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wife did not sweep their ancestors’ graves at the Qingming festival, or celebrate the Chinese New Year. Nor did they speak Chinese. They lived as Khmers and therefore, racially, they
    were
    Khmer, in their own minds as well as those of their neighbours. Their culture was Indianised, like that of the Burmese and the Indonesians, and all the other serendipitous nations which inhabit the water margin of Asia, from Sri Lanka to the Timor Sea.
    It was, in Nhep’s words, a normal, happy family. Loth was a reserved man, who kept his own counsel. ‘He never joked with us, or with anyone else. If he was angry, he didn’t show his feelings or become violent. He always remained calm. Our mother was the same, and I think that’s why they got on so well.’ The younger children closely resembled him, and Sâr inherited some of his character. He was a disciplinarian, like most Cambodian fathers, but by the standards of the time the chastisement he meted out was mild. For those were the days when a village schoolmaster would make a recalcitrant pupil lie down on a red ants’ nest to help him mend his ways.
    Keng Vannsak endured
    that once, and never misbehaved again:
    I didn’t like arithmetic, and I hadn’t learnt my multiplication tables. So every time we were going to have a lesson, I said that I had a stomach ache and wanted to go home. The third time I did that, the teacher said: ‘All right, you may go. But first recite the seven times table.’ Of course, I didn’t know it. Ai-ya! How he beat me! Kicks and punches . . . he was brutal! Then he took me outside, and put me under a grapefruit tree — full of red ants! After that, I knew my times tables. I knew them so well that I did all the other children’s questions, and in return they gave me things from their lunch-boxes, because their parents were richer than mine and they had nicer things to eat.
    Yet punishments like this were so much the norm for Cambodian youngsters that Vannsak remembered that same teacher as ‘an adorable, saintly man’who first instilled in him a love of learning. Certainly he was no worse than his own father, who used to tie his arms together, throw him on to a bed and beat him with a cane until he fainted.
    Sâr and his brothers were more fortunate. Or, as the people in the village would have put it, it was not their fate to suffer that way: a genie protected them.
    Cambodians, at that time even more than today, lived parallel sets of lives: one in the natural world, among the laws of reason; the other, mired in superstition, peopled by monsters and ghosts, a prey to witches and the fear of sorcery. In this sense Cambodia was, and to some extent is still, a medieval country, where even the King takes no important decision without first consulting the court astrologer. The resemblance to Africa is again overwhelming. Every village has its witch, or
    ap,
    and its
    k’ruu,
    or healer; each rural community its
    neak ta,
    the ancestor figure or tutelary genie who inhabits a stone or an ancient tree and must be propitiated by offerings of incense and perfumed water. In the countryside, more murders are attributed to sorcery than to any other single cause. Cambodian officials, university-educated men, still sometimes justify the beating to death of a suspected witch by a mob by saying: ‘The powers of those persons are too terrible. What else can the peasants do?’
    Sâr’s earliest memories
    were coloured by the lore of this nether world. One story that he would retell as an old man was about a
    dhmap’,
    or wizard, whose mouth, as a punishment for his blasphemy, had been shrunk until it was no bigger than a straw. To feed himself, so the story went, he rolled dough into fine strips, which was how the Cambodian people came to eat noodles. He recalled tales about glutton spirits, which, like the ancient Chinese
    taotie,
    had only a head and intestines, and fed on foul things that lived in the mud; and there were gruesome stories of corpse wax,