Though I Get Home Page 3

  “So, five ringgit today?” Lao Ping, ever eager, puts his hand in his pocket and asks. “I call five minutes past three!”

  I look at the sky, thinking. It’s blue enough, but you can just see a tinge of black clouds in the direction of Ipoh, capital of the best chicken rice in Malaysia. This is why I like sitting here with my friends. I can see the sky unobstructed because there are no walls and no doors blocking my view, and Lao Ping’s cigarette smoke is carried away by the wind soon enough. I’m sure my grandchildren think roadside stalls are out of fashion, but if I am willing to eat at KFC, I’m sure they can tolerate the idea of me sitting in a big shed with an atap roof and wooden beams.

  I look at the sky again. Then I crane my neck to look at the old clock hanging from a nail pounded into one of the wooden beams. That’s our official clock. Last year we had Mr. Yap’s son-in-law climb on top of two benches stacked together, with us holding the legs steady, so that he could hammer that nail in and hang the clock up. It was all because Ah Kao had cheated one day. Now we have an official clock that’s too high up for any of us to tamper with, and fair’s fair.

  The clock says half past noon. I think about it a bit more, then take five ringgit out of my wallet. “Seven minutes before three.” Lao Ping gives me a look. I match it. Mr. Yap laughs. Lao Ping asks him if he’s putting money down or what.

  We flag Vasan down the next time he’s passing by our table to bring his customers their plates of roti canai. “Betting again today?” he asks. “Sure we are,” we chorus. He laughs, nods, and goes on his way. We can always count on him to be a fair judge, that Vasan.

  It’s not even one o’clock. We have hours. Ah Kao had called half past three and Mr. Yap had said none today, a bold move on his part. So we sit on our benches, Ah Kao with his belly exposed again. My grandchildren always ask how I can sit for so long on those benches without backs. Doesn’t my spine hurt? I tell them that’s how I’ve always sat. My youngest daughter tells them to leave me be. She tells them how lucky they are that they don’t have to stay on their feet all day in a hot, stuffy kitchen, making food for ghost people. I don’t want to be the kind of old man who says things like that, but I can’t stop her disciplining her own child, or even her nieces and nephews, can I?

  In our roadside stall we wait for the occasional breeze to shift our positions. Now and then we look at the sky. We have hours to go. The smell of fried oysters from the stall behind me jostles with the smell of grease from KFC. I like my spot, right here on this particular bench, because I can always choose which smell to take in. If I concentrate on fried oysters, the KFC smell goes away, and vice versa. I like that.

  A strong breeze blows. The rain tree right next to our table shudders and sheds a few leaves onto our table. One leaf falls into my Milo kosong. I pick it out and let it drop its wet weight to the ground. This is what we get for moving our table so close to the edge of the curb, but Ah Kao always complains that it’s hot, so we do it every day unless it’s already raining by the time we arrive.

  Almost half past two. We start paying more attention now, perusing the clouds, checking the visibility of Maxwell Hill on the horizon. Mr. Yap plucks a leaf off the rain tree next to us and rubs his finger back and forth across its surface. He always says it’s his secret method, and I always say, “Just look at your track record; it obviously doesn’t work.” The others always laugh. We like our old jokes.

  The glass doors of KFC open. The breeze has died down, so my bare thigh feels a slight hint of the air-conditioning. Two white people come out, a man and a woman. I wonder why they’re here. The last white tourist I saw was years ago. It was a man alone with his very big backpack. See, there’s nothing to do here in Taiping. These two, they look like they are in their forties. They do not have yellow hair. One of the most common misconceptions of white people is that they all have yellow hair, while the truth is that most of them have brown hair. I know this because I used to work in the rest house.

  The white people stand outside the glass doors for a while, talking and blocking the way when a few other people try to get out of KFC. They apologize and move to the side. Suddenly the woman looks up and catches my eye. I shift my glance away quickly. When I next try to sneak a look at them, they are walking across the street, headed straight for our table. Mr. Yap and Lao Ping are arguing about something. They don’t notice. But I see that Ah Kao, too, is looking at them warily. I wish he would pull his singlet down.

  “Excuse me.” The man stops a few feet away from our table. Having no walls can be a bad thing after all, I think to myself.

  The man tries again. “Excuse me, could I ask you gentlemen a question?” My brain will not work, even though I have heard “excuse me” plenty of times before.

  “HALLO!” Ah Kao says. What is it about people raising their voices when they don’t know what they’re saying? I wish he would at least put his leg down.

  “Hi there. Hello.” The man looks a little taken aback. “I was wondering if you knew the way to the jail?”

  Lao Ping starts sniggering. He leans over and gives me a shove, speaking in Hokkien: “Eh, he’s talking to you!”

  “He’s talking to all of us,” I point out.

  “You’re the one who used to work for the ghost people, right?” He sniggers some more.

  I look at Lao Ping’s face, and I don’t like what I see, so I turn to the man and say, “I know.”

  “Great!” The man looks relieved. “How do we get there?”

  I hesitate. The words come slow, but they come, and soon they are coming faster. “I know how you can get to jail, but why do you want to go there?”

  The woman chuckles a little. The man turns to her and smiles briefly before talking to me. “We’ve heard that it’s the oldest jail in Malaysia. Is that true?”

  I tell them yes, and I tell them that we also have the oldest railway station, the oldest museum, and the oldest zoo. I tell them everything used to happen here in Taiping. They have a little difficulty understanding me, but they nod a lot to make up for it. I tell them how to get to the jail. And then I tell them to buy an umbrella because it’s going to rain seven minutes before three. They laugh as if it were a joke, not a bettor’s instinct honed by years of sitting right here.

  Ah Kao is jealous. I can see it. “What did you tell them?” he asks as soon as they start walking away.

  I look at the clock. It’s almost ten minutes to three. “I told them it’s going to rain soon,” I say, looking squarely into Ah Kao’s eyes. Mr. Yap laughs, and Lao Ping jokingly calls me a race traitor.

  “You’ll see,” I smile and say. I am confident that I will win the bet today. The rain will fall at exactly seven minutes to three. I will laugh and scoop up the money in the middle of the table. Ah Kao will try to guilt me into buying him a cup of teh tarik before we leave, and on my way home, I will get my favorite grandchild fried chicken.

  THOUGH SHE GETS HOME

  Isabella Sin turned away from the man preparing her char kuey teow to look up at the sky. It was yet another hot tropical day, and she would rather not watch the beads of sweat on the noodle hawker’s face coalesce into a globe that would then start rolling down the slope of his cheek, gathering momentum until, with the man’s next energetic slide and toss of his wok, it launches into air, missing the dirty rag draped around his neck to land on her lunch-in-progress without so much as a plip.

  The sky blazed blue. Little puffs of white clouds scattered about, their edges jagged, carelessly torn and discarded. Isa narrowed her eyes to locate the sun, just to see where it was. She looked away quickly the moment her vision blurred with brightness. Four and a half miles away, Maxwell Hill roosted on the horizon, and above it hovered dark swathes of monsoon clouds, nothing like the trifles hanging over her head. It would rain later today, no doubt.

  Isa caught herself and shook her head, half smiling. According to family legend, both her grandfathers had been competent cooks, but here she was, waiting her turn for greasy street food
. Her cooking was so terrible that no one wanted to marry her—that was Isa’s mother’s pet theory number one. Pet theory number two blamed Isa’s marital status on her beige-flecked eyes and propensity to speak proper English. These traits were simply too off-putting to local men, who thought her stuck up beyond words. “Too good for Manglish, izzit?” some would sneer. “If you like speaking like ang moh why you stay here lah?” others puzzled. Like the town of Taiping itself, she was too globalized to attract those seeking unalloyed rural peace and quiet, and yet not sophisticated enough to be metropolitan chic. A year in London had ruined her, Isa’s mother said. She should never have gone. And all she had to show for it was family shame coursing through her veins, her grandparents’ illicit marriage sheening her irises pale topaz under strong sunlight.

  Among her inheritance was the highly practical gift of rain betting. Today’s first raindrops would fall around 3:15 p.m. Isa squinted at the hills and nodded. Gong Gong had been a local legend in the field. Even after he’d become chairbound, he insisted on perching in front of the largest, best window of the house. When it did rain, he grinned gap-toothed and victorious at drizzling skies while Isa hurried to jam the jalousie window panes shut, for fear of the old man getting drenched.

  At least he was really, really good at something, Isa thought wistfully, entering the shade of her office building. She used to want to be a writer. She’d spent years writing poetry and starting the Great Malaysian Novel. Now here she was, almost thirty, writing ad copy in a town whose biggest advertising opportunities lay in calls to franchise global brands like Starbucks and KFC. She and the town, they were both forever playing catch-up, waiting for trends to play out elsewhere before catching the last carriage of a train pulling away.

  At 2:59 p.m. Isa peered out the window closest to her desk. The remains of her lunch lay next to her in a recycling wastebasket meant for paper, wafting smells of refried oil around the air-conditioned space.

  Yes, as she’d predicted. The little torn cotton balls from earlier had become black and solid, reminding her of the wads of makeup remover she wiped over her eyes every night. She waved hurried byes to her colleagues and left to collect her clothes hanging out on lines to dry. If she didn’t get home before the rain began in earnest, she would have to wash those clothes all over again. She straddled her motorbike and looked up at the skies one last time before kicking the machine to life.

  Nobody in town had a dryer. No one that Isa knew, at least. Everyone relied on the sun’s wholesome, germ-destroying rays to toast their laundry. Off on the horizon lightning flashed, a heavenly redwood tree spreading golden roots down to earth. Then rain fell. Drat. Her prediction was off after all. She was still a few minutes away from home, but the rain, lazy and steady, had already soaked her back through.

  Near the top of a slope, where she could almost see what lay beyond on the other side of the mound, she revved her motorbike. It lurched under her. Together they crested the slope, and then she was pulled into descent. She leaned backward to counter gravity, left hand squeezing, engaging the brakes. The back wheel stiffened and dragged. The motorcycle slid faster anyway. She looked at the houses going by on the left. There was the one with bougainvillea in many colors, next to the mosque. Another where an old man liked to sit on a stone bench abutting his rusty gate. But no one was out now.

  Finally, her own gates came into view. Water ran down her blouse as she dismounted. Next to her the bike hummed, propped up and listing to one side, as she slipped her hand through rusty metal bars to reach for the latch. From the clotheslines strung between two papaya trees, skirts and dress shirts hung heavy, gorged with rain and swaying dully in the wind. She dashed around, pulling them off and cradling their limp carcasses in her arms.

  The air smelled faintly of chemicals. Isabella stood at the kitchen sink, rinsing out the tin mug she had used to drain the last of some mystery alcohol she’d found on the top of the fridge. The rain had stopped. Through the kitchen window she could see the washed-out sky, bland like cheap pasar malam clothes after their third wash, all bled out.

  Just when she was starting to feel better, it was time to go back to work. She moved her tongue about in her mouth, touching first one cheek, then the other. She had dawdled as long as she could, but the excuse of rain had worn out. From the bedroom she picked through the pile of still-damp clothes for a jacket. It was a short trip to the office, but the winds could be nippy after a bout of rain.

  She didn’t register the drops of revenant rain until she was on her bike. She cocked her head. The second wave was a pitter patter against her helmet, almost playful, like a wooden fish in the hands of a monk with no sense of tempo. Isa revved the bike. Her neck felt stiff and her tongue was still oddly heavy and clammy from the alcohol. She wanted to course through the drizzle, zipping in and out of slow-moving, cow-like cars. And then rain roared. Without transition, the fickle monsoon weather let loose. Above rooftops, telephone lines thrashed wildly, as if carrying messages so unspeakable they could not bear it. Next door, the antenna on the neighbor’s car thrashed about, demonically possessed.

  The last scene Isa saw before she rushed into the house was the trees in her compound bending double, clotheslines yanked taut. She hoped they would not snap in the storm. Overhead, water poured so fast and so hard that it all seemed a vibrating solid block, no individual component discernible. It would be an hour, maybe more, before she could go back to work, and by that time there would be no point. Isa’s heart lifted. She thought regretfully of the empty bottle in the garbage.

  Still, the afternoon was hers, and the house, hers. She sat down on a rattan chair in the half darkness. The marble floor was chilly against her soles. The house grew dimmer, and soon she could not see very much at all, just dark lumps surrounding her. She thought about getting up to find a book to read—something she hadn’t done for a while. But books were no longer about distant worlds and alien people who did unimaginable things. Now she was too old; she knew too much. She couldn’t truly inhabit fictional worlds anymore.

  She drifted off to the sounds of waterfalls.

  The sun was down when Isa woke. Her throat felt parched.

  Something was wrong. The house was too dark. It must be raining still. She could hear it, a rushing of water in the background.

  She groped her way against furniture and walls to reach the kitchen, flicking on lights as she went. Maybe there was more mystery alcohol to be found, stashed behind fine bowls and trays never brought down to use. Strange, but the more light switches she flipped, the louder the rain sounded, as if her senses were dependent upon each other. And then icy marble turned into lukewarm liquid. Isa yelped. Water eddied about her ankles. All around her, the kitchen was a tank of tepid, dirty broth.

  The water invading the house seemed calm, content to mill, but somewhere outside she could hear a different version, angry and unceasing. She stood rigid in her kitchen pool, dazed, looking at the wall clock ticking. She had only been asleep for a little over an hour. How could this have happened?

  She saw now that the water, brown with dirt and thick with soil, was coming in fast through the kitchen door sill. That door usually opened to a thin scrap of land on which she grew a pair of hunchback rambutan trees, the favorite toilet of her neighbor’s turkeys. She heard the fowl now, cackling like nihilists greeting the end of the world with joy.

  Was there a bucket in that cupboard under the sink? The mop was in the hallway closet. And somewhere, gathering dust, was the old-fashioned chamber pot she had accepted, sniggering, from Gong Gong.

  The water was creeping up her calves now, translucent nude stockings she was slowly, very slowly, pulling on. Isa felt wild. She wanted to close her hand around the wooden door’s knob and swing it wide open to let in the rabble of furious water. It would be better than the maddening slow seep. Toaster, kettle, microwave, tudung saji. Those would be gone soon, ruined by dirt water. Radio, table, chairs, refrigerator? She swept the kitchen, taking inventory.

/>   Thunder sounded directly above. The house dimmed for a beat and the lights flickered twice, as if lightning had been brought indoors, just like the mud and rain. Isa waded out of the kitchen and into the bedroom. Dresser, footrest, gold-embroidered slippers, tacky music box with a lid that did not fully clamp down on overflowing jewelry. She picked the box up, put it down. In the living room, television, jade Buddha statuette, decorative piano no one played. She tried lifting the television, just to see. Too heavy.

  Back in the bedroom she found a suitcase that was still half-filled with shirts and underwear, crumpled, and a handkerchief, neatly folded. She shook the clothes out onto the bed, then splashed about filling the suitcase with what she could, trying to be smart about it—was the object’s worth equal to the volume of suitcase being taken up? Music box, in. Delicate antique cup, okay. Gong Gong’s gold watch, sure.

  In no time the suitcase was full. She clamped the lid shut and hoisted it, panting, onto the top of the piano, unsettling a patch of dust. When she clambered back down, the water was waist-high. She would have to leave.

  But first, she moved her legs with difficulty and made for the kitchen. In times of emergency, the authorities always advised storing potable water. From above the sink she took down a Sustagen water bottle and started filling it from the purifier hooked up to the faucet. And then she glanced down upon the breadth of water surrounding her, and the absurdity of what she was doing kicked in. She laughed until good water trembled into bad water.

  Snorting, she took a half step backward and fell into the bad water. Under the surface, the flood smelled at once rotten and too alive. The urgent gushing above turned into a dull gurgling below, like someone trying to rinse with a chunk of food wedged in one cheek pocket. Isa went into a half-hearted breaststroke. Her feet kept brushing the flood bed. With one last look at the kitchen door (was it bowing?), she paddled her way to the front of the house, fighting the dragging waters. If the scourge was coming in through the back, then perhaps leaving the front door open would allow the house to be more of a conduit and less of a trap, within which the entirety of her things waited, doomed to be ruined.