Mary hesitates. If she had read her Dickens already, if she already knew how to diagram sentences – in short, if she were better educated and better behaved – she’d say that importance is a state of mind. It’s her temper, and the impossibility of controlling it. It’s her yearning, unbearable desire to be grown up. Her bitten nails, the fried watermelon seeds she’ll eat alone in the garden and her luckiest five-stone that she keeps in her desk. She’d offered that stone to Anil yesterday, if only he’d talk. But of course, he didn’t.
‘Mary?’ Sister Hilda prompts.
‘I don’t know,’ Mary answers, and seals her fate for the next school year.
Sixty years in the future Mary will still have the temper, if not the bitten nails. She’ll be more than grown up; she’ll be old, which she never truly believed would happen, and is worse than she’d ever expected, and she’ll be alone again. When she tells this story to a bothersome grandchild, she’ll get the tenses wrong and the participles mixed up, because she never did learn to diagram sentences. And she’ll add a friend in, when she tells it later, to make it all bearable. A small friend, because Mary doesn’t – yet – meddle too much with truth. The kind of friend she might easily have missed in all that excitement. The kind who couldn’t do much harm.
‘I’m sure Anil won’t die,’ Cecelia tells Mary helpfully as she pokes her head over the garden wall. Five years after they first met, Cecelia and Mary are still best friends. But ever since the district got its government doctor – Rajan’s father, Dr Balakrishnan, bringing along his wife and two daughters and his tricky, sneaking son – the two girls have been eyeing each other with suspicion. Something’s happened.
To be precise, a lot has happened since then; Kuala Lipis now has a railway station, the Straits Chinese are agitating for political power and the Malay sultans are making treaties left, right and centre with the British to make sure they don’t get it. The Chettiar Indians are quietly lending money, the Kuomintang are recruiting Communists, and two years ago Rajan Balakrishnan clasped hands with Cecelia Lim in a flame-of-the-forest tree.
But most importantly, Mary and Cecelia have lost their bond. They used to be almost two-in-one, to the extent that Mary’s measles bloomed on Cecelia’s skin and Cecelia’s mild typhoid half-killed Mary. Witchcraft, the bomohs would have said. But now Mary and Cecelia’s connection has faded and they’re just two ordinary girls. Plain, sturdy. Healthy, no thanks to those bomohs.
As for Rajan himself, he’s a slippery character; head of his class with a heartbreaking smile. He has a habit of winkling people’s innocent secrets out of them and puffing those indiscretions up into monstrosities. Thanks to Rajan’s loose tongue, Mrs Abdul’s weakness for cigars swells into an opiate habit and the beef in Ah Chen’s satay is rumoured to come from stray dogs. His classmates aren’t spared either: when little Pok Mat defeats Rajan in a spelling test at school, he’s astonished to find himself carpeted for apparently gambling on cockfights he’s never even seen. Most of Rajan’s stories are harmless enough, although little Pok Mat sobs all afternoon following his beating, and is carpeted again for disturbing the class.
Rajan can be charming, though, when he chooses. Cecelia and Mary are both half in love, taking every opportunity to slip a hand into his or finish his homework. At any other time Mary’s father, Stephen, would have put his foot down – Mary’s getting older, she’s always been wilful, and soon it won’t be homework books she’s opening for Rajan – but Stephen has other things on his mind. Anil is getting worse.
Mary’s mother, Radhika, on the other hand, is perfectly capable of worrying over both children at once. It’s true that, despite being five years old, Anil barely moves and shows no inclination to babble. But it’s also true that Mary – and she must, Radhika complains to her friends, she really must stop Mary seeing so much of that Cecelia girl, not to credit market gossip but these Chinese tarts, eh? Sexy at nine years old and pregnant by twelve, isn’t it? – can still coax a smile out of her brother.
But that’s not enough to satisfy Stephen. He’s been disappointed in Anil since the day he was born – undersized, squalling, so dark skinned that only an Indian name seemed to suit. And to make it worse, the boy still doesn’t talk, so today Stephen has booked an appointment in the top hospital in KL. He and Radhika will get to the bottom of this, he’s resolved, will force some words out of Anil and some backbone in. They’ll be gone until tomorrow and as a special treat Mary’s been allowed to have Cecelia stay the night. The two girls are going to stay in the house by themselves tonight, with a lovely cold dinner and a stone bottle of orangeade. To make up for things, Radhika’s explained vaguely, and left Mary with the confused impression that Cecelia’s somewhat of a consolation prize. Shop soiled, so to speak.
She’s not the only one in the kampong to think that, either. Cecelia’s been spending entire afternoons sitting in the flame-of-the-forest tree with Rajan, picking up bad habits. By now she’s tried some of Rajan’s cigarettes, she’s tried some of his bad language, and she’s certainly outdone him in spreading rumours. If Rajan’s stories were harmless then Cecelia’s certainly aren’t, and by now there are more than a few broken marriages after she’s lied about seeing an embrace under the mango trees or a kiss behind the fish stalls.
It’s not so much the lies, but how Cecelia tells them. She has a penetrating voice, the kind that’s loudest when she’s whispering. And so when she sits placidly at her mother’s stall in the marketplace and whispers to Amir-from-the-market that she’s
