He could begin by saying, a dead woman brought me here, but the conceit was appalling. She was right about memories being remade in their retelling. It was as if Shanti had been a goddess, with twenty magnificently arrayed arms, and each person remembered her holding out only what they wanted. Did Shanti’s daughter need the saviour or the nemesis?
The silence grew uncomfortable. Then there was a slight noise of a door opening. Agni sprang to her feet with a smile. “I think I hear the nurse. My grandmother should have been up a long time ago. Please sit, I’ll check on her and come back… Then you can come in and say hello.”
Ten
Jay watched Agni disappear into a long corridor sectioned off by souvenirs from all around the world. Grinning masks from Cancun and Nigeria were placed next to a preserved yellow piranha, teeth bared in death. He couldn’t see much further into the gloom.
This was an old colonial building with high ceilings and cool mosaic floors, but the ventilation slats in the upper walls had been sealed to allow for air conditioning. He felt the soft darkness envelop him as he leaned forward into his palms, closing his eyes.
“Professor Ghosh? Are you okay?”
Agni was standing in front of him, concern creasing her brow.
He lifted his head and shook it sharply. “A bit of jet-lag. I should leave soon.”
She looked at her watch. “I have to go to work in a while. If you want, we can talk to my grandmother for a bit, and I can drop you off at your hotel? It would be easier than calling a taxi, especially with the protests.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind. You work on Sundays in Malaysia?”
She laughed easily. “Not usually! There’s a bit of a problem at the airport,” she responded to his raised eyebrows, “but it’s nothing serious. I need to go and check on the security system.”
He wanted to ask about her work, but they had stopped in front of a darkened bedroom.
“Dida?” Agni murmured into the darkness, “O Dida?”
The blinds were drawn, the glass window slats clicked shut. The shifting rays of the late afternoon sun seeped in through the doily designs near the ceiling, falling on an empty wheelchair.
“Dida?” Agni called again.
“Let her sleep.”
“She’s awake.” Agni leaned towards the huddle of cloth on the bed. “Dida,” she said in Bengali, “Someone is here to see you.”
Agni guided Jay to the chair near Shapna’s head. The spindly legs on the old kopitiam chair were spread at awkward angles and he lowered himself hesitantly. Agni sank into a faded blue peacock on the bedspread.
A smell of eucalyptus oil and stale spit wafted up as Shapna turned towards him. “Ke?” she slurred.
“Professor Jayanta Ghosh,” said Agni, adding in Bengali, “Ila’s son? You know him, from long ago.”
Jay had known that Shapna would recognise him, but the force of her recognition was startling. Her eyelashes fluttered like the wings of a wounded bird before she tightened them shut.
Agni let out a light laugh, while propping two pillows behind her grandmother’s back. “She can barely speak, and her memory comes and goes. She doesn’t recognise me on some days!”
Jay cleared his throat. “Hello,” he said, “Kemon acchen?”
Shapna grunted softly and stretched out a slow hand towards Agni. Jay noticed the dark blue veins gnarled under skin that was almost translucent, and remembered how breathtakingly beautiful she had been. Her high cheekbones jutted out, defining a strong silhouette, and her hair, skimping over the pale skin underneath, still had more raven than snow.
He fidgeted. Her silence made him safe; he had to hold on to that. He wasn’t going to let this slut drive him away again. This was the woman who taught him to flee from his problems, and he had been running ever since. He was going to be fifty in another year; he was tired of this.
Agni opened the blinds. “You were about to tell me why you came back, Professor?”
The challenge in her tone was clear – she would not let it rest.
“I am going to be a consultant at a research lab in Nilai… to work on biomaterials.”
She smiled at him. “Ah, Transfer of Technology? Usually the government just pays for our researchers to see your facilities in Boston, no?”
“Yes. But there are some restrictions. It’s… complicated.” He sounded staccato, even to himself. Leave Me Alone.
She looked at him briefly before turning to Shapna. “Dida? See him clearly now? This is Ila’s Babush?”
“You know my nickname?”
“Some of my childhood fables were about you, Professor. I know more about you than maybe even you remember, and about your father’s work in that village in Port Dickson.”
“A plantation, actually.”
Shapna made some gurgling noises. Agni rose to pour her a glass of water. Shapna wobbled her neck towards Jay and, in the depths of her rheumy eyes, he could see her fear.
Slobbering Slut, he thought, smiling at Shapna. You’re not the only one who can’t keep a secret.
Shapna’s trembling fingers raked over the bedclothes in uneven lines. Jay still remembered her, like an imperious empress, waving him away like a mosquito the last time they had met.
Eleven
I am an old woman who can’t keep water in my mouth, Jayanta, and my tongue can’t spit out your truth. But I know that if you have come back, after so many years, it can’t be for any good.
You look like your father now. The same sharp nose, and his high intelligent forehead. But you have your mother’s swarthy skin because her murky blood flows through your veins. What has happened, Jayanta, to bring you back? How is that mother of yours? Rotting in shit, I hope, with the rest of your plagued family. My spleen burns when I remember.
You were my biggest disappointment. Even greater than Shanti. If you look behind you right now, you will see that old picture, yes, the only one of you which I couldn’t bear to burn with the rest, of two children grinning toothlessly, both holding hamsters in clenched palms. You and Shanti. Remember?
I should have known. Even then, you would always rear the murderous pet. Shanti and you would choose fish from the same shop, and yours would be the one with the hidden teeth, the one that would last the longest after gouging the eyes and the fins of the rest. The rabbits you chose were brothers; but yours killed Shanti’s in a night so bloody it left deep gouges in the victor. Ah, you have seen the picture now. You do remember. You asked me once, “Why do I always choose the evil ones?” while tears rolled easily from your baby eyes. I never suspected.
When you first said you wanted to be a doctor, just like your father, Shanti told you, “Be a vet, lah. Get your pets to kena some victims and booming business what!”
I didn’t know then, no one knew… saving lives, hah! I thought the real reason Shanti had died was that we had given her no reason to live; and that I, her mother, was guilty. I carried the weight of that guilt Jayanta, not knowing any better. Everyone knew Shanti had two mothers, and had been cursed by both. How could she survive that? That is what I thought, for far too long.
But your crime? It wasn’t a vengeance forgivable by the gods. May your child die in your arms.
You are putting the picture back on the mantelpiece, lightly wiping the glass with the tips of your bloody fingers. But you will find no absolution here. There is no reason for you to be here, to breathe the same air as my granddaughter, no reason at all.
I curse the day I met your mother. I should have trusted my instincts and kept away. Or at least recognised the rot in her blood that runs through your veins. But I was so gullible then! I met your parents soon after Nikhil and I had first stepped into the harbour in Singapore. I was so open, so young and alone then, new to Malaya and disgusted with the languages that tripped up my tongue and made me seem foolish. When Nikhil said there would be two new Bengali brides coming, I couldn’t believe my luck! I can still see Nikhil, sitting on the open balcony, waving the card at me. “Bot
h Mahesh and Ranjan are getting married to girls from Calcutta!”
But the two brides couldn’t have been more different. Mridula, Ranjan’s bride, was a child, with pimply skin and an innocence to match her husband’s open heart. Two thick pigtails looped with red ribbons framed a plump face, and she plodded in flatfooted. I pushed up her shoulders as she bent to touch my feet. “No formality with me, little sister. We will be good friends, yes?” Mridula was so shy that her cheeks flamed immediately.
But your mother, Ila, oh, I could see at once that she was very different. Closer to me in age she should have been more of a friend, but we stood across from each other with eyes that critically appraised. My first thought was a triumphant, She is so dark! – until I noticed the way her skin glistened. Even modestly draped in a sari, head covered in deference to Nikhil’s age, she moved like a swan, her arching back regal on a gracefully curved behind.
Her jewellery tinkled when she spoke, so that the men, including Nikhil, turned to her. She looked at your father with an obscene hunger, while he found reasons to touch her frequently, even in public.
My husband was very poetic when Ila, in the middle of that evening, blushed and said that her family had despaired of ever finding her a husband for she was so impossibly dark, but oh, here she was! Nikhil closed his eyes and recited a poem from memory:
I am utterly enchanted
The sight of her beauty makes me
Melt like wax before the fire. What
Is the difference if she is black?
So is coal, but alight, it shines like roses.
“An ancient Greek poem, bhai,” he told your father as the men clapped with a loud theatrical Wah! Wah! Then Nikhil turned to me, finally acknowledging my simmering anger and gently mocked, “I didn’t write it!”
I should have known then, to be wary, to never let my guard down. But during that sweet twilight hour on our balcony in 1933, when we were first acquainted with the two brides, poetry was quoted, songs were sung, and we talked until the morning. No children came between us. It was almost dawn when we finally slept, but I already felt I had far more to fear from Ila than Ila did from me.
Enough of my memories – you are here again.
Go. Go away now. I wish I could tell my granddaughter to keep away from you, but she thinks I only need water. Maybe I do; it burns my marrow to see you put your hand on the small of her back, fitting into her, just so. She is not stupid, my Agni, but she has led a life too filled with wide-eyed wonder, for I have shaded her so. We say Gacher thekhe phol mishti – Sweeter than the tree you plant is the fruit it bears – and my grandchild is precious indeed.
Twelve
Colonel S dialled the hotel for the sixth time. He listened impatiently as the phone rang again and again before connecting to the front desk.
“Professor Ghosh MUST be in his room. Send someone up. I need to speak to him URGENTLY.”
The receptionist sounded unflappable. “Sir, I tell you already, Professor Ghosh checked in, but went out… an hour ago.”
“Rubbish. I NEED to talk to him.”
He heard the patronising sigh as she began to tell him that she would be happy to take a message, and it was against company policy to disturb their guests by checking hotel rooms. That was when Colonel S lost his temper and pulled rank, barking orders to make sure that the receptionist and her supervisor understood who he was. He insisted that they go check Jay’s room and wake the man if he was merely jet-lagged and asleep.
He vaguely heard the receptionist’s nervous stutter about Jay asking for a taxi and leaving, before the realisation hit with a force that made him disconnect the call. What a fool he was! Of course Jay had come back to Malaysia for Shanti! Colonel S had, in the long intervening years, forgotten all about that, but Jay never, ever, could. After a thirty-year absence, after everything that happened, would he still want to see those people with such immediacy?
Colonel S had saved Jay’s life, no doubt about it; even Jay acknowledged a blood debt, for if someone saved your life, it was no longer your own. But the life he had saved was of a castrated beast, still flailing about to make sense of the past.
Perhaps he should have left the child Jay had been to die in the stampede. He had not seen it then, but that rescue in the amusement park would spark the chain of events that taught Colonel S to kill women, something over which his religion and his conscience still stumbled. The killing of the Tibetan woman two months ago haunted his dreams, but she wasn’t the first woman he executed.
That evening, so long ago. A confused child in the melee, red ice rivulets running like blood down his arm while he traced the circles of the Ferris wheel in the air in front of him with the tip of his right finger in a crazed frenzy.
He wondered whether Jay had finally outgrown that nervous habit of agitated finger circles.
That evening seemed to belong to another time. Those were the days when people danced through lives that seemed uncomplicated and easy. The lights had been psychedelic in the late evening, and the music loud; the noise from the giggling and flirting on the joget dance floor mixed pleasantly with the klink-klunk of the Ferris wheel that held shrieking children. Those days there was a lot of dancing in Malaya, and Colonel S had happily watched the dancers. Plenty of Malay girls, the air festive with colourful kains, extending to their ankles but fluttering open with their movements. Every now and then a girl would flash a shapely ankle in a pointed red slipper, extended like a provocative tongue. Diaphanous blouses glowed ruby and turquoise and amethyst and jade, and the long filmy scarves, loosely flung over heads and shoulders, floated briefly over their partner like an imagined caress.
There were so many butterfly women in the park with gossamer selendangs floating on slim shoulders, that it became a garden of dancing butterflies.
Of course, there was no physical contact between the dancers; that is what made it so delicious! The man would lead, doing his best to ensure that his partner followed his movements while the woman tried to distract him. He would try to edge her into a corner where she would have to follow his movements, and she, with mincing steps and an arched look over a shoulder, would dance away; no special steps at all, but the air sizzled with grace and promise and the excitement of a man meeting a woman. The music would be melodic, gentle, Malay.
He loved the slow rhythmic music of the ronggeng, when everyone on the dance floor seemed to glide, approach, then hesitate, only to turn a few steps later and come back again in a swaying movement. A teasing flirtatious dance, full of looks and gestures.
And Zainal, how the teenaged Colonel S had always worshipped him! Zainal was the centre of attention on the dance floor. He was taller than most of the men, and his black wiry hair matched his taut body, giving him a rakish look. His open smile lit up his face from within, and there was no dearth of pretty women catching his eye and making him break into a handsome grin.
Colonel S did not remember a time when he had not loved Zainal. Always, he had loved him more than anyone else on earth, more than his own father, or any brother. Zainal had taken him in as a child; Zainal was his King, his Father and, in the hierarchy of treason, derhaka towards such a man would have been the most absolute, the crowning pinnacle of betrayal. Colonel S remained loyal to Zainal, no matter what it had cost him. But Zainal had been betrayed by his own friends, the Indians who had come into this country to take all they could, without giving anything back.
But Jay was not like that. Jay had come back because he owed a debt in blood and that would guarantee his loyalty.
That evening, as the music was again changing to the faster joget tune, one of the open hawker stalls caught fire. There was a loud phissshhhh as the oil from an enormous wok flamed onto the awning circling the park, then the fire spread in the balmy evening breeze. There was panic everywhere: the gamblers and the dancers, the fortunetellers and the hawkers, the magicians and the children, all jostling and elbowing their way to the exits. Children were scooped up and carried, caps and
sandals trampled in the frenzy.
Colonel S noticed the bright red ice potong melting in the child’s hands before anything else. Then he realised that no one was picking up this wild-eyed child, so he acted quickly, lifting up the child who started to shriek with high pitched wails as soon as he was trapped in a stranger’s arms. Then Colonel S ran, even as he felt the chill of the ice on his shoulders and face as the child struck out with furious fists, his wails shrieks of pure terror.
Zainal was outside, ashen-faced and scanning the crowd. He held his wife Siti tightly in his arms; his daughter was in Siti’s arms. Relief uncreased his brow as Colonel S appeared.
Then Jay was held up on Zainal’s tall shoulders, kicking and flailing, while the adults scanned the crowds for anyone with Indian features, who would claim this child. Finally Jay’s parents, Mahesh and Ila, had appeared with their friends Shapna and Nikhil. Colonel S remembered how distraught Jay’s mother had been, how she continued to sob.
Jay’s father had kissed the Colonel’s hands in gratitude. “I will never be able to repay your debt.”
Colonel S had looked embarrassed. “No, no. Really… I did nothing. I am glad the boy is safe.”
Thus began the long friendship between Zainal and Siti and the Indians. Shapna and Siti were as close as sisters – watching shadow-plays until late in the night, eating at open-air hawker stalls. They became Shanti’s co-mothers.
He, Colonel S, had been responsible for that first introduction. It was because of him that Siti had sobbed into his arms aku dianiaya kawan yang aku anggap darah daging sendiri,that a friend, whom she had treated as her own flesh and blood, had betrayed her. Then she and Zainal disappeared into the night forever.
Colonel S knew the history of that friendship so well that he felt that this act of pengkhianat, the ultimate betrayal, had also happened to him.
Ode to Broken Things Page 5