The Weight of Our Sky

by Hanna Alkaf

  There. It’s all out. Well, almost all of it—I can’t quite bring myself to tell him about the Djinn, but even then, I’m new to this being-honest-about-my-mental-and-emotional-state thing, and this is enough. I feel a strange combination of exhaustion, relief, and utter vulnerability, as though I’m naked next to him. Baby steps.

  This pause is stretching on for far too long now, and I’m aching to look at him, search his face for clues, ask him flat out what he’s thinking.

  Don’t look. Don’t look, Melati.

  The tips of my ears burn, and I rub them self-consciously as I wait for him to respond.

  “That sounds exhausting.” I strain my ears for any hint of disgust or pity, but amazingly enough, all I hear in his voice is compassion.

  “It is.”

  “Is there anything that makes it better?”

  I think about this for a while, trying to find the right words. “Music,” I say, finally. “Music calms me down. For my last birthday before my father . . . before he . . . you know. Before he died—” The word sticks in my throat, but I forge on. “They bought me my own record player. And even though my mom can’t really afford it now that it’s the two of us, every other month she somehow scrapes together the money to buy me a new record.”

  The memory of it brings up fresh tears: Mama and me at the record store, flipping through the latest releases, giggling over particularly garish album covers, shrieking with excitement when we find the perfect one.

  “She sounds like an amazing woman,” Vince says softly.

  “She was. I mean, is,” I quickly correct myself. Djinn got your tongue? the voice purrs, and not for the first time, I wish I could strangle him. I look down at my lap dreamily and realize that I’ve been tapping and counting the entire time. Quickly, I stuff my fingers beneath me and hope Vince didn’t notice.

  “The thing about a song is that, if you break it down, it’s all chaos,” I say. “Like, there’s all these different notes, different instruments, different sounds. It’s a mess. But you add a beat and a rhythm and somehow everything can come together and make something beautiful. I think that’s what I’m trying to do. Find a rhythm for the mess in my head, so that it somehow . . . makes sense.”

  I steal another glance at him; he’s looking straight ahead as he drives, frowning a little. I can tell he’s thinking about everything I’ve told him. The silence stretches on and on, and I can feel that familiar flutter. The Djinn opens his palms and releases a thousand tiny black birds, all flapping their wings frantically against the walls of my stomach. He thinks you’re crazy. He thinks you’re crazy. He thinks you’re crazy. My palms start to sweat, and before I realize it, my fingers have worked their way back onto my lap and are moving as if they have minds of their own. I close my eyes. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two . . .

  My mind stutters to a stop. I open my eyes.

  Vincent has reached over and taken my hand firmly in his, lacing our fingers together so mine can no longer tap out their endless refrain.

  No boy has ever held my hand before.

  Before I can say a word, he starts to sing a familiar song. “Little darling,” he calls me, his voice cracking on the unaccustomed high notes. “Little darling,” and my heart begins to melt.

  He’s not very good, and I want to laugh, even though I can feel tears pooling in my eyes. Don’t cry, stupid! I tell myself firmly. Don’t cry! So instead, I sing along, and our voices soar and blend together as we tell ourselves over and over again what we so desperately want to believe: Here comes the sun.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “AGAIN?” AUNTIE BEE STARES AT me aghast, her mouth open in a perfect O of dismay. “You are going with them AGAIN?”

  “Yes, Auntie.” I nod, not quite able to look her in the eye.

  “We had to come home yesterday, Ma,” Vince steps in. “By the time I finished the deliveries, there wasn’t any time left to go to Sungai Buloh before it got dark. We’ll make it there this time. Melati needs to be with her family,” he adds virtuously.

  Auntie Bee isn’t happy, and if I’m honest, I’m not in a huge hurry to get back out there either. Vince might have distracted me momentarily on that drive home, but in the night, my demon came back to plague me in a rampaging fury. I’ve spent my night fighting off the deaths of all the people I care about, and today I feel like I’m looking at the world through a thick, dense fog.

  All I want to do is lie in bed and sleep forever.

  Stop it, you weakling, I tell myself sternly. You can’t do this. Not today. Vince has promised me that we’ll make it to Kampung Baru today no matter what. I’m dressed in my own clothes this time, my white blouse and turquoise pinafore clean and dry now, my backpack slung over my shoulders, my hair tied back in a neat ponytail. Auntie Bee offers more of her niece’s clothes, but I refuse. Today is the day I’m going to finally, finally see my mother and make sure she’s really, truly okay. If I’m going to wage battle with demons both on the street and in my own head, I’m going to do it with all of myself, and not weighed down by borrowed clothes and secondhand memories.

  Auntie Bee sighs, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her finger and thumb. “Fine, fine,” she mutters. “Don’t listen to me, what do I know? I’m just an old woman who doesn’t want to outlive her children. Tell me, is that too much to ask?”

  Vince grins and hugs her. “So dramatic, Ma. You’re not in some Chinese soap opera, you know.”

  She doesn’t even crack a smile. “Every minute you are gone, I age a year, you know that?” she tells him seriously. “Better come back faster, before I use up all my years waiting for you.”

  • • •

  We hear the distinctive toot of Jay’s horn outside, and Vince immediately heads for the door. I hang back. I want to reassure Auntie Bee somehow, tell her we’ll be fine. Instead, I find myself reaching for her hands. She stares at me, surprised, as I take them in mine and bend low over them, touching my lips to the soft, papery skin. It’s the same good-bye I give my mother whenever I leave the house. “He’ll be back soon, Auntie,” I say. “Try not to worry too much.” Then I dash for the car, pretending I don’t see her eyes mist over with tears.

  The boys are waiting for me in the front seat as I open the back door and slide in, dropping my backpack on the floor. “Typical girl, keeping us waiting like this,” Jay says, wagging a finger at me.

  “Typical man, expecting every girl to come as soon as he calls, like a good dog,” I shoot back, and he laughs.

  “All right, today we’re heading toward Kampung Baru,” Vince says, taking charge. “That’s the area that’s worst hit, they say. We’ll try to get to some places before then, but I think we’ll mostly be concentrating on drop-offs along Batu Road.”

  Jay snaps off a jaunty salute. “Okay, boss!”

  “Okay, boss!” I say, following suit. In my head, I’ve already begun the work of securing the car, making it safe for all of us.

  Vince shoots a glance at me over his shoulder, then turns back to survey the road before us. “Say, Jay, you feel like singing?” he says. I look down at my fingers, twisting anxiously in my lap, and smile. I know what he’s doing.

  “Singing?”

  “Yes, singing! What songs do you like?”

  Jay thinks about this for a second. “I don’t know, really,” he muses. “All you young people, your music just gives me a headache.”

  “Okay, then, let’s sing something you know. Something happy.”

  “What nonsense is this? Why must we sing?”

  “Come on, Jay . . . ,” Vince wheedles. “It’ll make the ride go by much faster, you’ll see.”

  It takes a few minutes of back-and-forth, but in the end Jay gives in, launching into a spirited rendition of “Twist and Shout.” “The Beatles!” I crow happily, and he stops to look at me, scandalized. “The Beatles! Those mop-haired delinquents? No, no, this is the great Chuck Berry!”

  “What does it matter?” Vince grins. �
�It’s a great song!”

  Jay starts singing then, almost howling the words, grinding out some awkward dance moves behind the wheel as Vince puckers his lips and shimmies in his seat in his role as principal backup singer, and all I can do is laugh so hard I think I may throw up again.

  Jay is in the middle of growling out the second verse when I realize that Vince’s voice has trailed off. The happy bubble we’ve encased ourselves in shimmers, then bursts altogether, and the air that comes rushing in is thick with tension. “Stop,” Vince says, his voice ringing with authority. Jay pulls the car into a parking space. “Stay here,” Vince tells me, ignoring my outraged expression, then “Come on,” to Jay, and they both head out and down to the riverbank.

  Stay here? We’ll see about that, I think. So I get out of the car too.

  Floating lazily in the water, swaying with the current, are bodies.

  Part of me wants to retch; another part of me notes once again how familiar this scene is to my visions, this tableau of death and gore brought to life; one final other part, the one the Djinn has a firm grasp on, notes with grim satisfaction that there are six bodies, two sets of three, a safe number (although not, obviously, for them). Some are on their backs, their faces turned toward the sky; some are on their fronts, staring into the dark depths of the river. One is a girl who, I presume from the turquoise pinafore just like the one I’m wearing, is around my age. I’m glad she’s facedown; I don’t think I can bear to see her expression.

  Instead, I look at Vince, whose mouth is set in a tight, thin line. “We have to get them out,” he tells Jay. “We can’t just leave them there.” The older man just nods. All traces of laughter have been sucked out of him; he looks beaten, deflated.

  They begin looking around them, scouring the ground for long sticks they can use to poke and prod and fish the bodies out of the water, and suddenly I can’t bear to watch.

  “I’ll be in the car,” I mumble, stumbling over my own feet as I scramble up the riverbank. That could have been me, I think, remembering the girl in the school uniform. That could have been me. And then, almost immediately: That could be Mama.

  There it is, that familiar creeping doubt. None of those bodies was Mama. But are you sure? Did you check? Did you see all of their faces? Or did you run away, like the coward you are, like you did on the day you let your best friend die?

  I clench my fists, feeling the Djinn start to rise, his dark shadow unfurling like smoke from somewhere deep within my belly and spreading through my entire body. No, no, please, no. I’m so tired that the idea of giving in to the numbers makes me scratchy and irritable. I want to cry. But I can’t keep thinking about this, and I can’t keep seeing those images burned behind my eyelids, and my skin is starting to feel tight, like I’m wearing a buttoned-up coat two sizes too small, and so I count and count and count and count. I try to count the number of leaves on the big angsana tree shading the car from the morning sun, but the outstretched branches quiver in the wind, and I keep worrying that I’ve missed one, which makes me panicky. So instead, I think about the word “angsana”—ang-sa-na, three syllables, so that’s safe, but it’s seven letters, which isn’t. How to neutralize it? I add the letters in “tree,” which brings it up to eleven. Still not safe. The word for “tree” in Malay is “pokok,” and “pokok angsana” is twelve letters, which makes it safe. Good. What else? I count the number of cracks and holes in the leather seats of Jagdev’s car—twenty-eight, not a good number; I use my nail to make two tiny nicks so that I can make it an even, perfect thirty and pray Jay never finds out. I tap that number on the streaky windowpane, then tap it again with my feet, alternating right and left. And all the while, the Djinn holds me almost tenderly in his arms, and laughs and laughs.

  • • •

  When the men finally return, they’re rumpled and ashen and I can’t stomach asking them how they did it, or what they did with the bodies. Instead, we ride on to Kampung Baru without saying a word, the silence punctuated only by the coughs and splutters of Jay’s ancient car.

  As we turn the corner onto Batu Road, I can’t help but sit up a little straighter, eager to catch a glimpse of home.

  Or what’s left of it.

  Thick columns of black, black smoke rise from both sides of Batu Road. Here, even the buildings bear scars of the past week: broken windows, the haphazard patterns of bullet holes, angry smoke stains, smoldering husks of what used to be shops and homes.

  “They say this place was hit the hardest,” Jay says, finally breaking the silence.

  Vince shrugs. “It makes sense,” he says. “On one side of Batu Road, Chow Kit, full of Chinese people and the triad members that protect them. On the other side, Kampung Baru, the biggest Malay village in town, protected by Alang and his goons. If you want to start an explosion, you light a match in the dynamite factory.”

  I can hear them, but their voices sound like they’re coming from very far away, through a thick fog. I can’t stop staring out of the window, at everything at once familiar and incredibly alien. Were these really the streets I’d walked only a few days ago? Everywhere I look, I see ghosts: Mel and Saf, walking arm in arm to the sundry shop with a list of provisions for our mothers; sucking on ais kepal in the heat of a Sunday afternoon, fingers tingling from holding on to the balls of shaved ice doused liberally in rose syrup; giggling about something in particular or nothing at all as we walk to the religious teacher’s house for our weekly Quran-reading lessons. Or here and there, Mama, walking out in her brand-new kebaya with its fine lace-edged top and intricately patterned batik sarong, ready for Eid celebrations; Mama with a basket in hand, gabbing with the neighbor aunties on her way to market; Mama tending to her garden, hose in hand. Mama. It’s all right, I tell myself, trying to tamp down the jarring feeling of foreboding, the sense of impending doom. It’s all right. I’m home. Mama will be here. Everything will be all right Mama will be here.

  “Mel?”

  Vince’s voice breaks the spell; I turn from the window to look at him, but my vision seems to blur for a second and it takes a while for my eyes to focus on his face. I suddenly feel exhausted.

  “What do you want us to do now?” he asks.

  I take in a deep breath, hold for a count of three, exhale. “Stop here,” I say, gesturing to a clearing up ahead. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  • • •

  I don’t know what I imagined I’d see when I got here. If I were honest, I’d admit that I had visions of Mama throwing open the doors to welcome me home, taking me in her arms in the tightest hug, never letting me go again.

  Instead, here we are. My home, Mama’s and mine, is a pile of blackened ash and rubble, and the houses that used to surround us aren’t much better.

  I can sense Vincent’s eyes on me as he stands a little way away, giving me space, time to take it all in; Jay is waiting by the car. I walk through the detritus and although I feel like weeping, a part of me is fascinated by what the flames chose to consume and what they chose to keep intact: Our kitchen is completely devastated, but just steps away, our outhouse still proudly stands, all on its own; my prized records have been melted down into warped, unsalvageable lumps, but Mama’s black-and-gold sewing machine stands untouched on its little table, the silver letters spelling out SINGER still visible under a layer of soot.

  Mama. A fresh surge of panic rushes through me all at once, almost knocking me off my feet. Was Mama in the house when this happened? Did she make it out alive? I look around wildly; someone must know. Someone must know what happened to her.

  Then I hear a woman’s voice calling my name.

  “Mama?” I whirl around, the ashes crunching beneath my feet. “Mama?” But no Mama answers my call. Instead, approaching me from a distance is Mak Siti, as neat and trim as ever, her hair tied back in a loose bun, her floral cotton baju kurung with nary a smidge of dirt besmirching it.

  “Hello, Melati,” she says, as though we’re just making small talk at the market stan
d.

  “Hello, Mak Siti,” I say back, because what else am I supposed to say?

  “I was waiting for you to come home from school, you know, the other day,” she says, squinting at me. “Had dinner waiting. I took out a whole fish for you, fried it and everything. Your mother told me you were supposed to be home by four. Where were you, hmm?”

  Is she seriously scolding me for not coming home on time on the day of a massive, bloody racial riot, in the middle of the charred ruins of my former home? Seriously? I look closely for any signs that she’s kidding.

  Oh. She isn’t. Okay, then.

  “Sorry, Mak Siti,” I say, in the absence of any other alternative. This is becoming more and more surreal.

  “Naughty, naughty,” she tuts, pursing her lips. “Made me worry to death, once that nonsense started. I didn’t know what I was supposed to tell your mother when she came home. Not to mention the waste! One whole fish, did I tell you? Those things aren’t cheap, you know.”

  My heart lifts at the mention of my mother. “Mama! You saw Mama? Where is she? Is she—”

  “Of course I saw your mama,” Mak Siti interrupts, regarding my outburst with disapproval. “She came home early from her shift to look for you, make sure you were safe. Imagine how embarrassed I was when I had to tell her I didn’t know where you were! I didn’t know where to put my face! And the look on her! So much heartache you caused, young lady.”

  “Sorry, Mak Siti,” I say again, because I can see that she expects it. “But do you know where Mama is now? Is she here? I need to see her.”

  She sniffs. “She’s not here, of course. The hospital sent a car to pick up the nurses, doctors. They said they needed all the help possible. So she went. Told me to look out in case you came back home. And here you are.” She says this in a voice completely devoid of enthusiasm. Good old Mak Siti.

  My heart sinks. Mama isn’t here. We’ve come all this way for nothing.