He smiled at the memory of Jay shaking his shoulders: “Get up, Prof! We did this, You and I, not some random god!”
It was a small matter, this matter of belief and disbelief. It was enough that Jay believed in the science that allowed such miracles to happen: A stent filled with drugs could also be filled with superexplosives.
So easy – this modification, so alike the drugs and the undetectable biomaterial explosives. A breakthrough so similar to the bone structure in the body that it could fool nature. Machines like the mass spectrometers designed to detect the presence of trace quantities of chemicals would not stand a chance.
Scientists with moral scruples need not apply. Even the money became insignificant when scientists were changing human destiny in a petri dish and, in that respect, he completely agreed with Jay about unfettered scientific genius.
And soon, the miracle would be in the warrior, who would sit on a wheelchair and glide towards a press conference at this airport. He remembered the crippled young man on the hospital bed in Puchong, while his mother wailed, “We sent you to be an architect! So proud, your father; now what has my son become?”
He had barely been able to disguise his irritation. The way the family was mourning, anyone would think the young man was dead instead of crippled. The bomb that had blown off the warrior’s legs exploded prematurely at a shopping complex in Jakarta. But the warrior, just out of jail and with no legs, had taken over leadership of the group at a meeting in Puchong in 1999, saying dismissively: “They have castrated us all; what is the loss of a leg?”
The girl by the window was now pacing. He watched her frown at her reflection in the glass as a middle-aged Malay woman asked her the time. He drew deeply on his smoke, but his hands trembled slightly.
If the enemy could imprison their brothers and hang their leaders, mocking their martyrs as they stepped into certain death, it was fitting that young men were ready to fight on the side of the righteous. Their people were in Kedah, Jakarta, and many places in Indonesia. The plans were simple: always lie low, hit non-Muslim businesses. They aimed to achieve the Islamic union of Malaysia, Mindanao, and independent Islamic territories in Indonesia.
The trouble with this country was the bastard politicians. The country needed men who bonded in brotherhood under one God, not the pimps that ran this government now, extending hands of friendship to everyone. The last two months, especially the death of the Tibetan woman, taught him some important lessons.
Now it was finally his turn. That pimp of a minister would be taken out soon, God willing. The betrayal of this nation was the most unforgivable in the hierarchy of treason, and it was his job to find those treacherous to the rulers, and silence them all. Colonel S had given up too much for this cause, remaining as silent as a watersnake swimming in this muddy river of a country ambushed by whirlpools, to fail at this.
The girl at the window walked out of an emergency exit, swiping her card on the door. So she was an employee. They must have noticed him on the cameras by now, and he hoped he had them scuttling. As he stubbed out his cigarette and lit another, he mused, in another week, it will finally be out of my hands.
He needed to call Jay. Colonel S wouldn’t be able to pull this off alone once the plan was set in motion, and the first dry run was in a week’s time, in Malaysia, but after that they would show the world how it was done. There was still a slight problem in convincing Jay to come back – not the money, which was easy – but in convincing him that this country provided the most congenial soil for any kind of research. He had followed his protégé’s career over the past three decades, and Jay surpassed his expectations. Now it was up to Colonel S to woo him back to Malaysia, to take a sabbatical from the prestigious Haversham where he was now Professor.
He would invoke the blood-debt again; the ultimate ace dealt by fate.
Unfortunately, no one else knew the science as well as Jay did. Colonel S needed his protégé. Once Jay came back to Malaysia, he would be so deeply implicated that he would have to stay.
Colonel S could now see the girl with the crinkled hair on the tarmac, talking to someone. He picked at the hair growing out of the dark mole on his chin. He would give it another few minutes, then pick up his cane and walk towards the green and white sign that said Keluar. Then he would call Jay again, today, before time ran out.
A toddler wailed loudly as a young Chinese woman strained towards the monitor trying to make out the words on cnn. She shook the child’s shoulders and yelled, “Quiet! I’ll wallop you now!” The man next to them quickly scrambled up on one of the orange chairs to adjust the volume on the TV. Colonel S leaned back to watch the familiar face on the grainy footage from a mountainous cave in Afghanistan: … and they spread in every place in which injustice is perpetuated …
He picked up his cane and got to his feet. Someone with the logo of the airline stitched on his shirt started to walk towards him, but he waved him away. Then, with deliberate slowness, he extended his right foot, swivelled his right hip and dragged his left. People made way for him, smiling that pity which made his exits so easy.
Three
Professor Jay Ghosh stood cradling the telephone in his hand, and yawned loudly. What an intriguing offer from his old mentor. If only he could trust Colonel S again! He had debts to repay, and that old fox made sure Jay would remember that by spouting an old Malay pantun at him, as always. Colonel S recited Hutang emas boleh di bayar, hutang budi… and, before he had even finished, Jay found himself nodding: Yes, yes, debts of gold can be easily repaid; debts of gratitude are carried to the grave. Let me call you back in a week.
More than a week had passed since the first phone call. The old man called again this morning. With the phone in his hand now, Jay couldn’t believe that he, Professor Jay Ghosh, was actually thinking of going to Malaysia for three weeks. That he would say yes to a Return. That he would dial this phone now and say: I will come.
Not again. Not ever.
But why not?
Because he still didn’t trust Colonel S completely. Research with him was tremendously exciting, but somehow also… tainted.
Because he couldn’t bear the thought of going back to Malaysia.
He looked up at the ceiling. He loved the dining room cornices matching the flowered borders of the Turkish wool carpet leading out to the garden. This was his home now and, as always, he was comforted by its beauty and order. It had been years since he lived anywhere else. Then he looked at the lake outside, glimmering with chips of ice, and thought, I can’t let a ghost keep me out of Malaysia forever.
That morning, after speaking with Colonel S, when he had stepped into the shower and seen the raven-black hair in the drain, he had jumped out, naked and shivering. How many more such visitations lurked around the house, ordinary human traces embedded in the couch and the carpet, the inner crevices of a memory that would not be exorcised? He had to force himself back inside the shower, to turn the hot water on and vapourise the images, but the ghost hovered over the soap dispenser and in the scum of the tiles. He had always known there was no reclaiming his space, only the certainty of sharing it. He had shared it with a dead woman for almost three decades.
Should he go back to Malaysia and make peace with Shanti’s ghost? Shanti, his first love, whose mother had banished him so imperiously, but before all that were his sweetest, earliest memories, of a home in Kilat Tanah, the land of lightning, which two thousand years ago, long before it had become a Malayan Kingdom, had been a part of the mighty Sri Vijaya empire. Where the Thunder Demons had shaken the earth with incandescent ferocity before unleashing barbs of rain and smothering the land. Jay had lived his childhood within this ancient countryside where, after each flood, the river spit up stones, clearly artificially shaped, and he and Shanti had spent hours looking for this batu lintar, the teeth of the Thunder Demons, gnashed in fury and spat out over the countryside.
Although schoolbooks taught them that these were the axe-heads and chisels of the stone-
age man, they had grown up with a fear of the Thunder Demon. The demon’s teeth were especially powerful when casting spells, for age made them potent. Yet, when they had brought Shanti limp and dripping from the water, and she still had the demon’s teeth pendant around her neck, he had ripped it from her lifeless body and sworn never to believe again. Then he had devoted his life to science, his work disproving the notion of any power higher than human genius.
Jay softly rubbed his fingers over that familiar bulge at his chest. He still wore the demon’s teeth torn from the body of a dead girl, so very long ago. It was an albatross he could not shake off.
Maybe he had not tried hard enough, despite his twenties and thirties being filled with shrinks and happy pills. Maybe now was the time to lay this ghost to rest.
Shanti had a daughter before she died. The daughter, Agni, he calculated quickly, must be in her late twenties now. He imagined a face like Shanti’s, but older, the familiar curve of a cheek at the tips of his fingers… he flexed his fingers into a closed fist.
No, this time, he would return because Colonel S had called. It was a challenge to work with Colonel S, and the last phone conversation had made that clear.
“Come for a month, Jay, that’s all lah, the only thing this old man is asking from you.”
“I have projects in summer, I need to try and reschedule things… I don’t think I can, not for a month.”
“Ah, come on! You have tenure already, it can’t be so hard.”
He had tired at incessant wheedling. “This is not Universiti Malaya.”
A shocked intake of breath. Jay had not thought himself capable of such insolence and regretted it instantly. It was a relief to hear Colonel S speak again.
“As you wish, Jay. I just wanted to see you again. Think about this, please, I am an old man. I still feel like a godfather to you, and you, a child squirming in my arms…”
Jay felt his fingers looping circles in the air and knew he could not let Colonel S talk about the fire. “Three weeks. I can do three weeks. Maybe.”
“Excellent! I look forward to your arrival. Somebody will send a ticket…”
“I’ll call you back. Don’t send anything yet.”
“As you wish. Inshallah, it will be a pleasant three-week holiday for you, even if nothing else develops. But we are working on some biomaterials you will only have read about and I guarantee you’ll be intrigued.”
Three weeks. He would have time to see Shanti’s daughter – he felt a warming of his blood – even time to see Shanti’s mother again. Three quick weeks, and he would to be back in Boston… how bad could it get in such a short time?
He smiled as he remembered Colonel S on his knees in that lab in Seattle. For such a great scientist the man was a sucker for his God. He remembered shouting, Get up, Prof! We did this, you and I, not some random god!
Colonel S had taught him everything, besides saving his life. He couldn’t have asked for a better advisor for his doctoral research. Their relationship was about work and if Colonel S was now offering him an open door back into Malaysia, he should grab the opportunity without a second thought for the dangerous research that Colonel S had engaged with in Seattle. Any research in Malaysia was immaterial to his American life; it was not his problem, and he would be back in three weeks. The people of that country, that babbling bunch who believed in magic and miracles, deserved god-men like Colonel S. If the meek were cowed, it was only Darwinism at work.
Now that destiny was calling him back, it was time to settle past dues, especially with Shanti’s mother. It would be different now that he was no longer a boy. Living with Shanti’s ghost all his adult life had been crippling, and he had had enough.
Jay yanked the curtains shut, enclosing himself in darkness as the phone blinked crimson in a stuttering burst of light. Someone had left him a message, but he would deal with that later.
It was probably Manju anyway… and he didn’t want to talk any more. Or be persuaded not to go to Malaysia.
Jay headed to his computer, swivelling his chair so savagely that he dislodged two textbooks and a sheaf of papers dog-eared at the edges. He picked up the textbooks, forcing them between The Business of Biomaterials and Ceramics and the Anatomy, and then typed flight time Boston Kuala Lumpur into Google.
With the multiple stops on a last-minute booking, it could take him thirty-two hours to get to Kuala Lumpur. Even if travelling first class, did he really want to do this? He buried his head in his hands and thought of Manju. Bitch! He needed closure with her, and space between them, so that even if she wanted to come back, he wouldn’t be here.
Childhood memories crowded into his mind: soft evenings like crow wings melting into the night; the call to the faithful ringing out over the noise of the traffic in a roundabout; the cadences of the language rising and falling like a happy song; his nostrils hit by the sharp smell of burning red chillies, followed by the sizzle of wet vegetables.
Jay’s eyes watered involuntarily. He was getting old. He would be fifty soon.
He really wanted to go back to Malaysia.
The first thing he had done after Colonel S called was to search for Agni on Facebook. There was only one Agnibina listed, and he studied the profile picture, a cartoonish sexy Betty Boop, for clues. There were none. He had decided to send her a long message, introducing himself, and begun: Your mother was my dear childhood friend and I still miss her. I have some work in Malaysia and will be returning after a few decades. I would be delighted if you would meet me. You must have your own memories of your mother… and more meaningless shit.
This daughter would have no memories of Shanti, but it couldn’t hurt to pretend. He read over the email, then hit send before he could change his mind.
Miraculously, Shanti’s Agni had written back, a day later. And Jay had realised that life could get very interesting indeed.
Jay looked up at the oak-panelled walls. He could not think of a single person in Boston who wouldn’t be glad to see him go. Picking up the phone, he dialled the Colonel’s number.
Four
When Agni strode into the hall again against the lines of the red, white, and blue plane blurring into the distance picking up speed, the old man had disappeared. She scanned the rows of seats, but he was nowhere to be seen.
She bit a nail absentmindedly. The irregular security clearances were definitely a problem. The employee identification system had been breached, and an armed intrusion into the most sacrosanct of public spaces, the airport tarmac, was possible. If this had been another stunt by the media to prove how incompetent her department was, she hoped the public relations people would be able to contain this in time.
Whoever had planned the intrusion had timed it well. The group of senior ministers returning from the asean summit was due to hold an important press conference at the airport next week. Not even a full week left any more. She peered at the date on her watch. Time was running out.
Today’s security breach hadn’t led to a severe problem, and no aeroplanes were being directed to the Secondary Isolated Aircraft Parking Position, but the migraine sharpened into a pinpoint in her head as the phone rang again.
It was Rohani. “They talked to the old man.”
The silence grew. “And?”
“It’s Colonel S. You know, the princeling’s right-hand man? He came to pick up a disabled nephew, some fellow in a wheel-chair. Everything checked out.”
“So why didn’t he use the vip route? And for the past two weeks… why has he been lurking around in some stupid disguise?”
“Go home, Agni, it’s way past midnight.” Rohani sounded tired. “Worry about the security coding and leave the people to the airport police, lah… This fellow’s got clearance higher than you and me both, okay? If he wants to sit around the airport shaking legs every day also he can.”
“Okay, okay. I know.”
Rohani sighed softly. “It will be a long day tomorrow – meeting at nine, remember?”
On her way
back home on the desolate Sepang-Damansara Highway, Agni rolled down the window to let the cool air whip her hair. Distant hills, an inky blue in the clouds, changed to lush leafiness as she came closer, chameleon-like beauty. She scanned the midget trees in the oil palm estates hedging the highway. In all this, in her childhood, she had never encountered danger in the darkness. Now, without being aware of it, she had started to see the bushes as camouflage, waiting for something to happen, the growing sense of us against them: if you are not with us you are against us, and she felt tired, sickened by it all.
Yet, there were few places better than this on earth. She knew, for she had wanderdust on her feet. She had travelled to the far corners of the globe with Greg before spending two years in Texas, but any other climate after this was too frigid, too calm, and the memory of Malaysia pounded hot through her blood and called her back every time.
The door to Abhik’s apartment opened with a blast of arctic air. Clearly, Abhik had also just reached home, for the sound of splashing water was loud as Agni pushed open the bedroom door.
It was one-thirty in the morning.
She crossed the tiny living room, walking over the bars of moonlight piercing the floor of the darkened kitchen. Reaching for a can of Tiger from the fridge, she drank in great gulps until the beer ran down the sides of her mouth. It had been a long day. Tomorrow was likely to be even worse.
“Thought you’d be asleep,” she said through the bathroom door. There was only the sound of splashing water in reply. She felt like rushing into the bathroom and enveloping him in a wet hug, but sank to the ground in exhaustion instead, waiting for Abhik to come out.
She took another gulp of beer. Conversation was going to be impossible for a while, so she took out a travel-sized bottle of nail polish from her purse. She was sitting on the floor painting her toenails a silvery blue, smoothing on the topcoat that glistened like her moist lips when Abhik came out, a towel draped low over his hips.
Ode to Broken Things Page 2