The Minorities Read online

  Shanti moved first. She put a hand on the door knob, and paused to see if there would be more knocks. When none came, she twisted the knob and pushed the door open.

  There was nothing on the other side.

  “Door. Look,” said Tights.

  We looked. Indented upon the wooden door was an unmistakeable hand print, its outline marked by broken splinters.

  Chapter Four: Mysore Pak

  As a neighbourhood, Yishun was designed for function rather than form. Activity pulsated outwards from its train station and adjacent mall, before fading into shambling ennui the farther one got. My flat was situated where that pulse began to wane. As a result, my neighbours and I were blessed with a government-issue garden but were also privy to views of old blocks with peeling façades playing host to nongovernment-issue activities, such as gang fights and void deck football and loan shark demonstrations.

  The custodian of the garden was a kindly old man named Suleiman. He was likeable, always smiling and wishing passers-by a hearty good morning, every morning. It made the great big shears he wielded less intimidating.

  He was tending to the cabbages when I passed him en route to the train station. I wished him a less-hearty-than-usual good morning, my greeting undercut by the guilt I felt for allowing Tights to “let out the bad” on Suleiman’s garden, and by the weird events of the night before.

  “Good morning, my friend,” he said from behind his bushy beard, with trademark effervescence, the dark, weathered skin of his face creasing as

  he smiled.

  “How’s your morning so far?” I asked. And because it felt like the right thing for a younger man to ask a much older man in the light of morning, I added, “Have you had your breakfast?”

  “Yes, I have,” he said happily. Then, his smile faltered. “But my morning could be better.”

  “How so?”

  “Some nirbodha did his business in my garden,” he said. Suleiman made a V with his fingers. “Number two!”

  “Yeah, curse those, uh, nirbodhas!” I cried in my best performance of indignation. “Let me help you clean it up.” My right hand began trembling.

  “It’s okay. I’ve already cleared it.” He took off his dirty green cap and his gloves and ran a deeply tanned hand through his matted, greying hair. Suleiman looked positively ancient. “Do you know who it was, my friend?”

  “No.” I put my right hand in the pocket of my trousers.

  “If you do find out, please let me know. That person is in serious trouble.”

  “Why? Why would that person be in trouble? Did you call the police?”

  “No. There are some dangers more terrible than the authorities.” He motioned me to a bench that Tights and I had sat upon the night before. “You live next to this garden. Have you ever noticed anything…strange?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “Good. I wish whoever did that,” Suleiman said, jabbing his thumb towards the clump of banana trees, “the best of luck, because I don’t see it anymore.”

  “See what?”

  “The thing in the trees.”

  Sometimes, I question the wisdom of older people. Sure, they’ve seen more of the world—more of its pain and suffering, more of its joys and glories. Sure, they have seen things I cannot even begin to describe. I cannot deny that.

  But sometimes, older people talk about things that I simply cannot agree with. Wisdom, I learnt when I was very young, did not come with age.

  Wisdom came from the hardware shop at the end of the crowded street I was on. The street was Geylang Lorong 42, and it was home to an assortment of human endeavours. There was a spanking-new adult shop, neon signs spelling out a fantasy or another. Next to it was a juice bar, its digital display detailing the health benefits of various drinks. There was a small old hotel called Hotel 42, most of the blue tiles of its façade stained black. There was a grimy old restaurant (since 1992, it proclaimed) that specialised in frog legs. In a large transparent tank at the back, hundreds of frogs were amassed in an amphibious pile, croaking, hopping onto the glass.

  I walked to the old shophouse with the peeling blue façade at the end of Lorong 42, and stepped over its threshold into a dark, dank display of greasy spare parts. There were four shelves of them, each placed at odd, haphazard angles from the other.

  “Boy!” said the old shopkeeper loudly, energetically, as he came out in a singlet and shorts from behind a rusty workbench. “I haven’t seen you since the funeral!”

  I hugged the giant, balding man for the duration of two pats on the back. “Hello, Uncle Jun.” Despite what I called him, Wu Jun Wei was no relation. His friendship with my father had dated back to their childhood days in Kampong Sri Kuching, and for the sixty years after, they had remained close. When my father got expelled from vocational school, Jun Wei left school with him. When my father worked as a chef on an oil tanker, Jun Wei got a job on the same tanker as an engineer. When my father married my mother, he was best man, even though he was neither Muslim nor Jewish. In fact, Jun Wei was the person who first introduced me to the idea of godlessness. “You think God said, ‘Let there be light’ at the very beginning?” he had said to a very amused six-year-old me at my parents’ wedding. “I’m pretty sure God first said, ‘Oh no! It’s dark in here!’” He had hammed it up, flailing his arms blindly and pretending to trip over things that were not there. I had laughed until my sides hurt.

  That said, I did hear Jun Wei praying on the day of my father’s funeral. I could not discern to which God he had prayed, but he had knelt before the coffin and his mouth had moved rapidly, his voice soft yet manic, his eyes squeezed shut as if his mind were attempting to conjure the image of something all-powerful, something capable of making all this better.

  “What can I help you with?” he asked now. “If you need help nailing or hammering anything, I’m here.” He grinned that trademark mischievous grin that time could never wither away. “Also, I sell hammers and nails.”

  I passed him a piece of paper listing all the parts I required.

  “Yeah, I have all of these. I’ll get my wife to prepare them,” he said, after a swift scan. Then he asked, “Are you in a hurry?”

  “Not really,” I said to him respectfully.

  “Good,” he said. “Let’s go have tea. I want to know what you’ve been up to since the funeral.”

  He led me towards the mouldy door at the back of his shop but stopped short. “Woman!” he screamed. “Abdullah’s son is here!”

  A grumpy feminine voice snarled back from the bathroom. “What do you want me to do? Give him a trophy for surviving your run-down junk shop?”

  “We’re going upstairs to drink tea!”

  “Good! Stay there and never come back!”

  “He needs a few things!” he shouted towards the bathroom. “I left the list on the counter!”

  There was the sound of a toilet being flushed, followed by a door being opened with a rather violent amount of enthusiasm. Cik Salmah, Uncle Jun’s plump wife, emerged, a rolled-up newspaper in her hand.

  “Excuse me, you fat shit,” she said, shaking the newspaper menacingly at her husband. “Who do you think I am? One of your employees?”

  I sensed Uncle Jun did not have a good response for that, so I said, “Good afternoon, Cik Salmah!”

  Her countenance rearranged itself instantly into a warm smile. “Hello, dear,” she said sweetly. “It is good to see you again.”

  “How come you never smile at me like that?” asked Uncle Jun.

  “Because he was never a pain in my ass!” She turned to me and her smile returned. “I’ll get those parts you need, sayang. Go enjoy your tea.”

  Uncle Jun and I exited the back door and went up an outdoor spiral staircase that led to the rooftop. Grey concrete peeked at me from behind peeling paint. “Never get married, boy, it kills you faster than death,” Uncle Jun said with a morbid grin.

  It was not my first time up here on the rooftop of Uncle Jun’s shop. I us
ed to come here every Chinese New Year with my father (and my mother while they were still married), and in my adult days, whenever I needed parts for a contraption or another.

  I recognised the white wrought-iron table and its four green wrought-iron chairs. Having remained in my memory for so long, I attached a sense of timelessness to them, as if I were here alone as much as I was here with my father and my mother. A tin teapot sat on the table, as it had since the beginning of time, probably.

  We sat down facing one another. Jun Wei poured two cups, a steamed aroma scrambling from the pot. “I miss your father,” he said.

  “Me too.” Down below, the movable variables of Geylang blared and blathered. They got on with the day like gears in a part-metal, part-organic cog that smelled subtly of dead frog and smog. Up here, above it all, delicate wisps of an invisible breeze caressed my face. I took a sip of Jun Wei’s tea. It was mildly sweet with a tangy touch of ginseng and sent a surge of warmth through my body.

  “How’s your mother holding up?”

  “She’s fine,” I replied. “Saw her last week.”

  “Tell her I said hello next time you see her. Is she still doing her yoga?”

  “And her pilates, and her vegan food, and her meditation, and her scented candles,” I replied. “She’s reading Kerouac now.”

  “Isn’t she a bit too old to be reading Jack Kerouac?” asked Uncle Jun.

  “I think that’s exactly why she’s reading it.”

  “On the Road?”

  “Yup.”

  “I hated that book,” Uncle Jun said.

  “What? Why?” I asked, unable to hide my indignation.

  “The guy was irresponsible. He broke his aunt’s heart, leaving New York to snort cocaine and bop to jazz and sleep around with loose women.” Uncle Jun’s famous grin returned. “Well, actually, that does sound like fun.”

  “You’ve done your fair share, haven’t you?”

  Uncle Jun laughed wistfully. “Ah, my boy, yes, I have. Your father never approved.” The older man took a long swig of tea. “Did your father ever tell you of the time we fell into a well?”

  I snorted in laughter. “No, he did not!”

  “We were kids. Eight or nine. Younger than ten, definitely. Back in Kampong Sri Kuching, we drew our water from a well. I believed then that there was a jinni at the bottom of the well.”

  I began laughing, pointing at Uncle Jun.

  “I was an impressionable young boy, and my teacher was the one who told me! I believed in stupid things back then. Things change in fifty years.”

  “No kidding.”

  “People were more superstitious back then. As kids, we were told fantastical tales of jinn and pontianaks and ghosts. I was always fascinated, but I knew, logically, that they don’t exist. Unless, of course, I could find one.” Uncle Jun leaned forward and spoke in conspiratorial tones. “There was this girl who disappeared from our kampong. She was eighteen, I was seven. She was from one of the richer families. Their place had a television, a radio, they owned a car—the whole nine yards. Back in the sixties, that was filthy rich. One day, she just disappears in the middle of the night. Left her house to draw water from the well—there were people who saw her head in that direction—and then, gone. Just like that.”

  “They never found her?”

  “No. I’m pretty sure she ran off with a boyfriend. That family was always fighting—in every sense of the word. But, of course, seven-year-old me couldn’t rationalise that. Fast-forward two years, and my head had two more years to be filled with stories of the things that go bump at night. I heard stories of jinn, hiding in shadowy places and spiriting away any unsuspecting, defenceless human who trespassed. There were rumours that a jinni took her to be his slave, as punishment for being rude to her parents. So, I decided to climb down that well to find out for sure.”

  “Alone?”

  “Of course not. I asked your father to come with me.”

  “He went willingly?”

  Uncle Jun laughed, an unbridled guffaw that I was sure the people below could hear. “Dear lord, no. Abdullah said I was stupid. Your father was a grumpy human being even then.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “But he also said yes, because he knew I was going with or without him. He wasn’t happy, of course. He kept saying it was a stupid idea, that we were going to regret it—the entire journey from my place to the well, he was just complaining.”

  “Sounds like Father.”

  “When we finally reached the well, I climbed down first with the pail rope. Your father followed after.”

  “Was he grumbling the whole way down?” I asked sardonically.

  “Like an eighty-year-old man with haemorrhoids!”

  We both broke out laughing, Uncle Jun slamming his right palm onto the table as he chortled. It wasn’t that funny—it wasn’t even technically a joke. But there was something contagious about Uncle Jun’s unbridled laughter.

  “What happened when you got down there?” I asked.

  “I got down first. The water went up to my waist, and it was dark, so I turned on my torchlight and started waving it around.”

  “Any jinn?”

  “None at all.”

  “Where was Father?”

  “Your father was three-quarters of the way down when the rope snapped.”

  “Oh, fuck!”

  “Oh, fuck, indeed. As you can imagine, your father was not happy. We were stuck in that well with no way out. His clothes were sodden, and it was a cold night, I remember.”

  “You must have been very frightened.”

  “Yes, I was. Your father—well, if he was frightened, he hid it very well. He was livid, calling me ‘idiot’ and ‘asshole’ and all the other choice words he had picked up from your grandparents. He had never spoken to me like that, in all at-that-time three years of our friendship.”

  “How did you guys get out?”

  “We climbed. Well—your father climbed. He was an athletic kid. I tried to climb. I know you can’t tell, but I used to be a fat kid.” Arms akimbo, he placed his hands on the sides of his great jiggling waist.

  “No! What is your secret? You must tell me!”

  “Why, yoga and the paleo diet of course!”

  I realised then that for most of my life, Uncle Jun had been the counterpoint to my father. Where my father was cold and irritable, Uncle Jun had been warm and funny. Uncle Jun had never taken himself seriously, but he did not apply the same principle to the people he cared for.

  He continued, “Once your father made it out, he looked down at me with a look of pure rage, and then he just left me there, without saying a word.”

  A familiar flourish of resentment festered in the pit of my stomach.

  “I thought I was going to die.” Uncle Jun poured more tea into his cup. “Is the tea bad?” he asked, gesturing at my practically untouched cup.

  I took a quick sip and said, “Not at all. I’m too invested in your story to drink it now! It’s just—your story says a lot. That’s typical Father—”

  I stopped. Uncle Jun was looking at me curiously—his head tilted to one side, his brows furrowed. “You’re angry at him.”

  “Well, yeah, he just left you there!”

  “No, I don’t mean in relation to my story. I mean you’re still angry at him.”

  Of course I am. I said nothing and took a more prolonged swig of tea, steeling myself to say, “Uncle Jun, I think Father is haunting me.”

  As scheduled, this stopped him in his tracks. With visible effort, he said, “Do you mean ‘haunting’ in the Sylvia Plath sense or in the Edgar Allan Poe sense?”

  “Poe. I think his ghost has come back to the house.”

  Uncle Jun laughed, and noticed very quickly that I was not laughing with him. “You’re serious?”

  I told him about the events of last night. I told him about my father’s last words to me. I told him about how Cantona whored himself out to my experiment for the sake of lodg
ing. I told him about the strange events that have happened since that experiment.

  “Boy,” he said, with a gentle amalgamation of worry and admonition. “Correlation and causation are two different things. This is, at best, very faint correlation—there’s no clear proof that it was your father or any other ghost.”

  “How do you explain the hand print?”

  “Something flew into your flat.”

  “Something hand-shaped?”

  “Something that seemed hand-shaped. Have you heard of pareidolia?”

  “God damn it, Uncle Jun, I know what pareidolia is! I know what I saw. I’m not imagining it.”

  He did not respond. In fact, he sat there opposite me, silent, rubbing his hairless chin for several moments. “All right, I believe that you believe it,” he finally said.

  I sighed. I knew it was the best I could get from Uncle Jun. “You never finished your story. How did you get out of that well?”

  “How else? Your father came back. He brought a rope, and a few of the kampong kids.” He tapped his belly. “They lifted this fat fool up. Then your father fixed the pail and made sure we each snuck back without our parents finding out. Nobody, other than me, your father, those kampong kids and now you, know about that story. Nobody even suspected. Your father made sure of it.”

  Resentment, increasingly familiar, started to creep into my bones again. It was, however, a new kind of resentment. It was resentment at my father for allowing me, through these years, to develop a resentment for him, to hide from me his capacity for kindness and heroism. I was very sure that he knew—he was aware of how he made me feel. And yet he persisted on being the way he was. I knew Uncle Jun could read me like a book, so I busied myself with the intricate act of finishing a cupful of tea and then pouring myself a new one.

  “Your father wasn’t a bad man. And even if there was something haunting you, it wouldn’t be your father. If ghosts even existed, you have not done anything that warrants his ghost to haunt you,” he said gently.

  Before I could reply, Cik Salmah’s voice rang from downstairs. “Are you done being useless up there, Jun Wei?”