Shadow Theatre

by Fiona Cheong

  The sewing room was no longer used as a sewing room and, in fact, had been used only briefly when Madam had converted it into a sewing room in 1963 (Madam's school principal had assigned her to teach some of the sewing classes that year while the regular sewing teacher went on maternity leave, and Madam had confessed to Malika she was out of practice and that was why she needed Malika and Aatha to clear out the storeroom and clean it up, the sooner the better because Madam had purchased a new Singer and it was to be delivered within the week, one that even stitched buttonholes).

  Another bird flew past one of Madam's windows on that Friday afternoon, the one in the sewing room this time. I was passing by the doorway on my way back from the bathroom. Sali had played enough with Madam's jewelry for the time being, and she and Malika had gone into Malika's room because Malika's room was cooler than Madam's without air conditioning. (Malika had an air conditioner in her room, which neither Sali nor I had, but during the day she preferred fresh air, since at night, her windows were always shut. I would have chosen air conditioning at any time, and Sali would have, too, if we could have chosen. It was only Malika who could afford to enjoy the shady, dappled light of the flamboyant trees outside her windows, enjoy the scratchy harmony of a breeze now and then rocking the leaves.) I felt the bird's shadow swerve over the sunlight just like before, and then there was only sunlight, hard and brilliant on the British gentleman's brick wall.

  Malika was kneeling on the floor by the bed, unfolding the Scrabble board (the old edition had a cardboard one that folded in half for storage) and saying to Sali, At some point, you should try not using the dictionary and see what happens," when I reached her room.

  It was after four o'clock. A neighbors servant (not the British gentleman's) was outside beating on a carpet, the flat slaps thudding away as the fence over which the carpet hung rattled beneath its weight. Otherwise the air was quiet, with not even the thread of a wailing baby anywhere.

  Malika set the board down, then settled herself nimbly into a position in which she was sitting with her back against the bed. She stretched out her legs and swung them to the left of the board, and then she stared for a moment at her feet peeking out from her white salwar. She had always found her feet unfeminine, flattish-looking like a duck's feet, as she put it. Then she sighed and almost smiled, secretly, as if to remind herself to feel gratitude for small blessings bestowed on her by fate. A continued delay in the onset of arthritis was more than a small blessing of course, but Malika, like the rest of us, would realize this only in hindsight, only when the first tiny degree of a hint that flexibility was draining out of her limbs startled her, when she found herself wincing as she swung her legs over the side of the bed (such a simple action) on a morning yet to come.

  But that time waited unforeseeably in the future on this afternoon, and except for Malika's news of her sighting of the girl behind the sugar cane, it seemed a Friday like any other. Sali and I would stay until Madam came home, and then we would say hello to Madam and leave and return on the bus to our lives in Miss Shakilah's neighborhood (Sali worked for the Albuquerque family, and I, for Miss Dorothy Neo, who was a spinster). Although at the moment that I entered Malika's room a sensation of lightheadedness took hold of me and the room spun into a giddy whiteness, it was for no more than a few seconds. I blinked, and there was Sali standing by a window, gazing rather wanly at the flamboyant trees, and Malika was drawing columns on a foolscap pad in her lap.

  "Birds seem to he circling all around the house today," I said, and Malika glanced up to see if I was referring in some way to the girl. When she saw I wasn't trying to, she turned her attention hack to the columns, writing her name in neat, cursive blue letters at the top of the first one.

  Sali continued to gaze out the window.

  "I just saw another one zooming by the sewing-room window," I went on, sitting down on the floor beside the Scrabble board.

  "No birds zooming by here," said Sali, and she heaved a sigh. Sometimes it all became too much for her, the languid breeze and the shadows of the flamboyant leaves hardly moving on the ground, the air watery, tepid with light. Even the tiled roof of Madam's next-door neighbor on this side and the flat white wall of the neighbor's house, partially visible through the banana trees along the fence, were so familiar as to depress her at times.

  Malika was writing my name in the second column (always going by age), looping together the 1, u, 1, u, so gracefully like a repeated pattern in lace. (Sometimes I wondered which nun's handwriting it was that Malika had, only because I knew that before coming to Singapore, she had received some schooling in a convent.)

  "When an ancestral spirit returns, it may take the form of a bird, you know," I said, mostly for Sali's sake. (Because of her poor reading habit, Sali knew very little about the world and wasn't even aware there were limits to her knowledge.)

  She turned around with some interest. I watched her gaze flicker over Malika's bent head before she asked me if I was sure. I told her of course I was, and Sali looked at Malika again. But Malika didn't look up until she was done writing all our names, and then all she said was, "You want to try not using the dictionary today?"

  "No way, okay?" said Sali. She came away from the window and sat down, folding her legs Buddha style, and shook her head as she faced Malika across the board. "What, let you both bantam me? No way."

  Malika smiled and pulled her Oxford Dictionary out from under the bed where she kept it (so that it was within her reach if she needed to look up a word while she was reading at night). It was one of the few possessions she hadn't inherited from anyone, a Christmas present from Madam years ago, and Malika quite cherished it. The dictionary's spine had been loosened by her frequent use in the past, and the paper jacket had long been removed (Michelle had torn it accidentally one day when she was just over ten months old). Malika ran her fingertips gently over the navy-blue cover, before pushing the dictionary over to Sali.

  Outside, the servant beating on the carpet continued to swing her woven bamboo bat at it, the sounds coming more slowly across the still air as her arm grew tired.

  Sali reached into the maroon Scrabble bag and drew an X. "You see my luck-lah," she said, making a face. "That's why I don't like this game."

  Malika chuckled as I reached in after Sali and drew an M. Then it was Malika's turn, and she drew an A, to which Sali reacted by rolling her eyes in an exaggerated show of mock displeasure. Her boredom with Singapore (a small-fry country with small-fry men, as Sali saw it) was subsiding, as was her impatience with her present life (laden with a lack of opportunity for chance encounters with Westerners, among whom her Hollywood film director was waiting, keeping an eye out for the exotic girl of his dreams). Sali was always happy for a spell during our afternoons at Madam's house. I watched as she dropped her X back into the hag. Then she leaned forward, balancing her elbows on her knees, and prepared to concentrate.

  MAI.IKA WO 111.) NEVER manage to unearth what lay at the root of her anxiety about the children in the years that the family used to go to sleep with the windows open. (Even during the riots early in the 1970s, a few windows had been left ajar, Madam's husband insisting that as the fighting was between the Malays and the Chinese, being Eurasian, they were safe-he would not give in to intimidation by those lower-class hooligans, Malika would remember his saying to Madam one night when Madam had followed him into the bathroom and shut the door so they could speak privately). Nowadays she thought perhaps her imagination had simply been stirred by books, those fantastic volumes of foreign intrigue and romance Madam had shown her in the National Library and in which Malika would immerse herself night after night (it was Madam who had come up with the idea that Malika should apply for a library card, with which one was able to borrow four books at a time and keep them for two whole weeks).

  Aatha hadn't shared Malika's concern about the windows, or so she had replied when after Michelle was born, Malika had inquired, timidly, if they would be able to hear the children cry out while t
he air conditioner was on. (She knew by then that she and Aatha wouldn't hear a thing above the drone of the air conditioner. In the first year of Caroline's birth, it was Aatha who had moved into the baby's room and slept there at night. And Malika, who had stayed in the room outside the kitchen, had listened until she realized she couldn't catch a single sound if it came from inside the house.)

  Of course her anxiety had lessened when Madam finally reached her senses, especially now with just the two of them living in the house. (The truth was that Madam's decision to start closing the windows had come about not long after she had walked into the kitchen on an afternoon that Sali and I were sitting there, wondering out loud if the man who had raped Malika's friend thirty-one years ago was still alive. The fellow had never been caught and it was clear he wasn't going to be caught, given how much time had passed. Malika had been in the bathroom when Madam entered the kitchen, and later, when we suggested to her that Madam's decision may have resulted from her overhearing our conversation, Malika responded only that what had happened to Bettina wasn't news to Madam (Bettina had been a close friend of Malika's and perhaps for that reason, Malika could not bring herself to admit Bettina had been raped, although she did know about the baby, a stillbirth). I couldn't understand at the time her unwillingness to face the fact that as Madam was getting on in age and feeling less immortal, any memory of tragedy was bound to take on a new significance. But out of respect, Sali and I were leaving the topic alone.)

  One would have to wonder if, in fact, Madam had known about the ghost in her garden, whether burglars, or rapists, weren't what she was worried about after all. What some of us would have to ask ourselves shortly (it was early on that Friday night that one of Miss Shakilah's neighbors would disappear, the sister of a woman known even to the other Madams as Auntie Coco, and given that she would never be found and what else was about to happen) and the question Malika would not be able to answer, no matter how often in the years to come she would sieve patiently through the afternoons and nights and mornings of her past living with Madam, was whether the girl behind the sugar cane was related to Miss Shakilah (perhaps an ancestor of hers who had died young), or whether Miss Shakilah, like Malika, had been chosen to be an instrument of some sort (in which case the girl may have appeared to Madam too, long before Miss Shakilah's visit).

  It was Sali who asked out of the blue, in the middle of the game while Malika was pondering X-R-A-Y (worth thirty points because of the double-word score waiting beneath R-U-S-E) and E-X-I-L-E (worth twelve points, nothing extra, but it was a more exciting word), "What do you think she wants?"

  Malika stroked her red bead with her right thumb (as was her habit when she was confronted with a dilemma). Without looking up from her row of letters, she replied, "I'm not sure. Sometimes all a ghost wants is prayer. But if that's so, poor thing. She's come to the wrong person, ya?"

  "That can't be it," said Sali. "Ghosts usually know about people, right? From what I've heard, they seldom choose the wrong ones to appear to." She looked at me to see if I would confirm this piece of information, since Malika was engrossed with her choices of words at the moment.

  "I thought you didn't believe the girl could be a ghost," I said.

  "No, you're the one who doesn't believe she could be a ghost." Sali waggled her finger at me as if chiding a naughty child. She smiled when she saw I was annoyed, and I had to stop myself from falling into one of our habitual tussles. (Sometimes she took our friendship too far. Given the difference in our ages, had we been sisters, she would have had to show me some of the respect she showed Malika, and that we were unrelated was no excuse, as I saw it. But Sali's teasing was only a displacement of her daily frustration with life. That was the reason I put up with it.)

  A rustle in the flamboyant trees caught Malika's attention. Her thumb and finger squeezing the red bead, she stared past Sali's head, in the direction of the sprays of scarlet flowers and pinnate leaves and bright sky. Sali, too, found herself turning around, her lips parted slightly in anticipation of a glimpse of the supernatural (as if anyone could see it simply by desiring to).

  But it was only an afternoon breeze, passing more restlessly than usual over the branches of the flamboyant trees, shaking the air as if it were full of seeds.

  Sali caught her reflection in the mirror on the door of the armoire as she turned back to the game. Wisps of hair hung stickily about her face, stringy as seaweed in the damp heat, and she was about to smile and gesture to herself when she saw me rolling my eyes in the mirror. She swung around.

  "What?" she said sharply. "Why you always want to make fun of me? You don't have any wishes of your own, is it?"

  "You're letting the heat fry your brain," I said, as I didn't think there were grounds for her accusation. (It was true that I hadn't chosen to entertain Sali's daydreams with Malika's patience, but I didn't make fun of them regularly as she was implying. Indeed, what I usually did was to remain silent and uninvolved.)

  "Aiya, you two," murmured Malika. She let go of her bead, picked up her chips, leaned over the board and spelled E-X-I-LE downwards, through the I of T-R-I-E-D like a sword and onto the tail of P-L-A-N which then was P-L-A-N-E, a sum total of nineteen points.

  We weren't surprised to find out later (when I won) about the thirty points Malika had sacrificed. Malika always went for the more interesting word in the end, the more musical word or the word cloaked in degrees of interpretation, as if she were addicted or in love, and couldn't resist or say no once a word had caught her fancy. (X-R-A-Y, she would point out, was dull, dull because of its lackluster vowel and dull because it evoked only illness, particularly consumption.)

  It was around a quarter past six when we heard the long, slow swing of the wrought-iron gate, and then the gentle purr of Madam's silver-gray Corolla as it pulled into the driveway and came to a stop under the aluminum roof of the car porch, in front of the sugar cane.

  The car door opened and closed, a thump dropping into the evening air like an overly ripened fruit. It was followed (as always now) by the closing swing of the gate, and after that, Madam's voice was singing through the walls of the house, calling out for Malika as we were putting away the Scrabble board and as the flamboyant trees began to grow noisy, shrill with the prattle of mynah birds.

  "Any messages?" Madam wanted to know, after all of our hello's, and Malika was about to tell her Mrs. Allen (a family friend) had called in the morning to invite Madam over for lunch on Sunday and the upholsterer had called at noon to say the dining-room chairs were ready for delivery, when Madam asked first, "l)id Miss Shakilah call?"

  "No, Madam, Miss Shakilah didn't call," said Malika, almost apologetically as if it were her fault somehow. (She hadn't known Miss Shakilah was supposed to call, but it was apparent from Madam's tone a call had been expected.)

  Madam gave a small sigh, and as Sali and I were leaving we heard her asking if Caroline had called. (Caroline was the one who called home most regularly, much to Madam's and Malika's surprise. Her calls came once a week at least, sometimes two, three times, usually in the morning, after the boys were in their beds in Vancouver, Canada.) We didn't hear Malika's answer.

  Perhaps it was a yes and Madam had smiled, and Malika had smiled back conspiratorially, her heart swollen with a bittersweet understanding.

  All one could hear walking away around the side of the house at that hour was the searing cry of the mynah birds, sharp and thick as it billowed over the flamboyant trees.

  MAI)A,M \ fN I (1l I again after dinner (boiled rice with fish curry that Madam had brought home for her and Malika, and the sambal kangkung that Malika had fried up in a matter of min utes). Malika was in the kitchen, draping the white dish towels over their red plastic hooks on the wall above the dish rack when she heard the Corolla leaving the driveway. She gazed out the window towards the light that was on in a room downstairs in the neighbor's house, where the soft gurgle of running water floated into the night behind the banana trees. (She no longer wondered if
her nightmares had been brought on by the proximity between her room and the banana trees, since the trees were on the neighbor's side of the fence and beyond Madam's control to do anything about, or so Malika had rationalized each time she had decided not to tell Madam about the nightmares. Malika couldn't be sure what Aatha may have known or suspected. Aatha had never mentioned the nightmares or asked Malika whom it was she was wrestling and trying to push away in her sleep, and since Aatha herself had seemed to sleep peacefully, Malika had concluded after a while that the banana trees weren't haunted after all. Not all banana trees were, as she knew.) She turned from the window when the sound of the Corolla's engine had faded in the distance, evaporating like the trail of a Boeing 747 passing overhead.

  It was half-past seven. (Later she would remember glancing at the kitchen clock, at the black numerals and the position of the two black hands on the round white face, there on the wall above the refrigerator. She had noted the hour by force of habit. Malika always knew when to expect Madam back when Madam went out, especially when Madam was taking one of her drives to the airport, as she had told Malika she was doing this evening. She knew then that Madam was unlikely to bump into a friend and be delayed spontaneously.)

  Malika put the bowl of oranges and apples that sat on the kitchen table during the day back in the center of the table, a porcelain bowl hand-painted in coruscant swirls of azure and magenta, which Madam and her husband had found in a backstreet potter's shop in Macao ages ago, just after they were married and before Francesca was horn. (Madam had been dismayed to discover the shop gone by the time she was in Macao again, in May of 1984, a year after her husband's passing. Madam was taking her first vacation alone that time, unaccompanied even by the children. The former back street had become a thoroughfare, developed almost beyond recognition, she would tell Malika upon her return. None of the other proprietors had been able to tell her where she might find the Portuguese potter she had met on her previous trip, and while Malika was unpacking Madam's suitcase and sorting through unworn clothes and clothes to be washed, Madam had speculated out loud that perhaps the potter had passed away, her voice filling with regret the way a well slowly fills with rain during the monsoon. Or so Malika would remember as she was looking back, on one of her mornings yet to come.)