by Sandi Tan
We sat quietly for a moment. Once again, I was struck by how Issa seemed to have changed—from enigmatic, dangerous foe to sage uncle.
“Of course I’ll do it,” he finally said. “I’ve already told him I would.”
I must have smiled too happily, because he added, “It’s not something I agreed to lightly. And despite how he sometimes acts, I’m not his Caliban. So I want you to fully understand what you’re putting yourself into. You’re a commander, not his soldier. We’ll finish what we started in the jungle, but we can’t make the same mistakes. If we knowingly take innocent lives again—even one—we’ll pay for it later with our souls. We will become ghosts. Remember this.”
The thought sobered me up fast.
“It was arrogance on my part to have thought of the spirits as an army: They’re our equals. Yet when it comes to paying the price, it’ll be only you and me—not Kenneth—and it’ll be quite a price. As you know, things can go wrong. Many bomohs don’t survive more than one summoning in their lifetimes. We’re about to attempt two in less than a year.
“Assuming all goes well, you and I will be physically, mentally sapped for years. Years, Cassandra. Not just one or two, but five, six…I’ve seen men sleepwalk through ten years of their lives. You probably won’t be the same again. Your reflexes will slow; your mind will dull. It will age you. All that if it goes well. And if it goes badly, we die.”
On that bleak note, he shot me a quicksilver smile.
“Then, there’s the other price. Kenneth’s a very clever man, but he doesn’t have what you and I have. He could never do what you and I can do, and ultimately what he’ll feel, if we succeed, is that he owes us an enormous debt. And this will weigh on him. You know it will.”
I knew he was right. Already the Rolex around Kenneth’s wrist was a daily reminder of how much he was still in the Wees’ debt; it was his golden handcuff.
But could I live with myself if I let opportunity slip by, as I had before the war? The Isle needed me. The independence I’d fought all my life to win was now tied to the Black Isle’s fate. If I could bring freedom to all my fellow Islanders, what was losing a few years of my health? I would have lain down my life if it meant the Isle could finally be our own.
“Are you ready for the consequences, Cassandra?”
“You were just telling me not to forget how powerful I was.” I took his hand. “Teach me your chant.”
When people’s deepest instincts drive them to do something, it takes almost nothing to remove that last hurdle. The British yearned to leave. You could see it in their faces as they sat nursing their gin in coffee shops at noon, in the way they clutched their children at the taxi ranks. Who were we to make them stay?
There would be sacrifices.
There would be regrets.
But everybody stood to gain—Islander and British, living and dead.
A fortnight after our meeting, Issa and I defied the evening curfew and took the last trolley to Forbidden Hill, the site of my unfinished lesson years before and soon to be the new home, if the British had their way, of a luxury hotel.
Having discussed everything with Kenneth beforehand, I knew exactly the favors to ask of our underworld allies. Terrify the British, not kill them. Spare the children. Because the Brits were already jittery, grand gestures were unnecessary. Restraint was the key—cold spots, strange miasmas, displaced objects, doors and windows opening and closing on their own, things that might make them question their own sanity. We wanted to give the colonials a little push, but they had to believe they came to the decision to leave by themselves. We had to give them reason—and face.
I spent weeks perfecting Issa’s Arabic chant. He called it “singing,” and it was soon clear why. The “song” began as a Sufi incantation known as dhikr, composed of the various names of the Muslim god, which were joined by names of the saints and magical forebears from Issa’s Bugis ancestry. The recitation was for me less a test of memory than a test of will, because specific emotions had to be attached to each cycle of names—joy in the glory of life, grief at the transience of life, passion as a seeker, humility as a seeker. The goal was to repeat the cycle in such a seamless succession that they ceased to sound like names but full-bodied, poetic sentences, sentences so alive with feeling they would draw me into a trance.
“Think of each line of names as a fragrant garland,” Issa told me as I closed my eyes and began really seeing what he described. “Lay the garland of sorrow over the garland of joy, the garland of humility over the garland of pride, until you have a tower of wreaths high enough for the tomb of a king.”
My enchanted tower of wreaths was as real to me as any made of brick and mortar. And soon, before me, an avenue of more towers bloomed, the fragrant garlands proliferating without the slightest effort. I saw myself, tiny and inconsequential, in this floral corridor, and as I began walking, waves of emotion swept through me. It was not merely joy at the vibrant colors and smells of the flowers but an overwhelming awe at the beauty and the variation—the greatness—of life. This was followed by a supreme alertness to any petal or bud that was fading or had fallen to the ground, the sight of which drew me into a deep, aching sadness: Splendor can never be prolonged; the end always comes. To tame this grief, I had to bow to a higher level of awareness. My thirst for beauty and permanence turned at this point into a spiritual hunger, one that only knowledge of the truth could satisfy. Wisdom, when it arrived, was harsh; it told me to accept my own insignificance in the schema of all life. At this, I was once again in awe at the towers of wreaths before me, stretching out now in all directions.
After my lessons were done, Issa handed me a vial of what was clearly bone dust.
“As soon as you reach home,” he said, “sprinkle this across all entry points—doors, windows. This will keep them out.”
“Dare I ask who this was?” I said, examining the bottle.
“No”—he smiled, serious—“because I dare not tell.”
At the cemetery, I began chanting as soon as we arrived. There was no need to row or endure the badi and his games. I simply chanted for hours, until my throat was raw. With Issa by my side, I felt no worry.
Under the moonless night, I watched the spirits gather around Issa and me, entranced by the cadences of this ancient song. As before, I was struck by the mix of ages, races, and faiths of the dead, and the way they all lived side by side in this gloomy, gated plot. When all rose who could have been risen, I felt calm, completely at ease. I made my vow to my diverse constituency, repeating my message in the five languages I knew—English, Malay, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Mandarin:
“My friends, your eternal home will be in jeopardy if the British remain. They plan to flatten Forbidden Hill to make way for a hotel. In exchange for your help, I promise that you will have a permanent home here on Forbidden Hill. I’ll make sure you will never be disrupted from your rest.”
As I explained their side of the bargain, my army stood listening, their eyes blank, uninspired. Did they understand what I was asking of them? I looked at Issa, whose face showed only calm.
After the ghosts dispersed, their lips quivering their weird prayers, I could only wait and wonder. But one thing was already clear. Issa had been right. Calling forth the dead nearly killed me.
He had to carry me down Forbidden Hill and put me in a taxi. I wanted nothing more than to take to my bed, which I did—for seven full days and seven nights. I felt as if I’d caught the flu, and indeed the symptoms were similar: fever, migraines, muscle aches, the loss of energy and appetite. But this was no flu—unless it was a flu whose symptoms lasted not just days, but months.
Sadly, out in the world, nothing seemed to have changed.
“Maybe we need to do more,” I told Issa one night when he came to visit.
“You’ve already done more than your share; anything further would be testing fate,” he said. He, too, had been weakened, though far less severely. The chanter always suffered most. “The dead cann
ot be hurried. The Night of the Burning Trees was a rare exception. The youth of the girls made them impatient. Too much so, in fact.”
But I was impatient. It enraged me to think I’d sacrificed my health to no result. I could still see the passive, blank faces of my constituency at Forbidden Hill. Did they feel no obligation, no urgency to protect their own resting ground?
As soon as I recovered the strength to walk the streets on my own, I sought out two smaller resting places—a Taoist mausoleum in Chinatown, packed with the cremated remains of lonesome amahs, and an overgrown field in Little India where Indian convict laborers had been thrown into mass graves. There, without Issa, I chanted again and asked for volunteers in ridding the British.
In the days after, I obsessively followed the news, looking for signs.
The first one came at the Polo Club. One morning, during the Anzac & Friends tournament, horses from both the Island and Kiwi teams began bucking violently for no apparent reason, throwing off all their riders. Island captain Killian Ross lost his helmet and was trampled by his own horse, costing him his right eye. Several other players suffered broken bones. Nobody could explain the accident but it was quickly forgotten—horses were just animals, after all.
Less easy to dismiss were the events a fortnight later. The aptly named Cyril Cunning, the councilman who’d first suggested flattening Forbidden Hill, woke to find his eyes sewn shut with red Taoist thread. His wife began packing for England that same afternoon. The next day, just before lunch, the notoriously awful magistrate Alan Topper was set upon by his paperwork. The sharp edge of a lucrative engineering contract blew toward his eyes, slicing open his lenses. He ran from his office, blood streaming down his face as he screamed, “I can’t see!”
The eyes. I had to smile. The ghosts were targeting the colonials’ blind spots.
Two weeks later, yet more mischief. In an overgrown training area not far from the polo fields, night sentries reported seeing bare-skinned Tamils roaming the grounds. When ordered to stop, they simply vanished. When fired upon, bullets seemed to pass through their bodies. Entire squadrons of Gurkhas, bold warriors who had served as peacekeepers during India’s bloody partition, resigned, fearing for their lives.
After this came a long and desolate lull. Months went by with nothing out of the ordinary being recorded. I feared that, like me, the dead had worn themselves out.
Then one afternoon, I took a trip to the newly opened Van Kleef Aquarium, a large modernist cube not far from city hall. I was feeling depressed, hobbling around on a cane at the age of twenty-nine and unable to concentrate on a book for more than minutes at a stretch. I ruined my health, and still the Brits were hanging on.
As luck would have it, I’d picked the worst possible day to visit. It was May 24, Empire Day. Schoolchildren had the day off and the building was packed with a fleet of pint-sized, fair-haired delegates in the sickly green uniforms of the British Council kindergarten. Because of this group, the ticket seller had closed off the place to all other visitors but me—perhaps she felt sorry for the poor limping creature that I was.
Squeezed into the lightless, tank-lined passageways with a hundred children, I told myself I could shoo away the rowdy ones with a firm tap of my cane, but such measures proved unnecessary. They walked hand in hand, twenty charges in lockstep with each teacher, everyone sporting a paper crown to honor Queen Victoria’s birthday. Tunnel after darkened tunnel, the tiny monarchs traipsed in a hushed, bug-eyed state of wonder—impressively, not one of them sniveled. At their age, I would have been scared stiff by the expressionless orbs flitting and flying across the violet windows.
Finally, after eyeing these exhibits of modest anemones, sea stars, and unflappable fish—all locally caught, the signs proclaimed—we came to the hall containing the Van Kleef’s pièce de résistance: the Great Blue Yonder. The tank, the grandest in the Orient, was a glass chamber two stories high in which swam an undersea menagerie culled from far-off waters—coral, moray eels, and octopuses from the mid-Pacific, and four Australian great white sharks, each the size of a canoe.
Yelping in excitement, the children pushed ahead of me until I stood waist-deep in a sea of little crowned heads. They pressed their faces against the glass, even as their teachers warned them to stand back. But it was hard to fault their curiosity—this blue room was amazing. It pulled us all to the bottom of a fictional, harmonious ocean where sharks and octopuses were the best of friends.
The beasts, however, were unnaturally still. They seemed to have been hypnotized. The sharks floated in suspended motion instead of firing ahead, as they are wont to do. Only their gills shuddered.
The children were transfixed. Here were harmless sharks and spongy octopod arms that would give you a nice hug. They bustled by me to push closer to the glass, seeking authentication: Were these puppets or the real things?
I gave way to the anxious cohort, moving to the back of the hall. This was when I noticed the black nests of kelp in the tank beginning to move. They rose from behind the sharks like sentient weeds. As they swam toward the glass, I grasped that these were no fugitive plants, nor even fish, but the undulating Rapunzel locks of two creatures that had no business being there.
The ghostly pair showed themselves to be lithe, demonic maenads, all flowing black hair and naked flesh. They had the white eyes of the blind. But they could swim, and very well indeed, producing hoops of air bubbles around the somnambulistic sharks.
Now the madness began.
The two maenads grew rigid and torpedoed toward the glass. They banged their heads against the transparent wall, with a dull, sickening thump. Instinctively I looked to the exit. But no one else reacted. Hadn’t they heard it?
“Keep away from the tank!” I shouted to the children.
A curly haired boy turned back to look at me, quizzical, but my cry only inflamed his friends’ curiosity. They crowded in still closer to the glass.
The maenads swept back for a second, as if put off by all the small faces. Then, with a swift flap of their gray arms, they pitched themselves forth and again struck their heads on the glass. Thump! This time, the impact was loud enough to make the children jolt back. But none of them knew what to make of it. The curly haired boy walked toward me, throwing frightened glances at the tank.
“Tell the children to move away!” I cried to a nearby teacher, who seemed mesmerized by the static sharks. She didn’t move. “Hurry, children!” I led by example, grabbing the hand of the curly haired boy and pushing toward the exit. “Come with me, everyone! This way!”
The maenads stepped up their attack. They rammed their heads at the glass once more, this time producing the recognizable crunch of breaking glass.
I didn’t hear the glass shatter—it was drowned out by rushing water and shrieking children. The gargantuan tank tore across the center like a cellophane screen. Water rushed in to fill every pocket on the floor in one continuous wave. Even at the exit, water washed up my shins. Fish and glass followed in a violent whoosh. Behind me, the great hall had turned into a lake, the cold water swallowing up children too stricken to run. My God, they might drown!
What happened was even worse. Freed of the tank, the sharks sprang out of their coma. Each white beast splashed its way to a child and greedily flexed its jaws. But this wasn’t just hunger—it was mania driven by plenitude. Blood squirted from the soft bodies as the frenzied sharks ate their way around the hall, sampling the arm of one, the leg of another, spitting out a chunk when they saw something better, juicier. The water churned, a frothing fountain of reds and pinks. No doubt the eels and octopuses would divide up the rest.
All this happened in seconds. The shock giving me new strength, I forced open the emergency exit—sounding the alarm bell—carrying the curly haired boy with me. Immediately a torrent of water gushed out with us. As the red river drained, I set my shivering ward back on solid ground.
“You’re a brave one,” I told him.
I turned back and saw the maena
ds standing in the empty tank. Their grins told me everything. This was the high price exacted by delinquent ghouls—the ones who, like me, didn’t always abide by the rules.
The aquarium nearly finished me off. Although it sounds melodramatic to say it, I was never the same again. It was one thing to read about nefarious men getting their due and quite another to watch children being savaged before my eyes. Morphine barely lessened the nightmares that followed; it only kept me asleep longer, replaying the horrific scene again and again. I couldn’t leave the rooming house for weeks.
“Never let me have anything to do with the spirit world again,” I begged Issa. “I’d rather die than cause injury to another child.”
To my astonishment, Issa remained calm. Too calm.
“All riots burn themselves out,” he said. “Once they’re sated, the spirits will eventually return to their graves, even the unruly ones. We have to look at it this way. At least none of the children were killed.”
“They’ll be scarred for life!”
“Blame yourself if you like. But we can’t win every battle, Cassandra. Let’s just be content with winning one.”
He was right—about that battle. As much as the government-run Tribune tried to play it down, evidence of the exodus was everywhere. Taxicabs cruised along High Street empty. Both the Balmoral and the Metropole hired Chinese and Indian touts to solicit local custom for their restaurants and bars. One Monday night, Fitzpatricks, the hundred-year-old grocery that had fed generations of homesick Brits, shuttered its doors for good.
Change came officially, many months later. The civil service was forced to make up the loss of British personnel by taking a drastic measure: non-Europeans were welcome to apply. Naturally, Kenneth was first in line in May 1954.
The night his application was accepted, my energy made a miraculous comeback. After two long years of exhaustion, I felt stirrings of my old self again.