Though I Get Home Page 8

  REASON: She was his first cousin

  All they knew was that his mother had been adopted, making K. and H. first cousins by title but not by blood. K.’s father, H.’s mother’s brother, would elaborate no further, either.

  H.’s parents also refused to tell him how they met. Whenever H. asked, they pretended that he was not in the room, did not exist, as if by questioning their union he himself would cease to have been conceived.

  He could be from anywhere, have any kind of blood in him. K. always thought his skin color and hair type very slightly unusual. He could have been destined for another name, another race, another religion—and thus forever barred from her—but here he was! The fatefulness delighted her.

  “Taiping is too fucking small,” K.’s father had muttered in disgust when he learned about K. and H.

  K. had very few memories of H. as a child. Everybody was happy when they broke up. Everybody was happy, too, when the cousins appeared to harbor no hard feelings and continued to be friends. It saved a lot of pain and awkwardness at family gatherings. At one such gathering, H.’s mother went so far as to whisper to K. that the other one did not measure up to her.

  Sometimes, when K. and H. were bored, they would speculate about the (real) identity of his mother and how his parents had met. In one version, his mother was a prostitute who had fallen in love with his father, but shame and a sense of honor prevented H.’s father from marrying a whore. In the end the lovers begged K.’s grandfather, a client behind on his dues, to adopt H.’s mother and graft her onto a legitimate family tree.

  REASON: She was losing

  —Hair

  In school, there was a girl who showed up one day with her previously armpit-length hair cut short. K.’s classmate whispered to K. that it meant the girl had lost love, probably dumped. According to the classmate, the haircut was a “symbol.”

  After she ceased to be a girlfriend, K. decided never to have her hair cut again. Her hair grew longer and longer and became heavier and heavier. More and more of her hair fell; her scalp could not carry the weight.

  H. sometimes hurt her when he pressed his palms down onto the bed to support himself, catching her hair under his hands, yanking. He complained about the loose hair strewn over the sheets.

  —Friends

  The ones she lied to resented her vague excuses for being busy at odd hours of the day.

  The two (real) friends she did not lie to were furious at her for letting it happen to her, “it” being at various times incest, the fate of the Other Woman, and, more generally, self-destruction.

  One of the two wanted her to stand up for herself and reject the second-class, leftover scraps of love. But K. seemed unable to frame it that way. “What’s wrong with small desires and asking for very little?” she asked. “It’s much easier to be satisfied this way.” She said she was thankful and counted her blessings that he had heart enough to not abandon her even though he had moved on to someone else.

  The other friend staged an intervention of sorts and tricked K. into going on a date. The man was a well-off businessman. K. first learned about Starbucks’s impending arrival in Taiping from him. He waved his hands around, telling K. about the also-impending arrivals of Sushi King and a real, honest-to-goodness cinema, something Taiping had not seen for many years. “Times are changing,” he said. “Remember when that company offered to build a casino on Maxwell Hill, but the authorities refused to let them do it? Because they were afraid of spoiling nature or whatever? We missed our chance to really develop into a real city then, but look, we’re doing it after all, and by ourselves, too. Soon no one will be able to call Taiping a ‘small place’ anymore!”

  One night, half reclining on a sloping tree trunk in the lake garden, K. heard her cell phone ring. Later, when she was able to check her voice mail, she found that it was one of her two best friends, obviously drunk, calling to tell K. that she was the shame of women everywhere, allowing herself to be manipulated by a younger man so completely. “Do you know what century this is?” the friend asked. “Do you know that women have dignity?”

  “I would rather have love than dignity,” K. murmured to the phone. “Maybe I am just a small-town girl.”

  When K. got home, the first raindrops were splattering on her windshield. K. ran out of the car and rushed into the yard, yanking her family’s clothes off the lines stretched out between two trees, pegs flying every which way. Her father pulled in a minute later, slamming the car door and grumbling, “Open up a Starbucks and suddenly there’s a traffic jam everywhere, everybody wanting to pretend that they are city folk who can waste RM12 and three hours in line for kopi without even condensed milk in it. Taiping is just too fucking small!”

  Inside the house, K. dropped the armful of damp clothes on the living room couch and called Isa, one of her two (real) friends.

  “Do you want to go to Starbucks tomorrow?” K. asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing special and I won’t like it, but it’s something new.”

  KAMUNTING I

  She gave herself a month. That’s how long her tree of sanity would hold out in the country’s most notorious prison camp, she thought, before the branches were stripped and all you could see were skeletal fingers extending upward, supplicating half-open hands cradling air, begging from the sky—please, please, please.

  Isa had seen such needy trees a long time ago, in a land with fall.

  Here, where she was imprisoned, the trees, even ones felled, were verdant. They spread their abundance within the fenced area in which she was allowed to roam for a few hours a day. The fences too grew things at the top, barbed wire ouroboros as far as she could see, which, under the eye-watering equatorial sun, was not very far at all.

  “You lush,” she said to one tree. “You lushes,” she said, turning around and around in place, a game she used to play as a child to make herself dizzy. Her dance kicked up clouds and clouds of gravelly dust, mirroring the formations above, except those she created would never make rain.

  She gave herself a mouth so she could eat. She didn’t have one when she was first brought here to Kamunting. She had been mute then, and so very thirsty.

  The food here was not bad, really. She sometimes received whole loaves of soft bread or even sponge cake for breakfast, and for lunch there was always a sambal egg on a bed of rice.

  She could never finish the food, being still carb-conscious during those first weeks. One morning, after nibbling at the two ends of her allotted loaf of bread, she put it on her cell bed, placed her head upon the softness, and went to sleep, using the bread as a pillow. The guard said nothing when he came to take away her tray.

  She was the only female in the whole prison camp, she had been told. They probably meant to cow her with this fact, but instead, as far as she could tell, being a woman had guaranteed her certain amelioration of conditions. For example, she had a whole echoing prison block to herself. Even though there were many individual cells and bunks subdivided within, she was the only inmate, and on certain afternoons she could almost pretend to enjoy some power, taking naps first in one cell, then another, carrying around her bread pillow with her like a royal scepter.

  When one pillow grew moldy, she simply substituted another.

  Sponge cakes, despite the name, were not very pleasant at all. They did not do.

  Her block was T3. It was old, with holes in the walls and craters in the floors, but at least it was all hers. The other inmates, the men, were penned in other blocks they had to share—T2A, T2B, T4, and so on. She saw some of them, sometimes, during the hours she was allowed outside her block to visit the verdant trees. The ground of her exercise area was mostly sand and stones, with gritty weeds growing sparsely in tufts, colonies keeping their distance from other clumps. Sometimes she would catch glimpses of men through two layers of fences—his and hers—playing badminton, gardening, or jogging along their perimeter, staying close to the borders.

  Her second day there she was summone
d to an office of sorts. The whole affair was pretty casual, no handcuffs involved. Everyone acknowledged the impossibility of escaping, what with the fences within fences and the guardhouses by the entrance. It was called an entrance and not an exit for a reason, she thought.

  At the office, the man who seemed to be in charge asked her why she had brought bread along to the meeting. She shrugged.

  “You’re not eating enough,” he said in a kindly tone. “Look at you, so skinny.”

  He introduced himself as Encik Vas. They engaged in some inane conversation about her living conditions: whether she was comfortable, and was there anything she would like?

  “Fresh vegetables,” she said.

  The man nodded sympathetically and pretended to write something down.

  “Now,” he said. Then started questioning her about the “sodomic” poems she was accused of writing. “You’re not gay,” he informed her. “So why would you write something like that?”

  She would say nothing.

  The man tsked and shook his head.

  “I still can’t believe such a pretty young woman like you wrote something so filthy.”

  Then he let her go back to her cell. But the next day, she was escorted back to the same room with the same man, and for all she knew he was wearing the same clothes, some pastel collared shirt with dark pants, no branding visible anywhere. She saw now that they would keep sitting her down in this office, day after day, until she talked because what hurry were they in? None.

  Finally, she told the man she had written the poems because she loved her country and wanted to see it right.

  “See it right? What does that mean?”

  “I love my country,” she shrugged and repeated.

  “So you show your love by making people hate it? By making people dissatisfied, unhappy, hate each other, go waste their time strolling the streets with handwritten signs instead of doing their jobs or spending time with their families?”

  “I open their eyes.”

  “You’re ungrateful. Your country has done so much for you.”

  “Ask not what your country can do for you,” she said, almost cackling. “I did whatever I could for the sake of my country. I have no talents other than writing poetry. That is my contribution. This is my fate.”

  “If you say you love this country so much, why don’t you respect its laws and leaders?”

  “Those things and those people are not Malaysia. I am Malaysia. All the protestors are Malaysia. There are more small people like me than big shots like you!”

  The man’s face clouded. He said, “Ingrate,” but she heard “inmate.”

  “Do you know what this place was before it became a prison camp?”

  JUST HOW THE FIRE WILL BURN

  In 1936 Britannia ruled masses of land. In one corner of that empire was a leper colony. On a hand-drawn map, the colony looked to be wedged away in a tuck of area known as Bamboo River, where ramrod plants served as screens, as fences and borders. Only the strongest monsoons occasionally bent them far enough to reveal what they hid, knocking them against each other to play a harsh music.

  Emaciated brown bodies shuffled or lay about the leprosarium as they were able, many assuming Bartleby’s final position. The brown bodies were well taken care of by a bearded Scotsman, who had a good heart that had thus sailed him across seas for the sake of spreading basic health to the farthest reach of empire.

  Not having a female companion, Dr. Berry threw himself into the not insignificant labor required for the upkeep of a leper colony. His aim was twofold: to give the lepers the best comfort possible and to shield the public at large from the horrifying disease that so claimed lives—bodies swallowed whole into it, like a suicide sucked down a dark well. It was a macabre image, and Dr. Berry did not like to think about it because he had enough self-possession to recognize that it was merely a veiled way of regretting his wife, taken from him by melancholia.

  As is natural, the good doctor had a favorite inmate at the leprosarium. His name is not documented in posterity, but we can assume a few features: swollen feet tottering unsteadily; lumps for hands; neck forever craned forward and out, seeking balance that had been eaten away.

  A sweet tooth caused the inmate to suck on his gums, producing hideous smacks. Occasionally, the poor soul asked “Doktor Riri” for candy from his personal stash, which was sent over by steamer along with tins of tea from time to time. To Dr. Berry, this inmate and his frequent requests for sweets presented a moral quandary. Not that the doctor believed confections would further worsen the inmate’s leprosy, from a medical standpoint. But in his daily survey of the colony’s inhabitants—of the bowed, spotted trees within the compound, the bamboo-lined borders beyond which one heard the hissing of a river—he was conscious that a kind of punishment had been inflicted on these men and women in his charge. And to be sure one certainly did not feed sweets to the condemned, for sweets were things signaling innocence, crafted with joy in mind.

  Dr. Berry preferred to approach it as more of a monetary transaction, which was beyond morality. When he had first descended upon this strange land, he found his earlier efforts to preemptively familiarize himself with an alien landscape through field reports and ledgers sorely lacking. Navigating this entirely different atmosphere was like being forced to describe smells by using only colors; there was just enough resemblance to what he thought he knew to make him feel inadequate in the face of the untamed.

  Which rendered completely forgivable his failure to immediately recognize the oddity of the currency circulating in the colony when he had first arrived, standing under the tropical sun and coughing into his silk handkerchief. Yes, the soiled paper notes and bent tin coins looked crude, bearing more than a slight resemblance to children’s handiwork. But the four distinct languages crammed all over the money’s surface dazzled him, harmonizing with the embarrassment of riches he saw everywhere in his new home—lush leaves and branches drooping from top-heavy trees, weeds sprouting through the dimmest cracks, fruits the various hues of plenitude. So the doctor had quite naturally assumed that the homemade feel of the colony’s money was attributable to local traditions and limited native talents.

  One morning, the doctor went into town to enjoy his day off. As he parted the severe screens of bamboo and gazed upon the river, he felt a shiver of boldness. What would he find on the other side? He crouched down to wash his hands in the running water, even though they were perfectly clean. He vigorously clenched and then unclenched his fists. The liquid was delicious against his bare skin. It had felt good to take his gloves off for this jaunt into the local version of civilization. What, indeed, would he find?

  It was the beginning of the monsoon season then, the air just starting to be impregnated by humidity, swelling invisibly. In town, Dr. Berry walked along a pitted paved road, kicking up dust in his wake. He smiled to show he was not intimidated, even though he was the only white man he could see. Low rows of shop houses flanked him, no building over two stories high. The structures looked sturdy enough, although there was more wood and thatching than the doctor was used to seeing. The locals, unlike the buildings, did not quite look as hale as they ought to. Still smiling, the doctor peered at one or two of the men, contrasting them mentally with his patients. He took care to avert his eyes when the women openly stared.

  All in all, the town was quaint and quiet enough, the people seemingly timid but cleanly dressed. In a sundry shop next to a bird seller, the doctor pointed to a glass bottle behind the clerk, fishing out notes from his coat with his other hand. To his surprise, the clerk recoiled in horror when the doctor smoothed out the money, palm against palm. It took Dr. Berry much effort to comprehend the mixture of dread and disbelief in the clerk’s eyes, as the native man struggled to marry the repulsion inspired by the presence of an improbable leper with well-instilled instincts to be deferential toward a white man.

  Finally, confusion sorted out, the doctor emerged from the dark shop into the tropical sun.
A wave of dizziness stumbled his feet. He shot out an arm to steady himself and realized that he was still clutching the leper bills, soft with use, in his hand. He looked at the money fearfully, imagining leprosy bacteria, wriggling and minuscule, breaking free from the paper and leaping onto him, colonizing his wrist, traveling up his arm to circulate through the rest of him, the new host. Already his feet felt numb, a symptom of leprosy.

  And then the man of science straightened. He wiped away sweat from his brow and worried the brittle material of the money between three of his fingers. After a few moments, he carefully pushed the currency back into his coat pocket, struck his hand violently against air a few times, and then held the three fingers just under his nose. His digits tingled. Carefully, he sniffed. The tip of his tongue materialized to lick the laden air.

  Once back at the colony, the doctor acted decisively. He asked for and examined real money, money that the healthy used beyond the bamboos and the river. Setting the two currencies side by side, he wrote verbose observations about the differences in quality, demarcations, and design.

  In vain did he ask around for the origin of the leper money—its architect, its history, its ascendance to become such common fare in this community. But the mystery remained. All he learned was that the leper money was for the good of all. It empowered the leprosarium’s residents to feel ownership and claim property, while at the same time protecting the healthy from contamination. Inmates armed with the quadrilingual money traded what they had among themselves, items foraged or sent, few and far between, by relatives and friends from the outside. When one of them died, leper currency served to help divide the dead’s worldly possessions with minimum scuffles. It was a fine system.

  But Dr. Berry was equipped with rigorous scholarly training. He was further fueled by a need to know for certain that he would not succumb to the horrors of leprosy (a scenario that he had in truth never once considered before deciding to accept the charge of a leprosarium). The doctor now found himself within the perfect conditions for a scientific discovery. One cool evening about a fortnight after his journey into town, the doctor peeled his gloves off after a long day’s work and examined himself thoroughly, gently probing flesh with flesh. Once satisfied that no symptoms had manifested, the doctor sat down on his porch to write a letter.