Red Pilgrims
- May 19, 2023
- 3 min read
by Renee Chen
Editor’s note: This story about the Rohingya Genocide contains a scene of sexual violence.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.— Rumi
Today, I tell you about Arakan, coastal country by the Bay of Bengal. We run our hands through the mud in rice paddies, brushing knots off the strings of unbloomed crops. We are Arab merchants crowding the bazaar, shawls choked by dust after our long nightly travels, tribesmen of Pyu city-states, crossing the Arakan Mountains. We race across the mounds of mud, circle mothers with newborns nestled in their arms, and our heads turn wet like sodden duffels. Your father drapes his longgi over your nape and wraps his arm around me.
“How far are we from Kutupalong?” I ask him. He is shirtless, his naked back populated with pustules. He splays his arms out and pretends not to hear.
Above us, dusk settles. The skeletons of blue and yellow light do not mingle, splintering the skyline into shaded streaks instead. Beside me, you count the shrapnel on the slicking asphalt road in a one, two, three.
***
In your home in Minbya, a handwoven drugget covers the floor of the shack. The sun tattoos our napes as we doodle across it, paraffin wax to mildew, blue arcs and emerald zigzags to the dust motes.
When you laugh, your voice echoes inside the house, the tinplate walls knitting it into the string of yesterwater collecting on the roof. When he is not napping on the bamboo lawn chair, your father teaches us to battle with marbles, anchor bobbins of thread into a wrestling ring. The gemstones swirl before our eyeballs, tiger eyes and topazes spinning out of control, his bushy beard smelling like motor oil.
Occasionally, I am able to convince you to sneak past his guardpost. For a game of soccer with the boys at my madrassa, a gauntlet to climb the poplar trees beside the dump. Tonight, I usher you to a pond where fireflies rune. In the sapphire water, we bathe our monkey arms. The muddy bottom crackles, and tadpoles spill out like a sunset painted. We stencil our names onto an adjacent stash of red bricks. I ask you to marry me for the first time.
***
On the night we leave Rakhine, blood seeps into your mother’s inner thighs. The soldier spoons her on the ground, the scar on his cheekbone gleaming like a fish’s scale. He unbuttons his uniform trouser and crawls on top of her, thrusting himself ahead.
My throat tightens. Your tears dart down my tank top. Your father screams as another soldier beats him. On the stone step, we watch the artillery flashing white across the street, listening to the thuds of gunshots ripening in the heat. I hide your face in the folds of my shirt. “Everything is going to be okay,” I say.
***
Three days into our journey, we watch a couple raise a fire for the first time. The smoke coils up the air like a water snake. We eat raw mango, palmful of passion fruit seeds by the muddy roadside. Your cheeks plump pink, and a breeze scatters across the night.
We are the rulers of Rakhine, forced by a Burmese invasion to seek help from the Bengals in the north. You are Min Saw Mon, last ruler of the Launggyet Dynasty, founder of the Mrauk U Kingdom, and I am your warrior, returning with you to seize control of the Arakanese throne after twenty-four years of exile in Bengal.
We lie on a crabgrass of cigarette butts and long grass, our breaths perfumed by raw mango flesh. “This is the valley of the Lemro River,” I say. You fight off stray dogs shimmying around us as I build cities out of matchsticks. Pyinsa, Parein, Hkrit, Toungoo, and Launggret, you repeat after me.
***
You are waiting for me outside the madrassa, hoop rolling a mud-strewn tire on the checkered block. You study its arch of glass windows and ebony wood doors. “I have never seen anything so beautiful,” you say.
We walk side by side back home, taking turns rolling the tire, launching it ahead with a strap of electrical wire. A Buddhist boy hurls three pebbles at my back. You sling your arm over my shoulder, humming into my ear to drown out his laughter. You steer me past ashtrays and jerry cans, the headlights of a station wagon flash beside the road.
Renee Chen is an Asian American writer based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work has previously been published in JMWW, Cosmic Double, The Bookends Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Un-Inquired, is forthcoming in the Querencia Press.
