The Minorities

by Suffian Hakim

  “Go!”

  “We can’t leave her!”

  “We can’t help her! Go!”

  I stepped on the accelerator, rotating the steering wheel fervently as I did so. The car turned and I sped away, eager to put distance between my friends and the carnage.

  I did not know if I had driven for minutes or hours when the high beams caught a woman on the road, her white dress covered in blood, her fangs sheathed and her fingers ending in nails rather than razor-sharp claws. Tights opened the door and Diyanah, breathing heavily, crawled into the car.

  “You a superhero, Diyanah,” Tight said, regarding her with awe.

  Chapter Fourteen: Seafood Ghoulash

  It was almost midnight when I got off the road and turned into a dirt path leading to the jungles of northern Muar. Being on tarmac made us open targets, and after our encounter with Devas, I thought it best to change that.

  Unmapped dirt roads might be the way to go, moving forward.

  Tonight, however, staying still might be the way to go. “We get off the road, we hide away at night and we move only in the day, when neither Devas nor Gyava can do anything,” I told my companions.

  “Good idea,” Tights said. Diyanah, Cantona and Shanti nodded their heads as well.

  I parked the car along the dirt road under a sprawling canopy of ironwood and mangrove trees and next to a grassy hill. Outside, the creatures of the night sang their greetings to us.

  We discussed, and agreed, on a guard schedule. Cantona would take the midnight to 2am shift, and Tights would take the two hours after that. This would afford me some rest after driving through the night. The rest would wake up at six, and Shanti would take over driving duties.

  Diyanah would join whoever was on watch duty.

  Cantona left the car, holding a pair of binoculars –—I’m guessing it was Shanti’s—to begin the first watch.

  As Tights and Shanti prepared to sleep, I got out of the car and walked after Cantona. He was sitting on a large boulder atop the hill. It overlooked the shores of Muar, where the waters of the Strait of Malacca met a wall of mangrove trees.

  “Can I join you?” I asked him.

  “Isn’t your watch at four?”

  “It is.”

  Cantona sighed. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing at the ample space next to him.

  I sat down with my backpack and reached into its messy depths. I found what I was looking for—my Swiss Army knife. I had inadvertently pulled out a singular almond along with it. I dusted the almond and threw it back into my bag, the Swiss Army knife I offered to Cantona.

  “In case anything happens, this might help,” I told him.

  He pursed his lips and pocketed the knife.

  I knew what I wanted to say to him, but I was unsure about the how of it all. We sat in silence for a while. Up above, the stars twinkled in brilliance, free of the pall of clouds.

  “Cantona, I’m sorry about earlier.”

  He said nothing.

  “Actually, I’m sorry about the past few days.”

  “I’m sorry, too.” He sighed deeply, and admitted, “I have not been a good friend to you or Tights since Hilda’s vernissage. I was so caught up with my own failures. That vernissage was my chance for self-fulfilment, to become who I’ve wanted to be since I was a boy. I ran away from Bangladesh because it had only brought me despair. I risked my life running away from Chang and Sons, and I know becoming an artist doesn’t come at the first opportunity. But when we had to run from the vernissage, it felt like there was nowhere left for me to run to. It felt like I had lost my purpose.”

  “That’s the tricky thing about self-fulfilment, isn’t it?” I said, thinking about my own failed attempts to secure funding for the SoundLoft. “It’s always in somebody else’s hands. The worst thing is that that somebody is usually a person so vastly different from us, whose experiences in life are so removed from ours, how could they possibly understand what we’re trying to achieve?”

  “Exactly.” He twisted his body to face me. “I thought I could stop resenting Tights for what he did, and I could. I honestly have nothing against his beliefs, that ‘the bad’ needs to be let out immediately. But I still resent him for forcing me to remain a recluse. My art is rotting away with some stranger, and there is nothing I can do about it. I’m always hiding and running. This is no way to live, man, and I blame Tights.”

  “What does Shanti have to say about all this?”

  “She told me I’m a great artist, but it’s something she would say anyway because she’s my…friend.”

  “I thought you would know this by now,” I said to him. “Shanti doesn’t say things for the sake of saying things.”

  “I know. But I can’t help but think of the what-ifs. What-ifs are all I have.”

  “No, man. You have us.”

  He resumed his contemplative silence, gazing towards the lapping waves. I resumed looking up at the twinkling stars.

  “Well, I’ve made my confession,” he finally said. “Do you have one?”

  I took a deep breath. “I haven’t told anyone this. When my father died, he promised that if I brought home whores, he would come back and haunt me.”

  He looked confused. “So, you brought home whores?”

  “I wanted him to come back!”

  “You wanted your father to come back and haunt you?”

  “Yes!”

  “From what you told me, he did a lot of that while he was alive.”

  I chuckled gloomily.

  “Thank you for this,” Cantona said, patting the Swiss Army knife-shaped bulge in his pocket. “And for what it’s worth, I forgive you.”

  “Same here.” I got up. “Hey, do me a favour?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When Tights comes to take over later, talk to him a bit, will you? He really wants to be friends with you again, you know? He just doesn’t know any better.”

  “Sure.”

  I walked back to the car, nudged along by the gentle ocean breeze. Diyanah was standing on the roof of the car, scanning, watching intently. I opened the door as silently as I could, for fear of waking Shanti and Tights. I collapsed onto the driver’s seat, leaned it back and closed my eyes.

  Sleep came easily.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was in a barren, desolate land, its harsh winds whipping sand onto my grey skin. But I ambled on with my four legs, my hind legs setting the example for my fore legs. I wanted to yell but it came out as panicked braying.

  There were other asses in front and behind me, and they, too, trudged forlornly against the winds.

  I knew this scene although I had never seen it from this angle.

  This was the landscape Cantona had captured in his painting Assess Your Head. Sure enough, I looked up to see the line of asses reaching the end of the cliff. Beyond that was the abyss.

  The asses at the front had reached the edge now and, with a rather stupid whinny, they stepped into the abyss, and plunged. As they fell, they coalesced into a singular grotesque grey head, with misshapen eyes, twisted lips and a nose that grew like vulgar weeds from the skin.

  This ugly head then jetted up and hovered over me, looking down on me. The asses in front of me continued ambling off the cliff. Refusing to embrace the plummet, I stepped out from the line. The ass behind me ambled faster and covered the gap I had made. The line resumed its systematic march into oblivion. The floating head, moving in shifts of coloured oils, let out a furious howl. It hurtled horribly through the air and stopped a few mere centimetres from my nose.

  “You,” it spat. “Get back in line!”

  “No!” I brayed.

  The line was slowing now, as some of the other asses took notice of my transgression.

  “Get in line!”

  Defiantly, I stood where I was, staring into those bloodshot eyes.

  “As you wish,” hissed the head. With some telekinetic power, it caused shooting pains up my back. The pain grew excruciating, and I inadvertently
brayed in agony—as though something had been yanked violently from my back. I collapsed to the ground and I knew, logically, that even though my spine now hovered before me, having been magically pulled out of my body, that I was somewhere, sleeping, intact.

  The head then plunged my dislodged spine towards my face, and just before that blood-soaked column of bone pierced my cerebrum, I woke up drenched in icy sweat.

  I looked around. I was still in the car, my heavy breaths fogging up the driver’s seat window. Behind me, Shanti was sleeping in a seated position, her head resting against the half-open window. Tights was sleeping on her lap. Outside, Diyanah was standing next to the tree closest to the car. She was staring at me, a look of utmost concern on her face.

  Sleep returned uneasily but, in my fatigue, inevitably.

  Tights woke me at four in the morning for the final watch. I emptied half a bottle of water on my head, and drank the other half. Tights passed me my Swiss Army knife and a pack of cookies. The cookies tasted like bricks and seemed engineered to break my teeth, but I thanked Allah and Yahweh for breakfast.

  We were shrouded in the darkness of night. A great wall of trees that separated us from the road swayed and rustled with the spectral zephyrs of twilight. I walked up the hill towards the lone, empty stone atop it.

  The western shores of Malaysia were laid out before me, unmoving despite the lull of the waves. Upon the beach, a lone figure stood, as still as candle fire and as quiet as a statue.

  It was Diyanah standing by the sea, her feet never quite touching the sand underneath her. Her gaze was fixed upwards, towards the canopy of stars, the speckled blanket of the night. She was singing some unknown hymn, a lament of lost wanderers and lovers separated by the most immense distances.

  I made my way down the hill, past the car and followed a dirt track towards the small beach barely the size of a tanning salon. Most of the beach had been swallowed by mangrove.

  I sat next to her, planting my feet at the boundary where the waves gave way to dry sand. Her gaze remained fixated on the stars above, and she did not cease ennobling the night with her lullaby.

  “That’s a beautiful song.”

  “My grandmother used to sing it to me,” she said.

  “I never met my grandmother,” I lamented. “What was the song about?”

  “It’s called ‘The Garuda and the Cat’. The cat wanted to see the world as the garuda does, high among the clouds, so the garuda, in love with the cat, carries the cat in its talons. But up in the air, the cat panics without the ground underneath its feet, and struggles out of the garuda’s talons. The cat lands safely on its feet, but, buffeted by strong winds, ends up in a land far away. The garuda wanders forever, looking for the cat it lost.”

  “It works better as a song.”

  Diyanah chuckled. “Much better.”

  “Also, how blind is that garuda, that it wandered forever and still couldn’t find the cat?”

  “Very, very blind,” Diyanah said softly.

  Diyanah sat next to me. She smelled of jasmine and the salt of the earth. “Do you know what you’re going to do, once you reach home?” I asked.

  “I have everything planned.” She grinned playfully. “I will scare away the current tenants. I’ll start with disembodied voices in the night, followed by ghostly moans and scratchings at the window, culminating in sudden appearances in the bathroom.”

  I burst out laughing, picturing a Malaccan patriarch slipping into his toilet bowl in abject horror. “You’ve thought this out, huh?”

  “Yes, I have. And after they’re gone, I’ll be at peace.” I thought I caught a hint of melancholy in her voice when she added, “Alone.”

  “I’ll come visit, if I survive Devas.”

  “You will.” Flat, solemn, unsmiling. I did not know if she was referring to my coming to visit or my surviving Devas.

  Either way, it was a clear indication that this undead thing—this formerly living person—was concerned for me. The fact that I did not know much about her became a cause for embarrassment. “Diyanah, what was life like for you? I mean, before you got poisoned.”

  “I was…alive, and I loved being alive. I was always speaking to people, learning things. I was a self-styled tomboy.”

  “Did you grow up with brothers?”

  “No! I just felt behaving like a boy allowed you to see more, to go further. My father did not like it,” she recalled, laughing. “He said I needed to be more sopan, more polite. He used to say the devil had possessed me and made me dress like a boy to taunt him for missing out on his prayers.”

  One detail confused me. “More polite?”

  “Back then, it was polite for a girl to not be so socially forward. Speak only when spoken to. Be ladylike. At least, that’s what my father wanted of me.”

  I thought of my own father. “He didn’t understand you, did he? He had an exact idea of what he wanted you to be, and when you couldn’t live up to that, he presented you his disappointment, served on a silver platter.”

  She studied me curiously before replying, sympathy coursing through her words.

  “Yes.” Then, she asked, “What was life like for you growing up?”

  “Difficult. I never knew where I was going in life. The only reason I ever worked was because I had a degree in Engineering, and I had to do something with it. Humanity’s always about going somewhere, isn’t it? We celebrate progress and we pursue certainty. I don’t remember ever having either.”

  “I read in one of your newspapers that there is a child born to this world named North West. I guess the child has a clear direction in life. The problem with our world is that it is a globe. Once you go over the top, you start heading down, southwest instead. It is the wheel of life. And so, North West can be North West, to a point.” There was something strangely familiar with the way she seemingly divagated from our conversation while consoling me. It was almost magic, how she did it.

  I remained silent, and my smile hid the true extent of the euphoria I felt.

  Into this silence, the waves sent forth their crashing vocables.

  “I sometimes wish I could be human again,” Diyanah repined, a lament that rose above the sound of the waves, into the night, making the inky blanket that smothered us from above seem even darker.

  I did not expect that. “Why would you want to be human again? You’ll lose some major perks. You can’t fly, you won’t have killer claws. Your COME membership will be revoked. Devas would be having me for breakfast, probably.”

  “There is a lot about being human that I miss,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  She looked at me, smiling. The waves took over our conversation again. “Something’s wrong.”

  I did not expect that either. “What?”

  “I sense…something.”

  She ran back to the car, her skinny legs covering alarming ground in alarming time. I barely kept up. The car seemed unperturbed. Shanti and Cantona were leaning against one another as they slept, her head resting on his shoulder, and his head resting on her head. “Where’s Tights?”

  A terrible scream rented the air. It was Tights.

  I turned in the direction of the scream and saw his awkward frame running back to the car, one hand holding up his unbuckled pants, the other waving at us to run. Diyanah smacked the blue Toyota with a single hand—it slid about two metres. Cantona and Shanti jolted awake. They got out of the car. Tights had finally reached us.

  “What’s wrong?” Shanti asked.

  He pointed wildly back towards the jungle, panting too heavily to enunciate anything comprehensible.

  Diyanah, meanwhile, was slowly morphing into pontianak form. “Get in the car, and don’t come out until this is all over.”

  My friends scrambled in, but I remained by Diyanah’s side. “Until what’s all over? What’s coming?”

  But she turned to face me, her eyes glowing red, her mouth stretched open, baring her terrible fangs. “Get in the car!” she shouted
at me dengan semangat, so forcefully that I whimpered as I scrambled in.

  A terrible roar shook the jungle. It grew steadily louder, until two gargantuan figures burst forth. A miniscule one followed behind them. I recognised one of them—it was Gyava, tall and muscular and pale and cloaked. He swung a hand towards the tree next to him and, with an explosion of bark and splinters, it collapsed towards the jungle.

  The other was a wendigo. It had not been there when we were at COME. It was a good thing—I would probably have been a lot more unnerved to see it there. The wendigo was a humanoid creature with pale grey skin stained intermittently with blood. Its mouth was mayhem, a shamble of sharp teeth and a snaking black tongue. Growing out the sides of its scalp were jagged antlers. The wendigo swung its antlers against a tree, gorged it out of the ground and flung it back into the jungle.

  The third being was another toyol, its face covered in horrifying gashes. This one was slightly taller than It’s Complicated, and looked far more sinister. It snarled at us. It bared its knife-like fangs and bit into a tree. The tree stood tall and proud. The toyol, however, found itself stuck, with its fang embedded deep into the bark. With much difficulty, it dislodged itself from the tree. In what I guessed was an attempt at reasserting itself as a formidable threat, the toyol snarled at us again, only to cough out bits of wood.

  Gyava and the wendigo were not going to wait for their companion, however, as they began charging at Diyanah. She staved off the wendigo’s antlers with one hand and clawed deep gashes into Gyava’s chest with the other.

  “Drive!” Shanti was yelling at me.

  I turned the key, but a feminine hand punched into the driver’s seat window. Glass shattered all over me. My friends cried in shock, but it was my cry that was the loudest as the hand clamped around my neck and flung me out of the car.

  A pontianak dressed in a bloody baby-blue dress was squatting on the roof of the blue Toyota. It leapt off and rushed at me with inhuman speed. It pulled my hair and floated up. My feet now inches from the ground, I could see other beings spilling into the clearing. There were other pontianaks, a wendigo, a few ghosts.