“Nurul was alive inside me,” she said, her eyes never leaving her daughter’s tombstone. “I felt her die inside me. She was all I had. When Mahmoud left, when I became a shameful secret my family had to keep, she was all I had. When my essence returned to the kampong that stood here, I would come to this same spot, and my rage—white hot, pure rage—would bleed into the night.” Diyanah turned to me. “I don’t feel that anymore.”
I stood closer to her and held her hand.
“Come, there’s something I have to show you,” she said, smiling through her tears. Leading me by the hand, she took me farther from the billboard and the main road, towards a hill. We ascended it slowly—my calf was sending jolts of agony through my entire body. Diyanah, strangely, did not use her powers to help me levitate to the peak.
The hill overlooked a wide, surging river, its waters as black as the infancy of morning. In the evening, it would come alive with the coloured bulbs of riverboats filled with tourists paying a rather hefty price simply to be ferried up and down a river. On the other side of the river was a row of concrete-and-glass condominiums, its denizens still in dalliance with slumber.
“Is this where you would smoke opium among cows?” I asked Diyanah.
She nodded, parting her lips in a small smile. “But I don’t recognise this place anymore. I’ve waited so long to come back, but I never considered if this place would wait for me.”
She leaned into me, and bracing against the pain in my leg, I held her in my arms. We were silent. Diyanah asked, “Do you hear that?”
“No.”
“Listen closely. It is our song. Strings. Percussions. Horns.”
I smiled, and I nodded. My eyes welled with tears. “Piano.” I began swaying, stepping to and stepping forth and stepping inside and shuffling out. We were dancing, under the stars, to a soundless music, to a tune I last heard when Diyanah graced the SoundLoft.
She spun in my hands, her feet still on the ground, each soft graze of her skin against mine sending rousing bursts of emotion from my eyes.
We were moving in tandem, hand to hand, forehead to forehead, soul to soul. In that moment, we were perfect.
“Diyanah?”
“Yes?” she asked me, her eyes on my lips.
“Will I ever see you again?”
She remained silent.
Diyanah raised her face to mine. Our lips parted. But the sweet, rapturous contact did not happen.
I opened my eyes.
Diyanah was gone with the morning sun.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Sunrise Soma
When I returned to the car, my face said everything my friends needed to know. They got out of the car, and we hugged, the four of us—Shanti Rathasattama, Chang “Tights” Ying Hao, Cantona bin Fawwaz and I—together, so far from home. A home, I remembered, that had been thoroughly trashed by a now deceased Devas. Suddenly, it felt exactly like that—a crime scene, an outlet for the anger of men who were seeking the ghosts of their fathers, only to find the great force of nature that would scar them evermore.
I slumped into their arms, my face sinking into Cantona’s shoulders. I could not even tell when the tears began streaming, but by the time I looked up, I saw the world through watery prisms. I broke the hug. The sun was glowing a youthful yellow, peeking out of the horizon as night sprawled and stumbled away.
“Let’s go to the beach. I want to watch the waves,” I said.
Shanti agreed gently.
We drove to the shores of Malacca—it took barely ten minutes as we cruised through the empty, timeworn city. At the beach, a great, empty expanse of sand sat blue-beige in dawn. The four of us sat upon a breakwater that stretched far out into the sea. The waves crested and crashed. I lay back on the flat stony surface. Tights lay next to me. Cantona, too, lowered his back to the ground, on my other side. Next to him, Shanti did the same. Before us was endless ocean; above us, insurmountable sky.
“How do you feel?” Shanti asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.
“How are we going back?” Cantona said.
“We can’t,” I replied. “Without Diyanah’s powers, we can’t go home.” The truth was I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen to us. “But whatever comes, we’ll be together.”
“Together,” Shanti repeated. Cantona shifted slightly. He must be holding Shanti’s hands. She sounded hopeful, that somehow our combined capabilities would lead us to greener pastures.
We fell into silence. My thoughts turned to Diyanah. She was the sea breeze—I felt her on my skin, between my fingers, I could breathe in the very idea of her, this ephemeral gift, but when I reached out, all I grasped was a sustained, abysmal emptiness. I couldn’t hold her close to me. I couldn’t hold her.
Shanti was the first to break the silence. “You see that cloud?” she said, pointing her free hand upwards. “Doesn’t it look like a turd?”
We looked and agreed, laughing, that, yes, it looked somewhat like a pile of shit.
“Maybe God let out bad inside,” Cantona said, tapping Tights.
“It look like COME,” Tights said, and we waited, hoping he would clarify. “See?” he said, moving his finger. “That is the door and where we meet ghost, that the side.”
I looked closely. I could see the rough outline of the Old Changi Hospital, but I saw something else more prominently in the fluff of clouds. To me, it looked more like an almond. An almond. I remembered something.
I pushed my hand into my pocket and fished out a singular almond. I held it up against the sky, blocking my view of the heavens.
“Has that been in your pocket the whole time?” Cantona asked.
I studied it closely. It was old, dusty, slightly mouldy, worn. “Yeah, it had been here, all this time.”
I stood up, and with a painless flick of the wrist, I threw the almond into the sea. Refusing to fight the tide, it sank into the inky, swirling depths of the ocean.
Acknowledgements
The book is over.
Maybe one day, we will revisit the lives of The Narrator, Shanti, Tights, Cantona and Diyanah. But for now, it is time to give them—and ourselves—time to get back to normal, whatever normal might be.
I need to thank a few people who helped make this book possible. First and foremost is Shelby Sekar, my love, my sounding board and confidante. She is my President of Getting Shit Done, and I am able to impart the stories swirling in my head because of her intelligence, her hard work and her dedication. This book would not have come together without her. Thank you, Shelby, for being with me every step of the way as we put together the heart and soul of this very book. Here’s to many more steps for many more.
Second on the list is my editor Eldes Tran, for setting the stage for my humour and my wacky ideas to shine through. I love this story even more because it has gone through your hands.
Keith Premchand, O Thee of the Amazing Moustache, thank you for your support, not just with taking photos of my ugly ass, but with discussing the philosophies and social commentaries that get sprinkled into this book. More important, thank you for remaining true to art in all its wondrous expressions.
I need to thank my cousin Khairil Hakim, who forms one half of Team Hakim in my family. His insights and knowledge are a plane above anybody I know, eccentric and at times off-kilter as they are, and they have helped flavour some of the concepts that appear in this book.
My gratitude goes to my aunt Karnati, for listening, challenging and advising, and never allowing me to rest on my laurels.
To my friend Diyanah, please know that I do not think of you as a pontianak. What you have with in common with the pontianak is that you are both creatures of beauty, and that you can possibly subsist on a diet of raw animal meat. Beyond that, I am very thankful for your presence in the world of the living.
I began writing this story shortly after my grandmother passed. For the first three decades of my life, she was the dearest thing to me, and I’ve never faced a loss as gre
at. This book was written during a still-ongoing grieving process, and is my way of coming to terms with her death.
Before I finish this book in its entirety, I need to thank you as well, dear reader. Thank you for joining me in yet another adventure through the recesses of my mind. Thank you for taking the time to take in this collection of words and phrases and ideas by me. I truly hope you enjoyed reading it.
I’m very sure we’ll embark on another adventure very soon.
Until then, may you always let out the bad inside all that you do.
About the Author
Suffian Hakim is a writer of fantastical, whimsical, wacky books. His first was a parody, Harris bin Potter and the Stoned Philosopher, whose initial chapter was published online in 2013 and became viral. The Straits Times called Suffian “undoubtedly one of the most whimsical, creative and unpretentious young voices in Singapore literature”. He was previously a regional content lead at media agency GroupM and had written for television shows such as Random Island and The Noose, and publications Esquire and August Man.
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