The Minorities Read online

  We formed a line facing the entrance, Cantona on the left, followed by Shanti, Tights and myself.

  “Do we just start yelling?”

  “Yeah,” I said, armed with absolutely zero knowledge on the matter. We should have asked Pakcik Dollah more questions, but we were rather uncomfortable in his basement. “Just shout out what you want it to do, or not do anymore.” Each word was a stab in the dark.

  Shanti offered to go first.

  “Remember,” Tights said, “dejan summerknock.”

  We stared at Tights. “It’s dengan semangat, Tights!” I corrected him. More gently, I reminded Shanti: “Forcefully.”

  Shanti took a deep breath. She voiced with some strength, “I’ve never bothered you! Stop bothering me!”

  “That’s what you’re gonna shout at it? Don’t bother me?”

  Shanti didn’t reply, more interested in looking out for signs of the pontianak. Cantona shot me a dirty look.

  He then shouted, “Leave! Never return to this place!”

  Still no sign of the pontianak. I was starting to think that the haunting we had experienced was a one-off.

  Tights took a step forward and with a deep breath, he yelled at the top of his lungs, “The power of Tights compels you!”

  We stared incredulously at Tights again.

  Then something began manifesting before us. It was a whirlpool of dust that became linen appendages, twisting violently together. It unravelled, revealing a billowing white dress. With a sickening moan, a feminine figure took form inside the cloth. Its head was obscured by a macabre mess of matted black hair. A crackling, cracking sound came from further below, and I saw claws growing out of its blackened fingers. I felt that increasingly familiar pounding of my heart, as though it were racing to whatever gruesome end would inevitably come.

  There was no time to appreciate Tights’ immaculately timed rendition of The Exorcist, for the pontianak raised its claws at him.

  “No, don’t hurt him!” I shouted forcefully at it—and the thing stopped.

  Goddammit, I thought. Pakcik Dollah was not full of shit.

  The pontianak turned to Shanti next and floated menacingly towards her. “Don’t hurt her!” Tights and Cantona shouted together. The thing hesitated again. We were emboldened now, believing in the power in our words. The pontianak, however, pushed on, hungry for a kill. She moved to Cantona.

  “No, no, no,” Shanti said, not shouting, not begging. It was a declaration. “Don’t you even think about hurting him, you bitch.”

  Now she headed towards the only person left not protected by a forceful command: me. Her hair undulated like raven tsunamis as she closed the gap between us. It parted slightly, and I saw those burning brown eyes, the sharp, pale face, the full lips drawn back in a snarl.

  “Will you,” I demanded loudly, “just stop haunting us?”

  Chapter Seven: Bloodroot Juice

  They drank beetroot juice, and it stained their lips blood-red.

  “Do you know the story of Franz Karl Achard?” I asked the table, and with their lips still stained, those seated shook their heads, or said no. “He was a Prussian chemist.”

  “Do you mean Russian?” asked one of them haughtily, a woman in her thirties, her red lips bold and dramatic against her pale skin and her white blouse. I could not tell whether it was her lipstick or the beetroot. A colleague next to her whispered into her ear. Her face retained its imperious disposition, but she said nothing more.

  “In 1789,” I pressed on, hoping my face appeared impassive, “Achard developed a means of extracting sugar from beets in an efficient, cost-effective manner. It was, in every sense of the word, revolutionary. His work was the basis for industrial processes for beet beer, molasses—even tobacco. He was celebrated and esteemed by King Frederick the Second and King Frederick William the Second.”

  “They’re not the same person?”

  It was a slightly more valid question, this time asked by a balding man in spectacles. He was rather skinny—either that or he was wearing an oversized suit. The most plausible answer was both.

  “No. They’re uncle and nephew.” I turned to Shanti for moral support, but she had her arms folded and her eyebrows raised. I continued, “Anyway, Achard’s system augmented the beet sugar industry, as refineries started popping up everywhere across Europe. In less than a century, beet sugar made up half of the world’s sugar demand. Franz Achard provided Europe with a European-made alternative to sugar refined from sugarcane. Sugarcane, at that time, was grown in farms in the West Indies, and those farms, ladies and gents, were run by slaves. With the growing popularity of beet sugar, sugarcane demand was dipping, causing some of these farms to close. So not only did he disrupt a booming global industry, he also had a hand in disrupting the slave trade.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mister…”

  I told the man at the head of the table with the proud nose and the square jaw and the slicked-back blond hair my name, and he scoffed.

  “If you say so. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but are you trying to say, in the very boring history lecture that we just sat through, that you believe this…SoundLoft of yours can disrupt major industries? Which one specifically? Because as of now, the only thing you’re disrupting is our morning.”

  The entire meeting room burst into laughter. I looked to Shanti. She looked incensed, but she was directing it at me.

  “Well,” I began, but the rest of my sentence got its essence squeezed out in its struggle to push past my throat.

  Mr Nord-Hughes of the eponymous Nord-Hughes Investments—stood up. He gulped down whatever was left of his beetroot juice. He thanked us for our time and announced that the meeting was adjourned. His colleagues streamed out, and with that, my second failure at securing funding for the SoundLoft was complete.

  Nord-Hughes came up to me—he was a full head taller than I was—and said sympathetically, “I’m sorry, guys. The SoundLoft is just impractical and not the kind of product we want associated with our brand.” He then addressed me directly, “Word of advice? Don’t call it SoundLoft. There’s a better name for your invention, given what it does.”

  “What should I call it then?”

  “MacGuffin.” And then he laughed, wildly, maniacally. His sides seemed to split.

  My mother’s car smelled of heated leather, and lavender. I’d noticed it many times before, but it made me wonder what these smells would mean to me if I were to be homeless and had to sleep in the car. What would the stimuli of heated leather and lavender bring to mind?

  Citric fragrances, for example, reminded me of Taiwan, the first holiday I had with Ma and Father. I was six, I think. We had visited orange orchards, trekking up hills and plucking at bright orange…oranges. At night, we had slept in a riverside lodge with a fireplace. I remembered staring at father while he struggled to build a fire. Ma asked him to use a match, but he insisted on rubbing together two twigs, using firewood and dried leaves as kindle. They fought that night, one of their loud, dramatic ones. Father had slammed his fist against the table, Ma had used the word “fuck”, a lot. I remembered turning on the stove, and burning a towel so I could throw it into the fireplace. But the towel hadn’t burned, as I had hoped, according to cartoon rules. The fire had spread quickly across the towel, jumping from thread to thread before burning my hand. I dropped it in pain. If I remembered correctly, I had cried—both in pain and in fear of this lawless, fractious thing made of flames. Ma and Father came rushing in—Father stamped out the fire, and Ma tended to me. She kissed my blistered fingers. Father demanded to know what I had done. When I told him that I was only trying to help him start the fire, Father had told me to do only things that I was good at, or I would end up “burning the whole place down”.

  There was a sleek black Audi, six plots from us. I wondered if it smelled of protein shakes and musk and premature ejaculate.

  Shanti was staring at me.

  “What?”

  She was clearly annoyed
. “You’ve been staring into space for the past minute.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re distracted, you’re keeping secrets, you’re erratic. Dude, you blew a thousand dollars on prostitutes when you know that in a few months, our financial situation is going to be—and I’m being conservative here—dire as fuck.”

  “Shanti, we’re being haunted by a freaking pontianak. What do you expect me to be like?”

  “To focus on helping the people you claim you want to help!”

  “And what was bringing us to Pakcik Dollah? Care and Share with the elderly?”

  “That thing is the least of our concerns. You won’t be able to keep the house for long unless we sell the SoundLoft.”

  “What do you think I’m doing here, then, talking to these beetroot nutjobs?”

  “You’re giving them a fucking lecture about Franz-fucking-Achard!”

  “It was related!”

  “Tenuously, at best. Fuck it; it’s not even tenuous. It’s off tangent! Your inability to focus is getting us all fucked! You’re dragging us down, man.”

  I considered that for a moment, and perhaps it was true. There was one thing neither of us was considering. “Look, I haven’t been able to sleep.”

  “Me neither,” Shanti said, in a tone that suggested the time for sympathy was long gone. “She cries nonstop.”

  “Nonstop!” I repeated, in rather enthusiastic agreement.

  There was a buzz from her pocket. She answered and put her phone on speaker. It was Cantona. Her tone shifted tremendously when she said, “Hey.”

  “She’s ready to talk,” Cantona’s voice crackled through the speaker. “She stopped crying at about noon and she said she wanted to talk.”

  “Good,” Shanti replied, smiling. “We’re on our way back.”

  I could not hold back my thoughts. “Why did he call you and not me?”

  Neither acknowledged what I had said loudly and clearly. The voice that filtered through the phone asked, “How did the pitch go?”

  Shanti glared at me, a look so blazing I thought her retinas would start shooting lasers. “What’s a creative way of saying ‘really, really badly’?”

  “That bad?”

  “They said it was—and I quote—‘impractical’ and ‘not the kind of product we want associated with our brand’.”

  I heard Cantona groan dejectedly from the other end.

  I felt I had disappointed him, and I felt he had no right to make me feel that way.

  The drive home from the central business district was quiet and disquieting. Shanti did not want the radio on, and I was torn between feeling angry and feeling like I had no right to.

  The door was wide open when we reached home. The wailing that had pervaded the flat since I had told the pontianak to stop haunting us had mercifully ceased. Tights and Cantona were in the living room, standing nervously by the couch. Seated there was a lady in a white dress, her perfectly manicured hands on her lap. She had long black hair that fell neatly onto both shoulders. Her skin was an olive-ecru, made lighter by the soft rays of the late afternoon sun.

  She turned when we entered, smiling. She was beautiful. She had a mousy face—small, with a defined jawline and a gentle, aquiline nose. Her sad, almond eyes were like a brown sunset.

  I opened with, “Where’s the…” but I didn’t want to mention “pontianak” around our guest, so I said, “Hi” and then made a mental note to expand my lexicon of first-time greetings.

  “Hello,” she said. There was something familiar about her voice.

  Cantona was looking at her apprehensively. “Uh, this is…”

  “Diyanah,” said the lady, shyly.

  There was something that drew me to this mysterious stranger on my couch, in my flat. I took her hand in a delicate handshake. It was cold, like touching a pebble that had been left in the freezer. I managed to say, “Hi, Diyanah” and I gave myself a mental “fuck you!” for not adding to the lexicon.

  “Diyanah is the umm…the uh, the ummm…”

  “Damn it, Cantona,” I snapped, “use your words. Like you did when you called Shanti just now.”

  “She the porn-tea-ah-ma!” cried Tights.

  “What?”

  “Pontianak!” Cantona said tersely. “She’s the pontianak.”

  I withdrew my hand from Diyanah in half a breath. “No way!”

  Diyanah looked even more forlorn, and, for some absurd reason, I regretted retreating from this supernatural monstrosity.

  I looked at her—sweet Allah and Yahweh, I almost lost all sense of self looking into those eyes—and I asked, rather stupidly, “Are you?”

  She nodded.

  “No way,” I repeated.

  Then the most fascinatingly horrifying thing occurred: Diyanah morphed into the thing that had haunted my home the past few days—the thing with the ragged hair and the long macabre claws. She floated a few centimetres off the sofa, as if refusing to be grounded to the physical realities of my home.

  When she morphed back, her form returned to my sofa and my linoleum floor. While she looked exactly as she had earlier, there now lurked a dark, sordid secret underneath her beauty. It was captivating. It could also curdle blood.

  “Stay like this for the duration of our conversation, please,” Shanti said, her voice coming out in gasps of barely-contained terror.

  “I am the one who has been haunting you,” said Diyanah, looking at each of us in turn. “And I feel I need to apologise for the trouble.”

  “Apologise?” Cantona was incensed. “You put us through all of that and now you want to apologise?”

  “Look at what you did to him!” Shanti pointed to the scar on Tights, who, I noted, had remained silent throughout this exchange.

  The pontianak, armed with her supernatural abilities, continued looking morose, her head bowed in a prolonged, unspoken apology. “I am deeply sorry.” Her voice had a soft, almost ethereal quality, and a melancholic, singsong accent lost to time. “I am bounded to my covenant to haunt you, to follow you. I had no choice. Please believe me. If it were up to me, I would not.”

  “What do you mean, you’re bounded by your covenant?”

  “It is the laws that govern my kind, and our interactions with the world of the living. If a human taints my abode, I have the right to follow the human to their home and convey my wrath in any form. The human’s place of residence can then be claimed as my abode,” she explained. “We call it Operational Transmigration. You call it ‘being haunted’.”

  Something connected in my mind. I pointed to Tights. “That means you’re haunting him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I let out bad at garden?”

  “I am sorry, human, but you left me no choice.”

  Damn it, I thought. Pakcik Dollah was right again.

  “How I fix?” Tights asked. He was feeling more and more like this was his fault.

  “Maybe we should bring that bomoh in,” Shanti suggested.

  “No!” cried the pontianak. My friends ignored her. She then looked to me, those enstatites burrowing into my soul in search of mercy.

  “You mean the supernatural logician Pakcik Dollah?” asked Cantona wryly.

  “Please!” she cried, desperation seeping into her voice. “Please do not have me exorcised. You now know the weakness in my covenant.”

  “That you have to do what we tell you to do?” I asked.

  “If you say it dengan semangat.” I realised that her accent sounded perfectly natural saying the last two words. She spoke the Bahasa—the language—in a manner that can be described as pure. Her inflections and stresses followed a rhythm more suitable for Sanskrit, the spring from which the Bahasa originated. Her voice was melodious, a breeze of phonetics unique to the Straits, soft and gentle as the zephyrs above the white sands of the Malay Peninsula. And yet, with English, she was a modern speaker, the cadence of her speech not unlike any given local television presenter. “I cannot hurt
him now,” she said, gesturing to Tights. “Please, don’t have me exorcised. If they find out, I will be disgraced.”

  “You’re already dead,” Shanti said flatly. “I don’t think it matters if you’ve been disgraced or not.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Cantona asked.

  “COME,” she replied sombrely.

  “Hey, at least buy me a drink first.” I was not good at quips and regretted it as soon as I saw Diyanah’s confused look. I quickly tried to salvage the situation by asking her, “Where?”

  But Cantona had a more pressing question. “Well, you can’t stay here. What do you want?”

  “Dude, I decide whether she can stay here or not.” I realised as soon as the words came out of my mouth that I was being petty and childish about his decision to call Shanti instead of me earlier. It was apparent to my housemates as well; they looked at me with a rancid fusion of shock and displeasure. However, they said nothing.

  Cantona eventually opened his mouth to say something, but Diyanah spoke first. “I want to go home,” she said solemnly. “Back to where my covenant began. My transcendence from my human life to this current…existence occurred in a village north of Malacca. It was where I lived, as a woman, as a living human being. I only wish to go back there.”

  “Well, why don’t you just go, then?” Cantona asked, his voice unsteady with annoyance. What I said earlier had obviously affected him.

  “Your covenant doesn’t allow you to, does it?” It was a guess, but given the nature of her covenant, there was a sense that deliverance evaded her kind.

  “No,” she admitted. She looked at Tights now, who still stood there silent. Her eyes were pleading again, and Tights’ eyes fell to the floor sheepishly. “I have to be taken there by the one I’m haunting. Those are the limitations of my covenant.”

  “It’s decided then,” I said happily. “Road trip to Malacca!”

  “I don’t have my passport,” Cantona said quietly. “It’s with Chang and Sons.”