They’ve reached an intersection. There are neither traffic lights nor stop signs. But like all the cars around them, they slow to a crawl. Looking past the couple of cars ahead of them, Teera expects to see a motorcade escorting a convoy of armored Ford Rangers favored by high-ranking officials and oligarchs, or worse, a Hummer barreling down at sixty, eighty kilometers an hour in a zone marked twenty. No such vehicle emerges. Instead she notices an old man, tall and stately but otherwise dressed in the patch-filled clothes of a mendicant, a bamboo cane in one hand and a cotton satchel on his shoulder. He takes a cautious step from the sidewalk into the humming traffic, then pauses, tapping the bamboo cane on the asphalt, swinging it from right to left, his head cocked to one side, listening, observing with all his senses. Then he lifts his free hand straight past his head and proceeds forward, weaving across the intersection.
He’s blind, Teera realizes in astonishment. Though he can’t see, he raises his arm in the air so others can see him. Everything stills inside her. In this chaotic little city where traffic stops for no one, except out of fear for those with power, and fatal accidents occur daily, so it can seem human lives are as dispensable as those of chickens and pigs on their way to slaughter, this mute gesture feels like a revelation of sorts.
I have come hoping the truth did not die with him. What truth is that? What is she seeking? She’s no longer sure what she meant. Though she knows in this very instant that if all she has to take with her when she leaves this land is the image of the raised hand, she’ll have gained more than what she came with. She may never fully grasp the source of inhumanity, what drives a people to massacre one another, the potential for hate that lurks in every heart, or at what point ideals turn rancid with venom so that they poison and corrupt, murder the very beauty they aspire to create. What is clear before her is the simple fact that it takes conviction to do what this blind man does. In the absence of sight, when all is dark around you, it takes a deep-seated belief that others will answer your appeal, that their humanity will rise to meet your lifted hand, your raised hope, and in that brief moment, you cross the otherwise arbitrary divide between death and life.
On the other side, a middle-aged woman, cradling a basket of steamed peanuts she’s selling, takes a firm hold of the old man’s wrist and helps him onto the sidewalk, just as traffic weaves again around him. Teera’s eyes follow him, until their own car makes a turn and he disappears from her field of vision.
If her father lived to old age, would this be his life? Would a stranger look kindly upon him? Do others see what she sees—these small, unheralded testimonies to the ineradicable bonds holding together a society, affixing its shattered pieces despite the persistent aftershocks that add to its myriad strains and cracks?
“How old is he?” she asks, her thoughts leaping again, from one person to another.
“Hmm, I’m not sure.” Dr. Narunn seems to be thinking it over. “Maybe in his late seventies? For someone who can’t see, he crossed that road with such sense of direction and purpose. What do you think, uncle?” The physician turns to Mr. Chum.
“He could be much younger,” Mr. Chum says, hands on the steering wheel, mindful of the vehicles around them. “It’s hard to tell how old anyone is these days. Khmer yeung chap chas. Poverty and suffering age us. We all look older than we really are. Take me, for example!”
Dr. Narunn, not missing a beat—“Forgive me, uncle, how old are you? Twenty-nine?”
Mr. Chum laughs, head bobbing appreciatively.
“I meant the Old Musician,” Teera says.
A brief silence. The two men exchange surprised glances. Teera expects this. Until now she hasn’t said a word about her meeting.
“We don’t know really,” Dr. Narunn says after a moment. “We don’t even know his name. At the temple, we all call him Lokta Pleng—‘the Old Musician’—and he’s never objected to it, never once corrected us.”
“He spoke English to me.” In the cottage, she dismissed the Old Musician’s slip of the tongue as the result of thinking her an American, the way people here randomly blurt out English greetings—Hello! How are you?—when they sense she might be a foreigner, eager to test what they know, perhaps to demonstrate that Cambodians are catching up with the rest of the world. “I mean, he’s not just some homeless old musician, is he? He was once somebody, a learned man.”
Again, Dr. Narunn and Mr. Chum seem taken aback. After another awkward silence, the doctor says, “Well, yes, and he must’ve suffered horribly for who he was. Sometimes, I can’t help but think that his anonymity—this absence of name and history, or as we Buddhists say, this self-less existence—is the only way he’s able to continue.”
“Does he not have any family at all?”
“I’m afraid not. He’s never spoken of a single relative, friend, or anyone outside the temple community. Certainly not to me. He doesn’t speak at all of his life before he came to Wat Nagara. I believe he lost everyone to Pol Pot.”
Teera is silent.
“Sometimes, walking past his cottage,” Dr. Narunn continues, “I hear him speak, very tenderly, to the instruments, as if they were people, his children. He’s very attached to them.”
In the cottage, Teera also sensed this—the Old Musician’s love for the instruments, his almost parental protectiveness toward these inanimate objects. If it’s all right with you, she’d said before leaving, I’d like to keep them in your care awhile longer. He nodded. It seemed to her he could only nod.
Tentatively, Dr. Narunn says, “There’s only one person I’m aware of who might have some connection to his past. And even this I only guessed while helping him with a task.” Again, the doctor hesitates before continuing. “You see, several months back, he asked for my help in writing you.”
Teera is startled, more than she lets on. How many lives are connected to our own in these small ways without us knowing?
“You are destined to meet, then!” Mr. Chum exclaims.
Dr. Narunn flushes and, clearing his throat, says, “I’ve wanted to mention it since we got in the car.” He gives Teera an apologetic glance.
“So it was you who wrote the letter,” she murmurs, understanding now why it looked to her as if it had been written by one person and signed by another.
“No, I was the scribe—I merely took down his words. He was very exact in what he wanted to convey.”
“Are you close to him?” Teera asks.
“As close as one can be, I suppose, to someone extremely private, essentially unknowable.”