Praise for Gopal Baratham’s writing:
“The writer possesses a technically excellent prose style, so smooth that it slips down the reader’s throat like a well-made Singapore Sling.”
— THE HINDU
“Baratham’s talent as a writer has been undisputed. So has his moral courage.”
— THE INDIAN EXPRESS
“… a genuine ability to tell a story.”
— COMMENTARY
“Singapore’s literary enfant terrible…”
— THE WESTERN AUSTRALIA
“Baratham’s controversial — has always been…”
— ASIA TIMES
“The absence of jargon and pretentiousness lends a special charm to the low-key stories that explore the emotions of the locals…”
— ASIAWEEK
© 1996 Gopal Baratham
Cover designed by Sarah and Schooling
First published by Serpent’s Tail, 4 Blackstock Mews, London N4
This revised edition published in 2014 by
Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International
1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Baratham, Gopal, 1935-2002.
Moonrise, sunset / Gopal Baratham. – Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2014. pages cm
ISBN : 978-981-4351-36-2 (paperback)
eISBN: 978 981 4634 84 7
1. Murder – Investigation – Fiction. I. Title.
PR9570.S53
S823 — dc23 OCN891602477
Printed in Singapore by NPE Printers Pte Ltd
To Ban Kah Choon
with affection and respect
I SEE THINGS different from other people. The sky talks to me, sends messages in rainstorms and lightning. The Singapore night, warm and damp like a dog’s tongue, licks my face and tickles the side of my ear. People gushing out of MRT stations dance to secret harmonies and fingers working a keyboard have a choreography only I am aware of. Unconnected images string themselves into pictures and events, willy-nilly, lie one against the other till sequence is unavoidable. This is how the world has always been to me; this is how, I hope, it will always be. I keep my thoughts to myself, however. If I didn’t, people would think me mad.
Not Vanita though. She listens, tries not to smile, though I sometimes sound outrageous even to myself. This is one of the many things I love about Vanita. One of the many lovely, unbelievable, heart-stopping things.
I look to the east over the tops of the ships and beyond the shadows of the islands. Look right to the edge of the world, where a gigantic red ball is emerging from the sea. A thought strikes me. An odd thought, something which normally I would have kept to myself. But I loved the woman beside me and trusted her not to laugh, or at least not to laugh too much, at the goings-on in my head. So I spoke up. “I think that moonrise looks so much like sunset that it is impossible to tell one from the other.”
Vanita stopped what she was doing. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Moons rise in the east, which is there.” She pointed to the open sea. “Suns set in the west.” She held my face and turned my head sharply round till it faced the city “… which is there.” Vanita has a lovely voice, lilting with highs and lows jumbled, like a boy’s at puberty. She makes music without meaning to. I waited for its spell to subside before turning to stare at the full moon again.
For some reason it made me uneasy. Not full moons generally. This full moon. It stained the clouds which had hung about all evening a deep purplish-blue. A lovely colour, in most circumstances. Round their edges, however, were mean yellow tinges which made them look like bruises growing old. I was disturbed by this moonrise, wondered what it was trying to say to me.
I turned away from it, back to Vanita. “I have been looking at it for a long time and I can’t see how I can tell without turning my head whether it is moonrise or sunset.”
“My sweet, sweet boy, you are lovely to love but that doesn’t stop you being a dumbo. You can’t tell anything from anything unless you look around you.”
“What if you don’t want to? What if you can’t…?”
“Never mind,” she said, fishing out a piece of fried chicken and popping it into my mouth. She put another into my hand for good measure and went on with what she was doing.
Vanita treats me like a child. Perhaps, she has a right to, for she is my first girl.
When I met her a year ago, I was twenty-seven and a virgin. Vanita was surprised, though she need not have been. I am not hungry for experience, have never gone out to “grab” life in the way that is recommended these days. I tend to let things happen to me, allow myself to be buffeted this way and that by events. I must confess that I really don’t pay too much attention to what goes on around me because I am confident that, when things are right and without my searching for it, a pattern will emerge and I will recognise it; and in it the time, the place, the person. And, when this happens, I would know what to do.
As soon as I set eyes on Vanita, I knew that the person I had been waiting for had arrived. I slipped into the sequence of events that followed our meeting easily; as easily as I, though totally inexperienced, slipped into her body.
I was, nevertheless, glad that she had some expertise in these matters and, to put things in her own words, “knew what went where and how things worked”. I was grateful that she was knowledgeable but was never moved to find out how she had come by her knowledge or how many lovers she had had before me though she had said often enough that she would be only too happy to tell me. Vanita is not coy about such things. I discovered this very early on.
I am tall, unmuscular, and pale skinned. I have always been worried about looking effeminate. After our first night together, Vanita told me that I had nothing to be ashamed of. She assured me that I was, in the area that really mattered, better endowed than any of the men she had been with. This may have been why she handled my body with the kind of care that collectors reserve for their prize pieces; how she got it to do things I didn’t think it capable of. I was flattered; pleasured beyond my wildest dreams. Now, as I watched her unpack the food she had cooked, I felt the rush of desire and was impatient to begin making love.
I tore my eyes away from her and looked around the park.
Singapore is so small that it is easy to visualise it as
a diamond-shaped island lying sideways at the tip of the Malay peninsula. East Coast Park runs along its south-eastern edge where the waters of the Indian Ocean merge with those of the China Sea.
We had been coming to the same spot in the park for nearly a year. Vanita had chosen it. It was some distance from the beach and away from the teenagers and their noisy Sony compos, almost far enough for the smell of barbecue sauce not to reach us. From where we were, I could see the ships riding at anchor, smell the turning of the tides and, when I listened really carefully, hear voices speaking in strange tongues.
Our tiny island is the busiest port in the world and the destination, at some time, of every craft that sails the seas. And ships bring with them the sounds of faraway places, hints of exquisite pleasures, suggestions that impossible dreams can somewhere be realised. From where we sat, I felt that I could reach out and touch the world, feel it breathe, take its pulse. It was the perfect spot for making love to the woman for whom I had waited so long.
I stretched out on the grass and looked at the rising moon. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Vanita spreading the heavy waterproof sheet on which we would spend the night. At one end of this she placed the sleeping-bag which we would pull over our naked bodies when it got cold, as it sometimes did just before dawn. Then she began unpacking the food she had cooked.
I knew what this would be and knowing made my appetite as sharp as my desire. Besides the spicy fried chicken there would be chapatis wrapped round mince and peas, fish grilled in banana leaves, dry curried vegetables and an assortment of pickles. For dessert we always had semolina cooked in milk that had been sweetened with rock-sugar and spiced with cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. To this Vanita always added a generous helping of Benedictine, a liqueur which Singaporeans believe increases desire and improves sexual performance. I do not know what it did for my lovemaking but it certainly made me sleep soundly once this was done. And the depth of my slumber contributed to the horror I was soon to know.
Innocent of what was to come, we ate, fed each other and felt one with the sea and the dancing lights of the ships.
The food tasted better than ever. Vanita is a marvellous cook and I was especially happy that evening. I knew, from the moment I met her, that I wanted this woman for my wife but I waited several months before asking her to marry me. I was surprised when she turned me down.
“We should spend more time together and really get to know each other before we decide on marriage.” Seeing the look that crossed my face she winked and added, “Ask me again next month and I’ll see how I feel about it.”
I did on the same day the following month and every month after. Four days ago she agreed to marry me. I now looked upon myself as her husband and this our first night together as man and wife. I think Vanita saw it that way too. I smelled her excitement as we neared the end of our meal and my need for her became unbearable.
My mother’s Chinese genes must have got the upper hand when I was fashioned for I am odourless and almost devoid of body hair.
Vanita, in contrast, is hairy and exudes a symphony of aromas in the course of making love. I think of us as Yin and Yang, two fish-like creatures coming together to create, against all odds, the perfect circle. I turn to my love, moved not only by lust but by a yearning to complete the design that is a part of the nature of things.
We were both impatient and came quickly, Vanita making the strange choking noises that signalled her climaxes. I recalled how alarmed I had been the first time I heard them. I thought she was having an epileptic fit or a heart seizure. I feared she might die and wondered what I would do if she did. Now I waited for them because they told me we were at the rainbow’s end, that I was free to reach for my own pot of gold.
Sometimes she made orgasmic noises when asleep, groping for me, grinding herself against my body when she found it. If we woke sufficiently I saw to it that what had begun as a dream climaxed in reality. Usually, however, our eating and drinking and lovemaking saw to it that once asleep we remained so till the dawn.
As soon as we finished, Vanita began working on me again. I was surprised. We usually lay around a bit, enjoying the ebbing of our pleasure, remembering the high points of its tide. Tonight, Vanita wanted things differently. I should even then have noticed the slight disturbance in the pattern, the tiny shudder of the plate-glass window before it is shattered by the earthquake. But I was too full of Vanita. Too willing to do her bidding, too happy to go with her yet again over the edge of the world.
I was quickly ready. She turned me on my back, impaled herself and rode me. Vanita liked it this way. I did too, knowing how happy she was to be able to control the rhythms of her pleasure. There was another reason why I liked Vanita on top.
I knew the Egyptian creation legend, had read of Nut and Geb and Shu. Nut, the goddess of the sky, was so in love with her twin, Geb, the god of earth, that she mounted him, impaled herself deeply and refused to be separated from him. This terribly disturbed their father, Shu, the god of wind. So terribly disturbed was Shu, that he drew an enormous breath with which he forced the lovers apart. Thus was created light and space. When night fell, however, Nut would creep up and embrace her lover, protecting him with her body till the break of dawn.
The same instinct that caused me to see us Yin and Yang made me think of us as Geb and Nut. The notion that unions such as ours had existed from the beginning of time seemed to guarantee that Vanita and I would survive for a long while if not nearly for ever. Beliefs based on arrogance are always wrong and mine proved to be so more quickly than most.
Making love a second time was a long luxurious business and we fell asleep as soon as we were done, Vanita’s body lying heavily and protectively on mine. I thought I heard her choke and cry out in the middle of the night, half woke to see if she needed me, then, feeling her quiet in my arms, decided that we would wait till dawn before making love again. How was I to know that we had made love for the last time?
I woke with a start.
I realised how one could tell moonrise from sunset. It was a matter of direction. Not direction in the sense of orientation, the way one faced, but direction in the way satellite and star moved: the moon up and out of the sea, the sun down and into it. There was no need to look around. No need to compare. All one had to do was wait. Time was more important to identity than space. I had the answer to my question.
Problems prevent you sleeping; solutions don’t shake you awake. Vanita is a big girl and she lay heavily across me. My left arm was numb and my left leg which was pinned down at an awkward angle ached unbearably.
I tried to shift her. As I did, I became aware of something warm and sticky seeping from her body. It smelled like the goo one encounters in a meat market, and a lot of blood seemed to be pouring out of her. I had to get her to a doctor before she bled to death.
I shook her shoulder, at first gently but with increasing violence. Her blood-covered breasts made squelching noises against my chest and her head flopped against my shoulder. Her mouth hung open and from it a warm fluid trickled on to my body. I thought it too was blood. Then I smelled cinnamon and clove; Benedictine under the heavy flavour of curry. Vanita was bringing up the meal we had shared.
I prised myself from under her. The sleeping-bag which should have been covering us lay tangled at our feet. The moon sheltered behind a cloud and a mist obscured the lights of the ships. It was pitch dark. The teenagers were asleep, their Sony compos silent. Somewhere, far away, I could hear the soft scratching of the sea as the tide changed.
I am not strong and it was with difficulty that I turned Vanita on to her back. I shouted into her ear. She did not stir. I slapped her face. Her head lolled from side to side. Her skin felt cool and tacky the way plasticine does.
I think I realised that my darling was dead but I continued to shake her. When I saw that this was having no effect, I put my ear against her heart. The silence within was complete. Blood trickled on to my cheek and a little got into my mouth. I rubbed m
y face against her breasts and put both my arms around her. Then I felt it: a tiny mouth just below her left shoulder blade from which a little blood still drooled.
I do not know how long I held my love for I was unaware of anything but a sense of loss. When I finally managed to let go of her, she was beginning to stiffen and there were grey streaks across the horizon.
I pulled on my T-shirt and jeans. I did not have on underwear. Vanita preferred that I wore none when I was with her. I walked a few steps in the direction of the beach then returned to rummage among our clothes for the ten-cent coins I needed for public phones. The first phone I came to accepted only cards. The second had been vandalised. Finally I found one that worked. Only then did I remember that for emergency calls neither card nor coin was necessary. I reached the main police exchange which transferred my call to the duty sergeant of a nearby police station. I told him that my girlfriend had been stabbed.
“Is the injured party male or female?”
“Not injured, dead. And it’s a girl that has been killed.”
“Are you sure?”
Who could be more female than Vanita, I thought, a lump of pain rising in my throat. I forced myself to say, “Yes, I’m sure.”
“Where is the location of the corpse?”
I shuddered. Only moments ago she was bouncing on me, talking of marriage, of children, thinking she would live for ever. Now a stranger called her a corpse. The pain in my throat became unbearable. I found it impossible to breathe.
“Hello, sir. Hello, sir. You must stay on line, sir. Mustn’t hang up till you have given police all the info.”
“Yes, yes,” I managed to say. “We are near the three-kilometre stone in East Coast Park.”
“Near the jogging track, sir?”
“Quite near the track and not far from the beach.”
“Okay, sir. You stay near corpse. We send patrol-car round immediate. And don’t touch anything, sir.”
“I won’t,” I assured him.
My arms and face were covered with blood and my T-shirt was stiff with it. The clots on my face began to itch as they dried. I licked the corner of my mouth. The crust was salty-sweet. It was the last thing of my darling’s that I would taste.
Moonrise, Sunset Page 1