Anguli Ma (8 page)

The Brown Man

He runs down the valley to reach the gate at the bottom; he takes the gravel path that runs along the river. At the fork, he decides to take the narrower path, which continues along below and heads back down to the river. Soon the grass is untrampled, and the factory high above is hidden behind a sheer mound of earth. The brown man is on the riverbank under the edge of the course.

He looks across the water, and there he can see a patch of land between the two parts of the river; a small island overgrown with native shrubs; his own discovery of land.

The brown man leaves his shirt and trousers on the riverbank and wades across. The water entangles itself around his torso and limbs and disentangles itself just as quickly to flow away, erasing even the trace of
itself. Only his head remains dry now, bobbing in the ruddy water. He submerges himself in the cool river and swims to the concealed, tiny island.

His eyes adjust to dim light coming through the undisturbed foliage. Soon, he finds himself at the rocky entrance to a cave. He peers into the darkness, and is pleased to find it dry. He wonders whether this would be a good place to come and sit down for a while. The man positions himself on an outcrop at the entrance to the cave. Water slides down his body, traces lines in the dust and sand, and forms minute tributaries and small poolets. Daylight fades, and his mind returns to their last meeting. The monk had thrown him the challenge, which the brown man now yearns to undertake properly and wholeheartedly. A ghost of a gibbous moon appears to him, high in the sky.

Perhaps the monk spoke in poetry. Perhaps he is a false monk? Is the person most dangerous to him this monk? He searches his body for any traces of anger or animosity, and can find none: the monk evokes neither hatred nor fear. He has no one close enough to be dangerous to him.

The man knows that he who is wounded tries to conceal that festering damage from all around him, including himself. And so, the most dangerous person to him is indeed himself.

The man wonders whether humans can change overnight, and the change be so sudden that we entirely do not recognise our former selves and believe that we have always been this way. Twilight comes
to the small island, darkening and chilling the air. In the cave, the man consoles himself in a strange, childish way. “I will break each finger by finger, joint by joint, and thread my victim's fingers around my neck as a war trophy. It will be a shallow, violent, approach to killing the self, but one has to start somewhere.” His body writhes, and the killer tells himself that to change his mind now would only be to condemn the victim to his broken existence; there is no going back, you must do the job thoroughly because the thing in-between is worse off than the thing living or dead. He holds the twisting, coiling self more tightly, and finishes it in the only way he knows to deliver certainty. And tomorrow, he thinks, he will awaken a stranger.

But in the sparse morning, the man finds that he is still the same: a killer; one who killed; one who dies and is dying. In a world that is also continually dying, the man crawls back into the cave and tries to hide from this pain. Despite all his will he has failed to kill his ego, and this is the first lesson on the path.

Đào

Đào held the handset tightly with both hands.

From the depths of silence, her friend Thảo's voice rose to the surface. “How many hours since?”

“
Chết mẹ tôi, mất hết tiền rồi
. All our money is taken.”

“You have to call everyone immediately to let them know.”

“You and I, we helped each other since the early days at the migrant hostel, I wouldn't betray you now,” Đào pleaded.

Then Thảo repeated coldly, “They won't believe you. That it's simply vanished.”

“You should have been here to collect it immediately – I was doing you a favour. You shouldn't have left it in my house
em Æ¡i
; it became your money the moment your bid was drawn. And now I'm being punished.
Trời đất ơi
, my fate is so terrible.”

“Those who have already collected their
hụi
funds will wash their hands of it. And people like me will lose everything.”

“No, younger sister,” Đào begged, “please, let me look one more time.”

“Don't be stupid. You've already turned all your rooms upside down.” Đào rang her
hụi
members and listened and made promises to each and every one of them that she would raise the money to make the
hụi
scheme work again. Each of them to more or less an extent, emphasised to Đào that the
hụi
is an agreement by a group of people, bound together by the honour of its members.

“You understand me, sister?”

By her fourth call, the sharp, harsh voice told her, “We've already heard. You must pay us. If you kill off the
hụi
, your life will be much more…complicated.”

It was as though her shame was suddenly contagious. People in her community began avoiding her, perhaps they thought she would try to borrow money from them. Đào's footsteps became uncertain, her breath tentative. Her feet slipped while walking on normal ground. Her head felt like it was spinning, and this vertigo made her forget the new words she had learnt. She mixed words around and that made her sentences run backwards.

She needed to buy fruit and cakes for the Moon Festival, so Đào asked Sinh to go with her to Bà Sáu's store. She asked Sinh to come with her, so that she did not have to face the stares of her community.

“Let's tell Trung – you can borrow money off him,” Sinh said.

“No! I'm not going to borrow money from my son – he doesn't even have his own home, renting when he's got a child because he's too lazy to buy a house. Not a man.”

“You can't carry this burden all by yourself,” Sinh crossed her thin arms.

“There is no choice!” Then Đào lowered her voice, “Please don't tell him, I would be so ashamed I'd die.” Đào found that she could hardly breathe.

The girl's eyes remained fixed on the ground.

“Promise me you won't,” Đào begged.

“I'll come with you, but it can't be like this forever,” Sinh said quietly. “We didn't come over here to live in a prison.”

Tuyết

The young woman who lived out the back of grandma's house came into the kitchen in a new dress. She wore her long, black hair down and it flowed like the folds on the pink and black dress. Her stockings were also a brownish-pink colour. Then, Tuyết listened as Sinh told grandma that she'd bought the dress from a charity shop.

“Unlike most of the other clothes, this one was brand-new – it still had the maker's label dangling on it. Originally was twenty-five dollars, but I only paid two for it, can you believe it?”

Tuyết had not seen her grandma, or Bác or even Sinh wear such a lovely dress before. She decided that when she grew up, she would wear nice dresses and grow her hair long as well, rather than wear it like a boy.

Sinh bent down and asked Tuyết if she was going to the Festival. Tuyết did not answer, so Đào told them that they were not this year. Sinh politely told Tuyết not to be silly, everyone was going to the Festival.

“If you have things to do, then Bác and I could take the little girl instead.”

Đào grew pale and said, “We will go later,” in such a weak voice that Tuyết barely heard her.

Rain fell gently as the women who lived out the back left, taking the bus into town. Tuyết sat all that afternoon on the couch, holding the sateen cushions around her and refusing to eat.

At the Festival, grandma bought Tuyết some moon cake from the stall behind the outdoor stage. She held Tuyết's tiny hand too tight. The ground was wet from the recent rain, puddles were scattered like shards of gloomy sky fallen to earth. Tuyết began to eat the cake, but her mouth could no longer taste it. She watched the trodden rubbish and the blinking garish lights reflected in a puddle of mud.

Her eyes widened as a tall old man hurried over. He pushed past Tuyết, and his lit cigarette almost stabbed her in the face. He leaned forward and yelled “Slut your-mother” and “Dog-born” and “Horseslut”, and a quick mixture of other words Tuyết had never heard before. She looked about, and realised that he was shouting those words at her grandmother. The man drew hard on his cigarette, then pointed its red glow at her grandma's face, telling her they were going to send some Cowboys over.

Even complete strangers were staring at them now. Tuyết did not know what was happening, but her grandmother seemed to sink into the wet ground. She bent down to cover Tuyết from the tall old man, and told her that they had to go.

Sinh

Her landlady had begun to lock up the house and close all the blinds on the windows. There were times when strangers would ring the doorbell, which was left unanswered. And so the visitors would try to come down the side of the house, shout their demands for money and bang on the doors until they had spent their anger.

Now, when she came home from cleaning houses and motels, she kept her coat on and silently watched the brittleness of Đào's steps or the old woman's endless chewing. She would eat her bowls of rice quickly, and then head back to her half of the studio or leave the house. Sinh's walks became longer and more frequent as troubles seemed to mount at the house.

The local area included a large expanse of bushland inside the golf course situated in this industrial suburb. She found a walking path that connected her bus stop with the golf course, and then returned to her landlady's house. From behind the high hurricane fence, Sinh marvelled at the well-dressed men and women swinging their long metal sticks, or the caretaker riding his mower around.

Along a secluded part of the course, Sinh followed a line in the ground down to where a golf ball had rolled into the middle of a dried puddle. Over time, it had partially sunk into the earth. Her fingers carefully lifted the half-revealed find out from the soil, and she dusted
it off to reveal its bright orange colour.

It was perfectly dimpled and almost brand new – as far as she could tell. Sinh pondered the life of a golf ball. Its world of civilised ritual and intermittent aerial views over beautiful parklands and areas left to grow wild in a golf course. Although, it can also become lost, abandoned or abducted by children, and left in the garage for years.

Whoever had hit it over the fence had no way of retrieving it, as there were no gates on this side of the golf course. No one was around to claim it, so the girl dropped it into her plastic bag.

When Sinh returned home, the house was still gloomy. Đào was wearing her old jumper, which meant that she had not been outside all day, again. She moved around the kitchen tentatively as if the floor shifted beneath her, and her breathing was more difficult than before. Đào was engrossed in tying up a slow leaking tap stem with clean strips of fabric, and wiping up the film of water on the benchtops.

Sinh knew that her landlady liked it very much when she brought home found things – toilet paper for use in public toilets, flimsy umbrellas, takeaway containers, lost hats and scarves. But none of these was as strangely impossible as the immaculate golf ball she'd picked up that day.

“
Cô ơi
, I'm back. Look what I found!” she exclaimed to Đào's dark back.

Her landlady froze, and in the silence, Đào's neck lifted from the depths of her grief.

“What have you found?”

“Here, turn around and you'll see how marvellous it is!”

It was then Sinh realised her grave mistake. Đào spun around hungrily and her skinny fingers grasped for the object in Sinh's open palm. Then Đào's fingers recognised its round and mottled shape. Her posture dropped instantly and she snarled, “Why are you showing me this useless thing!”

Đào

In the evening, the women ate in silence. Đào sat in the pool of darkness in the corner of the kitchen. A noise came from the bathroom-outside. The three women looked at each other.

“It might be the new tenant,” Sinh said.

“Would he return here?” Đào said.

“Maybe he's forgotten something.”

“Please, Ancestors. Let me recover everyone's factory-earned money.” Đào got up.

“Wait!” Bác said, listening. Her old ears keener than her eyes.

“
Sao
? I'm going to find out where the money is.”

“It might not be him.”

Sinh looked up from the table at her landlady. “Let's call the police.”

“They don't want to hear from silly women afraid of the trees and empty houses; idiot migrants with their tongues full of foreign troubles. I will go check.” She pushed her jade and gold bracelet up into the flesh of her forearm.

“I'll come with you,” Sinh said.

“No!” Đào looked back at Sinh in horror. “No,” she repeated softly. She would not involve this innocent. Đào took the meat cleaver from her kitchen drawer. “I am old and ugly enough to scare the monster away.” She stepped out in the backyard and told them, “Lock the door after me.”