Things had quietened down. But he still found himself consulted at regular intervals by people wanting insight into their destinies.
Yet the most curious request he had had for months had arrived that morning. A man named Amran Ismail had called him at eight that morning, and requested an urgent meeting. The man spoke politely with a curious accent—a mixture of east and west Malaysian English, sprinkled with Malay and Chinese slang. But he sounded intelligent and sincere. As Sinha moved the conversation around to detailing his consultancy fees, the man had explained that he, too, was a mystic, and wanted a no-fees exchange on professional grounds. Sinha had agreed to this.
Amran Ismail had turned up on the doorstep less than an hour later, and he and his host had sat down to a breakfast of freshly baked bread, home-made fig jam and fruit, liberally washed down with blackish oolong.
The visitor was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his mid-30s from East Malaysia. He had espresso skin, dark and rather pockmarked from an excess of chilli oil, Sinha reckoned. His thick jet-black hair was slicked back with something like Brylcreem. High eyes and a flat nose suggested he had mixed Malay and Chinese blood. He had a stockiness about his shoulders which suggested great strength. He wore Western clothes, somewhat rumpled and without a tie, and carried a small black briefcase. Yet for all the power of his physique, the visitor walked stiffly and with a slight stoop, like someone who regularly slept in a bed too small. He wore a goatee beard and had a small, oval hat on his head.
After they had swapped small talk and started on the breakfast, it had been Sinha who turned the discussion to matters of work. ‘You said you too were a mystic of sorts?’
Ismail noisily swallowed a large piece of bread and then wiped his mouth with his hand before replying. ‘Am,’ he said, tilting his head to one side. ‘I am a bomoh.
’ ‘Really? How interesting.’
Ismail angled his head to the other side. ‘I know what you are thinking. Cannot blame you-lah. Don’t look like a bomoh. Don’t speak like a bomoh. How can I be real thing?’
The old Indian astrologer raised his bushy white eyebrows and smiled. ‘People come in all shapes and sizes. But I admit, you are right. You don’t look like the other bomohs I have seen.’
‘Bomohs are funny things, isn’t it?’ Ismail spluttered with his mouth full. ‘Witchdoctors. Chee-sin old men and women. Some, they dress in strange garments, so cacat. They have things around their necks—necklaces, icons, pendants, amulets. Bones. Bones they love. Bones of fish, bones of animals, bones of people. Not me. I prefer accessories from Dunhill shop on Orchard Road, ties by Hermes, nice cuff links, like that.’
‘You are not the only one who doesn’t wear bones. I have seen conservative bomohs.
’ ‘Of course-lah. In Kuala Lumpur sometimes you see. Now KL is all full of Ah Beng types, yummies or what is it? But even in KL, working bomohs still are mostly old and crazy. Never they are young men in smart-smart business suit. Like me.’
‘I cannot disagree with you there.’
Ismail leaned back in his chair, having apparently achieved satiety after having eaten an enormous amount of bread—at least a loaf, Sinha calculated.
Then the visitor thrust his cup out. ‘Give me one more tea and then I tell you a story, very interesting, very amazing, very shiok,’ he said. ‘One time I was dead.’
Between slurps, Ismail explained how he had been a wild young man, and spent most of his youth screeching around a small town in Sabah on a moped. His father Aroff Ismail had worked as a log cutter and his mother Silvia Choong had been a canteen cook for the timber company for which her husband worked. He had three younger siblings: Nizam, 26, Musa, 17, and Zahra, 13. ‘My poor, sweet, sick Zahra,’ he had said with a sad smile, clearly having a soft spot for his sister.
Ismail left school at eleven and worked as a labourer in Sarawak, but in his early twenties had decided to go back to his studies and learn a profession. He did well at night school back in Sabah and was soon on a course that would lead him to an accountancy qualification.
At the age of twenty-five, he raised enough cash to buy a secondhand Japanese motorbike; he had been thrilled at the speed and freedom it gave him and the friends who clutched his waist as he turned corners at angles of forty-five degrees.
The joy had lasted exactly one week. Seven days after he had bought the bike, his father’s logging truck pulled out in front of him and he had driven straight into it at 110 kilometres an hour, a girlfriend holding on to his waist.
The bike had been destroyed instantly. And so had its driver and his passenger, according to the first witnesses on the scene. The 22-year-old woman, who had flown over his head and hit the truck’s cabin headfirst, was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.
Amran Ismail had been thrown into the tarpaulin sheet covering the logs the truck had been carrying. His heart had stopped beating, but a passing teacher who had learned cardiac pulmonary resuscitation on a first aid course six days earlier had managed to restart it. Ismail had been sent into intensive care, where he stayed for ten days. He was then moved to a general ward for six weeks, after which he was sent home to his parents. There was talk of amputating his right leg.
His father had wanted to hire nurses to look after him, but his mother had had different ideas. A woman of great religious conviction, she arranged for a local female bomoh to take charge of his recovery.
‘It turns out to be very brilliant idea,’ said Ismail. ‘Old witchdoctor-auntie she knows more about medicine than all the useless young goondu doctors and nurses that come out of Malaysian schools. She didn’t have to go again-again-again to the clinic for buying pills, powders, medicine, all like that. When I had pain in my bad leg or my head, she would go into the forest and come out with some leaves that worked better than any doctor rubbish.
‘My mak gave the bomoh a little bit of money and she look after me for six months over. My pak thought she was chee-sin. At first I was very much not happy. In the early days, when doctors tol’ me maybe I cannot walk after, I want to die, I think all finish with me-lah. I told my mak: Do’wan’ be a cripple. Let Allah take me now. The bomoh, so many potion she gave me. But I would not take. Nothing I would take. That stuff all pantang. Not believing in superstitious rubbish, you know.’
His head slowly revolved to one side and then the other on his thick, mottled neck. ‘But the pain in my leg—very, very bad. Cannot even tell you! Sometimes I was all wet, turning around and around on the bed, feeling my life all draining away, like water down a drain, you know?’
Sinha nodded sympathetically. ‘I can imagine.’
‘So one day I decide, okay, I take. The bomoh potions. I feel better already. Wonderful dreams, it gave me. In the dreams can walk, even I can fly. And you know what happen? Do you know?’
‘Er, you got better?’
Ismail looked reverently at a dirty string bracelet on his left wrist and then tapped his thigh. ‘Allahu Akbar, she pour the life back into my dead leg.’
After six months, he had no interest in going back to his old life as a student of chartered public accountancy. ‘Now I wanted to be a bomoh. My pak was horrified, but my mak—like in most Malaysian families, she was real big boss—she like the idea. So I became new sort of bomoh.
’ His chest swelled out with pride. Clearly, he was reaching the climax of an oft-told tale.
‘Six months more I spend training, reading, visiting other bomohs in East Malaysia, like that. Then I set up bomoh office in Penang, small, just me, I everything one leg kick. I think I am first hi-tech bomoh. All usual bomoh skills I got: know which spells, which potions, which incense, which books to use. But my appointments I got by mobile phone.’ He tapped the Nokia swinging from his belt.
‘Website, my own home page also got.’ He pulled out a business card and pointed to some tiny print on it. ‘My invoices are attach to emails. Even you can email question to me and get reply in real time-lah. 3G phone even. You look sceptical. Any problem?’
Sinha blinked, his concentration suddenly interrupted.
‘Hmm? Oh no, not sceptical, not at all.’ In truth, the Indian astrologer’s main reaction was to be astonished to have met someone who told longer and more involved anecdotes than he did. He buttered another slice of bread and spoke slowly. ‘I am not sceptical. But I am surprised at the conclusion of your story. Surely the type of people who use bomohs wouldn’t have email addresses?’
Ismail gave a broad grin. ‘Of course-lah. Everybody think like that. But that make me one big hit. Bomohs belong to the poor, the working class, the people in shacks and villages in the jungles? Those old things are taken seriously by old people in old kampongs only, right? Fine for grandmother, but not for grandson, right?’
Sinha did not know whether the correct answer to this question was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, so said nothing—which was the right answer, since the question had been rhetorical.
The visitor continued: ‘Everybody think this. The truth much different. Many middle-class Malaysians had same beliefs as their grandfathers. Deep down everyone same-same. Also foreigners I had consulting me. Even they put me in new age bookshop.’ He raised his empty cup as if to toast himself. ‘I am a new age mystic-lah.’
‘I know the feeling,’ said Sinha, whose large breakfast had left him feeling in need of a mid-morning nap. He stifled a yawn. ‘It does seem to be that you have found a niche to claim as your very own.’ He raised his own cup to share the toast.
‘But tell me, what brings you here? What did you want to see me about?’
Ismail thumped the vessel on to the table and leaned forwards. He put both elbows on the rattan placemat and looked down, suddenly serious.
‘To thank Allah for giving me a new life, all my spare time I devote to make home for orphans. Small-to-medium only. Eighteen children I have, age eight to twenty. Before they were street boys. I pay for two nurse look after them. I get sponsor money from businesses, from the mosque, to buy rice, daal, mee. Hotels give me old food, old sheets, leftovers, like that. My sister Zahra, she is very sick. Pak and mak cannot look after her. I look after her, special nurse got for her only.’
Sinha noticed that the speaker was wringing his large hands together as he spoke. Evidently he was under stress.
‘Are you looking for financial . . . er . . . ?’
‘Money I don’t want. Professional advice only.’ Ismail slumped further forwards and studied his hands, suddenly deeply serious. ‘I wan’ give you see a case which I think very amazing. Case of a young person at my home with big problem—bad fortune in her stars. Very bad, soay only. I don’t know what to do. Expert advice myself I need on this matter.’
‘Of course, I’ll be more than glad to review the case myself. I’m sure there will be occasions in the future when you can render me the same service—we all get stuck, sometimes. Would you like me to meet her, or examine her records? Is it your sister?’
‘Thank you. You are very kind. You are a gentleman like people said. I am very, very thankful for you giving positive answer in this matter. But is not my sister. Client only. One more thing I mus’ tell you. On this matter, I wan’ cast-iron promise of confidentiality.’
‘Of course. All my cases, naturally, are confidential.’
‘No. Need specific promise for this case only. Here got—’ He opened a briefcase and took out a plastic bag. There was something wet inside.
Sinha was surprised to see that it was a dead chicken.
‘We use these things a lot,’ said Ismail. ‘Is the way of the school of bomohs I belong. Sorry about this. I know is a bit messy, but . . .’
He took the chicken out, and Sinha was distressed to see blood dripping from its neck on to his rattan placemats.
‘Sei-lah! Sorry,’ Ismail repeated. ‘Twitching a bit but is dead, more or less. I kill it on the doorstep just before I came in. Blood must be fresh, you see, when you make serious vows.’
Sinha watched his Malaysian visitor close his eyes and start to enter a trancelike state to prepare the chicken for the ritual, and was surprised to discover that the man was silently weeping.
Two hours later, a gently reverberating doorbell rang in a flat in a well-maintained block in Chinatown’s Sago Street.
The door was opened by a Chinese woman wearing so much jewellery that it sounded as if someone was wheeling a rack of bangles across the floor of a department store. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said. ‘You must be Mr Ismail.’
‘Yes. And you are Madame Xu,’ the visitor replied. ‘Very nice to meet you. I am Amran Ismail, your servant.’
Madame Xu’s broad smile disappeared instantly as she noticed that her visitor was carrying a plastic bag in which something was twitching violently.
‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘Your lunch?’
He glanced down at the bag in his hand as if noticing it for the first time. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Later, inshallah. A chicken. I get through a big number of chickens.’
‘Reminds me of Hong Kong,’ she said with distaste. ‘Dreadful place. Everyone comes out of the markets with their shopping bags twitching. Everything is sold alive in Hong Kong. Why don’t you give your bag to the maid—she’ll keep it in the kitchen for you—and then come and sit down and have a nice cup of tea. Darjeeling?’
‘Yes, yes, very kind,’ said Mr Ismail. ‘But first, I wan’ use your toilet. Already today I drink one gallon of tea over.’
He returned to the main room of the apartment a few minutes later to find Madame Xu in a room designed in what a visitor would likely consider surprisingly austere for an owner who was so obviously enamoured of fussy accessories. The floor was dark brown parquet, unsoftened by either carpet or rug, and the furniture consisted of a black leather sofa and an altar table and cabinet in old-fashioned Chinese rosewood design, with inlaid fittings in a matt-gray metal. There was no television, but a set of shelves in matching rosewood contained several dozen tiny photographs in non-matching frames.
They swapped small talk for five minutes, before Ismail gave her an introduction to his background as a bomoh. Then, after another round of tea, he grandly announced that it was time to explain his mission. He became increasingly serious as he told Madame Xu that he needed her advice urgently on the case of a young woman whose fortune appeared to be very negative, and needed an urgent remedy.
‘All details one hundred per cent confidential must keep,’ he said.
‘Why naturally,’ replied Madame Xu. ‘Since you haven’t told me anything about the client or the case, I can hardly broadcast it to the world.’
‘No, but I will reveal shocking details to you now. Top top secret, understand or not?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ replied the fortune-teller impatiently.
‘In my school of bomohs, need spilling of blood to make vow. For this reason I bring chicken only. First, I go into kitchen and get it.’
‘No need, no need,’ said Madame Xu. ‘I’ll get the girl to bring it.’ She reached for a bell from a side table and rang it energetically. Then she shouted in an extraordinarily loud voice for a woman so petite: ‘Concepcion! Bring the visitor’s chicken.’
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ came a shrieked reply.
Ismail waited tensely, uncomfortable without his chicken.
Suddenly fidgety, it was clear that he was unwilling to say what he had to say without it. Vows had to be taken with full formalities.
They chatted further on topics of general interest, and then the visitor took pains to again impress on Madame Xu the seriousness of keeping details of the case he was about to reveal to her completely to herself. While speaking, he kept turning around and craning his neck to see if his fowl was being brought to him.
‘Why not I just go and get it?’
‘It’s coming now,’ said his host. ‘Concepcion? Where are you?’ she screamed.
Two minutes later, a sullen pudding of a domestic helper plodded down the corridor, clutching a large platter containing the bird—roasted, dren
ched in soy sauce, sprinkled with garlic slices, and surrounded by pandan leaves. ‘Is ready, Ma’am,’ she murmured.
‘Oh,’ said Amran Ismail. ‘You cook it?’
‘Microwaves,’ said Madame Xu. ‘We bought one a month ago. Six hundred and fifty watts. Now Concepcion can do a small chicken in eleven minutes. Twenty-nine if you press “Dual cook”.’
‘Er, thank you.’ The bomoh took the dish from the servant’s hands.
He rather awkwardly performed his ritual with the dish of roasted chicken, sprinkling pungent warm gravy rather than blood on his hands and the hands of his hostess. ‘What to do,’ he mumbled, his thick brows knotted.
Madame Xu politely accepted the gravy splashes on her hands but quickly wiped them away with paper tissues. Her real handkerchief, which was made of perfumed silk, she retained purely for the purposes of patting her face from time to time.
‘Would you like Concepcion to carve it for you?’
‘Er, no. Later I eat.’
‘Okay, dear boy. Tell me about your client with the big problem.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s time.’
For the second time that day, Ismail related the story of how he had grown up in a poor kampong in the jungles of East Malaysia, and, after a terrible accident from which he recovered with the help of a traditional witchdoctor, had decided to become a bomoh himself.
‘Aren’t bomohs rather, er, primitive?’ Madame Xu ventured.
Ismail looked affronted.
‘I know computer. I know Internet. I mix old and new. I use only old spells that work. I know that some things the bomohs do is for show. Bones and everything. For children. I skip these things. Just show-off stuff.’
The Feng Shui Detective Goes South Page 4