Soliloquy

This essay was first published in The Borderless Journal. It has been reproduced here in its entirety.

Blank faces – with just the touch of curiousity aimed towards the brown foreigner in a black t-shirt and torn jeans – welcome me in Phnom Penh. That the people smile at all is a miracle; years of haggard living, tortured upbringing, and painful deprivations have reduced this golden city of Indochina to one filled with figurative corpses. What America could not achieve, Pol Pot did in a flash and years of oppression turned into that of a blood-filled regime that the Mekong did not even try to wash away. For all its salubriousness, this river, among the greatest in the world, stood by and watched its children be consumed by an ephemeral fire that could only be extinguished in 1979.

Then the Vietnamese intervened, returning only after being loathed by almost everyone in Cambodia. The former, among other benedictions, took apart whatever little credibility the Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) government had amassed in three and a half years in power. Pol Pot’s name, quite naturally, does not feature on the political billboards and hoardings that seem to have made themselves inconspicuous in Phnom Penh today. The national dish, Amok, made of fish or several vegan accoutrements to serve the European traveller, takes up the spot left by those of the beggars in the parking spot north of the royal palace. 

As I sip my umpteenth sugarcane juice, fortified with cubes of ice that may have once come out of Tibet, I wonder whether King Sihamoni curls his lips in distaste seeing the beggars and rag-pickers waiting outside the golden gates of his palace. But the official line in Cambodia is that Sihamoni is a staunch Buddhist who likes the occasional bit of Czech opera, and all my thoughts of irreverence – born out of weeks of living in Indochina – flush down the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap while looking past Sisowath Quay to the east.

This river, the lifeblood of Indochina, had once emerged as a trickle in Tibet, and I am perplexed by the lack of cohesion it shows while merging with the Tonle Sap, which also shares its name with a large freshwater lake in Siem Reap. During the monsoon season, the Mekong forces the Tonle Sap to reverse its water with such gushing force that the latter is left with no choice but to flood itself with fish that sustain the Cambodian peasantry for months. Known to watch the seasons go by as if playing but a passive role in the disbursal of fate, the Khmer are content with life as it is, and seek but little reward for what it ought to be.

***

It doesn’t rain in Phnom Penh; I had heard this phrase before but am accosted with it with painful lucidity for the first time when visiting the Tuol Sleng primary school that served, for years, as a torture centre for the Khmer Rouge. With the walls of all classrooms still stained with remnants of the blood of men and women that had been spilt – for being supposed spies of the West, being educated and speaking the language of the bourgeois, and the climax reached upon visiting a hall filled with skulls – life seems as if in an echo above oneself. 

Had it rained on the frangipani-filled lush gardens of the school – belittling the despair and agony that went on inside – I would not have noticed. I envy the frangipani blooms and their ability to distance themselves from such emotions as those that afflict men. Outside, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge years sells his story for a few pennies; recognition from the foreigner seems more validating to him than acceptance from his countrymen, who have long forgotten his ordeals. I am told that a McDonald’s might soon open across the street.

When encountering the fabled ‘baby-killing tree’ in the ignominious Killing Fields in Cheoung Ek outside Phnom Penh, there is a numbing sensation which I have scarcely felt before; the haunting cries of the babies whose heads had been smashed into its trunk reverberate in my ears, and their spirits, crying to be set free, howl in the desperation of those who know they are doomed. 

The tears fall heavier than the unseasonal rains I would have wished to encounter in Phnom Penh; it was not too long ago when I could have claimed that I had not cried in ten years. That this tree is also a Pipal, a cousin of the one under which Sakyamuni attained enlightenment, seems a cruel joke to me made by Nature. That there is still some sign of life on it, populated by the innumerable butterflies and twittering sparrows, exacerbates this feeling all the more.

***

Angkor, a few days later, seems resplendent at dawn, but I am unable to escape the reality that the men who built this monument had also given birth to the reality that the Khmer Rouge would later become. Indeed, Pol Pot was known for his selective readings of the classics of the Khmer kingdom of Angkor – if building this city was possible, anything was, even his vastly unerudite idea of returning the country to a year ‘zero’, doing away with the market economy, abolishing money and persecuting intellectuals for wearing spectacles. 

The rain that evades me in Phnom Penh finally catches up with me in Angkor Wat; unable to make a visit early one morning on a bicycle in a thunderstorm through the black jungle, I remain rooted to my guesthouse and eventually fall asleep. The babies I had heard in Cheoung Ek and Pol Pot’s murderous face make appearances in my dreams, and I wake up with a start to look outside the window to see the sun shining on Siem Reap’s gilt-edged roads built primarily for Americans.

On my first visit to Angkor Wat, I am stunned by the intricacies and details that seem to have permeated every angle of Khmer design. The frescoes on the walls and the images on the gates of the large temple complex depict wars fought and construction projects undertaken; for all its virility in eventually losing its grasp over modern-day Cambodia, the Hindu-Buddhist Khmer kingdom – of whose ilk Jayavarman VII had been, and whose predecessor Suryavarman II had ordered this temple made in 1150, at first as a tribute to Vishnu, and eventually, a mausoleum for himself – was remarkable in its aesthetic sensibilities.  

There is no getting past the fact that Angkor was built thanks to large swathes of forced, bonded slave labour, and yet the glory of the Khmer kings seems to reign supreme centuries after their fall from grace. Even the about-turn the state religion took from South Indian Hinduism to Theravada Buddhism seems to have done little to deface Angkor’s credentials. All that was needed to be done was impose the head of Sakyamuni where Vishnu’s may have once been.

The several other temples in the area, including the great Bayon, Ta Phrom and Prasat Preah Khan – not to mention the gigantic meadows located in the heart of the old city of Angkor Thom – attract and drive my senses even as I struggle to cycle on flat roads in the deadening midday heat. The meadows, which feature statues of elephants attired in regal resplendence, remind me of a time simpler than this, when a thousand parasols could be had for cheap and held over the head of the king. The climate of Indochina, I surmise, may not have been too different from what it is now; I look yonder for concrete jungles mimicking the ones that seem to have sprung up choc-a-bloc in west Hyderabad, but encounter only lush blackness.

***

In effect, understanding Khmer society or the part of it which is shown to the visitor, is a challenging affair unless one undertakes a voyage of the heart that infrequently involves short-changing between lives of a different kind. The Mekong, which makes no appearance in Siem Reap, slithers away from the intemperate nature one finds in Angkor. Once, waiting in the shade of a great verandah of the eponymous Wat, I am surrounded more by twittering Frenchwomen and their American counterparts than Cambodians, who would do well to visit the monument to understand their painful past better.

That a country so divided could be united in hate by one man and his follies seems a laughable idea until one sets foot in Cambodia. Whatever fancies that had once taken root inside classrooms preaching anti-state violence had been captured swiftly with that man’s hands carefully mapped on the self-destruct button. Coming out of the shadow of the genocidal years may be tough for Cambodia, but the restorative nature of the Mekong, coupled with the languid character of the average Khmer on the streets of Phnom Penh, would ensure yet more distance from the traveller, unless, of course, the latter is well-equipped with dollars in one hand, and a penchant for carelessness in the other.

When I walk past Sisowath Quay one night under a moonless sky, I am reminded of my own idea of happiness, which seems to have been torn to shreds on this journey; a group of middle-aged Khmer men, devoid of languor in this dark hour and well fortified with Angkor, the brew and not the temple, beckon me over to join in their game of foot-badminton. It is then that I know it is time to put the killing tree of Cheoung Ek to bed. For now.

You can also read this essay here.

If you like my work, consider visiting my website to get in touch with more of my writing. You can follow me on Twitter as well. Also, sign up for the newsletter to get regular updates coming your way. I would love to talk to you!