I close the door behind me. Even if Ammuma doesn’t mind, those ruined pictures tap the guilt inside me. I wonder if she has any copies, perhaps in the prayer room. The prayer room’s a small, dark alcove just off the verandah downstairs, with her shrines inside. She keeps things she doesn’t need in there: spare green mosquito netting, my old picture books and even her wedding sari tangled up in an ice-cream tub full of Flit sprays. She doesn’t go in for sentiment either, doesn’t mind a few spots of grease on the past.
When I push the prayer-room door open it looks smaller than I remember. Shabbier, too. In Canada I got used to measuring the importance of things by how new they were, how outsize and shiny. Not here in Pahang. I’d never noticed before just how tarnished the shrines are.
Ammuma never used the prayer room much when I was young, but these days she spends so many hours in front of the shrines it seems like even the floorboards hold a memory of her knees. There are three shrines: one for her husband, Rajan, one for Anil and one for Francesca. No shrines for her own parents, who were killed in the war. She’s never found out how they died and she won’t put up a shrine, she says, until she knows for sure. She misses them more than I can understand in some complicated, angry way, like grief sewn together out of little patches.
My grandfather’s photograph is the biggest. It’s a pre-war portrait, Rajan looking clean-cut in sepia. Ammuma dutifully lays marigolds before it every morning. Rajan is, after all, a respectable memory – he was a government doctor, whatever unsavoury things he might have got up to off duty – and Ammuma always spent their wedding anniversary fasting for him. She used to love anniversaries and auspicious days, and she wasn’t fussy about which religion they belonged to. Diwali, Christmas, lunar new year; she’d dip into the calendar and pull out a plum stuffed full of prayers and complicated rituals I’d have to fumble through.
Not now, though. Last year she didn’t bother fasting at all until the Jelai flooded and she ran out of groceries. Killing two birds with one stone, she told me triumphantly down the telephone. Making the most of things. She’s good at that, using up bits and ends of rags, of food and left-over flowers. She’s good at shrines.
Her brother Anil’s shrine has even more marigolds scattered on it than Rajan’s. She takes Anil more seriously, blood being thicker than marriage certificates, after all. And since he never learnt to speak he wouldn’t have even answered back; a point in his favour. Ammuma’s stories about Anil change depending on her mood; they shift and contradict and turn into different tales entirely. I know he was killed in the war, like Rajan. But Anil, Ammuma’s always said, didn’t deserve it.
There’s a fresh-cut flower and a bowl of sweets in front of Francesca’s shrine. Your Amma always did love sweets, Ammuma says to me every Diwali, down crackly phone lines and clear-as-a-bell phone lines and phone lines that echo with sadness. And now I’m back here, topping up Amma’s bowl of sweets myself. Francesca looks about thirteen in her photo, and it’s strange to think I was born only a few years after it was taken. Francesca pregnant with no husband in sight, and who knows the tears and tantrums there were over that. And then three more feverish days and she was dead. Sixteen years old, with her stomach still swollen from baby weight she never had a chance to lose.
I put the picture back firmly. Bad enough having to deal with my memories on this visit, without bargaining for Ammuma’s, too. Everything in here seems eerie, like a kind of trick photograph. With my Canadian eye it’s exotic and overdone, like a photograph on the wall of a travel agency. But with my Malaysian eye it’s real life.
I turn away, and to my surprise there’s one more rickety table. It’s been pushed in at the back of the room and there’s a shadowy photograph on it. I pick the photograph up and tilt it closer to the light from the open door. My hands start to shake. It isn’t. It isn’t.
But it is. I know this photograph. It used to hang on my bedroom wall, fifteen years ago. It was taken at the kampong school just a mile away: rows of children arranged on benches with our hands tucked behind our backs. We’re all teenagers and sulky with it, wearing pressed uniforms crisp as cellophane. I’m in the middle, my hair in two plaits, Tom’s in the back row with a smile and a bowl-cut, and then – yes, in the front. There she is, sitting cross-legged. Wrists covered in ballpoint tattoos and nails chipped from a game of five-stones in the playground. Peony.
6. The Princesses Set to War: 1926
In the year she turns eleven, Mary correctly spells the word importance. It’s the end-of-year class test, and this achievement should have lifted her into the standard above. In that rarefied atmosphere up there, they read Dickens instead of Alice in Wonderland; they parse sentences instead of telling stories. They are, in short, much better educated than Mary is right now and much better behaved.
‘Well done, Mary,’ Sister Hilda
