succession to the throne, he had had the son of King Taksin, a celestial prince, beaten to death with a scented sandalwood club.
For my mother to act as she did toward the royal physicians therefore must have seemed—to herself as well as to them—not only mad but unimaginable. One might as well attack a typhoon with a candle.
And yet that, in a sense, was precisely what she had done. Leaning into the gale, she had done the only thing she could: She had held the candle to her clothes, watched as the flames paused, then leaped up her sleeves. A gesture born of utter despair. The wind died. The palms righted themselves. On the horizon over Bangkok, a star appeared through a rent in the clouds. Then another.
The king’s physicians never returned. Busy collaborating with the court poets on a translation of the Hindu epic Ramayana , King Rama II forgot that he had sentenced us to death to avert the end of the world. An artist by nature, a man who insisted on personally sculpting the decorations for the buildings he commissioned, he lost himself in the adventures of Ramachandra and Sita and let us live.
The world, as is so often the case, did not end. Our mother’s andfather’s fears, like the terror that cramps the heart before dawn but winnows to a joke by breakfast, came to nothing. We lived, we grew, we wrapped our arms around each other and rolled laughing down the hills above the river, the sky and the grass spinning round our heads like the years. In a word, we survived. The sentence of death was extended, the full stop changed, as in most men’s lives, to a comma. The only mark it left on the visible world was a small, dark scar in the skin of our mother’s throat.
II.
Perhaps it comes down to this: our mother squatting before the fire, our brothers laughing from somewhere outside, the taste of rice and fish. Perhaps it’s the number of times our father pulled our ears or touched our faces, or the days (how many weeks or months would they make, added all together?) the three of us spent knee-deep in the sun-warm river, bent over the drying racks. What makes a home? Was it the familiar bump of our father’s boat when he returned in the afternoons? Or the way the floor would tip ever so slightly when he stepped aboard? He would strip his shirt and wash his arms in the basin, then cup his hands and gently pat water on his face and head. Was it the sound of the water raining down into the bowl?
I barely remember those early years now. Our lives were not easy. Even if they had wanted to, my parents could not have made them so, and they showed no signs of wanting to. We were never coddled. We crawled, we walked, we ran. We fought other boys our age and older in the dirt where the market used to be. We learned to swim. With the possible exception of climbing trees, we could do anything anyone else could do, only better, since there were two of us. When the floating theater came to Meklong we went to see it, and though a lifetime has come between that night and this one, though the storytellers we listened to are all long dead, and the tumblers and the jugglers as well, I rememberthem all. We watched as a strong young man in fantastic dress fought invisible demons with a flaming sword, thrusting, parrying, the blade streaming sparks against the dark until suddenly, tilting back his head, he raised his arm and in one smooth movement swallowed the burning steel to the hilt. The crowd gasped. A number of women screamed. We had just started to cry when he drew the extinguished blade out of his throat, tossed his hair and plunged it quivering into the wooden stage.
But these—the floating theatre, the giant pla buk that somehow made its way up the Meklong and tore up my father’s net, the purification fires burning on the eve of Songkran—these are the few boulders that rise above the river. The rest—the familiar voices, the songs, the thousand victories and humiliations of childhood—have sunk beneath the surface.
For my mother to act as she did toward the royal physicians therefore must have seemed—to herself as well as to them—not only mad but unimaginable. One might as well attack a typhoon with a candle.
And yet that, in a sense, was precisely what she had done. Leaning into the gale, she had done the only thing she could: She had held the candle to her clothes, watched as the flames paused, then leaped up her sleeves. A gesture born of utter despair. The wind died. The palms righted themselves. On the horizon over Bangkok, a star appeared through a rent in the clouds. Then another.
The king’s physicians never returned. Busy collaborating with the court poets on a translation of the Hindu epic Ramayana , King Rama II forgot that he had sentenced us to death to avert the end of the world. An artist by nature, a man who insisted on personally sculpting the decorations for the buildings he commissioned, he lost himself in the adventures of Ramachandra and Sita and let us live.
The world, as is so often the case, did not end. Our mother’s andfather’s fears, like the terror that cramps the heart before dawn but winnows to a joke by breakfast, came to nothing. We lived, we grew, we wrapped our arms around each other and rolled laughing down the hills above the river, the sky and the grass spinning round our heads like the years. In a word, we survived. The sentence of death was extended, the full stop changed, as in most men’s lives, to a comma. The only mark it left on the visible world was a small, dark scar in the skin of our mother’s throat.
II.
Perhaps it comes down to this: our mother squatting before the fire, our brothers laughing from somewhere outside, the taste of rice and fish. Perhaps it’s the number of times our father pulled our ears or touched our faces, or the days (how many weeks or months would they make, added all together?) the three of us spent knee-deep in the sun-warm river, bent over the drying racks. What makes a home? Was it the familiar bump of our father’s boat when he returned in the afternoons? Or the way the floor would tip ever so slightly when he stepped aboard? He would strip his shirt and wash his arms in the basin, then cup his hands and gently pat water on his face and head. Was it the sound of the water raining down into the bowl?
I barely remember those early years now. Our lives were not easy. Even if they had wanted to, my parents could not have made them so, and they showed no signs of wanting to. We were never coddled. We crawled, we walked, we ran. We fought other boys our age and older in the dirt where the market used to be. We learned to swim. With the possible exception of climbing trees, we could do anything anyone else could do, only better, since there were two of us. When the floating theater came to Meklong we went to see it, and though a lifetime has come between that night and this one, though the storytellers we listened to are all long dead, and the tumblers and the jugglers as well, I rememberthem all. We watched as a strong young man in fantastic dress fought invisible demons with a flaming sword, thrusting, parrying, the blade streaming sparks against the dark until suddenly, tilting back his head, he raised his arm and in one smooth movement swallowed the burning steel to the hilt. The crowd gasped. A number of women screamed. We had just started to cry when he drew the extinguished blade out of his throat, tossed his hair and plunged it quivering into the wooden stage.
But these—the floating theatre, the giant pla buk that somehow made its way up the Meklong and tore up my father’s net, the purification fires burning on the eve of Songkran—these are the few boulders that rise above the river. The rest—the familiar voices, the songs, the thousand victories and humiliations of childhood—have sunk beneath the surface.
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