Ode to Broken Things

by Dipika Mukherjee

  It was not hard to be a step ahead when they had the best brains in the world. When the Devil spread his poison throughout the world, men of science, like him, would rise up to make the antidote. They were everywhere now, and their forces were growing.

  The corruption and divisiveness in Malaysian politics made influence easy to buy. Or sell. Their biggest advantage was that they were the most kiasu of all the players, the most afraid to lose. For them, the fear of losing was far greater than the fear of death.

  Forty

  Running through the open halls of the secured airport, Agni had the feeling of driving down a dark highway in the torrential rain. She felt a force carrying her up, circling her in a steep darkness, slickly speeding on the wet road with a sharp curve ahead. She had to force herself to keep running through her dizziness. The television footage pounded in her head; the soft thrum was now a raging headache.

  It was the certainty, even before she had received the call, that Abhik had been there, within range. Agni had frantically called Rohani, driving back like a maniac from Port Dickson, and Rohani would be waiting at the scene. She flashed her identification card like a talisman and kept moving, through the medical personnel, the thronging reporters, the airport police.

  When Rohani met her at the scene, she hugged Agni tightly, and stopped her from going any further. Agni could hear the murmur about mangled bodies, dental records, and DNA analysis; it would take some time.

  “I need to go,” Agni said savagely.

  Rohani was tearful. “There’s nothing you can do. It’s like a battlefield in there.”

  She barged her way in, dragging Rohani with her. She walked past the charred bodies in that grim and silent room. She didn’t know what she was looking for until she found it.

  There was a body with blue nail polish, just two long blue gashes shimmering with silver, on the toes of a man’s right foot.

  Agni woke up to green walls, green curtains, a white metal bed, and a blue robe. And a nurse who leaned over to ask, “Feeling better?”

  “Dizzy.”

  The nurse drew the thick curtains. “Sleep, okay? You’ve been sedated. I’ll check on you in a couple of hours.”

  “I want to go home.”

  The nurse was young, but there was a matronly concern in her eyes as she lingered and adjusted the blanket. Agni turned deliberately to the wall and closed her eyes. When Rohani came in to clasp her hands in a hard squeeze, her face remained resolutely turned to the window.

  Agni said, “I kept pushing him away. He asked me once, you know, Don’t you wish I’d just disappear?”

  Rohani held her tight and patted her hand in awkward strokes. “You didn’t know this would happen, Agni.”

  “I didn’t love him enough. I kept pushing him away, not telling my grandmother about him, not telling anyone. Maybe I willed him dead, like my grandmother once willed me alive.”

  Rohani muffled her voice into her chest and said softly, “That’s nonsense, Agni; you don’t really believe that.”

  “No,” whimpered Agni. “The women in my family can do this.”

  She could not stop trembling. Rohani opened the cupboard and drew another blanket around her friend, but it was as if Agni had no control.

  Sunday

  Forty-one

  This is how it ends for my Abhik: two wads of cotton wool stuffed into his nose to keep his lifelessness from spilling out. He lies there still and, through the waving wafts of incense, I think I see him breathing, but then the smoke curls away and his body is rigid. There is so much noise here. The Sanskrit of The Gita drones on, as do the visitors’ voices and the cries of the women who clasp Mriduladida in grief. All are equally unintelligible. The Vedic slokas merge into the bizarre collage of faces until they all seem to be reciting Om Bhur Bhuvah Svaha.

  I am shocked by the stillness on my grandmother’s face. Someone, I don’t know who, brought her here. My grandmother is balanced painfully on a wheelchair, but she refuses to lie down, so I hold her. I see in her eyes such mirrored pain; what can I possibly say? I can only rub her back in gentle circles, the way she has soothed me so many times in childhood.

  Someone shouts loudly, asking the tentman to create a shade for the visitors. The tin slats squeak on each other and, with my eyes closed, I think of monkeys in deep jungles signalling danger by such high-pitched squeaks. Yet, where is the danger here? Just eyes everywhere, eyes that look into me, into Abhik’s parents and his grandparents, waiting for the act to begin.

  The alpona we had drawn so carefully on the ground, before placing the hundred and eight lamps, is totally smudged. I can’t believe I was happy once. I can’t believe I was ever happy.

  The casket arrives; it will be placed on the pyre. It is taller than the door, so it leans heavily against the gate. Someone shoves a wreath into my hands, and I fumble with it near Abhik’s head, overturning the bottle of rose-water. The smell of death and jasmine is overpowering, mingling with sandal-wood incense and rosewater. I feel too clumsy for this. I look at the strange covered body and think I see him stirring again in sleep as I have seen him so many times before, on yet another weekend afternoon. Then the fans whir noisily, and the touch of rose-water seeping into my white sari tells me where I am.

  Someone is shouting for iron keys; must be the colour of nails, make sure; and I stare blankly as they rummage near me. My grandmother’s eyes are fixed on a picture of Abhik to be pasted on white art paper. It’s a picture I recognise from a dinner two months ago. I know all his pictures, where they were taken, and by whom. We lived the same life.

  Then Abhik is lifted up, and he is placed in the casket. His mother is keening, but I can’t cry. I see the eyes surrounding us and digging into the depths of her soul. My grandmother’s are closed. She claws into my hand.

  Abhik’s father holds one side of the casket, and I see our friends lifting up the other three corners to the shouts of Hari Bol and the noise swells, even as I hear a lady giving another her phone number, “Call me, yah.” We are steered towards the hearse; the wails increase. The Gita chant is louder through the speakers outside.

  Not silence, nor shrieks; I want the whisper of the sleeper’s sigh. But, as the coffin passes through the gates, the noise rises to a crescendo, and the sun beats down with the crackle of flames.

  Suddenly, Ranjandadu wheels towards me and all necks swivel towards us, eyes alight with anticipation. My head dips to envelope him in a tight hug, and we remain fused in this shared pain that excludes everyone else, until I start to sob. Then Dida lifts her eyes to me, and I gently lead her away.

  I will not go to the crematorium to say the final goodbye. For now, I concentrate on holding up my grandmother, who is grimacing with pain. The crowd parts; susurrations follow us like grass snakes, nipping at our heels.

  Forty-two

  My Agni, when she was about twelve, kept a tortoise. She had rescued it from the road and kept it in the bathtub. Now she is like that animal, all curled up and hidden within.

  She was so closed at the funeral, as if Abhik had been only a friend. It was good Ranjan made her cry, or she would have shattered. If only the world was as simple as a computer problem. My Agni has mastered the blinking screen in front of her, finding problems and solving them, without having to look around.

  Sweeter than the tree you plant is the fruit it bears. My granddaughter lives, and for that I am glad. I can only chant this mantra in this insanity.

  When Nikhil brought me to this country as a bride, Malaya was a transit point in our journey in life. Agni has never had the detachment of a foreigner; she always felt the pulse of this country with the insight of a native and, unlike Abhik, she never found it faltering.

  But we still have too many secrets. Ah, my wild Lute of Fire, I was so weak, I did not know whether to spare you the pain of knowing, or the pain of not knowing.

  Jay is back again – I saw him circling like a vulture at the funeral. He is waiting for all us all to weaken. He has managed to
kill Abhik, I know it, and now he is waiting for me to die so that he can swoop down on Agni and devour her.

  There are rumours flying everywhere, and the town is a gaggle of hisses and gossipy mouths. It is easy to blame the Malays, or anybody who is not us. Troops have been deployed, just as they were in 1969. The government is saying, “We warned you, this is what happens when the political balance is not maintained and groups that should not be in power get some power to terrorise and de-stabilise.”

  There are soldiers on the streets again. They are also human, right? In such times you protect your own. How to blame anyone?

  I am old now, a prisoner of this body, and rotting in a wheel-chair, dependent on others. I am the crazy old woman people distractedly pat when they make the dutiful visits that are such a nuisance; such a distraction from their busy, productive lives. I can see it in their eyes as they turn away from me, asking piteously, “It is so hard for you, Dida, so lonely you poor thing,” but I know they just want to squeeze out some sentences so that they can go home.

  Abhik had never been like that. Our bond was beyond duty, and I knew that he would accept Agni no matter who she was. He didn’t need to know who her father was and I saw no need to tell him; but, even if I had, he would have taken Agni, for they were like two parts of the same soul.

  My mind is still unclouded and I understand. As well as I understood that day that Siti, wily Siti, who brought my child back from the dead, lost her own soul to a shadow-play on the kitchen wall.

  Abhik is dead. I can only worry about my Agni. The vulture circles, relentlessly.

  Forty-three

  When Jay saw the footage from the press conference at the airport, he knew at once that Colonel S was behind this.

  Jay’s bus was parked at a rest stop. Drawn by the hushed crowds around the three television screens, he too had stopped and stared. It didn’t take him long, from the cnn commentary, to guess that this was the experiment Colonel S had talked about.

  He stared, horrified. Immediately, he wondered how far he had been implicated.

  He wondered whether to call someone. Calling his ex-wife, Rina, would be the only possibility, but he would have to wake her from sleep to tell her. He knew Rina; in the current climate in America, she would worry about witch-hunts, maybe even a scandal ending his career. She would tell him, no matter how remote the possibility, he couldn’t risk his life’s work. Come home right now.

  He wasn’t ready to go back home. Not alone. He could only hope that his past with the old man would roll off his reputation like teflon. He would have to sever that connection immediately and move on.

  His mind churned chaotically, searching for an exit route that would allow other possibilities. He hadn’t felt such wild stirrings in his blood since he had last been in Malaysia, and then it had been due to an impossible obsession. Now things were possible. Even more so now. Obtainable.

  He took a taxi back to Kuala Lumpur, paying double, for the drivers were unwilling to drive into a troubled city with armed guards on the streets. He stood on the narrow pavement outside the huge automatic gates that opened into the long serpentine driveway, and rang the bell three times before anyone responded.

  The traffic whistled by too close for comfort, the speed of the cars shaking the bougainvillea plants which cascaded down the wrought-iron fence in white, pink, and a dusky orange before the doors swung reluctantly open. The house felt different. Naturally, he didn’t expect to be greeted again by the raucous laughter from a party in progress, but the lugubrious tangibility of bereavement was also unexpected. He had not experienced this in any American funeral he had attended.

  Jay looked at Agni from the distance. How that girl paces! Restless as a caged tiger, and just as uncommunicative.

  He pricked up his ears. In the balmy evening air, he could actually hear tigers growling; it wasn’t just his imagination. Was it only yesterday that he had said to Mridula, “Rohani tells me that you can hear tigers from your house?”

  Ranjan had answered for her. “Yes, but not because they are still roaming wild! The zoo is down the road from us, and sound travels far, especially at night. You must come for dinner sometime and we can relax and talk, with the tigers as background noise!” Then Ranjan had clasped Jay around the shoulder, “Oho, I keep forgetting… who has the luxury of time any more bhai?”

  “I’ll be back,” Jay had assured him.

  Jay was back, but now Ranjan was deeply sedated, lost in a sleep that he had no wish to awake from. Mridula sat morose, surrounded by a group of women who seemed to rise and fall like fluttering doves around her. Why doesn’t she go to bed? Jay thought irritably. Death was too much of a public spectacle in this country. His parents had subdued funerals, and everyone remained quite composed. He didn’t understand this need to call on nonexistent gods throughout the evening in a religious song and dance. People died everywhere. It was sad, yes; even he felt some regret about Abhik, but the living had to move on.

  Only very rarely could Death be bent to human will.

  When he had been sixteen, so many decades ago, he had learnt this. On his birthday. The birthday he shared with Agni.

  Shanti and Jay rowed through the darkness towards a magic shore, shrouded by the inky sky, empty of even a faint sickle moon. Then, turning a sudden corner, they were welcomed by fireflies; thousands of these insects flashing in a transient dance, some stationary, others circling in a sexual exuberance so frenzied that the night glowed with heat. The nightjars and owls added to the soft background chirrups of the night, while tree frogs glided from tree to darkened tree. The beremban trees that only flowered at night opened for the bats, and the cup-shaped flowers blew a strong, sour smell into the sudden breeze. Scattered clumps of light softly glowed on the ground as the luminous fungi spread on decaying wood.

  Jay’s young eyes took in all this in an enchanted glance for the first time, and he fell in love with this land. He wanted to row forever with this magical woman, and this would be where he would one day die.

  He had thought of all this in the silence of the night, wondering how to tell her that she was already irreparable, carrying this incestuous load in her womb, but he would make her his own. If he stayed here, he might never become a doctor, but he didn’t care. The civil unrest on the streets had been bloody, and his father was urging them on to America. It was time to go before racial discrimination became the price for peace.

  But he, Jay, would pay any price to remain here with this woman he loved so much.

  On the shore of that black sea, in a place where the fireflies cast no light, Shanti’s husband was waiting. That man from Sylhet, the half-educated low-caste chamar, how he had begun to sneer at Shanti, his words ringing through the house, castrating them all. This man, who had crossed the oceans as a servant, and could be bought for small change, now touched Shanti whenever he wanted. He could damage her at will.

  He had said, “Those people have never been able to treat people of other faiths equally. You were stupid to believe one of them would.”

  Shanti’s tears had goaded him on. “Even if what you say is true, things are different here.”

  “You mean they revised the Holy Book in this country? Hah! I wonder if you have anything in here at all.” He had jabbed a vicious finger at her forehead, flinging her head back.

  Jay had seen Shanti recoil at that touch, and quivered inside, fearing for what he knew, and the power of that knowledge in the face of such contempt. Shanti had stopped writing, locking up her poems into the same tin trunk that held Shapna’s wedding sari and Nikhil’s silk dhoti. The deep cavern which had swallowed Shapna’s romantic dreams now drew Shanti into its bosom and Jay could see his love spiralling, unravelling, until she was just a weed, floating further and further in an immense sea.

  Jay, half-crazed with the pent-up frustrations of a sixteen year-old, had searched that tin trunk one quiet afternoon and discovered this:

  right now I’d like to

  write poetry wit
h my nails

  on your skin stretched taut

  leaving deep imprints

  of me; I’d like to

  gnaw you till you can’t think

  your tongue in my mouth…

  He had felt a wild stirring in his groin at this celebration of unabashed copulation; that was how it was, the most basic instinct of all, spawning over the earth mongrel breeds… that was the history of civilisation. Then he realised who it had been written by and for whom.

  He knew Shanti didn’t love her Sylheti husband, but he burnt at the thought of the road ahead. She would never give up this baby swelling up her body so unapologetically; the baby might even bring her closer to the Sylheti. After all, she married him to give the baby a father. Perhaps the baby would be born and sit at this shore, putting mud in her mouth while Shanti told her to stop it, and they would be joined by the man, who would swing the baby up into the air as Shanti clasped his waist, leaning into his back.

  Jay couldn’t bear the images in his mind.

  Love had been a pot, slowly simmering, coming to a boil, and then escaping into steam, evading his grasp. Jay could imagine Shanti falling in love with this man, a man who was not Jay Ghosh, and he couldn’t bear it.

  Then, on that night while the fireflies danced, and her husband sat on his haunches by the shore thinking Jay was only a child, as immature as the wife he had unwittingly married, Jay declared his love for Shanti.

  He knew that if he told Shanti the truth about her incestuous baby, she would die. His father had told him that, and so had Shapna. His words would cause her death, so he carefully weighed his options, still drunk on the beauty of the night.

  Which was why he began with a declaration of his love, and only that. It was his birthday; the night was perfect; he couldn’t imagine a rejection.

  She giggled, unsure how to react. Then she touched her stomach gently, and said, “You don’t know what you are saying.”