“What can I do about it?”
“You could tell D’Cruz.” My face fell and he said, “I could tell him, though I suspect that he already knows. Our Oswald is nobody’s fool. You can be sure he’ll get the murdering swine in the end.”
I wasn’t sure. Mohan could disappear into the vagrant life and, however well policed Singapore was, it would be difficult to find him. He could also slip out of the island. The inspector had talked about watching the airport and the railway station, but he seemed to have forgotten one thing. Singapore is a diamond, forty-two kilometres wide and twenty-three long. Its area isn’t large but it has a coastline of a hundred and forty kilometres, too long to be guarded day and night.
From where I sat, I could see the islands of Indonesia. They were places in which a man could disappear completely and they were only an hour away by motor-launch.
I knew Mohan would get away. “I let a murderer escape, Jafri, a mass murderer. I don’t even know why.”
“I don’t either, but I can guess.” I looked puzzled and he continued, “When it comes to a murder trial, we all think of the judge saying, ‘you shall be taken to a place of execution and there hanged by the neck till you are dead’. It is a more premeditated, a more cold-blooded killing than any murder that one can imagine.”
I let what he said sink in before I remarked. “D’Cruz says that all murders are committed for money. I don’t think Mohan was money-minded, do you? He only wanted the money to advance his cause.”
Jafri shook his head. “I can’t allow you that, How Kum. We all want money to advance our cause, dharma or whatever. It usually transpires that our causes are ourselves. And, whatever your cause, it does not justify killing someone to advance it.”
In the west, the sun was slowly falling into the sea. The red ball stained the clouds blue and purple, colouring their edges with a mean yellow tinge. They looked like bruises growing old. As always at sunset, a light breeze begins to blow in from the sea. Breezes carry memories. I thought of my last evening with Vanita and how I woke to find her dead beside me. I remembered what had awakened me.
“You know, Jafri, Mohan maintained that things were only in the present. The evening Vanita died, I was telling her how difficult it was to tell moonrise from sunset just by looking.”
“Vanita was a sensible girl and I hope she told you how stupid you are. We identify things not by what they look like but by where they are taking us. There is a world of difference between sunset and moonrise. Sunset leads into the darkness, moonrise into the glorious light of love.”
Vanita hadn’t taught me that. All she had taught me was that there was love, that it was real. I realised that it could be, again. On the edge of the world, a full moon was beginning to rise.
Dr Gopal Baratham (1935–2002) was both a distinguished writer and a prominent neurosurgeon in equal parts. He was born in the quiet of the mid-thirties, survived in the turmoil of the fifties and sixties and, in the eighties, found the tranquillity for writing.
Dr Baratham never stopped writing throughout his medical career. A short story titled “Island” was featured in a 1974 university publication but it was only in 1981 that Figments of Experience, a collection of short stories, was published.
Considered a literary light during his lifetime, his oeuvre consists of five volumes of short stories, three novels and a non-fiction book. His first novel, A Candle or The Sun, won the Southeast Asia Write Award when it was published in 1991 and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Book Prize in 1992. One of the first Singapore writers to have their work published by an overseas publisher, his books have also received much international praise.
Moonrise, Sunset Page 26
