Ode to Broken Things by Dipika Mukherjee

felt his ears grow hot. They ate quietly for a while, Jay reaching for the dimpled pink napkins. The heat and the spice seemed to gently fry his head. Agni didn’t seem affected at all, except for a slight sheen of sweat on her upper lip.
    “So, tell me something about my mother.”
    Jay had to collect his thoughts. “Shanti? We were very good friends.”
    Agni looked at him steadily. “I am not stupid, Professor. You agitated my grandmother more than anyone else she has seen since the stroke.”
    He was disarmed by her directness, veiling a hint of steel. He would have to tread carefully. This was Shapna’s granddaughter, and Shapna had been a wounded tigress in defending her clan.
    “I remind her of Shanti. And Shanti caused her a great deal of pain. Isn’t that enough reason?”
    It felt childish, the way he had to stare her down. Finally she looked away and laughed self-consciously, “Maybe I’m getting carried away, but I grew up with the whispered secrets that were mine by heritage. The heritage of the bastard child… I was hoping you would tell me something I didn’t already know.”
    “Oh come on… bastard child?”
    “Surely you know my father was Malay? My birth came as a death sentence to my mother. You know this; you were there.”
    He stirred uncomfortably. How much did she know?“I thought you said your father was Sylheti.”
    “Pay attention, Prof. I said he was the man my mother married.” A slight smile took away the sting of her words. “Nobody ever talks to me about my real father, but I know he was Malay. I know that my grandmother went on about the shame of being a second wife, of having to embrace Islam in order to marry a Muslim in this country. We will not have any rights over your dead body; why don’t you just kill yourself now? – that kind of thing. So my mother did.”
    “And how can you know this? You were a baby when your mother died.”
    She rolled her eyes. “A cousin first said something. Then when I was thirteen, and thought I was falling in love with a Bengali boy, there were whispers at Pujobari designed to be overheard by the bastard child… that sort of thing.”
    “Did you ever look for your father?”
    “No. His name wasn’t even spat out in anger in my family. Only his race and religion mattered; everything else is immaterial.” Agni stirred her drink gently, not looking up. “I think my father was Zainal. His wife, Siti, was my grandmother’s best friend.”
    He felt his fingers tracing agitated circles under the table as he searched for ways to deal with such a frontal assault.
    Agni continued, “So. No more half-truths. I want you to tell me about my father, Professor,” she urged. “No one ever talks about him. At least you have been asking me questions about my mother… no one does that. I want to know what my father was like.”
    Her hair shielded her face as she drank. It was impossible to see the expression on her face.
    “How long have you known this?” he asked.
    “Actually, I think I always suspected it. All the whispering in Pujobari… He must have been much older?”
    “Thirty-three years older than Shanti.”
    He almost heard Agni calculating rapidly.
    “So what did she see in him?” Agni asked.
    Where do I begin ? “Zainal was a great hero… an amazing man,” Jay said simply. “When he told his stories, it was hard not to fall in love with him.”

Eighteen
    Even he, Jay told Agni, had been a little in love with Zainal. As a boy, Jay hero-worshipped Zainal through the Emergency Years.
    The Malayan Emergency lasted twelve long years. All over Malaysia, in the evenings, families would switch off lights and cower on the floors. The signal to do so would not be the sirens of war, but the dull thud of boots indicating the communists, most of them Chinese, were lurking in the dark. As they listened on the radio to the dramatic success of communism in China, the communists in Malaya set themselves up and grew stronger in the jungles