The plane slows, gliding parallel to the terminal building, its reflection undulating in the windowpanes. Alas, I am an old man, I shall confront death soon enough.
Teera feels the gears shift and the aircraft coming to a full stop. I don’t know how much time is left, or if it is already too late . . . I have in my possession three musical instruments that once belonged to your father. He would have liked you to have them. He would have liked you to know that some part of him lives, even if only in these instruments.
In her mind, Teera hears the music of her father’s sadiev. She doesn’t know why, but of all the instruments he played, she remembers the sound of this ancient lute most vividly. Perhaps it’s because as a child she grew up listening to her father trying to master it. She remembers a song, not its name but its melody, each note like a drop of predawn rain on bamboo.
She closes her eyes and lets the melody wash over her.
Someone raps on the front of his cottage. The Old Musician opens his eyes. The Venerable Kong Oul stands in the open doorway, a small black umbrella shielding the elder monk from the soft drizzle. “I’m sorry for intruding,” the abbot apologizes, his voice unusually deep and authoritative for a man so slight in build.
“I’ve come to ask for your participation in a ceremony. We have a young couple, the Rattanaks—you know them—whose boy is sick, and they wish to hold a blessing for him.”
The Old Musician recalls seeing the couple and their boy some months back. “What’s wrong with Makara, Venerable?”
“Louh pralung—the parents believe a ghost has lured their son’s spirit from his body to a forest, and as such they wish to make an offering of food and music to call the straying spirit back to the body. I’m wondering if you could play your sadiev.”
“Of course, Venerable.”
The abbot furrows his brow. “I’ve spoken with Dr. Narunn. He said the boy is suffering from drug abuse and recommended he be taken to a proper rehabilitation center, preferably an international one. I’ve expressed as much to the parents. While they suspect he’s indeed using this ‘crazy medicine’—as they call it—they believe that the straying of his spirit may be the root of all their son’s problems.”
Then, brightening, the abbot adds, “We’ve decided the ceremony should take place ten days from now, which coincides with the boy’s birthday. An auspicious day, befitting a ceremony for rebirth, don’t you think?”
“Yes, Venerable.”
The abbot’s eyes stray over to the upper corner of the bamboo bed where the lute leans over the oboe and drum as if whispering in confidence. “You ought to know I wrote to Miss Suteera, informing her that the communal stupa is finished. This was a while ago. I’ve yet to receive a reply.” The abbot hesitates. “It’s possible that her spirit has also strayed, journeyed too far to hear your lament. If it’s any consolation, my dear old man, I believe these instruments are meant for your keeping. Perhaps their purpose is to aid you in transcending another’s suffering.”
“You are too kind and wise, Venerable. I rely on your foresight.”
The abbot studies him, then, putting out his hand to feel the splattering drops, says, “Ah, if only I had the foresight to know when the rain will clear. I’ll let you return to your reverie.”
Alone again, the Old Musician tries to picture her in this setting. She whose presence he has sensed these past months, as surely as he felt her father’s ghost with him all these years. He straightens and looks around the vast temple grounds, his mind discerning clearly those things his vision can perceive only vaguely from a distance.
The compound is hemmed lengthwise on the east by the Mekong and on the west by a road. A vihear, a rectangular prayer hall, rises in the middle of the grounds, wrapped by a spacious white-pillared veranda, with a set of tall double teak doors on each side painted an earthy red and stenciled with gold-enameled lotuses. He was hardly surprised to learn that the whole compound was in ruins when the Venerable Kong Oul found it in the mid-1980s. The Old Musician knew all too well that most of the country’s Buddhist temples, along with churches and mosques and other religious edifices, were converted during the regime into warehouses, holding centers, or prisons. He himself had seen to some of these transformations firsthand, turning a blind eye as his young comrades beheaded and toppled statues of the Buddha or used them for target practice. Many times he has wanted to confess to the abbot his role in the regime, but always the Old Musician feels he is pardoned before he opens his mouth.
“I lost every single member of my family,” the old monk told him. “I’ve remained in the sangha, this spiritual fellowship, not so much to worship the gods but to honor the ghosts.” When he’d come upon the desecrated temple grounds during a boat ride along the Mekong, what first caught his eye was the remains of a staircase rising from piles of rubble and wooden debris. This partially burnt stairway, ascending to nowhere, moved him profoundly. The abbot set right away on the task of restoring Wat Nagara. “From this, from nothing, where could we go but up? We must rise from the ashes.”
Standing where he is, the Old Musician can see past the vihear, the cremation pavilion, and the cluster of stupas to the high wall and the two gates that open to the main road. An ancient banyan tree separates the stupas from the clearing where many festivities and celebrations take place. In the dry season the area is bare and brown, but during the rainy season talon grass, known for its tenacious hold on the earth, carpets the slope down to the river, whose sandy shore has all but disappeared, swallowed by the seasonal floods. Presently the concrete stairway, flanked by naga balustrades, descends halfway into the water, with the serpents’ heads completely submerged, leaving visible only their undulating tails.
Tall, mature frangipanis shade the grounds, some of their branches so bowed as to suggest hammocks, lending to the belief that ghosts and spirits often seek the refuge of these trees for their faintly fragrant blossoms. The Old Musician can’t be sure about the ghosts, but he certainly appreciates the trees’ ethereal beauty. The flowers fall in a constant stream, enshrouding the stupas and the surrounding pathways. They have a tentative hold on life, these blossoms. For it seems the moment their petals spread open, their beauty in full bloom, they lose their grip on the stems and fall to death. Their descent is made more poignant by a pair of white cotton banners hanging vertically along the front pillars of the cremation pavilion, each bearing in ornate black script a line of funerary smoat, poetry sung without music—
As these blossoms wilt away . . .
So my body succumbs to its inevitable end.