In The Shadow Of The Banyan

When Raami arrives at school one day, her teacher is gone. In the teacher’s place is a fearsome-looking soldier named Mouk. As he bangs his gun on the desk and gestures around the room, Mouk says that education is useless. Referring to a chair he just broke, he says, “To keep it is no gain, to destroy it is no loss!” (256). He then dismisses the children.

That afternoon, workers finish construction on a bamboo stage in the town square. The whole town receives a summons to the stage to witness a wedding between an injured Revolutionary soldier and Raami’s old teacher in what is apparently a forced marriage. After the brief and unhappy ceremony, soldiers bring out the district leader, whose face is badly blooded. After accusing the district leader of betrayal and deceit, a group of 20 soldiers beats the man with rifle butts until he is no longer moving.

The new leaders of Ksach implement a set of harsh rules. Families can no longer cook and eat in their own home. Virtually all possessions must be handed over to the soldiers for the common good. Fortunately, they allow Mama to hold onto Radana’s ratty old pillow which contains their remaining values. Residents also can no longer grow their own vegetables or catch their own fish.

Moreover, all able-bodied individuals over the age of six must work in labor camps building embankments and digging ditches. That includes Mama and Big Uncle. Because of her polio-related infirmities, Raami—who is now almost nine—stays behind and cares for Queen Grandmother. When Mama and Big Uncle depart, Mama tells Raami, “Don’t mistake my leaving for a good-bye” (262).

Raami settles into a routine of caring for Grandmother Queen. When possible, she scrounges for extra food morsels in order to keep both of them alive, stealing from vegetable patches or cornfields. The children left behind, including Raami, must do a number of tasks like collecting kindling, gathering plants, and making rope.

One day, Raami comes home to find that Grandmother Queen will no longer eat. This, combined with the festering bed sores on her back, signals to Raami that she is on the verge of death. When Raami tells Grandmother Queen that Papa is there with them, she replies, “I know. I see him” (271). To Raami’s knowledge, these are Grandmother Queen’s last words. She dies in the night.

A day later, Big Uncle arrives. With Grandmother Queen dead, Raami technically has no guardian and must now work in the labor camp with Mama and Big Uncle. Upon their arrival, Raami is immediately put to work digging ditches. In her weakened state, Raami faints amid the hot, dusty air. When she wakes, Mama is standing over her. Their reunion is brief, as Mama must return to work. She and Big Uncle take turns watching Raami. When Big Uncle returns, they discuss the prophecy of the Dragon Yiak and the myth of the Buried Civilization. Big Uncle says to no one in particular, “There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan” (277).

The days in the labor camp blur together, with nothing to mark the passage of time aside from the growth of the embankment built by the workers. The family’s food rations are so meager that to survive they must eat cockroaches and other insects. Even these they must consume in secret by, for example, feigning a coughing fit.

With an invasion from Vietnam underway, the constant propaganda from the soldiers takes on a different tone. Although the Vietnamese are also Communists, the Revolutionaries vilify them as foreign invaders. As a voice over a loudspeaker celebrates the military and agricultural prowess of Cambodia, Raami weakly works to dislodge a rock in the hope of finding insects underneath it. She finds nothing. Occasionally, Mama will trade her dwindling cache of jewelry for raw sugarcane or some rancid rice, which the family devours in the woods on supposed bathroom breaks.

After many days of sporadic rainfall—which Big Uncle calls “messenger rains”—the so-called “female rains” arrive in intense downpours that cause the embankment to collapse, killing four children. Big Uncle insists on burying them. After doing so, he tells Raami, “They rule with the logic of a child in a land where no children remain, Raami” (291). A few days later, Big Uncle hangs himself.

When planting season arrives, Mama must dig irrigation ditches while Raami works in a traveling youth brigade planting rice seedlings. The brigade leader, a young girl and a relative of Mouk, harbors a grudge against Raami that she feels is as irrational as the Fat One’s grudge against Mama. One day, Raami talks back to her, causing a soldier to push the tip of his gun into Raami’s chest. Although Raami is ready to die, the soldier lets her live, concluding, “Killing her is no loss, but she’s not worth a bullet, Comrade” (295). From then on, Raami no longer fears death.

Even after the start of the harvest season, Raami’s rations remain vanishingly small. Her skin becomes jaundiced, and she grows weaker every day. One day, Mama unexpectedly appears, having traded the last of her valuables for a relocation to Raami’s camp for threshing. But Raami has gone mute, unable to talk but screaming on the inside.

For the Revolutionaries, the new face of the enemy is the Vietnamese. They murder anyone said to look or behave like the Vietnamese, including Comrade Keng, Chae Bui, and their daughter Mui.

As the war between Cambodia and Vietnam intensifies, more and more people return to Ksach from the labor camps where work has come to a halt. Most of the soldiers are already gone, left for the battlefield. Now with defeat all but inevitable, the Kamaphibal and the few remaining soldiers are preparing to flee to the jungle. With no one left to govern their rations, all who remain calmly gather food and other goods from the abandoned storehouses. There is no fighting, Raami says, and everyone simply gathers what they need to survive another day. The next day, the survivors would gather a bit more for the next day, and so on.

At dawn one day, the Vietnamese arrive to liberate Ksach. Grinning soldiers invite survivors onto their truck. “It’s over Raami,” Mama says. “Now we can leave” (304). But Raami still does not speak. Mama takes out the torn sheet of paper from Papa’s notebook and reads the note he left for them. In his own poetic way, Papa tells them to flee Cambodia to Thailand as soon as they can. While the Vietnamese are technically their liberators, Mama knows that one Communist regime may be as bad as the other. Raami nods. There is also a note from Papa written specifically for Raami, but Raami is not ready to read it.

As they ride across the countryside in a Vietnamese truck, corpses and limbs blown off by mines litter the rice fields. The residents of Ksach were fortunate; in many other towns, the soldiers and Kamaphibal massacred anyone who refused to follow them into the jungle.

Using gold hidden at Chae Bui’s house, which the woman said Mama could have if she is the only one of them left alive, Raami and Mama pay for oxcart rides to the Thailand border. The last part of the journey must take place on foot through a dangerous stretch of jungle, where starvation and malaria looms. They join a 60-person caravan led by a guide who accepts one of Chae Bui’s necklaces as payment. Two weeks into the trip, half of the group is either dead or left for dead, too weak to push forward.

Close to the border, the caravan rests for the night. Counterintuitively, it is safer to cross the border during the day because, if detected, the guards will be more likely to capture them rather than kill them. That night, Mama speaks for a long time about Papa. When she finishes, Raami lets out a sob, the first vocalization she has made in weeks. Raami is finally ready to read the letter from Papa. In it, he writes, “Life, I believe, is a circular path. No matter what misery and awfulness we encounter along the way, I hold out hope that one day we’ll arrive at a blessed moment on the circle again” (312). On the last available space on the page, Raami sees Papa’s final poem.

The next day while crossing the border, a United Nations helicopter overtakes them. In fluent French, Mama communicates with the pilot who says he is there to help Cambodian refugees. Because of Raami’s polio and Mama’s ability to translate, the helicopter takes both of them to a refugee camp in the first wave. As they fly away from Cambodia, Raami speaks her first word in weeks: “Papa.”