Inside the hut, a horrible stench hit him, and in the semidark he thought he must’ve walked into an outhouse. They’d brought him here to let him defecate before shooting him. But why? So he wouldn’t soil his clothes? Clothes they would salvage after he was dead. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he saw that the hut was completely bare except for a plank of wood covering a hole in one corner of the dirt floor. Flies buzzed around it, and an incessant hum rose from beneath. He held his breath, quelling the urge to retch.
“This is where you’ll start,” a voice said from behind him. Tun turned around and saw a young soldier, older than the one who’d led him into the camp, a face he recognized from among the crowd eating the burnt tuber earlier. “You can’t leave the hut for any reason,” the soldier muttered. “You’ll do all your business there.” He nodded to the wood plank. A brief pause, and then he added, in a tone that sounded almost conciliatory, “You’ll stay put until your time is up, and this will depend on how well you’re taking it.”
Until my time is up? The question formed in his head but he could not summon the voice to express it. His throat felt tight, blocked, and he knew if he opened his mouth only a prolonged scream would emerge. But when had he last screamed aloud? Long ago he’d learned from his father to bear the anguish, to prove his strength against the pain. If he screamed now, it would reach all the way to that time, when he was a boy crouching under his father’s whip.
The soldier walked to the doorway, pistol hanging at his side. A handgun similar to the commander’s. “Lutdom kluan,” he said, using the revolutionary lingo, then switching to the gentler everyday language. “Ot thmut.” With this, the youth left, barring the door shut from the outside.
Discipline yourself. Endure. Tun puzzled over the ambiguity—the duplicity of words. Was the soldier trying to help him? Was this advice, cloaked in the tone of a command?—Do what it takes, and you will survive. Or was it merely an order?—Endure. Live.
Tun continued to stand there, rooted to the spot where he’d been left. If he moved, he would buckle. He must first find something to hang on to. A thought. A melody. Even a single note would do. Dtum. Dtum. Dtum. He tries mimicking the beats of a drum, a large bass drum that leads a funerary procession. A man had died—not someone he had known, not a friend but a comrade in the movement nevertheless—and if there was to be no funeral, then at the very least a note to signal his departure, to acknowledge the silent space left by a breath. But nothing emerged from Tun’s throat. He tried again. Still nothing. He had the odd sensation he was caught in a sleep paralysis. Yet, there was no doubt in his mind he was awake, and though he was standing upright, he saw himself recumbent, felt something pressing down on his chest. A presence, a weight. A sadness. But whose? His own? Was he dead? If it was his own lifeless body he was seeing, then he could not be grieving, mourning his own death. When his friend Prama died, he remembered, he’d tried to explain death to his daughter, at the funeral they’d attended together. He didn’t have the heart to tell her what he believed, what he knew to be true—that the moment we are born, each step we take is toward death. Instead, he resorted to telling her about the songs and melodies performed at different stages of a funeral. There’s music, you see, to awake the soul of the deceased, music to comfort it when it becomes aware that it’s no longer part of the human world, music to lead it into the otherworld . . . He knew he was veering from the truth, making it sound as if death too was a journey, much gentler and more poetic than life itself, and in some way preferable. He told her about the instruments in a “music of the ghosts” ensemble—the small oboe whose airy exhalation mimics the wind, the eternal breath; the crescent-shaped nine-gong gamelan whose rippling notes, when struck in continuous succession, echo the circling of time; the drum that marks the ending of one journey and the beginning of another, hastening the footsteps of the deceased toward the spirit realm. Once he’d finished, his daughter declared, “When I die, I want you to play all the instruments of the world one by one! I want you to sing me every song you know! Do you promise me, Papa, do you?” He nodded, and she said quietly, “Good, because I don’t ever want to leave you.” He’d wanted to abandon the funeral then, to spirit her as far from the presence of death as possible.
Tun realized now the weight on his chest was his longing for her. Again, he heard his daughter’s voice, as if she were inside the hut with him. His pulse quickened—What are you doing here? Go back home. But then it felt like they were already home, that he’d arrived back somehow, because there she was inside his room, surrounded by musical instruments, blowing this, tapping that, plucking a random string, curious about the new ones he’d brought to add to the collection. What’s this one, Papa? she inquired, her voice and words so gentle he dared believe he was forgiven for having left in the first place, for abandoning her in the middle of the night. It’s a leaf from a teak sapling. Sapling?—Is it a baby tree? Yes, a baby teak, one as tall as you. What’s it for, Papa? She held the leaf by its tiny stem between her thumb and forefinger, twirling it. For music. Music!—But how? He took the leaf from her and placed it between his lips, as one would a reed in the mouthpiece of a woodwind, his body the instrument. He blew on it, weaving a simple tune with his breath. The leaf vibrated, buzzing like a cicada. It’s alive, Papa, it’s alive! She clapped, enchanted. Yes, he agreed. Give anything the soul of music and it will sing. She turned to a drum and tapped on it. DTUM! Just once but loud enough.
Tun woke from his trance. He felt released, no longer paralyzed, although alone in the hut once more. Of course, he kept thinking, of course . . . He should’ve realized it. It was the wrong note, the wrong pitch, the wrong instrument altogether. He voiced the rhythm aloud—dtum dtak da-rum dtum dtak da-rum dtum dtak dtak dtum—invoking the double-headed sampho, a sacred drum regarded as the instrument of the Teacher, the Master. Once when he explained to her that the larger head was called the “teacher” and the smaller head the “child,” his daughter had laughed and thought the sampho was created specifically for the two of them, that it was their instrument.
He’d found what he was looking for. A reason to endure. He kept to one thought and one thought only—Sita, Sita, Sita. He had to stay alive. This was the only way to get back to her. No matter what it would take. He had to stay alive.