When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [44]
Around me, voices murmur, “These are foods her father would ask for!” My father’s spirit has possessed me, they decide. “The ghost is inside her,” someone concludes.
As crazed as the situation is, I feel embarrassed. I can hear who is talking, feel the eyes of onlookers—my mother’s horrified gaze, a neighbor’s well-intentioned suggestion. “Maybe the ghost of your husband is hungry.” My mind absorbs this, but my body refuses to respond.
Mak flies out of the hut, desperately searching for someone, anyone, who will trade her for fish and tamarind. She wouldn’t dare approach the “old people,” only the new arrivals. But no one can help. She returns, offering my father’s ghost all that we have—the thin rice gruel. Later Mak complains of a fierce stomachache. Everyone concludes that it is her punishment because my father’s angry spirit has had to go away hungry.
It is sad, but unavoidable. In Cambodian culture, we try hard to please the spirits of our ancestors. Sickness, bad luck, disappointments—all are often blamed on spirits who have gone away unsatisfied. When I pray to Buddha for protection, I routinely pray to my father’s spirit as well. Food offerings are presented as thanks for our good fortune, and as insurance for our continued wellbeing. My mother is frustrated that she cannot appease the spirit, but there is nothing to be done. Her face bespeaks her anguish, an expression of utter disbelief. “How could one find a fish in this day and time?” she murmurs. Her eyes plead her case. Here, we have nothing to eat. Why do you ask, spirit?
Within a half hour, I feel a physical transformation, as if my body has been raised from the floor of the hut and abruptly dropped. I feel control seeping back into my limbs, which now listen to my brain. My skin seems to open, and I sweat profusely. “What happened?” I ask.
Chea explains that my father’s ghost possessed me, and I can feel her fear. Her eyes grow large as she recounts it. Then Than speaks up, an expression of relief. “I’m glad I’m not Pa’s favorite koon,” he whispers.
The episode leaves me weak, my fever still an unwavering companion. Even when ill, we don’t get anything extra to eat to help nurse us back to health. Pa, whose magic I had depended on, has been taken away from me. Food is scarce and so is medicine. The magic is gone. We don’t even have clean water to drink. The nearby shrinking pond becomes a scar created by us. It’s depleted, polluted, the water evaporating to expose its bottom, a withering carpet of water plants. Unlike the pond, we’re more capable, more adaptable in this survival game. We can make another move, seek water elsewhere, even if it’s miles away. Even if it isn’t clean.
People in the village are now afflicted with severe diarrhea. So rampant is the problem that it defies embarrassment. Signs of sickness are everywhere—staining the fields and stinking in the bushes near the huts. The telltale symptoms are obvious—excrement containing blood and mucus, quickly attracting buzzing flies. Toilet paper consists of any leaf you can grab. The helplessness of sufferers makes them feel ashamed—another form of pain that adds to existing suffering. Sometimes we try to make light of it. Later, when the diarrhea passes, adults mock their discomfort by explaining, “I had a loose bolt.”
Others don’t seem to rebound from the parasites that plague us. For more than a week, my three-year-old brother Vin has suffered from dysenteric diarrhea. Every day he soils his few pairs of worn pants and the other clothes that Mak uses to cover him. On the wooden floor of our hut, his little body lies still, disturbed only by the slow, rhythmic motions of his breathing. He lies sideways, wearing only a shirt. He is naked from the waist down—it’s pointless to try to keep clean pants on him, and his tiny bottom is perpetually swamped by flies. We have a new job. Someone must sit near him, fanning the flies away. Thinking back, I remember Pa curing one of my cousins of diarrhea. He would have known what to do. Water and salt,