Danzanravjaa

I dreamed
a smile long gone
next to my pillow
the moon

- Excerpt from a Mongolian haiku by the Noyon Khutugt Danzanravjaa

Listen

She comes to see me in my tiny office. I don't have an extra chair to offer her so she sits on a small empty drawer desk. Her eyes drill into mine and her lips start moving, pouring words of anger and frustration into me. Her usual smile and cheerfulness leaves her heart. It is not at me she is angry but our ill-hearted bosses. She uses those words: ill hearted. I listen to her, keeping my mind empty and my heart cold. I cannot afford to fall into her drift of despair. I can only listen and utter small meaningless words. I know she doesn't care what I say or think about her predicament. She only needs someone to listen. I can only listen.

Rarity

I've never been to that village by the border. But it's Sunday and I have nothing better to do. The people there are strangers to my eyes. But a lone visitor in an unknown village, I am more a stranger to them. I sit down by the tuck shop, observing their movements. The occasional nods are directed at me and I respond with a smile. At one corner, a barter trade of sugar and salt with the rare garlic and ginger from the other side is transacted. Passing me by, I see an old man carrying a rolled-up zinc on his shoulder. He softly taps the zinc with his hands, maybe listening to the rhythm of an invisible melody. He comes to me and asks where I am from. I am a stranger, I say. He tells me he needs a ride to his place, located on the hill along the road that leads me home. At his small and low-lighted house, he passes me their local liquor. He then takes a rare musical instrument from the ashes among the gunnysacks of rice. The old man starts playing the bamboo-made instrument. Then, the invisible melody manifests itself. A melody that not many of his people play anymore. And I find this rare music on a hill. The old man smiles at my appreciation of this rarity. The road home is long. I leave the melody on a hill. In the hope of returning to this rarity.

Amen

He narrated his story with humor. I was laughing the whole time, trying to imagine him as a young kid and now, an old man. Together with four others, we were happily drinking our homemade rice-based liquor on a hot Saturday afternoon in his village. Among other things, he told us about how he liked this liquor so much that he had to steal some fruits from someone's orchard and sold it. That money was used to buy a big bottle of this absinthe-like drink. Drunkenness was the order of his day. He's old now. He's still drinking. But nowadays, he said there's no need to steal anything if he wants to drink this liquor. He left us in the evening. The next day, a Sunday, he had to give a sermon to his fellow villagers. He's the church elder. Amen. Oh, I mean cheers to the drink!

Afraid

There is fear in their voices as they inquire the lawyer about their rights to their lands. Their lands that will be flooded by the dam project. Their crops - cocoa, pepper, rubber trees, paddy, vegetables, bamboo and fruit trees -- will never grow on dry land again. In fact, they will never grow at all once the deluge takes place. Their fear is understandable though it is a sad sign of years of fear-mongering seeds nurtured by politicians and their well polished lies. I have never met a person, in fear, asking a thief "Is it alright for you to return the goods you stole from me? Please?"