Ode to Broken Things (2 page)

“Okay, but how is he getting in?”

“No idea.”

“I’m going to the airport, Hani. That old man doesn’t look much like a problem but no point in taking chances,
kan
?”

“I’ll come with you,” Rohani reached for her handbag.

“Don’t bother. I also need to check out all the strange employee clearances.” She stretched backwards, letting the padded chair slide over her spine.

Rohani put the last morsel in her mouth, and tossed the packet into the bin. “
Aiyah
, I hope this doesn’t spoil my holidays again. My mother will kill me if I don’t go home for my niece’s first birthday.”

Agni gave her a wan smile before switching off the tapes.

Colonel S looked at his watch. The hands had a nice symmetry at ten-ten; it was almost time.

It had been two months since the Tibetan woman had been blown up in the fields, and the media frenzy was dying down. The French press published pictures of the Beauty and the Princeling, but the Malaysian press collectively ignored all ‘rumours’. Only the bodyguards were taken into custody. It was unlikely that even the junior minister would be touched, especially as he made it a point to appear at press conferences with his supportive wife and that stony-faced teenage daughter.

Colonel S had come close to danger. He had been archly mentioned in a couple of early news reports, and even issued a press statement, but now, only the online bloggers were still interested in him. Thankfully, no one paid much attention to the bloggers. Those that got too smart could be locked up forever without a trial under the Internal Security Act, and the government made sure to flex that muscle as a reminder. However, the pressure was on. Too many people wanted to see him make a mistake.

Colonel S had to move fast if the master plan was to work. The next event had to be executed seamlessly, at this airport, in less than a week’s time. His experience made him wary of delegating any real responsibility. He trusted only a few people, not even friends.
Gigi dengan lidah ada kala bergigit juga… The teeth too, sometimes bite the tongue
. Especially in a crisis.

As the young woman moved into his line of vision, his brow furrowed. He had seen her before, this thin girl with the crinkled hair. He had an unerring memory for faces. Yes. It was the same girl who had passionately kissed a white man goodbye – when was it, ten months ago? – then followed the man with hungry eyes as he descended the escalator into the immigration area. Colonel S had impatiently passed them both then, irritated at the delay. She had a striking face, not quite beautiful, but unforgettable.

Why was the girl here again today? He squinted at her name-tag reflected in the glass but could make out only the capital A, then perhaps p, or a g.

He focused on the way the girl concentrated on the red, white, and blue markings of the American plane in front, absentmindedly chewing on the edge of a fingernail. Without taking her eyes off the plane, which was now drawing away, she lifted her hands to the turquoise band holding her hair captive and, arching her back so that her short top curved up onto her bared waist, she retied her hair. He watched the way the pink nail polish glinted on her toes as she curled her feet into the edge of her high-heeled sandals.

His deadline-driven time in America, where he studied and worked for a decade, seemed a lifetime away. He had considered getting a green card and living in Seattle forever, but the frenzied lifestyle never made him feel like he belonged there. Giving up his alien status he came home, to a brilliant career in the Malaysian army, specialising in explosive devices that were compact and undetectable. He never tired of waiting and watching, for that was what he did. All he ever needed was silent concentration and time to execute his plans. While the minions watched in amazement.

Working with new biomaterials had been a team effort but, even in the lab in Seattle, he towered godlike above the others, moulding hydroxyapatite polymer and composites, mixing bio-glass, and developing patents for biomedical breakthroughs that served as substitutes for damaged human tissues. He had taken the accolades and the frustrations that came with saving lives, and his last years had been spent on research for the ideal bone substitute. It still eluded him, as it had so many investigators in the field.

What Allah created was magic indeed; newly formed bone was strong, disintegrating over time yet simultaneously replacing itself. Only hydroxyapatite came somewhat close, with its osteoconductive property resembling bone structure, and its ability to bond directly with bone. Non-toxic, the human body accepted it, but it still wasn’t like the human bone.

Working on different bone-analogue materials, he had moved to biodegradable heart stents: little tubes to keep heart passageways open and deliver drugs after surgery. All the problems with biomaterials were like a game of chess, he told the young faculty; your strategy must account for opposites, while focusing on the final goal. The stents must be inserted in a contracted state, and then quickly expand in the artery after insertion. They must be strong enough to withstand the pressures that a blood vessel is subject to and yet disintegrate after delivering the drug over a period of time.

Like Mission Impossible,
kan
?

He worked with a talented team, but no one more talented than Jay Ghosh, the young kid he had recruited. He had known Jay for a lifetime, taught Jay everything, even saved his life once. Unfortunately, Jay had too quickly figured out what was really going on in the lab.

But, no matter. Jay had been crucial for the breakthrough. Colonel S had almost given up, through the endless animal testing and then the clinical trials in humans, days and months when nothing came close to touching the finger of god. Finally, when it had all come together, it was a vindication of his belief, and he had gone down on his knees.

He smiled at the memory of Jay shaking his shoulders: “Get up, Prof! We did this,
You
and
I
, not some random god!”

It was a small matter, this matter of belief and disbelief. It was enough that Jay believed in the science that allowed such miracles to happen: A stent filled with drugs could also be filled with superexplosives.

So easy – this modification, so alike the drugs and the undetectable biomaterial explosives. A breakthrough so similar to the bone structure in the body that it could fool nature. Machines like the mass spectrometers designed to detect the presence of trace quantities of chemicals would not stand a chance.

Scientists with moral scruples need not apply. Even the money became insignificant when scientists were changing human destiny in a petri dish and, in that respect, he completely agreed with Jay about unfettered scientific genius.

And soon, the miracle would be in the warrior, who would sit on a wheelchair and glide towards a press conference at this airport. He remembered the crippled young man on the hospital bed in Puchong, while his mother wailed, “We sent you to be an architect! So proud, your father; now what has my son become?”

He had barely been able to disguise his irritation. The way the family was mourning, anyone would think the young man was dead instead of crippled. The bomb that had blown off the warrior’s legs exploded prematurely at a shopping complex in Jakarta. But the warrior, just out of jail and with no legs, had taken over leadership of the group at a meeting in Puchong in 1999, saying dismissively: “They have castrated us all; what is the loss of a leg?”

The girl by the window was now pacing. He watched her frown at her reflection in the glass as a middle-aged Malay woman asked her the time. He drew deeply on his smoke, but his hands trembled slightly.

If the enemy could imprison their brothers and hang their leaders, mocking their martyrs as they stepped into certain death, it was fitting that young men were ready to fight on the side of the righteous. Their people were in Kedah, Jakarta, and many places in Indonesia. The plans were simple: always lie low, hit non-Muslim businesses. They aimed to achieve the Islamic union of Malaysia, Mindanao, and independent Islamic territories in Indonesia.

The trouble with this country was the bastard politicians. The country needed men who bonded in brotherhood under one God, not the pimps that ran this government now, extending hands of friendship to everyone. The last two months, especially the death of the Tibetan woman, taught him some important lessons.

Now it was finally his turn. That pimp of a minister would be taken out soon, God willing. The betrayal of this nation was the most unforgivable in the hierarchy of treason, and it was his job to find those treacherous to the rulers, and silence them all. Colonel S had given up too much for this cause, remaining as silent as a watersnake swimming in this muddy river of a country ambushed by whirlpools, to fail at this.

The girl at the window walked out of an emergency exit, swiping her card on the door. So she was an employee. They must have noticed him on the cameras by now, and he hoped he had them scuttling. As he stubbed out his cigarette and lit another, he mused, in another week, it will finally be out of my hands.

He needed to call Jay. Colonel S wouldn’t be able to pull this off alone once the plan was set in motion, and the first dry run was in a week’s time, in Malaysia, but after that they would show the world how it was done. There was still a slight problem in convincing Jay to come back – not the money, which was easy – but in convincing him that this country provided the most congenial soil for any kind of research. He had followed his protégé’s career over the past three decades, and Jay surpassed his expectations. Now it was up to Colonel S to woo him back to Malaysia, to take a sabbatical from the prestigious Haversham where he was now Professor.

He would invoke the blood-debt again; the ultimate ace dealt by fate.

Unfortunately, no one else knew the science as well as Jay did. Colonel S needed his protégé. Once Jay came back to Malaysia, he would be so deeply implicated that he would have to stay.

Colonel S could now see the girl with the crinkled hair on the tarmac, talking to someone. He picked at the hair growing out of the dark mole on his chin. He would give it another few minutes, then pick up his cane and walk towards the green and white sign that said
Keluar
. Then he would call Jay again, today, before time ran out.

A toddler wailed loudly as a young Chinese woman strained towards the monitor trying to make out the words on cnn. She shook the child’s shoulders and yelled, “Quiet! I’ll wallop you now!” The man next to them quickly scrambled up on one of the orange chairs to adjust the volume on the TV. Colonel S leaned back to watch the familiar face on the grainy footage from a mountainous cave in Afghanistan: …
and they spread in every place in which injustice is perpetuated …

He picked up his cane and got to his feet. Someone with the logo of the airline stitched on his shirt started to walk towards him, but he waved him away. Then, with deliberate slowness, he extended his right foot, swivelled his right hip and dragged his left. People made way for him, smiling that pity which made his exits so easy.

Professor Jay Ghosh stood cradling the telephone in his hand, and yawned loudly. What an intriguing offer from his old mentor. If only he could trust Colonel S again! He had debts to repay, and that old fox made sure Jay would remember that by spouting an old Malay
pantun
at him, as always. Colonel S recited
Hutang emas boleh di bayar, hutang budi
… and, before he had even finished, Jay found himself nodding:
Yes, yes, debts of gold can be easily repaid; debts of gratitude are carried to the grave
.
Let me call you back in a week.

More than a week had passed since the first phone call. The old man called again this morning. With the phone in his hand now, Jay couldn’t believe that he, Professor Jay Ghosh, was actually thinking of going to Malaysia for three weeks. That he would say
yes
to a Return. That he would dial this phone now and say:
I will come
.

Not again. Not ever.

But why not?

Because he still didn’t trust Colonel S completely. Research with him was tremendously exciting, but somehow also… tainted.

Because he couldn’t bear the thought of going back to Malaysia.

He looked up at the ceiling. He loved the dining room cornices matching the flowered borders of the Turkish wool carpet leading out to the garden. This was his home now and, as always, he was comforted by its beauty and order. It had been years since he lived anywhere else. Then he looked at the lake outside, glimmering with chips of ice, and thought, I can’t let a ghost keep me out of Malaysia forever.

That morning, after speaking with Colonel S, when he had stepped into the shower and seen the raven-black hair in the drain, he had jumped out, naked and shivering. How many more such visitations lurked around the house, ordinary human traces embedded in the couch and the carpet, the inner crevices of a memory that would not be exorcised? He had to force himself back inside the shower, to turn the hot water on and vapourise the images, but the ghost hovered over the soap dispenser and in the scum of the tiles. He had always known there was no reclaiming his space, only the certainty of sharing it. He had shared it with a dead woman for almost three decades.

Should he go back to Malaysia and make peace with Shanti’s ghost? Shanti, his first love, whose mother had banished him so imperiously, but before all that were his sweetest, earliest memories, of a home in Kilat Tanah, the land of lightning, which two thousand years ago, long before it had become a Malayan Kingdom, had been a part of the mighty Sri Vijaya empire. Where the Thunder Demons had shaken the earth with incandescent ferocity before unleashing barbs of rain and smothering the land. Jay had lived his childhood within this ancient countryside where, after each flood, the river spit up stones, clearly artificially shaped, and he and Shanti had spent hours looking for this
batu lintar
, the teeth of the Thunder Demons, gnashed in fury and spat out over the countryside.