What I gained from losing my wallet in Phnom Penh

By Brinda Bose That is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country? If he was already speaking our language, with all that that implies, if we already shared everything that is shared with a language, would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of asylum or hospitality in regard to him? - Jacques Derrida, On Hospitality I was not pondering such Derridean complexities when I walked into the night market of Phnom Penh a few nights ago. Tuktuk-driver Chantay surely didn’t think of me as anything but just another tourist in his town. Neither of us imagined our chance encounter would lead to an adventure through Phnom Penh’s dimly-lit by-lanes past nine o’clock into midnight - but someone at the riverside night-market had found my pretty peacock-blue wallet a little too hard to resist, and so there went my money, credit cards, identity cards, even a pendrive. [caption id=“attachment_873383” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] An Indian tourist confronts the ultimate nightmare abroad - losing her wallet with her money, credit cards and ID. Yet she gained something far more precious than the lost dollars and riel thanks to a tuk tuk driver in Phnom Penh. Reuters.[/caption] Driven by my son’s youthful determination and Chantay’s cooperative wheels, we pursued justice and our meagre wealth for close to three hours in that colourful little city of the dark Killing Fields, coming up trumps finally – not because we recovered our lost property, but because we got to experience a most astonishing display of fellowship and generosity in this smiling broken-English-speaking young man who adopted us as a cause and left us touched and bemused despite a very inconvenient loss in a foreign country. Once the market’s security men indicated that they could do little to track an errant wallet thief, Chantay careened us back and forth on his motorized magic carpet from shady dingy police rooms to the bustling market shimmering in lights, inordinately distressed lest we leave his country thinking that ‘all Cambodians (are) vely ba-ad’. He sweated while he endlessly interpreted our tale to sundry police officials. He was smilingly insistent that they make phone calls, consult chiefs, record our complaint with a red stamp and reach it to the Indian embassy so that our ambassador could “take care” of us. His exuberant faith and friendliness injected even those dour sleepy policemen with rare spirit, and they transformed their grimy shed into a haven of shelter before our wondering eyes. Three of them tussled with Chantay and us for over an hour to get minute details of our brush with petty crime on their beat, with a lot of wild miming (where my son got to put his thespian skills to test) and flickers of a shared spoken language. When all was sealed by my final thumbprints (and much excited exclaiming over my profession: “aah, professorrr!”), Chantay insisted on feeding us at his regular roadside dinner stop before taking us home to our hotel. Over bowls of basil-blessed beef noodle soup, he told us cheerfully how he wanted to study after school but had no money, how beautiful his country was and how we would fall in love with the Angkor Vat. He promised that he would meet us again when we returned in two days and personally escort us to the Indian Embassy, so that our ambassador could reimburse the money we had lost (he was completely sure of this). When we did return to Phnom Penh, we managed to convince Chantay that since we only had a day at hand, seeing Pol Pot’s killing fields was a trifle more important than paying a courtesy visit to our Embassy in the insane hope of them handing us a fistful of greenbacks. When we emerged from that moving experience of walking through the memorialized deathpits, he said softly, shaking his head “It is sad, it is sad, our history”. As we drove to the airport through the crowded roads on which survivors of the Khmer Rouge battled valiantly, spiritedly each day to rebuild their lives, he slowed and stopped. “One moment”, he grinned at us, and we were impatient, worried that we were late for our flight. He came back in a few minutes, and held out a plastic bag of rambutan, that exotic litchi-like fruit with hedgehog-pines that strew South-East Asian markets with abundant splashes of red and green. “For you, to take back to India!” I am not sure that we were adequately able to convey to Chantay either that midnight when he dropped us off at our hotel doorstep after chasing ghost-thieves, or two days later when he bought us fruits and hugged us with wordless goodbyes outside the airport, that Cambodia had given us a glimpse of wealth infinitely more precious than dollars or riel. And it seemed almost as if it was because we were foreigners who did not speak his language in word or culture that Chantay’s sense of hospitality burst upon us unexpectedly, splendidly, with such warmth and colour - much like a ripe rambutan on the clean grey pavements of Phnom Penh.