One intense young man with thick black eyebrows replied, as if contradicting him, 'Everything happens only once!'
And that too he had to remember. There was no doubt at all that it was true. Everything happens only once!
And so, eventually, one particular day came: first day of spring, Day One of Year 87, a festival day, first morning of this life, first year of this world; and Bao got up early with Gao and went out with some others, to hide coloured eggs and wrapped sweets in the grass of the lawn and meadow, and on the streambank. This was the ritual in their ring of cottages; every New Year's Day the adults would go out and hide eggs that had been coloured the day before, and sweets wrapped in vibrantly coloured metallic wrapping, and at the appointed hour of the morning all the children of the neighbourhood would be unleashed on their hum baskets in hand, the older ones racing forwards pouncing on finds to pile in their baskets, the youngest ones staggering dreamily from one great discovery to the next. Bao had learned to love this morning, especially that last walk downstream to the meeting point, after all the eggs and sweets had been hidden: he strolled through the high wet grass with his spectacles taken off, sometimes, so that the real flowers and their pure colours were mixed in with the artificial colours of the eggs and the sweet wrappers, and the meadow and streambank became like a painting or a dream, a hallucinated meadow and streambank, with more colours, and stranger colours, than any nature had ever made on her own, all dotting the omnipresent and surging vivid green.
So he made this walk again, as he had for so many years now, the sky a perfect blue above, like another coloured egg over them. The air was cool, the dew heavy on the grass. His feet were wet. The glimpsed sweet wrappers broke in his peripheral vision, cyanic and fuchsia and lime and copper, sparkier even than in previous years, he thought. Putah Creek was running high, purling over the salmon weirs. A doe and fawn stood in one brake like statues of themselves, watching him pass.
He came to the gathering place and sat to watch the children race about in their egghunt, shouting and squealing. He thought, if you can see that all the kids are happy, then maybe things are going to be all right after all.
In any case, this hour of pleasure. The adults stood around drinking green tea and coffee, eating cakes and hard boiled eggs, shaking hands or embracing. 'Happy new year! Happy new year!' Bao sat down in a low chair to watch their faces.
One of the three year olds he sometimes babysat came wandering by, distracted by the contents of her wicker basket. 'Look!' she said when she saw him. 'Egg!'
She plucked a red egg from her basket and shoved it in his face. He pulled back his head warily; like many of the children in the neighbourhood, this one had come into the world in the avatar of a complete maniac, and it would not be unlike her to whack him on the forehead with the egg just to see what would happen.
But this morning she was serene; she merely held the egg out between them for their mutual inspection, both rapt in contemplation of it. It had been steeped in the vinegar and dye solution for a long time, and was as vividly red as the sky was blue. Red curve in a blue curve, red' and blue together 'Very nice!' Bao said, pulling his head back to see it better. 'A red egg, that means happiness.'
'Egg!'
'Yes, that too. Red egg!'
'You can have it,' she said to him, and put the egg in his hand.
'Thank you!'
She wandered on. Bao looked at the egg; it was redder than he could remember the dye being, mottled in the way eggshells got when dyed, but everywhere deeply red.
The breakfast party was coming to a close, the kids sitting around busily chewing some of their treasure, the adults taking the paper plates inside. All at peace. Bao wished for a second that Kung had lived to see this scene. He had fought for something like this little age of peace, fought so full of anger and hilarity; it seemed only fair that he should have got to see it. But – fair. No. No, there would be another Kung in the village someday, perhaps that little girl, suddenly so intent and serious. Certainly they were all repeated again and again, the whole cast: in every group a Ka and a Ba, as in Old Red Ink's anthology, Ka always complaining with the caw of the crow, the cough of the cat, the cry of coyote, caw, caw, that fundamental protest; and then Ba always Ba, the banal baa of the water buffalo, the sound of the plough bound to the earth, the bleat of hope and fear, the bone inside. The one who missed the missing Ka, and felt the loss keenly, if intermittently, distracted by life; but also the one who had to do whatever possible to keep things going in that absence. Go on! The world was changed by the Kungs, but then the Baos had to try to hold it together, baaing their way along. All of them together playing their parts, performing their tasks in some dharma they never quite understood.
Right now his task was to teach. Third meeting of this particular class, when they began to get into things. He was looking forward to it.
He took the red egg back with him to his cottage, put it on his desk. He put his papers in his shoulder bag, said goodbye to Gao, got on his old bike and pedalled down the path to the college. The bike path followed Puta Creek, and the new leaves on the trees shaded the path, so that its asphalt was still wet with dew. The flowers in the grass looked like coloured eggs and sweets wrappers, everything stuffed with its own colour, the sky overhead unusually clear and dark for the valley, almost cobalt. The opaque water in the stream was the colour of apple jade. Valley oaks as big as villages overhung its banks.
He parked his bike, and seeing a gang of snow monkeys in the tree overhead, locked it to a stand. These monkeys enjoyed rolling bikes down the bank into the stream, two or three cooperating to launch them upright on their course. It had happened to Bao's bike more than once, before he purchased a lock and chain.
He walked on, downstream to the round picnic table where he always instructed his spring classes to meet him. Never had the greens of grass and leaf been so green before, they made him a bit unsteady on his feet. He recalled the little girl and her egg, the peace of the little celebration, everyone doing what they always did on this first day. His class would be the same as well. It always came down to this. There they were under the giant oak tree, gathering around the round table, and he would sit down with them and tell them as much as he could of what he had learned, trying to get it across to them, giving them what little portion of his experience he could. He would say to them, 'Come here, sit down, I have some stories to tell, about how people go on.'
But he was there to learn too. And this time, under the jade and emerald leaves, he saw that there was a beautiful young woman who had joined them, a Travancori student he had not seen before, dark-skinned, black haired, thick eyebrowed, eyes flashing as she glanced briefly up at him from across the picnic table. A sharp glance, suffused with a profound scepticism; by that look alone he could tell that she did not believe in teachers, that she did not trust them, that she was not prepared to believe a single thing he said. He would have a lot to learn from her.
He smiled and sat down, waited for them to grow still. 'I see we have someone new joining us,' he said, indicating the young woman with a polite nod. The other students looked at her curiously. 'Why don't you introduce yourself?'
'Hello,' the young woman said. 'My name is Kali.'