Ode to Broken Things (4 page)

Agni reached up and gave him a tight hug. “I’ll talk to my grandmother soon. Really.”

Abhik held her face in his palms. “Sometimes I think you wish I would disappear from your life. Poof! Gone!”

“Not disappear, buddy. Just a little more space.”

“More space? I don’t even see you everyday, and then it’s like this, not even for an hour! What do you want from me, B?”

“I’m sorry.” She kissed him on the lips. “Just let
me
get used to
us
,” she said. “I’ll tell her soon, promise.”

Jay Ghosh felt the plane stop and then start again. Inside the dimmed interior of the business class cabin, he unclenched his fist and fought the urge to crane his head for a look. The boy next to him, perched at the window seat, was about eight years old, probably the scion of an important Chinese family in Malaysia and travelling as an unaccompanied minor. Jay found himself increasingly irritated by the ungentle bobbing of the child, who was looking out of the window with great excitement.

The flashing lights of the cars on the tarmac had distracted the child from the game on his screen. Now the control dangled on Jay’s side of the seat, and he glowered at the intrusion. Jay pressed the button to call for a whiskey.

An Asian stewardess of doll-like proportions stopped at his seat. Before Jay could say anything, the boy screeched, “Why got police car and ambulance also?”

The stewardess ignored him and told Jay, “We have a medical emergency on our hands. One of the passengers seems to be disoriented and shaking. Can I get you another drink, sir?”

Before Jay could ask for anything, the boy leaned across and shouted, “Got bomb on plane, ah?”

The stewardess managed to force a weak laugh before fleeing. Jay closed his eyes and imagined Manju smacking the child’s clammy hands off the armrest. She was the most unmaternal woman he knew.

Manjula Sharma… how had she come into his life? He thought of holding Manju in his arms again, but this time strangling her, watching the disbelief on her face. She would probably enjoy it, thinking it was some new sexual game. Pain was exciting; life had to be a tragedy and the constant pain of it kept her going.

“Every word, all nothing, day after day, it
hurts
.” That was how Manju spoke while wringing a new poem, the single page crumpling under her frustration in the early morning.

“So why don’t you do something else? Something not so painful?”

“Jaan, you will never understand!” she rolled her eyes.

Jay knew she wasn’t his type. He liked his women smooth and fair, who never bared their arms in the hot sun, never breastfed babies, and kept flat stomachs and pert breasts into middle age. When they made love Manju clutched at him with a needy ferocity. Their relationship toppled him from the parallel rails of the ordered life he first envisioned in Malaysia, while swatting flies on hot afternoons and listening to the horn blaring
Pam-pumpah-pah, Old newspaper, Paper lama, Pam-pah-pah-pah.

On such afternoons, his mother had warned:
This is what you will become, son, driving a sampah lorry to pick up old newspapers, if you don’t study hard
.

While his mother had droned on like humming flies he had stared out the window, waiting for
her,
the doctor’s wife, his first love (even before Shanti, if Shanti could be called a
love
; she had been an
obsession
), driving to the club in her maroon Jaguar SS 100 Roadster. Her arms were hidden in a snowy linen shirt billowing in the wind and her face shaded by a ridiculous hat flopping about like the ears of her canine companion. Her lips glistened to match her silk
cheongsam
, and right then, at twelve years of age, he had sworn to become a doctor so that he too would deserve a creature as wonderful as this.

Whenever Manju started to whine, Jay sucked noisily at his teeth, dislodging imaginary food particles so that he wouldn’t have to listen.

“I have never belonged here,” Manju would say. “I am still asked where home is for me. I could be with three other American writers at a reading. We could have gone to the same school even, but it’s so predictable; they want me to talk about
new ethnicities
or
brown bodies
.”

“That’s because you peddle it,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Your ethnicity. What else do you write about?”

“I peddle my ethnicity?” Manju glared at him.

“Look, I don’t understand it, but all this stuff about
others
and
exile
, and
dislocation
, and what’s that word… um, yeah,
anomie
! What the fuck does it even mean?”

“
Anomie
?”

“You get all this attention because you are different, but that insults you? It doesn’t make sense.” He drew in an annoyed breath, “That’s why it’s paid so badly too.”

Manju was calm. “If you think so little of my work, Jaan, why are you still with me?”

Jay shrugged and said nothing. She was
such
a bear to live with. Manju slept all day after working through the night, and was grumpy when awake. She was starting to publish by then, in small poetry magazines that barely paid enough to cover her meals, and she was teaching wherever she could, freshman composition if they wouldn’t let her teach poetry.

Then she published a chapbook of poetry. It received wonderful reviews but didn’t sell. She travelled around the country giving book readings to five or six people at a time; her biggest audience had numbered fourteen. Sitting in the darkened room while a spotlight shone on Manju, silhouetting her in a yellow cone and diminishing her sharp edges, Jay had been embarrassed.

When Haversham University started to woo him, he managed to get Manju a teaching position as part of the deal. He even found himself house hunting in picturesque suburbs with her. Then Manju discovered the press release that the university had sent out.

“The eminent scientist, Jayanta Ghosh; and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Andre Parks, will be joining the faculty in the fall,” she read out. “Twelve paragraphs of how wonderful you are, and what an honour it is for them. Oh wait! Here’s where I come in:
Also joining our teaching faculty is the poet, Manjula Sharma
… the fucking footnote.”

Jay shrugged, “It’s a job.”

“As if,” murmured Manju.

“Maybe we can renegotiate a better position next year.”

It had surprised him to see Manju gone the next morning. She had taken her things and left a note on the kitchen table
. I don’t think you or Haversham need me.
He had been sure she would call; this wasn’t the first time she had pulled this stunt in the two years they had been together. He had gone back to his lab, where his project on polymers in orthopaedic implants had consumed him. He analysed the samples from six resin lots of calcium, evaluating the stearate-free polyethylene for non-degradability. At least his work helped patients gain mobility, and decreased pain. He had no doubts about being gainfully employed.

Now, at this prestigious new university, he was in a different league. Untouchable.

He didn’t have the time to moan about his demons, unlike Manju, whose fears were starker. “My father killed himself when I was a teenager,” she had told him. “Suddenly, I came home and all these aunties were there around my mother. He had shopped around for doctors until he had enough sleeping pills to do it.”

“I’m sorry.” Jay didn’t know what to say. He wished she wouldn’t tell him so much.

“Yeah. My mother, well, she stayed here to give us a better life, you know. And she never let us forget it.”

Jay had looked at the floor and said, “My best friend killed herself too, back in Malaysia.”

“Really? How come you’ve never talked about this before?”

“What’s to talk about? She got pregnant, drowned, left a mongrel child.”

“What the fuck is a
mongrel child
?”

Jay shrugged. “Whatever. She killed herself on my birthday. The gift that keeps on giving, eh?”

“No!” said Manju, “that’s so fucking unbelievable.”

It was twelve days since Manju had left, and he wouldn’t be there when she came crawling back. He was eleven thousand kilometres away, his plane pulsating at the tarmac of Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, on his way to Malaysia. Jay looked out of the window at the bright lights of an airport that was totally unfamiliar, and wondered how different Kuala Lumpur would be, after an absence of more than thirty years. This short stop in Tokyo and he would be in the air again, then on Malaysian soil in eight hours.

He would meet Shanti’s daughter. He took out Agni’s email from his breast pocket, trying to straighten out the words.

Diffused sunlight lit up the cool meeting room. The tinted glass windows looking out to the skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur’s city centre offered a spectacular view from the twenty-eighth floor, but Agni barely looked up as she sat shuffling through sheafs of statistics. The clients, who were government representatives, had asked for a meeting to discuss the progress in upgrading the information systems infrastructure at the airport. They spread a chill in the small room.

Two of them sat opposite the eight on Agni’s team. A Malay woman engineer, who seemed to be in charge of the government representatives, was glowering with undisguised hostility. Maurice, Agni’s American boss, had worked in Asia for most of his life, and was used to having his terse orders followed by people who never called him by his first name. These clients, who looked unpleasantly irate, puzzled him.

As the angry young woman fiddled with her pen, Agni recognised the insignia of an American university on the ring she wore. Another spoon-fed Malay government scholar
,
she thought dismissively, with a scholarship for being born Malay.

“Therefore, we will provide the fewest possible different styles and types of interfacing elements. Also, the information broker must be flexible enough to accommodate subsystems…” Maurice stopped as the woman held up her hand.

“We have not approved any of the drafts of the programme yet.” The woman turned her ring agitatedly as she spoke. “But you have already submitted the final version for our review.”

There was a long pause. Then Maurice explained carefully, enunciating each word, “The deadlines for your written response had passed. We contacted your office many times, but there was no response from you, so we thought…”

Perhaps it was the shrug with which he delivered the statement, or the condescension in his tone that made the lawyer sit up and cut him off mid-sentence. The Haji with the crocheted cap on his head softly said, “You assume too much, Mr Vossestein.”

Agni concentrated on the way the sun gleamed on individual strands of Maurice’s blonde hair, setting it alight. The air crackled as his face gradually reddened and he straightened in his seat. Like a cougar on the Discovery Channel, she thought, spine taut with ferocity. He masked his sentiments under a smile and said jokingly, “We have had to
assume
much as we had a hard time finding your people.”

“Yes, yes. Our offices are filled with
hantus
, our ghosts, so you never find our people,” interrupted the woman. “We are not amused. You will have to try a lot harder Mr ah, Vossestein, ah, to justify your fees.”

She picked up her bag, the Ferragamo clasp flashing in golden outrage, and strode out. The other two collected their documents and followed.

There was a shocked silence until Maurice laughed loudly. “That one needs a boyfriend. A BIG one.”

The two men seated on either side of Agni erupted into laughter as she put her head into her hands and pulled her hair gently. Working with a pack of male chauvinist retards didn’t help her stress levels.

She could understand why Maurice was scrambling to save face in his team. The Malay woman was obviously inexperienced yet in such a position of authority; as a relative newcomer in Malaysia, Maurice was still fazed by situations of competence being replaced by racial entitlement.

In order to get the government contract, the group had to prepare statistics in multicolour: green for Malays, red for Chinese, purple for Indians, blue for foreigners. To prove to the Malaysian government that racial quotas for Malays would indeed be met. Even if the Malay staff in the team was largely clerical, those tall bars of green marched across the screens of the boardroom with the assurance that the sons of the soil were employable, very world-class indeed. It was only when one of the tall bars became a person and flounced out of a boardroom that everyone seemed struck by the reality of it, of race and colour determining the destiny of all Malaysians.

It took time for the ten thousand Indian protestors to swell to a mass of angry humanity. It would take the police more than five hours to clear downtown Kuala Lumpur, that too, only after the crowds were worn down by a barrage of tear gas and water cannons which sprayed potent chemical-laced jets into the crowd.

The crowd built up slowly, gathering in temples smelling of milk souring in the midday sun and ribbons of jasmine. Lunch-time idlers in the shade of the Petronas Twin Towers, holding out rice in banana leaf cones, pointing at the curries of beef and squid and beans and lentils, murmured to each other, only slightly alarmed by the growing crowd. The ice-
kacang
seller looked up, spooning condensed milk over the shaved ice and sweet beans, and briefly wondered whether to abandon his makeshift stall.

The protestors, defying three days of official warnings, had mobilised an unprecedented number of people, especially young Indian men, incensed at the lack of job and educational opportunities. They had finally mobilised the anger against the growing arrogance of a Master Race of Malays.

Without any warning, the first plume of tear gas whizzed towards the lrt station. There were distant screams, running hordes, and then the fire trucks aimed the water jets at the panicked mass. The man holding a tall banner protesting the destruction of Hindu temples doubled-up in resistance to the jet, mooning the police, but he soon fell to the floor. A sulphurous smoke made everything opaque. The protestors scrambled for their handkerchiefs, and covered their mouths while fleeing. Some people vomited into the bushes, others rubbed their eyes. In a clearing still untouched by the smoke, groups of young men were being handcuffed to each other, their arms raised in defiance. Slogan-shouters hurled water bottles and stones, then flower pots and shoes at the advancing police, before being beaten up and dragged into police trucks.