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THE WRITERS POST (ISSN: 1527-5467) VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2 JUL 2005
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INRASARA __________________________________ STORIES
RETOLD ONLY AFTER
40 YEARS Translated by DO VINH Story 1. Running away from diseases Mother took my brothers
and sisters and I into hiding in sixty–three. Nowhere far,
mother took us to an aunt’s house three
streets away. Mother said: let’s sleep over at the lonely aunt’s,
I knew that mother was taking us
to run away from diseases. Father retold: in times
past, our maternal grandfather piggy-backed him running far, far. These days the ham- lets can
not go anywhere. I remember my sister with one hand
holding tightly to her dhai
dress ragged, president Ngo
forbade the Chams to wear, with the other arm holding
onto the youngest boy crying two rows of tears. Nowadays the youngest boy is in the sixth grade, the
dhai
dress no one forbids to wear, my sister has tossed it away a long
time ago, the strategic war diseases are no more. A story retold only after 40 years. Story
2. Eating words
I have a friend who is
afflicted with the disease of eating words. Nothing else, he eats morning noon afternoon, he chews gnashingly. His wife cried all of
these two years. He eats all sorts of light
and heavy things Nietzsche, Confucius, then Sagan. He eats habitually. He eats slow, meticulously. When I was still in shorts i saw an old man in my
village eating the moon with raw water
for lunch. Before that, my father
retold, my maternal great grandfather, running away from a Minh Menh mandate read the book of rituals,
burned through the poetry of Glang Anak, mixed kids urine to drink
instead of eating words. He lived over a hundred years old, my father said, such
strange eating habbits, unique to each generation no
matter where. Chams never cease to have the
word-eating gene. His wife cried why exactly it had to be her husband. Story 3. Waiting for boats Perhaps it has been one,
two hundred years, and more than that,
he has waited. Waited for the boats. Arriving in the afternoons, just as the
guru had promised. Like seventy years
earlier, his son waited for the boats.
Surely to come, the father had
said. A father could not ever lie to his son. Like forty years past, his
grandchildren waited for the boats. In the afternoon, after closing the cages. They waited as such, still in that upright position
on that mound of earth --- toward the sea. The boats surely will come. Their ancestors had promised so, it is written so in
books. They cannot but wait. For the boats to come from the sea. This inheritance passed down from fathers to
sons. Until the hamlets, then they stopped
waiting, no more opportunity to wait. The boats had came and gone, a long time
ago, perhaps. TRANSLATED BY DO VINH The Writers Post &
literature-in-translation, founded
1999, based in the US. Editorial
note: Works
published in this issue are simultaneously published in the printed Wordbridge magazine (ISSN: 1540-1723). Copyright
© Inrasara 2005.
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