still stands, but the birds are gone. I carry some groceries for the week for Ma. She cannot leave father’s side. He is mostly an invalid now, his mind traversing that zone in old age where time and space collapse indefinitely. Last Friday, I saw Ma waiting for me, peeping through a tiny window in our squalid little house.

It was raining so I lifted my mekhela above my ankle and dodged the little pools of muddy water. Even before I reached the giant teak, I called out to her, ‘Ma, don’t bother. I’ll open the gate. It’s all slippery here.’

Every time I visit, the house diminishes a little more, sinking into the ground as the teak gains a few inches in height. I looked up at the tree and thought of you. My dear sister, you were a storyteller of the gory, if you had a mind for it, making up things as you went along. Remember that morning when school was closed for Assam bandh, and Dhan and I were playing marbles in our front yard? With a book in hand, you watched us play. Then you signalled us to come near you.

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‘It’s the teak tree’s secret,’ you said, in a voice home to secrets. ‘At night, when the birds return to their nests, the teak feeds on their blood,’ you said.

It was not the most bizarre thing I had heard, but it definitely was the nearest, just ten feet from the fence, and that scared the shit out of me.

‘You’re lying! Have you lost your mind? How can trees suck blood?’ I’d asked in defiance.

‘Not all trees, just this one,’ you said. ‘Want proof?’ Then you called Hiren Kai, our milkman, who happened to be there at the gate. ‘Pluck some new leaves, Hiren Kai, from one of those branches there,’ you told him, as we waited, our hearts thumping in our frail chests. When he did, you crumbled up the leaves and rubbed them into your hands and held them up. Red with bird blood.

‘Do you believe now?’ you asked. We swallowed. Before retiring to your room, you took some red from the leaves and marked our foreheads, sealing the secret forever. I’ve never uttered that secret to anyone, not once in these many years.

‘Do the birds die?’ I called after you. Of course, you didn’t hear me. Or you chose not to reply.

After you left our home, I discovered a tiny writing pad in your drawer.

I turned its pages cautiously, afraid of discovering something horrible: things people write in diaries about loves and hates or, perhaps, magic chants that could turn us to goats and cows, as the Mayong people did in olden times. But I found nothing of that sort there. For a storyteller and reader, your writing was sparse. On one page, you’d written: Lover – Heathcliff.

A few blank pages later there was this bit: The leaves of tectona grandis (teak) reportedly contain a red dye used for dyeing silk. Tectona can be used as a natural colourant in textile dyeing on a commercial scale. The secret of the bloodsucking tree. And yet on that Friday, like other Fridays when I passed the teak, I got a creepy feeling that made the ends of my hair stand up. How easily you made the tree from my childhood mean something so different than it would have otherwise meant to me!

Ma tottered to the gate holding a frayed umbrella in her hand and, instantly, I knew she had something to tell me. I hoped it would not be about you, as it had been every time I’d visited her this past year. You know Nobi, after you left home, Ma fused with father like a Siamese twin, uttering

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his words, thinking his thoughts, doing his deeds. This is the only place, these twenty feet from the gate to the house, where she separates herself from father, like a soul from the body. So I asked her, ‘What is it, Ma? What’s bothering you?’ When actually all I wanted to do was shout at her – Father can barely hear, shits in bed all day, does not remember you any more! Do you have to fear him even now? But why ask if I already know? It’s a habit of being afraid. Chiselled into her. Years of submission to father’s will. Years of being on her toes, year of willing herself into saying things father wanted to hear, afraid of invoking his famous rage. Even if tomorrow father dies, unfettering all her shackles, Ma will fear his ghost.

Ma walked beside me, holding my elbow in one hand, restraining my long strides. ‘Anu, visit Nobina just once,’ she said, in a voice I strained to hear above the rain.

‘Ma,’ I said, exasperated, ‘why do you have to say the same thing every time? I told you, I’ll visit her when I can. Right now, there’s too much work.’

Ma wouldn’t give up. But Anu, you always say that. Work is never over.

You have to make time in between work. What is the point of going when it’s too late? Then, she added gently, ‘She’s got her mother’s disease.’

That was when I got to know about your sickness, Nobi. It’s true, Nobi, that I didn’t want to meet you, not now, not in this lifetime or in future lifetimes. And yet here I am, sitting by your bed in a hospital.

I hurried into our house, where nobody has uttered your name since the day you left, and where nobody ever will. As I walked into the living room, the familiar smell of damp, blistered walls mixed with cooking spices, medicines, Vicks and Navratna hair-oil, attacked me. I opened the curtains to let in some air and light, but the rain beat at the glass and I shut the window, making a mental note to call the dhobi and get the curtains washed.

Father was sitting in his old, adjustable wooden chair. Ma announced me to him as she’d announce a guest, and then she left us alone. Father nodded but said nothing. I don’t think he recognised me. I went closer to him and tried to read the milky whiteness of his eyes. What was I looking for? Some semblance of repentance? I don’t know. The doctor says he has dementia.

Wouldn’t that mean he is at peace, now that he’s lost his memories and none of his past actions can come hurtling back to haunt him?

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My fingertips tingled and the nerves around my mouth began twitching.

It happens to me sometimes, especially when I am about to do something I don’t yet know about. I walked up him and, although I recoiled at the stink of his body – of unwashed clothes, medicines, urine and old age – I went closer and, when I was close enough, I whispered into his ear your name. I chanted your forbidden name like a madwoman reciting a curse and I couldn’t stop.

Abruptly, he turned and grasped my hand with his long bony fingers.

For an old, ailing man, his grip was strong and I was afraid. Just then, I thought I saw his face unravel, his pupils change colour. Then he wept into my hands like a child. For a second, hope darted through me. Has it all come back to him? A word, a smell, a memory he is trying to grasp but instead sees fly up like a helium balloon, beyond his reach. Then, even as I watched, his face folded in on itself, inscrutable once again. If only there were a way to know how sorry he is, I’d be able to let him go, to release him from myself. I’d be able to let him die, Nobi.

I found Ma in the kitchen, boiling tea. I told her to sit, and I brought two cups to the small dining table, the one from our childhood into which you’d carved stick people before I was born, one leg of the table raised on two brick slabs. I had brought Ma chanachur and poured some of that into a plate. She still loves it. She put a little into her mouth and sucked in the sweet sourness and spat out the hard grains. ‘Loose tooth, can’t chew like before,’ she said, smiling at me.

‘Is that a complaint? For if it is, I can’t help you now. So many times, I have come to take you to see the dentist, but you wouldn’t budge.’

‘Don’t start again, Anu. How is Moina? Have you brought some of her drawings? Why didn’t you get her to see her old grandmother?’

There she was. Changing the subject again. Sometimes I think she wants to be a martyr, though for what cause, I just don’t know. I was thinking of that time when she resisted going to the doctor for so long that her enormous carbuncle ruptured and we had to get a doctor home. The other time, she waited for the stones to burst out of her gall bladder and then, in the middle of the night, we ferried her across the river for an emergency operation. How embarrassing it was! ‘Aren’t you educated people?’ the doctors yelled at us.

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I sipped the tea and felt a thousand needle pricks at my body, not particularly painful, but tingling uncomfortably, as though I needed to scratch. Maybe it was the teak, the rains, the stink of despair, the sight of Ma sucking and spitting, obstinately, like a starved beggar-woman who hadn’t eaten for days; all of this compounding, making me want to do something, to say something terrible. ‘So,’ I said. ‘You want to know the truth? The truth is I won’t visit Nobi, ever. I can’t.’

‘Mustn’t say that, Anu. She is your sister. But shhhh, not her name, Anu, not her. . . .’

‘Oh, stop it, Ma! Stop it! What are you scared of? You think that wooden piece of an old man who can hardly get to the toilet will hurt you? Stop behaving like a victim.’

Ma got up from beside me and walked towards the kitchen window. I got up too, and followed her. ‘Today I won’t give up so easily,’ I said. ‘That’s what you do, don’t you, Ma? If there’s something you can’t take, you lean on your elbows and gaze out the window.’

Then, even as I was raving, I said something that hadn’t occurred to me before, but in that instant of delirium it came to me. ‘You know what,’ I said, ‘I hate that old man. I hate him for doing what he did to Nobi, but, right now, as I am standing in this kitchen with you, I am beginning to think differently. You could have changed all that, couldn’t you? If only you had stood up to him. If you had at least tried! If only you hadn’t been such a window-watcher all your life, Nobi would be here with us, and I wouldn’t have had to carry all that I have been carrying inside me since the day she left. I might have even learnt to love my father.’

Then I had a very strange experience. It was as though I were performing in front of an audience, watching myself mouthing dialogue, enacting emotions. I ranted on and watched myself rant on.

‘We grew up timid, Dhan and I. We were always cowering. Never saying what we want to say. My brother, Dhan? He falls in love with a tribal girl in Arunachal Pradesh, marries her and leaves home forever. Why? Because he’s afraid. For marrying out of caste! Big deal is it, Ma? Can’t he come back, face the old man and say he did what he thought was right? But no! He has to hide in those hills. Shall I ever see him again? Will my daughter ever meet

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him? Will I see his kids? I don’t know! We are timid, Ma, timid. Do you see that? Do you see it now?’

I’m watching myself again, as if from above. Ma and me in the dark kitchen. Ma comes back from the window; she mumbles something; I am straining to hear what she says, but can’t. I try to read her moving lips, but find it difficult to breathe, as if the air has been sucked out of my lungs.

I slumped into a chair and sat for a while. Outside, the rain had stopped.

Exhausted and shaken by the evening’s turn of events, I gathered my belongings and got ready to leave. I hoped to slip away quietly but Ma hobbled in, forcing into my hand a packet of pithas she had made for Moina.

I put them in my bag, trying not to look at her – the patches of white stringy hair, the stained nails, the glasses that hid her eyes. Miserable, I wanted to get out of the house, but she wouldn’t leave me alone and walked me to the gate. We walked in silence. At the gate, she handed me an envelope. I took it without saying anything. As I crossed the wooden bridge, I thought of throwing it over the side without opening it. Whatever it was, I was in no mind to deal with it.

I did open it, though, in the bus on my way back home. A photograph from our childhood, invaded by blobs of white but salvaged just in time from whatever tin trunk it had been languishing in. Do you remember the time, Nobi, when Londonor Mama had come visiting with his Nikon, and had told Ma he wanted to carry us with him to London, and Dhan had cried, saying he didn’t want to leave Ma and go to London, and Ma had explained that Londonor Mama wanted to carry us with him to London only in a photograph? We didn’t have a camera at home then. If we ever needed to have a photograph taken, father hustled us to Saikia Studio in the main bazaar where the crippled photographer made us tilt our heads in all directions, then clicked the shutter just as you blinked. This photograph, I think, is the only one where you don’t appear to be sleeping.

Here Nobi, here it is. I have brought the photograph for you. Can you see it?

In the picture, Dhan and I are holding hands, grinning broadly at the camera, and you and I are wearing matching frocks. Matching blue frocks, with frills! Those days, Ma would buy thaan kapur, metres of cloth she sewed into identical frocks for us. She would call us for the measurements, a pencil

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held tight between her teeth and a long tape that coiled around our arms, waists, hips and our slight breasts. I looked forward to it, for that was the only time I got to wear new clothes. Our parents were the sort of people who believed in thrift. On the reams of white foolscap paper, we wrote first in pencil and later used the same paper to write in ink. That way we used the paper twice. This frugality extended to other things too. All the new stuff they bought for you, Nobi, came down to me when you tired of them – skirts that rose above your knees as you grew, frocks you lost interest in and shoes that became a touch too tight – and so, when my turn for the measurement came, I raised my arms and held myself as still as I possibly could so there would be no errors in the numbers, and I daydreamed myself into the new frock, hoping to look prettier than you, Nobi. I always wanted to be prettier than you. You hated the drill and kept fidgeting the whole time Ma took your measurements, eager to drown yourself in a book.

In the picture, you sit away, hands upturned on your lap. You aren’t looking at the camera, and neither are you looking down, as some shy children do. Instead, your eyes stare at something beyond Londonor Mama, beyond the burst of bougainvillea at our gate, beyond the teak, beyond the dusty road, the playground and the hills, at something only you can see.

What did you see, Nobi? Gazing now into your vacant eyes, I feel the depths of my stomach churn. How distant you appear, how wise, as if you were looking at your grim future, a future you were yet to live. And suddenly it occurred to me that the white patches threatening to bleach out the photograph are nothing but blind spots in my childhood eyes.

Move a finger, if ever so slightly, if you can hear me, Nobi.

Sunday morning. Your sixteenth birthday. A day of many firsts. The day I first used the F-word. The day when, for the first time, we didn’t celebrate your birthday. The day father became a stranger. The day you left home, never to return.

I woke up late, in the bed we shared, remembering how in the night I’d curled my body just right, wedging myself into your foetal curve, smelling the gold chain around your neck. Was there a moment in the darkness when you’d turned and put your arm around me, Nobi? That could be my imagination, too.

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Already you were slipping into your new lavender frock and matching princess pumps. You were going to the new Chinese beauty parlour in Tinsukia to have your hair styled for the party that evening. With your eyes fixed on the mirror, you combed your long hair back, and then glided a purple hairband with a dotted bow through your hair, forming a puff so perfect there was no sign of any crack. That perfect puff vaporised the last traces of the peaceful night’s sleep that clung to my eyes. I envied your long hair. While you were allowed to wear your hair long, my head exhibited some of the hideous innovations of the local naapit. The bowl-cut. Remember?

It was as if a bowl had been placed on my head like a helmet, and all the hair that stuck out trimmed around. Ma said short hair kept the lice away.

I raised a tantrum, stomped my foot, flailed my arms, cried and pleaded with Ma. She said I was too young. But wasn’t I your height almost? How would anyone know if I didn’t tell them my age? Ma had that look on her face which she often had when she lost her patience but pretended to be calm. ‘All right then, go speak to your father,’ she said solemnly, washing her hands of the matter.

Anger rose in me like water rising up a tank and I barked, ‘Fuck you!’

And immediately felt a slap resounding across my face. Ma gripped my shoulders and shook me so hard I almost fell on my knees. I thought I heard your crisp purple dress rustle along the corridor. You laughed. Furious, I ran, hoping to drag you from behind the door, pull your hair and tear your dress into pieces. You weren’t there, Nobi, but the sweet smell of your Pond’s powder lingered. Through the humming in my ear, I heard Ma saying I wouldn’t be allowed to attend the evening party. I brushed away the sprinkles of her spit with the back of my hand and watched you and father leave.

The room had gone so quiet I could hear the ceiling fan whirr. I took a long, hard look at myself in the mirror. In my nightdress and bowl-cut hair, a tuft of which stood up like a porcupine where it had pressed into the pillow, I looked repulsive. I kept patting the hair down, and it kept springing up. Tired, I sat on the floor, held the tuft down with both hands, and wept into my folded knees.

Everything changed when you returned. At the gate, father stumbled upon an obscene letter from some stranger, lying atop a bed of rose petals,

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a grotesque declaration of love. In the living room, he interrogated you.

How long had it been going on? How far had you gone? You were silent, and your silence tormented him. Ma explained later that it reminded father of Minoti Pehi, your mother, who had eloped, bringing shame upon the family. Father had never truly recovered from it, and now that letter with its obscenities and vulgar magazine cut-outs forced him to relive his past; and he took you to be its willing recipient. That’s why he whipped your back with his belt, calling you a whore.

But what about you? You remained silent through it all. Why, Nobi? You could have been indignant, you could have denied it, said something, anything, to save yourself from his terrible conviction. But you didn’t. What were you thinking, as you stared at the flapping laundry outside?

Next morning, you were not in your room and, after a day’s search, they found you in Sanatan Dukani’s house. You were declared damaged goods, a girl who’d spent a night with a man; no respectable boy would marry you now. Nobi, you didn’t love Sanatan; he was the kind you made fun of. You hadn’t even spoken to him. Then why? To spite father? Oh, Nobi, only sixteen years old and with a head full of fancy ideas; Nobi who loved Heathcliff; Nobi who wept as she read Victorian fiction. I’ll never know what was going on in that head of yours. Then father took you off to live with grandmother in her village. We grew up too, mute kids in a mute house.

Sometimes, I eavesdropped on gossip in the colony and learnt that you had male visitors, that you spent nights in the city. Did you think of horses mating when they touched you? Or stare at the ceiling fan as you’d stared at the flapping laundry? I obeyed my parents and never uttered your name, not even in my mind, not even in the dark, when I was all alone. I had exorcised my memories of you, and yet as I watch you now, beneath these pale sheets in a pale room, on your way to somewhere else, I walk the roads of the past.

You will die tomorrow, or maybe the day after, or in a month from now.

I will get on with my life and, sometimes, when you raise your head from your grave, I will push you back down under the layers of me as I have been doing all these years. Will I be happy? Will I be at peace? Although she hasn’t said it, I know Ma thinks this visit to you will give me peace. I am

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not without happiness or peace, and neither am I counting on you to afford me some. Happiness and peace will come to me in small portions: when I complete my thesis, when my daughter graduates, when she marries, when I have grandchildren, or when I see the flowers in my garden blossom. Will I think of you then? Maybe, maybe not.

Nobi, I’ve practised well. I’ve learnt to manoeuvre memories, saving only those moments that make me want to forget you, memories in which I am the victim, you the victimiser, memories which sometimes permit me to quote karma: you got what you deserved.

From where I’m sitting, I can see the nurses hovering outside this room.

Any minute now, they will come in to announce that my visiting time is up; but before that, I want you to protest. Protest, and ask me. Ask me, Nobi, what I do in careless moments. Ask me if I still search my fingernails for the spots of white that we borrowed from the cranes one hot afternoon.

Ask me if I remember that day, as we lay next to one another, heads together, inhaling the drowsy vapour that rose from the river, a patch of blue sky staring back at us. Not a cloud. Ask me what happened next, and I will tell you: that suddenly, the blue sky was speckled with white cranes and we, holding up our hands and shaking our slender fingers, we sang to the cranes, ‘Lend us some of your white, you lovely cranes!’ and there they were, white spots adorning our translucent nails.

We were awed. We laughed. We were happy. Happy as children are.

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Poetry

Yogesh Patel

Yogesh P atel

There They Blow there they blow words as fountains a chalk mountain blown to pieces night’s blackboard stunned, speechless like my language in Uganda in February 1972 there they go click-cluck-cluck tribal drumbeats mountain to mountain a language thread as an undercurrent in the liquid air The King of Scotland’s joke such cultural claims!

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who are you, chameleon? why are you a whale? there they are the wild ones the guitar plucks dancing on the water currents the liquid strings whose tunes are they playing? they breached once to say namaste to welcome me home there they blow now indifferent to an alien

Disenfranchised a near miss not one of Midnight’s Children an African, an Indian and the British citizen the all-in-one child orphaned by the Nile forsaken by the Thames abandoned by the Ganges sings in a school assembly asserts he is loved by history he salutes the flag muttering, ‘And who are you exactly?’

Blyth’s reed warbler and olive-backed pipit

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with sky under their wings sit on a pole with thoughts of nests far across the sea the child learns from them the sky paces like a Caged Bird someone opens the cage ‘Bloody British!’ the child jets off clutching his British passport only to be rediscovered as an alien haunted still by the rhythm of Idi Amin’s army boots Nehru’s bogus promise Hum Nehruchachake pyare (We are the children Nehru Uncle loves) he meets Wilma the Thames whale watches in desperation her rescue. Then bones. wondering in which museum he would leave the Nehruchacha child’s bones defeated he wanders dazed muttering We are apostrophes We are the bones We are the bones We are the bones Whale and I

Swimming with Whales is published by Skylark Publications (UK, 2017).

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Contributors Contribut ors Contribut ors

SHANTA ACHARYA, born and educated in Cuttack, India, won a scholarship to Oxford, where she was awarded a doctoral degree in English. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard University before joining an American investment bank in London. Author of eleven books, her latest is Imagine: New and Selected Poems.

Founder of Poetry in the House, Shanta hosted a series of monthly readings at Lauderdale House, London, from 1996–2015. www.shantaacharya.com.

ALEC ASH is a writer and editor in Beijing, author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016), literary nonfiction about the lives of six young Chinese. His articles have appeared in The Economist, Dissent, The Sunday Times and elsewhere. He is a contributing author to Chinese Characters (UC Press, 2012) and co-editor of the anthology of China writing While We’re Here (Earnshaw Books, 2015). He is Managing Editor of the China Channel at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Twitter: @alecash.

VRINDA BALIGA is the author of the short-story collection Name, Place, Animal, Thing (2017). Her work has appeared in the Himal Southasian, New Asian Writing, Commonwealth Writers’ adda, Muse India, Reading Hour, Out of Print, India Currents and Temenos, among others. She is the winner of several prizes, including the 2017 Katha Fiction Contest. She is a 2014 Fellow of the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency. Vrinda lives in Hyderabad, India, with her husband and two children.

POLLY BARTON, translator of Wen Yourou, is a translator of Japanese literature and nonfiction from London. She holds an MA in the Theory and Practice of Translation from SOAS, and was awarded first prize in the inaugural JLPP Translation Competition for her translations of Natsuki Ikezawa and Kobo Abe. Recent translations include Naocola Yamazaki and Misumi Kubo for the Keshiki chapbook series from Strangers Press. Her translation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden was released by Pushkin Press in 2017. pollybarton.net.

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GEORGIE CARROLL is a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London. Her research investigates eco-aesthetics in Indian poetry. She is author of Mouse (Animal) (Reaktion Books 2015). Georgie writes short stories, as well as nonfiction for magazines in the UK and South Asia. She is a lover of Indian cinemas.

JAMIE CHANG, translator of Kim Ae-ran, is a literary translator based in Seoul, who teaches at Ewha Womans University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Translation Academy at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Her works include The Great Soul of Siberia by Park Sooyong and The Summer by Choi Eunyoung.

MYINT WIN HLAING is an ethnic Rakhine writer and teacher born in Pan Ni La village, Rakhine State. He is a leading member of an influential Rakhine literature circle organising talks and live literature events for his remote community. He has published short stories both in Burmese in Shwe Amyutae and Yote Shin Tay Kabyar magazines and in the Rakhine language in Rakhine Journal.

He writes under the pen-name Green Maung.

JOSHUA IP is a poet, editor, and literary organiser. He has published four poetry collections and edited seven anthologies. He has won the Singapore Literature Prize, Golden Point Award, and received the Young Artist Award from the National Arts Council (Singapore) in 2017. He founded Sing Lit Station, an over-active literary charity that runs community initiatives including SingPoWriMo, Manuscript Bootcamp, poetry.sg and several workshop groups. joshuaip.com.

KIM AE-RAN’s literary debut, ‘No Knocking in This House’, a short story published in 2003, won the Daesan Literary Award. Her 2011 novel The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child was made into a film by E J-yong as My Brilliant Life. Kim’s other publications include two short-story collections, titled Vapor Trail and It is Summer Outside. Her novels have been published in France, Germany, Russia and China.

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Contributors

JOHN MATEER is a poet, curator and writer. Among his books are the prose Semar’s Cave: and Indonesian Journal, and The Quiet Slave: A History in Eight Episodes, a fictional retelling of the arrival of the Malays on the Cocos-Keeling Islands. He has published many books of poems and has been translated into Japanese, Indonesian, Malay and a number of European languages. His latest book, Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’, was published simultaneously in the UK and Australia, and has appeared in Portuguese and German editions.

RITU MONJORI was born and brought up in Assam, India, and now lives in Pune with her husband and five-year-old son. ‘Greetings from a Violent Homeland’, published in Commonwealth Writers’ adda, was her first work of published fiction.

NEEL MUKHERJEE is the author of two novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel. He lives in London.

KHIN HNIT THIT OO, translator of Ah Phyu Yaung (shwe), is a translator, tour guide and social entrepreneur. She is a graduate of the 2015 Link the Wor(l)d’s literary translation programme. She was recently invited to France to collaborate on a two-month long memoir translation project. She is currently writing a bilingual novel about Burmese society.

YOGESH PATEL runs Skylark Publications UK and the Word Masala project to promote writers and poets of the South Asian diaspora. He also edits eSkylark.

He has been awarded the Freedom of the City of London and, as a trilingual poet, has four LP records, two films, radio programmes, a children’s book, fiction and non-fiction books, including poetry collections, to his credit. Widely published, he has received many awards. www.patelyogesh.co.uk.

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SALEEM PEERADINA is the author of five books of poetry, of which Final Cut (Valley Press, 2016) is the most recent. He has also published a prose memoir, The Ocean in My Yard (Penguin, 2005), and a long-running anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (Macmillan, 1972). His latest book is Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poetry (Copper Coin Publishing, 2017). He is Professor Emeritus of English at Siena Heights University, MI, USA.

MUI POOPOKSAKUL, translator of Prabda Yoon, is a lawyer-turned-translator. She grew up in Bangkok and Boston, and practised law in New York City before returning to the literary field. She recently graduated with an MA in cultural translation at the American University of Paris and previously studied literature as an undergraduate at Harvard College. The Sad Part Was (Tilted Axis Press, 2017) is her first translation.

AHPOR RAHMONYA is an ethnic Mon writer and rubber trader from Thoung Pha Lu village in Mon State. His articles and poems, published in underground Mon language journals, explore the dynamics between national politics and the Mon people, often depicting Western and Asian intellectuals and thinkers. He currently lives in a Mon-speaking village in Karen State where he stood in the 2015 general election for the Mon National Party. Ahpor Rahmonya is a pen-name.

SANDIP ROY’s award-winning debut novel is Don’t Let Him Know. His work has appeared in different publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economic Times, Salon.com, The Independent, Mint, the Indian Express, Firstpost and Huffington Post. His radio commentaries air on National Public Radio and the BBC World Service. He was a long-time editor of Trikone, the world’s oldest LGBT magazine for South Asians. He currently lives in Kolkata.

BARRIE SHERWOOD is assistant professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His publications include The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa (DC Books, Montreal), and Escape from Amsterdam (Granta, London; St Martin’s Press, New York). He has published short fiction and non-fiction in various magazines.

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Contributors

LETYAR TUN is a writer, editor, photojournalist and former political prisoner.

He spent eighteen years in prison (fourteen on death row) for political activities.

Since his release in 2012, his photography has been exhibited in Myanmar and he has spoken on freedom of expression at events across Southeast Asia. He is a graduate of the 2015 Link the Wor(l)d’s literary translation programme and recently gained a scholarship to study at the inaugural School for Interpretation and Translation in Yangon. He currently works for Fojor Media Institute in Yangon.

SAN LIN TUN, translator of Ahpor Rahmonya, was born in Yangon from Mon-Burmese parents. A graduate of the 2015 Link the Wor(l)d’s literary translation programme, his fiction has appeared in numerous local and international publications including the New Asian Writing Anthology. He is the author of ten fiction and non-fiction books in English, including his latest collection of short stories, The Enigma of Big Bunny’s Arrival, published in October 2017.

MICHAEL VATIKIOTIS is a writer, journalist and private diplomat who has been working in Southeast Asia since 1987. He was formerly editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He has written two novels set in Indonesia and his new book, Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, was published

by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in June 2017.

FRANCIS WADE is a journalist specialising in Myanmar and Southeast Asia.

He began reporting on Myanmar in 2009 with the exiled Democratic Voice of Burma news organisation, based in Northern Thailand, before going on to cover in-depth the transition from military rule and the violence that accompanied it.

He has reported from across South and Southeast Asia for the Guardian, Time, Foreign Policy Magazine and others. He is now based in London.

AH PHYU YAUNG (SHWE) is the author of two short-story collections, Sounds of Knocking (on the door) (2013) and The Drowning of a Fairy Horse in Dirty Salty Waters (2014). She has published forty-four stories and essays in a wide range of journals including Mahaythi, Kalyar, Mahaw Thadar, Pann Alinka, Yanant Thit, Pay Phoo Hlwar and Rati. In 2006, she was a recipient of the People’s Choice Award and winner of the Shwe Amyutae Award for Short Stories in 2016.

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PRABDA YOON is the author of The Sad Part Was (Tilted Axis, 2017). The author of multiple story collections, novels and screenplays, Prabda Yoon is also a translator (of classics by Salinger and Nabokov), independent publisher (of books both originally written in and translated into Thai), graphic designer, and filmmaker.

WEN YOUROU was born in 1980 in Taipei, Taiwan. At the age of three, she moved to Tokyo with her family, graduating in 2006 from Hosei University. In 2009, her story ‘Kokyokorai-uta’ (‘Send-off Song’) received an honourable mention in the Subaru Newcomers’ Award. Her novel, Mannaka no kodomotachi (The Children in the Middle) (Shueisha, 2017), was nominated for the 157th Akutagawa Prize.

ELLEN ZHANG is a sophomore at Harvard University. As a Chinese-born American, she treasures discovering more about her Asian heritage. She works as an editor and contributor for The Harvard Crimson and Tuesday Magazine in addition to being the editor in chief of Prescriptions. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Albion Review, The Metaworker, Cuckoo Quarterly, Shades of the Same Skin, and The Quotable, among others.

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Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insider’s perspective.

Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn

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For more than 40 years, Index on Censorship magazine has published the world’s leading writers, journalists and thinkers, as well as the most censored voices. Past and present contributors include Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Gabriel García Márquez, Ariel Dorfman, Elif Shafak and Margaret Atwood.

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The Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) runs a wide range of programs to help Korean literature reach more readers across the globe.

We provide grants to translators and publishers, support international literary exchanges and provide training programs for literary translators. Our doors are wide open to everyone interested in Korean literature.

We welcome participation and suggestions from all quarters.

Translation & Publication Grants Translators and overseas publishers can apply for the Translation Grants and Publication Grants online. Applications may be submitted at any time and will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

International Events LTI Korea hosts various international events, including LTI Korea Forums, Overseas Residency Programs, International Workshop for the Translation and Publication of Korean Literature, the Seoul International Writers’ Festival, and more.

Translation Academy The Translation Academy is a specialized translation education facility that focuses on nurturing upcoming generations of translators with a passion for Korean literature and culture.

More informaƟon available at lƟkorea.org (English), lƟkorea.or.kr (Korean) Yeongdong-daero 112-gil 32(Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea (06083) Tel: +82-2-6919-7714 / Fax: +82-2-3448-4247

This issue focuses on lives at the fringes of Asian societies. With the region’s extraordinary ethnic diversity and modernisation’s fraying of rigid, long-held traditions, there are fringes everywhere. Conflict seems inevitable. Ethnic minorities are discriminated against, or worse. Rapid social change has led to dislocation and alienation. And yet, without the creativity and innovation that blossom at society’s edges, the mainstream would be a dull, stagnant place.

Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading Featuring: Writing from Myanmar and its complex ethnic identities Kim Ae-ran’s young professionals’ struggle for meaning in their lives A tragic homecoming to India for an emigrant father – Neel Mukherjee Michael Vatikiotis investigating Al Qaeda’s appeal in Indonesia A thin line between desire and violence – Georgie Carroll Sandip Roy’s unlikely friendship with a conservative Muslim Indian Taiwan-born Wen Yourou on being not-quite Japanese in Japan ‘For decades, Asia’s modern literature, even to us in Asia, was a dark continent. If all this is now changed or changing, ALR has had a lot to do with it.’ – Arvind Krishna Mehrotra asialiteraryreview.com