The Minorities Page 11

  “From the word ‘piano’,” I replied with concerted calm. “When it was first conceived in Italy, a piano was known as the fortepiano—‘forte’ being ‘loud’ in Italian, and ‘piano’ being ‘soft’, for its ability to create a range of tones.” I paused as Mr Jonathan Wang left the meeting room, shaking his head as he did so. If he was a lost cause, perhaps his colleagues were not. “So from Loud-Soft, I switched the first letters of each word, to get Soud-Loft, and that sounds stupid, and I realise for Soud to sound less stupid, it needs to sound like Sound, and so—SoundLoft!”

  “That’s really stupid,” Rebecca said flatly. I was torn between crying in despair and countering with, “No, you’re stupid.” I did neither. I simply stared, my heart beating so hard I felt it was trying to leave my failure-soaked body.

  “But nevertheless fascinating,” said her colleague two seats from her.

  “The piano is not the central element of this contraption, is it?” asked the woman with white hair. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you can replace it with any audio output device, can’t you?”

  “But it did work in the end, didn’t it? The name?” I asked hopefully, addressing the entire room. “A SoundLoft: the sounds of your”—I pointed to my head—“loft.”

  “Thank you for your time,” said Rebecca, in the same manner a thirsty man might say, “Thank you for this bottle of sand.”

  Most of the room rose and left. One man stayed, a kindly-looking old gentleman in a tweed suit, the one who had described the nomenclature of the SoundLoft as “fascinating”.

  “This would have held far more credibility if you came backed by Qyburn Labs,” he wheezed sympathetically. “Jonathan believes in reputation. He is an elitist, in that he only wants to work with something he deems of similar stature to him. What you’ve built here…there isn’t anything like it out there.”

  I tried to smile, but the weight of my failure to secure funding for the SoundLoft tautened my face.

  “Unfortunately, Jonathan calls the shots here, so I’m afraid all I can say is to keep trying, elsewhere. How many investors have you gone to?”

  “Redhill Holdings is my first.”

  “No wonder you were so optimistic and confident. I suggest you democratise your funding plan. Crowdfund or approach like-minded investors. I see fire in your eyes. You would give everything for this…SoundLoft. Firms like ours would want exactly that—everything. It will no longer be your baby. They would strip it apart, and put it back together as something entirely different. Something possibly less benign, but would make them a hell of a lot more money. We would have taken Victor Frankenstein’s technology and used it to make an army of slave workers. You’re closer to an actual, functioning mind-reader than you realise, but I admire your refusal to go down that path.” The old man clapped my shoulders. “You’re lucky Jonathan Wang didn’t think much of you, or he would try to squeeze everything he could from your machine.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because, my boy, this was the first good idea he rejected.”

  When I opened the door to my Yishun flat, I was greeted, for the first time, with silence. That is, until I heard whispers coming from underneath my dining table.

  “Come! Hurry!” Tights hissed at me.

  I pulled aside one chair to join him. Tights quickly dragged the chair back. We had imprisoned ourselves in this cell of wood.

  “Are we playing hide-and-seek?” I had to ask.

  He shook his head violently. I scanned the house for Shanti and Cantona, but a pervasive darkness had settled in, casting brooding shadows. My house seemed unfamiliar for a moment. I was used to its austerity, its unobstructed white walls that made the furniture appear smaller. Now, it wore gloom like a battle scar. For a moment, I forgot it was white.

  I could barely see beyond the dining room and the adjacent hall. “Where’s Shanti and Cantona?” As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that Tights was frightened. He was pale. Beads of cold sweat mottled his skin.

  “Inside.” He pointed a quivering finger towards Shanti’s room.

  “Tights, what’s going on?”

  “Woman from dream. She here!” His voice was hushed, but startling in its terror.

  My voice rising, I said, “You have got to be—”

  Tights clamped my mouth with his hand and I froze. A clanking came from the kitchen. We both stared, our faces cheek to cheek, his hand still over my mouth.

  Something white and billowing floated—floated with agency—from the kitchen. Slowly, not entirely sure if I wanted to know what it was, I tilted my head up. I saw feet, I saw hands culminating in curved, obsidian claws, I saw black hair undulating in the still, dark air. I have seen this thing before, floating above a sleeping Tights.

  The thing floated towards the corridor between our rooms and stopped outside Shanti’s room. It raised its profoundly frightening hands and slammed it against the door. It struck the wood again, and this time, the door came unhinged and crashed to the floor.

  The frightened yells of Shanti and Cantona pushed me into action.

  “Oi!” I shouted, climbing my way out from under the table and surging past Tights’ hand as he attempted to hold me back.

  The thing turned. It was an elegant, fluid action that began with a sweep of raven hair and ended with a pale, thin face with glowing brown eyes staring directly at me.

  Behind me, Tights too made his way out but he rushed past me, into the kitchen.

  The thing began to float towards me. It was a woman, her ghostly face glowing with an otherworldly glare, her emaciated body so sunken into her clothes that I did not know where body separated from cloth.

  She raised a hand as she approached me and brandished those horrid claws. In them, I found an unspeakable fear. It was a hundred childhood terrors manifest in claw-shaped hives of chittering madness. It was every pounding, racing heartbeat that left me breathless, helpless.

  And then, Tights appeared, standing between the thing and me. In his hands was a pail of toilet paper rolls. I nearly smiled, wondering what he was going to do with it. “Hey, ghost-woman-floating-crazy-sharp-hand-thing!” he shouted.

  The thing raised two razor-sharp claws now, and its lips drew back in an inhuman snarl.

  “You,” Tights shouted forcefully at it, “shall not pass!”

  Time seemed to freeze in the moment after, as I wondered how something from beyond our natural world might respond to Tights. As time thawed, I found myself filled with panic. “Tights, watch out!”

  The lithe man dodged her swinging claws. He shoved his hand into the pail, extracted a neat roll of toilet paper and flung it at the thing. The roll hit her in the shoulder and bounced pathetically onto the floor. He threw another one at her, and it hit her in the face. The thing snarled a snarl that filled the entire house.

  I began looking for something to throw, too. Spying a stack of books on the television console, I ran to get them. I threw the topmost one—a hardcover edition of The Singapore Story by Lee Kuan Yew—across the living room, hitting the thing in the head again, just as another roll of toilet paper hit it in the arm. I moved to Tights’ side. We threw more books and more toilet rolls, our incoherent battle cries drowning the feeble thuds of our projectiles. Shanti and Cantona peeked out of her room, probably wondering what all the commotion was about.

  I realised for a mad moment that we were winning—that thing had not moved from where it hovered. It had simply snarled and waved its claws around impotently.

  By then, Tights was out of toilet rolls, so he leaned forward to snatch one from near the thing’s feet. Just as he was within range, however, the thing swiped downwards and caught Tights in the cheek.

  He was flung backwards and came to a stop at my feet. His left cheek was bleeding from four parallel gashes, but he was still conscious.

  I threw the final book in my pile, Cooking With Gula Melaka—one of my mother’s, I believe. Cooking With Gula Melaka hit it in the stomach—o
r at least, the region that would correspond with a human’s stomach. With a high-pitched shriek that reverberated in our bones, the thing, for the lack of a better word, disappeared.

  The large hardcover book hit the floor with an imposing thud.

  Cantona yelled. “What was that?”

  Shanti was still scanning the house. “Is it gone?”

  Tights was gingerly touching his face. The injury looked like a normal scratch—nothing gangrenous or out of the ordinary. “Does it hurt?” I asked him.

  “No,” he replied bravely.

  Shanti joined me next to Tights. “It’s just a scratch,” she opined, looking closely at it. “Let’s get it cleaned.” She took him to the kitchen, where Cantona was already putting the toilet rolls back into storage.

  “Are you all okay?” I asked.

  “What are we going to do about that thing?” Cantona replied.

  Their faces were careworn and pallid, their countenances still heavy with fear.

  “We’ll go see a bomoh.”

  We all slept in my room that night—Shanti took my bed while I laid out futons for Cantona and Tights next to my bed. I laid out one more by the locked door for myself. Bedtime reading that night was a small frayed leather-bound notebook that had belonged to my father. In its pages—so yellow they could be jaundiced—were the numbers of everyone he had known. I recognised a few names. The entry for Uncle Jun contained six sets of telephone numbers, for his residences in Singapore, Penang and Batam, the land line and fax numbers for his shop and, in relatively fresher ink, his mobile number.

  The entry for Ma was under “Darling Shiri”, and I noticed with a sad smile that “Darling” had never been struck out. The page was even bookmarked with an old photograph of them in front of the Taj Mahal, that great monument to everlasting love.

  I eventually found the entry for “Cikgu Dollah”. As I saved his number in my mobile phone, I heard a sound of urgent shuffling.

  Tights was writhing in his sleep to some nightmare, very likely starring that woman, that thing, with the horrid claws. As I stared at his twisting and turning, tears began spilling from my eyes. It was supposed to be my father haunting us, not this monster. I closed my eyes, trying to picture my father’s face, and I found to heart-palpitating panic that I could not remember it.

  I was dreaming.

  It began with a heavy fall into a jungle. It was not a natural one—its rows of evenly spaced palm trees were orderly and stretched to infinity. I had never been in a place like this, but something about it seemed familiar. I thought of crackpot Internet articles about ancestral memory. I thought of my father and wondered what he thought of his father. I remembered that they were both now bones and dust in the soil, dreams within a dream.

  I looked up at the sky. It glowed aureate and red, the sun like a large drop of blood spilled upon a sea of gold.

  “Hello?” I called out, and my voice echoed back to me.

  I walked and in which direction, I could not tell. There was an infinite number of trees every which way.

  I knew I needed to orientate myself, and to do so in a field of endless palm trees, I needed to get to higher ground—or at least, a higher branch.

  I approached the tree closest to me, just off to my right. The climb was easy enough—I was able to wrap my legs around the trunk to stabilise myself and the branches were all within easy reach.

  The crown of the tree was still a good five metres from me.

  I eventually reached a branch that was sturdy enough to support my weight and that stretched out to the ends of the crown. I lay stomach-down and entwined my arms and legs around it. A cold draft blew, and I steeled myself in my wooden embrace.

  Something crawled onto my fingers. It was light, its weight so subtle I barely registered it. I looked up only when it reached my knuckles: an obsidian scorpion. It was headless but moved with a malevolent agency. The strange ticking sound it made crawled in my ears, clacking, cackling, festering there. In my fear, in my panic, I lost my grip on the branch and I fell backwards to the ground.

  I did not feel the force of the fall, but I eventually felt twigs poking at my elbows, leaves gathering at my hands and the ground pushing up against my back. Something black was falling from the tree as well, and I realised it was the scorpion, plummeting stinger-first towards my face.

  I closed my eyes, grimacing, ready for the impact and the penetration of my skin but not quite ready for the venom that was to come. Seconds later, my face was still quite untouched.

  I opened my eyes.

  There was a delicate human hand, clutched tightly, mere centimetres above my face, oozing a viscous yellow liquid from its side and a limp scorpion stinger sticking out between its middle and index fingers.

  I turned my head. The hand belonged to a woman, her long black tresses covering most of a sharp, pale face.

  I got to my feet and faced the woman. She was wearing a faded kebaya, the dress’ muted pink and blue making her raven hair even more striking. She parted her hair, and I knew her eyes. They were enstatites in a sea of pearly milk.

  “I know you,” I told her, slowly backing away.

  “A headless scorpion is an interesting thing to dream about,” she said in a voice so light I thought I had imagined it. She regarded the crushed thing in her hand. “You know you’re in danger, but you’re not sure from what.”

  “I think I’m surer now.”

  She stepped towards me, her slender feet making crinkles in the grass. I moved back.

  I noticed with decreasing trepidation that her fingernails were not elongated razors, but salmon-coloured crowns to slender fingers. “I know what you are.”

  “Do you?”

  I stepped further back. “Pontianak! What do you want from me?”

  “What all lost creatures want. Home.”

  “Well, my home is not for haunting.”

  “I do not want to haunt your home.”

  “Then what the fuck do you want?”

  “My home.”

  The forest dissolved, blurring into the ether. I blinked. We were in my room. She was a dark silhouette crouched by my futon, and I was on my side in a foetal position.

  Here, in the world that comes alive at the death of my dreams, my vocal chords ached in the discord of having to speak. My words came out soft, broken. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Help me,” she whispered, “go home.”

  And with the rising of the morning sun, she disappeared.

  Mains

  We are all that remains

  The mainly poor

  Stripped of our cloistered gains

  Clawing from dining gutter to shallow grave

  Chapter Six: The Long Arm of the Coleslaw

  There is a saying in Malay: takutkan hantu, terpeluk bangkai. Directly translated, it means, “In fearing a ghost, one embraces a corpse.”

  I never quite understood the proverb’s translation. I first heard it as a child, and until now, I could not understand it in any way other than my first interpretation of it which was that one was so frightened of a ghost, that one would hug a corpse just for comfort. What the proverb implies is that in avoiding a small, possibly imagined danger, one could end up facing an even larger, actual threat.

  I fared poorly in the Malay language as a student.

  The address that Dollah gave me over the phone took us to the heart of Changi Village. It was an old estate, its façades greyed by years of detritus and grime. The residential flats here rose to merely ten storeys high at most, and squatting underneath them were hawker centres and shops that looked like they had been there since the beginning of time, selling birds and old bicycle parts, antiques and the eclectic offerings of traditional Chinese medicine.

  I parked at an open-air carpark by the hawker centre, cooking under the glare of the early afternoon sun.

  “What’s a bomoh?” asked Cantona as we got out of my mother’s car.

  “It’s a sort of shaman or witch doc
tor in old Malay kampongs who claim to use Islamic knowledge to deal with the supernatural,” I answered. “They’re a crock of shit.”

  “So why are we seeing one?”

  “Because we need help dealing with a different crock of shit.”

  “I still no know what bomoh,” Tights said.

  “They’re mediums,” Shanti explained.

  “Aiya,” Tights said, making a dismissive sound, while touching the edges of his facial wound, “size not matter.”

  Tights, Cantona, Shanti and I made our way to an ancient bookstore in a niche under one of Changi Village’s low residential flats. Dimly lit, it was small with fewer than twenty shelves. The shelves were fully packed with volumes of books covered in a thick film of dust. A select few still bore colours, and I noticed they were popular titles—the Harry Potters, Twilights and Murakamis.

  There was a counter, but no one was behind it.

  “Hello?” Cantona called.

  Shanti busied herself studying the shelves, while Tights walked into the backroom. He came out after a few moments and shrugged.

  The next sound was that of Shanti cooing, “They have a second edition of Newton’s Principia!” I looked at her and she held up a mouldy leather-bound book, its pages yellowed but the text still legible.

  I could not help but be impressed, despite how grimy and decrepit my surroundings were. “That’s impossible,” I remarked—a remark that while seemingly frivolous was steeped in truth. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was first published in 1687. The first edition exists only because of conservation and preservation work by museums. For a second edition to exist, and survive more than two centuries, and find its way to a dingy bookstore in Singapore’s Changi Village required something truly magical.

  “And yet it’s there,” wheezed an ancient voice from the other end of the shop. A wizened, old man—so old he looked like a corpse, so old his childhood drawings might have been cave paintings—emerged from the shelves’ Zs. He was wearing what looked like pyjama robes and black cowboy boots. With a spring to his step, he approached us.