The Other Day

This post received the Gold BATOM Award of the Month via Blog-a-ton 21 on June 2011. Thank you for your support as always.

The bus stopped in front of a restaurant just a mile away from the border. I was hungry but nothing in the restaurant I could imagine eating. The last meal I had was in Vietnam, a plate of fried rice that I devoured before I heaved aboard the bus that I almost missed. The Cambodian sun was simmering; as yellow as a yolk and as bright as the tanned kids around me. My odyssey continued through the bumpy roads of Cambodia. The dust fluttered like butterflies. And the bloody chuckholes! They convulsed the bus every now and then and my arse ached. I prayed for a quick end of the bus journey.

The other day, when the rain fell copiously in 1975, news came that the city was taken. Announced Khmer Rouge via loudspeakers that US was going to bomb Phnom Penh. That the Americans would swallow the poor Kampucheans. Citizens were commanded to leave and hence the start of the march of death from the city to the countryside. They carried with them things so little, all that their small hands could carry. Citizens turned refugees within their own land. But US never came. The Americans didn’t at all swallow the Kampucheans. Khmer Rouge did. For the next three years, eight months and twenty days the Kampucheans prayed for a quick end of the Khmer Rouge communist regime.

I arrived in Phnom Penh with my rucksack weighing the dirty cloths I brought with me from Vietnam, unwashed. Unsmiling sanctimonious monks wrapped in sadly coloured cloths prayed to broken figurines of unknown religion. But this land is not a terra incognita. These people around me, they know well their history and they know well where they belong. And here I recounted the wrinkles and the saga of Phnom Penh, the woebegone Cambodian part of earth.

The other day, when the ability to think was a problem, the doctors were killed. The teachers were killed. The cham Muslims, the Vietnamese, the monks were all killed. The Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot deserted cities and demolished civilizations, temples, schools, law courts and markets. Familial bonds were forbidden. When relationships and ties were the problem, mothers and children were separated. Fathers were killed. Sisters were taken away and never returned.

Stood there a former high school that turned into a notorious Security Prison in 1975 known as Tuol Sleng, Hill of Poisonous Trees. I walked in with unwillingness where many school rooms divided into torture chambers and crude cells. Thousands of photographs of victim’s frightened faces and blood stains of yesteryears painted the wall.

The other day, hundreds of prisoners arrived in Tuol Sleng each day with hands chained, eyes blindfolded. Their photographs were taken and their autobiographies were written before they were stripped to their underwears. They were detained and chained in mass, forbidden to communicate with fellow prisoners. Twice a day they were fed with four small spoonfuls of porridge and soup of leaves. And the rest of the day with beatings, tortures, sexual abuses and interrogations. Sometimes they were forced to feast human feces and urine. Among the prisoners were foreigners, some of them arrested by Khmer when their boats drifted into Cambodian waters. None of the 17000 prisoners survived except for seven fortunate ones. Most of them brought to Choeung Ek for further tortures and executions. Some were killed by bleeding them to death in the prison, some by serious beatings. Most of them were burried headless, with hearts doing their final beats in mass graves of Choeung Ek.

A tuk tuk brought me to Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, landmarked by a Buddhist stupa fifteen kilometres from Phnom Penh where the stench of death clung on me. Incense sticks were vaporizing. Flowers were burgeoning. The tourists solemnly prayed for the deceased and I did nothing but stared at the skulls with their memories that weren’t purged.

The other day, trucks would arrive here every three weeks with not less than thirty blindfolded prisoners (intellectuals, ministers, foreigners, women, children, peasants…) mostly transported from Tuol Sleng. The frightened them were led to ditches for immediate execution. They cried, they moaned but overshadowed by the loudspeakers that played the sound recordings of festivals, music and laughter. But when victims to be executed increased to over 300 per day, it became impossible for the ditches and pits to swallow them within a day. They were detained in a dark wooden rooms for the next day’s killing. On January 1979 one last truck remained here until today. None came back.



I walked from one mass grave to another, made of 1,386,734 victims; unearthed in 1980. I was stepping without realizing on bones and teeth fragments, sometimes on the patches of cloths worn last by the dead victims. The killing tree stood in front of me as a demoniac fiend.

The other day, to kill along the possibility of sprouts of revenge in later days, babies and children were executed after their parents. The babies horrendously smashed against the killing tree with a belief – cleaning grasses, it shall dig its entire root off.

I left Phnom Penh with photographs in my camera hung around my neck. With questions stewing in my head. With a strange fear palpitating along with the beat of my heart. And with a promise I gave to myself, not to return again to this part of earth for it gave me the utmost dismay and apprehension.