‘Please try to be a little polite. Lailin feels bad when she hears you abusing. If you are not keeping well, then don’t keep on coming here. I will go instead. I will try to give you a little more money. I will tell Lailin. She will also give you some. She did not know about you. Now she does. She will understand. You have not done me any harm. You have married me for money. You have done me a favour by marrying me. It is because of you that Lailin has a good life today. Believe me, I have good feelings for you. I wish that everything goes well with you. But please leave now. I would feel better if I could give you some more dollars.’

The man looked speechlessly at Mei Lin. The woman who had kept silent all these years had spoken today. Did she always have good feelings for him?

The man slowly got up. Lailin was looking at him, standing in the doorway. She looked at him closely for the first time in many years. A skinny, sick old man in worn-out clothes. A withered face. A pair of lifeless eyes.

Lailin felt a strange sorrow. She returned to her room hurriedly, took out a few hundred-dollar notes and returned. The man was near the door. Handing out the notes, Lailin said slowly, ‘Take this.’

The man looked at the notes and then at her in surprise.

‘You need it,’ said Lailin.

The man looked at her eyes. Then, ignoring the cash, he left.

‘Let him go,’ her mother said slowly.

Lailin looked at her mother with confusion. She was picking up the broken pieces of the plate from the floor. She went and sat beside her. Her mother looked at her and said softly, ‘I can do it, dear.’

‘I know you can. But let me help you.’

Holding her mother’s hand, Lailin helped her mother up and said anxiously, ‘You have fever!’

‘If I rest for a while, I will be fine,’ her mother smiled.

‘Are you a doctor?’ she said angrily, handing the thermometer to her mother.

Seeing her mother’s frail, wrinkled hand, Lailin was suddenly overcome with emotion. She knelt down on the floor and placed her head on her mother’s lap.

Eleven

Eleven

I am not the architect of this narrative.

I am but an inept artist attempting to narrate the epic saga of pain and anguish of a helpless community caught in the maelstrom of history.

I am now out of words and space. Whose stories should I tell? Whose anguish should I depict? Every one of them has been carrying within them a ballad of grief. Everyone has been carrying a portion of that long and convoluted chronicle replete with sorrows and overlooked by history.