The Minorities

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by Suffian Hakim


  After they left, Diyanah poured me a glass of cool water. I smiled at her as the water relieved my dehydrated throat. She smiled back.

  “Go home?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Onion

  I woke up. The clock said 6am and, sure enough, the budding light of dawn streamed in between the curtains. Cantona, Shanti and Tights were nowhere to be seen. Neither, I noticed with a sharp yearning, was Diyanah. I stretched myself fully awake, both hands reaching for the insipid (but sterile) white ceiling.

  It had been two days since they removed the bandages from my shoulder. The scar left by the metal rod was rather cool if otherwise grotesque. It was a twist of scar tissue, lighter in shade than the rest of my skin.

  The silence in the ward was rather unnerving, so I picked up the remote control and switched on the television.

  A Malaysian talk show came on. The host in a bright pink headscarf was reading from a prompt. “It’s been two days since the body of Singapore President Pupus Tan was found among nearly a hundred others in an abandoned kampong north of Malacca. The burning question on everyone’s lips is: was Pupus Tan part of a suicide cult?”

  I pushed a button on the remote control. Static. I pushed another button. A Singaporean news programme. The formidable-looking newscaster was rather solemn as he read: “President Tan was one of few Presidents who came from the private sector, having served sixteen years as CEO of Forbes 500 energy company Singas before his election last year. He was assassinated while giving a speech espousing political freedoms in historical Malacca. The assassin killed himself immediately after—”

  I pushed another button. CNN. Did the hospital only have news channels?

  “…former Member of Parliament Madam Mazlah Yusoff is expected to be sworn in as President of Singapore after an uncontested snap election,” the newscaster said clearly into the camera.

  I pushed a button. The screen switched to a middle-aged man with thinning hair and dressed in tweed. I would recognise that face anywhere, having seen it every weekend as a child. This was Carl Sagan, speaking of the wonders of our known universe in a programme called Cosmos.

  It was when Diyanah appeared next to me and held my hand that I realised I was crying.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Waffles with Covenant Sauce

  I woke up feeling rather happy. It was Wednesday.

  By now, I was the only person left in the ward, and I was thankful for that. Every time my friends came over, we made so much noise. Today they were particularly boisterous as they came in, carrying packets of convenience-store waffles. It was the wafting scent that dragged me out of slumber.

  Tights rolled a table over my bed, careful not to push against my left leg, and I watched in anticipation as they laid breakfast out for me. It was my first meal that wasn’t prepared by the hospital in three weeks.

  “They didn’t have a kitchen in our hotel,” Shanti was saying as she distributed an equal number of waffles on each plate and squirted generous amounts of honey on them, “so we got instant ones instead. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said, smiling.

  “We watched No Country for Old Men in the hotel yesterday,” Tights said cheerfully.

  “Oh hey, that’s perfect grammar!” I exclaimed happily.

  Tights beamed. “Cantona teached me.”

  “Taught,” Cantona corrected.

  “Sorry,” Tights said sheepishly.

  “No, don’t be,” Cantona said. “You’re making really good progress. Actually, the proper sentence should be ‘Cantona has been teaching me’.”

  “Cantona has been teaching me,” Tights repeated.

  “That’s the present perfect continuous tense,” Cantona explained, “because I want to keep teaching you.”

  The smile on Shanti’s face as she watched the two was carved out of pure happiness. A part of me wanted to say that correct grammar was not the point of language—the point of language was for one person to understand the other, and as long as we understood Tights, it did not matter what his grasp of grammar might be. I didn’t think this was the right time to mention it.

  “Did you like the movie?” I asked Tights.

  He nodded enthusiastically. He quoted, “All the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you, more is going out the back door.”

  Cantona was about to say something, but Tights quickly interjected, “It should be ‘taken’.”

  We all applauded Tights, shouting and whooping in pride. The nurse on duty angrily shushed us, but we was too busy celebrating grammar.

  My laugh ended abruptly, however, when I felt we were leaving one of our own out of the revelry. Diyanah stood at the corner of the ward, watching us with a sad smile. I could see the weight of time in her eternal eyes. Her time for laughter and joy and merriment with her friends ended a death and a lifetime ago. Nevertheless, I beckoned for her to join us. She obliged. Shanti took another plate and gave up her last waffle. I placed my last one on it as well. Shanti then offered the plate to Diyanah, who took it, looking confused as she did so.

  “I don’t eat.”

  Shanti threw a quick look at me. “We know. This is just an offering. To say thank you for all that you’ve done for us.”

  “But mainly so you can join us,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Diyanah. Tights and Shanti scooted towards the end of my bed, and Diyanah sat by my waist. She took a small bite of a waffle and made a face.

  “Nice?” Tights asked.

  Diyanah shook her head. “Tastes like cardboard. But I think it’s because my essence wasn’t meant to process flavours.”

  “Oh no,” Shanti quipped, “it tastes like cardboard to us, too.”

  We talked, the five of us, as every single second melded into the next, losing definition. Tights was waxing lyrical in slightly improved grammar about No Country for Old Men, complaining only of his inability to understand its ending. Shanti then shared new discoveries on dark matter made by a team of Swiss scientists, to which I said, “We also made new discoveries about dark matter.” Cantona sagely posited that we could be making separate discoveries about the same thing, like blind men touching different parts of an elephant—one might say that an elephant is long, thin, furry and swishes around, while the other might say that it is smooth, curved, stiff and pointy at the end.

  The next time I looked at the clock, it was almost noon. We had been talking for nearly four hours. The nurse on duty approached my bed and said something softly to Shanti and Cantona. I caught the words “change” and “cast” as well as the admonishment, “Visitation time is limited to two hours per visitor!”

  Shanti asked for more time, but the nurse, her frown so pronounced I was afraid her skin might fold into itself, insisted that they leave now.

  “We’ve got to go,” Shanti said, holding a defiant hand up to the nurse on duty. “But our hotel is two blocks from here.” She gave me a small smile and glanced at Diyanah. I was still within her spiritual boundary to Tights.

  That night, my twentieth night at Mahkota Medical Centre, I opened my backpack for the first time in the hospital. From it, I extracted a thick yellowed book with a fraying, slightly tattered cover. It was Cosmos by Carl Sagan. A lifetime ago, my father had bought it for me for my eighth birthday.

  I opened the book and read—aloud, to fill the emptiness of the ward. It was 11pm when I got to Chapter 13. I recited to myself those immortalisations of Sagan’s thoughts, “In our tenure on this planet we have accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage, hereditary propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders and hostility to outsiders, which place our survival in some question. But we have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and our children’s children, a desire to learn from history, and a great soaring passionate intelligence—the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visi
on and understanding and prospects are bound exclusively to the Earth—or, worse, to one small part of it. But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us.”

  I put the book aside, switched off my reading light and sat up on the side of the bed, facing the window and the streets of Malacca outside, mottled with lamplight. Doing so meant I had to pivot on my hands, causing a relatively subdued ache to quiver up my right shoulder. I then placed my feet on the ground and tried to stand. I could not stand evenly due to the cast, as well as the explosion of pain that seared through my left shin.

  I rasped a silent cry of pain, feeling small against the flood of onrushing despondence. I thought of Diyanah, waiting weeks for me to take her home. I needed to fulfil my promise to her. More importantly, I needed to give her what she wanted.

  Something shifted in the dark corner of the ward. Something that wasn’t there, and suddenly was. Her voice betrayed what the shadows obscured. “Are you okay?” asked Diyanah.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “All right.” She looked at me standing gingerly by the bed, grimacing from the pressure on my left leg. “Do you need my help?”

  “No.”

  I was feeling embarrassed, and Diyanah must have sensed it for she said, “I’ll give you your privacy, then.”

  “No, you don’t have to.”

  Diyanah smiled. She sat next to me on my bed, and she took my hand in hers. I sat down, too, a song of joy beating in my heart. Every starry moment stretched into coruscating infinities, as we stared wordlessly out the window, into the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Tainted Loaf

  It was two in the morning when I turned to Diyanah, and said, “Let’s get you home. I owe that to you.”

  She shook her head. “You’re not in any condition to travel.”

  “I know. But I have you.” I reached across my bed for my backpack. “Go to Shanti, Cantona and Tights. Tell them to pack up, get my mother’s car ready and pick us up from here.”

  She nodded.

  I added, “After that I need you to come back to me. Remember what you did for Cantona and Tights at the immigration checkpoint? I need you to do that for me here.”

  She nodded, and left, blinking into thin air.

  At half past two, Diyanah returned to the ward. She put a thin arm around me and began chanting words I believed were Sanskrit.

  Her hands clasped mine as we stood by my bed. Slowly, my feet rose off the ground. I imagined strings, slow, steady. Soft percussion. We took our first steps on thin air towards the entrance. They were tentative, almost hesitant. I was escaping from a hospital. I did not know the kind of trouble a patient would be embroiled in if he or she simply disappeared from a hospital.

  Horns. We were bounding in the air now, Diyanah’s hands never leaving mine. It was a strange feeling, to go on by without anyone acknowledging your presence. I had never been completely invisible. It made me feel less human. It made me feel liberated.

  The percussions were growing now. Organs. Keyboards. Their chords swelled. Strings strained. There was a melody now, a hopeful one. We were going against the flow of human traffic. Doctors and nurses, shuttling about, were obstructing us. Diyanah and I did the dodging—we sidestepped and weaved and lunged, the dance of the unseen. We leapt sideways and backwards and forwards. We even leapt over one doctor.

  There was a light, feminine voice in the song now, and in the first tongues of men, it sang a plea, for us to take flight, to know that being human is a permanent state of existence—even in the afterlife. The euphoria in that voice, above the soaring rhythms that played in my mind, lifted us ever higher and ever forward. Life surged on around us, but we were alive, too, in a beatific dance that humanity had largely forgotten in our vanity, in our greed, in our wars. Diyanah and I found it at the periphery of our minds, and even if this experience were fleeting, our souls had never been more elevated towards the veiled world, the one more rapturous and sublime than ours. My eyes caught Diyanah’s, and I lost myself in her smile more than I had lost myself in the whirls of our dance.

  The music inside my head stopped suddenly. We were already at the sterile lobby of Mahkota Medical Centre. The pain in my leg returned in convulsions. I wondered if something in my medicine was giving me auditory hallucinations. A familiar blue Toyota was already parked by the lobby.

  The three people inside it could see us, but nobody else could.

  It was half past three. I was in the backseat of my mother’s car. Cantona was slowly cutting away at my cast with my Swiss Army knife. He was initially unwilling to do it, but I had insisted, complaining of the terrible itch that prickled under my skin, from my toes up to my shin.

  He eventually removed it and, from a first-aid kit Shanti had brought, bandaged up my swollen ankle and shin. Tights assisted him, passing him everything he needed from the box.

  Shanti was driving, while Diyanah navigated.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Shanti was saying.

  “I know,” I said. I tried putting pressure on my foot. The pain had subsided somewhat. “But I’m so glad I did it.” Diyanah turned, and we shared a smile, one of several I was accumulating in my mind for the sake of wistful recollection. There was a part of me, buried deep within, that expected this to be my final days—or moments—with Diyanah. I did not know what would happen after we got her home. Would she stay there, forever, until her covenant expired? Do covenants expire? I pictured the rest of my life, making trips to and from Malacca just to see her. Or would something more profound happen, and I would never be able to see her ever again?

  We had been driving for just over half an hour when Diyanah said uncertainly, “We should be here already.” I checked the map on my phone. Sure enough, we were north of Malacca, at approximately the same spot Diyanah had pointed out to me on the map back at my flat in Yishun. That night felt like a lifetime ago.

  The problem was, there was no Kampong Air Rindu. Shanti had taken us to a large expanse of hilly land with a sparse smattering of palm trees.

  A large billboard stood in the middle of the plot. “COMING YOUR WAY: LA MALACCIENE RESORT HOMES,” the sign read.

  “It’s supposed to be here!” Diyanah’s voice grew more anxious. With the car still moving, she opened the door and flew out of the blue Toyota. Shanti brought the car to a screeching halt.

  “This is supposed to be my home!” Diyanah was almost hysterical now. Her fingers were stretching into claws. “What happened to my home? Where did they take it?”

  I hobbled out the car and stood by her under the billboard. I felt that asking her to calm down would demean her trepidation, so I continued standing as she morphed into her beastly pontianak form. She spun as she floated into the air, her eyes glowing a wrathful red.

  Softly, I said her name.

  She stopped her spiralling, and regarded me with those wild eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  Diyanah began descending to the ground, and as soon as her foot touched the grass below, she fell to her knees and cried. I knelt with her, ignoring the pained resistance in my left leg, and embraced her shuddering, crying body.

  “It’s gone,” she said. “Everything I knew.”

  “Don’t despair, Diyanah. You can stay at our place if you’d like. As a matter of fact, haunt me. Can you do the Poltergeist thing? I think my place could do with some major furniture rearrangements.” I gave her a small laugh.

  She looked up from my chest, her human, human eyes red with tears.

  “Set your spiritual boundary to me. I’ll go wherever you want. I’ll feed you, clothe you. I’ll take care of you.” I wanted to tell her I loved her, human being to former human being. I wanted to tell her that the only thing that made sense to me right now was to spend as much time as I could with her. The one thing that had been in my mind since the death of my father, and my brush with the supernatural, was that life was short. I wanted to spend what little I had left of mine with her, to he
ar her voice, to talk to her, to see her smile until my eyes closed eternally to this world. It felt selfish. Perhaps it was.

  Inside the car, Tights and Cantona looked at us with worried faces. Shanti gave a small nod.

  We broke our embrace, and Diyanah turned sharply to a spot behind me, obscured by vegetation, bags of cement and a singular tractor. “It’s still there,” she said with a sardonic laugh.

  I turned around. Just behind a short line of trees were unmistakable tombstones. There were no gates or walls or fences to demarcate the cemetery. The gravestones stuck out of unruly grass beside a patch of well-manicured land. Whoever maintained the grass for La Malacienne Resort Homes did not bother to do the same for the grave site next to it. A small sign with cheery colours said the grave would be “relocated”. I hobbled towards it after Diyanah.

  We ventured deep into the graveyard, where the tombstones were mouldy and heavily weather-worn, until we reached a rather mismatched pair of tombstones. One was of average size, its cracked marker already annexed by nature, more sprawling fauna than hand-hewn stone. The other was tragically much smaller, with a tinier tombstone. I cleared the cobwebs and creepers from the larger one. Diyanah Ali. Under the carved name were dates: 19th March 1931–4th October 1949.

  The small tombstone had a single word: Nurul. And a single date: 4th October 1949. I understood then why dates were carved into tombstones. The extent of a life gave death its depth. The shorter a life, the less fathomable a death. Nurul was meant to live for so much more. She was not supposed to be some footnote in the textbook of Mahmoud Marican’s adulterous history. She was supposed to be raised to greatness, propelled by the ferocious love that Diyanah had for her. She was supposed to be alive right now, telling her grandchildren stories of her brave mother, the great Diyanah Ali.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to her.

 

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