Ode to Broken Things (8 page)

Agni kissed Shapna’s cheek and muttered the usual Bengali farewell, “I’ll be back.” She turned to Jay almost as an afterthought. “My grandmother used to be the best storyteller in Malaysia. Did you know that?”

“I know. I heard the story of your mother’s fabled birth from her, a long time ago.”

Agni laughed. “Of course you’d know that one, Professor. Come, we’ll talk in the car.”

Shapna’s eyelids were closed, but fluttered uncontrollably as she grasped at Agni’s fingers with an unsteady hand. Agni raised her other hand and drew gentle fingers across her grand-mother’s eyes, pressing lightly, as if easing a child to sleep.

The heavy wrought iron doors swung closed behind her. Agni waited for the electronic surveillance system to blink its goodbye before manoeuvring the Mercedes into traffic. Winding down the window, she waved a frantic arm to stop a tiny green Satria from hurtling into her path as she took the blind curve from her grandmother’s long sloping driveway.

The woman in the Satria extended her middle finger, honking shrilly for emphasis.

“Stupid bitch,” muttered Agni.

Jay smiled. “The drivers are more aggressive than I re -member.”

But Agni wasn’t paying attention. She swerved into the lane inching towards a green-and-white toll plaza. Shifting gears, she guided the Mercedes through the touch-n-go lane, her face grimly silhouetted in the twilight.

Jay wondered about the call. Had Abhik summoned Agni to his side? She seemed annoyed. Well, too bad; he hadn’t asked her for this ride.

When she spoke, Agni’s voice was even. “After next week, this traffic should get better. But first, it will get a lot worse, especially on the eve of Deepavali as the whole country shuts down for the mass exodus. The holidays are a long nuisance every year, and the protests won’t help.”

He nodded. “It’s good timing for the protests – with so much focus on Deepavali and the Indians anyway?”

She didn’t look at him. “Any day is equally good to protest against injustice, Professor.”

He felt patronised, but she changed the topic. “My grandmother seemed very… agitated. I thought she would be happier to see you.”

“Did she even recognise me?”

“Maybe you’re right. She’s been very mellow lately, especially with the new medication, so I’m not sure what changed. I should call her doctor.”

He allowed a small silence before he said, “I am curious about your work.”

“My department maintains the system security of the Integrated Operations Network at the airport.”

“And that means…”

Agni turned to smile at him. The effect was dazzling. “Modern airports are connected by large information systems which connect a number of subsystems, like Point of Sales, Baggage Handling, and so on. The one at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport is called the
ION
, Integrated Operations Network.”

She looked at the rearview mirror briefly before zooming into the next lane without signalling. “My group maintains the security of the iOn so that the whole airport is connected. And, of course, working efficiently.”

“So you are an engineer?”

“Um, an electrical engineer with a Master’s in Computer Science. But on most days I’m the
jaga
, the security guard I mean, on standby all night in case something goes wrong.”

“It sounds like an interesting job.”

“It’s stressful, Professor, especially as the subsystem that oversees the airport’s security, and the surveillance systems, are my also responsibility. I have to be at the airport whenever I’m needed, to fix a software bug before it becomes a crisis. Even on Sundays.”

Jay’s tone was carefully playful. “Such odd hours probably don’t leave you with much time for socialising then?”

“Not much.” Agni switched on the radio to indicate that the conversation was over.

The traffic seemed dangerously dense. He recognised the curve at the old Parliament House, and the landscaped Lake Gardens. They followed a trail of picturesque Victorian lamp-shades until they came to a standstill in front of the historic Tudor building that was Selangor Club. On the left, a monstrous plastic recreation of a Venus flytrap gurgled with water in the middle of the honking traffic.

On the radio, a local scholar was saying,
People are turning to religion because they have no place in the political debate
.

Agni turned down the radio and muttered. “I should warn you – the street protests might get ugly in the next few days.”

He didn’t have time to ask what she meant before the car drew up smoothly at his hotel foyer. She acknowledged his goodbye with a quick wave, before zooming down the tree-lined boulevard past the man-made feng shui fountain and out of his sight.

Whatever had come over her, Agni wondered, to tell that professor about her mother’s death, and then insist on the details? He probably thought she was a bit of a lunatic, and she didn’t blame him a bit. He probably knew how it all happened, so why was he asking so many questions? She didn’t want his pity, or his nosy curiosity invading her life. Some scabs still hung tight to raw skin.

It felt good to drop him off at the hotel and head for the airport. He made Shapna more agitated than Agni had seen her grandmother after the stroke. She should find out why. The Professor made her uneasy too – she looked at her watch and sighed – but this job left her so tired that she couldn’t think straight.

He was more handsome than she had expected. The childhood pictures of an acned teenager didn’t do justice to the man with salt-and-pepper hair falling low on his nape.

Abhik had woken up alone in his bed with the uneasy memory of Agni leaving in the night, and now, by midday, the unease had mutated into a dull throb in his temples. The roads of Kuala Lumpur were back to normal, with the detritus of the Hindsight 2020 protest – brochures, torn hoardings, discarded shoes and bottles – swept to the sides of the streets. The traffic moved slowly along Jalan Sultan Ismail for the next two long miles (as far as he could see), with the cars aggressively negotiating their way up a bottlenecked ramp at the end.

Abhik hit the steering wheel in frustration. Some fucktard had decided that taking that ramp at an awkward angle and jamming up two lanes would be a great idea.

This was why he got out of Kuala Lumpur whenever he could, zipping past the hibiscus and ixoras of the north-south highway, building an easy camaraderie with other motorists flashing their lights in the fraternity of us-against-the-cops. Tailgating the slowpokes in the fast lane, he felt an intense companionship with those who valued the speed and power of these well-built machines, a bonding made even sweeter by the certainty of its end. Inevitably, a grinning face would lean forward from the shadow of the passenger seat of a passing vehicle to wave goodbye, or a casual arm would lift in a salute through the moonroof at the fork on the road, making the perfect exit.

If only all relationships in life were so simple. Abhik drummed absentmindedly on the steering wheel, thinking of the bond that was growing, challenging Agni’s silence. He read Agni’s text again and frowned.

He couldn’t trust her with an older man; she seemed to have a fetish for them. So Agni never had a father, but she didn’t have a mother either, and it wasn’t driving her into the arms of older lesbians, was it? Besides, being an orphan was different in this country where parenting was such a community activity. They both had grown up spending a lot of time at Pujobari, the Bengali property by the sea where, as children, they would wander off to the five acres of surrounding jungle with a bunch of kids. The jungle was dense with monkeys and snakes that trapped them slyly, sucking in a ball or pulling in a kite that refused to fly.

But, whenever they headed into forbidden territory, a nearby uncle would spot them out of the corner of his eye. Man, they were always looking out, even as they sat distracted, twirling beers. The children would be marched back and publicly humiliated as a warning to others but, even then, through all the tears, they understood that anyone in that gathering would have risked snakebites to keep the children safe. And they never forgot this sense of belonging. It still pulled him back to Pujobari year after year, now that it was his turn to watch out for someone else’s kid.

Their grandfathers, and others of that generation, had pooled together half a month’s pay to build on the five acres of land that became Pujobari. All the Bengali children grew up knowing that the dilapidated old colonial building was theirs to keep. He still remembered chasing small geese and chickens, cowering from the dogs, sitting at an open gutter and sucking on ice-lollies while some adult paid the ice-cream man who had phut-phutted into the property on an old motorcycle.

He and Agni had grown up together, but it was at Pujobari that they became more than friends. As teenagers they took turns volunteering for weekends of
Gotong Royong
, descending on the old building from as far away as Penang with rags and buckets and mops and ladders for a wild weekend of cleaning and camping, to be supervised by a married couple barely older than themselves.

The electricity blinked erratically, and the wind howled through the leaky rafters. Ignoring the bunk beds, the twenty of them had huddled in the central hall, playing cards until dawn, until a stormy wind through the bay windows blew out the candle. Then they watched the wind churning huge waves that crashed to the shore, bluish purple in the faint light.

Someone started a ghost story then, and Agni inched closer to Abhik, sharing his thin cotton sheet, leaning against the warmth of his chest. Sometime during the story, during the magic of the wailing night and the eerie drone of disembodied voices, Abhik had kissed her. It was a chaste kiss, mouths closed, a stupid kiss even. His first.

It was understood that the parents wanted such things to happen. A community gathering cut through the usual constraints of overnight gender mixing. It was only one kiss, but they both felt awkward. They started avoiding each other, just so that they wouldn’t have to speak about it. When he finally had the courage to bring it up, he only said that calling Agni
Bonu
, little sister, as he had been doing all his life, was a little silly.
From now on, we call each other Bondhu, like friend, OK?

OK
. One sound in the Bengali alphabet, the aspirated breath of a ‘d’, renamed their relationship.
Bondhu
. Or Bondhu, shortened to B. That was how it had been ever since. They didn’t go into that unfamiliar territory for a long time. No more kisses, chaste or otherwise, until Agni came back from Texas, alone.

A touch of a button and the window slid down silently, bringing in heat and cacophony. Abhik craned his neck to see the cause of the delay along Jalan Sultan Ismail, and cursed as an office boy on a fumigating motorcycle swung his way out of a certain collision. The stale odour from his body grazed Abhik’s face and hung, vaporous, in the air. The mirror of the
BMW
now reflected the golden spires of Hotel Shangri La.

“Bloody fool! You fucking
nyamuk
!” Abhik shouted and, as the boy turned nervously for a fleeting look, he added a few choice invectives in Hokkien.

But the curses were swallowed by the honking, hurtling crowd. The lone traffic policeman, with one sweep of his arm, parted the traffic in both directions.

Abhik wished he didn’t jump every time Agni called, but he couldn’t help himself. This old family friend – she had texted – since Professor Ghosh’s parents had known Abhik’s grandparents, would he please, please invite the guy home for the Deepavali party? They would all be in Port Dickson for Deepavali, but on Friday was the big Open House feast where everyone in the neighbourhood would be free to drop in at his house for a bite, Malaysian style.

He imagined mounds of greasy food. He imagined the slew of relatives who would ask him why he was still unmarried, and then try to ‘introduce’ a niece or a daughter, and he would be trapped completely, the ever-polite host. Although Agni spent most nights at his apartment now, she didn’t want to make their relationship public. Yet. It was still too new, with too many uneven edges.

As if all this wasn’t enough, he would have to entertain this American gatecrasher as well.

Right now he had more important things to think about than another national holiday celebrating gluttony and gossip. He was such a fool – but then, he could never say no to Agni. All she had to do was to pick up a phone and say “Hey B – take a break from that Excel spreadsheet life of yours and do me a favour, yah?” and he would agree.

He would call his grandparents and ask them to call this professor – he wrote on the back of his hand,
Ghosh
– and invite him formally. Meanwhile, Agni was probably escorting the old fart around town. The lights changed; he stepped on the accelerator with unwarranted savagery, taking a steep curve.

Yet, he reflected, he couldn’t even name what he wanted from Agni. He had tried, more than once, but quickly retreated, abashed. Like their first kiss; they were more comfortable leaving things unsaid.

Abhik floored the accelerator as the lights changed to amber ahead.

Even when she had been living with Greg, he couldn’t let her go. He was in England when he received that strange email from Agni, worded in a way that only he would understand as abnormal, something reflecting a deep unhappiness in what she had left unsaid. He flew immediately to visit her in Texas. He hadn’t expected it but he and Greg got along, with the easy bonhomie that men affect over a few drinks despite the difference in their ages. Then Greg yawned, pleaded the excuse of an early morning meeting, and left them to catch up with each other.

Abhik got straight to the point. “You ok?”

“I miss home,
lah
! Miserable, yah?”

“Yeah. But I don’t fit in at home either. Not that that’s a bad thing… it would be so boring to
not
stand out!”

Agni smiled at him, both remembering the child he had been, one hand always waving in the air to catch the teacher’s attention. “You always were into the limelight thing.”