Cross Currents (23 page)

AS IT WAS STILL EARLY in the dreary morning, Sarai's restaurant was almost empty. Suchin and Niran were getting ready for school, and only Brooke was present, sipping tea, dressed in a colorful sarong, a white tank top, and her familiar baseball cap. As Sarai chopped vegetables in the kitchen and chatted with her mother, she thought about the American, wondering where her boyfriend was.

Setting down her knife, Sarai grabbed a pot of hot water and walked to her mother, who sat on a plastic chair and held Achara. Sarai pinched Achara's cheek, then went out into the restaurant. She approached Brooke and refilled her cup of tea. Brooke thanked Sarai in Thai, which pleased her.

“Where is your boyfriend?” Sarai asked in English, shrugging her shoulders. Since her restaurant had no gutters on its roof, the rain rushed down, falling from the roofline in a thick sheet of water. Sarai glanced up, looking for leaks, but saw none.

“He's on the beach,” Brooke replied, and sipped her tea. “Throwing a football with Patch.”

“In this rain?”

“I think it's a tradition of theirs.”

Sarai smiled. “You look bored. Come. Come back to my kitchen. Any friend of Patch's, she is a friend of mine. I will show you how to cook a Thai breakfast.”

Brooke lowered her mug, surprised by the invitation. She nodded and followed Sarai into the kitchen, passing Yai and Achara and saying hello. Though the kitchen was old and worn, Brooke noticed that every item of food was fresh. Bamboo baskets held mounds of onions, garlic bulbs, peppers, tomatoes, baby corn, lemongrass, and bok choy. Glass jars lining a shelf contained spices. Thick shrimp lay on a cutting board.

“I am making Thai breakfast soup,” Sarai said, moving toward the cutting board. “I work, and my mother sits and rests. It is always the same, every morning.”

Yai shook her head. “She forget that I already work for many, many years. I her slave when she baby.”

Grinning, Sarai handed Brooke a knife. “Will you cut up the peppers? Be careful. Do not wipe your eyes. The peppers are too spicy.”

Brooke took the knife, stood next to Sarai, and began dicing the peppers. “These go in the soup?”

“Yes, please. Thais love spicy soup. Even for breakfast. Niran and Suchin, if their soup is not spicy, their stomachs will be bored.”

Achara burped, prompting Yai to smile. “You see, Sarai? I told you. You feed her too fast. You always in hurry, so she drink in hurry.”

“I have to move fast,” Sarai replied, deveining shrimp with rapid flicks of a small knife. “If I moved like you, like a big snail, then everything would fall apart. No one would get fed. No rooms would get cleaned.”

Yai clucked her tongue. “You talk with your mother like this?” she asked Brooke. “You call her big snail? You say this to woman who give you life?”

“Maybe . . . maybe not exactly like that.”

“Sweet Buddha, he bless your mother. I must do something to bother him, long, long time ago. He give me Sarai for revenge.”

Sarai laughed, finishing with the shrimp. She set them into a stainless-steel bowl and placed them in the small refrigerator. “Where are Suchin and Niran? School will start soon.”

The peppers were so spicy that when Brooke wiped her nose, the insides of her nostrils began to burn. “They had fun yesterday at the cave.”

“Good,” Sarai replied. “Thank you for having your eye on them.”

“You're welcome.”

“Do you like Ko Phi Phi?”

“I adore it.”

“Why? Why do you adore it?”

Brooke sniffed, her nose running. “It's lovely. And the people . . . they're full of life and they make me smile.”

“Can you cut some green onions next?”

“Sure.”

“Thai people, they like to have fun. That is why everyone calls Thailand ‘the Land of Smiles.' ”

Brooke thought about a group of children she'd seen the previous day. Dressed in frayed clothes, they'd been chasing a gecko, laughing without end. “I think you're lucky,” she said, and started to dice the green onions.

Sarai nodded, breaking two eggs above a pot of boiling chicken stock, then glancing at a to-do list that she'd taped to the wall. “In some ways, yes, we are lucky. We have no pollution. No crime. But we are poor. We cannot always go to the doctor. We cannot buy our children everything we want.”

“But they seem happy.”

“Yes, they are happy. We are all happy. But our life is hard and happy. Of course, sometime it is okay to mix two things, like sweet-and-sour pork.”

Brooke kept cutting, thinking that her own life was much the same. She started to ask Sarai about that combination when giggles emerged from outside the kitchen. Suchin appeared in her school uniform, putting her hands in front of her face, almost doubled over with laughter.

“What?” Sarai asked, still speaking in English. “Why do you laugh so much?”

Suchin turned around, motioning someone forward, her laughter incessant. “You know . . . you know how Niran . . . he wants to be a scientist?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he . . . he changed his mind. He wants to become a Buddhist monk.”

Niran entered the kitchen wrapped in an orange sheet. His hair had been completely buzzed away, and he held a wooden bowl. He pretended to chant, closing his eyes, holding the bowl in front of him.

“Niran!” Sarai dropped her knife and stepped toward him. She spoke quickly in Thai, glanced at Brooke, and then switched back to English. “What did you do?”

Suchin pulled him forward. “The German men in bungalow number seven. They have a haircutter. I borrowed it and turned Niran into a monk.”

“Sweet Buddha, please be napping,” Yai muttered in Thai, shaking her head. “You don't want to see this.”

Niran pointed at his bowl, giggling. “I'm asking for alms. Rice and curry will do.”

Sarai laughed, bringing her hands together. “What a cute monk you are,” she said, returning to Thai. “You're the cutest monk I've ever seen.” She wanted to rub his head, but since the head was considered to be a sacred part of another person's body, and not to be touched, she dropped to her knees and took his hands in hers. “Was this Suchin's idea?”

“Yes.”

“And you let her?”

“I wanted her to.”

“So you could ask for alms?”

Niran cocked his head to the side, running his tongue over his gums. “We thought it would be funny. Asking for alms on the way to school.”

“And your uniform is underneath?”

“Yes. And I'm hot.”

Sarai squeezed his hands. “What a clever joke, Niran. Go and show your father. Make him laugh too. But you can't ask for alms. That wouldn't be right.”

“And then you'll walk us to school? Since it's raining?”

“You'll have to find me a hermit crab, my little monk.”

“I'll find you one. They'll be out in the rain for sure.”

“Good.”

Suchin and Niran departed, laughing and holding hands. Sarai watched them go. Though the day was dark and dreary, they'd brought such a light into her tidy kitchen. Needing to finish their soup, she stirred the contents of the pot and added the shrimp.

“You really are lucky,” Brooke said, and handed her the tray full of diced green onions.

Sarai smiled, liking the American woman. “Someday you will be lucky too,” she replied.

“Why . . . why do you say that?”

“Because Suchin, she told me how you drove the boat yesterday, how you smiled. And so I think good things, they will happen to you. Because you are not afraid. You do not sit still and wait for good things, but you stand and walk to them. You look for them, and when you look for something, when you look hard, you will find it.”

Brooke nodded, wondering what she was looking for, whether it was near or far, whether she would recognize it when it came. “Did you know when you found it?” she asked.

The knife paused in Sarai's hand. “No. But it found me again and again. And when it does that, when it keeps coming to you, that is when you stop, when you see what you need to see. That is how I discovered Lek. He was working every day on my father's boat. And one day, after so many days of seeing him smile at me, that day I knew that he would be with me. That I would be as lucky as you say.”

THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL WAS A cinder-block structure divided into several classrooms. Since Suchin and Niran were close in age, they shared the same teacher—a young woman whom Suchin adored. This teacher was responsible for close to thirty boys and girls dressed in uniforms who studied reading, writing, math, science, history, and English.

On this day, as he did toward the end of every month, Lek volunteered at the school, making repairs that didn't require strength. These moments were among his favorites, since he was able to watch his children in their element, a place where Suchin made her friends laugh and Niran asked questions about creatures large and small. The children enjoyed Lek's presence as well and often turned to smile at him as he mended a broken chair, rewired an old light, or patched up cracked floor tiles.

Lek now stood to one side of the classroom, staring at a punctured window screen, which might have been damaged by a pencil or a tool of some sort. He had a great deal of experience making such repairs, as sometimes tourists cut pieces out of the screens of his bungalows in order to make filters for marijuana pipes. Usually Sarai caught the offending guests upon their checkout and was able to assess them an appropriate fine. But Lek would have preferred that they didn't cut his screens. He didn't like waste, and few things were as wasteful as cutting a coin-size hole in a nice screen.

After taking a needle, some fine fishing line, and a square piece of screen from a small leather pouch, Lek used a pair of scissors to cut the screen to just the right size. He then held it against the damaged screen and began to sew it into place. Long ago he had realized that fishing line worked much better than cotton thread, which rotted in the humid air and didn't last longer than a year. As far as he could tell, fishing line lasted forever.

While Lek worked, he glanced at the teacher and her students. She was in the process of explaining how newspapers were written and assembled, and she held up old newspapers from Bangkok and other cities around the world. Her students were attentive, shifting in their chairs but rarely chatting with one another. After the teacher finished her explanation, she pulled large pieces of white paper from a drawer and handed one to each student. “I want you all to create your own front page,” she said, passing out rulers and black pens. “Write an article about something, make your headline, and draw a picture.”

The students appeared eager for the task and hurried to collect their supplies. Lek paused in his repairs, watching Suchin and Niran as they sat down at desks that wobbled despite Lek's previous efforts to stabilize them. His children didn't work at first but fiddled with their pens, apparently musing over what articles they wanted to bring to life. As Lek swatted away a mosquito and reminded himself to closely inspect all the screens, Niran turned in his direction and smiled. Lek grinned, holding back a laugh prompted by the sight of Niran's buzzed head.

His fingers making miniature movements, Lek began to sew again, determined to create a barrier through which no pest could enter. He stitched with care and patience, thinking about his children, pleased and saddened by the notion of their growing up. Sarai and he had always planned on having a large family, perhaps with as many as five or six children, but recently, because of their financial troubles, talk of a big family had been put to rest.

As Lek worked, he contemplated the beauty of Suchin, Niran, and Achara. He recognized the unique wonder of each child, and how each was a magical gift that he and Sarai had brought into the world, into their lives. And he wanted to make more such gifts, to watch more of their children step forward and smile. The concept that he had the power to create another miracle or two, but wouldn't be able to do so because he couldn't earn enough money, troubled him. A child whom he would love more than himself, who would love him, would never be born. Because of his own failings and weaknesses, such a child would never sit on his lap or wrap his or her fingers around his, would never go out and color the world with his or her beauty.

Still, as Lek stitched, he thanked Buddha for his good fortune. He had never been tested harshly by life, never been forced to endure more than he could bear, and he prayed that his fate would remain so. Several of his acquaintances had experienced hardships and woes so vast that Lek found it difficult to imagine what their days and nights must be like. Let us all live long and happy lives, he prayed. And then take me first. Please take me first.