Short Stories
vol.9Neem（1/5）
So what do you suppose was the biggest souvenir I brought back from my trip? It was so big it wouldn’t fit into my suitcase.
I was no longer surprised or alarmed at this sort of unabashedly childish remark.
She had two small black eyes right in the middle of a round face that looked like a Western doll. Her mouth, though, showed signs of aggression that kept me on my guard. She was no beauty, but she was type children are naturally drawn to. The reason I was able to calmly respond with, I know. The answer is ‘words,’ was because I knew she was dead.
If Miho had still been alive ― if she was still in that poor village, a three-hour twisting, turning drive into the mountains outside the inland city of Sagar, India, still teaching at that school she had built using her divorce settlement, living without electricity, plumbing or TV among children she taught to read and write ― children who had nothing to look forward to other than a life of growing and harvesting vegetables and rape blossoms ― and occasionally playing Japanese songs for them on a harmonium, a kind of modern koto; if she were still in that tiny village, garnering the respect of no one but the people who lived there, with those children covered in dirt, I would have been awestruck. I would have taken a step backwards and said, A souvenir of your trip? Something too big to fit in your suitcase? I couldn’t even guess. I would have smiled back and looked properly puzzled.
But Miho had escaped from the subcontinent a few years before. She had stayed with her parents for a year and then gone to Osaka, where she lived in a cheap apartment until she died of hepatitis she had contracted in India. So when I was listening to this chatter, Miho was nothing more than a leaf, one with veins visible on either side of it. In the end, she was just a normal Japanese person; I could pick her, the leaf, up and hold her to the sun and see it shining through her. Ha! She was no different from me.
People, like death, become more familiar the closer they get, and easier to understand. Things are frightening when they don’t make sense, and stop being so when they do. Although it was unexpected and made me wary for a few moments, I decided that it was like her to die the way she had.