Ode to Broken Things (5 page)

Chants of
Freedom Rakyat
and
People Power
started up, then died down again.

Sitting in her office, Agni pictured the face of the furious Malay woman in the reflection of her glass window, and saw her ring glinting in the sunlight.
Bumiputra. Sons of the Soil
. One Sanskrit word divided and transformed, despite a shared history and culture – defining who could rule and who must serve.

One choice made in her history so many years ago, made on her behalf by her own grandmother, separated her from the Malay woman engineer. What if her mother had been allowed to marry the Malay man, Agni’s father?

Agni rocked back and forth in her swivel chair as the reams of data, the letters and numbers, blurred into each other. She felt exhausted, yet the burr of the telephone was insistent, stopping and then starting again. The room felt unfamiliar as she stared up at the clock display blinking ten past eleven. When the phone started again, she sat up sharply, flinching at a spasm in her back.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end was terse. “Agni? Can you hear me?”

“Who’s this?” A point above her left eyebrow throbbed dully, and she didn’t want to play guessing games.

“Abhik!”

“Sorry, the line has a really bad echo… Where are you?”

“Listen, there’s going to be trouble in the streets today. Stay inside, okay? Especially at the city centre.”

Agni craned her neck over the money plants in the window-sill. “I can’t see anything.”

“Look, I can’t talk now. Just keep off the streets. Trust me on this… love you.”

Agni smiled at the mobile phone in her hand. Abhik, the intrepid lawyer, chasing ambulances before anyone died. The streets looked as normal as any other day. The computer screen blinked brightly. There was a new message from Professor Jay Ghosh of Haversham University in Boston.

By twelve in the afternoon it was eerily silent.

Agni rested her head on the cool metal of her table, thinking about the email exchange with Professor Jay Ghosh. He had unnerved her. She couldn’t believe the things she had told him in her first email, a drama-queen attitude she didn’t even know she harboured. It was as if a powerful magician from her childhood memory, a
jadugor
, had picked at hidden wounds. Jay had been her mother’s closest friend but, even then, it was no excuse to have actually sent off that drivel.

Jay would be here tomorrow.

Agni got up. Besides her awkwardness about the Professor, something else did not feel right. She pulled up the blinds, and was astonished to see no cars on the road. Instead there were people, thousands of them. A lone police car had pulled up onto the pavement, as if to make room for the swelling crowds. She was too far up to hear the sounds clearly.

More people were coming from around Masjid Jamek and the lrt station, and she could see the Federal Reserve Unit and police cars amassed in that area. A group of men were coming down the road with a sky-blue banner, which had the Queen of England’s face prominently displayed besides the words
Hope to Respect Our Humble Request and Rights
. The smaller Tamil words below the English were indistinguishable as the men marched past. The banner shivered in the wind.

Agni sat down heavily. Abhik had been talking about the Hindsight 2020 rally for months now. A Hindu group would petition for equal rights for all Malaysian races by the year 2020, as well as petition Britain to get involved in fighting for the rights of descendants of Indian labourers brought over to Malaya by a colonial government.

Politics bored Agni and, with the asean ministerial meeting at the airport this week, the problems at work had kept her busy. What was happening below seemed like a bad dream; she couldn’t believe that Hindsight 2020 would actually mobilise the Indians and challenge the growing Malay supremacy with this much courage.

How many would be killed? She felt her heart tighten; the crowd below looked like a sea of her relatives.
Where was Abhik?
Agni could see hundreds of them, men and women, like little ants being drowned in the sea of white fumes issuing from government vehicles, all of them struggling to keep afloat.

The phone rang incessantly after she speed dialled, but no one picked up at the other end. On the road, she could see three men jump up on a makeshift podium and wave Mahatma Gandhi’s picture. A man with a megaphone started a speech in rapid Tamil, but was interrupted by passing protesters who waved a banner,
How is Our Future Going to be?
,
chanting in loud voices. From her vantage point on the twenty-eighth floor, Agni could see the red fire trucks rumbling in from a distance, the bOMba lettering on the side clear in white. Red berets, black uniforms, red boots. Agni chewed nervously on her lip and tasted blood.

When the helicopters started to circle, it was as if the faces all turned towards the sky in the hope of a divine deliverance. Instead, more chemical-laced water rained down, forcing protestors to their knees.

She had seen enough. Agni turned to her mobile phone and called Abhik again. No reply. She felt embarrassed by the silence of her colleagues, and squirmed at the prospect of walking out of her office and facing them, as if the shame of the protesting Indians was hers alone.

Even Rohani had not stopped by. Rohani, who would drop in to share every new twist of an office romance, or some fresh libellous gossip, had stayed in her room.

Agni absentmindedly turned on the FM radio. The home minister’s voice was ferocious: “
Hindsight 2020 has said ‘Our enemies are the Malays, the Muslims.’ This is in some of their leaders’ speeches. Yes, there are some issues involving the Indians that have not been totally resolved, but to say that we oppress, commit apart-heid or genocide, and that the police allowed murder in Kampung Medan and Kampung Rawa
?
We don’t want them to think that because this is a group speaking for a certain race or religion that we took action…”

She felt a touch on her shoulder, then a light hug from behind. Rohani settled herself on the edge of the table, as if for a bit of gossip. They both looked mutely out at the scene below.

When Abhik called again, it was almost seven in the evening. Broken flowerpots, shoes, and glass bottles littered empty streets from which traffic remained barred. Shops were closed; only the five-star hotels had kept their doors open for camera-happy tourists.

His voice was exhausted. “Agni? Are you okay?”

“Abhik!! I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon! Are you all right?”

She heard him sigh. “I’m okay. The Hindsight leader managed to escape to London. He plans to sue the British Government for four trillion US dollars for the state of Malaysian Indians today. He won’t get any money, it’s only a publicity stunt, but maybe the world will pay some attention.”

“I was shit scared, Abhik! Watching all those people in the streets…”

“It’s over, Agni. No one’s been killed, even though so many came out for this. Some Hindsight leaders are locked-up under the Internal Security Act, but the bar council is issuing a statement now. I’m going home. Coming?”

“I’ll see you soon.”

Jay sat in the cool room, reading through Agni’s email again. Despite the warnings about the street protests, he insisted that the hotel concierge call a taxi immediately and now here he was, at Shanti’s old home.

On the long flight from Boston to Kuala Lumpur yesterday, he had read and reread the email many times, trying to figure out how much Agni already knew.
Dramatic Daughter
, he concluded.
Fantastic Fable
.

Agni had sent a follow-up message, apologising for the melo drama in her first response. She wanted him to delete the message immediately. His response had been to thank her for her honesty.

Now he turned the page to read the ending again:

As my father held my mother’s head down in the depths of the sea, I sat at the shore of a beach in Port Dickson. I saw her bobbing up and down, her sari bursting into marigold balloons.

I’ve replayed that scene so many times in my mind. I can freeze any frame at will, taste the bitterness of the sand and the slime of the mud, and become my mother gasping for life, and letting go. For she did. She let herself sink to the bottom of the ocean, answering its call, and didn’t look back at me. That is what I remember. Staring at her bobbing figure, I willed her to look at me, but she didn’t even raise an arm in farewell. There was just a sinking, floating sari, and then my father returned, alone.

“It wasn’t about you,” my grandmother says.

But I know it was. I know I made it happen, for I was a decision; I was born of a fairy-child, both magical and cursed. So I knew.

We remake our memories in our retelling. I remember all this even though it happened long ago.

When my mother sank, this country stood still long enough to hear its own heartbeat. I could hear the waves crashing into my own booming race for life, while my mother’s slowed to the last sigh.

He looked at the woman seated before him. Agni was still speaking into her mobile phone.

Jay felt chilled. This was Shanti’s daughter, he reminded himself; she wasn’t Shanti. In fact, there was absolutely no resemblance. His glance took in the gleaming toenails and hair, skimmed over the hint of lace in the bared cleavage. He consciously straightened his stooping shoulders. More than four decades of his failure with women, and his shoulders were the first to surrender.

She hung up the phone with a terse apology, explaining that she needed to send a very quick text, but it would only take a minute.

Jay stretched out his feet and looked again at the woman before him. The crinkled hair, an untamable frizz, was pulled into a tight knot at her nape, which drew attention by its severe contrast. She could pass as Malay, this one. She looked a bit like his colleague in Boston, the one who had married the Pakistani fellow in a rain-sodden wedding last year.

Agni put the phone down and regarded him with a half smile as he tried to frame a question. She shifted slightly, the slit in her sarong skirt framing a shapely thigh.

Women like her thrummed with such tautness, he thought. Shanti had been exactly the same.

“Thank you for this email… and for inviting me home.”

She shrugged off his gratitude. “You were my mother’s best friend. It has been so long, but I wrote down everything I remembered. Maybe too much.”

Jay smiled, even as his pen clicked in disbelief in his hands. “Yes, about your mother, Shanti, but… you said you were barely two years old then,” he paused. “Surely, you couldn’t have seen this… or remembered.”

“But I did, Professor Ghosh. I can see the scene as clearly as I see you now.” She made a slight movement with the tips of her silver-pink nails, and he felt dismissed.

She was clearly lying, but he didn’t know why. Before he could say anything, her telephone buzzed again. Agni looked at the number and, with another curt apology, explained that she had to take the call. This time she stepped outside, talking urgently into the phone.

He was irritated by the constant interruptions. Even after meeting her, Agni’s words didn’t make it any clearer how much she really knew. Did she know that she shared her birthday with him? If her phone kept ringing like a hotline, he may never find out.

He walked over to the window. Outside, an expanse of manicured land fell away from the slopes into an untamed jungle in the distance; palms swayed in the garden, shielding orangered heliconias bursting through the ground like strange winged birds. The house towered over the emerald landscape under an awning of delicately carved wood, propped up on cement stilts.

There was a swish of sound as Agni re-entered the room. “I am
so
sorry, Professor.” She gestured towards her phone, “We are having some security issues at the office…”

She trailed off and the silence grew longer as she turned her face towards the slatted glass windows. Jay followed her eyes. Even though the light filtered in through the shade of a rambutan tree loaded with red, hairy fruit, the air was moist with the heat of a Malaysian afternoon. Agni’s crinkly hair soaked in the sunshine and, as Jay stared at her with bemusement, she seemed to sizzle.

Fiery Femme
. Jay reframed this woman in front of him. Fire certainly wasn’t Shanti’s style. Shanti had been softer and had sizzled less and, although time had dulled the intensity of her being, he still remembered too well. How clearly this daughter, this mere
shadow
of a daughter, showed him that Shanti had always been out of his league.

He was, of course, older now, while Shanti would forever be as young as the day she died. Shanti, caught in that vision he carried in his mind, would always be standing outside the house, under the old Angsana tree – shady and dense, where fragrant yellow flowers would bloom in large bunches, but only for a day. Shanti would stand, waiting for a bus in the early morning, clutching her books to her chest, kicking the dust at her feet. Suddenly a gust of wind from the east would brush the tree, shaking its crown so the golden flowers would rain down, and he, the fourteen-year-old Jay, would watch her transform as she raised her face as if to a lover’s caress. Then she would twirl in that golden shower, bathing her languorous limbs. He would, over and over, feel that prickle as his friend disappeared in that golden shower, emerging as a lovely young woman in the spring of her life. He would fall in love, again.

Agni was waiting for him to speak again. But he didn’t know how to play her game, at least not yet.

He reached for the
kretek
in his pocket. It was a lifelong addiction stretching well over three decades, and he had always found a supplier, even in Boston. This pack was half empty, and he tossed it on the table, the open winged bird on the cover with the
Gudang Garam
stamped below so creased that the paper flaked onto his fingers. He lit the cigar, and the sweet fragrance of cloves spiced with cinnamon, followed by a hint of star anise, wafted up towards Agni.