Having spent the early morning in language study and counting, as the day grew stickier, Martiya would bathe herself and wash her clothes. This was a complicated business. Dyalo villages, Martiya learned, were built at altitude under a spring; this was the custom, not to do so would anger the spirits. The spring was not in the village itself but considerably higher on the mountain; and the villagers had constructed an elaborate and quite beautiful set of bamboo ramps and viaducts which conducted water down from the spring into what might be considered the village commons, the large area in front of the communal cooking hut. From there, water was ported to each household either in splashing plastic buckets (a recent innovation from the lowland plains) or in hollow bamboo tubes. The simple act of carrying water from one place to another substantially occupied the Dyalo day. Martiya's hut was on the far side of the ridge from the water source, so every morning Martiya would need to lug the heavy bucket up the hill, past the racist dog whose mad barking, she was sure, was the expression of a deep hatred of topo'uma people, and then down, before dousing herself in the private bamboo-enclosed bathing area behind the house.
When Martiya had finished bathing, her daily battle with her hair began. The effects of extreme humidity on long curly hair — this was another thing that had not been properly discussed in Martiya's graduate seminars, and as she stood dripping after her morning bath, she often felt it a subject of far greater interest to the working anthropologist such as herself than anything that gaseous, close-cropped windbag Margaret Mead had ever written. Martiya's hair had always been voluminous, but now, in the mountains, her head became a wild, savage place. Martiya considered cutting her hair very short, until advised that in a Dyalo village short hair was worn only by women who had lost their young children; the loss of young children was inevitably a sign of spiritual pollution; and such pollution would bar her from entering most of the village's households. She was stuck with the hair. She tried tying her hair back, rubbing it with oil, wearing a kerchief. Nothing worked, certainly not the shampoo the Dyalo made from leech limes and sesame: that stuff, which rendered Dyalo hair long, lithe, and supple, just made Martiya's hair sticky and attract bugs. Foolishly, Martiya had come into the mountains with only six barrettes. Four had disappeared — Martiya suspected the fourteen-year-old girl. The remaining two barrettes that restrained the dark chaos of her hair were all that kept Martiya from a nice career in sociology. She pulled back her long hair, bound it up and out of her face, and went to lunch.
Lunch was the main meal of the day in a Dyalo village; and to Martiya's profound relief, breakfast aside, the Dyalo ate well. The stories she had heard! She had expected rancid meats, a few stringy vegetables, bowls of insect-infested rice. Preparing for such an unfortunate eventuality, she and Vinai had lugged up into the hills a hundred packets of instant noodles. The noodles lay unopened in her pack. The long history of the Dyalo isn't well known, but it is generally believed that they drifted, as a people, down from Tibet, through Yunnan Province, over to Burma, then made a left turn into Thailand. From all these countries they acquired recipes, allowing them an exceptionally diverse kitchen; and, indeed, even as those Lahu monkeys were widely known in the hills for their stupidity, the Hmong for their clever avarice, and the Akha for their cruelty, the Dyalo were widely known for their cuisine. In the center of the village, there was a hut longer and taller than the others. This was the communal kitchen. The Dyalo did not eat communally, carrying the prepared food back to their own houses, nor did they farm communally, each Dyalo household reaping only what it sowed, but they shared one large cooking space. The hut was long with a high ceiling and a packed earth floor, with a half dozen small cooking fires. Rice was the staple of the Dyalo diet, and was served at every meal; but the Dyalo seemed to know everything that was edible in the hills, and it all ended up sooner or later in the wok or stew pot: a dozen types of mushrooms, weird spices, pungent roots, strange flowers, delicate game birds, even repulsive but given half a chance compellingly crunchy deep-fried termites. Dyalo rice — plain old white rice— was so delicious that Martiya could eat a bowl by itself without any sauce at alclass="underline" it was long-grained and earthy, and the difference between Dyalo mountain rice and the rice that Martiya was used to back home was pretty much the difference between Wonder Bread and hot bread fresh from the bakery oven. Strange pickled beets and at least two dozen fermented sauces; wild honey perfumed with orchids and jasmine which the children gathered at substantial personal risk from apiaries in the jungle; huge feathery omelettes in a chili and coriander sauce; on cold rainy nights, yellow Burmese curries with thick, floury potatoes, or three types of mushrooms soaked overnight in rice vinegar. Martiya was surprised to find herself gaining weight in Dan Loi, and she swore to herself that if she took home nothing else from the village, she'd become a competent Dyalo cook, a skill that she imagined might enliven otherwise dull dinner parties in later life.
After lunch, the villagers dozed. The pigs rooted in the mud and then, having dug themselves comfortable wet beds, stretched out; the dogs found quiet places under the houses and lay their flea-bitten heads on their worn paws; the chickens pecked industriously at slow-moving bugs; lazy clouds gathered together slowly in preparation for the afternoon rainstorm; the bullocks were tethered and dozed in their traces; water slithered down the bamboo pipes and dripped into the ceramic cisterns; the clang of the blacksmith's hammer petered out; the last woman pounding rice or grinding corn stretched her arms out, yawned, balanced her basket on her hip, and wandered home. This was Martiya's favorite time of the day. While the rest of Dan Loi napped, sometimes Martiya would take advantage of the opportunity to be alone and clamber up a nearby rock, from which she could see the entire village. Seen from this perspective, the village was nothing more than a clearing in the forest, houses made from things cut down in the forest — green bamboo streaked with yellow, heavy brown oak, black mahogany, and golden rattan, the forest for a moment tamed, paused, and reordered. She could see nothing that was not from the forest. The Dyalo were slash-and-burn farmers, and when all the forest within a half day's walk of the village had been cut down, set on fire, planted, burned again, planted again, and then exhausted, the people of Dan Loi would pack up their belongings and move on, as they had once left other villages. The forest would close in again.
Martiya was startled by the instability of her emotional life in Dan Loi. She had always been proud of her even keel, especially compared to her more unstable girlfriends: she called it her Dutch side. Karen had been capable of dissolving into tears at even a sidelong glance in a graduate seminar, and a failed romance left her as solidly bound to her bed as a limpet to a rock. Martiya had always considered these displays of emotion distasteful, and had taken a certain satisfaction in her masculine stolidity. Now she was frequently on the edge of tears. Sometimes Martiya would take Ping, Lai-Ma and Farts-a-Lot's three-year-old, on short walks around the village. On one such promenade, Ping tripped over an exposed root and tumbled hard on the muddy path. He began to cry. Martiya had never been around children before in her life and she was surprised by her instinctive reaction, to pick the boy up, cradle him on her hip, and stroke his brow. She was even more surprised that the boy found the gesture consoling, and by the time they made their way back to the hut, he was asleep in her arms. Martiya, however, found herself choking back tears, and she didn't know why. She wasn't even sad, not in any way she could identify, just overwhelmed. She wrote to Karen that she had never in her life dreamed so vividly: nightmares, fantasies, erotic dreams, and, above all, regularly recurring dreams that she was bathing herself by the banks of a running river. She was soaping herself, then stepping into the river, then being carried downstream. These dreams were often so intense that she would wake up in the morning and the village would seem to her less substantial than her visions from the night before. In the course of a single day, Martiya would veer from tears to euphoria and back to tears.