Shadow Theatre Read online

  THEATRE

  The Scent of the Gods

  SHE

  FIONA CHEONG

  )OW

  THEATRE

  a novel

  To Danny and Leela Sofia and in memory of my sister

  CONTENTS

  COMPILER'S NOTE ii) zi

  OCCURRENCES ON THE FIRST AND SECOND FRIDAYS IN august 1994 fi) 1

  ACCOUNTS OF THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY IN august 1994 iii 71

  WHISPERS FROM A FRIDAY REVISITED iij 125

  OCCURRENCES ON THE THIRD SUNDAY IN august 1994 s) 169

  TWO LISTENERS X3 213

  GLOSSARY u) 235

  EOGRAPHICALLY LOCATED ONE degree and eight minutes north of the Equator, the island of Singapore, once part of the land mass of the Malay Peninsula, is separated from the tip of the peninsula by a narrow strait and buffered by smaller islands from the full blast of seasonal monsoon winds. Possessing a natural harbor and situated at a confluence of the old trade routes between East and West, Singapore was colonized by the British in f 8 f 9, taken over by the Japanese in 1942, and returned to the British in 1945. Colonial rule ended in 1955, when Singapore became the only predominantly Chinese state in the Federation of Malaya. Due to irrec- onciliable differences in governmental philosophy between the Malays and the Chinese in power, Singapore was expelled from the Federation in 1965 and forced to re-form itself as an independent nation.

  Modern scholars cannot verify the origin of the Sanskrit name °Singapura,„or "Lion City,„ knowing only that it came into use sometime at the end of the fourteenth century because until then Chinese and Javanese seafarers referred to the island as Temasek. The Chinese trader Wang Ta-yuan, in particular, reported a settlement of pirates on the savage Tan-ma-shi, among whom were Chinese inhabitants who lived and dressed in native style.

  The seventeenth-century Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals, on the other hand, attribute the rise of civilization on the island to Raja Chulan, an Indian warrior-king and descendant of Alexander the Great, who encamped at Temasek on his way to conquer China. Raja Chulan married the daughter of the god of the sea, who gave birth to a son, Sang Utama, who later became Prince of Palembang, the Sumatran city from which he then ruled the Buddhist maritime kingdom of Srivijaya.

  According to the Sejarah Melayu, Sang Utama was forced to take refuge at Temasek one day during a storm. Sailing into the estuary of the present Singapore River, he encountered a strange beast with a red body, a black head, and a white breast, which he took to be a lion. Thinking the encounter a good omen, Sang Utama decided to build a trading city at its site. It was he who renamed the island Singapura. His city blossomed, but by 1365, under the rule of a successor, Singapura fell to the .Javanese and was claimed as a vassal state of the empire of Majapahit.

  It should be noted that neither the Sejarah Melayu nor the private papers of descendants of the earlier seafaring settlers are to he found among the official records stored in the various archives of the old British empire. The following pages, culled from such unofficial sources, tell of a race of women who still speak the language of the dreamer, who write in a saltwater wind, and breathe like the changing light over the sea.

  No historically verifiable record exists of the events they report.

  OCCURRENCES ON THE

  FIRST AND SECOND

  FRIDAYS IN

  august 1994

  TE HAD HEARD about the diamond woman since forever, the syllables of her name blowing about the still air on slow weekday afternoons, just out of reach behind the yam and pandan leaves spreading along the cemetery's edge across from our windows. We were living in those days off River Road (which has since been renamed, perhaps for reasons having nothing to do with what happened that August, the month Mrs. Nair's daughter came home, but as our neighbors used to say, who's to know the government's reasons?). Our road itself had two names, as it was shaped like the alphabet U and met up with River Road twice. Jo and I lived along the leg of the U facing the cemetery, with our back gardens lined up against the hack gardens of houses along the other leg. But nobody we knew used either name much (only with strangers or when Jo and I were filling out forms at school), and mostly you'd hear one neighbor saying to another, "Supposed to be someone from our road-lah," or "Come, let's go home," as if in those days, everyone looked upon each other as almost family, and the aluminum fences and hedges of hibiscus and morning glory separating our gardens were a mere illusion.

  And perhaps they were. Whispers floated through doors and windows every day, hushed gossip and speculative references spinning ceaselessly in the heat like ceiling fans while shirts were being washed or ironed, or the vegetables chopped and the meat pounded and seasoned for dinner. Women like the diamond woman seemed always to have existed, their faces unknown while the details of their deeds drifted up and down the road again and again, flattened facts like catechism lessons unwavering in their warning to us never to take anything for granted or trespass into the forbidden, because black magic was not a game and life wasn't meant to be perfect.

  Someone might begin, "Eh, you hear about that woman? She took her own son to see the bomoh?" or, "You remember that woman? Her husband, caught with the waitress sitting in his lap?" Whoever was listening would nod, sometimes add solemnly, "Ah, ya-lah, you see some people, they never learn." And if you waited and stayed out of sight (in case there was talk of sex deemed unfitting for children to hear), one by one the stories would break loose, unleashed like a monsoon flood, recent stories and old stories or old stories with new details uncovered or reconfigured, all always secondhand as none of our neighbors was ever a witness or would want to confess to being one. Eventually, occasionally, a neighbor would get around to the diamond woman's story, even though it was a story retold so much, there didn't seem anything anyone could do to it to shed light on what may have happened. And yet, "Remember," someone might say, "itu woman, she kept complaining how her hubby went out every night, he didn't come home sampai two or three in the morning, she was afraid he would leave her for another girl, and then tengok-lah, look what happened."

  What had happened was that the bomoh had put a diamond in the woman's cheek, inserted the glittering stone beneath the skin and left it there, like a pimple, and then the woman was given medicine to mix with her husband's coffee in the morning. But the woman was careless handling the medicine, or perhaps she had mixed up the bomoh's instructions, confusing the order of steps to be taken. The husband, instead of falling back in love with his wife, had fallen in love with their daughter. (Nobody knew how old the daughter was at the time. Charlotte's mother thought she might have been sixteen or seventeen, but Jo had overheard her mother saying to someone on the phone that Auntie Coco thought the girl wasn't even menstruating yet, and Auntie Coco was supposed to have a sixth sense about these things.) So the diamond woman had returned to the bomoh, frightened and pleading for medicine to alter her mistake, but as it turned out, not even the bomoh could undo the effect of the woman's own actions. The woman's only comfort was that as long as she kept the diamond in her cheek, her husband would not leave her. This was what the bomoh promised her. But it would always be their daughter whom he desired, because the bomoh had given the woman one of her strongest medicines.

  So the story would go, each time it was retold.

  That August Jo was fifteen and I was fourteen, and there were boys prowling about our daily lives (although mostly it was Jo whom they found sexy) and I wondered more than ever who the diamond woman was, how close by she lived or whether she had moved to a neighborhood farther away to save face, whether she was related to anyone we knew. I wondered who all those women were, who had "refused to take up their crosses" (as my mother would say at times when Jo's mother came over and they sat chatting in the kitchen), th
ose women who had sought cures beyond the scope of priests or marriage counselors or psychiatrists, daring to visit the house that sat behind the hack wall in the cemetery for powders and tea leaves to turn themselves beautiful, potions to freeze a vagabond lover's wandering gaze, Lucky Draw digits for a favorite son. I wondered about the missing details in their stories, the absence of names and dates that set them apart and left them adrift in a strand of gossip different from the usual.

  All that no longer exists, or so it would appear if you were to return to our road now. You would see people's houses still there, bought up mostly by modern Singaporeans with advanced technological tastes and impatient minds, Singaporeans who used to live elsewhere on the island or in the wider world and remember nothing about us. And as for the few of our neighbors who remain, ask them about the stories, about the diamond woman, and what happened after Shakilah Nair came home, and they will most likely say it was all just rumor in the end.

  And some of it was rumor, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen, and it's not as if everything that happened ever became a story.

  There was the thing Jo and I and the other girls who were in the cemetery saw, a week before Shakilah Nair was supposed to arrive, which we've kept to ourselves because we couldn't tell what we were doing in the cemetery in the first place, and the truth was, we were cowards, all of us except for Jo (who kept the secret for my sake and for Fay's, even months later when we heard about the baby).

  We were six yards from the bomoh's house, and Charlotte had just emptied the packet of powder into the granite bowl ...

  Phillipa was there, and our new classmate Fay Timmerman (who was from Jakarta and was staying with her uncle on River Road, next door to the doctor's abandoned house).

  Charlotte would want me to say it wasn't her, that it was one of the other girls who had volunteered to mix the powder, maybe even that it was me. But it was Charlotte who had procured the powder in the first place. Jo and I were responsible for the bowl (Jo having smuggled it out of her mother's kitchen that morning because Charlotte had insisted that it be a granite bowl), and Phillipa and Fay had brought an unopened box of white votive candles, and matches.

  We had come over together after that Tuesday's choir practice, and Charlotte still smelled of incense from the sacristy because she had met Alphonsus Wong for a brief kissing rendezvous (while the rest of us had waited for her outside the church, Phillipa and I because no boys were attracted to either of us yet, Fay because she was new and nobody knew her, and Jo because she wasn't interested in dating boys from the choir, who tended also to be altar boys). You could smell the myrrh and rose oil in Charlotte's hair as she crouched over the bowl and got herself ready to mix the powder, which had to be done with her left index finger and very, very slowly. I was kneeling closest to her, on her right. Jo was next to me on my right, and on Jo's right was Phillipa, then Fay (who had lit the candles after they were arranged, each balanced firmly in a depression in the ground, one candle behind each of us). We were an almost complete circle, with one opening for the spirit that might join us.

  Charlotte had given us the bomoh's instructions and we had followed them to a T. (Even Fay knew about the diamond woman, knew the possible consequences of the slightest deviation.) I say this so you'll see there were no mistakes, at least not on our part.

  What was supposed to happen was that while Charlotte was mixing the powder, the reddish grains would grow warmer and warmer, swirling into shades of violet and maroon and deepening until the powder liquefied, after which point we were supposed to turn our heads and look around (one at a time), to see among the trees and gravesites the passing figures of our future husbands, maybe even their faces. (Faces weren't guaranteed, but you were supposed to be able to discern from a man's gait what kind of man he was, whether he was thoughtful and attentive and inclined to he faithful, or whether his soul was constantly unsettled, constantly in search of greener pastures.)

  We weren't the first ever to try this ritual, or game, as the nuns used to call it. Nobody seems to play it anymore. People leave the spirits alone now, or perhaps it's true what some believe, that our energy is too interrupted by the noises and electricity breaking daily across the island, this perennial slam and crash of unending construction.

  Still, you might hear more if you try. Be very quiet, breathe very slowly. It's possible if you'll let yourself, if you'll leave hold of where you are and come to where we used to be, smell us returning like sleep, the air dripping with frangipani and jasmine and fruit, with guava, mango and mangosteen, and florid, hairy husks of rambutans, promising the most delectable juice.

  We had never seen Shakilah Nair, or her photograph, so nobody thought of her at the time. Aware only that someone was watching us as Charlotte was about to mix the powder, Jo turned to see who it was, and that was when she saw a pretty Eurasian woman smiling at her, about ten feet away, underneath a banyan tree. I heard Jo gasp, but when the rest of us looked, the woman was already walking away, and through the trees we could see she wasn't alone.

  There was a child with her, a girl younger than we were, who was holding her hand. They were heading towards the bomoh's house, and then they disappeared, vanished like night into the sun as they passed the yellow shrine (the one sheltering a baby's grave).

  That was why we didn't finish the ritual. Jo wasn't afraid, and I was willing to continue, but neither of us wanted to mix the powder, so when Charlotte changed her mind and Phillipa and Fay didn't volunteer, the afternoon was over.

  ALIKA AS OPENING the windows in Madam's living room when she saw the girl. Or rather, what caught her eye and made her pause long enough to set the new copper kettle shrieking like an emergency alarm on the kitchen stove was Madam's friend, dressed in a pair of Madam's sleeveless pajamas, pale green with flecks of white petals (because it had been a last-minute idea for the friend to spend the night), slipping into the house through the sliding glass doors of the study, which was the room Madam had added on to the house for herself back in 1985, after the children were all married and Madam's husband had passed away.

  Since it was half-past five in the morning, the air still bluey bluey and crisp as dead leaves and noisy with calling birds, as Malika would describe it (as if Sali and I wouldn't have been awake ourselves at half-past five in the morning, but then that was how Malika talked, fancying herself our storyteller), and since Madam and her friend had stayed up quite late chatting (Madam with her usual bedtime glass of whiskey and the friend sipping iced water with lime because, as Malika had heard her telling Madam, she was almost in her sixth month), Malika was surprised to see the friend up so early, which was not to say she was expecting anything odd to happen, not on such an ordinary morning, and she herself had been doing nothing unusual, just going around the house, opening Madam's windows to let in the fresh air, as was her routine every morning, ever since Madam had started closing the windows at night.

  The study extended from the side of the house, towards the back where Madam's bedroom was. It wasn't that far from the living room, but we agreed with Malika that it was possible Madam's friend hadn't noticed her or heard her unlocking the iron clasp on the windows. I remember there was a mango tree growing outside the living room, close to the windows. It could have blocked Malika from sight with its thick trunk. Or perhaps Madam's friend was so plagued by her dilemma that morning, over the book she was writing (she was a novelist, like Charlotte Bronte and Danielle Steele), she wasn't noticing anything around her.

  'That's why I thought she didn't notice the girl," said Malika, when she was telling us about it.

  I hadn't told her or Sali what else I knew about Madam's friend. I wasn't going to tell them, in case Madam found out that I had and thought of me as a busybody. At the moment, I was just one of Malika's friends, and perhaps because Madam was both kind and not paying attention to us, Sali and I were free to come and go as we pleased. No need to rock the boat, as I saw it.

  So all Malika knew was what she remembered, coupled
with some new details given to her by Madam (who from then on, particularly after what was about to happen had happened and her friend's visit started fading just like her daughters and her marriage into a sealed and sweetened past, would glow with both pride and sorrow whenever she reminisced about the days when Miss Shakilah had been a pupil at St. Agnes, and Madam had taught her, because as she would tell Malika, she both hoped and didn't hope she had had a hand in moulding Miss Shakilah into the success she had become in America-a famous writer and a university professor on top of that).

  Needless to say, Madam herself didn't address Miss Shakilah as Miss Shakilah when the two of them were in conversation. That was only how she would refer to her in front of Malika. With Miss Shakilah directly, Madam would say, Shak, my dear, or Darling, you don't understand, with the same tenderness in her voice as when she was speaking on the phone with Caroline or Michelle (the eldest one, Francesca, was a stockbroker in London and never called home, although like the other two, she would fly back with Madam's grandchildren once a year, usually during the Christmas holidays, and as with the other two, sometimes the husband would come along and sometimes not).

  Malika thought Madam could not have seen the girl in the garden because she was taking a shower at the time, although when Sali asked if she was sure about that, Malika couldn't say she was. "Madam always takes her shower at that time," was as close as Malika could get to pinpointing where Madam may have been at half-past five, somewhere else in the house or in the study with Miss Shakilah.

  The girl looked Chinese, around nine or ten years old, and was standing behind Madam's sugar cane near the fence. Malika saw her after Miss Shakilah had stepped into the study, while Miss Shakilah was pulling the glass door shut (Malika could hear the rubbery glide of the door in its steel groove just before the kettle started whistling). The girl was very thin, her arms bony like bamboo. Malika wasn't sure at first if there was really someone there, until a small breeze came and the sugar cane leaves swayed a little to the left, and the girl didn't move.