Story of a Road

The little one’s shaved head collected small drops of rain as he peeked out the window of the driver’s seat. The rain bounced off the white hood and trickled down in busy streams to the tires and headlights, where it dripped inconsistently upon the cracked, uneven concrete of the road.

            His mother’s look of indifference gave him no reason to despise the rain. He continued to poke his small forehead out, immediately drawing it back in. A little game he loved to play with his friend, the falling sky. Suddenly the floor beneath him groaned and shook, shivering, as he suspected, from the cold and drenching rain outside. The white car began to move and an invisible wall of something, some matter that the little one could not account for, immediately gated the window up, barring him from his jubilant companion outside.

            The boy was too young to grieve at the disappearance of the opened window; his attention now turned to the new sputtering noises of the rain as it struck against the glass. The boy leaned his head back upon his mother’s chest as she piloted her way down the rough-hewn street. He never wondered why they moved or how; he was content on his mother’s lap, close to the security and nourishment that she had always provided him with. He did not know the reason for the journey; he did not notice her shift from sitting on one side of the car to the other. Nor did he notice that his mother’s spot in the passenger seat was now filled with their family’s small number of possessions. He did not notice that she now sat where once his father did.

            The little boy did not know death, despite that shroud’s newfound relationship with his father. He did not understand the absence of the man; nor could he fathom the fact that the man would not return himself to them. All that the boy knew was that he liked the sound of rain, and enjoyed his new window, where just beyond its hidden perimeters his friend, falling sky, ran by.

            The back seat was crowded with the boy’s two brothers and two sisters. The youngest of the children, Srey An, slept on her older sister’s shoulder, until a bump either jolted her to consciousness or caused her to slump into her sister’s lap. Nari did not mind; her thoughts were too occupied with her father’s disappearance. The sudden velocity of time had coursed through memory when the news had originally been told to her as she stood within earshot of her bewailing mother. He brothers had not known, nor did they understand. How could they? Yet she knew something had happened. Something wrong. Something had taken her father away from her, to a place from which she doubted he could return. Since that day her mother had said very little; now suddenly they drove through the muddied streets of their village until they had reached and passed the crossroads that would lead them out of their province and on to the capital.

            Nari had never known the land to be so large for so long. Her pestering about their destination was met only with the monotonous phrase, “A new house in the city,” from her mother’s mouth. Her words came back to Nari as an irritant; she could not sense meaning in any of them. She was not afraid, but her awareness of their family’s sudden neediness and of their abrupt journey upon the road encouraged a sense of apprehension.

            Little Meng was fast asleep on his mother’s chest, while all of the family’s belongings rocked slightly on the passenger’s seat inside the tiny vehicle. The rain had not ceased, and light was becoming scarce. Soon night would fall, and the small family would arrive at the mother’s new location of employment: a textile factory in the midst of bustling Phnom Penh.

            The rain was still tapping the galvanized tin above the doorway of the house when they arrived, well past midnight. “You’re late,” a man said. The new world welcomed her as a worker, not as a widow. Her five children in tow, she followed the man into the house and up two tedious flights of stairs until they reached the narrow hallway that led to their new home: a small room with concrete walls, tile flooring, and a blaring fluorescent light overhead.

            Her children came in and collapsed on the mats already laid out for them, crammed and tired and hungry. The baby boy now stirred, craving his mother’s milk. The exhausted woman sat propped against a wall and complied as she surveyed her sleeping children in front of her. The two boys, twins, lay close together in a sweaty heap. Srey An lay curled up in between her brothers and Nari, who lay stiffly with her legs stretched out and her feet crossed.

            The man entered the doorway to the family’s new quarters and knelt beside the woman, giving no heed to sleeping babes or her nursing of little Meng.

            “You need to start early tomorrow,” he said. “If you want to pay for this room, I suggest you keep from being late this time.”

            The man left without hearing a reply from the woman and turned off the light and closed the door. Suddenly everything stopped, and the combined sounds of crickets and the drizzling rain outside began to rise in the woman’s ears. She nursed her little boy to sleep and then, finally, lay down beside the wall, cradling the boy close to her heart. She felt that still tense sensation of loneliness, having yet to become used to her husband’s absence beside her. Now instead of his warmth she touched the cold and rigid wall with her shoulders, and clutched an infant son to her breast. Having no time for tears, she was soon asleep, and the night’s hours of rest passed quickly in her dreamless mind; suddenly the morning brought both the humidity and a knock at the door. A meager breakfast greeted her and her young, as the man began to issue orders for the day.

            Days and weeks now passed without notice; time became elusive, choosing only to show its face in order to insult the drudgery of the woman’s “new” life. With no one from home to support her, she worked long and hard each day at the factory, sewing a certain brand’s logo onto golf tees, while her partner did the same thing, but with a different brand name stitched into the fabric.

            While their mother worked, Nari and her sister kept the baby; meanwhile their brothers lined the streets outside the small house looking for trash worthy of recycling. That, or the boys were content to resort to begging. Only a short time had passed before their house’s owner had “hired” them out to do that work. Being so young and frail, however, brought little more than an inquisitive look from foreigners or an ignorant wave of the hand from locals who passed by.

            The children watched their clothes become dirty and ragged. They watched their bodies become thin and bony. Their hair bred lice; their teeth darkened and occasionally chipped or fell out of their mouths. Their mother continued to work, and the boys continued to beg, and all the while the owner of the house began to hire out the girls behind their mother’s back. He would send them begging along the riverside of the Tonle Sap, where gangs of boys roamed and where skulking foreign men wandered about.

            One day the mother found out, and argued with the man, until he hit her and told her not to complain, or he would force her and her family out. He reminded her that it was not his fault that her husband had died. It was karma. Her anger subsided, though not willingly. She could not forget the fate that bound her to this life, a life that had, in turn, bound itself to her children.

            A day came soon after when Srey An did not come home. Nari had been busy watching little Meng, who had been busy all this time cutting teeth and learning to take his first steps. While Nari was not looking, Srey An had disappeared. She wailed over her lost sister, her silent but understanding companion in all this turmoil, and cried out to something—unnamed and unknown—to bring her back. When finally her cries diminished, and the incapable arms of fate had failed to return Srey An safely home, she gave in to her mother’s sullen assumption that she had fallen into the river and drowned. No one had witnessed this, nor had anyone sought to look for the little girl. Nari’s mother was too overwhelmed to feel anger; after fighting the owner of the house, she had given up her right to remorse, and all animosity that once resided in her she poured out ineffectively through quiet tears in the dead of night. “Karma,” she would say, hardly weeping. Karma had spoken for her daughter, just as it had for her husband. For all of them.

            The woman’s posture depleted; no longer could she work long hours at the factory. By midday she was spent, and her spirit was gone. Hope hung in the air like the air itself: sticky, dreary, more menacing than alleviating.

            The day came when little Meng learned his first words. No one applauded his accomplishment; his mother gave scarce attention to him, save during the night, when she would sleep with her frail arms wrapped around his tiny body.

            The day came when little Meng noticed that his sister was missing, but no one could explain to him why. Next came the day that his brothers began to leave and only return as they pleased. Nari scolded them in her mother’s place, as the woman grew more tired and worn with each passing day. Nari’s only wish was to see her mother well again, but she did not know how such miracles could ever be brought about.

            A day came when the children’s mother could no longer work at the factory. Instead, the man hired her out to work in the evenings, sometimes into the early morning hours; seldom did her children stay awake to see her return, save for Nari, who would lay quietly near the doorway, listening. Many times it would be just short of daybreak when her mother’s slow feet could be heard coming down the hallway.

            The woman’s children never knew their mother’s work, though they might have guessed, having been exposed to the nature of the after-hours in the city. They would sleep until morning without their mother, and rise to find her lying fast asleep on the floor nearby, her clothes and physical appearance greatly altered from what they had known before.

            At night, Nari would be forced to hold little Meng, who would cry for his mother for hours upon end. She grew tired of him, though she could do nothing to stop his incessant weeping. She began to find fault with the boy. No one else could be as selfish as he was, she thought. The rest were learning to get along; even with their mother’s condition they had managed to find ways of occupying themselves. Meng seemed, in Nari’s mind, content to only resist the reality that their family now lived in.

            Srey Nari began to reason that calamity had struck her family because of her brother. If not for his wailing, her mother might have peace of mind and take a little rest. If not for him, surely she would find time to console her embittered daughter. If not for him, perhaps her father would not have had to go away. It was not fair, she thought, though she feared what it would mean to tamper with the fates of her family. Still, her anger towards him daily increased, while her mother’s life seemed to daily deteriorate.

            The only time she could keep him silent at night was when it rained. Whenever the sky began to open its mouth, she would rise and place young Meng outside at the end of the hallway, where he would sit, quietly staring up into the clay-red sky above him, his tiny eyes straining to find his friend, the falling sky. The only time that Meng issued forth any laughter was at the coming of a heavy rain. Because of this, no one ever heard him laugh—and what a generous, joyous laugh he possessed! But no one would hear, for the friendly rain would unwittingly drown out his enamored squeals. No one saw his bursting smile, which elevated his cheeks and wrinkled the corners of his eyes and chin. All the while Nari held her mother’s head in her lap, as the woman went on throughout the night, growing more and more pathetic as the hours dragged on. The poisons in her body kept her mind in a chamber of darkness; the other children gradually got used to it. Nari could not. Nor could she see it as anyone’s fault but Meng’s. Bitterness had encircled her thoughts to such an extent that every look of pain or indifference from her mother was reflected in her mind as portraits of hatred and the agonizing desire to be freed from her despair.

            One day Nari was along the riverside. She held little Meng in her arms as he stared up at the tall cumulus columns that rose like immense giants in the distance. A man from the province came by. He spoke to one of the gang boys, the one whom Nari had seen carrying a knife, hidden under his shirt. She had seen him fight once, and had heard stories of his skill and authority among the other boys.

            The man and the boy stood close enough for young Nari to hear the subject matter of their conversation. The man was looking for several “new ones” to “keep up with the demands” of his own town. The boy nodded and tilted his head towards a few young children, toothless and ragged, as they unwittingly posed for a picture near a group of romanticizing tourists. The man shook his head and held his left hand out at his eye’s level. He brought it down to his waist and said, “Smaller.”

            Nari had an idea. It possessed her so quickly that before she could understand the ramifications of her decision, it had been made. Now she was free and swiftly running back home, with several dollars tucked safely into her skirt. The boy had taken all the rest. She ran home alone, as fast as she could, to see if she had achieved her miracle. Perhaps now her mother’s life would return to its former state, when once she possessed strength and that long-desired capacity to attend to her daughter’s affections.

            When Nari entered the room, her mother was no longer there, no longer asleep. This excited her at first, and she thought the curse had lifted. Then the approach of footsteps caught her ear, and she ran out into the hallway and into the path of the man who owned the house. “You’re mother is gone,” he said. “Time for you to work.”

            It had begun to rain again, unexpectedly. That is how Cambodian storms often are. They mount up on great columns before plunging down, turning the streets into streams. Some fight the rain with coldness, or with ignorance. Many simply accept it as natural—a thing not to be fought or tampered with. For them, daily activity must remain; thus the Khmer people will travel through the blinding, drenching downpour, often passing through its streams with a characteristic sense of casual disregard.

            Little Meng pulled himself up in the back seat of the van, next to several other children, who slept. He watched, with a smile of delight on his face, as his friend, falling sky, came running up from behind. After a while the road looked strangely familiar to him. He had spent an earlier day with the rain here. He sat down after a time and fell asleep, his mind’s small memory filled with visions of his mother’s grasp, and the white car hood, and a window without its invisible walls.

           

-Ryan

*NOTE: This story and its characters are fictional, depicting events true to life.*