UNMARKED

The first person to notice that the village had stopped being angry was Arun.

It was not the absence of shouting that told him. Poor communities were not always loud in their grief. People who depended upon employers, landlords, police officers, immigration stamps and the uncertain mercy of strangers often learned to lower their voices around suffering. Silence could be caution. It could be exhaustion. It could be the careful stillness of someone carrying a bowl filled too close to the rim.

This silence was different.

It lay over Ban Mae Dao with the polished smoothness of oil on water.

The settlement stood behind three longan warehouses beyond the northern edge of Chiang Mai, where the city loosened into irrigation channels, concrete access roads and fields divided by walls of red earth. Trucks moved through the district from before sunrise, their metal sides painted with telephone numbers and bright fruit that looked cleaner than anything growing nearby. In the harvest season, sweet dust clung to the roadside weeds. In the dry months, every passing lorry lifted a pale cloud that settled on roofs, washing lines, spirit houses, children's hair and the broad leaves of banana plants trying to remain green beside the dormitories.

Ban Mae Dao was called a village because settlement sounded temporary and camp sounded political. It was neither a village nor quite anything else. Eighty-seven rooms of concrete block stood in six rows behind a wire fence that had fallen open years ago. Families from Myanmar had arrived by different roads and under different pressures: Shan labourers from hills emptied by fighting, Karen mothers with children who spoke three languages and wrote confidently in none, Bamar mechanics, Pa-O farm workers, widows who never explained where their husbands were. Some had documents in plastic envelopes. Some had photographs of documents. Some had names that changed slightly depending on which official was asking.

They packed fruit, poured concrete, cleaned hotels, washed dishes and stitched garments whose labels named countries they would never visit.

Three weeks earlier, a nineteen-year-old warehouse worker named Sai Naw had died beneath a loading platform.

The company called it an accident. His friends called it a machine everyone knew was broken. His older sister, Nang Hnin, called it nothing at all.

Now she stood beneath the corrugated roof of the community hall beside a framed photograph of her brother. In the picture, Sai Naw wore a football shirt and an expression of comic seriousness, his black hair combed high above his forehead. A loop of white flowers rested around the frame. The petals had browned at their edges in the heat. Beneath them sat an aluminium bowl holding ash from incense sticks, three oranges, a bottle of red soft drink and a packet of the spicy crisps he had liked.