Ode to Broken Things (10 page)

Colonel S was looking at him closely. “We’re going to be running important tests soon,” he explained, “A dry run, so to speak. I need you to start work immediately.”

“Tests? How soon?”

Colonel S walked away to check the broth on the fire. “I’ll let you know. Soon. You’ll know when it happens.” He looked at Jay, “Is there a problem?”

“No… I was taken by surprise, since it’s a national holiday. Deepavali’s in a few days, right?”

“Right. Since Deepavali’s not a national holiday in Boston, I didn’t think you’d mind.” The Colonel smiled, “Kuala Lumpur’s a madhouse now. All the flights are sold out and even the buses, especially the double-deckers with hostess service, get sold out months in advance. Deepavali’s the best time to work, this city empties out.”

“I still don’t understand the rush. Why did you need me here so urgently?”

“Ah, my impatient friend, one hopes all will be revealed tomorrow. Or the day after,” Colonel S stirred the liquid again with the long iron spoon, “and it will be amazing! We’ve been through much, my friend; trust me on this.”

Jay took a sip of beer. He knew the old man too well to probe any further.

Colonel S peered through the steam, and watched the water hissing. He turned back to Jay. “I am very grateful you came… you were always the best man on my team. It’ll be like the old days, eh?”

Carefully tipping out the shiny rich black broth, Colonel S deeply inhaled its bittersharp freshness. Like raisins put into water, the bees had swollen up beautifully to full size, and each bee was as large as his thumb, gleaming black and absolutely whole and perfect, the long wings glistening metallic blue. Jay’s eyes widened in shock. He knew from his childhood that the Chinese ate the bile of bear, and pickled lizard as medicine, but surely, there was some concept of halal in the Colonel’s meat? Colonel S carefully put the broth into a cup and placed it on a low coffee table in front of Jay.

“Ah, my mead!” he beamed, “My friend, I would offer you some, but there is only one portion here to cure my cough, and it has a ghastly taste. I can offer you another beer though. Or would you prefer something else?”

“Nothing, thank you. I really should get back to my hotel.” He found himself making excuses. “I’m really jet-lagged, and I still have to call some people – some old friends of my parents.”

“Ah, I’m impressed that you have maintained your ties over time and distance! I won’t detain you then. But I was hoping you would stay for dinner? It has been a long time.”

Jay stood up and reached out for the slim folder. “I’ll have a look at this immediately. We’ll have dinner some other time… I wanted to meet you tonight and thank you personally for, um, arranging this trip to Malaysia. I appreciate this opportunity…” he trailed off.

“Don’t thank me with your words, my friend; there will be work enough later,” Colonel S said. “I don’t have to tell you how important the folder is, eh, some military work, that kind of thing. Let me at least give you a ride to this hotel of yours. It’s impossible to get a taxi to come in here with all the trouble on the streets! Let me have my man drive you back safely with this folder, and we will talk again soon.”

He enveloped Jay in a half hug. Then, stepping slightly back, he said, “I am so glad to see you. Welcome back!”

Agni’s eyes burned from checking and rechecking the subsystems. Blurry data still scrolled across multiple screens. When the call came in, she automatically picked up the phone, leaned back, and shut her eyes tight.

It was Jay. Of course, it was the Professor.

She
had
been a bit rude to him yesterday, but the memory of Shapna’s distress made her head pulse at his cheery, “Hul-lo, is this a bad time to call?”

She forced her voice to remain even. “No, it’s fine. You caught me by surprise, that’s all. How are you? Jet-lagged?”

“No, I’m good now. Um, I was hoping you would have time to have some coffee with me today? I have to start work soon, at this research lab in Nilai, but I wanted to talk to you again. For old time’s sake and, um, we didn’t really get to talk much… about anything…”

She heard the nervousness in his voice. Maybe he was always like that; or there was something important he wanted to say. She wondered whether to tell him that he was invited to Abhik’s house tomorrow and she could talk to him there. But that would be such a brush-off. Besides, it would be impossible to ask him any personal questions about her mother or father in that large gathering.

It would be better to find out what he wanted from her, and get that over and done with. And get out of this office at the same time. She looked at her watch, “Had lunch yet?”

“Nope. I slept through breakfast too.”

“Join me for a quick lunch then? I have to pick up a blouse from my tailor at Semua House, and I was planning to eat at the hawker stalls around there. If you don’t mind, that is?”

“Sounds great.”

“I have to warn you… the place will be crawling with people.”

“I spent my childhood here, remember?”

She paused briefly. “Right. How about I pick you up from your hotel lobby in about twenty minutes? I’m not very far.”

She had dark patches under her eyes. Jay couldn’t decide whether it was due to the liberal amounts of
kohl
she used, or a late night. Agni sat framed by palms in a deep winged armchair as the blue expanse of the swimming pool stretched out behind her. One foot idly circled the air while she turned the page of a magazine. Today, Jay noticed with pleasure, she was in tailored pants with a cropped top that played peek-a-boo with her bare midriff. A light blue jacket was slung casually on the armrest.

Clearly the Cool Coquette.

“Thanks for stopping by. I’m afraid I’m being a nuisance but you are very kind.”

Agni shook her head. “It’s ok. I had an awful meeting in the morning and it’s good to get away from the post-mortem.” She fished out a ticket, and led the way across the plush carpeting of the hotel’s lobby and outside to the silver Mercedes. As she draped herself over the valet’s podium to give him a tip, she said something to the young attendant in Malay that caused him to wink cheekily at her. Jay stood there, catching a phrase or two, but missing the message.

“Remember any Malay?” Agni asked.

He smiled ruefully, “
Sikit, Sikit
.”

She smiled, “Maybe it will come back. You’ll be fine with English, of course.”

“I thought so, but a receptionist yesterday was monolingual. She had to call someone else.”

He lowered himself into the car, and Agni sighed. Déjà vu. So often, with Greg, she had felt that she was constantly translating. Greg had lived in Malaysia for a little over a year, but the alliances, especially the overt politeness and hidden resentments, never failed to shock him when he encountered them. And she had wearied of playing the interpreter of the inexplicable. Greg thought he needed to adjudicate in the Malaysian squabbling, and he was always wrong, until the Malaysians had nicknamed him a
Blur Sotong
, a squid with desperately waving tentacles that blurred the reality around him.

Agni looked obliquely at this other American seated next to her. She hoped Jay wouldn’t need too much hand-holding before he left. He was undoubtedly a dear friend of her moth-er’s, but she didn’t have time to play tourist guide.

Hindi music blared from the shops in Jalan Masjid India. It was a cacophony of similar sounds with throbbing basses. Jay couldn’t hear any Malay music.

He stopped to listen to the familiar Hindi tunes in disbelief. Agni laughed. “
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai
was the youth anthem in this country,” she explained. “Last Hari Raya, the government had to ask the TV stations to show Malay movies on a Muslim holiday, instead of all these Hindi movies that are so popular. The Malay kids are crazy about Bollywood, and especially King Khan!”

While Agni was whisked up in an ancient elevator, Jay browsed the colourful pavement displays that hawked everything from prayer caps to male potency pills. She soon reappeared, triumphantly holding a thin plastic bag, exulting at her success in getting her blouse from the tailor without having to make repeated trips.

“Shall we?” she gestured with her head towards an area heavy with the aroma of spices.

The hawker stalls jostled each other in congested congeniality. They ordered some
lobak
and
popiah
from a Chinese stall, and then munched on
satay
and
murtabak
from the Malay stall next door. Jay watched Agni as she reached for her glass of Kopi-O and stirred the concoction with a long metal spoon. Then she picked up a flimsy pink plastic straw, put a finger over the top, filled it with liquid from her glass, and turned the straw over to let the liquid run out into the road.

A dim memory ran through his head. “That’s really not very hygienic, you know,” he finally commented. “If the straw is dirty, cleaning the inside of it with your coffee doesn’t help. The germs are probably on the outside.”

“Thanks for the lecture, Prof.” Agni screwed up her nose at him. “It’s a ritual. I doubt we Malaysians drink this stuff any other way.”

“Ritual, huh? Like the way you just opened a new cigarette pack and turned one upside down? I was wondering about that.”

Agni grinned. “Are you watching me too closely, Prof?”

He felt his ears grow hot. They ate quietly for a while, Jay reaching for the dimpled pink napkins. The heat and the spice seemed to gently fry his head. Agni didn’t seem affected at all, except for a slight sheen of sweat on her upper lip.

“So, tell me something about my mother.”

Jay had to collect his thoughts. “Shanti? We were very good friends.”

Agni looked at him steadily. “I am not stupid, Professor. You agitated my grandmother more than anyone else she has seen since the stroke.”

He was disarmed by her directness, veiling a hint of steel. He would have to tread carefully. This was Shapna’s granddaughter, and Shapna had been a wounded tigress in defending her clan.

“I remind her of Shanti. And Shanti caused her a great deal of pain. Isn’t that enough reason?”

It felt childish, the way he had to stare her down. Finally she looked away and laughed self-consciously, “Maybe I’m getting carried away, but I grew up with the whispered secrets that were mine by heritage. The heritage of the bastard child… I was hoping you would tell me something I didn’t already know.”

“Oh come on…
bastard
child?”

“Surely you know my father was Malay? My birth came as a death sentence to my mother. You know this; you were there.”

He stirred uncomfortably. How much did she know?
“I thought you said your father was Sylheti.”

“Pay attention, Prof. I said he was the man my mother married.” A slight smile took away the sting of her words. “Nobody ever talks to me about my real father, but I know he was Malay. I know that my grandmother went on about the shame of being a second wife, of having to embrace Islam in order to marry a Muslim in this country.
We will not have any rights over your dead body; why don’t you just kill yourself now?
– that kind of thing. So my mother did.”

“And how can you know this? You were a baby when your mother died.”

She rolled her eyes. “A cousin first said something. Then when I was thirteen, and thought I was falling in love with a Bengali boy, there were whispers at Pujobari designed to be overheard by the bastard child… that sort of thing.”

“Did you ever look for your father?”

“No. His name wasn’t even spat out in anger in my family. Only his race and religion mattered; everything else is immaterial.” Agni stirred her drink gently, not looking up. “I think my father was Zainal. His wife, Siti, was my grandmother’s best friend.”

He felt his fingers tracing agitated circles under the table as he searched for ways to deal with such a frontal assault.

Agni continued, “So. No more half-truths. I want you to tell me about my father, Professor,” she urged. “No one ever talks about him. At least you have been asking me questions about my mother… no one does that. I want to know what my father was like.”

Her hair shielded her face as she drank. It was impossible to see the expression on her face.

“How long have you known this?” he asked.

“Actually, I think I always suspected it. All the whispering in Pujobari… He must have been much older?”

“Thirty-three years older than Shanti.”

He almost heard Agni calculating rapidly.

“So what did she see in him?” Agni asked.

Where do I begin
? “Zainal was a great hero… an amazing man,” Jay said simply. “When he told his stories, it was hard not to fall in love with him.”

Even he, Jay told Agni, had been a little in love with Zainal. As a boy, Jay hero-worshipped Zainal through the Emergency Years.

The Malayan Emergency lasted twelve long years. All over Malaysia, in the evenings, families would switch off lights and cower on the floors. The signal to do so would not be the sirens of war, but the dull thud of boots indicating the communists, most of them Chinese, were lurking in the dark. As they listened on the radio to the dramatic success of communism in China, the communists in Malaya set themselves up and grew stronger in the jungles of the neighbourhood.

Zainal was one of the first to volunteer to fight the communists. Twelve years worth of stories of Zainal’s heroism, as both Shanti and Jay grew up. Zainal was a tall man and, illuminated by the small light in the post-dinner storytelling sessions, his shadow would loom even larger on the wall. His stories would flow into the night, sometimes stretching into dawn. During the years of the Emergency, they heard many stories of Zainal running into large bandit camps and exchanging bursts of gunfire in the thick jungle. But his most dramatic story, by far, was the capture of the Kajang Terror.

The Kajang Terror prowled the district of Selangor but, despite the reward of twenty-five thousand on his head, the people of the villages and
kampung
s in his area feared him. He was a legend. He operated around Sungei Besi, Serdang, and the Kuala Langat Forest Reserve, but his favourite areas were around Kajang and Banting, and the jungle swamps in between these two towns. He massacred the troops and the police who got in his way, for he had many thousands of Min Yuen and other informers working for him.