The euphoria was as real and unexpected a thing as the tears. She'd be walking back from the fields in the late afternoon, alone on a mountain path, she'd climb over a rock and see the big green valley spread out below, and suddenly her delicate stomach would rise up behind her lungs and constrict her breath with a happiness so intense she could feel it. Just like her unexpected bursts of sadness, these unexpected bursts of concentrated happiness were a new thing, unanticipated and strange.
Martiya had the good fortune to arrive in the village at a time when both men and women still wore the traditional dress, and in the early evenings, when Martiya saw the villagers wandering barefoot back from the fields in their hand-woven clothes — the women in their brightly colored shifts and flashing silver jewelry, long black skirts fringed in brilliant crimson and gold trailing to their ankles; the black turbaned men in simple gray tunics, their only adornment always across their shoulders on a rattan string, the jaw of some tiger or bear dead now many generations, a family heirloom — sometimes when she saw the villagers, Martiya thought that she had tumbled off of the Earth itself. This was a different world. Farts-a-Lot was an exception, with his thick beetle brow and tiny suspicious eyes, but the Dyalo were generally a handsome people, tall, with dignified faces and rich black hair. They moved gracefully and were athletic and strong. They had features that were familiar but which she couldn't quite place: not cute like the Thai or hard and nervous like the Lahu, but mysterious and aristocratic, with pale skin somewhere between the color of honey and the color of wheat bread, high cheekbones, long noses, and elegant arching lips. Now that Martiya had been in the village six months, she started to notice that the Dyalo never slouched, and they used their bodies in just slightly unfamiliar ways: the men walked barefoot to the rice fields with their backs very straight but their legs slightly bowed; the women threshed the paddy into the large bamboo baskets with an explosive motion of their hips and shoulders; in the evenings, everyone squatted on their heels and rocked. They were an intensely attractive people. Martiya liked Dyalo hands, which were long-fingered and muscular. The Dyalo had adopted the Thai game of takraw, a cross between volleyball and Hacky Sack played with a small woven bamboo ball, and Martiya thought that there was no more charming sight in all of Asia than when, in the late afternoons, the young men leaped like graceful acrobats to kick the fluttering ball over the high net. Then Martiya stood with the Dyalo girls, all dressed in their colorful handmade shifts and bright white headdresses, all of them laughing and shouting "Koo-koo" at every graceful point.
While the young men played and the young women watched, Martiya and Vinai went from hut to hut, taking genealogies. This was an essential piece of anthropological drudge-work. Anthropologists tend to see the drama of family life as little more than a complicated game played by complicated rules; only by working through dozens of family trees could an outsider decipher just what conventions governed courtship, marriage, kinship, inheritance, legitimacy, incest, and relations between clans. Martiya liked the way the genealogical work balanced gossipy love talk, with its inevitable talk of beautiful brides, with the underlying rigor of the genealogical chart, which kept the conversation focused and disciplined and forward-moving, like an escalator. She soon found herself trying to juggle:
the members of at least two dozen Dyalo villages, if not more, whose descendants and offspring married and moved from one village to the other, and intermarried occasionally with other tribes from other villages;
organizing themselves in accordance with
painfully complicated conventions that determined which clan members could marry with one another;* given that there were between twelve and fifteen clans (depending on whether the Bird clans were considered three separate clans or only one), there were thus between 144 and 225 separate relationships to consider, all on a continuum between forbidden and desirable;
every potential match governed by
at least a dozen seemingly arbitrary rules for auspicious, inauspicious, and incestuous marriages; for example: a girl who marries her father's nephews was considered to have married well, but marriage to her mother's nephews was absolutely impossible; marriage within the village was discouraged but not forbidden; and so on;
and
the institution of bride-price, by which the groom's family compensated the bride's family for the trouble and expense of raising the
*To summarize something that took Martiya upwards of two months to realize: a clan was an extended family, and membership in the clan was passed in the same way as family name in Western culture — it was inherited from the father. Lai-Ma had been born in the Bird clan, but upon marriage entered into Farts-a-Lot's Fish clan. Her daughters would leave the clan; her sons would stay within it. Just what a clan really meant to its members, what bonds of emotional loyalty the clan demanded, what protections the clan offered — these were questions it would take Martiya years to answer.
daughter; a sufficient bride-price seemed reason to ignore or violate some but not all of the other marriage rules;
never forgetting
all of the natural drama of the human heart, which overwhelmed by passion and desire, inevitably produced exceptions to any and every rule Martiya thought she had established as an absolute of Dyalo romantic life.
Thank God, Martiya thought, the Dyalo weren't polygamous.
The genealogical work inevitably provoked questions about Martiya's own love life, and at first Martiya was not sure just how to explain her particular position as an unmarried, independent adult. There was simply no place in the Dyalo mind for such a remote and isolated creature. Indeed, so strange were the looks that Martiya received when first questioned about her marital status that to save the time and trouble of explaining the complicated kinship rules of her own culture, she invented a fictitious husband waiting for her back home. It had started out as a simple white lie, on a stifingly hot and humid afternoon when her patience was low, but very quickly Martiya realized the advantages of the story. Some of her most successful attempts at building rapport with local women had been when she had discussed her wedding, her bride-price, and her relations with her in-laws, a subject that was almost an obsession among Dyalo women. Martiya named her husband Pierre, for no reason at all, and Pierre, which the Dyalo pronounced "Pell," very quickly became something of a character in the village. Like all villagers everywhere, the people of Dan Loi were naturally gossipy, and stories about Martiya's man were legion: Pell was as tall as two Dyalo men, with a head of brilliant blond hair and the strength of a water buffalo; Pell was so wealthy that he ate pig every day, which was necessary on account of his ferocious sexual appetites. On one of Martiya's visits to the lowland, she bought a magazine with photographs of Hollywood celebrities, and clipped a picture of Robert Redford. "This is Pell," she told the women when she came back to the village. The women puzzled over the strange figure, trying to interpret the photograph and the man. Nobody in the village had ever seen blond hair before, or knew that humanity came in such a pale color. Is he a ghost? they asked — and it took Martiya a moment to realize that the question was asked with absolute sincerity.