In the beginning there was a man and a bowl. A piece of cloth for a covering, perhaps orange like the sunrise, or brown like the ground. He would go from door to door, and people would give him food. No one called him a beggar, they called it giving alms.
The madman looked like a benign grandfather, as they often do. He didn’t have eyes like caves or hair on his face to hide a disturbing smile. In fact, when he smiled, it seemed sincere. But it was not a smile to make new friends, it was a smile to ward them off. It was the smile of the four-faced stone Buddhas on the Angkor Wat, after a rocket had been launched at it.
The madman, whose name was Saloth Sar, had once worn an orange blanket, had once carried a bowl. For a time there he chanted and lived a life of complete dependency on the grace of others. But then he started to realise that the order he belonged to was wrong when seen from the angle of a new world. Monks floated around like orange butterflies, and butterflies were creatures that were superfluous.
The madman took his new name of war not from a virtue like courage, or even from a creature like a snake. His name came from the coldest of places – a concept, Political Potential, and an ideal, fraternity. Brother Number One, or Pol Pot for short, had visions for a brave new world that would grow green over the cratered old one.
A few decades ago, the French had discovered the temple in the forests, the Angkor Wat. They were astonished by such a miracle, but it had always lain there, in wait. Meanwhile the carved stone pillars had coupled with the trees so that when the archaeologists discovered the lost world, nature and man-made history seemed to be conjoined companions. But this was a benign creation, unlike the new world to come.
In Pol Pot’s godless prelapsarian paradise, everything was presumed perfect about the original man, the ‘Base Person’. The Base Person was as if moulded from clay, emerging from the earth on which he stood. Sometimes his skin was even the same colour. The peasant who had tilled this land for hundreds and hundreds of years with self-sufficient stoicism had no need for glasses, false teeth, walking canes, shoes. Only jumped-up city folk needed such things because they couldn’t walk barefoot on the land without their soft soles bleeding. Some of them even died from walking on the land. They called it infection, but the revolution called it weakness. All those soft, soft soles. The only thing a person in this brave new world needed was a body fit for work and a clean mind.
That was what Pol Pot, once known as Saloth Sar, expected of his people. They were to start the world anew from Year Zero. It would be as if they were to wake up every morning with the past wiped out, their minds blown up clean and taut and soaring like balloons. Those who couldn’t wipe their minds hard or fast or clean enough would be popped.