Page 63 - Raffles09_March2022

at it, seemed arbitrary, self-alienated. Nothing truly connected. Not herself to her own subjectivity, nor to any logics of what had happened to her. Nor – profoundly – to other people. Even the passions of her French novels – total ecstasy, total degradation – felt more rhetorical than real. She missed her father but felt unmoved to write to him, unmoved by their correspondence. Pollen analysis around the baray confirms the city was not completely abandoned, as we had previously thought. Your brothers ask for news. She missed her village, the dense jungle encroaching it, but understood that returning there would be returning to stagnation, to inconsequence. But then what of here? Of what consequence was a baccalaureate in mathematics from a colonial school when all it was good for was a score, to be converted to a currency, to be tendered in a society that made every effort to discount her?
One day a schoolmate named A asked her to join his club and because he was the first to approach her, and without invitation or excuse, she said yes. His face was shovel-shaped and serious, mostly forehead. He was seventeen. Without his white button shirt – although she never once saw him without his white button shirt – he looked five years younger. It was said, though not by him, that he’d seen the inside of a police interrogation cell.
As for the club, its purpose seemed to be all talk all the time, the topic the war – or, rather, the American bombing inside the eastern border. Anything that flies on everything that moves. An invisible war shimmering the air, sucking the air out of the air. The earth a riot, stories of people emerging mute and mindless out of jute fields, stories of people found wandering beneath lurid reefs of smoke. She perused these images in her mind while A and his comrades talked about politics and military tactics, laws, lines of resistance. She was fascinated by how strongly they felt about abstractions. Did they really hate the Americans, as A said he did? Did he realise he sounded little different to villagers who cursed demons?
Perhaps her bemusement showed, perhaps her presence as the only girl in the group was a goad to bravura, or perhaps he too was drawn by the collision of Western technology, which was its own magic – for how else did they splash fire from clear blue skies? – with the native magic of their jungles. Whatever the reason, A quietly declared he would go east. See for himself. Who would come with him?
***
What it was like: a landscape of unspeakable dignity. Even as it suffered every insult and offence. The first time they experienced a sortie, the ground convulsed beneath them like a muscle. Then the violent ejecta of smoke. Yet the smoke held a hundred colours and convected upon it were millions upon millions of seeds, galaxies of pollen and yellow spore. Where there was fire there was also the all-sound of fire, the windroar with its promise of perfect sleep. Green areas went black but mornings later the pale buds protruded, the stones sweated their bitter healing tonic.
In a nearby dale a stream was yet unharmed and on its steep bank, near the water, the grass grew two feet tall. She liked to go there and lie in it, breaking the stalks to make a human-shaped crater. If she turned her face to the side, the green wall shot up forever.
Of course, she was the only one of their club who had come with A. Together they met locals and interviewed them and took notes. Even the most dejected of subjects talked to them, even while rubbing eyes burned by chemical fall-out, covering stomachs ruptured by shock wave suction. A strange couple: the boyish warrior-scholar who was one with their rage; the sad, statuesque girl who actually was one of them. The fact that she came from jungle too – that she had crossed cities to come to their jungle – spurred people who had lost everything else to nevertheless relinquish their stories, believing they might be made to matter.
− EMOTION −
understood that
soul not of this world.
RAFFLES MAGAZINE 61