‘I don’t know,’ I say again, uselessly. ‘My mother’s dead, though. She’s been dead for thirty years, since 1955. She died having me.’
His spectacles catch the fluorescent light, blank and glittering. I wonder what he’s thinking. This one is thirty already, perhaps. Past her best. Missed her chance. Ammuma watches us out of the corner of one slitted eye. She might agree but she’s not going to put up with any insinuations from a toddy-eyed young doctor.
‘We’ll have to keep her in for a few days,’ he says, pursing his lips. ‘This confusion, and the shadow on her lungs … are you sure she hasn’t had TB?’
‘She told you she hadn’t,’ I snap. Ammuma and I tighten our lips, stare past him to where the morning’s a glaring oily square behind the window blinds. I move back to the bed and feel for her hand under the blanket. She grips my fingers. We’re on each other’s side for once, even if we don’t quite know it.
Dr Rao finishes his examination and tells me she can go home on Sunday. Two days in hospital, he says, will see her right. Ammuma, who’s never considered she could be anything other than right, snorts at this.
‘Do you want to stay with her tonight?’ he asks. ‘We can put a chair by her bed and give you a blanket.’
I nod. Ammuma’s always been one for dwelling on the past, having so much more of it than future. She’s always been inclined to ghosts and folklore, to mixing fairy tales with my bedroom stories and swearing the whole lot was true. Not easy to sleep after hearing some of those things: women drowned in wells, the tiger-prince and the frog-monster, demons and rakshasas and more devils than you can shake a happy ending at.
We’ll pack them off together, I promise her silently. Tonight is Diwali and everyone and their god is out on the prowl, and those evil spirits will have to look sharp if they think they can get past us.
4. A Prince and Two Princesses: 1924
By 1924, Mary’s at school. It’s a mission school, run by the Sisters of the Holy Infant, and once Mary arrived the Holy Infant never stood a chance. Mary spends her time flicking pencil shavings down other girls’ necks, she coaxes fighting spiders into matchboxes and cheats her way through breathless games of marbles. She has things on her own terms these days, and she’s even made a best friend. Cecelia. Cecelia is Chinese, she sits two desks away, she’s the daughter of a cookhouse worker, and she’s a thoroughly bad example.
‘We’ll take him to the bomohs,’ Cecelia says. The girls are in the nursery at Mary’s house, hands on hips and legs apart under identical ruffled skirts. Cecelia’s watching Anil and Mary, to her surprise, finds herself watching Cecelia. She doesn’t trust those guileless eyes.
‘Why?’ she asks. Mary and Cecelia have seen a bomoh in action only once, when Mohamed-the-butcher’s teenage son went missing. The butcher called in a pear-shaped bomoh from Kedah, his face plastered with white mud and flowers strung through his hair. He paced, he flung coconut husks and he sat dirty-legged on a valuable carpet he’d demanded Mohamed drag out to the offal-strewn yard. Despite all that, the boy never appeared. Taken by a crocodile, was the verdict, and Mary and Cecelia shivered with a delicious, squirming horror whenever they slipped down the banks of the Jelai to look for fighting fish.
‘He’s been chomped,’ Cecelia would sigh, opening her legs to the lapping waves and the suggestion of teeth, and Mary squealed and splashed and moaned in terror. When Mohamed’s son turned up two months afterwards with the dumpy woman he’d run off to marry, Mary felt flat disappointment. She would have told it better, if only it had been up to her.
‘We’ll take him to the bomohs,’ Cecelia insists again. ‘They’ll fix him.’
‘What if they hurt him?’ Mary objects.
Ever since Cecelia sat next to her during that first howling day at school, Mary’s taken her best friend’s advice. Cecelia has a sly twist to her mind, she comes up with the best games and the most exciting adventures, and lately Mary’s felt like she’s never going to catch up. It’s Anil’s fault, in a way. Ever since he was born there’s been a cloud of bad feeling over the house. Everyone’s felt it; Maniam-cook’s handed in his notice, the knife-sharpener bicycles passed without a word and the kitchen cats have given up hunting mice and taken to scowling in corners. Mary’s father, Stephen, his pale English skin sunburnt as he nails yet another verandah onto yet another annexe, can’t understand it. Damn place has a mind of its own, he mutters.
Mary’s mother, Radhika, too, knows something’s wrong. She’s started to talk to herself in Malayalam, the mother tongue of Kerala, which nobody here understands. She uses it to plead with her son, to whisper apologies into his unheeding ears. Radhika blames herself for Anil, which is handy for all concerned.
‘Look, Mary, he isn’t right.’ Cecelia points an accusing finger at Anil. It’s true that he never makes a sound, that he’s slow to smile or open his eyes or grasp what’s going on. But that’s not always a bad thing, thinks Mary.
‘The bomohs will fix him,’ Cecelia insists. ‘And everyone will be happy again.’
Mary sighs and gives in, gathering Anil up from the cot in all his knitted swaddling. Despite her reluctance, she’s known all along that she’d do as Cecelia said. The
