Ode to Broken Things by Dipika Mukherjee Page A

of the neighbourhood.
    Zainal was one of the first to volunteer to fight the communists. Twelve years worth of stories of Zainal’s heroism, as both Shanti and Jay grew up. Zainal was a tall man and, illuminated by the small light in the post-dinner storytelling sessions, his shadow would loom even larger on the wall. His stories would flow into the night, sometimes stretching into dawn. During the years of the Emergency, they heard many stories of Zainal running into large bandit camps and exchanging bursts of gunfire in the thick jungle. But his most dramatic story, by far, was the capture of the Kajang Terror.
    The Kajang Terror prowled the district of Selangor but, despite the reward of twenty-five thousand on his head, the people of the villages and kampung s in his area feared him. He was a legend. He operated around Sungei Besi, Serdang, and the Kuala Langat Forest Reserve, but his favourite areas were around Kajang and Banting, and the jungle swamps in between these two towns. He massacred the troops and the police who got in his way, for he had many thousands of Min Yuen and other informers working for him.
    “So how did you track him down?” Shanti asked Zainal one evening.
    A wind blew through the light, making shadows waver. Jay covered his mouth to stifle a tired yawn and closed his eyes, while his ears sharpened for the murmuring voices. Zainal cracked his knuckles slowly, one by one, and then, after the suspense had stretched the room taut with its silence, he began his story.
    “First, we try and follow the tracks to the edge of the swamp, but we lose them to the leeches and the snakes and centipedes.”
    Zainal ruffled the hair of his youngest child and said, “ Aiyoh, even the centipede’s not as troublesome as the little nyamuk ,” with a meaningful smile at his little son. The little mosquitoes, he explained, caused the most trouble in the jungle. They had to keep their faces and hands covered with a sarong, with only the eyes and the nose sticking out.
    Drawn into the wilderness by Zainal’s voice, the young Jay could see the pale faces of the bandits moving through the dense undergrowth carefully, using hand signals to communicate. The jungle was deathly quiet during the day, and sounds and smells could be detected quite easily by a wary patrol. The rainforest was beautiful, with thousands of tall trees, white, grey, and shaded with almost every colour imaginable, all reaching towards the sunlight, hundreds of feet up. There, they spread out in a carpet of tangled green as the creepers, rattans, and vines hung down from the trees. No birds could be seen, for they were above the canopy in the bright sunlight. The light in the deep jungle was very faint, distilled through the ancient trees, and the air was moist with the breath of their long existence.
    The day Zainal’s platoon captured the Kajang Terror, the call had come from Bukit Hitam Estate, about three bandits trying to collect protection money from rubber tappers. The men got into two trucks, and circled round and round the hill dense with rubber trees.
    “Then the krackkrackkrack Bren gun fire zoooom past my left ear. I duck, but the ground near the bush is bloody, and blood trickling down the fallen leaves of the rubber trees. Alhamdulillah , I was safe! Although a bandit with a grenade is right next to me, planning to throw grenade, someone empty a gun from close range into him!”
    Siti never asked Zainal any questions. But Jay could see her lips moving in the lamplight, and she stared at Zainal’s fingers as he squeezed together a thumb and forefinger to illustrate his narrow escape.
    Zainal’s troop had followed the small jungle track and, after walking about fifty yards, suddenly heard music. In a small clearing there was a rustic hut, and inside was a radio.
    “Playing dum-da-da-dah, so we know that the time was exactly nine in the morning. We start to close in, quietly, very, very quietly. Three bandits come out; one with long