In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

“Good god, they’re doing what they said they would—they’re expelling all foreigners.”

At some point they started talking with us and we learned they were village boys who’d joined the Revolution because—as one put it—“guns were a lot lighter to lug around than plows.”

“They made the abbot take off his robe there and put on civilian clothes,” the sweeper said, pointing to the festering mounds. “I don’t know why they bothered, if they were going to do what they did. Perhaps they feared the cloth more than the man. I don’t know.”

It was clear to me now that while books could be torn and burned, the stories they held needn’t be lost or forgotten.

If you know how to read and write, the Organization needs you. The Organization calls out to you to help rebuild the country.

The Organization spoken about similar to Big Brother

“Words, you see,” he said, looking at me again, “allow us to make permanent what is essentially transient. Turn a world filled with injustice and hurt into a place that is beautiful and lyrical.

Tevodas, it was clear to me now, were not celestial beings at all but earthly things, beautiful things I saw every day, and what made them beautiful was precisely that they were momentary, just a glimpse here and there before vanishing again.

They say mine is a ravaged land, Scarred and broken by hate— On a path to self-extermination. Yet no other place So resembles my dream of heaven. The lotus fields that cradle my home Each flower a reincarnated spirit— Or perhaps, like me, A child who wishes to be reborn Should dreams become possible again.

On closer observation, it was clear that they were not so much two different people as they were complements of each other: he felt, she acted; he thought, she spoke. Two sides of the same revelation.

“There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan.” “A prophecy, I know.” The prophecy, Papa had explained that day long ago when Om Bao went missing, said a darkness would settle upon Cambodia. There would be empty houses and empty roads, the country would be governed by those with no morals or teaching, and blood would course so high as to reach the underbelly of an elephant. In the end only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute would survive.

“Female rains?” someone asked. “What are they?” “Rains that weep a whole river,” said a woman from a village not far from here, “and flood a plain.” “When will they come?” “When everything is dead.”

Rain gathered in her eyes and I felt that if she blinked it would drown me.

told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything—your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world’s suffering . . .