Free JOHNNY GONE DOWN by Karan Bajaj

refugee camps on the border are well-intentioned, but so busy that individual attention is impossible.’
    It came back to me. The villagers who I’d thought were Cambodians were probably Thai, and Khmer must be spoken at the border in the same way that Hindi is spoken at the Indo-Nepalese border. When we were in high school, Sam and I had once run away to Nepal to get stoned. Suddenly, I wished Ihadn’t been found by the villagers. I would rather be dead than be a cripple.
    ‘I am from Texas,’ he said. ‘I came here as a Red Cross worker, but became a Buddhist monk instead.’ He shook my right hand. ‘I am David, now Monk Dechen.’
    ‘I am Nikhil,’ I said. ‘I came from Boston on a vacation.’
    It sounded unreal.
    He patted my head, and I cried shamelessly against his arm.
    ‘Where is the man who helped me?’ I asked after a while, trying to pull myself together.
    ‘Who?’ he said with a puzzled expression.
    ‘There was someone in the forest who guided me to the border, otherwise I’d never have made it.’
    ‘They found you alone.’
    How could he die in the forest when he seemed so confident? Why couldn’t I remember his name or his face?
    ‘Was it a voice that spoke to you?’ David asked.
    I nodded, although I didn’t like the implication of his words. I wasn’t a lunatic. I didn’t have visions of God speaking to me.
    ‘You aren’t going crazy,’ said David kindly. ‘Many crisis survivors experience this third presence. I am not a psychologist, but from what I understand, the mind divorces itself from the body in situations of extreme duress when the physical systems shut down.’
    It made sense. I was too fatigued to move even a step, yet I had managed to walk for five days without stopping or treading on a mine. For what, though? I wished I had known it would end like this. I would have allowed myself to slip into eternity.
    ‘Do you know the date today?’ said David.
    I shook my head.
    ‘5 June, 1977,’ he said.
    Sam and I had arrived in Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, just after our convocation at MIT. I had spent more than two years in that cell. What was my fault? What was Ishmael’s crime? What had she done, the pregnant woman who had been hacked to death in front of our eyes?
    ‘You are a survivor. A brave, brave man,’ said David. ‘The Red Cross estimates that nearly six million people have been killed since the Khmer Rouge took over two years ago. That’s a third of the Cambodian population. Can you believe that? A third of the population eliminated using methods that are nowhere as sophisticated as the Nazis’, as you well know.’
    I recalled the shrivelled corpses of children in the countryside with vultures feeding on them. Madness, I thought, stark, raving madness.
    ‘Isn’t someone doing anything about it?’ I asked.
    ‘They have cut off all international ties completely, and frankly, no one cares. America is busy fighting a war with Vietnam, and Cambodia is too small aneconomy to matter to anyone else. Besides, there is just a handful of survivors who’ve escaped to tell their stories; most of the country is dying slowly of either starvation or the not-so-random acts of brutal violence in the fields.’
    But it’s their country, I wanted to shout. They had something to do with it, or at least they were born there. What about me? What did I have to do with anything? Suddenly, I was reminded of Ishmael, smiling and dignified even in death, accepting his destiny with grace. He had helped me escape. He wouldn’t be complaining right now if he were me, I thought. He had given me a chance to live; if nothing else, I owed it to him to make something of it.
    ‘When can I get back to the US?’ I asked, my mind a confused jumble of thoughts.
    ‘As early as tomorrow, if you feel up to it,’ he replied. ‘There are flights every night from Bangkok to New York. We could arrange for you to leave for Bangkok tomorrow with someone from the monastery. The American embassy