It’s no use. Anil doesn’t talk much, which leaves him plenty more room for thinking, and right now he can see through Mary’s protestations. Rajan won’t stand for a halfwit brother-in-law hanging around, and this might be one of the last few moments Anil will be alone with his sister. So he pushes her away, jumps off the chair in tears and races down the steps and into the jungle.
Who knows what he was thinking, this strange, quiet great-uncle of mine? Anil, who’s always been more complicated than anyone’s given him credit for, is the kind to fling himself away from trouble. The kind of boy to see it coming, to put his head down and run as fast as he can from this vision of the future, until he runs slap-bang into Paavai’s son Luke, kicking a stone down the jungle path.
‘Where are you going?’ Luke asks mildly.
Luke and Anil look extraordinarily alike, although Anil’s fourteen and Luke is only four. They’re both coffee-coloured, sturdy, with Stephen’s grey eyes and huddled neck.
‘Mary!’ Anil bursts out. ‘Mary … marry, Mary.’
Luke frowns. He doesn’t understand, but he can tell his best friend is terrified.
‘Anil-Uncle,’ he says. ‘You and me sit down there.’
He tugs Anil, now quieter and calmer, along the dappled trail. It’s the same path that Mary and Rajan walked earlier and their footsteps are still plain for Anil to see in the mud. He follows them, head down and eyes wide, and then stops abruptly. There’s a splash of blood mixed in with the leaves.
Anil yelps; the blood is so red, and it’s soaked into the ground. The leaf underneath squirms and pulses and throbs with a sickening rhythm. If Anil stopped to think, he’d realize it’s only the leech that had been on Mary’s ankle, unceremoniously pushed off by the toe of her patent-leather shoe, and spilling out its last meal as it fell to the jungle floor. Anil should know this, of course, but in his panic he forgets. Luke gives a little scream, and clings to Anil with all the strength of his four-year-old fingers.
‘Blood, Anil-Uncle! It’s hantu – it’s ghosts. It’s bloodsuckers!’
Luke cowers back against Anil’s legs. He’s a superstitious child, and Paavai’s filled his head with tales about drowned women, about lepers and jungle spirits and pontianaks. No wonder he’s confused. The two of them clutch at each other’s hands and back slowly away from that throbbing crimson puddle.
‘Ghosts,’ Anil repeats thoughtfully. ‘Devils.’
Anil will continue to whisper this all night. He’ll still be whispering it in the sleepless dawn when Mary rolls over in her convent bed, thrusts her fists with grim determination between her legs and begins to plan her wedding day.
Because against all expectations, Stephen has agreed to the marriage: Mary and Rajan will marry in two short months’ time. It’ll be an extravagant wedding with music and snake charmers, with Mary in her jewelled gown and her mother’s rubies. Radhika will sniff back tears and Stephen will escape from the dancing to sit in his lonely study and brood over the newspapers and his letters. And after that, Mary and Rajan will move – for ever, Mary thinks, because at twenty everything is for ever – across the Kinta Valley.
After Mary’s gone, there’ll be nobody to calm Anil’s fears and hush his talk of devils. The state of Europe will get worse in those years, women’s rights won’t count for much and T. S. Eliot for even less. Stephen – reading about Europe in flames, about men shot against the wall and his own brother’s death from shrapnel while driving an ambulance in France – will never tell his son that devils don’t exist. Radhika, learning in an airmail letter of famine riots and madness in her hometown, will lock herself into her bedroom and scream quietly for days.
All of this will get into Anil’s dreams. He’ll see splashes of blood in his sleep; he’ll see leeches and snakes that have charmed his sister away. He’ll submerge himself in books he can barely read. He’ll learn about Chinese ghosts and Malay tricksters, about vampires and demons that flap their wings about the roof at night. He’ll open his mind to a world he can’t see or touch; he’ll lose what language he has and gain a reckless, useless sort of bravery instead. With his mind open and his mouth firmly shut, it won’t be long before he makes the worst decision of his young life.
19. Tuesday, 3 p.m.
It takes all afternoon to make it back from Tom’s house to Ammuma’s. The roads south are still blocked, and there are only a few cars left on the roads. The clouds have thickened, and look like they mean business.
‘Durga!’
The smell of chai and spices drifts out from the verandah, where Ammuma’s sitting with Mother Agnes. They have their heads together over a pile of cheap postcards, scrawled over in clumsy writing. Ammuma told me the left-behinds have taken to dropping their letters at Mother Agnes’s house to save the postage. It’s a point of pride with Agnes never to let them down and so she picks the letters up every day. By the time Arif-the-postman arrives here she’s stamped every letter and told Ammuma every secret in them. Ammuma won’t read them herself; she’ll only give them a shake and smooth them down. She used to be a postmistress herself and nobody – she says now over Mother Agnes’s head with a scalding calm – likes to get crumpled news.
Mother Agnes is scribbling in her red exercise book – private, those crimson pages, for secrets and confidences only – but drops it when she sees me. She snatches up her blue-for-friendship book instead.
Durga! she writes.
She’s in a satin-green kebaya and her eyebrows
