Authors: Fiona Cheong
Outside, the servant beating on the carpet continued to
swing her woven bamboo bat at it, the sounds coming more
slowly across the still air as her arm grew tired.
Sali reached into the maroon Scrabble bag and drew an X.
"You see my luck-lah," she said, making a face. "That's why I
don't like this game."
Malika chuckled as I reached in after Sali and drew an M.
Then it was Malika's turn, and she drew an A, to which Sali reacted by rolling her eyes in an exaggerated show of mock displeasure. Her boredom with Singapore (a small-fry country with
small-fry men, as Sali saw it) was subsiding, as was her impatience with her present life (laden with a lack of opportunity for chance
encounters with Westerners, among whom her Hollywood film
director was waiting, keeping an eye out for the exotic girl of his
dreams). Sali was always happy for a spell during our afternoons
at Madam's house. I watched as she dropped her X back into the
hag. Then she leaned forward, balancing her elbows on her
knees, and prepared to concentrate.
MAI.IKA WO 111.) NEVER manage to unearth what lay at the
root of her anxiety about the children in the years that the family used to go to sleep with the windows open. (Even during the
riots early in the 1970s, a few windows had been left ajar,
Madam's husband insisting that as the fighting was between the
Malays and the Chinese, being Eurasian, they were safe-he
would not give in to intimidation by those lower-class hooligans, Malika would remember his saying to Madam one night
when Madam had followed him into the bathroom and shut the
door so they could speak privately). Nowadays she thought
perhaps her imagination had simply been stirred by books,
those fantastic volumes of foreign intrigue and romance Madam
had shown her in the National Library and in which Malika
would immerse herself night after night (it was Madam who had
come up with the idea that Malika should apply for a library
card, with which one was able to borrow four books at a time
and keep them for two whole weeks).
Aatha hadn't shared Malika's concern about the windows, or
so she had replied when after Michelle was born, Malika had
inquired, timidly, if they would be able to hear the children cry
out while the air conditioner was on. (She knew by then that
she and Aatha wouldn't hear a thing above the drone of the air
conditioner. In the first year of Caroline's birth, it was Aatha
who had moved into the baby's room and slept there at night.
And Malika, who had stayed in the room outside the kitchen, had listened until she realized she couldn't catch a single sound
if it came from inside the house.)
Of course her anxiety had lessened when Madam finally
reached her senses, especially now with just the two of them living
in the house. (The truth was that Madam's decision to start closing
the windows had come about not long after she had walked into
the kitchen on an afternoon that Sali and I were sitting there,
wondering out loud if the man who had raped Malika's friend
thirty-one years ago was still alive. The fellow had never been
caught and it was clear he wasn't going to be caught, given how
much time had passed. Malika had been in the bathroom when
Madam entered the kitchen, and later, when we suggested to her
that Madam's decision may have resulted from her overhearing
our conversation, Malika responded only that what had happened to Bettina wasn't news to Madam (Bettina had been a close
friend of Malika's and perhaps for that reason, Malika could not
bring herself to admit Bettina had been raped, although she did
know about the baby, a stillbirth). I couldn't understand at the
time her unwillingness to face the fact that as Madam was getting on in age and feeling less immortal, any memory of tragedy
was bound to take on a new significance. But out of respect, Sali
and I were leaving the topic alone.)
One would have to wonder if, in fact, Madam had known
about the ghost in her garden, whether burglars, or rapists, weren't
what she was worried about after all. What some of us would have
to ask ourselves shortly (it was early on that Friday night that one
of Miss Shakilah's neighbors would disappear, the sister of a woman
known even to the other Madams as Auntie Coco, and given that
she would never be found and what else was about to happen) and
the question Malika would not be able to answer, no matter how
often in the years to come she would sieve patiently through the
afternoons and nights and mornings of her past living with Madam,
was whether the girl behind the sugar cane was related to Miss
Shakilah (perhaps an ancestor of hers who had died young), or whether Miss Shakilah, like Malika, had been chosen to be an
instrument of some sort (in which case the girl may have appeared
to Madam too, long before Miss Shakilah's visit).
It was Sali who asked out of the blue, in the middle of the
game while Malika was pondering X-R-A-Y (worth thirty points
because of the double-word score waiting beneath R-U-S-E)
and E-X-I-L-E (worth twelve points, nothing extra, but it was a
more exciting word), "What do you think she wants?"
Malika stroked her red bead with her right thumb (as was
her habit when she was confronted with a dilemma). Without
looking up from her row of letters, she replied, "I'm not sure.
Sometimes all a ghost wants is prayer. But if that's so, poor
thing. She's come to the wrong person, ya?"
"That can't be it," said Sali. "Ghosts usually know about people, right? From what I've heard, they seldom choose the wrong
ones to appear to." She looked at me to see if I would confirm
this piece of information, since Malika was engrossed with her
choices of words at the moment.
"I thought you didn't believe the girl could be a ghost," I said.
"No, you're the one who doesn't believe she could be a ghost."
Sali waggled her finger at me as if chiding a naughty child. She
smiled when she saw I was annoyed, and I had to stop myself from
falling into one of our habitual tussles. (Sometimes she took our
friendship too far. Given the difference in our ages, had we been
sisters, she would have had to show me some of the respect she
showed Malika, and that we were unrelated was no excuse, as
I saw it. But Sali's teasing was only a displacement of her daily frustration with life. That was the reason I put up with it.)
A rustle in the flamboyant trees caught Malika's attention.
Her thumb and finger squeezing the red bead, she stared past
Sali's head, in the direction of the sprays of scarlet flowers and
pinnate leaves and bright sky. Sali, too, found herself turning
around, her lips parted slightly in anticipation of a glimpse of the
supernatural (as if anyone could see it simply by desiring to).
But it was only an afternoon breeze, passing more restlessly
than usual over the branches of the flamboyant trees, shaking
the air as if it were full of seeds.
Sali caught her reflection in the mirror on the door of the
armoire as she turned back to the game. Wisps of hair hung
stickily about her face, stringy as seaweed in the damp heat, and
she was about to smile and gesture to herself when she saw me
rolling my eyes in the mirror. She swung around.
"What?" she said sharply. "Why you always want to make
fun of me? You don't have any wishes of your own, is it?"
"You're letting the heat fry your brain," I said, as I didn't
think there were grounds for her accusation. (It was true that I
hadn't chosen to entertain Sali's daydreams with Malika's
patience, but I didn't make fun of them regularly as she was
implying. Indeed, what I usually did was to remain silent and
uninvolved.)
"Aiya, you two," murmured Malika. She let go of her bead,
picked up her chips, leaned over the board and spelled E-X-I-LE downwards, through the I of T-R-I-E-D like a sword and onto
the tail of P-L-A-N which then was P-L-A-N-E, a sum total of
nineteen points.
We weren't surprised to find out later (when I won) about
the thirty points Malika had sacrificed. Malika always went for
the more interesting word in the end, the more musical word
or the word cloaked in degrees of interpretation, as if she were
addicted or in love, and couldn't resist or say no once a word
had caught her fancy. (X-R-A-Y, she would point out, was dull,
dull because of its lackluster vowel and dull because it evoked
only illness, particularly consumption.)
It was around a quarter past six when we heard the long,
slow swing of the wrought-iron gate, and then the gentle purr
of Madam's silver-gray Corolla as it pulled into the driveway
and came to a stop under the aluminum roof of the car porch,
in front of the sugar cane.
The car door opened and closed, a thump dropping into the
evening air like an overly ripened fruit. It was followed (as
always now) by the closing swing of the gate, and after that,
Madam's voice was singing through the walls of the house, calling
out for Malika as we were putting away the Scrabble board and
as the flamboyant trees began to grow noisy, shrill with the
prattle of mynah birds.
"Any messages?" Madam wanted to know, after all of our
hello's, and Malika was about to tell her Mrs. Allen (a family
friend) had called in the morning to invite Madam over for
lunch on Sunday and the upholsterer had called at noon to say
the dining-room chairs were ready for delivery, when Madam
asked first, "l)id Miss Shakilah call?"
"No, Madam, Miss Shakilah didn't call," said Malika, almost
apologetically as if it were her fault somehow. (She hadn't
known Miss Shakilah was supposed to call, but it was apparent from Madam's tone a call had been expected.)
Madam gave a small sigh, and as Sali and I were leaving we
heard her asking if Caroline had called. (Caroline was the one
who called home most regularly, much to Madam's and Malika's
surprise. Her calls came once a week at least, sometimes two,
three times, usually in the morning, after the boys were in their
beds in Vancouver, Canada.) We didn't hear Malika's answer.
Perhaps it was a yes and Madam had smiled, and Malika
had smiled back conspiratorially, her heart swollen with a bittersweet understanding.
All one could hear walking away around the side of the
house at that hour was the searing cry of the mynah birds, sharp
and thick as it billowed over the flamboyant trees.
MAI)A,M \\ fN I (1l I again after dinner (boiled rice with fish
curry that Madam had brought home for her and Malika, and
the sambal kangkung that Malika had fried up in a matter of min utes). Malika was in the kitchen, draping the white dish towels
over their red plastic hooks on the wall above the dish rack
when she heard the Corolla leaving the driveway. She gazed
out the window towards the light that was on in a room downstairs in the neighbor's house, where the soft gurgle of running
water floated into the night behind the banana trees. (She no
longer wondered if her nightmares had been brought on by the
proximity between her room and the banana trees, since the
trees were on the neighbor's side of the fence and beyond
Madam's control to do anything about, or so Malika had rationalized each time she had decided not to tell Madam about the
nightmares. Malika couldn't be sure what Aatha may have
known or suspected. Aatha had never mentioned the nightmares or asked Malika whom it was she was wrestling and trying
to push away in her sleep, and since Aatha herself had seemed
to sleep peacefully, Malika had concluded after a while that the
banana trees weren't haunted after all. Not all banana trees
were, as she knew.) She turned from the window when the
sound of the Corolla's engine had faded in the distance, evaporating like the trail of a Boeing 747 passing overhead.
It was half-past seven. (Later she would remember glancing
at the kitchen clock, at the black numerals and the position of
the two black hands on the round white face, there on the wall
above the refrigerator. She had noted the hour by force of
habit. Malika always knew when to expect Madam back when
Madam went out, especially when Madam was taking one of her
drives to the airport, as she had told Malika she was doing this
evening. She knew then that Madam was unlikely to bump into
a friend and be delayed spontaneously.)
Malika put the bowl of oranges and apples that sat on the
kitchen table during the day back in the center of the table, a
porcelain bowl hand-painted in coruscant swirls of azure and
magenta, which Madam and her husband had found in a backstreet potter's shop in Macao ages ago, just after they were married and before Francesca was horn. (Madam had been dismayed to
discover the shop gone by the time she was in Macao again, in
May of 1984, a year after her husband's passing. Madam was
taking her first vacation alone that time, unaccompanied even
by the children. The former back street had become a thoroughfare, developed almost beyond recognition, she would tell
Malika upon her return. None of the other proprietors had been
able to tell her where she might find the Portuguese potter she
had met on her previous trip, and while Malika was unpacking
Madam's suitcase and sorting through unworn clothes and
clothes to be washed, Madam had speculated out loud that perhaps the potter had passed away, her voice filling with regret
the way a well slowly fills with rain during the monsoon. Or so
Malika would remember as she was looking back, on one of her
mornings yet to come.)
She turned off the kitchen light after picking up the book she
was in the middle of reading from her blue desk (switching on
the lamp on the armoire before she left the room), and walked
to the front of the house to settle herself in one of Madam's cane
armchairs on the patio, a habit she had started forming after
Michelle left, on those first few nights after the wedding, when
the silence in the house had been deafening and Madam had
started going out for her drives alone on the new highway.
From the patio one could catch the sounds of Madam's
neighbors on the right (on the left if one was looking from the
road), a family of four. One might hear the thud of an object
dropping on the floor (slipping out of the hands of one of the
children, Malika presumed-the son was four, the daughter was
five), the clink of a glass or the tinnier ring of a metal utensil,
and sometimes voices. Bits of parental conversation might ripple out of a window and drift through the thick hibiscus hedge
along the fence, or the son's voice (more often than the daughter's) might break out, raised in a pouting protest. One could
hear, too, if one were attentive enough, traffic humming on the main road a quarter of a mile away, a soothing slush of tires
through puddles if there had been rain, or on a still night like
tonight, just a whirring rhythm of the engines of different
cars, the squealing crescendo of a bus approaching a stop, and
in Madam's garden an almost imperceptible bristling of night
insects beating about in the sultry air.