Lek - The Beginning

Chapter 3

Chapter Seven

Lek was proud to be joining the sorority of womanhood, and also proud, although rather guiltily, of being the first among her friends to have got there. As she grew older and increased her mass, she became stronger too, and the work became easier. The only thing she didn’t like was that her skin was a darker brown than that of her friends because they spend more time indoors, while at school, than she did. Every month she treated herself to a bottle of the only cosmetic she had ever used: skin whitener.

However, it was an expensive one, which included moisturiser, so the pharmacist had told her, to counteract the harmful UVB rays of the sun. She thought it was extremely extravagant of her, and when she put a dab on in the privacy of the bathroom morning and night, she felt like a film star, but she wouldn’t dare leave it on the shelf in case her mother or parents criticised her for her egoistic decadence. In fact, she didn’t even tell her friends, because she didn’t want them to know how she felt about her life and jobs.

Her most prized attribute was her hair, and here she had an advantage over girls even several years older than herself. She was allowed to grow her raven-black locks as long as she cared to, and they reached down to her waist, whereas school regulations did not allow pupils to wear their hair past their collar until they were sixteen, and then they were allowed to have it a few inches longer.

A month after her birthday, she overheard her parents rowing. She had heard them fighting before, although it happened only rarely, but this time was different. Her Mae Pang was crying hysterically and telling Paw Boonchu to ‘pack his bags and get out’.

She would normally have gone outside and left them to sort out their marital problems alone, but these words frightened her into immobility. She cowered behind the door, and listened. Luckily, her brothers and sister were not there, as she had not been, which was why they had chosen that moment to have it out, whatever ‘it’ was.

“You and your w***e can move in together, and I will find a real man to take care of me and the children! I’ve had enough! I have been turning a blind eye to your cavorting for years, but you have gone too far this time. There she is, your floozy, prancing about the village telling everyone what a nice man you are to buy her ‘new, real-leather shoes’, and what do I get? Your wife of sixteen years?

“I’ll tell you what… bloody flip-flops! Plastic bloody flip-flops. You have gone too far, Maar Suksawat! You make a laughing stock out of me only once! Now get out before I cut your throat!”

“Look, she had nothing, and I only wanted…”

“Shut up! Just shut up! Everybody knows what you only wanted, and everybody knows what you got, and you paid the b***h for it with new leather shoes, while I walk around in plastic, and your children are dressed in rags!

“Get out of my sight; you make me sick just looking at you”.

Lek started to cry and to whimper. Her world was falling apart before her very eyes and she couldn’t take it. The sound of her sobbing attracted Mae Pang’s attention, so she went to investigate. She took Lek’s arm and hauled her into the room.

“Look, big man, look what you’ve done to your daughter!”

Maar looked at the pitiful crumpled body on the floor that was his eldest daughter and felt ashamed, but he didn’t know what to do or say to make it better. All the men in his family had had mistresses, and all his friends too. Prior to 1932, men had been allowed to marry as many women as they could afford to keep, but polygamy had been outlawed, so men just took on mistresses instead. It was a cultural solution to a difficult problem.

Men married younger women and usually died before them, which left a pool of destitute middle-aged women, who had nobody to take care of them in a land without social security. The only option they had was to seek a lover, especially if they had children. The way Maar saw it, he was helping the woman out, and she was repaying him in the only way she could. His cardinal mistake had been to dishonour his first wife, the mother of his children, by making her lose face in public, which he had done not by sleeping with the woman, but by buying her better clothes than he bought his number one wife.

He realized his mistake, and he would never make it again - it would be flip-flops all round from now on, but how was he to get out of this situation? No-one would sympathise with him, he was on his own with this one.

“I am sorry that I hurt you, Pang, it was not my intention, and I am sorry that you had to witness this, Lek. I will take my unworthy carcass to my parents’ house until you can find it in your heart to forgive me”, and with that he went out the door.

Pang had plenty of insults lined up in her mind, but remained silent because of her daughter.

The next day, Maar turned up for work as usual, but there was no sanuk, and the next time anyone saw the woman, she was sporting a black eye as if she was proud of it, but she was wearing flip-flops.

It was a week before her father was allowed to return from exile, and a week after that before people stopped feeling as if they were walking on eggshells around him, although Lek never looked at her Paw Maar ever in the same light again. He was no longer her hero… he had made her and her Mae Pang cry, and not only that, but feel awful for a fortnight.

It was the first time that Lek had ever thought about men and women, mothers and fathers and their relationships. She knew that boys taunted girls and tried to get them to show them their knickers, and she wondered whether it was all related, but on he whole, she was still happy that she had nothing to do with the whole sorry shebang.

Still, Karma has its own agenda, and one day, when she arrived at the field, there were five strangers working with her family: a boy and four adults. The boy was of average height, handsome, quiet and about three years older than herself. Their job for the week was to cut and transport the rice to the threshers, because, as her father later explained, their were storms forecast for the end of the week, so in order to not risk losing any of their crop, he had hired extra labour from a neighbouring village to ensure that they got the rice in before then. The labour they had hired were all from one family, which a friend had recommended as reliable.

It was the first time since school that she had been in a controlled environment with a boy, which meant that he had to behave himself. She didn’t know whether the boy would have behaved any differently if their families hadn’t been around, but she liked the way he was. In fact, she couldn’t keep her eyes off him, and she was so worried that he or her parents would notice, that she placed herself as far away from him as possible.

Yet still, she watched him working. He handled the scythe expertly, and the muscles in his arms and legs bulged under the exertion He was without a doubt the most handsome boy she had ever seen.

When they stopped for lunch, Pang asked her to pour water for everyone, and when he looked into her eyes, smiled and thanked her, she felt her cheeks flush. She wanted to hurry on, but her legs would not obey her.

“You are very welcome. Do you want some more?” she heard herself say, although his beaker was still full. She felt such an i***t.

“No, that’s fine, thanks. Maybe later”, he said and gave her a broad smile. She responded in kind, and forced herself on to the next worker.

The sun was very strong in the afternoon, and the boy took his T-shirt off. It was not an unusual thing to do, but it had a profound effect on Lek, and what made it worse was that now, whenever he caught her eye, he would smile at her.

She wanted to return the smile, but that would have been going too far. She had her pride. She had already given far too much about herself away. No, that was impossible, but still her eyes kept drifting back to watch him, and he caught her watching almost every time.

Three thirty came more quickly than she had ever noticed before, and on the one hand she was glad of the excuse to get away from him, but on the other hand she wasn’t.

Three hours later, she was cooking dinner and trying to keep her siblings under control when she spotted all the field workers approaching. To her horror, she realized that she hadn’t tidied herself up after leaving them, so rushed to the bathroom for a shower before the boy could see her, shouting, “Mae, toilet quickly!” leaving her grandmother bewildered about what all the fuss was over.

She barely had time to wash the mud off under the shower and pull on a clean dress, before she heard her mother calling for her, so she hurried downstairs, took a deep breath and nonchalantly walked into view brushing her wet hair.

“Yes, Mae Pang?”

Her mother gaped at her, but eventually said, “Er, we have guests for dinner today, so will you make certain there’s enough?”

“Certainly, mother”, she replied smiling affectionately at her and then Tom, the boy from the field that day. Her mother had never seen her get changed for dinner, but her wily old grandmother could see what was going on, and nodded knowingly to herself.

Lek paid extra attention to her appearance that week, and it didn’t go unnoticed by her family. It was the first time that they had seen their daughter take any interest in a boy, and that was correct for it was the very first time too.

Unfortunately for Lek and her awakening libido, the crop was gathered in in record time, and then the expected storm came, so the family was paid off. Lek didn’t even get the chance to cook Tom a last supper and say ‘Goodbye’, because his family wanted to get home before the rain came, now that they had their wages.

Lek never told anyone the story of her brief infatuation with Tom and her family never mentioned it either, although her father probably hadn’t even noticed.

Her mother Pang had though, and she was glad that Tom was out of the picture. She didn’t want some common farm labourer for a son-in-law After all, they owned land, and sometimes employed ‘his kind of person’. No, she had other dreams for her beautiful Lek, although she had no idea how she was going to find a suitable boy from a decent family for her. For her part, Lek just notched it up to the same bad Karma that she thought had blotted her whole life so far.

Not for the first time in her life, weeks went past when she laid in bed at night wondering what she had done to deserve such a rotten life. However, she was, in general, a philosophical person, and she found, in her Sunday school lectures at the Wat, ways to deal with her situation by assuring herself that if she paid off her debt to Karma early in her current life, she might get to live more happily when she got older.

She embraced that thought, and it got her through each day. Her only wish was that the day when the balance was in her favour would come soon.