‘I’m not a coward, nor faint-hearted. The more I know it has to do with your misfortune, the more I feel I need to hear it.’
‘Nopporn, of late you’re always a little earnest,’ she said, beginning to smile in an affectionate way. ‘I never manage to put you off.’
‘Your two younger sisters are already married, aren’t they?’ I began.
‘They married seven or eight years before I did. Now they’re living happily with their husbands, and not old husbands, either. And not only happily, either, because they have both happiness and love, too.’
‘That’s very sad.’
‘That my sisters are happy and love their husbands?’
‘No, I’m very glad about that. I’m sad about you.’
‘Do you want to tell me what you think, or do you want to hear it from my lips?’
‘I’m ready and listening.’
‘You already know that I married Chao Khun without loving him,’ Mom Ratchawong Kirati began. ‘What you want to know now iswhyI married him, even though I didn’t love him. For you to fully understand, I shall have to enlighten you on another important matter first, and that is the question of why I marriedat the age of thirty-five. It’s too old for a woman getting married for the first time. You must know that, generally, women get married between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, or at the latest – or at worst, not after; or it shouldn’t be after – the age of thirty. So why was it that I got married when I was nearly thirty-five? It’s too old. You mustn’t take my side by saying I still look very young. You have to admit that it really is too old, whatever the reason. You never raised this question before. Perhaps it was something you overlooked, thinking it wasn’t an important issue. But I myself know very well that it is important. So important, in fact, that it might be regarded as the source of the subsequent problem, that is, why I married someone I didn’t love. I’ll give you answers to both of these questions, so that you’ll understand me as clearly as if you were gazing at the sky on a cloudless day. I want to satisfy your curiosity so completely that you’ll stop bothering me with questions.’
Mom Ratchawong Kirati paused and stared at me as I sat in a meditative posture right at her feet, paying close attention to her words. We were sitting on a large floral-patterned blanket, big enough for us to stretch out and lie down on. But we did not. Mom Ratchawong Kirati sat leaning against the cedar tree, a cushion behind her back.
‘I really would like to know why you waited so long before you got married. It was silly of me not to have asked.’
‘It’s silly of you to be always flattering me for still looking so young,’ she said, half in jest, half seriously. ‘I have only just got married, but it wasn’t that I put off marriage. When I say this, you may well imagine that as a young girl, my life was full of strange and wonderful things, with its fair share of love and heartbreak. So as not to let you waste your time guessing, then, for you’d be sure to guess wrong, let me tell you in advance that in my life there was no love, no heartbreak, no shedding of tears, no feeling of being transported to heaven, nor to thedepths of hell, or anything exciting like that at all. My life was far removed from such things. My life was ordinary, too ordinary perhaps, which led to disappointment and made me such an unfortunate woman.’
I could scarcely contain my curiosity. ‘I don’t want to interrupt, but I find it hard to believe that in a life where there is a significant problem, such as yours, there isn’t at least something strange or unusual hidden away.’
‘My dear young man, you should give up your studies and take up fortune-telling, because you always know more about my life than I do myself. When I was a girl,’ Mom Ratchawong Kirati continued, ‘I led a very restricted life. While I was growing up, I had no chance to enjoy myself the way ordinary girls do. I didn’t intend to keep myself apart from other girls. I was in fact kept apart. I wasn’t a Chao, but the daughter of one. My father was a real Chao Nai. Before the end of the absolute monarchy, most Chao Nai, as you know, really behaved like Chao Nai. They inhabited a different world. My father tried to mould me and his other children to be like him. At first, I went to school regularly, like anyone else. Then when I reached adolescence, he kept me shut away in his world. He shielded me from contact with the outside world. I continued my education with an elderly English governess at home, or at the palace, as it was called in those days. I learned about the outside world from my English governess and from elderly English women, you know. There didn’t seem to be much difference between my governess and elderly Thai ladies. Her conversation was all to do with moral virtues and housekeeping and that kind of thing. I had a bit of good fortune in that she introduced me to the existence ofVogueandMcCall’s, which gave me advice on how to take care of and preserve my youth and beauty for a long time, so that it would be like the enduring freshness of the hydrangea.
‘So I stayed at home, studying with my governess. Sometimesmy father would send me to another palace to wait upon various senior princesses who were relatives of ours. As a girl, I spent many years this way. I lived in the world of Chao Nai for so long, I scarcely had the chance to realize just how precious youth is to the female sex, and that I should be using my youth for my own benefit. It seems I never asked myself at the time whether it was right that we should shut away our youth from the eyes of the outside world, what good it did to our lives, and whether it was clever to keep our most beautiful years hidden. At the time I never thought about it because we hadn’t been trained to think. The path had been laid out for us and we had to walk down its narrow way in accordance with tradition.’
At this point, Mom Ratchawong Kirati paused for a moment, and I seized the opportunity to interrupt. ‘But that’s not like the you I know. You think deeply and you’re much cleverer than an ordinary person like me.’
‘Please don’t say I’m cleverer than you, or anyone else. If I can just manage to hold my own among others, that’s good enough for me. It was events over the years that followed that taught me to think. Apart from that, my governess used to find me good English books to read, to encourage in me a love of books. And I love art and every kind of beauty, and so I began to think more deeply. I think I have a natural inclination in this direction, so it was just for my own satisfaction that I took care of my looks and appearance at that time. I’ve already told you that I had no thoughts of doing anything to capitalize on my youth.’
‘I really sympathize with you being in such a position,’ I interjected.
‘But art came to my aid,’ she continued. ‘I have little time to spend reflecting and feeling lonely. I have work to do nearly all day long. I’m interested in drawing and, as you know, I spend a lot of time practising. I get a lot of pleasure from it. Besidesthat, I have another regular activity, and that is taking care of my looks so that they will last as long as possible. I have to spend several hours a day on my regular routine.’
‘That’s scarcely believable,’ I remarked doubtfully. ‘What do you have to do for several hours every day? One hour should be enough for powdering yourself, making up your face and putting lipstick on.’
She smiled, her eyes sparkling with good humour. ‘Actually, there’s a lot more to it than you might think. You don’t understand everything about women. Anyway, I hope you’re not suddenly going to criticize me for wasting several hours a day on something useless. Have some sympathy for the female sex. We’re born to be decorations, to please the world, and in order to perform these duties to the best of our ability, we have to take care of our appearance. Of course, that’s not the only duty of the female sex. But you won’t deny, I’m sure, that it’s one of them.’
‘I certainly wouldn’t disagree with you, because over and above virtue, men seek beauty in the female sex.’
‘What’s more,’ said Mom Ratchawong Kirati emphatically, ‘a good woman is sometimes completely overlooked if she is not beautiful as well. After my youngest sister got married, although I sometimes used to dream of love, I lived on happily in hope for a further two years, until my other younger sister married the man she loved. It was then that I first began to feel I was unlucky. At the time I was twenty-nine and my sister was twenty-six. Her marriage and the happiness it brought her was rather painful for me. Believe me, Nopporn, I’m not jealous of my sister. I love her more than I love myself. But I felt pity for my own fate. Up until now it’s been difficult to tell you how I really feel, because it might have looked as if I were being overdramatic or struggling with some shameful thoughts. Do you think you really understand me?’
‘I’m your closest friend. I feel for you and fully understand you.’
‘You have faith in my moral principles?’
‘I have no doubts whatsoever.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely, without the slightest wavering.’
‘Your assurance sounds as firm as a pledge. So I’ll tell you my feelings, honestly and sincerely.’ She gazed past me, her eyes still sparkling, it was true, but with a tinge of sadness. ‘When I was twenty-nine, I was still beautiful and looked younger and more radiant than my sisters. I was lucky to have been blessed with beauty, but unlucky to be without love. It may have been because of that beauty that I, more than my sisters, was shielded and prevented from having contact with the outside world. I wouldn’t feel unfortunate if I’d been born plain. But when He bestowed beauty upon me, why didn’t God, or whatever sacred powers there might be, create an opening for me? Why didn’t He give me love? Why did He abandon my beauty to loneliness and solitude, the beauty I’d cherished and fought to preserve in a way that few women could match?’
