Tua and the Elephant (2 page)

Tua spun around and searched the rows of people on mats having their muscles and limbs pummeled and pulled until she spotted Auntie Duan, the blind masseuse.

“
Sawatdee kha,
Auntie. How did you know it was me?”

“By the sound of your footsteps.”

“But it’s too noisy to hear my footsteps,” Tua argued.

“Then I must have smelled you,” Duan shrugged.

Tua still wasn’t convinced. “What do I smell like?”

“Night jasmine and chocolate sauce,” guessed Auntie Duan.

Tua opened her mouth but was too flabbergasted to speak.

“Tua, don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open like a carp,” hollered Auntie Nam, the curry noodle vendor. “Run over to Uncle Sip’s and fetch me some bean sprouts. And don’t let the old bandit cheat you,” she warned, flipping a ten-
baht
coin into Tua’s hands.

“
Kha,
” Tua said, after closing her mouth and inspecting the coin. Then she leapt into the market like a cat, weaving her way through and around the
legs of the shoppers until she came to a stop in front of Uncle Sip’s vegetable stand.

“
Sawatdee kha,
Uncle.”

“What’s that?” he barked, still angry with the chef who had offered such a ridiculously low price for his cabbages. Some people didn’t seem to know that life is a wheel, and that every living thing is only a spoke in the wheel of life.

“Life is a wheel, Tua,” Uncle Sip declared suddenly, as if the idea had just occurred to him.

“And we are only spokes in the wheel of life, Uncle.”

This response brought Sip out of his reverie. He looked down at Tua and grinned like a gecko.

“You are so smart, Tua. Who taught you that?”

“You did, Uncle.”

“No wonder you’re so smart, then. Did you finish your homework?”

“
Kha,
” Tua said, crossing her fingers behind her back. “All finished.”

“Good. That’s good, because you’ll never get ahead in this world on night market philosophy alone. You need an education. Let’s test your math and haggling skills. Pretend you’re here to do some shopping.”

“But I
am
here to do some shopping. I need bean sprouts for Auntie Nam.”

“Pretend you’ve come on an errand to buy bean sprouts for Auntie Nam,” Sip suggested, as if this, too, was an original idea.

“Ten
baht
a pound,” he announced.

Tua handed him the ten-
baht
coin.

“You’re supposed to haggle,” he whispered.

“May I have some change, please?”

Uncle Sip handed Tua a bag of bean sprouts and a five-
baht
coin.

“Good. Very good indeed,” he said. “Well-mannered and forthright. Manners are harder to teach than business skills. We’ll work on the haggling tomorrow.”

“
Kha,
Uncle,” Tua said, and shot off back to Auntie Nam.

Auntie Nam plucked the bag of bean sprouts out of Tua’s hands and replaced it with a bowl of curry noodles.

“Yum, Auntie!” Tua said. “I love
khao soi.
”

Auntie Nam held out the flat of her hand while Tua, balancing the hot bowl in one tiny palm like a juggler, dropped the five-
baht
coin into it. Auntie Nam squeezed her eyes into slits and stared down at the coin with suspicion, sniffed approval at last, pocketed it, and brushed her hand affectionately across Tua’s cheek.

“Good girl,” she said. “Now eat.”

“
Kha,
Auntie,” Tua said, and sat down on a little plastic stool that seemed custom-made for a girl her size.

“
Aroy mak mak,
” she said, expressing her pleasure to the bowl of khao soi in her lap. The aroma rose up from it in a spicy cloud that encircled her
head and poured into her nostrils, filling her with a warm and comforting glow.

She might have remained in that trance had Auntie Nam not dropped a handful of crispy fried noodles into Tua’s bowl and squeezed half a lime over the top of them. The gesture broke the spell Tua was in, and she lifted the bowl to her lips with both hands and drank the rich, thick curry sauce. “It’s so delicious!” she repeated, this time to Auntie Nam instead of the bowl.

Auntie Nam bowed a wai with her palms pressed together, thanking Tua for the compliment.

After washing her bowl and spoon, and all of the other bowls and spoons that needed washing, Tua bid good luck to Auntie Nam and continued on her rounds. She stopped for a gossip and a giggle with her school chum Kip, who, with her mother, Na, sold hand-painted paper umbrellas, silks, sarongs, and Thai fisherman pants. When Na called Kip back to work, Tua began following a scruffy brown dog with a muzzle over his snout.

“Why are you wearing that muzzle?” she asked the brown dog.

The brown dog led Tua to a quiet corner of the market. Then he settled down on his haunches beside a large, teetering pile of boxes and crates, and tugged at the muzzle with his front paws.

“Would you like me to help you take that off?” she asked him.

The brown dog lifted his ears, tilted his head in an attitude of welcome surprise as if to say, “What an especially good idea,” and attempted as best he could to affect a grin behind the muzzle.

“First you must tell me why you’re wearing it,” Tua said.

But before he could speak, if speech is possible for a brown dog with a muzzle on his snout, a slim gray cat dropped from the sky (or perhaps from the wall separating the market from the street) and onto the boxes and crates. The cat glared down at the brown dog, then snarled and hissed—rather rudely, Tua thought. The dog must have thought it
rude as well, for he leapt up from his crouch, sending the boxes, crates, and the gray cat scattering.

That was as good an answer to the question of why he was wearing a muzzle as Tua could have gotten from the brown dog himself, muzzle or no muzzle. It was a mystery unlocked.

But now, there in the wall, a new mystery presented itself. Behind where the boxes and crates had been stacked higher than a brown dog can jump—and gaping like old Grandma Orn’s toothless mouth—there, looking just big enough for Tua to squeeze through … was a hole.

If walls could talk, this one would have invited Tua to step through the hole to the other side.

Tua put her foot through the hole as if testing her weight on the outer limb of a tree.

“I’ll just have a look,” she said.

Then, with a backward glance, she squeezed the rest of herself through. Straightening up to her full height on the other side, she cast her eyes about the busy street.

The buildings were taller and grander (some of them even had names), and they seemed to lean over the sidewalk as if inspecting the traffic, human and motorized, before selecting who or what they would direct inside them. They often chose badly, or so it seemed to Tua, for they spit out as many through one door as they admitted through another.

“Perhaps they can’t make up their minds,” Tua supposed. “There are just too many people and cars and motorbikes to choose from.”

And it was while she was musing on the flighty nature of large buildings that she found herself caught up in a current of pedestrian traffic. Tua didn’t attempt to struggle out of this current any more than a leaf caught in a flooding gutter would have done, but allowed it to take her where it would.

Before long she found herself in a crowd of unfamiliar people, all of whom were much taller than she—so tall, as it happened, that they blocked from view the landmarks she used to navigate the city by. When this human current stopped at last, she tugged on the nearest sleeve to beg assistance.

“
Kho thot kha,
” Tua said, begging the woman’s pardon.

But the face that looked down from the sleeve she was tugging was not a Thai face. It was a
farang
face.

A
farang
is a creature from a foreign land. It can be from France, or Germany, or Ireland, or
England, or Sweden, or Fiji, or Italy, or Australia, or New Zealand, or Uruguay, or even the United States of America. Tua had seen many
farangs
before, but she’d never actually met one.
Farangs,
unless they are unusually clever, don’t speak Thai. The
farang
whose sleeve Tua had been tugging was unusual in appearance only.

“Oh, hullo, honey,” the big-nosed
farang
said, lifting her bug-eyed sunglasses and leaning over Tua.

Tua leaned back on her heels. “
Sawatdee kha,
” she replied.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any small change for you, darling,” she said, and patted Tua on the top of the head.

Tua bunched her fists and twisted her mouth into a frown. It is taboo and impolite to touch a Thai on the top of the head. The top of the head is the highest part of the body, spiritually as well as physically.

“Frowns pinch the heart,” she remembered her mother saying, and immediately unwrinkled her face.

“Oh, all right, dearie,” the
farang
said impatiently as she gave Tua a twenty-
baht
note and dismissed her with a fluttering hand.

Tua recalled what Uncle Sip had so often said about
farangs:
that they were under the misapprehension that they were the wheel of life itself rather than spokes like everyone—and everything— else. “
Farangs
are as noisy as frogs in a pond,” he was fond of saying. “And puffed up to twice their normal size.”

A twenty-
baht
note is nothing to scoff at. It would buy four pounds of bean sprouts for one with bargaining skills. But Tua had no use for it. She no more needed money than a chicken needs teeth. Sometimes possessing nothing is like having everything.

That was why she began to cast her eyes about for someone to share this small fortune with. But she was still imprisoned in a forest of legs and hips and stomachs.

Suddenly, like a train leaving a station, this mass of body parts lurched forward on the signal of the changing light, and carried its prisoner, Tua, with it.

Escape through the scissoring legs was impossible, and weaving around them only produced more legs, hips, buttocks, and stomachs. This mass of legs would stop from time to time, collapse into itself, pull apart again, and continue on its many-legged way, like a giant caterpillar.

“
Kho thot kha,
” excuse me, Tua said as she tugged the back pocket in front of her. “You’re crushing me.”

“Thief!” the pocket cried out in alarm. “Pickpocket!”

Those four syllables had the power of an incantation, for no sooner had they been spoken than the legs and their attachments scurried away in all directions like ants fleeing a monsoon.

Tua found herself standing alone in an open square beside a fountain. This was not a fountain
Tua had ever seen before. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the skyline in search of a familiar landmark. And just as she was about to swallow the lump in her throat, she swung her head back to the gray blur that her eyes had bumped over: something vaguely, fuzzily familiar.

“It’s an elephant!” Tua cried out, and rudely pointed her finger.