The first day

 

SOMEONE RANG Salachi’s son’s wife. ‘We saw your mother-in-law outside the bus station,’ the woman announced, her voice nasal and accusatory. ‘Buying bananas for the trip. Better hurry.’ But perhaps because the child was running a fever that day, or perhaps because Salachi’s son was working overtime at the factory, or simply because his wife was tired of rushing into town to retrieve the old woman, it was dinner time before they realised afresh that she was missing and that nothing had been done about it.

     ‘Oh, God,’ the daughter-in-law said. ‘Oh, God in heaven. It’s late. It’s dark. Who knows where she will have got to by now?’

     The last time, Salachi had reached Kuala Lumpur before the police had been able to track her down. They had her picture on file; her son had needed only to describe what she was wearing that day (blue cotton sari, white sari blouse, maroon plastic Bata slippers). She had stolen the money for her travels: probably from her son’s trouser pockets or the small-change jar in the kitchen. She’d had some idea that she was going to visit her sister in Cheras – who was long dead – but when the police caught her at the Pudu Raya bus station in Kuala Lumpur, she’d screamed and howled and kicked, sticking her elbows out at both sides so that she was all sharp corners, so that it was impossible for them to pick her up, tiny as she was. ‘Macam toyol aje,’ a small Malay boy waiting for the 5:30pm to Johor Baru had remarked to his mother. It was true: small and black, spinning in a rage that unwound her sari into the policeman’s bewildered hands, she did look like a toyol, a malevolent little foetus-ghost that had been freed from its jar to do its master’s bidding. She pulled one policeman’s hair; she kneed the other in the balls. ‘You idiots!’ she cried. ‘Baddava rascals! My sister has been waiting all day for me! I’m already so late, and now I’m going to miss the bus to Cheras!’ If she’d had teeth, she would have bitten a hand or a shoulder, but she had to content herself with baring her red gums at them, indignant tears streaming down her cheeks as they pinned her wrists behind her. ‘Don’t make me go with you,’ she begged, her fury softening into sorrow when it became clear that she could not win. She wiped her tears with both hands and sank down onto a bench. ‘Please,’ she whimpered, ‘I left something on the stove. My house will burn down. I’ve got to catch the next bus to Alor Setar.’

     ‘Madam,’ the first policeman said, ‘you don’t have a house in Alor Setar or a sister in Cheras. Your sister is dead. You live with your son and his wife in Ipoh.’

     ‘Auntie,’ said the second policeman, who was younger and kinder, ‘you didn’t leave anything on any stove.’ He squatted on his heels beside her and hung his big hands between his knees. ‘You never have to put anything on the stove because your daughter-in-law does all the cooking. Isn’t that true? A nice hot meal she’ll have waiting for you when we get you home. Rice and rasam. Pickles and pappadums.’

     After that, Salachi’s daughter-in-law took to tying the old woman’s left ankle to the banister with a length of rope. ‘Very convenient,’ visitors always remarked in high admiring voices, raising their eyebrows at each other. ‘It’s no joke looking after an old lady that age, after all. This way you have time for the cooking and cleaning and your son.’

     Salachi’s daughter-in-law had no trouble reading between the lines. ‘Oh, it’s easy for other people to criticise,’ she said to her husband. ‘They don’t know what it’s like to have to keep an eye on her twenty-four hours a day. It’s worse than having a crawling infant in the house. An infant doesn’t go and hop on a bus. An infant doesn’t steal the money you’ve been saving for the water bill.’

     At such times, Thangarajah, Salachi’s son, held his enormous newspaper up in front of his face and said nothing, partly because each word he attempted was liable to keep his wife going for an additional five minutes, until, eventually, she’d worked herself up into a tearful frustration; and partly because he knew she was right. His mother was nothing but trouble these days, and truly he felt sorry for everyone concerned: for the old lady, who was losing her dignity along with her mind and no longer knew herself; for his wife, who could never have predicted her lot when she’d married him; for himself, for being caught between his mother’s ossified sorrows and his wife’s flourishing discontent.

     Salachi had worked the restraining knot loose, of course. Though she was eighty-six years old, her hands were as quick as a monkey’s, with skeleton fingers and tough nails. And this time she was not at the Pudu Raya bus station when, finally, her son lodged the report and two officers were sent out to look for her. ‘She might have already taken a bus,’ Thangarajah said on the phone, his stomach growling for his quickly cooling dinner. ‘It’s been hours, you see. She might be in KL or in Penang. She was wearing a sari with small red flowers . . . no, wait, my wife says pink flowers . . . pink, a bit faded, and a white sari blouse. And slippers. Maroon plastic, from Bata.’

     On that first day, Salachi ate two of the bananas she had bought for lunch and saved the other two for dinner. She walked down the main road from the fruit stall, past the bakery, past the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes and the Fraser & Neave bottling plant, singing a TV jingle under her breath:

      

     Saya Charlie Chickadee

     Yang ranggup, enak sekali

     Cuba dan nak lagi

     Saya Charlie Chickadee!

 

Funny little tune; her grandson sang it all day every day, so that those were the only Malay words she knew. Even so, she didn’t know what they meant. Her grandson probably knew; these days all the children studied Malay in primary school. Her son and daughter-in-law might know, too. They’d been young enough to learn new things when the country had started to change. But at sixty, Salachi had already felt old when independence had come to Malaya in 1957, and older still when Malay had begun to replace English everywhere in the early 1970s. She had been left behind; she’d found herself, in her seventies, a foreigner in the land of her birth.

     Now she was so old that all that no longer mattered. Citizen, foreigner, wanderer: when you had white hair and no teeth and a head jangling with memories like coins in a tin can, these categories were no longer as distinct as they’d once been. And there were always Tamils she could ask for directions: they shared her past, spoke her language, and understood her fears as no one else could in this messy, mixed-up country.

     She was going to try to take it easy today, to make it just to the house they had been living in when her husband had died. There she’d stop for the night, maybe stay with a friend or a cousin in the area. It would be easy enough to work all that out after she got there: she knew, somehow, that once she found the house she would be safe and well cared for. Krishnasamy’s wife, people would say, Stationmaster’s wife, and she would be strong again, and walk tall, and no one would tie her up.

     Her husband had built that house, a red house with cement floors and a veranda. She would find it eventually, because she remembered the name of the street: Tambun Road. ‘Tambun Road?’ she asked people as she passed them – a newspaper man on a bicycle, a pleasant-faced Chinese lady with a bundle of greens wrapped in newspaper – and they all knew what she meant. They pointed and gestured with their hands, straight roads and curved roads, turns and roundabouts, and she almost understood even the ones who didn’t speak Tamil. Tambun Road. That was the first house they had owned, because before her husband had retired they’d always lived in railway quarters.

     A taxi pulled up beside her, the driver tooting his hopeful horn, crawling along at her pace. She bent down and stuck her head in the window. ‘Tambun Road?’ He pushed the door open without getting out of his seat, and she climbed in.

     When she got home, her husband would be ready for his tea. Taxis were expensive these days, but he would say nothing about it. ‘There you are,’ he’d say with his quiet half-smile, and she would shake her head and say what a fool she was for missing the bus, and promise to walk to and from the market for the rest of the week to make up for today’s extravagance. He’d be tired from his afternoon of gardening, his joints aching, the sweat sticking his cotton singlet to his back. She would tell him to sit down under the fan, and she would fry him two bananas, just the way he liked them, without batter. She had them here in this bag, good raja bananas, the best ones for cooking, just barely starting to show dark speckles on their yellow skins. She would be gentle with him, as always, because he was getting old, and his heart had been broken twice. Once when they had lost the boy – but no – Salachi rolled down the window now and stared determinedly out at the tea-break crowds slurping cendol and ice kacang at the roadside stalls – she must not, could not bear to think of the lost child; if she dwelt on it, who would be strong for her husband? She would ask him how the bougainvilleas were doing and pour his tea into a saucer to cool it for him – but why was the taxi-man shouting at her?

     ‘Tutup, tutup!’ he yelled, and his eyes were suddenly cruel, but Salachi did not know what he wanted. Please, she wanted to say, please, I only know ‘Saya Charlie Chickadee,’ and then perhaps the man would laugh despite himself, a reluctant giggle at first, and then a full-blown guffaw; perhaps they would laugh together. If she sang it for him he might, at least, understand that it was all the Malay she knew – but before she could begin he was leaning over her, rolling the window up, casting such a look, oh, these Chinese men. He’d wanted the window up, that was all; she was alright. He still knew Tambun Road.

     She remembered, suddenly, all sorts of things she had meant to buy while out running her errands: matches, asafoetida, atta flour, oil for the prayer-room lamps. Should she get out now? Should she stop the man and pay him, and walk back down the road to the shops?

     ‘Tambun Road!’ the taxi driver was saying, pulling up next to a bus stop, but this wasn’t the Tambun Road that Salachi remembered; he must’ve taken a different route, and brought her to the other end of the street, because nowhere in sight was there a red house with a veranda, although there were so many houses here, many more than at the other end. The taxi man was giving her that look again, sidelong at first, but then he turned to face her, shouting in Malay, pointing at the houses and at a nasi lemak stall under a tree.

     Salachi’s money was tied into a knot at the end of her sari: fresh clean bills and a handful of coins. She’d tied them in herself this morning. But now she couldn’t undo the knot; her fingers fumbled and slipped, and it seemed her nails were too short. All of a sudden she hated knots, wanted to scream and cry and tear this one out with the teeth she didn’t have. Stupid, selfish things knots were, always guarding something for themselves, always holding something captive that wanted to be free. The taxi man was shaking his head. ‘Aiyo,’ she said, ‘aiyo.’ She held the knot out to him. He looked from the knot to her face and back at the knot, then grabbed it and undid it in one ruthless movement. He pulled out two dark blue notes, but his face brimmed with disgust. Discoloured teeth stuck out every which way from his gums; his nostrils flared like bellows. Salachi shook her head slowly at him. Saya Charlie Chickadee, she thought sadly.

     He was opening the passenger-side door again; he was shoving her out, pushing her thin flank away with the heel of his hand. He couldn’t stop shouting, it seemed, once he was off: on and on he went, louder and louder, as if he were selling some new gadget at a market or a fair, as if he were trying to steal customers away from a competing hawker. All the people at the nasi lemak stall looked up. Salachi felt obscurely ashamed, though she didn’t know why – hadn’t she paid him good money? Clean-smelling money, with a picture of the king on it. The king was a Malay man now, had been Malay, not British, for a long time. Salachi knew that, and she’d certainly given the taxi driver the correct money. Still, who knew what he was telling them, because he could speak Malay and they could understand it, and she could do neither? At the very last second she remembered the bag with the two bananas in it, and as she bent to grab it he spat. She felt the glob of spittle hit the top of her head, soak through her thin white hair to her flaking scalp. He’d probably meant to get her right in the face. She clutched the bag to her chest as he sped off, filling her old nose with the smell of burnt rubber.

     Nasty Chinese man, she thought, no respect. No respect at all. At least she had her bananas. She could sit down for a few minutes before deciding what to do; she could rest her feet at the nasi lemak stall. There were lots of unoccupied stools. The stall seemed almost to be carved into the tree; people seemed to scurry like little animals in and out of a great black hole in its trunk, bearing plates and trays and glasses. Salachi was thirsty; she could order something here, she thought, an F&N orange squash or an ice-cream soda, but she may as well go on and find the house today so that she could move on tomorrow.

     She walked past the roundabout with the fountain in the middle of it – new, somewhat new; at least, she remembered when it was built, and how for years there was a crazy man who lived at that fountain, took his afternoon baths in its spraying water, sang and danced on its rim, waving at the people who pointed and laughed as they rode past in cars and buses. When was that? After the children had all left? After her husband had died? But before she had moved in with her youngest son and his wife, obviously. Mostly the man was naked, but once he wore a little girl’s dress he must have found in some rubbish bin, a pink crocheted thing that only came down to his belly button and left his private parts exposed.

     She was parched now, and her feet were sore, but the house was nowhere in sight. She wanted to see the garden one last time; that was all she wanted, really, to see the garden where her husband had died, quiet and gentle to the end, sinking slowly down onto his knees among the bougainvilleas. She would put her palms in the depressions his knees had left, say a short prayer, and walk away to her next destination. She would not disturb the people who lived in the house now.

     Heart attack, the doctor had said. A broken heart, she’d thought. Twice broken. She’d imagined it splitting along the old seams, like a cup cracking just where you’d glued it together. The second time was only weeks before he died, when their eldest daughter had come running home to them, terrified and pregnant, the wounds on her back still fresh. She couldn’t bear it anymore, she’d said; she would have borne it all her life to save them this shame, but now she feared for the child inside her. Salachi’s husband had held their daughter’s face between his palms and begged for her forgiveness. Our fault, he had said over and over again. My fault. I’ve failed you, I’ve failed you, I’ve failed you. A father’s job is to arrange good marriages for his daughters. How could I not have seen it in him? How?

     She came now to a bus stop, another bus stop, beside it another stall selling something else. Maybe she could ask these people where the house was. Maybe the driver of the next bus would know. At any rate, she could sit down for a while. When she got home the house would be cool and shady, and her husband would be dozing in the sitting room. She would scold him for getting his sweat all over the newly washed cushion covers, and he would laugh and swat at her hips as she walked past.

     Evening fell, a purple-and-yellow evening glimmering with pollution and the florescent lights of roadside stalls. Swallows swooped homeward through the darkening sky. Sparrows gathered on telephone wires, their feathered shoulders already hunched for the night. Salachi nodded off on the bench in the bus stop, her bag of bananas on her lap.

 

The second day

 

The sparrows’ noisy morning greetings awoke Salachi for the bus at dawn. She opened her eyes to see the birds still amassed on the telephone wires, preening themselves for a new day.

     Today she would go to the railway house they’d lived in when the children were small. This morning, in that moment just before she’d opened her eyes, she’d seen it behind her eyelids, as if it had been waiting there while she slept: the railway house, aglow in the afternoon sunlight, every room golden, redolent with the smell of sizzling oil in a teatime wok. In that house she would be busy and useful again, rushing from sink to stove to backyard all day, undeterred by the four or five pairs of sticky hands invariably clinging to her sari. She and her husband had been proud to move into that house, because it had been built especially for the stationmaster; it was bigger than the others and stood perched on top of a hill. She would recognise it when she saw it. At the bottom of the hill was the cinema where she and her husband would sometimes take the children on Sundays for a treat; beside the cinema was the school they’d all gone to, each one in his or her turn; beyond the school was the field where she used to take the cow and the goats to graze. When the children were older, she’d sometimes let them take the animals to graze on their own, in pairs just in case something went wrong – one of the goats scampered away, say, or fell down a drain. But nothing like that had ever happened. They had sold the cow and all the goats soon after the Japanese invasion, but until then they’d kept them well and enjoyed fresh milk and ghee whenever they had wanted it. The bus conductor, thank goodness, was Indian.

     ‘One ticket to the hill road,’ Salachi said. ‘You know, where the cinema is, and the school.’

     ‘Brewster Road, you mean?’ the conductor said.

     ‘No, no, not Brewster Road. The white school, you know, a big white building. With arches. Near the Jubilee Cinema.’

     ‘The Jubilee Cinema is on the other side of town, Auntie, and it’s not near any school.’

     Salachi sucked her teeth at the conductor. ‘What are you trying to tell me? I’ve lived in this town since before you were born. Just drop me off at the Jubilee Cinema, and I’ll find the school and the house I’m looking for.’

     ‘This bus doesn’t go to the Jubilee Cinema,’ the conductor said, clicking his ticket puncher three times in quick succession. ‘You’ll have to get off here and take the Number 65 bus going the other way. I won’t charge you, then.’ He rang the bell, and the bus slowed to a stop. From the front of the bus the driver shouted something in Malay and pulled away with a jerk just as Salachi’s left foot came off the bottom step, so that she tottered and held out her arms for balance, the bag of bananas swinging in her right hand.

     ‘Okay-ah Auntie?’ a Chinese girl said to her. An office girl, in a grey suit and pink shirt, smart high heels, lacquered nails. That word even Salachi knew. ‘Okay,’ she said, and grinned her toothless grin at the girl. The girl touched her elbow lightly, and Salachi wanted to grab both her soft hands and say come with me, help me find my children, please, I’ve lost my children, all of them, five, or maybe six, seven once, all gone, and now I need them back. Maybe, she thought, once we’re on the bus I could at least ask this nice girl if she knows where to get off for the hill road. But the girl got on a different bus, and the Number 65 did not come for a long, long time. Salachi hoisted her legs stiffly up onto the bus stop bench and leaned back to wait.

     A young Indian woman – a modern type, in trousers and make-up – hurried past the bus stop with a young child who turned to Salachi and cried out, ‘Paati, Paati!’

     ‘Tch,’ the woman said without looking at Salachi, ‘don’t be silly, that’s not your grandmother. Look, everybody’s pointing at you and laughing. That Auntie across the road is shaking her head and thinking, what is wrong with this girl?’ But there was no one, as far as Salachi could see, pointing or laughing. Across the road a plump woman in a nurse’s uniform sat sipping an ice-cream soda at a small table outside a coffee shop, but her eyes were on the advertisement plastered on the roof of the bus stop, not on the little girl or on Salachi.

     Salachi was thirsty again – or still? She could not remember if she had drunk anything since she’d begun to feel thirsty – and it seemed to her that the roof of the bus stop must be made of tin, bright, shiny tin, so hot did the top of her head feel, so thin and burned her scalp. She wondered if the nurse would finish her ice cream soda, or if she would leave a little in the bottle, as so many young people with too much money did these days. Maybe, then, if the traffic eased up a little, she could cross the road before a waitress came to clear the table, and make off with the bottle before anyone noticed. And why would the waitress mind, anyway, even if she did notice? They’d have to throw out the bottle, whether or not it was empty. Maybe, even if the traffic didn’t ease up, someone else would come to try to cross the road, and she would use her usual trick of just crossing when the other person crossed, her eyes practically closed, her ears shut against all the frightening horns and squealing brakes and rushing air.

     A Malay woman in a headscarf, not, surely, all that much younger than Salachi herself, toddled past the bus stop, and then slowed to a stop just a few feet away. She looked back at Salachi, seemed to hesitate, fished frantically around in her cloth bag. She made her way back and stood there for what seemed a long time, looking Salachi in the eyes, so that Salachi had time to memorise the configuration of fat black moles on her face, to wonder whether she was bald under the headscarf, to venture a slow smile that the woman returned with only a thoughtful pressing together of her dark lips. When, finally, the woman turned to go, Salachi watched her back until it was a dot in the distance, and only afterwards did she realise that a crisp bank note lay in her lap.

     This was a strange new kind of money – not British, not Japanese, maybe temporary wartime money – but a great deal of money, and she would not have it if they hadn’t sold the cow and the goats. True, that was a cruel loss; they’d had that cow for years, and she was as dear to Salachi as if she had been a pet. She gave good, sweet milk, and sometimes round tears fell from her brown eyes for no reason at all. ‘She’s remembering her past life,’ Salachi’s husband would say then, playfully grabbing the animal’s horns or petting her neck, ‘when she was a Maharani with twenty sons and two palaces.’ To sell a cow like that, with years of good milk in her, at a price that would buy just a few weeks’ worth of food – but they’d had no choice, had they? They couldn’t have fled to the countryside with the cow. Salachi had tried not to think of what would become of her in the hands of Chinamen who ate beef, or Muslims whose God cried out for the fresh blood of animals, or Japanese soldiers who killed anything moving just for the sport of it – but at night, in the barn where fifty people slept huddled on the floor, something churned her belly even as she clasped her youngest children to her chest, as if once again she’d lost – but no, so much money, she must not dwell on the past, she must just be glad for what she had here in her hands, enough money to buy the children real rice, perhaps even salted fish, perhaps a few fresh chillies if such things were still available somewhere. She would go into town to look for them.

     A bus swerved to dodge Salachi as she crossed the road; a cyclist rang his bell furiously; a lorry-hand leaned towards her and yelled, ‘Oi, ammachi, you think this is your grandfather’s road, is it?’ Someone leaned hard on their horn until she’d reached the other side of the road.

     She sat at a table near the nurse. A waitress came and dragged a dirty dishcloth around the tabletop, and then looked up at her. Salachi held out the funny green money, smoothing it with both thumbs. ‘Will you take a note this big?’ she asked in Tamil. ‘Do you have change?’ The waitress blinked at her. ‘Salted fish?’ Salachi said. ‘White rice? Chillies? Or maybe you don’t have these things anymore, yes, of course not, not with this terrible war —’

     The nurse was staring at Salachi now, her shoulders shaking in her white uniform. She said something to the waitress – a short word, round as a ball in her mouth – and the two women laughed. The waitress clattered off in her wooden clogs, but before Salachi could make another plan – she would hitch a ride to the bigger shops on a bullock cart, perhaps, or find someone else to go for her – she was back, holding a plate of noodles in one hand and a bottle of F&N orange squash in the other. She put them down and took Salachi’s money from her hands.

     Salachi had wanted an ice-cream soda, not an orange squash, and she had never eaten noodles in her life, but she said nothing now. Her grandson ate noodles sometimes, instant noodles that his mother prepared for him; she’d watched him often enough to know, more or less, how they were eaten. But they slipped off the fork when she tried to lift them. They slapped against her chin. They fell down the front of her sari blouse. She put the fork down and began to eat, as she always did, with her right hand, but she knew that she was all wrong, a shameful old lady with sauce on her chin and stains on her front. Now the nurse really was shaking her head; now the waitress – Salachi knew this without looking up – was curling her lip as she watched from the doorway of the coffee shop. People turned their heads to look at her as they walked past; children stared openly and wives nudged their husbands. She ate only half the plate of noodles, but drank all the orange squash and then washed her hands with the ice cubes. When she was done she pushed the glass away. The waitress would bring her her change now; she would tuck it into her blouse and make her way back to the bus stop to wait for the Number 65 bus.

     But the waitress never came back, and eventually Salachi stood up, belched softly to herself, and inched her way once more across the road, the lorry-hands yelling again, the cars tooting their horns in varying degrees of friendliness, the motorcycles dodging deftly around her as if she were a pothole. At the bus stop she sank down onto the bench, edged back her old bottom until her feet stuck straight out in front of her, and fell into a fitful, full-bellied doze. When evening fell and the chatter of the birds on telephone wires replaced the din of traffic, she lifted her feet onto the bench, Bata slippers and all, and lay her head down on its other end.

 

*   *   *

 

That night, his knuckles tight around the telephone receiver, Thangarajah said to the police: ‘My mother could be in Singapore by now. Have you all checked all the bus stations and railway stations? The taxi stands?’

     Yes, yes, everywhere, the policeman said. But there were so many old ladies these days, all of them in faded saris, all of them claiming to be on crucial races against time. Pots left on stoves, children trapped on buses heading the other way, husbands who would beat them for being late. They would notify the Singapore border checkpoint; someone would call as soon as she turned up.

     That night visions of a thousand hollow-eyed old women kept Thangarajah awake. Their shoulders were all slight under their cotton saris; their feet were all callused in their Bata slippers. Just before dawn, he dreamed for a single hour of his mother as she had been in his childhood: a brisk, smiling woman with a bottomless sadness in her eyes that he had known never to ask about. ‘O my Rajah, my prince,’ she’d said so often, and though it had always seemed at first that she was saying these things to him, he knew she was talking to herself. ‘How much you look like your oldest brother sometimes! It’s as if God sent me the same child twice.’ Her hands on his face were always cool then, cool and smooth and surprisingly firm, as if only by pressing his cheeks hard could she confirm that he was real.

 

The third day

 

For breakfast, Salachi ate one of her bananas. She had wanted to save them for her children, to fry them when she got home. Sliced and sprinkled with powdered sugar, two bananas would’ve been plenty for all of them, but now there was only one. Well, she could always buy more at the shop near the cinema when she got there.

     Had someone told her it was the Number 65 bus she should take? This rang a faint bell, and so, when the bus came, she clambered onto it, hitching her sari up to her knees so that she wouldn’t trip. The bus was packed, no empty seats anywhere, people pushed up nose to nose. She worried she wouldn’t know when the bus turned onto the hill road, because she couldn’t see out the windows. Perhaps she should get off and take a less crowded bus; perhaps she should ask someone, one of these efficient-looking housewives, or maybe one of the office workers who took the same route every day, how many stops it was to the hill road.

     Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned her head, couldn’t see the conductor’s face, but knew he was there: bush jacket, bag of tickets, ticket puncher. Coins, coins, she needed coins, and she had them somewhere, coins in a knot or a purse. She grabbed the end of her sari, but it hung limp, though she could tell it had once been knotted from the stubborn wrinkles in it. She peered into her bag, but only the banana nestled there, already much blacker than it had been yesterday, the end of it visibly soft where it had been plucked off the bunch. She wished she could see the conductor’s face, at least; if she could only see his face, she knew, she could explain, and he would understand, he would see that she needed to get home to her children because their father was at work and they needed their lunch.

     ‘Where are you going, Auntie?’ the conductor said in Tamil.

     ‘The hill road leading up from the Jubilee Cinema.’

     ‘One twenty, then.’

     Salachi rummaged some more in her bag, turning the banana this way and that in her long fingers, wondering if she should offer it to the conductor.

     ‘Auntie?’ said the conductor.

     ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said a plump woman in a green sari, ‘leave her alone. She’s old enough to be your grandmother and she still didn’t get a seat, and now you want to harass her for not having one ringgit and twenty sen? If you really want it, I’ll give it to you.’

     The conductor moved on. ‘Auntie,’ the woman said, ‘I’ll tell you when we get to the Jubilee Cinema.’

     But the Jubilee Cinema was an enormous pink building surrounded by textile shops, on a road that did not so much as slope. Salachi wandered into an alleyway. Stray cats bolted at her approach; a small child watched her from between the two green shutters of an upstairs window. It was almost noon, the sun white overhead. All the Old Town smells mingled in the heat: fried fish from the back kitchens, dirty bird cages, newspaper ink. She’d had nothing to eat or drink since yesterday – how foolish of her! How irresponsible! How her husband would scold when she finally got home! She sat down in the five-foot-way of a Chinese medicine shop to rest her feet in the shade. On the chequerboard floor, so cool under her bottom, the bamboo blinds threw slatted shadows. A passer-by dropped two fifty-sen coins by her knee. I’m not a beggar woman, Salachi thought, I’m not what you think. My husband has a good job in the railways, a government job; we have a cow and eight goats. But she knotted the coins into the end of her sari, because what else could she do with them? An old man came out of the Chinese medicine shop and held out a mug of tea, which she took with both hands. Later a child, shaking her arm, tugging at the sleeve of her sari blouse, woke her up. When she opened her eyes the child thrust a plastic bowl of rice and chicken in her hands and ran away into the medicine shop.

     In the afternoon Salachi found herself among rows and rows of houses, all alike, terrace houses like the one she now lived in with her son and his wife. Small cement porches, iron front gates, children’s tricycles and pedal-cars lying on their sides on the tiny lawns. The road here was smooth and new, and her slippers were beginning to pinch her big toes, so she slipped them off and held them in one hand. In front of one house a child of about eight or ten was running in circles, holding something with two fingers, laughing. Salachi saw, as she drew closer, that the child was chasing a dog, and that every time the child got close to the dog, it yelped and sprinted off in the opposite direction. But finally – she sat on the culvert outside the front gate to watch – the child cornered the dog behind an enormous urn in which a mother-in-law’s tongue plant grew lush and strong, every pointy leaf hungering up towards the blue sky. The dog shook and whined as if in terrible pain, and Salachi wanted to cry out, don’t, don’t, I had dogs once, and they are such gentle animals; they will follow you around all day if you are nice to them. Then she saw what the child held between his fingers: a snakeskin, all in one piece, long and transparent. Closer and closer to the dog’s nose the child dangled it, shaking it to suggest some ghostly snake-life, laughing at the animal’s terror. Salachi felt ill, the Chinese tea and chicken fat suddenly frothing to the top of her throat in a single swell. Of course she knew that snakes shed their skin in order to grow; of course they felt no pain when their skin peeled off like that, all in one piece. Of course when the old skin cracked open there was already a new skin waiting underneath, so that the creature was never left naked and glistening, its blood vessels exposed like so much wiring. All the same, she felt terribly sick, and a pang for the dog, in all its abject, quivering fear, filled her hungry heart.

     She sat for a while, holding on to the corners of the culvert for support, glad that there was a drain just beneath her in case she needed to vomit. When she decided it would be all right to stand up, she realised that the hill road must be just beyond the next row of houses: there the school would be, handsome under a fresh coat of paint; there the Jubilee Cinema, showing indecent modern Tamil films she had no wish to see; and there the pasture, its grass brown from the recent drought.

     On Monday it had been Amuda’s and Vikneswary’s turn to take the cow and the goats out. On Tuesday, Balan’s and Sugu’s. Today it would be Ramu’s and Lalita’s. She would have to tell them to take the animals some greens from the vegetable patch to supplement the dry grass. Last week she’d had to punish Sugu and Ramu for shooting at mynah birds with a catapult. Shame on you, she’d said. Hurting harmless animals. We’ve always been kind to animals in this family, don’t you know? We treat them like babies. Your oldest brother, she’d begun, your oldest brother – but the words had sunk back down to the bottom of her belly like small, sharp stones, slicing up her insides on their way down. In silence she’d sat at the tea table for hours afterwards, her elbows sticking to the sheet of plastic over the tablecloth. Come, come, her husband had said, I’ve made us chicken chops for dinner. Nice and hot, crispy on the edges the way the children like them. That’s just how her husband was: showering the children with surprises, performing all these vellakaran kitchen tricks he’d picked up despite not being allowed into their clubs and pubs. Chicken chops, mutton cutlets, tinned-salmon sandwiches. But that day she’d shaken her head and refused to get up. No, she’d told him, not tonight. In the dying light at the window, a small boy stood in a sailor suit, holding a white dove up to freedom. If she blinked, he would disappear. She would forego her dinner to hold him in place with her fierce memories. She’d sewn him that suit for King George V’s Jubilee; he’d gone to watch the parade with his father and come back feverishly excited, the fine hair around his temples soaked with sweat. ‘Let him set a few doves free,’ her husband had said. ‘He got so excited when he saw it at the parade, you should have seen him. A hundred white doves dissolving into the sky like so many puffs of steam, and his eyes like you’ve never seen them before, like brand-new planets.’ Please, Amma! Please! the boy said – all he could say, so overcome had he been with the day’s adventure. He’d been practically shaking, the words practically garbling in his throat, and he a child who’d spoken full sentences at eighteen months! All right, she had said, all right, but just one because these doves are expensive and the English king isn’t going to come here and buy you more if you let them all go.

     She had been walking for a while now. In the distance she could hear the hum of a generator; open-air food stalls, perhaps, or a night market. The streetlights came on one by one. From someone’s living room the ad for Milo blared brash and triumphant, competing with the shivering start of the Muslim call to prayer. Was that someone else’s TV, or was there a mosque nearby? Nowadays there were mosques everywhere, and as if that weren’t enough, they broadcast their wailing prayers. Was it five times a day, her son had said? Five times a day they interrupted the TV programmes for those prayers, but her grandson hadn’t learned those words.

 

Saya Charlie Chickadee, he sang all day. Yang ranggup enak sekal....

 

Sometimes when the rotiman came and his parents weren’t paying attention, Salachi gave the boy twenty sen to go out and buy a packet of Chickadees, the real thing, instead of just singing about it. She wondered how he was tonight, if he’d been given two tight slaps for braying that song at the top of his voice while his father tried to watch the news, if he’d been sent to bed in tears without his grandmother there to stand up for his rights. Even tied to the banister as she was until bedtime, all she had to do was shout and threaten to tell people how they treated the boy, and they always stopped. ‘You’re upsetting Amma,’ her daughter-in-law would say. ‘Keep the child under control, then,’ her son would growl. Then he would sulk in front of the TV for the rest of the night, but the boy would be spared the slaps.

     O my Rajah, she thought, and she felt sure then that her son could hear her thoughts in his head at this very moment, as clear as a voice spoken into the silence of his newspaper or above the hum of his TV. O my Rajah, my prince, be nice to your boy! He’s all you’ve got. Can’t you know how to be thankful without having to learn it the hard way?

     Here, now, was a field that might once have been the pasture. Perhaps the Jubilee Cinema and the school had been torn down. The grass was damp, but she could eat her banana, and then lay her head on the plastic bag to protect her hair. Fireflies flickered all around her – fireflies! She hadn’t seen fireflies in years. Maybe not since the Japanese occupation, when they had lived in a barn in the countryside for months, waiting for the British to win. She’d always believed the fireflies had disappeared with all the development, the squat blocks of flats, the big, ugly office buildings. But no, here they were, fireflies everywhere, like Deepavali lights. She must tell the children. She must bring them out here to see one night. She had let them catch a few in a jar, but she’d make sure they released them before they went home.

 

*   *   *

 

When Thangarajah tried to send his son to bed without dinner that night (for interrupting his news-watching twice; for spilling Milo all over the sitting-room carpet; for picking his nose and wiping his fingers on the coffee table) the child burst into tears and cried for his grandmother. ‘Paati’s lost,’ he howled, ‘Paati’s lost and never coming back!’

     ‘Come, come,’ Thangarajah said, overcome with remorse. For the first time in months, he pulled the boy onto his lap. ‘Come, don’t cry. We’ll find your Paati. Tomorrow itself the police will find her. Devi! Devi! Bring our son a chocolate biscuit from the tin.’

     When the boy had eaten his biscuit, Thangarajah put him to bed and came downstairs. I’ll nicely blast the bastard police, he thought. Enough of this. Surely they could’ve found her by now. How fast can a woman her age go?

 

 

The fourth day

 

When Salachi awoke on the fourth morning, she put a hand to her head to find her hair in a shameful state. Aiyo paaru, she thought, look at this, everyone will be thinking I’m some kind of beggar woman, not the wife of a government servant. Her husband would suck his teeth and shake his head and push her gently in the direction of her room. ‘What is this,’ he’d say, ‘can’t you make yourself look respectable? Go, go.’ But here she was in the middle of town, and she had to make do without her mirror and comb for the time being. She undid her small hair bun and began to work the tangles out with her long fingers. There was so little of it left, and what there was was as fine as corn silk, silver-yellow, stained by sunlight and sweat. When she had come to her husband’s house as a new bride her hair, unpinned each night, fell down to her knees. Even dry, the weight of it bent her neck. ‘Yabbah,’ he used to say, ‘look at the amount of hair you have.’ But she knew he was proud.

     Now it seemed barely to cling to her scalp. One rough tug and it would all come away in her fingers, like cotton wool. Already, gentle as she was, fine clumps of it drifted away on the meagre morning breeze. Cat fur, dust, feathers, who would be able to tell what it was? She ran her fingertips down her scalp one last time, checking for hidden tangles. Then she smoothed the hair back with both hands as neatly as she could, twisted it into a knot so tight she felt her forehead unwrinkle itself, and pushed the pins in hard. She wasn’t afraid of a little pain.

     She had a long walk ahead of her today: she had to find the house where she’d lived as a new bride, where they’d lived until her husband had said they must leave, they must move on, they must no longer live in the past. She had been happy in that house; she had known a perfect happiness that had later come to seem an impossibility. A dream, a fairytale, a story her grandmother had told her about someone else, some distant ancestor in India whose life shone through the mists of time. Surely that tale could not have been her own life. Surely she’d misremembered it in the way the past is always charitably misremembered, for the light in those days could not truly have been so much clearer, the air so much purer, the water fresher on her tongue.

     That was what she tried to tell herself, but really, she knew, she had been happy then. Every night as she’d fallen asleep she had thought to herself: I am happy. And yes, it was true that the air and the water had been cleaner. Everything you bought to eat burst with flavour in those days: the Chinaman’s ice cream, the pickled onions, the fine-fleshed surumbu that had been fished until they vanished. That was the sharp thorn hidden under all happiness: the knowledge that it was slipping away from you, even as you lived it. When finally the last of it had gone, you knew you could never get it back. You could try and try, you could chase it in eternal desperation, banging on all the past’s doors one after another, but those doors were locked, and the little bit you could see through the keyholes faded right before you.

 

*   *   *

 

That morning the police called Salachi’s daughter-in-law. We think we have your mother-in-law, they said. Is she skinny but only a little hunched, with a small bun at the nape of her neck? Didn’t you say a cotton sari with small pink flowers on it? She’s here in the police station near the old hospital.
She never took a bus; she never went to Singapore. She’s been wandering around Ipoh the whole time. But when Salachi’s daughter-in-law got to the police station, having taken two buses and walked half a mile, dragging her son by one arm under the hot sun, she saw that the old woman waiting on a bench was not her mother-in-law. This old woman was fair-skinned, with a Roman nose; you could tell she thought she was still beautiful. ‘My name is Kuppamma,’ she told Salachi’s daughter-in-law. ‘I tried to tell them I didn’t have a daughter-in-law, but they wouldn’t listen. You can see very well that whatever they told you, I am not your mother-in-law. My parents named me Kuppamma because they thought that they could trick Providence into believing that that’s what I was – rubbish. They thought it would protect me from the evil eye. But I can’t sit here chatting all day; I have an appointment with the Minister of Housing. Tell these goondas to let me go.’ Salachi’s daughter-in-law went home, the boy snivelling for sugar-cane juice and coconut water and soy-bean milk, begging for anything and everything he saw all the way to the bus stop.

 

*   *   *

 

The house to which Salachi’s husband had brought his new bride was built on stilts like a Malay village house, with enough space under it for a five-year-old to stand almost straight. She had kept a vegetable garden behind the house, and she’d had two dogs that had followed her around all day. And chickens and geese and, after the child had clamoured for them, doves in a dovecote. But the house might be painted now. There wouldn’t be a vegetable garden or geese, because there was no longer space for such things in this town. There was no longer space for anything; cars rushed here and there and everywhere, trucks farted into her face and edged her off the road, people thronged the pavements with baskets and bags and briefcases, never even stopping to apologise when they bumped her shoulders. Where were they going, all these people? They all had places to go, and they all had to get there in a hurry.

     She had her own reasons to make haste. She’d left the child with a neighbour for the afternoon, but she couldn’t take too long; the neighbour had her own cooking and cleaning to see to. When she got home, she had have to be careful, because there were sometimes tigers after dusk. She’d make sure the child came in from under the house; she’d put the chickens and geese in their coop, or the foxes – because there were always foxes, even when there were no tigers – would eat them, leaving feathers and blood on the grass. Still, these were small fears compared to the big one that ruled all her days: that the child would somehow get lost or trapped under the house, that he wouldn’t be able to get out by himself, and she wouldn’t be able to reach him. It was an unreasonable fear: if he could walk right in, why wouldn’t he be able to walk right out? And wouldn’t she be able to crawl in on her belly? Still, she worried. What if he got his shoelaces caught on something, and a tiger crept in after him? What if he hit his head on a rock, and lay there bleeding for hours before she noticed he was missing? In her dreams she always saw his small body laying there in the half light, his neck twisted at an awful angle, his eyes just slightly open.

     Funny how fate always trips you up with the one thing you haven’t planned for: in the end no tree root had caught the boy’s laces, no tiger had slunk in behind him, no rock had cracked his head open. He had come in safe and sound each day from under the house, gurgling, his face trained on her like a lantern. But she had pictured one detail precisely: his body was indeed small when he lay on his funeral pyre, smaller than he had ever seemed while he was toddling around and babbling new words. Dead, he was tiny, and yet so much heavier than he had been alive. They hadn’t wanted her to see his body at all, let alone hold it. ‘No, no, Salachi,’ they’d cried, holding her back by the shoulders, ‘why should you torture yourself now? What happened has happened. It’s not your fault, and you can’t do anything to undo it.’ They had tried to get the doctor to give her an injection, even though she had remained calm and quiet while all around her bawled.

     She’d had to deliver the news to her husband, that morning when the workmen had found the boy. He had known, of course, as soon as he’d heard their voices at the door. ‘Madam, the boy,’ they’d begun, and their voices rang like gongs, no, louder than gongs, louder than any sound she had ever heard, echoing through the house like Lord Shiva’s drum itself, bouncing off the hard blue sky. ‘Madam, we found your boy in the quicklime vat, but we were too late, we could not pull him out in time, we tried, we did everything we could.’ She left them standing in the front hall and went to kneel by her husband where he lay curled on his side on the coir mat in their bedroom, his right knee exactly on top of his left, his fists pressed to his chest. He had loved that child, the first of their children to have lived more than a year. The first two, both girls, were just names and dates in his little black book. This one had a face they would always see at twilit windows, hovering above the smart collar of a sailor suit.

     They wouldn’t let her see him, but even as they held her back a neighbour’s twelve-year-old hurtled down the path behind the houses, her mouth cavernous, her face drenched. ‘His skin!’ she’d screamed. ‘His skin all came off, came off, came off, like paint only, like a tomato, like … like …’ then the girl fainted, and the doctor shot into her thin arm the injection he’d prepared for Salachi.

     Let me see, she had said. Just let me see. And it hadn’t been what she’d expected. Not better, just different. Maybe if there’d been a few more minutes’ delay before they’d lifted him out, he would have looked like she’d expected, but they’d been quick, and there were only large patches missing, swathes from his belly and back, and on his face all but his nose, as if he had sunk into the vat inch by inch, face up, until at the end, just before they pulled him out, only his little nose had been left above the lime.

     Greentown. That was the area where the house was. And everyone seemed to have heard of Greentown. ‘It’s not far,’ one man told her. ‘You can’t miss it.’ It wasn’t far: she had only been walking for about half an hour when she stopped to ask a kacang puteh vendor where Greentown was, and the man pointed at the ground beneath them, shook his head in delight, and said, ‘This is Greentown, Auntie!’

     But Greentown was no longer green; it was all nightclubs and fancy Chinese restaurants now, flashing lights and, across from where she stood, a monstrous building made of blue glass. There could be no tigers in the dusk here, no foxes preying on hapless hens.

     ‘Where are the Malay houses?’ she asked the kacang puteh vendor, shuffling back to his stall after five minutes of wandering.

     The vendor squinted at her and cocked his head.

     Before she could stop herself, Salachi reached out a hand and ran her fingers lightly through the peanuts. Then, realising what she’d done, she flinched and withdrew her hand as though dodging a mother’s slap. But the vendor was a kind soul. She saw in his face that he had noticed her straying fingers, yet was going to say nothing. Why had she done it? A grown woman like her, the mother of seven children, grabbing things from a stall like an urchin! She was hungry, that was all. She hadn’t been thinking clearly. And the boy, yes, the boy, she’d been thinking of the boy, of how she would buy him two cents’ worth of peanuts, two cents of broad beans, and five cents of the hard pakora, his favourite, the only treat he ever asked for when she took him on outings. Thinking of it, anticipating his delight when he saw the newspaper bundles in her hands, she had forgotten herself.

     There he was, all buttoned and powdered, his father’s pomade in his hair. There were elephant rides and a merry-go-round. Ice balls for one cent. Five cents of the hard pakora. ‘Be careful,’ she would say, ‘chew properly. Take one piece at a time. Don’t hurt your teeth. Don’t bite your lip.’ Later she would take him right to the front to see the band up close, and he would put his fingers in his ears to block out the blare of the trombones. What was the occasion? Where were they?

     ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the vendor. ‘I’m very sorry to bother you. But where is it?’

     ‘Auntie?’ the man said.

     ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I meant … I was looking for … I couldn’t find the Malay houses. I’m in a hurry, my son is waiting for me, but I can’t find the Malay houses.’

     ‘Malay houses?’ the man repeated. ‘You must be thinking of Kampung Manjoi, Auntie, not Greentown.’

     It was Greentown, she was sure of it.

     But the houses, the path through the meadow behind them, the dim, violet dusk, all these were gone. Salachi felt the air escape from her mouth as if a knife had punctured one of her lungs.

     ‘Auntie, sit down here, Auntie, I think you’re not feeling well,’ said the vendor, producing a wooden stool and patting its seat. ‘It’s a hot day, not good for a lady of your age to be walking around town, you know.’

     It was true, she wasn’t feeling well; she could barely stand straight, and yet she couldn’t sit down, couldn’t waste time on small talk. She’d left her son with the lady next door all morning while she shopped. Even as she stood here he might be getting into all sorts of trouble, might have disappeared underneath the house hours ago without the lady noticing, busy as she was with her own children and her chores. She had to go. She would hurry home and make them both a cool drink of fresh lime juice. Then she would put him to bed for his afternoon nap and sit at the kitchen table, the dog’s snout across her feet, to cut the fabric she had specially bought this morning. She was going to make a sailor suit for the boy to wear to the King’s Jubilee celebration in town next month.

 

*   *   *

 

At lunchtime, Thangarajah came home to see if there’d been any news about his mother. His wife told him about the call from the police, about her trip to the station, about Kuppamma.

     ‘Useless buggers,’ Thangarajah said. ‘Don’t they have a picture of her on file?’ He picked up the receiver and began dialling the inspector’s number. His wife stood up and touched his elbow. ‘If we don’t find her by Friday,’ she said softly, ‘if there’s no news, we must go to the temple and pray for her. We must do a proper offering. At least if something has happened to her, let her soul pass peacefully on to the next world.’

     ‘Tch,’ Thangarajah said, pressing the phone to his ear as the line began to ring. ‘Don’t talk nonsense. What could have happened to her? You know how people always take care of an old lady, even if they don’t know her. Somebody somewhere is taking good care of her. She’s probably having a grand time in KL or Penang.’

     But even as the inspector answered his phone, Thangarajah imagined his mother huddled in a barn somewhere as they’d all been during the Japanese occupation, only alone this time, frightened and alone and confused, craving hot rice and fried salted fish just the way she liked it, wasting away, not a single piece of identification on her. He saw her curled up on a bare wooden floor, her small fists pressed to her chest. What would she think of as she sank into unconsciousness? He dared not contemplate this; he did not want to know, just as he had never really wanted to know the source of her sadness when, as a small boy, he’d watched her stare at windows and empty spaces.

 

*   *   *

 

Ignoring the kacang puteh vendor’s concern, Salachi shambled back the way she had come. Her toes stung. The bones in her feet seemed to have slipped out of place; she could almost hear them grind with each step. Something seemed to stab the ball of her left foot, but when she took her slipper off there was nothing in it, no pebble, not even a blade of grass. She took the other slipper off anyway, and kept walking, slippers in hand. She heard the vendor calling after her: ‘Auntie! Auntie! Kampong Manjoi is too far to walk, Auntie, and it’s the other way! Auntie! Better take a bus!’

     But she kept walking. Her father’s house wasn’t far. She could be there within the hour if she didn’t dawdle. Today was a market day: her father’s bullock carts would soon come creaking down the long path, the cowbells jangling, every cart laden with a different kind of fruit. Durians, mangosteens, rambutans. She would have to be there, ready and waiting with her sisters, or Sulochana would cheat her out of her share. ‘Girls, girls,’ her father would scold, as into their cupped hands he heaped rambutans crawling with velvety black ants and mangosteens sticky with white sap, ‘Girls, there’s enough for everyone. Don’t fight.’ And squatting in the red earth, spitting mangosteen seeds as far as she could spit them, she would believe him: there was always enough for everyone, and the future stretched bright before them all, full of kind, handsome husbands, big houses, and dimpled sons in sailor suits.