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365). He also says she is ‘a young woman of spirit, who will do anything’, though he quickly
protects her dignity, saying, ‘she is quite possibly virgin’ (HW, 266). Koch’s classical and
dignified description of Keang leaves no doubt of her identification as a heavenly creature:
She wears a traditional dress: a white, high-necked blouse and a dark anklelength
sarong with an embroidered band around the hem. Her thick, loosely
waving hair is pulled back from the forehead and temples to expose her ears;
held by a comb on top and then falling below her shoulders, it combines with
her slender, hour-glass figure to recall an apsaras in a temple carving. (HW,
256)
The name apsarasas signifies ‘moving in the water’ from their inception when Brahma
first churned the cosmic ocean to create the first beings in the beginning of time and space.
They are associated with the water of the earth and with the vapours which rise from the earth
into the air (Balfour, 122). In the Rig Veda, they assist the god Soma to pour down his floods,
bringing fertility to the earth (Garrett, 40). Ly Keang is appropriately always active and
accompanied with movement, and associated with water and rain. When she comes to
Langford for the first time in his apartment, it is a magical, wayang kulit scene:
No lights on in the room. Through the open doors onto the balcony, over by
the railings of the market, the petrol lamps of the Khmer traders were blurred
and trembling in the rain. Wind, and more thunder. The top of the coconut
palm next to the balcony running with water, fronds gleaming and tossing like
landed green fish.
Keang enters the apartment like a shadow. The first thing Langford notices is a ‘cool finger on
my bare shoulder’. She looks up at him in the dark without speaking, searching for something
in him.
She opened her lips, her saliva for a moment in my mouth, starting an electric
tingling that would have built and built, if I hadn't let her go. Deadly, that
tingling; everything being changed for us, far into the future. I could hear a
mosquito whining; then it settled on my shoulder and began to drink my blood.
I let it, looking at her. The sting was part of what was happening: a brand.
(HW, 366-67)
As the divine feminine, Keang is especially part Durga, with the symbolic exchange of blood
attending the woman who is known for her combat fatigues and bungle boots and long blue-
black hair (HW, 264), bringing destruction and re-creation to Langford, and part apsarasas, an
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