Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
At six o’clock in the morning dawn was sneaking through the chill of night. A mountain mist lay over the village like a damp cloth; dogs lay curled nose to tail on steps and under houses, too cold to bark. Along the main street shops and businesses were stirring, creaking and clattering their shutters and opening their doors. A thousand small birds prattled in the ancient banyan tree in the temple grounds, while cockerels stretched their scrawny necks and crowed in the back yards of sleepy householders who shivered, washed their faces and spat out the staleness of the night’s sleep.
It was the first day of December. Mother Pensri yawned noisily and stretched. While dressing, she pondered the unfolding day and how different her life could be by late afternoon. She washed her face and swept her black hair back with both hands, expertly making a neat bun. Peering into the mirror, she powdered her nose and cheeks, pursing her lips and applying a dash of lipstick for respectability. She moved through the house towards the door, frowning at the few particles of dust that had dared creep inside overnight. Once outside, she plucked a jasmine blossom from the bush in the yard, inhaled its scent and tucked it into the folds of her bun before mounting her bicycle. The front wheel wobbled as she found her balance in the dawning day and pedalled past the district office, oblivious to the pink and purple bougainvillea that flourished luxuriantly in the gardens. She turned left on to the main road.
“Where are you going?” called her neighbour, Mother Nong.
“To market! Are you coming?”
“What are you cooking today?”
“Nam prik ong!”
“Isn’t it cold!”
“Oh, colder than last year… but then, we had so much rain in September!”
Bellows of laughter rang out from the market entrance. Standing amidst the mopeds, bicycles, barrows and baskets was Uncle Moon, the dustcart driver. Clutching the neck of an almost empty bottle of rice whisky, he staggered from stall to stall, berating the market vendors good-naturedly on the price of their goods.
“Aow,” he shouted, “three baht for one lime! You are all thieves! No one will buy your tomatoes at the prices you ask!” He took another swig of whisky. “Oh-ho, Mother Pensri! Good morning!” He bowed elaborately as she went past him into the market. “How do you stay looking so beautiful?”
Mother Pensri clicked her tongue against her teeth. Uncle Moon had never married. Some of the villagers dismissed him as a drunkard and a ne’er-do-well, but with the older women he was a favourite: they understood he drank to forget the death of a young girl with a strawberry birthmark on her cheek many years before.
The market was set out in three long rows of wooden tables, covered by a makeshift roof of corrugated iron to keep out the cool winter mists, the hot summer sun and the rainy season downpours. It began in darkness at four o’clock when the first vendors arrived to set up their stalls, donkey baskets full of goods slung across the backs of their mopeds, balaclavas over their heads to keep out the cold. A couple of the vendors sold their products wholesale. They drove out before midnight to the nocturnal city markets to buy fresh squid, meatballs, egg noodles, dried shrimps and yellow slabs of tofu, which they piled into trucks and brought back over the mountains, a three-hour drive along a narrow switchback road with hairpin twists and turns. In the old days the road was a rough dirt track, cut into north-western highlands by the Japanese during the occupation to improve their trade route from Thailand into Burma. In those times the villagers had to walk to the city in the rainy season, camping in the forest, lighting fires to scare away tigers and bears. But as the village expanded much of the forest was felled to make way for concrete roads, and the tigers and bears were hunted down or chased away.
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