Ode to Broken Things (9 page)

“Limelight?
Moi
?” He grinned. “Nah, London’s great, but Malaysia’s home, eh? Despite the fact that our government would prefer us to migrate.”

She smiled at him, “And you get prejudice everywhere in the world…”

“Except in our lovely country, it’s bloody enshrined in the constitution; no avenues for redress, sorry. And my family has been there for what, five generations? Maybe longer, if you take a closer look at my grandfather’s photographs.”

Abhik reached out to tickle Lucy, Greg’s dog, curled up in a resplendent sheen on the sofa. “And you know what really gets me? We are the post-1969 generation. We don’t care about the ‘69 riots because they didn’t happen to
us
. But, with all the Bumi nonsense, we’re all like – she’s Indian, he’s Chinese, she’s Malay. But there are so many Chindians and the Malchins? The all-mixed-ups, huh?”

“You mean mongrel breeds like me? Stop whining about the same things, OK? We should just accept that here we are, two screwed-up people who will never belong anywhere.”

“The globally promiscuous,” Abhik articulated with relish. “Belonging in many places and in none. Cheer up, B, you seem to be doing all right.” He inclined his head to the door that Greg had walked through.

“He’s okay, I guess.”

“Well, I’m glad that you are so exuberant about him, Bondhu!” Abhik leapt to his feet and knelt at Agni’s, startling her by grabbing her hands. “
But if he ever/ Breaks your heart/ Before the next
…” Abhik warbled, off-key.

Agni had only heard him sing onstage in Pujobari before,
Alo Amar Alo
or some other equally vapid choir tune indestructible under the assault of childish trilling. Even he heard the plaintive tone before she shook her hands free and clamped them on his mouth, begging him to stop caterwauling.

Abhik bit the hand over his mouth with a gentle, moist tug.

For Jay, the hotel room felt unbearably cramped after the spaciousness of Agni’s home. The curtains were cheerfully batik- inspired, but the view they framed of the bumper-to-bumper traffic inching towards Cheras and Petaling Jaya was depressing. Jay yanked the curtains shut, shrinking the room even more. He yawned loudly.

He fell on the bed on his back, focusing on the green arrow on the ceiling.
Kiblat
, it declared
,
pointing the faithful towards Mecca. If only life came with such clear directional signs.

He felt himself spiralling into a deep tired sleep, thoughts pinging into his mind from all directions, uncontrolled. Agnibina! What a ridiculous, fanciful name! Did Shanti want her child to set the world on fire and name her accordingly?

Agni was still an enigma. He wondered what to tell her: How much? When? Would it be better to make her trust him, slowly, so that the end was sweeter?

She clearly believed that her mother was a fairy-child. He too had listened to the tale, so many years ago; yes, wide-eyed, sitting in front of those dragons and phoenixes darting through the rosewood, his legs jiggling on the floor impatiently.

Jay’s tired eyes closed of their own accord as he heard Shapna’s voice in his ear, narrating that fabled story, merging into his dreams.

How do people deal with the loss of a child, surely the most terrible grief on earth?

When I lost my firstborn, a son, I couldn’t see it as a celebration of cosmic renewal:
Just as a body sheds its clothes, so the soul sheds its body to take on a new one… The soul is timeless, infinite.
What use was such Vedic wisdom in the face of such intolerable grief?

I think I lost my mind. I knew what I had to do, and I did it every day. I set the table for the child and fed his portrait the food and, with every morsel, I reiterated my grief. My home became a museum as his gaze peered out from every wall, a macabre wallpaper that covered every bit of space. I sang to the child, I scolded him – all with a passion that left me spent.

Until the day Shanti came out of the mists of a turbulent monsoon morning. This was at dawn, when I was visiting the grave of my child by the sea.

We, too, have our immaculate conceptions.

In Malay folklore, rich with the animism of treespirits and water-wizards and bolsterghosts, long before Islam and the suppression of things originally Malay, there were spirits called toyols. These little beings were stillborns, exhumed in the dead hours of the night, and brought back to life with incantations and the sacrificial blood of a pure white rooster. Emerging out of graveyards, they had to be whisked into genie bottles so that they could work their black magic, masked by the scent of incense to cover the smell of death.

I had heard about these beings, for in Malaya the spirits have as much presence as mortals. Houses are haunted, ghosts rise from graves shrouded in their deathcloth, and thieves still use black magic to put a spell on a home.

So when my Malay friend, Siti, offered me a toyol, I clutched at the lifeline.

“There are rules for this,” Siti warned, digging her nails deeply into my skin. “This one, it can really kill you.”

That is how I happened to be in the graveyard, at four o’clock in the morning, as the mist hung heavy and floated past the vision in a dreamworld. What else could I do but weep in front of the earthen mound of what I had carried in my womb for nine months that was no more?

But then, out of the mist, out of that lifeless mound, there was a sound. A single syllable that rose like a breath from the ground and froze my blood.

Ma.

Uttered the child. Then again, Ma.

The breath of the morning was so sweet. A hint of damp rain fell on my hands and I squinted at the moisture, willing it to be real so that the child would be, and I wouldn’t find myself waking in an empty bed, the bolster damp with tears. I looked up and there was a child, gazing at me, and I knew it was a girl-child, not my son, though in the mist they looked the same. I knew then that my son had come back in a different body, but he had come. He was there, and so I hugged the child to my parched breast, squeezing out a sound of pain.

Long before the Japanese pocket monsters and Pokémon trainers, long before all that, this country had its own pocket monsters, grown in avarice and often in hate, trained to be unleashed at their owner’s will. They had magic; they were magic – enough to bring a soul back from the dead.

And that was how Shanti came to be my child. I gave her a simple name for I, burdened with my own name, wanted my child to be lighter in life. I, Shapnasundari, as beautiful as a dream, named my daughter Shanti, a name that evoked the peace she brought into my life and into her new home.

My husband treated this new addition as he treated everything else in life – with a detached sense of inevitability. He reported to the police that a child had been found. Who she was no one knew or cared. In the poverty of war years, no one wished to reclaim this lost girl-child.

Shanti remained my magical child, one who was different and treated so. I had to make her special, especially as everyone knew she was an illegitimate part of that pure Brahmin tradition from which we sprang. So Shanti grew up playing on my heartstrings with her infant fingers, for she had given me back my life.

Jay woke up with a start. There was a gentle knocking on his door, and then a scratching sound as someone slid a white envelope under his door. He watched with tired disinterest, registering the padded feet retreating along the corridor. It had to be a message from Colonel S. Jay felt the ache in his limbs pulling him into a foetal curl in the comfortable bed. He wanted to fall deeply asleep and hoped there would be time for that, soon. But not yet.

He padded across the room and reached for the envelope. Tearing it open, he skimmed to an address in Ampang.

Clearly, he had been summoned.

The taxi driver seemed to have circled the periphery of Kuala Lumpur, trying to find the address on the piece of paper. Jay’s watch indicated it was six twenty in the evening, but his body was running on Boston time. The driver wound down the window as they asked yet another pedestrian for directions, and slowly circled the greenery dotted with random dwellings. This was an undeveloped part of Kuala Lumpur, deep in the heart of Ampang, where the residents were able to maintain their isolation.

The taxi driver was a young Indian Muslim who wavered between annoyance and apology. “
Aiyo
Boss, all this new,
lah
! See new flyover here, big hospital there, where got last time?”

Jay resigned himself to a fruitless evening, and sank into his seat as the sun disappeared as if doused. He took a deep breath, and focused on the writing on the crumpled piece of paper while the driver veered into a small lane, squeezing through the muddy path between ramshackle huts, and shouted the address again. He couldn’t believe his ears when the answer was affirmative.

Colonel S did not enjoy the sight of blood. He grimaced at the blood seeping through the wrinkles on his hands and down his wrist. Then, still holding the warm carcass, he looked into the darkening sky with relief. It had been a very hot day.

It was the eve of a national holiday, and the spirit of Deepavali festivity had crept into this little hut by the river, settling into the crevices of his careful life. He knew this city intimately and moved amongst the crowd like a fish in water, slipping silently and swiftly between people, stalls, carts; threading deftly between moving cars. With age had come fatigue, and now, with the media stories linking him to the dead model, he rarely moved out of his prescribed route of home-airport-home.

He had picked up the chicken from the many that clucked around the yard, pointlessly pirouetting in circles. He chose one both alive and uninjured, then, severed both arteries and trachea using a very sharp knife, chanting while allowing the blood to drain from the body. The animal had to be fully conscious until it bled to death, and he eyed the last twitches dispassionately, counting silently. It took eight seconds for the blood to drain out completely.

He squatted on his haunches. He gathered the chicken pieces into a battered aluminium bowl and turned on the tap, letting the blood run in rivulets into the drain. Blood dissolving into water. Even now, when he touched blood, his skin crawled like this. He squeezed the muscles of his forearm and shook off the droplets.

His body convulsed in a sharp spasm of coughing, and he felt the sudden wetness between his thighs. His body was getting old, beyond what he could control. He felt tired. He hoped Jay would come soon. He hoped Jay would not stay for too long.

“Yes?” A man peered out from the dark recesses of a room thick with inky fumes.

Jay briefly peered at the scrawl in his hand. “I’m looking for Colonel S.”

The man appraised Jay silently. “Yes?”

“Is he here?”

“Yes.”

It was hot in the dark courtyard. Jay felt he was being watched by more eyes than those of the taciturn man in front of him. He felt his ears getting warm as even the hibiscus plant seemed to shimmer with suppressed laughter.

He flashed his most genial smile. “My name is Jay Ghosh… I work with the Colonel.”

The taxi horn sounded an impatient
pop
, reminding him he still hadn’t paid. Jay reached for the wallet as the man turned to the foggy doorway and pointed, “There,” and walked away.

He turned to pay the amount on the taxi metre, and added a generous tip. Behind him he heard a familiar voice, the English words clearly enunciated with a slight trace of a British accent. “Ah, Jay, finally! I was beginning to think you were lost!”

Colonel S stood framed in the doorway, his features unmistakable despite the gloom surrounding him. Jay strode towards him, one arm slightly extended, and the old man said, “You’ll have to excuse me for being slightly bloody. I just killed my dinner.”

When Jay’s eyes adjusted to the dim interior, he realised that the inky smog originated from a small fire on a stove, on which a battered aluminium pot bubbled furiously. A naked bulb swung in a corner. It was the only light in the room.

Colonel S followed his eyes. “Medicine for my sore throat. Nasty inflammation. Sometimes when I eat too many chillies, or it rains too much, this happens.” His eyes twinkled. “I should accept that I am old now. The only thing that cures my throat is this medicine from the Chinaman shop. Come,” he crooked an imperative finger, “let’s talk.”

On a crude packet on the table Jay could make out the gnarled shapes of roots, bark, seeds and dried fruit, and something else. He leaned forward for a closer look and recoiled. The bamboo bees lay still in death, whole and perfectly preserved, down to the very fine hairs on each leg. He could even see a few tiny accompanying salt crystals in which they had been sealed. They were fairly large black bees, with gleaming metallic blue wings.

Jay had forgotten the exotic forms that medicine took in this part of the world. “What
is
this stuff?”

“The best cold medicine known to mankind. Perfected over centuries of an ancient civilisation.” Colonel S popped five bees, and the pack of mixed herbs into the boiling pot. “Now, while the water evaporates, let’s get down to business. Drink?”

Jay shook his head. “No, thanks.”

“C’mon – I insist. I have chilled beer.”

A man stepped out of the shadows and handed Jay a can of beer. Then he disappeared. Jay shook his head slightly as he popped the can open; the shadow man, the bees, Agni… he felt assaulted by this country, and slightly dizzy.

Colonel S handed him a folder, “You’ll start work tomorrow. It’s not like there is much else for you to do in Kuala Lumpur, eh?”

Jay looked at the Colonel and nodded briefly. He wanted to spend time with Agni at Pujobari over the Deepavali holidays, but he remained silent. He wondered how much he should tell Colonel S about Agni. Their mentor-student relationship had been predicated on revealing only what was absolutely necessary. He knew that the Colonel had known Shapna, but that was a long time ago.