As announced in Literary Hub, we’re delighted that Praveen Herat is the winner of the 2022 Prize for New Immigrant Writing. His brilliant, propulsive international thriller Between This World and the Next is forthcoming in 2024. Congratulations, Praveen!
As prize judges Tiphanie Yanique, Deepak Unnikrishnan, and Ilan Stavans write, "Between This World and the Next tells the story of Fearless, a burnt British war photographer and Song, a Cambodian woman who has been physically and psychologically beset by the violence in her country…. Praveen Herat challenges our own complicity as passive observers when exposed to a constant stream of media depicting suffering across the world and asks what we truly know about anyone, even the people we hold dearest." Read the full judges' citation.
Excerpt from Between This World and the Next by Praveen Herat
In the following excerpt, Fearless wakes up after getting drunk and being drugged in the Naga Bar and brothel by Wish, a former sniper he met on one of his previous jobs, and encounters Song for the first time.
When Fearless's eyes flickered, he saw a curtain backlit by sunshine, wafting away from the window in a breeze. For a while, he watched the material inhale and exhale, drifting on the sea between sleep and wakefulness. Laure, of course, was standing right behind it. As long as he lay still, she would remain watching over him, casting a golden veil around the space. There, just there, alive, complete. Then a dirt bike turned into the street with a farting roar and the dream was punctured; there was no getting it back.
Now, to the other side, he heard a snap and then a clacking. He turned his head to see a little Cambodian girl, sitting on a stool and swinging her legs. The clacking was the sound of a gobstopper in her mouth; the snapping the box he had bought in Nairobi.
Quickly, she reached out and handed him the velvet-covered cube.
Taking it, he blinked several times and unglued his tongue from his palate.
"Engagement ring," he said in a hoarse, whispering voice. He opened the cover to take a look at it himself. "Speak English? I bought this for a lady."
"Pretty lady," the little girl said.
He swung his legs off the bed and sat up slowly, running a hand across his stomach and wincing through gritted teeth.
Holding up the ring in the space between them, he let the light play across its dark blue stone. He remembered the dealer in Nairobi giving him the full shtick: "In this light, Sir, you will see all the tanzanite's colors: blue, pink and even red. The Maasai chiefs give this stone to their wives. It is to celebrate the successful birth of their babies." That had appealed to Fearless deeply: giving an ancient symbol of new life to Laure.
Then, as if to match his bid and raise it, and thankfully distract him from the regret rising within him, the girl reached into her mouth and produced the gobstopper, also holding it up for him to see. She had reached a blue layer, beneath which was a green.
He tried to swallow but couldn't.
"The whole wide world," he said, "You win."
She popped the sweet back in and pointed to the bedside table, on which sat a covered saucepan bound in a tea towel, a china bowl of rice and a big steel spoon.
"Who are you, little one? What's your name?"
"My nem Bopha."
"Hello Bopha. My name is." - he had the urge to say 'Joseph', but then followed the groove of habit - "Fearless."
When he lifted the pan's lid, the steam of a golden broth surrounded them and hunger stirred inside him for the first time in weeks.
"Do you know what happened to me, Bopha? I don't remember."
She didn't understand or didn't want to answer. Instead, with great care, she took the spoon and ladled soup and poured him a fresh glass of water from a jug.
Fearless removed his string necklace so it wouldn't dangle in the soup. The first spoonful was delicious - the broth meaty yet light: the perfect antidote to whatever the hell he'd drunk or snorted - which he realized now must have been no ordinary drink or drug.
"Wish," he murmured. Yes. Wish had taken his opportunity for revenge. He had been standing at the bar with Alyosha, hadn't he? He could have slipped something into his drink without being seen.
As he ate, Bopha took his string necklace and held it up, twisting the plastic letter 'S' that hung from it back and forth.
"You like?"
"Sa'aht," she said to herself.
"You have it," he said, "I don't want."
She drew in her chin.
"Sa'aht," said Fearless, mimicking her, "It's for you. Take it. Go on. I mean it. No problem."
When she had hung it around her neck and placed her palms together, Fearless opened his hand and waggled his fingers.
"Only one dollar!" he said - a joke which made her smile. He was good with kids; any photojournalist had to cultivate the skill. They were instant pathos. Innocence. Blamelessness. Hope. The letter had fallen off a grave marker in the Lion Cemetery years ago when a funeral he'd been covering had come under shelling.
A young woman hurried into the room and shouted out: a cleaner, he presumed, for she carried a soft-haired broom and her head was wrapped in a gingham cloth as if to protect her from clouds of dust. There was something familiar about her, but he couldn't work out what. Immediately, she put herself between him and the child. Seeing the necklace, she ordered the girl to take it off.
"No no - it's my gift," said Fearless.
"She does not want presents."
"It's nothing. Let her have it."
Bopha scurried away.
"What's your name?"
"Song."
"I'm Fearless. Is it you that left this soup?"
But the girl bowed her head and quickly hurried after Bopha.
Someone else now appeared: a young Khmer man whose eyes opened wide when he saw Fearless sitting there. Another young man jostled up behind, peering over the first one's shoulder inquisitively.
"Sua s'day," Fearless said, his throat crackling around the words. Alyosha's voice barked and the two men stepped back.
"Ah - thank God! I heard you were drunk as Zuzya."
"I'm fine," Fearless said, "I think I threw up everything."
"Fucking shit," said Alyosha. His bare ankle had brushed a mosquito coil. He dusted off its ash and shook his head.
"So you're okay then?"
"I've had hangovers," Fearless said - though he knew that what had happened was something different. Not just the thing he'd ingested but the feeling he had had - the desire for oblivion, for giving up on life.
"That's good. Okay. That's good. But something's come up. I can't spend the day with you after all, bacha."
If Fearless's mind hadn't been so focused on piecing the previous night together - connecting the mosquito coil to the cleaning girl to the wet room to throwing up - he might have been more disappointed at this news or even relieved that he would not be expected to move. But he was starting to wonder whether the girl had helped him. And then he remembered walking through the beaded curtain into blue neon light, his eyes dazzled by sparkling sequins. No wonder the girl had put herself between Bopha and him! He ought to find her somehow and thank her; show her that he wasn't like the other men, that she had got him all wrong.
As Alyosha made his excuses and took his leave, Fearless's eyes fell on the rice pot sitting on the nightstand. Yes. Returning it would be a perfect pretext for finding her.
When he was dressed, he went around the other floors in the building, knocking on locked doors but receiving no responses. Returning, he found an entry to the opposite side of the building which led outdoors to a walkway from which staircases ascended and descended. Over the railing, he saw a courtyard below: lines of washing, a cluster of plastic bowls and a bucket.
Along the walkway he heard some movement behind another door. When he nudged it a centimeter he could see her foot. A little further: the fraying edge of a royal blue sampot. Another centimeter and he could see her fully, side on and deep in thought, slowly brushing her hair: a long black curtain swept to the right. But, as he took a step into the room, she tilted her head and flipped the hair over, making him draw in his breath and shrink back. For the other side of her head appeared to be missing; it was a large patch of scalp, the skin of it rippled and ridged, her right ear shriveled as if its cartilage was melted wax. For a split second, the sight brought the fire back to his mind and he was stumbling through the nursing home in Bosnia, walls collapsing, the old people trapped and suffocating.
He must have made a noise, because the girl cried out and scrabbled for a cloth to cover herself.
"I'm sorry," Fearless said, pushing the door open fully, "I came to say thank you and return this pot."
The girl tied a knot in her scarf and held herself still - a small animal realizing the predator is too close to flee.
"What happened to your head? Who did that to you?" Fearless blurted - questions so insensitive and hurtful that he rued them the moment he spoke.
What had happened to him? was the question he should have been asking, he realized. His empathy, his respect, his gentleness had been his assets. The people he photographed always recognized it and trusted him. Somewhere he had lost it - even before he lost Laure.
But before he could apologize, the girl fired back:
"Who did this?" She tapped her left forearm.
"Sorry?"
She meant his arm - the scars that he always covered up with long sleeves.
"I did," he said - once again without thinking first.
She looked up at him, then down, then up again with narrower eyes.
Why hadn't he made his usual excuse? The old story about his arm being caught in barbed wire - the story he had told every woman he'd ever slept with.
"I did it when I was young and messed up and in pain."
The first time, in his teens, it had been a complete accident: a scratch from a coat hanger when he was reaching for a shirt. But then he had done it on purpose - just a week later. And again. For month after month after month. Doing it made him feel like he was achieving something, that - somehow, in some way he couldn't begin to verbalize - he was making everything that had gone wrong right again.
Why trust the girl with this? Was that his weird way of thanking her? How could sharing something of yourself be a kind of thanks? Why had he never told Laure the truth about this?
As this torrent of questions rippled through his mind, his eyes scanned the room, trying to get a grip on the world the girl inhabited. To call it a glorified cell would have been far too generous. An old beer crate next to the door contained a scattering of possessions. Apart from that, there was nothing save a tub with two Lotus flowers and the thin mat on the floor, on which she sat. Light fell across her through the bars of a window grille that in its ornate flourishes suggested better times had once been imagined here. But that would have been long before she took up residence.
"What can I do to thank you for helping me?" He reached into his pocket. "Maybe, this."
The moment he offered her cash he regretted it.
"No no," she told him.
"Please - take it."
"No!"
He was conscious of how inappropriate the situation was: an older foreigner lingering in a young girl's room when she clearly didn't want him anywhere near her. He put the rice pot down and turned to take his leave.
"Wait Sir."
"Yes?"
"You can do something. Please. I need to go in taxi car somewhere."
"Okay?"
"A taxi car and a driver. Tonight. When it is dark. But don't tell anyone. It's secret. Not your friend."
"You mean. Mr. Federenko?"
She met his eyes and held them. The sudden fieriness of her gaze surprised him.
His instinct was to tell her not to judge Alyosha. But maybe that prejudice didn't apply here. In the West, even among the well-traveled and well-read, any Russian-sounding name could arouse a frisson of suspicion, making Alyosha an instant cliché: KGB agent, scar- faced mobster, rogue scientist, criminal mastermind - all of which owed much to Cold War narratives that had faced little scrutiny since the fall of Communism. This had given birth to some bizarre contradictions. The Russian is state controlled and cannot think for himself - because he does not see the world as it truly is. And yet, he is also manipulative and deeply devious, driven by insatiable material greed. All of this was doubly ridiculous for Alyosha as he was, in fact, not ethnically Russian. But that is the thing about prejudice, Fearless knew; he had experienced it himself for as long as he could remember. We are subject to assumptions that do not apply to us because we are the ones who are not truly seen.
Still, he had no idea what assumptions Song might make. After she had told him the time and place to wait, Fearless left her quietly and strolled the Phnom Penh streets, waving away the scooter taxis that beckoned at every junction, trying to remember the last time he'd been anywhere without a project. Interests, pastimes, hobbies, occupations: he had had nothing else in his life save photography. For some reason, images from a book he had loved as a child - What Do People Do All Day? - floated through his mind: dogs and rabbits sawing tree trunks into logs, grading ground for roads, mining coal and tin. He could picture his father reading the book out loud to him, the two of them squeezed on his single bed. He's turning the last page. It's time to turn out the lights. I love you, little man: there were not many men who would say that - not of his generation and not of his class. "You must always remember, Jojo," he had told Fearless more than once, "That people are good at heart, even when they don't seem to be."
Was he good at heart? The stupid questions he had asked the girl and the horrible offer of the money needled him. Without his layers of sensitivity and diplomacy who was he?
He would do as she asked at least. He would get her her taxi.
This simple taxi ride now loomed large in his mind. Because, throughout his career, he had done his utmost never to act or intervene in any situation in which he found himself. If he had intervened in things then he couldn't capture them on film; not intervening made sure things remained the same. But without his camera, maybe he could begin to do instead of observe, like his father had passively observed during his Cambodia trip, on which every last detail had been carefully stage-managed: the places they went, the people they spoke to, the designated times for eating and sleeping. Fearless knew this from a detailed report, published by a Swedish journalist not long afterwards. Along the roads the visitors had traveled in their chauffeur-driven Mercedes, Cambodians had lined up, dressed in new clothes - like Catholic children awaiting a papal motorcade. They had been on best behavior wherever the party arrived: fishing cooperatives and engineering schools, pig farms and pharmaceutical plants, cutting-edge irrigation projects, gleaming new rubber factories, during meals in communal halls in well-maintained villages that manifested the perfect society Khmer Rouge rationality had produced. At night, the visitors were driven back to Phnom Penh directly to their lodgings on Monivong Boulevard, where limitless supplies of gin and cigarettes were laid on.
Fearless now entered a bustling market, which offered respite from the heat of the day but overwhelmed him with the aromas of spices, meat and sweat. "Sorry, so sorry!" He bumped straight into a white man haggling at a hardware stall over an electric iron. Exiting into a street of shop houses and blinding light, Fearless suddenly found himself back on the riverside, not knowing whether to head to the left or right. The rush hour was in full swing, cars and motorbikes and tuk-tuks everywhere. Streets that had been deserted two hours ago were alive with people heading home to their families.
His father must have known that he hadn't seen ordinary Cambodian life. The thought might even have tickled him, Fearless suspected. So what if it was PR? What government on earth doesn't do it? And the Khmer Rouge had liberated Cambodia from a more pernicious farce: the CIA-backed sham of the Lon Nol government. How could rallying their people to put on a show be worse than the Americans and their carpet bombs and chemical sprays?
At first, Fearless thought it was a hallucination, but, then, in the distance he saw an elephant floating towards him, drifting through the mass of riverside traffic. It was as if, in the middle of all the bustle and turmoil, the restaurants and bars, the workers and beggars, the privileged and the dispossessed, there was a still, silent center: a heart of peace, that went at its own pace, that was always open and forever forgiving. Slowly, the giant emerged from the heat haze, came up into focus and glided by, the motorbikes weaving around it with nonchalant ease as it lolloped along the tea-colored river.
Fearless decided to follow it, watching it from a distance, hoping it would somehow lead him home. But in fact, it led him to a vast hotel that was a mishmash of modern and ancient Khmer styles: The Cambodiana. Now, where had he heard that name before? Here, at least, he would be able to arrange a car and driver and take Song wherever she wanted to go.