Dreams of Paradise

 I was staying in a small fishing village that was just connected with the land but mainly rested on wooden stilts over the tidal waters of the Mekong estuary.

The dwellings were simple huts of woven bamboo with atap roofing. There was no machinery of any sort around, no electricity, no telephones, and no water other than that which ran back and forth with the tides beneath the village huts.

Fishing kept the inhabitants alive and occupied, but they did make a special crab soup that local people came to buy.

That was why I was there - to taste the soup and see how it was made.

The locally famous dish was concocted in a "missionary" cauldron above burning wood sticks, and consisted of salted water and crabs. Two kinds of crab were used, virtually filling the pot. The larger variety was placed above a smaller kind. 

After the initial cooking, the larger crabs were taken from the liquid to be dried in the sun, and the smaller ones to have their meat extracted and returned to the soup. The shells of the smaller ones were then pulverised into a paste which was also added to the soup. A small bowl, full of secret ingredients, was tipped in to form the complete dish.

It was when the old and wizened lady cook was about to tip in the secret stuff, and possibly disclose some or all of its ingredients, when a young Englishman interrupted my observations. He wanted my advise (possibly because of my age). He was of the English Public School mould, tall, fair, well spoken and somewhat too well dressed for the surroundings and the heat. No sooner had he arrived, than a young lady fisherwoman appeared. She was quite stunning in appearance, tall, willowy, elegant and graceful. She would have starred on the finest cat-walks of the grandest fashion houses of the world.

The two were obviously in love, touching each other, gazing into each other's eyes and quite lost in that euphoric state that engulfs young lovers. They wanted my advice on their future. 

I had to point out, possibly too bluntly, the obvious difficulties of language and cultures, and the obstacles that they and their children would encounter, summed up in the words "roots" and "acceptance".

Having put these ideas before them I noticed tears in their love-sick eyes and felt some in my own as well. I ended by saying that should they part they would always look back on this period of their lives and remember them as their time in paradise.

I kept in touch with both, the man who then joined the ranks of the expected and orderly by marrying and bringing up a family, and the girl, who continued life in her fishing community, unaware, perhaps, that to western eyes she was a striking beauty.

Both revealed that they recalled their days in paradise, wondering what their lives together might have been.

My contact with the girl ceased abruptly. A tsunami had swept away her village with no one surviving the catastrophic upheaval of nature.

And the soup? I never did discover what was added to it from that bowl of secret ingredients.

You see, in times of virus pandemic and lockdown when not much happens, I have begun to take interest in, and to remember and record dreams like this one.