by Zen Cho
This was for the benefit of their audience. Tet Sang already knew it, and from the gleam in the waitress’s eye, she hadn’t forgotten this.
“You’re the girl from the coffeehouse,” said Fung Cheung.
“What’s your name?” said Tet Sang.
The waitress folded her hands. “At my tokong they called me Nirodha.”
Tet Sang raised an eyebrow. “And your actual name?”
The waitress held his eyes for half a second before her gaze faltered. “My birth name was Guet Imm.”
Ah Hin had digested the implications of the waitress being a follower of the Pure Moon.
“That girl is a witch!” he said. “Must be she enchanted me, that’s why I fell asleep!”
Suspicious muttering rose from the group like a bad smell.
“Did you enchant Ah Hin?” said Tet Sang.
Guet Imm looked injured. “No! Brother was already sleeping when I came. He looked tired, so I tried not to wake him up. I was looking for you, brother.”
“What for?”
“You’re the one I know,” explained Guet Imm.
Tet Sang jerked his head towards Fung Cheung. “You know him.”
“Yes, but you’re the one I trust,” said Guet Imm.
“Because of you, I fought that guy!” said Fung Cheung, offended.
“Yeah,” said Guet Imm apologetically. “Sorry, brother. But because of your fight, Mr Aw fired me.”
“He would have fired you anyway. You cannot go around hexing customers and expect to keep your job. It’s bad customer service.”
“He might have changed his mind before you got involved,” argued Guet Imm. “Anyway, this brother was actually helpful.” She gestured at Tet Sang. “He gave me money.”
“He did?” said Fung Cheung. He clapped Tet Sang on the back, delighted. “Ah Sang, you didn’t say! When you’re always scolding me for being too generous! All the more we shouldn’t worry. That coffeehouse earnt a lot of money today. It would be too ungrateful if they put the mata on us after all that.”
“I’m not at the coffeehouse anymore,” said Guet Imm. “I said they let me go.”
“Big Brother,” said Ah Hin urgently, “what about the witch’s jampi?”
But he’d lost his moment. Fung Cheung would have forgiven the nun much worse for such ammunition against Tet Sang as she’d given him.
“Come on, Ah Hin, you don’t need this sister’s jampi to fall asleep on watch,” said Fung Cheung. “You’ve done it so many times, must be you offended some spirit. We better take you to visit a sinseh in the next town, see if he can cure you.”
Amid the ensuing merriment at Ah Hin’s expense, Tet Sang said to the nun, “I gave you the money so you would go away. What happened to it?”
Guet Imm held up a soft black thing like the hide of a small animal. It turned out to be a wig. “I bought this so I’m not so conspicuous. It fell off when you jumped on me.”
She put it on her head. The effect was singularly unconvincing.
“I still have the rest of the money,” she added. “I thought of getting pots and pans, maybe some cooking chopsticks. But I wasn’t sure what you all had already.”
“Huh?” said Tet Sang.
“Oh, I’m joining you all,” said Guet Imm, wide-eyed. “Didn’t I say already?”
“You definitely did not say that!”
Guet Imm looked piteous. “But I don’t have anywhere else to go. Brother”—she meant Fung Cheung—“caused me to lose my job.” Another thought struck her. “And you saved my life! That’s two reasons why you have to look after me now.”
Tet Sang’s brow furrowed. “Wait, how does that even—”
“Don’t worry, brother. I won’t be a burden. I’ll make myself useful. I learnt how to cook at the coffeehouse. And,” the nun added, with rather more confidence, “I’m great at cleaning!”
“We’re roving contractors,” said Tet Sang. “We have nothing to clean.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Guet Imm, looking at Tet Sang’s clothes in an unflattering way. “Contractors, huh? I thought you were bandits. What kind of contract work do you do? Building houses, stuff like that?”
“More ‘stuff like that,’” said Fung Cheung. It was evident the nun amused him.
This was a bad sign. Fung Cheung would do anything for a laugh. Tet Sang glared at him, but before he could say anything, Ah Boon intervened.
“Maybe it’s not such a bad idea, Big Brother,” he said to Fung Cheung. “It gets boring, just us men. A woman in the group could contribute something different. She says she’ll make herself useful. I’m sure she can help us out—do more than cooking and cleaning. You won’t mind being kind to us, right, little sister?”
Ah Boon chucked the nun under her chin. It was like watching an idiot child pull a tiger’s tail. Tet Sang leant back.
But Guet Imm kept her hands in her lap. She looked puzzled, but after a moment, her face cleared.
“Oh, you mean sex!” she said. “Would you want me to have sex with you?”
“No!” said Tet Sang.
“Yes?” said Ah Boon.
“Maybe,” said Fung Cheung.
Guet Imm considered it. “I can do that. I’ve never done it before, but it can’t be difficult, right? Even cats and dogs know how to do.
“Of course,” she added, “as a devotee of the Pure Moon, I vowed when I first shaved my head that I would have no profane intercourse with men. If I break my vow to the deity, I must make sure to cleanse myself afterwards. I would need to make a sacrifice each time.”
“We’re very open in this company,” said Fung Cheung. “Everyone can practise their religion, no problem. You ask Rimau; we never eat pork.”
“Correct,” said Rimau, who had fallen asleep last night after three gourds of beer.
“She means,” said Tet Sang, “she’d have to chop off the dick of any man she fucked.”
“That’s right,” said Guet Imm, approving of his acuity. “You’re very clever about our doctrine, brother! Are you a follower also?”
“There was a tokong of the Pure Moon in the town where I grew up,” said Tet Sang.
“Chop off our dicks?” said Ah Boon.
“It’s how I would wash out the sin,” explained Guet Imm. “Using the men’s blood. Strictly, my teacher would say I must do the cleansing even if I didn’t go so far as to have the profane intercourse. Even thinking of betraying my vows is enough! If we are being strict, I should make the sacrifice now you’ve raised the subject.”
She directed a speculative look at Ah Boon’s crotch but shook her head. “But I think that’s too rigid. Let’s see what happens. I am homeless, I have nowhere to go. I’m sure the deity will close one eye on this occasion.
“Of course, if she doesn’t, we’ll soon find out,” she said brightly. “The deity is amazing. There was one time this novice at my tokong stole the joss sticks to eat—she was always a bit weird—and before anyone even found out, her father’s house burnt down! The family lost everything.”
“We can’t take her,” said Ah Boon to Fung Cheung.
But Tet Sang had read the signs right. Fung Cheung hadn’t been that interested in the sex. He’d already made up his mind. He replied:
“You may enjoy Ah Yee’s cooking, but I’m getting fed up.”
“Big Brother, if you don’t want me to cook, I don’t have to do it,” said Ah Yee in a throbbing voice.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Tet Sang. “Your food is disgusting, but nobody else can do it.”
“At least you appreciate me, Second Brother!”
Tet Sang turned to the nun. “This is ridiculous. You can’t come with us. Take your money, get out of here and find another job.”
He grabbed her arm, intending to escort her out of their camp, but it was like trying to shift a boulder. Guet Imm wouldn’t budge. She remained seated, cross-legged like a statue of the Pure Moon in repose.
She shook off Tet Sang’s hand with rath
er less effort than it would take to bat away a fly. “No.”
Tet Sang looked at his hand, then at her. “No?”
“You’re not the boss,” said Guet Imm. She nodded at Fung Cheung. “Brother is the boss. I knew it straight away, from the nobility of his countenance.”
“I was the helpful one,” Tet Sang reminded her. “The one who gave you money, remember? You said you didn’t trust Ah Lau.”
“I trust him now,” said Guet Imm. “Before, I admit I misunderstood him. I thought, who is this busybody fellow, poking his nose into other people’s business? Nobody asked him to beat up that guy also. Because he wants to show off, I must lose my job.
“But now I see I was wrong. This encounter has shown me his true character. Brother is like a knight-errant of the olden days, rescuing people from corrupt authority. His heart is like beaten gold, as beautiful as his face.”
She gazed at Fung Cheung, her eyes shining.
Tet Sang’s heart fell. Fung Cheung loved being gazed at adoringly—ideally by handsome young men, but a pretty woman would do in a pinch.
Guet Imm reached out a reverent hand, touching Fung Cheung’s shin.
“Brother,” she said, “I know you won’t let me down!”
The addition of the nun to the group was not as disastrous as Tet Sang had feared. She could not in fact cook, which was no surprise in a votary of the Order of the Pure Moon. They were not one of the useful orders that reared goats and taught children mathematics. Every tokong of the Pure Moon that Tet Sang had ever known had been supported by a numerous establishment of servants, whose attendance on the nuns gained them pahala and enabled the nuns to devote their days exclusively to study, meditation and self-cultivation.
To be fair to Guet Imm, she was less useless than most Pure Moon devotees. She managed to part the men from their filthy clothes and launder them, in the teeth of the men’s appalled resistance. She also proved handy with a needle, skilled at leech removal, and knowledgeable about where to find herbs to keep off the mosquitoes.
Even when the group gave in to the inevitable and admitted that Ah Yee must take over cooking duties again if they were not all to be poisoned, there was no suggestion of getting rid of the nun. They had all got used to itching less.
“And you all smell better now,” said Guet Imm. “Well done!”
The group walked in the evenings and mornings, stopping to rest late at night and in the dull intolerable heat of the afternoons. At most, they had four hours of uninterrupted sleep at any time. Some of the group, used to waking in the day and sleeping at night, had found it hard to get used to this when they first joined, but the pattern of their days was not unlike that adopted by the monastic orders, and it did not seem to trouble Guet Imm. She travelled well and did not complain of discomfort, so Tet Sang would not have known that she felt any, had he not noticed her stealing away from the group one night.
After a moment’s reflection, he followed her. They had pitched camp in an abandoned plantation that was slowly being retaken by the jungle. There was more than one kind of danger here, for Guet Imm as much as for the group.
He found her sitting on a log with her shoes off, rinsing her feet with water from a stream. She had not brought a torch with her, but Tet Sang was not surprised that she had not needed it to navigate the scrub in the dark.
He had not made a sound, but she looked up suddenly, her face a pale oval in the moonlight filtering through the canopy.
Tet Sang had all the bandit’s fabled ability to move in the forest without being detected. He was fairly sure he had done nothing to betray his presence, but still he shrank behind a tree.
“What are you doing here, brother?” said the nun. For once, she sounded annoyed.
Tet Sang stepped out of the shadows.
“What’s wrong with your leg?” he said.
But now he could see the state of her feet—blistered and rubbed raw from walking. She shifted away from Tet Sang, bending to pat her feet dry. A wince briefly displaced her frown.
“You should call Ah Boon to look at that,” said Tet Sang, embarrassed. “He can give you medicine. He used to look after people’s cows.”
“That’s some recommendation,” said Guet Imm. “I’m okay. It’s a small thing only. I’m not used to walking so much, but my feet will toughen up.”
Tet Sang knew he should leave her alone. Nobody had asked her to come along. If her feet hurt, it was her own fault.
“I thought the votaries of the Pure Moon were taught healing arts,” he said. “What do you call it? ‘Shaping the air’?”
“Very good!” said Guet Imm snappishly. “You know a lot, brother, but you don’t know everything. We can’t use the deity’s gifts for selfish purposes. The five fingers of her hand are only to benefit other people.”
“Healing your feet is to benefit us,” said Tet Sang. “We have an appointment to get to. You have to keep up. We can’t afford to get slowed down.”
Guet Imm’s gaze was steely.
“You don’t need to worry, brother,” she said. “I’ll keep up.”
She sat there with her head held high, her eyes on his, until he went away.
He did not let the incident bother him, though they were taking longer than they should to get to Sungai Tombak, where they were to make delivery of the goods. After the hue and cry Fung Cheung had raised at the last town, Tet Sang had insisted on taking a circuitous route, avoiding their usual haunts.
The Protectorate’s posters might not have borne a very good likeness of Fung Cheung and his men, but they had got the names and descriptions more or less right. You never knew whether a chancer hoping for a reward might turn them in. These were uncertain times, and hunger a powerful incentive even for the faint-hearted.
It was only prudent to go the long way round. Tet Sang refused to feel guilty about it. Guet Imm was evidently determined not to be pitied, anyway. Her gait never faltered during the day, though she still crept away in the evenings.
She made it easier not to feel sorry for her by refusing to talk to him for a time, while taking pains to be especially nice to everyone else. She struck up a particular friendship with Ah Hin, who had always had urgings towards religion.
“If not for my mother, I would have joined an order,” he was wont to say wistfully. “But how to support her as a monk? Begging and chanting prayers, maybe you can get rice for yourself, but not for your family. Life could have been different. I would have been educated if I followed a god.”
Being illiterate, he had restricted his religious endeavours to wasting his hard-earned share of the group’s earnings on donations to the religious orders and buying charms and trinkets from monks. To nuns, he had never paid attention before. But after Guet Imm had accompanied them for some time, Ah Hin realised that she did not rise earlier than everyone else to sit, cross-legged and unmoving with her eyes shut, for no reason.
“Sister Guet Imm,” he said after he had watched her, rapt, for half an hour, “you were meditating!”
Guet Imm looked puzzled. “Yes? It’s one of the five fingers of the deity’s hand. Emptying the gourd—meditation—is the first finger, the most fundamental. Everything follows from that. Filling the gourd, planting seeds…”
Ah Hin wasn’t listening. Excited, he rummaged through his possessions and produced a small crumpled booklet, printed in red ink.
“The Abbot gave me this at the last tokong we passed. The last tokong that was still standing,” he corrected himself. “They followed a different deity, but … can you read it to me, sister?”
Guet Imm read out the title: “Scriptures of the Baby God.” She flipped through the tract, nodding.
Her prohibition on profane intercourse with men aside, the Pure Moon was not a jealous goddess. Tet Sang had once known a votary of her Order who had snuck out every fifth-day to make offerings at other houses of worship—those dedicated to the gods of the Malayu and the Damilans as well as the Tang pantheon. She even went to the Protectorate’s c
hurches: “Safer to keep all the gods happy,” she’d said pragmatically.
“Rather than I read to you,” said Guet Imm, “isn’t it better if I teach you how to read yourself?”
“Oh, no,” said Ah Hin, taken aback. “I’m not clever, sister. I went to school one whole year and I learnt how to gamble only.”
“Doesn’t matter whether you’re clever or not,” said Guet Imm. “With the deity’s help, all things can be done.”
She appropriated one of the group’s torches and attended patiently to Ah Hin every evening as he read aloud, stumbling over the red words. The tract recounted the adventures of a boy god, a troublesome infant who spent more time subduing dragons and taming seas than preaching about ethics or spiritual cultivation.
It was a good story, with plenty of fighting. The group found the Baby God far more sympathetic than they would have found the Pure Moon. Their complaints about Guet Imm’s annexation of the torch died down, and Ah Hin’s education was stimulated by the brothers’ objections to his halting pace.
Tet Sang was the one member of the group who did not enjoy their story-time sessions. Perhaps to the others it was natural to see a woman with her head bent, her nape deceptively vulnerable and her lashes casting shadows on her cheeks, as she devoted herself to a man. No doubt the scene recalled memories of the mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins who had once tended to them.
Tet Sang had come to the group with a different set of memories. He knew how dangerous it could be to assume that either women or mystics were harmless.
There was no reason to worry, he told himself. It was not a good time for Tang religious orders, and the Order of the Pure Moon had suffered as much as the others from the Protectorate’s purges. Without her tokong, the nun depended on the group for her livelihood. She would do nothing to jeopardize that.
Still, he thought it his duty to warn Ah Hin.
“Better be careful around that nun,” Tet Sang said one morning. “You don’t know what her intentions are.”
Ah Hin gave him a wounded look. “You’re always so suspicious, brother. Why don’t you like Sister Guet Imm?”
“It’s been two weeks,” said Tet Sang. “We don’t know anything about where she’s from or what she’s done. Just because she’s a religious doesn’t mean she’s sincere. You know what they say about devotees of the Pure Moon.” There were rumours about the powers the deity granted her followers, and the wise were cautious where magic was concerned.
