Though I Get Home Read online

  It took just one day and one night to break Mr. Burgess. He was yet reasonably contained when the search party agreed by consensus to suspend its efforts, due to the darkness of nightfall. But the father went wild when morning came and Miss Lily did not turn up. He accused anyone he saw of abducting his daughter. Grandfather got the worst of it because he stoically insisted on serving Mr. Burgess his meals and fetching him his papers just as before. When Mr. Burgess hurled all kinds of insults—calling him a scoundrel, a blackguard, a ruffian—Grandfather simply averted his eyes and coaxed his employer to eat in a monotonous voice void of emotion. For once, he had no “buts” to offer.

  Grandfather persisted. He thought having his usual routine would help moor Mr. Burgess. When that didn’t work, Grandfather did what he could to introduce distraction, risking insolence to ask for recipes of classic English dishes from the flow of visitors now coming every hour to see the man placed under such painful trials.

  “But it will make Mr. Burgess forget,” he would say. He never said “happy”; it was always “forget.”

  “Be strong and put your faith in God,” the visitors advised Mr. Burgess, the ladies making sure to be standing at least three feet away on account of his aura of intoxication.

  Time passed, and the visitors stopped coming. She must have left town, perhaps even the colony, they said. Sometimes young people lose their heads, a few commented. On the other hand, there were hushed whispers about white slavery, a horrible fate. Were there not still living sultans in this barbaric land, even if they had been stripped of power and had to pay tribute to the British? Mrs. Windshuttle’s cousin’s secretary swore on a true story, about a girl just like Lily, who was now in chains and feeding grapes to an obese old chieftain of some sort in Borneo, across the waters.

  Grandfather made sure none of this gossip reached Mr. Burgess. He thought it a good thing that Mr. Burgess’s people had stopped coming around, prying and disturbing the peace. He had acted as a shield as best he could, but anyone could see Mr. Burgess had no fight left. He drank at all hours of the day and did nothing except scour newspapers and local pamphlets for signs of his girl. When he got into one of his dark moods, he abused Grandfather until he tired himself out. Grandfather bore it all.

  “But sir is drinking too much,” he would venture. Sometimes he even wrestled bottles away, holding them in custody and promising Mr. Burgess, “But if you eat as much as you drink, you can drink as much as you want.”

  Once, I asked my parents why I had no brothers or sisters. I was feeling lonely, with no one to admire the Lego castles I painstakingly built, or to be jealous of my newly acquired rollerblading skills. At my question, Father and Mama fixed their eyes on their plates, their mouths making chewing motions. They ignored me.

  Everyone knew Miss Lily was dead when the rest house became haunted a year later. Spoons flew across rooms and headless geckos turned up in all corners of the place. An insistent, regular thumping could be heard in the afternoons, the sounds of someone methodically clomping up stairs, except the rest house was single story and had no stairs to speak of.

  The fact that Miss Lily had become a ghost surprisingly gained ground without resistance among all communities, from hired labor to enlightened colonizers. It spanned cultures and beliefs and experiences and intellects. The visitors once more took interest in That Poor Man, including new arrivals who had not been around for the previous year’s heartrending drama.

  Mr. Burgess was by now greatly changed. He had ceased to leave the rest house months ago. He looked as sallow and sleepy as a lotus eater, except the lotus he ate was full of bitter sorrow. He alone had to be taught that the supernatural events around him were proof that his daughter was no more. Because of his dilapidated state, everyone assumed that he had long ago accepted his loss, and therefore the news could not add so very much to his pain, but they learned their mistake when Mr. Burgess shot himself in the chest with a pistol.

  Luckily the wound was not mortal. Naturally, it fell upon Grandfather to treat Mr. Burgess’s injuries and to nurse him back to health. Even the white doctor summoned from the next, bigger town conceded that Grandfather was doing Mr. Burgess good. “Keep changing those rags,” he gruffly instructed, though he could see with his own eyes that that was precisely what Grandfather had been doing on his own initiative.

  Grandfather liked to say that this was when he had acquired his stooped back, from constantly bending over a prone, moaning Mr. Burgess. I would get piggyback rides on Father’s shoulders, sometimes even Mama’s, but Grandfather never gave me any rides, and I had been told that it was because he had a bad back.

  “But I can do it,” I remembered Grandfather saying.

  My parents never relented.

  Grandfather latched on to the idea of a funeral to motivate Mr. Burgess. As ideas went it was a strange one, but Grandfather could think of no better. In his mind, if Mr. Burgess could not be induced to get well and leave his bed for his own precious daughter’s funeral, nothing would do the trick. And so Grandfather set to work making preparations, airing out what he judged Miss Lily’s prettiest dresses, and searching through Mr. Burgess’s trunks for a photograph.

  But Mr. Burgess could not be moved. He groaned and tried to shift positions in bed, which simply set off more waves of pain—perhaps that was what he wanted, to feel pain.

  “Do as you wish,” he finally growled, his teeth clenched and bared.

  Grandfather shook his head. “But funeral is for Miss Lily,” he said.

  Mr. Burgess managed to turn himself over and lay facing the wall, panting.

  So it came to pass that Miss Lily’s last rites caused a great commotion and upheaval among the town’s residents. The British community was aghast at the handwritten “invitations” that turned up on their doorsteps, informing them in almost but not quite impeccable English that a wake would be held at the rest house—at the rest house! The note also begged their pardon and asked them to “please excuse the different pastor.” It was plain that the messages had been written by Mr. Burgess’s butler, and the thought that Mr. Burgess had slipped so far brought a fresh wave of visitors to his sick bed. To no avail did they try to dissuade him from entrusting everything to his butler, who was, after all, not of their kind. A few men and women even volunteered themselves, deigning to overstep the boundaries of convention for the sake of not having Mr. Burgess humiliate himself further. But he turned them all down.

  Nothing yet prepared them, those who dressed up for the wake out of curiosity or some last shred of pity and respect, for the shocking spectacle awaiting them at the rest house. For it was not at all the proper Christian rites due to an innocent girl taken in her prime by the Lord, who caused everything to happen for a reason. What greeted them was instead some kind of barbaric ritual, the rest house suffused with incense smoke and the toxic smell of things burning. Besides Grandfather, who was doing things the only way he knew how, there was a heretic dressed in yellow robes fussing with his silly hat in the corner. Wait—was he—was he putting on makeup?

  Preposterous! Some of the guests turned on their heels and left immediately. Even sympathy had its limits, and God helped only those who helped themselves. Mr. Burgess was obviously a lost cause.

  Bowing at everyone who walked in, Grandfather ignored the glares and mutterings directed at him, busying himself instead with various small tasks, something which was, after all, his job. He straightened and restraightened the huge framed black-and-white image of Miss Lily near the entrance, the first thing anyone would see when they entered, providing their eyes had adjusted to the clouds of noxious smoke. Miss Lily was not smiling in this picture. Her expression was mock serious, as if obeying a cameraman who had asked her to look dignified.

  “It smells like an opium den in here,” whispered a woman to her husband, glancing meaningfully at Grandfather. “I dare say,” murmured the husband in response.

  About half a dozen stayed on because, at the end of the day, they could not ent
irely abandon Mr. Burgess; astray though he was, he was one of them. And of course, there was the morbid need to see for themselves what would happen. At least they outnumbered the heretics who had hijacked the wake—perhaps they could even override the two? They could quickly nip back for a Bible, or dispatch someone . . .

  But no such luck, for here came an entire village more of barbarians, bent on ferrying away the poor girl’s soul. A few of them were recognizable as rickshaw drivers or washer-women whose services had previously been contracted, but for the most part the throng looked strange and yet oddly familiar, by dint of their resemblance to one another. They stuck fresh joss sticks in the incense pot, crowding it until it looked like an overused horizontal archery target.

  A coffin stretched out behind Miss Lily’s framed face. Someone had hung a garland of white and yellow flowers over the photograph, forming a second frame. Grandfather beckoned at the guests to come forward. But there were so many bodies squeezed into the space. The white people felt it would not do for them to rub shoulders with the newcomers, whom they gathered were hired mourners paid to stand in as Miss Lily’s family and friends. Disgraceful!

  Eventually, some kind of system was forged out of the chaos. The British watched in amazement as the disingenuous actors formed a single-file line and walked one by one around the coffin, counterclockwise. They each paused at the head of the box and peered down, presumably at an opening where Miss Lily’s beautiful face would be. But there was no body, was there? They had never found her.

  From a muted commotion among the hired mourners the British guests hazarded that the savages were—believe it or not—also shocked by the unconventionality of the wake. Indignant, the British traded hypotheses among themselves, growing pink with exertion. What, were made-up prayers and false gods too good for a white woman? They should know it was the other way around!

  Then they, too, wended their way toward the coffin. Here the incense haze grew thicker. Someone sneezed. “God—!” said a Mrs. Maycock. She had meant to say “God bless you,” but once the first word was out she realized that she had not seen the sneezer, who could very well have been one of the heretics.

  “Lord have mercy!” The first white person to reach the head of the coffin stiffened back in horror. Mrs. Maycock, disregarding the measured shuffling of the counterclockwise procession, pushed forward, looked down, and gasped.

  The coffin indeed had a viewing panel of sorts at the head, offering a neck-up look at the deceased. Except instead of a serene face, Mrs. Maycock was staring, upside down, at a different picture of Miss Lily, this time smiling broadly, and she would have looked like an angel had someone not colored her stretched lips with a garish red, an amateur hand that barely stayed inside the lines. This picture was unframed, and at its bottom it was joined with the collar of a frilly white dress, smoothed out and laid flat.

  “You!” Mrs. Maycock said, whirling around and almost pointing a finger at Grandfather.

  He winced. “Makeup is tradition,” he explained apologetically. He knew his hand had been shaking. He was sorry; he felt sorry for everyone.

  Mrs. Maycock wanted to pick it up with him further, but the decked-out heretic in the corner advanced forward with a dinging handbell, waving her and everyone else away from the coffin by flapping his robes.

  There was a long, ominous pause as he made his eyes big and surveyed the crowd, seemingly looking into everyone’s eyes in turn. Then, without warning, stentorian streams of chants emerged from him, accompanied by spasmodic handbell rings. It must have sounded like a strange tongue to the outsiders, its long plains of steady tones suddenly giving way to peaks of plaintive cries. The hired mourners got to work almost immediately, echoing parts of the voodoo sounds at intervals. A few of them had a different task, that of wailing insensibly and performing grief.

  Nobody left, even though it was a truly eerie scene. After about twenty minutes of chanting and ringing the mercenary mourners all got up and stood side by side in a line facing the coffin. At a gesture from the costumed man they all bowed to their waist as one. Whenever they bent their bodies, their heads and shoulders and backs gave way to Miss Lily’s unsmiling visage, revealing it to the spectators at the back of the room, only to obscure it again when they straightened. Reveal, obscure. Reveal, obscure. Three times they repeated this part of the ritual, and then, finally, quiet. One after another, the hired mourners now silently lit stacks of paper on fire and dropped them into a wide but shallow metal basin.

  “It looks like counterfeit money,” someone said in a hushed, awed voice.

  Then came papier-mâché houses, cars, horses, even a pair of people, man and woman. The British guests gazed in heightened amazement as these, too, were set on fire in turn. “She must have loved the arts and crafts, bless her soul,” they said.

  Fed by those offerings, the fire blazed, shaking loose thick gray smoke that undulated upward to intertwine with clouds of incense. Soon, it formed a screen separating the living from the coffin.

  Quite a show, some of the visitors would later say, as casually as they could. It was the talk of the town for months.

  Grandfather told me this story four times, always when Mama was out dyeing her hair. I liked this story because Grandfather would slip into a kind of trance, delivering the narrative as if it had happened to someone else, or as if he were a stranger talking about Grandfather’s life. I could never tell if he was proud of what he had done. All but one time he went into a reverie after finishing the tale, staring fixedly at his creased palms, his head bowed by his hunched back. The time that was different, he ended the story by saying that the haunting had stopped sixteen years ago, and that I could go see for myself at the rest house, still standing in the center of town. Then he gave me a long look and asked if I wanted some ice cream.

  Once, at the dinner table, I asked about my grandmother, who had died long before I was born. Was she pretty?

  A silence expanded like a smoke bomb. After a while, Grandfather smiled weakly at me. He leaned over and pinched my chin. And then he stared for a long time into my eyes, his irises two hard kernels. He looked like he wanted to say something important, but perhaps it was nothing more than another one of his entertaining stories. When his mouth finally moved, Mama made a loud sound, something between a cough and a grunt. Grandfather let go of my chin. I supposed he thought I was asking because I was insecure about my looks, especially my eyes. They are not like other people’s eyes, which are black and uncomplicated. My irises have two or three colors, depending on the position of the sun. They contain shades of brown, and sometimes they become like glass, fragile and watery. I hated them. I didn’t want to be different, a freak.

  And now Grandfather has been gone for two years, and Mama more silent than ever. She no longer bothers dyeing her hair, which is naturally tainted with odd streaks of rust, as if her hair were just like real metal and required regular polishing.

  I miss Grandfather. I often think about his stories—how intoxicating they were because they were forbidden, made taboo by Mama. But now that I am an adult I can do whatever I want. I told her I am going to England in a week, a trip made possible by my inheritance from Grandfather. She did not ask me the reason for my visit. But she did ask, “How far must you go?”

  “London is more than six thousand miles away,” I said.

  A BET IS PLACED

  Across the street is a KFC. I see a lot of young people with motorbike helmets tucked under their arms go in there, pushing the glass doors inward and letting out a blast of air-conditioned air. I’m an old man now, so they say, but I still like to pay attention to what young people do, so that I can communicate with my grandchildren. My grandkids sure do like their KFC, although none of them are old enough to ride motorbikes yet. I’m not sure if I want to live long enough to hear about their first road accidents, actually. I know everyone has those; it’s part of growing up. But the way I see these youngsters weave in and out of traffic on their bikes, it worries me.


  I pride myself on being much more open-minded than other men my age, really. The KFC, for one. I eat there sometimes, with my youngest daughter and her husband and child when they visit me. I can’t cook so much anymore, not like I used to. Tossing meat and vegetables in a wok the right way strains your wrist a lot. Besides, my daughter decided for me years ago that I hate cooking. She tells her daughter the story of how I used to be a cook at the rest house, where all the British civil servants liked to congregate and relax after work. She emphasizes how I could make pork chops and scones and all that English stuff, but could not pronounce the names of the dishes “properly” because I was born in mainland China. She stresses this fact as if it were very important.

  My daughter also uses that story to explain why she never cooks. She talks of how I always made her help out in the English kitchen, how terrible that was. Her story always ends with how happy she was when Merdeka was declared and the British left. I never knew she was that happy. She did not show it. Just a girl of five.

  Anyways. I am a modern-minded old man, not like other men my age. For example, Ah Kao sitting across the table from me here. He has one leg up on the edge of his chair, twitching to some beat only he can hear. His once-white singlet is pulled up to rest just under his nipples, exposing his Tiger beer belly to the scant breeze. “It’s too hot,” he always complains. Whenever I tell him to stop exposing his crotch and put his leg down, he cackles and says, “At least I’m not wearing a sarong!”

  Ah Kao has a good heart though. He’s just stubborn and set in his ways. His children and grandchildren don’t love him as much as mine do me. Another favorite topic of his is how his kin never visit him. I always tell him to try some KFC, just across the street from where we sit every day, but he always goes “Ahhhhhhh!” in an irritated tone and spits on the ground. He says air-conditioning makes his skin itch. I say it’s because he doesn’t shower, and the others laugh. Our jokes repeat a lot, but I like it that way. There’s Ah Kao and me and Lao Ping and Mr. Yap. Sometimes Vasan takes a break from his roti canai stall and joins us.