Spirit Play

by Barbara Ismail

  She looked hard at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘But Ashikin thought—and you know, I listen to her, because she’s smart.’ Osman could not have agreed more heartily but would himself have added ‘intimidating.’ ‘Zaiton believed you’d attacked me and was trying to draw attention away from you.’ She flicked the ashes of her cigarette into a battered ashtray, and Osman silently leaned over to offer her another. Rahim also took one.

  ‘What do you think of what I’ve said?’

  ‘You won’t believe me now.’

  ‘Maybe not. But you really must try. Right, Chik Osman?’

  Osman nodded and looked official.

  Rahim sighed. ‘I was going over to see you, Mak Chik. Not to hit you over the head, why would I do that? And where would I have gotten an enam sembilan? I wanted to talk to you and tell you what was happening with us, that we were going to Sungei Golok and why, so you wouldn’t think we were two suspects running away. Though why you would suspect anyone of killing their own parents…’ No one spoke.

  ‘So I was coming to see you. And as I was coming into the village, I heard all the commotion and realized you’d been hurt. I decided not to continue, because if I came there to help, everyone would ask what I was doing there, and our secret would have come out, and everyone would know.’

  ‘Everyone knows now,’ Maryam pointed out to him.

  He nodded sadly. ‘I was hoping to do it quietly, but then, after what happened with Zaiton—and Mak Chik, I’m very sorry it did—she couldn’t tell her father, so she just left, and then he went to the police, of course, and then…well, you know. But it wasn’t because I didn’t want to help you. There were so many people around I knew you’d be cared for, and I still thought, like I said, we could keep it quiet and no one would know.

  ‘I look back now and think how stupid I was, believing that no one would find out. And if I had come forward, you wouldn’t be asking me this.’

  ‘Probably not,’ Maryam agreed.

  ‘After the main puteri, Zaiton went to speak to her mother, to ask her when we could get married. I was in the house, but not in the room with them. I couldn’t hear them, but I could see Mak Chik Jamillah was tired, and I don’t think she wanted to discuss it then. I tried to tell Zaiton that earlier; a couple of days more wouldn’t make any difference. But she can be stubborn.’

  Maryam silently agreed.

  ‘She went right into the bedroom with her mother, saying she was going to help her into bed, but I know she wanted to talk about it. Then she came out a few minutes later and said her mother was sleeping, which the bomoh told us would happen.’ Maryam knew all about that. ‘And then I went home.’

  ‘So Mak Chik Jamillah didn’t come out of the bedroom again after Zaiton put her to sleep.’

  ‘No, she was asleep. Well, she didn’t come out while I was there anyway. Maybe she did after I left? But Zaiton said she was asleep.’

  ‘So Zaiton would have been the last to see her.’

  ‘Except for her father. I mean, he was sleeping right next to her.’

  ‘True.’

  Rahim looked at her with horror. ‘You don’t mean you’re thinking…? That wouldn’t be possible. No.’ He looked from one to the other.

  ‘We’re thinking everything, Rahim,’ she said tiredly. ‘We’re keeping an open mind.’

  ‘That’s it. You can go now,’ Osman told him. ‘But not to Thailand, you understand?’ Rahim nodded glumly. ‘Because if you try that again, I’ll arrest you.’

  He nodded again and shuffled out of the office. He looked broken.

  Chapter 25

  MARYAM, RUBIAH AND OSMAN sat on Aziz’s porch drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and eating Rubiah’s cakes while an anxious Zaiton hovered nearby, offering more refreshments and looking to her father for help.

  Maryam reflected it was actually quite pleasant sitting here, if you didn’t remember why you came. It was late afternoon, so the air was cooler than it had been at noon, the cakes were excellent, the cigarettes were Osman’s, and the coffee thick and sweet. Really, a Kelantan paradise; but then thinking about being here to question people ruined the atmosphere. She strove to enjoy her coffee and cigarette before settling down to business.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked Zaiton.

  ‘Oh fine,’ she answered nervously, looking constantly toward her father as though he might know better how she felt.

  ‘Not sick in the mornings?’

  ‘Well, maybe sometimes.’

  ‘Eat plain rice when you get up,’ Rubiah advised. ‘It’ll settle your stomach.’

  Zaiton nodded and fidgeted.

  ‘Pak Chik Aziz,’ Osman asked finally, ‘would you mind if we spoke to Zaiton alone for a moment?’

  With a long look at his daughter, who looked back imploringly, he turned and walked down the stairs. Rahman invited him for a coffee at a nearby stall, and they walked away together, with Aziz frequently looking back as if to send Zaiton moral support.

  Rubiah was at her most maternal: understanding and sympathetic, yet allowing no nonsense. ‘Now Zaiton, tell us what happened after the main puteri.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just what I said. After the ceremony, did your mother go to bed? She must have been tired.’

  ‘I know I was,’ Maryam chimed in.

  ‘Yes, she was. I helped her to bed.’

  ‘Did you discuss anything with her?’

  ‘She was tired.’

  ‘Did you talk about your wedding?’

  ‘She was tired…’

  ‘Zaiton,’ Rubiah adjusted her glasses and looked down her nose at the girl. ‘If you don’t want to answer questions here…’

  ‘We did…a little.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She was very tired, like I told you. She just wanted to go to sleep. She said we could talk in the morning.’

  ‘Why was that a problem?’

  Zaiton commenced squirming, making Rubiah herself nervous. ‘It was just that, you see…’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Maryam said softly, but with menace, ‘I think we’ve all had enough of your acting and crying and being confused. Now, you tell us what happened without any more fuss. And hurry up!’

  Zaiton looked pleadingly at Osman, who sat stone-faced. He agreed she had been allowed to get away with this far too long. She deflated.

  ‘It was just that I wanted to get it going! She’d put it off a couple of times because she was sick and she was waiting to have the main puteri finished first. She knew I had to do something soon! I didn’t want to wait till morning, and then she’d say she had to have breakfast first, and then something else, and before you know it, even more time would have passed and then what? I told her, and she just lay down and fell asleep! Just like that.’

  ‘Did you do anything to her?’

  ‘Do anything?’

  ‘To keep her awake?’

  ‘No, why? There was no point. She was already asleep.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t shake her or anything?’

  ‘Are you asking me if I killed my own mother?’

  ‘I’m asking if you shook her.’

  ‘No! She was asleep. She wasn’t going to talk about anything.’

  ‘Was the window opened in the bedroom?’

  Zaiton thought about it. ‘Yes, about halfway. The shutters were opened a little. She liked fresh air.’

  Rubiah nodded. She did, too.

  ‘And one more thing. Did your father go to sleep right away after that?’

  ‘No, my relatives were all here, Zainab and her family. We stayed up for a while, we were all so happy that she was cured. No one was in a hurry to go to sleep.’

  Zaiton was dispatched to the kitchen when her father came back, and they reconvened on the porch. Again, coffee was served, cigarettes offered, cakes passed around. Maryam was putting her weight back on faster than she would have thought possible—but then, for the past weeks she’d been living on
a cake-heavy diet.

  ‘Is she alright?’ Aziz asked about Zaiton.

  ‘Of course, she is. Why wouldn’t she be?’

  ‘I’m just asking. I thought she looked upset.’ He craned his neck as if trying to see through the wall of the house to the kitchen.

  ‘Nothing to be upset about,’ Maryam said briskly. ‘Abang Aziz, tell me, what happened after the main puteri?’

  Aziz shrugged. ‘We came back here, all the family. Jamillah was so tired, she was practically asleep standing up. Zaiton took her into the bedroom to put her to sleep.’

  ‘Did they argue?’

  ‘No, I didn’t hear anything. She was asleep!’

  ‘Alright. And then?’

  He looked confused. ‘Well, we talked for a while. Zainab was here with her family, and Jamillah’s sisters, and my family. We just sat here and talked.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Oh, at least two hours, I would think.’

  ‘And you went to sleep after that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Next to Jamillah?’

  ‘Where else?’ He seemed mystified.

  ‘And she seemed fine when you went to sleep.’

  ‘She seemed asleep!’ He began to look angry. ‘Did I check her? No, she was asleep, turned away towards the window. And I went to sleep. And in the morning, I tried to wake her, and you know what happened then. You were here!’

  ‘Yes,’ Maryam said, absently. ‘Did you notice anyone hanging around the house?’

  Now he was angry. ‘If I had, don’t you think I would have said so already? Would I have kept quiet about it?’ He glared at all of them. ‘What a question!’

  ‘I’m just asking, Abang,’ she said mildly. ‘Just trying to get all the facts together.’

  ‘Well, now you have them.’ Aziz stood up, ending the meeting. ‘So you can do with them what you like.’

  Chapter 26

  ‘HE THINKS ZAITON killed her,’ Maryam told Osman as they walked back to her house. ‘That’s why he’s so angry.’

  ‘Really? How could he live with her?’

  Maryam shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you that’s what I see there. Rubiah?’

  Rubiah was adjusting her headscarf and pushed her glasses farther up her nose. ‘It’s very sad,’ she replied. ‘It feels like that to me, too. He’s lost his wife and doesn’t want to lose his daughter and grandchild now. It’s a terrible choice.’

  Osman protested. ‘But how can he protect a child who’s killed her mother?’

  ‘I didn’t say she had,’ Maryam told him, kicking away a goose who was following her and getting ready to start making noise. ‘I just said Aziz thinks so, or is afraid so. That’s why he isn’t pushing anyone to hurry up the investigation.

  ‘Zainab may agree, because no one’s heard from her either, have they? You would think for something like this, the family wouldn’t leave you alone about finding the killer. It’s odd they’re just sitting quietly.’

  ‘No more coffee for me,’ Osman said, as he held up a restraining hand. ‘Please.’

  ‘You aren’t hungry?’ Rubiah asked, unwilling to send him home without a meal.

  ‘Oh no,’ he assured her. ‘We’ve been eating all day.’

  ‘Maybe you have,’ Rubiah chided him. ‘We’ve been talking.’

  He laughed, something he never would have done with either Maryam or Rubiah before, where he would only have felt rebuked and then apologized. But his confidence had grown since his marriage, and he no longer interpreted every comment as a reprimand—even if it was.

  ‘Do you think we should talk to Zainab?’

  Maryam thought about it. ‘Of course. We should speak to the whole family.’

  Zainab’s story matched those of her sister and father. ‘You had to clean up the whole mess with Zaiton, didn’t you?’ Maryam asked sympathetically. ‘It must have been so hard on you, like taking over as the mother.’

  Zainab agreed. ‘I just don’t know why Zaiton did what she did. Making me go all the way to Golok to find her, running away like that. At least everything worked out in the end. We had the kenduri, Mak Chik, and I think it went very well.’

  ‘An excellent idea,’ Maryam congratulated her. ‘I think you handled it beautifully. No one could have done any better.’

  ‘Thank you!’ Zainab seemed pleased. ‘I did try to get it all straightened out.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Maryam leaned forward confidentially, ‘did you think Rahim had anything to do with the enam sembilan? I’m just asking your opinion. He says he was on his way here and then saw what happened and ran. I like him, you know. He’s a nice boy.’

  ‘We thought he was a nice boy,’ Rubiah added.

  ‘I don’t know, Mak Chik. I know I should say “No, never!”, and I’m not accusing anyone, but that whole situation was so tense and mixed up, I don’t know what either of them were doing. I don’t think they were thinking clearly either. I mean, now they’re home and everything is quiet, and I don’t doubt it will stay that way. Zaiton and I are going to take over my mother’s stall in the market.’

  ‘Congratulations! We’ll be neighbors!’

  Zainab smiled back at her. ‘I know. Things have already settled down. It was a crazy time.’

  Maryam and Rubiah smiled pleasantly and thanked her.

  ‘She thinks it too,’ Rubiah said as they left. ‘She’s telling us it won’t happen again, so we should leave it alone.’

  ‘I can understand why they wouldn’t want to go through any more scandal. But a crime like that—it’s unnatural! It makes me shiver.’ She wrapped her arms around herself to demonstrate. ‘If they all think Zaiton killed her mother, then it’s most likely one of them who attacked me to make me stop investigating. But then, and this bothers me, what was Kamal doing climbing into my house?’

  Rubiah had no answer.

  Osman could not understand Hamidah. Two female officers, assisted by Azrina, attempted to bathe her, which resulted in the three of them becoming soaked to the bone, while Hamidah’s hair remained untouched and most of her dirt still in place.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with her!’ Azrina exclaimed to Osman later. ‘She fought like a tiger, like a familiar spirit touched by water! She almost threw herself out of the room. And why? She wouldn’t put on clean clothes or comb her hair.’ Azrina gritted her teeth in frustration. ‘Unbelievable. She really must be crazy, you know. What grown person would act that way? She’s filthy!’

  He watched as she stormed around the house shaking her head at the recalcitrance of the woman. He was completely content.

  ‘Let’s go to the night market,’ he suggested. ‘We can get some food there. Or eat by the river.’ She smiled at him, excited now at the thought of exploring Kota Bharu after dark. ‘Yes, I’ll get my bag.’ And she left him in the kitchen.

  ‘Look at this,’ she came back in, holding a small, shredded piece of yellow cloth with Thai writing on it. It had been balled up into the smallest size possible and was grubby with smeared black fingerprints.

  ‘What do you think it is?’ she asked him, trying to flatten it out so they could see what it said. Osman felt his back go cold. Azrina smoothed it out on the table; even out to its full length it was small, and he couldn’t read Thai anyway. But there was no mistaking the small drawing of a demon face in the corner, slightly obscured by dirt but clear enough if you were looking hard. He put his hand on his forehead, and carefully removed her hand from it. ‘Where did you get it?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She cocked her head to look at it from another angle. ‘It isn’t mine. Could Hamidah have stuck it into my clothes before? It looks like something she would have: dirty. Look at it.’

  She looked up at him and her faced creased in concern. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think it’s a spell, a jampi. And it must be from her. No one else would have one so smudged.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off it. ‘Let me take it, sweetheart. Don’t even think about it.’


  He took the offending object and tried to look insouciant, but it unnerved him. ‘I don’t want it in the house,’ he said suddenly. ‘Let’s leave it in the office on our way out.’

  He resolved to bring it to Pak Nik Lah first thing in the morning and find out what this family was trying to do to him. He kept a sharp eye out for grasshoppers but saw none for the rest of the evening. Thankfully.

  ‘At least it isn’t poisonous,’ Maryam told him. She didn’t waste much time on the spell when Osman brought it to her. ‘Heaven only knows what else she’s got stuck into pockets and what-not. This is probably the cleanest thing on her.’

  She kept her manner completely businesslike. ‘What do these little scribbles mean? It’s poison you worry about. Besides,’ she whipped a batik sarong open to show to a customer, ‘that woman is crazy.’

  Osman was a bit insulted that Maryam made such short shrift of this jampi. After all, hadn’t she herself suffered under the curse of black magic?

  ‘It was the poison,’ she answered briefly. ‘Not yellow cloth. Anyway, you should be finding out what that family is up to. I can’t figure it out.’

  Chapter 27

  HE STRODE INTO THE HOLDING CELLS in the police department—hardly a jail, just three rooms with bars. The air was heavy and hot: there was no air conditioning and only a small window in each cell, hardly sufficient for a breeze.

  He went first to Kamal, sitting wretchedly on the hard bench, his head in his hands, looking as though he’d been sitting in that posture for years. He leaned in through the bars, his habitual expression of disapproval and disdain unchanged, even seeing his only child in such straits. Kamal lifted his head to look at him without any warmth.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Is that how you talk to me?’ his father asked. If he was surprised at the lack of deference he’d come to expect from his son, his face didn’t reveal it.