Jay stood up and reached out for the slim folder. “I’ll have a look at this immediately. We’ll have dinner some other time… I wanted to meet you tonight and thank you personally for, um, arranging this trip to Malaysia. I appreciate this opportunity…” he trailed off.
“Don’t thank me with your words, my friend; there will be work enough later,” Colonel S said. “I don’t have to tell you how important the folder is, eh, some military work, that kind of thing. Let me at least give you a ride to this hotel of yours. It’s impossible to get a taxi to come in here with all the trouble on the streets! Let me have my man drive you back safely with this folder, and we will talk again soon.”
He enveloped Jay in a half hug. Then, stepping slightly back, he said, “I am so glad to see you. Welcome back!”
Thursday
Seventeen
Agni’s eyes burned from checking and rechecking the subsystems. Blurry data still scrolled across multiple screens. When the call came in, she automatically picked up the phone, leaned back, and shut her eyes tight.
It was Jay. Of course, it was the Professor.
She had been a bit rude to him yesterday, but the memory of Shapna’s distress made her head pulse at his cheery, “Hul-lo, is this a bad time to call?”
She forced her voice to remain even. “No, it’s fine. You caught me by surprise, that’s all. How are you? Jet-lagged?”
“No, I’m good now. Um, I was hoping you would have time to have some coffee with me today? I have to start work soon, at this research lab in Nilai, but I wanted to talk to you again. For old time’s sake and, um, we didn’t really get to talk much… about anything…”
She heard the nervousness in his voice. Maybe he was always like that; or there was something important he wanted to say. She wondered whether to tell him that he was invited to Abhik’s house tomorrow and she could talk to him there. But that would be such a brush-off. Besides, it would be impossible to ask him any personal questions about her mother or father in that large gathering.
It would be better to find out what he wanted from her, and get that over and done with. And get out of this office at the same time. She looked at her watch, “Had lunch yet?”
“Nope. I slept through breakfast too.”
“Join me for a quick lunch then? I have to pick up a blouse from my tailor at Semua House, and I was planning to eat at the hawker stalls around there. If you don’t mind, that is?”
“Sounds great.”
“I have to warn you… the place will be crawling with people.”
“I spent my childhood here, remember?”
She paused briefly. “Right. How about I pick you up from your hotel lobby in about twenty minutes? I’m not very far.”
She had dark patches under her eyes. Jay couldn’t decide whether it was due to the liberal amounts of kohl she used, or a late night. Agni sat framed by palms in a deep winged armchair as the blue expanse of the swimming pool stretched out behind her. One foot idly circled the air while she turned the page of a magazine. Today, Jay noticed with pleasure, she was in tailored pants with a cropped top that played peek-a-boo with her bare midriff. A light blue jacket was slung casually on the armrest.
Clearly the Cool Coquette.
“Thanks for stopping by. I’m afraid I’m being a nuisance but you are very kind.”
Agni shook her head. “It’s ok. I had an awful meeting in the morning and it’s good to get away from the post-mortem.” She fished out a ticket, and led the way across the plush carpeting of the hotel’s lobby and outside to the silver Mercedes. As she draped herself over the valet’s podium to give him a tip, she said something to the young attendant in Malay that caused him to wink cheekily at her. Jay stood there, catching a phrase or two, but missing the message.
“Remember any Malay?” Agni asked.
He smiled ruefully, “Sikit, Sikit.”
She smiled, “Maybe it will come back. You’ll be fine with English, of course.”
“I thought so, but a receptionist yesterday was monolingual. She had to call someone else.”
He lowered himself into the car, and Agni sighed. Déjà vu. So often, with Greg, she had felt that she was constantly translating. Greg had lived in Malaysia for a little over a year, but the alliances, especially the overt politeness and hidden resentments, never failed to shock him when he encountered them. And she had wearied of playing the interpreter of the inexplicable. Greg thought he needed to adjudicate in the Malaysian squabbling, and he was always wrong, until the Malaysians had nicknamed him a Blur Sotong, a squid with desperately waving tentacles that blurred the reality around him.
Agni looked obliquely at this other American seated next to her. She hoped Jay wouldn’t need too much hand-holding before he left. He was undoubtedly a dear friend of her moth-er’s, but she didn’t have time to play tourist guide.
Hindi music blared from the shops in Jalan Masjid India. It was a cacophony of similar sounds with throbbing basses. Jay couldn’t hear any Malay music.
He stopped to listen to the familiar Hindi tunes in disbelief. Agni laughed. “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was the youth anthem in this country,” she explained. “Last Hari Raya, the government had to ask the TV stations to show Malay movies on a Muslim holiday, instead of all these Hindi movies that are so popular. The Malay kids are crazy about Bollywood, and especially King Khan!”
While Agni was whisked up in an ancient elevator, Jay browsed the colourful pavement displays that hawked everything from prayer caps to male potency pills. She soon reappeared, triumphantly holding a thin plastic bag, exulting at her success in getting her blouse from the tailor without having to make repeated trips.
“Shall we?” she gestured with her head towards an area heavy with the aroma of spices.
The hawker stalls jostled each other in congested congeniality. They ordered some lobak and popiah from a Chinese stall, and then munched on satay and murtabak from the Malay stall next door. Jay watched Agni as she reached for her glass of Kopi-O and stirred the concoction with a long metal spoon. Then she picked up a flimsy pink plastic straw, put a finger over the top, filled it with liquid from her glass, and turned the straw over to let the liquid run out into the road.
A dim memory ran through his head. “That’s really not very hygienic, you know,” he finally commented. “If the straw is dirty, cleaning the inside of it with your coffee doesn’t help. The germs are probably on the outside.”
“Thanks for the lecture, Prof.” Agni screwed up her nose at him. “It’s a ritual. I doubt we Malaysians drink this stuff any other way.”
“Ritual, huh? Like the way you just opened a new cigarette pack and turned one upside down? I was wondering about that.”
Agni grinned. “Are you watching me too closely, Prof?”
He felt his ears grow hot. They ate quietly for a while, Jay reaching for the dimpled pink napkins. The heat and the spice seemed to gently fry his head. Agni didn’t seem affected at all, except for a slight sheen of sweat on her upper lip.
“So, tell me something about my mother.”
Jay had to collect his thoughts. “Shanti? We were very good friends.”
Agni looked at him steadily. “I am not stupid, Professor. You agitated my grandmother more than anyone else she has seen since the stroke.”
He was disarmed by her directness, veiling a hint of steel. He would have to tread carefully. This was Shapna’s granddaughter, and Shapna had been a wounded tigress in defending her clan.
“I remind her of Shanti. And Shanti caused her a great deal of pain. Isn’t that enough reason?”
It felt childish, the way he had to stare her down. Finally she looked away and laughed self-consciously, “Maybe I’m getting carried away, but I grew up with the whispered secrets that were mine by heritage. The heritage of the bastard child… I was hoping you would tell me something I didn’t already know.”
“Oh come on… bastard child?”
“Surely you know my father was Malay? My birth c
ame as a death sentence to my mother. You know this; you were there.”
He stirred uncomfortably. How much did she know?“I thought you said your father was Sylheti.”
“Pay attention, Prof. I said he was the man my mother married.” A slight smile took away the sting of her words. “Nobody ever talks to me about my real father, but I know he was Malay. I know that my grandmother went on about the shame of being a second wife, of having to embrace Islam in order to marry a Muslim in this country. We will not have any rights over your dead body; why don’t you just kill yourself now?– that kind of thing. So my mother did.”
“And how can you know this? You were a baby when your mother died.”
She rolled her eyes. “A cousin first said something. Then when I was thirteen, and thought I was falling in love with a Bengali boy, there were whispers at Pujobari designed to be overheard by the bastard child… that sort of thing.”
“Did you ever look for your father?”
“No. His name wasn’t even spat out in anger in my family. Only his race and religion mattered; everything else is immaterial.” Agni stirred her drink gently, not looking up. “I think my father was Zainal. His wife, Siti, was my grandmother’s best friend.”
He felt his fingers tracing agitated circles under the table as he searched for ways to deal with such a frontal assault.
Agni continued, “So. No more half-truths. I want you to tell me about my father, Professor,” she urged. “No one ever talks about him. At least you have been asking me questions about my mother… no one does that. I want to know what my father was like.”
Her hair shielded her face as she drank. It was impossible to see the expression on her face.
“How long have you known this?” he asked.
“Actually, I think I always suspected it. All the whispering in Pujobari… He must have been much older?”
“Thirty-three years older than Shanti.”
He almost heard Agni calculating rapidly.
“So what did she see in him?” Agni asked.
Where do I begin? “Zainal was a great hero… an amazing man,” Jay said simply. “When he told his stories, it was hard not to fall in love with him.”
Eighteen
Even he, Jay told Agni, had been a little in love with Zainal. As a boy, Jay hero-worshipped Zainal through the Emergency Years.
The Malayan Emergency lasted twelve long years. All over Malaysia, in the evenings, families would switch off lights and cower on the floors. The signal to do so would not be the sirens of war, but the dull thud of boots indicating the communists, most of them Chinese, were lurking in the dark. As they listened on the radio to the dramatic success of communism in China, the communists in Malaya set themselves up and grew stronger in the jungles of the neighbourhood.
Zainal was one of the first to volunteer to fight the communists. Twelve years worth of stories of Zainal’s heroism, as both Shanti and Jay grew up. Zainal was a tall man and, illuminated by the small light in the post-dinner storytelling sessions, his shadow would loom even larger on the wall. His stories would flow into the night, sometimes stretching into dawn. During the years of the Emergency, they heard many stories of Zainal running into large bandit camps and exchanging bursts of gunfire in the thick jungle. But his most dramatic story, by far, was the capture of the Kajang Terror.
The Kajang Terror prowled the district of Selangor but, despite the reward of twenty-five thousand on his head, the people of the villages and kampungs in his area feared him. He was a legend. He operated around Sungei Besi, Serdang, and the Kuala Langat Forest Reserve, but his favourite areas were around Kajang and Banting, and the jungle swamps in between these two towns. He massacred the troops and the police who got in his way, for he had many thousands of Min Yuen and other informers working for him.
“So how did you track him down?” Shanti asked Zainal one evening.
A wind blew through the light, making shadows waver. Jay covered his mouth to stifle a tired yawn and closed his eyes, while his ears sharpened for the murmuring voices. Zainal cracked his knuckles slowly, one by one, and then, after the suspense had stretched the room taut with its silence, he began his story.
“First, we try and follow the tracks to the edge of the swamp, but we lose them to the leeches and the snakes and centipedes.”
Zainal ruffled the hair of his youngest child and said, “Aiyoh, even the centipede’s not as troublesome as the little nyamuk,” with a meaningful smile at his little son. The little mosquitoes, he explained, caused the most trouble in the jungle. They had to keep their faces and hands covered with a sarong, with only the eyes and the nose sticking out.
Drawn into the wilderness by Zainal’s voice, the young Jay could see the pale faces of the bandits moving through the dense undergrowth carefully, using hand signals to communicate. The jungle was deathly quiet during the day, and sounds and smells could be detected quite easily by a wary patrol. The rainforest was beautiful, with thousands of tall trees, white, grey, and shaded with almost every colour imaginable, all reaching towards the sunlight, hundreds of feet up. There, they spread out in a carpet of tangled green as the creepers, rattans, and vines hung down from the trees. No birds could be seen, for they were above the canopy in the bright sunlight. The light in the deep jungle was very faint, distilled through the ancient trees, and the air was moist with the breath of their long existence.
The day Zainal’s platoon captured the Kajang Terror, the call had come from Bukit Hitam Estate, about three bandits trying to collect protection money from rubber tappers. The men got into two trucks, and circled round and round the hill dense with rubber trees.
“Then the krackkrackkrack Bren gun fire zoooom past my left ear. I duck, but the ground near the bush is bloody, and blood trickling down the fallen leaves of the rubber trees. Alhamdulillah, I was safe! Although a bandit with a grenade is right next to me, planning to throw grenade, someone empty a gun from close range into him!”
Siti never asked Zainal any questions. But Jay could see her lips moving in the lamplight, and she stared at Zainal’s fingers as he squeezed together a thumb and forefinger to illustrate his narrow escape.
Zainal’s troop had followed the small jungle track and, after walking about fifty yards, suddenly heard music. In a small clearing there was a rustic hut, and inside was a radio.
“Playing dum-da-da-dah, so we know that the time was exactly nine in the morning. We start to close in, quietly, very, very quietly. Three bandits come out; one with long beard, like this, and one a girl, all with guns and uniforms some more. So we open fire, lah, and the bandits ran, all of them from the hut and jump into the swamp. The Kajang Terror by this time was fat, really fat, and suddenly there he was, stuck in the swamp like a hippo. Somebody fire and pshew, straight through the eye, and The Terror was dead. It all happen so fast no time to think also.”
They brought the body into Klang and tied him to a wooden door; then trailed the corpse behind a police van, for all the Min Yuen and other Chinese fellows to see and learn. They went to all the towns and kampung areas the bandits had previously terrorised, so that the people would know that the legend had ended… that he was really dead.
“But these people, so stupid one. Really afraid of him, think his hantu is even more powerful now that he is dead. Even the Malays, they sit in mosques and talk about this ghost that never die,” Zainal shook his head.
Jay remembered Shanti sitting still after this story, absorbed in her own thoughts. His heart had cramped as Shapna looked at her watch irritably and signalled that it was time to go home. Siti, Zainal’s wife, had kissed Shanti on the forehead in goodbye.
Siti had loved Shanti like a daughter. She and Shapna conjured Shanti out of a bottle (they claimed) and both loved her equally. He still had a picture, in Boston, which showed Siti looking lovingly at Shanti as she lay curled against the cushions, scribbling into a notebook balanced on her knees. If the seed is good, when it falls into the ocean an island will spring up
; that was what Siti said when Jay took that picture.
But Shanti died for them the day she found her soulmate.
Zainal was thirty-three years older than her. Yet, she had found sanity in his arms, and contentment in the knowledge that his religion allowed him more than one wife.
For Siti, her husband’s infidelity came as a shadow-play on the kitchen wall.
The night was cool, and Shanti and Jay were spending the evening at Siti’s house again. The TV droned on, as usual.
Shanti got up to get some water. Zainal followed. Siti, looking up from the TV, wondered at the long silence, listened for the drip of the tap, the clink of a glass, but heard nothing. Instead, two shadows on the kitchen wall merged soundlessly. The shadows heightened as he pulled away. She leaned forward. Then he raised his arms, dissolving into her upturned face.
It is in such silences that we lose our sanity, Jay knew too well. He had looked up and seen only the stricken look on Siti’s face. Confused, he had turned to the shadows, then back to the TV, oblivious.
Siti had drawn on her semangat and willed Shanti to die. The curse of a mother is powerful, and Shanti had been cursed by two. How could she have survived that?
Shapna, too, went berserk when she heard about the pregnancy.
“His bastard child!” she shrieked, putting Shanti’s hand on her own head. “Swear on me you will have nothing to do with him again.”
Shanti steeled herself. “I cannot swear on your life,” she said, while Shapna screamed, “Slut! You will never become a Fatimah or Aishah or whatever the hell it is you want, with your bastard child. You might as well kill yourself now; it will be the same thing!”
Jay remained silent through it all.
Nineteen
Agni’s voice broke the silence. “And then? What about Zainal and my mother? They wanted to marry each other, right? Tarpor?”
Ode to Broken Things Page 8