Beyond Speaking

She was always there, crouched on her low stool with the tapestry flaps blowing around her face. It was her place, her very own private spot. She was undisturbed too; in the rare times when some tourist came in to buy the sights with his eyes, ambling idly around the store, she was hidden in the shadows of the decorative objects for sale, rippling rugs and colourful canvas tapestries.  Even when they saw her, she fixed them with her wide-eyed gaze, like a deer staring at the hunter from its stance in full view, fearful and innocent – and the shopper would understand, feel the aura of the coded language and move away. It was as if she spoke, and told them of her fears, her mistrust, her joys, her ills; and they listened, felt their own emotions stirring, and were akin to her in that one moment eye met eye.1

But no one was truly akin to her. She had lived more of a life in the eight years of her youth than the archetypical old man had in his eighty years, though none of it would she tell. It was frozen on her tongue. She merely sat, the proprietor’s adopted child, on her wooden stool, eating her rice, playing with the few toys she had, or simply lost in thought. 2

No one knew who she really was, who her real parents were. No one knew how she lived in a cold, dank world of apprehension, fearing the return of the shadows of her past. It was a closed book – they did not know about the tall, forbidding figure that intruded upon her restless dreams, shouting at her to return. They did not know whom the limp, lifeless figure represented, that lay crumpled at the nameless child’s feet, bludgeoned to death by her promised. They knew not of how the child-girl had wept, seized by terror and despair, fleeing the image of paternity like a lost sheep, cradling memories and broken truths to her tiny breast.3

Did anyone know of how she ran? Mindless pounding on the red earth with her bare feet, spurning the wealth and seeking refuge from darkness and honour she went, searching for a place where someone would take her under the wing of support. She ran from her pain into the little antique, curio store. That, perhaps, they knew, and of how the kindly old proprietor gave her a meal of porridge and pork, a room and a new name, a new life.4

So there she was, poised on her seat. She knew the shadows still chased her. She was constantly shifting her stare from the walls to the customers, watching for familiar faces and absently noting the beautifully captured renditions of the gods and goddesses of ancient folklore. On could almost see her trying to assume a mask of impassivity, of pride and dignity just like the goddess of mercy painted on the tapestries behind her slender form, a way of shutting out the calls of her past and replying only those of the present. 5

She spoke not of her fresh worries – of the cost of her living, the expressions cast in her direction by the proprietor of the failing store, the big white man with the papers and briefcases, the endless discussions. It seemed that no sooner had she a family did it again break down – would she have to run once more? Flee the world? Was all life like that? Why was she not like the children in the streets, or even the white spectres that were the children of the foreigners?6

She curled up on her chair and said nothing.7