Anguli Ma Read online

  The sky starts spitting small, cold droplets. The monk notices a large lopsided man leaning on the side of the barbeque shelter. He isn’t there to jog or walk a dog or eat his lunch, and seems without purpose, other than to watch the monk. The clouds darken dramatically and rain begins to pour down. The monk dashes beneath a wattle and sits under its luxuriant silver-green foliage. Before him is a declination where he can look over the view of dense shrubs and trees as he waits for the heavy rain to pass. He takes out a book from his cloth pouch.

  The lopsided man’s skin is deeply tanned and leathery. He walks around the back of the shelter, then climbs down the slope amongst the trees and shrubs and is now standing only twenty metres in front of the resting monk. The man stands there with his hands in his pockets.

  The monk reads from a book about Emptiness in Nature and Man. He applies his reading to contemplate how this very park has been shaped by the different elements of water, sun, wind and air. The largest trees growing under those power lines on the other side of the river had come from tiny seeds, which had then been nourished by water…

  The monk stops reading and looks up from his book. He sees the brown man, now less than ten metres away, standing beside a slender, dripping eucalypt with something metallic flashing in his hand.

  The monk lowers his eyelids, returns to his breath. The large trees in this park have within them light from the sun and the nutrients from the soil. These non-tree elements have transformed into tree-elements: trunk, bark, foliage, roots like strands of hair digging into the sandy earth. This is the nature of Emptiness, contemplates the monk, and he lifts his eyes a third time. The brown man is right before him, drenched, his gnarled fingers curled around a pair of meat shears.

  Heat rises on the monk’s cheeks and tension increases in his body. He observes the changing; the slightly harder breathing, the unusual strength entering his arms and legs, an increased sharpness of vision. The monk detects in the other man a faint rotting smell, festering in the intestines perhaps, causing a dull pain of which the brown man is no longer aware. The monk’s nostrils flare softly as he inhales the whole earth with each tender, deliberate breath. Continuing to sit still, the monk remembers, “I came here to read”, so he reads aloud from his book, raising his gentle voice to meet the stranger: “If you meet the Buddha on the road,” his voice betrays a flicker of tension, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

  The Brown Man

  With each step, his feet sink into the gravel. His hands clench the heavy sharpness in his pockets as he walks along the dirty river coursing its way through these industrial suburbs. High above him is an escarpment with shabby grass and thistles. He continues along the path as it diverges from the river and opens on to a plateau surrounded with shrubs and grasses. In the centre is a bench beneath a weeping, misshapen tree.

  On the embankment, he can see the path resuming and veering back down towards the river. Suddenly, a bald, shiny head appears from behind a shrub. It is a monk, untangling himself from an overgrown corner of the deserted park.

  The man is so shocked he almost falls backwards; the monk has dirty hands and a dirty brown robe. The monk sees him and nods, then sits underneath the weeping tree. He lowers his eyes, as if he is asleep while sitting upright.

  The brown man stands there for a long time. He watches how the monk arranges each finger like the petals of the lotus flower. The brown man looks down at his own fingers, which are thick and dirty. His own body is scarred and deformed, broken and mended wrong. The clouds draw from the horizon and begin to foam and gather overhead.

  He approaches the monk, feet brushing against the serrated tussocks. A strong wind forces the branches of the tree downward in one big gust and the cold rain comes. Still the monk does not look up. The man is astonished – perhaps the monk is blind and does not realise how menacing he is. So he musters greater fearsomeness; his eyes widen to show the pink membranes of his eye sockets; the furrow of his brow deepens and forces its way downwards almost between his eyes; his teeth present their dull lustre to his seated victim; he lets out a wild cry that pierces the emptiness of the park. This he does several times, and after each howl, stops to watch for the monk’s reaction of fear and terror. Instead, the monk remains motionless, his eyes lowered. The brown man takes the meat shears from his pocket; with his other hand he reaches out to touch the monk. He feels the warmth of the monk’s skin, then notices how icy his own fingers are, how the rain has made his hands so cold.

  The monk opens his eyes wide. The brown man shows his weapon, and demonstrates his intent; he intimates the cutting of his own fingers and limbs. The monk watches the man impassively. During the sawing action of the shears, the brown man’s face changes, pulling downwards like plastic, and he starts to cry out, no longer with coercion, but with fear of the monk’s composure.

  The monk interrupts the man, “If you meet the Buddha on the road…”

  The brown man stops cutting into his own hand and redirects the shears at the seated monk. Each of the monk’s words seeps through his skin, muscles and internal organs, bleeding some perceptual outline that separates him from the world, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

  Bác

  The old woman lay in bed. She was relishing the warmth seeping into her bones like the humid embrace of the tropics. Her frail body felt protected under the covers. She knew that her landlady was going to come into the studio at any moment, so she should probably get up and put a coat on. But Bác kept her eyes shut against the new day and continued to roast underneath her blankets, reminiscing about the plump and brightly coloured fruit at the market stalls, and her friends tossing cakes wrapped in banana leaf to her. The more she remembered the generosity of her childhood friends, the more she unclenched her hands from the blanket and opened them to the heavens. She was staring at the ceiling, peering into her memories when Đào’s figure appeared in the studio.

  Bác withdrew from the brightness of the past, to sit up slowly on her thin bed-mattress. Đào moved across the partitioned studio and pulled the nylon curtains open. Bác was suddenly bathed in the harsh daylight, and she quickly shielded her eyes.

  She knew that her landlady was here to collect the board and lodgings for the month. Instead of enacting the transaction, Bác charged into her complaints of aches and pains, and how she was far from even her distant relatives in this strange nước lạ quê người.

  “It is too late for me, in my old age, to make use of this new land. Nếu tôi mà tuổi em, what I could do with this new beginning, but I don’t have your energy. Why did he take me along to abandon me on this land? And now he is in some watery grave never to be seen again.”

  Đào stared mutely at the cardboard boxes and a still-life print, of glistening European fruit, that made up the partition in the room.

  “My only son, so có hiếu. He didn’t want me to spend my dying days amongst mấy Ổng – bọn cướp đất tao! They confiscated our land, our house, our entire life savings, and called him ‘thằng ngụy’, a ‘puppet’ of the Americans. For which nationalist ideology did they do this? For their own children to be fattened by our ancestral property, để cho con cháu nó ăn! This is what it means to be a conquered people…And then to come over here, to the cold, and work like một con servant. You work your fingers to the bone too, Đào, and what for? To lurch into your old age in this foreign land? Feel these hands of mine, feel what they’ve become.” Bác reached out and clasped her landlady’s hands.

  Đào gently pulled away from the old woman’s icy, thin fingers and returned her hands to the plastic bag on her lap. “Cô, do not think about the past too much; thinking about it just makes us sad. And what’s the point?” Đào said. Then, to cheer Bác up, Đào changed the topic. “You should wear socks to protect your feet. What do you expect if you wear open sandals in this cold weather?”

  Bác became aware of her poor feet, how the wrinkly skin gathered just above her cracked heels.
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  “I am not used to socks, for more than six decades my feet have been bare…” Bác protested.

  Đào slowly produced a new pair of socks from the plastic bag. “But Bác, I even had to argue with the stall holder over them. He told me that woollen socks were warmer. What lies! He was just working on a commission. Then I said to him, ‘Mr Stallholder, I could buy three pairs of nylon socks for the same price, and wear them all at the same time!’ And this made him laugh a lot, so he gave me a discount.”

  Đào handed her the dark blue nylon socks. “You wear them, Bác.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I will wear them later.”

  She rose slowly, and put them in a drawer in front of the partition, without taking them out of the wrapping.

  Bác would eventually send the socks back to the countryside in Việt Nam as a gift from the West. They would arrive six months later, after having been thoroughly inspected by the new Communist government for “subversive political content”. Then, back in the village, what remained of Bác’s extended family would be allowed to collect them from the State-run postal service. There, the socks would be highly prized, but completely useless due to the tropical heat, and would also be kept in a drawer.

  Đào

  Đào left the studio after she received Bác’s money, and went along the narrow path past the bathroom-outside. She crossed the yard to the garage. There was a stench in the air. Đào wondered if the smell was coming from the vacant lot beyond her back fence. Perhaps a rat, or a stray cat, had trapped itself in some disused piece of equipment or column of tyres.

  Perhaps the thick smell came from Đào’s neighbours, an Australian couple whom she never saw except when the ruddy-faced husband worked in his garden, swearing at his lawnmower. He also swore at the houses down the street, who all mowed their lawns in an accidental sequence, two-stroke engines starting up, one after another, throughout the entire weekend. “Fuck fuck fuck,” Đào would hear her neighbour mutter, just loud enough to be heard from the other side of the fence. The only other times she saw him outside was when he drank beer, alone, in his immaculate garden. Then Đào could hear his AM radio and the names of horses jostling one another for the race announcer’s breath.

  Đào sniffed the air along her neighbour’s fence; the rotting smell did not come from there. No, it was nearer. Perhaps from her garage.

  Anguli Ma had gone to work, so perhaps she should have a look around. A truck roared past, its fumes deadened the smell in her nostrils for a few breaths. As she came closer, Đào was overcome by the fetid stench of rotting meat. She knocked on the warped door and waited. A soft breeze came over her and provided a moment of relief. It was silent inside the garage, so Đào took out her key and started to open the door.

  Đào heard Anguli Ma’s footsteps. He was coming down the side of the house. What was he doing home so early? She heard him open the gate, so she hid the key inside her fist and proceeded to knock on his garage door again. She stood and waited earnestly.

  “What are you looking for?” His voice was right by her ear.

  “Oh,” Đào turned around in feigned surprise, “I thought you were sleeping inside.”

  “I’m at work this time of the day.”

  “I am collecting the money for board and lodgings.”

  Anguli Ma unlocked the warped wooden door and was closing it after him, but Đào pushed her way in.

  “What’s the smell in here?” She stepped inside the garage. Clothes and shoes had been strewn indiscriminately on the floor, cigarettes lay dead in an overflowing tray of ash and crushed butts, empty beer cans had collapsed on the ground. The walls had previously been stained from water damage, but now there flourished plumes of mould. The air inside was stagnant, which magnified the rancid stench of meat. Anguli Ma reached down to pick a wrinkled jacket from the floor. He checked its pockets for his tobacco and lighter, and then slipped it on.

  Đào scanned the room for the source of the smell. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the bed. While holding her breath, she ran over and picked up a bowl of decomposing Bún Bò Huế that sat on the concrete floor. When she stood up, Đào caught a dark, disdainful look on Anguli Ma’s face, which was immediately concealed by a genial mask.

  “Thank you,” Anguli Ma said after the shortest pause. His voice was eerily small, as though it came to her from very far away. “You’ve found it. How forgetful of me. My sense of smell seems to be not what it was since working at that abattoir.” The frayed collar of his T-shirt was awry, as was his mouth.

  Đào felt a wave of nausea about to crash over her, and ran outside to get a lungful of fresh air.

  In between deep intakes of breath, Đào asked, “Have you got the money for me?”

  “Unfortunately, I won’t have it until next…Wednesday.” His face was half hidden in the darkness of the garage; his voice seemed thin and detached.

  “What? Next week?” Đào said, “I need the money for the hụi this Saturday!” She was about to dart into the garage once more, but he had closed the door.

  Đào cursed under her breath, “Thằng thô bỉ!”

  She stood there looking at the wood panelling, unsure what to do.

  Then, her rashness was restrained by a new thought. In the pale sunlight, Đào was not even sure if she had seen that fleeting, terrifying look on her new tenant’s face.

  She carried the rancid soup past the bathroom-outside, down the concrete path dotted with stunted pot plants. At the very end of her backyard, Đào emptied the bowl of rotting Bún Bò Huế into three plastic bags, tied each one up securely and placed it in the rubbish bin, lined with old advertising material. She hosed down the bowl, spraying the foul juice onto her mint weeds, and marvelled at the way her new tenant was unaffected by the stench.

  The Brown Man

  “Sit down,” the monk says softly.

  The brown man looks at the bench, which is covered with thick drops of rain.

  Then, in the gentlest of voices, the monk says to him, “You are ignorant. Your anger…is the result of your ignorance. Sit, and cross your legs.”

  The brown man is still agitated by the composure of the monk. He keeps his leering eyes on the monk as he slowly sits. He can injure this monk, he can subjugate and debase him. Yet the monk is not taken in by his seething anger. This monk is a cool and smooth pebble.

  They are both seated now, side-by-side. The brown man’s hands start to move, touching different pockets, not knowing where to be.

  “Lower your eyes, close them if you can. Now observe your breath. Watch how it comes in, then goes out again.”

  How stupidly simple, the brown man wants to blurt, but realises that the monk might have seen him in the park earlier. This makes him suddenly nervous.

  “Everything is changing, changing, changing,” the monk continues. “As soon as you sit down your mind has already begun to wander. Bring the mind back to the breath.”

  The rain eases, and the park is now empty of birds, wild rabbits, foxes and dogs who have all scurried away from the storm. Cool air seems to envelope the men.

  The brown man decides to find out what the monk has seen, if he has seen anything. So he reaches out and takes the monk’s words, grasps them by the neck, chokes and drags them, limp and unconscious, back into his very being. The brown man sits apprehensively with his eyes closed. His mind shifts from his own anguish to the monk’s flat and round face. It fidgets and fights with a thousand ideas, how he would teach this stupid monk a lesson; the cold, discarded meal he ate; the beautiful garland of dripping red buds. Then his mind wanders in the opposite direction as tension pushes against his forehead.

  He opens his eyes a little to peek at the monk, whose eyes are indeed closed. Bolder now, the man looks openly at the monk’s profile, tracing the perfectly balanced features, the monk’s easeful frame. He is searching for the markings of history on the monk’s countenance to locate his place within the order of things. Yet the brown man cannot perceiv
e such lines.

  Then, he has an experience that is completely unknown to him. Without willing or choosing it, his mind drops between the churning waves of anguish into something underneath, as though submerged momentarily into another world. Resting beneath his wandering, agitated mind is the clear and still truth. He has his first taste of not grasping at the future or the past.

  Then, just as suddenly, it is gone and the brown man is back on the choppy surface, scarcely understanding what has happened. As quickly as the truly present moment has come, it has vanished, and inside his mind again swirl a thousand thoughts of violence and hate.

  The monk tells him, “The human race needs to practise to know itself as an animal.”

  Together they sit, feeling the subtle movement of air through their nostrils. The blades of grass glisten with droplets of rain, and the earth warms with returning sunlight.

  Đào

  Đào figured that even a piece of junk was better than nothing. Something can always be pulled off one thing and tied onto or stuck onto another thing – you improvised what was needed as you went along. Đào loved found things, pilfered things too, takeaway containers, plastic forks and spoons, little paper parcels of salt and pepper from the fast-food chains.

  The sound of the highway traffic rose and fell outside her house. When Đào thought all her tenants had gone out, she went to the spare room, which was right next to her own bedroom. The lock was stuck. She tried again, and kept turning the door handle, but nothing budged. Her temples became hotter as she tried again, turning the key at a slower rotation. And then it unclicked.