My son-in-law had bought a karaoke set, for the children he claimed; he would get them those educational sing-a-long videos and they would learn while having fun. But he was the one who ended up singing into the golden microphone, sitting on the sofa, making his voice have echo effects, sometimes even with his working socks on. He would sing songs like ‘Everything I do I’d do it for you’ and his favourite, ‘Right here waiting’. On one of the days when he was singing, and the children were watching the Caucasian man on screen chasing after a bonnet that the wind had blown away, we heard a loud bang. I realised soon after that it was our neighbours slamming shut their door. In fact, they continued from then on to bang the door shut whenever they could see that we were at home, regardless of whether my son-in-law was singing or not.
There were other things also, most of them too ugly, not worthy of mention, small bitter annoyances, things to make your heart harden like mud in a kiln. There was urine one day at our doorstep. It could have been an animal that had done it, but my daughter claimed that it had been splashed methodically: collected, and then sprinkled from a vessel. We didn’t dare after a while to keep our windows open anymore, because one day we found a clump of earth beside the television. My son-in-law insisted it was dried dung. Our neighbours did the same, closed their windows and doors, bought air-con, stayed cocooned in their houses as if they were plotting something diabolical and new.
My son-in-law one day almost wanted to buy a video camera because he “wanted to catch them in action” so that we could show evidence to the police. But it was not that we were completely innocent. My own daughter whom I raised in the best manner I could, once while sweeping the corridor, brushed most of the rubbish towards their doorstep. My grandchildren started calling the neighbour’s wife a witch. If they didn’t sleep early, she would pay them a visit and feed them with geckos, added my son-in-law.* * *“Switch on the lights.”
“Ok, grandma.”
“Help your father with the travelling bags, and open the windows.”
“Ok, ok.”
“Why are you switching on the TV?”
“But grandma, one whole week we never watch.”
“Open the windows first. The hall smells funny.”
When I first entered the house there seemed to be so much sunlight streaming in, and in those shafts of light, I could see so many dust motes, so many sparkling like luminous punctuation marks in the air. I thought then, two things I could do, either clean the house from ceiling to floor, or to get curtains so as to not let in the betraying light. But I liked the house, I liked the children standing in the kitchen and turning on the taps, the echoing, empty bone-white rooms, the smiles we met along the corridor. Our neighbours had bought us canned drinks as a way of welcome, and we let the dust on our hands mingle with the condensation on those cans, smiling in gratitude, glad that our hands were dirty, as if we had been working on building a house. In which case we were taking a rest, offered drinks for our labour, and our smiles were filled with not only gratefulness, but the satisfaction of sunburnt workers.
It was dusk when I walked out of the house, and the memory of the dead man stayed with me as I wandered barefoot out onto the corridor. The cement floor was cold, a polished cold, and a breeze flickered across the slivers of leaves of my Japanese bamboo. I went over to the ledge and felt a stickiness on my soles. It was then that I remembered the kampung,˚ and how on one night, a thief who had stolen money had gone off to the forested area to hide. The entire kampung went in search of him, even little girls like me, and we searched for half an hour without any success. I was getting sleepy, I kept rubbing my eyes, and then suddenly I felt it. I felt the powerful sensation that he was around, and the shadows around me started rustling. It seemed as if something was travelling among the bushes like a snake under velvet cloth. Then I saw him perched on a tree, shivering, the boy thief. I pointed him out, and later on the way back everyone was saying how I had sharp eyes, and I, I just knew I had a feeling, the feeling for these things.
So I closed my eyes and thought about the man, the unfortunate man who stumbled upon our corridor and got killed, seven stab wounds, no relatives found, dying words unrecorded, nothing to answer to but a ledge that blocked his view of dawn, and the fast-fading stars. I took a few steps to my right, towards the side of the staircase, my neighbour’s house. My hands were still holding on to the edge of the ledge. I should have been there when the crowd had assembled, with the running Indian man and the screaming woman, and that Linda.
I tried to feel for the man, the exact spot where he lay, a part of me wondered if it
