Black Water Sister

by Zen Cho

  “This is not your business also,” Ah Ma said. “Who asked you to be a busybody? If you simply do, you’ll make things worse only.”

  Jess rolled her eyes and stuck a finger in her free ear. Ah Ma kept talking inside her head, but at least it blocked out the background noise from the construction site.

  Jess had finished her call and wandered back to the collapsed scaffolding to take some discreet shots when someone said behind her, “Awak ambil gambar?”

  It was one of the construction workers. Jess looked around, but Mr. Yong was nowhere to be seen.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said. There didn’t seem any point in trying to deny it, given she was holding a huge camera. “I’m taking photos.”

  It was weird hearing the Malay words drop from her lips, a gift from the unwanted presence in her head. She closed her left eye so she wouldn’t have to see Ah Ma, pretending she was squinting because of the sun.

  “How many Facebook friends you have?” said the worker.

  “I—what?”

  “If you put on Facebook, how many people will see?” said the worker. “Four hundred, five hundred?”

  “Um. Maybe fifty?” said Jess. “I don’t really use Facebook—”

  “Fifty?” said the worker, outraged. “Like that, what’s the point you put on Facebook? Might as well you give me the photos.” He lowered his voice. “I have a friend, he had to go to hospital so cannot work, but the NGO is helping him. I can contact them.”

  “I was planning to send the photos to the press, not put them on Facebook,” said Jess. “But I can send them to you too. What’s your number?”

  The worker’s name was Kassim. He typed his number into Jess’s phone, glancing over his shoulder to check no one was watching. “Very good, you send to the newspaper. Might as well you put on Facebook also. Even fifty people is better than nothing. The bosses all want it to be quiet, don’t want people to know. You go and show everybody.”

  “OK,” said Jess. The only people who followed her on Facebook were her relatives. But it was impossible to disagree with the man; his urgency compelled assent.

  “This is not the first time,” said Kassim. “This hantu, she’ll sure come back. Then how? It shouldn’t be like that. We have rights also. You tell people. Show them your photos. Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” said Jess. “I will.”

  She didn’t know what else to say, but that was all he wanted from her. He nodded and turned away.

  Jess watched his retreating back till she heard the distant wail of sirens. She shook herself and went out to the entrance to greet the arriving firefighters and paramedics.

  “The accident was over there,” she said, pointing. “They’re trying to get the guy out now. He’s conscious and talking. He says he’s OK, no injuries.”

  Then she kept walking, out and along the road, back to the sales office where Dad was—hopefully—not freaking out too much about her absence.

  “You don’t want to stay ah?” said Ah Ma, looking back toward the construction site. She seemed nonplussed.

  “He’s going to be OK, right?” said Jess. “That spirit’s with him. The Datuk Kong?”

  Out of her left eye she saw Ah Ma nod.

  “Not bad this Datuk,” she said grudgingly. “Can help people. Datuk are the same as humans, some you cannot trust. At least this one can stand up to the god, protect that Bangladeshi.”

  This was a little surprising. “I thought you were on the god’s side.”

  Ah Ma snorted. “When your mother was small, I used to go and plant vegetables on the vacant ground there so we can eat. You think the cangkul was on my side? When the god chooses you to be their medium, it’s not you’re on the god’s side or against the god’s side. You are the tool only.”

  “Ah Ma,” said Jess, “who is Ng Chee Hin, actually? Why are you so mad at him?”

  Ah Ma sniffed. “You ask your uncle, your father’s brother-in-law. He should know about that bastard what. He’s the one doing business with the bastard’s company.”

  “You’re the one who wants me to be your medium,” Jess pointed out.

  “I thought you don’t want?”

  Jess stopped on the sidewalk, even though the sun was blazing so hard it was giving her a headache. The air wavered in the heat.

  “Look, I’ve seen your god now.” A shiver ran over Jess’s skin, despite the intolerable heat. “I know what she’s capable of. If saving the temple from this development is the only thing that will stop her, then I’ll help you do it. I didn’t understand before. I thought it was just, like, a place. I didn’t realize she was going after people.

  “But you’ve got to tell me the truth,” said Jess. “It’s not going to work otherwise.”

  Ah Ma looked at her, her expression opaque.

  It was a rare moment when Jess couldn’t tell what she was thinking. It was a strange realization to have, that she understood Ah Ma that well.

  “Ng Chee Hin is a samseng,” said Ah Ma. “He’s the biggest gang boss in Penang. That’s why that bastard is not scared of anything. The police also don’t want to fight with him.”

  Jess let out a breath. So that was what Kor Kor had meant by the “funny business” the Ng family were mixed up in. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Like that also must tell you?” said Ah Ma. “I thought you’re so clever, went to university. I have to tell you Malaysia is hot and chili is spicy also, is it?”

  Jess started walking again. “I think telling me yesterday that we might encounter dangerous criminals at the temple would have been relevant information, yes!”

  “Dangerous what dangerous? Ah Ma protected you what.”

  “The god’s not like the cops,” said Jess. The scream of the scaffolding coming down was still resounding in her ears. “Why isn’t he scared of her?”

  “He hasn’t learned to be scared,” said Ah Ma. “This kind of man, they think they’re above everything. Heaven also they don’t respect. If that bastard builds condos here and sells, he can make a lot of money. He doesn’t care about anything else.”

  It made sense. You probably didn’t get on the Forbes rich list by being easily intimidated.

  They turned off the main road. Dad and Ah Chong’s vans were still parked outside the sales office.

  “Why is the temple even here?” said Jess. “If the temple committee doesn’t own the land, who built it?”

  “This place, last time got rubber plantation,” said Ah Ma. “The workers built the temple so they can pray. This god, she’s been here for a long time already. Now the humans have gone off, but the gods are not so easy to chase out.”

  She gave Jess a sidelong look. “If you’re willing to help Ah Ma, means we’re going to Ah Ku’s house after this, is it?”

  “No,” said Jess. “We’re going to go to Ng Wei Sherng’s café.”

  * * *

  • • •

  DAD DIDN’T SEEM like he’d been too worried about Jess being gone. She’d been spending so much time with her mom that she’d forgotten Mom’s level of parental paranoia wasn’t normal.

  Dad only glanced at his watch and said, “So long ah, your phone call? So how, you got the job or not?”

  “It was a phone screening. They said they’d let me know in a couple of days if I’m getting into the next round,” said Jess. “Are you guys done?”

  While Dad and Ah Chong packed up, she took photos of the appliances they’d installed—a range cooker, a cooker hood and a fridge. It wasn’t the most exciting shoot she’d ever done, but it gave her time to think.

  Ah Ma had disappeared the moment Jess stepped into the show unit. She suspected the ghost was avoiding Dad.

  She was half waiting for someone to burst in demanding to talk to her about the accident at the construction site, but nothing like that happened. When they went through
the office on their way out, the guy who’d greeted them earlier was on the phone, talking in a low urgent voice. He gave them a tense smile and a wave, but didn’t say anything.

  The fire engine was parked in the road outside the construction site, but the ambulance was gone. Jess hoped that meant they’d gotten Rijaul out.

  “Something going on,” said Dad. He glanced over at the construction site, but you couldn’t see the collapsed scaffolding from where they were. “Must be some accident or what.”

  It would have been a good moment to tell him what had happened. But Jess hesitated and then he was getting in the van, the moment lost.

  There was no more humming on the drive back. Dad was quiet, engrossed in navigating the rush-hour traffic.

  Jess said, “You OK, Dad?”

  “Hmm?” Dad glanced at her like he’d forgotten she was there. “Yeah, OK. How is it, working for Kor Tiao?”

  Jess tried to study him without making it obvious she was doing it, something she’d gotten very good at when he was sick.

  He sounded fine. Was he pretending? Managing her mom’s feelings took up so much of Jess’s emotional energy that she rarely had much left to spare for her dad. He’d always been easier to handle. Even after he’d gotten sick, he’d held as much as he could inside himself, asking as little of Mom and Jess as he could get away with.

  He’d spent the afternoon engaged in manual labor. He was probably tired. This wasn’t the time to interrogate him, but the question came out almost against Jess’s volition.

  “Dad, why is Kor Tiao making you do this?”

  “Hah? Do what?”

  “I thought when you said you were going to help with his business, you were going to be advising on strategy, or doing his accounts or something,” said Jess. “A desk job. Instead he’s sending you out to construction sites and people’s houses. It’s not like he doesn’t know you’re—you were sick.”

  An unexpected lump in her throat stopped her from going on. She turned to look out of the window, blinking furiously.

  There was a startled silence on Dad’s side of the car. Then he said, “Mom talked to you, is it?”

  Jess ventured a look at him. He was half smiling, but he looked a little annoyed as well. Not at Jess.

  “This Mom ah, she stress you out only,” he said. “Told her already, but she don’t want to listen. I asked Kor Tiao if I can do this job. Actually he give me face. You think normal handyman can earn six thousand ringgit a month? If I’m not the brother-in-law, he won’t bother with me.”

  “Oh,” said Jess, a little taken aback. “You wanted to install fridges?”

  Dad shrugged. “I can do this kind of thing what.” It was true he had always been handy around the house. Their old house—the one they’d had to sell when Dad got sick—had been full of things he’d built or fixed. “At my age, learning a new skill is good, right?”

  “Mom’s got a point, though. Shouldn’t you be taking it easy?” said Jess. “It seems like a lot to be doing at your age.”

  “I’m not even sixty yet,” said Dad. “That’s not considered old. There’s a lot of things I still want to do.”

  They’d come to a stop at a traffic light, but it flipped to green. He paused while changing gears.

  “The doctors said I’m OK,” he said. “I told Mom, if I act like I’m sick, then really cannot already. Might as well I go and live in the old folks’ home. We all must move on, Mom also. Cannot be so kiasi, everything also don’t want to do.

  “If I want to go and sit in the aircon office, write emails, of course Kor Tiao will let me do. He is helping me only. You think he needs a fifty-year-old staff? But with this job, I can learn something new, talk to people, drive around. End of the day, I go home, don’t stress. You tell Mom, don’t need to worry so much. Aiyah, if I cannot handle myself by this age, there’s really no hope lah.”

  This was Dad as he had been before he’d lost his job and fallen sick—brisk, competent, unflappable. Jess had been conditioned to find his manner reassuring. She relaxed almost despite herself.

  With that came an old impulse, so layered over by more recent impressions that it felt fresh—a longing to lean on her dad’s strength the way she used to, back when she’d thought it would never give out.

  She hadn’t even considered telling her parents what was going on before. Her instinct for hiding the unwelcome parts of her life from them had kicked in automatically. For the first time, she thought about it.

  She was no longer used to seeking help from her parents. It was simultaneously true that they had given her everything she had and were the reason she could do all she did, and that they were unequipped to deal with 90 percent of the problems she had as an adult. They’d set her up to have a life different from theirs, free of the hardships they’d had to endure. The result was that almost all her troubles were exciting new troubles, beyond their skill set to address.

  But Ah Ma and her god didn’t belong to that category. It wasn’t as though, in telling Mom and Dad about ghosts and spirit possession and vengeful gods, Jess would be presenting them with an unfamiliar concept, like—to take a random example—the idea that your daughter could be gay and it might not be the end of the world. In their version of reality, people had unlucky encounters with spirits all the time.

  For most of her life, Mom and Dad had been living in her world, a world Jess had been trained to deal with by education and socialization in a way they hadn’t. Now she was living in theirs.

  Maybe she could let them in. Maybe they could help her.

  “Dad,” she said, “that development we were at, it’s owned by Ng Chee Hin, right?”

  “Hmm? Yeah,” said Dad. “Sejahtera Holdings is Dato’ Ng Chee Hin’s company. This project, he joint venture with the other company.” He seemed surprised. “How you know who is Ng Chee Hin?”

  “Kor Kor and her friends were talking about him the other day.” Jess hesitated. “Is he—I mean, isn’t he a gangster?”

  It sounded stupid once she said it out loud. She remembered the clean-cut old guy she’d seen in the newspaper articles, cutting ribbons. It was hard to imagine anything less like a gangster.

  “No lah,” scoffed Dad.

  “It’s just that I’ve heard things—”

  “That one was back then, when he was starting out,” said Dad. “Nowadays no more already.”

  This wasn’t quite the denial Jess had been expecting from his initial response.

  “Is Kor Tiao OK with that?” she said. “I would’ve thought, with him and Kor Kor being Christians, they wouldn’t want to be doing business with criminals.”

  “This project is legal what,” said Dad. “Aiyah, this Dato’ Ng has so much capital, why he want to do illegal projects for what? If you look at all the gangsters, it’s the same. Once they build up, they don’t want to be involved in crime anymore. That kind of business is not sustainable. The real money is in the legal industries.”

  “Oh,” said Jess.

  “Malaysia is like that,” said Dad. “Cannot be so choosy. Dato’ Ng behaves decently, donates to charity . . . A lot of people, if they have his money, they won’t bother to stay in Penang. They’ll go off to KL or Hong Kong. But this is his hometown, he wants to invest in it.

  “Have to be fair to him also. His father was a rubber tapper, the family didn’t have money. When he was young he had to go out and work, no chance to go to school. For someone like him, how can he progress? Nowadays it’s the Indian boys. You see them, by the time they’re in secondary school they’ll be in a gang.”

  Jess sighed. It wasn’t the first time she’d thought that, even if everything had been different, she wouldn’t have wanted to introduce Sharanya to her parents anyway. There was too much of a risk that they’d embarrass her by being hideously racist. “Dad . . .”

  “They have no choice,” said Dad. �
��The teacher don’t want to waste time on them. They cannot find a job. The gangster comes to them, helps them, tells them now you have all these brothers. End up they go down that road.” He shook his head.

  “Dato’ Ng is lucky,” he said. “To achieve until his level, normal people cannot do it. But Dato’ Ng is different. From young already the police can see he’s going to be the boss. They can beat him, but he won’t say anything.”

  Jess was about to ask how he knew so much about Ng Chee Hin when Dad added:

  “Ah Ma was like that also. Very tough lady. Things other people don’t dare to do, she can do.”

  Jess hadn’t expected this. Dad never spoke about Mom’s side of the family.

  “Really?” she said. “Like what?”

  “She’s the one who cari makan for the family,” said Dad. “She went out to tap rubber so they all can eat. Hard life. Some more the man she married, your Ah Kong, he’s not easy to live with.”

  Jess knew pretty much nothing about her maternal grandfather. He had died when Mom was a kid, young enough that she didn’t remember much about him. That’s what Mom had always said, anyway. “What was wrong with Ah Kong?”

  “Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” said Dad.

  There was a long enough pause that it became evident that he meant to leave it there.

  “Come on, Dad!” said Jess. “He’s my grandfather. It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone.”

  “Ah Kong was not responsible,” said Dad reluctantly. “That’s why I tell Mom, Ah Ma managed to bring up two children. It’s not bad already. In this life, who is perfect? You have to forgive. Cannot simpan dendam. It’s your own mother what.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Jess. “What did Mom have to forgive Ah Ma for?”

  But they were rounding the corner into the street where Kor Kor’s house was, and the conversation was over from Dad’s point of view.

  “That one you better ask Mom,” was all he would say.

  “Fine,” said Jess, exasperated. “I will!”