‘Mary-Miss!’ Ah Sim’s hand flies to her mouth and she glances around, worried that Mary will bring vengeful spirits flying in through the windows. Stephen’s built this house like an Indian bungalow to make his wife feel at home, and all the doors and windows lie in straight lines. Once a spirit gets into a house like this, Ah Sim knows it’s going to be hard to get it out.
‘The jungle spirits won’t like that,’ Ah Sim tries to reason with Mary. ‘They’ll cry too.’
‘Well then, I’ll drown the bloody spirits,’ Mary snaps, and her mother, Radhika, walks in just in time to hear her.
If Radhika had taken more time to reflect, she probably wouldn’t have boxed Ah Sim’s ears for encouraging that sort of language. And if she hadn’t slapped Ah Sim then the amah might have stayed and taught young Mary a thing or two. She might even have spotted what was wrong with Anil before it was all too late. But Radhika’s not a woman who thinks ahead, and so she slaps Ah Sim – and Mary, for good measure – packs one off to the servant’s room and the other off to bed, then sits down to cry. The sound of his mother’s sobs gives baby Anil the fright of his life. Shock fills his gummy mouth and he gasps. Gulps. Swallows his own howl once and for all. For good, as it turns out.
When Radhika unlocks the door an hour later, Mary hurtles out with her mouth set to quarrel. She’s bursting to tell her mother what’s what, to insist it’s all her fault. It’s always Radhika’s fault, according to Mary.
‘You scared Anil! Look at his little face! Ah Sim-amah doesn’t teach me bad language, I just know it. All by myself.’
‘Mary. Go back into your room.’
Mary stares her down, three feet of defiance. An hour ago she’d have slapped Anil herself, but she won’t stand for her mother feeling the same way.
‘You don’t like either of us! You hate us!’
It’s a lucky guess, and Mary doesn’t realize how right she is. Radhika’s life hasn’t turned out quite as she imagined. She met Stephen in her hometown in Kerala, married him and sailed out to Malaya with hopes so high she can barely remember them. Like any good Kerala girl she’d have liked a fine, manly boy-child to light her funeral pyre; she’d have liked a sweet, pretty girl-child to carry on the family name. Come to that, she’d have liked love, too, a comfortable house in town, a husband who didn’t mumble as though he were speaking a foreign language. Radhika – who is speaking a foreign language, who will eventually lose her mother tongue and die out here with a hundred forgotten words in her mouth – can’t quite bring herself to comfort Mary. She does her best though, holds out her hands and lifts her daughter to perch on the windowsill.
‘I daresay it’ll all get better,’ Radhika says doubtfully, somewhere over Mary’s head. She takes a package of betel nut from her pocket and starts to wad it against her gums.
Mary wriggles down and stands on one leg, irresolute. The crickets are screeching outside, Ah Sim’s sobbing in the servant’s room and a tok-tok bird is sounding its mechanical call. There’s something ominous in all this din, some note that’s missing. She looks at her baby brother, lying here in the nursery and pawing at his mouth. Amongst all this noise, this chewing and birdsong and sobbing, she realizes – he hasn’t made another sound.
‘Cook’s excelled himself tonight. Soup looks almost good enough to eat.’
Mary’s father, Stephen, makes this joke nearly every evening. They’re gathered in the dining room, under a buckling roof held together with nails and spit. The family still dress for dinner: Radhika in her saris of glittering thread, Stephen in his rapidly rotting dinner jacket and Mary buttoned into smocked gingham and good behaviour. Candles are set out on the table and the soup is tinned mulligatawny, with a dash of evaporated milk from another tin. Stephen’s determined not to go native – bad show, he mutters over his solitary evening whisky – just because he’s alone in a Malayan swamp with a couple of civet-cats fighting somewhere in the roof. It’s seven miles to the next kampong, and half of Pahang lies between him and the nearest Englishman. It’s all right for his wife and daughter, he thinks. Radhika’s Indian; she’s used to privation. And as for Mary – well, Mary’s a little hooligan.
Stephen keeps his spirits up, though. He likes to take stock at dinner; he likes to make little jokes and tease his wife over laxities in the housekeeping. He’s earned it, after all. He’s extricated Radhika from the jungle and established her at the head of a table glittering with silverware. She can stand a little teasing.
‘But Daddy, we are eating the soup.’ Mary isn’t usually this demure. On bad days she refuses to speak English, insisting on using bazaar Malay and overturning her water glass. Not today though. Today she’s nervous. Anil still hasn’t uttered a single cry since the afternoon. He looks puzzled and miserable, doubling his fists and smacking the side of his head. Mary can hear trouble in the air, like a finger sliding over wet glass.
‘Hush, Mary. Children should be seen and not heard.’
Mary scowls, pushes her hands into her lap and kicks at the leg of her chair. She isn’t hungry, having already gorged herself on ais kacang and kueh lapis in the kitchen with Maniam-cook. Maniam-cook is Mary’s best friend. She sneaks him cigarettes from Stephen’s private stash, gobbles palm-sugar lumps from his cupboard and brings him whatever gossip she’s heard behind the door at Radhika’s coffee mornings.
‘Mary!’ Her father snaps. ‘Stop kicking your chair and eat. If
