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a friend
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The only striking thing about the memories of my childhood are that they consist only as colors and smells. As a child I moved with lips pursed and eyes bowed, a silent and relentless observer. It was expected that I would work in the rice fields with the other children my age. "Working" for a six year old, consisted of passing the time with my thin arms wrapped around the mud-clotted gangly legs of the caribou working the fields. Or tangling your toes in his tail and lying back behind him in the soupy brown water, you could be pulled effortlessly along; looking up I would imagine that I was instead swimming in the pool of deep blue above me.
Two small fists full of wilted saplings, more a sort of pale-yellow than green; this precarious life. The funny thing about asking children to plant rice is that, to them, it is an act of faith. entirely. The waters we waded in were perhaps two feet deep, and the fields stretched out endlessly only to be swallowed up by a thin and voracious horizon. Monsoon season ended and the fields would be left flooded and ripe, waters purged from the dissatisfied stomachs of the gods. At dawn we were sent to the fields, and we were told to walk in straight lines through the waters. The young rice plants looked like crab grass, unruly and wild; a single blade would be dipped and held under the waters by my hesitant hand. And then I was told to let go. Nothing of substance held the infant in place. Nothing held it upright and some were swiftly pulled under the dark waters. We were told to keep walking, lest our rhythm be broken. The plantation owner scolded from his seat atop the plodding caribou. Children who stopped to fish the drowning plants from where they sank, were beaten. Tears tearing rivers down their mud caked cheeks. Tiny fingers were whipped with a branch, and scolded in a language they didn't understand. It was entirely an act of faith.
So I moved forward, lest my rhythm be broken.
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