Awesome Blossoms: Horn OK Please (26 page)

“After you left, Ani Karma La bought a restaurant down the hill. She made all the nuns work in the restaurant in the night. She threatened that if we refused, she would stop all English classes and all philosophy classes. We cooked momos and gave it to the customers, but the men looked scary. All the nuns were very scared to go up the steps in dark. One day we decided to not work in the restaurant any more, and Ani Karma La, she stopped all the classes.

All the nuns got upset and frightened. No English, no philosophy, no Tibetan. Only cooking and working and puja. After some time, we met the older nuns.” 

There had been a revolution. There had been an uprising.

Ani Karma had been exiled to her palace built of dirty money. The nuns now governed themselves through an elected committee of elders. They were free.

The food was still god-awful though. The leftovers shunned by both the dogs and the monkeys, had to be thrown down the banking to rot. The nuns didn’t care.

As I waited for the bus to rattle towards me on the road by the river at the bottom of the steps, I heard the rushing of the water, the distant beeping of horns, and the lofty screech of an eagle. What on earth was I doing here? How had I found home in such a place? I saw myself from above;
a young, white woman, five feet ten
inches, from Yorkshire, with a rubbish tattoo under my clothes, waiting at a remote bus stop on Pathankot Road.

Five years later, in my blouse and pencil skirt and proper shoes, I’m thankful to Channa Masala for leading me to the Litter Man. Thankful to the litter man for shaking me out of some of my self-importance. Without your help, I would never have considered Muhammad to be an egg, just like everyone else.

***
  

CHAPTER TWENTY-
FIVE

By Christina Francis

***

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

- Saint Augustine

The Ghost of
Beng Mealea

W
hen I first saw her, it seemed to me as though she sprang out of nowhere. I was ambling around the stunning ruins of Beng Mealea, wide-eyed and wonder-struck, and I was pretty sure that I was the only one there… And right then, shattering the perfect silence around me, she chimed, “Watch your step lady!” I almost jumped with fright. Beng Mealea can have that effect on you. Of all the temple ruins in Cambodia, this one is completely isolated and truly magnificent, in an eerie sort of way.

“Watch your step,” the stranger warned again, as she stepped out of the mossy green shadows of the temple ruins. Her voice was a tad softer this time, and she sounded concerned as she pointed towards the rubble I was about to step on. The stones that made the path in front of me had come loose and if not for her, I would have stepped on them and come tumbling down. “Thank you,” I gushed, as she nodded in response, flashing a warm smile. She, like many others whom I’d met during the past few days in Cambodia, had a gold front tooth. Only, hers was faded; almost blackened rather, with age, the gold coating now only a pale shade on the tooth. She wore a faded blue shirt and a pair of trousers, which I had come to recognize as the uniform of the guards at the temples of Angkor Wat.

I took a deep breath and wondered which way to go — the temple, or what remained of it, looked like a giant heap of big black stones, some propped up against others to create some sort of semblance to the glory that existed long back. You could make out the shapes if you looked carefully — a door here, an archway there, huge walls of black stones that seemed to rise to the sky only to come crumbling down midway. The moss-covered stones gleamed in the soft sun filtering in through the canopy of ancient trees that towered over the temple complex. It was a mossy green world with an aura of the past.

There was a calm that’s typical of abandoned places. And yet, there was an unmistakable chaos to the calmness, as though the air around it was crackling with secret stories, waiting to be told. The effect was haunting.

“This way,” my kind stranger said again, and without another word, she walked ahead of me. I followed her. She tip-toed on a flimsy plank of wood that served as a makeshift bridge between two massive, high walls of the ruins. Her frayed canvas shoes had holes in them. But they seemed to know their way around this place, her steps never faltered even once. She had reached the other side already, and I was still mulling, wondering whether I should just stick to the straight wooden path that ran around the wall with a sign that read ‘This Way’.

“
Come this way,” she said again. I followed her, one careful foot on the wooden plank after the other, till I reached the giant wall. She led the way, this time walking along a narrow stone ledge on the wall. I followed suit, gingerly. She jumped onto a huge boulder, and held out her hand to help me climb over. Then, holding on to the branch of a sturdy creeper that was swinging low, I stepped right into the middle of a wonderland.

Streams of sunbeam trickled in through gaps in the roof. I figured I was in
side a large antechamber of what was once the temple complex. My new-found temple companion pointed to a large window frame to my left. “There, nice light for nice picture…you can click,” she said. And lo! That was the best light one could ask for. I couldn’t stop clicking, amateur though I am.

“
You can go and sit on the tree now… I will click,” she said, egging me to climb over the window and step onto a pile of stones and rubble, covered in a film of beautiful moss. Large vines of some unstoppable creepers had taken root in this room, some branches, thick with age, stooping low enough to make a natural swing. I sat on one. She said ‘cheese’ and clicked, freezing on film my wide-eyed excitement at getting to explore this beautiful temple ruin all to myself, away from the hordes of Chinese tourists that arrive by the busloads at every other temple. Oh, they were here too, the Chinese. With their impeccable travel wardrobe, excited chatter, and enviable camera lenses and paraphernalia. But thanks to my Beng Mealea friend, I was in a part of the temple no one else even knew existed, perhaps.

“
What’s your name…” I asked her, after thanking her for the picture.

“My
name Mai,” she said, her hand crossing her heart and her gold tooth gleaming in the faint sunlight. In that one moment Mai looked like a young girl, though I knew from the deep lines on her wrinkled face that she had seen some very rough decades.

“Come, this way” she said, hurrying down a long alleyway. I was inside the heart of Beng Mealea’s ruins. It was so beautiful that my voice came out only in reverent whispers. Through the cracks in the walls, or holes in the ceilings, I could see the other tourists circling the high walls walking on the wooden ramps.

“This used to be the passage to main temple area,” Mai informed me, her voice echoing in the closed alleyway whose floors and walls were still intact, even after a thousand years or more. Some more climbing — this time over large dislodged boulder-like stones, half-collapsed walls, and root-infested rooms later — we arrived at yet another spot of the ruin. Perched on a broken door way, Mai pointed out to the right, “Look there…nice light, nice picture”.

Clearly, she had an understanding of how important light and shadow were to make good photographs. I wondered where she had learned that from. Sprawling out in front of me were the high walls of an inner courtyard, now covered with roots, wines and branches of all possible sizes. They looked like long tentacles with a hold so strong, a reach so far, and a grip so tight, that it gave me goosebumps. My viewfinder showed that I had captured some stunning poetry in stone. I was pleased.

“Thank you Mai…You know so much. How long have you been working here?” I asked.

“10 years. I have been here for 10 years,” she said. That explained why she knew the underbelly of this place as though it were the back of her hand. She walked briskly ahead of me, stopping every now and then to help me negotiate a tricky ascend over slippery stones, or give me her hand so I could climb over large heaps of crumbled structures. We came to a fairly bare room that was lit up by the soft winter sun coming in sleepily through the roof…I didn’t find anything to photograph here, until she urged me to look through one of the exquisite railings into yet another smaller room. It was filled with more rubble and wild undergrowth. But I followed where her fingers pointed to and lo! In all that unremarkable randomness lay hidden some carvings of breathtaking beauty. Shiva, Parvati, some celestial dancers….

Mai moved quickly. At some point, when she walked ahead of me quietly, I even wondered if she was for real. She walked in shadows, spoke in clipped sentences and sometimes, she seemed as old as the temple itself. She turned around and smiled at me, as though she heard my thoughts. “This way” she said again, as I jogged to catch up with her. Agile though she was, I noticed that she had been limping.

“What happened to your leg Mai, are you hurt?”

“This? Oh! This not real leg,” she replied, pushing her fingers into the gap between the stub of flesh that was left of her right leg and her prosthetic limb to show me what she meant. She had just one leg. I felt terrible for having asked her, but she continued her climb up the narrow steps and steep stony walls, without losing track.

”I lost my leg in a mine blast,” she continued, as we stepped out in the sun, into an opening in the temple’s inner complex. “A mine blast near Siem Reap in 1978. My husband lost both eyes. He is now blind,” she continued in the same breath. Something sank inside me, but Mai enthusiastically pointed to a heap of rubble and a beautiful building beside it, still intact. “This was Library. This temple had two Libraries. Now all broken of course,” she laughed. “You take picture,” she said, even as I clicked distractedly.

I remembered reading somewhere that during the end of Khmer Rouge days, Cambodia’s borders and a lot of interior territories were infested with landmines. The result? Some 64,000 landmine casualties and over 25,000 amputees since 1979. Now that these statistics had a human face, they were no longer mere numbers. My heart felt heavy.

We walked in silence for a while. Well, I walked. She limped. We had just climbed up an endless mound of stones to come down to a clearing and I was a little short of breath. I felt ashamed at my urban comfort-induced lethargy. Mai inspired me with her fitness and her spirit; she seemed to glide over the hurdles, both literal and metaphorical.

“
And there, that is the bridge,” she said, pointing to an impossibly beautiful ruin of a stone bridge, falling apart yet held together as though by magic. “There used to be a moat here, where we are standing now…,” she said. The earth below my feet seemed parched, but it wasn’t hard for my mind to transport me back to a time when a gentle stream would have gurgled at the same spot. Perhaps the moat, or the stream, was dotted with wild lotus plants and swans. Perhaps there were crocodiles… Perhaps…

“Here, come here…” Mai said, shaking me out of my day dream yet again. Or, is she the day dream here, I wondered, considering there wasn’t a single soul around us. I couldn’t be in the same Cambodia, looking at the same temple ruins that attract thousands of noisy tourists. This was exactly my idea of the lost temples of Cambodia like I imagined them to be. In fact, this was better.

Mai pointed out a large temple-swallowing tree in front of us … its branches had intertwined themselves into the windows and doorways, and large roots had dug deep into the wall. “Beng Mealea can make Ta Prom (Angkor’s most stunning and most photographed temple of Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider fame) seem like someone had just forgotten to mow the lawn…” read Lonely Planet’s snippet on Beng Mealea. Now I saw why. From a certain angle, it seemed as though the whole massive tree was balancing on that one ancient, flimsy stonewall of the temple. Mai was the one who showed me that angle. She knew her stuff.

After taking my sweet time to click crowd-free pictures of the
jungle-infested temple, Mai led me to another clearing. Some tourists now spotted us from the stairway far above and seemed curious, wondering how we got there! It would take them a full 20 minutes to figure out the round-about way, but by then Mai had already made me climb a tree, and, reluctantly, hang upside down like Tarzan, or er, Jane, and even say ‘cheeeese’. Her enthusiasm was infectious. Two young Korean girls — backpackers, yet immaculately dressed, reached there by the time I scrambled down. They seemed envious of me, and my Facebook-worthy photo opportunity. They had no clue how I got there on top of that tree. I showed them how and offered to click a picture for them. They squealed in delight when they saw the result. I asked them if they could click a picture of Mai and me. Mai took her hat off, ran her fingers through her scanty, cropped hair and gave the picture her best smile. She even checked to see if the picture was good enough. I bid the giggling backpackers goodbye, wished them good luck, and followed Mai. She told me some more stories of the temple and the ruins, showed me some stunning photo opportunities and soon, we were coming to the end of my personalized tour of Beng Mealea.

She led me towards the west gate, rich with its carvings. On the way, she told me the story of her children — a boy and girl aged 10 and 8
respectively— whom she had lost in the same mine blast. I couldn’t even begin to fathom that tragedy. A moment was all it took for one whole family to be shattered forever… their life changed in a moment, never to be the same again.

Like it goes with life, and death, a moment is all it takes.

Mai’s grief had become my own grief in that one moment. The kind of grief that rises from the pit of your stomach and spreads through your chest and rises like bile in your throat, till you are not sure whether you want to weep or howl or simply gag. Mai never had kids again… I gave her a half hug and told her that everything would be okay. I am not a hugger, but this seemed in order. Mai only smiled. She accepted my small token of thanks with the same smile. Like everyone else I met in Cambodia, she too didn’t as much as peek into her palm to see what I’d given her. She simply took it, put it away and said thanks, as though it didn’t even matter. I felt small for thinking she would check…

I began searching for my parents now…they had stayed behind and toured Beng Mealea and its periphery like the other tourists, while I’d followed Mai and plunged into its dark, cold, heart that thumped with roots and trees and ancient stories of forgotten gods and kings. I’d asked my folks to wait by the benches in any case, but I couldn’t find them.

“Oh! Mama-Papa are not here. They are at East side. Come this way,” she said, as she took me by hand and led the way.

Uh, how did she know I was here with my parents and that I was looking for them? And that they were at the East gate?

I didn’t ask, but I followed her as if by habit. We walked for a good 10 minutes, all the way around. “There…” she said, as she pointed afar. And sure enough, there they were across the road, just outside the temple gate, resting on a rock in the shade of some trees.

I offered her my final thanks and byes, and walked off. I looked back a couple
of times to see if Mai was for real. Or if she was some ghost who lived in the mossy green shadows of the beautiful Beng Mealea, chasing sunbeams and smiling at wide-eyed tourists hungry for stories.

As though in response, she waved out to me excitedly, like a child.

I walked back smiling sadly, with a lump in my throat and warmth in my heart.