The Girl and the Ghost

by Hanna Alkaf

  That night, while the little girl sprawled on her bedroom floor drawing yet more pictures in the hour before bed, the ghost paced back and forth on the ledge of her open window, trying to calm himself. He did not understand why his throat was dry and tight, or why it felt like his chest cavern was filled with a thousand butterflies frantically fluttering their soft wings, but he wished they would stop. A pelesit needs a master, he told himself firmly. She must know who you are.

  And that was why he slowly unwound himself from his little grasshopper body, rising like smoke, growing and swelling into himself until he stood before her, dark as night and horned and scaled, in all his horrifying glory.

  But Suraya merely sat up and looked at him with the same naked curiosity she trained on everything. “Hello,” she said, running the back of her hand across her dripping nose and leaving a trail of snot that she quickly wiped on her pink pajama pants.

  The ghost paused. He suddenly felt very unsure of himself. Hello? His voice came out as a squeak, and he cleared his throat, red-faced. I mean . . . hello.

  “Who are you?”

  He drew himself up and took a breath. This was his moment. I am a dark spirit, he announced rather grandly. I am your inheritance, your grandmother’s legacy. I am yours to command. I will smite your enemies. I will . . .

  “What’s a ’heritance?” Her big brown eyes were full of questions.

  The ghost sagged and sighed. I’m a . . . present, he said finally. From your granny. She sent me to take care of you.

  “I have a granny?” This time her eyes were wide and full of excitement.

  Not anymore, he told her gently, and Suraya slumped. But you have me now.

  She brightened at this. “That’s true,” she said, nodding happily. “I have you, and you can be my friend, and we can play together. Only Mama might not like us playing at nighttime, because I’m s’posed to be asleep soon. . . .” The little girl stopped suddenly and clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. “Only I can’t tell her about you,” she said conspiratorially, leaning close. “She wouldn’t like this at all. She doesn’t like ‘magic and fairy tales and other whimsical nonsense.’” At the last few words she crossed her eyes and put on a mocking, sing-song voice that the ghost supposed was meant to be an imitation of her mother. It was not, he noted, particuarly accurate.

  I am not a mere playmate, he said disdainfully. Nor am I a character from some childhood tale. I am a pelesit. I can do whatever you command. And I can protect you.

  “Oooh, does this mean you’re like a genie? Or . . . or my FAIRY GODMOTHER?”

  I don’t grant wishes, the ghost said hurriedly. (Fairy godmothers! She wouldn’t want one of those if she really knew fairies, he thought, with an indignant sniff. The stories he could tell. . . .)

  Suraya’s expression moved quickly from eager anticipation to resignation, with a quick stop at disappointment in between. “Oh well,” she said with the air of one used to life’s many letdowns. “I suppose you can’t help that.” She paused to scratch the tip of her nose.

  “So what’s your name?”

  My name?

  “Duuuuuh.” She dragged out the one syllable until it sounded like at least six. “Everyone has a name. See, like this”—she gestured to the rag doll next to her—“This is Nana. And that one’s Bingo, and that one’s Ariel like the princess, and that one’s Saloma like the pretty lady in those boring old movies Mama likes to watch, only I call her Sally because Saloma is just too long, and that one’s Suraya the Second because she’s going to rule the kingdom after me, and that one’s . . .”

  The chatter went on, but the ghost barely heard it. Nobody, as far as he could remember, had ever asked him for his name. The witch had only ever addressed him as “you,” as in, “You! Go and rot this farmer’s entire crop of bananas, would you,” or “You! I need you to give this woman nightmares all night so that her competitor wins the beauty pageant.”

  There was a pause while Suraya took a breath, and he quickly spoke before she could get going again. I don’t have a name.

  She gasped, looking shocked. “You don’t?”

  I . . . I don’t think so. The ghost felt strangely embarrassed by this and had to remind himself that ghosts don’t have feelings.

  “That’s okay,” she said, reaching out a hand to pat him consolingly on one scaly paw. “I’ll think of one for you. I’m SUPER good at names. I named all my toys all by myself. And I named that orange cat that likes to come around and steal our fried fish from the kitchen table. He’s called Comel now.”

  Comel?

  “Means ‘cute,’” she explained seriously, as if he didn’t know. “’Cause he’s cute.” She tilted her head to one side, frowning as she stared at him, her tongue poking out of the side of her mouth, her hand still clutching a bright pink crayon.

  The ghost could not help feeling nervous. Names, he knew, existed to give shape to the nebulous, ground the unknown in a comforting reality. He did not think he could cope with being called cute.

  Then Suraya brightened. “I KNOW!” she shouted gleefully.

  Please don’t be Comel, please don’t be Comel, please don’t be Comel . . .

  “Your name is . . . Pink.”

  PINK?! It was much worse than he had feared.

  “Yes!” She climbed up onto her bed and began to bounce up and down. “Pink!”

  I am a dark spirit, the ghost said desperately. I am a powerful being. I have the wisdom of the ages. I cannot be called PINK.

  “But you are! You’re Pink!”

  He sat down heavily on the tattered carpet and sighed. But WHY am I Pink?

  “Because.” Suraya shot him such a withering look that he felt rather silly for asking. “That’s my favorite color.” She slipped off the bed and ran up to pat him on the cheek. “You’ll get used to it,” she told him. “It’s a good name. A very good name, maybe the bestest I’ve made so far.”

  As good a name as any, I suppose.

  Outside, they heard the light, quick step of Suraya’s mama. “Quick, hide!” she hissed, and the ghost now known as Pink quickly shrunk back down into his grasshopper form and hopped into the pajama pocket Suraya held open for him, just as the door swung open.

  The woman took in Suraya’s bright eyes and feverish cheeks and pursed her thin lips. “What games have you been playing in here?”

  “Nothing, Mama,” Suraya said. “Just drawing.”

  The woman’s eyes scanned the room as if she were looking for something, and the ghost felt Suraya’s little fingers move protectively over her pocket.

  At last, finding nothing, the woman looked at Suraya. “Well then. Time for bed. Go and brush your teeth, and wash your feet or you’ll have nightmares. Don’t forget to say your duaa.”

  “Okay, Mama.”

  The woman swept off back down the hallway toward the living room, where a stack of papers waited to be marked before a flickering television set. And there she stayed for a long, long time, never smiling even as the laugh track played artificial chuckles over the bumbling antics on the screen, her red pen scratching and scribbling busily as Suraya and Pink slept curled up against each other on her narrow bed.

  “Tell me about my grandma, Pink.”

  They were in bed, huddled up together as they always were. It was rainy season once again, and there was a constant, dreary night drizzle tapping on the window. In the darkness, Pink could just make out the outline of Suraya’s little head as she leaned against his shoulder.

  Again, little one? She asked about the witch constantly; he was running out of stories to tell.

  “Please, Pink.”

  He sighed. Very well. He closed his eyes and called up memories of the witch, delicate as smoke wending from a candle flame. Your grandmother was a small woman, and round, and soft. She had no corners, no sharp edges to her. When she smiled, her whole face crinkled up and her eyes would disappear into two thin lines.

  He did not add that that smile only appeared on her face
after she had caused some mischief or other; he often edited these stories in his head before reciting them for Suraya, having long ago decided that there was no point presenting her with yet another disappointing family member. Between her strange, distant mother and her dead father, she had enough of those already.

  Suraya smiled. “Tell me the story about the jambu again.”

  It was her favorite. There was one day when a little boy was standing just outside your grandmother’s garden. Your grandmother had a big jambu tree, so big that some of its branches stretched beyond the fence. And the jambu themselves were miraculous fruits: bright red, crisp, juicy.

  Pink could almost smell the sweet tang of the jambu tree in full bloom.

  The little boy was staring up at the tree, his eyes round with hunger. Your grandmother had harvested most of the fruit, but there was one perfect bell-shaped jambu she’d left behind, right near the top—too high for him to reach. Your grandmother was hanging clothes on the line. She saw him staring up at her tree, and she knew what he wanted. But she herself was too small to reach the fruit, and too old to be climbing trees with her aching back and her quivering knees.

  “So what did she do?” Pink could hear the laughing anticipation in her voice. She knew exactly what would happen next.

  She waved her hand, Pink told her. She waved her hand, and one of the tree branches began to move.

  Suraya giggled, then quickly stifled it before her mother heard. She was meant to be asleep.

  Slowly, the branch made its way to that perfect jambu and plucked it with twiggy wooden fingers. Then it passed it to a branch below, which passed it on to the next, and so on and so on, until at last the lowest branch handed the fruit to the little boy, whose mouth hung open in shock and delight. “Thank you,” he gasped, looking first at the tree and then at your grandmother. “Thank you.” And in answer all she did was put her finger to her lips and wink at him before she went back into her house to get away from the hot afternoon sun.

  There was a pause. From down the hall, they could hear the blaring of the television, the old sitcom that was Mama’s favorite: “SO NO ONE TOLD YOU LIFE WAS GONNA BE THIS WAY.”

  Suraya sighed happily. “I always like hearing that story.”

  I know you do. He never told her what happened afterward as he watched, hidden among the long blades of grass. The little boy bit eagerly into the jambu he had so longed for. There was a yelp of surprise and fear and a heavy, wet thwack as the fruit hit the ground, then retching and splashing as the boy turned and vomited into the bushes. The air filled with a foul, sour smell that lingered long after the boy had run off home, tears streaming down his face.

  Pink didn’t tell her how much work it had been to bend that thick wooden branch, how it had felt to burrow into the hard sweetness of that perfect jambu and turn it into nothing but rot and ruin, maggots squirming through its flesh.

  He told himself she didn’t need to know. That it didn’t matter.

  “I’LL BE THERE FOR YOU,” sang the TV. “’CAUSE YOU’RE THERE FOR ME TOO.”

  Beside him, Suraya had fallen asleep.

  Three

  Girl

  FOR AS LONG as she could remember, it had been just the two of them: Mama and Suraya, rattling around together in the old wooden house that swayed gently in the slightest breeze. It had taken her a while to figure out that this wasn’t typical; that the families peopling her picture books and the brightly colored cartoons on TV usually had more than just two people in them.

  “Where’s my daddy?” she’d asked her mother once. She was almost four years old then, still tripping over her words, fidgeting impatiently while her mother combed the tangles out of her hair and wrestled the unruly tresses into sedate twin braids. “Everybody else has a daddy. Mariam’s daddy drives a big truck. Adam’s daddy has a ’stache. Kiran’s daddy buyed her a new baby doll with real hair you can brush.” Her lower lip stuck out as she thought sorrowful thoughts about the injustice of not having someone who could take you for rides in a big truck and buy you toys (she was less sure about the desirability of a ’stache).

  She felt Mama’s hands still for just a moment, hovering uncertainly near her neck. “He’s dead,” she said finally. “Your daddy is dead.”

  “What’s dead mean?”

  Suraya couldn’t see Mama’s face, but when she responded, her voice was as dry and sharp as the snapping of an old twig. “It’s when people go away and never come back, and you never get to see them again.”

  Suraya mulled this over quietly, wincing as Mama’s nimble fingers pulled at her hair, sending tiny needles of pain shooting into her scalp.

  The next day at her preschool, Mrs. Chow, whose stomach had been swelling gently for many months, was not there. The nine little ones under her care, Suraya among them, were told she would be away for a while, and that they would have a different teacher to mind them.

  “Yes, Suraya?” Cik Aminah asked, seeing her little hand raised high in the air.

  “If she doesn’t come back, she’s probably dead,” Suraya said matter-of-factly.

  There had been a call to her home, and a discussion with her mother. It had not been the first time she had made such unsettling pronouncements in class; it made the other children uncomfortable, the teacher had said politely.

  Mama had not been pleased.

  By the time she was five years old, Suraya understood that she was different. Nobody ever said it aloud—at least not to her face—but the difference was easy enough to measure. It was in the inches between her and the other kids when they sat on the colorful benches for breaktime snack; in the seconds that dragged by when the teacher told everyone to pick partners, her heart pounding so hard it felt like her whole body shook when nobody reached for her hand; in the twenty extra minutes she waited on her own after everyone else’s parents or grandparents or babysitters or maids had picked them up in a riot of cheerful chatter, because her mother had work to finish in the primary school where she taught; in the number of baju kurungs that filled her closet, the matching long tops and bottoms sewn by her mother from the cheap cotton she bought in bulk in the big town, so different from the other girls’ colorful skirts and dresses and T-shirts with cartoon characters on them.

  Suraya tried her best not to mind this. It was, she told herself, a case of durians. Some people, like her mother, loved the creamy yellow insides of the spiky green fruit with a passion; some people, like Suraya herself, thought it both smelled and tasted like stinky feet. “It’s an acquired taste,” Mama had shrugged at her as Suraya wrinkled her little nose against the overpowering odor. “You’ll learn to like it one day.”

  Maybe that was what she was. The durian of friends. Maybe people would learn to like her one day. Maybe she just had to meet the right ones.

  So until they came around, Suraya kept herself busy. There was plenty to do: the letters in her books were starting to come together, forming delightful stories she could discover over and over again; the scenes and characters she conjured up in her head took shape in technicolor crayon on the pages and pages of old notebook paper Mama brought home for her use; and when she was done with those, there were trees to climb, paddy fields to splash through, bugs to investigate, fruit to pick off trees, and mud pies to make.

  So when Pink came along, bursting out of his tiny grasshopper body to show her his true self, she looked at him with the same frank curiosity she looked at everything, and she smiled. When he offered her the seed of friendship, loneliness provided a soil so fertile that she buried it deep in her heart and let it grow and grow until it filled her and patched over the broken bits and made her whole.

  “Tell me about my grandma, Mama,” Suraya said one evening, while she sat drawing a picture at the kitchen table, picking through markers and trying to choose the perfect colors for her unicorn as Mama made dinner.

  She’d been puzzling over this in her head for what felt like ages now, like the mathematics she struggled with in school (Suraya was cu
rrently learning to subtract, and was not terribly pleased about it). If she had a grandma once, as Pink had told her, why had Mama never mentioned it? Why were there no stories, no pictures of her anywhere? The only way to find out, she figured, was to ask.

  As the words left her lips, she saw her mother and felt Pink in her pocket both go perfectly still at exactly the same time.

  “You don’t have one,” Mama said finally, her back to Suraya, then her knife resumed moving once more, a steady clack, clack, clack against the wooden chopping block as she decimated onions and carrots for the daging masak kicap.

  Suraya frowned. “That’s im-poss-ible,” she said. It was a freshly acquired word, and she took a great deal of care in pronouncing it ever so carefully and with a great deal of relish. “Everyone has a grandma. You can’t not have a mama.”

  “I did have one,” Mama said. “But not anymore. Not for a long time now.”

  “Did she die?” Suraya understood death now that she was a whole five years old; she wasn’t a baby anymore, not like when she was four.

  “Yes.”

  “But what was she like when she was alive?” Suraya leaned forward eagerly, her drawing forgotten, the uncapped markers drying gently on the table. “What did she look like? What was it like when you were growing up? Did you—”

  She had to stop then, because Mama had smacked the knife down on the counter and whirled around to face her, and in that moment she reminded Suraya of the sky right before rain begins to fall on the paddy fields, dark and heavy with a storm of epic proportions. But when Mama spoke, her voice was calm and even, each word slicing through the air like the knife she had just been wielding.

  “We do not talk about your grandmother,” she said.

  And they never did again.

  Four

  Girl

  WHAT ARE YOU drawing now? Pink asked, clambering to the edge of Suraya’s notebook to try and take a peek. Suraya was eight now, tall and thin, with skin tanned a ruddy brown from constantly being out in the sun, and a wide, ready smile. Her dark hair obscured the pages of her notebook as she hunched over it on the bed, her pen moving quickly. Suraya never drew with pencil or crayons these days, only black ink.