Tua and the Elephant Read online

  For Mishy—R. P. H.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE In the Night Market

  CHAPTER TWO The Other Side of the Wall

  CHAPTER THREE Tua Encounters an Elephant

  CHAPTER FOUR The Elephant Beckons

  CHAPTER FIVE Sizing Up the Elephant

  CHAPTER SIX Meeting Auntie Orchid

  CHAPTER SEVEN An Elephant by Any Other Name

  CHAPTER EIGHT A Hungry Elephant

  CHAPTER NINE A Little Help from the Neighbors

  CHAPTER TEN Beside the River Ping

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Breakfast with Pohn-Pohn

  CHAPTER TWELVE A Narrow Escape

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN On the Run

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Diversion

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Concrete Island

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN In Pursuit

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Crossing the River

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Paying the Ransom

  CHAPTER NINETEEN The Other Ransom

  CHAPTER TWENTY The Wat

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Outside the Walls

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Leaving the Wat

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Journey to the Mountain

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Into the Forest

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE A Raft on the River

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Mae Noi

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN The Confrontation

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Night at the Sanctuary

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE A New Beginning

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  When Tua was born, a nurse in the delivery room exclaimed, “Look at the little peanut!” Tua, in Thai, means peanut. And Tua, having arrived prematurely, was quite small. At that exact moment, she let out such a scream for attention that all of the doctors and nurses in the delivery room exhaled sighs of relief. It was clear that this baby, small though she was, was a survivor. She had just ordered them to get on with the job of making her comfortable, and that is exactly what they did. Soon everyone in the maternity ward was calling the little baby in the incubator Tua.

  And that is how she got her name.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the Night Market

  Tua and her mother lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on a quiet lane near one of the city’s most popular night markets.

  “Tua, darling, where are you? I need your help. My shoes have run off, and I’m late for work.”

  Tua leapt up from her desk and ran to fetch her mother’s shoes from outside the front door.

  “Wherever did you find them? I looked everywhere.”

  “They were on the porch,” Tua said.

  “Were they running away or sneaking back home?”

  “They were where you left them when you came home from work,” she reminded her mother. “Like you always do.”

  Suay Nam hugged and kissed her daughter, then slipped on her shoes. “What would I do without you? Oh, I’m late! What time is it? I gotta go. I love you the most!”

  “I love you the most,” Tua called down the stairs.

  “If you need anything, go to Auntie Orchid’s. And don’t stay out too late at the night market. Have you got the number of the restaurant?”

  “I’ve got it,” Tua said.

  As soon as her mother was out of sight, Tua put away her homework and dashed into the street as if late for an appointment of her own.

  “Sawatdee kha, Uncle,” Tua said to Somchai, the roti pancake vendor.

  “Who speaks?” Somchai called over his cart.

  “It’s me, Tua,” Tua said, stretching to the tips of her toes and waving her hand in the air.

  “Of course it is, who else could it be?” Somchai replied, handing Tua a banana roti with chocolate sauce and condensed milk.

  “Khawp khun kha.” Tua politely thanked him.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “She’s working at the restaurant tonight,” Tua said, and took a greedy bite of the banana roti.

  “Always working. Every day and every night.” Somchai stretched his neck like a tortoise and sighed. “Some of us were only born to work.”

  “I’m going to the night market,” Tua said.

  “Don’t let me keep you from your appointed rounds, then. Better play while you may.”

  “Kha.” Tua waved good-bye and zigzagged through the clogged traffic to the other side of the street.

  “Hey, Tua, what’s your big hurry?” Uncle Khun the tuk-tuk driver called out as she skipped onto the curb. He was collapsed in the back of his three-wheeled taxi, with one bare leg dangling over the side like a python.

  “I’m going to the night market,” Tua pouted. But recalling her mother’s warning, “Girls who pout bite their cheeks,” she immediately unpuckered her face.

  “Get in,” Khun winked. “I’ll give you a good price.”

  “No thank you,” she said. “I’m almost there.”

  Khun threw back his head to laugh, thought better of it, pulled a newspaper over his face, and fell asleep to a lullaby of honking horns, screeching tires, and the occasional collision.

  The alley Tua ducked down, soi 5, led her to the middle of the night market. She stopped at the end with hands on hips, surveying her domain as if waiting for a cue to enter the stage.

  Strings of bare lightbulbs crisscrossed overhead, igniting the street in a blaze. Vendors’ carts crowded both sides of the street, hawking their wares to the people strolling down the middle. Curries with rice and curries with noodles; pad Thai and pad Thai omelets; rotis with chocolate sauce and condensed milk; sticky rice and mango; green papaya salad with shredded carrots, tomatoes, green onions, and peanuts. Taro, tamarind, durian, and coconut ice cream, and crispy banana fritters. Sliced watermelon, pineapple, papaya, and mango nestled on beds of crushed ice. Coconut oil sizzled in woks, grills smoked, and blenders whirred.

  A traditional band made up of a coconut-shell fiddle, bamboo flute, skin drum, chimes, gongs, and a wooden xylophone competed with a boy dancing to pop music on a screeching boom box. A girl in a school uniform scratched out a tune on a battered violin.

  “Sawatdee khrap, Tua,” said a bare-chested boy as he hung a string of jasmine flowers around her neck. White jasmine necklaces climbed up the length of his arm.

  “Khawp khun kha, Ananda,” she thanked him, lifting the string of flowers to her nose and inhaling the sugary-sweet scent.

  Lam, Ananda’s sister, tugged at Tua’s elbow. Tua lifted the girl in her arms and rubbed noses with her.

  Tua nodded at the dozens of jasmine necklaces around her neck. “You smell good enough to eat. Are you going to sell all of those tonight?”

  Lam shook her head no, then nodded yes.

  “Come, Lam,” Ananda said. He reached for his sister, sat her down, and took her by the hand. “See you later, Tua!”

  “Kha.” Tua waved good-bye and stepped into the strolling current.

  Halfway through the market, Tua stopped to watch a man carve a bar of soap into the shape of an elephant when she heard a voice call out behind her.

  “Does the little peanut want a foot massage?”

  Tua spun around and searched the rows of people on mats having their muscles and limbs pummeled and pulled until she spotted Auntie Duan, the blind masseuse.

  “Sawatdee kha, Auntie. How did you know it was me?”

  “By the sound of your footsteps.”

  “But it’s too noisy to hear my footsteps,” Tua argued.

  “Then I must have smelled you,” Duan shrugged.

  Tua still wasn’t convinced. “What do I smell like?”

  “Night jasmine and chocolate sauce,” guessed Auntie Duan.


  Tua opened her mouth but was too flabbergasted to speak.

  “Tua, don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open like a carp,” hollered Auntie Nam, the curry noodle vendor. “Run over to Uncle Sip’s and fetch me some bean sprouts. And don’t let the old bandit cheat you,” she warned, flipping a ten-baht coin into Tua’s hands.

  “Kha,” Tua said, after closing her mouth and inspecting the coin. Then she leapt into the market like a cat, weaving her way through and around the legs of the shoppers until she came to a stop in front of Uncle Sip’s vegetable stand.

  “Sawatdee kha, Uncle.”

  “What’s that?” he barked, still angry with the chef who had offered such a ridiculously low price for his cabbages. Some people didn’t seem to know that life is a wheel, and that every living thing is only a spoke in the wheel of life.

  “Life is a wheel, Tua,” Uncle Sip declared suddenly, as if the idea had just occurred to him.

  “And we are only spokes in the wheel of life, Uncle.”

  This response brought Sip out of his reverie. He looked down at Tua and grinned like a gecko.

  “You are so smart, Tua. Who taught you that?”

  “You did, Uncle.”

  “No wonder you’re so smart, then. Did you finish your homework?”

  “Kha,” Tua said, crossing her fingers behind her back. “All finished.”

  “Good. That’s good, because you’ll never get ahead in this world on night market philosophy alone. You need an education. Let’s test your math and haggling skills. Pretend you’re here to do some shopping.”

  “But I am here to do some shopping. I need bean sprouts for Auntie Nam.”

  “Pretend you’ve come on an errand to buy bean sprouts for Auntie Nam,” Sip suggested, as if this, too, was an original idea.

  “Ten baht a pound,” he announced.

  Tua handed him the ten-baht coin.

  “You’re supposed to haggle,” he whispered.

  “May I have some change, please?”

  Uncle Sip handed Tua a bag of bean sprouts and a five-baht coin.

  “Good. Very good indeed,” he said. “Well-mannered and forthright. Manners are harder to teach than business skills. We’ll work on the haggling tomorrow.”

  “Kha, Uncle,” Tua said, and shot off back to Auntie Nam.

  Auntie Nam plucked the bag of bean sprouts out of Tua’s hands and replaced it with a bowl of curry noodles.

  “Yum, Auntie!” Tua said. “I love khao soi.”

  Auntie Nam held out the flat of her hand while Tua, balancing the hot bowl in one tiny palm like a juggler, dropped the five-baht coin into it. Auntie Nam squeezed her eyes into slits and stared down at the coin with suspicion, sniffed approval at last, pocketed it, and brushed her hand affectionately across Tua’s cheek.

  “Good girl,” she said. “Now eat.”

  “Kha, Auntie,” Tua said, and sat down on a little plastic stool that seemed custom-made for a girl her size.

  “Aroy mak mak,” she said, expressing her pleasure to the bowl of khao soi in her lap. The aroma rose up from it in a spicy cloud that encircled her head and poured into her nostrils, filling her with a warm and comforting glow.

  She might have remained in that trance had Auntie Nam not dropped a handful of crispy fried noodles into Tua’s bowl and squeezed half a lime over the top of them. The gesture broke the spell Tua was in, and she lifted the bowl to her lips with both hands and drank the rich, thick curry sauce. “It’s so delicious!” she repeated, this time to Auntie Nam instead of the bowl.

  Auntie Nam bowed a wai with her palms pressed together, thanking Tua for the compliment.

  After washing her bowl and spoon, and all of the other bowls and spoons that needed washing, Tua bid good luck to Auntie Nam and continued on her rounds. She stopped for a gossip and a giggle with her school chum Kip, who, with her mother, Na, sold hand-painted paper umbrellas, silks, sarongs, and Thai fisherman pants. When Na called Kip back to work, Tua began following a scruffy brown dog with a muzzle over his snout.

  “Why are you wearing that muzzle?” she asked the brown dog.

  The brown dog led Tua to a quiet corner of the market. Then he settled down on his haunches beside a large, teetering pile of boxes and crates, and tugged at the muzzle with his front paws.

  “Would you like me to help you take that off?” she asked him.

  The brown dog lifted his ears, tilted his head in an attitude of welcome surprise as if to say, “What an especially good idea,” and attempted as best he could to affect a grin behind the muzzle.

  “First you must tell me why you’re wearing it,” Tua said.

  But before he could speak, if speech is possible for a brown dog with a muzzle on his snout, a slim gray cat dropped from the sky (or perhaps from the wall separating the market from the street) and onto the boxes and crates. The cat glared down at the brown dog, then snarled and hissed—rather rudely, Tua thought. The dog must have thought it rude as well, for he leapt up from his crouch, sending the boxes, crates, and the gray cat scattering.

  That was as good an answer to the question of why he was wearing a muzzle as Tua could have gotten from the brown dog himself, muzzle or no muzzle. It was a mystery unlocked.

  But now, there in the wall, a new mystery presented itself. Behind where the boxes and crates had been stacked higher than a brown dog can jump—and gaping like old Grandma Orn’s toothless mouth—there, looking just big enough for Tua to squeeze through … was a hole.

  If walls could talk, this one would have invited Tua to step through the hole to the other side.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Other Side

  of the Wall

  Tua put her foot through the hole as if testing her weight on the outer limb of a tree.

  “I’ll just have a look,” she said.

  Then, with a backward glance, she squeezed the rest of herself through. Straightening up to her full height on the other side, she cast her eyes about the busy street.

  The buildings were taller and grander (some of them even had names), and they seemed to lean over the sidewalk as if inspecting the traffic, human and motorized, before selecting who or what they would direct inside them. They often chose badly, or so it seemed to Tua, for they spit out as many through one door as they admitted through another.

  “Perhaps they can’t make up their minds,” Tua supposed. “There are just too many people and cars and motorbikes to choose from.”

  And it was while she was musing on the flighty nature of large buildings that she found herself caught up in a current of pedestrian traffic. Tua didn’t attempt to struggle out of this current any more than a leaf caught in a flooding gutter would have done, but allowed it to take her where it would.

  Before long she found herself in a crowd of unfamiliar people, all of whom were much taller than she—so tall, as it happened, that they blocked from view the landmarks she used to navigate the city by. When this human current stopped at last, she tugged on the nearest sleeve to beg assistance.

  “Kho thot kha,” Tua said, begging the woman’s pardon.

  But the face that looked down from the sleeve she was tugging was not a Thai face. It was a farang face.

  A farang is a creature from a foreign land. It can be from France, or Germany, or Ireland, or England, or Sweden, or Fiji, or Italy, or Australia, or New Zealand, or Uruguay, or even the United States of America. Tua had seen many farangs before, but she’d never actually met one. Farangs, unless they are unusually clever, don’t speak Thai. The farang whose sleeve Tua had been tugging was unusual in appearance only.

  “Oh, hullo, honey,” the big-nosed farang said, lifting her bug-eyed sunglasses and leaning over Tua.

  Tua leaned back on her heels. “Sawatdee kha,” she replied.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any small change for you, darling,” she said, and patted Tua on the top of the head.

  Tua bunched her fists and twisted her mouth into a frown. It is taboo and
impolite to touch a Thai on the top of the head. The top of the head is the highest part of the body, spiritually as well as physically.

  “Frowns pinch the heart,” she remembered her mother saying, and immediately unwrinkled her face.

  “Oh, all right, dearie,” the farang said impatiently as she gave Tua a twenty-baht note and dismissed her with a fluttering hand.

  Tua recalled what Uncle Sip had so often said about farangs: that they were under the misapprehension that they were the wheel of life itself rather than spokes like everyone—and everything— else. “Farangs are as noisy as frogs in a pond,” he was fond of saying. “And puffed up to twice their normal size.”

  A twenty-baht note is nothing to scoff at. It would buy four pounds of bean sprouts for one with bargaining skills. But Tua had no use for it. She no more needed money than a chicken needs teeth. Sometimes possessing nothing is like having everything.

  That was why she began to cast her eyes about for someone to share this small fortune with. But she was still imprisoned in a forest of legs and hips and stomachs.

  Suddenly, like a train leaving a station, this mass of body parts lurched forward on the signal of the changing light, and carried its prisoner, Tua, with it.

  Escape through the scissoring legs was impossible, and weaving around them only produced more legs, hips, buttocks, and stomachs. This mass of legs would stop from time to time, collapse into itself, pull apart again, and continue on its many-legged way, like a giant caterpillar.

  “Kho thot kha,” excuse me, Tua said as she tugged the back pocket in front of her. “You’re crushing me.”

  “Thief!” the pocket cried out in alarm. “Pickpocket!”

  Those four syllables had the power of an incantation, for no sooner had they been spoken than the legs and their attachments scurried away in all directions like ants fleeing a monsoon.

  Tua found herself standing alone in an open square beside a fountain. This was not a fountain Tua had ever seen before. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the skyline in search of a familiar landmark. And just as she was about to swallow the lump in her throat, she swung her head back to the gray blur that her eyes had bumped over: something vaguely, fuzzily familiar.