‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Ralph said. ‘There are three days of religious festivities coming up – the Prophet’s birthday tomorrow, Thaipusam on Saturday, and the Chinese St Valentine’s on Sunday. Most officials are taking a long weekend and their minds won’t be on the job after this morning. You may as well relax.’ His carefully rounded voice became avuncular. ‘Look, Judith, there is a wonderful travel story for you in Thaipusam, the Hindu festival.’ He almost ruined his spiel by laughing as he added, ‘It’s very colourful. Everybody should see it at least once.’
Sancha was looking at him fretfully, but he flapped his hand at her to keep quiet. He ended ‘O.K. If you promise to get up at 2.30 am, I’ll fix it with a mate of mine to take you,’ and rang off.
He poked an index finger at Sancha. ‘Not a bloody word out of you. It should come as a surprise.’ As he began to dial Kanan’s telephone number he added, ‘You’ve never been to Thaipusam, anyway. You only yap-yap hearsay about it.’
Ralph sat on the edge of the bed with the handpiece to his ear, grinning. Kanan, whom he loved like a brother, was a sucker for a soft voice. Like a lot of Indians he attended to a woman’s voice and her walk as marks of beauty. Ralph hoped that Judith had a nice, undulating walk. The vibrant days in Sydney in that Ultimo flat he and Kanan had shared – ‘Those times have seized upon my imagination for ever,’ he’d once admitted to Kanan. He smiled broadly, inwardly, as his most cherished picture of Kanan came back into mind – black arse in the air and what looked like a dozen white arms and legs flashing around on the bed. There had only been three of them – a couple of freshers and a psychology tutor – but in 1963 getting just one into the cot had been a major operation. Kanan had turned round and said, ‘Ralphie, Ralphie, come and meet my milkmaids.’ They’d had to move on to the floor for lack of space.
A year ago, when they had met again in KL, embracing at the airport, Sancha and the kids forgotten, and then Christ knows what … an afternoon, a night and another day talking and on the piss together … Ralph had said, ‘Now for a couple of milkmaids, eh Kanan?’ Kanan had replied, bewildered, ‘But I am married, Ralph’ and for a moment they had looked into each other. Kanan added, ‘I must go home to Mariam, isn’t it?’ That look of his had been like a hot needle. Ralph had stared into his beer and said, ‘You don’t want to play up?’ His question dropped between them, a rock dropped into a chasm.
‘This will be two birds with one spear,’ he muttered to Sancha. Then he began swearing when he realized that Kanan’s telephone had gone unanswered for twenty rings.
10
The auntie with a nose-jewel had gone around grumbling after she had finished her prayers at five am and these grumbles had developed into a thunder storm of Tamil at six-thirty when Kanan displayed little appetite for his breakfast of chapatis.
‘Alcoholic,’ she said. And ‘Cow-eater,’ and having made the egregious accusation, she worked herself into a frenzy. She was a small, wiry woman past child-bearing age and she chewed betel, so that her lips were scarlet and her teeth dark brown. This gave her a frightening appearance like a mandrill’s, Kanan thought, when she was angry.
He sat at the table watching the chapati become soggy while auntie raged about his sins. They were numerous and had begun five years before his birth, when Kanan had refused to be conceived.
‘Five years! Five years your parents asked you to come, but oh, no! Mr Stubborn. You made your father carry the kavadi five years before you were ready. Mr Too Proud To Be Born! You didn’t care about how your mama suffered. You wanted to come out of a lotus. Then, one day you turned up, Mr Little God, for your mama.’
Kanan pulled off bits of the chapati and fed them to the cat, which was a vegetarian. The auntie had progressed to his era of Mr Everything Western (which included a truly delinquent stretch of Mr Listening To Elvis Presley) and had got on to Mr Lover Of Cow Murderers. Kanan fed the cat lime pickle, which made it sneeze and made auntie pause for a moment. Mr Kill Cat would be included in future, he supposed. The auntie finished in a hurry, since it was almost seven o’clock and time for Kanan to leave for the polyclinic.
‘Now your wife is in pain, pain, and you are Mr Run About Town, Mr Drinking All Night.’
‘Would you like to come with me to the polyclinic?’ Kanan asked.
‘Nephew,’ the auntie said, ‘you are a good boy at heart.’ She started to grumble again, quietly, while she collected the mushy packages of herbs she had already prepared to take to the polyclinic, in case Kanan should invite her. As a widow whose sons were plantation workers, she considered herself a servant in Kanan’s house. It had not occurred to her that she could ask him to take her to the polyclinic.
‘What have you done, nephew, to get only daughters?’ she muttered. ‘Why are you being punished?’
‘I like daughters,’ Kanan said.
The auntie gave him a sharp look and went off to change into her nose-jewel for visiting.
A bank occupied the first two storeys of the building which housed the polyclinic; the surgical theatre was on the third floor, and the labour, maternity and nursery wards were on the fourth, at the top of the building. From the footpath below passers-by could observe women leaning out of the top-floor windows, shouting at men in the street.
As Kanan was gingerly steering his car into a parking space he was distracted by the screams of a Chinese woman above, which were being returned by a Chinese man cooking at a mobile stall. The smell of frying garlic, which Kanan enjoyed, was hard to detect even at this early hour when the air was soft and easily imprinted with aromas. For, across the road from the polyclinic building sprawled the Kuala Lumpur Pasar Borong, the city’s wholesale market, and from it came the smell of rotten shrimps. Kanan’s auntie poured some rose-essence scent on her handkerchief and clapped it over her nose.
A Malay strolled past and she muttered, ‘Eater of rottenness’. The street cook made a rude gesture at the Chinese woman, who threw a pink plastic bag out the window at him. It landed at the Malay’s feet, bursting and splattering his high-heeled shoes with wet noodles. The Malay spun round and looked at Kanan and his auntie. The Chinese cook was giving minute attention to his frying vegetables and the Chinese woman had disappeared back inside the window.
The Malay advanced, glaring from his fouled shoes to Kanan. He was making the tiger noise of the angry Malay, Kanan noticed. ‘Please, sir, to tell you frankly, I have not thrown noodles,’ he said, but the Malay, who had now noticed a sliver of shallot on his trouser leg, was not paying attention.
He took Kanan by the throat and slapped his face. Kanan’s eyes watered and the Malay slapped his face again. The auntie screeched in Tamil – fortunately she could speak no other language – ‘Hit him, nephew! Hit the eater of rotten shrimps!’
Kanan stood still. The Malay spat and walked off.
The Chinese woman leaned out the window again and the street cook gave her a wave, shouting, ‘O.K., O.K. Pork. No prawn,’ and began tying up a new pink plastic bag of noodles for her.
There was no kitchen in the polyclinic and the ravenously hungry post-partum mothers relied on the street vendors for their meals.
All the way up in the lift Kanan’s auntie said ‘Mr Harmless. Mr Wouldn’t Protect Himself. Mr Scared Of Malays.’ It was known in family circles that Kanan had never beaten his wife. ‘Mr Harmless’ the auntie repeated.
‘The Gita says we must do our duty, not the duty of others. I am a lecturer in history. It is not my duty to hit Malays in the street and thereby start race riots,’ Kanan said and after this speech was silent.
His wife’s room was filled with the scent of bunches of tuberoses and the even stronger smell of his mother-in-law. She was a big, powerful woman and she liked big, powerful colours: this morning’s sari was watermelon pink, edged with gold. Two folds of mauve-brown blubber filled the space between the bottom of her lime-green choli and the top of her sari skirt.
‘Get out! Get out, boy!’ she shouted at Kanan when he put
his head through the door and smiled. She and three other women were clustered around his wife’s bed, performing rites of extreme, feminine delicacy. These mysteries were being observed by his two young daughters, seated together on a chair. The women whipped back the sheet over Mrs Kanan’s naked, puffed belly and flexed legs. Kanan withdrew, charmed to have stolen a look at her, for it would be months before he would be allowed to see her naked again. Even his mother, who referred in private to his mother-in-law as Maharanee-Ride-On-An-Elephant, would combine forces with her on this point of marital protocol. Already she had snatched his daughters from him, carrying them off for a month with the authority of supernatural wisdom which descends upon Indian females when they reach grandmotherhood.
The auntie slipped through into the room, carrying her bags of mushy herbs. Maharanee-Ride-On-An-Elephant said ‘Oooooh’ up and down the scale and Kanan heard his wife whimper from what they were doing to her.
He stood in the corridor, unsure of what he should do.
An Indian nurse with a long black plait came by. ‘Not allowed in?’ She was amused, as women always were by the irrelevance of men in these female strongholds. Then she became severe. ‘They are putting herbs on your wife? Doctor will be angry, la! He says it is a filthy practice which does not promote healing.’
‘The herbs are clean,’ Kanan said.
The nurse rolled her head at him. ‘I know. But doctor is modern.’ They understood each other perfectly. ‘Come, I will show you your daughter,’ she said.
A Hakka nurse, as neat as a doll, was guarding the nursery entrance, inside which twenty iron-framed cradles, half of them painted blue, half pink, were on show behind a plateglass window. Inside each was a bundle of brown- or yellowskinned, new-born baby wrapped in white flannel. With their squeezed-shut eyes and shiny black birth hair they looked more like kittens than human infants, Kanan thought.
‘Your name?’ the Hakka said.
Kanan told her and stared at his shoes, for the Hakka’s glance had been a frank invitation to see her later. She ran an orange-painted fingernail as long and sharp as a claw down her list.
‘You have daughter. Pity, la.’ Her smile now indicated that she, if given the opportunity, would do the right thing and would provide him with a son.
‘I have three daughters,’ Kanan said.
The Hakka decided he was unlucky, and shrugged. From the row of pink cradles at the back of the room she picked out a bundle and walked to the glass window, where she held the bundle up for a few moments for Kanan to admire. He swayed and his eyes half-closed, for he felt faint with joy. The baby was as pale as a lotus and a tiny hand, like a bud, was curled up against its mouth.
‘Nice,’ mouthed the nurse through the glass and took the bundle away again.
Kanan continued to stand at the window, transfixed by the glow from the new-born souls which he could see now shining around each one of the babies. Every tiny black head had a golden envelope of light. As his gaze wandered from one to the next he lost awareness of the limited world and floated upwards and hovered, looking down at the shimmering lights.
In Hakka the nurse quacked to another who had come by, ‘They have such big penises but they only get girls out of them’, and they giggled.
Kanan understood some Hakka from schooldays. He sighed. He had been celibate for two months already and it would be another three or more before his wife would receive him again. She was a simple girl, ten years his junior, and although he had the right to demand of her whatever he chose he would not frighten her by challenging her beliefs.
He returned to her room where Maharanee-Ride-On-An-Elephant said, ‘So! You have seen your daughter! One disaster after another, with you. The child is white!’
‘She is fair-skinned,’ Kanan agreed.
Seven pairs of black female eyes looked at him disapprovingly. The eighth pair, his wife’s, were lowered in shame, for although her husband was a partner in this misfortune, the blame was really hers.
‘You are pleased! You have no pity for these poor children!’ The Maharanee rushed to the two young girls on the chair and flung a protective arm around them, giving off as she did so a blast of body odour which made Kanan dizzy. ‘How will they find husbands, these poor babies, when they are dark-dark and little sister is pale-pale like buttermilk?’ she demanded. ‘You better start praying now. Millions in dowry you’ll have to pay. And how?’
‘I will not pay dowry,’ Kanan said. ‘I will educate them. Then they will not have to get married at all, if they don’t want to.’
The room filled with flapping coloured wings as the women raised their arms and their sari scarfs fluttered upwards.
‘Mr Modern Man!’ they shrieked at him. The abuse lasted for several minutes, then the mother-in-law took control of the floor again and jabbed her finger at Kanan.
‘You go to the cave tomorrow, boy. You pray to the Lord and get your hair cut and show you are a decent man who will bring up his family properly. Hair shaved!’
They let Kanan look at his wife and press the present he had brought her between her palms, but he was not allowed in nose-rubbing range. When they jostled him and auntie out of the room again Maharanee-Ride-On-An-Elephant was muttering about carrying the kavadi, a theme which auntie took up on the drive home.
Kanan said to her in English, ‘The Gita expressly warns us against excessive practices. Those who bear the kavadi are indulging in a vain and disgusting ritual which has been banned in Mother India since Independence, isn’t it? To tell you frankly, the Malaysian government allows and even encourages us Hindus to admire the kavadi-bearers because it understands our weakness for God and for self-abnegation and it knows that if we are free to express this in the most difficult ways we will have no energy left to do anything but tap rubber. Soon Thaipusam will be promoted abroad as a tourist attraction, so that the sophisticated will be appalled and the naive impressed while the government makes money and laughs.’
In Tamil, he said, ‘Yes, auntie.’
11
At dawn the sky and the South China Sea formed an unbroken pearl-coloured expanse, without horizon. The water, which could be deadly along the East Coast beaches for it had hidden undercurrents, especially strong at ebb tide, lay as smooth and lifeless as a sheet of tin and it was only by looking directly overhead that one could know that the silver-grey liquid had changed at some point to air. This was a miraculous place, no one understood why – though Mama would have an explanation, Minou knew – but something attracted the giant sea turtles to swim from far-off oceans to this one beach. In KL Minou had once asked a man at a cocktail party, who’d said he was studying turtles, what it was about this stretch of sand. ‘Maybe it is a species memory they have. Distant ancestors hatched there, perhaps fifty thousand years ago, and somehow the geography of the place is patterned into their brains.’ He’d pulled a silly face, adding ‘Lamarck, you know,’ (she didn’t) ‘is being rehabilitated. We understand very little, really.’
Bala, who was a good boy, had fixed up one of the beach shelters for Minou before she had sent him off in the car to sleep in Dungun, with instructions to return with her breakfast at 6.30 am. He’d arrived on the dot the morning before and would again this morning, in another hour. She lay propped on her elbows, looking at the straight wall of sea-and-sky, wishing she had told Bala to come earlier, for she was already hungry and there was nothing out there, nothing to wait for.
Then, it happened.
Minou started upright at what seemed at first an illusion, for with distances distorted the boat looked to be floating high up, in the sky. Then a pink thread defined the horizon, many kilometres back behind the dark blob, and she realized that the boat was real, and close in. She went rushing to the water’s edge. The sun, rising above the sea, shot forward a red-gold spear. Suddenly the whole expanse turned to molten metal, blinding her. She stood clenched against herself, feet glued into wet sand beneath the incoming tide, willing it to be their boat, for Mama and the boys to be
on board.
When she opened her eyes again she knew they were not. The air did not feel right, even now when the boat was close enough to hear the beat of its engine. Failure, again. Minou studied her feet, turned unfamiliarly pale beneath the cool lick of sea water. She had said to them, ‘He’ll only take me on the plane. But I’ll get you out, when I’ve escaped. Don’t let them take the house or we’ll lose contact.’ But they had taken it, of course, the bloodthirsty bumpkins. She still wrote every week to the old address in Cholon and in four years had received no letter in reply – so the house must have been requisitioned.
‘I was requisitioned, the first time,’ she’d told Adrian. ‘That is – oh, you don’t understand much, at twelve. Mama came to me and said “The military governor has asked for you”. We were living in Song Be then, before we moved to Cholon.’ Mama brewed herbs for my complexion – they were sickeningly bitter and I choked trying to drink them. She said, ‘Learn now to swallow bitterness. Everything changes. Your beauty is today a curse for you; it will become a blessing.’ The governor was kindly. When I had Quoc Quang he said, ‘A doll with a doll’. Then one dawn, with this same grey refracted light, when I was feeding Quoc Quang I looked out into the courtyard and saw the governor lying in his dressing gown under a durian tree with a note attached to the handle of a knife that stuck out of his back, like a flag.
‘I wrapped up Quoc Quang,’ she’d told Adrian, ‘put him on my hip and walked home to Mama. Fifteen kilometres. I wondered all the time if anyone had seen me leave and if I’d be arrested and questioned. Quoc Quang was hungry – something had happened to my milk – and I had to steal a banana for him and chew it up and poke it in his mouth.’
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