Ammuma gives a rattling, whistling gasp: she can’t breathe, even with the tubing gone. I jam the mouthpiece back over her lips but the mask must be broken because nothing comes through. She coughs, and this time there’s more fluid. Some blood, something sticky and essential from deep in her guts.
I thrash the tubing down on the floor. Some clots fly free but the oxygen still isn’t flowing, and Ammuma’s gasps are whooping-cough loud. I stick my fingers in the mask to clear it. Nothing.
Ammuma’s chest shudders and she convulses. Her arm flies up and points behind me. She’s seeing ghosts, I think wildly: Francesca and Peony standing there with their translucent hands full of broken china and oxygen masks.
‘Breathing,’ she gasps, and her head lolls.
I run into the hallway and snatch up the receiver. It’s still dead and I bang it down. No help, nobody to stop Ammuma drowning right here on dry land as the Jelai floods harmlessly through the back garden. I run back to the verandah and grab her mask again. I thrust my fingers deep into the mouthpiece. Jabbing at it, again and again. There’s something in there, just out of reach. I jam my whole hand in, the skin scraping from my knuckles. Once more, and then I’ve got it. A piece of chewed rubber just like the one in her windpipe. I throw it on the ground, and feel a faint breeze of air from the tube again.
I press the mouthpiece against her face. Her lips flutter and then she takes a feeble breath. Her heart’s racing under her collarbone, shallow trips that lift up her skin. After a few breaths her lips lose their blue tinge. She lifts a hand to the mouthpiece and holds it herself. It shakes with her tremors, then stills as I watch. The sweat shines on her face and there’s a triumphant cast to the hollows below her cheekbones. Behind her mask, behind those dislodged porcelain fangs, Ammuma’s smiling.
By evening she’s a little better. The mask seems to be holding, although there’s a patchiness to the oxygen flow that I don’t like. She’s getting less air with every breath. I try the phone every half hour to see if I can reach the hospital but the line’s still dead.
When I tell Ammuma this she snaps her jaw in satisfaction. She can barely breathe, but she doesn’t want to go into hospital. I can see it in her face, that dread of being trapped in a starched bed until she desiccates into nothing but skin and bone and the feeblest of demands. Ammuma, at least, knows where she belongs.
Between attempts, I stand at the back door. I’m exhausted, propping myself up with my hands braced on my hips. I can see clods from the riverbanks falling in with a sound like ripping cloth, and the water’s thick and syrupy. The wooden house-panels jam tight against each other and the floorboards give every time I take a step. Chickens cluster under the house – stupid, the first place to flood – the cats are in the attap roof and monkeys cling bedraggled to the palm trees. I think, very hard, about the chickens and the cats and the monkeys. I count them all, and then I start again and I don’t think about anything else. I could pass an afternoon like this or a week or a year. I could pass a few seconds. A minute or two, at most.
‘Durga?’ Ammuma calls from the verandah. She’s become restless as the day closes, muttering words I can’t make out.
The contents of the Amma-tin are still scattered over the table. It’s dim, but I can see the photographs and the Little Twin Stars autograph book. My feet pad on the concrete floor but Ammuma doesn’t even look up. She leans across and touches the photograph gently, with the very tip of her finger. The air tightens: a breeze, a breath, a shifting foundation. This house was built for giving away secrets, right down to the floorboards that creak under me.
‘Wanted answers, ar?’ Ammuma’s voice is thick, and her breath smells of rubber and old spit.
‘Ammuma, I …’
‘I don’t chatter-chatter secrets for being asked, is it,’ she mutters to herself. Her head sinks down between her shoulder blades. The blanket’s fallen away from her scrawny legs and she stretches out her feet onto the damp floor. And then, without looking up, she exhales a rubber-and-plastic breath and asks, ‘Did I ever tell you about the Kempetai, Durga?’
22. The Princess’s Sacrifice: 1943
Ammuma might be a poor patient and a questionable grandmother, she might be inclined to lie first and answer questions later, but she has a gift for storytelling.
‘So imagine, Durga; 1943 is no food, is soldiers and sentries. I sing “Kimigayo”, I keep my head down, isn’t it? And in a few weeks only, I’m delivering letters.’
It was a pitch-black morning, she says, and she was standing outside Noor Abi’s house with the post office gunny sack chafing her shoulder. Anil was waiting at the gate with their shared bicycle, having been too scared to wheel it up the overgrown path to Noor Abi’s shadowy door.
Strictly speaking, Mary has no business with the post office sack at all. Anil is the official postman, a job that keeps him out of Japanese conscription into the railway gangs. Of course, Anil can’t read or write, so Mary surreptitiously helps him out. She’s tidying up, she tells him as she sorts and files and stacks the letters for delivery; she’s along for the ride, she explains as she pedals madly uphill with Anil clinging on behind. And now she’s standing at Noor Abi’s door on a gritty, raw day with a letter bringing news of a death. It’s not a pleasant task at all, and Mary arranges her face into a
