In the Shadow of the Banyan

by Vaddey Ratner

“No, not them. Not the men, but the ideals. Decency, justice, integrity . . . I believed in these and always will. Not only for myself but for our children. All this”—he looked around the courtyard—“will come and go, Aana. Privileges, wealth, our titles and names are transient. But these ideals are timeless, the core of our humanity. I want our girls to grow up in a world that allows them, if nothing else, these. A world without such ideals is madness.”

“There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan tree . . .”

“When you love a flower,” he said, as if wishing to explain his altered appearance, “and suddenly she is gone, everything vanishes with her. I lived because she lived. Now she is gone. Without her, I am nothing, Princess. Nothing.” “Oh.” To mourn then, I thought, is to feel your own nothingness.

The man stood there shaking as the crowds moved about him, his life saved and ignored all in the same moment.

“Can one not be sympathetic to their cause?” Papa said, his voice tentative. “To the ideals they’re fighting for?” “And what’s their cause? We don’t know, do we? And I’m quite certain neither do these children. As for ideals, I don’t think they even know what the word means.”

“I 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.”

When I lie buried beneath this earth, you will fly. For me, Raami. For your papa, you will soar.”

They had nothing between them now except sadness and tears and memories. He pierced her body with words that ripped holes and wounded like bullets.

“I know I’ve not always been present when you need me.” He held her still, pulling her to him now, her arms trapped between his chest and hers. “Often, I lose myself in the constellation of my own ideas, forever searching for points of illumination. But no matter where I look, I find you, shining and bright, offering me whatever it is I seek. You are my one single star. My sun, my moon, my guide and direction. I know as long as I have you, I’ll never lose my way. Even if I cannot touch you, I know I will see you, feel you, from anywhere. If I need you, I know where to find you.” He brought her hand to his heart. “Here—you are always here.”

I didn’t know so much sadness could exist in so small a place.

I hugged him until I could no longer feel him, feel his heart breaking against mine.

“Even when my heart hurts, I must go.

Words gave him wings, he had said. Not solace. Wings. These, I realized, he’d severed and handed to me so I could continue my flight.

One ordeal gave companionship to another, and in this way everyone accepted the fact that they were not alone, that this awfulness was universal, inescapable.

I didn’t know if I was angry at him for his useless pondering or astounded by the absurdity of a god who could be so easily coaxed into returning my father with a simple offering of his brother’s hair.

But I regretted what I saw, which all along I hadn’t wanted to see: her incompleteness, she without him, Mama without Papa. Since he was gone, I’d avoided being alone with her, avoided looking into her eyes. I didn’t want to witness her devastation—I could hardly bear my own.

As much as I longed for the bond I’d had with my father, I knew I could not repeat it with anyone. Others would appear and disappear like fireflies; I could never know when. The best I could hope was to draw from each the light I needed to guide myself on this dark and uncertain path. The rest I’d have to do on my own. And my aloneness, this solitude, would be my strength.

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.

Maybe it was enough that I knew I was not alone, that, at the very least, standing here beside me was this one person, who, unbeknownst to me till now, had all along been journeying this same journey with me, only from the opposite direction.

joy and sorrow often travel the same road and sometimes, whether by grace or misfortune, they meet and become each other’s companion.

I understood now why they were called “people of the paddies.” Their whole life seemed to take place in these muddy fields, and, like the rice stalks, they appeared at once youthful and ancient, tenuous and resilient, light-footed and permanently rooted.

I felt a rush to hug her—to confirm her realness and solidity against my chest, her heartbeats with mine. But I stayed still, afraid I’d unravel what the rain had mended, that my tenderness would break her all over again.

Out here in the natural world, it seemed to me, life and death were simultaneously celebrated and mourned, neither more noted than the other.

I couldn’t help but believe ever more firmly that who we were resided in all we had lost, that the disappearance of home and family, this gaping hole left by Papa and the others, gave shape and weight to our persons, as air to balloons, so that we hovered and drifted, light-headed with grief, anchored to solid ground only by a flimsy thread of self-knowledge—this faint notion that once we had been more, that there had been more to ourselves besides loss.

It was clear that while food fed our bodies, gave us strength to work and breathe another day, silence kept us alive and would be the key to our survival. Anything else, any other emotion—grief, regret, longing—was extraneous, a private, hidden luxury we each pulled out in our separate solitudes and stroked until it shone with renewed luster, before we put it away again and attended to the mundane.

“Words, they are our rise and our fall, Raami. Perhaps this is why I prefer not to say too much.”

“Yes, your papa may have brought you wings, Raami,” she said, whipping around to face me now. “But it is I who must teach you to fly. I want you to understand this. This is not a story.”

She appeared like any other bovine, witless and uninterested, until she mooed, and only then you realized she was still grieving, capable of sustained sorrow, as if death, the awareness of it, is a universal consciousness, the thor that allows us to empathize with another that’s not of our own kind.

and, looking at her now, I wished for this grieving beast of burden a human disease—forgetfulness.

“But love, I know now, hides in all sorts of places, exists in the most sorrowful corner of your heart, and you don’t know how much you really love someone until that person is gone. I realize, to my regret, that all this time I’ve loved one child more than I did another.

I secretly believed the gods lent her to me for my sorrow—the sorrow of seeing you walk and knowing that no one, no mother, will see you as beautiful as I see you, that your beauty was in your strength, in your ability to pick yourself up from a fall and walk again, as I’ve seen you do again and again,

“In this sense I’ve loved you more than I loved your sister, because even though you are broken and imperfect I never wavered in my belief that you belong only to me.

“I have no stories to tell you, Raami. There is only this reality—when your sister died, I wanted to die with her. But I fought to live. I live because of you—for you. I’ve chosen you over Radana.”

Now I saw her beauty for what it was—a forbearance against loss, her own stolen childhood. All these years she had drawn strength from silence, while I’d sought solace in words.

“We’ve always known you don’t belong to us.” Pok handed Mama Radana’s little bolster pillow. “But still we love you—” He choked on his own words. Mama was right. Love hides in all sorts of places, in the most sorrowful corner of your heart, in the darkest and most hopeless situation.

we continued to hold one another, so tight that not even air could come between us. If we died now it would be as a single entity.

Now I knew what it was—the odor of dying. Not of death, but the act of it, of your body giving up even as your mind fights to stay alive.