Ode to Broken Things (16 page)

Maheshbabu kept his sobriety and his dignity through the war years with extraordinary courage. But then, he was not married to Shapna.

Shapna humiliated Nikhil by her affair with Maheshbabu. She behaved like a slut. There was no way to condone that; even though the rot in their marriage, the lack of completion between Nikhil and Shapna, had started with the child that neither could bury, the affair was still unforgivable.

Mridula traced the high intelligent foreheads of the two boys in the picture, remembering Maheshbabu after many years. Shapna had almost destroyed Maheshbabu too.

Mridula sneezed delicately, drawing her
sari pallu
over her shoulder as she watched Ranjan and Jay talking. Jay had been such a tortured teenager. His father and Shapna, carrying on like that, so shamelessly, so openly! She was glad that life had treated him well. Jay’s mother, Ila, had borne much, too much for a woman alone in a foreign land to be able to bear.

There was no doubt that Maheshbabu had been a good man. It was Maheshbabu who would appear with offerings from grateful patients, usually Japanese officers, while Nikhil wasted time writing poetry through the war years. Mridula still remembered Nikhil’s poem about Chinatown, grim and silent, the deathly hush over Kuala Lumpur, the Chinese eyes through the grilled bars of shophouses.

Mridula looked down at her hands; the memories were so disturbing that she had torn the petals of a marigold to shreds and was now twisting the pliant stem around her finger, like a green ring.

Of course Shapna had been traumatised by the death of her child, she had to give her that. But there had been a world war and a dead child, hah, what was a dead child after all, when the radio wheezed with numbers of the slain? Nikhil was no help. First he blamed himself, then Shapna, for the curse of the malformed child. She remembered the nurse who brought the baby to them saying,
I am not sure how to tell you this. See this banana shape? The baby’s head stopped developing at three months, and the spine – it stops here, and then it is all open, only three-fourths formed…

Then the nurses had all looked at what they called the
specimen,
and she heard the nurse whisper say,
It’s all for the best, for everything that happens is destined by Allah
. Nikhil stormed out of the room.

Shapna’s best friend, that Malay woman… was it Siti? Yes, Siti, had shouted
Cukuplah!
and hushed them all. She healed Shapna’s body with heated stones and tight cloth wraps, plastered her milk with
jamus
that only she knew grew where, stopping the floods, suturing wounds, making her whole. Siti was the only one who dared to come near Shapna as she howled through the nights like a demented amputee, searching for her phantom child, convinced that she had left him somewhere, alone. The others were no one to her; she barely recognised even her husband then.

All war stories are about death and loss. Shapna should not have used that trauma to become so pitiful that a man like Maheshbabu, exemplary in so many ways, left his family for her. It was wrong that Ila, who had agonised about losing Maheshbabu to the war – there were so many ways to die, so sudden and all without warning – had lost Maheshbabu to another woman.

Then there was Maheshbabu’s inexplicable decision to take Ila and his two boys to America. No one knew why he had chosen to do that so suddenly. Mridula had once examined Agni’s sleeping face and had thought she had seen the reason why, but she held her peace. The truth could be unbearable.

Mridula returned the picture to Jay who looked startled at the interruption. “Your parents,” she said softly, “were exceptional people and our
very
good friends.” She hugged him tight. “If there is anything we can do for you while you are here, you must, absolutely must, let us know.”

Watching Mridula’s
sari
disappearing into the crowds, Jay realised how tired he was getting of the fractious people around him.

One man was loudly explaining how a minister’s Tibetan mistress had been executed by the Malaysian military. Ranjan was simultaneously arguing, on a parallel track, that the Arabs were the most successful colonisers in the history of the world, and had stripped native art forms, rituals, and dressing styles in Malaysia, demanding a loyalty that left no room for the rich layers of the original life. Another man pointed out that all new recruits in any religion, hollowed from the core of their history, found an identity in proving their zeal for their god.

He didn’t follow their logic. The country did not appear to be in such a state of heightened lawlessness to him. On the streets, he had seen the covered Muslim women with colourful head-scarves that matched their clothes, not the dark and dour faces of the ninja women that these men were complaining about.

He decided he needed a break from paranoid geriatrics.

He found Agni with Abhik in the wet kitchen. This space, tucked into the back of the house behind the western-style kitchen, was not air-conditioned; it was stifling in the accumulated heat of hot
vadas
being fried. Abhik towered over the catering staff, milling around in their maroon and white uniforms, while Agni unravelled rubber bands from plastic bags holding a variety of sloppy looking sauces. Traces of oily spices pockmarked the marble-topped table, and bits of newspaper were crumpled in random disarray.

“I give up,” Agni said. As she raised her hand to wipe off a sheen of sweat, she left a trail of glittering oil. “Shit. Shit!” she shouted, staring at her hands.

Abhik reached over her head for the kitchen towel. Tilting her forehead with his clean hand, he gently wiped away the smear. “Good as new,” he pronounced, “now get back to work, woman; no more excuses.”

She stuck her tongue out at him but quickly composed herself as Mridula appeared. “Mriduladida!” howled Agni, “I think I liked it better when you did all the cooking.” She switched to a loud Bengali whisper, “These Curries Corner people are absolutely stupid. They need so much help, and work so slowly; then the packets either collapse when you open them, or they burst. This is a stupid, stupid, waste of my time.”

“Cheer up, B. We are lucky to have them today, you know that!” said Abhik. He and Agni both noticed Jay at the doorway at the same time.

“Agni,” said Jay, “looks like you could do with some help?”

Agni’s face brightened, but Mridula was already bustling towards her guest. “Now, Jayanta, you have come after many years; don’t waste your time in here. Let me introduce you to someone who knew your parents, a very dear friend of mine. She has been waiting to meet you.”

Jay half-turned to see Agni, who, not expecting this act of intimacy to be noticed, ran a deliberate finger down Abhik’s groin, leaving a trail of oil. Abhik threw the towel at her and looked down at himself, horrified.

Jay frowned. The situation looked complicated.

“You are working in Nilai tomorrow!” Mridula was saying, “But you can’t! You have to come to Port Dickson with us. It has been so many years!”

Jay shrugged, “I want to go, but it’s work. Maybe some other time.”

“It’s an annual event,” said the woman who had known his mother. “You
have
to come.”

“Stop harassing the man,” Ranjan barked from the corner of the room. “He has important work to do, unlike the rest of us. And the rest of us, well… we are all very hungry!”

Mridula bustled out, but not before glaring at her husband. Jay wandered through the large rooms, catching snippets of conversation, mostly about the politics related to the recent street protests. He stopped at the staircase lined with old photographs, and climbed up two steps to peer closely at the familiar patrician figure.

The sepia-tint had been manually enhanced so that the face had an unnatural pink glow, while the suit had been coloured a bright navy blue. In his right hand the man held a wooden cane, decorated with a glint-eyed hawk head.

Yes. This was definitely Nikhil, Shapna’s cuckolded husband. He felt that red-hot hatred flare up after many years. He was amazed that the sight of Shapna hadn’t brought on the same intensity of emotion that a picture of her husband had.

There was a burst of loud laughter, and he saw a ring of women sitting under the landing under the stairs. A white-haired woman was saying, “
Tchah
, this grandchild of mine, of course I worry about her! In our time we showed our curves, but we were elegant, hah, flaunting not much skin, but the promise of it, eh?”

“Oh, I’ve seen
your
pictures! In your time, Nenek,” a young women countered, “you all squeezed into bras a size too tight, so that everything spilled out from the transparent
kebayas
yah? Stylo-Milo
lah
you all!” She squeezed her grandmother.

“Such a silly child!” The older woman sighed, “And so naughty! I wouldn’t put up with it if it were anyone else!” Her face softened as all the women surrounding her laughed.

Jay turned back to the pictures; he also recognised the old photographs of Ranjan’s grandfather and grandmother on the wall. The grandfather was distinguished by a large turban and looked very solemn. His wife, Ranjan’s grandmother, had been born in Singapore, and wore a
sari
with a
kebaya
top, the
sari
material bunched around her middle.

Ranjan had started his career in films, so there were frames from the movies lining the stairway. Photographs of the dream merchants of that time, including one from the first Malay movie,
Laila Majnum
, were hung in order. Jay had been a boy of five then, and some of his earliest childhood memories were of the doctor’s quarters where his parents had lived for six months, separated from the teeming humanity of the labourers’ quarters by a thin wall. This was where the magic of the talking movies first entered his life.

He heard Ranjan’s wheelchair approaching, and walked down the steps towards the older man. Ranjan pointed at the picture Jay had been looking at. “I was assisting the Indian film director, Rajhans, in Malaya. Do you remember? Anything from that time?”

Jay spoke rapidly as the memories came flooding back; Ranjan had taken Jay for a shoot one day, and the set was within a large bungalow. When the recording session was on, they had to cover the whole house with large gunnysacks to keep the noise out. It was all very entertaining. Suddenly in the middle of an intense dialogue there would be the ding-ding-ding of the ice-cream man, so they would have to stop. As soon as they started again, an aeroplane would fly past and the director would groan loudly, adding to the noise.

There were lots of songs and dances. These later proved to be a big hit when broadcast on radio but, on the day Jay had gone for the shooting, it seemed more trouble than it was worth. All the songs had to be recorded in one take so, in addition to the incidental noises that disrupted the schedule, any slight mistake by the singer or musicians also brought the session to a halt. The music was performed by violinists, guitarists, and keyboardists, as well as a lone
tabla
player, so he sat impatiently through a number of false starts. Now, dredging from the depths of this memory, he recited a Malay
pantun
hesitantly.

Ranjan clapped the younger man on the back and laughed uproariously. “You probably remember our leading lady, the one with the hibiscus blooms in her hair?”

Jay remembered a lot more. Her tight bustier had left her shoulders bare, and her sarong was wound over a lush body. She was very coy with her co-star, who wooed her with the Malay
pantun
. Jay laughed, “I can’t remember all the words any more; but I remember that next to her hibiscus blossoms and her bustier, the poor hero looked quite flat!”

“Yes,” Ranjan grew pensive. “That was the golden age of our cinema. This film made good money. People flocked to pay their forty cents and see it.”

“So, how long has your family been in Malaya? Looks like your family was here way before Malaya became Malaysia?”

Ranjan pointed at a picture of his great grandfather, standing alone in the frame. “My great grandfather was quite a character. He knifed a friend during a heated argument and ended up in Singapore as a convict, sometime around 1860. Indian convict labour laid the foundations of the roads to Singapore, you know. You can still see the building at the junction of Bras Basah Road and Bencoolen Street. It was a jail once. Almost hidden by palm trees, but still there.”

He was distracted by the sound of swift feet as Agni came around the corner. “I’m
hungry
, Ranjandadu,” she announced. “Shall we eat now?” She turned to Jay, “The food is being served outside, Professor; please join us.”

“Okay, little mother, let’s go.” Ranjan patted Agni’s arm as she steered the wheelchair towards the large French windows. Jay noted their easy relationship. They weren’t related by blood, but the kinship in their modes of address to each other spoke volumes about the strength of their ties.

The highway to Ampang was relatively empty, and it didn’t surprise Colonel S to be back home in thirty minutes. He stood by the hibiscus tree in the courtyard, drinking in the fresh air on this beautiful day as the air sparkled in bright sunshine. He could see the dark clouds already building up on the far horizon though; the rain would wash away this brightness in the afternoon.

So Jay was celebrating a Deepavali Open House right now, in a home filled with happy Malaysians drinking and eating and laughing together… while this country fell apart.

Colonel S believed that he was the only person in this blighted country who cared in any way. That he was the last Malay patriot, refusing to partake in a celebration that honoured multitudes of copulating deities, in every shape and form, male and female, lion and elephant and fish… It was all so
wrong
.

There was no God but One God, and Allah was without form or gender.

This country was led by a motley crew of wastrels and pimps. It was necessary to periodically remind the infidels that there could be only one real religion in this world, and it was strong. That Malay hospitality for the migrant races shouldn’t be taken for granted by the Chinese and Indians; it didn’t mean they could do as they pleased in this country. If they didn’t like the Malay supremacy,
balik Cina, balik kampong, lah
, just send them back to their own ancestral homes.