Shadow Play

by Barbara Ismail

  Maryam immediately began handling one of the customers, giving Ashikin a brilliant smile. This customer, a harried young mother with two toddlers, was looking for low-end merchandise: two cotton sarong for everyday use. Maryam opened the fabrics as though she were throwing out a fishing net: they unfurled from their folded state and landed perfectly on the shelf.

  “Here are a few you might like.” Maryam displayed them with pride. “Good colours for you: red and blue are always nice. Here, look at this pattern: very finely drawn, isn’t it?”

  The woman nodded and grabbed hold of a wandering little boy.

  “I see you don’t have much time,” Maryam sympathized with a grin. “I’ll try to make it easy for you.” She picked out two from the several she’d shown her. “What about these? Do you like them?”

  The woman ran her eyes over the fabrics. “Nice,” she commented. “From around here?”

  “My brother makes them,” Maryam said proudly. “I only sell Kelantan sarong here: none of that factory-made cheap stuff. It’s not worth buying you know: the colours fade and the fabric’s thin. This one will look just as bright a year from now!”

  Her customer nodded vigorously. “You’re right. I won’t buy those sarong. They’ve turned into rags before you know it! And with these two, you can see I can’t go shopping all that often.”

  They laughed together. “Well, how much are they?” she asked.

  Maryam named her price: the correct one, plus a little something for bargaining. While they haggled, she wrapped the sarong in a newspaper, knowing it was harder for a customer to refuse an item she wanted when it was all wrapped and ready to go. She thanked the woman for her business and watched her frog-march her two kids out of the market before they could grab anything off the shelves.

  “Sell anything?” she asked Ashikin.

  “Two songket sets. Pretty good, isn’t it? A bridal party, getting married in two months. Took forever to choose the colours, but bought in the end.”

  Maryam beamed with pride. “Good,” she said shortly, imbuing that one word with a world of parental approval. “I’m waiting for the police to come and get me.” Maryam lit a cigarette and gave one to her daughter. “We’re going to talk to a suspect.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow nothing. I just couldn’t get to see someone, so I’m going together with the police. Otherwise, how am I supposed to talk to him?”

  “What would the police do without you, Mak?”

  “Nothing, probably.” Maryam was disappointed, frankly, in how little they seemed to have done. Osman often looked as though he hadn’t moved a muscle between meetings with her. Maybe that glimmer she noticed earlier would grow, she thought charitably, and Osman would begin working on his own.

  Suddenly, a woman appeared in the midst of milling shoppers, walking swiftly down the aisle of the market, looking neither left nor right, paying no attention at all to the fabrics heaped on either side of her. Just as Ashikin had described her, she had draped a white chiffon headscarf over her head, with the flowing end held over the lower half of her face, eyes locked on Maryam as she approached.

  “It’s her!” cried Ashikin, nudging her mother in the shoulder. “That’s the one I told you about.”

  Maryam jumped off the stall shelf to stop her as she walked by, reaching out her arm and saying, “I’m Mak Cik Maryam. Were you looking for me?”

  The woman stopped and looked intently at Maryam, saying nothing. She almost began to speak, then abruptly stopped herself, glared at Maryam with what looked like hatred, and continued her march out of the market.

  “What was that?” Maryam asked, confused and maybe a little frightened. “Did you see the way she looked at me? I don’t even know her.”

  “That was strange,” Ashikin agreed. “What did she want?”

  Maryam shook her head, and continued to look out the entrance to the market as if following the woman, who had already melted into the chaos on the street. There were a great many strange people walking around, she thought, and why any one of those would seek her out especially was a mystery. “Does it have anything to do with Ghani?” she mused to Ashikin.

  “I can’t imagine,” Ashikin replied, lighting a cigarette for each of them. “She was odd, that’s for sure.” She tried to keep her unease out of her face, where she knew her mother would immediately spot it, and turned away towards the crowd of shoppers, distracting herself from the woman and what it might mean.

  Maryam, too, dived back into her work, fearing to upset Ashikin if she reflected on who it might be. Perhaps another message for her, silently ordering her to leave the case. Such a strange way of sending it. Glancing at the door, she saw a young policeman jogging uncertainly down the aisle towards them. “Here’s my date,” she told Ashikin jauntily, and went to meet him.

  Chapter XV

  Maryam once again arrived in Tawang, this time accompanied by the chief of police. She felt quite professional, and oddly excited. “Kak Hasnah,” she called from the bottom of the steps. Osman stood quietly next to her.

  Hasnah appeared at the doorway, her eyes widening when she saw Osman in his uniform. “Kak Maryam,” she said slowly, her eyes moving back and forth between Maryam and Osman. “Please, come in and get out of the sun.”

  Osman carefully untied his policeman’s shoes at the top of the stairs and sat next to Maryam on the porch. “Mak Cik,” he introduced himself, speaking slowly and clearly, “I am Osman, the chief of police in Kota Bharu.”

  “Ah,” said Aisha’s mother, nodding. “I see.”

  He smiled his most winning smile. “You know Mak Cik Maryam is helping us …”

  “Coffee?” Hasnah interrupted, and leaned into the door to order one of her children to prepare something. “Yes?” she returned to Osman.

  He smiled again, tamping down his impatience. Kampong life had its own rhythm, and there was no use trying to rush it. “I am here with Mak Cik Maryam. She is working with us.” Maryam was proud to hear it so officially. She looked approvingly at him.

  “So,” he continued, “we’d like to speak to Ali.”

  “Why?” she asked Maryam in rapid Kelantanese. “What does he want with Ali?”

  “Don’t worry, he only wants to ask some questions,” Maryam answered soothingly. “Really, it’s all for a good reason.”

  Hasnah sniffed. “I’m not so sure.” She turned back to Osman. “What do you want to ask him?”

  This is what Osman had feared: people would speak to him and he’d be unable to understand. Maryam rescued him as she saw him hesitate. “Just questions, right, Che Osman?”

  “Yes,” he answered firmly. “I have some questions for him.”

  The coffee and cakes appeared, and Hasnah appeared to throw herself into serving with a vengeance. “Have something to drink. Please,” she invited them. “It’s so hot, isn’t it?”

  Maryam nodded politely. “Yes, indeed.” She agreed. She let Osman ask again for Ali, maintaining her own status as a friendly neighbour rather than a member of officialdom.

  Ali came slowly and unwillingly out to the porch, clearly resentful. His mother watched him anxiously. “What is it?” he demanded. “Why are you keeping me here?” He saw Maryam walk and a sour smile twisted his face. “I should have known. Why are you doing this? Is this any of your business?”

  “Yes, Maryam answered calmly. “It happened on my land.”

  “So what?”

  “So I want to see justice done.”

  “You don’t think Ghani might have deserved it?”

  Osman raised his eyebrows and shot Maryam a quick look. She was more than happy to engage in a philosophical discussion: it made a nice change.

  “He deserved something, for sure: believe me, Ali, I’m no fan of taking another wife. I don’t think any woman is. But death: don’t you think it’s a touch harsh?”

  “Look at my poor sister.”

  Maryam shook her head sadly. “Oh, I know. I’m heartbroken to see it. Has anythi
ng worked?”

  “No,” he answered morosely. “She’s confused.” He paused and rubbed his forehead. “We’re all sick. It’s as though we’ve all lost our wits, just like Aisha.”

  “Really?” Maryam was curious. “Since when?”

  Ali shrugged again: now that Maryam looked closely at him, and at his mother, she thought they did look pale, although it could be grief alone. She looked over at Osman, whose face mirrored her own concern.

  “A few days. I think my parents are sick because of watching Aisha. They can’t bear seeing their daughter suffer like this. Who could?” Hasnah looked at the porch, lost in her own reverie. “Aisha’s not here now. She’s at Ghani’s parents,” Ali added.

  Maryam shook her head in sympathy. “I can’t imagine. You know, time may help. It may be the only thing. And she’s still very young. She could remarry.”

  “Or she could spend the rest of her life wandering around the house with only half a mind.”

  Hasnah rose abruptly and walked into the house, clearly unable to listen to the conversation. Osman watched her go with a concerned frown.

  “I hope not,” Maryam shuddered. “It’s too sad to think about.”

  “Well, she’s my sister, so I’ve got to think about it, don’t you see? That’s why I argued with Ghani.”

  “I understand. but by then, he’d already divorced this girl and was back with your sister. And sorry, too, I heard.”

  Ali nearly spat. “Sorry! That’s really nice. He broke Aisha’s heart, and I wanted him to know it.”

  Maryam nodded encouragement. “And what did he say?”

  Ali’s shoulders slumped, and he suddenly looked tired.

  “ “Some coffee, Ali?” she asked. He nodded. She poured him a cup from the tray in front of them, and he sipped it thoughtfully.

  “Where were we?” She affected forgetfulness and Ali eyed her suspiciously. “Ah yes, what Ghani said to you.” She settled back for the story.

  He squirmed for a moment and then began talking. Amazing the power of mothers, Maryam thought. An older woman could command most younger men with just a stern look. It was perhaps the only benefit for a woman getting older. Of course, it could also have been Osman’s quiet but official presence next to her; she was surprised at herself for thinking this.

  “First, he started apologizing,” Ali began, still sulky but coming out of it. “He kept telling me he agreed with me, it was his fault, he didn’t know why he’d done it. He said he loved Aisha and the kids, would never leave her, blah blah blah. He told me he thought he’d been bewitched: Faouda must have put a spell on him and that’s why he married her. Then when he came back to Kota Bharu, he was too far for the spell to work and he woke up.

  “That’s what he said, ‘I woke up when I came home, and I couldn’t believe it was me who married Faouda. Ali, maybe it wasn’t me, because I love my family, and now that I’m cured, it will be fine.’

  “Right, I told him, it’ll be fine until the next time, and then the whole thing will start all over again. What are you going to do about it?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t have this happen every time you go away, you know. Why don’t you go to a bomoh yourself and get an azimat? Or better yet, Aisha can get one to make sure you stay faithful, what about that?’

  “That’s when he got mad. ‘You’re trying to have me bewitched all the time?’ he asked me. ‘I won’t have a life of my own? You just shut up about bomoh,’ he told me, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ He was shouting by now: scared, I think, that we’d have all these spells on him and he’d be totally in our power. Which is crazy, of course; that’s not what I was talking about at all. ‘Stay away from me!’ he said. ‘You’re trying to kill me!’

  Maryam sat up at this. “He said that?”

  “Of course, Mak Cik, he meant you’re trying to kill me with spells and sorcery, not with a golok. Because I wasn’t: I didn’t have one or anything.”

  “That’s quite an argument,” Maryam commented. “Was Aisha there with you?”

  Ali was silent. Maryam surmised she was, and Ali didn’t want to give her away. The silence grew, and Ali realized he’d not spoken for too long to have ‘No’ be a credible answer.

  “You know,” he began slowly, trying to see his way out of the thicket, “she didn’t have anything to do with this argument.”

  “She wasn’t there when you were talking to Ghani?”

  “No.” Now he answered promptly, not making the same mistake twice.

  “Where was she?”

  “Around,” he said vaguely. Maryam stared hard at him until he decided to amend his answer. “Look, she wasn’t part of the argument.”

  “Where was she?”

  Ali answered with a hint of desperation in his voice. “She was standing a little way away.”

  “So she heard the whole thing.”

  Ali nodded miserably. “She did. I didn’t want her to.”

  “What about Ghani?”

  He shrugged and stared at the floor.

  “Ali,” she said sternly. “Do you want to tell us, or shall I leave and you can speak to Che Osman here yourself?”

  Tears came to his eyes. “Mak Cik, I made everything worse. It wasn’t my intention, my niat was only good, but I made it worse and it’s all my fault.” He began crying in earnest.

  “What?” Maryam asked, both alarmed and elated at the thought of an explanation at last.

  “Aisha heard it all, like I told you, and she tried to stop the argument. And Ghani yelled at her and said, ‘I won’t spend the rest of my life bewitched by you and your family. I said I loved you, I said I was sorry, and now your brother wants me to just alangkah leher minta disembeleh: stretch out my neck and ask to have it cut? Are you going to put spells on me whether I know it or not?’

  “ ‘I won’t have it,’ he said to her. ‘Maybe it would be better if I just left. I can’t live like this.’ And he pulled his arm away and run up into the panggung. She stood there crying into her hands, and I knew it was all my fault.”

  “Alamak!” Maryam was at a loss. No wonder Aisha was so beside herself.

  “She was so angry at me,” Ali sobbed. “She said I’d ruined her life. I’d made her children fatherless. Why did I even get involved, she asked me? She sat on the ground in the back of the panggung and just cried. I was ready to do anything to make it better, Mak Cik, you must believe me.”

  She nodded. “I do. What happened next?”

  “She wouldn’t leave,” he wiped his nose with his sleeve, and tried to dry his eyes. “She told me to get away from her. By this time, the break was over and the performance had started again, so she couldn’t go in and talk to him. Besides, I don’t think he was ready to talk to anyone right then. I told her she should just go home and talk to him tomorrow, but she started hitting me. So I walked to the front and tried to watch. I couldn’t go home without her, Mak Cik. I couldn’t leave her there.”

  “Of course not,” Maryam agreed, passing him some paper napkins from the tray. “Here, blow your nose.” She waited until he was finished. He looked like a woebegone five-year-old. “So when did you leave?”

  “Not for a while”

  “For a while?”

  He wiggled again. Finally, the truth, she thought. “Not till after the performance ended. Aisha tried to talk to him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “She said he told her to leave him alone. That he’d divorce her if she went to the bomoh and put a spell on him. He said they could talk when this run was finished. She was crying and crying. I took her home on my motorcycle.” He looked miserably at Maryam and Osman, his eyes moving from one to the other. Osman now seemed a strangely sympathetic presence, and Maryam could see how people might open up to him, once he could understand them. “I walked it out to the main road so it wouldn’t wake you.”

  Osman smiled kindly, as though he had just heard what he’d been waiting all his life to hear. “Thank you, Che Ali,” he said calmly, rising slowly from the
porch. “You’ve been a great help.” He touched him briefly on the shoulder, a small but strangely comforting gesture, and with that, he was down the stairs, waiting for Maryam at the bottom.

  Chapter XVI

  Maryam left her house early the next morning, even before the children had gone to school. She was completely exasperated: as her investigation progressed, she seemed to add suspects rather than eliminate them. With every step, she seemed to be farther from a conclusion.

  Something wide and flat seemed half buried under the stairs, and she bent over to throw it away. It wasn’t that big, true, but some poisonous snakes weren’t that big either, and she wasn’t going to provide camouflage for them. “Aduh!” she cried. Her middle finger was bleeding, punctured by a spiny thorn, deep and clean. She pulled out the whole package, and picked it apart gingerly.

  She found a spine which she thought might be from an ikan keli, a poisonous catfish, stabbed through the head of a crude wax figure of a woman. A rolled paper with drawings on it, a spell no doubt, ran through the figure’s torso. Nails were driven into the doll, through the head, chest, arms and legs and, of course, the poisonous spine through the forehead. It was wrapped in a white shroud, covered with a broad banana leaf.

  She examined it blankly at first, then with mounting horror. It was an evil spell, perhaps even a death spell. The wax figure was clearly meant to represent her, to add jampi as supernatural assistance to the more practical poisonous spine. She felt a sudden prick of fear: was the poison active and even now coursing through her blood?

  She looked up at the stairs, thankful that it was she who found it, rather than her children. She tried to stay calm. “Mamat!” she cried.

  He came calmly to the door, holding a cup of coffee. “What?”

  “I … I think I’ve found a jampi under the stairs,” she began. “A spine from an ikan keli,” she ended vaguely. Her head was beginning to pound, whether from fear or a poison, she didn’t know. Maryam bent over and closed her eyes, tamping down the panic rising within her. “It’s all in my head,” she told Mamat, who was now next to her holding her arm. “I’m imagining it. There’s nothing wrong with me.”