Ode to Broken Things

by Dipika Mukherjee

  Friday

  Twenty-five

  He was already an hour late for the Deepavali Open House at his grandparents’ home. Abhik sped up the sloping driveway, taking the curve with his foot on the accelerator and swinging the car violently at the apex. The last thing he expected on the top of the drive was the beaten up Peugeot.

  “Slow down!” Agni shrieked next to him.

  Abhik hit the brakes with the deftness of long practice. The wheels of the BMW churned the gravel as it veered off the road to the right.

  The two men standing by the Peugeot glanced up sharply. “Thanks again for the ride,” Jay was saying. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for everything…” He broke off as he saw Agni and Abhik approaching. “Agni! And you must be Abhik! Agni, meet Colonel S. We have been colleagues for many years. Colonel S, this is Agni. You knew her mother – Shanti? Shanti and I, if you remember, were very good childhood friends. And this is Abhik.”

  Abhik shook Jay’s hand. “Professor Ghosh, it’s great to finally meet you. Colonel S, what an unexpected honour to have you at my family’s Open House. Please come in.”

  Colonel S smiled. “Ah, Happy Deepavali my young friend! Unfortunately, I have another prior engagement, so I must wish you Happy Deepavali at your door.”

  “Please, I insist that you have at least a small drink with us, Colonel, it’s the first time you are visiting our home,” Abhik urged.

  The Colonel was mumbling something when Agni interrupted, a frown lining her forehead. “I have seen you before,” she extended her hand, “at the airport?”

  Colonel S brushed her hand lightly before touching his heart. “I don’t think so,” he said evenly.

  “Yes,” Agni insisted, “at the airport. On Monday. You were there in the evening.”

  The Colonel laughed easily. “Perhaps old men my age start looking alike,” he said. “White hair, sallow skin, stooped back. But I would have remembered a girl as pretty as you, my dear.” He turned to Abhik, “I really have to go, young man; I have to travel far. Thank you again for your invitation.”

  Wishing everyone a cheery Happy Deepavali, Colonel S got into his car and drove off with a beep of his horn. The three of them stood silently and watched as his car spluttered down the driveway.

  “He’s lying,” Agni said through narrowed eyes. “I saw him at the airport.”

  Jay couldn’t curb his annoyance. “Why the hell would he need to lie?”

  Abhik adroitly stepped in between them and manoeuvred Agni through the open doorway. “We should go in now, Professor Ghosh. My grandparents are very eager to meet you. Thank you so much for coming.”

  “I should be thanking you for the invitation! Please call me Jay.”

  “Your parents were my grandparents’ friends – so I really should at least call you mesho or kaku or some sort of uncle?”

  Belligerent Boyfriend. Jay felt his age highlighted by the younger man’s words. Uncle indeed! He could see the beginnings of a smirk on Agni’s face; this young man was clearly marking the boundaries with kinship terms.

  He smiled broadly. “Please, I insist you call me Jay.”

  “Okay, if you insist! I am sorry you won’t be meeting my parents today. My father is away on his UN assignment for another ten months in Brazil. My grandparents are very eager to meet you though.”

  The open house was in full swing. Abhik’s grandmother, Mridula, was near the door, surrounded by a number of women, but she bustled towards him at once. Jay guessed that Mridula must be at least in her early seventies now, but she was dressed in the colours of a much younger woman. Her slate-grey sari had an enormous red border and her jet-black hair was streaked with warm red highlights. Right in the middle of her forehead was an artistically twirled grey curl. Jay smiled as he mused whether the curl changed to match all her outfits.

  She returned his smile. “Jayanta!” She raised her hands and clasped his firmly, “I am so glad you could come! I asked Abhik to go fetch you,” she looked at Abhik dolefully, “but the children nowadays are always too busy.”

  “No problem at all. A friend dropped me off here,” he assured her.

  “Come, come, you must meet my husband Ranjan. He has been waiting for you to arrive.”

  He followed her through the throngs of people, who interrupted their passage with greetings for Mridula, and sized up Jay as he folded his hands in a namaskar. She finally stopped next to a bald man in a wheelchair, holding court amongst a large group of other men.

  Jay had only a vague memory of the man before him but seeing Ranjan after so many years brought his childhood back again. Ranjan was a documentary filmmaker, and cultivated a certain distinctiveness that had always made him stand out. Jay recognised the elegant figure in his ivory kurta with the subtlest of chikan embroidery. The churidar pyjamas, which folded into waves over his crossed ankles, were of a slightly lighter shade. He seemed as understated as his wife was loud, and Jay felt a rush of affection for this man who had aged so badly.

  Ranjan was gesticulating wildly while talking. “The problem,

  Oy! – Let me finish here. The problem with us Indians is that we don’t think like Malaysians. All Malaysians have the same problem, but these Hindsight 2020 buggers, take the Hindsight fellers, ah, why HIND, like Hindu eh? Why not ask for our rights as Malaysians? We build all these temples here that look like they’re from Madras and Rajasthan, for what? We need Malaysian buildings, hah, like the mosque-church-temple rojak, and be Malaysian here. You say you want Hindu rights; of course the Muslims don’t like it.”

  “Eh, you think this country is a Petronas advertisement, ah, all muhibbah and harmony?” the man on the right interrupted. “That’s for TV only, dey, all your artsy-fartsy talk cock only. The problem is not about us becoming Malaysians. It’s whether they see us as foreigners. You think they’ll be happy if we build a temple like a mosque, hah? They’ll pull it down, say it’s an insult. Non-Muslims are not allowed to use the word Allah anymore, kan? Go to any country in the West – Europe, America, Canada, or just go down the road only, look at Shah Alam, and you will see huge mosques, round domes, copied from Istanbul or Cairo, all from a glorious Islamic past in another country. Where is the Malaysian in this, hah? Bullshit only!”

  “It was more muhibbah and racial harmony,” another man insisted, “in our days, but not any more. We,” he stabbed his own chest with a finger twice, “we failed in this… to ask for more… to give our children more.”

  The man in batik stood up. “What, lah, you fellers, Malays have been protected under privileges for forty years. For-ty years,” he emphasised, visibly annoyed. “They don’t know the meaning of competition any more. Stop blaming anyone else for their problems!”

  Mridula stepped deftly into the middle of the circle and held up her hands. “Quiet!” she hollered. “You all will fight all night about this, so let me introduce you to our special special guest, Professor Jayanta Ghosh. We knew him as a small child, running around without any clothes on.”

  Jay joined in the genial laughter of the men. “It’s a pity that you only have this langto picture of me in your memory!” he told Mridula reproachfully. Then, turning to the men, he said, “Please call me Jay.”

  “Welcome back, Jayanta!” Ranjan’s clasp was as warm as his voice. “Tell me, how are your parents? And your brother?”

  “My parents both passed away,” he acknowledged the murmured condolences with a slight dip of his head. “But my brother is well. He is a father of two boys now, and lives in Texas.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your parents,” Ranjan pointed to his weak legs regretfully, “but really, there’s no reason to live at this age, unless you have grandchildren around.” He gestured towards Abhik, who was zigzagging through the crowd with two wine glasses in his hand, “That boy keeps me going.”

  Mridula looked up at Jay. “Don’t listen to him. He still has his friends and his beer to keep him happy! But tell me about your own family… Do you have children?”
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  Jay didn’t mention the divorce. Instead, he reached for a picture in his wallet, “We have twin boys, both doctors now. See, here’s a picture of Tublu and Gublu at their graduation.”

  Mridula held up the pictures of the two boys and saw the clear likeness. They looked like Maheshbabu, their grandfather, not so much in their features, but the way they had of looking confidently at the world.

  That extraordinary confidence of Maheshbabu. She remembered it well, for it kept them alive during the war.

  They looked up to two men in the community then: Nikhil and Maheshbabu. Nikhil was soon stripped of all his authority with the ban on immigration, which left him without a job. Then, with the fall of the British, Nikhil began to drink steadily, reaching for the local arak and toddy when all other bottles ran dry.

  Maheshbabu kept his sobriety and his dignity through the war years with extraordinary courage. But then, he was not married to Shapna.

  Shapna humiliated Nikhil by her affair with Maheshbabu. She behaved like a slut. There was no way to condone that; even though the rot in their marriage, the lack of completion between Nikhil and Shapna, had started with the child that neither could bury, the affair was still unforgivable.

  Mridula traced the high intelligent foreheads of the two boys in the picture, remembering Maheshbabu after many years. Shapna had almost destroyed Maheshbabu too.

  Mridula sneezed delicately, drawing her sari pallu over her shoulder as she watched Ranjan and Jay talking. Jay had been such a tortured teenager. His father and Shapna, carrying on like that, so shamelessly, so openly! She was glad that life had treated him well. Jay’s mother, Ila, had borne much, too much for a woman alone in a foreign land to be able to bear.

  There was no doubt that Maheshbabu had been a good man. It was Maheshbabu who would appear with offerings from grateful patients, usually Japanese officers, while Nikhil wasted time writing poetry through the war years. Mridula still remembered Nikhil’s poem about Chinatown, grim and silent, the deathly hush over Kuala Lumpur, the Chinese eyes through the grilled bars of shophouses.

  Mridula looked down at her hands; the memories were so disturbing that she had torn the petals of a marigold to shreds and was now twisting the pliant stem around her finger, like a green ring.

  Of course Shapna had been traumatised by the death of her child, she had to give her that. But there had been a world war and a dead child, hah, what was a dead child after all, when the radio wheezed with numbers of the slain? Nikhil was no help. First he blamed himself, then Shapna, for the curse of the malformed child. She remembered the nurse who brought the baby to them saying, I am not sure how to tell you this. See this banana shape? The baby’s head stopped developing at three months, and the spine – it stops here, and then it is all open, only three-fourths formed…

  Then the nurses had all looked at what they called the specimen, and she heard the nurse whisper say, It’s all for the best, for everything that happens is destined by Allah. Nikhil stormed out of the room.

  Shapna’s best friend, that Malay woman… was it Siti? Yes, Siti, had shouted Cukuplah! and hushed them all. She healed Shapna’s body with heated stones and tight cloth wraps, plastered her milk with jamus that only she knew grew where, stopping the floods, suturing wounds, making her whole. Siti was the only one who dared to come near Shapna as she howled through the nights like a demented amputee, searching for her phantom child, convinced that she had left him somewhere, alone. The others were no one to her; she barely recognised even her husband then.

  All war stories are about death and loss. Shapna should not have used that trauma to become so pitiful that a man like Maheshbabu, exemplary in so many ways, left his family for her. It was wrong that Ila, who had agonised about losing Maheshbabu to the war – there were so many ways to die, so sudden and all without warning – had lost Maheshbabu to another woman.

  Then there was Maheshbabu’s inexplicable decision to take Ila and his two boys to America. No one knew why he had chosen to do that so suddenly. Mridula had once examined Agni’s sleeping face and had thought she had seen the reason why, but she held her peace. The truth could be unbearable.

  Mridula returned the picture to Jay who looked startled at the interruption. “Your parents,” she said softly, “were exceptional people and our very good friends.” She hugged him tight. “If there is anything we can do for you while you are here, you must, absolutely must, let us know.”

  Twenty-six

  Watching Mridula’s sari disappearing into the crowds, Jay realised how tired he was getting of the fractious people around him.

  One man was loudly explaining how a minister’s Tibetan mistress had been executed by the Malaysian military. Ranjan was simultaneously arguing, on a parallel track, that the Arabs were the most successful colonisers in the history of the world, and had stripped native art forms, rituals, and dressing styles in Malaysia, demanding a loyalty that left no room for the rich layers of the original life. Another man pointed out that all new recruits in any religion, hollowed from the core of their history, found an identity in proving their zeal for their god.

  He didn’t follow their logic. The country did not appear to be in such a state of heightened lawlessness to him. On the streets, he had seen the covered Muslim women with colourful head-scarves that matched their clothes, not the dark and dour faces of the ninja women that these men were complaining about.

  He decided he needed a break from paranoid geriatrics.

  He found Agni with Abhik in the wet kitchen. This space, tucked into the back of the house behind the western-style kitchen, was not air-conditioned; it was stifling in the accumulated heat of hot vadas being fried. Abhik towered over the catering staff, milling around in their maroon and white uniforms, while Agni unravelled rubber bands from plastic bags holding a variety of sloppy looking sauces. Traces of oily spices pockmarked the marble-topped table, and bits of newspaper were crumpled in random disarray.

  “I give up,” Agni said. As she raised her hand to wipe off a sheen of sweat, she left a trail of glittering oil. “Shit. Shit!” she shouted, staring at her hands.

  Abhik reached over her head for the kitchen towel. Tilting her forehead with his clean hand, he gently wiped away the smear. “Good as new,” he pronounced, “now get back to work, woman; no more excuses.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him but quickly composed herself as Mridula appeared. “Mriduladida!” howled Agni, “I think I liked it better when you did all the cooking.” She switched to a loud Bengali whisper, “These Curries Corner people are absolutely stupid. They need so much help, and work so slowly; then the packets either collapse when you open them, or they burst. This is a stupid, stupid, waste of my time.”

  “Cheer up, B. We are lucky to have them today, you know that!” said Abhik. He and Agni both noticed Jay at the doorway at the same time.

  “Agni,” said Jay, “looks like you could do with some help?”

  Agni’s face brightened, but Mridula was already bustling towards her guest. “Now, Jayanta, you have come after many years; don’t waste your time in here. Let me introduce you to someone who knew your parents, a very dear friend of mine. She has been waiting to meet you.”

  Jay half-turned to see Agni, who, not expecting this act of intimacy to be noticed, ran a deliberate finger down Abhik’s groin, leaving a trail of oil. Abhik threw the towel at her and looked down at himself, horrified.

  Jay frowned. The situation looked complicated.

  “You are working in Nilai tomorrow!” Mridula was saying, “But you can’t! You have to come to Port Dickson with us. It has been so many years!”

  Jay shrugged, “I want to go, but it’s work. Maybe some other time.”

  “It’s an annual event,” said the woman who had known his mother. “You have to come.”

  “Stop harassing the man,” Ranjan barked from the corner of the room. “He has important work to do, unlike the rest of us. And the rest of us, well… we are all very hungry!”


  Mridula bustled out, but not before glaring at her husband. Jay wandered through the large rooms, catching snippets of conversation, mostly about the politics related to the recent street protests. He stopped at the staircase lined with old photographs, and climbed up two steps to peer closely at the familiar patrician figure.

  The sepia-tint had been manually enhanced so that the face had an unnatural pink glow, while the suit had been coloured a bright navy blue. In his right hand the man held a wooden cane, decorated with a glint-eyed hawk head.

  Yes. This was definitely Nikhil, Shapna’s cuckolded husband. He felt that red-hot hatred flare up after many years. He was amazed that the sight of Shapna hadn’t brought on the same intensity of emotion that a picture of her husband had.

  There was a burst of loud laughter, and he saw a ring of women sitting under the landing under the stairs. A white-haired woman was saying, “Tchah, this grandchild of mine, of course I worry about her! In our time we showed our curves, but we were elegant, hah, flaunting not much skin, but the promise of it, eh?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen your pictures! In your time, Nenek,” a young women countered, “you all squeezed into bras a size too tight, so that everything spilled out from the transparent kebayas yah? Stylo-Milo lah you all!” She squeezed her grandmother.

  “Such a silly child!” The older woman sighed, “And so naughty! I wouldn’t put up with it if it were anyone else!” Her face softened as all the women surrounding her laughed.

  Jay turned back to the pictures; he also recognised the old photographs of Ranjan’s grandfather and grandmother on the wall. The grandfather was distinguished by a large turban and looked very solemn. His wife, Ranjan’s grandmother, had been born in Singapore, and wore a sari with a kebaya top, the sari material bunched around her middle.

  Ranjan had started his career in films, so there were frames from the movies lining the stairway. Photographs of the dream merchants of that time, including one from the first Malay movie, Laila Majnum, were hung in order. Jay had been a boy of five then, and some of his earliest childhood memories were of the doctor’s quarters where his parents had lived for six months, separated from the teeming humanity of the labourers’ quarters by a thin wall. This was where the magic of the talking movies first entered his life.