AS HOT AS ANGKOR

Reading Amitav Ghosh's collection gave me perspective—and pause—during my long trip to the Far East.

On my long trip to the Far East, one essay collection filled in some spaces in my understanding of Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and its neighbors. While I’d heard about Amitav Ghosh’s Dancing in Cambodia, I’d forgotten about it when I flew out to Ho Chi Minh City in mid-February. I was fortunate to happen upon the book in one of the only bookstores selling books in English in the city of Hà Nội.

I’ve been unable to read much on this long and demanding trip and hence my weekly posts have not happened with their Sunday morning regularity. Instead for my weekly reading during the trip, I opted for works that helped me along in my journey. Over the last many years, I’ve plumbed the depths of Ghosh’s singular talent in combing history to unpack the current political challenges and conflicts in South East Asia. Dancing in Cambodia was a terrific choice

From the minute I first entered Angkor Wat I found myself awash in stories. I was puzzled by this in the beginning, but now, looking back, several months later, it seems to me that there was something inevitable in it. For above all Angkor Wat is a monument to the power of the story.

This is true in a perfectly literal sense: with every step a visitor takes in this immense twelfth-century Cambodian temple he finds himself moving counters in a gigantic abacus of storytelling. The device is a vast one—it is said to the largest single religious edifice in the world—and it provides its own setting as well as a cast of galactic dimensions.

By the time I reached Angkor Wat’s magnificent expanse at about 9 AM one morning I was already hot even though the vast body of water around the temple complex was cooling to the eye. A well-fed monkey accompanied the four of us (we were two couples traveling together) as if it too were part of our group on a first visit to Cambodia. Apparently these creatures can bite and transmit rabies and hence guides tend to scare them away with a catapult.

The entire complex of the temples of the Khmer empire—built in the 12th century—seem to be inspired by the esthetics of the Chola empire in India. The bodies of the 1866 apsaras at Angkor Wat seem to have much in common with those I’ve seen in Indian temples. Sea routes from India had been long established by the time of the Pallava empire and it’s clear how ideas about god as well as goods were exchanged by people in lands far away. The embroidery, the appliqué and the ikat textiles found in these parts are evidence that the confluence and clash of cultures has been the only constant.

Khmer art and architecture is supposed to have reached its zenith with the construction of the majestic Angkor Wat. We visited two other temples also constructed (a few decades later in the 12th century) in the Angkor region named Ta Prohm and Bayon. The construction of all these temples demonstrates the artistic and technical achievements of “Kambuja” through its architectural mastery of stone masonry. I believe it was in Ta Prohm where the stones seemed to have been loosely placed (without any binding at all) on one another making us wonder what might happen if just one of those stones decided to leave its perch. But such questions may never be asked during travel.

Daily living itself is filled with moments of extreme danger as I found out last July inside the comfort of my own bathroom. Travel is always a reminder of our own inconsequentiality in the world. At the Ta Prohm complex at Angkor Wat, roots have invaded the old 12th century temple. Its renovation with the help of India’s expertise has tried to capture the artful and gnarled hands of nature on stone, always remembering and consecrating, the routes of roots.

While walking through these ruins it’s impossible to take a step forward without telling ourselves that just about everything will be strangled—and snuffed out—by the march of time. Reading Ghosh’s essay titled Stories in Stone led me into the horrific scenes of carnage committed on the premises of Angkor Wat in more recent times.

Lasting for four years (between 1975 and 1979), the Cambodian genocide was an explosion of mass violence that resulted in about 3 million people being killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a communist political group. The Khmer Rouge took power in the country following the Cambodian Civil War. During that period, people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge due to tortures, executions and forced labor. S-21, also known as “Office 21” (21 Security Prison) was created as an interrogation, torture and execution center against people considered enemies of the State, of the then-called Democratic Kampuchea.

In his essay, Amitav Ghosh writes about a Buddhist monk who had lived on the premises of Angkor Wat for most of his life, having entered the monastery in his adolescence. This monk, the Ven. Luong Chun, recalled a time when the layout of the temple’s grounds was quite different, especially at the time of his own grandfather. His own story is hardly pleasant, it turns out.

The Ven. Luong Chun was living in Angkor Wat in April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power. There were about four hundred monks in the monastery at the time: several of them were killed, some right on the threshold of the pagoda. He, along with the others, was taken away to a work-camp some distance away. He was stripped of his monk’s robes which were cut up and made into trousers, and he spent the three years of the ‘Pol Pot time’ working in the rice-fields.

Ghosh talks to another man in Cambodia, the chain-smoking Kong Sarith who was studying to be a lawyer at the University at Phnom Penh before his country succumbed to chaos.. During the Pol Pot regime, Sarith had to hide the truth about his intellectual background during the forcible evacuation of the city.

The essay ends with a poignant moment between Sarith and a woman at Angkor Wat after the Khmer Rouge was defeated by the Vietnamese invasion. The woman, an archeologist who had been hiding her identity during the genocide years, leads Sarith and several other survivors through the magnificent stone edifice at Angkor Wat, telling everyone fascinating stories about stone.

“You must remember,” said Sarith, “for years we had seen nothing but hunger, death and famine.” Now, they would not let the woman stop; they listened entranced as she recounted old, old stories. Slowly they worked their way around the vast galleries, listening to the stories over and over again.

“By the end of the day, said Sarith, “I knew I could not leave. I said: I will spend the rest of my life here, in Angkor Wat.”

Aside from Ghosh’s work, one other book, a memoir written by a photographer who had worked for the Khmer Rouge, offered a look at what the people of Cambodia had endured during the last many decades.

In 1976, En was sent by the Khmer Rouge regime to study photography in China. After his return, he was placed at Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh in order to take photographs of inmates as they were being incarcerated or executed. His short memoir is a celebration of a human being’s will power to survive.

I picked up The Khmer Rouge’s Photographer At S-21 at a museum dedicated to Tanzanian rats that are used in landmine detection, Cambodia still continues to happen upon landmines from the war years, especially in rural areas. This is the legacy of three decades of war which has taken a severe toll on the Cambodians. I leave you with Nhem En’s closing words which have special relevance for us today.

I, Nhem En, a former photographer at S-21, appeal to all world leaders to stop all types of war crimes against humanity, and any types of civil wars just for political gain or absolute power for themselves, without thinking about the people and country first, and consider if their actions will always lead the nation to destruction. Their actions will only destroy lives and the future of our innocent children.

Yet what’s most puzzling of all is that even after years of turmoil in these parts and the sorrow of unexplainable genocide, thanks in no small measure to the machinations of the superpowers, the negative feeling among people is palpable. It’s clear that suspicion and resentment towards the Vietnamese run deep among the Cambodians who also believe the water and its riches must belong only to them. It’s a story, repeating endlessly, no matter the time or clime.