Every year there were six months hard rain, and even Martiya knew her mother was unhappy. Her father smoked a pipe and wrote lexical tables and then wandered to the village headman's house to drink rice whiskey or palm wine; her mother paced the house. She dressed Martiya in all her clothes and played frantic games of dress-up: she told Martiya the terrifying story of Sita and Ravana, and kidnapped Martiya from the veranda to the bedroom. They put Pue' in a cape and called him Rama, but Pue' was too dirty to be allowed in the house, and Sita was forced to rescue herself. Areta never learned Uma well and took Martiya with her to the big village down the road to negotiate on market day. Areta would smoke clove cigarettes and give Martiya a fistful of rupiah. The five-year-old girl would wander from market stall to market stall, buying cassava and taro and chili peppers and eggs. She handed over all her money to the Chinese merchant, who took what he wanted and handed her back the rest. Her mother had told her not to buy from the Chinese, but the Chinese always gave her a piece of sugarcane. The merchants all knew that she was the tuan's child and always charged her white man's prices. She would walk with her mother under the huge umbrella in the rain back home, their sandaled toes slipping in the mud. Areta sometimes told Martiya about the house in Penang in which she grew up, with hardwood floors covered in rugs and an entire library of books and a globe that spun on a copper base. A real English house! Her father was a sultan's brother! Once, as a child, Areta had decided that she wished to play the gamelan. Her father arranged lessons for her. Her teacher was old and Hindu, and arrived at the house dressed in a perfectly white dhoti. Although she was not a Hindu, of course, he began every lesson with a Sanskrit prayer, which she repeated, and he kissed the instrument before playing. Areta became quite competent at the gamelan. Now, of course, she would not remember the fingerings, but she hoped that Martiya would have the opportunity to play an instrument — not one of the crude pipes they played in the village, but something with which she might make real music.
Piers was increasingly concerned about his wife, Elena told me. He offered to take her back to Holland, but she refused: she detested the cold and she did not wish to bear the guilt of separating Piers from his work. "She did not like us," added Elena, a touch of bitterness in the old woman's scratchy voice. "It was too clear that she did not like our family." Her family's house in Malaysia had been destroyed. Areta hatched wild schemes: the family should go to Spain, she said. There was a copy of Don Quixote in her trunk of books. Or Morocco. Someplace it never rained. Piers wrote a letter to the university in Singapore, but there was no position available. Then, for a long while, the tone of Piers's letters changed. Areta had calmed herself, he wrote. Once again, she chattered about any old thing. She had started to learn the village songs. They had agreed that by the time Martiya was old enough for school, they would leave the village. Piers speculated that all the previous years of hysteria had been mourning for her family and lost world. Perhaps now the mourning had come to an end.
When Martiya was six years old, Areta died by drowning in the low river where the villagers bathed. Some speculated that she had slipped; others said that the pockets of her dress had been weighed down by heavy stones. It was the onset of the rainy season and the river was swollen high. Piers wrote to his sister that the villagers held a festival of darkness. A buffalo was slaughtered to ensure that the dead would have good eating and leave the living in peace. Two birds held in a bamboo cage were released. Martiya watched them circle over the village twice and fly off into the ebony forest.
A year after her death, Piers accepted a position as professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He and Martiya packed up the little hut. They gave away almost everything to the villagers, even Areta's books, which were accepted gravely but with utter incomprehension by the Tobaku villagers, who, lacking a script for their own language, had little use for a hardcover edition of Pride and Prejudice on India paper.
Elena van der Leun told me one more thing: when Martiya left the village, she spoke Uma like a native. Within several years, she remembered the language only in occasional dreams. But for the rest of her life, if asked to state her ethnicity, either on a form or by someone curious about the origins of her round eyes, black hair, and flat features, she would always respond that she was topo'uma—a user of the Uma language, the same response any villager who lived near the mighty Lariang River in southern Kulawi District would have given.
THREE. "FOR NIXON?"
I GOT BACK TO CHIANG MAI and wrote my piece about the sculptor, then for the Bangkok Times I wrote fifteen hundred words about a jazz trio that played nightly in the lobby of the Amari Hotel. I phoned both the Dutch and the American consulates, looking for details into Martiya's case, but neither consul had much to tell me: official records of both governments were sealed; the personnel who might have recalled details of her case had long since transferred to new posts. She must have been represented by a lawyer at trial, I figured, but I had no idea how to find him; I called another lawyer, who informed me that the details of legal proceedings in Thailand are not available to the public. Elena van der Leun had told me all that she could: her biography of Martiya ended effectively at age six, with Martiya's arrival in California. Piers spent the rest of his career at Berkeley, but Elena did not know much beyond that: there had been a fight over an inheritance; Martiya had been very far away. I let the story slide.
Martiya's story interested me, but Thailand was full of strange stories and inexplicable mysteries: one morning when I woke up, from my balcony I found a troupe of elephants marching through the neighborhood, led by a wiry mahout; a baby elephant looked at me with huge, curious eyes; and then the elephants disappeared from view past the bend in the road that led toward the Westin Hotel. I couldn't explain the elephants either, or why they were walking around my middle-class Chiang Mai suburb. That fall, Rachel explained to chubby Morris how to add up numbers, even big ones, and she tried to teach Maria how to tell time, who found the whole business so tricky that for a while just looking at a clock was an invitation to tears. When the class arrived at the unit on families, Najda, a little angel who took great delight in ratting out the wrongdoings of the other children, gravely explained to Miss Rachel that she lived with her mommy from Thailand and her other mommy from Malaysia and her daddy from America all in the same house; the situation, Najda explained with precocious tact, was "very sensitive." There was a haunted house for Halloween, until the third-graders got too rambunctious and stepped on the papier-mâché ghosts and had to have a time-out; on the first full moon in November, like everyone in Thailand, we thanked the spirits of the waters by decorating hearts-of-palm kratong with flowers, incense, and candles and setting them adrift on the muddy-brown river.