WHEN my mother Priya died, she requested in her will that a stake be driven through her heart, and that I perform this task. What she feared most was to be buried alive. She had a recurring dream in which she woke in her coffin and found herself next to a beetle-like insect of human proportions, its armoured back crowding the airless box, its steely limbs wrapped around her in an arthropod hug. She pictured herself lying in terror, praying for suffocation.
I didn’t fulfil her final request. I don’t think she ever stopped to consider the practicalities of such a demand. Firstly, I have nothing to base this on, but I suspect it takes a superhuman thrust to drive wood – even metal – through flesh and bone. And secondly, well, there is more to violent acts than physical strength and whatever my true feelings may have been, I could not bring myself to mutilate my own mother.
Our house, one of the grandest in Kuala Lumpur’s Ampang district, was open on all sides to a surrounding veranda. Like the other houses in our neighbourhood, ours was an old black-and-white colonial; a two-storey structure with expansive high-ceilinged rooms. Like us, our neighbours were wealthy or influential or both; lawyers and doctors and government officials who knew each other, if not personally, then at least by name. Our neighbourhood – and this city, come to think of it – was just a big village.
Two steps down from the relative safety of the veranda the garden stretched out, vast and exuberant. The gardener, a withered old man in a white singlet and faded shorts, came each day to tidy the rampaging green. It never occurred to me to wonder where he lived, where he came from. He was part of the landscape, a thin, silent figure; he went about his tasks with great self-sufficiency and never showed any interest in what went on inside the house. As a child, I could see him sometimes from the living-room window, pushing a wheelbarrow unhurriedly across the lawn, crouching to take a closer look at a shrub. He never looked my way.
Time flowed with few external events to mark it. A mynah signalled each new day with its call, a recurring, quizzical note, while mosquitoes whined along the trail of stagnant pools left by the night’s heavy rains. During the day, lizards scurried across the walls and at dusk, as though summoned by the muezzin’s resonant call to prayer – loud enough for everyone in the neighbourhood to hear – black carapaced beetles appeared on the cool floors, looking like glistening pebbles in the dying light. Every once in a while there was the triumphant slap of a sandal against a wall as the Malay girl who cooked and cleaned for us annihilated a cockroach. The smells of curry and ripening fruit emanated from the gloomy kitchen where the lights remained on no matter the time of day. From the kitchen, a narrow concrete path led to the amah’s room. I never ventured that far and only saw her sometimes on the evenings I entered the kitchen to fetch a drink of water. From the kitchen sink I would see her, squatting by a hose and a bucket and rinsing her hair, outside her single room.
My father was a doctor and had a clinic that was part of our house, but with a separate entrance. We hardly saw him and I remember a feeling of apprehension whenever I had to enter his sanctuary. The waiting room was functional yet comfortable, with magazines neatly piled on a glass table – mostly these were British medical journals and publications relating to economics and foreign affairs – and prints on the walls. In my father’s office, bookcases lined one wall, filled with medical papers and reference books; there was a large teak desk and a leather chair where he sat, and a pair of cosy armchairs for patients. On his desk, there was the sort of green-shaded lamp you see in the British House of Commons and public libraries. Whenever I had to visit him there, I would knock with a sense of trepidation, wanting to enter and see what he was up to and at the same time fearing I was encroaching. He would peer at me over the top of his reading glasses before gesturing, as he would with a patient, to one of the chairs facing him. My father’s framed honours degree hung on the wall behind him. In this room he seemed impressive, a man one could respect.
Until I left for England at the age of twelve to get, in my father’s words, a ‘decent’ education – he had been to Oxford and never tired of saying how the experience had changed him as a young man and opened his eyes to the world – my mother and I mostly floated about the house, watchful, bored. Having inherited her fear of insects, I hardly went outside and instead stayed close to her. She liked best the living area where there were few dark corners and things could not creep up on her. It was a large, airy room, with wooden shutters along one side always flung open, even during the rainy season when they would bang repeatedly and the polished floors would become slippery with wind-blown water. At one end of this enormous room was a long, formal dining table, at the other a coffee table with a sofa and two chairs. There were no photos and few ornaments.
In the centre of the room, a baby grand presided, gathering dust and no doubt mould, its sounds grown muffled from the humidity and heat. My mother loved Chopin and I would sit next to her, hour upon hour, listening to wistful nocturnes. Music was her greatest love, her path to serenity, along with the Valium my father dispensed to her. She would sit at the piano with somewhat lacklustre eyes, her hands running effortlessly along the keys, perfectly attuned to the Polish composer’s rhythmic nuances. There I would sit, a breeze flitting through the open house, mingling with the fragrance of frangipani and the promise of rain. I was invisible to her yet I felt safe with my feet off the ground, close to the black and white keys and the indefinite shape of the woman next to me, lost in her own world.
My father had no time for music – the piano had been his wedding gift to her, an act of passion, perhaps. Such generosity he never replicated in their marriage. Perhaps it had been a lure, a means of drawing her here. I know now that he was no match for her, that she found Kuala Lumpur stuffy, claustrophobic, by comparison with Singapore and the life she’d had there. Her mother had played the piano professionally and her father was an eminent cardiologist. She liked to tell my father that the sort of people who visited her childhood home had achieved great things through merit, not because they knew the right people. My mother felt cheated. Like Emma Bovary, she lived two lives: one this provincial existence, as she saw it, alongside her husband, a life she despised; the other a life full of imagined successes and bitter regret. She would gaze intensely at my father when he walked through the door in the evening after work, pointedly averting his eyes from her as he went to get himself a whisky. Occasionally, she would receive letters from her sister who had remained in Singapore. She would sigh over these letters for hours. Yet she never went back, not once.
My father was a man of influence. His father had come to Malaysia as a money-lender and become comparatively wealthy. My father had gone to Oxford, the first in his family to receive a European education. He had met my mother on a trip to Singapore – there the details are sketchy – and embarked on a charm offensive. He had loved her; that much I knew. But did she love him? Even then, when I was too young to know much, I sensed the power play between them, the vulnerabilities on both sides.
It was through his lucrative medical practice that my father built his connections. These people, who ruled Malaysian politics and business, welcomed him into their world. Dinner parties, formal functions, were held throughout the year. My parents attended regularly. My mother found such things tedious and generally came home in a dark mood.
As a boy, I could sense how uncomfortable she made other people. When we were out together, people greeted her with simpering deference to her husband. But no one actually liked her for herself. My parents were both from Hindu families that had converted to Christianity, becoming Anglicans. Though neither of them practised, they still belonged to a minority in a predominantly Malay Muslim town. My father charmed everyone and won respect through his reputation as a doctor. My mother made no effort whatsoever. She attended school concerts and handed out awards, she hosted charity events, because my father expected it of her. Often, I went with her. I watched her speak, in lofty tones, smiling without conviction, while the other ladies smiled back, fidgeted in their seats, giggled inappropriately. I sat there feeling just as embarrassed as they did. At the Selangor Club, I sat by her on the shady veranda, my skin itching from boredom, as she and the other ladies had cucumber sandwiches and sipped at tea that drew out lines of sweat on their upper lips. Their meaningless chatter would soon fade into the background and I would find myself gazing blankly at the empty padang stretched out before me and at the neo-Moorish court buildings beyond it. If I dozed off, she would dig a finger into my thigh, and I would snap my eyes open and sit up straight as the platitudes wore on through the humid afternoon.
I was happiest on the piano stool with her at home. It was our special place. When she wasn’t playing, she would tell me about her childhood in Singapore. She came from a family of Brahmins; her father and grandfather had been notable physicians. One of her uncles had worked alongside Albert Einstein, a name I knew from books. My mother and her sister, Vidya, had grown up in a house where hard work was prized above all else. When my mother stated at the age of five that she wanted to learn the piano, she was taken seriously. But she was expected to work at it. From the day she began, on her sixth birthday, she practised two or three hours a day, without fail. As a young married man, her father, my grandfather, had embraced the Anglican Church, and expected his Hindu wife to do the same, more as a statement than an act of faith. His religion was science, and by rejecting Hinduism he was turning his back on the myths and superstitions that had been passed down from one generation to the next, starting with the story about the old woman who was a witch with great powers, my great-great-grandmother, I believe it was. I can’t quite recall.
My mother and Vidya were exceptional students at school and accomplished musicians.
‘So you see, Vikram,’ my mother would say, her protuberant eyes – for she suffered from an overactive thyroid – not quite meeting mine, ‘you have a lot to live up to.’
She could fly into a rage, or burst into a storm of tears, at a moment’s notice. Once it was a column of ants, marching across the kitchen floor, that caused her to slap the amah and lock her in her room for the rest of the day; another time she stepped on a beetle. The crunch underfoot, more than the stain it left on her shoe, made her weep. At such times, she would turn on my father, accusing him of having taken her from a civilised place to this – the slow, humiliating degradation of her former, vibrant self, as she saw it.
‘This is no better than living in the jungle. Like animals,’ she raged at my father, who looked at her with an air of mild concern. ‘Have you taken your pills?’ he would say. The more she cursed him and ranted, the calmer he seemed. It was a game they played, loaded with their mutual dislike and reluctant dependency. For it was obvious, even from my limited perspective as a child, that while she was dependent on him, he too needed her approval. That it was he who had wanted her here, and that her dissatisfaction undermined him, showed him up as a failure. Still, watching her flail helplessly before him, I only saw her unhappiness, and his seeming lack of empathy.
My father’s ambitions were easily fulfilled by the reputation he had achieved, measured in terms of his influential cronies, a big fish in this small pond. He would have liked, I am sure, to ‘make it’ in London, as some of his student friends had, but here he had a name. He also enjoyed the money, which simply accumulated as neither he nor my mother spent any of it on themselves.
My father was happiest after an evening entertaining one important person or another. My mother would sit there with him, imagining she was elsewhere. Sometimes she and I played a game that began with ‘where are you now?’ and she, or I, would describe a place so removed from where we were that I could almost forget the cloying heat of our familiar world. Then, with a start, I would become aware of the tears spilling from her eyes, her sweat-stained sari, the room’s evident neglect.
As I mentioned, I shared my mother’s fear of all things that flitted and crawled. I found their evasiveness terrifying, their lurking, the knowledge that I might not always know they were there. My father, who prided himself on being a man of reason, scoffed at us. At times my mother would go running into his office, shrieking about this or that bug she had found and begging him to come and deal with it. He would refuse, but in the end, after much shouting, he would come storming into the house and with a rolled-up newspaper slam the insect into oblivion, his anger at her directed at the hapless house spider. During these moments, my mother and I were close, clutching hands and cowering, too dependent on this man who, when it came down to it, could not be depended upon at all.
From Monday to Saturday, the house belonged to my mother and me; on Sundays, it was my father’s. Each week I watched him linger over his breakfast, wearing only a singlet and a sarong. With his spectacles and balding pate, he looked like a professor at ease, an impression reinforced by his habit of pausing as he read the newspaper to deliver a short speech about this or that issue that had consumed a few minutes of his attention.
He went about this day as competently as he did his workdays, putting his feet up after breakfast in his bedroom – my parents slept in separate rooms, his room had a reclining rattan chair and a side table always piled high with medical reports and journals from London and a yellowing pile of the Straits Times. He remained in his room until lunch, the blinds drawn low and a fan whirring above his head. Sunday lunch was typically a meal the amah had prepared and left for my mother to warm up. In the afternoon, he might take a nap, or sometimes meet an acquaintance for a game of golf. When he was home, my mother would disappear into her own room. She didn’t play the piano. Then, she might write to her sister, or stare out the window, and in the afternoon cook our dinner. I hated Sundays, long empty stretches of time punctuated only by my parents’ avoidance of each other.
When I turned twelve, I was sent to boarding school in England, where the sudden exposure to dormitory life and the proximity of hundreds of other boys, sleeping and eating and bathing together, was like those few seconds before a major collision, at once heady and terrifying. From the strange, bemused atmosphere my mother cast on my childhood years, I was plunged into a most literal world, where the hours of each day were filled with various manifestations of bullying, from pinching to punching, all to peals of uproarious laughter, usually at somebody’s expense. With puberty came inescapable promiscuity; it was a continual invasion of one’s self. A diminutive Indian boy, I had to sharpen my wits to survive; I became skilful at fending off the hard-edged tactics of older boys, and at ignoring the racial taunts.
That first year, my monthly letters home were full of begging to return to Malaysia, but my pleas went ignored, as if they were never delivered. My father wrote once every six weeks, each time filling just one page with his tidy, sloping script, telling me of the weather and the local politics and some of his more interesting medical cases. I pictured a diary on his desk, with an entry each month and a half reminding him to write to his son. My mother communicated intermittently, her letters a painful scrawl, convinced as she was that arthritis was settling in her joints. She seldom played the piano now. She never once mentioned my life at school and was entirely preoccupied with her health. I could tell by her words how many pills she’d taken before putting pen to paper.
I was to remain in England until Christmas, when I would fly home with my father, who planned to be in London for a medical conference. This was to be his first trip back since his Oxford days and he wrote to say how he looked forward to being in England again. In the meantime, I spent the school breaks at the house of an Indian lawyer whom my father had befriended during his student days, and who had opened a practice in Fulham, mainly frequented by an emerging class of wealthy Indian migrants. This solitary man worked long hours and returned alone to his three-storey townhouse. During the day, his housekeeper, an elderly English woman, kept the place in order. She cooked meals for him and left them in the fridge for his return. She kept an eye on me during the day.
In December, my father came and, when school closed, we returned together on the plane. I was glad to be going home. I remember very little about the journey itself, except that it was long, and that we sat together in darkness, drifting over the clouds, surrounded by passengers who seemed to demand very little and whom we barely noticed. In those days there wasn’t the bustle there is now: the queues of irate passengers jostling for position at ticket counters, security checks, endless waiting in sanitised departure lounges. My father was thoroughly pleased with his trip, and that made him genial, easy to be with.
Back home, I found my mother much changed. One day at lunch, sharing a meal of curry, okra and rice, she leaned toward me with glazed eyes, and said, ‘Vikram, your father is poisoning me.’ I told her to pull herself together. She told me I had become heartless; and it was true, I was more impatient, less willing to listen to her incoherent ramblings. I couldn’t tell her there was too much going on in my own life that I had to contend with. These days I spent a great deal of time feeling sorry for myself.
I did ask my father if he was giving her more pills. ‘I give her what she needs, no more no less,’ he said, adding, ‘don’t make the mistake of believing everything your mother tells you.’
In the matter-of-fact way he might have discussed a patient with a colleague, he told me that my mother’s hyperthyroidism was affecting her thinking, which was one of the symptoms, along with depression, slow reflexes and weight gain.
‘And constipation, and a host of other inconveniences,’ he continued, as I fidgeted, wishing he would stop. ‘It really is a bad business. I do what I can for her, but there is only so much I can do, as a doctor.’ His words puzzled me, raising more questions than were answered, but I didn’t want to take it further.
While I was away, my father wrote to me as though we were both adults. This was 1969, and he was deeply affected by the Chinese-Malay riots in Kuala Lumpur, in which so many were killed. I was fourteen then, and my father’s letters around that time were strained, a sort of rambling monologue, as though he were holding a conversation with himself. He hadn’t seen it coming, he said, but then who had? Firemen, police, and even the city’s residents had been totally unprepared. By the time the clashes had died down, it was reported in the press that the general hospital’s morgue had been so crowded that bodies were put into plastic bags and hung on ceiling hooks. My father knew a couple, Indian, innocent bystanders, who had been assaulted, not far from our home. But then there had been Indians, too, aiding the Chinese, arming themselves with pistols and shotguns, striking at Malay kampongs. It made no sense at all.
‘Well, to the rest of the world we are now barbarians,’ my father wrote. ‘All anyone is interested in now is the race issue. Race. That is all one hears about. Now we can forget about progress.’
Though I am certain my father never discussed these events with my mother, I know they affected her, too. When I returned in the Christmas of 1969, I found her more anxious than ever, fearful. On at least two occasions during that visit, she insisted she saw something crawling up the wall in her bedroom, crying out for me to come and rescue her. Reluctantly, I would enter her room, each time a little relieved to find nothing. She went out rarely, hardly set foot in the Selangor Club, a development that no doubt pleased the other ladies. Eventually, my father stopped insisting that she keep up her end of their social contract.
Over time, he wrote more often, while she wrote less and less. In her last few letters to me, her writing had become illegible. Until I turned eighteen and left school, I returned with increasingly less eagerness each year for Christmas. I became used to school and formed unexpected friendships. The days of victimhood were long gone. I was too small to be any good at rugby, but it turned out I was a fast runner, and skilful with a cricket bat. One of the rugby boys, a good-looking, freckled lad called Angus, took a shine to me. He was popular and I became popular by extension. Over the school breaks, I began to stay with him. How to describe these visits? His parents were delightful, eager to win me over, and Angus was feted upon his return like the prodigal son. He and I sat up with his parents, listening to rock and roll, The Beatles, Joan Baez, The Who, music that seemed utterly foreign to me before it became all that I knew. In summer, Angus and I bathed in a creek that ran at the bottom of his parents’ property. On warm days, he lay on his stomach on the grass, shirtless, his pale freckled shoulders quickly turning red. In these moments, I found myself growing shy around him. But most of the time we were equals: what I lacked in physical strength I made up for in intellectual confidence. I could outwit him, anytime.
When I was home, my father spent more time with me. Once, we travelled together to Penang on the train. In Georgetown, we walked for hours along narrow lanes that were always busy, day or night, stopping to eat chicken rice and fishball noodles amid the rising steam and clattering of utensils and crockery as they were rinsed in buckets of water before being returned for the next orders; the rowdy exchanges of the Chinese hawkers calling to each other across the open-air stalls; the oily, pungent smells rising from woks and open-air drains. Another time we drove my father’s old Bentley up the east coast to Kota Bahru. He was never tender, but my father opened my eyes to the world around me. For the first time I noted the richness of the landscape streaming past my window, and how people lived outside the capital. We drove for hours along dusty tracks where overloaded buses swerved to avoid chickens and children, competing with mopeds and bicycles loaded with entire families or an impossible weight of wares. Women squatted by the roadside selling durian, its pungency invading the car in an instant and lingering too long after. We drove through villages where Chinese and Malay lived side by side, getting on with the necessity of living, feeding their families, working, resting. To my youthful eyes there seemed to be no divisions, either racial or generational. Often I would see three generations together, the mother selling her wares, a baby fast asleep in a sling around her neck, while in the background an old lady swept the shack before which they crouched, all under a too hot sun.
My father was a pedagogue. He would start, gazing at the road ahead, ‘You see Vikram, what we have here is a country poised on the brink of change.’ He’d veer to avoid a mangy dog, or a couple of children chasing each other across the track. ‘The decisions we make now, as a nation, will determine what sort of people we are. Will we find our way, or will we remain bogged down by prejudice and ignorance?’ He talked about the importance of education, about civilisation, while I thought how ironic it was to hear him make the sort of comments he would dismiss with a snort if my mother had uttered them. At times he grew morose. ‘These riots will be our undoing,’ he would say. ‘Now the government can say, whenever it suits it, “Look out, behave, or the bogeyman will come”.’ I was surprised to hear him being critical, he who had worked so hard to make friends in government. At times he was hopeful, excited about the future. ‘Do you know what we have, that Europe does not? Lots and lots of young people.’ All the time, I sensed in his words a parallel discourse, which was about the choices he had made in his own life, his disappointment being as much about himself as about the future of Malaysia. He was a man trying to disentangle himself from a host of influences that prevented him from simply being, if there is such a thing.
Over time, we achieved the sort of non-judgemental camaraderie that men can so easily attain, without ever becoming intimate. He was not a bad man, but neither was he much given to compassion. He was unimaginative, though always at the back of his mind was the question of how he could further advance his own interests. Released from home, from my mother’s presence and the demands of work, he was capable of fun. One night, in Kuala Lumpur, we stayed at the house of a fellow general practitioner, a man I had never met before but whom my father greeted as though they were close. They embraced, and for a while I sat unseen as they traded stories of their student days at Oxford. They drank whisky and shared anecdotes about people they both knew but who were strangers to me. Later, more subdued, they talked about the future of Malaysia.
It was on that night, in our shared room, that we were suddenly assailed by a dozen flying cockroaches. My father snapped the lights on and we found them suddenly on our clothes, our skin. Immediately, we began to flail our arms about, tried to get rid of them. I was terrified, but could only laugh at the sight of my father doing a manic dance, waving his arms furiously to ward off the insects. Once rid of them, we fell into each other’s arms and roared with sheer relief.
Another time, driving back from the north at night, my father’s voice rose from the darkness around us to say, unprompted and without sentiment, simply stating a fact, ‘Your mother was absolutely beautiful when I married her. You wouldn’t know it now, but she was. I couldn’t believe my luck, when she agreed to marry me.’ He made a sound, halfway between astonishment and laughter, while I pictured her in my mind as she was now, overweight, bloated, and tried to see something different. I had never seen a photograph of her, a fact which surprised me now as he spoke. It was hard to picture anything else than what I knew, but my father’s words impressed me, and in my mind I saw my mother as she might once have been, young and happy and beautiful. That was the only time my father ever referred to her so intimately in conversation with me.
In those first years spent away from home, I tried each time I returned to spend time with my mother, but I found her too removed to talk to, sitting with her eyes narrowed, fixed on a faraway point, humming to herself. She could, or would, no longer play the piano and after a while my father had it removed. I told him that I felt it was an unnecessary and cruel gesture, but he turned to me then with anger and said, ‘Don’t you see? It’s painful for your mother to have it there reminding her constantly of her inability to play.’ Yet I felt as though, by disposing of the piano, he was giving up on her. The vast room looked empty. I saw her unhappiness, not as a part of me but from a distance, and tried to cross the divide that was widening between us. It was like trying to learn a language neither of us spoke. My mother shied from intimacy as though it were repugnant.
Until the end, a small part of me remained the child sitting by her side on the piano stool, sharing her self-inflicted exile from the world. Yet, at each return, I found growing inside me a determination to shake myself free of her and of this house. In England, there were always invitations from boys whose families offered to take me in during the holidays. Apparently, I was considered a good influence. My friends knew better, but parents are often clueless. Angus and I had gone our separate ways, but there were other boys. The centre of my universe had shifted. Yet I still straddled the two worlds. There was the one where I could romp to my heart’s content among others whose inexhaustible libidos guided most of their wakeful, and unconscious, acts. And this world, where the only way three people could co-exist – my father, my mother and I – was by ignoring the things that mattered most.
After school, I was accepted at Oxford as a medical student. The following year, my father died of a heart attack, and I returned to Kuala Lumpur in response to a telegram from my mother. I stayed a week. Aunt Vidya was there so that my mother would not be alone once I was gone. Vidya was nothing like my mother: tall, with grey hair pulled back in a bun, and soft grey eyes. We embraced, briefly, then she stood back to look at me. ‘So this is Vikram.’ She said nothing else of consequence.
My father’s will, handed me by his lawyer, gave clear instructions about the parcelling out of his practice, and how best to dispose of the house, if that was my decision. Of the not inconsiderable capital he had accumulated, my father advised in his notes to trust his lawyer’s judgement. ‘Leave all the details to him,’ my father wrote. There was nothing of a personal nature. Nor did he mention my mother.
At Oxford, a few weeks after my return, a letter arrived from Vidya. She would, she said, stay on with my mother for a while longer; then, soon after, another arrived telling me my mother had slipped into a coma. By the time I got there, she was gone. Vidya said she didn’t regain consciousness. I dealt with the funeral details, an unsurprisingly simple affair in which she was buried next to my father, after which I accompanied Vidya to the airport. I thanked her for being there. Vidya looked at me as though she wanted to say something, but thought better of it.
My mother left me a key to a box, which I opened after Vidya had gone. There was some sheet music, awards she had collected as a student, and a photo of a skinny girl with large eyes and a white dress below her knees standing next to a piano and facing the camera with a guarded look. On the back, someone had pencilled ‘Priya, eight years old’. There was a locket, with a photo I guessed might be of my grandmother as a younger woman, and a silk pouch of jewellery. I remembered what my father had said about her, how beautiful she was when they met, how much he’d loved her, although he hadn’t put it quite like that. What about her? I could not guess. I thought about those moments when she played her Chopin and I was with her. I thought about our shared terror of insects; the fear she’d passed on to me as a child of the world beyond what we knew, what was familiar. I remembered the way she held herself aloof from everyone. For a moment, I felt entirely helpless, knowing she was gone.
In the box was a packet of letters, from Vidya; mostly they contained practical advice to my mother, on how to keep the humidity from ruining her silk saris, how to keep the worms from getting the furniture. But they also chided my mother for not getting out more. ‘You are terribly proud. There is surely one person in this town that is good enough for you.’ I could see she cared for my mother and worried about her, and that this had been for my mother an important friendship, perhaps the only one she had. Vidya, who had married a close friend of the family, a man much older than herself, often referred in her letters to the sisters’ separation. ‘We have made different choices, it’s true. But I don’t see why we have to be apart. You could visit, or I could come to you if you prefer.’
In one letter, Vidya mentioned me. ‘I am sorry to hear that Vikram has been such a disappointment. And that he has not turned out to be musical, as you hoped. Still, our children grow up to be what they will be, and our influences are not as great as we might wish.’ I stared at this letter, which had been written when I was in my second year of boarding school and only thirteen. I remembered that year going on a car trip with my father and finding my mother so unresponsive when we returned that for the remainder of the school break we barely spoke. I remember waiting for more from her, and realising gradually that this was all there was. I wanted to ask Vidya what my mother had meant, but it seemed impossible to write to a woman I barely knew about something as personal as this.
I stayed in London, worked in public health for ten years before partnering with another GP to open a private practice. David and I had been together for two years by then and it made sense to move in together. We took a flat two blocks from the practice.
At some point, amid the regular formal correspondence from the lawyer handling my father’s estate, I was informed that the Ampang house was sold to a Chinese developer after it was assessed that necessary renovations would be too expensive to keep it on the rental market. The house was to be pulled down to make way for a condominium. I hadn’t been back to Malaysia for nearly two decades and I felt compelled to return, to see the house one more time. And I wanted David with me.
How strange it was, to be making this familiar journey again after so long, and with him by my side. On the flight to Kuala Lumpur, I thought of my father, heady from his conference, beaming like a child. David and I took a taxi to the Shangri-La, and the next morning decided to walk to Ampang Road. It was raining and the traffic had come to a complete standstill. I found it difficult to get my bearings; there were buildings everywhere, where grand old houses once stood, and more still being built. It was like visiting a place I’d never known, where everyone we walked past seemed young and purposeful, with mobile phones to their ears, so many of the men and women uniform in their suits. I glanced at David, who had insisted on a panama hat and a linen suit. He was like a Graham Greene character, the lapsed Catholic languishing in some dusty colonial outpost. I burst out laughing.
‘We look like a couple of old farts,’ I said, and for a moment David seemed mildly offended but took the joke. I forgot the busyness, the hooting horns, the broken footpath – the total erasure of everything I remembered.
It took forever to find the house. Drenched, exhausted, we peered past the rusted gate, and the sounds of traffic seemed to pause, leaving me alone with a rush of memories. They were all of my mother.
We could barely make out the house from the road. Nature was taking it back, the gardens gone, creeping branches breaking down the walls. A family of monkeys stared at us from the untended trees, daring us to enter. I took a step back, sensing in the undergrowth the creeping movements of creatures too small, too sly for us to see. It now looked like the jungle my mother had imagined and feared.
‘Let’s take a peek,’ David whispered to me, visibly excited.
‘No!’ I replied fiercely, and I saw him turn, puzzled by my tone. I stood rooted to the spot, dreading what lay beyond, and at the same time dreading a return to what I knew, the bustle and immediacy of my life in London that was reality, the tangible present which my mother had tried so hard to evade. Like her I found myself longing, in this moment, for a dark, secluded place where time would cease to matter, and I could pass my days in a haze of forgetfulness.
I felt David’s arm around me, and through teary eyes I saw his look of gentle concern, heard his voice warmly enquire, though I could not quite make out what he was saying. It was only a minute or two, but felt much longer, before I became calm again. I looked at David, and knew where I was.
I didn’t go in, didn’t even unlock the gate. Instead, I pulled David away, and together we walked back the way we had come.
