Rakpabon (รักษ์ป่าบอน)
There is a fence on Koh Lipe that nobody talks about. It runs behind the dive shop on Sunrise Beach, chain-link gone the color of rust, and under the grass inside it are graves the island has agreed to forget. Tourists step over its shadow on their way to sunset yoga and never look down. I lived a hundred meters from that fence for three years before I learned what was under it.
An old man told me. He mended nets in the shade behind the shop where I bought my coffee every morning, and one evening, I asked him about the fence because I had run out of things to say about the weather. His people were Urak Lawoi, the people the brochures call sea gypsies, and his mother lay somewhere under that grass, and a resort had fenced the land before anyone thought to ask the family. He told me this plainly, the tone of a man who had made his peace with it, because peace was the only thing left on the sand.
Over the months that followed, he told me more. That four Chao Ley villages used to sit along this stretch of coast, and now there was barely one, the rest folded into staff quarters behind the same resorts standing on what had been their beaches. That his grandchildren couldn’t speak the language his mother had spoken to him, a language built entirely around reading the reef, because nobody saw the use in teaching it to children who’d grow up parking jet skis instead of reading the waves.
Then, one night, he told me something he hadn’t before. His youngest daughter had married into the Banthad Mountains, to a Maniq family. They didn’t call themselves Chao Ley, or Thai, or anything I recognized. Maniq, he said. Forest people. He said it once and stopped talking, a man closing a door he had not meant to open. When I asked how I might find them, he sat with the question a long time, and then wrote a name and a district on the back of a receipt, and told me there was a driver he trusted, if I was serious about going.
I did not go the way people go to see hill tribes further north, paying an entrance fee to photograph a woman weaving a basket. I went because a man who had lost almost everything told me his youngest daughter was about to lose the rest, and trusted me to reach her. He wanted nothing in return, and I couldn’t spend one more sunset on that beach pretending I hadn’t heard him.
The boat to the mainland left at five, before the island had put its face on for the day. Pak Bara pier was still wet from the night’s rain, longtails knocking against each other in a wind that hadn’t decided what it wanted yet. The driver who’d agreed to take me was younger than I expected and wouldn’t say exactly where we were going. He kept his eyes on the road the whole way and his answers shorter than my questions.
The pavement gave out an hour past La-ngu district. After that it was red laterite, the kind that turns to grease the second it rains, and it had rained a lot. Twice the truck slid toward a ditch deep enough to swallow the wheels. We got out and pushed, both of us silent, mud closing over my sandals to the ankle. The driver kept checking the mirror longer than the empty road behind us needed. When I asked why, he only said that not everyone who came out this way was welcome, and left it at that.
An hour later came the rubber trees, rows of them where forest used to stand, planted in lines a ruler could have drawn, the canopy thinned to let the whole white sky through. We left the truck at the plantation’s edge and walked the last stretch, the driver a few paces ahead, glancing at the trees like they might be listening. Smoke first. Then the shape of a lean-to, palm thatch lashed over bamboo, and a woman crouched at a fire so small it looked like it was trying not to be noticed.
She didn’t stand when we entered the clearing. She took her time looking up and read the day off our faces before either of us spoke. A girl, maybe six, sat close to the fire, drawing something into the dirt with a stick and didn’t look up at all.
A second woman stepped from the trees carrying a bundle of split bamboo on her shoulder. She looked older than the old man had led me to imagine, though perhaps that was only the forest. The driver introduced us, and she stopped when I told her I’d come from Koh Lipe. Before she could ask why, I mentioned her father, in the broken Thai three years on an island had given me. The years left her face all at once.
She said her father never stopped going to the same stretch of beach, even after the boats got louder and the nets came back lighter. The words had a long way to travel before they reached her mouth, and she let each one make the trip alone. I told her nothing had changed there, except the way the water sounded now, and for a moment she looked past me, not at the forest, but somewhere far behind it, like she could still see the line of the sea if she tried hard enough.
Of everything I said in that clearing, that was the only lie.
She asked if he was still alive. I told her he was. Still mending nets behind the dive shop on Sunrise Beach. Still choosing the same patch of shade every morning. She closed her eyes, nodded once, and said nothing. Then she turned to the older woman by the fire. “This is Rakpabon,” she said. “My husband’s mother.”
The driver spoke to her in Thai. She answered in Maniq, a language that shares no root with Thai or Malay and is running out of children to inherit it. Then she said a name. Not the one her daughter-in-law had used. She said it once, in her own language. I nodded. The conversation moved on. I did not ask her to say it again.
When the driver asked if she still had her card, she reached into the thatch and pulled out a plastic sleeve gone cloudy
with damp. Inside was a laminated ID, her photograph washed pale under fluorescent light, her name printed beneath it in the tidy certainty of government ink. The card and the woman had never met.
The driver dropped his voice to translate it, like the word itself embarrassed him. It means protector of the forest. I’ve read a lot of ugly bureaucratic language in my life. None of it ever stopped me cold on a dirt floor the way that word did.
Somewhere in an air-conditioned office, a person had typed Protector of the Forest onto a card belonging to a woman the state could fine, arrest, or relocate for existing inside the forest the card named her to guard. It wasn’t written as an act of cruelty. That’s the part I still can’t get past. It didn’t have to be.
She told us she’d been born under a tree at the river’s edge, not far from where we stood, though not somewhere she could walk to anymore, not legally. Her mother had delivered her alone, the way her mother had delivered her, no clinic, no paperwork, only water and leaves and a cord bitten through with her mother’s teeth. That was, until a few decades ago, simply how it had always been done here.
Then the government drew a line around the forest to protect it, and the line went straight through the place she was born, and one side of that line became a national park with a gate and an entrance fee for people like me, and the other side became a rubber tree plantation, and she stood where she had always stood, on the wrong side of a border that hadn’t existed the week before it did.
Twenty years, the paperwork gave her family. The land had belonged to her people for thousands of years. The paperwork offered them twenty. Her granddaughter would be a grown woman before that number reached zero and the next generation would be born with fewer years left than the last.
Her husband had buried his blowpipe under a stone the year before, after the forestry department began calling it a weapon instead of a tool. In the whole of their marriage he’d used it twice. Once for a bird. Once for a squirrel, the night their granddaughter couldn’t sleep from hunger and the traps came back empty. For that, some form in some office now lists him as a poacher.
The girl’s drawing, when I finally looked down at it, was a house. A square with a peaked roof and a curl of smoke rising from a chimney she’d never stood beside, copied line for line from a government workbook, the only shape anyone had put in front of her and called a home. She’d spent her first years in the green dark under the canopy and slept now in a borrowed lean-to at a stranger’s mercy, and neither had made it into the book.
Then the engine.
Not close. Not yet. But the driver was already moving, telling me it was time to leave without saying the words. The woman flattened the fire with the back of a stick until it was nothing but warm ash. Around us, the clearing rearranged itself for a danger that had not shown itself. A truck somewhere on the logging track below. Brown, government issue. Nobody had to see it to know its color. It didn’t come closer. It didn’t need to. Everyone in that clearing had run the maths, and the driver had my sleeve in his fist before the arithmetic reached me.
We left the way you leave a room where somebody’s sleeping. The woman didn’t walk us out. She stood at the edge of the clearing with her granddaughter’s hand in hers and watched us go, unmoved, someone who’d been leaving all her life.
I walked backward through the rubber trees so I could keep looking at her. She had survived a hundred versions of that engine and would survive a hundred more, right up until the year the paperwork said she would have to leave.
We didn’t talk on the drive back. The rain started again past La-ngu and the driver didn’t slow down for it. By the time the boat pulled into Lipe, the island had put its face back on. Fire dancers on the beach. A string of paper lanterns between two bars. A bachelorette party doing shots off a tray shaped like a surfboard, all of them laughing at something that wouldn’t survive the night.
I walked past the fence on my way home. I hadn’t planned to. My feet just went that way. The old man will be behind the dive shop tomorrow, in his patch of shade, mending the same nets he mended the morning I left.
And one of these mornings he is going to ask me how she was. I have decided what to tell him. That she asked after him before she asked anything else. That she closed her eyes when I said he still went down to the water. All of it true. None of it the thing he will want, which is to know his daughter is going to be all right. That is the one sentence I did not carry back down the mountain. I still do not know what a person is allowed to carry between two people the same country has decided not to see.
I don’t know her real name. Not the one on the card. The one her mother gave her at the river, the one she said once and did not repeat. I could have asked. I nodded instead, and the conversation moved on, and that is the part I cannot put down. Some things you are only offered once. That missing word has outlasted everything else I carried down from the clearing.
Rakpabon. Protector of the Forest.
I keep waiting for the irony of it to wear off. It hasn’t. I don’t think it’s going to. Somewhere behind a dive shop on an island people fly across the world just to photograph, there’s a fence over a grave nobody asked permission to build on.
And somewhere in the mountains above it, a woman named Protector of the Forest is standing beside the line that will soon move over her.
Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. Drawing on an M.Sc. in Environmental Science and his experience as a longform fiction reader for Ploughshares, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Expat Press, Thieving Magpie, Flash Fiction Online, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Literary Garage, Empyrean Magazine, and others. Read more at ashleymangtanifiction.carrd.co