Asia Literary Review No. 15, Spring 2010 by Asia Literary Review

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW SPRING 2010 No. 15

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW SPRING 2010 No. 15 Publisher Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Deputy Editor Poetry Editor Consulting Editors Contributing Editors

Ilyas Khan Chris Wood Duncan Jepson Tim Cribb Martin Alexander Ian Jack, Peter Koenig Karl Taro Greenfeld, Justin Hill, Wen Huang, Andrew Lam, Nam Le, Nguyen Qui Duc, Palani Mohan, John Batten (Art)

Production Sandra Kong, Alan Sargent, Reggie Hui Designer Steffan Leyshon-Jones Circulation, Sales & Marketing Anil Kumar Cover Image Palani Mohan Back Cover Image Associated Press Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong www.asialiteraryreview.com To subscribe email subs@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: 852.2167.8947 Email: chris.wood@asialiteraryreview.com Advertising: 852.2167.8910 Email: anil.kumar@asialiteraryreview.com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Printed in China by C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd. ISBN: 978-988-18747-2-6 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual stories © 2010 the Authors This compilation © 2010 Print Work Limited

Contents

Contents Chris Wood

Andrew Lam

Liao Yiwu

Kevin Simmonds

James Kidd

Tew Bunnag

Kabir

Wendy Law-Yone

Palani Mohan

Kirby Wright

Editor’s Notes Memoir Love Your Parents, Follow Your Bliss Non-fiction Go South, Further South Translated by Wen Huang

Poem Shaker John, Bamboo Spine

Interview Hanif Kureishi

Fiction A Most Generous Uncle

Poems Five poems Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra Fiction From The Road to Wanting Photo Essay A Leap of Faith Words by Mark Tully

Poems At Billy Boozer’s, Kowloon Tong 119 The Ghost Barracks of Kowloon Tong 120 November in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong 121 3

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David Yost

Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Tanaz Bhathena

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Ramona Koval

Mitsuyo Kakuta

Tishani Doshi

Nguyen Qui Duc

Fiction The Counterfeit

123

Poem Do Not Go Into The Woods

143

Fiction Fatiha

145

Poems A Hindu Panegyrist Remembers Sultan Mahmud They’ll Ride Out Any Storm Herodotus, My Mother, and Civets

159 160 161

Transcript Pico Iyer and the Dalai Lama

163

Fiction Mazakon Translated by Wayne P Lammers

173

Poems After the Rains Lost The River of Girls Love Poem Seasons Michael Mangal’s Dream

187 188 189 190 191 192

Fiction Evening Meal

195

Contributors

205

Editor’s Notes

eorge orwell, they say in Rangoon, wrote the story of Burma in three novels, not one, and they call him The Prophet. Burmese Days tells of the country’s colonial past; Animal Farm, they say, of the catastrophic years under General Ne Win’s dictatorship and his ‘Burmese way of socialism’; and Nineteen Eighty-Four of the soulless dystopia of today. It is late July, 1988. Ugly scenes in the streets echo the rumble of thunder in the clouds overhead. Demonstrations have broken out following the deaths in March of students at the hands of the police, and they stubbornly refuse to subside. The monsoon is in full swing and, as Rangoon swelters in the sticky heat, events are about to take a strange and unexpected turn. General Ne Win has ruled the nation with an iron fist since seizing power in 1962. On July 23, the ageing dictator makes his way into a cavernous meeting chamber near Kyaik-Ka-San racetrack to address delegates of the Burma Socialist Programme Party Central Committee for what, he knows, will be the last time as their leader. He will announce a popular referendum on the country’s political future. He will accept responsibility for the deaths of students while in the custody of police. He will stand down immediately. But he will also issue a warning: ‘I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits – there is no firing into the air to scare.’ As he leaves the podium word of the extraordinary speech spreads and is greeted with scenes of jubilation. The world looks on in astonishment. But the military men of Ne Win’s party fear a reckoning and they oppose his plans. Millions take to the streets in defiance and, true to his words, the general responds with force. ‘Many thousands of us knelt down in front of the soldiers,’ one woman protestor will later recall. ‘We sang to them: “We love you; you are our brothers; all we want is freedom; you are the people’s army; come to our side.”’ Shots are fired and in the blood-letting that ensues on August 8 thousands are slaughtered by the armed forces. 7

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Aung San Suu Kyi enters the fray on August 26. Daughter of Aung San, the revered leader who brought independence from the British in 1947, she is visiting Rangoon from England to be at the bedside of her dying mother. She has often told her husband, the British scholar Michael Aris, that if her nation calls, she will answer, and now she must embrace her fate. Sanding before half a million people in grounds near Shwedagon Pagoda, she tells them: ‘This great struggle has arisen from the intense and deep desire of the people for a fully democratic parliamentary system … I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.’ The popular movement for democracy gathers momentum as the weeks go by, demonstrators bearing placards that read: ‘Pull Us Out From Hell’, ‘Get Out Murder Party’, ‘Our Hearts Are Strong Till We Die’. Then, on September 18, Ne Win orchestrates a coup and installs a new military government – the State Law and Order Restoration Council. Martial law and a curfew are imposed but, again, the protests will not die down and in a bid to appease the demonstrators the junta announces ‘free and fair multi-party elections’ in the spring of 1990. It is quickly clear that the government has no intention of playing by the rules but it has seriously misjudged the mood of the people and on May 27, 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy sweeps to victory, taking 392 of 485 seats contested. For a moment the nation seems to stand on the brink of democracy but there is no transfer of power. Instead comes a crackdown. Newly elected MPs are imprisoned and others flee to the hills or into exile, to continue the fight from there. Once again a veil of fear descends on the country. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent much of the intervening years under house arrest. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and in 1995, free for a time, she told the writer Alan Clements: ‘Nothing has changed since my release … Let the world know that we are still prisoners in our own country.’ There have been moments since 1990 when change might have come. In August 2007, tens of thousands of Buddhist monks poured through the streets in protest against the regime. As they passed the family home of Aung San Suu Kyi – now her prison – she was seen shedding a tear at the gates of the walled compound, lowering her head to the monks in reverence. Once again, the junta reasserted itself and the uprising ended in bloodshed. 8

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Monique Skidmore, in Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear, describes a nation still pregnant with the expectation that ‘something will happen’. But it is a place in which time no longer ‘flows’. Instead, she says, it ‘pools’. Life goes on much as before and there is only the sense of ‘waiting for events’, and fear. She writes: A prostitute lies in the mud under a bridge, a knife pressed to her throat. A teenage boy, the son of an army colonel, squats beside a major arterial road plunging a used syringe full of almost pure heroin into his ankle. A young mother sucks betel paste off a banana leaf and presses her shrivelled nipple to her emaciated baby’s mouth while watching a Burmese romance in a video hut. These are images of Rangoon. Substitute heroin for opium and a puppet show for the video hut, and these scenes could date any time from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the present.

Burma looms large in the background of this issue of Asia Literary Review, in the writing of Wendy Law-Yone and David Yost, and now, later this year, the junta will hold new elections. Few though are persuaded. Law-Yone told ALR: ‘Whether or not the elections end up as a catalyst for something new, and what that something new might look like, it’s worth seeing the whole election show for what it is at this point: theatre for the masses in a time of unrest. It’s a relatively low-cost production, staged by dictators rather than directors. The script is an old one and can be changed at whim – as it was twenty years ago, in the last such production – with no regard for consistency or logic. The illusion of audience participation prolongs the diversion. And if anybody dares to boo the denouement … see that trap door in the middle of the stage? ‘The irony, though, is that the Burmese are the last to be taken in by such bogus tactics. We know good theatre from bad. Real Burmese theatre, after all, is one of great sophistication, artistry, and wit.’ Hope does remain that one day Rangoon will fulfil the promise of its name: ‘end of strife’. And daily, in temples around the country, Buddhist monks chant, ‘Annica vatta sankara upadavio dhammino’ – ‘All things are impermanent in this world.’

Chris Wood

Pale Dagoba (2006) by Ralph Kiggell. Pigment on Japanese paper â&#x20AC;&#x201C; woodblock print, 60cm x 45cm edition of twenty. Courtesy of the artist, Thailand.

Love Your Parents, Follow Your Bliss Andrew Lam

ilial piety, and the idea that the collective assigns and directs the destiny of the individual, overarches the lives of the children of Confucian Asia’s political and economic refugees, trumped only by pragmatism in the newcomers’ struggle to make a home among the western middle class. On the summer afternoon that I stole home and robbed my parents of their American Dream, it was as if all the air had been sucked out of the living room. Mother covered her mouth and cried; Father cursed in French. Older brother shook his head and left the room. I sat silent and defiant. I was only a small child when we fled Vietnam in 1975, but I remember how I trembled then as my small world collapsed around me. I trembled on this day, too, as I told my parents that I was following my passion and refused to become a doctor. I would, instead, be a writer. At Berkeley, more than half of the Vietnamese Students’ Association to which I belonged majored in computer science and electrical engineering. These fields were highly competitive. A few told me they didn’t want to become engineers: some wanted to be artists, or architects, and had ample talent to do so, but their parents were against them. It was worse for those with family still living in impoverished Vietnam. One in particular was an ‘anchor kid’ whose family sold everything to buy him perilous passage across the South China Sea on a boat full of refugees. He knew that others were literally dying for the opportunities he had before him, and failure was not an option. 11

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Many of my friends were driven; theirs was an iron will to achieve academic success. On the wall of the dorm room occupied by a Vietnamese friend was his painting of a mandarin in silk brocade and hat. Flanked by soldiers carrying banners, the young mandarin rides in an ornate carriage while peasants look on and cheer. It was a visual sutra to help him focus on his studies. And I, with a degree in biochemistry and on track for medical school to the delight of my parents, was, in their eyes, throwing it all away – for what? I had, in secret, applied to and been accepted by the graduate programme in creative writing at San Francisco State University. ‘Andrew, you are not going to medical school,’ said Helen, my first writing teacher after reading one of my short stories. My response was entirely lacking in eloquence. ‘But … but … my mom is going to kill me.’ Filial piety was ingrained long before I stepped foot onto American shores. It is in essence the opposite of individualism. ‘Father’s benefaction is like Mount Everest, Mother’s love like the water from the purest source,’ we sang in first grade. If American teenagers long to be free and to find themselves, Vietnamese are taught filial obligation, forever honouring and fulfilling a debt incurred in their name. Mom didn’t kill me; she wept. It was Father who vented his fury. ‘I wanted to write, too, you know, when I was young. I studied French poetry and philosophy. But do you think I could feed our family on poems? Can you name one Vietnamese who’s making a living as an American writer? What makes you think you can do it?’ This was the late 1980s and the vast majority in our community were first-generation refugees, many of them boat people who had subsisted for years in refugee camps in Southeast Asia. ‘I can’t name one,’ I said. ‘There may be none right now. So, I’ll be the first.’ Father looked at me and with that look I knew it was not an answer he’d expected; it was not how I talked in the family, which was to say respectfully and with vague compliance. Perhaps for the first time, he was assessing me anew. I matched his gaze, which both thrilled and terrified me. And crossing that invisible line, failure was no longer an option. * * * 12

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My friend with the painting of a mandarin became an optometrist and gave up art. I remember the first time he showed the picture to me at Berkeley. He said, ‘Do trang nguyen ve lang’ – Vietnamese for, ‘Mandarin returns home after passing the imperial examination’. But the image needed no explanation, to me or any student from Confucian Asia: the dream of glorious academic achievement and with it influence and wealth for the entire family. Villages and towns pooled resources and sent their best and brightest to compete at the imperial court, hoping that one of their own would make it to the centre of power. Mandarins were selected and ranked according to their performance in the rigorous examinations, which took place every four years. Vietnam was for a long time a tributary of China and it was governed by mandarins, a meritocracy open to even the lowest peasant if he had the determination and ability to prevail. Of all the temples in Hanoi, the most beautiful is Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature, dedicated to all those laureates of Vietnam who became mandarins, their names etched on stone steles going back eight centuries. It was Vietnam’s first university, the Imperial Academy. That it became a temple to the worship of education seems entirely appropriate. Under French colonial rule, China’s imperial examinations were replaced by the baccalaureate, and in the 1940s and 1950s to have passed its requirements was something so rare that one’s name was forever connected to the title. My paternal grandmother’s closest friend was Ong Tu Tai Quoc – Mr Baccalaureate Quoc. My paternal grandfather’s baccalaureate took him to Bordeaux to study law and when he returned he married the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the Mekong Delta. And for Vietnamese in America, education is everything. So, for someone lucky enough to escape the horrors of post-war Vietnam and be handed through the hard work of his parents the opportunity to become a doctor, to say ‘no, thank you’ was akin to Confucian sin. By refusing to fulfil my expected role within the family, I was being dishonourable. ‘Selfish’, more than a few relatives called me. But part of America’s seduction is that it invites betrayal of the parochial. For immigrant children growing up in two conflicting cultures, two antipodes, those of the old and the new, America demands of the child serious examination of the soul. Obey and honour the wishes of one’s parents. Think 13

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for yourself and look out for number one. America whispers rebellion of the individual against the communal: follow your dream. It also demands it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The children of Asian immigrants learn early to negotiate between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, between seemingly opposed ideas and flagrant contradictions, in order to appease and survive in both cultures. In Vietnam as a child during the war, I read French comic books and martial arts epics translated from Chinese into Vietnamese, even my mother’s indulgent romance novels. In America, I read American novels and spent my spare time in public libraries, devoting the summers to devouring book after book. When not studying, I was reading. If I was encouraged to mourn the loss of my homeland, I was also glad that I became an American because here, and perhaps nowhere else, I could follow my bliss, as mythologist Joseph Campbell urges. * * * In my freshman year at Berkeley I fell hopelessly in love and when that ended a year after graduation I took to writing, in part to grieve. Berkeley radicalised me. The quiet, bookish, apolitical, obedient boy who didn’t date in high school left his Vietnamese household and embraced the carnal pleasures of college, falling in love with M, in whose embrace and kisses I discovered that all I had thought important – my desire to please my chronically unhappy mother, good grades, the path to med school – was trivial. Berkeley also marked me. A Chinese student from my dorm climbed the campanile because, so the rumours ran, for the first time in his life he scored a ‘B’. I remember thinking, not without a certain vanity, that he wouldn’t have considered jumping had he been embraced by romantic passion. Then M was gone and my heart was broken and I began to write, not about my refugee experience of the Vietnam War, but what it meant to lose someone who was my life, my first love – with its private language and private world – and I felt I had been exiled forever. But my writing led me backwards to the undressed wounds of a distraught child who stood alone on a Guam beach, the refugee camp with its khaki green tents flapping in the wind, missing friends, his pet dogs, fretting about 14

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his father who said he would follow later, wondering if he’d ever see home again. Then the long lines for food under a punishing sun, people weeping themselves to sleep, the makeshift family altar and faded photographs of the dead, the long vertical ash of burning incense. I wrote it all. I began to go back. * * * Eavesdropping from upstairs during a visit home, I heard my mother greeting friends and learned of a new addition to our family. ‘These are Andrew Lam’s awards,’ she said. ‘Andrew Lam’ was important, and arranged on the bookshelf are his trophies and diplomas and writing awards. ‘My son the Berkeley radical,’ my father would say by way of introduction to his friends. ‘Parents give birth to children,’ says my mother, ‘God gives birth to their personalities.’ I can’t remember for sure how long he stood up there, and how that studious Chinese boy was talked down, but they put a metal barrier on the campanile afterward so no one else could jump. Not long ago, having given a lecture at my own alma mater, I had a dream. It is me atop the campanile, alone at sunset. I hesitate but I am not afraid. Below, people are gathering. Before me, I see a beatific horizon. I leap. And soar high over the old Berkeley campus before heading out to where sky kisses sea. I haven’t landed yet.

The Sam Mun Tsai Village (2009) by Halley Cheng. Watercolor on paper, 58cm x 38cm. Courtesy of the artist, Hong Kong.

Go South, Further South Liao Yiwu Translated by Wen Huang

ichuanbana is the launch pad for hundreds of Chinese who yearn for a new life. There, the broad leaves of banana trees with stems as thick as buckets shelter the footpaths and their traffic of Dai women in traditional bright-coloured skirts with silk satchels wrapped around their waists past Dai-style houses standing lonely amid drab concrete buildings at the southern-most tip of Yunnan Province. It wasn’t at all what I had imagined. All that I knew came from Ai Wu’s Journey to the South, which chronicles the author’s early life as a vagabond in Southeast Asia. Ai had fled his native city of Chengdu to escape an arranged marriage and a stifling education system. The young writer hitchhiked south to Kunming where, weak and vulnerable, he wandered the streets by day, and at night slept in any available bed in a small rundown inn, a pair of old shoes as his pillow until the shoes were stolen by an even poorer guest. Ai’s 1935 journey took him further south, to Xichuanbana, from where he crossed without visa or passport into Burma, reaching Rangoon and filling his book with descriptions of that exotic land. Journey to the South isn’t as famous as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which helped define America’s Beat Generation, but for my generation of Chinese it had much the same effect. ‘Go south, further south’ was for years a popular mantra among my friends; now it is debased as a motivational slogan. 17

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In the 1980s, I dated a girl who read Journey to the South with tears slipping down her cheeks. She re-read the book on the night before she broke up with me and then followed the path mapped by Ai. She went south, further south, and was arrested by border police. She spent six months in a detention centre, where she endured the abuse and harassment of fellow inmates, most of whom were prostitutes and drug dealers. She returned to Chengdu, but only to better plan her next journey south. She sold everything she had and used the cash to bribe a private guide from a Dai village to take her across the border. She is now a wealthy woman, with a home in Bangkok and several properties in Chengdu – and two beautiful children. In 2001, during one of her visits to Chengdu, she treated me to a sumptuous meal and, over hard liquor, scolded me: ‘You gave me Journey to the South when I was still in my early twenties. I was inspired and wanted you to be part of my adventure, but you couldn’t be bothered. Look at yourself now: a middleaged man shadowed by public security people. That’s pathetic, don’t you think?’ Jing Bute went further south too. He was a leader of the underground ‘spoilt brat’ poetry movement, one of the trendy literary styles of the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, he slipped across the border from Xichuanbana, following Ai’s trail to what is now Yangon, where he was picked up as a street person and thrown in jail for more than a year. Rumour has it that his cellmate was a leader of the Myanmar Communist Party and, with his help, Jing was released and joined a group of labourers being shipped off by the government to work in Europe. He lives in Denmark now, the home to Hans Christian Andersen. Friends who have seen him say he has shaved his head and seems content. Yang Wei and Wu Ciyu were neither poets nor adventurers but fellow ‘counter-revolutionaries’ imprisoned after the government’s crackdown following Tiananmen in 1989. Before heading south, they were frequent guests at our house and got along superbly with my then wife, Song Yu. On their last visit, Yang took my copy of Journey to the South, which had lost its cover, and Wu took my flute, as well as a copy of my book Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society. They harboured grand ambitions. Before leaving, they tried to persuade me to go with them. Wu, who had already visited Xichuanbana three times, secured the services of private 18

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tour guides in Dai villages and scouted their crossing point; every detail was meticulously planned. But I couldn’t commit myself. Next I heard they had reached Thailand and for several years roamed the streets in Bangkok as ‘international beggars’. I lost touch with Yang after Canada accepted him as a political refugee. As far as I know, Wu is still in Thailand. I received a letter from him recently: There’s been some disturbing news. The Thai military government has ordered the UN Refugee Agency to cease its operations in Thailand. A translator working for the agency told me that the agency could leave Thailand anytime now. If that’s the case, I’m losing my last ray of hope. My situation here will further deteriorate. Brother Yiwu, no matter how hard it is, please help me.

I forwarded his message to friends who might have the right contacts, saddened by thoughts of what had become of him. When Hong Kong returned to China in 1997, following in Ai’s footsteps became the only viable means of escape from the mainland and ‘go south, further south’ the only advice one could offer those seeking a way out. Xichuanbana was often a topic of conversation among friends. Fellow inmates Xu Wanping and She Wanbao often talked – with the passion of young lovers planning their honeymoon – of sneaking across the border. I heard ‘Xichuanbana’ so often I thought it would blister my eardrums. And now I, too, had gone south, thinking of my friends and their dreams. ‘Go south, further south,’ I mumbled to myself. My travel companion, a Christian doctor with the family name Sun, who knew the region well, heard me. ‘Is another poem in the making?’ he teased. I laughed. ‘Do you find Xichuanbana poetic?’ Dr Sun shook his head. ‘I came here in 1974 as a sent-down youth after graduating from high school. Jinghong was a forest town then: monkeys shuffling between bamboo houses, teasing and playing with the children and the Dai girls in their colourful dresses. It’s all gone. The city is getting bigger, and dirtier, by the day. It’s like anywhere else now.’ He was right. We walked several of the mile-long streets, boxed in by ugly concrete buildings with monotonous façades. It could be a city in Sichuan. 19

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So we went in search of the authentic Xichuanbana. We asked a taxi driver to take us to a ‘real’ Dai village. The driver appeared nonchalant. The Dai villages had apparently become a major tourist attraction, he explained. Some have been converted into luxury resorts. Dr Sun was persistent: ‘But can’t you take us to a village where ordinary Dai people live?’ The driver’s face collapsed into confusion, so we had him stop and we tried other taxis, encountering the same reaction from each of the four we approached. The fifth driver was a Dai woman and she offered us a ride to a cluster of Dai villages near the Jinghong airport. I was in the middle of interviewing people for a book I was writing about the Land Reform Movement of the 1950s in Yunnan, and the prospect of talking to Dai villagers thrilled me. Dr Sun was excited too by the rare opportunity of a glimpse into the past. Traffic was light and our taxi zoomed onto the airport highway, where the narrow road suddenly expanded to five lanes. ‘We should be there in just a few minutes,’ our driver said. ‘Only twenty kilometres, very close to the border with Myanmar.’ We began to see exit signs in both Chinese characters and the local script that pointed to Dai villages, but the driver appeared lost, making several calls on her mobile phone for directions. I began to despair until she turned off the highway and followed a side road for several kilometres before stopping and asking for payment. ‘You’re on your own now,’ she said, and pointed to the head of a path barely discernible amid the thick vegetation. We thanked her and set out along the pathway, which steadily narrowed the deeper in we went. Banana trees closed in until their leaves formed an impenetrable canopy and I imagined us walking in a deep, dark place. ‘This is what I used to see in Xichuanbana,’ said Dr Sun, clearly elated by the surroundings. The path led us to a wall and we followed that for some two hundred metres before coming to an old archway, which announced itself as the entrance to a village named ‘Manjingbao’, and we saw what the wall had been hiding: domed Dai-style houses – some old and dilapidated, others new and elaborate, some constructed with stone, others traditional bamboo structures with soot-covered roofs, densely packed together, the populace going about their business. We wandered around for about fifteen minutes before happening on a family inn and restaurant. The first level of the bamboo structure stood about two metres off the ground. I peeped inside the closed 20

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in ground level, dark as a cellar, and could make out the thick timber poles that supported the house, which was as big as a basketball court. We climbed its steps to the second level, where there were several bedrooms with floor mattresses, a kitchen, dining and living rooms. The roof resembled the cover of a bamboo steamer. Dr Sun and I were led to our room, which had a strong musty smell, and two rectangular mattresses were pulled out and spread on the floor. Dr Sun sat down to test his bed. He nodded his head and said: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I feel as though the clock has been turned back.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; We were treated to a Dai meal on the balcony: stewed chicken, spearmint leaves with beef, some unnameable indigenous vegetables and fried tree leaves. With a couple of drinks, we were all smiles. After lunch, Dr Sun went out with his bag to scout candidates for my interviews. * * * I used the quiet to work through some old newspapers that I had brought along in my satchel and reread a story about child slaves in brick kilns. I had seen the same story online: two mothers in the central province of Henan had gone looking for their missing children. In the course of their search, they went to various brick kilns in nearby cities and stumbled on a horrifying scandal of children abducted to work in slave-like conditions. They contacted a journalist and, with several other mothers who had also lost children, returned to the kilns in disguise and secretly videotaped what was happening to the children. The tape was broadcast on television and the nation was shocked. Police rescued more than 400 children. The public outcry spurred the Chinese leadership into ordering a crackdown on human trafficking. I had seen the video and listened to the commentary: children, ranging in age from eight to their early teens, worked for up to nineteen hours a day inside dark brick kilns; guards and vicious dogs monitored their movements; a lack of nutrition and excessive hard labour had reduced them to mere skeletons. As children, the Communist Party had us visit museums with exhibits purporting to expose the brutalities of so-called evil landlords against poor children and adults in rural areas. That such crimes against children could happen in modern times only fuelled public anger, as did the allegation that control of thousands of illegal brick kilns had been 21

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monopolised by local Party secretaries and officials. Children were abducted and sold to the kilns at 300 to 400 yuan each. Many of the illegal brick kilns under investigation were in provinces that supplied Beijing’s property developers and construction projects related to the 2008 Olympics. I think it was Karl Marx, revered grandfather of the world’s Communist movement, who wrote with gothic flair of ‘Capital which comes into the world soiled with mire from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore’. It all reminded me of the illegal coal mines I saw twenty years ago when I worked as a truck driver and travelled to remote villages in Sichuan Province. Private coal mines owned by former Communist officials and new entrepreneurs had turned the mountain slopes into a honeycomb of small mines. Adults and children crawled through entrances no bigger than dog holes, torches tied to their heads and headbands tied to a basket that trailed behind them. They would crawl to the coalface, load the basket and crawl back. For each basket of coal, they received a paper slip, and at the end of the month the slips were exchanged for wages, from which random deductions for something or other were common, such as rent for the dorms in which they were locked each night. There was no compensation for work-related death or injury. Guards with dogs were a constant presence, in case they attempted to break their ‘contract’ with the mine-owner and run away. Such scandals were becoming commonplace. My friend Yi Ping from the United States emailed me after one such scandal: Isn’t it true that the Chinese people are hopeless? Is this what we get after receiving years of Communist education, which admonishes people to be altruistic and devote their lives to the Party and the masses?

I still don’t know how to answer him. China is a rising power, many overseas students are returning to profit from the economic boom, while many who will never benefit from China’s success are desperate to flee the fate to which the Party has condemned them. Some who plan their escape seek freedom; others, like corrupt Communist officials who sleep on stacks of one-hundred-yuan bills and worry about being stripped of their ill-gotten wealth by more powerful robbers, are also planning their escapes. Confucius 22

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advised us two thousand years ago that ‘A sage will not enter a tottering state, nor dwell in a disorganised one. When right principles of government prevail he shows himself, but when they are prostrated he remains concealed.’ I read on the Internet a poem by someone called Wang Xinwen, entitled ‘Brick Kiln Slaves’: I know the whole nation resembled a brick kiln, dark and its doors shut Nobody inside can escape the tragic fate I therefore turn myself into a worm, dive deep And swallow mouthfuls of poisonous dirt.

The solution is to ‘go south, further south’, dodge the gunfire of the border police, dash across the border as fast as your legs will carry you, and find a new home, perhaps on another continent. Once settled securely, you can turn around with hands on hips and watch with ease the troubles in your native land and then, only then, open your mouth and say what you wish. * * * Dr Sun returned around dusk, sweaty and exhausted. He forced a smile. His visits to three Dai villages had produced nothing. Two people labelled ‘evil landlords’ and persecuted during the Land Reform Movement had passed away. Their descendants were too young to remember anything. I suppressed my frustration. When Dr Sun went to take a shower, I picked up a book, sat on the squeaking bamboo balcony and watched the bloody rays of sunset soak the banana trees. Then, the moon was out. Stars filled the sky. Dr Sun returned with renewed optimism. He touched the low eaves with a hand and said: ‘We have another new lead. He lives in Mannan Village, on the other side of the airport.’ ‘Are you sure this will work?’ ‘We’ll have to see what God’s plan is,’ said Dr Sun, and he laid out what he had learned. ‘The father of the family became a target for condemnation during the land redistribution campaign. So he took his son and attempted to escape to Myanmar. They were caught. The father was shot on the spot and the son was sent to a forced labour camp.’ 23

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That was another border-crossing story. A comet flashed through the clear black sky. I shuddered in the evening chill. I wasn’t a Christian, but I said a prayer in my mind. If God truly cared about what happened in China, he would make the meeting possible so I could record the suffering of his flock. * * * From Xichuanbana one can cross the border by land, passing through the pristine forests, and walk to the end of the ancient path of Chama, or one can go by water, floating all the way down the Lancang River until it becomes the Mekong River that meanders along the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. People are like birds and beasts. We are born to be free. Unfortunately, the bullets of border police target humans, not birds or beasts. But if you are lucky, the bullets can be dodged. I recalled an email from a friend who had spent twenty-one years in prison for his anti-Party activities. He went to the United States after his release. This friend invited me to have a drink with him in America. He said he hadn’t had a drink for three years and he hadn’t had the opportunity to speak Chinese for several months. He was busy at work and at home. His email said: Come on over. Bring your flute and bring your voice. We can drink, play and sing together, just like we used to do in China.

I wrote back saying the government wouldn’t give me a passport. He replied: What are you afraid of? You attempted suicide twice when you were in jail. You were never afraid of death. Why don’t you run over to Xichuanbana, bribe a local Dai guide and go south, further south? You have nothing to lose. Thousands of people have already laid down their lives along the border. Their bodies are piling up in the netherworld. When you fall into the netherworld, you will at least have a soft landing.

But I’m not in Xichuanbana to escape. I am here with Dr Sun on another mission. Dr Sun didn’t intend me to go so far south that I didn’t come back. 24

Go South, Further South

He had been in the border region for many years, doing missionary work among the poor. He could easily cross to the other side, but he didn’t. Why should I? * * * Fatigue had set in, but Dr Sun stood out on the balcony looking up at the stars and began to talk to me about God. ‘Only God has the power to judge what happens in this world. We, as human beings, are not in the position to be judgmental.’ I asked: ‘Shouldn’t we be judgmental and speak out against a totalitarian society?’ ‘We don’t need to,’ he said, ‘because God has already reached his verdict for us. You already know what God’s judgment will be. That’s why you are not following the paths of other Chinese writers who make up stories to please those in power. You come here to document history and to record people’s suffering. You write about topics that nobody dares to write. Even though you have not been baptised, God will take special care of you. Stay and continue to write.’ Fine sentiments, but I didn’t see how religious faith was going to make that any easier. * * * In January 2009, news came from Melbourne that the Chinese version of The Big Earthquake had won me an award from something called Qi’s Cultural Foundation. I looked up the organisation on the Internet and learned that the award was set up in memory of a former Chinese political prisoner, Qi Zunzhou. Qi was an alumnus of the No. 2 Sichuan Provincial Prison, where I spent two years for writing and distributing my poem ‘Massacre’ after the Tiananmen crackdown. The prize came as a shock. It was encouragement from one political prisoner to another. I was touched and enticed, like a prisoner hearing the sound of keys outside his dark cell. This was an award I wanted to collect in person and it was as if an invisible hand was leading and guiding me in life. Then my phone rang. It was the local police. They wanted a meeting. 25

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It was a sunny afternoon, right after Chinese New Year. Mr Zeng, the local police chief, looked weary and distracted. He said he had to officially convey to me the government decision to reject my application for a passport. When I asked for more explanation, he said: ‘You know what I mean.’ I nodded in response: ‘Of course. It’s going to be an eventful year – one year after the earthquake, the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen, the tenth anniversary of the government’s crackdown on Falun Gong, the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Those milestones pose many potential headaches for the government. I know … but what does this have to do with my travelling abroad?’ Mr Zeng warned me not to pursue the matter any further. Public security officials in my hometown were busy handling the aftermath of the earthquake and it was relatively easy for me to change my residential registration and obtain a new one at a small town nearby. With the new registration card, I was able to obtain a passport – the public security bureau in Chengdu had denied my application nine times. With my new passport, I submitted my visa application at the Australian consulate and went there for an interview, during which I promised: ‘I won’t use this award as an opportunity to escape to your country and claim political asylum, as many of my pathetic fellow countrymen have. I have no ulterior motives. I’m a writer who thrives on the tales of people living at the bottom rung of society. I’m rooted here despite the fact I hate it. The air in Australia is fresher, but I can’t live on fresh air alone.’ The tone of my voice was one of confidence, but deep down I had a gnawing pain. It is a hard life to be a writer. Over the past two decades, I have interviewed more than 300 people at the bottom of society and chronicled their lives, which had been particularly harsh amid tumultuous political campaigns and disasters. None of my books are permitted in China, but my writings have reached the Internet and, despite attempts by the authorities to censor cyberspace, a growing audience at home. I was granted a visa, reluctantly, I think, and only because the Australians feared the adverse publicity more than the annoyance of Beijing. As I made my preparations, my intellectual friends determined I was acting ‘recklessly’. ‘We are living in a big country ruled by a powerful totalitarian government,’ they said. ‘Don’t even go near the immigration checkpoints at major airports. You could get yourself into trouble.’ 26

Go South, Further South

I argued that I had all the necessary legal documents. They snorted with laughter. ‘Old Liao, you are over fifty years old, yet you still haven’t grown up. Your longing for freedom has blinded you; you cannot see reality.’ My lawyer told me not to relinquish my passport to anyone. ‘Don’t let them snatch it away.’ My plan was an elaborate one, worthy of Ai Wu himself. I would go south, further south, but not through Xichuanbana. That would be too risky. My girlfriend and I would put together a large parcel, much like the ones hauled back and forth across the border by travellers and traders, and board the train from Chengdu to Nanning, in Guangxi Province. I planned to cross at the China-Vietnam border, and would erase any trace of my escape by turning off my mobile phone and shutting my email accounts. The only thing I didn’t do was have plastic surgery. As my girlfriend and I joined the crowd filtering through immigration, an officer asked me to step out of the queue. I released my package, which stood as tall as me, and handed over my passport. ‘Is this your first time travelling abroad?’ he said, scrutinising the photo and details, testing the surface with his thumb, flicking through its blank pages. ‘ID card,’ he snapped. The immigration officer went to a nearby desk and, pecking at the keyboard, tapped my information into the computer. He then raised his head and looked at me for a few moments. ‘There’s a problem. Wait inside this office for a few minutes.’ ‘Do you want to check my luggage?’ I asked, trying my best to feign innocence. ‘Yes,’ he said. Four police officers followed me into the office and leaned against the walls. They didn’t search me. They didn’t ask me any questions. I sat on a hard chair for more than two hours. The immigration officer came in with a piece of paper and read from it: ‘Liao Yiwu, based on Article 8 of the Chinese Immigration Regulation, you have been barred from leaving the country.’ I didn’t argue with them. After leaving the immigration office, I went to an adjacent village and from there looked at the border – a huge muddy pool with several wooden stakes marking a line through its middle. No barbed wire or searchlights; really nothing more than a line on a map. 27

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From the bus station, I headed for Yunnan Province and, twelve hours later, reached Mengzi. Another five or six hours further on and I reached Hekou County. I could see Vietnam from across the river. But when I reached immigration, the computer delivered the same message. As the saying goes: ‘The net of heaven stretches far and wide, coarse mesh letting nothing through.’ In two weeks, I traversed thousands of kilometres of border, looking for a legitimate way through, before finally I conceded that my plan had failed miserably. I returned to my hometown, exhausted. It was a beautiful dream of freedom while it lasted. Now I am awake, and I am still here. As I wrote my book about the earthquake, my mind reached a point of saturation. I was reluctant to talk about the book. I didn’t want to revisit the purgatory of death and pain I had witnessed. I thought the award might let me see the ocean on the other side of the hemisphere and breathe some fresh air. I used to blame fate for the obstacles I encountered in life. But I had survived prison, while others had died within its walls. And I had survived a devastating earthquake while so many others perished. And hundreds of people are arrested or shot crossing the border. I don’t have a single reason to complain. I accept my fate, which is to stay, and write.

Liberation Road

Poem Kevin Simmonds

Shaker John, Bamboo Spine

Prophecy Fish boat sail, Tiny and square In year of ox, Won’t do. Cart of black ocean Will take you beyond mackerel, Even mackerel of the bravest dead Before you. Father’s stone Will turn to face This exodus In winter.

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The Call Oil for New England light Trapped in bellies of whales. Tidy-bearded men, Whalers of light. Manjiro. Prepare. For stars. November 21, 1841

The Polynesian

Captain William H. Whitfield of the whaler John Howland rescued five youth stranded on a rockhedged island in the East. Upon seeing the divine whaler, one of the youth, named Manjiro, tied his own tattered clothing to a void of driftwood and disturbed the air until seen. He then dove past the treacherous rocks and swam to his rescuers. It is yet unknown from where these starved souls hail since they understand merely a thimbleful of English. We do know, however, that God is God and His manner is to bring the outermost fold into His bosom. We are certain that these five will become seekers of His delight.

Poem by Kevin Simmonds

Prayer Water go back Tell mother Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m alive Brush her heels Cradle fish for her plate Robe the shore with my calling Make me alive without anger.

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

Manifest Destiny What a century Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve chosen. No witch trials, Except that Lizzie, The swinger. Patents fly: Toilet paper, safety pins. Morse and his code. Typewriters, can openers, The revolving door. We ram shores Until they treaty. Negroes leave the auction, Try their hands at freedom. New world again. And again. All this, As we pan for our right To live as kings. Nigger Heaven Have him join the Negroes, William. Up in the balcony. Welcome to the balcony, John. Welcome. Closer to heaven up here, John. Closer. For them God bends His back, William. Down in the balcony.

Poem by Kevin Simmonds

God of mine sits high, John. God of yours does too. He one in the same, John. One in the same. It’s in Him to do it, William. There, in the balcony. Next Sunday ‘til the last, William. Up in God’s balcony. These hymns don’t come easy, John. Their organ’s mighty proud. Sing what you can, John. Up here with us, sing loud.

Fairhaven Earth again. Its west. Its east. Round again. Flat plate of ocean. Cracked Again. Buttons and slaves Spellers and milk. Ciphered and wrong Again.

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

The Call Sons of New England, appraise John Mung. Feed him Nantucket dumplings, fetch the nestling dolls of hospitality. He will judge a nation by us. Fisherman’s blood dreams through him. Discovery – his industry, same as ours. Open your cowsheds, the church doors. Show him our advantage. Tune Shaker John, Bamboo spine, Copper stars, Hammered time. Seeker John, Crowded boy, One-room school, One-roomed joy. Savior John, Clapboard soul, Ripened boy, Empty bowl. Simple John, Fill your head, Claim a world, No, Worlds instead.

Interview: Hanif Kureishi

opulist, popular and down-to-earth in his depiction of the immigrant experience in Britain, for almost thirty years Hanif Kureishi has been a prophetic, entertaining and occasionally controversial force in British, Asian and World literature. As a writer comfortable with theatre, television and cinema, he has been able to reach beyond the literary milieu in examining, and participating in, the transformation of British society by emigrants from the Indian sub-continent, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Britain’s expired empire. Though his fictional universe rarely extends beyond a relatively tiny corner of London, he has become an icon of post-colonial literature, lauded by critic Sukhdev Sandhu as a ‘father figure to a whole generation of Asian artists … inspired by the fearlessness of his writing’. His work is intimately engaged with questions of shifting identities – race and nationality, culture and religion, the local and the global, sexuality and 35

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gender. His artistic and commercial breakthrough, the Oscar-nominated screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), centred on a gay relationship between a young Asian man and a former member of the National Front. Kureishi’s prose comprises a playful mix of influences, voices, genres and tones. Inspired as much by pop music as by Chekov, James Baldwin and The Mahabharata, his writing is comic, vulgar and erotic, but also emotional, philosophical and tragic. In form, he is a chameleon, producing plays, scripts for radio and television, novels, short stories, articles and a memoir. And while he is yet to publish any poetry, he does admit to trying his hand at verse. What links all this experimentation is Kureishi – the born entertainer. Funny, sexy and accessible, his prose strives to connect with as large and as varied an audience as possible. Several of his works appear in more than one form – he adapted his debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) for a BBC television series; The Black Album (1995) transferred to the London stage in 2009. Kureishi was born in Bromley, south London, in 1954 to an Anglo mother, Audrey, and a Muslim Indian father, Rafiushan. His father had emigrated after the partition of India and Pakistan and never returned. His heritage singled him out for especially harsh treatment as racial tension created by the influx of Asian immigrants to Britain flared into open violence through his teenage years. Kureishi found escape in music and literature. He fell in love with pop icons like The Beatles, fellow Bromley-boy David Bowie and Pink Floyd, and writers like Chekov, Orwell and Baldwin. Described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘literary godfather to a generation of British Asians’, he told Sandhu in a 2004 interview: ‘I’m not an anti-racist writer; I write about people.’ His recent work on screen – The Mother (2003) and Venus (2006) – and in fiction, notably ‘The Decline of the West’ (2009), is populated by white, middle-class English people on the verge of nervous, romantic or financial breakdown. Although he spent his adolescence writing a sprawling novel, his initial success came in the theatre. His first play, Soaking the Heat, was read at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1976, when Kureishi was just twentytwo. His first full-length play was The Mother Country (1980), followed by Outskirts and Borderline (both 1981) and Birds of Passage (1983). Kureishi’s view then was that of an outsider who sees England and its inhabitants with a mixture of ambition, fear, amusement and confusion. ‘The English haven’t 36

Interview: Hanif Kureishi

done anything good since 1945,’ says Asif in Birds of Passage. ‘We say you are a Third World country. You know, underdeveloped.’ Yet, present too is Kureishi’s inclusive humanity, his drive to understand the most racist characters even as he exposes them to censure. Having grown frustrated with the limitations of fringe theatre, he wrote the screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette. Directed by Stephen Frears and starring Gordon Warnecke as Omar and Daniel Day-Lewis as Johnny, the film was a snapshot of Thatcherite Britain that few outside the beleaguered Asian community had witnessed. Although Kureishi’s London is characterised by violence, unhappiness, alienation and despair, this is not a world devoid of hope or even romance. Society may be increasingly riven by class, race and income, but this is also a city where working-class skinheads and ambitious Asian entrepreneurs can flirt and find mutual salvation. Kureishi was nominated for an Academy Award in 1987 for best original screenplay, but the Oscar went to Woody Allen for Hannah and Her Sisters. His first novels, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, allowed him to probe more deeply such issues as identity, community and heritage that reflect Kureishi’s coming to terms with himself in an age when Britain as a whole was undergoing social upheaval. Karim, in The Buddha of Suburbia, is torn between the culture of his white, working-class mother and that of his father, an Indian Muslim bringing Buddhist meditation to middle-class London. It is a portrait of the author as a young man – albeit one who listens to Pink Floyd, drops acid and sleeps with anything in trousers. The exuberant tone darkens in The Black Album. Like Karim, Shahid is suspended between conflicting worlds: East and West, spiritual submission and personal liberation, political commitment and sensual abandon, abstinence and pleasure. There is the sense of identity, community and heritage provided by the group of radical and politicised Islamists. Fighting this in the battle for Shahid’s soul is the lure of liberal, cross-cultural and epicurean Bohemia that exists in London’s clubs and colleges, as well as the music of Prince. Kureishi continues to write for the page and screen, while exploring, too, his own role and responsibility as a writer in the essay collections Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (2002) and The Word and The Bomb (2005). In 2004, he published a beguiling and tender memoir, My Ear at His Heart. The book was partly a creative autobiography, and partly an elegy 37

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for his father, who never fulfilled his dream of becoming a professional writer. The memoir confirmed for some what they had long suspected: that Kureishi had always been writing about himself. Indeed, his sister, mother and ex-partner have all complained of having their lives exploited and private history ‘fabricated for the entertainment of the public or for Hanif ’s profit’. ALR spoke to Hanif Kureishi in a café near his west London home about his experiences of racism, his desire to entertain and his need to dissect, and his complex relationship with Islam, his family and his Asian heritage. James Kidd

Interview: Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi … … on growing up in sixties Britain. I grew up in a paradise really, apart from the racism. Between the 1950s and Thatcherism, there was free school, free university and cheap housing. My dad used to say, ‘It’s unbelievable that you don’t pay for your school in this country. I go to the doctor, and it’s free! In India, you wouldn’t even get a fucking doctor.’ I was in India [at the Jaipur Literary Festival]. You come out of Delhi airport and there are five-year-old children living on the pavement covered in filth. No shelter, no electricity, no proper food. There they live on the side of the road. It is extraordinary to think they can’t get housing. Coming from India, my father made me very aware what the welfare state represented. He didn’t pay one penny for my education. Extraordinary. We thought that would go on forever – that safety, that sense of post-Second World War security. There have been a lot of blows to the narcissism of the West since then. … on his father’s experience of racism. There weren’t any Indians in my neighbourhood before my father turned up. If you were an Indian in England in the 1950s, people just thought you were inferior. If you were an English chap, you looked down on an Arab. You might be very polite to him, ask him how his family was, but you thought he was inferior. My dad was aware of that. He knew English people thought they were superior to him – because of class, the empire, the white man. I never felt that. I experienced it, but I never internalised it. I could see dad had a very complicated relationship to that. Maybe that’s why he liked the white working class. They were like him. They were also patronised by the English ruling class. He had his wife, he had his kids and his house. That suited him. He could write. … on his mixed-race heritage. It was brave of mum. It wasn’t particularly brave of dad, because his family didn’t particularly disapprove. Several of his brothers married white women. It wasn’t a big deal. Only one of the brothers had an arranged marriage. My grandfather knocked off a few white women as well. They were all here 39

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during the war. It was controversial from the other side. But my mother’s family really liked dad. They were really fond of him. We are all mixed race now – me, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton. In those days, you were despised if you were half-caste because people had this notion of purity. You could either be black or you could be white. The idea you could be in-between seemed like a dreadful mix-up. People were always asking, Where do you belong? Do you know who you are? Are you one of us or one of them? It would do your head in because I didn’t know really. Did I have to make a choice?

… on his formative political and cultural influences. I was very impressed by the civil rights movement in the United States and by the Black Panthers – especially the demonstration at the Olympics [in 1968, by Tommie Smith and John Carlos]. I had lots of arguments in the neighbourhood with white people about it. They were really offended. That seemed to me one of the greatest gestures I had ever seen. Because I identified with what it was like to be talked about all the time as a Paki, as a half-caste, a reject. To see that was absolutely stunning for me. Writers like James Baldwin also really helped. He was black and gay. He had been subject to the force of other people’s descriptions. Also pop music. Everyone was weird in pop. If you were a freak as a Paki, you could join the world of pop where everyone was a freak. It was Jimi Hendrix, and all that world, then, seemed very free. … on his own experience of racism. The racism my father experienced was of a different order. The bad stuff didn’t really happen until the end of the 1960s, when Paki-bashing became a thing. My mates from school would go out to beat up Pakis. We didn’t have a structure for understanding racism. A lot of the people who were abusive towards you were the authorities themselves. All the teachers were racist. They would say to me, ‘Hey, Paki.’ ‘Hey, brown boy.’ And there wasn’t another authority you could appeal to about the injustice of your situation. That is what is horrific about abuse of children. The very authority you go to for help is often the abuser. For me that was the case. It was a strange and disturbing world. There were marches by the National Front from the 1970s through the 1980s. There was the big march 40

Interview: Hanif Kureishi

in Southall when Blair Peach was killed. The racism of the skinheads became party-based. A lot of my friends became skinheads. People I had known since I was four turned up one day and they were skinheads. They remained my friends, though. Some black kids would also hang around with the skinheads because of the ska thing. It was quite a complicated picture. These skinheads would be chasing your dad down the street and then listening to Desmond Dekker at dance halls in Petts Wood with black boys wearing crombies and braces.

… on racism, art and being a writer. I tried to make sense of it by writing it down. In that sense, writing is therapeutic. That’s what The Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Laundrette are about. They are attempts to work out what the fuck I was doing, and whether I belonged anywhere. They are love stories to my friends. But to friends whose relationship with you is really ambivalent. It was very disturbing. I got out of Bromley as soon as I could and went to London. Once I got there, I was alright. Once I had become a writer, it was a counterforce to them saying I was a half-caste, a Paki, a mongrel. Being a writer is a real thing in the world. It is an identity. Back then, I needed to call myself a writer because they were calling me a fucking Paki. Other people need to call themselves Muslim when they are being called a Third World coolie. These are all defences that you need. Becoming a writer and finding a subject that people might be interested in … [immigration and race] was happening already. I just noticed it, like Alan Sillitoe noticed that working-class people were joining the bourgeoisie. I was lucky. Any writer is lucky if you hit it for a bit. You get five years when what you are saying and the society you are saying it in are in the same place. Like John Osborne, or Salinger with The Catcher in the Rye. … on racism and language. It really is about language. It’s very traumatic to exist in a world of other people’s descriptions. Your own words have no force. You are bullied and disintegrate psychologically. That is why there were the big debates through the 1970s and 1980s about political correctness. We are still arguing about what you can say about Muslims, about what is free speech. For me, there isn’t a rule. If there was, you would know what you could 41

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say and couldn’t say. I do get offended, though. I was in Germany recently doing a book tour. People asked me questions nobody in England would ever dream of asking: Do you feel you really belong in England? Do you really feel you will be an Englishman? No one has said that to me for thirty years.

… on how race and immigration became central to his writing. I realised I was very lucky to have grown up during this revolutionary transformation of Britain, from a white country to a brown country – what we call multiculturalism. This is a massive revolution. This is something that has never happened anywhere before. It wasn’t until I was eighteen or nineteen that I realised that this was what my writing would be about. I suddenly saw that this story, represented by my father, a Muslim man coming to Britain, was not only his story, but that of the West. No one else was writing about this. They would say to me: ‘This is very good, Hanif, but do they have to be Indians in a corner shop?’ And the global theme for me was immigration: the way Britain was changing faster and faster as more immigrants arrived. In Bromley, we were the only Indian family. Then the corner shop was run by Indians, and then the launderette, and so on. You could see us pouring into the country. Nobody foresaw that in three generations the whole of the racial landscape of the country would completely change. But I could see a process that was taking place, Britain becoming India. That was what I wanted to write about. … on Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. It really bothers us, doesn’t it? It’s odd that we would be shocked by people believing things so profoundly. It’s as though we don’t expect people to believe anything with fervency or conviction any longer; that they are willing to die for something. I am fascinated by Islam, by the idea of authority and by the protection that religion offers you: the rules and the hierarchy. Throughout history, most people in most parts of the world have lived, not in democracies, but in authoritarian regimes ruled over by cruel dictators. There is a deep need for the safety and the security. The sort of consumer vertigo that we live in now is quite an unusual thing.

Interview: Hanif Kureishi

… on China. I had always thought of economic power and cultural power going together – look at Holland – [but] China seems to be a country in which people have a lot of money, but no freedom to speak. That seems to me a very odd thing, but it also seems like the future – economic freedom and cultural censorship. I can see this as a model for Malaysia, Indonesia, perhaps India, where you have religion and consumerism. So why would you want freedom of speech or political freedom? I grew up in the 1960s and took it for granted that people would want that. For me, there is no thought without speech. … on art as entertainment. When I am teaching – and I think it is a duty to teach – I tell students they are in showbiz. Writing isn’t for their benefit; they are making stories for other people. Why order it, make it sophisticated, make it into a narrative? It has got to work for someone else. It has to entertain them in some way. I have always liked performance. I grew up on pop music, so my heroes were always performers. I went to work in the theatre and then the movies. It happened by accident, but it also wasn’t an accident. The idea that I would leave university and just sit in a room and write alone for the rest of my life seemed very depressing. I like working with other people. … on his recent and future work. I write every day. I am doing some short fiction at the moment. I want to write more quickly now. As you get older, you want economy. You want to say it more quickly. I don’t want to start something now and maybe it will come out in five years. Salman does that. I can’t bear it. It is too long for me now. … on the writing process. Writing is a very dreamy process. You start with a very vague idea, and then you sit there for days working on it. After a couple of weeks you realise it was a terrible idea, and throw it away. Except there is a little bit of the story that you think might make a good idea. You sit there for another three weeks, fiddling around with it, and something comes out. You don’t know what it is, where it comes from, but eventually you might have something. You are panning for gold, but you have to go though a lot of dirt. 43

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These days I tend to work stories out in my head much more. You may see me lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, but I am actually thinking about it. I am writing a movie at the moment, an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger. I thought about it a lot, before I wrote anything down. I have been thinking a great deal lately about what a waste of time [writing] is. But the waste of time makes it possible. There is anger and boredom about the stupidity of what you are doing. Then you quieten down and get on with it. I rather resent it. It’s like my dad’s making me go to work. Then I realise I am doing it because I want to.

… on why he wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be an artist, but more importantly I wanted to be a professional writer. For me, that is more of a deal than being an artist. Can you make a living at this? Can you support your family? How is this a real job in England? Your father is an immigrant. You are a Pakistani. Are you a bum or are you a person who can support their family, which is a source of dignity and integrity? Dad wrote his books to be published. He would have hated the fact that I would have written about reading his book [in My Ear at his Heart], and that I was the only person to have read them. … the key lesson he has learned about writing. It’s a discipline. It’s a love, an obsession, and it never runs out. Henry James says something like, ‘art makes life’. It makes life more interesting and makes you more interested in it. It makes the world more alive to me when I think about it in a literary way. Art and life are interlinked. That’s why culture is important. That’s why the Chinese need more of it, why free speech is important. It’s a creative interaction with the world. We talked earlier about people crushing you with their descriptions. They own the language. They have the power. There is something very destructive about doing that to somebody: You are a Paki; you are nothing. It empties you out. To speak, to be creative and to write, that seems to me to be really authentic.

A Most Generous Uncle Tew Bunnag

ew were surprised when Khun Lung was felled by a stroke, fewer still when he died. It was his lifestyle, they told one another. His three younger sisters had been warning him for decades. Other family members, too. That Khun Lung was an intensely private person, discreet almost to the point of secrecy, and that they could only guess what he got up to, was irrelevant. At family gatherings and social functions, the mere sight of this aging, unmarried dandy enjoying the earthly pleasures with such relish provoked a disagreeable reaction among them. It was not that they disliked him; everyone acknowledged his generosity and kindness. No. Slim figured and elegant though he remained, it was generally agreed that Khun Lung led an ‘unhealthy’ life for a man in his sixties and was an embarrassment to their good family name, smoking fine cigars and drinking expensive whiskey, and almost certainly taking drugs and fornicating. ‘He is destined to fall,’ they’d say without prompting. It became over the years almost a family mantra, born from that mixture of moral indignation, hypocrisy and well-disguised jealousy that is among the least attractive qualities of the Thai character. Khun Lung did have allies, and one who felt genuine concern for his well-being was his youngest sister, Pim, a devout Buddhist in her late forties; she included him in her prayers when she went to the temple in Ayudhya once a month to make merit. After lighting the candles and incense and 45

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before putting the envelope into the donation box, she would pray her brother would change his ways and, instead of continuing to live only for the senses, find sobriety and solace in Buddha’s teachings. Out of love and decency she continued to defend him to the family, some of whom were prone to exaggerate their pious condemnation of Khun Lung’s behaviour, as though they needed a focus to vent their frustrations on. This was especially true of Chada, the middle sister. Still, even Pim privately agreed with the others sometimes, and she wondered when his decadence would eventually catch up with him, and so she too awaited his fall, though with compassion rather than anticipation. There was an appropriate show of grief at Khun Lung’s passing, but behind this mask of tears the sharp observer might have detected an impatience among relatives to get on with the business of exposing the truth about him, in the strictest confidence, of course, so that they could feel vindicated in their judgment. As with most things in Thai society, this was by no means a straightforward exercise. * * * Khun Lung was the eldest child and only son of a surgeon who, after much consideration, decided against sending the boy abroad for his education, concerned that the offspring of friends sent down that path were, on returning, unable to readapt to Thai culture and take up their allotted positions in society. At any rate this was what Khun Lung’s father told anyone who cared to ask. The truth was more selfish: surrounded at home by women, whose company he often found irritating without knowing or caring to understand why, he wanted to keep Khun Lung by his side. He made sure the boy was pampered by his nurse and his mother and free to do as he pleased from an early age, unlike his sisters who, in strict Thai tradition, were brought up to be proper, obedient and modest. Khun Lung was a princeling, blessed with lean, good looks and natural charm. To the annoyance of those who would have taken pleasure in seeing him spoiled, he grew to be an easy-going, considerate and unassuming young man. Lacking for nothing, he enjoyed his life. He attended a private day school and never envied the friends sent off to England or Australia, who would return each summer with complaints about the weather and their foreign 46

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guardians and the food and the weirdness of boarding schools. During the long months of the rainy season he would take his companions around the parts of Bangkok he frequented and show them what they had been missing. Far from feeling deprived, he considered himself lucky. By the age of fifteen, Khun Lung realised he was committed to a life of sensual gratification in all its aspects, and the slippery shadows of the City of Angels became his domain. Finding he could separate his private self from his public persona with an ease that came naturally, he vowed never to bring shame on his parents, who had not the least suspicion of how he spent his spare hours in the afternoon, or the nights when he slipped through the gate at the back of the garden and onto the leafy, dark path along the canal. By the time he was in university, Khun Lung was well acquainted with all Bangkok had to offer the sensualist. A veritable banquet to the American soldiers on leave from the war in Vietnam, it was a city throbbing with lust and desperation, where everything and anyone was available for a price. His father, as if in compensation for not having sent him abroad, gave Khun Lung a generous allowance to use as he wished and he was able to taste Bangkokâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s delights, always taking his pleasures with moderation and self-control. Only during his second year of university, when he was experimenting with opium in a small private den in Thonburi, did he feel himself losing control, but, with the self-discipline that would serve him throughout his life, he regained his balance. After graduating as an architectural engineer, Khun Lung joined a firm that would, during the boom of the late 1980s, grow to become one of the largest property developers in Thailand. He commanded a high salary, augmented by fat annual bonuses. Khun Lung had inherited a conservative streak from his father, which meshed neatly with his own instincts when it came to risk, and by mid-life he was financially independent. He was one of the few to emerge unscathed from the speculative crash of 1997 that began in Bangkok and swept across Asia. When he took retirement at the age of sixty, Khun Lung was a wealthy man. If his professional career followed the sure and steady course through the calm waters of material security that was familiar to the privileged, his personal life reflected no less commitment to tranquil conservatism. He came early to the conclusion that it would be impossible for him to 47

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be faithful to one person; he saw the exhausting turmoil of dishonesty and furtiveness that dogged the married men around him who sought to maintain a mistress. Khun Lung decided not to marry or to have children, thereby avoiding the householder’s dukkha – that especial suffering Buddhists must live through on the path to enlightenment. In any case, he enjoyed the single life and, despite moments of pondering the benefits he may have gained by having a companion at his side, he never regretted his decision. He was a bachelor, and that status gave him licence to play the field, he would joke, but though his elegance and wealth allowed him to choose freely from the beautiful men and women who came into his orbit, he was neither promiscuous nor greedy. Khun Lung had many affairs but was never possessive and always made clear to his partners that they should not expect any greater involvement than he was able to offer. As a consequence he was rarely the subject of bitter accusations, and never the target of jealous husbands. He was often bemused by the importance many of his contemporaries, particularly those educated abroad, attached to civic affairs and the need to leave a mark on society. Khun Lung was a sceptical observer. He did not expect Thailand to change in any meaningful way during his lifetime. His youthful illusions were shattered when the brief experiment with democracy in the mid-1970s ended with the massacre at Thammasat University and he had no desire to endorse the benevolent and not-so-benevolent dictatorships that came and went over the next decades, or the cynical demagoguery that filled the intervening periods – and certainly not the culture of corruption that underpinned political life. Khun Lung’s obituary was, by comparison with the dearly departed others of his generation, rather dull – where were the public accomplishments, the fame that might normally attach to wealth or power? To the close observer, his was the charmed, casual existence of a man devoid of ambition, one who stood at a distance from his social environment, who held back from becoming too deeply involved in personal relationships, who was so private as to be scarcely knowable. Yet while not going out of his way to do good, he could nevertheless claim to have done no harm. To acquaintances, Khun Lung’s life was normal, correct and well-starred, and this was put down to good karma left over from a previous incarnation. Those old lovers who attended his funeral at Wat Tadtong knew a slightly 48

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different Khun Lung. And there were others who were by nature suspicious of a life too ordinary and uneventful. Behind the silk fans that fluttered in the afternoon to combat the sweltering heat, gossip was exchanged. But there was nothing sensational about Khun Lung. There was no mud that would stick. His passing provoked neither reverence and admiration nor the retrospective condemnation that had accompanied the recent deaths of certain powerful personalities. Like most committed hedonists, Khun Lung lived his life in a world shaded from public scrutiny, in those private moments of delicious satisfaction to the eye, or the tongue, or the nose, in the touch of soft skin, the colours and visions that come with drugs, the shiver of a blissful orgasm at dawn. No one could have written of these things in the thin booklet that accompanied his cremation, nor would they have, if only for the sake of decorum. The living have no right to judge the dead. Yet, thumbing through those few pages of eulogy composed by a cousin, a retired professor of literature who thought herself the authority on family members, those who suspected that Khun Lung’s life had been far richer than it appeared sat in stiff silence, eager to speculate about what he had been doing all those years. * * * One of the discoveries that slid like a snake from its hole was that Khun Lung’s death had not, in fact, come as the result of a stroke, but from a subsequent heart attack in a hospital bed during a visit by Pim and her daughter, Nong Fon. This detail, and issues concerning his will, set tongues wagging and provoked not a little speculation as to the precise nature of Khun Lung’s relationship with these two close relatives. It was common knowledge that during his final year Khun Lung had begun to spend more and more time at Pim’s house. In itself this was nothing odd; Pim was his favourite sister, and it was natural that he, being single, should feel the need for her company at this point in his life. Pim was joyful to see more of her brother, if only because it fed her hopes that he was showing signs of reforming. Although she did not expect Khun Lung to ask her to direct him to a temple retreat, she was sure that he was heading for some kind of spiritual awakening. After all, she reasoned, he already had so much experience of the world. At his age it was time to prepare 49

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for what lay ahead and to begin building up a store of good karma for the coming journey. Pim had always admired her brother, who was fifteen years her senior, despite her opinions concerning his lifestyle. When she was a little girl, he had made time to play with her and shown her more affection than he had the other sisters. The bond they shared endured into adulthood. On the rare occasions that Khun Lung confided in somebody, it was always Pim. He had, for example, announced to her his decision to give up taking drugs. This was when he turned fifty-seven: he felt he no longer had the stamina for them. ‘I’m going to cut out smoking altogether. It just makes me cough,’ he told her, though she later surmised he was only talking about opium. Two months later, she saw him on the terrace puffing happily on a thin joint of marijuana. He was constant in his inconsistency and while many who knew him found this aspect of his character annoying and deemed him to be a selfish degenerate who refused to grow up, Pim saw in him a cheerful authenticity and freedom of spirit that others around her lacked. ‘He is who he is,’ she would chorus, although no one quite knew what this meant. Khun Lung did not like to speak about himself. He thought the western obsession for delving publicly into the interior world crass. He said he disliked New York because there was always someone at the next table whining about their neuroses, and preferred the reticence of Londoners. His fondness for Paris, he said, was enhanced by not understanding a word of the language that sounded so elegant and enchanting. When a friend pressed him to clarify his personal philosophy, Khun Lung merely shrugged and said, ‘I have none, except to extract as much pleasure as possible from life and to do no harm.’ A word often used in connection with him was ‘generous’. As a young man, he helped a colleague who was in the debt of gangsters. Perhaps it was this incident that gave rise to his reputation, but his acts of generosity were always performed quietly; he did not like attention. At first, his visits to his sister’s house in a peaceful lane in the Bang Lampoo district were preceded by a telephone call to enquire when it might be convenient to join Pim and her daughter for dinner, or lunch on a weekend. Pim never said no and, gradually it was accepted that Khun Lung would drop by unannounced. Soon her house became his second home. 50

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Pim’s husband had died early and she had not remarried. She did not care to have a social life, nor did she have a close relationship with her sisters who, in any case moved in different circles. Ladda, the eldest, was married to a police chief and Chada to a businessman who was never around and was rumoured to have several nubile mistresses. And so she lived with a bitterness that jaundiced her opinion of the younger members of her sex. Pim, for her part, accepted the role of single mother as both a sacrifice and a blessing, devoting all her time and attention to Nong Fon. The year Khun Lung began to become part of the household, Nong Fon was twenty and studying sociology at Bangkok University. She was what others called ‘a quiet girl’, her shyness ascribed to the deep suffering inflicted by her father’s death when she was eight. She grew almost unnoticed from gawky child to attractive young woman. Her style of dress was modest, unlike many of her contemporaries, and her behaviour was reserved. Her aunts liked her for this and praised her for not being drawn into the excesses of her generation, though Auntie Chada would wonder, always out loud, if Nong Fon was really happy and balanced as she did seem unusually introverted. Khun Lung was proud of this niece. He had been vaguely interested in her welfare as a child, but it was when the butterfly began to emerge that she became a real presence in his life. This, he admitted to himself, was in part because he was charmed by her looks. Khun Lung had a carefully cultivated appreciation of beautiful women and beautiful men, and he referred to his love of sex as ‘the thrill of the skin’. But love itself had eluded him. He had watched friends falling in love and heard their excited, rambling descriptions, and he had recognised glimmers of tenderness with a few of his lovers, but he had never felt the love others described and he had long ago concluded that, for whatever reason, its pleasures and pains would elude him in this lifetime. This was to change in a quiet though radical way during the year of his frequent visits to his sister’s house. It was not that he fell in love with his niece; there was no physical desire on his part, no impulse to possess her on any level, nor did he accord her a special position that might entail some kind of reciprocation. Yet, little by little, he found himself connected to his heart in a way he had not known before. Whenever he was in Nong Fon’s company he felt a warm wave of delight flow through him and an interest in 51

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her more intense than he had experienced towards any other human being. He reasoned that these feelings were inspired by her mixture of shyness and ease around him, which he found highly attractive, but also by the manner in which she conducted herself without any apparent concern for the effect a gesture or a phrase might have; in other words, he saw in his niece an innate, shining innocent purity, and it was this that captivated him. Khun Lung’s love for Nong Fon was so fresh and surprising to him that, disregarding his usual discretion, he discussed it with Pim, who seemed genuinely amused. ‘But of course, dear brother,’ she said, ‘it is because she’s the daughter you never had.’ Then she laughed and added, only half in jest, ‘Why don’t you adopt her?’ * * * Towards the end of that year, during which he floated in a cloud of bliss and contentment he owed entirely to the pleasure he derived from his niece’s company, an incident intruded on Khun Lung’s happiness. One morning in the month of October – shortly before his death – he was awakened by a phone call from Chada, who asked if they could meet for coffee. She would explain her reasons later, she said. Khun Lung had never gotten along with Chada and was annoyed both at being woken so early and by the air of mystery she managed to contrive. But he was curious; apart from the occasional family gatherings, they didn’t speak much. Chada wasted no time getting to the point: she was concerned about Nong Fon. ‘You never know what these young people get up to nowadays,’ she said by way of invidious preface to her description of an incident she felt Khun Lung should know about. On the previous Thursday, Chanda said, at about three in the afternoon, she had been sitting in her car idly looking out the window – traffic was bad and she was watching the busy pavement scenes outside one of the shopping malls. A mere arm’s length away was parked a shiny dark blue Japanese car, the latest model, the kind that young people liked, the kind old lechers buy for their little mistresses. She followed this comment with a sarcastic laugh. Imagine her surprise, she said, when she observed through her discreetly tinted windows a young woman dash out of the entrance of the mall carrying a shopping bag in each hand and get 52

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into the very same parked car. Chada could not believe her eyes – it was none other than Nong Fon. And instead of the usual demure style they all associated with the girl, she was wearing a red dress and shiny high heels more suited to a night out at a disco than an afternoon’s shopping. Chada was so shocked that, as the traffic began to move, she told the driver to stop and lowered the window for a better look at her niece, who was now at the wheel and gazing vaguely in her direction. She waved, she said, expecting Nong Fon to wave back, but instead the girl looked right through her as if she was not there, and, with the road ahead now clear, slipped into the flow without so much as an acknowledgment. Chada, now indignant, and annoyed at the cacophony of car horns urging her to move, would have told the driver to catch up with Nong Fon, but she was already late for her hair appointment and let the matter go. But it was her ‘duty’ as a sister to tell her dear brother what she had seen. Khun Lung’s first reaction was that Chada had been mistaken, and he said so. ‘I saw the girl with my own eyes,’ she insisted. ‘It was Nong Fon. There’s no mistaking her. Now it’s your duty,’ (and here she stressed the word, as though it was a concept alien to her brother) ‘to get to the bottom of this. If our niece is going astray then we must save her.’ Entirely aware that far from saving anybody what his sister wanted was some juicy gossip to share with her card-playing circle and to use in a personal attack on Pim, Khun Lung took a slow sip of his coffee. Setting the delicate porcelain cup back on its saucer, taking a moment to listen to the pleasing ‘clink’ of fine china upon fine china, he promised that if there was anything in what she had told him he would deal with the matter without delay. Khun Lung felt vexed. Having had no experience of parenting and averse as he was to awkward situations, he determined that he lacked the necessary skills to achieve a diplomatic solution. The best approach would be to confront the problem head on and, that evening, as he, Pim and Nong Fon were having dinner, he asked his niece directly if she had been at the shopping mall the previous Thursday. Khun Lung was an astute judge of character and knew the subtle but unmistakable signals of a lie being told. He had not decided, however, what exactly he would do if she lied to him and all through the day he had been anxiously debating the issue without coming to any conclusions. 53

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He was relieved to find that his intuition had been right. Nong Fon, without so much as a blink, replied that she had been at a friend’s house studying for the coming exams. ‘But Auntie Chada says she saw you in a red dress and high heels getting into a car,’ Khun Lung said, making plain the accusation that lay behind this statement. Nong Fon was silent for a moment, then, lifting her hand to her mouth so as not to appear impolite, giggled. Pim caught on and began to laugh, and soon the two of them were laughing as if Khun Lung had told the funniest joke they had heard in a long time, and he, with a sense of utter relief, joined them. As they recovered, wiping at the tears in their eyes, Nong Fon said quietly, ‘Uncle, if you have any doubt, please call Pi Daeng, or her mother.’ ‘No need,’ Khun Lung said. ‘Your Auntie Chada has always had an over active imagination.’ And with that remark, they burst out laughing again. Khun Lung was annoyed at himself for having listened to Chada. He knew the game, and over the years had played it as patron to some hard-up girl or boy looking for extra pocket money to indulge an addiction to the vacuous consumerism that had sunk its claws into an entire generation and made a mockery of dedication and hard work; they were not much bothered by what they might have to do in return. But Nong Fon was not in the same category. She lacked for nothing and displayed not the slightest interest in the material or the fashionable. He was angry with his sister for having put him in such a delicate and disagreeable position. And his anger led him to resolve that if Chada had acted with malice, either towards himself or to his beloved niece, then she had no place in his life. But the seed of doubt had been planted and, in the flow of his thoughts that night as he lay in bed, Khun Lung pondered what he might have said had Chada been right. He rarely had to offer advice to anyone. Had Nong Fon been the girl in the red dress, what would he have said then? Given that he had devoted his life to the pursuit of pleasure, what could he say about ‘morality’ that wouldn’t ring with hypocrisy? His guiding principle was that everything is permissible ‘so long as you do no harm to others’. It now sounded more than a little hollow. * * * 54

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Khun Lung slept badly, his dreams crowded and troubling. Just before dawn the sound of a siren in the distance sat him bolt upright in bed, a minor illumination flashing him into consciousness, and he uttered, ‘No harm!’ Buddhists believe Death sends out signals before its eventual arrival at one’s door. Sometimes these are clear signs visible on the physical plane. Others appear in dreams that hint at departure. It is widely held that if one cultivates a sense of awareness and does not cling so much to continuity in this existence, such signs are quite obvious. Khun Lung could not attribute a physical or psychic experience to the realisation that he was entering the slipstream of death. That he was on the verge of some significant transformation came upon him as an understanding that he was lonely. He looked for another word to explain what was happening to him, but ‘lonely’ persisted and he came to comprehend in those last few months that it was a loneliness without context. It did not come from a need to make contact with others, to have company or be surrounded by people. It was not about solitude at all, but rather a sense of being isolated from the business of living, and a sense of pointlessness and deep, visceral regret that his life had been wasted – that his preoccupation with the sensual would count for nought. His love for Nong Fon was real and pure, he reasoned, but this was not enough to dispel the increasingly frequent bouts of desolation, nor could the whiskey he once enjoyed, or the marijuana delivered to him each month by the farmer from Korat. And he had to admit that, for the past several years, his drinking and smoking had become more habitual than pleasurable and lately served only to worsen his loneliness. Even sex had lost its thrill. His last affair ended shortly after his fifty-ninth birthday when his lover, a diplomat ten years his junior, was posted to one of the more pleasing European capitals. He felt relief rather than regret when she left, and told himself he no longer had the energy for fresh emotional entanglement. Professionals were easier, but the thought of venturing into even the most luxurious massage parlour or bordello appalled him, and he settled on exploring the refinement of select private clubs reserved for the wealthy and the cognoscenti, where there was at least the illusion of social as well as sexual intercourse. Khun Lung chose a club with no name, housed in a three-storey colonialstyle mansion in a narrow lane off Sukhumvit Road. Members, both men and women, were driven through high metal gates and, by a winding, 55

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shaded path to a discrete garage, entered a world where anonymity was preserved with the greatest care. There was no limit to desire: private dining rooms; a library; a small cinema; a spa; luxurious bedrooms. A nod to one of the managers and a male or female in the exquisite bloom of youth would appear. Suites were available for group entertainment. The wine cellar was well stocked. The finest drugs, both local and imported, were close to hand. Here he felt life ebbing through his fingers like so much fine coral sand. It was Christmas Eve when Khun Lung paid his last visit to the club, in an effort to escape the crass Christian commercialism that crept into every corner of the beloved Buddhist Bangkok of his childhood. He wanted an oasis of calm, if only for a few hours. He had thought to spend the week at a Hua Hin beach resort, but Pim had insisted he come for Christmas Day – Nong Fon would be cooking turkey for Pi Daeng and her parents. It was a holiday, and there seemed no harm in indulging that western wish – he winced at the hypocrisy – for peace on earth and goodwill to all men. So he stayed in the city and at the club ate a solitary light lunch. The maître d’ told him there was to be a lavish private party that evening. With the food he ordered a half-bottle of white wine, though he almost never drank at lunchtime, and afterwards, feeling groggy, he had asked for a room for the afternoon. The manager smiled and said Khun Lung’s usual room on the second floor was prepared. ‘Will you require anything else?’ Khun Lung told him no, but the young man was insistent: ‘I do think you will like our new part-timer – just out of school.’ ‘No. Thank you. I’m tired and want a little rest before I go home.’ The siesta did nothing to revive him – two hours and he felt wearier than ever. A long soak in the sunken marble bath didn’t help either. He wrapped himself in a bathrobe and called down for tea to be sent up to his room. Khun Lung slumped into an armchair. His legs felt as heavy as tree trunks. Shortly, there came a knock, but he found difficult the four or five steps to the door. Reaching for the handle, he heard voices, one that was familiar, another that was not, and then a peal of laughter. A uniformed maid with a tea tray and service smile stood in the hallway. As he observed the stark contrast of her starched white collar against her dark skin, his eye was drawn to a couple beyond and, with the clarity of slow motion, he took in the handsome, angular face of an aging actor-turned-chat-show-host and his cream linen 56

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suit, his arm around the waist of a thin, beautiful girl in a short, white satin dress cut low to reveal the tops of her young breasts above which was the face of Nong Fon, eyes frozen in shocked recognition, a hand covering her mouth. She was saying something – perhaps she was calling his name – but Khun Lung could hear only a roaring in his ears and when he tried to say her name managed only slurred syllables, as if his mouth had been stuffed with cotton wool. There was a blinding flash. The maid reported thinking she heard him say ‘no harm’ before dropping limp to the floor. * * * Samitivej Hospital is just a couple of laneways from the club, but no ambulance was summoned lest the commotion disturb members gathering for the evening’s festivities. Khun Lung was lifted onto the broad back seat of a limousine and Nong Fon, who had quickly changed into modest day clothes and checked twice that she had removed all traces of make-up, accompanied the chauffeur on the short journey. She held tight the clammy hand of her ashen uncle and speed-dialled her mother. An emergency-room doctor met the car as it arrived. He diagnosed a stroke and nurses began inserting tubes into Khun Lung, administering medication that would prevent further clotting. Khun Lung’s condition was not critical, the doctor told Nong Fun, but the probability of complications was high and her uncle should not be moved. Nong Fon insisted that nothing be done until her mother arrived and paced the private room in a worsening state of distress. Her eyes betrayed her panic as she scrambled in her mind for an explanation of what had just taken place. How and where had she found her uncle? She had no doubt he would, when he recovered, vouch for her story, however implausible it might be. And, gazing at his inert form, surrounded by machines and dressed in a sage-green cotton smock, she sent silent prayers. Khun Lung watched his niece from the corner of his eye, unable to tell her to come sit beside him. Since the initial searing flash, which he found an entirely unpleasant experience, he had been in an otherworldly twilight: sound was intermittent, coming all at once then suddenly not at all, and he tried to filter the noise to just this well-appointed hospital room as he struggled to recall how he got there. He saw rather than felt the hands of the club staff as they clothed his 57

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naked body, as though he were already a corpse, and carried him down the back stairs – how careful they were not to bang his head against the wall. He wanted to tell them he could walk, if they would only give him a little support under the arms, but he was unable to speak. Nong Fon was at the bottom of the stairs, wringing her hands, frightened, like a little girl. Once the furious activity at the hospital abated and a measure of calm restored, Nong Fon approached the foot of his narrow, utilitarian bed and looked at her uncle for a few moments. Then she was by his side, bending towards him. Khun Lung could see that she had been crying. He saw her fingers touch his face, but it was numb, as was the whole of his right side. ‘I’m sorry, uncle,’ she said, her hands together in obeisance, her voice barely a whisper. ‘Don’t think badly of me. I … I just wanted more.’ Khun Lung managed to close and open his eyes, trying to communicate that he was okay, that he understood. He first heard, then saw Pim. She took his hand in hers and began rubbing it as though this act alone would revive him. ‘The specialist will be here any moment,’ she said to him, a quiver in her voice, a trembling smile on her lips. ‘They want to do some tests. You’ll be all right.’ He tried to focus on Pim, on Nong Fon, but the machines around him began beeping wildly as he experienced what felt like a series of electric shocks run down his left arm and there was a sudden sharp, unbearably brutal stab in his heart. His body convulsed several times. Pim and Nong Fon held each other in grief and tears as doctors and nurses flurried around Khun Lung in futile activity. Pim could smell a strong perfume on her daughter, a scent both subtle and sophisticated. Nong Fon did not wear perfume. Pim had questions, many questions. * * * It was not until after Khun Lung’s cremation that Pim felt she could look for some answers. The ‘official’ version was that Khun Lung had come to the house, interrupting Nong Fon’s study, and they were about to prepare tea when he suffered a stroke. She had rushed him to the hospital in a taxi and the doctors were hopeful, but he had a heart attack, which proved fatal. Pim saw the holes in the story only after it had been made public, and it 58

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caused raised eyebrows among a few, not least Auntie Chada: ‘But why all the way to Samitivej Hospital? It’s on the other side of town … and with all that traffic on Christmas Eve? Did the poor girl want to make sure her uncle died?’ Mother and daughter stuck to the story, and in their sadness at the loss of Khun Lung it was felt neither kind nor polite to press them. Pim, too, kept her own counsel, for she had difficulty formulating a scenario that cast Nong Fon in a favourable light. She felt that she no longer knew her daughter and searched her memory for the signs she had so wilfully ignored. She could press for the truth and live with its consequences, or remain silent and trust her. It was Nong Fon who ultimately took matters into her own hands. ‘You must not ask me about the past,’ she told Pim one evening as they sat together in the quiet time before dinner. ‘I have done wrong, and I am sorry. But if we are to carry on loving each other you must let it go. Know that, for me, everything has changed. It is aniccam. But know also that I will never again put you in a difficult position, nor give you cause to be ashamed of me.’ Pim was left with no response except to say she hoped that what her daughter said was true. A good Buddhist, she let her questions drop away and through prayers offered up at the temple sought merit for Nong Fon’s decisions and expressed gratitude for the wisdom she had found. Nong Fon hoped, too, that she was speaking the truth. She had enjoyed the thrill of a rarefied world of desire, serving the rich, the powerful and the famous, and knowing that men were at the mercy of her charms. She had made a good deal of money, and it had afforded her a lavish lifestyle, with all the trappings of fine clothes and shoes and jewellery. Would she, could she, give all that up? * * * About a month after Khun Lung’s death, Pim and Nong Fon were summoned to the offices of his lawyer to hear the fate of his assets. The short, bespectacled man behind the desk informed them in a brittle tone of voice that it had been his client’s stipulation no one else be present when his material intentions were revealed. Khun Lung’s reasoning soon became 59

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clear. Everything – his condominium by the river, properties in Chiang Mai, Phuket and Khao Yai that yielded a considerable yearly rental income, two vintage cars and the garage in which they were stored, and a lucrative stock portfolio spread across only the best Thai and foreign companies – now belonged to Nong Fon. Auntie Chada was, of course, furious and tried to stir suspicion in the family that Khun Lung and Nong Fon might have been more to each other than just uncle and niece. ‘She must have been very special to him,’ she said. But it was known that Chada had resented her brother when he was alive, and she clearly intended to go on doing so in death. Khun Lung was a generous man, it was generally agreed, and his decision was entirely in keeping with his eccentricities. It was a time for mudita and they celebrated Nong Fon’s good fortune, sharing in the joy Khun Lung bestowed. * * * Nong Fon never again spoke of Khun Lung’s death, only of his life, and in the contented years that followed she would cover her mouth with her hand to hide the smile that played on her lips as she told her children tales of his escapades. In doing so, she hoped to pass on a little of his belief in the independence of the spirit – in finding one’s own path in life and not being constrained by the words and thoughts of others. And she would remind them to be thankful for the inheritance he had left to her. What she never revealed to anyone was his greatest gift of all: that he had taken her secret with him when he died. She would simply tell them: ‘He was a most generous uncle.’

Liberation Road

Poems Kabir Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra 1 While you’re busy perfuming Your body with sandal oil, Someone else is chopping The wood for your funeral. A kite string in your hand And paan dribbling from your mouth, You forget that when you die They’ll tie your body with a rope, As one might truss up a common thief, And leave it on the pyre To burn. Can’t you see, says Kabir, That Rama is the only truth, Everything else a monstrous lie?

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2 ‘It take a man that have the blues so to sing the blues’ Leadbelly O pundit, your hair-splitting’s So much bullshit that I’m surprised You still get away with it. If parroting the name of Rama Brought salvation, Then saying sugarcane should sweeten The mouth, saying fire burn the feet, Saying water slake thirst, and saying food Make you belch, as after a meal. If saying money made everyone rich, There’d be no beggars in the streets. My back turned on the world, You hear me singing of Rama and you smile. One day, says Kabir, tied like a bundle, You’ll be delivered to Deathville.

3 Death has them in its sights, Both beggar and king. Man’s life is a dancing shadow, Amounting to nothing. But the body’s a lake, The soul a swan, If the chemical on your tongue, Says Kabir, is called Rama. 62

Poems by Kabir

4 To get a big head Is easy. Food on the table Cash in the pocket And you walk with a swagger. Be street-smart. And you can rake in Twice as much. But money’s like the leaves Of a forest’s trees. You didn’t bring it with you when you were born, It won’t go with you when you die; Greater kings than Ravana Have vanished in the blink of an eye. Parents, children, wife, You’ll leave them behind. You must be mad, says Kabir, Not to sing of Rama And to screw up your life.

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5 Twelve years were To childhood lost; Twenty to youth; Middle age took care Of the rest. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s too late To have regrets. You built an embankment, But the lake had dried up; You enclosed the field, But there was no crop to save; You ran out with the snaffle, But after the horse-stealer Had made off with the horse. Bedridden with a stroke, You make a clucking sound And wish to make amends. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll leave this world, says Kabir, Empty-handed.

Burger Time (2009) by Abdi Setiawan. Acrylic on fibreglass, 110cm x 40cm x 30cm. Courtesy of Sin Sin Fine Art, Hong Kong.

A man who is waiting for someone (2009) by Kim Hyung-Jin. Coffee, charcoal, acrylic on paper on canvas, 150cm x 150cm. Courtesy of Shin Hwa Gallery and Hong Kong ArtWalk.

From The Road to Wanting Wendy Law-Yone

mericans, I have noticed, are fools for homelands – especially the homelands of others. To determine a person’s provenance is as important to them as it is to the Chinese to determine a person’s worth. And to Americans like Will, who have escaped their own homelands, proudly calling themselves ‘expats’, it seems even more important to repatriate everyone else. Will’s mother was American, his father was Swiss, but Asia was his adopted home. He’d been to almost every city, every province in the region, and knew a great deal about the clans and customs of each. I could only be thankful for his interest. I wouldn’t have been with him otherwise: he would never have noticed me. What set me apart was my particular rarity: I belonged to one of the smallest ethnic minorities on the Southeast Asian mainland. I once overheard an Australian journalist make a comment about me. We were attending a lecture at the Bangkok Foreign Correspondents’ Club. During the intermission, Will must have been telling him where I came from, because the Australian said, ‘Why, she’s one of the abos, then.’ When I asked Will later what ‘abo’ meant, he explained that my people were thought to be the earliest settlers of the region, the ones that arrived before even the Mon and the Khmer. That they were to their area what American Indians were to America, or the Aborigines to Australia. It was a compliment, he said of the Australian journalist’s remark. 67

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Will seemed proud of the fact that I was an ‘abo’. It disappointed him that I didn’t share his pride, that I remembered so little about my childhood. But trying to recall those days was like piecing together a dream. Just as I caught hold of one bit, the rest slipped away. Will refused to let things be, however. He thought up countless methods for jogging my memory. One method was to hand me a book or a magazine, and say, ‘Here, read this. Tell me if it’s true.’ ‘“In general,”’ I read out loud, ‘“the Wild Lu are far too busy taking it easy to waste much time in farm work.” Untrue!’ Taking it easy was not how I would have described our way of life, had I known how to describe it at all. Will laughed. ‘A little defensive, are we? But go on, keep reading.’ ‘“A Wild Lu selling bananas at so much for six cannot sell fifteen of them because of the odd number; and if three were left over he would eat them or carry them home.” I don’t know what that means, so I can’t say if it’s true,’ I said. ‘Obviously true. You can’t add two and two.’ ‘“Hygiene is unknown, washing done by nobody …” True, I suppose.’ Hygiene. Poverty. What did I understand about those conditions when I was living them? The horseflies that clung to the sores on our noses and lips. The rats that burrowed through the beds of garlic bulbs on which we slept. The stink of vomit in old blankets. There had been no one word for it all then, no word like ‘hygiene’. Or ‘poverty’. ‘“Victims,”’ I went on reading, ‘“prisoners in most cases, were bought for sacrifice like cattle on the hoof …” Will, I don’t want to read any more.’ ‘“The aquiline Red Indian nose,”’ he read over my shoulder, before taking the mouldy book out of my hands. Turning my head to one side, he said, ‘“The flat back of the head …”’ ‘I do not have a flat head!’ ‘Of course not. A hard head, maybe …’ Later, free from his scrutiny, I studied those books and journals more closely. But try as I might I couldn’t connect the photographs (neither the glossy new ones nor the grainy old ones), less so their confident captions, with the patchy dream-memories I retained. The images of my childhood that came readily to mind were of frailty, of impermanence. I remembered trees on fire, fields of ash, thatch sheets sailing off in the wind. I remembered 68

From The Road to Wanting

holes and gaps: in a roof that let in the rain, in the floor that let in the draught, in the hearth at the centre of our living space – the source of endless smoke but never enough heat. Especially I remembered smoke – from cooking fires, bonfires, burning fields – and the way it blackened the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the bedding. But every so often, all that smoke and haze hanging over my childhood would part of its own accord to bring back a scene, or a sensation, or a face. Then, for a vivid instant I would catch sight of our shaman staggering about drunkenly in a storm, the rain streaking his sooty cheeks. Or my skin would tingle, taking me back to a time before speech (before I could remember speaking, anyway), when I stuck my arm through a gap in the bamboo floor, letting it hang into the space below where our cow and mule lived, and felt the lick of a thick warm tongue on my hand. Or a smell would return to me: the sour-bamboo tang of my mother’s lap, for instance. Even her face might appear at such moments, in a liquid flash – though soon enough a stone would drop from somewhere on high, and splinter the watery image. But these memories were not willed: they flared up unbidden, sparked by a stray ember in a bed of ash. And how true they were was hard to say. I couldn’t swear that the thick hedge of thorn and bramble enclosing our village was as high and forbidding as I remembered it. Or that the tunnel I saw in my mind’s eye – the long dark tunnel of barbed twigs that served as the entrance – wasn’t shaped by a story I came to know later, the story of Briar Rose. The hedge around the castle of that sleeping princess grew higher and higher, the thorns holding fast ‘as if they had hands’, until whoever tried getting through them ended up impaled on the spikes. That the tunnel and hedge existed I had no doubt. It said so, after all, in one of the books Will kept thrusting at me, ‘To gain entry into a Lu village you must either be invited or fight.’ True or false, I was not prepared to put these memories into words for Will’s benefit. I was ashamed of my past, and suspicious of his probing. I couldn’t see why it should make such a difference to him whether or not I kept alive my childhood home – a home so far away now, in memory and in fact, that it might as well not have existed. * * * 69

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‘Why won’t you sleep, Na Ga?’ Will would groan. He could tell I was wide awake, even though I did my best to lie still. Sleep didn’t come so easily for him, either. Will needed drink – more and more of it to make him sleep. Or maybe it was the drink that ruined his sleep. What if he went to bed at an early hour, I wondered, before the drinking began? Would he be different then? Would he expect different things of me? Would he want me to excite him, inflame him, in ways that I hadn’t? Would he allow himself something other than the groggy fumble with the condom, followed by the hard, hasty fucking? But that rare event – to lie abed without drink – would have had to take place during a very brief period: between ten in the morning, when he got up, and noon, when he left for the day. First for lunch at the club (a sandwich, two beers and a Bloody Mary). Then to the office for an hour or two. Back to the club in the afternoon, for a game of squash or a few laps in the pool, followed by a couple of cocktails. Or home to shower and dress for the evening, and more drinks at clubs, bars, restaurants or the homes of friends. By the time he came home and fell into bed, it was almost morning. * * * Only when Will was sound asleep could I observe him as closely as he observed me. Eyes narrowing and flaring as though to focus his gaze, he seemed to be looking through me, past me, down his nose at me, trying to see beyond the obvious, to pick out some hidden detail. But whenever I tried to return his scrutiny, I came up against a stillness, an emptiness, in the glassy depths of his green-blue eyes. Eyes closed, however, Will’s face opened itself to me. Then I could see in the worried frown, in the pouting lips, the fear and petulance of a child. I came to know the patterns of his breathing, and what the different patterns meant – shallow sleep, or restless dreaming, or death-like oblivion. With my ear on his chest, I could tell from his heartbeat how far he was in that other world, or how close to waking. Once I felt confident that he wouldn’t be easily awakened, I turned on the bedside lamp and examined his body from end to end. I lay alongside him, propped on an elbow, or sat up the better to take in the length and breadth of his naked frame. Neck: sun-reddened. Shoulders: wide and pale. Nipples: dark and tough, like the navels of old oranges. Chest: hairy. Arms: likewise. Belly: concave, with the navel sunk in its fur pit. Pubic hair: fine 70

From The Road to Wanting

and frizzy, not coarse and straight like the hair on his arms and legs. Cock: quiescent. Balls: without distinction. Thighs: hairy and sinewy. Knees: large and knobby. Calves and shins: hairy, with prominent veins. Feet: long and white. Toes: wide and curled inwards. Nails: battered, with jagged edges. When I moved to the foot of the bed for a different view, it was my custom to begin by touching my head to his feet, pressing my arms along the sides of his legs. Someone watching from a distance might have thought I was praying. What a singular beast is the body of a man, a body with a mind behind it! The bodies of beasts are menaces too, but a beast can only crush you, maul you and devour your flesh; it cannot imagine, and plan, and carry out, and enjoy – not only enjoy but rejoice in your degradation. The body I studied under the light was not one that had ever harmed me. Those big solid ribs had never ground against mine, harshly or otherwise; those legs had never bruised me; those feet had never kicked me; those big broad hands, with the fingernails chewed down to the quick, had never once struck me … Yet how could I approach that harmless being, that blameless body, except with utmost caution? * * * I never knew, in the beginning, whether to leave or stay in his bed. Should I lie still, not touching him, but remaining within reach for touching – in case he needed a hip to rest his hand on, a leg to straddle, a breast to cushion him? But would I be able to stifle every cough and sneeze? I was afraid to disturb him, afraid to breathe. Sometimes he caught me holding my breath. Then he shook me. ‘Breathe, Na Ga, breathe! For God’s sake!’ Only when he started snoring could I inhale and exhale deeply. One day I asked him outright if he had a lot of money. ‘None of your beeswax,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to know? Look, if your allowance is not enough, if you need anything, just say so.’ My allowance was more than enough. That wasn’t what concerned me. I wanted to know because I was afraid of what money could buy. If he could buy anything he wanted, what was to keep him from buying something else, someone else, to replace me? But money was not a subject Will enjoyed discussing. Neither was the subject of what he did for a living. 71

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‘I am an amateur,’ he said, when I asked him. ‘An amateur is what?’ ‘Someone who isn’t doing what he does in order to make money.’ ‘For what, then, if not for money?’ ‘For amusement, for interest, for fun.’ ‘But what is it you do for real, for money?’ I persisted. ‘I have my own business.’ ‘What kind of business?’ Will laughed, but I could tell he didn’t like being questioned. ‘What is this, a trial? It’s not important, my business.’ ‘Are you a spook?’ I asked him. I’d heard some of his friends use that term. ‘A spook! First, tell me what you think a spook is, and I’ll tell you whether I’m one or not.’ ‘A spy?’ ‘You don’t miss a trick, do you? But, no, I’m not a spook. You speak a few languages, you have a few friends in key positions, and everyone takes you for a spook. ‘No, I’m not a spook,’ he repeated. ‘I’m a student.’ ‘A student! But what is your subject?’ ‘The world. I like to look and listen and learn.’ ‘And you like to collect strange things,’ I said, looking around the room at his collection of betel-nut boxes and bamboo backscratchers, his assortment of iron birds once used for opium weights, his ear-cleaning instruments so dear to the Chinese. ‘Why do you think I picked you up?’ he teased. I was not strange, I was common. Yet he’d singled me out that first time in the refugee village. * * * ‘ICR!’ somebody whispered. ‘God be praised.’ We’d all heard of the ICR – the International Committee for Repatriation. They were the ones who negotiated the fate of those waiting to be deported, who bargained on their behalf with officials on both sides of the border. I noticed him right away, the tall one in the checked shirt who detached himself from the group of foreigners he’d arrived with and was standing 72

From The Road to Wanting

alone, watching me. I’d seen him peering over a relief worker’s shoulder at the roll-call list, seen him looking up when someone pointed me out to him. Now I watched him stroll about the room with studied indifference, hands in his pockets, nose in the air. He appeared to be looking down at everyone, but then he would stop to talk to someone with a little bow of courtesy. Suddenly he was directly in front, bowing slightly and saying something in a language I couldn’t understand. I shrugged. He smiled, apparently satisfied, and went back to join the members of his group. I could tell they were talking about me, nodding in agreement with whatever he was saying. Later, when my name was called over the loudspeaker, summoning me to the main office, he was standing by the entrance, holding out his hand in greeting as I stepped in. Once again he seemed to be speaking a foreign language. Once again I failed to understand him. ‘Never mind,’ he said in English, laughing awkwardly. ‘I was trying to practise the three phrases I have in your language.’ My language? It was only then I realised what he’d been saying all along. He’d been asking me my name – in Lu, of all languages. And now he was telling me his. ‘I’m Will. I’m your new … sponsor.’ Sponsor. What could that mean? ‘I live in Bangkok,’ he added. ‘Have you ever been?’ I shook my head. ‘Want to go there with me?’ He was looking down his nose, but his eyes slid shyly from side to side. Of course I said yes – but with an indifferent shrug, careful not to seem too eager, in case I was being tested, or teased. * * * A sour smell was circulating in the air-conditioned car – and it was coming from my damp T-shirt and jeans. I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering or my eyes streaming. Blindly, I had signed the release papers thrust at me, then followed him out through the camp and into the waiting car, never even stopping to gather up my few belongings. It was only when he handed me his handkerchief, saying, ‘It’s okay, everything’s going to be okay,’ that I gave up pretending it was the cold that was making my nose run and my eyes stream. * * * 73

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He was rich, he was handsome, he inhabited the house of my dreams. And he was taking me in, no questions asked, no services owed in exchange. It was far too good to be true, and I was almost relieved when he took me out one night – I’d been with him hardly a week – to show me another side of Bangkok. The driver let us out at the head of a narrow street, in a snarl of tuk-tuks, mopeds and vendors on wheels. We dashed – it was raining, as usual – into an arcade with T-shirts on tables, watches on trays, satay sticks on smoking grills. The ground itself shook in that tunnel of noise, from the din of live bands, boom boxes and the drumming rain. The touts had taken shelter under an awning but continued to call out their greetings anyway. Will led me by the hand into the first bar – through a barrage of pulsing music, flashing lights and gyrating girls in G-strings. He seemed to know every last person on the scene, pimps, managers, bartenders, go-go girls, and most of the guests as well. Shaking hands, waving, saluting, he made his way through the crowds, leading me along behind him. The girls in the sequined bikinis came down from the stage to greet him between dances. They looked me over, full of curiosity and tease. Fan? Was I his fan, they wanted to know … his girlfriend? We stayed long enough for Will to make his rounds; and then it was out onto the strip again, with neon signs spelling royalty, victory, and magic. Cleopatra. Queen’s Castle. Napoleon. Winner’s Bar. Pussy Alive. Magic Grill. Every bar we entered, every show on stage, seemed part of the same city-wide celebration: balloons on the ceilings, confetti on the floors, sparklers between the legs of naked girls on trapezes, swinging upside down like gibbons. ‘Cunts doing stunts,’ I heard a fat farang say. Whistles were blown, bottles were opened, spoons were bent, chopsticks were wielded – all by means of the cunt. Cocktails were mixed in upended cunts. Trick scarves without number were pulled out of trick cunts, then turned into flapping doves. Garlands, too, and streamers, and bells on strings, were draped like bunting from cunt to cunt to cunt. The printed menus, handed out on the street, offered more variations: pussy smokecigarettes. pussy openbeer bot tle. pussy pick the desert with chopsticks. bigdildo show. fish push in sideher. long-eggplant push into her cunt. blue movie film snake sexy dance. boy-girl fucking show. 74

From The Road to Wanting

In the smoky light below the stages, everything white looked phosphorescent – white shirts, white socks, white teeth. Up on a stage, a long-legged dancer did the splits over a handstand, while a bottle of Coke was poured down a funnel planted in her crotch. Back on her feet the girl bowed to applause, then bent to swoop up a roll of toilet paper. She tore off a piece while tiptoeing off the stage and, with a sudden delicacy that made me look away, she held it between her legs to staunch the dripping. I was beginning to grit my teeth – first in anger, then in fear. I didn’t know what was behind Will’s eagerness to bring me here, to this all-too-familiar world of flesh for sale. Was he teaching me some sort of lesson, like rubbing a dog’s nose in the mess it has made? Or was he trying to say, ‘Here it is – the place where sooner or later you’ll have to make your way’? But maybe Will, my sponsor, was up to something else altogether – something in the shaman’s line of business. I remembered when one of the boys in the Daru village was accidentally shot with a poisoned arrow, and the shaman had to be called in to remove it. ‘Watch,’ he said, holding up the thin shard he’d pulled out for all to see. ‘First, you pull out the source of the poison.’ The Daru shaman was a different sort of healer from Asita, the shaman in our Lu village: more like a dull teacher than a drunk magician. ‘Step one.’ He snapped the bamboo in two against his knee. ‘Step two. Only when you break the poisoned arrow will the wound close properly. Only now can the flesh begin to heal.’ Was that the sort of healing Will had in mind? Maybe it was his way of saying, ‘Look at this great festival of lust and greed. It always has been, and always will be, right here with us. Look it in the eye, face it squarely. See it for what it is.’ His face gave nothing away except mild amusement as he went on greeting his countless friends, leaning into their ears until they shouted with laughter, which I could see but not hear in that din. ‘Hungry?’ he asked me finally. I nodded, eager to leave. We wove through the alleys and up along the strip, past Rififi, Blue Hawaii, Memphis Queen, not stopping once to go in. Down one of these alleys there was a roof-top restaurant, lit with red apples that hung from the boughs of potted trees. The flashing lights on the sign outside spelled ‘Garden of Eatin’. There, at a corner table, we sat and ate 75

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without speaking, like an old married couple. Or a pair of doomed lovers. Or a whore and her pimp. * * * In the early days I went with him everywhere – to cocktail parties, dinner parties, restaurants, clubs and bars. Then, little by little, I stopped going along on his rounds of the city. For although it would please him to see me all dressed up, ready to go out on the town with him, it pleased him more to have me at home to greet him when he returned at three or four in the morning, and ask if he wanted anything to eat. To bring him the chicken sandwich or pound cake he fancied, and to keep him company while he ate. To lead him to bed afterwards and undress him. To put his clothes away: trousers on the hanger, shirt and underwear in the laundry basket, shoes fitted snugly on shoe trees. To sit at the edge of his bed and ask where he would like me to sleep: in my own bed, or with him. It pleased him, too, that in the morning I was there at the table where Samai, the maid, had set out coffee and toast and fresh fruit for his breakfast. Shuffling out of the bedroom in one of his checked sarongs, he would touch me on the head or shoulder before sitting down for his first sip of coffee. I never asked where he had been or whom he had seen because Will was a truthful person, unlike me. More and more I was afraid of the truth when it might have the wrong consequences. That he might have been with another woman, for instance, was not so worrisome; but if this other woman was likely to replace me, then that was a truth I would want to put off knowing. I hoped this was one of the qualities Will liked about me: that I was prepared to wait for him to tell me things. I was not impatient, not loud, shrill and excitable, like those women on the Patpong strip, like the one I’d watched annoying the sour-looking European couple in a crowded bar by flirting with the husband long after they had made it clear they wanted to be left in peace. The girl had gone on teasing, hitting the tight-lipped European on the shoulder, ruffling his hair, wiggling on his lap. In the end he had caught her hand and held it, twisted, in a clearly painful grip. With a grimace of effort she had screwed it out of his, but as she turned her back on him to walk away, she had raised a fist, screaming, ‘Fuckhead!’ 76

From The Road to Wanting

It wasn’t that I was free from such urges – far from it. How many times had I wanted to let loose, to shout and laugh, scream with rage or bawl my head off, instead of always weighing the outcome, telling myself not to laugh so hard, or seem too pleased, or talk too much, because laughing or smiling or talking might not serve me well. So, keeping my fears to myself and my questions to a minimum, I simply sat and watched Will eat. Once, when he came home so late that it was already early morning and he didn’t want to wake me, he poured himself a glass of juice, found something to eat in the fridge, and was sitting at the dining table, reading a paper, when I came out and saw him before he saw me. He was bent over the table, engrossed in his paper, the crown of his head a dull gold in the cone of light cast from the hanging lamp above. I drew back and watched him for a long while, overcome with a contentment I couldn’t immediately place. Then I remembered those last days in Rangoon, and how I would kneel at my window, spying on the man from Holland in the house next door, watching him attend to his solitary meals as to some sacred rite, his head aglow under lamplight just like this. I prayed then to find a way of attaching myself to the lonely figure across the way. I imagined saving his life through some heroic act, dragging him out of a burning building, perhaps; or nursing him back from a near-fatal illness. What choice would he have then but to take me with him, to a new life in a new country, wherever that happened to be? Now my prayers had been answered. I had found my guardian, my protector. There he was, alone at the table; and here I was, in a new life, a new world, with him. * * * As he said from the start, my body was not what was important to him. In time it was not only unimportant, it became uninteresting. In time he ceased finding pleasure in only receiving, never giving, satisfaction. When he failed to coax me into relaxing or enjoying his attempts to soothe or arouse me, he gave up the pretence of trying. Pleasure of that nature, he came to understand, was not pleasurable for me. And so we entered into an agreement – an unspoken pact – not to pretend to each other, not to lie. He was not going to pretend my body was 77

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important to him; and I was not going to pretend it was responsive to him. I’d had my fill of pretence, deception, false promises. I knew it frustrated him not to be able to reach me and heal me in that most basic way, and I was sorry to place that distance between us. Because, when all was said and done, I felt more at home in his bed than in mine, on my own. I knew of no greater comfort than lying by his side, asleep or awake. I liked the solidity of his flesh, its boozy, sour-sweet smells. Still, the thought of his disappointment nagged at me, and I searched for ways to justify myself. I was doing all I could to make up for my deficiencies. Why couldn’t he be content with all my other expressions of gratitude and devotion? Wasn’t it enough that I served – dutifully and eagerly – as companion, cook and housekeeper? That I’d got rid of all the servants – except Nid, the driver, and Som, the part-time gardener? That I was running a home-stay for his endless stream of friends, and friends of those friends, who needed a berth while passing through the city? That I not only changed their sheets, and scrubbed their baths and toilets, washed and ironed their laundry, prepared their meals, told them where to find the shops and offices they were seeking, and helped sort out their travel arrangements with phone calls to airports, taxis and bus stations? That, in addition to everything, I sat and listened? How ready they were, these ‘odds and sods’ as Will called them, to pour out their hearts to a stranger like me, one who no doubt had seen it all, heard it all. I listened to a fat black American, who claimed to be a judge in California, go on and on about his ex-fiancée, a woman he’d thought better of marrying because she smothered him. For one thing, she couldn’t stop buying him gifts. For another, she had an ‘overeager’ vagina. He didn’t know how to describe it exactly, but it was scary the way it vibrated. I listened to a Belgian mining engineer worry about whether his girlfriend might have mixed feelings about sex since she tended to vomit on his belly after the act. I listened to a professor of philosophy from Calgary who described himself as a lover of women. Women were so much more interesting than men, he felt, so much more sensitive and easier to talk to. It made him very sad when he met a woman who had never had an orgasm. He felt a responsibility to ‘gift’ such a woman an orgasm or two, even though it sometimes required a fair bit of persuasion. And because he loved women, he saw himself as a ‘universal donor’. He liked the idea of impregnating 78

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women, of making his selfless ‘deposits’ even in those who would never mean anything to him. He was that sort of person – generous with his seed. I sat and listened for hours to Nefertiti, a healer from San Francisco with milky skin and the hair of an Egyptian queen: black, polished and blunt above the brow. She herself was not Egyptian, but had studied the wisdom of ancient Egypt. Chem, she said – as in chemistry – meant ‘blackness’. It was also the old name for Egypt. Egypt stood for the chemistry of knowledge. Going into the blackness was necessary for salvation. She advised me to look into my blackness if I wanted to see the light. I had to die to my old life in order to wake to true knowledge. If I went on being nice, being good, I would be disappointed, disappointed, disappointed. She urged me to go down into myself, deep, deep into the darkness. Did I not know the ‘Hymn of the Pearl’? We were put on earth to find the pearl, but we drink the drink and eat the food, become drowsy and lazy and forget to go after the pearl. ‘“Awake, arise, or be fallen!” Who said that?’ she demanded, eyes flashing in challenge. ‘Come on, Na Ga, get with it. Don’t you know anything? Oh, don’t give me that I’m-just-a-hot-and-cold-running-maid routine. You’ve got a regular library here, you’re surrounded by good books. Why don’t you read? Start with the big book, the Bible. It’s got everything in it, everything you need to find your way. Lucifer! Lucifer said that: “Awake, arise, or be fallen!”’ She muttered, laughing at a secret joke. ‘He knew what he was talking about, Lucifer.’ The things that made Nefertiti laugh never ceased to puzzle me. She made me pick a tarot card from a deck she carried in her purse, then threw her head back and cackled at my choice. ‘What do you see? What do you see?’ She gathered up the rest of the deck, leaving only my card on the table. ‘Lightning?’ I said. ‘Striking a tower?’ ‘What else? Come on, what else?’ ‘The dome knocked off in the fire?’ ‘And?’ ‘Flames coming out from every window. A man and woman falling head down.’ ‘If that doesn’t say it all!’ she crowed. ‘Total destruction before salvation.’ 79

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It was Nefertiti the healer who put a name to the ailment, the handicap, as she saw it, that kept me homebound. Agoraphobia, she said, a Greek word meaning a fear of the market, was what kept me from going into the world and finding things to occupy myself with outside the home – from taking an interest, any kind of interest, in the life of the great ‘sprawling, brawling’ city I lived in. When I told Will what Nefertiti had said about my so-called agoraphobia, expecting him to snort at such rubbish, he surprised me by saying, ‘She may have a point.’ ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘You don’t go out any more. You don’t do anything outside the house any more. You bury yourself in housework, slave over unnecessary things. You’ve got rid of the maid, the cook. You’ve saddled yourself with work that no one expects you to do. You don’t need to do any of this cleaning and scrubbing and …’ He stopped himself, realising how heated he was becoming, got up and poured himself another drink. In a calmer voice, he said, ‘I have nothing to complain about. The house is spotless, the guests are happy, my shoes are polished, my shirts are ironed. You’re waiting for me at whatever hour I come home. It’s difficult for guys to say no to such comfort and care. But you’re not my housekeeper or caretaker or my slave, Na Ga. Christ sakes, you’re not even my wife. What am I doing letting you go on like this? It’s not what I want for you. And it can’t be what you want for yourself. I just wish I knew after all this time what it is you do want. You won’t go to school and get yourself an education, you won’t read any of the books I suggest, you won’t go out and make friends, you won’t take trips I’ll gladly pay for. I can’t force you to do any of these things. But, really, I’d much rather you devoted your energies to your own well-being than to mine, much as I would stand to lose in the way of comfort. ‘Now you’re all pissed off,’ he said, drawing me to him and putting his arms around me. ‘The ungrateful bastard … after all I do …’ There was a point in his drinking when Will became conciliatory – another point when he spoke in fragments, in a kind of shorthand that I had to struggle to understand. But right now he was still lucid, and expecting some kind of response. All I could think of saying was, ‘You know why I don’t read? It’s because I hate the way you interrogate me afterwards.’ He was listening closely, taking 80

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me seriously, it seemed. ‘You always want to know exactly what I understand and remember and think after I’ve read something you gave me. It wipes out everything from my head because you’re giving me a test that I’m sure to fail.’ ‘But why sure to fail? Why such defeatist thinking? I’m only trying to discuss ideas with you. It’s called conversation.’ No wonder I was afraid of conversation. ‘It isn’t a test. This whole thing, this life. It’s … it’s …’ He looked old and tired suddenly. ‘Let’s go to bed.’ But I knew he’d meant everything he’d said. I’d been put on notice. I would just have to try harder, work better, in order to make myself even more necessary. How could Will not know what I really wanted? All I wanted was to stay where I was – with him. I was living in a fool’s paradise, of course I knew that. It wouldn’t last – it couldn’t – for ever. Will was away for increasingly long stretches: in America, in Europe, in other parts of Southeast Asia. He saw friends on those trips: women friends, even girlfriends, for all I knew. There had been more than a few before me, of course; even a few liveins. Like Lana, the model from Hong Kong, who threatened for years to slash her wrists, and finally did – though not fatally: she went on to a successful career in public relations, in charge of a big Saudi account. Like Melinda, a Filipina journalist who had covered the Vietnam War from the age of seventeen, and since then had worn only khaki correspondent’s jackets. One particular friend of Will’s enjoyed a special status, however. He’d told me about her from the very beginning: a sort of childhood friend he was expected to marry some day. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. They’d been engaged more than once, but one or the other had not been ready at the last minute. So I had always known that one day they might marry and then I would be sent away. I’d had clear and ample warning. But knowing a thing is not the same as really believing it will ever happen. How serious his plans were it was difficult to tell – except that he made it a point to remind me of them from time to time; and I made it a point to feign acceptance. ‘Na Ga, you must see this. Nothing is for ever; no one belongs to another. I am not your owner. I happened by when my help was needed. I did what 81

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any decent person would have done. You would have done the same for me. But helping doesn’t mean owning.’ You only say that, I thought bitterly, because you can own, you are in a position to own and disown as you please. All over the face of the earth people did own other people. Shaman Asita owned our village; the Daru headman had owned me until his wife released me into Daw Daw Seng’s care. Now I was owned by Will – even if he didn’t want to admit it. ‘You don’t want to be a slave all your life,’ he said, having just insisted I was not a slave. ‘Look at me. Don’t look away.’ Holding my head still, he banged his forehead gently against it. ‘I am what I am: a restless farang who drinks too much.’ I waited for him to finish the comparison, to say: ‘And you are what you are.’ Instead, he said, ‘If I don’t get down to business, I’ll end up with no next of kin. You know what they say: if a man doesn’t settle down in his forties, he’ll never do it. Time is running out on me. And pretty soon my faithful fiancée will be running out on me too. ‘Okay, don’t look at me. But listen to me, at least. You have to start living. You’re young, you have a future. I want you to start breathing, to quit holding your breath.’ Taking my silence as a rebuke, he said, ‘You know I’ve never lied to you.’ And you are proud of that? I thought. Was lying to a person really the worst thing in the world? How like a judge he could be, for all his easy going ways: righteous and sure of his position. I once heard, on television, a Japanese man using the word ‘blue’ to speak of western ways. A mania for clarity, for right and wrong, a stubbornness – hard-headed and stiff-backed in the extreme: these were ‘blue’ qualities, he explained. There were times when Will was blue to a fault: honest, pitiless, true blue. ‘I don’t want to keep you,’ he said firmly. ‘You are not mine to keep. We have things to do, you and me both. We have to get on with our lives. You have a past, a home, a family – all stolen from you, taken away. You need to go back and find them, see who you are, who you were before you were …’ He hesitated. ‘Misled.’ Misled. Certain words of kindness could be oh-so-hateful. There was loving-kindness, as the Buddhists called it, and there was the other kind, 82

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the kind that made you want to scream. What nonsense could pour out of a man’s mouth when it suited him! Misled! Go back home and see who I was! * * * Eventually it happened, of course. One day, exactly ten years and three months after he had brought me home, Will asked me to move out. Only for a while, only for ten days, he said, with awkward courtesy but no hint of apology. Without argument, I agreed. I’d seen the way he beat down prices at the weekend market, hiding his hand, stating his absolute limit with the indifference of one prepared to walk away. But I was hardly in a position to bargain with him. So I accepted the deal, if one could call it that, with phoney indifference – the loser’s small revenge. Only for a while, only for ten days, I told myself, fighting panic as I emptied the cupboards and cleared away my things with needless zeal, like a criminal erasing a trail. With a vengeance I went about making myself scarce, packing up almost everything in cardboard boxes for storage, stuffing the rest into two shoulder-bags to take away. As I cleaned and concealed and rearranged, all for Will’s convenience and shifting whim, I noticed that he, too, was hiding things from me. He wasn’t telling me everything, no matter how patiently I sat at the breakfast table, no matter how silently I waited. It had to be difficult for him, I didn’t think it wasn’t. I didn’t believe for one minute that it was nothing for him to ask me to leave – even if he did it with seeming ease. Even if he could stand to look me in the eye and say, without further explanation, ‘Helen is coming to visit.’ Nid, the driver, took me away. Nobody else was around to witness my going. Will was at work by then, and even the dogs failed to follow me into the car as they were in the habit of doing. They remained on the cement walkway, felled by the heat, their eyes open a slit, if open at all, as though pretending not to see. * * * A whole week passed at Mole’s, where I was staying, before I heard from Will. I don’t know how long I had been sleeping when the phone rang. 83

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‘What’s up, kiddo?’ ‘Will! Hello!’ I tried not to let on that he’d caught me not only sleeping but in the middle of a dream. ‘So! What are you doing? Where’s Mole?’ ‘He’s gone,’ I said, ‘until tomorrow.’ ‘What? Leaving you alone? I’ll have to have a word with him!’ A little laugh in his voice – his drinking voice. ‘Well, I was just checking in. Listen, I thought I’d come by for a bit, say hello.’ ‘Now?’ ‘Now. Well, an hour from now, with this traffic.’ * * * He came through the door and gave me a quick kiss on the head without looking at me, squeezing the back of my neck on his way to the bar in the living room. He poured himself a drink, a double whisky, and took a sip before turning to face me. We sat in the conservatory, across from each other, while he looked into his glass, shaking it gently as though it was tea he was drinking, with leaves at the bottom he was trying to read. Was my room comfortable, he wanted to know. At least three times he asked me the same question. Then he yawned deeply. ‘Come on, let’s get a little shut-eye.’ I led him to my room, where he took off his clothes and collapsed onto the bed, not bothering to get under the sheets. I draped his clothes on the chair, tucked his shoes under it, and went to lie with him, my head on his chest. He clasped my arms firmly as though to keep them still. ‘I found a dragon today,’ he said sleepily. ‘A beautiful gold naga, lying under your bed. It made me think of you. That’s why I came.’ For a moment I was puzzled. Then I understood: he meant my brass belt with the heavy scales and the dragon-head buckle. How had I missed checking under my bed while clearing up before leaving? And why had he gone into my room in the first place? But he had. He’d gone into my room, reached under my bed for who knew what reason, and found something I’d left behind. He had picked it up and examined it. He had thought of me. And, with Helen still in town, he had come to see me. He was fast asleep now; I could tell from the rise and 84

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fall of his chest. But I didn’t want him to sleep. I wanted him to wake, to see me for once as I was. I got up and stripped, then knelt at the foot of the bed. ‘Will! Will!’ I shook him. ‘What is it?’ he murmured. Then, seeing I was naked, ‘Wow-za!’ But pleasure was not what I heard in his voice. ‘Tell me what you want me to do! Anything, Will. Just tell me!’ He laughed softly. ‘I want to hit you on the head, very hard, so you’ll finally go to sleep.’ ‘Anything!’ I said. ‘Do whatever you want to me.’ I knelt over him and bent low. First with my hand and then with my mouth I tried, how I tried, to arouse him. But while he stroked my hair, and sighed a little, and lifted his groin slightly to meet my face, he was not to be aroused, not to be seduced – and finally he lay very still. But I was not about to give up. I took his hand and cupped it over my breast. Then I leaned over and fed my breast to him. And when he turned away I felt the despair of a nursing mother when her infant prefers bawling to the tit. I lay on top of him, clinging and rocking. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ he said. ‘Come on, kiddo. That’s not necessary.’ Covered with sweat from all that fruitless effort, I said, ‘Tell me what to do, Will! Just tell me what to do!’ Firmly he pushed me away. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’ll be back home in three days. Three days is all. What’s the hurry?’ ‘Stay with me,’ I begged. ‘Please.’ ‘Na Ga, I can’t,’ he said, irritated now, getting up to dress. ‘You know I can’t do that.’ * * * Nine nights had gone by at Mole’s – nine endless nights without rest, without peace. Just one more to go before my ten-day sentence would end. Mole chose that evening to bring out his baby pictures and introduce, one by one, reminders of his childhood in England: mother, father, sisters, uncle, a nanny, a pair of shoes, a painting of a church and two horses. I was having trouble breathing with a sudden constriction in my chest. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, getting up. ‘I don’t feel well.’ 85

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Mole looked up. ‘Oh, I am sorry.’ Mole had a tiresome way of speaking, of answering straightforward questions with roundabout phrases. ‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ he’d say, when ‘no’ would suffice, or ‘I would have thought’ when he most definitely thought. Will once tried to explain that such a way of speaking was called ‘the conditional’ or ‘the subjunctive’. ‘The Brits like to talk that way,’ he said. But the Englishman was emphatic now in his concern. ‘Go to your room,’ he said, as though chastising me, ‘and get some sleep.’ I went to my room, but only to find my bag and the money I’d need. I hurried past him on my way out, afraid he would try to restrain me. But though he rose from his seat and followed me to the door, saying, ‘Where are you going, then? Must you do this? Is it wise?’, he stood aside to let me by. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was still early – eight thirty. I knew where to go, where my search had to begin. In the dark I opened the garden gate and shut it behind me. I broke into a half run along the side-street. Before I reached the main road, a drizzle hit me, but it was too late to return for an umbrella or a rain jacket – too late for anything except ploughing on. Just as I reached the top of the street, the rain lashed down in a fury. By the time a tuk-tuk stopped for me I was soaked through and shivering. The city was hosting a mammoth celebration. Firecrackers popped and hissed from every direction, and the horns of cars were kazoos. The festive lights were brighter than ever, floating in the sea of rain. I got out at the head of Patpong 2, where the street was blocked with parked taxis and tuk-tuks, mopeds and food vendors. I hurried through the neon-lit arcade of cigarette, newspaper and video stalls, and along the noisetunnel, where hard rock was thrumming from open windows and doors, competing with the blare of boom boxes for sale. Under an awning like a wedding tent, the touts took shelter, calling to me in a mix of languages. Where was I going? What was I seeking? But they were asking out of habit and boredom; they knew there was nothing of interest or profit to be gained from this drab, drenched figure charging head down through the noise and the rain. I hated that place. I’d hated it from the very beginning – from the very first time Will had taken me there. I hated it now more than ever as I plunged into its bowels with no clear plan or motive. I wanted to find Will 86

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and Helen. It wasn’t the search of a thinking, planning person: it was a mad, hit-or-miss spree. I wanted something more, of course, than just to find them. At the back of my mind, in the depths of my heart, I wanted to shake them. Explode their smug contentment. Drive her away. Bring him back to me. Or just make a scene for once in my life, a little scene to embarrass him. Show him that I was somebody, not just something. Not just a slave he could own and disown with impunity. Yes, all over the world people owned other people: this was a slave planet, all right. But even slaves didn’t go to their graves without making a fuss or shaking their fists now and then. All I had to do was show up, stand there in front of them and the poison would spread without a word being said: Look at what he’s done, see how he’s left me! Even better: I could show up with a baby. Will and his talk of wanting a child, needing to breed, so he was not deprived of next-of-kin. You want a child? I’ll give you a child! I remembered the alley behind the pharmacy where Will had pointed out the building to me. ‘That’s where they rent out babies,’ he’d said, nodding towards the second floor. ‘Rent out babies? What for?’ ‘For begging, for photography, for fun, who knows?’ he said, shrugging. It wasn’t in the exact place he had said, but the woman upstairs told me where to go next: to the dress shop around the corner. The one available baby was on the floor, in a swinging rattan basket, right next to the treadle of a sewing-machine. The young woman working the treadle took her foot off the pedal every so often to keep the crib rocking steadily. She made me wait while she finished a long seam, her mouth pointed like a beak. I thought of a gull overseeing a nest in which the eggs have been left by a cuckoo. The child wasn’t the woman’s, I knew in that instant. It couldn’t, simply couldn’t have been. It wasn’t a newborn, either, I was relieved to see. Newborns made me nervous – they were hardly human. This one was formed, it was whole, its features were complete. It woke from its sleep long enough to regard me calmly for a moment; then closed its eyes and was still. 87

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The seamstress asked for a deposit and the two-hour minimum. Renting a baby for two hours was cheaper than renting a ball-gown for an evening. She handed me a carrier, a pouch made of corduroy, and showed me how it worked: I could wear it in front, kangaroo-style, or on my back, like a rucksack. I held the pouch open while she filled it with the still sleeping infant. Then she helped me strap the carrier to my back. Seeing I was without an umbrella or jacket, the seamstress tore off a length of thick black plastic from a rubbish-bag dispenser behind her sewing-machine. This she draped over my shoulders and tied by one end around my neck, like a cape. Bracing myself, I charged back into the rain. I knew I’d find them somewhere along the strip, where he did most of his entertaining and drinking. Cleopatra. Winner’s Bar. Pussy Alive. Queen’s Castle. I recognised the names from the early days, but no longer remembered which were the bars with the go-go dancers, which the second-storey rooms with the floor shows and special acts. I hadn’t thought through the problem of entrance, either, of how to get past the bouncers, barkers and pimps. Somehow I made them understand that stepping inside for one moment was all I was after. A quick survey of the audience, nothing more. For I could spot him in a single instant. Even below the stages, below the bodies in the spotlight, coupling and writhing, even in that eerie ultraviolet gloom where the white objects – white shirts, white teeth – looked radioactive, while everything else stayed hidden: even there I would know him right away. Dashing from door to door, criss-crossing the streets, I scurried like a rat in a maze. In and out of entries, up and down stairs, past bodies and faces, and dancers on stages, and neon signs repeating the same names: King’s Castle, Napoleon, Goldfinger, New Red Door, Mizu, Mango Brutus, Magic Grill … I was beginning to despair of finding them when I remembered the one place I hadn’t yet tried: the Garden of Eatin. Under one of those trees with the apple lights for bulbs was the round table where they were all sitting. The friends around him were faceless to me, except the one sitting opposite him, her face turned in my direction. I had thought of Helen as a girl – a violet-eyed girl with corn-husk hair like the girl in the giant milk advertisement posted all over the city. But 88

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she was a woman, this Helen – a pale-skinned older woman with hair like untidy wool framing a troubled face. From the deep crease on her brow and the downturn of her mouth, I could tell she was no stranger to misery. And she understood mine, I could see. Before I could step back behind the screen, she looked up and straight at me. I stood near the door, trembling in the air-conditioned chill, but there was no turning back any more. Her head tilted; her eyes narrowed and widened. While Will and the others went on laughing and talking, unaware of my presence, she watched me closely as I approached the gathering. My heart was clapping wildly as I stood at the foot of the table and watched Will’s face as it registered surprise, then anger, then a terrible, terrible coldness. He wouldn’t – or couldn’t – bring himself to get up for what seemed a very long time. The silence at the table was spreading to other tables as well. From the clinking of cutlery and the clearing of throats I was dimly aware of the kind of tension that precedes a public speech. But the only face I could take in was Will’s, and the expression on it made me quail. As though watching a film that had come to a stop and was starting up again, I saw Will rise to his feet. With a mocking courtesy that cut me to the quick, he said, ‘Well, if it isn’t our favourite fury! Na Ga! What a surprise! Come and have a seat!’ I pushed away his outstretched arm and saw him clench his fist as I worried at the knotted plastic around my neck. The seamstress had tied the ends so tightly that I couldn’t get it undone; and in the end I just slid the whole thing back to front, and reached behind to unfasten the pouch with the baby. ‘What do we have here?’ I could still hear the ice in his voice as I unhooked the straps from my shoulders and set it on the chair he had offered me. I started to unzip the front of the carrier. ‘A baby,’ I said flatly. I heard murmurs, clicking tongues, placating noises. ‘Aw, a baby …’ ‘You want a baby …’ I couldn’t keep my voice flat: it came out like a croak. ‘I’ve brought you a baby.’ I was trying to get the child out of the carrier as quickly as possible – I wanted to thrust it at Will, force it into his arms – but the zipper was sticking, and its limbs were oddly inert and heavy. It was still fast asleep. What an exceptionally placid brat! 89

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My God! It wasn’t moving – it hadn’t moved! I shook its arm. I shook its leg. It wasn’t moving! I put my ear to its chest. It wasn’t breathing! It was dead! The child was dead! Roughly I pulled it out of its pouch and gave it another shake. I slapped it on the back, on its feet, on its face. I held it high, held it low, slapped it again and again. The child was dead. I’d smothered it under the plastic. I turned to Will. ‘I killed it,’ I said, trying to hand him the heavy mass. The arms that relieved me of the burden were not Will’s but Helen’s. She took the child from me and gathered it to herself before hoisting it slightly to one side and over her shoulder. Calmly, almost absentmindedly, she rubbed its back. All of a sudden the baby arched, almost flipping backwards in her arms, but she caught it by the neck and brought its head towards her shoulder again. The baby looked around, confused, its eyes flicking across the room before it let out a shriek. I saw Helen smile as she went on patting its back, flinching a little as it continued to scream but otherwise unperturbed. The baby worked itself up, yelling its head off. When I reached out to try to comfort it, Helen turned and gave me her back so that the baby was facing me. Seeing me seemed to be the final straw: it flailed about, trying to throw itself out of Helen’s arms, while screaming at the top of its lungs. Once more I reached out to take it from Helen. ‘Give it to me!’ I had to shout to be heard in the din. A weight fell on my shoulders. Will’s hands were crushing – like a yoke or a gibbet. ‘That’s enough, Na Ga,’ he said in his old voice. ‘You’re coming with me.’ As he led me through the restaurant and out of the door to where Nid was dozing in the car, draped over the steering wheel, I was aware of the plastic still hanging down my front like a ridiculous black bib. I allowed myself, nevertheless, to be led without protest as though already handcuffed and sentenced. ‘Take her home to Mole’s,’ Will said to the driver, who had started the car and was revving the engine. Nid was used to snapping out of sleep in an instant, at any time of night or day. ‘What about the baby?’ was the only thing I said. 90

From The Road to Wanting

‘Never mind the baby. We’ll take care of it.’ I had the presence of mind, I don’t know how, to hand Will the receipt from the seamstress, and he slammed the door in my face. Nid’s eyes kept flicking towards me in the rear-view mirror. But he’d learned to be discreet, to mind his own business. His lack of curiosity enraged me. ‘I almost killed a child back there,’ I announced. ‘Lerh? ’ he said, meaning, ‘yeah?’ in Thai. Fucking blood-sucking, brothel-owning, baby-renting Thais! But I knew then that the doors had not only slammed shut behind me; they were now locked and double-bolted for good measure. Once again this Wild Lu had proven herself unfit for companionship, unfit for slavery. Unfit for child minding even.

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A Leap of Faith Palani Mohan Words by Mark Tully

ilgrims come in the millions, streaming from overcrowded trains and decrepit buses to spend the nights under cover of canvas or under the stars, braving the cold of the North Indian winter to wash away their sins and break the karmic cycle of life and rebirth in the sacred Ganges. The Kumbh Mela is the largest religious gathering on earth. Marking a celestial battle for the urn containing the nectar of immortality, Hindu creation myth has it that as the gods and the demons struggled to possess it, a few drops spilled in four places: Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, Nasik in Maharashtra, and Haridwar in Uttarakhand. The Kumbh Mela takes place four times every twelve years, when Jupiter enters Aquarius and the Sun enters Aries â&#x20AC;&#x201C; once at each location. Observance of the festival is thought to date back to the Vedic period but Indians having in the past preferred myth to history, it is perhaps not surprising that the first written record of the Kumbh is found in the accounts of the seventh-century Chinese traveller Huan Tsang. Allahabad and Haridwar traditionally draw the greatest crowds and this year it is the turn of Haridwar, where the Ganges emerges from the Himalayas, and where as many as sixty million pilgrims were expected between January 14 and April 28. Once every twelve years, an even larger Maha Kumbh Mela is held. The next will take place at Allahabad in 2013.

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‘It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born out of it is beyond imagination, marvellous to our kind of people, the cold whites,’ wrote Mark Twain after seeing the Kumbh. I have never known anyone who has witnessed a Kumbh Mela and not marvelled. In Allahabad in 1989, the first Kumbh I attended, a leading lawyer of that city told me it was something I would never be able to understand. He and millions of other pilgrims were camped out on the sandbanks where the brown waters of the Ganges merge with the blue waters of the Jumna River at what is known as the ‘sangam’, the meeting place. ‘We come here because we have faith in our rituals, not because we hope to gain faith,’ he said. ‘Without faith you cannot expect to understand the Mela.’

A Leap of Faith

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A Leap of Faith

At the heart of the Kumbh are the Kalpvasis, those pilgrims who make no claim to spiritual wisdom and who live ordinary lives, but who find time to spend a month during the festival living austerely in tents on the banks of the river, eating just one meal a day – and that, for many, is uncooked. They bathe three times in the river each day and what remains of their time is spent meditating and listening to re ligious discourse. Kumbhs I have attended also brought the heads of the monasteries established by the eighth-century reformer Adi Shankara, who is among the most influential of the philosophers of Hindu ism. Alas, I did not find his successors quite so profound. I heard one defend the practice of sati – the burning of the widow on the funeral pyre of her husband – and a Baba Bhutnath, a Lord of the Ghosts, taught that we can learn to transcend our earthly desires by indulging them. Ascet ics practised spectacular feats of austerity. There was a sadhu – a holy man – who, it was said, had been standing on one leg for eight years. Another lay on a bed of thorns. Some though have no time for ritual and the head of the Kabirpanthis, followers of the fifteenth-century mystic poet Kabir, did not even bathe in the Ganges. ‘The tap is just as good,’ he told me.

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A Leap of Faith

The most spectacular and most troubleÂ some of the sects present at Kumbhs are the militant monastic orders, or Akharas. On days deemed auspicious for bathing by astronomers calculating from the positions of the planets, they emerge from their camps in colourful procession, scholars of the order, who would once have been mounted on elephants, now seated on elaborate gilded thrones carried on carts pulled by their devotees. Naked sadhus head the processions, shouting, dancing, beating drums, twirling maces and carrying tridents and swords. Pilgrims line the route bowing their heads in reverence. As they approach the river the sadhus break ranks and rush into the water shrieking with joy. But there is intense rivalry between the sects and clashes are not uncommon.

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Over the three most auspicious days of the 1989 Allahabad Kumbh Mela, twenty-seven million people took to the waters to bathe. They waited for hours in orderly queues to reach the banks of the Ganges. There was no pushing, no shoving, no sign of panic, just a patient waiting. I wrote after my first Kumbh, ‘There was no frenzy, just the calm certainty of faith; the knowledge that what had to be done had been done.’ RC Zaehner, a renowned scholar of the eastern religions, wrote that Hindus have ‘nothing but shocked incomprehension’ for the Semitic religions’ dogmatic certainties, and so Hindus bring their individual faiths to the banks of the Ganges to celebrate the Kumbh Mela. All one can say is that they believe in some way they will gain merit and be cleansed.

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Pilgrims do not come only to bathe, for the Kumbh is a spectacular religious fair. Hinduism has been likened to a great banyan tree, setting down roots wherever its branches spread but no longer retaining a central trunk. It is not a religion of one book, it has no church or central authority, and its diversity has led many to say that it should not be thought of as a religion at all. Teachers and preachers of the many branches of Hinduism, inheritors of historic offices, monastic sects â&#x20AC;Ś all set out their stalls at the fair. Pilgrims wander from place to place and hear tell of the different roads that salvation has to offer.

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Liberation Road

Poems Kirby Wright

At Billy Boozer’s, Kowloon Tong I slip into Billy Boozer’s for a drink. I am confident, hair dyed blond. You are the Carlsberg girl, a beer model. I like the green Danish frock. I am confident, hair dyed blond. You ask my age after the fourth pint. I like the green Danish frock. I know there are three decades between us. You ask my age after the fourth pint. We take a red cab with a silver roof. I know there are three decades between us. I barely speak Cantonese. I hang the Do Not Disturb sign. You are the Carlsberg girl, a beer model. I give you a left-handed promise. I slip into Billy Boozer’s for a drink. 119

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The Ghost Barracks of Kowloon Tong A gust from Lion Rock Roars open my linen curtains On the eleventh floor. The Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Liberation Army compound Squats below me. This is the strange heart of the district: There are no twirling rifles, No shouting orders, no battalions, No clippity-clop of boots. Here are 20 acres Surrounded by a woven fence Crowned with razor wire. Mint-green housing blocks Eight stories high Flank a Zhong Guo flag Hanging limp on its pole. Windows on every floor Are shut, curtains drawn. Satellite dishes on rooftops Are umbrellas reversed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; They intercept only rain and dust. Ghosts from China wars Ascend and descend the stairwells. A gardener in black pants 120

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And a wide-brimmed hat Trims timber bamboo. A basketball court waits for players Where no balls bounce. A jun ren with peaked olive cap Stands between a sentry box And a red wall Embossed with gold characters. A taxi brakes hard on Renfrew Road – Shouts echo off the asphalt. The jun ren looks in my direction Then, gazing through the fence, Watches the crowd of students Marching toward the Kowloon hills.

November in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong The winds have returned. A cold sun burns through the veil of clouds. Cantonese drifts past the shivering curtains. I pretend you’re calling my name. A cold sun burns through the veil of clouds. I leave another message on your phone. I pretend you’re calling my name. The ironwood trees weep like willows. I leave another message on your phone. I scramble blood sausage with eggs for breakfast. 121

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The ironwood trees weep like willows. At Riverside Restaurant you told me I lied. I eat off the wedding plates. Cantonese drifts past the shivering curtains. My phone doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ring. The winds have returned.

122

The Counterfeit David Yost

ater, this is the moment Jude will return to again and again, when he stands two customers from the teller in a bank awash with fluorescent light and Thai chatter, looks down at the pair of hundred-dollar bills in his hand, and sees that one of them is darker than the other. He frowns, shifts his shoulder bag, and holds them up to look. On the right, an anaemic Franklin, worn smooth by dozens of thumbs; on the left, a chiaroscuro of wrinkles and jowls. Jude checks the dates: 2001, 2005. Okay then, he thinks, but he canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop looking. He compares the Treasury seals, the typeface, and the signatures. He reverses the bills and checks the clock dial and thin trees of Independence Hall. Both are darker and more detailed on the left-hand bill, in a fine-lined ink that makes Jude think of old Dutch woodcuts. On the right, again, the image is blurred and pale. A dark-suited man gathers up a stack of baht from the counter and steps away to be replaced by the broad woman just before Jude. Jude looks again at the two bills and his heart begins to speed. Is he actually considering that one may be a counterfeit? The thought seems absurd, but then he thinks how easily Daw Mai Mai could have been sold a phoney banknote inside Burma â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a North Korean super-note perhaps. He thinks of paper quality and crumples the edge of one bill and then the other between his fingertips. The same. 123

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The absurdity strikes him again – Jude the Midwestern philosophy major, worrying about a Thai jail sentence for counterfeiting – and he bites back a smile. He lives too much in his head, he knows, blowing up hypotheses and imaginings. The bills read ‘legal tender’; surely they are. And yet, he thinks, the consequences if he’s wrong. He looks to the bank’s door, where a young Thai man stands smiling with his blue jacket, cap, and gun. Ahead, the broad woman slips a roll of baht into her handbag and signs her name to a form. The bank is quieter now, the remaining conversations muted by carpet and air-conditioning. If the money were his, Jude could leave the line, think, and come back tomorrow. But he imagines trying to explain in Daw Mai Mai’s five-hundred-word vocabulary that the last of her money might be a fraud, and for what? The comparison of an old bill to a new? To half-remembered hundreds from birthdays and Christmases? ‘Sir?’ the teller asks, and the suddenness of her English makes him jump. It’s not too late, he knows. He can make an excuse. He can walk away. Instead he thinks, come on, Jude, be rational, and steps up to the counter as if stepping onto a stage. ‘Sà-wàt-dee krup,’ he says to the teller, smiles wide, and hands her the bills. * * * Robin loved to tease him about his claims of shyness, and he loved to hear it. The truth was, Jude had surprised himself each time: asking to join her in the sickly sweet shade of a blooming Russian olive, where she sat reading a Louis L’Amour novel and chewing the end of her long, yellow braid; asking her to join him as he walked the trails, his binoculars dangling between them; asking her to a dinner of vegetarian sushi, and, weeks later, to bed. ‘There are days,’ he told her as she lay beside him, ‘when I try to just pretend I’m not shy. A will-power thing.’ ‘So how many days do you have to pretend you’re not shy before you’re just not shy?’ she asked, smiling, her hair loose and spread beneath her like a blond lagoon. ‘A lot.’ The truth was this had been his project for years, yet he kept butting up against something stubborn in his own nature, in the comfort 124

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he took in a shut-up afternoon of web design or a Saturday morning in the still woods, waiting for a glimpse of a Swainson’s Thrush or a Sharp-shinned Hawk. ‘Like I said,’ he whispered, dipping his fingers into that pool of hair, ‘will power.’ On their fourth date she had taken him back to her apartment to show him her Elvis lamp, her classic Godzilla posters, and the vintage model horses she restored for sale on eBay. ‘The biggest problem with this town,’ she said without a trace of irony, ‘is that they don’t keep the Hobby Lobby open late enough,’ and even as Jude laughed, he suspected that he was falling in love, and when he stepped forward to kiss her and felt the way she shivered in his arms, he was sure of it. In a fit of honesty the following week, Jude listed his liabilities to her – his baby-fat face and paper-pale skin, the long hours of web design for shitty part-time pay, the long weekends of birdwatching and introspection, his annex-room abutting the house of his father, a widowed Unitarian minister – but she only nodded solemnly and then pointed out her widening hips, her thousand cousins and collection of Disney lunchboxes, and then squeezed his thigh and said, ‘I think I can make do.’ But the greatest problem, his departure, they left unspoken, and it lay between them this way for months. ‘You understand that this can’t really happen,’ he said to her much later, long after it was too late and apropos of nothing, but still he knew she followed. ‘I’m still leaving in January and I won’t be back for a year.’ ‘What if you stay?’ she asked. It was a cold Wisconsin night and they lay beneath his comforter in the glow of each other’s bodies, and for a long moment all he could think was, I do not want to leave this space. But he thought, too, of the people he’d been promising to help for a year now, of his great experiment to test his ethics in the field and of what he might write when he returns, of the endless postponements for his father’s prostate scare and Jude’s own lack of funds, of the florid emails of scrambled English: Mr Jude, thank you for want to help Internet teacher with so very important democracy, justice and human right. Many Burmese people very much need to talk on Internet about human right and brutal thug dictatorship. Mr Jude, when will you come? ‘I love you,’ Robin said, ‘you love me.’ 125

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Jude rolled on his back to stare at the ceiling. ‘Listen, maybe we’d better be ready to forget that.’ ‘Oh, right,’ Robin said, sitting up. ‘Will power.’ After a minute, she climbed out of bed and began to dress and the cold air leaked under the cover from every corner. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I love you. I love you but I also have to do this thing, I have to do it, and I don’t know what to do.’ He expected this to soften her, but still she put on her socks and then her boots and only then did she turn to look at him. ‘I don’t know what to do either,’ she said. ‘But I think I’d better go.’ He spent the next two hours writing her an email about his actions, reaching deep back into his philosophy BA for Kant’s categorical imperative and Nagel’s possibility of altruism, and then he deleted it all and wrote I love you and I’m sorry and please come back. He clicked ‘send’, laid his head on the mouse pad, and cried. An hour later, he heard a knock on his window and turned and there she was in cap and coat with the snow coming down all around her. ‘Sà-wàt-dee kaa,’ she said, practising. * * * The teller is older, with shockingly black hair and red nails, and she doesn’t return Jude’s smile as she takes his passport and the two hundreds and slides him a bilingual form. As she rises to make photocopies, Jude starts to write, but then hesitates at the blank for his Thai address. Though Daw Mai Mai has registered with the United Nations through the camps, his other students are in the country illegally, and to write their address would needlessly endanger them. He himself is risking deportation doing volunteer work on his tourist visa for an unofficial organisation. Jude tries to remember the last intentional lie he told before his trip, and can’t. He thinks of Kant’s insistence that one should tell even a murderer the true location of an intended victim, yet in truth, this has always struck Jude as one of Kant’s stupider ideas, and so finally he shrugs, apologises inwardly to der Allzermalmende, and writes No. 1 Guest House, a name he saw beside the bus station. The teller returns and sets aside his passport and its photocopy. She takes up the darker of the hundred-dollar bills and then the lighter, looks from 126

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one to the other, and frowns. She lifts a bill in each hand, framing them against the ceiling’s lights. Jude watches her for a long minute and then forces his eyes back to the exchange form. He writes his hometown, his state, his country, and the passport number he’s conscientiously memorised. He signs his name, and when he looks up, the woman is still staring at the lighter bill. Should he say something now, he wonders. Ask if she sees anything wrong, mention his own uncertainty about the bill? Yet how could he explain giving it to her without warning in the first place? This is what he should’ve done from the beginning, he realises – handed her the bill and asked her to check it for him. But again, he thinks, he’s being ridiculous; of course the bank has to check foreign currency. Jude’s teller says something quick and hard in Thai to the teller beside her and flicks on a lamp that bathes her workspace in purple. She puts the hundreds into the beam and studies them in much the same way he’s seen local medics check slides for malaria, squinting as she moves them up and down and left and right to see from one angle and then another. Jude looks down at the counter to see that his hands are trembling and moves them to his side. In his bag, he has a magazine piled in with the latest HTML worksheets, and he wonders if he should flip through it to create a more casual air. How would a real counterfeiter handle this? he asks himself, but the thought only sets his hands shaking harder. The teller frowns at the lamp, switches it off, and says something else to the woman beside her that makes them both laugh. She takes the bills and places them back on the counter beside Jude’s passport, and Jude feels the muscles relaxing in his legs and chest. ‘Okay, then?’ he asks, his smile genuine now. ‘Now I get baht?’ ‘Please-sir-wait,’ she says, running the words together without inflection. She uncaps a pen and makes a tiny yellow check mark on each bill. On the paler of the bills, and only on the paler, the check mark slowly, irrevocably, fades to black. ‘What is that?’ Jude asks. The teller says nothing to him but turns her head to the left, eyes always fixed on Jude, and calls to the back room in Thai. He looks down the counter. The other tellers have stopped their transactions and are watching him, fascinated. 127

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A man with a receding hairline and a managerial air steps forward and speaks quickly with the teller and the only word Jude can understand is ‘A-may-rí-gaa.’ After a moment, the man straightens. ‘Excuse me, sir, where is this money from?’ ‘Wisconsin,’ Jude says as one security guard and then another step up unsmiling beside him. ‘America. Is there some kind of problem?’ * * * Because Aaron, the volunteer coordinator, had warned him to treat older students with deference, and because Daw Mai Mai made such a show of greeting Jude each morning before class and cooking for him after, it was three days before it occurred to him to call on her during the lesson. They were still going over computer parts and so he pointed to the monitor and asked, ‘Daw Mai Mai, what do you call this in English?’ and she exploded. ‘No, Teacher!’ She threw up her hands as if in panic. ‘I cannot speak! I cannot learn!’ Jude stared at her as the teenager beside her giggled and then turned to the boy and said, ‘Okay … Kyaw Nyunt?’ ‘Teacher,’ the boy said, becoming solemn, ‘I do not know.’ ‘She is crazy, Teacher,’ the teens told Jude later, smiling nervously. All three had been child soldiers in the Karen National Liberation Army, he knew, but they carried themselves without any of the cynicism or weariness that the BBC had led him to expect. They laughed, they scuffled, they kicked a cane ball over a ragged net and walked hand-in-hand along the fence, arms swinging like sweethearts. ‘Crazy?’ Jude asked. ‘Yes,’ Moe Sein put in. At forty-two, he was the oldest after Daw Mai Mai, lean and handsome, his gums stained clown-red by betel nut. ‘Her son die.’ ‘How?’ Jude asked. ‘Burmese police, they kill him,’ Moe Sein said. ‘Now she is, very crazy!’ The students laughed, and Jude spent the next hour pacing the fence of the compound, bewildered by their cruelty and wishing that Robin was there to speak to. The next day in class, Jude pointed again to the computer monitor and asked Daw Mai Mai its English name. 128

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‘No, no, no, Teacher!’ she cried. ‘Yes,’ Jude said, ‘It’s okay. Just try to guess.’ ‘No, Teacher,’ she said. ‘I cannot. My brain, crazy.’ Jude stared, open mouthed, but Kyaw Nyunt chimed in at her side with, ‘Monitor’. ‘What?’ Kyaw Nyunt pointed. ‘Monitor, Teacher. Computer television.’ After class, Daw Mai Mai insisted that Jude wait at the card table he used for teaching and returned minutes later with a fried egg over rice. ‘For you, Teacher,’ she said. ‘No, please, I don’t want any special treatment,’ Jude said, knowing that his students in the next room were eating rice, and rice only, but he could see that she didn’t understand and he finally, guiltily, accepted the plate. ‘I am sorry, Teacher,’ she said. ‘In class, I do not understand. My son, last year, he died.’ ‘Moe Sein told me. I am very sorry.’ Struggling to appear casual, Jude forked some egg into his mouth. The egg was crispy, unseasoned, and with a mouthful of rice, revoltingly bland. Jude chewed, forced a swallow and then reached for some more. ‘Yes, Teacher. All the time, I cry and I cry.’ She pantomimed rolling tears, rubbing her knuckles down worn cheeks. Her smile never broke. ‘Now, every day, I read … I forget!’ Jude knew Daw Mai Mai, like so many other refugees here, was waiting on papers from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the golden ticket to Sweden or America, to safety and surplus. He tried to imagine her using her English to buy a cluster of grapes or a bus ticket to Philadelphia. Americans, he suspected, would not be so patient with her language skills as the Thais were with his. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we will keep trying.’ That night, his fourth at the students’ compound, Jude explored the two large wooden houses where they lived, counting rooms and bedrolls. As he suspected, his was the only single room, while the students slept four to a room on mats of woven plastic, their belongings piled in backpacks and plastic bags. In the common room Jude found the men, smoking cheroots and watching a Thai kickboxing film on the computer. ‘Moe Sein,’ Jude said, ‘I will share a room also. I want to be the same as everyone else.’ 129

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Moe Sein stared at him. ‘But you are not the same,’ he said at last. ‘You are American. You are Teacher.’ * * * They have taken his bag, his passport, his wallet, his cell phone, and his watch, and now Jude sits alone in a concrete room of the police station and waits, his stomach roiling like a hot spring. ‘Man come, speak very English!’ an officer assured him before closing the door. Jude feels as if hours have passed since then, but he understands that the adrenaline is distorting his sense of time and understands too that, right now, every minute is a gift, if he can use it to construct the lie that will save him. If he sticks to the story that he got the bill in Manitowoc he can plead that this was an accident. Which, oddly enough, it was – Daw Mai Mai surely hadn’t known either – but to explain the circumstances would only endanger her without freeing him. Yet they’ll investigate any story he gives them, so where could he have picked up the bill? The counterfeit is too clumsy to have made it past an American bank teller, he suspects, but Jude’s never taken cash from a client or carried large bills; the truth is that before today, he hasn’t touched a hundred-dollar bill in years. Be rational, he tells himself, think. But even as he tries his mind returns to outrageous prison sentences, beatings and deprivations, and the age he might be when he returns home at last, and so when the door finally opens, Jude still hasn’t the least idea of what he might say. The man who enters is not a police officer, but Jude has seen this uniform before, with its asparagus-green shirt and dull epaulettes. After a moment, he places it; on a rare trip to the tea shop, Moe Sein had pointed one out across the market, tugged at Jude’s sleeve and said, ‘Thai Military Intelligence, Teacher. We must go.’ But the man inside it is new to Jude, muscular and balding and nearly his own height, and he sets a plastic chair across from Jude’s and a folder beside it on the floor, and sits without shaking hands. ‘My name is, I think, very long for you,’ the man says, smiling, ‘but you can call me Lieutenant Ting. Would you like a cigarette, Jude?’ Jude doesn’t smoke and says so. ‘Are you sure?’ Ting draws a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. 130

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‘Your country, yes?’ Just the thought sets Jude’s stomach flopping again. ‘No, thank you,’ he says, and Ting laughs. ‘Healthy, healthy Americans. And yet so many, so fat. Why, I ask you?’ Jude says nothing. ‘I lived in America, you know,’ Ting says. ‘Los Angeles, California. For five years. So every time there is a problem with an American, or British, or Australian’ – he drags out each nationality to emphasise the imposition – ‘they call me.’ Ting smiles. ‘You are having a problem, I think.’ ‘Yes,’ Jude says, smiling himself. ‘I think I’m having a big problem.’ He must keep calm, he thinks, but already he feels his guts twisting traitorously within him. ‘So why are you in our city, Jude?’ ‘I was thinking of visiting Umphang National Park. I’m a birdwatcher.’ So far, so good, he thinks. ‘And you are staying at …’ Ting picks up the folder, flips it open, and takes out Jude’s currency exchange form. ‘… Number One Guest House?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘That is strange,’ Ting says. ‘I called them and they do not recognise your name. Maybe you are there with a different name?’ Jude says nothing. ‘So let us cut the chase,’ Ting says. ‘Where is this bill from?’ ‘Manitowoc, Wisconsin. You know Wisconsin?’ ‘This is a state, yes? In the north?’ ‘Yes. I do computer work, and I must have gotten it from a client there.’ ‘You are sure now? This bill?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure. Whenever I got a large bill, I set it aside for travel cash. It’s the only place it could have come from. I’m very sorry for all this trouble. I just didn’t know it was a bad bill.’ The more Jude speaks, the more plausible it sounds, and for the first time in an hour he thinks, maybe I’m not going to jail after all. Ting narrows his eyes. ‘Yes? You had no idea?’ ‘No,’ Jude says, ‘I’m not a bank teller or anything.’ Ting takes a long drag on his Marlboro. ‘I am here because I want to help you,’ he says. ‘I know. I appreciate it.’ 131

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‘So why are you lying to me?’ ‘It’s the truth.’ But Jude can feel the hot flush in his forehead, the sting of sweat in the corners of his eyes. ‘Jude,’ Ting says sadly. ‘We know this bill, we have many others of these.’ And he takes the pale hundred from the folder. ‘This is from a counterfeiter in Yangon, an already arrested man. You see this spot on your president’s forehead?’ Jude looks at the spot and does not correct him. ‘This is dust on the man’s … what do you call it?’ ‘Scanner?’ Jude is breathing fast now, pressing a hand hard into his abdomen. ‘Yes!’ Ting says. ‘Scanner. You see, perhaps I need computer classes as well.’ So he went through the bag, Jude thinks, of course he did. ‘So every cheap bill he prints is same to this one. So I ask you … how does this bill go then to Wisconsin? And back?’ ‘I think I need to talk to my embassy,’ Jude says. ‘Oh, I think so too! Do you know how long you go to jail for counterfeit in Thailand?’ Ting leans forward, his breath stinking of cigarettes and green curry. ‘I don’t want to…’ Jude can’t finish the sentence. ‘Fifteen years, Jude. This is minimum. Minimum.’ Jude rocks back, tipping his chair, and stumbles to his feet clutching at his stomach as if he’s been shot. ‘Where is the …’ ‘If you must upchuck,’ Ting says, ‘do it in the corner.’ And then, to Jude’s shame, he does, staggering the final step, bracing himself against a wall filthy with sweat and piss-reek, noodles and soup and rice and acid surging out of him in hot gouts and splashing away across the concrete floor. He heaves and retches and when his stomach is empty he sinks to his knees, gasping and dry-retching, and when he looks up the lieutenant has not moved from his chair. ‘We know what happened, Jude,’ Ting says. ‘We are not stupid, you know? Like every other farang in this town you feel bad for the Burmese and want to help them. They ask you to exchange money at the bank because you have passport and they have no papers at all. Stupid, but okay. You break the law but you aren’t wanting to be a criminal, right?’ Jude slumps against the wall and watches warily. 132

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‘So I tell these police, I think we do not want you.’ Ting reaches into his folder again, takes out a sheet of paper, and turns it so Jude can read it. One of the HTML worksheets, he sees. Daw Mai Mai, it says at the top. ‘We want her.’ * * * Two days after her son’s death, when she was sure she could control herself long enough to fill out the paperwork, Daw Mai Mai returned to the police headquarters. ‘Excuse me,’ she called to the moon-faced man behind the desk, ‘I’m here to file murder charges against Officers Tin Aye, Saw Tun, and Myint Shwe, and Police Lieutenant Colonel Than Kyaw, for the torture and death of my son. Can you help me?’ And now the man’s eyes were wide as moon craters. ‘Please just go,’ he said. But already another officer was walking over to the desk, a man with a thick jaw and large, ugly hands. ‘Lady,’ this man said, ‘if you say one more word about the lieutenant colonel, I’m going to throw you right out of here.’ ‘I don’t need to speak,’ Daw Mai Mai said. ‘I only need the form.’ ‘Okay,’ said the man with big hands, lifting a panel to step around the desk, ‘come on,’ and he took her by the arm and pulled hard. ‘I just need the form,’ Daw Mai Mai said calmly, but the man opened the station door and shoved her down the three concrete stairs. She hit the pavement hard and lay there. ‘I’m trying to help you, lady,’ he said from the doorway. ‘Just because your son died doesn’t mean that you have to.’ Daw Mai Mai heard the door close and she lay on the rough concrete for some time, listening to the cries of street hawkers and the squeaks of trishaws trundling past, and she thought of the week it took her son to die, of the ragged holes in his left hand where his fingernails had been, of the way he had coughed blood whenever the friends brave enough to visit had made him laugh, of the cigarette burns on his genitals that, after he died, Daw Mai Mai had lifted the sheet aside to see, and, after a long while, ignoring the pain in her back and hip, she straightened and stepped up the three stairs one by one and opened the door and returned to the desk. 133

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‘I only need the form,’ she said to the moon-faced man. His big-handed colleague was nowhere in sight, she could see. ‘Just give it to me and I’ll be no more trouble to you.’ ‘Daw Mai Mai,’ he said. ‘They know you were a political prisoner. If they come to kill you there is no one who will stop them. Please, you must go.’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll choose for myself.’ He shrugged and passed her the complaint form. ‘It’s not me they’ll bury.’ Why didn’t they kill her, she wondered that night in bed, an old woman already at forty-four, her hair grey and her back a ruin from the concrete floors of prison, if she was the one they wanted? Why her son, with his harmless love poems and his taste for green mangoes? She lay awake and wept and when the police came shouting taunts and throwing rocks at her shutters, she didn’t even stir. The men came again the next night, and the next. ‘We will burn you out, Mai Mai,’ they called, young men but still dropping the honorific before her name. They called her ‘traitor’ and ‘spy’ and many worse names than that and they told her how her son had begged and wept and always they threw rocks, and when, in a rage, she finally opened her door to confront them, one of these caught her square on the temple, and she fell to her knees, gasping. The headlamp of a motorcycle was behind the men and as they approached they were only shadows. ‘You know what you need to do to make us go away, Mai Mai.’ They were standing all around her now in their thick police boots. ‘Tin Aye,’ she said. ‘Saw Tun. Myint Shwe. Than Kyaw.’ She saw a boot rise and she prepared herself for the kick but instead the man placed it on her shoulder and, almost gently, tipped her onto her side. ‘Withdraw the complaint,’ he said, ‘or we will rape you, and we will kill you,’ and then they walked away. The next day, Daw Mai Mai talked to an old friend from the resistance movement, the friend who had given her the tapes of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for which she had been arrested all those months before, and by nightfall she was stowed between two bushels of new potatoes in a truck on its way to Thailand, to continue her fight from there. When Jude spent a week piecing together her story for the organisation’s web site at her request, working sometimes from her own words but more 134

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often from Moe Sein’s translations, and then brought her the finished article to look at, Daw Mai Mai only laughed and threw up her hands. ‘No, Teacher,’ she said. ‘English, I do not read!’ * * * When Jude first saw the men gathered in the snowy road, he assumed that there had been some kind of accident. Even when the car ahead of him pulled off the road into a bank car park to turn around, Jude guessed that the driver was making room for emergency vehicles, and he prepared to do the same. So it was Robin who told him, ‘It’s a fight. Just turn around, I’m calling 911.’ Jude’s headlights reflected up from the slush to frame the five men as they circled a man on the ground. As Jude watched, the man raised himself on his knees and one arm. The men let him rise but when he was erect on his knees one stepped forward to clip his face with a gloved fist and then another gave him a fast kick to the ribs that sent him sprawling. Jude clicked the radio off and even over the snowy wind he could hear their laughter. ‘Go, Jude,’ Robin said angrily, but then the 911 operator was on the line and she began explaining and giving directions and when she looked up again Jude was already stepping out of the car. ‘Lock the door,’ he said, and he slammed it shut with a bang that made two of the men cock their heads in his direction like startled deer. ‘Hey,’ he called, his voice as loud and firm as he could make it. He couldn’t fight even one of these men, he knew, but if he stayed behind the headlights he hoped he might be able to bluff them. ‘We’ve called 911,’ he said. ‘The police are on the way. Why don’t you just get out of here and we can all still have a good Saturday night.’ Jude watched as the men squinted in his direction, but at thirty feet they could no more make out his form than he could make out their faces. ‘There’s no need for this. Let’s just all go enjoy our Saturday night,’ he repeated. ‘You want to be next, asshole?’ one of them called and took a step forward, but another in a snorkel parka put a hand on the man’s arm and began to guide him toward a hastily parked car at the curb. The bloodied man was on his hands and knees again, coughing, but the others were ignoring him 135

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now, murmuring to each other and squinting again toward Jude, and then they set across the snow and slush in the road at a quick and dangerous stride and before Jude could think of what to say or do, the three men were around him. ‘You think you’re funny, kid?’ one of them asked. They were only inches away on all sides, older than Jude had realised and moustached and stinking of bourbon and beer and cigarettes, and Jude resisted the urge to step back, knowing that if he did they would certainly set upon him. ‘I don’t want to fight you,’ Jude said, and the three men laughed. ‘That’s a relief. Are you relieved, Gene?’ ‘I’m relieved.’ ‘There’s no need for any of this,’ Jude said. Already Gene was reaching for him and Jude had time to think how badly he’d miscalculated, that this could only end with two people bleeding in the snow instead of one and possibly Robin as well, but then Jude’s car horn blared and each man jumped and even as their ears cleared they could hear the siren rising from the next block. A car pulled up alongside them now, the man in the snorkel parka at the wheel, and without any further prompting the men glared each in turn at Jude and then piled inside. The car fishtailed away and Jude looked over to where the bloodied man had lain and saw that he was gone too. Jude turned and tapped on the window. ‘Okay,’ he said. They answered the officer’s questions but of course they could identify no one nor press any charges themselves. Robin’s face was flushed and tight as she spoke, and as Jude listened to her staccato sentences, he began to understand how much trouble he was in. ‘I don’t want to talk about it here,’ she told him in the car. He spent the drive internally rehearsing his argument – the small risk to his own safety balanced against the much larger risk to the safety of the victim, the need under the democratic social contract to gamble one’s safety for that of another – and before they’d arrived at her apartment he already felt he had her on the run. He thought too of the old ethics problem of switching the tracks of the runaway train to save five lives, even though it kills one who would otherwise have lived, and he wondered if he should mention it. Jude had never been sure if he was prepared to flip the switch; he was, he felt, prepared to be the man on the other track. 136

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But inside Robin stripped her coat and boots off in a rage and still did not want to speak. ‘Listen, I had to help,’ Jude started, sinking onto her bed. ‘Is this what Thailand is going to be like?’ she asked, and the question was so far from the conversation he’d been preparing for in his head that she had to repeat, ‘Is this why you’re going to Thailand?’ ‘I’m sorry I put you in danger,’ he said, but Robin waved an arm to indicate that this was not the issue. ‘Do you have a death wish?’ she asked. ‘They wouldn’t stop kicking that guy, they could have killed him.’ ‘They could have killed you, and then what was I supposed to do?’ ‘Listen,’ Jude said, trying to re-route the conversation. ‘That guy …’ ‘Any time I hear you say “Listen,” I know a great bit of moral reasoning’s about to come out. Please, edify me.’ Jude kept his voice carefully level as he spoke. ‘I just wanted to say that that guy was a person just like me, and every bit as important as me, and if there was a way I could help him, there was no way I could drive past.’ ‘But he wasn’t you.’ Robin sat down beside him and touched his hand, yet he understood that this was not surrender but rather a new line of attack. ‘Where do you fit into all of this, Jude? What about your happiness?’ ‘Just the same as everybody else.’ ‘And what about mine?’ she asked. ‘I love you, you know that.’ He reached to put a hand to her back but she twisted away. ‘That’s not what I asked,’ she said. ‘I love you,’ he said again. ‘It’s just that …’ ‘… it’s just that you have to be somebody better than that,’ she finished for him, and he didn’t know how to correct her. After a minute she stood and walked to the window and with her back to him she said, ‘If you want to stay with me, you can. But I don’t think I can go to Thailand.’ Jude ran his hand over the soft blues and purples of the quilt. Robin had sewn it herself, he knew, from patches given to her by a grandmother and two aunts. One day after Thailand, she’d make him one, she’d said. He closed the door behind him so softly that he could barely hear the click of the latch. 137

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And when she apologised to his voicemail three days later and asked him to come over for hot cocoa and a talk, he neither picked up nor called her back. He’d made his choice. * * * ‘Do you like movies, Jude?’ Lieutenant Ting asks, proffering a handkerchief. Jude takes it and mops at his lips but he can still taste the sour burn of stomach acid caking his cheeks and gums. ‘Documentaries,’ he says, settling weakly back into his chair. ‘Sometimes.’ ‘Do you watch cop movies?’ ‘Not really.’ ‘Beverly Hills Cop? LA Confidential? Another 48 Hours?’ Jude shakes his head at each and Ting sighs in exasperation. ‘But, you know, good cop, bad cop, yes?’ Jude nods. ‘Okay, Jude, good. Well, I am good cop. Okay? I am here to help you. Those men outside …’ he indicates the closed metal door. ‘Bad cop. All bad cop. They tire of farang in their town looking for drugs and prostitutes and little refugee children that no one will miss.’ ‘I’m not …’ ‘I know, Jude, I know. You have big heart and you want to help the refugees. It is against the law, but you take tourist visa and come anyway. But the problem is that you do not understand our problems here. It is like your Mexicans, yes? Like California. They are poor and they come from bad lives, but there are so many of them, and now we have the gangs and the drugs and many violence.’ ‘They’re not all like that.’ ‘Then why did they give you this money that sends you to jail?’ ‘I think we need to call my embassy,’ Jude says. ‘We have already made this call, Jude. An officer will be here in the morning. The problem is that we have many forms that we must give to her and we are having many troubles completing the paperwork.’ Ting shakes another cigarette out of his pack and sticks it between his ragged lips. ‘Did we arrest an American criminal for counterfeit dollars? Or did we arrest the alien criminal who took advantage of this innocent American – who 138

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tricked him, Jude, into taking counterfeit money to the bank? He taps the worksheet again and smiles. ‘Right now, I do not know who gave you this money. But this is the woman the Myanmar police need. This is the woman we will give them.’ No matter what this man says, Jude thinks, he will never believe that Daw Mai Mai has done this to him on purpose. ‘This must be clear by morning,’ Ting says. ‘Perhaps if you have the night to think you will remember what happened?’ He lights his cigarette and stands to go. ‘A man will bring you a mat and a bucket for toilet,’ he says. ‘I have money,’ Jude says. ‘My father has money.’ Ting shakes his head sadly. ‘Not as much as Myanmar,’ he says, and goes out the door. * * * The day before Jude’s arrest, he biked to the hills that ringed the town and paced over them for hours with his binoculars and two canteens that he drained almost immediately of their water. He sat above the road in the thin shade of a mango tree and watched old pick-ups trundle past with their loads of pineapples, sisal, migrant workers and hitchhiking monks. He waved to three children picking plastic bags and scraps of metal from the roadside debris and shared with them the last of his peanuts and the change from his pockets. He walked on and found a grove of lychee trees but even sitting patiently within it, he saw only three pipits and some thrushes and though he heard the piercing aut-see, aut-see of a Slaty-backed Forktail, he could not find it. As the sun sank, Jude gave up and rode his bike back into town. ‘Where are all the birds?’ he asked Daw Mai Mai when he returned to the compound. She shook her head, not understanding. ‘There are many trees outside of town,’ he said. ‘There is much forest. But not many birds. Where are the birds?’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Many refugee, always hungry! People eat them, Teacher.’ Jude laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean little birds. Little birds that sing.’ And he held his fingers to the width of a sparrow. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘People eat them.’ And then, without segue, she drew two one-hundred-dollar bills from the pocket of her blouse. 139

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‘Teacher,’ she said. ‘I need help.’ And after she explained, it made sense. He’d read of how the Burmese junta would suddenly declare certain denominations of kyat worthless, stripping families of their savings in an instant; he’d read, too, of the growing demand for black-market dollars, and of the junta’s rising prison terms for possession of foreign currency. ‘It is, end money,’ Daw Mai Mai said. ‘I hope, I go America soon!’ Jude knew it wasn’t likely and ached to offer her money of his own, but he knew also that his dollar-a-day budget could stretch no further, that to help her with his money now would mean later to help no one at all. ‘I hope so, too,’ he mumbled instead. ‘So, you can change, Teacher?’ ‘Sure,’ he said, taking the bills, relieved there was something he could do. ‘No problem.’ * * * They give him a plastic mat and plastic bucket and a tin cup of water and a bowl of pasty rice that he forces himself to eat, using his fingers as a scoop. After a while, the light bulb clicks off and Jude sits in the flimsy chair in darkness until his eyes adjust to the faint light of the single, barred window. When he goes to look through it, he sees only another concrete wall. He can’t believe the lies he’s told, the bribe he offered; he thinks of it as a hung-over man might reflect on his drunken misdeeds. How little it took for his deontology to fall away, he thinks, into this shoddy ends-justify-the-means. And the vomiting, and the tears he felt swelling in their ducts. So he’s human after all, he thinks, and then he thinks, wryly, of how relieved Robin would be to know, and then he thinks, but she knew all along, I was the one who didn’t, and before he can help himself he thinks again of her email the week before: I don’t know if you still check this, she’d written, but I still think about you a lot. And, further down: I miss you. I know you won’t, but I wish you’d come home. And the longing he’d felt when he returned, alone, to his unfurnished room, to his mattress and mosquito net and histories of Southeast Asia, and looked at his calendar and saw that ten months of his promised time yet remained. He thinks of escape, checks the bars in the window, and returns to his chair. He thinks of the Americans he knows – Aaron, the coordinator always 140

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out of town, Sam, the ex-cop who spends every night at the bar, Lee, the exdietician who smiles at her handsome Burmese boyfriend with every sentence she speaks – and he understands that he can get help from none of them. He thinks of his father and the way he lay in Jude’s bed and wept the night Jude’s mother died, Jude reaching his five-year-old arms around his father’s neck and then patting his balding head and whispering to him that it would be all right, and he wonders if his father will cry like this again when he hears the news. He wonders if Robin will think to go to him and he knows that she will. And he thinks of Daw Mai Mai’s doting care and how easily this decision could be taken out of his hands, of what she might do when she hears of his arrest, and the thought gives rise to a swift joy as he imagines his future restored and returning to it, blameless, through no action of his own. But Jude also remembers his father’s words that if a man can simply pretend to be a good man from when he rises in the morning until he retires at night, imagining all the things a good man might do and then doing these things, he will look back at the end of his life and discover that he has, in fact, been a good man, regardless of what was otherwise in his heart. He is the man on the other track, Jude thinks, and if he can remember that till morning, it’ll be done. But as he lies on his mat and shivers in the February chill, all he can think of is Robin’s quilt. * * * ‘All I need from you is address,’ Ting says to him in the morning, ‘and then you fly back to America.’ He’s brought porridge with squid for both of them, and Jude, rationalising his vegetarianism, ignores the lingering stink of his vomit and devours the bowl to the last grain of rice. ‘You are worrying for me, Jude,’ Ting says, his forehead creased. ‘You understand Thai prison is not safe for farang. The government works hard but still there is AIDS. Still there is …’ and he pantomimes the upward stabbing of a shiv, so suddenly that Jude flinches, but still says nothing. Ting looks at him for a long moment and then takes two objects from the bulging pockets of his shirt. One is a microcassette recorder; the other is Jude’s wallet. Ting places the recorder on the ground between them, but keeps the wallet in his hands and extracts a picture from it. 141

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‘This is your father?’ he asks, handing it to Jude, but Jude can already see the back: ‘Jude and Dad, Christmas 2006’. I am the man on the other track, Jude thinks, and does not look at the picture, but Jude only carries two pictures in his wallet and it’s easy to guess what’s coming next. ‘And, your girlfriend?’ Ting asks. ‘Robin with Duchess, October 2006’. He hands Jude the photograph and this time he can’t help but look: Robin curled on a cousin’s couch in plaid pyjamas, dangling her hair for the kitten like so much yarn. She’d made them banana pancakes that morning, he and her cousin and her cousin’s husband, and then walked him to the pond at the back of their property and sat for hours with him in the tall grass, taking turns kissing and scanning with the binoculars, their fingers knotted inseparably. He looks at the picture and can’t believe that once this happiness was his, can’t believe with how few words he could make it his again. ‘She is very beautiful,’ Ting says. ‘She is waiting for you?’ Jude can feel the tears coming to his eyes and he curses the exhaustion that has reduced him to this. ‘She is,’ he says. ‘The embassy officer will be here soon,’ Ting says. ‘We must record your story. You will cooperate?’ Jude nods and wipes his eyes and picks up the tape recorder, but still the tears are coming. ‘Turn it on,’ Ting says, and Jude does. ‘Now, you must tell the address.’ ‘The address was in Thai,’ Jude says. ‘I don’t know it.’ ‘This is okay, Jude. You can show later. But now, tell me,’ Ting asks, leaning forward and over-enunciating for the recorder, ‘who bought this counterfeit bill on the black market, and then wanted to change it for Thai baht?’ He flips his hand twice toward Jude, cuing him to speak. ‘I did,’ Jude mumbles, trying on the words. ‘Excuse me?’ ‘I did it,’ he says, louder now and into the tape recorder’s stub of a microphone. ‘There was no one else.’ ‘Jude …’ Ting begins. ‘Listen,’ Jude says, staring straight into the rage of Ting’s eyes. ‘It was me.’

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Liberation Road

Poem Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Do Not Go Into The Woods The gingerbread house lures us with walnuts, glacĂŠ cherries, icing but it is thatched with innocentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hair. There are dark pools, and bracken arching over lairs of trapdoor spiders. The witch slips a finger bone into her apron pocket before polishing a red apple. Children, a god is watching you from the saucer eyes of owls, and your small lives are nothing to him.

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Tung Chi College 1-1 (2009) by Gareth Brown. Gelatin silver print, 60cm x 90cm. Courtesy of the artist and Edge Gallery, Hong Kong.

Fatiha Tanaz Bhathena

lizard waited, high on the shadowed wall of the attic. Its prey, an ordinary brown moth, flapped its delicate wings lazily in the late afternoon sunlight. The housemaid lay on the bare tiled floor of the empty room and watched. She’d observed the lizard’s slow, steady ascent into the dark corner; it was now just inches from the moth. Mr Hamidi also waited, outside the door. He shuffled. He played with the lock and whistled. ‘Ya, girlie,’ he whispered into the keyhole. Her skin crawled. She tried to relax, to conserve what energy she had left. Hunger sapped strength the way a leech drained blood from a body, a lesson she had learned growing up in an orphanage in Jakarta, where mouths were many and the food scarce. Outside, the shamal began to blow, hot and whistling. The labour agent in Jakarta had not warned her about the sandstorms in Riyadh; he never mentioned how the sand rose, how it veiled sight and muffled sound, how it bit into uncovered skin. She wondered if the agent had simply been unaware, or if the old matron at the orphanage had asked him to keep this information hidden from her – just as Mr Hamidi had kept himself hidden when she arrived in Riyadh a month earlier, sending a driver in his place with a sign that read ‘July’, not ‘Julie’. Sand blew in through the window and she coughed. Her throat had grown hoarse from shouting for help, her hands sore from pulling at the 145

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iron grill bolted to the window. She’d realised after hours of futile effort that her voice, though surprisingly loud for a woman so small, was not strong enough to carry past the villa’s garden and the wall that surrounded it. And now, the coming storm would silence everything but the azan, the call to prayer carried on the wind from the local mosque. There was one way out. Mr Hamidi had explained it to her two days before, a few hours after his wife left with the children to visit their grandparents three hundred miles away in Dammam. Julie had been crouched on the kitchen floor, sweeping crumbs into a dustpan. ‘Ya, girlie. Come here and do your job,’ he said. He stood in front of her, his short, crab-like legs spread apart, and pushed down his pants. ‘It’s a sin,’ she replied, shaking her head. The muscles of her gut had tightened then lurched as he ground his boot into her belly. ‘Telling your kafil he’s a sinner, huh?’ he’d taunted from outside as he turned the key that confined her in the attic. ‘Let’s see how long you last without me.’ The smell of grilled chicken, sour pickles, garlic and warm bread slipped in from under the door. Mr Hamidi was eating a shawarma. Her stomach contracted. She blinked away the yellow spots from her eyes and focused on the wall. The lizard was visible, silhouetted in the fading sunlight. Its tongue struck like a whip. The moth did not struggle. The door creaked open and Mr Hamidi entered the attic, a white bundle in one hand. ‘Get up,’ he grunted. Hard fingers dug into her arm and yanked her to a sitting position against the wall. He pulled down her jaw and pushed the half-eaten shawarma into her mouth. ‘Eat.’ Her teeth sank through the bread and chicken. As her hands reached out to grab the pita he pulled it away and held it up, out of reach. ‘Do your job first.’ Her eyes cleared and she raised her gaze to his face. He leered, his lean cheeks unshaven. His cotton thob was bunched around his hips; he wore nothing beneath it. ‘You know the maid before you?’ he said. ‘Pretty little brown-eyed thing. The silly girl wanted to complain to my wife. Then she fell off the roof. Careless, wallahi, really careless. Her sister threatened to take me to court.’ He coiled her long black braid around a fist and drew her closer till her cheek brushed his thigh. ‘The poor demented woman. How could she 146

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take me to court,’ he demanded, thrusting his hips forward, ‘when it was an accident?’ * * * Accidents were a fact of life at the orphanage. Stubbed toes. Spilt milk. Dead mothers. Fatherless babies. The house that held them – thirty-eight children, the old matron and the cook – seemed an accident in itself: three tiers of cement and brick amid a cluster of corrugated metal shanties. There, Julie was a duck in a pond of frogs: the only girl in the kampong without an Indonesian name. ‘We had to dig you out of the rubbish bin outside,’ Cook said one afternoon, a few months after Julie turned thirteen. ‘A quiet bundle of rags covered by a newspaper. You didn’t even cry for heaven’s sake!’ Julie sat cross-legged on the cracked tiles of the floor, washing plates and glasses under a tap before leaning them against the wall, largest at the back, smallest at the front, the way Cook had taught her. As she worked, she listened to the sounds from the far side of the wall; the laughter of the younger children playing in the backyard, the calls of hawkers from the alleyway beyond. Heavy rain that morning had washed some of the filth from the drains and Julie knew the air would, for a short time, smell of damp earth and banana leaves. Cook slowly stirred a pot of soup on the stove, sunlight dulled by the grime that had accumulated on the window turning her white hair bronze. ‘I swear, Matron, she smelled worse than a broken drainpipe,’ said Cook, eyeing Julie. ‘I was sorely tempted to name her after one.’ The old matron grunted from her chair at the kitchen table. She, too, had white hair – a soft bun that rested on her head like spun sugar. But unlike Cook, whose skin showed no sign of ageing and stretched over her cheekbones like new leather over a bicycle saddle, the matron’s face resembled a prune drained of all sweetness. ‘An inconvenience, this business of names,’ the matron said. ‘How many questions I get from these little runts, “Matron, what is my mother’s name?” “Matron, what is my father’s name?” As if they’ll carry their names to the grave. Chheh!’ Saliva sprayed from her fleshy lips, covering the table in glistening spital. 147

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The matron watched Julie clean the table, her mouth flattened like satay on a stick. ‘Now, Matron, names are necessary,’ Cook said, ladling soup into a bowl, ‘if only to distinguish one durian from another. Sometimes a name can have a strong influence on a child. Look at that foolish little Sukarno: father’s a total drunkard, but that boy walks by the rubbish heaps every morning – chest out, belly in – acting as if he’s the president of the kampong.’ Julie wondered if little Sukarno’s swagger really did come from the name he’d been given; or from the booze his father kept in their shack at the other end of the village – booze the boy bragged of drinking whenever the old man’s back was turned. Cook glanced at Julie’s thin face, her fragile wrists and ankles. ‘I should have named this one after the British prime minister. What a strong name, Margaret! But so masculine-sounding for such a delicate girl.’ ‘Pish!’ the old matron said. ‘I never understood your fixation with these kafir names. And this one – she will always need taking care of, no matter how many names you give her.’ ‘It would have given her some courage at least, to look up to the woman she was named after.’ ‘Then she can think of herself as Julie Andrews, the one from The Sound of Music. Maybe she will escape when the Nazis invade Jakarta.’ Cook laughed and shredded boiled chicken to toss into the soup. Threads of white meat floated on a surface the colour of tea, among beads of oil and cassava leaves. Julie did not understand the joke but knew better than to ask for an explanation. Questions only made the matron smile and Julie had learned long ago that it was far safer to face the old woman’s contempt in silence. She watched her dip a spoon into the bowl and wondered if she saw how the soup resembled the sewage that flowed in the kampong’s open drains. Perhaps she no longer cared, knowing that, like an orphan girl’s curiosity about her parents, the food too would soon be gone. * * * Julie wiped her hands on her stained apron and stared at the cartons of ice cream in the freezer. Butterscotch. Chocolate. Strawberry. Mr Hamidi had 148

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bought them the night before from the hypermarket long after she had tucked his three children into bed, a kiss for each forehead. Two rooms away, the television blared. Mrs Hamidi and the children were watching an Arabic drama, the volume turned up full. Julie took out the ice cream and placed it on the counter. She peeled the lid of the butterscotch carton. If Mrs Hamidi caught her now she would go hungry, but after two years working at the villa Julie knew that was not likely on a Friday at this time – Mrs Hamidi would miss her prayers before she missed an episode of her drama. She dug in a spoon with all her might. After today, she would no longer have to worry about the Hamidis. Licking the spoon clean she cooled herself by the open fridge. A pile of unwashed dishes lay in the sink, along with Mr Hamidi’s emptied cup of morning kahwa. It was a week now since he had first complained of an upset stomach, and each morning Julie prepared a special coffee, brewed following an old recipe – a panacea for all ills. He would down the kahwa in a single gulp, seemingly oblivious to the tang of dirty mop water Julie mixed in. This morning he had not even grimaced and she knew this was because his mind was on the business conference in Taif. Before leaving for the airport he spoke urgently to Mrs Hamidi. Julie had no need of Arabic, she could sense the excitement in his voice. He would be gone for three days. The conference might mean a promotion, a bigger villa, even the opportunity to travel abroad. Julie’s own movements were restricted to brief trips to a local convenience store on the outer fringes of the mausoleum-like residential district where the Hamidis lived: row upon row of sand-coloured villas enclosed by iron gates and white concrete walls topped with gleaming shards of glass. Even on weekdays, the only sounds were the opening and closing of gates and garage doors, the low hum of expensive cars and the mewling of cats as they rummaged in the municipal rubbish bins. Some maids from the villas accompanied their kafils’ wives to shop in the souks and malls. ‘Not you though,’ Mr Hamidi had said, tracing Julie’s cheek with a finger. ‘It’ll only give you ideas of running away.’ Mr Hamidi had Julie’s passport and residence permit. When they were alone, he told her horror stories of maids who tried to leave and of the prisons where they now languished. She would be praying for death by the end of a week in prison. Then they would kill her – slowly, painfully. 149

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Though Julie no longer fought Mr Hamidi, still he shackled her wrists to the tall wooden bedposts with velvet handcuffs that left no bruises. Before he mounted her, he cupped her neck in both hands and squeezed, as if testing its resistance, stopping only when she began to suffocate. Julie knew how a body looked heaving with its last breaths. The young woman at the orphanage who’d bled to death giving birth to a child on the floor. Later the child too, its breathing staunched by Cook with a feather pillow. It was not the first time they’d seen the matron’s eyes light up as those of another dulled, but no one spoke of such things at the orphanage. On nights after Mr Hamidi left her room Julie would dream of the maid before her – the one who, the police said, ‘lost balance and fell’ while hanging wet clothes on a washing line ten feet from the edge of a roof terrace. In her nightmares, the maid had Julie’s pointed chin and rounded cheeks. As Mr Hamidi stroked her throat he said, in the matron’s voice, ‘Silence is golden.’ * * * The sound of the Tazaj Chicken jingle reminded Julie the television drama would soon be over. She tossed the butterscotch carton into a garbage bag, followed by the chocolate and strawberry, opened the back door and flung it into the dumpster. She took a mop from the kitchen, moved silently to the first floor, picked up the cordless phone and keyed in a number. One ring. Two rings. ‘Alloo?’ A low-pitched female voice, Anita, the neighbour’s maid. ‘Selamat pagi,’ Julie said, ‘It’s me. I must hurry.’ ‘Speak quickly then.’ ‘Meet me at the baqala.’ A pause. ‘Now?’ ‘Yes, now.’ Small feet hammered the polished hardwood floors of the living room. Julie pushed the mop around the already spotless floor. ‘Yallah!’ Mrs Hamidi called. ‘The children want ice cream. Wash your hands first.’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Julie, who went to the kitchen, opened and closed the freezer door, then returned to the living room. She waited for Mrs Hamidi 150

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to wipe her silver-framed bifocals. Brown pouches sagged under the woman’s eyes, and folds of skin bunched under her jaw as she looked down. Only five years older than Julie, she looked twice her age. Three pregnancies had turned a once slender woman into what her husband sometimes called a cow. ‘There is no ice cream, ma’am,’ Julie said. Mrs Hamidi’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean? Mr Hamidi bought some yesterday.’ ‘There is no ice cream in the freezer, ma’am,’ Julie repeated politely. ‘Mama, I want chocolate!’ the eldest boy shouted. ‘He forgot.’ Mrs Hamidi sighed irritably. ‘Go get some from the baqala.’ A hundred riyal note crackled as she pulled it from her wallet and handed it to Julie. ‘I know the exact change.’ * * * The baqala was quiet on Friday afternoons. Julie had met Anita there a year ago. She had worn a blue batik print scarf with a ‘Made in Indonesia’ tag, a grey abaya and black sunglasses. They had not spoken, but acknowledged each other with a nod. Sometimes their errands to the baqala overlapped. Once, Anita had let her dark glasses slip, revealing the left eye shaped like a leaf, the pupil a rich mahogany, and her right swollen to a squint, the flesh around it a dark bruise. Julie made no mention of the bruise but discreetly pushed her own white scarf behind her ear until Anita could see the bite marks. A week later Anita had pressed a slip of paper into Julie’s palm. ‘Call me … this number … any Friday,’ she’d whispered. ‘The marks on your neck,’ Anita said the first time Julie called. ‘Was it your sheikh?’ Julie said nothing. ‘I understand … If you ever plan to leave Riyadh you must call me. You know what I mean.’ Now Anita stood under the baqala’s striped green canopy as Julie approach with hurried, furtive steps. ‘So?’ she asked. ‘He’s out of Riyadh,’ Julie replied. ‘Not coming back for three days.’ Anita nodded as though she had been prepared for this all along. ‘How much time do you have before they start looking for you?’ 151

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‘Ten, fifteen minutes.’ ‘Then we must move fast.’ Anita stepped into the store for a word with the cashier. He eyed her the way the eldest Hamidi boy looked at a bowl of chocolate ice cream. ‘Quick,’ Anita told Julie. They went around to the delivery dock at the back of the baqala, from where they could see the main road, which was empty save for a few parked cars, two of them white-and-orange taxis. ‘Good,’ Anita said. ‘The cashier was right. Did you manage to get your residence permit – your iqama?’ ‘No. The bastard keeps it locked away.’ ‘What about money?’ ‘A hundred and fifty. The sheikh’s wife gave me a hundred for ice cream and the rest I took from his wallet last night. They owe me eight hundred – four months’ salary.’ ‘Shhh! Not so loud.’ Julie exhaled to calm herself. ‘What about the man you told me about … in Al-Batha … makes fake passports?’ ‘He was arrested last week. All I can do is get you a bus ticket to Jeddah under my name. On the bus, do not talk to anyone. If a local asks questions, just say “Mafi Arabi”. If they try talking to you in English pretend you don’t understand. The rest I will explain when we reach the bus station. Your ten minutes are almost up.’ * * * The taxi meter showed twenty riyals by the time they reached the Al-Batha bus terminal, a flat sandstone construction topped with a royal-blue glass dome. Wide coaches – white, orange and dark blue – stood to the left of the building, one after another, in diagonal parking spaces marked for destinations. Passengers weaved in and out of the terminal: brown-skinned Saudis in thobs, pale Lebanese businessmen in suits, red-eyed Sudanese labourers and dozens of veiled women in black. Julie waited while Anita paid the fare. ‘The taxi driver,’ Julie said as they headed towards the terminal’s glass doors. Anita glanced back at the taxi. The driver was watching them. 152

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‘He kept looking at us in the rear-view mirror.’ ‘This is Riyadh. He probably hasn’t seen a woman’s face in months.’ ‘No. He looked at us as if he knew we were doing something illegal.’ Anita clenched her jaw. ‘It might not be what you think.’ ‘I know, but … ’ ‘Stay calm. Please.’ Anita joined the queue at the women’s counter and Julie leaned against a wall, turning her head now and then to see whether the taxi driver had followed them into the terminal. She saw him at the window. He took a mobile phone from his pocket and punched in a few numbers, but before he could raise the phone to his ear a fat Yemeni with two large suitcases caught his attention and by the time Anita returned and pushed a ticket into Julie’s hands the taxi was gone. ‘The bus ride to Jeddah is twelve hours and it will be past midnight when you reach the station. Stay there … in the women’s prayer room or somewhere you won’t been seen … at six o’clock, take a taxi to Qala Academy, in the Aziziyah district. It’s a school for girls. Find the headmistress there; her name is Begum Hazrat. Tell her Anita, the housemaid from Riyadh, sent you. She will help.’ The ticket cost ninty riyals, which left Julie with sixty, not enough to go anywhere else if the begum turned her away. As she followed Anita towards the giant orange Mercedes bus, Julie felt the eyes of the men on board watching her. ‘Here.’ Anita pulled out an envelope from her purse. ‘My sheikh’s gift from last month’s Eid party.’ Inside were two purple banknotes. Five hundred. Five hundred. First Anita’s name, now Anita’s money? ‘Why?’ Julie asked. ‘Just go.’ * * * In Begum Hazrat’s office at Qala Academy a large window opened over the volleyball court below where uniformed girls whacked a white ball over the worn net, braids and ponytails flying, flushed faces shining in the sun. Whenever a team scored loud cheers floated up into the room. The begum, a tall, square-jawed woman with laughter lines at the corners of her eyes, paid no attention to the girls as she wrote herself a note in bold, neat letters. She 153

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wore a pressed blue salwar kameez and matching silk hijab and smelled of flowers. Julie faced the begum in a straight-backed chair, aware of her own sticky, dust-covered abaya and body odour. ‘Do you have an iqama?’ ‘No.’ Begum Hazrat muttered. Then she looked into Julie’s eyes. ‘You are very lucky that you are Anita’s sister.’ Julie stiffened, but did not correct her. ‘Anita saved my life once … three years ago,’ the begum said. ‘I was shopping at the ladies’ souk in Riyadh when I was overcome by severe chest pains and fell to the pavement. I heard screams and cries, but no one made a move to help, no one except this small Indonesian woman who kept patting my hand and saying, “I’m here, sister. I’m here.” Anita got her employer’s driver to help carry me to the car and drive me to hospital. A heart attack, the doctor said. ‘I needed an operation and afterward she came to visit me. We talked and she told me about her sister’s … that is, your … situation.’ The begum paused, giving Julie a look of appraisal. ‘Fortune is such a funny thing, isn’t it? You and your sister were practically neighbours … yet you were treated so differently.’ The begum paused to watch the laughing girls playing volleyball. ‘You know,’ she said after a few moments of silence, ‘Anita was very anxious for your safety. She told me your kafil had punched her in the face when she tried to visit you. “You must go to court,” I told her. “Your sister’s employer has no right to hit you.” She was afraid for you. But her own employer, a good man on most counts, said he would have to let her go if she went about poking her nose into the neighbours’ business.’ The begum’s face became serious. ‘Miss Julie. You have been very brave coming here. But I am going to ask you to be even braver.’ Julie swallowed, her eyes widened. ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘You must surrender yourself to the Indonesian consulate. Tell them what that awful man has done to you.’ ‘But … they’ll tell him … I’ll … go to jail. It will be his word against mine.’ 154

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Julie remembered how frightened she had been after reading a newspaper report about a Filipina nanny accused of witchcraft. She had complained to the Labour Bureau about being underpaid. But her employer said he had found ‘talismans with demoniac symbols’ in her room, the newspaper said. The sharia court accepted his ‘evidence’ and sentenced the nanny to seventyfive lashes, after which she was deported. The begum poured a glass of water for Julie. ‘You must trust me.’ * * * The begum and Julie followed the crowd through the heavy oak doors of the Indonesian consulate and into a large, air-conditioned foyer. The man at the inquiry desk wrote as the begum talked, and when the begum returned they went to a waiting room with metallic brown folding chairs where Julie lost track of time. ‘Assalamwalaikum, ladies,’ said the man who had spoken to the begum. ‘Mr Daud will now see you now.’ He escorted them down a wide corridor, passing consular officials in neat suits and peci hats and plastic name-tags who paid them no attention. The receptionist stopped in front of a polished brown door and knocked twice. The office was small and smelled of nasi goreng. There were no windows. Mr Daud had a pockmarked face and greasy black hair. He looked up from his papers. His desk was cluttered with thick leather-bound books and documents embossed with Indonesia’s grim gold garuda. ‘Please sit.’ He went back to reviewing his papers. Julie fought a wave of nausea – the room had an oily smell. ‘I have studied your complaint. Everything is here in these papers. However, I need to confirm a few things.’ He looked up at Julie, his gaze direct and probing. ‘When did you come to this country?’ ‘Fourteenth March, two years,’ Julie rasped. She fixed her eyes on the little red and white flag on Mr Daud’s desk. ‘A little more than two years.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you sure about the date?’ ‘Yes. It was my first time on a plane.’ 155

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He scribbled on a sheet of paper and took up another page, which he appeared to study carefully. ‘What was the nature of your work?’ ‘Housework … cooking, cleaning, washing clothes.’ ‘Did your work involve anything of a sexual nature?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you sure about this?’ ‘I am sure.’ Julie glared at him. Her cheeks burned. But if Mr Daud noticed her anger his face did not reveal it. He wrote on the piece of paper. ‘When was the first time your kafil asked you to have sex with him?’ ‘A month after I’d started working there.’ ‘Why didn’t you leave immediately?’ ‘I could not. I needed the money. I took loans in Jakarta to pay the agency fees and buy my air ticket to Riyadh.’ ‘I see … Did your employer compensate you with money when you obeyed his demands?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then why did you stay?’ ‘I had to … I did not have a choice. He took away my iqama and passport.’ Mr Daud put down his pen. ‘Are there any bruises on your body?’ he asked, drumming his fingers on the table. Julie decided she did not like Mr Daud. ‘No, but that’s only because I stopped fighting him … I was afraid! … I …’ ‘Look, Miss Julie,’ said Mr Daud. ‘You must understand my position. I see cases like yours every day. Without evidence, it is simply your word against your kafil’s. If you are saying that you have been sexually abused you will need a minimum of four male witnesses to vouch for that.’ ‘Mr Daud,’ Begum Hazrat cut in firmly, ‘there must be a way to punish this man. This young woman is clearly distraught and afraid.’ ‘I don’t want to go to court!’ Julie cried out and, trying to fight back her sobbing, said, ‘Just let me go home!’ Mr Daud proferred a box of tissues. She took a handful and wiped at her face. Then he showed her a slip of paper. ‘Is this your kafil’s phone number?’ he asked. ‘Yes, but … are you going to call him?’ 156

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‘Don’t look so frightened. You will not have to talk to him at any point. However, you will be able to listen to the conversation. I will put him on speaker.’ Mr Daud dialled the number quickly and they heard the phone at the other end ringing. ‘Hello?’ a man’s voice said. ‘Asalamwalaikum. This is Daud from the Indonesian consulate in Jeddah. May I speak to Abdulrehman Hamidi?’ ‘This is Hamidi.’ ‘Mr Hamidi, I am calling with regard to one of your employees – a housemaid named Miss Julie …’ ‘Jeddah?’ Mr Hamidi’s voice was loud and sounded close. ‘She’s in Jeddah? Send her back immediately!’ ‘I have spoken with Miss Julie. Give me a good reason why I should send her back,’ Daud said. Mr Hamidi breathed heavily, forcing himself to remain calm. ‘She is bound by contract,’ he said, ‘for five years.’ ‘Miss Julie claims you have not been paying her.’ ‘The bitch is lying. I have receipts to prove payment.’ ‘Receipts can be forged.’ Daud’s voice was calm, his eyes were cold. ‘It’s my word against hers. You should know better, habibi.’ ‘Perhaps. But what is this about a contract? Five years you say?’ ‘Five years.’ Mr Daud leaned forward – there was excitement in his face now, a gleam Julie hadn’t seen before. ‘You are sure about this?’ Mr Daud asked. ‘What is this nonsense? Of course I’m sure! What …’ ‘You see, habibi,’ Mr Daud cut in, ‘your contract may be for five years, but there is a law that overrides that.’ Mr Hamidi fell silent. His breathing grew more rapid. ‘The law mandates that all Indonesian housemaids in Saudi Arabia must return to their homeland every two years to renew their visas. Your maid may have a contract for five years, but she must renew her visa. It has expired.’ Mr Hamidi unravelled, his breathing more ragged now. ‘You are lying … I have her passport and papers! I …’ 157

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‘It does not matter what you have and what you don’t have. The fact is, Mr Hamidi, that Miss Julie came to Saudi Arabia two years ago. We have means of verifying this. Of course, if you insist on keeping her then I must report you to the Expatriate Administration for harbouring an illegal immigrant.’ Only Mr Hamidi’s breathing could be heard on the speaker, and then a click, followed by the dialling tone. ‘I do not think your sponsor wishes to continue your contract,’ Mr Daud said, a trace of a smile on his thin, hard lips. ‘Now just a few formalities remain …’ * * * ‘You have a very interesting name,’ said the factory manager. ‘Fatiha. Do you know what it means?’ ‘It means “inception”.’ She had chosen it for herself, from the first chapter of the Qur’an. The manager’s smile was friendly. ‘You can start tomorrow morning at eight-thirty.’ The journey to the factory from the Muslim women’s shelter in Jakarta – a new concrete-block building in the neighbourhood of her old kampong – took an hour by bus. She worked with sixty other women, sewing buttons on shirts and dresses with machines that pierced the fabric at breakneck speed. The work was tedious and intricate, straining her eyes and back. But she was paid every week. When she was not working, she prayed. There were many women like herself in the shelter, women who tossed and turned on their wooden cots at night, who spoke little of their pasts. Suicide was not uncommon. But rather than embrace death, she contemplated a life that had been given back to her. Once a week a few of the factory women took a bus to a beach where they talked, ate ice cream and watched children playing in the shallows. Fatiha watched the sun take into the sea some of the day’s sweltering heat and closed her eyes looking deep into herself, and said a prayer for a girl named Julie.

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Liberation Road

Poems Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

A Hindu Panegyrist Remembers Sultan Mahmud Ghazna, 1030

The wasting disease was bad enough, Then he started losing his mind. Visiting the treasury the week he died, His jewels on display, he broke down And wept like a child. New comers Won’t believe it, but Ghazna used to be A miserable little place, known only for The sweetness of its melons, before he Changed its face, gave it a skyline To rival Baghdad’s. He also changed our lives. Each year before the onset of winter He’d set off on his Indian campaign, And four months later, when he returned In the spring, the camel trains carrying The spoils of war took a day and a night To go past my door. We sang his praises, He didn’t stint on the reward; gold mostly, But sometimes a string of pearls Or a silk robe, like the one I’m wearing. 159

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Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll Ride Out Any Storm Five or so years ago, He set up a roadside stall, From where he sold towels, Bedlinen, cheap ready-mades, And Smiley wall hangings. Business mustâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been good, For he soon expanded it To include a Xerox facility, A phone booth, And a dealership in inverters. I got to like this man. From a passing cart Laden with disco papayas He once helped me pick A sweet one. The last time I saw him There was a summer Dust storm blowing, And while everyone else Ran for cover He was fast asleep On a pile Of machine-washable Export quality Scatter rugs.

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Poems by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Herodotus, My Mother, and Civets There are no gold-digging ants here, Or trees that bear wool instead of fruit, Or men whose ears reach to their feet. But I have seen my mother recently, Her remembering head thrown back, Having oil rubbed in her thinning white hair, And at night heard the civets, come out to forage. Woken up by a banging on the roof, I saw their silhouettes, as they stood On the storage tank, the moon behind them.

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On the Quiet Water Heavenly City/Untitled 5 (2008) by Yang Yongliang. Digital photograph, 76cm x128cm. Image courtesy of The Upper Station Photo Gallery and Hong Kong ArtWalk

Liberation Road

Pico Iyer and the Dalai Lama Ramona Koval

here are few individuals on the international stage more likely to rile China than Lhamo Thondup, better known as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan branch of Mahayana Buddhism and Tibet’s leader in exile since the 1959 uprising against China. His February meeting with US President Barak Obama at the White House predictably raised the hackles of China, with Beijing saying it ‘seriously harms US-China relations’. He understands political gesturing and pays it no heed. Many books have been written about the Dalai Lama, with and without his cooperation, the latest of which is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer, author of two novels, seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul, and numerous essays for the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New York Times, and Time. In this interview with ABC Radio National’s The Book Show, Iyer talks about his own quest as a writer for the contemplative life and his assessment of the Dalai Lama and light and dark sides of Tibetan Buddhism. Iyer: My father was a professional philosopher and interested in many religions, including Buddhism, and so as soon as the Dalai Lama came out of Tibet and arrived in India in 1959, we were living in England, I think my father was one of the relatively few people who realised that suddenly for the 163

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first time in history this amazing repository of centuries’ worth of wisdom and tradition, who had always been completely secluded from the world, was available to the larger world. So my father sailed all the way from England to India and requested an audience with the Dalai Lama in his first few months in India, and went up to visit him in the foothills of the Himalayas. They had a long conversation and my father, by good fortune, was deep in research on Gandhi at the time so I think the Dalai Lama felt that he had a lot to learn from my father, too, because he was newly interested in Gandhi and how to lead a non-violent resistance against an occupying power in Tibet. And at the end of the conversation, maybe I suppose like any proud father, my dad said, ‘Your Holiness, I’ve got this little kid back in Oxford, England, three years old, and he took an unusually keen interest in the story of your flight across the mountains from Tibet into India.’ And so the Dalai Lama, I think with his perfect gift for the perfect gesture, found a photograph of himself when he was only five years old but was already on the throne in Lhasa and sent it through my father to me. Of course I was a typical three-year-old, so I didn’t exactly really know who or what a Dalai Lama was, but I think I could instantly make contact with this picture of a little boy not much older than myself, in a difficult position, living in something of a foreign country. I can remember to this day that when I was growing up and I had that picture on my desk, every now and then I’d begin to feel sorry for myself, you know, here I am, Indian boy living in England by myself, life seems difficult, and then I look at this picture of a little boy, five years old, already ruling six million people, and I can’t feel sorry for myself again. So I made that contact with his image and the idea of him very young, and then I first met him a few years later when I was a teenager. Koval: Just remind us again of the position of the Dalai Lama. He’s supposedly the fourteenth reincarnation of …? Iyer: … of Avalokitesvara, who is the Tibetan god of compassion. But it’s interesting because, as you know, the Dalai Lama always makes a distinction between his position among the Tibetans, which is indeed their leader and the incarnation of their god, and his position among the rest of us where he always emphasises that he’s a fallible human. I remember once I was writing an article about him and I described him as a god-king, and the next time I saw him he was very impatient and he said, ‘No, I’m not a god at all, I’m just a regular human being, and to call me a god actually makes a mockery of the whole of Buddhism,’ which doesn’t necessarily believe in god. 164

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He does feel convinced that he’s the reincarnation of this particular spirit and in some ways it’s like inheriting a company or inheriting a job from your parents, and so the Dalai Lama institution for him, I think, is a set of duties and especially responsibilities and certain customs. And he accepts that for Tibetans he does carry this superhuman significance, and he stands for something much larger than himself. But he feels that it’s important for non-Buddhists, who don’t subscribe to that religion, just to see him as a regular scientist or philosopher, and in fact he even describes the Buddha as a scientist, which is, as you said, one reason why he often says that if new science shows the Buddhist teachings (let alone the Dalai Lama’s teachings) to be imperfect or inaccurate … for him I think science always trumps faith. Koval: He’s taken that back to the people who are responsible for the belief system, and changed a few things. Iyer: He’s actually surprisingly radical. So he will startle other senior Tibetan monks by saying that the next Dalai Lama may be a woman, there may be no next Dalai Lama, that really anything is possible once science has shown it to be so. For example, I remember he was once pointing out to me some old Tibetan scrolls that showed the sun and the moon as equidistant from the Earth. He said, ‘Well, we now know that that’s not true. So they may have a symbolic value for certain other Tibetans and I respect that, but for me I really have no interest in those scrolls because they’re presenting a very inaccurate representation of the world.’ And I think maybe that’s one reason why so many of us from afar see the Dalai Lama almost as this fairytale figure from this very faraway kingdom who’s in possession of all these magical powers. And while some of that may be true, I think the Dalai Lama I see is really a realist. You’ll notice if you listen to him that at every point he’s always stressing investigation and analysis and research, including as to his own status. But whatever is going on he wants to take the scientific approach, I think. Koval:You write about his most agonising and mounting conundrums, his decisiveness with respect to his opposition to Chinese oppression, his ideas about the religious principle of forbearance and looking for points in common. This puts him in a very difficult position when it comes to young Tibetans, for example. Iyer: It does, especially because, as he is the first to acknowledge, his policy of forbearance and non-violence has actually borne no apparent fruit in the last fifty years. He has always extended the hand of forgiveness and friendship to the Chinese and all that’s happened is that the Chinese government has come down harder and harder on the six million Tibetans in Tibet. And 165

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so in fact when I travelled around Japan with him last year, over and over he said, ‘Well, my policy has failed. Please other Tibetans come up with different solutions to this problem.’ And I think he understands more than anyone that younger Tibetans, who’ve never even seen Tibet in most cases, feel the same impatience that you or I would feel if we were told just to sit in our rooms while our country was being wiped off the map and our cousins were being imprisoned and our parents were being killed, and they would say, ‘How can we begin to follow the way of forbearance when soon there will be no Tibet to protect?’ And I think the Dalai Lama has a very far-sighted and in fact a very pragmatic vision of things, and he realises that ultimately Tibet will be okay, but in the short run it’s heart-rending for him to see and hear his people express that very understandable frustration: ‘How, how, how can you ask us to practise non-violence when we’re being stripped of everything that human life consists of?’ Koval: But you also write about this idea of Shangri-La and the fairy tale and the myth of Shangri-La and that Tibetans know how to play the fairy tale. Iyer: The Dalai Lama never plays that fairy tale and most of the more thoughtful and honest monks never would, but I spent a lot of time in Dharamsala in northern India where the Dalai Lama and his government in exile are centred, and it’s not so surprising that many of the Tibetans there have come over the mountains from Tibet, it’s difficult for them to find jobs in India, difficult for them to find lives anywhere and in some ways they’re severed from their homeland, and so the one thing that they have is this connection with the super-exotic place that the rest of the world has romanticised for so long, and the fact that many of them are nomads and come from a world that is hard for the rest of us to imagine. So when you walk around the streets of Dharamsala one of the main things you see are these very, very handsome Tibetan guys with hair down to their waists and turquoise earrings and beautiful smiles and very sad stories, hypnotising really the young ladies of the world from Australia and America and France, because they’re very hunky and also because they come from this very poignant situation. And so like most of us, those guys know what their assets are and one of their main assets is to come from this fairy-tale land. And so there’s an interesting kind of circle of dreams that you see in the Tibetan exile situation where most Tibetans are, of course, desperate to come to Sydney or New York or Paris, and many young people from Australia, America and France are desperate to partake of the mystery of the East, and so they circle around one another, each projecting his or her 166

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illusions a little bit upon the other. And then the Dalai Lama sits removed from all that, just working very hard to try to protect his people, and can’t really afford to be distracted by that dance taking place around his temple. Koval: You write of Dharamsala, ‘I could be walking through a Buddhist text on suffering and need and decay and illusion.’ What did you find there? Iyer: It’s a very poignant place because most of us from other countries race to Dharamsala because we think of it as little Lhasa, the closest we can get to this long-inaccessible kingdom of Tibet. But most of the Tibetans there are hoping that it will disappear. All they want to do is to go back to Tibet. So they’re there in a very reluctant and provisional and temporary fashion. What you see among the Tibetans, as among any refugee populations anywhere understandably, is restlessness, indirection, and they have the Dalai Lama to centre them and they cling to him, as to their culture itself. But apart from him, they don’t really know who or where they are, they’re caught up in that exile bind. So I feel there’s a lot of longing and there’s a lot of illusion and obviously there’s a lot of wistfulness and projection in this city, which has been so wonderfully created by the Dalai Lama as a kind of Buddhist city on a hill, about cutting away illusion and looking past projection and seeing reality for what it is. And I think that speaks just for my larger sense, which is that to me he is an impressive man who has done almost everything he can to bring clarity and realism to his life and to the world, but we are human beings and it’s the nature of humanity to traffic in illusions and to have romances and not always to want reality. I think TS Eliot said humankind cannot bear too much reality. And so I see in Dharamsala almost this tug and tension between a very rigorous and clear-sighted philosopher and the confusion of the rest of us, including, of course, me. Koval: Pico, let’s talk about the Dalai Lama and his family, which was another very interesting part of your book. His relationships between his older brothers and his sister … there seems to be some tensions in the family. Iyer: Yes, again it’s an interesting illustration that even this very exalted person, as I see him, is surrounded by the regular stuff of human existence. So his eldest brother, who actually passed away last September, who was himself an incarnate lama, in other words a very high monk within the Tibetan system, he always felt that Tibet should completely hold out for independence, shouldn’t make any agreement with China at all, shouldn’t begin to come up with compromise solutions the way the Dalai Lama has. So the Dalai Lama’s own eldest brother was one of the Dalai Lama’s critics in terms of his policy of forbearance. 167

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At the same time his second brother, who also of course is an elegant man who has seen a lot of the world, speaks fluent Chinese, was married to a Chinese woman, was largely based in Hong Kong and is one of his main unofficial emissaries to Beijing. So just within his two eldest brothers you’ve almost got the two extremes of the Tibetan situation; one person calling out for never even beginning to talk to China, the other holding out for a much more pragmatic response and saying we’ve got to find the common ground with China. And it’s just a small reminder of how almost unimaginably complicated the Dalai Lama’s life is. It’s a wonderful thing that I think if you were to ask most of your listeners what they associate with the Dalai Lama, probably the first thing they’d say is his infectious laugh and his smile and his air of optimism, which I think is at the very core of him. But that’s more impressive to me because when you look at him close up you see how at every level, from his family to his community to, of course, his relations with China, he has the most difficult life of anyone I can imagine, more difficult than the Pope or than that of President Obama, I think. Koval: You also remind us that if you dig a little deeper there’s a lot of group rivalry within the Buddhist groups, and quite a bloody history. Can you talk a little bit about that? The Shugden group rivalry, for example? Iyer: Yes, it’s a very bloody history because Tibet until recently was living really in something akin to medieval times and fraught with all the tensions and rivalries, both philosophical and geographical, that we might have found in medieval Europe. And I think that’s why the Dalai Lama is always one of the first people to say, ‘I don’t want to go back to the way Tibet was in 1950, there was much that was wrong with it,’ and I think … Koval: What was wrong with it? Iyer: It wasn’t a very democratic society and also the eastern Tibetans were resentful of central Tibetans, and there were four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism and they were all going off in opposite directions. So in terms of the Shugden group, they are one small group that actually about fifteen, twenty years ago came into direct conflict with the Dalai Lama because he felt that they were more or less turning this very rational scientific philosophy of Buddhism into folk worship and simply trying to placate this supernatural deity, which went against the central principles of Buddhism. And he also felt that they were speaking for a much more divided Buddhism. They were saying ‘our group is right and the other groups of Tibetan Buddhism are wrong’. So he asked his followers not to propitiate that deity and he said, ‘Those of you who do want to be part of that group, please don’t come to my 168

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teachings because it can damage psychically the people from other groups who are attending my teaching.’ And so they started picketing his teaching and calling him a tyrant for wanting to impose his vision of Buddhism upon all other Tibetans. And suddenly this conflict, which eighty years ago would have just been a remote thing that none of us would have heard about taking place in Lhasa, was of course playing out on a global stage and splashed across the newspapers of the world. And I think as soon as the Dalai Lama came into exile, he saw this as an opportunity for Tibetans to band together, as they didn’t in old Tibet, and to begin to dissolve some of their rivalries because they all now have a common purpose in trying to keep Tibet going in exile. So he’s worked hard to bring all the four schools of Buddhism together, but it is an uphill task and there are always going to be other groups who of course have their own agendas. Koval: You describe the daylight and the night-time side of Tibetan Buddhism. What goes on in the night-time side? Iyer: Well, it goes back to what you asked so well a few minutes ago about his position on reincarnation, which is to say that the Dalai Lama, when he speaks to you or me in Australia or the US will always emphasise reason, science, the ecumenical side of Buddhism, but of course there’s a whole other series of … set of rites and customs and even belief within the Buddhist community itself that are much more esoteric and mystical and that make no sense to us. Wherever he goes he travels with certain ceremonial objects that he downplays when he’s speaking to you or me, but that come from these mysterious rites that to us would seem to be the stuff of superstition, just like any religion, starting with Christianity. Christianity has the Sermon on the Mount and the gospels, which I think people from any tradition can respond to, but they also have Mass and the sacramental offerings that are very peculiar to Catholicism, which to an outsider they would think ‘Why are you drinking blood? Why are you taking that wafer to be the body of your saviour?’ And of course Tibetan Buddhism has its equivalents to that. Koval: And do you know what they are? Iyer: No, partly because I am not a Buddhist and not a Tibetan, but every now and then I get an intimation just of how little I know. I’ll even ask the Dalai Lama if what has happened to Tibet in its recent history is the result of karma (in other words, the law of cause and effect that is the central principle of Buddhism), and he’ll always say to me, ‘Well, it’s very mysterious’ or, ‘It’s very complex,’ which I think is his gracious way of saying, ‘It’s much too complicated for you as an outsider to understand, and 169

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to begin to understand it you’d really need to know the intimate mysteries of Buddhism.’ Koval: You say the Dalai Lama shields the wider world from esoteric Buddhism, the way one might keep a loaded gun in a locked cabinet so the kids don’t start to play with it and it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Iyer: Yes. For example, an important school within Buddhism is Tantra, which involves intoxication and sexual rites and all kinds of things that, taken out of context, are very, very inflammatory. If you are an extremely enlightened lama and you know how to use sexual intercourse as a means to enlightenment, then probably it makes absolute sense. But if it’s you or me who is dabbling in these practices that we don’t fully have an understanding or a context for, then it’s very likely to backfire. I think that’s one reason why the Dalai Lama, when he travels around the world actually as the world’s most visual Buddhist, tells foreigners not to take up Buddhism because I think he’s seen so much get lost in translation, and he knows that if you or I were to reach for Buddhism today we might be reaching for the exoticism of it or for everything that we don’t understand rather than for what we do understand, and in the process we might damage ourselves as well as damaging Buddhism. Koval: So he’s got two constituencies, he’s got his own people and the wider world. Iyer: Yes, exactly. Koval: And what about this idea about attachment and non-attachment, and being attached to Tibet? Iyer: Yes, and I think he is strikingly unattached to Tibet in the sense that he always says that Tibet has everything to gain from being part of China, he doesn’t want to be separate from China. And he always stresses, too, that the most important parts of Tibet are invisible, having to do with sets of values and certain cultural traditions and language, that can be carried out in other countries as much as in the geographical entity of Tibet itself. But again, his people are understandably attached to their country, and they’re like people who have suddenly been thrown out of their house and all they want to do is go back to their house. And he and other philosophical counsellors can tell them, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be attached to the house, the most important thing is your children or your community,’ but they’re regular human beings like the rest of us and do feel that attachment, even though the first law of Buddhism almost is that desire and longing bring suffering. So I think he’s like any religious leader really, trying to lay down 170

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reminders and principles, but aware that it’s always hard for all of us to listen to them. Koval: Pico, you say you’ve spent much of your adult life in monasteries, what attracts you to these places and have you ever been tempted to join one? Iyer: What attracts me might be all that boarding school training I had in England as an impressionable youth that formed or deformed me for life. I grew up as an only child, 6,000 miles away from the nearest relative, my parents were in California and my family was in India, so I’ve always had a very strong solitary tendency, which of course is ideal for a writer and a traveller. I have been tempted to spend time in monasteries. In fact, I’ve probably made every mistake that I was describing earlier, which is to say, I was working for Time magazine in New York City when I was in my twenties and I left all that in order to come to Kyoto, Japan, to live for a year in a Zen temple. My year in the Zen temple lasted all of a week because as soon as I arrived I found that it wasn’t just depthless contemplation of the moon and writing haiku and pondering impermanence, it was scrubbing and cleaning and cooking and scrubbing and cleaning some more. So I didn’t last very long. And yet a few years later I found a Benedictine monastery just up the road from my parents’ house in California, and now I do spend a lot of time there, without of course being a Benedictine. I think the reason I go to those places is that, especially as the world gets more and more accelerated and all of us know that we’re surrounded by beeping cell phones and twinkling laptops and more and more distraction devices, the greatest luxury of all for me us just stillness and silence. Koval: And what’s your next work on? Iyer: Well, it’s I suppose a bit of a sequel in that I’m writing a book on Graham Greene who has haunted and inspired me for many years. And I think, as you can tell from the way we’ve been talking, the thing that really impresses me about the Dalai Lama is that he’s never been a holy man up on the mountaintop, he’s always had to bring those high philosophical principles into the middle of the real world, realpolitik, as you said. And I think Graham Greene for me speaks for the same thing, which is how do you find any clarity or hope or faith in the middle of the confused, fallen world around us? So I see them very much in the same breath as people who have looked at the world very undilutedly and see it in all its confusion and silliness but also feel that there is a place for hope and a place for compassion in it. 171

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Koval: Graham Greene was a man who had religion close to his heart but was kind of flawed; he never quite made the heights that perhaps he aspired to. Iyer: ‘Close to his heart’ is a very good way of putting it. I think Catholicism was the mistress that he was constantly raging against but never fully embraced his entire life. Even at the end of his life he called himself a Catholic agnostic and said he wished he had faith but couldn’t get there.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview broadcast on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. The full transcript and audio of Koval’s interview with Iyer can be found at www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2010/2786351.htm.

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Mazakon Mitsuyo Kakuta Translated by Wayne P Lammers

ama’s boy. I can’t quite believe it. I’ve just been called a mama’s boy. So I respond, here in the soft orange light of the living room after one in the morning, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ My first meeting tomorrow is at 8.30, which means I have to leave the house by 7.30, so I need to be up at 6.30, and if I’m getting up at 6.30, it’s definitely time for me to be hitting the sack, but damned if I’m going to slink off to the bedroom without a word after being called a mama’s boy. ‘No, I’m not kidding. You are a mama’s boy – through and through,’ Sayuri declares from the sofa. It reminds me of a primary school classmate and the infantile lie he spouted about his family owning five cars and three television sets; that same haughty tone and nothing to back it up. ‘Through and through, my foot. In that case, I’d like to know what your definition of a “mama’s boy” is. If anything, you’re the one who’s got a mother complex. I don’t see how anyone can say that about me.’ ‘Pff, you want a definition. What a laugh. You’re so predictable,’ she says, sounding terribly amused, as she sorts one-by-one through the bottles of nail polish lined up on the end table. ‘Tell a guy he’s a mama’s boy, and you can count on him to get all hot and bothered. That’s proof right there. You’re a mama’s boy.’ ‘So that’s why I’m asking, tell me what I do that makes me a mama’s boy? I mean, it’s easy enough to …’ 173

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‘Look,’ she raises her voice to cut me off, ‘it’s the way you insist on spelling everything out like that. That’s what makes you a mama’s boy. Like just now, when we were talking about the coffee you forgot. Why do you have to go on and on explaining every little reason it slipped your mind? I’m not your mother, you know. What am I supposed to say? Oh, my poor baby, I guess you just couldn’t help it.’ Her shrill voice grates inside my head. ‘I can’t believe you’re still giving me a hard time about that. Is it really so unforgivable that I forgot to pick up some coffee?’ Even as I say it, I know how silly this is becoming. ‘You’re missing the point. It’s not about the coffee. You wanted to know why I said you’re a mama’s boy, so I’m just trying to explain. You get sidetracked so easily.’ Heaving an exaggerated sigh, she spreads her fingers and begins to paint her nails. Her thumbnail turns a glistening purple. I’m ready to explode, but I know I can’t win, no matter what I say, so I head for the bedroom, slamming the door behind me. What a mistake! I say to myself. This whole marriage was one big mistake. I crawl into bed and pull the covers up over my head. It’s scary how that woman can hold onto a grudge. I forgot to pick up the coffee beans she asked me to get, that’s all – well, okay, for two days in a row – but just for that, she bitches at me for hours, refusing to let it go, and she’ll probably bring it up again a year from now and bitch at me some more. You just can’t have a rational discussion with her because she gets hysterical and raises her voice all the time. Even when she doesn’t, it’s impossible to talk to her – she’s utterly incapable of thinking logically. When we were dating, I thought she was a grown-up. How stupid can you get? I let her age fool me. I just assumed she was mature because she was six years older. It never occurred to me that her mental age might not match her real age. She’s almost thirty-eight now, but she’s still got the mind of a ten year old. I mean, damn, it’s only coffee. If you’re out of beans, you make do with instant. You don’t start disparaging people and calling them mama’s boys. But you know what? It occurs to me now that derision is the only thing Sayuri can do, the only mode of communication she has. She’s never learned to relate to people any other way than with vitriol. My eyes open wide under 174

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the covers. That’s very good. Lay that on her as she sits there smugly painting her nails and it’s definitely going to hit her where it hurts. I just realised, all you know is hatefulness, you poor thing. Maybe I’ll get out of bed and go say that to her right this minute. No, I’ll stay put. Not because I’m afraid she might have a comeback: I’ll hold onto this card for another time. If she starts in on me again with one of her infantile grievances, I’ll play it on her then, and give her an oh-so-pitying smile. When I came to bed I was sure I’d be lying awake until three, but now that I have this ace up my sleeve it sets my mind at ease, and I quickly drift off to sleep. * * * After making the rounds of several stores in Kozukue I head for my usual lunch spot, but the place is unusually busy and all the tables are taken. Driving on a little, I turn left at the Kishine intersection and pull into the first family restaurant I see. There are just a handful of customers and I’m shown to a booth by the window. After ordering the lunch special, I check my phone and find a message from Sayuri telling me she’ll be having dinner with her mother tonight so not to expect her until late. I toss the phone on the bench beside me and wipe my face with the lukewarm towelette the waitress brought. Sayuri sees her mother two or three times a week: stopping by on the way home from work, going shopping on the weekend, taking in a show together. The woman is over sixty but looks young enough to make you wonder, and seeing her walking with Sayuri from behind you’d swear they must be sisters. Their voices sound almost identical and they share the same habits of speech, too. Isn’t thaaat the truth. Hunnnh, are you serious? Doesn’t that just make you sick? Well, you kno-oww … It’s always bugged me how Sayuri puts doing things with her mother ahead of spending time with me, and back when we first got married I tried to talk to her about it. Didn’t she think she was being overly dependent on her mother? Now that she was married, wasn’t it time she and her mother let go of one another? Not to mention that maybe a woman who’s over thirty should stop calling her mother ‘mama’, except in the privacy of her own home. It didn’t turn out to be much of a discussion. She flew off the handle and started blathering all sorts of stuff that didn’t make any sense, 175

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but to fill in the blanks as best I can, it came down to something like this: About the time she hit puberty she began hating her mother, but this hatred actually arose out of her dependency, and it was precisely because she wasn’t dependent on her mother any more that she could see her as an individual without all that baggage, and that was what finally made it possible for them to grow close. It was nobody else’s business what she chose to call her own mother. Faced with her shrill rantings, I pretended to be swayed. I actually thought there was a good deal more to be said. I mean, close is fine, but can’t there sometimes be too much of a good thing? Don’t you have to say something’s a little out of whack when you’re dining out with your mother more often than with your husband? But she topped off her screaming by bursting into tears, and any further discussion was impossible. Since then, I’ve said no more about it. The waitress brings my meal. It’s an assortment of fried seafood with egg drop soup, a green salad and rice. I gaze absently out the window as I sip the watery broth and chew on the dried-out salad. A bullet train slides by beneath a flawless blue sky. Since moving to Tokyo I rarely talk to my mother back in Yamanashi, and I seldom visit, even at Bon or New Year. I’ve never felt the need to consult her about anything I do, and she’s never offered her advice. Her announcement two years ago that she planned to remarry was certainly a surprise – but it wasn’t something I had any particular feelings about. As her eldest, it did set my mind at ease, but that was about it. All I could say about the groom-to-be was that he seemed like a nice enough man. I’ve come to think that I don’t know my mother at all. She’s the woman who carried me, gave birth to me, and raised me to adulthood, and yet, even though we lived under the same roof for eighteen years, I sometimes think I know more about complete strangers. I finish my flavourless meal down to the last grain of rice, light a cigarette, and gaze out the window over a cup of weak coffee. The trees lining the street have turned yellow, their leaves scattering the bright sunlight. Another bullet train passes by and I imagine jumping into my work van and tearing off in pursuit. A feeling of weightlessness comes over me, and then the number thirty-two pops into my head. Thirty-two years. That’s how long I have left on the mortgage for our condominium. Which 176

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means I’ll be making payments to the bank for the same number of years as I’ve been alive. But what that will gain me grows harder to see with each passing day. * * * The head of sales is a woman called Aiko Oyamada. She and Sayuri are the same age, though Sayuri looks far younger and has a prettier face, not to mention a more sophisticated air – all of which makes me feel a little superior. But in other ways, the two are very much alike. For one thing, they’re both extremely long-winded. If they wanted to say A, they could just say A and be done with it, but instead they have to start in at F, and tediously make their way through E, D, and C, and then, just when they get to B and you’re bracing yourself for the point, they’ll suddenly go off on a tangent to M. I’ve been standing in front of Aiko Oyamada’s desk for thirty-five minutes when she finally gets to what she wants to say. ‘So how exactly do you wind up coming back here with every last bit of product you took out with you still in the van? Would you care to explain that to me, my dear Mr Kubota?’ She is leaning back in her chair, smiling. Why couldn’t she simply have asked that to begin with, instead of going on and on about the ramen shop in front of the station that went out of business, and the bicycle shop where all the bikes are cheap? I just don’t get it. Grateful that we have finally come to the point, I open my mouth. ‘Nitta Office Supply in Kozukue said they’d just laid in stock from another supplier and want to hold off until after that has sold. It’s a space issue. In Hakuraku, both Angel and Muranaka said they want to wait until next month to see how things are shaping up. And the Tanakas in Kikuna say they’re in discussions to convert to a hundred-yen shop at the beginning of the year … except that the mother-in-law is apparently opposed to the idea.’ Aiko Oyamada looks me straight in the eye. ‘Are you a total idiot?’ In the office kitchen I throw water on my face at the sink. I twist the tap off and reach for my handkerchief, but my pocket is empty. Clicking my tongue, I dry my face with a paper towel – I hate the way the wet paper clings to my fingers. Come to think of it, Sayuri used to call me ‘my dear Mr Kubota’ too, back when we first met. 177

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Just six more months. Then I’ll finally be liberated from sales, and from Aiko Oyamada. I joined Nozaki Office Products straight out of college and three years ago was transferred to the product development department where I worked mainly as a product manager. Then for no good reason I could see, some of us were placed with other firms in the name of in-service training and I ended up assigned to the sales department at Daiwa, a wholesaler that distributes for Nozaki. With a large bar graph on the wall tracking every sales rep’s performance it’s like I’ve time-warped to another era. The transfer is supposed to be for one year and every time I look at that ridiculous graph I reckon how much time I have left, like a prisoner counting the days to his release – nine months to go, six months to go … ‘Poor Kubota.’ I turn to find Tezuka standing behind me. She is two years younger than I am and dyes her hair a light chestnut colour. She’s the one person in this place I feel I can talk to openly. ‘You get transferred here out of the blue, and right off the bat she makes you go out on sales calls all by yourself, without any training, and the thanks you get is, ‘Are you a total idiot?’ Is she serious? That woman seems to have a chip on her shoulder about the whole world, you know, and you just happen to be an easy target for her to take a dump.’ ‘Take a dump?’ ‘Oh, oops, no, I mean “to dump on”.’ I chuckle at her slip of the tongue and she laughs, too, as she pours coffee into a disposable cup and hands it to me before filling another for herself. As I watch her, I ask something that pops into my head. ‘Does it seem to you like women born in the sixties have a lot in common?’ ‘Huh? What do you mean?’ She leans against the sink and takes a sip of her coffee. ‘I’m not sure how to put it, but it’s like they’re just monumentally bad at expressing themselves. They don’t see discussion as a way to make things happen. They just lash out emotionally.’ It’s not as if I’ve given this any deep thought. Being born in the sixties happens to be the first thing I hit on that Sayuri and my boss have in common. I was just looking for a way to put them both down at the same 178

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time. But she responds, ‘Oh, definitely, I know just what you mean. They’re, like, on edge all the time,’ and it thrills me to have struck a chord. ‘Exactly. They’re on edge for no reason at all,’ I say. ‘And I reckon it’s because they’re just not very good with words. You know how you see some girl talking a tongue-tied guy into a corner and he can’t hold his own so he just throws up his hands? They’re like that.’ We stand there in the windowless kitchen near the end of the hall and chat on in much the same vein until both of our cups are empty. All the while, I’m wondering in the back of my mind what life would be like if I’d fallen in love with someone like this younger, chestnut-haired girl who talks to me so free and easy. It seems a good bet I’d be looking at something a whole lot less stressful than the life I have. ‘Can I ask you something?’ I say as she tosses her coffee cup into the wastebasket and starts for the door. ‘Do I strike you as a mama’s boy?’ She turns around, stares at me for a moment, then doubles over with laughter. Before I know it, I say, ‘If you’re free tonight, would you maybe like to go out for a drink? My treat.’ * * * The first time I realised I didn’t really know my mother at all was three years ago, when my father lay dying in hospital. He had been diagnosed with cancer and the doctors gave him three months to live, which turned out to be an accurate prognosis. I travelled back to Yamanashi every weekend to be with him, joining my mother at his bedside. It was near the end and he was on morphine, so it’s hard to know just how aware he was when he stretched an arm covered with puffy, purple IV tracks out from under the blankets towards my mother. Instead of taking his hand tenderly in her own as I expected, she pushed it away, not forcefully but reflexively, as if she was waving off a fly. I couldn’t hide my surprise, and when she saw that I’d seen, she looked away awkwardly, fixing her gaze out the window. The mother I remembered was a quiet, unassuming woman. She had always been a stay-at-home wife and mother, and she knew next to nothing about the outside world. Nearly every day at the breakfast table she would 179

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ask my father, my little brother and me what we wanted for dinner that night. When we were small, my brother and I vied with each other to call out ‘hamburger steaks!’ or ‘pork cutlets!’ Later, though, we got so we ignored her daily query. Our father had his nose in a newspaper and never once bothered to answer. Still, my mother always asked: What would you like for dinner tonight?, and when she received no reply she would carry on a private conversation with herself in a sing-song voice. It must be about time for saury to come on the market, but we just had fish yesterday, so maybe sukiyaki would be a better choice today. Yes, I think sukiyaki. That sounds good. And then, sure enough, the table would be set for sukiyaki that evening. That was my mother: a woman who spent her days thinking about dinner – who never had anything she needed to think about but what to make for dinner. By the time I was in high school, I found her totally depressing. And infuriating. The world kept moving along at a dizzying pace, yet she sat apart, all by herself, forever debating, ‘Fish or meat?’ I felt sorry for her. Embarrassed. After I left home my feelings towards my mother gradually changed. I graduated college, found a job and fell in love, and came to think of her daily query about dinner as the very essence of peace and security. I came to think it was precisely because my mother was the kind of woman she was that, no matter how badly the world treated me or my father or my brother, we could always return home to rest and recharge and go back out the next day to face the world again. So the woman who brushed my father’s hand away that day was not the mother I knew – not the same person who would ask each day with a smile, What would you like for dinner tonight? When my father died, my mother did not weep. Relatives who came praised her for it – she was so brave, so strong. But the moment they had me and my brother to themselves, they’d say, ‘She’s keyed up right now because of the funeral, but once it’s all over the strength is going to drain right out of her. It’s the ones who act the bravest who get hit the hardest, so you boys need to keep an eye out for her, you hear?’ We nodded like little children and later exchanged a few words about needing to be there for her, but less than four months later she called to say that she was remarrying and wanted the two of us to come to Yamanashi to meet her fiancé over dinner. The man was two years younger than her and ran an accounting office. He was more talkative than our father had 180

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ever been, with a more jovial air, and like a teacher who is popular with his students he engaged us easily in conversation, listening to what we had to say as if he was genuinely interested. Our mother said very little. She just sat there wearing one of those smiles you see on members of the imperial family. At the end of the meal she announced softly that they intended to register the marriage once the first anniversary observances for my father were done. It was clear that she was not consulting us, merely informing us, so all we could do was nod. On the train back to Tokyo, my brother said, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way this is just some recent fling.’ I had pretty much come to the same conclusion, but when I ran my mind back over the years, all those mornings of being asked what we wanted for dinner without the slightest hint of anything amiss, I could find no clue as to when she might have met this man or fallen in love or promised herself to him, and I realised again that I didn’t really know my mother. They made it official as soon as the first anniversary of my father’s death had passed, and shortly afterwards I decided to marry Sayuri. We made a trip to Yamanashi to give my mother the news. The four of us dined together at the restaurant where I’d first met my stepfather and he was as jovial as before, his animation matched only by Sayuri’s as the conversation turned to my screwups and other amusing childhood stories. My mother maintained that same imperial smile. We appeared for all the world the picture of a happy family. On our way back, Sayuri gushed that my mother was the ideal mother. ‘She’s so kind, and considerate, and most of all, it’s wonderful that she’s independent. I feel so lucky.’ I was too happy seeing her in such high spirits to say anything, but my own thoughts were of how strange my mother was: The mother who hadn’t invited us to the home she had made with her new husband. The mother who’d asked nothing of our wedding plans. The mother who’d pushed aside her dying husband’s hand. The woman who’d become a mystery to me. Where was the mother who’d never failed to ask what we wanted for dinner? * * * Wearing only her panties, Tezuka jumps off the bed and opens the fridge. ‘You know what I think?’ she says. ‘I think it’s because your wife is jealous of your mother.’ 181

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The yellow glow from the refrigerator lights up her pretty legs. ‘I doubt that,’ I say, sitting up on the bed. ‘Besides, isn’t it usually the other way around? In the stories I’ve heard, it’s the mother that’s jealous of the daughter-in-law.’ I peel bits of Kleenex off myself before she notices. Tezuka grabs a beer and takes a long drink. My buzz has completely worn off. ‘Me, too,’ I say, and she tosses one over. I pull the top and foam spews out onto the sheet. ‘Yeah, but she called your mom the ideal mother, right? She’s afraid of being compared with her. That’s why she accuses you of being a mama’s boy.’ Tezuka takes a final swig, then crushes the empty can in one hand and tosses it into the wastebasket. She picks up her bra from the floor and turns her back as she puts it on. I had taken her to a yakitori restaurant and the next I knew I was telling her things about my mother I’d never even told Sayuri. She didn’t interrupt or ask questions, offering only well-timed uh-huhs and wows and I sees. I ended up telling her pretty much everything. ‘Women really are scary, aren’t they?’ she said when I finished. I was a little taken aback to have it all distilled down to such a hackneyed phrase, but it seemed like too much hassle to say that wasn’t what I meant and go back over the whole thing again, so I just nodded, ‘No kidding.’ When she’s done dressing she turns back to me, cross-legged on the bed, sipping my beer. ‘The last train leaves pretty soon, so I need to get going … what do you want to do?’ she asks. ‘If you want to go with me, you need to hurry. Otherwise, I’ll just head on out by myself.’ ‘I’ll finish this first,’ I say, raising the can in my hand. ‘Okay. I’m off then. Bye,’ she says airily, as if she’s merely knocking off work ahead of me, and hurries out the door. This is the first time since being married that I’ve been with another woman. I’m relieved she never asked if I love her – not even in the heat of passion. And that afterwards there was no, Where do we go from here? I take a shower and dress, thinking how much I like her, trying to imagine what it would have been like if I’d known her before I met Sayuri. One thing’s for sure: Tezuka would never call me a mama’s boy. * * * 182

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It’s one tiny indiscretion but the secret soon gets out. Despite giving no sign of expectations when she left that night and acting the same as ever at work, Tezuka starts sending text messages. ‘When can I see you again?’ is her stock question, and when I reply, ‘Not today,’ she comes back with, ‘How about Monday?’ or, ‘How about next Friday?’ It’s not long before Sayuri discovers these messages and confronts me with my mobile phone when I come out of the bath, her eyes flashing. ‘What’s this all about?’ she demands as I stand there in my boxers, my hair still wet. ‘Who is this woman? Where do you know her from? What’s her name? How old is she?’ ‘Well, her name is Tezuka, and she works with me at Daiwa, and she’s thirty,’ I say, responding to each of her questions. ‘That’s not what I’m asking!’ she screams, totally contradicting herself. ‘Nothing’s going on, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ I say. ‘She was having man trouble and wanted my advice, so I lent an ear, but now she says she needs to talk more and keeps sending me messages. But, sheesh, who wants to listen over and over to someone else’s relationship problems?’ ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she shrieks. ‘Do you actually believe I don’t know what’s going on? I’m not stupid!’ She pulls herself up to her full height as she rages, her shoulders heaving, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘This is unforgivable. You’ll be sorry. I’ll leave. That’s right, I’ll leave you. I’m out of here tomorrow!’ She spits it out at the top of her lungs and stomps off to the bedroom. I hurry after her as she starts pulling clothes from the closet and throwing them on the bed. This is not good, I have to convince her that it’s not what she thinks. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ I say. ‘Please! Try to calm down and listen to me.’ I hear my own voice quivering, on the verge of tears. It’s true I thought this marriage was a mistake, but I can’t let this happen. I can’t let a simple misunderstanding tear us apart. It really is just a misunderstanding, and after I get that through to her, if she still wants to leave, there’s nothing I can do, but it wouldn’t be right for her to go for no good reason, without ever hearing my side. So as Sayuri furiously drags more clothes from the closet I try to explain that I have no feelings for Tezuka, and that she has none for me. We went drinking one lousy time, and even then only because Sayuri was having dinner with her mother and I knew I had to eat out somewhere anyway, plus 183

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it was right after she’d called me a mama’s boy so I was sort of pissed about that, and I had all this stuff to get off my chest from the new work they have me doing that isn’t going well, so since Tezuka had been saying for a while that she wanted my advice … I admit I got a little carried away and drank more than I should have, but I absolutely did not sleep with her. Standing there in the bedroom in nothing but my shorts I explain all this and more as calmly as I can, with every bit of sincerity I have, as accurately and as close to the right order as possible, but as I fill out the details, lies begin to creep in among the truths – lies like the exact nature of the fictitious man-trouble Tezuka wanted to talk to me about. As I continue pleading my case with Sayuri, I hear in my head a smaller voice overlapping my own. So you see, then my friend had to go pee-pee, you see. So we went to the park, you see. But the bathroom there was closed and we couldn’t get in, you see … The man in boxers becomes a little boy in shorts, and the woman piling outfits on the bed in a frenzy is my aproned mother. The hardwood floorboards of the bedroom become the linoleum tiles of the kitchen of my childhood. Oh, right, I think somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I’ve been through this drill before: when I broke a neighbour’s window, and when I stole a Coke from the back door of the liquor store; when I injured a friend, and when I used the money for my entrance exam prep classes to buy a game. My mother never scolded me. Just tell me why on earth you’d do a thing like that, she’d say. So I told her. I tried to explain exactly what had happened, without omitting a single detail – because if I told her everything, she would forgive me – but as I proceeded through my account, lies crept in; lies that were intended to win her forgiveness. I knew perfectly well which parts were true and which parts were lies. Young as I was, I knew what a miserable coward I was being. To ease the guilt I embellished my lies further, with ever greater detail, and eventually they stopped seeming like lies – they became exactly what had happened, and my sense of being a miserable coward faded. When I was finished, my mother simply nodded. That was all. She did not get angry with me. I knew I was forgiven. So this is what Sayuri was talking about. I’m in the midst of recounting Tezuka’s romantic woes in minute detail when it hits me. Mama’s boy. This is what she meant. Now I see. I get it, Sayuri, but you’re still wrong. And I’ll tell you why you’re wrong … 184

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The words I’m speaking and the explanation I’m formulating in my head start to run together, so I stop talking. I didn’t realise how quiet this room is, I think to myself in the silence. I never knew my mother. Did my mother ever know me? By making me explain myself, by making me give her this mishmash of truth and fiction, did she really think she could get to know who I was? Does she know who I am now? Suddenly, I feel the urge of a small child to confess everything to his mother. I want to call her up and tell her how I met Sayuri, and why I asked her to marry me, and what kind of work I did at Nozaki Office Products, and what kind of work I do on loan to Daiwa, and how much grief I get every day from Aiko Oyamada, and what makes me think this marriage was a mistake, and why I slept with Tezuka. I feel an urge to let it all come pouring out – every last thing that makes up my daily existence, every last thing that goes through my head – with my eyes lowered to her slippers on the linoleum floor. Leaping onto the bed I grab an armful of the clothes Sayuri has been heaping there and start shoving them back into the closet. I ignore the hangers that fail to catch on the bar and fall to the floor, picking up one armful after another from the bed to put back where they belong. As long as I live, I will never really know my mother. Inside my head she will always be asking, What would you like for dinner tonight? I cram Sayuri’s clothes back into the closet and push the doors shut, corners of plastic dry-cleaning bags and hems of skirts poking out. My shoulders are heaving as I turn to her, and she stands staring at me with an expressionless face. I remember that I have an ace in the hole. A card I can play that will hit her where it hurts. Now is the time. I open my mouth. ‘I am so sorry.’ Those are the words that spill from my lips. Talk about pathetic. It’s embarrassing. But it’s all that I can think to say. She stares at me in silence, offering no response. Dust dances in the air all around as we hold each other’s gaze, like two siblings anxious for their mother to return. ‘Why don’t you at least put on some clothes,’ Sayuri says, finally breaking the silence, and I realise how cold I am. I hear my own voice ringing out from somewhere far away. What shall we have for dinner tomorrow?

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Pose (2009) by Yamaguchi Soichi. Acrylic on canvas, 145cm x 145cm. Courtesy of Madhouse Contemporary and Hong Kong ArtWalk.

Liberation Road

Poems Tishani Doshi

After the Rains After the rains the temple flowers lie like fallen soldiers – dirtied and bloodied pink. I want to get down on bended knee, gather each broken petal to my chest. Out there – where the river meets the ocean’s mouth, it would be called the kiss of life, a resuscitation. But here, with the world washed clean, it is nothing but a trampling.

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Lost These walls are from yesterday. Today, rain falls like history, and trees speak of distant woes. My father stands on a cliff contemplating childhood. By afternoon, the world has changed, become smaller, desolate. All this is nothing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these red leaves on Autumn walks, these planets hurtling from long ago. Later, we may dream of fires and singing. The house will open her doors for the dark, salty territory of night to enter on wet footstep, falcon wing. My father comes in to turn off the lights. Together, he says, we must call in the lost, breathe shape into all that is vanishing.

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Poems by Tishani Doshi

The River of Girls i.m. Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 10 million missing girls This is not really myth or secret. This murmur in the mouth of the mountain where the sound of rain is born. This surging past pilgrim town and village well. This coin-thin vagina and acid stain of bone. This doctor with his rusty tools, this street cleaner, this mother laying down the bloody offerings of birth. This is not the cry of a beginning, or a river buried in the bowels of the earth. This is the sound of ten million girls singing of a time in the universe when they were born with tigers breathing between their thighs, when they set out for battle with all three eyes on fire, their golden breasts held high like weapons to the sky.

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Love Poem Ultimately, we will lose each other to something. I would hope for grand circumstance – death or disaster. But it might not be that way at all. It might be that you walk out one morning after making love to buy cigarettes, and never return, or I fall in love with another man. It might be a slow drift into indifference. Either way, we’ll have to learn to bear the weight of the eventuality that we will lose each other to something. So why not begin now, while your head rests like a perfect moon in my lap, and the dogs on the beach are howling? Why not reach for the seam in this South Indian night and tear it, just a little, so the falling can begin? Because later, when we cross each other on the streets, and are forced to look away, when we’ve thrown the disregarded pieces of our togetherness into bedroom drawers and the smell of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet decay of lilies – what will we call it, when it’s no longer love?

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Seasons By October the reach of sky is complete. Everything longs for escape – the snow geese weaving their way south, the pigs in the yard, the leaves. We are walking that line between the trees, shameful in their half-foliage, replete with desire. Somewhere across the valley there must be another life – a woman drawing her children a bath, a husband returned to this picture of wife. If we believed in seasons how easily we could hold to this: this falling away and returning. But we, who live with only the heat and rain, with perpetual dying – we, who are impervious to birdsong, we must imagine the sound of love as something of a deafness – a single vowel of longing scratched across the sky.

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Michael Mangal’s Dream The nights grow long in Pillowpanja with all the people gone, thinks Michael Mangal, lying insect-style on his back where his house once used to be. The stars seem closer too – bare-boned, full of promises, in this month-old lacerated sky abandoned by the Gods. He could lie like this – waiting for the winds to change, for a spirit’s gentle finger to turn him over. Or he could dream of pigs in pandanus from Christmas lunch, or the woman from next-door whom he never told he loved, to reappear from the Kingdom of the Sea and save him. * * * At daybreak he will scour the beach, sift through broken bamboo stilts

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and ravaged roofs, a million orphaned carcasses. He will lean against the ocean floor, and imagine the woman from next door is offering up her watery chest so he can listen for the sounds of all the friends he’s feasted with, built precarious houses with. And later, when they finally speak of love, she can drag him with her spirit hands to that underworld of longing and deliverance where the season of the rains begin – where children saved inside their fathers’ thighs, with gleaming backs and startled eyes, learn to walk the sands again.

Michael Mangal was the lone survivor of the island of Pillowpanja of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. He was rescued by the Indian Navy almost a month after the waves hit. 193

Nevermind Nirvana (detail) (2009) by Chun Kai Qun. Mixed media diorama installation, size variable. Exhibited in ‘ENIMINIMINIMOS: Artists who make things small II’ at Esplanade Jendela (Visual Arts Space), Singapore, 2009–2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Evening Meal Nguyen Qui Duc

hey’re walking, ahead of them and ignoring the traffic are the two children, absorbed in their gifts – Japanese dolls made in China. Sunset was an hour ago and now Bui Thi Xuan Street is crowded: people going home from work or the market or on their way out for the evening. It’s dusty and the smell of smoke and cooking in the air mixes with the stink of the open drains on either side of the street. ‘I know it’s bothering you. I’m really sorry,’ Lan says. Vinh keeps walking. ‘How’d you find out?’ Lan asks. ‘You should’ve told me. It was obvious.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘You had all the signs.’ Lan has her hands in her pockets, her eyes on the ground. ‘I was going to tell you. It’s just … it’s not easy. I would have told you.’ Vinh says, ‘I’d known for weeks. All the things you said. The complaints. I know I’m not that bad. I’m not such a terrible man.’ ‘I wish you’d get just angry. It’d be easier for me,’ Lan says. Vinh rubs a palm against his light beard. ‘Sure. It’d be easier.’ Lan’s face, drawn with stress, is still attractive, and could easily be mistaken for that of someone in her late twenties. ‘Look, I was drunk the first time it happened. I was.’ 195

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‘Sure,’ Vinh says. ‘Drunk. For weeks. While I was …’ ‘Now, don’t. Let’s not go back …’ Vinh lights a cigarette. He’s walking in shadow and his face has a faint red glow. Lan is on the inside, closer to the shops, and her oversized denim overalls look more faded under the blue-white neon light which washes her white T-shirt an odd shade of blue and makes her face pale. Her raw silk scarf is a heavy mass around her neck, and she has covered her close-cropped hair with a piece of tribal fabric. Her blue-and-white sneakers are loosely tied. People stare at her as they pass. ‘Do you want to know about him?’ Lan asks. ‘You’re abusive.’ ‘I’m sorry. I thought you wanted me to tell you.’ Vinh stops and turns around, flips his cigarette into the street. ‘You know, it’s not that big a deal,’ Lan says. ‘I was drunk. I liked what he said about me. I thought it was nice he paid that much attention to me for a while.’ ‘Lan. Will you …?’ ‘You know, you’re always so calm. But I know that’s how you control me. You’re a controlling man.’ ‘It’s all about me, and how bad I am again, right? You were drunk. What’s with that? You’ve been drunk a lot lately.’ ‘So? Can’t a woman get drunk? You’re drunk a lot, too. It’s not easy, you know.’ Vinh again turns away. Lan stands still, looking at the ground, ignoring the people around her. After a moment, Vinh takes a few steps back towards her. ‘I’m not sure what to do now,’ Vinh says. Lan keeps her elbows close to her side. ‘You know, you meet people. Things happen.’ Vinh turns towards her. ‘Yeah, things happen. You get drunk.’ They look at each other as a scooter slides between them. Hanoi has long been a difficult city for pedestrians; the footpaths taken over by tea or beer stalls where people sit on low plastic chairs, chatting and drinking. Men smoke tobacco through bamboo water pipes, the water hissing each time they draw a smoke. Women in pyjamas sit on stools and boxes, picking lice from each other’s hair, commenting on neighbours, passers-by, dogs, food, life. Every few feet, someone fans a crude charcoal 196

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burner to grill meat for bun cha; the noodles are a lunchtime crowd-pleaser. Teenagers wash and rinse pots and bowls in aluminium basins, tossing into the street the dirty water, which mingles with spat-out bones and paper napkins and cigarette butts. No one cares about pedestrians forced into the street by the crowded footpath. Even after a short walk, clothes feel unclean and stink of grease and cooking fumes. And it only grows more crowded, more chaotic – the city’s population multiplies like frogs. Lan raises her voice over the noise of engines, horns and barter. ‘Now you know why I couldn’t talk to you.’ Even walking along the road is becoming impossible, more hazardous. The newly rich have gone insane, forcing their massive Bentleys and Cadillacs and Japanese seven-seater SUVs through thousands of scooters going in all directions. Vinh watches the children walk obliviously toward a cement truck stopped in the middle of the street, the driver sticking his head out the window and yelling at the people from a construction truck unloading bricks, cables and steel bars. Vinh wonders if the government has not gone insane too, letting trucks into the city centre just as the work day ends. Around the cement truck, cars lurch forward in first or second gear, stuck between impatient scooters, pedestrians, rubbish collectors pushing metal bins on noisy iron wheels, and hawkers with plastic buckets, bottles, and straw mats hanging everywhere on their bicycles. Few obey the traffic laws. The honking is unceasing. Vinh quickens his pace to catch up with the children. Lan’s path is blocked by beggars and shoeshine boys, relentless and whiny. She pushes them out of her way, only to trip over a newspaper seller and two hawkers of pirated DVDs crowding near teenagers sitting on stools around a low table sharing dessert pudding, laughing and shouting. ‘Cool style!’ one says as he flips an undisguised and appraising look at Lan. Lan falls in behind Vinh. He seems not to notice her. ‘Stop it,’ she says as she catches up to him. ‘It was just a few days. I was just … I don’t know. I wanted something.’ Vinh sees that the kids are safe ahead of him. He waits for several scooters and motorcycles to go past before turning back towards Lan. ‘D’you want noodles?’ He waits. She says nothing. 197

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‘Chicken rice?’ ‘Let’s see what the kids want. I’m not really hungry.’ ‘You’re nearly thirty-five years old.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Vinh keeps his head down, and a moment later, places his fingers on her elbow. She lets him. ‘What time is it?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know. Let’s see what the kids want.’ A young women on a scooter speeds blindly out of an alley. ‘Watch it!’ Lan shouts. She turns to Vinh, ‘She looks like a whore.’ Vinh says, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ They reach the kids. The older one shoots them a glance but she doesn’t slow. The boy reaches a hand up to Lan’s arm. ‘Ma, can we go get a kite after dinner?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Lan says. ‘What do you want a kite for?’ Vinh takes the boy’s hand. ‘We’ll get you one this weekend; just don’t make your mom upset.’ ‘Don’t pamper him,’ Lan says to Vinh. ‘His dad always does that.’ She pushes the boy ahead, towards his sister. ‘I knew what I wanted at thirty-five,’ Vinh says. ‘I didn’t run around … looking for things.’ ‘I’m not like you. I’m not as good as you. Are you happy? I don’t know things. I am confused. I was confused. Can’t people be confused? He happens to …’ Lan lets her sentence drop. ‘Ah, shit. I don’t know. Fuck it!’ Vinh raises his hands towards her, signalling ‘enough’, and turns toward a busy restaurant with rows of tables covered with shiny sheets of tin and lit by long fluorescent tubes. The walls are covered with pastel tiles, the dust and grime thick and visible. Bui Thi Xuan Street has many such eateries competing daily for office workers, students and labourers looking for a cheap meal. ‘Kids!’ Lan calls out. ‘I don’t want to eat there,’ says the boy. ‘I won’t.’ Half a dozen people at the entrance point at trays of ready-made food and shout their orders. ‘You want spaghetti?’ Vinh asks the boy. ‘I don’t want spaghetti,’ Lan says. ‘Why do you want him to eat spaghetti?’ 198

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‘I want spaghetti,’ says the boy’s sister. The boy is silent, watching Lan and Vinh, waiting for them to decide. ‘Your mom says no spaghetti. Let’s go further up the street.’ ‘I don’t want noodles,’ Lan says. ‘I don’t mind what it is. I just want to get home fairly early.’ Lan lowers her voice. ‘The boy’s staying with us. We won’t be able to talk much. Let’s eat here.’ ‘It’s filthy,’ says the girl. ‘I know,’ Vinh says. ‘Yeah, it’s filthy,’ says the boy. ‘Don’t start any trouble,’ Lan says. ‘I’m going in. What d’you want?’ She turns, walks to the front counter and begins ordering. Vegetables, clay-pot fish, tofu. She finds an empty table, pushes the basket of chopsticks and spoons to one side, reaches for a paper napkin and wipes the surface, slides the bottle of fish sauce toward the middle of the table. Vinh and the kids push the plastic stools into place around the table. The girl fidgets with her plastic carrier bag, uncertain where to put it. ‘D’you want to sit with your mom?’ Vinh asks the boy. ‘I ordered spinach for you,’ Lan says. ‘But I want French fries,’ the boy says. ‘French fries will make you fat,’ the sister says. She drags out the word ‘fat’. ‘They don’t have any here,’ Lan says. ‘It’s not that kind of a place,’ Vinh says. ‘Maybe …’ ‘No French fries,’ Lan says. A waitress brings out a tray with their food and sets out the dishes on the table. The boy points to the bulky wall-mounted television. ‘Mommy, mommy! It’s …’ ‘Sit down and eat,’ Lan says and starts scooping out rice. She pushes a bowl toward Vinh. She turns to her daughter. ‘Sit down. Get your brother some rice. I want to get out of here soon. Hurry up!’ Vinh guides the boy down to a plastic chair and sits next to him. The boy immediately picks up a pair of chopsticks and starts drumming on the table. ‘Nam,’ Vinh says to him, ‘it’s not polite to make noise at the dinner table.’ ‘Stop it, Nam!’ Lan orders. The boy stops. He turns to Vinh. ‘Uncle, can I watch TV in mom’s room tonight?’ 199

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‘Don’t you have homework to do?’ ‘Ma …?’ ‘No TV,’ Lan says. The boy looks at Vinh, who turns away. ‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ Lan says. Vinh calls out to the waitress. ‘Can I get a beer? A Tiger?’ He turns back. ‘Old-fashioned? What does that mean?’ The two kids glance at Vinh and Lan, then turn to the television. ‘Nam, eat!’ Lan says. ‘Take it easy, Lan,’ Vinh says. Lan looks at him, her lips moving slightly. A second goes past. She keeps her silence. The children fidget, glancing back and forth between Vinh and Lan, then go back to the programme on the television. Vinh looks at his food, Lan keeps eating. ‘Mom, can we get a Harry Potter DVD tonight?’ Nam asks. ‘Stop pestering me. Just eat!’ Lan says. She turns to Vinh. ‘You’re always telling people what to do.’ ‘But I like Harry Potter,’ Nam says. Lan raises her voice. ‘I don’t care. Eat!’ A couple takes the table next to them. The woman is carrying two shopping bags with a Burberry pattern. The man wears a jacket with the same pattern over a white shirt, and jeans. His wife, heavily made-up, looks like an office worker: colourful knit blouse, black velvet jacket, a thick crease where her stomach bulges out. ‘Don’t tell me how to talk to my kid,’ Lan says. ‘You’re possessive.’ The couple sits down. The man picks up the napkin at his setting, squeezes its plastic wrapper to make a bubble and pops it open. Nam turns and looks at the similar napkins on their table. He glances at his mother, then at Vinh. Vinh silently shakes his head. ‘You going to eat?’ Lan asks. Vinh says, ‘I will. Now I’m possessive.’ ‘Order something else, if you want.’ The food arrives at the next table and the man begins scooping out the rice. He picks up some morning glory and shoves it into his mouth. ‘Do you want some pork tongue?’ the woman asks him. He continues chewing, says nothing. ‘I know the boy’s not mine,’ Vinh says. ‘I’m just …’ 200

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‘I’m eating,’ Lan says, her voice lowered. ‘I don’t want to talk.’ The kids stare at the couple, forgetting the TV, and the girl leans over to Vinh and whispers: ‘That man makes such loud chewing noises.’ Nam says out loud, ‘My teacher says it’s rude to make so much noise when you eat.’ Lan slaps her palm on the table. ‘Nam, will you concentrate on your food?’ The couple looks over at them. ‘I’m not hungry,’ says the daughter. She goes back to watching the TV, but she’s also watching the couple. The man fills another bowl of rice. The woman takes a dish of pork tongue from the waitress, asks, ‘Fish sauce?’ and places the plate in front of the man. ‘Do you want some iced tea?’ she asks. Reaching out to touch the daughter’s hand, Vinh signals with his face for her not to stare at the couple at the next table. Vinh leans toward Lan. ‘There’s always an excuse. When are we going to talk?’ ‘I can’t talk to you. You don’t listen. You want to hear, but you don’t want to know.’ A shoe-shine boy snakes his way into the restaurant, walks up to Vinh and waves a black brush. Vinh shakes his head. The boy turns to the man at the other table and gets the same response. ‘You never say anything either,’ Lan says. ‘You’re a good actor. You never let anybody know what you think. I’m tired of that. This whole country is like that. Nobody dares say the truth. Nobody does what they want to.’ Vinh raises the beer bottle to his mouth and, head back, drains it. He places the empty on the table to his right. Lan puts her bowl down and begins watching the man. He waves the waitress away when she brings out two glasses of iced tea. The woman calls her back. ‘Give me one. Sorry.’ ‘You don’t want to talk – never,’ he says. The man at the next table wastes no motion. He picks up his food, shoves it between his lips, chews, picks up some more. The woman scoops up some rice, lifting it toward his bowl. He puts it down, waits for the rice. ‘We need to pay the school fees tomorrow,’ the woman says. The man keeps chewing. ‘There’s nothing to say,’ Lan says. ‘Every time I want to talk, you’re too sleepy, too tired, too drunk.’ 201

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‘That’s right,’ Lan snaps. ‘I’m always drunk. There are others you can talk to. You pretend like the rest of them. Be nice, be forgiving. But you don’t forget.’ The girl looks up at Lan, waits for a moment, then says, ‘Mom, I’m not hungry. Can I go next door? I need new jeans.’ ‘Can I go, too?’ Nam says. ‘Nam, please don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Vinh says. ‘Why, Uncle?’ ‘It’s impolite, Nam.’ ‘Wait Mai, I’ll go with you,’ Lan says to her daughter. ‘Nam, you stay with Uncle. Finish your food.’ She stands up. Nam lowers his head, pushing out his lower lip. Mai is already outside, shopping bag in hand. Lan calls out to the waitress for the bill. The waitress nods and shouts, ‘Check, table three!’ ‘I thought we were getting married,’ Vinh says quietly. The man puts down his empty bowl, pushes what’s left of the pork tongue towards his wife and reaches for a toothpick. His wife says, ‘Why don’t you finish the vegetable?’ and slides the plate towards him. The man pushes it away and sticks the toothpick in his mouth. Lan hands the waitress some money while checking her mobile phone for messages. ‘I thought so, too,’ she says and walks away. Nam sits with his shoulders hunched up. Vinh places a piece of tofu in Nam’s bowl. Nam looks at the man at the next table, who sticks two fingers in his wife’s tea and extracts an ice cube. He rubs the ice against his lips and throws the melting cube back into the glass. He rubs his mouth with the palm of his hand. Done, he slides the glass back towards his wife and lights a cigarette. ‘Nam,’ Vinh says. ‘Eat the tofu.’ ‘Mom says you’re always bothering her.’ ‘She said that? To you?’ ‘When you called yesterday. She said it to my sister.’ ‘She said it to Mai?’ ‘She did. My dad never calls my mom.’ The couple at the next table gets up to leave. The man glances quickly at Vinh. The woman silently waves a hand in front of her face to push her husband’s cigarette smoke away, then turns and glances at Nam. 202

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Vinh ignores them and motions to the waitress. He points to the bottle of Tiger beer on the table to his right. ‘And she said this yesterday? I’m not bothering her, am I?’ Vinh asks. ‘Uncle, she says you don’t let her breathe. Why do you do that? I mean, why can’t she breathe?’ ‘It’s not true. She’s just saying that. It just means …’ ‘Will you get me a Harry Potter DVD tonight?’ ‘Look, Nam. Finish your food. I just gave you a DVD last week.’ ‘I watched it already. We can get a Michael Jackson one. Mom won’t let me buy anything when you two fight.’ Vinh takes the beer from the waitress. He leans close to Nam. ‘We’re not fighting.’ The boy smiles. ‘I know. Mai says you’re not going to live with mom.’ ‘You should eat.’ ‘Dad says if you marry mom, I can live with you two.’ Vinh takes a gulp of his beer. ‘Your dad doesn’t know. Did you tell him about me?’ The restaurant is emptying. The waitress turns off the television. Nam pushes his bowl away. ‘I don’t want to eat any more. Can I stop? Only once, I showed him the mask you made for me.’ Vinh puts down his bottle. ‘Let’s talk about this another time. Let’s go find Mai and your mom.’ Nam stands up. ‘I want to go home and watch Mr Bean with you.’ ‘I don’t know,’ Vinh says. ‘Let’s go talk to your mom. I need to talk to your mom.’ ‘Yesssss!’ the boy says. ‘Talk to my mom. Tell her we can all watch Mr Bean tonight. Tell her, please.’

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Contributors

TANAZ BHATHENA writes Middle-Eastern and South-Asian fiction. In 2009, she won the Whidbey MFA Student Choice Contest and the Mississauga Arts Council award for Emerging Literary Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Third Reader, Sotto Voce, Glossolalia and Room. She is currently working on a collection of stories with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. TEW BUNNAG was born in Bangkok and studied Chinese and Economics at Cambridge University. After graduation, he spent seven years travelling around the world. In 1975 he became a t’ai chi and meditation teacher. Since 2000 he has been working for the Human Development Foundation in the slums of Bangkok. His published works of fiction include Fragile Days, After the Wave, and The Naga’s Journey. A new novel, The Curtain of Rain, is in progress.

TISHANI DOSHI is a writer and dancer. She has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from John Hopkins University. Her book of poems, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for best first collection and her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury and Penguin India.

MITSUYO KAKUTA was born in Yokohama in 1967. She graduated from Waseda University, majoring in Creative Writing. She is the author of more than forty books and is one of Japan’s most prolific writers. She has won nine major literary awards in her home country, including the prestigious Naoki Prize for the novel Woman on the Other Shore and the Chuo Koron Literary Prize for The Eighth Day, both published by Kodansha International.

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ÂŠ Ulla Montan

Contributors JAMES KIDD studied English Literature at Liverpool University and University College London. Based in London, he writes for the South China Morning Post, the Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph. He recently contributed to the Little Black Book of Books: A Century of the Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Rocked the Literary World.

RAMONA KOVAL presents The Book Show, on ABC Radio National Australia, which can also be heard at www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow. She is the author of a cookbook, Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks, a novel, Samovar, and several non-fiction books. A collection of her literary interviews, Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers, is forthcoming from Scribe in August.

ANDREW LAM is a writer and an editor with New America Media. His book of essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, won the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, 2006. His collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise, is due out in 2010 and he is working on a novel. He was featured in the documentary My Journey Home, which aired on PBS nationwide in the US on April 7, 2004, in which a film crew followed him back to his homeland, Vietnam.

ÂŠ Jocelyn Seagrave

WAYNE P LAMMERS taught Japanese Language and Literature for a number of years before becoming an independent translator and writer. In 2007 he introduced Japanese writer Mitsuyo Kakuta to the English-speaking world with the novel Woman on the Other Shore. Along with contemporary Japanese fiction, his work has included translations of classical romance, memoirs, stage plays, screenplays and subtitles, manga, and a manga guide to Japanese grammar. He lives near Portland, Oregon. WENDY LAW-YONE, a native of Burma, was born in Mandalay. She grew up in Rangoon, and lived in Thailand, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur before settling in the United States, where she published two novels, The Coffin Tree and Irrawaddy Tango. Following a David TK Wong creative writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia, she moved to the UK in 2005 and now lives in central London. Her latest novel, The Road to Wanting, is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus in April.

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Contributors LIAO YIWU is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. His collection of interviews, The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, was published by Pantheon in 2008. Other non-fiction works include Testimonials, The Earthquake Chronicle and Report on China’s Victims of Injustice. In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett grant, and in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre. ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA has published four books of poems, most recently The Transfiguring Places (1998). He edited The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992), An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (2003), The Last Bungalow (2007), and The Boatride and Other Poems (2009). The Absent Traveller (1991), a volume of translations, has been recently reprinted. He is currently undertaking a translation of Kabir, the fifteenth-century Indian mystic poet, to be published by the New York Review of Books. PALANI MOHAN was born in Chennai, India, moved to Australia as a child, and currently lives in Malaysia. His photography has featured in many of the world’s leading magazines and newspapers. He has published three books, the latest being Vanishing Giants: Elephants of Asia, and has won a number of international awards.

NGUYEN QUI DUC is the author of Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family (1994), and the co-editor of Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (1995) and Once Upon A Dream, the Vietnamese American Experience (1995). He is the translator of the novella Behind the Red Mist by Ho Anh Thai (1997) and of The Time Tree: Poems by Huu Thinh (2004).

KEVIN SIMMONDS is a writer and musician. His work has appeared in Field, jubilat, Kyoto Journal and Poetry, and in the anthologies War Diaries and The Ringing Ear. He wrote the musical score for Hope, a meditation on AIDS which won an Emmy in 2009, and Wisteria: Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country, an original composition in collaboration with poet Kwame Dawes, which opened the 2006 Poetry International Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

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Contributors PAUL STJOHN MACKINTOSH is a British poet, writer and journalist living in Hong Kong. His first poetry collection, The Golden Age, was published by Bellew Books in 1997, and his second, The Musical Box of Wonders, is forthcoming from H Harksen Productions. He has published English translations from Japanese and Romanian and, working with his wife, Hungarian film-maker Lilla Anna Ban, is an award-winning film producer. SIR MARK TULLY, KBE, was born in Calcutta in 1936. He was for twenty years the BBC’s Chief of Bureau in New Delhi, before resigning in 1994. A journalist and a broadcaster, he is the author of India in Slow Motion, No Full Stops in India, The Heart of India, Divide & Quit, Last Children of the Raj, From Raj to Rajiv – Forty Years Of Indian Independence, India – 50 years of Independence, India’s Unending Journey and Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle. WEN HUANG is a writer and freelance journalist whose articles and translations have appeared in the Wall Street Journal Asia, the Chicago Tribune, the South China Morning Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Paris Review. His translations include The Corpse Walker (2008) by Liao Yiwu and Woman from Shanghai (2009) by Yang Xianhui.

KIRBY WRIGHT was born and raised in Hawaii. Before the City, his first book of poetry, was awarded first place at the San Diego Book Awards. He is the author of the companion novels Punahou Blues and Moloka’i Nui, both of which are set in Hawaii. He was a Visiting Writer at the 2009 International Writers’ Workshop in Hong Kong.

DAVID YOST was born and raised in St Louis, Missouri. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, he recently returned to the US from working with Burmese refugees in Thailand. His fiction has appeared in Witness, Pleiades, The Mid-American Review, Harpur Palate and The Minnesota Review.

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