He had been in his fourth year at the School of Arts and Trade, finishing his studies in woodworking—his particular specialty the technique and art of carving traditional Khmer instruments—when he was selected, along with a handful of classmates, for a two-year language immersion course funded by a grant from the United States government. That spring—in ’61—he and his classmates enrolled in an intensive English class taught by an Indian teacher from Burma. By the fall, they’d learned enough of the language to feel some confidence when they boarded a Pan Am flight that took them first to Hong Kong, then Honolulu, and finally to the America he’d dreamed of for so long. A land where the endless expressways alone inspired in him inexhaustible optimism and hope.
He couldn’t have known then that in a few months’ time he would reverse course, speeding along those same expressways back to the airport on a no-return flight to his homeland, to his dismal prospects in a country he’d come to regard after his brush with modernity as a place stuck in time, folded in on itself. He could not permit himself to think of Channara, their severed love, his shattered heart. He could not face her. A good-bye was impossible. As he resigned himself to the task of caring for his mother, he dared not voice his ambition but vowed that one day he would resume his studies in America. It never happened. The country drew him into politics, and politics drew him underground, into the jungle, and war.
Minneapolisminnesota. The Old Musician says the two names as one, letting the syllables roll effortlessly off his tongue, noting the way the letters repeat themselves, like the reflections of a reflection inside a hall of mirrors, as if the place felt a need to confirm its existence through persistent alliteration. If he gets up now and looks into one of the rain puddles, he wonders childishly, will he see this Minneapolisminnesota? Will he see a paradise reflected among the cumuli, and in its pure white serenity will he see her, this Suteera, another tevoda reincarnated, grown-up and altogether different from the child she had been, peering down to search for him, for her father?
He places a handful of kindling in the brazier, lights a dried coconut blade, and sticks it into the cluster. Swirls of smoke rise like recalcitrant sprites slow to awaken. A tiny orange-blue flame leaps forth through the dry leaves and branches, a chameleon born of alchemy. The flame grows and multiplies. He adds bigger pieces of wood to the fire and gives it his breath, once and then again. The flames spring higher, the heat reaching his face, reminiscent of the warmth of his daughter’s tiny hands cupping his cheeks.
Wake up, Papa, wake up! He recalls those mornings when she would tiptoe into his room and rouse him with a peck on the nose. Time to practice your music! When he groaned, she would kiss him all over his face. You lazy papa! she’d say, her breath redolent of the sugarcane juice she’d drunk for breakfast. If she kissed him now, he thinks, if she were here as the little girl she was, tenderhearted and joyful, showering him with sweet, scented drops, his scars and injuries would vanish, as the fissures and rifts on a drought-inflicted earth would surely disappear under the monsoon rains. He longs to be whole again.
He gets up and shuffles over to the front of his cottage. He fills his kettle with the rainwater collected in the clay cistern, shuffles back to the brazier, and sets the kettle down over the fire, letting the blackened bottom cover the orange flames like the moon eclipsing the sun.
Will she appear through the far gate? Or the one nearer to him? Sometimes he sees her so clearly his heart stops. Will she walk? Will she float? However she arrives, he knows she will appear to him like a vision, her beauty as untamable as her mother’s. Even as young as four or five, she’d already become the spitting image of the young Channara, with long, swirling locks tumbling past the small of her back. A little girl, she was more hair than body, more spirit than mass. When she ran she was a blur of moving strands. A current of air. A thought or wish whizzing past. If he’s not vigilant—
He gasps, shocked by his own perfidy, the tricks his mind will play with hope and memory.
Suteera, he meant. He is certain of her return.
The streets teem with pedestrians, vendors, and vehicles of all sorts. Cars big and small, some with steering wheels on the left, others on the right, pack the narrow lanes littered with detritus. Quite often a vehicle will force its way from the opposite direction, facing the oncoming traffic, with no regard for driving rules and regulations, or even common sense. Tuk-tuks sputter next to SUVs emblazoned with giant letters—LEXUS—across the full span of their exteriors, as if making clear their status and origin, should anyone question the satiny frilled synthetic curtains across the tinted windows, and other such oddities, and mistake them for inferior cars. Cyclos, most empty of passengers, roll aimlessly along, a species marching toward its inevitable extinction. Open carriages rigged to motorcycles haul supplies ranging from toilet seats to oversize mattresses to assortments of sharply cut glass and rebar protruding dangerously into the crowds. It’s been more than a week—ten days, to be exact—and Teera still can’t get used to the contradictions and incongruities, the endless acrobatics.
Mopeds convey cartons of eggs stacked a meter high into the air, plumes of live chickens hanging upside down by their feet, a litter of pigs squirming and squealing in the confines of bamboo netting. Ramshackle trucks crammed with passengers gurgle next to spotless Land Cruisers carrying foreign aid workers, whose affluent appearances and calm demeanors sharply contrast with the bedraggled populace they’ve come to help. On sidewalks, shiny glass carts offering noodles and steamed buns vie for space next to crooked wooden shelves hawking gasoline and antifreeze in reused soda bottles that emit a dirty phosphorescent glow. A rainbow of pollutants, poisons, and pickles. You can’t be sure what is what. All seem flammable, a lineup of Molotov cocktails. Again, Teera is unnerved by how closely it resembles the mass exodus decades ago when Khmer Rouge soldiers forced everyone out of their homes toward the countryside, leaving the entire city in apocalyptic disarray.
Shantytowns fight for their inch of land against sprawling residential estates and hotel grounds, against sprouting American-style shopping malls and Chinese-style row houses. Open sewage canals—clogged with plastic bottles and bags, the blackened water a hothouse for diseases heaving in the heat and dust—hem the streets boasting modern clinics and pharmacies. Casinos and nightclubs, thudding with pop rock and hip-hop music at all hours, cast their neon auras onto crumbling brick walls of adjacent Buddhist temples. The city evinces a makeshift existence, a way of life in constant flux, which at any moment can implode into violence, like the last bloody coup that took place only six years ago, in 1997, when televised images of gunfire and tanks and fallen bodies recalled again and again those frightful days of the Khmer Rouge takeover. Always the potential for another war, another revolution. Teera fears this every time she emerges from the guarded enclosure of Hotel Le Royal. Despite the relative calm and stability, she senses tension everywhere, in the reckoning of these disparate elements forced into proximity.