There was a time during which my mother had no money to buy fruit to resell or pay the rent for her stall at the village market. She earned five to ten baht a day from selling shaved-ice with syrup and toasted bread at the parking bay for the minibuses that ran between Bang Pakong and Chonburi. During that period, my father had gone looking for jobs in the South and my eldest sister and elder brother were earning their living in other provinces; thus I was the oldest child in the house. With my three younger siblings, it meant Mother had many mouths to feed day in and day out. She had a plaster piggy bank, made in the shape of a horse, in which there were more than ten coins in various sizes and a five-baht banknote. Any day when she didn’t earn enough from her sales to buy food, she’d take the coins to supplement whatever she had, and whenever she had one or two baht left, she’d slip them into the piggy bank. Things went on like this for a long time.
One day, she came home looking utterly exhausted. She grumbled that there had been no one at the parking bay all day. After resting for a while, she took out the horse-shaped piggy bank, turned it upside down and inserted a hair clip to retrieve the five-baht note she badly needed to solve her current predicament.
In no time her face grew tense and she suddenly burst into tears.
“To have come this low, and still have them doing this to me,” she said between sobs.
I sat stock-still and stole glances at the tears on her weather-beaten cheeks. I had the urge to hug her and say something, but I felt that, for people like us who’ve only had sad parts to play since the day we were born, it would be overreacting. I knew she didn’t feel sorry about the money but was disheartened that we were harming one another at a time when society at large was wilfully tearing itself apart.
That day – the day of my departure – I sat waiting for her until it was near dusk, but she didn’t come. Father, who didn’t know why I had come home, tried to get me to stay the night, but I had to refuse. An appointment had been made that could not be missed – an appointment with my destiny which was tightly linked to the future of the country.
Father hobbled to see me off at the end of the alley leading to our house. As I walked away quietly, I didn’t dare turn around and look at his face again for fear he might catch on to the fact that this time our separation could be final. Besides, I knew he didn’t like to see any of his children cry.
And certainly not his sons.
While we stopped for lunch, we argued among ourselves about the best way to cross the rapids. One member of our party was my lifelong soul mate, and she couldn’t swim,