It is evening, and the Old Musician returns alone to the naga steps. He scans the shoreline, noting the debris—plastic bags, water bottles, old nylon nets, a rusted bicycle wheel—partially hidden in the mud and grass near him. He is suspicious of everything he sees, fearing a discovery much worse than a gun. In the river, where a few days earlier the little girl stood on her water buffalo, he discerns a woman standing on the stern of her boat, a metal bowl in her hand, and for a split second he is confused—How much time has passed? Has the girl aged into a woman?—only to realize they are not the same person. The distance between him and the woman is not much, certainly near enough for him to be privy to the choreography of her ritual, but the sense of privacy she embodies allows them each their separate solitude.
It appears she has just finished washing her face and arms, and now with her wet hand is smoothing back her hair. Then, from the waist of her sarong, she extracts a pinkish scarf and begins to cover her head in the way a Cham woman covers herself, tucking in the edges so that when she’s done only the oval of her face is showing. In her colorful batik sarong and embroidered white shirt, she appears ageless, serene as a minaret at midnight. He knows her, or more accurately, she is a familiar figure, her home the brightly painted wooden sampan she shares with her husband and three small grandchildren. Despite their frequent encounters, she’s never once spoken with the Old Musician, and he never dares engage her, conscious of her faith and the restrictions she must observe. But on many occasions he has spoken with the husband, who often brings their boat to moor and seek refuge along the shore during a particularly scorching afternoon, or when there is a violent rainstorm. Abdul Razak. A name that would have gotten a man killed during Pol Pot’s regime. A birth name that he has reclaimed since he survived the decimation of his people, and therefore, as he calls it, niam chivit. “My life name, through which I honor Allah for every breath I take.”
The Cham fisherman is as light-footed as he is soft-spoken, and the Old Musician sees him emerging now with a broom from under the woven rattan roof that arches over the middle section of the vessel. Abdul Razak gathers his nets and fishing tools into one corner by the entrance and begins sweeping the floorboard.
When he’s finished sweeping, the Cham fisherman puts away his broom, rinses himself with water from a bucket, and goes back inside. A few minutes later he reemerges onto the bow, donning an embroidered skullcap, a loose white shirt, and a checkered sarong. His three grandchildren trail him, two boys and a girl, between the ages of four and eight. The little ones’ parents have gone to other provinces in search of more stable work.
At the sound of a distant call to prayer, the wife enters the roofed enclosure. In that constricted space, she will address her God, seek His boundless refuge. Near the prow, Abdul Razak kneels down and rolls out his small square of mat, his grandchildren emulating his every move, like little shadows of himself. He recites verses from the Quran, in a language he does not speak, his face to the distant Mecca. A spiritual origin. A home that a man like Abdul Razak will never see, can never reach, but a home nevertheless, for in believing he belongs somewhere, even in a far-flung and unknowable geography, he has found his reason for being.
Perhaps home then, in the simplest and profoundest sense, is the center of one’s faith, the belief that shelters and moors a soul tossed to drift in the open sea. The Old Musician longs for such certainty of conviction.
The call to prayer grows more sonorous. The human voice and its ancient, mysterious music. It unfurls across the Mekong where the river narrows so that the Old Musician is able to hear it, catch its refrain and loop, even as the words are indecipherable to him. It must be coming from somewhere in Arei Ksatre, where, Abdul Razak told him, a small community of Muslim nomads living on the edge of the Mekong has erected a makeshift mosque of tarp and bamboo so that those like themselves without land or permanent homes can come to worship. While most humbly constructed, the mosque boasts a pair of loudspeakers, a small wooden board listing the precise times for the five daily prayers, and a bronze carving of the crescent moon and star, which the imam carries with him everywhere, Abdul Razak said, the only permanent feature of their “wandering mosque.”
The singing deepens in resonance. Judging from the light, it is the call that precedes the setting sun. The Old Musician has returned to the river, hoping to catch a glimpse of the little girl and her water buffalo, that faint reverberation of his daughter, and hold it still. But this mournful echo of the soul resonating across water and sky, stretching as if toward its source, its longed-for infinity, seems providential. Then again, the mind perceives what it desires, a pattern or importance where perhaps there is none. For the moment, he feels everything—the appearance of the Razaks and their boat, the wind sending a continuous ripple in the direction of the peninsula, the porousness of the evening that makes time seem mutable—conspires to draw him back to that night, which for so long has existed only as an outline in his memory, like the missing note on the sralai, its tone and timbre muted, until now.
*
With the headlights off, Tun and his comrades eased their car slowly off the ferry to the makeshift landing on the other side of the abandoned bridge. They turned right and drove south for about two kilometers until they came to a throng of open-air huts on stilts at the river’s edge, reached by bamboo walkways. During peacetime, this outdoor yet secluded eating place, frequented by young lovers, would be open from early evening to the small hours of the morning, but the fear of monsoon floods and mortar shells had left it mostly empty, abandoned. Under the moonlight, it appeared like a ghost settlement awaiting some impending arrival, an exodus from the world of the living.