Beyond The Road

In a café on the outskirts of Little India, I sat across from four men. There was a pot of coffee on the table between us, as well as some pastries that looked as if they had been baked the day before. The gleam coming off the metal from the machines behind the barista’s counter gave everything in the room a faint color of orange. There was a hiss as the machines were operated and momentary signs of traffic from beyond the glass walls that allowed us to peer into the outside world. The chairs were very comfortable as well. All of us at the table were travelers passing through the modern port of Singapore. The city with its skyscrapers carved out of a tropical island was a brief rest, a taste of civilization before anyone moved on to rougher parts. But these men were in a league of their own. I could not compete with them, nor would I ever want to.

Each of us wore the clothes best befitting a traveler. There was a casual, non-descript look about us enough to give the impression of rumpled worldliness. I had just finished doing my laundry, and lacking an iron I had the distinguished honor of being called a man who had been “shot with the wrinkle gun.” In contrast, my newfound compatriots looked immaculate in their appearance as if they had spent hours working, planning, coordinating their outfits with each other. Instead of the professional migrants that they were, they looked more scholarly. If you had met them yourself, perhaps you would have assumed that they had recently embarked upon a lengthy sabbatical. Yellow and red beards sprouted from their faces, with exception of one who merely kept his sideburns long. Just from looking at them, I could not imagine these four figures in any kind of professional setting. They would look comical if they dressed in suits. They discussed literature, and all of them carried books around in their satchels. One of them even held an MFA, which I was a little jealous of because I have always thought of myself as a writer. I was never good enough at it to support myself, and here was a man who earned his daily bread from his pen.

It is true. I was jealous of this man, but that same feeling should really be extended to the whole group. With their beards, their clothes, and their habits, they all looked as if they might have been one person who split into four different pieces. I suspect the original man from which they had split from had had too big a personality to be confined within a single individual. Most likely he had split into pieces the way a cell does during a film presentation of mitosis. The bond of having once come from the same entity probably kept them from separating. They needed each other to do different tasks. Like both parts of the brain need to work together, the same could be said for this group of men. Each of them took responsibilities for various tasks that needed to be done such as the buying of maps and the planning of routes. The writer of the group was responsible for recording all the stories from their expeditions so that he could write them down later and publish. This was how they supported themselves. To see them in action was to see different parts of the same organism working together. I could not imagine a situation in which they could be parted from each other, for the group would surely break down as a whole and the four of them would die. This is how much a part of each other’s lives they were.

I met the group during a brief stay in Singapore. My English teaching position in the Malay Peninsula was coming to a close, and I was exploring the region for other opportunities. The group of travelers was staying at the same youth hostel as I was, and they introduced themselves to me in one of the shared dormitories. Singapore was an appropriately exotic place to meet such a group that defined itself by traveling to as many countries as humanly possible. The morning after I had checked in they invited me to café across the street for breakfast, which was where we all sat and started to talk at length about our various trips to the corners of the earth. Almost immediately they started to list the cities they had traveled to with as much ease as a person recounting the members of their extended family: Bangkok, Jakarta, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Timboktu, Fez, Zurich, Moscow, Cairo, Baghdad, Mumbai, Bhopal, Chengdu, the list was simply endless. They had ridden camels and donkeys when it had suited them, and flown in jets and hot air balloons when they deemed it absolutely necessary. For the most part, I gathered that they simply liked to walk or ride the bus as much as possible.

It was hard to imagine that there were any places where they had not been. As they talked, I listened and looked at all of them carefully. As the sun rose, the light changed from red to yellow as it painted their beards and faces. It was early, but none of them seemed the least bit tired as they munched on bagels and muffins. They explained how they lived and how they functioned as a group, but any question I asked about their origins was immediately ignored. They might have agreed with you if you accused them of having spontaneously appeared out of thin air one day. As if these people were not strange enough, none of them knew where they were going.

“We’ve been on the road for as long as we can remember. Who is to say that we were even born or had a life before this one?”

“But you must have a passport, or some country of origin? Surely you cannot simply walk across the Chinese border and say, ‘Hey everyone, here I am!’”

“We have ways of getting around passports and visas and such. It is not easy, but it works. Besides, we have no country that we could call our home.” This was all a little ridiculous, but I was willing to listen to them just to be entertained.

The writer spoke up. “It has been a long time since we began our journey, and it will be longer still before we end it.”

I looked at them with an incredulous expression that they must have seen nearly a thousand times before. “How can you keep going like this? I’ve only managed to do two or three weeks of travel before I had to call it quits. Not knowing where your next meal was coming from, always trying to find a bed before dark, it was exhausting. Besides, after you’ve been to a few hundred cities, doesn’t every place on earth begin to look alike? How have you kept it up for so long?”

The leader of the group spoke up. He was the tallest, and his beard was the largest. “There are not many people who can continue on as we do. We’ve heard questions like yours before, but we still can’t answer them to anyone’s satisfaction. It helps that we have very few needs except for one: the feeling that we are in motion and heading off towards someplace new. Hearing the sound of an engine beneath our feet or the sound of waves crashing against a hull is a feeling that has a greater affect on us than most people. To know that we are hurtling like a bullet towards the unknown is everything that we live for.” The group nodded to each other, and I had no choice but to admire the simplicity of their existence. Everything except the voyage was a trivial matter to them. They were not bogged down with careers, family, or any concern for the opposite sex. A good day’s journey was all that they needed to stay happy.

When we decided that it was time for all of us to leave, they asked me if I wanted to come with them. They could always use an additional partner in tough situations, and they said they had often traveled with others before because it gave them company. I declined, even though I wanted to join them very badly. I knew that I could not keep up that life for very long, and that I would die of exhaustion and want of a home after a few years. They understood when I told them this, and without making a fuss we made our goodbyes. When they filed down the road, I watched them walk for a little while until they disappeared.

They were monks of the open road. And I envied them for it.

Tiger and Ox

Once, while I was in a brief trip to Singapore, I had the pleasure of attending a concert given by a Chinese youth orchestra. The reason for my hearing their performance was completely accidental. I was wandering around the city looking for some form of distraction, and I happened to stumble upon a public square full of people watching a red colored stage. It was the month of Chinese New Year after all, and I gathered that this was in some way connected the celebration. I arrived during the middle of one piece, but as soon as it ended a woman in a splendid red dress came to the center of the stage with a microphone. She began to give us a description of the following piece, but since it was in Chinese I grew disinterested in the sounds of so many tones falling and rising. Suddenly there was English with faint lingering on British vowels: “For our last piece this evening, ladies and gentlemen, we would like to present the traditional Chinese work ‘The Ox and Tiger.’ The music depicts a battle between these two animals. Who do you think will win? The tenacious ox or the fearsome tiger? Listen carefully, and you will soon know!” I listened to the music eagerly, but neither the movements of the performers, the prolonged tremolos in the music, nor the rattling of gongs and drums provided me with any clues as to who had won the battle. If I absolutely had to guess, I would say that there was a draw between the two animals. The two forces were forces of an eternal struggle for balance and order, and their contention fit well within the confines of an Eastern philosophy. There was no victor in this particular battle, which was settling in some way, but when I returned to my life and home in Cambodia I soon found the answer as to who would eventually win.

At the public high school in Bott where I taught English, there were two were two different teachers with whom I worked. Mr. Vannak was the ox. Stalwart, trustworthy, and hard working, he was faithful to his friends and his students as he was uxorious to his wife. He divided his time between the classroom and the school offices, and carried out his duties there faithfully and without error. Everyone adored him, and I considered myself grateful to be counted as one among his friends. In fact, I could think of no better praise for him than to be called “Vannak the American.” The man often blushed when I said this, and I often wondered if I had accidentally called him a traitor. He loved his country, as most Khmers do, and perhaps being called a foreigner was not something that he reacted well to. I never asked him, but he was far too polite to ever tell me that I had offended him.

Every morning, I would see him ride into school on his motorbike. His shirts were always clean, and his head was always groomed. He would lead the flag ceremony every morning, barking at the students to stand to attention and to sing the national anthem with some degree of enthusiasm. It was a valiant effort he gave very day, even though the students would simply mumble through the words and march sleepily off to their classrooms. Never the less, he was always there.

The antithesis to Mr. Vannak was Mr. Bunhoan. Where the former was sober and alert every morning, the latter was hung-over and sleepy. He always up for morning assembly, but his clothes were dirty, rumpled, and reeked of alcohol. If this was not enough, his hair was unkempt, and he sported an adolescent looking mustache that he swore made women want him badly. Bunhoan would walk to class and teach his morning classes, but by the middle of the after noon he was raving drunk. He bought beer when he could afford it, but his main source of liquor came from a dark red concoction of rice wine. If being an alcoholic was not bad enough, the man was incredibly indiscreet about his habit. I suspect that there was something in that homebrew he bought that made him more than a little mad. On most afternoons he could be seen lying in his hammock underneath a cluster of trees that were just outside our classroom buildings. For his own amusement, he would sing loudly and shout the most obscene nonsense to anyone who passed by. He was only harmless if not provoked. During an afternoon class I paused the lesson to go and have a chat with Bunhoan. When I politely asked him in his own language to pipe down his infernal racket, he rose from his hammock with a stick and threatened to hit me with it. I backed away slowly and started mumbling calm entreaties, but as soon as he heard me speak he fell to the ground in a heap of laughter. Of course I complained to the other teachers, but what was there to be done about it? The school director thought the man highly amusing, and kept him on the payroll as long as he caused no significant trouble. However, Bunhoan’s antics caused me no end of trouble, and I often found myself in Vannak’s office complaining about it.

It was afternoon after the stick incident that I felt particularly incensed. “But surely something has to be done about this! We can’t go on like this? Today he threatens me with a stick, tomorrow he goes and smashes a bottle over someone’s head. The man needs help.”

Vannak was looking at some of the files on his desk. He was slumped over in his chair, and I suspect he had not listened to a word I had said. “Oh…I don’t know…”

“But doesn’t it make you make you mad? I mean, you and I have to listen to that prattle through class, and its hard as hell to talk over, not to mention distracting.”

“You only think that because you are a foreigner. You are not used to Cambodian people.” I hated this reply. It was the standard answer to everything that made me mad or frustrated in this country, but it did not make it true.

“The culture and the people be damned! The man’s an alcoholic!” Vannak did not understand that word. I explained what I meant, but once he understood the meaning of it he dismissed its importance. His mind fell back to the papers on his desk. I fell into a state of defeated lassitude, and as I sat there I remembered the story of the ox and tiger.

“Vannak, if you witnessed a battle between an ox and a tiger, which animal do you think would win?”

Vannak looked up from his papers, stared off into space for a moment, and gave his answer very slowly. “Tiger. A tiger would win.”

“I was hoping you would say ox.” I could see that Vannak was busy, and that my being there was just a distraction. With that, I went off to lunch.

Despite Vannak’s reluctance to act, I was convinced that action was needed. I knew that Vannak would not act against Bunhoan unless he had some kind of personal reason to. Any motive he possessed would have to be reasonable, and would have to exclude the school director and myself. Having the boss involved was always a sure path to having unintended consequences. When I ate my usual lunch of chicken soup and rice, I thought of countless ways in which I could embarrass the drunken Bunhoan in such a way that he would have to be reprimanded by most of the teachers, including the school director and Vannak. But no matter how hard I thought, the plans that I came up with were ridiculous and intrinsically juvenile. The best I could come up with was simply trying to move Bunhoan while he was safe within the realm of inebriated slumber into compromising positions. For example, someone discovering a naked, drunken teacher on the floor of the women’s dormitory would put pressure on someone like Vannak to act out of sheer embarrassment for the guy. I could almost imagine the delicious lashing that the man would be given. “Bunhoan!” they would scream at him, “This time you have gone too far!” I sat at my usual restaurant gnawing at some chicken bones while I played out the scene again and again. Of course, I had sense enough to realize that this plan and others like it were childish and doomed to failure if I ever tried to carry them out. By the time I had finished eating, I had slumped into my plastic chair. Defeated by my own schemes, I decided that there was ultimately nothing to be done about this man. I was simply going to have to live with Bunhoan during the time I had left in the country and that I had better find ways of coping with it. It was not easy, but it was the best resolution I could come up with.

Bunhoan died the next day. Naturally I felt awful at having thought terrible things about him, when it was obvious that his habits were a disease. We all took solace in the fact that he had died in his sleep, and it did not appear to have suffered much. It was still strange though. Usually one thinks of the elderly dying in their sleep near the end of a long life, and not someone who was thirty four. Bunhoan had looked maybe ten to fifteen years older than he was, but this did not add anything to the tragedy. I never found out what the exact cause of death was, but I imagine that the alcohol he had consumed the night before had numbed him to whatever had done him in. The last time I saw him, he was in his hammock, the same one he used to set up over by the trees. I might have thought that he was asleep if someone had not told me that he was dead. A car came later that morning and took down the laterite road to his own village. His funeral and cremation services were all held there and I never saw him again.

When the sun had risen later that afternoon, I walked into Vannak’s office feeling tired, dejected, and sweaty. My friend was typing something on his computer, and I was not in the mood for talking. Instead of taking my usual seat across from his desk, I chose one in a dark corner where I could sit undisturbed. After some quiet moments looking at the floor, I looked up to see two geckos dancing rapidly across the whitewashed wall in front of me. Vannak paused from typing and room grew eerily silent when the lizards had gone. He spoke without looking at me.

“I think I was maybe wrong when I answered your question.”

“What?” I had not the slightest clue as to what he was talking about.

“The ox would win. I think maybe the tiger would lose.”

I looked at him with an incredulous expression on my face that he did not bother to look at. Some moments later I realized exactly what he was talking about. The ox, slow, patient, hard working and reliable had defeated the tiger. The latter had been too quick to jump at everything that life had offered him to eat, and was now reduced to a pile of ashes. The ox, on the other hand, sat calmly in his office, working away and enjoying the luxury of time that life had to offer him. He needed not to fight the tiger, just outlast him.

I studied Vannak’s face for a smile, but it never came. Such a thing would have been inappropriate for either one of us, despite our differences in culture. Instead, we both excused ourselves while citing the work that we both had to get back to.