Kim Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain

“Amazing,” Charlie kept saying to their stories. He could not help but compare these to his own relatively straightforward and serene passage through the years. “And now, after all that, you’re getting flooded?”

“Many times,” they said in unison. Padma, still sniffing Charlie’s sauce as if it were the perfect ambrosia, elaborated. “Used to happen only every eighteen years or about, moon tides, you know. We could plan it happening, and be prepared. But now, whenever the monsoon hits hard.”

“Also every month at moon tide,” Sucandra added. “Certainly three, four times a year. No one can live that way for long. If it gets worse, then the island will no longer be habitable. So we came here.”

Charlie shook his head, tried to joke: “This place may be lower in elevation than your island.”

They laughed politely. Not the funniest joke. Charlie said, “Listen, speaking of elevation, have you talked to the other low-lying countries?”

Padma said, “Oh yes, we are part of the League of Drowning Nations, of course. Charter member.”

“Headquarters in The Hague, near the World Court.”

“Very appropriate,” Charlie said. “And now you are establishing an embassy here…”

“To argue our case, yes.”

Sucandra said, “We must speak to the hyperpower.”

The two men smiled cheerily.

“Well. That’s very interesting.” Charlie tested the pasta to see if it was ready. “I’ve been working on climate issues myself, for Senator Chase. I’ll have to get you in there to talk to him. And you need to hire a good firm of lobbyists too.”

“Yes?” They regarded him with interest. Padma said, “You think it best?”

“Yes. Definitely. You’re here to lobby the U.S. government, that’s what it comes down to. And there are pros in town to help foreign governments do that. I used to do it myself, and I’ve still got a good friend working for one of the better firms. I’ll put you in touch with him and you can see what he tells you.”

Charlie slipped on potholders and lifted the pasta pot over to the sink, tipped it into the colander until it was overflowing. Always a problem with their little colander, which he never thought to replace except at moments like this. “I think my friend’s firm already represents the Dutch on these issues—oops—so it’s a perfect match. They’ll be knowledgeable about your suite of problems, you’ll fit right in there.”

“Do they lobby for Tibet?”

“That I don’t know. Separate issues, I should think. But they have a lot of client countries. You’ll see how they fit your needs when you talk to them.”

They nodded. “Thank you for that. We will enjoy that.”

They took the food into the little dining room, which was a kind of corner in the passageway between kitchen and living room, and with a great deal of to-and-froing, all of them just managed to fit around the dining room table. Joe consented to a booster seat to get his head up to the level of the table, where he shoveled baby food industriously into his mouth or onto the floor as the case might be, narrating the process all the while in his own tongue. Sucandra and Rudra Cakrin had seated themselves on either side of him, and they watched his performance with pleasure. Both attended to him as if they thought he was speaking a real language. They ate in a style that was not that dissimilar to his, Charlie thought—absorbed, happy, shoveling it in. The sauce was a hit with everyone but Nick, who ate his pasta plain. Joe tossed a roll across the table at Nick, who batted it aside expertly, and all the Khembalis laughed.

Charlie got up and followed Anna out to the kitchen when she went to get the salad. He said to her under his breath, “I bet the old man speaks English too.”

“What?”

“It’s like in that Ang Lee movie, remember? The old man pretends not to understand English, but really he does? It’s like that I bet.”

Anna shook her head. “Why would he do that? It’s a hassle, all that translating. It doesn’t give him any advantage.”

“You don’t know that! Watch his eyes, see how he’s getting it all.”

“He’s just paying attention. Don’t be silly.”

“You’ll see.” Charlie leaned into her conspiratorially: “Maybe he learned English in an earlier incarnation. Just be aware of that when you’re talking around him.”

“Quit it,” she said, laughing her low laugh. “ You be aware. You learn to pay attention like that.”

“Oh and then you’ll believe I understand English?”

“That’s right yeah.”

They returned to the dining room, laughing, and found Joe holding forth in a language anyone could understand, a language of imperious gesture and commanding eye, and the assumption of authority in the world. Which worked like a charm over them all, even though he was babbling.

After salad, and seconds on the pasta, they returned to the living room and settled around the coffee table again. Anna brought out tea and cookies. “We’ll have to have Tibetan tea next time,” she said.

The Khembalis nodded uncertainly.

“An acquired taste,” Drepung suggested. “Not actually tea as you know it.”

“Bitter,” Padma said appreciatively.

“You can use as blood coagulant,” Sucandra said.

Drepung added, “Also we add yak butter to it, aged until a bit rancid.”

“The butter has to be rancid?” Charlie said.

“Traditional.”

“Think fermentation,” Sucandra explained.

“Well, let’s have that for sure. Nick will love it.”

A scrunch-faced pretend-scowl from Nick: Yeah right Dad.

Rudra Cakrin sat again with Joe on the floor. He stacked blocks into elaborate towers. Whenever they began to sway, Joe leaned in and chopped them to the floor. Tumbling clack of colored wood, instant catastrophe: the two of them cast their heads back and laughed in exactly the same way. Kindred souls.

The others watched. From the couch Drepung observed the old man, smiling fondly, although Charlie thought he also saw traces of the look that Anna had tried to describe to him when explaining why she had invited them to lunch in the first place: a kind of concern that came perhaps from an intensity of love. Charlie knew that feeling. It had been a good idea to invite them over. He had groaned when Anna told him about it, life was simply Too Busy for more to be added. Or so it had seemed; though at the same time he was somewhat starved for adult company. Now he was enjoying himself, watching Rudra Cakrin and Joe play on the floor as if there were no tomorrow.

Anna was deep in conversation with Sucandra. Charlie heard Sucandra say to her, “We give patients quantities, very small, keep records, of course, and judge results. There is a personal element to all medicine, as you know. People talking about how they feel. You can average numbers, I know you do that, but the subjective feeling remains.”

Anna nodded, but Charlie knew she thought this aspect of medicine was unscientific, and it annoyed her as such. She kept to the quantitative as much as she could in her work, as far as he could tell, precisely to avoid this kind of subjective residual in the facts.

Now she said, “But you do support attempts to make objective studies of such matters?”

“Of course,” Sucandra replied. “Buddhist science is much like Western science in that regard.”

Anna nodded, brow furrowed like a hawk. Her definition of science was extremely narrow. “Reproducible studies?”

“Yes, that is Buddhism precisely.”

Now Anna’s eyebrows met in a deep vertical furrow that split the horizontal ones higher on her brow. “I thought Buddhism was a kind of feeling, you know—meditation, compassion?”