Ode to Broken Things by Dipika Mukherjee Page B

beard, like this, and one a girl, all with guns and uniforms some more. So we open fire, lah , and the bandits ran, all of them from the hut and jump into the swamp. The Kajang Terror by this time was fat, really fat, and suddenly there he was, stuck in the swamp like a hippo. Somebody fire and pshew , straight through the eye, and The Terror was dead. It all happen so fast no time to think also.”
    They brought the body into Klang and tied him to a wooden door; then trailed the corpse behind a police van, for all the Min Yuen and other Chinese fellows to see and learn. They went to all the towns and kampung areas the bandits had previously terrorised, so that the people would know that the legend had ended… that he was really dead.
    “But these people, so stupid one. Really afraid of him, think his hantu is even more powerful now that he is dead. Even the Malays, they sit in mosques and talk about this ghost that never die,” Zainal shook his head.
    Jay remembered Shanti sitting still after this story, absorbed in her own thoughts. His heart had cramped as Shapna looked at her watch irritably and signalled that it was time to go home. Siti, Zainal’s wife, had kissed Shanti on the forehead in goodbye.
    Siti had loved Shanti like a daughter. She and Shapna conjured Shanti out of a bottle (they claimed) and both loved her equally. He still had a picture, in Boston, which showed Siti looking lovingly at Shanti as she lay curled against the cushions, scribbling into a notebook balanced on her knees. If the seed is good, when it falls into the ocean an island will spring up ; that was what Siti said when Jay took that picture.
    But Shanti died for them the day she found her soulmate.
    Zainal was thirty-three years older than her. Yet, she had found sanity in his arms, and contentment in the knowledge that his religion allowed him more than one wife.
    For Siti, her husband’s infidelity came as a shadow-play on the kitchen wall.
    The night was cool, and Shanti and Jay were spending the evening at Siti’s house again. The TV droned on, as usual.
    Shanti got up to get some water. Zainal followed. Siti, looking up from the TV, wondered at the long silence, listened for the drip of the tap, the clink of a glass, but heard nothing. Instead, two shadows on the kitchen wall merged soundlessly. The shadows heightened as he pulled away. She leaned forward. Then he raised his arms, dissolving into her upturned face.
    It is in such silences that we lose our sanity , Jay knew too well. He had looked up and seen only the stricken look on Siti’s face. Confused, he had turned to the shadows, then back to the TV, oblivious.
    Siti had drawn on her semangat and willed Shanti to die. The curse of a mother is powerful, and Shanti had been cursed by two. How could she have survived that?
    Shapna, too, went berserk when she heard about the pregnancy.
    “His bastard child!” she shrieked, putting Shanti’s hand on her own head. “Swear on me you will have nothing to do with him again.”
    Shanti steeled herself. “I cannot swear on your life,” she said, while Shapna screamed, “Slut! You will never become a Fatimah or Aishah or whatever the hell it is you want, with your bastard child. You might as well kill yourself now; it will be the same thing!”
    Jay remained silent through it all.

Nineteen
    Agni’s voice broke the silence. “And then? What about Zainal and my mother? They wanted to marry each other, right? Tarpor ?”
    Was this the time to tell her the truth? Agni’s voice brought Jay back to the open air hawker stalls functioning as a huge food court under balmy skies, fragrant with mingling cuisines. He heard the shouts of the clients with the languages all mixed up; names of foods learnt from the languages of the hawkers, never translated, and even he had once known how to order exactly what he wanted in Cantonese, Hokkien, or Hakka. The words hadn’t fazed him at all, all these cultures comingling in a history that was