The garden had become unruly with weeds. The rows of heliconia, crab’s claw and bird of paradise were thinning, and the slender, once glossy leaves dry from lack of water. But there were no flowers, none of the deep red, pinkish yellow and orange flowers that used to grow in abundance. The white and purple lilies in the dragon pots had all wilted. The orchids, all of his prized expensive orchids—which my mother loved, and cut and put into vases all over the house—were dead. Rows of handmade terracotta pots hung like a macabre installation from their wooden gallows. And the pots on the two-tier benches that our gardener Raja built over one weekend were choked with tall dried stalks. Even the buds had fallen off.
The only thing that thrived and grew with wild abandon were the papaya trees, lush and pregnant with fruit. The birds were responsible for the baby trees, which grew around the three big ones. And then there was the bamboo, the cluster of skinny bamboo which grew like a fortress, and which I believed sheltered a family of snakes—king cobras to be precise. Raja had ceased to come every day as Papa had stopped paying him. But once a month, he would come to cut the grass by hand and I would leave him a fifty-ringgit note underneath a flower pot. I did not want the garden to be completely overgrown, but whenever I stood in the garden, I was at a loss as to what to do. Everything needed trimming. I would have to spend hours on my knees, digging up weeds. I would get bitten by mosquitoes and the grass would make my thighs itch.
I remember watching Papa in the garden, squatting in his sarong and singlet, floppy white hat, smoking his pipe. Papa humming a tune, digging up weeds, trimming the orchids. Mother sitting in a rattan chair under the shade of my tree, the flame of the forest, red flowers all around her. Them chatting about something, then laughing in agreement. My father nodding to what she was saying, the smoke swirling around his head. The scent of tobacco in the evening breeze, the bamboo leaves flitting like skittles . The water in the pool a deep blue from the mosaic tiles. The promise of a good dinner, television and conversation. Papa’s mutton curry. Hot fluffy white rice. Music on the gramophone. Them dancing to Bing Crosby. Those were our weekends, until Mother died.
Now, the house filled me with sadness and I would feel the desire to leave after minutes. The curse of being the only child rendered me somewhat distant and uncommunicative. I could not reach out to my father. I didn’t know how to. I had no words to articulate to him, no way to understand the void that had consumed him. I wanted to kiss his cheek like I did when I was a child, hanging on to him for dear life while he spun me around and around till I was dizzy.
The house had withered outside, a testament to the tropics, but inside, it felt abandoned and unloved. The paint on the walls had aged and the damp had settled in mouldy pockets. My mother’s beloved Persian rugs smelt of cockroaches and the paintings that Papa had collected so lovingly—because Mother loved art—stared into empty rooms and hallways. Papa sat alone in his study. He slept alone and woke alone, his life a testament to self-imposed solitude and loneliness. He refused to see or talk to anyone. It terrified me. I did not want love to do this to me. I did not want to lose contact, touch, desire. My father did not love again. He chose not to. Not even me, his only child.
When I brought Omar to the house for the first time, Papa emerged from his study in his sarong and singlet, pipe in mouth, smelling of whisky, dishevelled hair unwashed.
My father, the once-great human rights lawyer.
Omar shook his hand and was led into the study. Papa smiled and said that he wanted to have a chat and closed the door silently behind Omar. I walked to my bedroom and sat on my bed for all of two unbearable minutes and then decided to go into my father’s room, the room once reserved for guests. He had kept it sparse. A simple white Indian cotton bed sheet adorned his bed, smelling of vanilla and his aftershave. A worn white singlet with a huge hole was thrown over a chair. Slippers by the bed. A half-empty glass of water. A bar of smoothened Pears soap in the bathroom. The dragon pot full of ice-cold water.
I stepped quietly into my parents’ bedroom. My mother’s antique dressing table, with the oval mirror, her perfume bottles, Dior lipsticks and silver bangles. Her pearls, which she wore on special occasions. Their wedding picture still on the wall, my father in his dark suit and my mother’s eyes gazing up from the white veil. Her clothes were still in the glass and teak cupboard, where I used to sneak into and find secret things. In the drawers, love letters, Valentine cards, a skinny black-strapped Art Deco watch still in its oblong case, a crystal necklace, an antique pocket watch with the inscriptions RC.
And in the corner on a Malacca chair, her Japanese silk caftan, which she wore throughout the day, sometimes from morning till night. Now faded into a dusky pink with streaks, the blossoms barely visible. A memory of my mother with her loose hair, striding though the house with a glass of vodka in her hand.
I sat on the bed and stared out the window into the garden. My tree. In spite of everything, it had grown and flourished. And the crimson flowers fell in anarchy onto the uncut grass and into the pool. The tears came furiously. How terrible and tragic life could be. How unfair. How ruthless and unkind.
That’s where Papa found me, my face curled into my mother’s caftan, asleep on their marital bed.
Wake up, Del. Time to go.
I saw Omar standing in the hallway, his face tight and drawn. I went into the bathroom. My tears had left dried rivulets of salt on my face, so I splashed myself with cold water and rubbed my cheeks and my eyes. Then I pulled my hair into a ponytail.
Goodbye, Papa, take care.
I will, Del. I will.
Omar drove home silent. He never spoke of what my father said to him that day. We went home and made quiet love.
On 13 April 1999, Anwar was sentenced by the nefarious judge Augustine Paul to six years for corruption. Two months later, he was sentenced to another nine years. Both sentences were to be served consecutively.
We were beyond anger. Men had turned into savages. The judiciary was in shambles. How could a court not uphold the rule of law? How could a judge make a mockery of justice? Was there ever going to be justice?
Omar and I took to the streets. The city once again was brutalised by tear gas, from hurt, from sadness. KL, which was mother, father, surrogate mother, sister, brother, lover, friend, was once again violated. We were unwitting witnesses to each other. KL could not protect us, and neither could we protect it. How could we love a city that brought nothing but sickness to our souls? And how could we hate it?
How could a mattress be made into a scapegoat? How could a lowly mattress be shown in court again and again with semen stains, as witness? The soiled mattress on which Anwar supposedly sodomised his half-brother and advisor was brought in and out of court like a shamed prostitute. That poor tainted mattress with splotches of dried semen. Out of thirteen stains, ten matched Anwar’s DNA. Parents shielded their children’s eyes from the newspapers on the stands. The headlines were vile, lurid, completely obscene.
Imran was a man possessed. His opinion pieces got angrier and more brazen. He was the go-to fixer, writer, contact on the ground for the journos who had once again descended on KL. Many had become friends now, chums for the cause. The late nights, the drinking, and the conversations continued. Sumi and Fairman had started living together, so they sometimes barricaded themselves in the bedroom for fast, furious sex. Imran held court. Omar and I sat, held hands and listened to the endless tirades.
One night, I woke up to searing abdominal pains and a damp bed. I thought I had wet myself. Something was wrong. I did not know that we had conceived a child in the sullen erotic moisture of our bedroom, and now she—for I believe it was female—had decided that this life was not to be. The world was too difficult to live in, and when I was in the hospital, in between the cold gusts of anaesthesia, I felt a warm hand on my chest and thought of my mother.
Omar was silent for weeks after that.
Our lives now had sadness, which had meaning, I suppose. Meaning meant hi
story. We had made a child, and lost it. I had lost it. My womb was incapable of making limbs, a skeleton, a brain, eyes, ears, perfect toes and fingers. Hair. Eyes—would they too be green like his? I couldn’t keep it in my womb. There it had been, lying in layers of uterus, blood and muscle, I didn’t even know.
How could I not have known? Was my body so foreign to me that I did not know that I was with child? Or was I just too worn out to feel the flood of life in my body? I blamed myself. I had to. I saw Omar differently after that. As a father. That he and I could be a family.
I drank myself to sleep. Empty bottles of wine lined the kitchen wall until they were sealed into bin bags and dumped into rubbish bins. The clattering of empty bottles became familiar.
Drinking hollowed me out and I felt even more lost. Omar left me alone in my grief. Until one night, after a political rally. I stumbled downstairs for water, parched and drunk. I saw him sunken and slouched in a corner by the fridge. His head was in between his knees. He looked up, and I could see that he had been crying.
His head felt heavy and warm in my hands. There were no words. Just an empty womb between us.
But there was love, yes.
There was love.
This was a grief that was unfamiliar. It did not come with a sense of recompense or relief after tears; it felt ancestral, ancient. As if my ancestors had come back to reclaim something that they had left behind. Vengeance. It was primal, visceral, dark. I was hovering in a place of in-betweenness. I did not understand it at all.
I wasn’t even sure why I grieved. A child would have thrown our lives into chaos. We would have been forced to marry, and I would have faced an inevitable conversion into Islam—an act which filled me with trepidation. And we were scarcely ready for anything apart from reacting to the headlines that filled us with more rage every day. I would have been angry and pregnant, pounding the streets in frumpy skirts and sneakers, shouting slogans and getting shoved into the other hapless, sweaty activists. Getting tear-gassed. It would have been completely foolish.
I took to roaming the streets. The city was less hostile at night and I would take a taxi to Old Market Square and walk towards Dataran Merdeka, passing the confluence of the two rivers that gave the city its name—muddy estuary. Kuala Lumpur.
A hundred and fifty years ago, this area was filled with thieves, vigilantes, and opportunists. I imagined exhausted Chinese coolies lying comatose in opium dens, the noisy clacking of mahjong tiles in the hands of drunk gamblers, the swiftness of the rickshaws and the drone of snores from street dwellers. Yap Ah Loy, the Chinese-born Kapitan, had turned the tiny mining village into the most important town in the Malay Peninsula and was sheriff, businessman and visionary. He introduced public services and amenities, brought in thousands of mainland Chinese coolies to work in the mines and slowly, built the foundations of a city.Life revolved around the tin that was found upriver and the daily haggling and selling took place in the market square. There was meat and incense and spices. Women selling vegetables and fruits, steaming noodles with pork broth, Indian curries and pungent pickles. Brothels for sex. Malay traders selling fabrics, knives, potions for magic spells. Rhino horn, tiger testicles, bear claw, dried seahorses, elephant penis, golden, sinewy globules of dried birds’ nest, bark, herb, roots for strength, vitality, insomnia. The endless spoils of the seas and the rainforest.
The graceful copper domes on the Sultan Abdul Samad building gleamed. The courts were silent at night, and all the fury of the day would sink into the curve of the walls. I was fond of many colonial structures, but this was by far my favourite. The elegance of AC Norman’s design embraced the neo-Moorish, Mughal, Indo-Saracenic influences of the time. Across it lay Dataran Merdeka or Independence Square, where our founding father Tunku Abdul Rahman shouted with a raised fist, Merdeka! Merdeka! Merdeka! as the Union flag was lowered for the last time. He was a man of honour, a real gentleman, a politician who worked for the people of the new nation. That was then.
But now, there was no honour left in our politics. There was only rot from a gallery of rogues who were set on driving our country into ruin.
There were kids on skateboards, trying out new flips in the light of the street lamps. There were furtive lovers huddled in the shadows, tired labourers shuffling home, and as I wandered further down into Chow Kit, the ladies of the night emerged. Some of them beautiful, slim men with shaved calves, hiked up skirts tottering on stilettos, teased hair, crimson lips.
I had done a feature story on sex workers for The Review and I had spent time interviewing women and transsexuals who were in the trade. One woman had been raped at knife-point, then slit from her vagina to her anus and then sold into slavery to a Chinese towkay for five years. Another had to continue working whilst her dead child was putrefying in her womb. She eventually died of septicaemia, poisoned by the blood from her foetus. Then there was Ariff, or Michelle as he preferred to be known, disowned by a father who branded him a “syaitan”, a devil, and cast him out of his home in a fishing village.
I recalled these stories as I walked on, guided only by instinct and the will to keep walking. My story paled in comparison to theirs—and yet I felt weak, haunted by a thing that had not yet become anything.
Hi, sayang. You okay tak?
Behind me, I heard a deep giggle and I smelt cigarette smoke.
You nampak macam sedih.
I turned around. A statuesque transsexual towered over me. She was in a short denim skirt and a pink top with spaghetti straps. Had soft frosted pink lips and a large black mole over her right eyebrow. Her hair was straight and highlighted with streaks of blonde and brown. She sashayed like a supermodel while puffing on a slim clove cigarette. She was beautiful.
Huh? I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me.
Hi honey, you look sad. Want some company?
I shrugged. Yeah, sure. Do you want to walk? Where you going?
Nowhere, just walking you know. I should be working, but I can walk.
And so we walked. The eyes of passers-by dug into us but she moved those hips to an invisible tune as if she were on a catwalk. In heels. I couldn’t keep up. We found a 24-hour mamak place and ordered hot tea.
The waiter served us our frothed tea with a smile that struck me as over-familiar. But she nodded, lit another cigarette and cocked an eyebrow. I pictured the plump waiter’s loins grinding into hers in a dark alley, squirting his seed into her, and then wiping his forehead with his sweat- and curry-stained towel.
Embarrassed, I took a sip of the tea and immediately spat it out. It was scalding hot. A tissue appeared at my mouth and I saw long, glittery nails.
Go slow, honey. You okay?
I sputtered and nodded, eyes brimming with pain.
Good. My name’s Marina and I think we’re going to be great friends.
The miscarriage affected Omar more than he’d expected. He had never thought of himself as a father. All of a sudden his life had an unfamiliar meaning. It felt like success, but a pain-filled form of success.
“Ah there it is. Pain,” he blurted out loud one day.
It wasn’t like buying his apartment in Shoreditch at a bank auction, neither was it like shagging three women in one week. Those were pure, unadulterated glories. That was coincidence, being at the right place at the right time. So how was this different? Was it—different?
The past months had made him feel alive. Getting tear-gassed, running the streets, seeing Malaysians come together in solidarity for a cause: it had given him a passion, a fervor that he had never quite felt before. And being with Del— moving in with her, living with her and then conceiving a child—it was as if he had come to be everything that he was not.
There were times when he felt out of his depth. Del knew so much about the country and felt so deeply for everything. Her drive and desires extended themselves to not just the need for change, but for a deep awareness of her self. She was the kind of woman that he had hoped for yet feared at the same time. She was instinc
tive, kind, fiercely protective and intelligent, but there was a kind of darkness to her that he could not fathom. The kind that was given shape on the day he met her father.
He was assailed by sadness as soon as he walked in. The house smelled of neglect and dust. He knew that Del was ashamed of the state of her childhood home: “Papa stopped living after Mother died and the house is a mess.” But she had wanted him to meet her father. She walked through the heavy front door, closed it with a thud, took her shoes off, whispered, “He’s in the study,” and pointed to a door down the hallway.
Omar took his shoes off, looked up and saw cobwebs on the ceiling. The vast garden had crept in, creepers and vines entangled with the furniture and the curtains. Immediately he thought of snakes, and wondered if there was indeed the possibility of a family of cobras living in the house somewhere. He padded silently behind Del.
The house was in semi-darkness, and apart from the hallway, there was little light let in. It was airless and stale. Heavy drapes hung silently, as if they had been unmoved for years. They walked through the living room full of antique wooden furniture. He spied a Victorian-style cupboard with delicate triangles of glass. It reminded him of the one his mother had bought at an antique shop somewhere in Suffolk. The carpets felt moist under his feet. They came to a door and in a corner lay a neat pile of unwashed plates, mugs and silver cutlery. Del knocked on the door, cleared her throat and whispered, “Papa, Papa. We’re here.”
There was a low cough and shuffling footsteps approaching the door, which swung open.
Del’s father was a tall man, with a shock of grey hair, metal-framed glasses and a full beard. He wore a white singlet and a sarong. His shoulders were hunched and his arms were fleshy; Omar could tell that those arms were once muscled and strong and that Del’s father was once a handsome man.
Once We Were There Page 7
