BANGKOK
JEWEL
by Derek Hanebury
Taking a break from the
sun and the great souvenir search, I unzip and stand
facing the urinal
leaking two Thai teas I downed an hour ago
with a platter of khao phat Amerikan
when something shifts in
the edge of my eye;
remembering the green
viper I watched yesterday
scale the plaster wall
and coil into a hole above the door, I am relieved
to recognize a woman
spidered onto the floor, spread out like an opened lotus,
her thin arm washing the
polished cement with wide-circling swipes of a wet rag.
She keeps her head bowed
to her work just as I keep my eyes forward now, observing
stippled plaster and
wondering if she’ll wait for this white guy to finish his whizz before
she finishes her floor.
I push a little harder when I see she is circling in my direction,
angling under the row of
urinals, but those Thai teas were tall and my poor tourist’s bladder is
still stretched like a
water balloon full to bursting. What can I do, but pretend she isn’t there on
the floor, halfway
closer to me now that I can see the strands of grey in her dark hair,
the thin ropes of muscle
braided through her tawny arm?
Mother? Grandmother? The
dutiful Thai wife doomed to clean the floors of public bathrooms
while her husband
hunkers down at the bar?
Just under the whish of
my pissing, I hear it then, a whispering sound subtle and soothing
as water over sand, the
words indistinguishable at first beneath the flowing water but growing
now that I tune in, her
every outbreath singing it to herself:
Om
Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani Padme Hum.
A Buddhist then,
polishing the floor while chanting a mantra to scrub the illusions from her
eyes,
not just cleaning a
floor but scraping the sticky samskara off the Buddha self,
using every breath to
find the jewel in the lotus. And I wonder how real I am to her now, or if I
even exist as she
handmops the floor in slow circles; like ripples in a koi pond, she moves
towards my feet, my face
flushing in the steaming Bangkok heat as the waves of her washing
edge the dust from one
side of my sandals, the next pass skewing slightly to leave me marooned
on a small island of dry
concrete,
surrounded by a tide of Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani Padme Hum;
not sure if my eyes are
open or closed then, my exposed self awash in the mantra and the energy
of this bird-boned woman
serving her Lord, turning the room into an ocean, into a temple,
with her Om Mani Padme Hum, Om Mani Padme Hum, until she is somewhere behind me, and
with a shudder and a
shake,
I’m finally empty.
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