The Minorities Read online

Page 16


  An orang minyak—a ghoul doused in oil whose name, if I remember correctly, was Steven—stood up and said aloud, “Singapore is so rapidly gentrifying. Plaza Singapura’s had four makeovers in the time I’ve haunted it! We cannot split up, Diyanah. We need to band together, consolidate our power and show these humans that we’ve been on this land far longer than they have been.”

  Another pontianak, with claws far longer than Diyanah’s and a well-defined, square jaw that seemed particularly adept at chomping on human flesh, floated above her seat, her dress billowing ferociously. She said, mostly to the ghost of William Farquhar, “You may not be afraid of Durshirah. But there are those of us who respect him. Durshirah is wisdom. You represent fear, uncertainty. You do not lead us. You are merely administrator.”

  The dynamics of this group was becoming evident, and I began wondering who this Durshirah was.

  “Is Durshirah here?” I asked, getting back to my feet.

  “You dare say his name, unworthy mortal!” cried Gyava.

  “I don’t even know who the fuck he is!”

  The clamour of growls and snarls erupted again. I believe I caught a “How dare he!” and a classic “Off with his head!”

  “Well, where is he then?” I stood slightly closer to Diyanah, both of us defiant against her people.

  “He’s with his human.”

  “Convenient. Now, you, Gyava, what do you claim Durshirah promises?”

  “Freedom! Freedom from the oppression of the living!” He said it like he was rallying troops to battle.

  The pontianak with the square jaw parroted him. “Freedom!” she yelled.

  “Well, then, as the spokesperson for Diyanah’s human,” I addressed the group, gesturing to Tights, “I will provide her with the freedom to return to uh, whence she came.”

  The chamber erupted in inhuman voices again, but they were no longer as intimidating. Diyanah was smiling at me.

  By the time we reached Yishun, the sun had already set. We had stayed a while longer after the group meeting, as the ghost of William Farquhar briefed Tights on the ritual to sever his connection to Diyanah. “It has to be done in the building in which she wishes to transmigrate to,” he said, to which Tights replied, “Transmigrate? She want to be man?”

  We shook our heads and left it to Shanti to explain to him, in simpler terms, what he had to do.

  A heavy fatigue had settled on us. We had seen and heard a lot today, and were made privy to an entire community that lived beyond the existence we were familiar with. Learning about one pontianak was one thing. Learning about an entire community of metaphysical entities required the use of a cliché.

  Cantona collapsed on the couch upon reaching home. Shanti headed straight for her room. Tights sat at the dining table with Diyanah. He was asking her all sorts of questions: if she remembered her life, if she remembered her death, if she was hungry.

  I was unable to discern her soft replies.

  I made a beeline for my room, and sat at my desk. My laptop laid shut, a singular almond nearby. Next to the almond was my copy of Cosmos. I picked it up and opened to a random page. I tried to read, but the words were not making any sense to me.

  I went into the bathroom and took a long, cold shower.

  It failed to invigorate me, and I fell asleep with my towel still wrapped around my waist.

  Diyanah was in my dream.

  It was a dream of obsidian tranquillity. I was sitting cross-legged in a room so black and glassy, I did not know where it began, nor where it ended. She joined me later and sat cross-legged opposite me. Her white dress flattened where it met the floor.

  She uttered nothing. The walls behind me began replaying the scene, through Diyanah’s eyes, when we had shouted dengan semangat at her.

  I saw myself, my shock of messy hair thrown back, as I ordered her not to hurt Tights. I saw Tights and Cantona yelling at her not to hurt Shanti. I saw Shanti, her voice measured and assured as she proclaimed, “Don’t you even think about hurting him, you bitch” as Diyanah attempted to strike Cantona. I was very impressed by how formidable she, Shanti, was in that moment.

  And then realisation came rushing to me. Nobody had commanded Diyanah not to hurt me. I looked at her, serene as she sat across from me. I got onto my knees, and crossed the distance that separated us. Her eyes opened, and they bore into mine. I reached out and took her hand in mine. I closed my eyes, wanting my only stimuli to be the warmth of her touch.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was back in my room, on my bed. I was in a T-shirt and sweatpants. My towel was draped upon the chair by my desk. There was something warm in my hands. I turned to see Diyanah standing by my bed, holding my hand.

  Slumber dragged my eyes close again.

  I opened my eyes.

  It was morning. Diyanah was gone.

  The emptiness in my hand seemed to become more chasmal.

  I showered and made my way to the kitchen where Tights was eating cereal. Shanti and Cantona were in the midst of a deep, solemn discussion. My presence killed it.

  As I poured myself a glass of orange juice, Shanti said, “I still think it’s a bad idea to bring Tights into Malaysia.”

  I glanced at Tights. He was choosing to lose himself in the cereal box’s nutritional information. “Well, like I said, you and Cantona can stay here.”

  She sighed. “Do you remember what happened at the vernissage? Just a few moments with you and you let Tights disappear.”

  “If you hadn’t done that,” Cantona added, “we might not even be in this mess.”

  Guilt crept out from my heart. This was the first time Cantona had so openly criticised me. I knew it had a lot to do with his unfulfilled aspirations to become an artist, but it was clearly also due to my own irresponsibility. The guilt burgeoned further from the fact that I had not realised, until now, that the fault could lie with me.

  With an irrefutable finality, Shanti declared, “I’m coming with the two of you. I think we need at least one adult on this trip.”

  Cantona looked as though he were accepting some grim fate. “If she’s coming with you, then I’m coming too.”

  I smiled. “Fantastic. We’re all coming together then.”

  Chapter Nine: Roadkill Pizza

  It was an old map. It was a long map as well, and I laid it out on the living room floor, moving the coffee table to make space. At the bottom of the map was Singapore, a small green mass surrounded by blue. At this magnification, only the major roads and expressways could be seen, and only the largest towns were demarcated.

  Occupying the majority—the top five-sixths, in fact—was the cassava-shaped land mass of western Malaysia.

  The night breeze passed through the flat in its journey across the land. It lifted the map slightly, so I placed a glass of milk at its top left corner. The glass was half full. Unsteady snores rose from Tights and Cantona’s room, a sawing symphony of troubled slumber. I could not discern anything from Shanti’s room.

  Diyanah and I were kneeling as we studied the roads between Singapore and Malacca. We were figuring out the fastest route there. “Those highways are filled with supernatural entities—mostly ghosts and orang minyaks,” Diyanah said, gesturing at the thick grey line that symbolised Malaysia’s North-South Expressway. “I want to keep a low profile.”

  I did not blame her. Considering how divided her fellow supernatural cousins were about her leaving, it was best for a pontianak and her four human companions travelling across Malaysia not to attract attention.

  I scanned the map and pointed out the most obvious road to Malacca. “So we follow the western coastal route.”

  She nodded, and I began tracing our route with a red marker.

  “That way, we’ll pass mostly developed areas,” I added, moving the pen westwards from the immigration checkpoint to Danga Bay, Bukit Indah and Horizon Hills—areas in Johor that had relatively denser human traffic. “It gets tricky after that. Gelang Patah and Pekan Nanas are small town
s, and it’ll be harder to blend in.”

  “I will hide your friends if need be. I will protect them,” promised Diyanah. She sounded more assured than she had ever been.

  “Thank you.”

  Diyanah placed a finger farther west from Pekan Nanas, on the coastal town of Pontian Kechil. “I’ve been to Pontian Kechil as a child. My ayah had a brother who worked as a fisherman there. Uncle Ahmad,” she said wistfully. “I would follow him out to sea in his sampan. There, in the middle of the ocean, I felt at peace.”

  “We can stop there if you’d like.”

  She turned to me. Diyanah smelled of jasmine and sea breeze. Her black hair hung to her shoulders, delicately framing her thin, sharp face. When she smiled, as she did now, she drew me to her eyes, those smouldering brown gems. She was heart-wrenchingly beautiful. I knew this was merely the expression of her essence upon the physical world, a rather rudimentary re-creation of her human, living form. But the feelings she instigated in me were real and human and possibly actionable. Possibly actionable. Possibly.

  I said quickly, for fear that my thoughts were translating onto my face, “Then we head north, following Jalan Pontian into Tampok and then Batu Pahat—Batu Pahat is densely populated, so we should be able to breathe easier there.”

  “That is very close to home.”

  “Diyanah, who is Durshirah?” The question was begging to be asked since group therapy, and now, as I sought routes that hid us away from Diyanah’s kin, it gained greater relevance.

  I thought I caught Diyanah grimacing at the mention of the name. She replied, “Durshirah is a penanggal.”

  I, too, grimaced. I most feared the penanggal among all the supernatural entities that populated Malay folktales. It was gruesome, loathsome and then some. The penanggal was a floating head, its spine and entrails hanging out from the gaping chasm at the neck. One myth suggested it was the entity that remained upon the death of the truly cruel and unjust. No longer deserving of a human heart, all that was left were the head and the guts.

  “For a small handful of COME’s members, he’s the de facto leader. He speaks of freedom for all supernatural kind, freedom from our covenants and from the ‘yoke of the living’”— she said that last phrase in a raspy voice that I assumed to be a poor imitation of Durshirah’s— “but I know he’s not above using violence on the living.”

  “Sounds like he and I can be bros.”

  “You won’t like him as a friend,” Diyanah said wryly. “He’d always want to be a head.”

  It took me a few solid moments to register Diyanah’s wisecrack. We both broke into giggles. A part of me admonished myself for giggling but my larger being was simply enjoying a rather good joke.

  Diyanah added more seriously, “He hates the living. I don’t know much about him, hardly even see him around, but the few times he attends group meetings, he boasts of killing people.”

  “Doesn’t anybody do anything about it? William Farquhar, surely?”

  “The laws that govern the living do not apply to us. We act in accordance to our respective covenants.” Her eyes returned to the map on the floor.

  I followed suit. “From Batu Pahat, we go north into Muar, and from Muar, we go on to Malacca through the small town of Telok Mas,” I said, marking the route on the map.

  “This needs to be a sprint,” she said, indicating the route from Muar up to Malacca. “The outskirts of Malacca are heavily haunted, and they’ve been there since European colonialism. They’re old and cranky ghosts, mostly. The Malaccan chapter of COME would keep them in check, but let’s not take unnecessary risks.”

  “Completely agreed.” I placed the nub of my marker pen on the map and made a thick circle around Malacca.

  “My old kampong is to the north of Melaka City, by the river, here. Kampong Air Rindu. It’s a really old place. I don’t think you’d find it on any modern map.”

  I marked a deep red X where she had pointed. It fell just inside the haphazard circle surrounding Malacca. “That should be a one-day journey then,” I said, standing up, “depending on how long we’ll take at Pontian Kechil.” I fished out my phone and took a picture of the map.

  “Thank you for doing this for me,” Diyanah said, softly, her lips parting delicately as she spoke. I felt a sudden urge to press my lips against hers.

  And so, I took a step away from her. A silence settled between us. She was staring at the space where my feet were. I was staring at the spot my feet currently occupied. Awkwardly, trying my hardest not to stammer, I asked, “So, um, what’s waiting for you in Malacca?”

  “The man who murdered me,” Diyanah replied, standing up, her tone suddenly cold.

  “You were murdered?”

  “Yes. That’s what brought me back, to this existence. It’s what gave me my covenant: I was obsessed with my need for revenge, for closure.” It was a discomforting thing, to see and hear the blood-soaked, rickety bridge that linked Diyanah’s slender pulchritude to the terrible, snarling thing with the massive claws.

  “You know, my father always said closure is an artificial construct created to sell the three-act structure in books and movies. Closure doesn’t exist in real life. Nobody ever really gets closure. We carry our scars throughout our lives—and, it seems, our afterlives as well.” I saw the look on her face. “Uh, but, you see, um, my father was also full of, uh, shit. We’ll get you your closure, Diyanah. Who murdered you?”

  “A former lover,” she replied.

  I felt a sudden scrape of jealousy, despite being keenly aware that I was developing feelings for someone who had died a long time ago.

  “He was a regular visitor to Kampong Air Rindu all those years ago, a young man from the city. He was rich, handsome. He brought me gifts from the city—mainly books. The first one he ever bought me was Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I didn’t understand the words back then, but the idea of this entire world wrapped in pages of paper astounded me. We grew closer with every visit.” The scraping in my chest raked even deeper. “And then one day I got pregnant.”

  I shifted my weight uneasily as I stood. I knew, rationally, that I had no reason to feel jealous. This was, for her, another lifetime. There were no existing agreements between Diyanah and myself that warranted such green-eyed thoughts. I knew all of that, rationally. And yet, the scraping continued.

  “The next time he visited, I was already six months along. It was only then that I could tell him I was pregnant. That lelaki sial panicked, naturally.” Even when cursing in Malay, Diyanah’s accent seemed to come from another time.

  “Naturally.”

  “I, on the other hand, wanted to marry him.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. Well, I tried to raise an eyebrow at her. I found that I couldn’t raise just one and had inadvertently raised both eyebrows. The look I eventually conveyed was one of surprise.

  “You have to understand that this was after the war. Good, healthy young men were in short supply—do you want to sit down? You look tense.”

  I took my body language in check. I had not realised it but my fists were clenched, my shoulders square. “Yeah, sure.” We sat on my couch, bodies directed towards each other. “Go on.”

  “Where was I?”

  It hurt to even say it. “You wanted to marry him.”

  “Well, my family wanted me to marry him. They were ashamed of me.” But she chuckled. “They kept telling our neighbours that I was gaining weight because I was just eating more than usual—to deal with the fact that I was eighteen and single.”

  “Family, they can be the death of us. So, what did the guy do?”

  “This lelaki sial—”

  “Does he have a name?”

  She hesitated. “Mahmoud Marican; I will never forget that name. He came over later that night. He appeared to have calmed down—even brought me a glass of water and told me that everything will be all right.”

  “It wasn’t, was it?”

  “He put something into my water.”


  The pieces of her story were falling into place, and it horrified me.

  “It was poison meant to kill the baby. I went into labour prematurely,” she recounted, though I wish she would not. “I remembered searing pain, like my body was being torn apart. I wished it would, so the pain could finally end. And then I felt my baby fall from my body. I picked her up. She was not fully formed, but she had these tiny legs and tiny hands, and she had a face. There was blood everywhere on her, this beautiful thing that I had created.”

  The way her face contorted in the pain of the memory broke my heart.

  “And as I held her close to my chest, I realised she was not breathing, she had no heartbeat. It is the worst thing for a mother to feel from her child—that horrible stillness. She only ever lived inside of me. She died entering your world. The pain that tore through my body was nothing compared to the emptiness I felt then. I died soon after, from the blood loss, my baby girl in my arms.”

  For a long while, I sat in silence. There was nothing I could say that would not cheapen her anguish, be it as it were from a completely different lifetime. Diyanah was sitting there, stony-eyed and wordless. I saw then that pain was an eternal thing—we carried it in our souls for the lives to come. It would forever mark us, until we could go to the place where all pain finally would end. Eventually I asked her, “Did you ever find Mahmoud?”

  “Yes,” she replied, her eyes now ablaze with rage. “When my essence returned to this world, all I could feel was this maddening thirst for vengeance. I somehow—I don’t know how—made my way from my grave to Mahmoud’s house.”

  “Wait—where were you before that?”

  “The fire, the angry fires.”

  “What, like, hell?”

  “No, more like a manifestation of what my soul felt. It didn’t hurt or burn me—those are human, physical impulses. But the fire raged. And I raged with it.”