Asia Literary Review No. 31, Summer 2016

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Photos by James E. Elbrecht • Graphic Services & Print Center, P&M • 740045

No. 31, Summer 2016

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No. 31, Summer 2016

Publisher Greater Talent Limited Managing Editor Phillip Kim Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Senior Editors Kavita A. Jindal, Justin Hill, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Special Acknowledgement Ilyas Khan, co-founder of the Asia Literary Review Production Alan Sargent Front cover image ‘Revenge of Green Dragon. E. meets W.’, 2014 © Konstantin Bessmertny konstantinbessmertny.com. Published with kind permission of the artist Back cover image ‘L’État C’est Moi! Can smoke & Free Noodles’, 2014 © Konstantin Bessmertny konstantinbessmertny.com. Published with kind permission of the artist The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited 2504 Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Managing.Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Subscriptions and Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-14782-5-2 (print) ISBN: 978-988-14782-6-9 (eBook) ISSN: 1999-8511 ‘Underground’ published with the generous support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea ltikorea.org ‘Rocky Romeo’ and ‘Watermelon Seeds’, from Love Across a Broken Map, a production of The Whole Kahani, are published with kind permission of Dahlia Publishing (UK) http://www.dahliapublishing.co.uk Extracts from Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao!, Now That It’s Over and Sugarbread are published with kind permission of Epigram Books (Singapore) shop.epigrambooks.sg Individual contents © 2016 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2016 Greater Talent Limited

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Contents Editorial

5

Fiction from Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao!

9

Sebastian Sim

from Underground

25

Seo Jin translated by Jason Woodruff

from Now That It’s Over

47

O Thiam Chin

from Sugarbread

65

Balli Kaur Jaswal

from That Man in Our Lives

85

Xu Xi

My Mother’s Miracle

88

Rajesh K. Reddy

Rocky Romeo

107

Dimmi Khan

Watermelon Seeds

116

C. G. Menon

From Noin Ula

130

Bae Suah translated by Janet Hong

Circular Feed

145

Sreedhevi Iyer

from Malindo

159

Nada Holland

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Non-fiction Interview: Xu Xi

79

Interview: Krys Lee

101

The Whole Kahani

106

Kavita A. Jindal

About ‘From Noin Ula’

127

Bae Suah translated by Janet Hong

Poetry Hiuen Tsang

42

Abhay K.

Giving a Reading of My Poetry in Hong Kong

61

Yu Jian translated by Simon Patton

The Punctual Air-Hostess

76

Rushda Rafeek

Eelam, 2009

77

Rushda Rafeek

Narrow Lanes of Sanity

125

Shuja Alhaq

Chinese Checkers

157

John Thieme

The Creeper

178

Zhu Zhu translated by Dong Li

Island in the Sea

179

Zhu Zhu translated by Dong Li

Contributors

181

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Editorial Edit orial

Edit orial

Politics, as George Orwell famously wrote, gives ‘an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. If that holds true, 2016 has been particularly blustery.

Unsettling gusts have blown in from the extremes of right and left to fill the vacuum of a middle ground hollowed out of once widely-accepted doctrines – capitalism, globalisation and representative governments.

Though the storms are geographically distinct – Brexit in the UK, Trumpism in the US, Localists in Hong Kong and Hell Choseon in Korea, to name a few – their turbulent consequences have merged into a jet stream of disillusionment and alienation sweeping across the world.

The debate over the merits and shortfalls of prevailing socioeconomic policies is a complex matter that is not easily packaged into tidy remedies.

Nevertheless, the prevailing popular agitation has given rise to political campaigns presented in snappy, binary terms. Us or Them? In or Out? White or Non-white? EU or not EU, China or not-China? Law-and-order or Chaos? Arguments are offered in sound bites or 140-character tweetstorms that epidemically attention-deficit audiences can easily digest. The Internet has always furnished the means to disseminate opinions and democratise debate, and Google and social media provide easily accessible megaphones.

But instead of celebrating diversity, populations cluster into self-reinforcing echo chambers. Polarisation freezes out nuance.

Particularly troubling about the abuse of slogans in shaping government policy is the attendant application of labels to individuals in a group. No person will ever be less than a unique and complex nation-state in microcosm. True friendships and rivalries can only be built day by day through delicate and fluid diplomacy, much of it more subconscious than rational.

Labels are useful shorthand, but they become obstructive when they cross

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Editorial

over from descriptive to definitive. Asian. White. Muslim. Jewish. Female.

Male. LGBTQ. Conservative. While each label can be an invitation to open a door to explore a wider world, it can also shut its community into a prison of ignorance. Even the language of political correctness can erect walls by closing off discourse.

Pieces in this issue of the Asia Literary Review explore a variety of forms of politics between individuals – identity, gender, love, loyalty. In ways that only literature can, the writings examine the fragile, fraught nature of interpersonal relationships that defy labels. Three of the fiction pieces are excerpts taken from the winner and finalists of Singapore’s 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, a privately-funded competition that celebrates literary excellence from the island state. The stories are refreshingly different from one another, and in a country often labelled as an autocratic ‘nanny state’, it is encouraging that such diverse talents can thrive. Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! is a Singaporean Midnight’s Children of sorts, and it pushes the boundaries that define gender. Now That It’s Over explores the calamitous impact of the 2004 tsunami on the lives of a few young professionals.

Sugarbread lays out a piquant offering of personal dramas and food inside a Sikh temple.

In ‘Underground’, South Korean author Seo Jin delves into the anguish of losing one’s own identity, as his main character finds himself trapped in a loop of amnesia while riding the New York City subway. Hong Kong’s Xu Xi and her That Man in Our Lives distils the evolving geopolitics between China and US into the power play between a few long term friends.

Catherine Menon’s ‘Watermelon Seeds’ is a touching story of two young Asian girls that demonstrates how idealistic expectations can undermine even the closest of childhood friendships.

Though human nature has not fundamentally changed in millennia, our perceptions of one another (not to mention our efficiency in manifesting compassion or hate) are morphing at ever-increasing speed. The 2016 Man Booker International Prize winner, The Vegetarian, written by Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith (whose essay on Korean contemporary literature appeared in ALR 30), illustrates that a thorough portrayal of any individual is possible only through a close scrutiny of multiple facets and perspectives. Sadly, the frequency of terrorist acts and hate crimes, and the

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Editorial

pervasiveness of fascist rhetoric suggests that such empathy does not feature prominently in the mood of the day.

There is no Matrix blue pill that can return us to nostalgia’s idyllic but illusory world of clear and prescriptive ideologies. Political philosophies, once so clearly delineated in an array of distinct colours, lie crumbled before us as grey rubble. As the UK politician Michael Gove recently declared, even the ‘experts’ struggle for new paradigms – and expertise is now widely derided. Given these uncertainties, trite slogans and catchphrases shouted out from flag-draped daises provide no lasting remedy for society’s ills.

Without substance or deep thinking behind them, the words are simply blasts of hot Orwellian air. Or worse, in times when lives are increasingly dislocated, they can fan the flames of rancour.

The need to address the social inequality that fuels so much dysfunction has reached a critical point. Endless debate may be tiresome, and not all responses are to our liking. However, without the steady, stiff breeze provided by sincere dialogue, stagnation and rot are inevitable. And good literature, such as that presented in the following pages, always serves as an essential catalyst towards promoting understanding. With luck and effort, the winds of change that blow can act to refresh the old, rather than sweep out so much good with the bad.

Phillip Kim Martin Alexander

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from Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! from Let’s GiveSebast I t Upian forSim Gimme Lao!

Sebastian Sim

T

here were three things Gimme Lao did not know about himself.

The first occurred at his point of birth. The second happened way before he was born. And the third repeated itself many times over his life.

Strictly speaking, the third was not about him. It was about the pivotal impact he had on other people, which he never found out about.

Take, for example, Yik Fan. Gimme Lao and Yik Fan went to the same primary school. Being two years apart, they were not in the same class, nor did they end up in the same extracurricular sports team. As far as he was concerned, Gimme Lao never knew Yik Fan existed.

Yik Fan, on the other hand, would never forget Gimme Lao. Specifically, Yik Fan would never forget the spectacle of Gimme Lao’s public humiliation on stage during school assembly. Not the fierce sobbing of the subject of ridicule, nor the malicious smirk of the disciplinary master as he made the boy put on a frock and applied cherry-red lipstick on his lips. The entire assembly was collapsing in riotous laughter, and no one noticed that Yik Fan was trembling with fear.

When Yik Fan reached home that afternoon, he quickly retrieved the lipstick he hid in his sock drawer and threw it down the rubbish chute. For the following two Sundays, after his mother left for the market, he refrained from slipping into her high heels and prancing around the house as he usually did. By the time the third Sunday rolled around, the suppressed urge had become an unbearable itch. The boy succumbed. But the thrill of slipping his feet into the familiar comfort of his mother’s high heels was sullied by a new apprehension. He saw his eventual downfall with clarity

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and certainty. It was only a matter of time before he would be paraded on stage, a subject of ridicule for the entire world’s entertainment.

Yik Fan countered the fear with pain. He brought out his mother’s nail clipper and clipped deep into his toe, tearing off a tender chunk of skin and flesh along with a sliver of toenail. His mother chided him for being careless.

The boy continued to be careless. As a teenager, he was always scraping his heels against the teeth on his bicycle chain-ring. When he was riding his first motorcycle, the exhaust pipe must have seared his thighs a dozen times.

After he got married, his wife was shocked at how easily Yik Fan could hurt himself. There were always razor blade cuts on his lips and bruised nails where he had stubbed his toes. She sighed and accepted the fact that her husband was hopelessly clumsy.

Yik Fan accepted the penalty of pain for the right to continue with his secret fetish. After his firstborn arrived, his wife was so preoccupied with the baby she left him very much to himself. That was when Yik Fan became emboldened. He bought a new kimono cardigan, a crêpe gown and a split dance dress in sultry red to expand his repertoire. On Sunday afternoons when his wife brought the baby to the in-laws, Yik Fan decked himself out in elaborate outfits and enacted scenes of fantasy. He was supposedly a damsel in distress chained up in a dungeon on that fateful afternoon when his mother-in-law came in unannounced to retrieve the tin of baby formula.

He panicked at the sound of the key at the front door and dropped his key to the handcuffs. The look of horror on his mother-in-law’s face searing into his psyche was many times more painful than the multiple burns from the motorcycle exhaust pipe. After she left, he extricated himself from the bondage and sat in a daze for a full hour before realising that it was all over.

The last image he saw before he applied the blade to his wrist was that of Gimme Lao on stage at the school assembly twenty years ago, sobbing fiercely as the crowd roared with laughter.

Gimme Lao did not know that. Neither did the disciplinary master who had humiliated him on stage. Both of them went on living their lives, oblivious to the fact that their actions had planted shame and fear so deep in a little boy’s psyche, it led him to end his own life twenty years later.

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The second thing that Gimme Lao did not know about himself happened way before he was born. Both his parents decided it was better that Gimme Lao not know. Grandma Toh, the only other person who knew, was sworn to secrecy.

Grandma Toh was a widow who lived next door to Gimme Lao’s parents in their single-bedroom flat unit. She was entrusted with babysitting duties while Gimme Lao’s parents worked. She understood the gravity of the secret she was supposed to keep and agreed wholeheartedly that Gimme Lao should never be told. But the secret grew like a throbbing tumour in her throat. It was a relief to her when Aunty Seah, who lived two doors away, accidentally scraped her foot against the lid of the secret and proceeded to pry it open with curiosity.

‘Don’t you find it strange that the boy’s grandparents never visit?’ Aunty Seah mentioned casually when she came visiting one afternoon.

Grandma Toh bit her lip as she rocked the baby suckling the milk bottle in her arms. She prayed that Aunty Seah would veer off the topic and not tempt her.

‘When the young couple moved in a year ago, I thought it was nice to have newlyweds join us in the block. The husband was especially amiable.

Mild-tempered fellow. Can’t say the same for the wife though. I am pretty sure she’s the one who wears the trousers in the house.’ Aunty Seah continued with the gossip: ‘But what irks me is that the couple is so secretive.

No one in the block knows about their past or their background. Seriously, what is the big secret that they cannot share?’

Grandma Toh felt an actual, physical constriction in her throat. It was such a torture to know and be forbidden to tell.

‘And then when the young wife got pregnant, all the neighbours were happy for them. We kept a lookout for the inexperienced couple and gave them all the help they needed. You even volunteered to be her confinement nurse after the baby was born. But don’t you find it weird that the couple receives no visits whatsoever from their parents or their relatives? I mean, how would the couple cope if you had not stepped forward to take over babysitting duties when they went back to work?’

‘Well, I did promise my cousin I would look after the young couple,’ Grandma Toh muttered.

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‘How did your cousin come into the picture?’ Aunty Seah asked, confused.

Grandma Toh sighed. It was simply too difficult to hold her tongue. ‘My cousin works as a maid for the Lao family, the one that owns the Three Rifles fashion brand. They have a massive mansion in Grange Road.’

Aunty Seah’s eyes widened. ‘Wait a minute. Are you telling me that Lao Sheng Yang, the father of this baby, who works as an administrative clerk in an insurance company, comes from one of the richest families in town?’

Grandma Toh nodded. It was so satisfying to be in a position to dispense secrets by the spoonful into a willing ear and watch the amazement grow.

‘Was he kicked out of the house and disowned by the family because they were against his marriage?’ Aunty Seah ventured a guess.

Grandma Toh frowned. It was a let-down when the listener was too quick to guess the ending. ‘It is a long and complicated story.’

‘You have to tell me.’

‘You have to keep it a secret.’

Aunty Seah nodded eagerly.

‘My cousin has worked for the Lao family for decades. She practically watched Lao Sheng Yang and his two brothers grow up. She was there too when the boys’ mother succumbed to tuberculosis and became bedridden for many years. That was when Huang Rhoo was brought into the family as a goddaughter to look after the ailing mother.’

Aunty Seah’s eyes widened again. ‘You mean to say Huang Rhoo, the baby’s mother, was Lao Sheng Yang’s godsister? That is kind of scandalous.’

‘There is more to it,’ Grandma Toh continued. ‘Huang Rhoo’s father, who worked for Sheng Yang’s father, was a compulsive gambler. He had to beg Sheng Yang’s father constantly to cover his debts. In a way, he was selling his daughter to the family. Tuberculosis is contagious, and Sheng Yang’s father would rather have someone from outside his family look after his wife.’

‘So that was how the couple met and fell in love,’ Aunty Seah nodded.

‘Both were in their mid-teens then. Huang Rhoo was doing very well in school before she had to quit and take on the nursing role. She begged Sheng Yang to continue tutoring her in the evenings. In fact, my cousin told me that between the two, Huang Rhoo was the smarter one. She could tell because whenever the two played Chinese chess, Huang Rhoo often lost

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her temper and chided Sheng Yang for making badly calculated moves. It’s a pity she never went back to school. Otherwise she could easily get a better job now, instead of the pharmacy assistant job she currently holds.’

‘Don’t we all know about her temper,’ Aunty Seah raised an eyebrow.

‘Remember the time she kicked up a big fuss with the family living upstairs who hung wet laundry out over hers that dripped on her drying bedsheets?

This is one woman with a fierce temper.’

‘Well, not unexpectedly, the young couple developed feelings for one another over time.’ Grandma Toh ignored the rude digression from the story she was telling. ‘When the mother eventually passed away two years ago, they decided to inform the family of their intention to get married.

That was when all hell broke loose. My cousin told me that Sheng Yang’s father chased the girl out of the house and gave his son an ultimatum. Either he break off the relationship, or he would be disowned and cut off from the family inheritance. That was how the couple ended up fending for themselves in our neighbourhood. Now you should understand why the two are so secretive about their past. And remember that you gave your promise.

Keep this secret to yourself!’

‘Of course I will,’ Aunty Seah said. ‘But what I do not understand is, what is the big deal about the marriage? Granted the girl is poor and her father is a compulsive gambler. But is that reason enough to disown the son?’

Grandma Toh bit her lip hard. She was hoping to get away with sharing only half the secret.

‘Is there more to the story?’ Aunty Seah was as sharp as a brand new pair of scissors.

‘I have told you that Huang Rhoo’s father is a compulsive gambler. Why do you think Sheng Yang’s father keeps him on the payroll and covers his debts?’

‘Why indeed?’

‘Because they are half-brothers. The patriarch of the Lao family has more than one mistress hidden outside. So Sheng Yang’s father has no choice but to keep him and two other half-brothers on the family business payroll.’

Aunty Seah’s eyes widened for the third time. ‘Which makes Lao Sheng Yang and his wife cousins? That is incestuous!’

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from Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao!

‘Which is why you must keep this secret to yourself,’ Grandma Toh reminded her in a hushed tone. ‘The baby must not know. Ever.’

Aunty Seah looked at the suckling baby with sympathy. ‘Poor little bastard. He could have inherited such a huge family fortune but for the sins of his parents.’

Grandma Toh slapped Aunty Seah on the thigh and warned, ‘Enough!

Don’t make me regret telling you this.’

Aunty Seah did deliver on her promise. Gimme Lao grew up not knowing that he was born rich, yet robbed of his inheritance by true, defiant love.

The first thing that Gimme Lao did not know about himself occurred on the day he was born. That was the day half the population on the island was glued to the television. Not their personal set at home, for most of them could not afford one back in 1965. They were hanging around various community centres, where television sets were mounted on wooden pedestals, from which arced stone benches fanned out. Rumour was abuzz that the prime minister was going to announce a momentous piece of news at any moment.

The other half of the population was engaged in their quotidian affairs: clipping their nails, picking their teeth or scratching that persistent itch in their arse-cracks. Positioned at the outer circle of the rippling shock wave, they received the terrible news an hour or two late. Some of them had the audacity to question the news bearers. Did they hear it right? Did the prime minister really mean something else? But the news bearers were indignant in their own defence. The prime minister choked and shed a tear on national television. There was no doubt about it.

The entire population on the island had been unceremoniously kicked out of their own country. They were no more a part of Malaysia. The Mother had disowned them.

For some strange reason, Gimme Lao the unborn baby must have experienced prenatal cognisance. He refused to be purged from his mother’s womb. For nine whole hours, his mother shrieked and howled, scratched his father till she left claw marks on his arm and at one point even punched the nurse who was screaming at her for making too much noise. Eventually, Gimme Lao had to exit. He emerged looking bewildered, unsure whether

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the world that awaited him was hostile or benign. But the nurse was mad at the mother and took revenge by giving the baby a merciless pinch on the thigh. That was the moment Gimme Lao recognised hostility and bawled.

Gimme Lao’s father was a soft man who shed tears easily. He whimpered with pain when his wife’s nails dug deep and drew blood on his arm. He snivelled with joy at the sight of his firstborn bawling his tiny lungs out.

He would later choke up with emotion when he found out that the island would no longer be flying the Malaysian flag.

In the midst of all the excitement, Gimme Lao’s father did not realise that his was the first baby to be born in independent Singapore.

At that point in time, this significant little detail caught no one’s attention. Gimme Lao’s mother was too exhausted, his father too excited and the doctor who delivered him too caught up with the next three babies arriving on his shift.

Three days had passed before a journalist finally called up the hospital and wanted to know which baby was the first born past midnight on 9 August. The hospital administrator flipped through the nurses’ schedule and summoned the nurse who was on midnight shift. ‘Go check the records on your shift and let me have the name.’

The nurse was annoyed to discover that according to the records, a Chinese baby named Lao Chee Hong was born one minute past midnight on 9 August to a mother named Lao Huang Rhoo. She was pretty certain that this was the woman who had punched her in the face.

Flipping to the next record sheet, the nurse saw that a baby girl was born six minutes past midnight. That was the moment the idea struck her. She extracted a Zebra-brand ballpoint pen from her pocket, tested to make sure the ink matched and carefully added a horizontal stroke to the figure one.

Gimme Lao became the second baby to be born, seven minutes past midnight.

It was by this insidious horizontal stroke that Gimme Lao was robbed of his rightful title of the first baby to be born in independent Singapore.

No one ever found out the truth.

*

*

*

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from Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao!

All seven of Mary Lao’s sales agents were familiar with the Subramaniam story. Mary Lao used it to illustrate the third and fourth of her Five Rules of Success.

Gnash your hottest chilli. The one that brings tears to your eyes and triggers a coughing fit so severe your windpipe feels like bursting. For, once you learn to handle the hottest chilli, you can feast on dishes that are out of reach to those who cannot handle their chilli.

That was the third rule.

Had Mary Lao assumed the Subramaniams could not possibly afford to buy insurance and chosen not to approach them, she would not have been able to close four cases in one go. In fact, Mr Subramaniam subsequently referred two of his fellow prison wardens, to whom Mary Lao sold three more policies.

Thus the fourth rule: do not judge a covered dish.

After the tearful introduction to the Subramaniam brand of spicy curry, both Mary Lao and Gimme became enamoured with Indian spices and dishes. Every other week, Mary Lao and Sabitha’s mother would bring one another dishes to sample. Gimme Lao became fast friends with Omala in school too. During lunch break at the canteen, Omala would slip Gimme Lao a piece of dharwad pedha from her lunch box, and Gimme would share his ang ku kueh. When they moved on to year three, both children enrolled in the school band and became recorder buddies. While waiting for the school bus home, the pair would whip out their hard plastic recorders and practise their band pieces together. The girls in their respective classes mocked them by calling them a kopi susu couple, which directly translated to ‘black coffee with white milk’. Peeved, Gimme Lao and Omala simply launched their counter-offensive and called the girls various demeaning nicknames.

Although the two often joined each other for lunch breaks, Gimme Lao almost never got to see Omala during the morning tea break. That was when Omala retreated to the secluded corner of the garden behind the janitor’s storeroom to play zero point. Gimme Lao played various games with the boys. There was hantam bola, police and thief and the ever-popular hopscotch. But none of the boys played zero point. It was a girl’s game; one that Gimme Lao secretly wished to play.

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Zero point was a game played using a rope made of intertwined rubber bands. Two girls, acting as height markers, held one end each and stretched the rope taut at ankle level. The rest of the girls took turns to straddle the horizontal rope and perform a set of skipping manoeuvres with incremental complexity using their legs to draw patterns out of the rope. Once everyone had had a go, the rope was brought up to knee level, and the game replayed.

By the time the rope reached waist level, most of the weaker players would have been eliminated. The last girl standing won the game.

For weeks Gimme Lao hid himself behind the janitor’s storeroom to watch and study the game. Omala was quick on her feet but too short to tackle the rope at chest level. Two of the best players were in year five, tall, rangy girls who dominated the game. Of the two, the one with a mole on her chin was a harrier. She ordered the other girls around, decided the queuing sequence and determined forfeits and penalties. Her name was Gan Ah Sai, but the girls called her Garnasai, or ‘like shit’ in Hokkien, behind her back. The other girl, Kai Li, was Garnasai’s loyal sidekick. The two had the last say when it came to the game of zero point.

Eventually, Gimme Lao could not bear it any longer. He stepped up to the two of them and announced that he wanted to play too. Garnasai gave him a dismissive glance and shook her head. Kai Li added, ‘Zero point is for girls only. No boys allowed.’

‘But I want to play,’ Gimme Lao persisted.

‘You can play if you are a girl. Are you a girl?’ Kai Li teased. Some of the other girls started giggling.

Gimme Lao kept quiet but would not leave. He stood to one side and watched as Garnasai executed a flawless pattern with the rubber band rope held at chest level. When she finished, Gimme Lao announced stubbornly, ‘I can do that too.’

Garnasai glared at him and snorted. Omala decided to put in a good word for her buddy, ‘Let him play. He can take my turn and I will just watch.’ Kai Li objected, ‘No, he cannot take your place. Only girls can play this game.’ Omala threw up her hands and challenged the other girl, ‘But why?’

Before Kai Li could answer, Gimme Lao remarked coldly, ‘Because they are afraid I will beat all of them.’

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For a while, a frozen silence descended on the group. Garnasai glared at Gimme Lao, who stood a full head shorter than her. When Gimme Lao returned her glare and did not flinch, Garnasai decided to issue him a challenge. ‘You can be the first boy to play zero point if you can beat me.

Until then, you will play as a girl. Omala can lend you her frock.’

All the girls broke out into paroxysms of laughter. Even Omala laughed, until she suddenly remembered Gimme Lao was her buddy and quickly hid her grin behind a cupped palm. Gimme Lao himself frowned, silently contemplating the challenge. When he eventually made up his mind and nodded his agreement, all the girls gaped in astonishment. Even Garnasai found it hard to believe Gimme Lao had actually accepted her challenge.

‘Quick, let him have your frock, Omala!’ Kai Li urged gleefully. Omala looked doubtful, but Gimme Lao nodded to reassure her. All the girls wore the same white shirt and blue shorts the boys wore, but had an additional pleated blue frock worn over the first layer. Gimme Lao took Omala’s frock and quietly slipped it over his head. All the girls started to giggle hysterically.

Gimme Lao folded his arms, bit his lip and waited patiently till the game resumed. The moves he had observed and studied from afar were not as easily executable as he had imagined. By the time break ended, Gimme Lao had never once managed to move past the waist level. Garnasai snorted at him and pointed her thumb downwards. The other girls scuttled back to their respective classes and eagerly spread the news that Gimme Lao had worn a frock to play zero point.

When Gimme Lao returned the next morning to the secluded garden, there was a handful of boys from the other classes who were gathered there leaning against the wall of the janitor’s storeroom. They alerted one another once Gimme Lao approached and cackled loudly. Gimme Lao felt the deep burn of his own blush. He did not know then, but there was a betting pool among the boys as to whether Gimme Lao would have the guts to put on a frock in their presence.

‘Are you going to join us, Princess Gimme?’ Kai Li teased. The girls giggled and the boys cackled.

Gimme Lao strode over to the girls but shook his head when Omala gestured to ask if he needed her frock. For this morning, he would just observe the game. He was certain the boys would grow impatient and leave

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soon. But Garnasai understood his strategy and shred it asunder by throwing him an ultimatum. If he did not put on a frock and play zero point right away, he could forget about playing the game ever again.

Gimme Lao bit his lip and thought hard. The boys by the wall started a chorus of wolf whistles. The girls giggled. Omala was about to put in a good word when Gimme Lao suddenly turned to her and held out his hand. The boys erupted into spontaneous cheering as Omala uneasily took off her frock and handed it over.

His face tense but determined, Gimme Lao strode over to the group of boys, glared at them belligerently and quietly slipped on the frock. At first, the boys laughed out loud. Gimme Lao remained silent but took a step closer. Some of the boys became unnerved by the proximity and belligerence of their subject of ridicule, and their laughter quickly dwindled. An awkward silence ensued. The head of the gang finally realised that Gimme Lao had effectively robbed them of their fun and with a scowl, gestured for the rest of the gang to retreat.

The game of zero point was constantly interrupted for the rest of the session. Every time curious onlookers came to gawk or ogle, Gimme Lao would stride up to them and stare them down till the element of fun was completely eroded. In no time, the girls were so frustrated with the interruptions they began to shoo the onlookers away before Gimme Lao had a chance to react.

By the third day, word had got around to the teachers. The principal, together with the disciplinary master, decided to investigate the matter.

They recruited a mole from among the zero point players and received confirmation before they launched their surprise visit to the secluded garden. All the girls froze and looked worried.

‘Why are you in a frock?’ the disciplinary master asked in a severe tone.

Gimme Lao turned pallid. The disciplinary master had a reputation for ruthlessness when he dealt with recalcitrant students.

‘Boys do not wear frocks,’ the disciplinary master declared. ‘Only an Ah Gua would wear a frock. Do you want to put on lipstick and wear high heels and become an Ah Gua?’ Some of the girls giggled. There was a handful of effeminate boys in school that were badly teased and labelled as Ah Gua. The disciplinary

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master quickly singled out Omala, who was conspicuously missing her frock.

‘And why did you lend him your frock?’

Omala looked around helplessly. Gimme Lao had his head bowed, while the other girls remained silent and unsupportive. Garnasai glared at her ferociously, daring her to mention her name.

When the disciplinary master realised he wasn’t going to extract any confession from the pair of recalcitrants, he decided to escalate it to the next level. ‘I want both of your mothers to see me tomorrow morning before the assembly.’

On the ride home in the school bus, Omala nudged Gimme Lao and asked if he was going to comply with the instruction. Gimme Lao shook his head. It was embarrassing enough to be called an Ah Gua by the disciplinary master in front of a group of girls. He did not want his mother to hear that too. Omala thought about it and decided she would meet the disciplinary master’s injunction midway. She would bring her cousin Sabitha, but keep her mother out of it.

Omala’s strategy did not work. When the disciplinary master saw Sabitha, he simply waved her away. ‘I asked to see your mother. Not your sister, not your cousin. Which part of my instruction was unclear?’

At the assembly that followed, the disciplinary master took to the stage and summoned the pair of misfits. To Gimme Lao’s horror, he made Omala remove her frock and hand it over. ‘Since you obviously like it, you will wear it in front of the whole school.’

The giggles and cackles in the assembly rippled from the front row backwards as those behind stood on toes or leaned sideways to catch a glimpse of the spectacle. Riotous laughter erupted when the disciplinary master produced half a dozen clothes pegs and proceeded to pinch small tufts of Gimme Lao’s hair upright. By the time he whipped out a lipstick and drew on Gimme Lao’s lips, the assembly grid had collapsed. All those behind were pushing their way forward to get a better glimpse. Some of the teachers laughed too, although there were a few who looked perturbed.

The disciplinary master allowed the students to have their fill of laughter before ordering them back into their assembly grid. Pointing his finger at Gimme Lao, who was by then sobbing with acute humiliation, he delivered

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his message through a loudspeaker, ‘This is how an Ah Gua looks like. If you are a boy, dress like a boy. Boys do not wear skirts, or frocks, or gowns or dresses. Only if you want to be an Ah Gua, then you dress like Gimme Lao. Do you want to be an Ah Gua? Do you?’

The disciplinary master kept pressing until the entire assembly gave him a resounding ‘No’. He then turned to Gimme Lao and proclaimed, ‘Let this be a lesson to you, Gimme Lao. There are boundaries you do not cross.

You are born a boy. You will grow up a man. One day in the future, you will recall this day of humiliation and thank me for stopping you in time before you turn into a wayward Ah Gua.’ Gimme Lao was weeping inconsolably when the disciplinary master had a teacher help remove his frock and lead him to the toilet to wash up. For the rest of the day, he hid his head in his folded arms on his desk and sniffled intermittently. His class teachers let him be. On the school bus going home, Omala sat next to him and ferociously stared down anyone who dared hurl a snigger at her buddy. Gimme Lao was too distraught to put up any form of defence himself.

By the time the bus deposited them below their block, Gimme Lao and Omala had come to an agreement. This episode of humiliation would be kept a secret from their families. The two sealed their agreement with a tug on their little fingers, not knowing that the bird was already out of the cage.

Unbeknown to them, Sabitha had stayed back and witnessed their humiliation from the far end of the assembly field. Both the Subramaniams and the Laos soon learnt all about it.

Over dinner, Gimme Lao was grilled by his parents. Both Mary Lao and her husband wanted to know the details. Strangely though, the two interrogators had entirely different focuses. His father wanted to know why on earth he put on a frock, while his mother wanted to know exactly how the disciplinary master had punished him in the assembly. As the dinner came to an end, the two interrogators arrived at vastly different conclusions.

Gimme Lao’s father concluded that Gimme Lao had it coming and hoped that the public humiliation would dissuade him from ever crossing the boundary again. Mary Lao however stared at her husband in disgust.

‘Have you not been listening to our boy?’ she gasped. ‘He had been issued a challenge, and he took it up. That was why he put on a frock!’

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‘And you think that makes it right?’ her husband retorted, incredulous.

‘I am saying he had a reason.’

‘He has to learn to do the right thing.’

‘If we all had to do the right thing, the two of us wouldn’t be married in the first place, would we?’ Mary Lao snapped and almost immediately regretted it. They both blushed deeply and stole a furtive glance at Gimme Lao. The boy did not appear to have caught what she said. Mary Lao heaved a sigh of relief and muttered to herself, ‘I need to speak to the disciplinary master.’

‘About what?’ her husband asked, alarmed.

‘About calling our boy an Ah Gua!’ The next day, Mary Lao timed herself to arrive just as the school bell rang. She collected Gimme Lao and marched him to the principal’s office.

Gimme Lao felt a heady mix of apprehension and excitement. He knew his mother was fearless and felt a secret pride that she was pitting herself against the principal for his sake.

The principal had to summon the disciplinary master upon Mary Lao’s request. Once he arrived, Mary Lao asked him point blank if he had called her son an Ah Gua in front of the entire student body. The disciplinary master sniggered and replied derisively, ‘Your boy was wearing a frock. What else do you expect me to call him? A good example?’

Mary Lao reached into her tote bag, extracted two library books and slammed them onto the table. She flipped through the first volume until she came to a chapter on the attire worn by ancient Chinese emperors.

Tapping her knuckles on the page, Mary Lao glared at the disciplinary master and challenged, ‘From Tang dynasty to Ming dynasty to Qing dynasty, tell me what the emperors are wearing? Are you calling them Ah Gua? Is that what you are teaching the students in class?’

The disciplinary master frowned at Mary Lao’s belligerence. Before he could reply, Mary Lao flipped through the second volume until she came to a chapter featuring Elizabethan attire for men and asked again, ‘Are you telling me these men are Western Ah Gua? All of them?’

The principal saw that the disciplinary master was flushed with anger and decided to step in quickly. ‘Mrs Lao, perhaps we shouldn’t have used

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the term Ah Gua on your boy. For that I apologise. But we do have rules in school. Boys are simply not allowed to wear frocks.’

‘Show me then.’

‘Sorry?’ The principal looked confused.

‘Show me where it is stated that boys are not allowed to wear frocks in school,’ Mary Lao requested stubbornly.

The principal had to hide his look of agitation as he turned to reach for the volume of school rules and regulations. His agitation quickly turned into embarrassment as he realised there was no statement in the volume that spelled it out. It was simply understood as an unwritten rule.

‘So you are telling me my boy was punished for breaching a rule that does not exist in your school rules and regulations,’ Mary Lao stated coldly. The principal and the disciplinary master exchanged looks of silent fury. They knew they were right, but could not prove it.

Mary Lao glared at them a little longer before she swept the two library books back into her tote bag. Turning to Gimme Lao, she spoke in a clear voice so the two could hear her. ‘What did the disciplinary master tell you again? That there are boundaries you do not cross? Remember this. People who follow rules blindly are people who are too lazy to use their brains. You have your own brain. Use it. Question the rules. Question the boundaries.’

With that, Mary Lao stood up and left the office with her boy.

The same night, Mary Lao’s husband blew his top. He was aghast at the bad example his wife had set for their child. What was she thinking? How could she possibly teach the child to disrespect school authority? When his tirade gained momentum, Mary Lao sent Gimme Lao next door to play at Grandma Toh’s place. But the walls were thin, and Gimme Lao did not miss a word of his parents’ thunderous argument.

When Harrison the sales manager drove by to pick Mary Lao and her husband up for work the next morning, he could sense the palpable frost between husband and wife. Unwittingly, he enquired and was instantly ensnared and pressed for an opinion.

‘If your boy crossed the line, I guess we should trust the school authorities to discipline him.’ Harrison cleared his throat uneasily. ‘The principal can’t possibly have all the boys running around in frocks in school, right?’

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‘It was not stated in the school rules and regulations,’ Mary Lao insisted icily.

‘Some boundaries are drawn with invisible ink, but respected nonetheless.’ Harrison attempted to make his case. ‘Take, for example, insurance sales. As a man, I can walk into the red light district at Geylang to make cold calls and suffer no consequence to my safety or reputation. As a woman, you can’t do the same. There is a boundary. It may not be spelled out in our company rules and regulations, but we all know it exists, and we all respect it.’

Mary Lao sealed her lips in defiance and thought hard. Despite the logic in Harrison’s analogy, she was not convinced. But Mary Lao was not one who was adamant about winning an argument. She would rather prove her point. And the name that sprang to her mind was Black Cougar.

Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! is published by Epigram Books (Singapore).

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from Underground from Under gr ound Seo Jin

Seo Jin translated by Jason Woodruff

D

unkadunk, dunkadunk.

I hear the sound of a moving subway train. Surrounded by darkness, able to hear nothing but the sound of the train, I fumble through my memory but, terrifyingly, I can remember absolutely nothing. OK, it’s time to try to scream and wake myself up from this nightmare. One of the secrets my mom once told me: if you want to wake up from a nightmare, count to three in your head and then scream. Doesn’t matter if you fall from the sky, get shot or are attacked by a monster: if you can count to three and scream, you can wake yourself up from a nightmare. Just focus on your voice. Picture your vibrating uvula. Take a deep breath and scream, ‘Ahhh!’

Of course I make no sound; my lips may have merely fluttered. Focus.

Visualise it. I can walk. Stride gracefully, confidently down the runway as the audience applauds. People with disabled legs have been able to walk again after focusing and visualising, like in those inspirational medical documentaries. That vibrating uvula, like that animated movie with the screaming cat and his shaking uvula – focus on that uvula. It’s all a matter of focus. OK, let’s count to three. After I count to three, if I am unable to make any sound, I will never be able to wake up from this nightmare.

One, Two – Deep breath – Three.

‘Ah.’

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from Underground

I open my eyes with a faint exclamation. I never knew my thirteen-gram eyelids could be this heavy. I never knew it could be so hard to get my voice to work. The ‘ah’ sound I was able to make was not loud enough really to get the vocal cords to resonate, but closer to the sound you might make when you realise you left your keys at home.

The dark screen slowly brightens. I wait for things to come into focus. I blink several times. Apparently I’m able to move my eyelids at will. That’s good. I’m on the subway, the N train that moves between Coney Island and Astoria-Ditmars Blvd. It’s written on a black sign across from me in white Gothic type. I have no idea where those places are. I can hear the sound of the train with my ears, and I can see the movement of the train with my eyes, but I have no idea why I’m sitting here. This is a subway train, but bright sunlight is coming through the windows, so I guess we’re passing through an above-ground section. Faded red brick apartment buildings and old, abandoned factories covered in graffiti move by outside the windows.

PROVE YOURSELF is written in big letters on one of them. A few people are sitting on the dark orange plastic seats, mostly black people, but there is one old white man and one Asian boy, too.

I slowly close my eyes again. Where was I going? I can’t recall a destination. At what station did I get on this train? I can’t remember that either. It’s probably because I just woke up. I shake my head. I wait for something to come to mind. I should be able to remember everything by now. . . . The sound of the train, the sound that woke me up, doesn’t help me anymore. All I feel is the afternoon sunlight moving quickly across my closed eyelids. I clench my teeth and close my eyes more tightly, trying with all my might to remember why I’m on this train, trying to pull up some clue in the darkness, but all I find is deeper darkness. Rewind, Fast Forward.

A vibrating uvula. Thirteen-gram eyelids.

I open my eyes again; it is just too hard to keep them closed any longer.

I see the train is beginning to cross a bridge. I can see Brooklyn Bridge across the glistening water. Where am I headed? I can’t think of my destination.

OK, that’s that, but what’s my name? This is a bigger problem than why I’m on this train or where I’m going. Who am I?

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The train crosses the bridge and enters the darkness of a tunnel. Still unable to remember anything, a cold sweat drips down my whole body. I need to come up with a plan. I can’t sit here forever pretending to know where I’m going. It would be better if I were a tourist; I could look at a map and find out where to get off, or even ask someone next to me. I check my pockets and find a leather wallet in the left one. Bingo. In it there are three ten-dollar bills, a credit card and a few pictures.

KIM HA JIN. This name is stamped across the card in gold letters, though the gold has mostly worn off. Kim Ha Jin . . . I doubt it’s something I found on the street or got from a friend, but the name doesn’t sound familiar to me at all. I quietly pronounce my own name, trying not to let others hear me. ‘Kim Ha Jin.’ A dozing black man sitting next to me looks sidelong at me. It sounds less like my name and more like the name of a divorce lawyer in a Korean business address book.

‘For just $500, start your new life at Kim Ha Jin’s Office.’

All right, let’s briefly talk about amnesia, a device used by all scenario writers when they can’t think of anything else, used just as often as nightmares. Why in the world do so many people in movies and dramas have amnesia? Have you ever had a friend who actually had amnesia? At this point you may think that my story has become too trite, but please don’t worry, there aren’t any poor, innocent young girls with terminal illnesses coming up. However, if you are worried, Skip, Skip. Jump ahead and read the next chapter, put down the book and turn on the TV, flip through the channels, turn on your computer, read the comments on a news article online, play a video game. I won’t complain, you’re already someone who has given up on reading. Whether you like it or not, your time is wasted whether you read this book or do something else. The last novel you read was The Book and the Sword by Jin Yong. The last practical book you read was Secrets from Successful Real Estate Insiders. But after you watch TV, read the comments on a news article online, or play a video game, you have to come back and hear my story. Because you have seen me. We’ve met before.

It’s not by chance that you’re reading this book. You’re a part of it. You play an important role. This novel wouldn’t be complete without you. A book no one reads is a 250-gram piece of trash, not even fit for use as toilet paper.

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So you at least have to read the part of this story that you appear in. If you want to read that part now, Skip, Skip. What page is it? Come on, how much do you expect from someone who’s not even sure of his own name?

In the movies, it’s always a beautiful woman who gets amnesia because the weaker and more beautiful the person is, the more likely the viewers will feel compassion for him or her. When an out-of-date, middle-aged man like me gets amnesia, no one really cares. It needs to be a more charismatic character. A beautiful woman gets amnesia and can’t recognise the man who swore to love her until the day he dies. ‘Who are you? You sure are a nice man to bring me flowers every day,’ she says. The man cries, feeling discouraged. ‘I will be here by your side to help you until your memory comes back, until the end.’ Fade Out. . . . If you’re interested in providing a happy ending, you have the woman get in another accident that returns her memory to her. If you want to make it a little more tragic, you can have the man die in an accident the moment her memory returns. It’s even better if they are in the same car. But one of them has to live and one of them has to die. You think no one buys this kind of conventional storyline anymore?

People aren’t as sophisticated as you think. The more conventional it is, the more easily it holds people’s attention. Turn on the TV and watch a morning soap opera, read an online novel, think of your friend’s story about her affair.

And anyway, aren’t you already reading my story? Nightmares and amnesia, the two main devices of B movies, have already appeared at the beginning of this book, but aren’t you still reading it? There’s a little bit of a trick here: trying to get the reader to keep reading without wondering why she should; trying to make her cry without being ashamed.

OK, let’s look at the versions of amnesia you see in more realistic South Korean TV family dramas. How about a grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease? One who forgets the names of her grandchildren one by one until she has even forgotten the name of her own son. ‘Hey there, good looking young man, I don’t know whose son you are but you sure are handsome.’

It comes at the moment when the handsome son, who used to be a member of a biker gang, has repented of his past and is trying to show his filial devotion to his old mother who was widowed at a young age. She now even has a well-mannered daughter-in-law-to-be too. But the old mother can’t

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recognise her own son. It’s not just that she has forgotten his name, the very existence of her son has been wiped clean from her mind. Close-up. And so the son is crying. It is too late; his regrets are useless. Big, thick tears. As you stare at the screen, tears flow from your eyes too.

The screen pans away from the hospital, away from the city, and even away from South Korea. The familiar shape of our country remains there in the middle of the earth while the beautiful globe turns like a soccer ball. We cross the deep-blue Pacific Ocean at ultra-high speed and come upon America. First we see California on the western coast before quickly passing over the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, and in three seconds we arrive in New York City. As the clouds thin out the city grows closer and the tall buildings appear. That little dot-looking thing down there is the Statue of Liberty, that tall building pointing out there is the Empire State Building, and that place there that looks like a green soccer pitch is Central Park. The camera now zooms in on Broadway, full of yellow taxis, buses, and cars, before plunging into the ground. The top layer of ground in the city is an area full of asphalt, steel, and a totally unknowable tangle of ventilation pipes and electrical wires. Passing through the top layer, we enter a large tunnel, just as the N train is speeding through, and inside sits a pitiful-looking man. He is rifling through a wallet as if he had stolen it from someone and finally pulls out a couple of pictures. . . .

They are worn and old. One picture looks like it was taken on a ferry to Staten Island, with the Statue of Liberty and the blue of the ocean as the background. A man and woman are standing in the picture, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders. As if they will live happily ever after together. I turn my head to look at my reflection in the blackness of the window. I see heavily sagging eyelids and a small mole to the left of my nose. I look at the man in the picture. He is wearing ridiculously large sunglasses. The colours of the sky, the ocean, and the clothes all look faded.

The man in the picture looks younger than my reflection, but there is no doubt that he’s me. Then what about the woman next to me? My girlfriend?

Or maybe my wife?

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If this woman, with her straight hair pulled back and her sharp, charismatic eyes, is really my wife, I must’ve had sex with her hundreds of times, and yet I can’t remember her at all. The smiles of the couple in the picture look unnatural and awkward, as if they are forcing the pose just for the photograph.

The other picture shows a boy who looks to be around four or five years old. He is in a Taekwondo uniform and stands in perfect ready-to-kick form, a yellow belt around his waist. I can’t help but laugh. The space between the boy’s eyes seems a little wide and his expression looks awkward and stiff. I again stare into the reflective surface of the window. Within the dark tunnel red lights race by at uniform intervals. The gap between my eyes isn’t as wide as the boy’s, but if I look closely there is a part of him that looks like me. So he could be my son. I slide the two photographs carefully back into the wallet as if they were a priceless treasure.

An announcement states that the next station is Canal Street, and the train slows down and stops at the platform. Steel beams stand as pillars and there’s a lot of black dust. On one beam is hung a black sign that reads ‘Canal Street’. I stand up. I have absolutely no feeling that I need to get off at this station, but I feel that if I don’t get off somewhere I will have to be on this train forever. Plus, I see people with black hair like mine and that comforts me. I push through the crowd and slip through the door just before it closes. I head up the nearest staircase and pass through the turnstiles. I see a few people with black hair coming down the stairs. I weave through the crowd and head for the exit. I have to get somewhere, whether that place is a hospital, a jail, or a back alley.

Everyone out of my way. I am the busiest one here, you know. I don’t even know my name, or where to go, or even where I got on this train. I might have to go to the police station or maybe even to a mental institution.

I push past the people that are pushing past me and escape the underground.

Light begins to appear. The sun is sinking low, the shadows are growing darker. It’s the time of day when mothers head to the markets to buy food for dinner.

But as soon as I set foot on the ground above the subway station, it starts to grow dark. Splat. I crumble down onto the sewer-smelling alleyway. I can hear footsteps as people pass by me. I don’t yet hear that sound so

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common in New York, the sound of an ambulance. The sunlight quickly disappears and is replaced by darkness. Is this a nightmare? As my limbs begin to shake I meticulously think it over. Again, is this a nightmare? I have no way of knowing.

Real nightmares are nightmares that can’t be remembered.

Fast Forward.

‘You really like this music, huh?’ Andy says to me as his fingers pound the piano keys. The spaces between the keys of the Yamaha keyboard look too full of dirt and dust to produce sound, yet his wrinkled fingers dance over it.

‘It’s just that it reminds me of something,’ I say. ‘I feel like I’ve heard this before.’

Just answering is difficult. How many hours have I sat heaped in a pile down in this subway station?

‘I’ve been playing in the subway for twenty years, so I’m sure you’ve heard me before. No one knows my name, but tell anyone about the Polka keyboard player in Times Square station and everyone will’ve heard of me, I’m that famous. I’m on a completely different level than that fake Chinese guy who plays the cello on the platform. Or at least I think so.’

Even while he’s speaking, Andy hits the keys in time with the automatic accompaniment and drums. It’s the kind of dreary music that’s always played in the elevators of old hotels. Dolls dance to the music, dancing to attract the gaze of the passers-by. They dance on the dirty, gum-covered floor with sad expressions that make it look like they are dancing whether they want to or not. Next to the dolls is a white plastic bucket with a few bills and several coins in it. Andy motions to it with his head. I scoop up the coins and bills and see how much it adds up to. $15.75. ‘$15.75, see? Didn’t I tell you that it would be about that much?’ Andy says. ‘It might look like I am focusing on playing but I can close my eyes and play my entire repertoire for two or three hours. How much is in that bucket is the most important thing. You gotta keep the bucket kinda empty so people feel more sympathy for you. Sorry to ask, but will you pass around the bucket while I play? I used to have this dwarf as an assistant but he disappeared. He was great ’cause he would dance too.’

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‘Where’d he go?’

‘Good question. Maybe his wife ran away or something? I’m sure that trying to chase her down would be futile. . . . Or maybe he needed more money? No way he coulda thought I was paying him unfairly. I never found out what country he came from. He never said anything, just shook and nodded his head. You know, I thought dwarfs with beards and red hats existed only in fairy tales like Snow White. I never knew they were real. I was playing for a long time one day when a dwarf just came up next to me and started dancing.’

The dwarf danced along to the polka music as if he were dancing with an amazing partner, Andy said. His short legs would move so unbelievably gracefully that passing people would stop and stare awhile in awe. Tourists would take picture after picture of him, and children would beg their moms to take a picture of them arm in arm with the dwarf. And while the pictures were taken, coins and bills would pile up in the bucket. It was mostly quarters or one-dollar bills but occasionally a twenty-dollar bill would find its way into it. Without the dwarf, a twenty-dollar bill was unthinkable.

And now electronic dolls have taken his place. If you look closely, the dolls have the same red hat and grey beard that the dwarf had.

Andy laughs, his perfectly white teeth sticking out from his heavily wrinkled face.

‘This is the last performance of the day. I have to get outta here by ten at night. It might not look like much, but this is a formal performance, sanctioned by the Department of Transportation and everything.’

‘More like a free concert that doesn’t even sell tickets,’ I say.

Andy laughs again. He gathers up the dolls one by one and places his number one treasure, the Yamaha keyboard, in a black instrument bag.

‘Can you help me with this bag? It’s as heavy as an elephant. In honour of our meeting for the first time today, I’ll buy dinner. It’s also been a long time since I had a conversation with a normal person. And you look like someone with a lot to say.’

Rewind. When I awoke from the nightmare and discovered the name on the credit card. KIM HA JIN – a name like a divorce lawyer’s. Back then it felt like if I’d just waited ten minutes, if I’d just waited an hour, all my memories

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would return. I thought I would remember who the people in the pictures were. With my first step out of the station at Canal Street, I passed out right there on the street. The world before my eyes went up to 100 brightness, 100 contrast, before the level slowly sank all the way down to -100 brightness, -100 contrast. Darkness. A totally empty darkness. An unremembered nightmare. Thirteen-gram eyelids.

How much time must have passed. When I opened my eyes, I was again sitting on a subway train. I couldn’t see where this train was going because people were blocking the sign. The irregular vibrating dunkadunk of the train was so familiar to me. For a moment, I was really happy. I thought that everything that had happened before was actually a nightmare and now I’d finally woken up to reality again. I’d merely dozed off on the subway and had a nightmare. And it was over. I was simply a normal person who had worked late that day and had fallen asleep on the subway on his way home. But even after opening my eyes, I couldn’t think of where I was going.

I knew that my name was Kim Ha Jin, but that was only because I found that out in the dream (if indeed that was a dream). I pulled out my wallet.

The very same credit card I’d seen in my dream, the very same KIM HA JIN name, the very same two pictures inside. So it wasn’t a dream. I actually did pass out at Canal Street.

To make things worse, a thick, sticky fluid was running down my left shin. Dark red blood. As soon as I saw the blood, I felt the sting of the deep wound in my leg. The pain was sharp, like being cut with a knife. The blood was creating a small puddle on the floor of the train, but nobody asked me if I was all right. What happened to me after I got out of the subway? I can’t remember anything. The scariest nightmares are unremembered nightmares.

Fast Forward. A pizza cafeteria at Penn Station.

‘It’s a shame you aren’t a dwarf. People would really like to see a dwarf all the way from China dancing to music. Even better if you used a fan or something.’

Andy takes bites of the large pepperoni and olive pizza.

‘People would love it, sure, and more importantly you’d make a lot of money. But like I said, I’m not from China, I’m from South Korea.’

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‘They all look the same to me. Korean, Japanese, Chinese, you all have black hair and a yellow face. Can you tell you guys apart just by looking at a face?’

‘Somewhat, but there are definitely other differences. It’s a little hard to explain.’

‘Can I have this last slice?’ Andy looks at the last slice and licks his lips.

‘Of course. I’m not that hungry.’

The last triangle goes into his mouth and cheese drips down onto his shirt. He gulps down some Coke. How did he become someone who plays the keyboard in a subway station? I’d like to hear about that.

‘Don’t just wander around the subway, why don’t you go to a police station or something? You know? Your family probably already reported you missing.’

‘Thing is . . . I’m afraid of going outside,’ I say.

Andy nods his head and says, ‘Have you thought about this? Maybe it’s not that you can’t remember but that you actually don’t want to remember.

There are lots of mornings where I wish I could forget about everything that happened before. I’m jealous. You kinda have a chance to start a new life now.’

‘You think I would fake this? I want nothing more than to get out of this dark, dirty place and breathe fresh air.’

Andy gulps down more Coke. ‘You can’t get something you can’t get just by trying to get it. If you keep desiring something you can’t have you’ll get sick. A stomach disease, or a heart attack, or amnesia. You don’t need to go to the police, you need to go to a hospital. You gotta have some problem with your head. Some big hole or some dark, burnt spot.’

I don’t answer but instead stare at the people walking hurriedly by. Even if it’s hell, people with a place to go are happy.

‘So that’s why I wonder if you can help. I don’t need the police and I don’t need a doctor. I don’t think I’m able to leave the subway. I don’t want to have another nightmare I can’t remember. So it would be great if you could help me. Go out there instead of me and find my family,’ I say, staring directly into Andy’s eyes.

‘But what happened to your leg? Did you hurt it somewhere?’

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Seo Jin

‘It’s kinda a long story. Do you want to hear it?’ I let out a sigh. My left shin and thigh start to ache. And I go through my memory and tell him all that has happened to me. That is, all that I can remember.

Back in South Korea, you drink and sneak a glance at your watch. If you miss the last subway train, you’ll have to take a taxi and pay the after-hours surcharge too. You try to figure out in your head if listening to ten more minutes of your drunk friend’s lament is worth the taxi fare plus the surcharge. Of course that kind of lament is worthless. It’s not worth the surcharge, it’s not even worth as much as a subway ride. Starting with the grumble, ‘What’s the purpose of life?’, the stories of your friend’s annoying boss, of how their girlfriend or boyfriend won’t call them, of the suspicious new person in their girlfriend or boyfriend’s life, of how sad it is to see their parents grow old – these stories will all be forgotten after the hangover. And then those stories will all be repeated the next day when you meet for drinks again. The falling stocks and the rising apartment prices won’t be left out either. You listen half-heartedly and look at your watch again. But I’m not sure if you’re aware of this. Your friend’s stories and your stories are actually very similar. And it’s the same for all the stories of all the people sitting at the tables around you. It might be nicer for you if you go home and watch the movie you’ve downloaded. Or maybe play a computer game, or read Internet news comments, or watch the unchanging TV dramas.

But you are lonely. And your friend and everyone sitting in the bar is lonely just like you, regardless of whether you’re in a relationship or not, or if you have a good job or a bad job. And so, because your friend looks lonely and you feel just as lonely, you listen to the story. It’s past twelve o’clock now, so seeing how it’s already too late, you sit and talk with your friend until he has run out of things to say.

In New York there is no need to look at the clock – the subway runs twenty-four hours a day. After midnight, the interval between trains is longer, and the trains don’t stop at all the stations, but the trains are alive and moving even while people sleep. You are sitting in an old chair on the platform of Union Square station. It’s already past midnight, but go ahead, feel comfortable and let it all out, all your stories about your annoying boss, your suspicious lover, your aging parents, or even stories about your pet cat

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from Underground

or dog. You can tell me any story that will help ease your loneliness. Because you are not alone. I am asking you to tell me your stories. I just ask one thing: don’t ask me any questions. Because, honestly, I really can’t remember anything. Because the part of my brain that’s in charge of memories is totally empty, I’m confident that I can absorb your stories like a sponge. I’m confident that I can listen more intently to your stories than anyone else possibly could. Even if they are pretty much the same as everyone else’s stories, they will sound new to me, so don’t worry about that, just go ahead and say whatever comes to mind. Anyway, I’m trapped in the subway and the trains will run all night. After telling me your stories, you’ll be able to get on the train and go home feeling like a load has been taken off your shoulders.

Rewind. After I had passed out at Canal Street and awoke on a subway train for the second time.

As I sit blankly on the train trying to figure out exactly what happened to me, midnight passes. I want to talk with someone, anyone, but I can’t see anyone around that I can talk to. I am afraid to walk out of the subway, even to get off the train. And so I am forever stuck sitting here. Whenever I start to feel a little sick, like I want to throw up or something, I get off one train and hop on the next.

The electric display in the train shows the name of the next station and the time in red. The train shakes, it’s gloomy, it’s uncomfortable. This is the 2 train, headed to Harlem. Around five or six black kids and one white kid are playing loud music from a stereo while smoking and drinking beer from a bottle hidden in a paper bag. Bass and a drumbeat boom out of the stereo while they dance to the rhythm of the mumbling rapper. Some of them keep repeating a few words I can’t understand while performing hand movements. My left leg hurts. It’s bleeding.

‘Hi, I’m Billy, and these here are my friends. Hope you don’t mind the loud noise,’ says the boy sitting next to me, bobbing his head and tapping his foot.

‘Looks like you’re having some kind of party.’

‘Ha, ha, yeah, that’s right. A subway party. It’s nice because there’re no cops or people at this time of night. But where are you going?’

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‘Well . . . you see. . . .’ I too would like to know the answer to that question. Billy’s chocolate-coloured forehead shines with sweat below his curly hair. His big, white eyes blink against his surprisingly black skin. At 96th Street, he sticks his head out of the open doors to see if anyone is coming and gives his friends a thumbs up sign. His friends aren’t paying any attention to him though, they just continue to dance.

‘So you’re just killing time on the subway too,’ he says to me.

‘Is that what you’re doing? Shouldn’t you be home asleep?’

‘I can sleep anytime during the day. I like riding the subway like this. Just endlessly killing time, night or day, from one end to the other. I meet all sorts of interesting people. I meet my friends too.’

‘What about school? Your parents aren’t upset?’

‘It’s the middle of the night and you’re asking me about school? My father left home and my mother died on the street. Even if I’m home, there’s nothing for me to do.’

I suddenly think of the boy in the picture in my wallet. What’s he doing right now? He’s probably not wandering the subway like Billy. He’s probably comfortably in bed in a nicely air-conditioned room set at seventy-eight degrees. That’s what I hope, anyway.

‘When I woke up I was on the subway. This is already the second time it’s happened. And I just can’t remember where I’m going,’ I say to Billy.

For some reason I feel very close to this boy. It seems that I’ve met him before, before I lost my memory. It’s announced that we have reached Harlem station and the kids all gather at the door.

‘That’s happened to me a lot too. If you have nothing else to do, why not come out with us? There’s a lot of fun stuff outside too. You’ve never been to Harlem, have you?’

‘Well . . . I’ll just stay here.’

As soon as the door opens, the dancing, noisy group flows out. I stumble out of the train door as well, pulled by Billy’s hand. We go along the grey platform and push through the turnstiles set up like sparse teeth in a comb.

I grab Billy’s wrist to try and stop him, but he seems to be enjoying pulling me along and he won’t let go. The fat attendant in the glass booth rests his chin on his hand, not even looking at us. I dumbly follow Billy. We flow

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quickly by the gum-covered floor, the sooty walls and hallways, and finally arrive at the stairs. They look like a tremendous obstacle to me.

The kids all go bouncing up the stairs. I, too, following Billy, go up step by step. But with each step I mount, my feet grow heavier and my head gets a little dizzier. The other kids are already up the stairs and outside, playing the stereo loudly, shouting and laughing, having a good time. I smell a rotten sewer smell wafting over from somewhere.

‘Actually I’ve got somewhere else to go. Will you let go of my hand?’

Billy looks back at me. I actually wish I could go out there with Billy and run through the streets. Even if a gun-fight breaks out while they dance, I just want to run freely outside. But I break free of Billy’s grip and head back down the stairs. I’m afraid of what might happen. I might pass out; I might get injured again.

‘Next time, if we meet again, let’s run all around Harlem together. Bye.’ Billy tilts his head to the side as he stares back at me. ‘All right, get home safe,’ he says, before running the rest of the way up the stairs. I slowly work my way back down. The attendant is still asleep. I hesitate about whether I should buy a ticket or not but finally just climb over the gate. I look back.

The attendant is still asleep.

I plop down onto an old, partitioned, wooden bench and stare down at the train tracks while cold drops of sweat drip down my forehead. There are several black puddles filled with paper cups, metro cards, napkins and other trash. A few rats squeak by. My calf still aches.

I wait for a long time but the train doesn’t come. A sign on a pillar on the platform announces some kind of weekend schedule change, but I can’t make out exactly what it means. It’s probably saying something about how the trains aren’t running at this time during the weekend.

The whole world is normal, except for me. I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing here. If I have a family, they could be anxiously looking for me. It’s possible that my memory will never return. I have to get out of this place, by whatever means possible.

Sitting on that old bench with my head buried in my hands, I am lost within these thoughts. Just then, you sit down right next to me. It’s so late, have you lost your way? Or maybe you feel like sleeping is a waste of time and

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you want to tour as much as possible? Without me even asking, you start telling me one of your stories. Your Korean has the southern, Gyungsando dialect. You tell me about your life, the name of your high school and your favourite teacher, your military service and how you broke up with your first love, your annoying boss at work and how you met your wife through a friend, the room you two rent and how you fight, about your first son, about your parent’s sixtieth birthday celebrations and your son’s first birthday celebration. . . .

‘But, why are you telling me all this now?’ I ask you.

At my question, you stop talking. ‘I was bored, waiting for the train. I don’t have a book or an MP3 player. But then why did you listen to my story?’

Just then a light can be seen at the end of the dark tunnel. The dunkadunk sound grows slowly louder. Even though everyone is sleeping, the trains themselves never sleep.

I want to tell you a story too, but there are no stories left in my head.

You say you’re waiting for the express train so I get on this one by myself. I try to tell you there is no express train at this time of night but you won’t listen to me. The guide book doesn’t say that, you reply, and so you ignore me.

You’ve come to New York for the first time in your life, via JFK, LaGuardia, or maybe even Newark Airport. Perhaps you quit your job doing the same thing all day every day and squeezed out all the money you had in savings to come. Maybe you came here to study English with the generous support of your affluent parents. Or maybe even your company sent you here because you had the highest TOEIC score. Regardless, it’s your first visit to New York.

You’re having trouble with the time difference, your head is foggy and your ears are red, yet you can’t stop staring out the taxi window at the forest of tall, old buildings. Actually, you may even feel a little disappointed. New York City isn’t as impressive as the wallpaper on your computer screen that you’ve been staring at every day, it isn’t as glamorous as it appears in movies and on TV. Forget about Sex and the City. Broadway is a cheap knock-off.

See, you need to understand, the reason that so many people are able to live and work on the small island of Manhattan is because of those tall buildings. And those buildings weren’t built in the 1970s, they started

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building them in the early 1900s. So unlike the buildings in Gangnam in Seoul, they are not shiny glass structures, they are not in any fancy geometrical shapes. They are from before you were born, from before your parents were born, so of course the windows and the walls, the outside architecture and the elevators are going to look old. They haven’t left these old buildings up just for tourists to come and see. They are old not because they have been tossed aside by society. They’re old because they’re still needed, still in use.

As steel-frame construction was developed and improved and the use of elevators proliferated, the buildings gradually grew taller and taller. People flocked to New York from Germany, from England, from Italy, even from faraway Russia and China, all looking for the land of hope. In order for all those people to work, to live, or even sometimes to show off that their bank is the best in world, the buildings grew taller and taller. Don’t forget that that building that you absolutely must visit, the 102-storey Empire State Building, was built in 1931. Before you were born, before your parents were born.

And the subway is just as old as the buildings. The subway and skyscrapers have an intimate relationship. The reason that all those people from Queens and Brooklyn and even Harlem can come to work in the tall buildings of Manhattan is because of the subway system. The subway lines are the arteries of New York City. This being your first trip to New York City, you will no doubt visit Times Square, Broadway, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building. And, who knows, you might even take one of those ridiculous-looking open-top bus tours.

But promise me one thing. Before you’ve done all those other things, you have to ride the subway. For just seven dollars you can buy a Fun Pass and travel anywhere in New York City, even transferring to a bus for no extra charge. Forget the tour bus. You need to ride this subway system, so much darker, so much dirtier than the subway in Seoul. You need to ride the arteries of the city and observe the real New Yorkers – tourists looking continually flustered about where to get off, young kids bobbing their heads with earphones in, fat black mothers and their skinny daughters, white-collar workers burying their faces in magazines. If you begin to feel a little dismal from sitting in the subway for so long, get out and walk around. Explore

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New York on your own two feet. The city isn’t as big as you think, just three hours wide and four to five hours from the bottom up to Central Park. It’s also impossible to get lost: the street numbers are laid out in a perfect grid.

If you do get lost, though, you can always use the Empire State Building on 32nd Street as your geographical marker.

By around 6 a.m. the subway starts to get crowded as all those people who sleep in Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens begin to move to their jobs in Manhattan. As a transfer station, Times Square station has the most trains running through it. The 1, 2, and 3 trains coming from Harlem through west Central Park meet the N, R, W, and Q trains coming across the bridge from Queens, and, after a short walk, allow you to transfer to the A, C, and E trains. If you need the 4, 5, or 6 trains, which stop at Grand Central station, you just need to take a shuttle, and the B, D, F, and V trains are all just about a block away. It’s also the last stop for the 7 train from Flushing.

And it’s also currently the place where I squat down and watch all the people that pass through. I hope that maybe someone passing by will recognise me.

If you do see me as you pass, you pretend you didn’t. I don’t blame you. I’m the type of person most people try hard not to see, or pretend is invisible.

But if you take a picture of Andy playing the keyboard with your digital camera and upload that on your blog for your friends to see, shouldn’t you at least give him a dollar tip?

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Poetry

Abhay K.

Abhay K.

Hiuen Tsang Hiuen Tsang spent seventeen years travelling from China to India and back in the seventh century CE, at the time of the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong. His adventures inspired Wu Ch’en-en’s sixteenth century novel, Journey to the West, which refers to India as ‘Buddha’s pure land’.

An azure pool winds around the monasteries, adorned with the full-blown cups of the blue lotus; the dazzling red flowers of the lovely kanaka hang here and there, and outside groves of mango trees offer the inhabitants their dense and protective shade.

—Hiuen Tsang on Nalanda i A half-monk at thirteen restless to find the truth one night I saw in my dream an azure pool a blue lotus dazzling red flowers

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thick mango groves wrinkled face of a Bhikchhu I set out for Yintu secretly escaping the Middle Kingdom at night, like the young Siddhartha against the Emperor’s diktats I travelled alone for years a fakir along the Silk Road hungry, naked but blessed crossing Gobi, Tien Shan, Samarkand, Jalandhar, Kashmir, Kannauj, Varanasi, Patliputra On my way I met kings and queens saw blossoming monasteries; decaying, crumbling ruins Finally, I found Nalanda hidden as a jewel under the thick mango groves Silbhadra had always known I would come to Nalanda as a bee comes to a flower seeking nectar He took me in as one of his own taught me Yogacara and gave me a new name, Mokshadeva Spending many blissful years with the Guru and fellow monks I absorbed their profound wisdom

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set out to travel across the moon land visiting Kanchipuram, Ajanta, Malva, Multan Nostalgic, I returned to Nalanda before bidding a final farewell to head for Kamrupa, the land of Brahmaputra ruled by the learned Kumar Bhaskar Varman but my friend King Harshavardhan could not bear my absence for long I was brought to attend the Great Assembly at Kannauj extolled Mahayana Buddhism there, visited Prayag then journeyed home, my horses laden with texts statues, rare relics of the Enlightened I nearly drowned crossing the Indus washed away by its mighty currents but was saved by local fishermen Continuing my journey back passing Khyber, Kashgar, Khotan, arriving in Chang’an where a great procession celebrated my return the Emperor himself at the city gates welcomed me with open arms showered on me the highest honours of the land but gently I refused them all I presented Emperor Taizong my Great Tang Records (On Western Regions) and retired to the monastery at Da Ci’en

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Abhay K.

translating precious gems gathered on my odyssey to the Buddha’s pure land. ii Hieun Tsang come back to Nalanda King Harsha is long gone but here is a new dawn Hieun Tsang it won’t take you seventeen years you don’t have to cross Gobi or Tien Shan Hiuen Tsang the prince of pilgrims you don’t have to stop at Liangzhu or Turpan Hiuen Tsang take a non-stop flight from Beijing to Bodh Gaya straight to the pure land Nalanda has risen from its ashes to embrace you once again with open arms Rise like a phoenix Hiuen Tsang bring along I-tsing and Faxian come back to Nalanda Hiuen Tsang

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Notes: 1. Yintu or Indu (land of the moon), was the name by which India was known in China.

2. I-tsing and Faxian were other prominent Chinese travellers to India, respectively 673–695 and 399–412 CE. 3. Hiuen Tsang studied Yogacara (pure consciousness) at the famous Nalanda University under the guidance of the abbot Silbhadra. He was fêted by King Harshavardhana and returned to China with over 600 Buddhist texts and more than a hundred relics of the Buddha’s body. He then recounted his adventures in The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions.

4. The Great Assembly at Kannauj: In 643 CE Harsha summoned an assembly, the object of which was to take advantage of the presence of Hiuen Tsang to extol Mahayana Buddhism and refute Hinayana. Hiuen Tsang at Nalanda had written The Destruction of Heresy – a refutation of Hinayana. A large number of kings attended the assembly, as well as 3,000 Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhist monks, 3,000 Brahmanas and Jains and about 1,000 Buddhist scholars from Nalanda University.

5. Nalanda is considered the oldest university in the world and an important seat of Buddhist learning. Destroyed in the twelfth century, Nalanda was forgotten until the late 1800s.

Excavated in the early twentieth century with the help of Hiuen Tsang’s writings, Nalanda University has been revived as an international centre for learning. In 2014 it began to function again as a university.

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from Now That It’s Over from Now That O Thiam It’s Over Chin

O Thiam Chin

Ai Ling

T

he body lies on the quiet beach, its long hair wild and brittle, streaking across the face and back. It has floated for a day on the waves, before finally being deposited on this stretch of fine, pristine sand, the shoreline of a tiny island that lies nine kilometres southeast of the coastal town of Phuket, Thailand, one of over four hundred such islands sprinkled all over the Andaman Sea. Until the body arrived, the only presence on the island has been a family of crabs that found refuge there – digging holes in the sand, multiplying in great numbers – as well as the occasional seagull that would pause and rest on its way to or from Phuket.

In its wake, the body – a woman in her mid-thirties – has brought along a school of dead fish, mostly red snappers and garoupas that the fishermen in the vicinity hunt for their livelihood; the decomposing piscine bodies litter the beach, their silvery corpses sparkling under the sun, already starting to reek.

A seagull flies down and lands on a rock. It eyes the sea with a weary, suspicious stare, and then scrutinises the woman’s body, as if waiting for her to stir. But she remains motionless.

It had been Ai Ling’s idea to go to Phuket for a vacation.

‘It would be a nice change to our usual year-end holidays,’ she told her husband Wei Xiang over breakfast. ‘The price of air tickets is cheap, thanks to the promotions going on for the December holidays. It’d be easy to get tickets to Phuket.’

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‘It’s already November. Isn’t it too late to plan? What about work?’ said Wei Xiang, looking up from the newspaper. ‘And you were in Thailand just last month.’

‘I’ll get someone to cover for me,’ she said.

For the past four years, Ai Ling had worked as a preschool teacher in a childcare centre, taking care of children aged one to five. It was the longest job she’d had after graduating from the National University of Singapore with a Social Sciences degree. The job market was in a bad shape the year she graduated, and for years all she could find were temporary contract jobs that only lasted from two to six months. Fortuitously, she was able to find something more permanent, as a secretary at a mid-sized air-con repair company – a job recommended to her by Cody, a close friend from university – which she held onto for a year before quitting out of boredom.

She hated the idea of taking calls, making coffee and scheduling her boss’s calendar as a long-term career, even though the pay was decent enough and her boss treated her well. When she told Wei Xiang she wanted to quit, he tried to reason with her: the job was stable, regular hours, no overtime, good salary. But with her mind made up, there was nothing he could say to change it. The teaching job at the childcare centre came along just a few months later, reinforcing the belief that she had made the right decision.

Once Wei Xiang had agreed to the Phuket trip, Ai Ling went about checking the prices of tickets online and borrowing Lonely Planet guidebooks from the public library. Cody had visited Phuket two years before with his boyfriend Chee Seng, and over coffee one afternoon, Ai Ling asked him to join them on the trip.

‘It would be fun, just like old times. God, how long has it been since we last travelled together? Since our university days?’

‘Yes, years ago,’ Cody said. ‘To Bangkok, for our secret getaway, where I broke your heart, and then you married Wei Xiang after. Do you still remember that trip?’

‘Arsehole, still dare to say. Lied to me and dragged me into the mud with my little crush.’

‘You were too blind to see it, so obvious to everyone else. I made it very clear to you, but you didn’t pick up the hints.’

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‘How could I know? It’s not as if you had a sign over your head screaming ‘gay’,’ Ai Ling said, mock-punching Cody in the arm. ‘So how, you want to join us?’

‘I don’t know. Does Wei Xiang mind if we tag along?’

‘He’s perfectly fine with you guys, you know that. He won’t mind at all.’

‘Let me ask Chee Seng then, see whether he’s interested. He hates when I make any decision without asking him first.’

A few days later, Cody called and told Ai Ling to go ahead and book the tickets for him and Chee Seng. His voice over the phone was upbeat but somewhat restrained, as if he were carefully mulling over his words. When she asked if anything was wrong, he said, ‘There’s a lot of shit going on in our lives right now. So I think we really need a break to get away, you know?

To sort things out.’

When Ai Ling pressed for more details, Cody became cautious and vague in his replies. She gave up trying after a while and put the whole matter aside; she’d take it up later when the time was right.

Fortunately, there were still available seats on flights to Phuket during the Christmas period, after she checked with several budget airlines. It would be a good idea to spend the holidays away from Singapore, she convinced herself, to leave behind their busy lives, even for a short while.

Good to take things easy, and maybe then she could drum up the courage to break the news to Wei Xiang. She did not think she could keep it from him any longer.

So Ai Ling bought the tickets. They would fly to Phuket via a nine o’clock flight on the morning of Christmas Day and come back four days later.

Chee Seng A sharp smell assaults my senses as I stir awake. The hard, wood-planked bed beneath me creaks as I try to move; every stiff muscle in my body shrieks with pain. A frayed stale-smelling blanket is draped over me, looking as though sewn together from different rags. The air in the room is warm, almost suffocating. I manage to lean up onto one elbow; I appear to be in the living area of a small, sparsely furnished hut. Slender beams of sunlight

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stream through the only window in the room, illuminating the dust motes that dance languidly in the stuffy air.

Directly opposite the bed, a dented soot-stained pot is boiling on a stove, with soft plumes of steam rising from its jumping lid. A sharp hunger comes alive inside me, though my body is too weak to move. No one seems to be around; everything is still. Outside, a songbird is trilling. I open my mouth but no sound comes out; my tongue is thick and my throat feels scraped raw.

I turn my head and see a ceramic bowl holding some kind of dark liquid, on a wooden stool beside the bed. I inch towards it. I try lifting my hands, but they are so sapped of strength that they barely move. I lean over the edge of the bowl and sip – and almost immediately my gag reflex kicks in, and I vomit up the little that was left in my stomach, leaving behind a rancid aftertaste. I spit onto the floor, strings of yellowish saliva sticking to my chin. I start to cough, which causes me to double up in a knife-sharp convulsion of pain. Once it subsides, I lean back and sink deeper into the folds of the rag blanket, and close my eyes, exhausted.

I hear something, the scuffle of someone stepping into the room, and crack my eyelids open to see a figure in silhouette. It approaches the bed and presses a hand to my forehead. Then the hand moves to the back of my head, raising it up. My lips meet the rim of the ceramic bowl. The bitterness of the brew once again causes me to gag, but before I can retch, the foul fluid is poured down my throat, forcing me to swallow it all. Then my head is laid back down, and I fall instantly into a sleep as deep as death.

Dipping in and out of wakefulness, I lose track of the reality around me; the only thing that makes any sense is the recent memory that keeps looping through my mind.

I was lying on the beach after a long tussle with the sea. I could feel the gritty texture of wet sand on my face; my lips were crusted with salt, and a residual metallic taste lingered in my mouth. My stomach churned, and I began to tremble violently, as though I were still trapped in the sea’s undercurrents, being whipped and tossed about, drowning. I forced myself to calm down, then opened my eyes again and surveyed the beach. The harsh sunlight had bleached everything of colour. I had no clue where I was;

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the long expanse of beach seemed to stretch without end in both directions.

Apart from the rhythmic sound of the lapping waves, it was utterly silent.

With great effort, I flipped onto my back. The sky was smothered with billows of heavy rain clouds. I could have lain there forever were it not for the sharp little flints of raindrops now hitting my face. I jerked backward on the sand, away from the breaking waves, suddenly overcome by the primal fear that the water would take me again. I had to leave the beach immediately; despite the pain, I struggled to my feet.

Past the beach was a thick grove of palm trees, a forest that led to a hilly, craggy ridge via a narrow dirt path. A world of shadows beckoned from within.

I took a step, and then another, and stumbled my way into the dark forest.

Ai Ling Swallowing the eyeball, the seagull turns its attention back to the woman’s body, assessing it with unfaltering concentration. It pecks away a stray strand of hair from her sand-speckled forehead. The woman’s face is swollen and discoloured, bruises darkening into islands of deep green and indigo on her sunken cheeks, and around the eyes. In the mute sky, a fellow seagull, newly arrived, sounds out a mournful cry, dipping and rising in the wind. The seagull on the beach looks up and regards the other bird. Then it flaps its wings forcefully and skips up into the sky, disappearing in the direction of Phuket, in pursuit of the other seagull.

The blood seeping from the empty pit of the eye socket has hardened into dark crusty trails on the woman’s face, and stained the patch of sand around the head into a crimson peninsula. Already the body is transforming, breaking down quickly in the heat and humidity. The muscles have finally relaxed, causing the body to sag, giving it a languid, restful demeanour. Rising from the body: a complicated mixture of smells, strong and overripe.

An agitated gust of wind blowing in from the sea lifts the woman’s torn shirt, revealing the bulge. The gastric acid is gradually eating out the stomach, dissolving its contents into a slushy broth. Bloated with noxious gases produced by the digestion, the stomach has distended like a balloon, pressing itself against the sand. The woman’s hands, claw-like and protective, rest on it.

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Suspended in the quiet sea inside the woman’s body, the tiny form remains inert, enclosed in a shrinking world.

During the second year of their marriage, Ai Ling had a miscarriage that she kept secret from Wei Xiang, barely a week after she had tested herself with a home pregnancy kit. She had wanted to tell him on several occasions, but the moment was never right. Then one morning, she woke to terrible cramps and bleeding, and had to call in sick after Wei Xiang left for work.

Over breakfast, he had commented on how pale she looked, which she shook off with a smile. She stayed in the toilet and did not come out until she heard the front door close.

Ai Ling tried to staunch the bleeding with sanitary pads, but they were completely soaked through in no time. She threw on a loose-fitting shirt and left for the neighbourhood polyclinic, numb with pain and fear. She held her dark thoughts at a distance and focused only on her breathing.

Two hours passed before her number was called. The polyclinic doctor, a short, balding man with a stern expression, was surprised that Ai Ling had endured so long – she should have called an ambulance instead – and gave her a strange, sympathetic look. The doctor asked about her husband, but Ai Ling gave a vague, noncommittal reply and looked down at her hands.

She was transferred to the nearest hospital for the operation.

Ai Ling checked out of the hospital the very same evening after she was stitched up. While standing in the taxi queue, she called Wei Xiang on her mobile phone, telling him that she was running late and would not be cooking that night, that he should buy something back for dinner. In the taxi, she told the driver to switch off the air-con and roll down the rear-side windows. She pressed herself against the door, the warm rush of air hitting her face, and put her hands on her tender abdomen, feeling nothing except for a fist of pain inside her. Everything happened so fast, she thought, but now that it’s over, I don’t want to think about it.

She felt her skin go cold and clammy; something tightened inside her, leaving her out of breath. She had to ask the driver to stop by the side of the road so that she could get out to vomit whatever was still inside her stomach.

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Ai Ling carried on as usual after the incident. She went to work at the childcare centre every day, knocked off at six, prepared dinner and ate with Wei Xiang. Sometimes she would watch the TV programmes with him, and sometimes she would read the books she had borrowed from the library. At night, she stayed on her side of the bed, quiet and still. The rush of happiness she had felt when she first held the pregnancy test indicator was now a distant memory, something that might have happened to another person in a fleeting scene in a movie. What a silly person, she would have said if she had seen such a character. She would have clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes, reaching for the TV remote to change the channel.

Sometimes, when her mind drifted as she was picking up the toys after the kids at the childcare centre, or stir-frying a dish at the stove, Ai Ling would wonder about why she had kept the pregnancy and the miscarriage from Wei Xiang. Just after they got married, Wei Xiang told her in passing that they ought to hold out on having a baby in the first few years of their marriage, so that they could enjoy their couplehood, just the two of them; since then they had not talked about it. Now her silence was sealed, and she would have to carry the burden of her secret stolidly.

For a long time after the miscarriage, Ai Ling avoided having sex with Wei Xiang. She could not bear the thought of it; her body felt depleted, sapped dry of any desire, and she did not want to do anything that might cause it to hurt in such a terrible way again. So she remained rigid and tense when Wei Xiang tried to initiate sex, brushing off his advances. She would stay up late on weekends, watching reruns of the Taiwanese drama serials on TV till the wee hours, only going to bed after Wei Xiang had fallen asleep.

One time, in a fury of lust, he overpowered her, clamping down her flailing fists and legs, reaching into her shirt to grope her breasts, and she had to fight him off with every bit of strength to get away from him.

In his confusion and frustration, Wei Xiang spat: ‘What is wrong with you? You have to tell me.’ Ai Ling threw a pillow at him, left their bedroom and slept in the spare bedroom for a week.

Three months after the miscarriage, while she was clearing out the wardrobe drawers in the bedroom, she felt something behind a stack of old clothes.

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Pulling it out, she saw that it was a pair of infant shoes, still held together with a plastic band, the price tag of $5.90 on the sole. Ai Ling stared at the shoes as if they were a relic from ages ago, one that had suddenly landed in her hands, although she could not remember when or where or who had bought them, or why they were kept at the back of the drawer. She did not hear Wei Xiang until he was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder.

‘What is that?’ Wei Xiang said.

Ai Ling spun around and held out the pair of shoes, like a thief surrendering her loot, unsure of the punishment awaiting her.

‘Wait, I remember. I bought them a few months ago when I was at the mall. Aren’t they adorable?’ Wei Xiang said. Ai Ling stared at him, still holding out the shoes. She could feel the immense weight in her hands.

‘Do you still want them?’ Ai Ling said, putting the shoes into his hand and stepping back. Wei Xiang adjusted the laces and chuckled to himself, as if amused by his impulsive decision to buy the tiny shoes. Ai Ling bit her lip. She wanted to laugh, all of a sudden, at this scene playing out in front of her, at the absurdity, the irony. She let out a choking noise.

‘Let’s keep them. It’s a waste to throw them out,’ Wei Xiang said, tearing away the price tag. ‘Just in case we plan to have kids when the time is right.’

Ai Ling said nothing. Then she turned away and returned to the task of clearing out the drawers.

Wei Xiang kept the shoes, hanging them by the laces near the dresser table, where Ai Ling could not avoid them. She decided one day, when Wei Xiang was at work, to throw them out. She put the shoes in a plastic bag and left for the neighbourhood park.

It was late afternoon, and the park was quiet except for several runners and a few mothers pushing strollers or chatting on the benches near the children’s playground. Ai Ling walked past them and avoided looking into the strollers. She headed for the large pond located near the south exit of the park. The water was jade-green, overrun with water lilies, arrowheads and duckweeds, giving off a raw, earthy smell. There was no one around as Ai Ling made her way down to the edge of the pond. The water touched the tips of her toes, darkening the fabric of her sandals. She could step in and sink right to the bottom, and nobody would notice or save her.

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Ai Ling stirred the water with her fingers and watched the ripples rouse the clump of duckweed. Taking out the pair of infant shoes, Ai Ling placed them on the surface of the pond, making footsteps on the water. She relaxed her hold – the shoes seemed to float for a moment – and then quickly pulled them out and put them beside her on the soggy ground. Slipping out of her sandals, Ai Ling sank her feet into the water, feeling the cold permeate her skin. Stirring the water, she could imagine the disturbance her feet were causing, scaring away the tadpoles and fish. She waited for something to bite her, to pull her down into the depths.

But all she could feel was the slow, heavy movements of her kicks. She picked up the infant shoes again and dropped them into the pond. The bright colours of the appliqués on the shoes – of an elephant and a bear – were quickly darkened by the water. The shoes suspended for a breath of a second in the water before sinking. She stared at the spot, watching the bubbles form and then pop.

Ai Ling heard a cough and saw an old man with a cane looking at her from the pebble-strewn path a few metres away. She withdrew her feet from the pond, the sensation of chilliness lifting off her wet skin. Without looking back, or paying heed to the old man, Ai Ling walked away. It was only when she was almost out of the park that she realised she had been walking barefoot, having left her sandals beside the pond. She considered heading back to retrieve them, but gave up the thought. She could always buy a new pair. There was no rush.

As Ai Ling had hoped, Wei Xiang did not notice the missing pair of infant shoes, and she did not care to remind him about them. He was forgetful, she told herself, and it was not necessarily a bad thing.

Chee Seng When I open my eyes, the world around me is shadows, and it takes a long time before they start to rearrange themselves into shapes and dimensions, shades and colours. The sounds, and then the smells, begin to make themselves known, little by little, as my mind struggles to make sense of these new, strange sensations. Slight movements out of the corner of my

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eye: a figure bent over a soot-blackened stove, swathed in layers of rags, stirring a pot, somewhat familiar. Steam rising up from the pot shrouds the face.

I shove away the dusty blanket, and pain shoots through my arms. I attempt to push my body upright and fail; I fall back on the bed, drained.

The figure at the stove does not turn around or show any sign of noticing me; it keeps stirring the pot. The smell of garlic and eucalyptus hangs in the air, prickling my senses. My stomach rumbles with hunger, and then I remember the ceramic bowl, the bitter concoction.

Nearby are a small wooden table and two benches; on the table is a bundle of tiny yellow flowers with red berries – herbs? – and a water jug. At the ankle-high threshold of the doorway, two brownish-grey hens are clucking and pecking, sneaking glances into the hut. Morning light reaches in to expose the grainy texture of the cement floor. Near the far wall, three wooden chests are stacked on top of one another according to size. The dark figure trudges towards a latticed larder, and from one of the compartments takes out a glass jar. Removing its cover, it sprinkles the contents into the pot with two light shakes and continues to stir it with the ladle. Then turning around, it finally acknowledges my presence with a steady gaze.

I have a hard time deciphering the face looking at me. With a scarf covering the hair and deeply creased lines around the eyes and lips, the face looks ancient, otherworldly, like a stone carving that has weathered seasons of rain and sun. The eyes, however, set deep within the folds of wrinkled skin, beam with a sagacious, ageless intensity, the eyes of a cat in the dark.

As the figure steps towards me, I notice that one of the eyes is actually glass, slightly larger, unmoving in the socket; the other is assessing me closely.

It is an old woman.

Putting the ladle down on the wooden table, she pours some water into a cup and brings it to me. I drink it very slowly, but want more. The old woman brings the jug over and fills the cup again. I drain it. After I finish, she points to the boiling pot on the stove. She places the jug on a stool beside the bed, then goes over and ladles the contents of the pot into an earthenware bowl, the steam rising visibly. It is a thick broth, almost gruel-like, rich with herbal spiciness; I scald the tip of my tongue in my haste, and it leaves an acrid aftertaste in my mouth and a sizzle on my chapped lips. Holding the bowl, the old woman encourages me to eat more.

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It takes a long time to finish it all; by the time I’m forcing the last granular dregs into my mouth, the soup has turned cold. I lie back down; a warm, effervescent sensation infuses my insides, spreading out to the rest of my body. Once again, I feel drowsy, the irresistible pull of sleep dragging me under. The soft, nearly incorporeal touches of the old woman as she arranges the blanket around me and smoothens out my hair come to me as if from a distant place.

The next time I wake, the old woman is nowhere in sight. How long have I slept? A few hours, a day? There is no clock to tell the time. How long since I was carried off by the waves? I try to recall something else – anything – but my memories are all fuzzy and loose, untethered to any semblance of reality. I slowly sit up on the bed, some of my strength returned, and listen to the surroundings. Apart from the clucking of the chickens outside, there is hardly any other sound. At the foot of the bed are my shirt and jeans, dried out and stiff like pieces of a discarded husk. The old woman has dressed me in layers of dun-coloured robes, held together with frog buttons. Though it is warm, I can’t bring myself to shed the layers.

The cement floor is cool to the touch. I try to stand and the blood rushes from my head; I waver unsteadily, my knees almost buckling, as though the earth is shaking under my feet. Once the moment has passed, I hobble towards the doorway in small, tottering steps. The soles of my feet are raw and tender. Narrowing my eyes against the light, I look out, resting my shoulder against the wooden doorframe.

Outside the hut is a small, compact courtyard, bordered on one side with ramshackle wire cages with missing or unhinged doors, and on another by a tidy garden plot, its perimeter marked out with trails of stones and pebbles, and a brick well in one corner. Budding knots of yellow flowers bloom in the garden, along with hanging fruits of berries, green limes and chillies.

The raked soil looks freshly turned over; a brood of chickens prances and pecks on the ground beside it, seemingly aware of the boundary of the garden, taking care not to step into it. A cobble-stone path, perhaps smoothened by years of footsteps, leads out of the courtyard and into a thick grove of trees about fifteen metres away. Beyond that, the hills rise and dip in smooth undulations, stretching to the distant coast.

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The old woman is sweeping the fallen leaves with a short rattan broom into the thick undergrowth of shrubs bordering the compound of the hut, stopping from time to time to pluck weeds from the ground. Despite her apparent advanced age, her strength is evident in the manner in which she is able to easily yank out the weeds, the roots still clutching clumps of damp soil. Across the sloping hills, the sun is descending, drenching the sky in yellow, purple and orange. The old woman continues to work, undisturbed, oblivious to my presence. I sit near the threshold in the shade of the hanging eave of the hut – standing has become unbearable – and watch her move across the courtyard, finishing her sweeping, then tending to the garden and herding the chickens back into the cages. She surveys the whole courtyard and walks to the brick well; she removes the wooden cover, picks up a small bucket attached with a rope to the side of the well, and throws it in. A hollow sound echoes from the mouth of the well, a watery slap.

With a few tugs, the bucket reappears, water overflowing the brim. She splashes the dry, hard ground of the courtyard with the water, then repeats the motion. The water spreads across the cracked surface in dark, rapidly moving tentacles, until the whole ground glistens like a shining coat of oil.

From somewhere deep in the forest, a melancholic howl pierces the air.

The old woman unties the rope from its metal handle, hefts the bucket of water and walks towards the hut, nodding at me as she crosses the threshold; her shrunken, furrowed feet are caked with grains of wet soil. I follow her inside.

She empties the water into two large earthenware jars and a cooking pot on the stove. With a quick strike of a matchstick, she lights a handful of dried chaff and shoves it into the hole of the stove, provoking the flames with a straw fan. Flickering orange embers glow from within. She starts to cook, taking out rice, eggs, cloves of garlic and stalks of leafy vegetables from the larder, and seasons the food with sauces taken from bottles coated with a sticky layer of grease. The smell of cooking conjures up fragmented memories of my childhood, of time spent in the kitchen watching my mother prepare dinners, a miasma of smells that lingered in the air long after the meals were done and the dishes put away.

The old woman performs the task briskly, knowing exactly when to add a pinch of salt or a dash of sauce, and how long to keep the lid on the pot

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to allow the soup to simmer. She does not ask for my help, though she throws pithy glances at me every so often. Sitting at the wooden table, I rest my cheek on my arm and drift in and out of sleep.

My dream is a broken reel of images and sounds: random faces, the terrible sound of waves crashing in my ears, a deluge of noises that shatter the silence. Amongst the images, I catch a glimpse of Cody’s face, staring into mine, expressionless, vanishing and then appearing again. His mouth moves, but nothing comes forth. I reach for him, but he is pulling away, receding farther and farther. I start to shout – in the dream? – and suddenly feel a firm pressure on my shoulder, shaking me, and I leap back into wakefulness with a gasp. The old woman is standing over me, watching me intently. She gives me a cup of water, puts her hand on my forehead, and motions to me to lie down on the bed. I fumble my way to the bed and collapse into it. Though I’m bone tired, I try to keep myself awake this time, afraid to slip back into my dream.

When the food is cooked, she heaps the rice and stir-fried vegetables onto a metal plate and brings it to me. Though I’m hungry, I can barely eat more than a mouthful of rice. She serves up a bowl of egg soup and nudges me to drink. I take a few sips and push the bowl away, suppressing the urge to throw up. I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling. The old woman returns to the wooden dining table and eats quietly; other than the chirping of crickets out in the gathering dusk and the nervous clicking of darting geckos, the hut is silent.

The old woman has still not spoken a single word to me, yet I do not find it in any way strange. It has briefly crossed my mind that perhaps she is mute, or if not, that she has chosen not to speak for reasons of her own.

Perhaps since she lives alone – I have not seen any other person in the hut or its surroundings – she does not need to speak at all, and maybe has already given up the ability. I myself am still too fatigued to speak, and even if I could, what could I say? Even the simple act of opening my mouth and forming words with my tongue seems like an impossible feat, one that requires a reserve of strength that I do not have.

After our meal, the old woman puts aside the leftovers in the larder, and washes the plates and bowls. When she is done, she dunks a rag in a small pail of water, then takes out a glass bottle filled with a dark liquid from a

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wooden chest beside the wall. She places a small stool before me and rests my feet on it. She starts to clean the dirt from the cuts and wounds on my soles and calves, causing me to grit my teeth against the pain. After pouring a small amount of the dark liquid onto another rag, she dabs gently. Some of the injuries are inflamed, while others are starting to ooze yellow pus. I bite my lip and taste blood. The pain tips over into numbness. For some of the larger wounds, the old woman applies a salve – from another jar – with her fingers. By the time she is done with my legs, and then my arms, chest and back, I have been reduced to a mass of worn, frayed nerves, beyond exhaustion, and I pass out.

Waking up later – is it the same night? – I immediately sense the absence of the old woman from the room. In the near darkness, I listen for any sounds of movement amid the noises of the night. A flute-shaped kerosene lamp is placed on the wooden table, emitting soft, feeble aureoles of light that throw the shadows of the objects in the room onto the walls in sharp relief. The wooden door of the hut is partially open, letting in the cool night air. I stumble to the entrance, using the lamp to guide me.

Outside, I can barely make out anything in the darkness, which has sealed the surroundings in a thick, impenetrable cloak. The sky is a lighter shade of purple-blue, and the scattering of stars seems to pulse with an irregular rhythm, like weak heartbeats. A wedge of light emerges from a gap in the tiny shed beside the hut. In daylight, the shed looked nondescript and run down, constructed out of uneven planks of wood and a corrugated-zinc roof; but now in the dark, it seems ominous, foreboding.

I hobble towards the shed, careful not to trip over any unseen objects or make a sound. The door is unlocked. I pull it open, adjusting my vision to the wan light provided by the lamp on the floor. The old woman is squatting just inside, her silhouette shaky on the wall of the shed, her body bent over something. I sidle up to her, and peep over her hunched shoulders.

Lying on the ground before us is a young boy, unmoving, his body enshrouded in a coarse blanket, revealing only his bloated face. And cutting across his closed left eye: a deep, red scar.

Now That It’s Over is published by Epigram Books (Singapore).

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Poetry

Yu Jian translated by Simon Patton

Yu Jian

Giving a Reading of My Poetry in Hong Kong for the Parenthèses bookshop Hong Kong’s waters are too shallow: skyscrapers and diminutive rooms

it’s for this reason that

Grab the opportunity to occupy the dried-up islands, original inhabitants – the fish – dive to other depths.

while the

With newcomer Finance on the rise, a bookstore is no easy thing to find amid all the gourmet food and pleasure-seeking.

The characters for the name ‘Rimbaud’ in Chinese mean ‘Orchid Wave’ his fish-scales are tucked away in an elevator in Wellington Street There, Madeline Progin’s Tiny bookstore

sells French books;

to read them

Surrounded by Cantonese, English and a putonghua pronounced in a galaxy of accents

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Poetry

Is like being at some secret meeting-place political group. The task

for an underground

I have been assigned is fraught with danger: I have to find a way through a gap in the surging logistical flow in Central And at 7.30

make my way between rows of bookshelves like station platforms

To do a reading of my poetry discharged themselves voluntarily.

for an audience who have

By that time they will be looking at their watches types of account books

between different

And carbon paper, swivelling on their office chairs at computer desks after their cigarettes have burnt down to their fingers And, face to face with sunset’s glass eye, are too long, or B’s.

discussing whether A’s lines

They will treasure the tea-break at interval parentheses I must get away

suspended within brief

From the disdainful whites of a 1,000 ATMs’ eyes of the legendary

and in the manner

Swordfish slice my way through a cement and glass sea, my Octopus card in the MTR,

showing

Touching on one more time as another layer peels off this life not poetry These pocket-size rhymes,

but

Have been restored to their original state having escaped the endless babble of language Recently, they have been translated into French by Li Jinjia and Sebastian Veg

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And now take up more room in that language than they did in Chinese I only have one copy on me which I brought all the way from the Yunnan Plateau.

I hack my way through a jungle of Gucci stores, perfume retailers and McDonalds, narrowly miss being knocked over By travellers lugging over-sized plastic carry bags car dressed in a black uniform the slip

and I give a private

Just as if I had managed to shrug off a secret agent wearing a cap pulled down over his eyes.

I am just beginning to get into my stride when suddenly I jump clear Of an escalator, its green light frozen, and so do not push and shove my way into the jubilant ranks of the Successful.

Instead, I make some changes to line 48, add three phrases, and walk past a newspaper kiosk then head downhill.

turn

Somewhere towards the south I cross a pedestrian bridge, dodge an illegal immigrant handing out advertising brochures in property’s Concentration camp and dig a clandestine tunnel out of there no one had ever seen the likes of.

After that No one is much interested in asking about my lost Peach Blossom Spring: anyone who wants to follow in my footsteps will have to go back there and get lost all over again – and again.

I go on hacking through the jungle and on, as things take a surreal turn, and I am made a liar of three times in the process.

At the entrances of flagship stores men and women with superstar looks ask me: Have you bought anything?

Yes, I have.

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Poetry

Have you had anything to eat?

Yes, I have And where are you off to?

To Landmark.

I am too embarrassed to tell them The truth, worried they will think I am up to something confiscate my travel documents My short lines of poetry

and

are past their use-by date, dealing with a flight the purpose of which is to lag further and further behind, to incite a go-slow The number 2 Is today’s secret signal: frame on the elevator

when it leaps out at me from the small green

The metal door opens.

You need light to read poetry light (the bookshop).

and there is

The whole space is brilliantly lit up, as an audience of expensive bookworms gaze at me in silent anticipation just like Soldiers waiting for their comrade-in-arms to return with the top-secret documents he has stolen.

I feel a bit edgy since I have no way of knowing for sure If the secret codes about to be deciphered not in the course of the journey

have gone bad by now or

Owing to all the endless twists and turns.

Day-time operations having taken their toll, I take a sip of water And start to read the first poem, hoping that this moment going to be one of disappointment.

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is not

from Sugarbread from Sugarbread B alli Kaur Jas wal

Balli Kaur Jaswal

‘P

romise that you will not become like me.’

The first time Ma had said it, I waited for an explanation but there was none. I asked her why and she said, ‘There are many reasons, Pin. You’re too young now to understand it all but you can avoid making my mistakes.

I just want you to keep it in mind. I was a little bit older than you when everything went wrong.’

The second time she warned me, I reminded her that she had told me the previous week. She gave me a sharp look. ‘And I’m going to keep saying it until you learn, Pin,’ she snapped. ‘Do not become like me.’ I felt embarrassed. Ma would not have had to remind me if she hadn’t seen me imitating her walk or trying to style my hair like hers. I thought that maybe this was just how it was – daughters and mothers were not supposed to be alike. It did not make sense to me, but Ma was adamant, and she repeated this only on Sundays, so it became our weekly after-market ritual.

I didn’t like it because it sounded like I was in danger, and I wanted to know more, but Ma did not like questions. She rarely gave answers, and only when she wanted to. I was only certain about a few things with Ma. I knew that she had a beautiful face but scarred, wrecked skin on her arms and legs. I knew that she liked watching Hindi movies and she sometimes cooed to the potted plants outside our flat. If I wanted to know anything else, I had to look for clues in her cooking.

We walked towards our flat and Ma slowed down so I could keep up.

She looked worried. ‘Let me take that,’ she said, pulling the bag of tofu from me. Going back to our block, we always took the route that led us away from the strings of people shuffling on their way to the market.

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‘Good thing we went early. Look at all of these people going now. It’ll be madness in there,’ she said.

Our block was Number 549. Daddy had bought a ticket with those digits before, combined with one new number each week. Directly opposite our block, the void deck of 547 was crowded with rattan birdcages. A few men helped to hang the cages from hooks in the ceilings, then they placed numbers above them. Inside the cages, brown songbirds chirped shrilly, as if trying to overpower each other. There was a sign in Chinese characters with the English translation scrawled underneath. It was for another community songbird contest. There was one under a different block every week. Old pot-bellied uncles, wearing white singlets and black shorts, sat underneath the cages with their heads cocked, listening for the sweetest song.

‘They all sound the bloody same to me,’ Ma muttered as we walked out of the lift and down the corridor to our flat. We could hear the birds from our floor – the shrill whistling would filter in through our kitchen windows all day until a winner was announced.

Ma went into her bedroom and emerged with a bottle of ointment. She rubbed it on the rash I had dug into my leg. ‘OK?’ she asked, but before I could answer, she said, ‘Yes, you’ll be OK.’ I felt so guilty about pretending to have a rash that I lined all of the plastic bags neatly against the kitchen walls. Ma paced the length of the counter a few times, an army general. I opened the door of the fridge and moved a carton of milk to make space. There was an order to how the food was arranged in the fridge, and it all depended on the week’s menu. I watched as Ma stacked spinach and bean sprouts in the vegetable drawer, put the chicken thighs and steely fish in the freezer, and the slab of tofu in a bowl of water. I tried to guess the food combinations for the week the way I searched my mind for Daddy’s winning numbers, but nothing came up.

Nothing made sense. Only Ma knew the plan. By the time she had finished, the fridge was crammed and blurred with colour, and it was almost noon.

I went back into my room, turned on the fan and stretched out across the cool, tiled floor. Fierce sunlight softened as it entered in shards through the slats of my blinds. In our small living room, Ma arranged the furniture as an excuse to watch television, and eventually she slouched onto the rattan

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sofa. The blurry shadows of neighbours continued to pass and I guessed the owner of each one, knowing I was correct. I could guess at the events of the rest of the day as well. Daddy would come home soon from his night shift at the hotel and poke his head into my room to tell me about his lottery numbers. Ma would cook a simple lunch, nothing too filling, because it was Sunday and she liked to cook big meals for our Sunday dinner. I would eat, help to clear the dishes, then go into my room while Ma and Daddy sat on the couch together and watched television. I would drift in and out of sleep, songs from the afternoon Hindi movies trailing into my room as the sun set and light escaped our home.

In our house, food was not just prepared and eaten to satisfy our appetites.

Ma created meals based on her mood, the weather or unusual events. I always chewed my meals carefully, tasting for clues. Cabbage leaves soaked in sweet coconut gravy told me that Ma was feeling mellow. Perhaps it had rained that afternoon and I hadn’t noticed it from the classroom window at school. Bay leaves and sour sauces were signs of sophistication – Ma was inspiring me to leave the narrow hallways of this block of flats where neighbours eavesdropped and tripped over each other’s shoes. Cinnamon sticks were Ma’s way of comforting me when she noticed a flaw in the way the world worked and she was softening the blow. The sharp tang of cumin added to any dish meant that Ma was bothered about something. There were many cumin dishes.

Daddy was the one who taught me how to find the hidden meanings in Ma’s food. He said that it was a useful skill, especially when she was upset.

The first time he told me about it, I was excited. I thought I would finally be able to figure Ma out. But all I discovered were her emotions. I could taste anger in the amount of red chilli powder and mustard seeds she sprinkled in a curry and I could tell that she was happy when she roasted chicken with light soy sauce and anise seeds, and served it over white rice.

But I ached to find out more about Ma. She was full of secrets. I had known that from the very first time I saw her standing at the window, gazing intently at the buildings in the distance and the sky beyond that. She did this often, becoming oblivious to everything but the wide sky ahead of her.

I was never sure if she was looking at something or looking for something.

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‘Your Ma does not always say what she’s thinking or feeling,’ Daddy said.

‘But when she cooks, she puts her whole mind and heart into the food and you’re bound to learn something about her.’ So I searched for Ma in her spices and sauces, her mixed vegetables and her sweet desserts.

Ma had only started making the market a part of our regular Sunday routine when we stopped going to the Sikh temple. I couldn’t decide which one I disliked more. I didn’t mind wearing a salwaar-kameez or keeping my head covered and my feet bare. I liked the quiet peace of the prayer hall with its separate sections for men and women. I pretended I was a celebrity when I walked down the strip of dull red carpet and bowed low in front of the large Holy Book and the bearded priest who loudly read the script and never looked up. I could bear the service – sitting cross-legged under fans that chopped the air, listening to the creaky accordions leading the hymns.

But I dreaded eating at the temple, and for this I was sure that God would punish me.

Temple food was charred roti – wheat flour and water rolled into a soft dough, flattened and cooked on a flat iron stove. Cauliflower and potatoes mixed with spices and lumpy dhal were stirred in massive pots and pans over huge blue flames that flared like upside-down skirts. Thin, runny yoghurt contained strips of carrot and cucumber. They hadn’t been cooked

by Ma. The women in the back kitchen lived on gossip, trading stories about their friends’ children and marriages. I always heard them talking when I walked in to put my plate in the sink. Once, one of them had caught my eye as I passed her and nudged her friend. ‘Isn’t that. . . ?’ she asked. Her voice wasn’t low enough. On the way home, I recalled the taste of their food in my mouth, dry and sour like their hushed gossip, and I told Ma I could no longer eat at the temple.

‘It’s God’s food,’ Ma always said firmly, like that was an explanation for anything. I was to be thankful for being Sikh, she reminded me, because in our religion, everybody was treated equally when it came to eating. ‘Old and young, poor and rich – as long as you believe in Him, you are welcome to dine at the temple.’ I had to admit that it was quite generous of God to feed everyone. But I still wished He would make His food a bit more appealing. Whining around Ma was not a good idea; she didn’t tolerate it.

I never attempted the scratching trick at the temple because it was too risky

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with so many people watching. They weren’t supposed to know about Ma’s skin trouble. It was something the three of us kept to ourselves. She had a condition that made her skin itch and become frighteningly red. She went to a doctor who gave her a special ointment and advised her not to scratch, but she said it was unbearable sometimes. If she was upset, her skin got even worse. The rashes grew and spread, and took over her skin completely. Ma wore long sleeves to the temple, even on the hottest days, and pulled them over her hands if anybody stared. People were always staring – needle-nosed ladies with their large eyes and greying hair, younger women whose glances darted away only to look back again. The men held their looks longer. I had asked Ma once why they always looked at us. She shrugged and said, ‘When my skin trouble started, they all had their own ideas about it. A stupid superstitious lot they are.’

To get me to eat at the temple, Ma had coaxed. She had pleaded. She had threatened. She had even allowed her voice to rise to a near-shout once, but so many people had looked up that she had to lower it, defeated. Finally, when I was about six years old, she came up with an idea. In her handbag, with napkins and a purse heavy with coins, she carried a small jar of sugar.

Glancing around first to see if anybody was looking, she allowed me to sprinkle the sugar onto the hot roti. I always watched and waited until it melted into the dough before I tore off a bite to test. Every time Ma let me eat this sugar bread, she shook her head and muttered, ‘This is the last time.’

But she brought that jar with her every Sunday, to every temple programme.

She told me once that roti was the only thing her own mother cooked when they were growing up. This was no surprise to me because my Nani-ji still ate roti for every meal.

‘Sometimes we had to modify it too. Just for a change,’ she had said, a smile playing on her lips. It was the kind of smile she wore when she was remembering something that made her happy. It wasn’t a look I noticed because often, the past brought shadows to Ma’s face.

Nani-ji was at the temple every Sunday, sitting in the ladies’ section, wearing her widow’s white. Her hair was so thin that small pink strips of her scalp showed through the gauzy material of her scarf. Every time I walked in and noticed her, I quickly reached up to make sure that my scarf was covering my head, concealing my short ponytail. From the corner of

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my eye, I noticed Ma doing the same thing. Nani-ji knew that we cut our hair and she didn’t like it, so we tried our best to hide the sin so she wouldn’t notice and comment. Sikhs are not supposed to cut their hair or shave; the girls and women have plaits that hang down their backs like ropes, and the men wear turbans and thick beards that swallow their faces. Ma and I were modern with our short hair and Daddy too, with those faint dots of stubble on his cheeks. He managed to escape the temple most of the time because he took Sunday shifts at the hotel. He wasn’t very religious, he admitted to me. He said that he had nothing against God, but he didn’t think it was necessary to sit and drink tea in His home every week either.

Nani-ji was too old and slow on her feet to go to the temple on her own.

Ma’s brother, Mama-ji Sarjit, drove her early in the mornings. She always sat up front with his wife, my Fat Auntie, which was why we sat in the back.

Ma and her brother only spoke few words to each other, and to Fat Auntie, even fewer. There had been an argument a few years earlier during which Fat Auntie had called Ma a disgrace for not attending her housewarming prayers. I knew this because Ma had said some unpleasant words about Fat Auntie’s figure, specifically about her bum. After that, we avoided the temple for a few weeks, then Nani-ji got sick and had to go to the hospital, so they were forced to speak again. They politely said hello and gave awkward side hugs as we queued up for food. The tension between them lingered in the air and settled in the milky tea I was forced to sip to push the hard bread down my throat.

‘I don’t like it,’ I told Ma, shaking the cup at her. The black dots of tea leaves rose to the surface. ‘It’s . . . unfriendly.’

‘Bitter,’ Ma corrected me but she had failed the test. I wanted to see if she, too, could taste emotions. ‘There’s no such thing as an unfriendly taste.

It’s the cardamom that kicks you a bit, takes away the sweetness.’ So she was not aware of the clues she gave away every day.

Beneath his thick beard, my Mama-ji’s mouth was set in a permanent frown. He greeted by nodding. He allowed Fat Auntie to talk as much as she wanted. At the temple, she was always the loudest. From across the women’s section, I could hear her shrill voice bouncing between the steel plates and the pale yellow walls. She got along well with the temple ladies.

I wasn’t sure if my grandmother liked her because Nani-ji didn’t like

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anybody, but Fat Auntie was always on her side. Every time Nani-ji stood up, Fat Auntie rushed to help her. Every time Nani-ji coughed, Fat Auntie patted her back with a look on her face that seemed more like concentration than concern. These gestures made Ma’s lips become thin as if she had to swallow them to refrain from saying something nasty. Because she felt this way, I did too. I spent my lunches at the temple focusing on hating Fat Auntie, and couldn’t eat the sweet rice pudding and greasy golden rings of jalebi because of the anger that coated my taste buds, stinging my mouth with bitterness.

We stopped going to the temple because Ma had had an argument with Fat Auntie. I did not know exactly what they had disagreed about because there was nothing they didn’t disagree about. It happened about a year ago in the dining hall after a long service.

I had just finished eating my lunch and was staring at the portraits on the wall. There were five portraits of the Gurus and I tried to figure out the stories they told. One portrait showed Guru Nanak atop a horse, a gentle halo illuminating his long robes. Another showed three men charging towards an army with spears. In another portrait, all nine Gurus sat cross-legged in a line, a temple towering behind them. I let my legs swing under the table. Nani-ji and Fat Auntie sat opposite us. Fat Auntie’s niece was there – a girl named Harpreet with long hair and a pointy chin. ‘We are cousins,’ she told me matter-of-factly. ‘My Auntie is your Auntie.’ I worked it out in my mind and we were not really related. Fat Auntie’s sister was Harpreet’s mother. But Harpreet was friendly enough and when I accidentally kicked her under the table, she cheerily said, ‘Never mind!’ before I could even apologise.

Ma and Fat Auntie were speaking in English and Nani-ji was slowly eating her food, mashing the roti up with her fingers and shovelling it into her mouth. She frowned as they spoke because she did not understand what they were saying. The conversation was about her. ‘She’s too old to be staying on her own,’ Fat Auntie insisted. ‘She can’t live in my house. I’ve got my two boys to look after.’ She gestured to her two sons, my cousins Devjit and Gurpreet. They were teenagers and didn’t look like they needed to be looked after at all. I only realised I was staring when Devjit scowled at me, so I turned my attention to Ma.

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‘We have no room in my flat,’ Ma said. ‘It’s too small. At least there’s a spare bedroom in your home. You know I want to take care of my mother in her old age. But it’s just not practical.’

‘Do you want to take care of her?’ Fat Auntie countered. ‘Or are you just making excuses?’

Ma stared at her and I could feel her boiling rage. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ she asked quietly.

‘Nothing. It’s just very typical of you. You don’t like to take on family responsibilities. And it’s hard to know when you’re telling the truth.’ She looked pointedly at Ma’s wrists, which poked out of her long sleeves. The sun had been strong that morning on our path from the block to the bus stop and Ma’s skin was scarlet.

‘Want to go outside and play?’ Harpreet asked me. I wanted to say no but Ma turned to me and said, ‘Pin, go with your new friend.’ She gave Harpreet a warm smile.

‘Your mother is very pretty,’ Harpreet said as we searched the racks outside for our shoes. I had placed mine on top of Ma’s but then more people had arrived and kicked their shoes off and the floor was a mess of black leather shoes, sneakers, high-heeled sequined sandals and flat slippers. I finally found my shoes but Harpreet said, ‘Don’t put them on. We’re going to play a running game.’ We left the temple building and descended the stairs that led to a courtyard where I met the other children. Ma and I had never stayed at the temple for very long before, so I didn’t know the other kids. ‘This is my cousin Parveen!’ Harpreet said, clasping my hand. ‘I’m Pin,’ I corrected her. Nobody called me by my full name. Daddy liked to joke that it was too long for me.

The courtyard was a wide open space with high grey walls covered in moss and creeping vines. The ground below my feet was rough and uneven but Harpreet assured me I’d get used to it once I started running. She was in charge of choosing the game because she was the oldest. ‘Can we play catching?’ a boy asked.

‘Later,’ Harpreet replied, then I saw her turn her head to the side. ‘Choos,’ she said under her breath. She saw me looking and she looked around before she quietly explained it. ‘I learnt it from my friend at school. If you say

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something but it’s not true, you have to say ‘choos’ afterwards. Otherwise God will punish you for lying.’ I kept this in mind.

We played ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ One person was named Mr Wolf and they had to stand against the wall with their back facing the rest of us.

‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ we cried out, and Mr Wolf would call out a time. We crept closer to Mr Wolf according to the number of hours he called out. If he said it was three o’clock, then we took three steps. The moment anybody got close enough to Mr Wolf, they had to try to touch the wall and run before he tagged them back. The person who got tagged became the next Mr Wolf.

We played rounds of the game until a cluster of clouds briefly blocked the sun and cast shadows on the courtyard. ‘Rain!’ Harpreet called out, dancing around as though it was already pouring. In the distance, we heard rolling thunder. A strong gust of wind carried the smell of damp earth from some other part of the island where it was already raining. I expected Ma to come out of the temple already but there were no signs of her.

‘Let’s play some more. I want to be Mr Wolf,’ one boy named Jaswinder said. It was not actually his turn to be Mr Wolf but everybody was tired and we were only half-heartedly playing anyway. He ran to the front wall.

‘Ready?’ He called out. ‘OK, ask me.’

The adults began to trickle outside, looking up at the tin-coloured sky.

‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ we asked. He did not answer.

‘Oi! What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’

Still nothing.

‘WHAT’S THE TIME, MR WOLF?’ we all screamed in unison.

Jaswinder turned around slowly and gave us a grin. And then he said, ‘Fuck’.

A hush fell over the group. Some boys began to giggle. The girls were appalled. ‘I’m telling your mother,’ Harpreet scolded him. She looked at me and shook her head. ‘I know his mother,’ she said to me. He did not seem to care. He announced the word again between giggles. The other boys shrieked with laughter but nobody dared to repeat what he had said.

The girls huddled together.

Harpreet didn’t have to tell his mother. She was one of the parents who had come outside when the sky began to darken. She rushed towards our

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group like a lightning bolt. ‘Say that again?’ she challenged, before slapping him hard across the face twice. I winced. Harpreet put her hands on her hips and looked satisfied. Jaswinder howled and whimpered as his mother dragged him off by the ear. ‘Saying vulgar words in the temple in front of everybody. Just you wait till I tell your father about this. He’ll give you a bloody thrashing at home. Just wait.’

We stood there in silence for a moment, as if mourning the loss of a soldier. ‘Maybe we should play catching or hide-and-seek,’ suggested a bony girl named Neelu. Harpreet agreed and asked me if I wanted to play too. I was about to say yes when I spotted Ma coming out of the temple entrance with my shoes in her hands. She was walking quickly and something was wrong. I could tell because of the way she looked at me, almost as if she was looking right past me because her mind was full of other thoughts.

‘We’re going now, Pin,’ she said sharply.

‘We’re playing hide-and-seek,’ I told Ma. ‘No. Get your shoes. We’re going now.’

I turned to Harpreet. ‘OK, next week,’ I said apologetically. I liked the temple more now that I knew the other kids. Running around and playing made me forget God’s bad food.

‘No. We’re not coming back next week. We’re not coming back here any more,’ Ma said. Harpreet’s eyes widened.

After I put my shoes back on, Ma took my hand and led me out of the courtyard. The group of adults stepped aside quietly to let us pass. The children looked confused. Harpreet waved but Ma was pulling me along so hard, I did not have a chance to wave back.

At the bus stop, I noticed that the backs of Ma’s hands were raw with scabs. She wrung her hands and bit her lower lip and tried to blink back tears that poured down her cheeks anyway. I put my head against her shoulder and my hand in hers but she shrugged me away. ‘God sees everything, Pin,’ she said finally as our bus approached. ‘You just remember that.’ I immediately felt a wave of guilt for playing ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ with that foul-mouthed boy Jaswinder. God had seen the whole thing.

The following Sunday, we started going to the market and Ma made a religion out of buying food and transforming it into delicious dishes with

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her recipes. I knew that Fat Auntie must have said something terrible to make her so angry but I did not dare to ask her what it was. I just accompanied her to the market and when she first told me that I should never become like her, I said, ‘OK.’ Then I turned to my side and said, ‘Choos, choos, choos.’ Thrice, because it was likely to be stronger that way.

Sugarbread is published by Epigram Books (Singapore).

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Poetry

Rushda Rafeek

Rus hda Rafeek

The Punctual Air-Hostess ‘Never married,’ my mother scoffed, a little less interested, her face twitching slightly to December’s cool.

Before the staff bus pulled in, her laughter threw chance on the road, watched dark-plumed ravens swirl around. Mornings holidayed in her scented nape like bougainvillea now tussling duller than empty estuaries spotted in her wrinkles.

‘Her lipstick,’ my mother said, ‘is too much.’

‘For a Chinese?’ I retorted, heading for bed.

She looked at me as if I’d done something terrible like the next day when the hem of a beach lay blood-lipped, some train torn from its tracks. That day, a shock, up in arms, spouting like an avalanche vicious and salty making orphans of children still in their sleep.

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The water galumphed, crashed in like a husband inebriated and when her name was asked ‘Na Tsumi’, my mother, with a quiver, informed the authorities searching for bodies somewhere between disaster and a long list in hand.

Poetry

Rushda Rafeek

Eelam, 2009 He waits under clouds sticky-white like yoghurt, in the absence of marbled doves, utters the risk of a Tamil alphabet cowering by the margins.

Neem trees bend to listen careful not to drop their thoughts blessed in green. Everywhere the fat in gilded mangoes sings mournful dew.

His hands garland her breast like huts catching fire, licking up roofs, her nipple in his mouth like a seed stuck out.

And when these soldiers stir the grass you would know how fear struggles to love, discovers life between her legs, utters a sentence of dark smoke

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and stains the sky with a gunshot. You would know how the lagoon in his ankles weeps lotus seeds as he runs without surrendering, her body mirrored in a puddle as it falls.

Note: ‘Eelam’ is derived from the name given to the civil conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, for over twenty-six years.

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Interview: Xu Xi

Int erview: XuInt Xi erview: Xu Xi

X

u Xi – an Indonesian-born Chinese raised in Hong Kong and educated in the US – is one of Hong Kong’s leading writers. Her transnational background gives her insights into the impact that shifting geopolitics and intertwining cultures have on individual lives. She has both written and edited compilations of short stories and essays, many set in Hong Kong.

Between 2010 and 2016, she acted as writer-in-residence at the City University of Hong Kong’s low-residency MFA creative writing programme.

Her fifth novel, That Man in Our Lives, was released in June 2016. The story is centred around a character – Gordon Ashberry – who appears in three earlier novels, Hong Kong Rose (1997), The Unwalled City (2001) and Habit of a Foreign Sky (2010), a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Her writing has been widely acclaimed, described as ‘beautifully refined in

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both intelligence and prose’ by Robert Olen Butler, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Asia Literary Review recently spoke to the author about the themes in the book and her views on Hong Kong, China and the changing balance of power between East and West.

Your new novel was originally inspired by the opera Nixon in China. What is it about that work, or that event in 1972, that motivated you? What relevance do you think it has to the current political environment between China and the US? When Nixon met Mao, it was a bit like when Harry met Sally – the beginning of a long relationship that would prove to be fraught with tension and arguments, but also involved cooperation, mutually beneficial trades and cultural, artistic and personal interaction. It was also the beginning of a challenge to US supremacy as the world’s superpower, because China’s subsequent economic rise proved so startling and fast, much faster than the world expected. When I first heard Nixon in China, something exploded in my head. Art has always interpreted history in unexpected ways, but here was one that was close to my heart. I was a college student in the US in 1972 and was fascinated by Nixon – both his paranoia and passions – and later, was living and working in Hong Kong when the US formally recognised China in 1979. Adams’ opera, which premiered in October 1987, placed history into the context of our global cultural life. The opera also happened to come out in the month I pledged allegiance to the US in New York and a couple of years before Tiananmen happened. Today, the US and China are on more of an equal footing economically, and the political balance of power is changing the way we think about our future world. For me as a novelist, this history as art and the evolution of the balance of power is riveting, especially in relation to long-term personal friendships and relationships, which is in large measure what That Man in Our Lives addresses. On an artistic level, the novel’s tropes are gender, love, romance, sex, power, marriage, family – everything a novelist needs to observe the world at an intimate level. What happens in the larger world – politically, economically, culturally – is simply an extrapolation of private lives, writ large, warts and all.

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Describe your character Gordon Ashberry, the ‘man’ in the book’s title.

Who or what was the inspiration for him?

No ‘Gordon’ or ‘Gordie’ exists in my life as a single person, although he is drawn from a number of men I’ve known, both real and fictional, from a variety of places and cultures. He first appeared in my 1997 novel Hong Kong Rose as a boy whose father brings him to Hong Kong. He falls in love with all things Chinese. I invented a back story and life for him, although he was a minor – albeit important – character. He’s a failed entrepreneur on Wall Street with a somewhat questionable or shady side, as well as a romantic wise guy. He then re-inserted himself into my next novel published in 2001, The Unwalled City, set during the years prior to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong back to China. Again, he was a minor character, though more about Gordie’s character and life emerged. Gordie had a much larger part to play in my 2010 novel Habit of a Foreign Sky. Now he has his own book, mostly to finally shut him up and to write him out of my over-active imagination. Some of the inspiration for him is jazz, the music I (and Gordie) love. But if I had to trace Gordie back to his ‘original sin’ source, as it were, it would be my fascination as a child with Bugs Bunny. I loved Bugs – the way he spoke, his wise-guy personality, his nonchalance as everything explodes around him, his irritation at all disturbances to his equilibrium. He is the nemesis for a host of characters, especially Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck. Bugs’ accent is Bronx-Brooklyn – a more literate Archie Bunker – which is of course not Gordie’s natural accent (he’s from a wealthy, patrician East Coast family in Connecticut) but it is one he delights in imitating. One of the more profoundly memorable moments of my adult life was to arrive in New York in 1986 and hear people (including colleagues who were former NYPD colleagues) who actually spoke like Bugs.

This was when he transformed from a cartoon character to his origins in real life, and it proved one of my conduits into understanding American culture. So Looney Tunes, and Bugs in particular, were the earliest inspiration for the man in my life that became Gordon Ashberry.

What are the core themes in your story and in your work?

The core themes in my work have evolved over my ten books and other published stories and essays. Among the central concerns in my writing are

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the Chinese diaspora family, feminism and the Asian woman, America’s influence on global culture, the politics of sex, and being Chinese in the world today. I’ve always been interested in politics, and after an eighteenyear former career as a marketing professional for multinationals and other businesses, I am concerned by the impact of capitalism on culture, society and individual lives.

In That Man In Our Lives, the idea of the balance of power in the larger world is examined through that more intimate power balance amongst friends, lovers, spouses, acquaintances. This novel took me a very long time to complete – a little over nine years, actually – because I found myself revising, complicating and expanding the fictional universe where Gordie hung out. My MFA advisor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Hungarian novelist Tamas Aczel, told me that my early attempts at novels needed more complications. I’ve heeded that advice over the years, never settling for the predictable or the easily explained or just the mechanics of a clever plot. The world deserves better than that from its novelists.

Why is ‘transnationalism’ such a major element in your novels? Is it simply because it mirrors your own life, or is there a broader point you are exploring?

My writing does of course mirror my own life, but my interest in transnationalism goes far beyond my personal experience. Many of the transnational lives I write about are quite different from my own, some significantly more privileged in terms of wealth, opportunities, intelligence and talent. Partly it’s to invent what I perhaps wished I had, but more importantly, I am extremely interested in the imbalance of wealth and opportunity in the world. Growing up in Hong Kong, and having lived and worked there, I am very aware of the huge divide between those privileged to be ‘transnational’ versus those who are ‘local’ because that is the only choice that life presents them. Modern urban reality is extremely stratified by class, even in the presumed democracy of the US. In Hong Kong, there are also many small traders of daily goods who transit through Chungking Mansions, many from African nations, as well as the sex trade – primarily Thai, Filipino, Mainland Chinese – or the Filipino, Indonesian and South Asian domestic helpers. In other words,

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there are many from third-world nations who can profit from the disparity of income with the first world. I’ve written about Filipino domestic helpers and their lives in some of my work, just as I’ve written about the intersection of local lives with transnational ones. It can be very easy, as a writer in English who is also read by third-culture kids in Hong Kong and Asia, to forget that not everyone gets to learn Mandarin or English well enough.

Many, many are left behind because of globalisation. The current US presidential election, as well as the rise of right-wing political parties in Europe, offer evidence of this divide.

What is your view of Hong Kong as a place for creative writers, given the sudden shutdown of the City University MFA program? What concerns do you have for Hong Kong?

My concerns for Hong Kong have less to do with whether or not creative writers can write here (writers can write anywhere they wish, Hong Kong included, and always will), but rather, whether or not Hong Kong will have a future that furthers the position it’s achieved as a major international city.

Right now, I hear, Hong Kong is the top competitive city according to some study (I think it’s Swiss), beating out the US. As a city, we are consistently ranked with nation states for all kinds of international indices – competitiveness being one – but also happiness, stress level, liveability, etc. The city is right now experiencing what is arguably its most political moment ever – topping even the 1967 riots.

Years ago, I wrote a novel about Hong Kong called Proximity. In it, a local political party arises that wants independence for the city, calling itself The Free China Movement. No one would publish the novel back in the seventies; no one cared about the Handover then. Fast forward and guess what, here we are, a little later than I perhaps anticipated, but certainly not far off. The first version of my novel projected a future-shock moment when Hong Kong sank like Atlantis. Such a dystopian ending has been echoed in a video that went a little viral after the Umbrella Revolution and also in an indie film about Hong Kong (Ten Years). Reality is often even more bizarre and stranger than fiction. Am I hopeful for the city’s future? Right now, I really don’t know. Trepidation is the prevailing mood in the world, not just in Hong Kong, as many uncertainties and mass movements of

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people daunt us. Meanwhile noisy people shout nonsense into our airwaves and cyberspace.

Do you think that it’s possible for Hong Kong to maintain its own identity separate from the PRC, given the gradually strengthening hand of Beijing in the SAR’s affairs?

I think Beijing would actually like Hong Kong to maintain a somewhat separate identity from the PRC, as long as the economy is stable and society is not in a state of turmoil. My reading of the tea leaves (i.e. what the PRC officially says) suggests that they want us to read between the lines, because that way everyone can pretend that they did not mean X or Y if the wrong things come to pass, which is just so Chinese. The Chinese leadership has enough on its plate to worry about without having to waste either ‘too much saliva or grey matter on tiny little Hong Kong’, this ‘pimple on the backside of China’ as I once described the city. There are plenty of creams to get rid of zits, but right now, the zits won’t go away – they erupt and grow ever more explosively red. For me it comes down to the local Hong Kong government, and whether or not it can rise to assume the mantle of real local leadership, as opposed to shutting out the voices of the people. There are real social problems in Hong Kong that need to be addressed locally, and is it any wonder that political movements have risen up through frustrated people who feel they have no voice that the local government appears willing to hear? Never mind the PRC.

That Man in Our Lives is published by C&R Press.

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from That Man in Our Lives That Man in Xu OurXiL ives

Xu Xi

March 2003

T

he flight delay from JFK into Tokyo meant that Gordon Marc Ashberry (born Gordon Haddon Ashberry) missed his Hong Kong connection and spent the night, without luggage, at a hotel near Narita, courtesy of Northwest. His travel companion Larry Woo was billeted at a different hotel as a result of alphabetical logic. In the morning, Larry Woo boarded Japan Airlines flight 731 for Hong Kong. He looked out for his long-time friend, the man he met some forty years earlier on board a flight from Hong Kong when Larry was still an eager ‘foreign student’, leaving home for the first time for college in New York. As boarding ended, he listened, concerned, to the announcement that departure would be delayed due to a no-show, because that passenger’s baggage had to be offloaded. Procedure in the best of times, but post 911, the travel world took fewer chances. Larry flagged the purser and suggested the airline page Gordie one last time because his friend must be around.

‘Perhaps he didn’t wake up in time,’ the purser remarked, although she made no attempt either to stop the offload or issue an announcement. Larry sat back, trapped, unable to decide whether or not to disembark. In all the years of their friendship, he had never known Gordie not to wake up, Gordie, the man who never slept.

Gordon Ashberry meant to board JL 731. The check-in counter was frantic when he arrived, because some dignitary had lost either his passport or

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wallet, or so Gordie ascertained from the Putonghua conversations among that Chinese party. Japanese agents were bowing; Chinese faces looked perplexed. Sino-Japanese relations were at their usual impasse, their minimally shared language notwithstanding.

It was, as Chairman Mao might have said, a moment to be seized.

Gordie had been prepared for the past year and a half. In the men’s room, he chose a stall at the far end, away from the entrance, to delay discovery.

There, he removed from his calfskin travel wallet the driver’s licence, social security and credit cards of one Marshall Hayden, as well as a US passport that listed his occupation as a jazz singer (baritone) with a work visa for Japan. The passport and wallet of Gordon Marc Ashberry he left in the stall.

From his carry-on, he pulled out a pair of black Levi’s and a grey sweater (never his colours anytime), took off his dark-olive Armani suit, and effected the change. Shoes! He had not considered shoes, but then he remembered sneakers in a locker from his last trip, two months prior, too-bulky sneakers he had stuck away without further thought. Fortuitous. The locker had not expired and, in what he later considered his most brilliant move, he locked his leather shoes and overcoat inside. For a second, he regretted the coat, a camel cashmere, one he had owned for at least twenty years, purchased at the Peninsula Hotel’s shopping arcade in Kowloon. True to form, he did not think either too long or too hard, and folded the coat neatly for airport employees and detectives to puzzle over in the months to come.

Just before heading to the Northwest customer services desk, he discreetly tucked the carry-on containing his suit and shirt behind a row of seats. Then Marshall ‘Mars’ Hayden presented his credit card and identification to purchase a round-trip ticket for Tokyo to Detroit.

‘It’s a family emergency,’ he explained, his boyish features poignant. ‘My mother’s cancer took a turn for the worse. They say she won’t make it. I’ve had to cancel all my performances.’ The Japanese woman behind the counter was sympathetic, but mostly she was charmed by this green-eyed gaijin with the Reds baseball cap and sexy smile, who spoke halting Japanese and said he sang jazz (Kool! She would tell all her jazz club friends, how jealous they’d be!), this man who was so upset that he at first gave her his US driver’s licence (State of Ohio) instead of a passport. She glanced at his age: forty-two, but he looks so much younger. A willing vagina does many

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things, not the least of which was that she charged him the cheaper medical emergency fare which, technically, she shouldn’t have without proof, but what use was being thirty-something and a ‘supervisor’ if you couldn’t occasionally act that way?

‘You’re a sweetheart,’ Gordie-Mars exclaimed, blowing her an air kiss. She blushed pink as a dyed turnip on a sushi platter and giggled like the schoolgirl she still, at heart, was.

D.O.B. on Gordon M. Ashberry’s New York State driver’s licence was 1948, as the detective noted in his report the next morning. The police did not talk to the Northwest customer services supervisor because there wasn’t any reason to. Had they done so, she would have recalled those magical green eyes, which might have tipped them off. She might not have remembered the dirty blond hair peeking out of the baseball cap, but she would have remembered the eyes. Eye colour in Marshall Hayden’s passport was declared to be grey, and the photograph showed his hair a dark auburn hue. Gordie had hesitated a second as he jammed the cap on his head in the men’s room; he had forgotten his kit with the hair dye and grey contacts. So it was a gamble, one of his last.

By the time his calfskin wallet had become ‘evidence’, as had the carry-on (although these two items remained unconnected for months afterwards, almost a year, because Larry Woo could not recall what Gordie was wearing, other than, oh, I don’t know, what he always wears) Marshall Hayden was long gone.

And that was how Gordon Marc Ashberry disappeared, became invisible, vamoosed once and for all down his rabbit hole, where he could croon like a lounge lizard and mimic Bugs, forever, in peace.

That Man in Our Lives is published by C&R Press.

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My Mother’s Miracle My Mother’s Miracle Rajes h K. Reddy

Rajesh K. Reddy

I

t had long been my mother’s dream to see our house become a temple.

Saturday nights she would measure grains of rice into her mortar and grind them with the pestle. Her own mother had passed the tradition on to her and, with the powder tight in her fist, she would thumb the flour out to form the shapes of petals until, an hour later, a wealth of lotuses graced the entrance to our home. It was around these blossoms that my mother arranged a dozen tea lights. The flowers were the precursor to her Sunday devotions, a welcoming into our lives of the goddess Lakshmi, herself born of a lotus.

I remember the doorbell ringing around midnight one Saturday in September. I was six or seven and had slipped out of my bedroom to the balcony, where I stuck my head between the railings to catch sight of the policeman at the door. He was dressed in a tan-coloured, short-sleeved shirt, with a badge in the shape of an encircled star hanging from his pocket. He spoke in measured tones and addressed my father first, saying that he’d spotted the candles from the road. Then my mother came between them to explain what they were for.

‘Like a welcome mat?’ he asked her.

‘Not like a welcome mat,’ she said pointedly, and waited for him to step back.

But it was against the law to have a fire left unattended, no matter how small. It was for their own safety, the officer explained, and that of the neighbours.

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My father opened the door wider to show him the smoke curling out from the prayer room beneath the stairs and said, ‘She’s just as likely to burn down this house and the whole neighbourhood from within as from without.’

The officer smiled and gave him a shrug. ‘Afraid the law’s the law, no matter how little sense it makes to us, sir,’ he said and then waited, thumbs in his pockets, until my mother had snuffed them out. He made a point of speaking directly to her the next time some weeks later and remarked that a third visit would see her fined, or worse.

Although my mother stopped setting the candles out on the porch, she continued to draw the rangolis every week, my father shaking his head as he watched her, for it was not the candles but the designs that concerned him. ‘Your mother’s logic,’ he once said to me as she worked the pestle. ‘The more of these she makes and nothing happens, the more convinced she gets that God will come. But who turns up at our door instead? The very voice of reason telling her to stop.’

It is a governing tenet of Hindu thought that the devas reveal themselves only to the most devoted of all their supplicants, and the bedtime stories my mother told me often featured gurus seated cross-legged under Bodhi trees while they eschewed the essentials of food, water, and shelter for months, if not years, until one of the gods visited them with their desired boon. My father confided that it wasn’t really my mother’s fault that she believed this. She was a product of her surroundings just as her mother and her mother’s mother had been long before her.

Descended from lines of farmers, my parents grew up in remote villages in Andra Pradesh, where temples constituted the few gathering places, a good number of them having been carved into the hillsides more than a millennium ago. Their marriage had been arranged in one such place, and in 1979 they embarked on the long passage to southeast Texas, where my father was preparing to build his medical practice and where they’d soon be searching for a house to call their home. A year and a half later, they closed on a new, two-storey house with a long staircase, three baths, and four rooms. I knew that my mother had desired full use of a room for her worship and that my father, determined to free himself from the clutches of

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superstition, had forbidden it outright. He considered America to be the land of reason, and he wouldn’t see his children caught up in the religious fervour he’d escaped from. But my mother had a will of her own. Eventually, she laid claim to the closet that ran beneath the stairs. It featured more floor space than all the others, and I can imagine my father conceding it to her out of having found it somehow fitting, for while you could take a step or two within, you were forced to kneel at its deepest point, where my mother had arranged her chosen gods.

It was in this place that my mother cloistered herself on most mornings and for the better part of every Sunday, praying before a clutch of candles while incense and the bhajans from her cassette tapes filled the house. It was as if she’d created a realm inside yet apart from the rest of our home, and it was practically impossible to draw her out of it before her prayers were done.

Only then would she call me in to press a tikka between my eyes and receive the day’s prasad, whether a basketful of pomegranates, bananas, or coconuts, or a plate of laddoos or jalebis she’d asked the gods to bless. At five or six years old, I was sure that this space beneath the stairs constituted something very much like holy ground and I was always conscious of my presence in it whenever I was called inside. Yet at some point I began to grow aware of the fact that the older I became, the sooner I had to stoop to avoid the ceiling, which had blemished as the smoke from the candles and incense curled out of the closet along the slant into the hall, where my father had planted a chair to disable the smoke detector some years before I was born.

I’ve often heard that where there’s smoke there’s a fire, and the expression has always made me wonder, albeit vaguely, if smoke wasn’t just evidence of a fire but could somehow itself start one. I can only imagine how much of it must have accrued along the years, and I wondered if it would have ever been enough to set the alarm off in warning, and if my mother, in one of her meditative states, would have been able to tune it out also. But it was all just a matter of biding our time, I learned. My parents had had that house for eleven years, and I was almost nine on the day when the phone began to ring with the news that my mother’s miracle had finally come.

My father responded to the first two or three by shouting for her to get the phone. But it was a Sunday and she was in her temple, deaf to the world outside. By the fifth, he decided we would go out to lunch early. It had

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grown into a tradition, a father and son affair. We would head to the local sports bar near the hospital and I would try to match how much he ate while he nursed a couple of beers. He’d come to know the owner and most of the servers and he loved it when his patients would come up and grab his shoulder or shake his hand. They would often ask me what I wanted to do with my life, and whether I was planning on becoming a doctor too.

The question was enough to make my father proud, and I knew that being in that place and being known in it was important to him as well. It was proof that he’d assimilated, that he’d become a fixture in our town.

But that day was different. Instead of sitting at an open table, my father directed us into a booth and when the waitress came to take our order, he asked for his usual pint and a glass of milk as well. We were going to conduct an experiment, he told me in a voice so low it felt conspiratorial, and he began to turn his coaster around and around on the table, waiting for the drinks to come. A chemist at heart, my father took a special pride in his demonstrations, and the ones that pleased him most were those he said they’d never teach me in my public school.

Almost a year before, he’d sat me down in the kitchen, twisted a banana free from the prasad of one of my mother’s pujas, then plucked a second from a cluster she’d bought for the coming Sunday. He peeled both beneath the table, set the skins aside, and held the bananas up, one in each hand, and asked me, ‘Same or different?’ He spoke in his didactic tone, which meant there was only one answer and that he already knew what that answer was.

My mother was scrubbing dishes in the sink. She let the water run and waited.

‘They’re different,’ I answered him, and my father asked me how. One was probably days, perhaps a full week older. It featured specks of brown and was riper than the other.

‘Won’t this one get just as ripe?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘So, basically?’ he said.

‘Basically the same,’ I told him.

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‘But your mother here thinks otherwise.’ She’d come closer to the table and he ate one of the bananas to the nub, then finished that too. ‘So have I been blessed?’ he asked.

My mother answered for me. ‘That you’d make games of God’s gifts,’ she started. ‘You might as well eat the other also. Neither will work for you.’

This was the response my father had been waiting for, and he handed me the second and said I’d have to decide what to make of it myself.

‘Then let him,’ my mother shouted.

‘Only fair to let the boy hear both sides before he chooses, no?’

He’d given me the riper one and so I was sure it was the one she had already used in her puja a week ago. But though this was beside the point for my father, for my mother it was everything. I took a bite of the banana and answered with a question of my own. ‘Then why do you eat the prasad at all?’ I asked him.

‘If a blessing can do no good, how could it possibly do me harm?’ he said.

‘Then no need to eat any of it here forward,’ my mother said.

My father raised his voice in turn. ‘A wife blesses all the food in the house, and what is a husband to eat in his own kitchen? She blesses every piece of furniture he buys, where is he to sit when he comes home? Can I even step on the carpet now, or has it become holy beneath my feet as well?’ My father waved her off and proceeded to compare what she believed with what he called the hoax of transubstantiation. Essentially, there was no difference between a banana that had been blessed and one that hadn’t, no difference between two wafers despite what a priest might say about them. In the end, there could be no mystery because there had been no change in chemistry, and any argument to the contrary proved a shame to my father, for he believed there was mystery enough in chemistry alone.

My father made sure to ask for a pair of straws when the server returned with our drinks. One was for my soda and he set the second down on the table and sipped thoughtfully from his beer. My mother hated that he brought me there to eat the kind of food she’d never prepare for us at home and she never missed an opportunity to warn me about the dangers of smoking and the perils of alcohol. We were still waiting for our burgers and fries when I asked what the milk was for. The straw was still cased in its

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wrapper and my father dipped the end of it into the cup. The milk climbed a half-inch up the paper. A little later, it climbed some more. He asked me in his probing tone why it did that.

There was only one answer, and I didn’t know it.

The process was called capillary action. It accounted for the movement of molecules against the pull of gravity. After a minute the milk had risen halfway up the paper and he tore the tip of it off the top and plugged the hole with his thumb. There was no mysterious force siphoning the milk through the straw, he said, and added in a harsh whisper that the laws of science could either govern everything or account for nothing, and that it would be up to me to decide what I thought. We stayed a couple hours longer, and I remember waiting for my father to tell me what the lesson had been for. But that answer wouldn’t come from him. I wouldn’t know it until I got home.

My mother had finished her puja and changed into one of her finer saris, the pallu of it bedecked with dime-size mirrors, a dozen of which held my father, others of which reflected me. My mother pulled me to her.

‘You didn’t think to tell me? Instead you take him to that place?’

‘It’s a pub, or a prison?’ he asked her. ‘And did I not shout ten times for you to get the phone?’

‘How to hear you when I’m praying?’

‘Then why expect me to waste the words at all?’

‘This is different.’

He laughed and raised his finger, though it was himself indicted in all her mirrors. ‘You have to ask yourself what kind of mind claims to both be deaf and have selective hearing.’

The news had been spreading among my mother’s friends, and several had called to report that for two days a statue of Ganesh had been drinking up gallons of milk, spoonful by spoonful. The idol belonged to one of the families from our temple who lived in northeast Houston, which meant that visiting it was a two-and-a-half-hour drive each way. I protested that it was a school night, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. It was true that she could make herself deaf to anything. What’s more was that my father

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proved no ally, either, for he seemed to advocate my going for that very reason, as if this were my education.

It was growing dark by the time we reached the outskirts of Houston. It had started raining and I’d been following the swishing of the wiper blades when I asked my mother if she’d ever heard of capillary action. She hadn’t and I did my best to explain.

‘It’s someone talking through you,’ she said.

‘It’s science,’ I explained.

‘You sound just like him,’ my mother told me. For years, this would be the harshest criticism she would know to level at me. ‘Some hundreds must have held a spoonful of milk in offering to Ganesh now, so tell me, what has your capillary action done with it all?’

It was something to think about, and I wished for a moment that my father really did have the power to talk through me, if only so I could know what his explanation might be.

But the truth was that I had, and still have, both my mother’s and my father’s voices in me, this despite the fact that their marriage would not last two years more. I’ve since learned that there are moments one can point to after something has broken to determine when the first cracks began to form. Except that my mother and father were two halves that had never fit together and no piece conceived of could have ever satisfied the fissures to make them whole, for a child cannot choose to both believe and disbelieve.

Dozens of cars lined the family’s street. They lived in a modest, single-storey home with two trees in the yard, the leaves stripped by the season.

There were familiar faces there. Most of the children were my age or a little younger, many seated on their parents’ laps as we moved from chair to chair. Since we lived hours from the temple, I only saw them at the most important festivals. One of these was Maha Shivarathri, which was occasioned when the suras, or lesser gods, and the asuras, their demon counterparts, collaborated to unearth the nectar of immortality buried beneath the ocean floor. What they uncovered, however, wasn’t a nectar but a poison, one whose spread threatened to end all life. Recognising the peril, the god Shiva drew the poison into his throat while the goddess Parvati clamped her hand

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over his mouth to keep it from escaping. As my mother told the story, millions stay awake during Maha Shivarathri, or the Great Night of Shiva, in remembrance of the god’s selfless act.

The significance of the celebration marked it as one of the few times my mother would make the trip to Houston instead of worshipping at home, and it also happened to be the one time of the year my father would accompany us. For him, it was little more than a social event, an excuse to drink chai and play rummy with other men. But even with the games and conversation, he always seemed distracted by the fire.

My father never shared his thoughts with the others, and it was only years later that I considered the ritual in light of all he’d lived through. He was the first-born of a farmer’s sons, and it had been in his blood to plough and pull water, to seed grains into the furrows, to tease milk from the cows and pinch eggs from the chickens. Like my mother, he knew how the land could never yield enough, and it must have struck him as incredible that a starving people could watch the very answers to their prayers rise in smoke.

I was never able to meet the dawn and I’d always be shaken from my sleep by the chiming of the bells, after which everyone would gather for the morning prayer, receive their offerings that the priests had blessed, and redistribute them among their family and friends, all grateful for the day.

My father, however, found the story of Shiva’s exploit absurd, and I recall how one time he adjusted the rear-view mirror so that our eyes met in it.

We’d just turned out of the parking lot and he asked, ‘So what did Shiva do with all this poison once the sun came up? Have they ever told you that?’

They hadn’t.

‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ my mother told him.

‘He must have spat it out at some point or else held it in his throat forever – or maybe did he drank it and then he died, if it’d really been poison after all. You tell me. One of these three things must have happened, no?’

‘He swallowed it,’ my mother answered. ‘But by then the poison had turned into the nectar the suras and asuras had been vying for.’

My father huffed a laugh. He checked the road and tried the mirror again.

‘The reason your mother has an answer for everything is that she gets to make it up as she goes.’

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Nevertheless, I’d liked my mother’s answer better. My father must have suspected this, for it was a few weeks later that he sat me down in the kitchen to discuss the sameness of bananas and wafers and the politics of transubstantiation.

United by their belief, our hosts had seen their house become a temple.

Theirs was what our house might’ve looked like if my mother had been given free rein over it, if my father had been a different man; and I imagined the pang of jealousy my mother must have felt knowing God had favoured this family over hers.

For her, Ganesh’s drinking milk was proof of the divine as well as a test, and we’d been waiting for more than an hour when we finally saw him. He was cut from marble and sat eight inches high, cross-legged on a mat of straw. One of the priests had come to conduct the prayers and the offering of milk. Together, my mother and I watched as the next worshipper, a woman, was questioned and let in. The priest asked her to recite a prayer and as she did I gave a tug of my mother’s sari and whispered how I’d had a burger with my father that day. My mother kept me in front of her, her hands hard on my shoulders, anxious as I was – more perhaps, for the woman had set a rose at Ganesh’s feet and the priest was dipping the spoon into the bowl for her. But her back was turned to us and so all I saw was that the milk was gone when she drew it back and the priest, taking it back from her with one hand, pressed a tikka between her eyes and sprinkled coconut water into her hair. She pressed her hands together, prayed again, then rose and was gone.

‘Meat today?’ he asked me.

‘Not today,’ my mother said, and her grip on my shoulders tightened as she guided me into the room, where I dropped to my knees. The priest placed a yellow rose in my hands and asked me to recite the prayers after him. They were only sounds to me, rhythmic as the back and forth of birdsong. They might have signified anything or nothing. They were the voices of my mother and my father. They were a voice growing louder in me. A plea for Ganesh to drink one more time, a confidence that the laws of chemistry would draw the liquid away, and a hope that if it would not rise for me, that it would for all those who’d come after; and having set my

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rose beside the others and given the spoon, I raised the milk in offering, and waited.

It was still raining when we left. The sky was seared by forks of lightning followed by moans of thunder. I could still feel the touch of the priest’s thumb upon my forehead, the smear of red powder, fine as my mother’s ground rice, that would disappear by morning. The world seemed broken somehow and I remember trying to piece it back together, to make it appear whole again. I remember once asking my mother what the point of offering food to God was since we ended up eating it ourselves anyway. What she told me was the story of a king who’d grown proud of his wealth and who ascended Shiva’s mountain to display his greatness with a feast. Irritated with the king’s arrogance, Shiva suggested he take Ganesh in his stead but not before warning him of the child’s appetite. Self-assured, the king led Ganesh back to his kingdom, where the latter consumed his entire store of food, then turned to the king’s gold coins before starting at the walls themselves. It was then that the king raced up Shiva’s mountain and begged forgiveness for his pride. Satisfied, Shiva gave him a handful of toasted rice and explained how only an offering made in humility could satiate the gods.

It was true, my mother said, that faith needed something to feed upon. But the important thing, she noted, was not that God eats all or any part of what one offers but that the offering is given in devotion.

The story had meant one thing before, and I knew then that it now meant something different. Faith needed something to feed upon. Something to feed upon. Something to feed. I was sure that my father would’ve said that he couldn’t have agreed with her more. Faith needed something to feed upon. Something to feed upon. Something to feed.

He ended up keeping the house, my mother getting her choice of the cars.

They’d divvied up the furniture, but my father was eager to see each piece he’d fought over sold or given away so that he could replace it. I remember asking him if none of the chairs or beds that my mother had blessed had resulted in any good, how could any of them have harmed him now. But that was beside the point, he said. It was a time to start anew, to make that house his home again. It’s since been afforded two coats of paint, the

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smoke-stained ceiling from my mother’s worship layered over, the closet full of shoes, suitcases and winter coats. Yet sometimes when I take the stairs back up to my old room I still get the sensation I’m passing over a sacred place, a crevice someone had once thought to carve a temple into.

My father never asked me what happened that night. On the one hand, I assumed that inquiring would have constituted an admission that the laws that he believed in could fluctuate. On the other, I guessed that he and my mother had already argued over it. Either way, I’ve only talked with him about it once.

It was Thanksgiving break of my final year at college and I’d timed my drive back to meet him for a drink after his last rounds at the hospital, before I’d make the drive to Houston to see my mother. He was waiting in one of the booths, ahead by two beers, and there was a pint and a basket of fries waiting for me. I’d given up meat two years back, and by that time had begun phasing out eggs and dairy too. The fries were soggy and my father tapped the table, prompting me to catch up. Taking a drink, I noticed the ring of water my glass had marked the coaster with. I smiled and asked if he remembered the time he taught me about capillary action.

‘Vaguely,’ he told me. ‘Why?’ ‘We were sitting right here,’ I said.

He looked from the wall of TV screens. ‘Place didn’t exist then.’

He was right. Years had passed, this bar had opened, and the first had closed. Still, it was the same bar. My father had come to belong in that one then just as he belonged in this one now, and I think he knew it for he’d begun to seek out booths instead of the open tables and the bar. ‘It was the day that that statue of Ganesh was drinking milk, you remember?’

‘It wasn’t drinking,’ he told me.

‘So you do.’

He nodded. He remembered. He mentioned the wrapper and the straw.

I took a drink, and my father gestured for the server to get me my next round as she passed. ‘You know that they weren’t letting people who’d eaten meat offer milk that day,’ I said.

‘How would I have known that?’

‘I don’t know. Someone might’ve told you when they called.’

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‘No one told me.’

‘Either way, I’m not asking how. I’m asking if you did.’

‘I don’t remember if I did or if I didn’t. It was a decade ago. It was more.’

The waitress set my beer down. Bubbles were rising in it, then breaking out across the surface.

My father was still watching the TVs. He said, ‘I let you order what you always ordered. I let you eat what you wanted to. If anyone, it was your mother, her miracle that betrayed you.’

‘You had no hand in it?’

‘You can say I did if you like, but I didn’t. From sunrise to sunset that day you chose what you wanted to choose.’

‘How did I choose?’

‘You chose,’ he said and picked up his beer. He waited.

I finished my first and set the second onto the coaster. I looked up at the TVs and tried to guess which had his attention.

‘You know what your mother would say if she were here?’

‘Mom? At a bar?’ I said.

‘Do you know what she’d say?’

I hadn’t heard him use the tone in years, and I lifted my glass. ‘You could just tell me,’ I said. ‘ “My whole life I prayed for a sign, something to make you believe. But your father, he made it so that all you could offer with the spoon was poison.” Sound like her?’

I agreed. It did.

Still, he didn’t take his eyes from the TVs. ‘But it wasn’t what you gave but how you gave it, and that belief turned the poison back into milk. How simple to make these things up.’

‘Transubstantiation.’

‘Though she’d never use that word.’

‘No. She wouldn’t,’ I said, yet it was something I could imagine her reasoning. She would have said that it was something for faith to feed upon.

‘It was stone, you know.’

‘What was?’

‘The statue. It was marble.’

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He saw where I was going and he looked at me and huffed a laugh. ‘You shouldn’t have any doubts then, should you?’

He was right. I shouldn’t have, and the truth was I didn’t – this despite the fact that I still had no answer to my mother’s question about where the milk had gone. But my father was also wrong about something. I never got to choose to believe or disbelieve, just as neither he nor my mother had ever been able to choose for themselves.

It just so happened that I’d begun to see the world through the bonds of chemistry. Yet while it’s true that the matter of like elements will always pool together, the knowledge that should have cleaved me from the one just as it cleaved me to the other could not forget the first. It was a different kind of orbit, with every tug, a tossing, the storm of a valence electron. And it made something as simple as a Dos Equis exquisite, for my father had explained some years ago how the molecules of air trapped in it gathered, then rose from the most infinitesimal of imperfections in his glass.

Watching the bubbles rise in my own that day reminded me of the promise he’d made as he detailed how a crush of grapes will turn to wine in the right conditions and thin the blood. There was chemistry in mystery, yes, but there was mystery in chemistry also. One contained the other, which contained the other still. But my father could never drink to that and so I lifted my own in its recognition, and held the beer in my mouth a while before I dared to swallow.

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Interview: Krys Lee

Int erview: Krys IntLerview: ee Krys L ee

K

rys Lee’s highly-acclaimed 2012 collection of short stories, Drifting House, was shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Award and was awarded the Rome Prize. Praised at the time for the ‘stark beauty’ (Daily Telegraph) and ‘rare clarity’ (Economist) of her writing, and for plumbing ‘the darkness on both sides of this divided nation’ (Financial Times), Lee’s latest work builds on her earlier achievement, this time in the form of a novel.

How I Became a North Korean, published by Faber & Faber in August 2016, has received similar accolades from such writers as Adam Johnson, whose novel about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son, won the Pulitzer Prize. Yiyun Li speaks of Lee’s ‘empathy and insight and a deep sense of place’. That’s high praise for fiction based in the border areas of North Korea and China, about which there is much speculation and little informed

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knowledge. Krys Lee has worked closely with escapees on that border, and her own experience imbues her fiction with a startling sense of moral truth.

Lee’s three protagonists – a Chinese-American of Korean descent, a North Korean woman desperate to protect her unborn child, and a member of the Pyongyang elite whose father was murdered by Kim Jong-il himself – find themselves on the Chinese side of the border, where the novel follows their converging lives as they try to escape from their disparate pasts and find a route to freedom.

The Asia Literary Review recently spoke to the author about how she came to write the novel, and how she approached the challenges of conveying accurately the difficulties faced by refugees from North Korea.

What got you started on How I Became a North Korean?

I started How I Became a North Korean early in 2010, after I had been asked to help set up a safe house in the Chinese border area, between North Korea and China. Though I’d been good friends with North Koreans and activists for nearly ten years, and involved in the community, I had had no intention of writing about it because I thought it was a story that North Koreans should write themselves. But upon the prodding of North Korean friends as well as the growing sense that maybe I should write about what was central to my life and concerns at the time, I finally gave myself permission to begin the novel.

How did you come to write a novel rather than non-fiction? (Though the given assumption in the West is that the country is inscrutable, is it so opaque that it can be approached only through fiction?)

I chose to write the story in fictionalised form as it’s always been most important to me that the people I know are protected and no more is revealed about them that they would desire. And though North Korea is largely unknown to many, we still know so much, especially now compared to the past. I’m more interested in the North Korean people as individuals, frankly, and the identities we impose on them are the deeper concerns of How I Became a North Korean. Non-fiction would have required many betrayals or revelations that people might regret later, and though I’m aware

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that the memoir is a huge market, I’m far more interested in protecting the identities of real people.

You’ve said your work isn’t autobiographical, but the title suggests personal involvement. Tell us about the ‘I’ in the title of your book, and about the process of researching for the novel.

It is and isn’t autobiographical, like much of my work. All my work is inspired by autobiography, and my concerns and themes well up organically from my life, but I’m a fairly private person. I was directly involved in the world I am describing. The situation in the North Korean–Chinese border area and its relationship with the Christian churches that operate there is very complicated, and made more so by the exchange of money and the dangers faced by those who are involved in the daily running of a safe house.

Being a pastor’s daughter, I grew up in the church, which means I also grew up inspired both by the good people one meets in the church and also horrified by the power-play and hypocrisy that is rife.

The ‘I’ in the title, as well as the Danny character, is actually a version – and variant – of myself though, unfortunately, I lack his academic brilliance and energy. His concerns and his stance as witness, as well as his curiosity, his desire for a morally upright and equal world, his self-directed questions about sexual orientation and about home, nationhood, and belonging, are all issues that I have grappled or am grappling with. Like Danny, though I grew up in the church, I have been fundamentally changed by it but no longer attend services. I’ll stop there.

In terms of research, I did read many books and articles, but because I have known North Koreans and activists intimately for so many years, long before I ever imagined writing a novel or even considered myself a writer, my novel is more or less based on what I saw and experienced and knew personally, inspired far more by conversations and events that I either partook in or was witness to, than in traditional forms of research that only confirmed what I had known. That, however, doesn’t make those books any less valuable. My current novel in progress, which is not based on a world I know, has been my first book requiring intensive amounts of conventional research.

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Interview: Krys Lee

The plight of refugee women, in particular, is a key theme of the novel, along with that of sexual identity. How important are these issues to you as a writer and a woman, and to the perception of North Korea in the outside world?

The plight of refugees in general is important to me, whether they are men or women. Unfortunately, however, women are always incredibly vulnerable because they lack the physical strength of men and are more likely to be victims of physical aggressors. I believe most women, especially petite women like me, have experienced dangerous situations where their sexuality, or even their life, has been threatened by those who can physically overpower them. For North Korean women who cross the border, life becomes a relentless, exhausting and terrifying journey of such danger.

Being uncertain of one’s sexual orientation, or being deemed by the church as having the ‘wrong orientation’ is devastating for a Christian because you’re essentially told you’ll burn in hell. And if you’re a believer, as I was, it creates fear and guilt. There are some liberal pastors and denominations, but that wasn’t my experience or the experience of many.

It’s already hard enough being pressured by society at large and sometimes by one’s family to fit into the so-called ‘norm’. I’ve always felt, and still feel, that it is a violation of one’s human rights to be told who you can love, whether that be a man, a woman, or a houseful of cats. The right to love is a fundamental part of being human, so long as you are not hurting other people. Sexual identity is a hugely contested area in Korea right now, and I think about this often as I have many friends who have been pressured to hide or flee in order to be themselves.

There’s no doubt about the regime’s vicious oppression of its people, but you have other villains in the novel. How did you come to see the ubiquity of evil in the political, religious and personal realms?

It’s impossible to think and write about individuals without the greater context, as it’s all connected. After all, families, organisations, corporations and nations are composed of individuals who are shaped and influenced by their society. I grew up in a complicated family where we as children were clearly reminded that we were at the bottom of the family power structure, that we were property, and that our very troubled but well-intended parents

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had the right to do anything they wanted to with us. I saw that structure of power and hypocrisy replicated in the church that I grew up in, then later, everywhere in society where Darwinian assumptions seemed to dominate. It frustrates me and sometimes makes me angry but, on the other hand, I’m also inspired by all that is good and true around me.

It seems that the device of Danny, a Chinese-American of Korean descent, both allows you to speak through him and to use him as a bridge between the outside world he comes from and the experience of North Korean refugees.

This is very true. He was my entrance into the book because Danny is me at an oblique angle, trying to come to terms with all I had seen and experienced over the years.

I began by asking you about how you got started. How do you think this will all end, and what effect would you wish your book to have on its readers?

I have no idea how it will end, and though many have been predicting the end of North Korea for years, the country has been remarkably resilient.

China’s active financial support of the nation has helped to keep it propped up, though China has become warier of its unreliable ally. I hope very much for the sake of all the separated families that reunification happens soon, no matter the financial cost on South Korea, a burden that I would also share since I returned to South Korea and have lived there since graduating from college. To be separated from one’s home, one’s family and one’s culture – it’s the most terrible form of exile. The historical, artificial division of the nation needs to be righted, no matter the cost or the competing interests of more powerful nations. It’s a very old-fashioned, trite thing to say, but I strongly believe in justice, good, and doing the right thing, whether that is in one’s personal relationships or on a national scale. The people who inspire me most are not those largely considered successful, but those under the radar who have quietly done the ‘right thing’ though it may not have always been to their own advantage.

How I Became a North Korean is published by Faber and Faber (August 2016).

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from Love Across A Broken Map The Whole Kahani The Whole Kahani Kavita A. Jindal

Kavita A. Jindal

T

he Whole Kahani (The Complete Story) is a collective of British writers of South Asian origin. The group was formed in 2011 and meets monthly in Central London. Its aim is to provide a creative perspective that straddles cultures and boundaries, both emotional and geographical. The group also seeks to increase the visibility of South Asian writers in Britain.

The members have ethnic origins across four countries and religions and their academic qualifications, upbringing, family circumstances, and professions all differ widely from writer to writer.

The members have come to think of The Whole Kahani as a unique twenty-first-century central London literary set. They draw on dual or triple heritages in their writing; they understand each other’s work and have similar perspectives on London and the UK. Love Across A Broken Map is the first anthology produced by the group.

From London to Goa, Manchester to Mumbai, the collection spans virtual gigolos, fashion start-ups, girl crushes, obsessive fans and astrological mishaps. The theme of love and longing was set by the publisher, Dahlia Publishing and the individual authors came up with stories that celebrate and mourn love in its many forms.

The members of The Whole Kahani are: Kavita A. Jindal, Reshma Ruia, Dimmi Khan, Rohan Kar, Iman Qureshi, Mona Dash, Radhika Kapur, C. G. Menon, Farrah Yusuf, and Shibani Lal.

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Rocky Romeo Rocky Rom eoDim mi Khan

Dimmi Khan

R

ocky begins with the shirt. He lets his fingers tease the silk, the visceral thrill of material against skin, imagines how it will feel when he slips it on and off. The label on the collar satisfies, the price tag is checked.

The scent is next, he picks it up on the air, veers towards it. The top of the aftershave tester is cold against his wrist as he dabs, sniffs, turns the whisky-style bottle and memorises the name. He makes a note of the cost.

Two senses ablaze, he searches for something to enliven his ocular realm.

Silver bracelet, lock of opal and amethyst. Bling, bling. He asks to try, it fits and sits, it’s his, he must possess it.

Satisfied, Rocky pulls his shoulders back, unburdened by the pressure to buy, leaves the shop. Empty-handed.

A memory outside the entrance, stuffing bread and cans of beans into his duffle coat. Too young at three to know what was being done to him, an expert by six.

Rocky breathes it out, lets the thoughts travel into the distance of his mind, getting fainter, until they are small and grey and can’t hurt him.

The sun is stirring up dust, sweat, people, as they cram onto Oxford Street. Rocky sits at a café, sipping hot chocolate, tapping the calories in to his daily tracker app. He watches the mass of bodies, safe with his terrace view. He continues to swipe, drum, slide, his fingers caressing his phone’s screen.

He recalls the labels, the prices, adds links to where they can be purchased. Adds comments, what the material objects mean to him, how much the purchaser would mean to him.

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Rocky’s facial from the morning is still fresh, so he takes a selfie, adds it to his collection. Sends it to a couple of special women, gets himself printed onto their busy days, see which one will bite. The waitress is from Plovid, Bulgaria’s second city, she tells him. It has a Roman Amphitheatre, an Ottoman Mosque, cobbled streets, an easy pace. She has milk-white skin, bright grey eyes, auburn hair, neat waist, curves. Rocky is unmoved.

He has praised damaged, self-loathing, too many times.

His play acting, learning to love imperfection, has ironically left him with a love for it. The raw, natural beauty of the waitress is as flat as a magazine image to Rocky.

Still, he flirts with Albena, as she pours her life story into his eyes. Practise when he can.

She tells him she misses her father – her mother has died.

Rocky is taken unawares, flinches. A father to miss – he envies Albena.

His own left him with a black slick of criminal experience and his youth in care.

A hell of a lot more than his mother ever did, though. He leaves Albena a huge tip. Envy burns inside him as he walks away, thinking of her father.

Rocky lets his body open into a hot bath, aromas of amber and musk steam against the tiles. His muscles separate under his skin as he stretches, yogi like. Busy day, busier night ahead.

His phone tells him he has a text. He uses the sound of coins jingling in a pocket.

His soapy finger struggles with the phone’s touchscreen, he wipes it on a towel, watches as the shirt shows up as bought.

Rocky logs into his profile, sees his gift list, sees what is left. The aftershave, the bracelet from that morning. A few minor items left over from previous shopping sprees.

Rocky goes to the gifts purchased page, and sees which of his clients has bought him the shirt.

Monica. Mumbai socialite, heiress to jute furniture or plastic chappals, he can’t remember. That’s shoddy, he must look up her file. He takes a selfie of himself, his intimate parts hidden by soapy water. Wink, wink, grin, perfect teeth, biceps taut, a bit of tongue flicked out.

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Monica calls. Rocky doesn’t answer. Monica knows the drill. Skype, one hour, a hundred pounds, via PayPal. Rocky plays Monica’s message.

‘I need you, jaan,’ she says, breathless, desperate, strung out.

Horny housewife, philandering husband, nowhere to scratch that itch.

Rocky wonders if it’s always a cliché if it’s true?

Rocky isn’t that sort of boy, he thinks with pride. First course only, whets the appetite, wets the women.

Rocky, unattainable, he feels his vanity, an ache in the groins, the drug they all want.

His stomach knots at the thought of drugs. Rocky remembers, aged six, having his stomach pumped. His father used him as a mule, a donkey, stuffing plastic bags of coke into Rocky’s mouth, holding his nose till he swallowed.

‘Your mother did one good thing, gave you her looks. You look like an angel. They will search the shit out of me, but you, they won’t touch.’

They didn’t, until a bag burst, and he started to vomit blood. Jingle, jingle. The phone breaks into his self-pity, another notification.

The scent is purchased.

Raqib. Political heir to a Pakistani ruling dynasty, fast-tracked through the judiciary, already looking at judgeship at thirty-two. Rocky lets the stab of jealousy dissipate, the success born from a normal family. Instead, he runs his wrist across his nose. The faint citrus of the aftershave from earlier still lingers. Anonymous. Purdah.

It took time – weeks, months, years even. Rocky let them move at their own pace, reveal when they were clawing at the walls, craving him. And they all craved him, eventually. His mother’s fine bone structure, his sculpted body. They all loved the shell, they all had a use for that. Just like his father.

Rocky didn’t care, their fingerprints were never real, only virtual. The melancholy violins dimmed as he was fostered, a childless couple with decades of pent-up love to shower on him. They nurtured him, sent him to university. Then died in a car crash. Rocky was heartbroken, broken, broke. He started off through cybersex, mutual pleasure. He hated the touch of flesh, the way women tried to cover him with their hands, possess him.

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One cyber stalker offered him money, said she would pay to watch him strip.

Rocky had been floating in sewage ever since.

One by one his friends, who had lauded him stud, player, da man, dropped off. Too nervous to have Rocky around their partners, didn’t want him polluting their offspring.

Alone, lone, wolf. Rocky became his own cliché.

Sitara is logged on, her online status clear.

The sound of squelching, as Skype chats come at him. Women asking to speak to him, men asking him to strip. Rocky plays it dark, acts the busy boy, in demand, wait your turn.

Sitara.

The poet.

‘My dignity is trampled, my honour is scorched. Melt into me, bring me to life again.’

Rocky remembers the first time, the first shayari. It was all he knew of her.

She doesn’t indulge him in gifts, she pays him for his time.

‘Don’t switch your camera on,’ she had said.

Her camera was switched off. Rocky unable to use his shell, forced to engage mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

At first she only typed her words. Slowly, as Rocky’s heart turned wistful, as he shed tears for the beauty of them, he persuaded her to speak to him.

‘They say the pen is sharper, they say the sword is blunt against my soul.

When they took my lover, I watched as the sword cut his flesh. What use were my stories then?’

‘You wrote his fable, gave him eternity,’ Rocky had said. Sitara had gasped, switched off her Skype, her session ended forty minutes too soon.

Rocky had waited for hours, until the dawn cleaved the sky in two, desperate for her to return. He wanted to hear her gasp again, he craved her, needed her.

Understanding fell like burning stars, broke his world, as he tasted his own bitter poison.

‘You free?’ she types.

‘Yes,’ his response immediate.

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‘Check your account,’ she types.

Rocky doesn’t bother, she never fails to pay.

Rocky video calls, leaves his camera on. She drops the call. He calls again, camera off.

‘Did you get the money OK?’ she says.

Her body, her face, nothing more than a black rectangle.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Sorry, about the video call. I’ve got nothing to hide from you though. Why won’t you look at me? I’m dressed and decent.’

‘They sit among whores, and talk of decency,’ she says.

‘Ouch,’ he says.

‘I didn’t mean . . . does the moon dim when it sails over your house? Then why do you doubt your worth?’ Rocky pulls his sheets close around him, dims his light. Shame burns his face, he wants to be better for her, purer.

‘Still, there is truth, and there is pain,’ she says.

‘My truth, but I’m not . . . that,’ he says.

‘Does it matter?’ she says.

‘Yes. Your opinion matters,’ he says.

‘I am nothing. I am not even a shadow. You walk over dust more valuable than me.’

She is gone, her words ache his heart. It forgets to beat.

The shirt arrives. It stays unopened.

The aftershave arrives. Rocky puts it away.

The bracelet is bought. Monica has purchased his time. He owes her.

For the first time in more time than he can recall, Rocky feels it’s a chore, he feels it’s wrong. This is not love, this is not sex, this is not lust. This is something grimier, grimmer.

His misery dissipates in his actions, as he Skypes with Monica, his shirt off, his hands carelessly touching himself, as she looks on. She fills his head with idle gossip, tells him money is to her like air, she has no concept of it.

She is rich, she wants him, in real time.

The bracelet arrives. It is cold metal, sharp stones.

Rocky sends Sitara a video-call.

She drops the call.

Rocky sends Sitara a video-call.

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She drops the call. They do the dance in the same parenthesis thirteen times. Then she is gone.

He has no recourse.

He sits and he stares, and he wills for her to come back. As the sun rises, he is deprived. Sleep, life, love, food, water. He is empty, and he is desperate.

Her words run through his head.

‘The misery of your tyranny is no less painful than death. . . .’

The woman on the webcam is showing signs of a newbie. She laughs a lot, giggles, shy, touches her hair. It is black, touched with grey, falls to below her ears. The webcam has smoothed her lines, but those around her mouth are deep, he sees them. He imagines tracing them with his finger. Attraction to imperfection.

‘I’m not sure what to do,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to do anything?

No. He wants her to shut up, take her abashed embarrassment and leave.

‘What do you feel like doing?’ he says, revealing dimples as he smiles, touching his exposed collarbone.

‘I like this . . . just chatting,’ she says, giggling.

Giggle, giggle. Rocky feels nauseous.

Sitara is offline. Sitara is invisible.

Fuck her then. Fuck her and her purity, and her sanctimony, and her selfishness, and her privacy. She isn’t so much better than him, she pays him for fuck’s sake. His anger tastes sour, he swallows it back, and takes his shirt off.

‘You’re making me hot,’ he says.

He rarely does this on a first date, prefers to keep them keen. ‘Would you like me to play with myself for you?’ he says.

He tries, but can’t, gives up frustrated. The woman is understanding, compassionate, feels sorry for him. Rocky’s failure has made him seem vulnerable. The woman is already falling in love with him.

‘I hold you in my mind’s eye, come and see, close your eyes, and look inside.’

Sitara’s words, scratched into his head, like ancient hieroglyphs on stone caverns.

Rocky writes messages into space. He sends them, word after word, sentence after sentence. She will see them if she ever comes online. Maybe

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she is always online, she just hides herself? He blocked her the day before, deleted her. Only to add her again an hour later. The messages end with a simple statement: My life is in your hands. Come online or I die. He can’t stop grinning, his threats have worked.

‘I missed you,’ he says.

‘Pointless, this is nonsense, we are nothing. I am nothing, I am unreal,’ she says.

‘You are as real to me as the heart of a volcano,’ he says. ‘I want you. I will give this up, I will change myself for you. I want you to see me,’ he says.

‘No,’ she says, she is quick, terse, instant.

‘Yes,’ he says, and he sends the video call. ‘I have a blade, and it’s flirting with a vein.’ She accepts. Rocky sees himself in the corner of the screen. His small picture, in the bigger black rectangle that is her.

‘I forgot my happiness, lost my desire . . . my soul found you, but did not know it was looking for you,’ she says.

‘Let me see you,’ he says.

‘There is no razor,’ she says, but she doesn’t drop the call.

‘You already killed me,’ he says. ‘We can be happy.’

‘I won’t make any man happy, not now, not ever,’ she says.

‘What about me? You make me ecstatic.’

She is silent. Rocky’s phone jingles, it is ignored.

‘As I slope off into the sunrise, I can see the others already approaching your threshold,’ she says.

‘I don’t want anyone else,’ he says.

‘You will, if you ever see me,’ she says.

‘Trust me,’ he says.

She doesn’t relent.

Rocky dismantles his life, client by client.

He takes down his website, he blocks his Skype contacts, he deletes his PayPal account, he takes the battery and SIM out of his phone.

The day is moulding itself from hazy light to wintry evening, but he opens his windows, letting the cold air brush through and cleanse his corners.

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How did he get to this, how did this woman, faceless, strange, stranger, manipulate the master manipulator? Is that her strength, is that her power over him? No, it’s so much simpler. She has loved Kabir, the boy he was, the man he wants to be, not Rocky, the malevolent parasite he is forced to be.

Kabir has been hiding, ignored, asleep. Sitara woke him, and now he won’t let Rocky live in peace. He fills Rocky’s head with chants of derision, a moral compass, tells him to stop feeling sorry for himself, showers him with disgust.

Rocky closes his eyes, and hears Kabir. He puts on loud music, runs as fast as he can, but Kabir is his heartbeat, his accelerated breathing, his blood.

Only Sitara calms him, only she lets Rocky be, because Kabir, invisible, unbidden, is loved by her. She bypassed the bricks and mortar, the funerary adornment, and touched the soul.

On the bed is a fresh blade. He wears a white shirt, leaves off the cufflinks, sits on his white bedspread. The blood will vibrate, its passion will be irrevocable, the result irreversible.

Sitara accepts his video call.

‘I can’t transfer the money,’ she says, panic in her voice.

‘I deleted my account,’ he says.

‘Why?’ ‘I gave it all up. For you.’

He rubs the blade between his thumb and forefinger, lets it cut the flesh, lets blood spot on his shirt, on the sheets. Kabir mocks him.

Rocky can turn screws, use subterfuge. For Sitara, the poet, a grand show, she will bite, she could have written this herself.

‘What are you doing? Please stop,’ Sitara says.

‘Any last words? A poem to see me off?’ Rocky says.

‘Please, you can’t, not for me, not ever. . . .’ she says.

‘Let me see you,’ he says.

‘No,’ she says.

He doesn’t barter, he simply takes the blade to his wrist, his eyes lock into the black space that is her, and he begins to cut, knowing he is hacking at

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skin, not a vein. Crimson rivulets stream across his hand. Better effects than he had planned.

For a second, a flicker, a fear, has he severed an artery by mistake? Why not, he soothes himself, why not go the way your father did, the way your life was headed. You don’t deserve salvation, redemption. You don’t deserve a mantle from the firmaments.

‘Wait,’ she says, terse, immediate.

The black rectangle that has been Sitara comes to life. Rocky watches as she fills the void. Her eyes are downcast, her lips trembling.

‘You see now, how could anybody love this?’

Rocky is quiet, staring. His only urge is to reach out and touch her.

Acting, playing the role too many times, imperfection is perfection for him.

‘You are everything I want,’ he says. He puts the blade down, takes his shirt off, stems the blood, and touches the screen. She looks up at him, and he feels himself breathe for the first time in years.

Rocky is gone.

‘Rocky Romeo’, from Love Across a Broken Map, a production of The Whole Kahani, is published with kind permission of Dahlia Publishing (UK) http://www.dahliapublishing.co.uk

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Watermelon Seeds Watermelon Seeds C. G. Menon

C. G. Menon

P

eony has whiskers; she has a pointy face and a tail made out of blue raffia; she’s messing about in boats and dabbling-up-tails-all, and I am in love.

‘You have to say “Blow spring-cleaning!” now, Anjali,’ she insists, and jumps with a splash of patent-leather shoes right into the tricky, rippling flood that swirls down the gutter between our houses. The monsoon is coming, and the water will soon be ankle-deep and silted up with rotting fruit. But Peony and I don’t care because by then we’ll be inside, watching a Cantonese soap opera on her drawing-room television and eating fried watermelon seeds. She’ll crack one open between her teeth and I’ll taste it a split-second before she swallows, because Peony and I are two-together like dots on a domino and everything we feel is the same.

We were given our parts for the school play today; it was chatter-andelbows in front of the noticeboard, it was congratulations waved off; – So much fuss, lah! All talk-talk – and tears in the padang outside the school gate. I’m an understudy for Mole, but Peony, oh, Peony is going to be Ratty and how could anyone not be in love? Mr and Mrs Wong will come to watch her in the dark school gym with the fans spinning high up in the rafters where you can only reach if you climb up a plaited rope in your gym-skirt: one, two, feet-together. They will sit on the folding metal chairs, and the spotlights will glint off their spectacles and mosquitoes will bite at their ankles, and none of this will matter because their daughter is Ratty in a river of light on stage, and this is where it all begins.

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‘Prompt me again, Anjali!’ She reaches out for my hand and tugs me into the water too. My hands fold warm into hers and my feet bump up against her toes, and for a moment our faces float frail as ghosts somewhere below the water. And then she kicks up a giant spray, a fan of rainbow drops that soaks my dress and leaves her slumped solid and giggling against me.

‘I won’t play!’ But I will, of course, and she pulls me up on the mudsplashed gutter to dangle my feet next to hers in the stream.

‘Blow spring-cleaning. . . ?’ I offer tentatively. Her face splits into a wide, wide smile as she sails into her lines and I think my heart breaks, just a little bit, because now Peony is Ratty again. This is our last day before the holidays and I want to save every little bit of it, to squeeze it up tight in my hands.

‘Come and watch TV with me, Anjali,’ she says as she steps toe-heel out of her shoes on the shallow steps of the Wong’s verandah. A stone lion guards the door, and I stroke its face, already blurred from years of our hugs. The hall behind it smells of silence; of lilies and rosewater and cool polished wood, and Peony disappears down it like a breath against the wind. Next door, my own quiet house reeks of coconut oil and turmeric. Such a Tamil smell, Mrs Wong said once when she thought we were upstairs, and for months after that Peony and I mouthed Tamil-smell across the classroom to each other when we got our homework wrong.

‘I have to pack first,’ I call to the fluttering lace of her dress. A breeze is coming down from the jungle and everything is alive with it. Along the padang the casuarina leaves are rustling and the soft petals of hibiscus are being slowly shredded. All through Kuala Lipis hair-ribbons will be whipping and sarongs will be blowing, and everyone will know the monsoon is on its way from the polished pewter sky.

Peony turns at the end of the hall and calls back something rude in Cantonese. She’s taught me a little and I know that these are bad words; grownup words to reach into the future and pull the years and everything that waits in them tumbling down like a stack of dominoes onto her tangled black head. But then a silver curtain of rain sweeps down from the road and her skirt flutters in the dark of the hall and Peony is gone.

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‘Here, sir-madam. Colonial House.’ The driver glances back at us, glued tight as snails on the lumpish leather seats. His hair leaves a coconut oil smear on the back of his seat.

‘Already we paid so no money now, OK, lah?’ My mother grabs at the back of his seat, smearing the hair-oil over her fingers (Tchee! So dirty!), and levers herself up from her mushroom of skirts and travelling rugs.

‘Hello! Hello!’ my father calls. ‘Come and help us unload.’ He slaps at his arms in a bluff and hearty way I don’t recognise, as though somewhere on the journey someone has slipped a different Appa into our car. The verandah gate opens and a bearded fleet of uncles and uncles-by-marriage begin to steam up like full-bellied sailing ships.

‘Out you get, little Anjali; lock, stock and barrel.’ The uncles are like this, I remember, full of mysterious phrases with the sense sucked out of them.

Barrels mean rum, I think, and pirates and fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Tamil-smell uncles, I whisper, but Peony is miles away back home with the watermelon seeds and the tumbling monsoons and nobody hears me.

I slide down flat in my seat until my bare knees joggle the seat in front, and listen to an uncle drop our bags plump-plump on the ground.

‘Come on, Anjali!’

Behind that verandah is my grandfather’s house, and behind that are the courtyards. They stretch out like a rope of caves, each of them darker than the next and filled with banyan trees and swamps and bricked-up wells. The window shutters are open upstairs and I can see the faces of my cousins, crammed in like mice in a nest. Each year they arrive before us, stepping lordly off the plane from England instead of being lock-stock-barrelled out of a station taxi. They leave a sort of silt wherever they go – hair-ties and pencil shavings and faded perfume – and for the next two weeks I will pick my way through this in the spaces that are left.

A door slams inside, and then the aunties troop kajal-eyed out onto the verandah, bulging from their saris and warm as cats from an afternoon nap.

Amma begins to shuffle from her seat, muttering the complaints she’s been saving in her throat for their loving ears, and I follow all alone like a single dot on a domino.

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‘Girls, take Anjali with you today. I’m sure she knows some new games.’

My cousins and I swap silent, muttering glances over our breakfast-plates.

How-can-she-know-anything, and Leave-me-alone, and underneath all that a sort of awkward It’s not your fault though, like bumping elbows with a friend in the dark.

‘If she wants to, Mummy.’ Priya is the oldest girl-cousin; she’s fifteen and poised forever between the children and the kajal-aunties. I wonder if she likes this, or if she’s too old for all this ‘liking-disliking’, as my mother would say, and is therefore truly grownup. Priya has a lovely faint smile, and a whitish face like ivory gone yellow; her voice is smooth and English and everything she says is the exact opposite of what she means.

I stare down at my Weetabix and don’t say anything. There’s a spoonful of Nutella on top, dolloped there by one of the aunties who doesn’t know that Nutella is only for treats. I’ve been saving it for the final mouthful, but now Priya’s words are hanging in the air, and everything is melting into plain brown mush. Anjali, don’t be such a baby, someone will say in a moment, and then the Weetabix will stick in my throat and Nutella will never be a treat again.

‘She can come with me,’ Rahul says suddenly, and I look up in surprise.

Rahul is thirteen and right in the middle of the boy-cousins. He has eyelashes like splashes of ink and slabbed front teeth too big for his mouth, and I want both those things too, with a kind of fierce and determined itch.

Peony likes him, though she’s only ever seen photographs, and begs me to tell her about him every year. She said once in Truth-or-Dare that she would marry him when she grew up, and I refused to play any more until she took it back.

‘If you like,’ I mutter into my bowl, and swirl the milk around until Amma scolds and snatches it away, Nutella and Weetabix and baby-and-all.

‘Are you going to play cricket?’ I ask.

Rahul and the boy-cousins have stamped a pitch into the biggest courtyard, and out there they take turns to be heroes: Viv Richards, and Peter Willey and others whose names I’ve never even heard. I don’t get to be a hero though, only a comic sidekick Anjali trailing after dropped catches and

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missed throws while jackfruit blossom drops on her head. I whisper one of Peony’s rude words under my breath, and Rahul peers at me.

‘No, I’m going to show you something. Come on, Anjali – quickly!’

He takes me through the courtyards to the furthest one, where durian trees mass together and banyans choke the walls. It looks like a place from the horror movies Peony and I watched in Kuala Lipis: a swampy tangle where sharp-nailed ghosts and bloodsucking pontianaks shriek at night.

The windows to the back bedrooms are high above us, and tonight our grandparents will mumble there, safe in their mosquito-netted dreams. For now, though, the shutters droop open in the sun, half-hidden by slack jowls of bougainvillea, and a banyan tree looms nearby. Its bare branches swoop down to make a dim cave speckled with shadows and the tiny smells of the naked earth.

I put my hands on my hips, where the waist of my new dress ties. It’s blue cotton with ruffles, and the feel of the satin sash makes me brave. ‘I don’t see anything,’ I say.

Rahul doesn’t answer, but instead squats down and begins to scoop out a shallow trench. It criss-crosses the ground, a glistening gutter of slug slime and earth that doubles back just beyond my toes. I think I hear the pontianaks hissing from the banyan roots and beating at its banks; then Rahul sits back on his heels with a look of triumph.

‘There!’ He wipes his hands clean on a patch of moss. ‘It’s going to be a house, Anjali. Don’t you see?’

And suddenly, there it is. I crouch down next to Rahul and the ditches turn into walls, and beyond them are halls and rooms and endless jewelled courtyards where nobody will ever leave me out of games again. The pontianaks can cry all they like, and the cousins can burrow like mice, but this is mine all mine and inside here I will choose how everything turns out.

Rahul’s left a gap for the front door where a mass of fungus has spread and blistered, and I slide my shoes off heel-toe. He’s forgotten to draw steps, but I climb them anyway and pat the empty place by the door-gap where my stone lion will be. ‘Blow spring-cleaning,’ I mutter, and from somewhere my skirt flutters in a breeze and there’s a silver scent of rain.

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‘Anjali! So dirty, your feet! Aiyoh, do you think I’m coming here to wash and slave for you?’ Amma is upset, or she wouldn’t talk like that; not like she does at home. When we’re at my grandfather’s house she tries to speak nicely-nicely, like the English aunties.

‘It was my fault, Aunt Sajni. We were playing in the courtyards.’ Rahul’s voice is smooth as pebbles underwater, and it soothes Amma. She nods her head one-two-three along with all the other kajal-aunties who loll on kitchen chairs sipping mango juice and watching us eat. Amma nestles back into the middle of them, and her bite melts down to a purr of complaint somewhere deep in her plump dark neck.

Rahul beckons me over to the sideboard, where he’s heaping a plate full of the soft white mounds of idli. He squeezes them together so they bulge like bosoms; fleshy like Amma or the big girls at school, and I start to giggle.

When Priya takes one, his fingers brush against mine and a little smile slinks between us, like a silver firefly in the deep-green dining room.

After lunch Rahul and I wander outside, stranded and small in the beating bronze air. Everything is silent, and even the cats lie exhausted and slit-eyed in puddles of tar-black shade. Upstairs the girl-cousins are lying down too, in their vests and knickers with their strange white bodies beached beneath the mosquito nets. Like slugs, I tell Rahul, and when he laughs it fizzes cold and clear in my head.

In the durian courtyard the trees look baked, crisp and curled tight in the heat. I’ve been telling Rahul about our play; about Anjali-the-Mole and Peony-the-Ratty; about the stone lion I’ve hugged every morning before school; about the monsoon and the watermelon seeds and how Peony and I will one day be actors under the clear yellow sun in California. I don’t think he’s listening, but then he remembers to walk up our invisible steps and pat our stone lion, and I forgive him.

‘We need a guest room, Anjali,’ he tells me, and I immediately start to squabble with him, in a comforting sort of way that I know doesn’t really matter. A guest room has to have flowers, I insist, and he offers to climb the banyan tree where orchids clump above our heads, but I refuse. He has to creep back to the house, I tell him, and steal some fresh-cut flowers from my grandmother’s vases. He mustn’t be seen, and he must double back to

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confuse his tracks, and stay downwind of the aunties to avoid being captured. His eyes gleam as he listens and his teeth shine wet, and for one moment I’m two-together again, and it feels disloyal and lovely.

While Rahul’s gone I draw in our steps and our stone lion. Its face is sharp and its eyes are crossed, all the better to look both ways with. The soil must be damp, because a pool collects under my feet as I draw and soon my feet are wet from the squelching mud and mosquitoes are swarming beneath the lion’s fur.

It’s dusk by the time Rahul comes back. The sun slants gold through the vines, and glosses off the banyan leaves in a sunset haze. A cricket gives a tinny little chirrup, but the noise cuts off with a stutter of alarm as Rahul pushes back.

He’s brought flowers from every vase in the house and they drip cool on my fingers, smooth and waxy and smelling of rosewater. Stolen flowers for you, Anjali, he says, and comes to sit next to me with his back against the garden wall. His arm is damp against mine and I watch a mosquito land under his ear, on that thumb patch of bare salt skin. A red lump starts to swell, but he’s fiddling with the flower stems and doesn’t notice, so for one moment there’s a tiny secret about him that belongs just to me.

‘There!’ He passes me the flowers, plaited into a twining bouquet, and asks, ‘Will Peony be our first guest?’

I’d forgotten all about the guestroom and I swallow. The flowers are wilting from being plaited, and their colours have already faded a little in the dry night air. Rahul slaps at his ear and says ‘Mosquito bite!’ in a tone of surprise, and my secret is gone. ‘I don’t want Peony here,’ I tell him and the pontianaks and devils nod one-two-three and purr down in their throats. ‘She wants to. . . .’ and now it’s almost too late, and then one breath later I take his hand and then it is too late. ‘She wants to marry you.’ There’s a pause, a heartbeat where nothing moves. His face is a glow of ivory in the dusk, and his ink-splash eyelashes are blinking soft as a breath. And then he spins around, and the air is thick with tiger-striped shadows; with the choking smell of durian and the sound of Rahul laughing.

I push him away and he whoops with a metallic sort of jeer, bitter like teeth on tinfoil.

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‘You’re in love!’

He’s found it out and the secret’s too big to keep to himself. It bites at his lips and squeals for air and the next moment it’s sent him cackling like a dart right into the knot of cousins somewhere outside. His feet scuff our fragile walls and his sandal-thumps echo down our hallways and rooms.

When he’s gone, when it’s quiet and all the normal day-coloured sounds have come shuffling back, I lean against the garden wall. I whisper rude words in Cantonese under my breath and with the very tip of one finger I make a little trench around me, just enough to keep out the tiniest pontianak and the slowest devil.

Back at school, Peony still has her raffia tail; she still has her whiskers and her pointy face; she’s still messing-about-in-boats, and for her, everything is still the same.

I don’t look at her during class, and when the bell goes I stay in the classroom until she leaves, looking back at me in a puzzled sort of way as though she, too, doesn’t understand how it’s all turned out. I don’t tell her about the durian courtyard, or the pontianaks or the way those chants of Anjali’s in love, Anjali’s in love braided themselves through my cousins’ singsong games. I take somebody else as my partner for gym class, and we climb one-two so high up a plaited rope that I think I might never come down again. And later, I give up my role in the school play, and tell the drama teacher that Amma refused to let me join.

The night of the performance, I sit on my bedroom floor with the light off and a mosquito coil glowing under the bed. I watch cockroaches scuttle along the doorframe and breathe in Tamil-smell and whisper ‘Bother spring-cleaning’ into the gloom. But perhaps I get the timing wrong, because over in the school hall Peony forgets her lines, and cries in the chalk-and-paint wings of the gymnasium stage.

Peony and I will never speak again, except for brief words with their tails caught sharp between our teeth. She will move to Kuala Lumpur to study drama, and when my mother rings to tell me about this I will pretend to have heard already. By then I will be in England, and not long afterwards I will marry an Englishman with pale white skin and hair the colour of sand.

Our children will be fair as ivory, and their teachers will call me Angie; our

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house will smell only of floral air-freshener and my husband will, in any case, dislike turmeric.

And then, on those short summer nights when the air feels like home, I will slide my slippers off heel-toe and creep downstairs. I will find a Cantonese film on the television, while my sandy husband sleeps off his Sunday-night stew and the children lie beached under the drape of blankets.

The heroine will smile out at me from the dark, and I will taste the watermelon seeds between her teeth, but she will never be Peony, not ever, and by then I won’t understand a single word she says.

‘Watermelon Seeds’, from Love Across a Broken Map, a production of The Whole Kahani, is published with kind permission of Dahlia Publishing (UK) http://www.dahliapublishing.co.uk

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Poetry

Shuja Alhaq

Shuja Alhaq

Narrow Lanes of Sanity I am a pretender – A strange fluid runs through my veins for the blood is the witness to the truthfulness of man.

During sleep my mind is awake like a watchtower but while I am awake it is blind to the nearest of my intentions.

Carefully I have concealed my bones of clay under the cover of steel, yet still I shake at the mere thought of first explosions.

In the grand golden dome of my imagination I climb the ladder of glory and transcendence with the vigour of light.

In everyday life however I quarrel with the grocer high on my heels

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and the auto-functioning chains of thought strangle me to watch the agonising moans of my helpless hour.

Walking down the narrow lanes of sanity I often wonder uneasily what life would be like on either side.

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About ‘From Noin Ula’ About ‘From B Noin ae Suah Ula’

Bae Suah translated by Janet Hong

I

n 2009, I travelled to Mongolia’s Altai Mountains. One day, our nomad guides mentioned that there were some Scythian tombs nearby and escorted us there. We went on horseback and crossed a rough river. The burial mounds, set in the middle of the steppes, looked like wide, low hills that were perhaps a dozen metres in diameter. It would be more apt to say they looked like slight swells on the surface. That was all there was to see.

There were no grave markers or signs. If our guides hadn’t pointed them out, we would never have known that they were graves.

The following year, I visited a friend who lived in Germany. Karin was in her seventies and had lived through World War II as a child. She often told me stories about her family who, after the war, had moved back to Germany from Poland, where they had lived as immigrants. With the father imprisoned as a war criminal, and seven young children, including Karin, in tow, the family had left behind everything they owned – their house, land, and livestock – and fled Poland with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

On the shelf of her guest bedroom, I discovered a book of photographs from World War II. The most shocking picture in the collection was of a teenage girl, a Soviet partisan. When the Germans finally captured the members of the partisan unit responsible for causing great disruption on the Eastern Front, its leader turned out to be the young girl. The German soldiers hanged her in the playground of a school in the village where they were stationed. It was winter and the playground was covered in snow.

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The girl hung from the rope, her neck twisted to the left at an unnatural angle. She was barefoot, dressed in black trousers that came only to her ankles. To my surprise, there was a close-up of the girl’s face on the next page. The girl, whose eyes were closed, was astonishingly beautiful. She didn’t look like a girl who had been hanged, but rather a blind girl who was merely dreaming.

When the Scythians occupied the western part of the Eurasian Steppe, the Huns lived to their east. While civilisation flowed between East and West, most notably along the Silk Road, the history of the desolate grasslands drifted along without civilisation, without script, without records. It was the custom of the Huns and Scythians for a ruler’s wife and concubines to be buried alive with him when he died. This was sometimes the practice in the southern parts of the Korean peninsula during the early kingdoms period. I’ve always wondered if my ancestors descended from the Huns.

Herodotus wrote that the Scythians blinded all their slaves in order to use them in preparing their milk. The Scythians claimed that countless feathers so filled the air that one was unable to see or pass through the further parts of the continent. According to Herodotus, these white feathers were snow. Hans Christian Andersen compared falling snowflakes to great white chickens.

In 2013, I had the opportunity to translate Dreams, a compilation of Franz Kafka’s writings on that subject taken from his diaries and letters. Instead of the translator’s afterword that would typically conclude such a book, the editor suggested that I write a short story about dreams. I decided to use the images that had been knocking around in my head for the past several years. What eventually emerged was the story of a girl who leaves on a journey to find her father. And so, ‘What Did the Girl Dream Right Before She Was Burned Alive in the Snow?’ appeared as the afterword to Dreams.

If ‘What Did the Girl Dream Right Before She Was Burned Alive in the Snow?’ is a story about what happens to the girl before the journey, ‘From Noin Ula’ is what happens afterwards. At the point where the former narrative ends, the latter begins. Noin Ula is located in the hills of northern Mongolia. It is where the graves of the Mongolian aristocracy have been

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excavated. You can be sure that there wouldn’t be a railway station or the like at the Noin Ula burial site.

Neither the Scythians nor the Huns left behind a single written record that can be deciphered by people today. We know about them only through records left by other cultures in the region, through the writings of Herodotus, and from Chinese histories. But none of these told me why or how they vanished, and I was able to let my imagination roam free. It was therefore relatively easy to put my protagonist on a train and send her there.

I constructed a kind of childhood that comes before memory, a childhood located on the threshold between memory and oblivion, and made it ‘the subconscious’, or ‘a previous life’, or ‘a living dream’, or perhaps ‘the faceless girl with whom I once had a connection’. I wrote several short stories related to this subject. ‘From Noin Ula’ became one of those stories.

My translator Janet Hong asked me why I had assigned to the story’s protagonist the particular job of sharpening pencils. First of all, there isn’t much that a child can do in wartime, but I wanted to give her a task that might serve her imaginary father. When I thought further about the question, I realised the one who could record this story was the Commander, the owner of the pencils and the protagonist’s invisible father. At once an intellectual, a scholar, a commander, a dictator, a ruler of letters and the keeper of memory and consciousness, he struggles in vain to record this history/journal/tale, wasting countless pencils in the process. But my story doesn’t follow the Commander’s record. Although I write his history, I write about secrets and legends. My story isn’t so much a piece of writing as a voice, a song. I secretly hoped that it would be sung, not read. My story is flowing, secretly, behind what is being written. Therefore, the Commander and the girl who sharpens pencils will pass each other by, just as an elm tree and a blind girl might, and like some piece of history, like some legend, they will forever remain as strangers.

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From Noin Ula From N oin Ula Bae Suah

Bae Suah translated by Janet Hong

‘W

e’ll be arriving in Noin Ula shortly,’ said the train conductor as he walked past, but I had fallen asleep, hunched over in an awkward position, and did not hear him.

One passenger climbed out. No one was seeing anyone off. No one was waving out the window. The train was quiet for some time before it began to move its heavy body once again. It didn’t move forward, but went back the way it came.

Noin Ula was the last station at the north end of the line.

The passenger who had got off the train was me. Therefore, this isn’t someone else’s dream.

It was snowing. The large snowflakes were wet and heavy, and the wind raged. The coat I was wearing was so big that it dragged on the ground.

There wasn’t a single chair inside the small station made of bricks so blackened it looked as though it had been scorched. I stood by the window and gazed out at the falling snow. The snow seemed to be falling more heavily, and it was growing dark at an alarming rate. There was probably a town somewhere. I tried to locate at least a glimmer of light. But all I could see were the shadows of trees, shaking in the wind. There were nine elm trees. Someone had draped white hats and white blankets over the dead elm trees that had lost their leaves. The ends of the blankets flapped in the wind.

Below, the pale faces of soldiers materialised and then vanished. Their chests were pierced with white arrows. The trees were walking. The dead trees were walking into the snow that fell aslant. Only then I realised they weren’t trees, but tall soldiers draped in white blankets.

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I tried to call out to them. I wanted to ask where the town was. But they vanished right away, as though they had been absorbed by the night.

A uniformed man holding a torch suddenly appeared. Instead of a hat, he had a scarf wrapped around his head. Although I hadn’t seen him enter, I was sure he had come from behind the small wooden door with the sign that read ‘Stationmaster’s Office’. His small torch was absurdly inadequate to brighten the dark station.

‘There used to be a chair here, but the Commander’s men took it away,’ he murmured from inside the scarf. With a suspicious eye, he looked from my ridiculously long coat to my face. ‘They said a person would be arriving today,’ he said, coughing momentarily in the dark, ‘but I had no idea it would be a child travelling alone.’

‘I was told that once I got off here, a person would come to take me to my father.’ I repeated the words of the police officer who had put me on the train.

‘Your father?’ he said, with a strange expression. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I’m the Noin Ula stationmaster and my instructions were to take the passenger who got off here . . .’ he paused, considering whether or not I could actually be that passenger, ‘. . . to the Commander. That’s all I was told on the phone.’

‘Then the Commander is my father!’

‘That I wouldn’t know. I guess you’d know better than anybody if the Commander were your father.’

‘All I was told was that when I got off at the last possible station at the north end, there would be people who would take me to my father.’

‘Who exactly is your father?’

I said my father’s name and described his appearance. How he was a giant, how you could see him at once, just as you would an elm tree that stood on top of a hill. But the stationmaster shook his head.

‘I don’t know the Commander’s name. Why would he need a name?

There’s only one commander in this town and we don’t know any other commanders. So we simply call him ‘Commander’. He wears a white cape over his uniform like the other officers. But you would never confuse him with them, because the Commander is a giant. He’s probably the biggest person in the whole town. But isn’t that what you would expect of a

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commander? Plus his beard is as black as soot and fans out like the branches of an elm tree. But I couldn’t say if he’s your father or not.’

‘Maybe the Commander knows my father.’

‘Well, he might, and he might not,’ the stationmaster said, his words ringing inside his scarf as though he were talking to himself. He put an old-fashioned padlock the size of a human head on the station door and we started walking toward town in the falling snow.

‘If the town has a commander, then there must be soldiers, too.’

The man didn’t answer and continued to walk with his head bowed.

‘Just now, I saw nine soldiers walking through the blizzard. Maybe they were the Commander’s men,’ I said.

‘Yes, all the soldiers are the Commander’s men,’ said the man in an apathetic voice. ‘But you must have been mistaken because of all the snow.

I wasn’t notified, and no one has come to the station today besides you.’

The sky poured snow. The wet snowflakes turned into white birds and lunged at me. They had pointed beaks like arrows. I kept walking, pushing aside their white bodies with both hands.

I thought we would only reach town if we walked all night long.

But a gate appeared all of a sudden, as though it had surged up from the ground. It was a rusty old latticed gate with peeling paint. It looked like there was a large playing field behind the gate, but other than the night snow that raged blackly and radiated murky darkness, I couldn’t see a thing.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

‘This used to be a school. But it’s been shut down. Now the Commander’s army is stationed here.’

The stationmaster took a key from his pocket and opened the padlock on the gate. He let me in first and stepped inside himself. He locked the gate behind him and returned the key to his pocket.

‘Come this way.’

He cut across the deserted field. Behind the curtain of snow, the grey outline of a building emerged. It was a typical two-storey concrete building in the shape of a rectangle. The windows that resembled teeth gleamed in the darkness. A flagpole stood in front of the building.

When we got closer, I realised what had seemed like a flagpole was actually a gallows. A rope with an empty noose at its end swayed in the air.

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‘There’s no need to be afraid,’ the man said reassuringly when he noticed my expression. ‘That has nothing to do with us. The Commander set it up just for show. It’s to scare off the Huns. After all, it’s his duty to protect this town from the invasion of the Huns.’

‘The Huns?’

‘Barbarians, all of them,’ the man said without much emotion. ‘Invading barbarians.’

‘Are you saying there are barbarians nearby?’

‘No, the Commander drove them out into the wilderness a long time ago.

They don’t dare challenge his men.’

‘There aren’t any Huns in the city. People don’t know who they are. I’ve never seen one before.’

‘I guess city folk don’t even believe they exist.’ The man sniffed. ‘I heard they think the Huns are a tribe that died off a long time ago and a bunch of superstitious tales just go around these frontier towns. It’s only natural they think that, since no one’s ever seen a Hun before.’ He sniffed once again. ‘The Huns never ride trains or cars, only horses. They’ve never been known to fall off a horse. It’s hard to believe, but they’re even born on a horse. They shoot arrows from a horse, they eat on a horse, and when it’s time for them to die, they just die on a horse. When the owner dies, the horse gets buried in the grave with the owner sitting on top, so they say.’

‘So no one’s ever seen a Hun before?’

‘That’s right. But everyone knows they’re cruel and horrible. They use bowls made from their enemies’ skulls to drink the milk of mountain goats.

They make perfectly healthy children go blind by squeezing the sap of poisonous plants into their eyes. But there’s no need to worry. We’re safe, as long as the Commander’s army is here.’

This time too, he pulled out a slightly smaller key from his pocket and opened the door to the building.

‘Wait here,’ he said, after guiding me down a dark corridor into a room as small as a shed. ‘I have to go back once I find a chair here. You see, the Commander’s men took the chair from the station. But before I go, I’ll bring something to keep you warm.’

When he flicked on the switch, the dim ceiling light came on. There was a wooden desk, a cabinet, and a bench in the room. The stationmaster

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returned with two blankets and draped them over the bench. He said that I should get some rest, as it was already late, and meet the Commander tomorrow. The small windowless room was unexpectedly warm and, exhausted from the day’s travels, I fell asleep.

The next morning, someone gently shook me awake. The first thing I saw were all the pencils splayed on top of the desk.

‘So you’re the new child who’s come to sharpen the pencils.’

The person who woke me was a young man in military uniform. His skin was pale and his face was lovely as a sculpture. He introduced himself as the lieutenant and spilled a sack of pencils onto the desk.

‘For a long time, there was no child to sharpen pencils, so the Commander had a really hard time. Look!’ he said, pointing at the second sack that was filled with pencils. The points of all the pencils, both long and short, were dull. ‘But now that you’re finally here, I feel so much better. I tried to sharpen the pencils myself for a while, but they didn’t turn out so well. You see, my hands are too big and clumsy.’

‘But I didn’t come here to sharpen pencils,’ I said to him.

‘What?’ All of a sudden, he looked dumbfounded. ‘I heard a child who would be sharpening pencils was coming, but if you’re not that child, why are you here?’

‘I came to look for my father.’

‘What?’ His long lashes fluttered rapidly. ‘You came to look for your father?’

‘I was told my father would be here.’

‘Who’s your father?’

I said my father’s name. I also described his appearance. How he was a giant, how you could see him at once, just as you would an elm tree that stood on top of a hill.

‘What?’ He looked dumbfounded again and then burst into laughter.

‘You little liar! You’re describing the Commander! Giants aren’t common, especially one who’s like an elm tree! The Commander is probably the only giant like that in the whole world. So are you saying he’s your father? What kind of lie is that? I’ve never once heard that he had a child like you.’

‘But you’ll still take me to the Commander, won’t you?’ I asked as I slipped out from under the blanket.

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‘Fine, even though I know you’re just pulling my leg. But since you’re sharpening pencils for the Commander, I guess it would be all right for you to meet him just once.’

‘When can I meet him?’

‘Well, he would have to come back first.’

‘You mean he’s not here?’

‘He had to leave on urgent business this morning. He went to go find the nine officers who disappeared recently. . . . That’s why it’s a little depressing around here.’ The lieutenant’s cheerful manner vanished and he sadly dropped his gaze. ‘They were most likely killed by the Huns. The Huns can shoot their arrows with such skill from hidden places, so you don’t even see the arrow until it’s hit you in the chest. It devastated the Commander to have lost his prized officers. That’s why he’s personally gone on the military expedition to the Huns’ plains. He’ll probably be back in a few days.’

All day long, I sharpened pencils and waited for the Commander to return. I went to the building entrance and sharpened pencils while gazing out the hazy window at the snow falling on the field. The noose at the end of the rope remained empty. In the distance, soldiers passed in single file.

They wore high boots and white capes. I sat in a corner of the lobby on the main floor and sharpened pencils. I sat on the icy stone steps and sharpened pencils. I sat in front of a window and sharpened pencils. After the soldiers had eaten and left, I ate alone in the basement cafeteria and sharpened pencils. Snowflakes like white arrowheads came down. On the day I finish sharpening two sacks of pencils, surely, the Commander will return!

One day in the cafeteria, I discovered that I was not alone. The girl who worked in the kitchen was eating. She looked to be around my age and her long hair was tied in a red ribbon. Because she groped with her hands while her gaze remained fixed before her, I realised she was blind.

And so, I approached her.

‘My name is Snowchild,’ the blind girl said first. ‘I heard the Commander might be your father.’

‘Maybe. But maybe not. One of the officers who disappeared could be my real father.’

‘Rumour says they all died after being struck with arrows in the chest.’

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I had always been afraid that I would never see my father again. Tears flowed from my eyes.

‘The Commander will be furious if the officers never come back. Then he might really start a war with the Huns,’ the girl said. And with her small, soft hand, she wiped away my tears.

‘Where’s your father?’ I asked her this time.

‘I only have a mother.’ A small smile appeared on her face. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

I nodded. ‘I mean, yes,’ I said.

‘My mother was a Hun sorceress,’ the girl said. ‘She could make an arrow fly without anyone shooting it and she could stick an arrow in an enemy’s chest without making it fly. If she prayed to her god, milk flowed even from a dead woman’s chest. But you really mustn’t tell anyone.’

‘Then you’re actually a Hun child?’ I gazed at the girl’s face with fear and awe. But her face was no different from mine. Not even the slightest bit.

‘All right, I won’t tell anyone. But how come you can’t see?’

‘It was my mother who blinded me. She squeezed the sap from the black anemone into my pupils. She wanted me to prepare milk for the Hun Queen. The Queen makes blind girls do the milking. Because it’s a sacred job.’

‘I sharpen pencils for the Commander,’ I whispered to the girl, as though this were a secret. ‘What I do isn’t sacred, and it isn’t hard either. So there’s no need to put the sap of the black anemone in my eyes. Have you ever seen the Commander?’

‘No,’ the girl said, shaking her head. ‘I’m blind, so I can’t see him. But I’ve heard he’s a giant.’

My father was a giant. You could see him at once, just as you would an elm tree that stood on top of a hill.

The next day, when I went down to the deserted cafeteria, the girl had grown a little. She still had a red ribbon in her hair, but her body was bigger and her face had changed slightly.

‘I grow fast,’ she said, as though sensing my surprise. ‘When I wake up in the morning, I find that my body has changed from the day before.’

‘Really? Then it means you have something I don’t have.’ I envied her.

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‘My mother never set out for any particular place, but because she was a sorceress, there were times she simply vanished into thin air.’ The girl whispered as she ate. ‘Then several days, perhaps weeks, later, she would suddenly appear again in the same spot. During the time she was gone, she would be somewhere else. She called it going on a trip. But no one knew where she went. She herself couldn’t remember. She had only a dim recollection of doing something and seeing something, somewhere, like a dream. She told me that one time after vanishing like that, she returned, only she wasn’t alone.’

The blind girl touched the end of her ribbon. ‘They say she was holding a baby in her arms. That’s how I came into the world.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘I’m looking for my father,’ the blind girl said. ‘One time after my mother vanished like that, she never came back. The only thing left in her place was the ribbon she always wore. That’s why I left. On the day the lake ice began to melt and the Queen drove her herds of sheep and horses to summer pasture, I tied my hair with my mother’s ribbon and began to walk in the opposite direction. That was my first trip. That’s how I came to this town.’

‘Do you think one of the missing officers is also your father? Do you know anything about your father?’

‘No, nothing.’ The girl shook her head. ‘I was born during a trip no one knew about. So all I can do is to wait for my father to recognise me.’

‘If the Commander turns out to be my father, I’ll ask him to help you.

The Commander could gather all his officers in one place and get them to meet you. If anyone could do that, it would be him.’

‘But if the missing officers never return, I heard the Commander will be furious with the Huns.’ The blind girl’s voice was quiet and composed. ‘If he finds out that my mother was a Hun sorceress, he’ll be furious with me, too. So he probably won’t help me.’

‘I won’t tell anyone. I’ll keep your secret. I won’t even say how you became blind from the sap of the black anemone. No one can tell you’re a Hun child by looking at you.’

We faced each other. I gazed at her face, at her gaze that was fixed on one spot, at her pupils that were no different from mine. At those secretive Hun

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pupils with a slightly dark green speck lurking in the left pupil, visible only if I looked very closely.

All of a sudden, I remembered what had happened at the police station’s children’s shelter after losing my father.

A blind girl with a red ribbon in her hair was walking out of the police station. All I could see were their backs, but I knew the person pulling her along by the hand was my father. I shouted to try to get them to stop. I was sure that my father, in some confusion, believed the blind girl to be me and so was taking her instead.

Had my father gone blind? Had the Hun Queen squeezed the sap of the black anemone into his eyes?

When we’d finished eating, we went to the building entrance and gazed out at the snow falling on the field. The air was thin and murky and bright black. In the distance, the soldiers passed, flashing like hazy shadows. They marched in single file. They wore high boots and white capes.

‘I want to marry a soldier one day,’ the girl said, her nose pressed against the glass while she looked in the direction of the soldiers’ footsteps with pupils that couldn’t see. ‘A soldier dressed in a white cape and boots with a beard that fans out like the branches of an elm tree. Someone who is as tall as a giant and smells like an elm tree. But if I can’t,’ the girl said, as she turned her head my way and touched my face and lips with her finger, ‘if that doesn’t happen, I want to marry you.’

We found ourselves outside, standing side by side, as we felt the snow come down on us. The girl, dressed in trousers that were much too short, didn’t seem to notice the cold and was instead listening for something in the snow.

‘Do you hear the Commander returning?’ I asked.

‘No, there’s no sound of the Commander returning.’ The girl, who had been listening for a distant sound, whispered, as though confessing a secret.

‘All I can hear is the flight of a single arrow, and the crying of the slave girls who had their noses and foreheads cut before they were buried alive with the chief in his grave.’

My father was a giant. He was as bright as an elm tree that stood on top of a hill, and you could see him at once, even from a distance. But at the same time, nothing, just like a story from a picture book he reads me. He

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was a dead elm tree, shrouded in a white blanket on the night of a blizzard.

He was a thin and murky blackness. I had always been afraid that I would never see my father again.

‘I just received some news that might concern your father.’

The next morning, the Commander’s lieutenant who had come to retrieve the sharpened pencils wore a happy expression. ‘A few days ago, a man was discovered lying in a field a little way from town. He wasn’t from around here, but luckily someone recognised him. It turns out he was the trainer of a snow leopard, part of a circus troupe that performed in the closest city, maybe a day’s walk from here. But when the snow leopard died, there was no work for him. And then, on top of that, he became ill. So the circus troupe probably left him behind as they were leaving the city. No one knows why, but he walked all the way to this town in that state, and ended up collapsing.’

The lieutenant’s voice was full of excitement and his face shone with anticipation. ‘He’s at the town clinic right now. But they say he’s a giant!’

‘A giant?’ I repeated like a parrot, bewildered, while staring at his face.

‘Who’s a giant?’

‘What do you mean who? The snow leopard trainer! And they say his beard is as black as soot and that it fans out like this, like the dried up branches of a dead elm tree.’ The lieutenant gestured exaggeratedly with his hands. ‘He might be your father. Let’s head toward town and go see that man. You don’t have to sharpen pencils today.’

It was a fine day to go for a walk. It had stopped snowing during the night and the world had cleared up as though everything before had been a lie. Everything, even the most distant spot the eye could see, sparkled white. The white light itself was that cold sparkle. Mountains and hills were covered with ice and even the road was covered with snow and a thin layer of ice. The lieutenant and I walked side by side.

‘The clinic is right behind the hill,’ he said. ‘You won’t be able to see it from here.’

Just as he said, as soon as we rounded the hill, a small brick hut appeared.

We went inside.

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One elderly pharmacist was on duty in the shabby single-room clinic.

There was only one bed and one patient. The lieutenant led me to the bed.

‘Go on, take a look.’

But the pharmacist was in the middle of pulling a white sheet over the patient’s face.

‘It’s too late,’ the pharmacist said. ‘He’s been unconscious for the past few days and just now he died.’

Because the dead patient was as tall as a giant, his bare feet stuck out from the clinic bed. His feet were very big, black with frostbite, and covered in cuts and bruises. Even though a blanket was covering him, his body gave off the smell of elm trees.

‘That’s not my father.’ I shook my head at the lieutenant. ‘Those aren’t my father’s feet.’

‘How can you tell just by looking at the feet?’ The lieutenant looked as though he didn’t believe me. He then raised the blanket in front of me. I saw the gaunt, dead face of the giant. ‘Take a good look at the face. Look how his beard fans out like tree branches.’

‘That’s not him.’ I shook my head.

On the way back, we sat on a small rock by the side of the road and ate an apple each. The lieutenant had got them from the pharmacist back at the clinic. He glanced at me and asked, ‘You know what? I still don’t know your name. What’s your name?’

‘Snowchild,’ I said while chewing.

‘Snowchild, that sounds like the name of a Hun child.’ He spat out an apple seed on the spotless white snow and began to whistle as he gazed out into the distance. He then said, ‘One day I want to make a lot of money and get rich. Then I’m going to get a Hun slave girl to work for me. I don’t care if she’s blind.’

The next day, Snowchild wasn’t at the cafeteria. The kitchen was cold and empty. I sat on the steps where I could see the entrance, and sharpened pencils. It was warmer in my room, but I liked the steps because I could see outside. Even if the Commander should arrive without warning, I would be the first one to spot him.

All morning the sky was overcast and in the afternoon it began to snow again.

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Snow fell on the piled-up snow, more and more heavily.

The air was thin and murky and a radiant black. In the distance, the soldiers passed, flashing like hazy shadows. They marched in single file.

They wore high boots and white capes.

You can’t see a snow leopard in the snow.

You can’t see Mother in the snow.

You can’t see a dead elm tree in the snow.

That’s what my father had said.

I missed Snowchild.

The Commander returned without any warning. No flag, no bugler accompanied him. No white horse carried him.

I sat on the steps and sharpened pencils. Was it then that I’d fallen asleep?

There was a pile of pencil shavings by my feet. I heard the sounds of mice and lizards building their nests inside the shavings. Outside, it was dark and filled with the thin and murky light of blackness that the snow radiated.

There in the centre, I saw the Commander sitting on his horse. He was a towering figure in that black light.

The Commander had returned!

My heart skipped against my will. As though it were some independent star that didn’t belong inside my chest, it flickered and sparkled on its own.

Had the Commander found the vanished officers and brought them back?

I went closer to the window so that I could see him better. But he was alone.

The horse stood still and the Commander, too, was motionless, like someone who had fallen asleep on his horse. The horse’s face was covered with a mask made of bark, with antlers like those of a reindeer. The snow raged and fell aslant. I thought I saw an arrow in the Commander’s chest and started with fright. Then just like the other vanished officers, he, too, will become an elm tree, shrouded in a white blanket. Then he, too, will disappear into the snow, never to be seen again. I opened the door and went out before he could vanish. I ran toward him.

The giant Commander was as hazy and pale as the bark of an elm tree.

He looked like a shadow that lacked thickness, with only a front and reverse side. Every time the wind blew, he flapped back and forth like a white blanket. His pale face, whenever it appeared from under the blanket, looked like a sketch of the dead snow leopard trainer’s face. The snowflakes became

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white arrowheads and pierced his body as they fell to the ground. I called out to him from within the blizzard.

Dad! I looked for Snowchild. All day I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the cafeteria. She had probably gone to bed, since it was night-time. But I didn’t know where she slept. When I returned to my room, Snowchild was lying on the bench. The fact that she had grown even more and now looked almost like my mother, the fact that milk as white as snow was flowing from her completely exposed left breast, were not enough to take me by surprise.

So big and heavy was my sadness.

‘Snowchild, the Commander has returned!’ I said.

Snowchild raised her unseeing eyes and gazed at me. ‘That’s good,’ she said.

She wrapped her arms around me and laid me down by her side. We latched onto each other and held tight. I whispered, ‘You know what? I dozed off while I was sharpening pencils and had the strangest thought.

Could the Commander be my father and yours as well? Do you think he could recognise both me and you at the same time?’

‘But I’ve grown too big. I’m not a child anymore. Even if he turned out to be my father, he wouldn’t recognise me now.’ She whispered in my ear, as though she were confessing a secret. She clutched my hand and placed it on her chest. ‘Look how big my chest has become.’

I sucked the milk that flowed from her breast, lukewarm with its sweet and metallic flavour. I drifted to sleep.

The next morning, someone gently shook me awake. The first thing I saw were all the pencils splayed on top of the desk. The lieutenant was pouring a new sack of pencils onto the desk.

‘The Commander returned last night. He used a sack of pencils during his expedition. You’ve got a lot more work to do now.’

‘Where’s Snowchild?’ I asked, rubbing my eyes.

‘What are you talking about? You’re Snowchild.’

‘I’m Snowchild, but Snowchild’s name is also Snowchild. She slept here last night.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I guess you’re still half-asleep.’

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I ran down the corridor in my bare feet, all the way to the entrance. I looked out the window down to the field piled with snow. There was the whole world in that sparkling afternoon. But I saw neither the Commander nor his horse. The field was deserted. Had last night been a dream?

I opened the door and went outside. I called out to Snowchild.

Snowchild!

At first no one knew why the officers had gone to the dangerous plains.

All of them died. One by one, they were hit by the Huns’ arrows. Arrows that no one shot, that no one saw, that didn’t even make the air vibrate. A Hun girl came walking toward them. From her throat came the sound of a bear. The Hun girl was blind, and white milk flowed from her breasts. The hair on her body was as black as soot. The hair on her head fanned out like the branches of an elm tree. That girl is the Hun sorceress. That girl is the Hun child who does the milking. That girl is the adopted daughter and slave to the Hun Queen. That girl milked the bear and married the bear, that girl milked the mountain goat and married the mountain goat. At first no one knew why the officers had gone to the dangerous plains. White milk flowed from the Hun girl’s chest and fell on the white snow. The officers had followed that trail. Arrows they couldn’t see, arrows that had no need to fly. The officers’ chests were pierced with arrows. Ah, one day, I want to make a lot of money and become rich. Then I’m definitely going to get a Hun slave girl to work for me. I don’t care if she’s blind. The Commander was furious. The officers he had cherished as his own sons were dead. The Commander roamed the Huns’ plains and even entered their woods. He killed the bear and removed its hide, he killed the mountain goat and removed its hide, he killed the Huns’ elm tree and removed its hide. And finally he found the child of the Hun sorceress. The blind girl who had dripped white milk on the snow to lure the officers, the adopted daughter and slave to the Hun Queen. And that’s why you, Snowchild, must never look back.

This is what the lieutenant had said.

I looked back.

And there she was. The soldiers brought a chair. They made Snowchild climb onto the chair and pushed her head into the noose, and the Noin Ula stationmaster took away the chair and carried it back to the station.

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There used to be a chair here, but the Commander’s men took it away.

Snowchild’s neck twisted at an impossible angle, and snap, I heard the sound of bone breaking. Her small, scrawny bare feet that were covered in cuts and bruises swayed gently in the air.

You’ll live as a boy until you’re seven years old, but after your seventh birthday, you’ll become a girl. It’s because the evil Queen kidnaps young girls. She puts the sap of the black anemone in their eyes to make them go blind and then raises them up to prepare milk. So you’ll have to cut your hair short like a boy’s. You’ll have to wear trousers like a boy and you’ll have to talk like a boy. But when you turn seven, you won’t have to worry about the Queen anymore, and you can begin to live as a girl. From then on, your hair will become long and black, and your chest will grow big and white.

That’s what my father had said.

I picked up the red ribbon that had fallen from Snowchild’s body. It was my seventh birthday that day. I tied my short hair with the red ribbon. Then I vanished, just like that, and so no one has seen a thing that has happened to me in Noin Ula since then.

Books by Bae Suah at the ALR website – http://www.asialiteraryreview.com/users/bae-suah.

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Circular Feed Circular Feed Sreedhevi Iyer

Sreedhevi Iyer

Y

es, that’s him, said Zya to Khalid, he said he was going to do it, and now he is. That’s brave of him, Khalid told Yusuf later at dinner, but Yusuf only shook his head, brave and stupid are same sides of the coin, he said, he was going to get himself killed. That’s a bad attitude, said Khan, we should be more supportive, and Zya pointed out they were all here because they themselves were not getting any, and it’s been eighteen months, said Amir to Yaakub, and all Shelley tells me is to wait, no wonder he is up there then, added Khan, he is doing it for his wife and kids. He’s doing it for attention, said Yusuf (according to Khalid), he’s only going to make it worse for the rest of us because he doesn’t know the value of keeping his mouth shut and listening to the authorities. They should be out there soon, said Ahmed, talking to him to get him down. Would that help? asked Zahid, I can just see Robert and Graham and Shelley trying to talk to him from the ground, craning their necks, trying to see him against the sky. Aziz laughed, it would be like looking up at God. Yes, looking up after a very long time, but maybe that is a good thing, him being up there, said Samar, maybe then they will know we really don’t want to return. How can they not believe we don’t want to return? asked Ahmed, no, it’s only processing, he said, but if it is only that then it will only be a matter of time, but Syed (according to Yaakub) in the other building says for him eighteen months is nothing, he is now no longer counting, his number should have been up that long ago, but Syed didn’t think to get up there. Maybe now that he has, said Aziz, maybe they will now see what we have not been able to say, but will he be OK up there? wondered Khan, the zinc gets very hot, as hot

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as our backs when they let us out sometimes, no, hotter than that, yes, yes, hotter than that of course, supplied Shiraz, this place, it is like home and it is not like home, they will never make this place like our home, explained Latif, that is why he is up there, standing on zinc and looking down at them.

And the next day, when some of the others, the ones who had been discussing and passing on information, saw him still up there, it was Khalid who predicted this might get bigger. So he isn’t just going crazy, said Jamal, no, maybe he has a plan, said Zahid, who was the quiet one but knew him the closest, what plan, has he said anything to you? queried Yusuf, a bit too harshly, thought Zya, as he relayed the update to Syed, yes in here everything is everybody else’s business, but we don’t need to announce going to the toilet! But this is very far from toilets, said Qamar to Anas later, as the word spread from group to group, language to language, we are all watching, can you see, even though some turn away, like Aziz and Habib and some of the smaller ones shielded by the women, the rest of us, Yaakub pointed out, we’re shameless, watching this tamasha circus. He’s sitting down now, crouched low, look at him, his shirt is drenched, said Salma, in the closest building. Does anyone know what is it he’s saying? No, said Sara, he’s talking in English, is his English good? wondered Shelley around lunchtime as she walked around the mess, and Zahid almost responded, said Jamal, what a naïve boy, he would’ve told her his family’s in a royal mansion in Afghanistan if asked, poor stupid boy, how would he know, said Yusuf, that it wouldn’t help him one bit, that to them we’re the poorest of the poor, and need to be to get out?

Someone’s here, said Habib, see Shelley rushing outside, you wait here boys, it’s all good, she said. They are not in uniform, reported Salma, slightly disappointed, wouldn’t they send more uniformed people, I like the kind of blue, makes their eyes even more blue, except you can never say a word properly when they come to you, laughed Aishah, you get so tongue-tied like a sixteen-year-old virgin, not a forty-year-old mother, sshhh, said Salma, trying to deflect her embarrassment, they are talking to Graham and Robert under the roof, OK, OK now, said Shelley, suddenly coming through the building, nothing to see here, she’s gone now said Aishah after a while, so what are they doing? They’re just talking, said Samad in the other building, you sound disappointed, said Yaakub, did you expect to come and bow

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down to that great man on the roof, give him salaam and send him on his way? Where did they come from? asked Qamar, did you see outside the fences, there is nothing out there. This is a big place, replied Zya, with more gentleness than normal, according to Yusuf, it is still an island, insisted Qamar, which part did they come from? Malik said he didn’t see the point.

They are defending him, can you not see, they are in clothes I have seen on television, speaking English, they are pointing fingers at Graham, who has his arms crossed. They want to save him, pronounced Aziz. So suddenly the rest had to pause, said Zahid. Yes, see, they are like Americans, Zya reassured Qamar again, I told you, this place is big, Australia, it is very close to America, almost next to it.

Two more, said Khairil, I wonder when did they get up there? I think the question is how did they get up there, said Yusuf (according to Qamar), did they climb up the pipes? I think they’re being brave, said Khalid, but, observed Aziz, that only means yesterday’s talks didn’t work. It cannot work in one day, said Qamar to Zya with big gestures and some pointing. We talked and talked for years before leaving. People come with set agendas, agreed Habib, it would take a long time for one to understand another.

Stupid young people, spat Yusuf, they think by making spectacles of themselves they will change the world. Why so negative, chacha-jaan, said Zahid, it is better than not knowing what is going to happen any day, how long have you been here? Shut up, you’re still a small boy, said Yusuf (when has he ever admitted being wrong, said Zya, even Shelley ignores him now).

Speaking of which, said Aziz, I spoke to Salma yesterday, she says Shelley is not telling them anything. They’re scared, suggested Qamar, it looks like he’s seen things like this before, Khalid pointed out, Qamar thinks the guards are now scared, reported Zya later to Salma in the women’s quarters.

So many guards scared of three boys on a roof, laughed Salma to Megha. It is not what they’re doing, it’s why they’re doing it, said Megha, my cousin, the one in Quetta, told me the white people don’t react much to just saying the truth, but they react when it is shown, when it is not hidden but seen.

I had told him then he fancied himself an American, and then, said Sara, she went silent, just like we all do after speaking of the ones far away. She has been waiting long, said Aishah, she has been here from the time I came, how far are you in the queue? asked Amena, does it matter? Salma sighed,

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I am losing count, those boys are trying to jump the queue, said Sara, sshh, do you want Shelley to hear, said Amena, maybe they will talk for all of us, said Salma, no, impossible, Aishah refuted, Qamar said they’re having trouble communicating. That’s because it’s just those guards and those people who came in from outside, said Salma (and Aishah later relayed to Qamar to tell the men) if the Americans (Australians, corrected Amena) like all the showing, then we must do more showing. Keep the showing, keep the show going, how do they say it, asked Salma, the show must go on, replied Amena.

No, guys, sorry, not today, said Shelley, are there any more up on the roof? asked Rizwan, no, replied Aziz, but I don’t think that’s the reason why we aren’t going out today, it’s the cameras, said Zahid, they don’t want us captured on it, can you see how many asked Yusuf (was his voice trembling then, queried Zya later), about five or six, but they are big, said Jamal, how would you know, you seen film shooting before? asked Yaakub, Amitabh Bachchan came to Afghanistan, retorted Jamal, I was ten years old, they had very big cameras. Aziz told Khairil later he felt Jamal was lying, that he was making it up, let it be, Khairil replied, they put him in that tiny dark room for too long, he’s been telling tales ever since he came out. Nothing to do but nod and say yes and hope the boys on the roof somehow do something soon enough that we all don’t end up the same. There are people on mikes now, pointed Habib, you can see them from this window. What are they saying? asked Yusuf, Qamar should be here, he could translate, well it’s all about the boys anyway, noted Jamal, they are the ones everyone can see. They will put this on television, said Habib, then all of them will be famous, people will know about us and release us. They won’t, not that quickly, said Yusuf, what is wrong with you, do you not want to continue what has been interrupted? roared Khairil, it will not do the boys good if we fight, said Aziz, we must keep calm, the boys are doing their best. They’ve crouched now, said Zya, they’re darker with the sun. They must be hungry, said Faisal, apparently they asked for water earlier, reported Yaakub, Shelley was very angry about that, she was slamming doors again. She was angry that they asked? enquired Yusuf, no, you know Shelley tries, she looks at you directly and she tells you to your face. Maybe she was angry with the other guards, wondered Jamal. Maybe we should ask her what is going on,

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said Habib. Now it’s twelve people talking to three boys, observed Zahid, they must be taking this seriously. You really think this would make a difference, asked Yusuf, oh, chacha-jaan, Zahid replied, this is the most exciting thing that has happened since I came here, I don’t know about you, but I think the Australians outside are not like these guards, but more like Shelley. That’s why the cameras are here, agreed Jamal, the cameras mean other people outside know, and that will make us processed faster. Don’t think I’m an idiot, said Yusuf (according to Zya, talking to Qamar). I know how it all works. We must keep calm, repeated Aziz. You keep calm, said Zahid, while they put their life up there. One bullet, yes, agreed Habib, and it’s finished. But not while the cameras are here, said Zahid softly. I really want Qamar here, said Khairil.

Are you still counting? asked Salma, it takes a while from here, be patient, said Amena. Eight, said Megha decisively. Your banner is looking really good, Salma, said Sara, it’s nothing said Salma, oh so modest, teased Amena.

It only took me an hour, continued Salma (she’s so proud of it, said Sara to Qamar). Did you see Shelley’s face when the boys unfurled it? asked Aishah, I think she might’ve smiled, Shelley smile! exclaimed Salma, what are you saying! Qamar said the cameras focused on it a lot, from where he stood, continued Sara.

More boys, not eating, it is like they are now young Gandhis, said Megha.

The new ones up there, how long have they been here, asked Aishah. I don’t think they’re Hazaras, the new ones, said Sara. Whoever they are, said Salma, they have strength, look at them. Their mothers aren’t here, which is probably a good thing, said Megha, yes, although, said Khatija, I’m sure they miss them, they must be thinking of them as they slept on those terrible tiles. Yes, Megha and Aishah nodded, it is not easy what they’re doing, they must have been pushed to some crazy point. Boys take these things harder, said Salma to nobody in particular, is Afzal OK? she asked Aishah (was it necessary to bring that up right then, Khatija complained to Sara) yes he is, said Aishah, he is sleeping, he was very tired afterwards. At least Shelley let you have him, said Salma, if it had been one of the others, they would’ve left it after bandaging his wrists. Shelley knows he’s nine, said Aishah, the others probably didn’t ask, you don’t need words to know a boy’s age, said Amena (you’re right, but don’t scare her, said Salma to her later), there is

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no blame here, said Megha, oh but there is so much blame, Megha, said Amena, that I don’t know where to start. The cameras are now all around, said Salma, the news must be growing big, does that mean the guards will listen to the boys? asked Sara, it’s so frustrating that we don’t know what they’re saying. Nobody has responded to our newspaper request yet, said Amena. I don’t think they will let us have newspapers, said Aishah, maybe that’s a good sign, said Megha. There are more people now, said Salma, just standing around from outside the fence and watching. The boys are now famous, said Aishah, Allah protect them, they give me strength. We are not going outside today either, said Megha, I think Shelley has been given strict orders. That’s OK, said Salma, Qamar said he heard some reporters talk to their cameras using the newspaper words. It’s how they see us, shrugged Sara, as long as it gets us out. Do the boys know what to say to get us out, though? asked Aishah, of course, there’s so many of them now, said Sara, they will speak for all of us, in here we are the same. I am going to work as a banker when I get out, said Megha (always with her plans, that Megha, said Salma to Aishah), I want to deal with a lot of money. Fool and money soon parted, said Amena, it’s an English saying, wah wah, Amena madam, said Sara, maybe you will become English teacher. Of course not, said Amena, I will work in the newspapers, like those people, I will write about all the bad things happening in the world. And you will also write about all the things I sew and knit, said Salma, of course, I will write about everything. I will bring Mahdi over, said Sara, and my son will go to school here. School in America (Australia, said Amena) will be very expensive, said Salma, no, Khairil said it is free, he heard Shelly say so, said Sara. You must tell that to your son Afzal, said Salma to Aishah, he must know what to expect out there. Yes, agreed Aishah, there is so much to prepare.

He’s asking for water, said Zya (according to Khalid). He had bent down and asked Graham. Did they give him any? asked Yusuf, no, I don’t know, I don’t think so, said Qamar. Did anyone go to talk to them? asked Zahid, we were out for a bit yesterday, the first boy just keeps saying they will not eat till they are free, informed Jamal. He’s saying that even when Graham is on the megaphone asking them all to come down, saying they will hurt themselves, said Zya, oh, suddenly our safety is so important, laughed Aziz, yes, because it is all being captured on camera, who knows what has been

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on television, wondered Qamar, I haven’t seen television in months, wouldn’t it be funny, that we come here and the first real thing that happens is we end up on white man television, Yaakub pointed out, and it was such an absurd thought that everyone laughed, relayed Habib to Aishah, and it was odd that we did with everything happening outside, oh not at all, replied Aishah, I think it’s necessary, we need it, it’s a good relief, even if it’s temporary, besides we shouldn’t let those boys down. We’re not really eating either, Khairil observed absently, as if, said Jamal, he was trying to make conversation about safer things but only making it worse, Latif said this made him feel closer to the boys, even though he wasn’t burning his feet on the roof with them, they could’ve at least taken their shoes up there, mused Salma, it would’ve not lasted, said Amena, and anyway I don’t see how that is important when they are all still out there, what is this a standstill, enquired Fatima, nobody seems to be doing anything, one of them used to get visits from an uncle, noted Aishah (but we all know that, Zya told her later) have they gone to get him maybe, I doubt it, I don’t see Yara anymore, said Amena, I haven’t seen her for two months, maybe she came but wasn’t allowed in, suggested Salma (as usual, with her complete lack of tact, what good does it do? complained Aishah to Jamal), the boys must be missing their mothers, said Latifah, holding Aishah’s Afzal, noted Amena, as if he were her own, they must be very scared, they probably never thought this would go on for so long, what’s worse is if they were thinking they should’ve done it earlier, said Hafiz, if they had known what kind of attention it would get, rather than wasting time listening to Shelley, said Khairil, well that’s because there’s such a thing as faith, said Yusuf, faith that is more than just touching your head to the floor five times a day. And your faith is that by keeping silent and licking their arses they will let you out, chacha-jaan, asked Yaakub (according to Zya), some courtesy towards the elders, observed Salma, it is already going, being on this American land (Australian, sighed Amena), am I the only one who understands the nature of this place, said Yusuf, where things like law and order actually exist and aren’t figments of a corrupt politician’s imagination (I understand, said Hafiz), this is only another reaction to being here, isn’t it, suggested Salma when she heard of it, some things are as big, too big, to understand, so the logical reaction is to believe it is also better, he really believes it doesn’t he, poor chacha-jaan,

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said Aishah softly, after putting Afzal to sleep, I think he believes we should be grateful, said Sharifah, that we’re here at all, we have already been that, interrupted Amena, those boys aren’t up there for fun, it’s not like they are unfaithful kafirs, Yusuf chacha should have some empathy, he didn’t mean to disrespect them, Amena, said Salma, he is of the same ilk as my in-laws back home, who survived generations by hiding themselves, it’s not cowardice, it’s a different kind of courage, this kind of stuff is probably scaring him silly, if so then maybe he doesn’t deserve to get out (oh, Amena, sighed Aishah) because he is only going to be the same out there, hiding away from everything, if that’s the way his family has been for years, finished Amena, and Qamar said for some hours nobody talked to her, because they had all been so intent on the boys and getting out but nobody had really thought about what that would be like, and isn’t that just like them, ventured Latif, saying so many things they shouldn’t, even the honest ones, but it’s something to be said that they were all quiet about it, because, you know, Zahid said, hedging and hesitant, the truth is, we will do anything, like these boys, to get out, but who knows what out is, well then we must believe Yusuf is right, felt Jamal, that it is a place of law and order, but, Khairil contradicted, if they don’t like us in here, they may not like us out there, oh you’re saying that from all the poison your cousin outside says on visits, said Habib, it is only about what to prepare for, Habib, said Zya, but no, no, said Habib, I don’t want to think about it that way.

And while the boys still fasted up on the roof, with everyone, even Shelley, watching and anticipating more, Amena said all of a sudden it meant nothing that they were up there, and that she was going to ask for something to eat, I told you she would go crazy, because like Jamal one day, said Zya, no, she had had a surprise visit from her cousin Yara, said Qamar, everyone is watching the television, the boys are everywhere, ah but that is good news, said Zahid, maybe tomorrow I will ask Shelley again about my file, ask all you want, Yara said we are going to be sent back (what, Khalid, what do you mean? asked Yusuf ), the big government people want to stop the boat owners from coming here, but we are already here, Aziz pointed out, are they going to put us back on the boats, you are lying, that girl must have it wrong, said Salma, maybe her English isn’t very good and she misunderstood, said Qamar with hope (all we have left, said Jamal to Habib). But what if

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it’s true, oh get the boys to come down then, let them eat, said Aishah, already thinking of Afzal, have you seen them now, their faces are completely different, not like when they first went up, said Khatijah, I don’t know, I feel like I’ve been seeing them like this for so long I no longer remember what they were like before, said Salma, how odd, even Zahid said that, mentioned Yaakub, and he was on the same boat as them. I am now afraid they will get processed faster, how awful, said Fatima, bursting into tears, can you imagine if they get out there and nobody gives them a job? oh get a hold of yourself, it is not like that, anyway so many relatives are here, it must be for a reason, said Yaakub (but I don’t think he really believed it, observed Farhan). We’re still going to be up here, they’ve reported to have said, and maybe they already knew what outside was like, said Zya, they’re losing weight, said Salma, I swear I saw one close his eyes for a while, he probably fainted but didn’t want anyone to know, do they really hate us so much, Aishah asked suddenly, and Fatima was certain she had been thinking of Afzal’s bandages, in all the rooftop attention nobody had thought of changing the dressing, she is as vulnerable as those boys, pronounced Khairil, she must feel a special connection to them. Do we have a choice in this, Yusuf spoke up unexpectedly, let them hate us, let them think what they want, here, there, what does it matter, I will still go out there to live, and with that Yusuf (according to Zya) seemed to be done talking about the whole issue, and it really seemed rather appropriate that in this way Yusuf chacha-jaan had articulated the most honest truth of all, the truth which had bound them on boats then and on rooftops now.

None of them were reported to look very good, which was the answer everyone received when they asked, and it was always the first question of the morning. They aren’t giving us water, the youngest was reported to have said, we’ve asked but they said we’ll get it if we come down, are the press covering this? asked Salma, we must find a way to get something positive out of this situation, stressed Amena, the law is still the law, said Shelley later on, suddenly, it seemed, to be on talking terms again, as if the implication of her true loyalty in those days of silence hadn’t existed, she’s only doing her job, defended Yusuf, I’m surprised people still listen to him, said Amena. The first boy refused the compromise because it came too late, said Khairil, I think I overheard that lady with the mike say they will look

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at our files again, how many times are they going to look at the files, nothing has changed inside it, said Yaakub, Aishah brought Afzal out last night, to show his bandages to the cameras, said Jamal, and Habib was a little concerned about his tone, since it seemed cloudier than usual, she wanted them to see what was happening, what her boy had done to himself. Now, now, no such talk here, said Shelley, coming in, although she could not meet Jamal’s eyes, according to Khalid, and she later brought them all some chocolate, which Aziz flung against the wall. Afzal might want that, said Qamar, just make sure the boys don’t hear of it, they might think us unworthy of what they’re fighting for, scrambling like beggars while they waste away like patients with a disease, nobody wanting to touch them.

Some of the names have been called, according to Sara, only a sham a part of the so-called compromise, sneered Amena, still, we must take what is offered, otherwise we insult the efforts of the boys, said Khatija, and most of the women nodded, although Qamar expressed a certain dissatisfaction with how easily everyone changed their minds, isn’t that also being really selfish and disrespectful? he told Ishan, who then told Amena, what kind of signal does that send out about us? and the women agreed what nobody else saw was how the atmosphere had changed, there was no longer that dense layer of bodies at the outer fence plastering against it and shouting slogans, and the number of mikes and questions had slowed from a torrent to a trickle, and Amena was just slightly annoyed that people might start saying Yusuf was right after all, especially since showing Afzal seemed to have attracted not enough attention. The funny thing is, said Jamal, if we were Christian this wouldn’t be the case, and Habib and Aziz tried weak protests, but it’s true, insisted Jamal, the guards used to let them out every week to go out to the church, and they would attend service and return, while waiting to be processed, and they would ask for eggs, because they missed them, if only they could bring some back for us, this is hardly the time, interjected Khairil, but you cannot deny it, Jamal went on, and maybe instead of punishing themselves like this, what the boys need to do is to convert into Christianity, and we should too, no, no, please hear me out, I’m not being insensitive, I’m not saying do it literally, but in name, the white man is all about appearances, if we appear to be Christian, but still remain what we are inside, they will let us out faster, we can do this, I

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remember Christians in Iran, they would hide and pray to Jesus, but go to mosque on Fridays, so people would leave them alone. And just as Aziz and Qamar and even Yusuf cocked their ears to this, Jamal continued, and I would follow them home, and I would ask them why they are so afraid, and they would say sir, you do not know what we go through, and I said look, it is only what is in your heart that matters, don’t worry about what others say, not even me, oh sir, they said, thank you for saying this to us, it is wise indeed, and they gave me a big hug, and this is where Jamal lost them. Let it be, said Khairil to Habib, there is no use telling him he’s lying, he doesn’t see it that way. It’s the result of Red One, said Qamar, when you’ve been in there too long too young, I hope they don’t put the boys in there, said Khalid, it might be too late for everyone, was Yusuf ’s solemn thought (don’t say that, chacha-jaan, said Khairil) but this is what we’re coming to, sitting around babbling nonsense, I wonder who is worse off, the boys or us.

Sara saw Salma out there with them when they came down, reported Qamar. She said they did not speak much, as if all the words they had were already exhausted, and there was nothing left. They didn’t even correct her when she told them this was the nature of America, according to Amena.

They did smile at her as the guards took them away, if she’s to be believed, said Khairil, it’s not Red One, please tell me it’s not Red One, was Aziz’s worry, no, if you put eight boys in a single room, the room loses its purpose, Jamal pointed out (very fittingly, surmised Khalid). Do they know about their files? asked Fatima, maybe they’re being processed right now, Amena has already gathered all the women’s files, said Qamar, just to be on the safe side, yes, we should do the same, felt Habib, but what do we tell Shelley? why, the truth, shrugged Khairil, as if this happened every day, our stages are different but we want the same thing, and the mention of it opened the thing none of them could say while the boys were on the roof, all their stages, levels, checks, what’s done, what’s left, my bones are in those files, said Jamal, and oddly nobody, not even Amena, thought that as crazy. When Salma came back Aishah rushed to her, because, according to Latifah, she knew beforehand a collapse was imminent, and sure enough, there were her cries, ululating off the walls, it’s like they’re mine, she said (strength, said Aishah, strength, sister) all I did was pass some water into their lips, so swollen, so cracked, she said, as if describing a painting or a distant memory,

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they looked at me but did not seem to recognise me, but of course they know you, they’re just in shock, said Aishah, but Salma wasn’t listening, felt Sara, because she could finally release herself and she wasn’t going to have it stymied. How far has she been processed? asked Shelley, watching from a doorway (oh what a fright that was, whispered Sara to Khatija) and Amena lied, according to Qamar, because this had already happened, everyone knew each other’s stages, it is envy that isn’t in our control, agreed Khairil, we don’t determine the dates, and it is what put them up there in the first place, said Zya, this fear of being left behind as others race to the outside.

We’re going in reverse, said Habib, it’s like we’re becoming children again, and have to relearn everything, but Zahid disagreed, having been to the boys himself, felt they had aged, as if they had encountered something none of them had seen and were in a strange state, almost as if in peace.

Astafaullah-al-azim, said Aishah when she heard, after putting both Afzal and Salma to sleep, he blasphemes, no, he’s trying to keep things stable, said Amena with an air of finality. Latif asked if the boys recognised Zahid, and according to Zya one of them may have, because when he caught sight of him, in between gulping some water and eyeing some sandwiches, he smiled, and brazenly asked Zahid to tell him a story. Aishah was certain Zahid had misheard, it seemed such an unusual thing to say, but what is usual about this? asked Qamar, we are all stories for the camera and the chanting people outside, they are only asking to be fed, and Jamal laughed so loud Sara said it woke Salma up, she said it must have travelled across all those lines of people, they must be hungry, said Qamar, they must be very very hungry.

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Poetry

John Thieme

John Thieme

Chinese Checkers I make steady progress across the board.

‘Imperious’ is the word you use to describe it, While mounting a nonchalant defence, Against my hopeful, hopping pegs, Pygmy soldiers in the Shanghai dusk.

In a moment of distraction, as I sip my tea, Broken orange pekoe from Sri Lanka, I venture to remark that China Has given much to the West, and you reply, ‘Oh yes, but taken so much more.

You taught us all your rules of trade, How to give and take. We gave, you took.

That habit will be hard for us to break.

And this game? Japan gave us this German game, So now we make smart sets to send to you.’

While you say this, I strive to cross the board And steal a victory through a pincer-like advance, Hoping that your mind may be wandering to

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Your husband who left you a year or two ago, Or your lover, arrested for cheating at checkers With the sharp-faced Russian ambassador, Whose diplomatic immunity saved their skins.

‘Of course,’ you say, ‘The West has given too, But let’s not talk about the Opium Wars.’

There’s little humour in your voice.

‘One way of avoiding that past Is to put it in the margins of a longer, Finer history of walls and warriors and woks.

Oh yes, we sent you woks too, didn’t we?’

The game looks to be moving towards stalemate, As you pull backwards from the board, Grating your chair-legs on the tiled floor.

I see a chance to win the day And swiftly push my pegs towards your space.

You deftly thwart my move, not by ingenious defence, But by rising to your feet. You whisper softly, ‘Our pandas seldom mate in Western zoos.’

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from Malindo from MalindoNada H olland

Nada Holland

1. Star Indonesia, Jakarta, January 6, 2010, Mawar BANG, my heart thunders, BANG, BANG, in time with the house beat, the stadium grind, stage-lamps lightning all around us. I watch the frontrow faces, hantu, every last gun-barrel and stare fixed on me but they don’t see, they don’t know, even the Militia, secret police can’t read me; can’t see what I see, feel what I feel, cannot hear what I hear. A pulse as still as my own stance, as my real heart, which lies low in my hips and hears only a bassline that isn’t here, slow and low; my real heart, which beats only for you.

I hold. Stand perfectly still, on one foot. Not an eyelash flutters.

And still, no-one knows, no-one sees, no-one hears. And still. The moment lasts. And lasts.

All eyes on the stage, on the dance, on my single foot.

Held perfectly still.

Almost.

Twitch: my middle, my ring finger, part and cleave again. Twitch.

I hold my pose, offer up my arms, my feet, my hands, my hips, as I was taught. I am a civil servant. I offer up my smile. Another perfect, happy show. Classic sweetness. Ancient joy.

I am a perfect offering.

Twitch.

Tomi gawks at my fingers. From the other end, Officer Rizal. Who do I fear most: the fascist Militia, secret police, plain-clothes officers, or Rizal himself? My heart skips from my ribs to my throat, still feeling Rizal’s

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from Malindo

familiar threat there, his voice spitting as he growls in my neck, Are you a virgin?

And even now my heart sinks back between my hips as your music overtakes me. I no longer hear Rizal, no longer hear the house beat. In my head, my body, all I hear is the bassline from that other orbit, low like a trance, like my own slow-motion movements. I watch the front rows, the judges’ booth, the other waiting contestants: the can-can dancers, the beauty-queen. I don’t even look at the fierce Muslim DJ, waiting morosely to the side as the show’s own house beat thunders away. I glance back at Rizal. Look for my partner, waiting to join me.

But it’s not my partner, Angger, I think of.

It’s not Rizal either, my eye is drawn to; nor to the secret police, Militia, the fascists all watching me. It’s Tomi. My mentor.

Help.

Still, Rizal’s voice floats around in my head . . . You are a civil servant. . . .

Is it Rizal I fear, or the gunmen stationed in every corner? I watch the execs, the foreign producers, and picture the spooks: the viewers, the hantu spectres overseas.

But I’m not fooled by the faces fleeting before me, their floaty voices, the sounds drifting around in my head, in my hips: the low, supernatural bassline still there, Gendjer-gendjer, slowly parting and cleaving my two middle fingers: Willing my body to yield, to give in, to break into my grandmother’s dance, restore her unruly groin, un-drown her bones, dredge up her trance.

It’s the killer I fear. Right in front of me— HERE I hold out my arm, flawlessly still. I am a civil servant. A perfect offering.

TWITCH Either I hold this pose and kill it dead, or it kills me.

2. Spring 1965, Nolo, East Java, Tomi ‘Bung Karno grew up barefoot, like you and me.’ Tomi’s father points at his peasant feet, rough and calloused in the dark on the dust floor. ‘And yet

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Brother Karno,’ Tomi’s father takes the suitcase from the top of the wall, where it sits perched under the palm leaf roof, ‘has met Marilyn Monroe.’

The gas lamp sputters. Tomi’s father blows on the case. More dust.

Twelve-year-old Tomi can only see before him the famous actress. The blonde candy-floss smile, more mysterious, more bewitching, more alluring than all the Sitas of the Ramayana, than all the virgins tending to the Prophet Mohammed in Heaven. His father is still talking about Bung Karno, the president, and the president’s lady friends. More accurately, the president and his thoughts about ladies – some rant about the brown man conquering the white by conquering his woman – but Tomi isn’t really listening. Bung Karno knows a star!

Bung Karno is a star.

All Tomi sees in his mind’s eye now, as his father continues talking and dusting off the old suitcase, is Bung Karno and Marilyn on the silver screen together, singing and dancing, Marilyn’s lovely legs click-clacking in patent pumps; lovely bones covered in plump flesh and diamonds and lace, shimmering, sashaying, click-clack, across the stage. Dancing and singing: Bung Karno smiling in his white suit, his dark glasses, his black pitji, that trademark little hat. More smiles, back and forth, between the First Lady of Film and the President of the Union of Non-Aligned States.

Or whatever. Tomi really isn’t listening too closely as his father continues to talk about non-alignment: Nasser, Nehru, Tito, Belgrade. About Bung Karno, Bandung, Indonesia, heading the countries who will choose to sit in the Cold War’s cool little heart, binding themselves neither to Moscow nor to the United States.

The world is like a house, like a family, his father with his hollow cheeks, his missing teeth, is explaining. ‘The man at the head talks to his squabbling children. Listens to one side, listens to the other. Lets each side give a little, take a little. Bung Karno is that father.’

Tomi nods. Now he is listening.

‘Musyawarah, deliberation. Consensus. That’s the Javanese way,’ his father says, setting down the little case with his thin brown arms. He wears an old white vest, a faded sarong, then bony ankles, bare feet. ‘Same for Indonesia,’ his father explains, sticking out his left arm. ‘Here we have the communists, the PKI, pulling on one side.’ He leans left. ‘There we have the army.’ He leans

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right now, as if the army were tugging at his other arm. ‘. . . the generals who want us to go with Amerika.’

His father straightens. ‘Bung Karno in the middle. Consensus.’

Tomi nods.

His father plants his bare feet even more flatly in the dust. ‘See? Stabil.

Stable.’

Tomi nods again. Bung Karno is the Father. Keeping the country, the whole world, he sees now, in place.

‘When Karno was in Amerika, they had the Cuba Crisis. Nuclear war,’ Tomi’s father is saying. ‘Bung went to the White House. He said, no talking in the room, or in the garden. Not safe. They went to Pak Kennedy’s bedroom! There, Bung said he’d make Pak Kennedy talk to Pak Khrushchev.

About Cuba.’

Tomi nods.

His father is shaking. ‘Bung Karno saved the planet!’

It’s very late. Tomi has no bedtime, just nods off at some point like Tuti, his mother, but it’s unusual for his father to speak to Tomi in the evenings.

It’s as if his father is trying to tell him something, keeping him up, keeping him close, and Tomi too doesn’t want to let go, though he is nodding and nodding at his father with a head increasingly heavy on his small shoulders.

‘In the kampung, the village,’ his father is saying, ‘we have the landowners.’

He sticks out his right arm and leans right in his faded peasant sarong, as if being pulled at. ‘And the little farmers’ – he leans left – ‘arguing over the land.’

Tomi nods again.

His father stands up straight. ‘Bung Karno in the middle. Bung listens to both sides. Then makes the new Land-Reform Law.’ ‘Ah,’ Tomi says. ‘Gitu. Like that.’

‘Gitu,’ his father nods. ‘Like that.’

‘And then?’

His father leans right. ‘Landowners ignore the new law. District Police, Koramil, protect them.’ He leans further to the right. ‘Kampung lapar.

Hungry.’

‘And then?’

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‘Communist help. One-Sided Actions.’ His father leans left. ‘Kampung take the land.’

Tomi nods. ‘Bapak take?’

His father, still tilting left in his ragged sarong, his bare feet, nods. ‘Papa take.’

Tomi can hear his father’s thin knees cracking.

His father straightens up.

In bed with his mother, as Tomi falls asleep against her tummy, he can still hear his father – who’ll leave the bed to Tuti and the children and sleep on a mat on the floor in the next room – walking around. His soft bare steps seem barely to touch the floor, like hantu, ghostly footfalls over the buzz of the gas lamp, the crickets, the frogs out in the paddy.

Tomi that night dreams of his father wearing Bung Karno’s white suit, Karno’s black pitji, and dancing on the stage. His father is like Karno, he sees in the dream, not just the father of their own little hut, their own little family, but the Father of the Nation.

He wakes early, the dream still vivid, his father in Bung Karno’s suit: the Father of the World. Tomi, half-waking, half-dreaming still, worries the suit won’t fit, hears the crick-crack of his father’s bones, his creaking knee-joints.

He needs to find his father an egg. Tomi doesn’t know much about food, but he knows about knee-joints and egg-white. Everyone does. The knees are where a man’s sperma, his life-juice, is made. From egg-white. Flush young men will order an egg, setenga-matang, half-boiled, by the roadside, and eat it standing up, to show off their manhood. If they really want to prove the point, they’ll chuck the yolk. Then order another.

Tomi has no money. He can’t go to the roadside stand near the market, nor to the Chinese toko, where they sell eggs, suits, everything. But he knows he might get an egg from one of the neighbours with chickens. Most Nolo poultry has gone in these months of hunger surrounding the ’65 One-Sided Actions, but Tomi knows the local District Policeman’s old father still has chickens. He can go and ask for an egg. That, too, is the Javanese way, gotong royong. Neighbourliness. Mutual aid.

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Tomi’s own joints are soundless. Supple as a cik-cak, a lizard, he slips out of the window at the crack of dawn, careful not to wake his father. Tomi smiles as he slides down from the windowsill, remembering his dream. He could be a dancer himself. Up on a stage, on a screen. A star, like Bung Karno. He knows all the martial ballets from the Mahabharata, has seen Srikandi acted out in the wayang-shows. Black shadow-limbs against the back-lit canvas. Serrated blades. Here he shimmies out of the yard, cik-cak, a shadow-puppet himself. Give him a kris and he’ll shadow-dance for his life: Srikandi the stars from the sky.

The old neighbour is still saying his prayers. Tough little chickens peck at the cracked earth.

Tomi taps his toe in the doorway, doesn’t speak. In daylight, in his patched shorts and T-shirt, he’s thin as a snake, as thin, in fact, as his father.

He’s been growing his hair over his ears, down his neck, in the style of the stars. In his frayed shirt and bare feet, the long black locks, like fine, glistening ropes, are the one thing binding him still to the power, the glory, of his dream.

The neighbour gets up, dusts off after his prayers, invites little Tomi out into the yard.

‘Pak!’ Tomi rushes. ‘Mau telur satu, ya. An egg please.’

The old neighbour looks him up and down, looks at his own little chickens, indicates a palm-leaf mat on the concrete. ‘Duduk dulu,’ he says at last. ‘Sit down first, son.’

Tomi squats down beside the neighbour on the floor. Together they watch the chickens. The neighbour doesn’t speak.

‘How is your father?’ the man says at last.

‘Bagus, good,’ Tomi nods.

‘And how’s Tuti, your mother?’

‘Good, too.’

‘She’s a good woman, your mother. Quiet. Doesn’t deserve all the trouble.’

Tomi shakes his head.

‘Pretty, too,’ the man says. ‘Manis. Sweet.’ He looks up. ‘You know my son? Military District Police Officer Kuat?’

Tomi nods respectfully. Everyone knows about young Officer Kuat.

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‘When Tuti was little, even Kuat had an eye on her,’ the neighbour sighs.

‘Modest girl. Not one of those politik women. Gerwani.’ He nods at something in the distance. ‘Those harridans out in the street, shouting about things. Polygamy. Illiteracy. They want,’ the old man gestures with his hand, ‘to read and write.’

Tomi bites his lip. The idea of his mother with a book makes him giggle.

‘Shout One man, One wife!’ The neighbour chuckles now, too. ‘Complain about the president’s wives. Want to improve the Law of the Prophet.’

Tomi chuckles politely. The old man is losing him a bit. They watch the chickens.

‘Manis,’ the man repeats. ‘Sweet, your mother. No man wants to come home to someone who talks back. Your father better watch out. Plenty of men willing to look after her.’ He gazes at a little hen and mutters, ‘Even the president has good taste in wives. Married a Japanese now, we hear.

Dewi.’ He yawns. ‘A fine little stable.’

Tomi nods.

Nothing happens for a long while.

‘And how’s the baby?’ the neighbour asks at last.

The baby? Oh right, the baby. His sister. Tomi keeps forgetting about her. ‘She’s fine, too.’

‘Good,’ the neighbour nods. ‘And Tuti has enough food?’

Tomi nods. ‘Just the egg, please,’ he adds, seizing the chance to speed things up a little.

‘Ya, ya,’ the neighbour nods.

Tomi waits.

The neighbour smiles pleasantly as he continues to watch the chickens.

After five minutes, Tomi stretches his legs, yawns.

‘Patience,’ the neighbour smiles.

Tomi nods. He worries his father will start missing him soon and come looking. The egg needs to be a surprise. Briefly, he recalls the suitcase, shrugs off the thought. Ten more minutes pass. Fifteen. The neighbour seems to have gone to sleep. Tomi scrapes his throat. ‘Pak,’ he says, ‘about the egg.’

The neighbour starts, and yawns. ‘Ya, ya,’ he repeats. ‘Patience, ya. Kita tunggu ayam. We are waiting chicken.’

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3. Fitri Four months later, ten-year-old Fitri follows her mother around the market in Nolo. She passes the stalls set out on concrete slippery with trampled lettuce, discarded fruit, rotting fish juices, old blood. It’s afternoon and the first food vendors are starting to pack up, but Fitri’s basket already contains a small bag of rice, some tomatoes, tofu, and chillies. Hati and she are done food-shopping. Still Fitri follows her mother around, amidst the waste piling up on the floor along the gutters.

Hati stops in front of the covered Chinese toko at the corner of the market. ‘I’ll go in to get some tinsel for head decorations,’ she says. ‘You wait out here with the food.’

Fitri nods. The Chinese toko has a small, glass window where she can look in. They sell food but also pristine notebooks, pens, markers, even paint and brushes. Fitri can see all kinds of paper, fabric, ribbons, lace. A shiny satin dress hangs from a rod, children’s shoes line a section of the counter. In the small window, a pair of polished two-tone men’s brogues is displayed. At the back of the shop, her mother Hati is picking gold tinsel for her dancers’ costumes. By the counter, a Military Police officer in uniform is ordering the Chinese owner to take down paper-wrapped dresses from the shelves.

Next to Fitri, a long-haired teen has joined her outside the toko. He is also gazing in. Fitri watches him stare at the two-tone shoes, then glance up at a small transistor radio in the window. She too feels a pang of longing for the smooth metal object with the little dial. It’s hard to believe it could produce music-and-dance, on the go, from nothing but air, like a dragonfly somehow, so airborne and light.

Inside, before the counter, the police officer has chosen a dress for a thin woman beside him. The woman is filigree pretty, but looks undernourished and drab. Fitri studies the officer through the window as he gestures the shop-owner to wrap up the garment. It’s Officer Kuat from Koramil, the Nolo Military District Police: Fitri has seen him in school. He came in to talk about the One-Sided Actions, about the need to get rid of the ‘reds’, the peasants squatting the land.

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Inside the shop, the thin woman next to officer Kuat doesn’t look at the Chinese owner as she takes her package and follows Kuat to the door.

Fitri watches the couple come out.

The woman halts, stares at the long-haired boy, then quickly back down at the floor. She doesn’t move.

The boy stares back at her, says nothing.

‘Tuti!’ Kuat says, but the woman seems frozen before the teen.

‘Mau apa, what do you want?’ Kuat says at last, looking from the woman to the boy, ‘Siapa kamu? Who are you?’

‘Teen Boy, pak. Anaknya,’ Teen Boy answers, nodding at the woman. ‘Her son.’

The woman nods, whispers, ‘Tomi.’

‘Gitu,’ nods Kuat at the boy, slowly. ‘Like that, ya?’ He pauses, he looks back at Tuti, with her parcel. ‘So,’ he whistles at Teen Boy, and lights a kretek. ‘Tomi. Are you a red like your father?’

The boy shakes his head, spits on the floor. ‘He’s nothing, pak, a traitor.

He left.’

‘Good boy,’ nods Kuat, exhaling a cloud of smoke at the teen. ‘Teen Boy, ya?’ He studies the boy, who still hasn’t moved out of his way. ‘Mau apa, what do you want?’

Teen Boy doesn’t respond. He is very skinny, barefoot in shorts.

Kuat looks at the boy, and back at the toko window.

Teen Boy too glares in, at the small radio. Then back at his bare toes.

‘Ah,’ says Kuat. ‘Gitu. Tunggu ya, wait here.’ Kuat re-enters the shop.

Fitri watches the owner come to the window, remove the items on display.

Inside, Hati is still waiting to be served.

Outside, beside Teen Boy and his mother, Fitri waits under the now empty window. Seconds later, Kuat comes back out with the pair of two-tone shoes and the radio.

Teen Boy grabs the radio and the shoes. He looks from one trophy to the other, finally hands over the transistor to his mother and squats down on the dirty concrete, wipes the grime from his toes, stuffs his callused feet into the shoes, plucks at the laces with clumsy fingers.

His mother watches in silence. Squats down in front of the boy, holding the radio and her own bundle in her lap, and starts tying the laces.

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Her fingers are thin and nimble, yet she also struggles with the unfamiliar things. Impatiently, the boy gets up in his new shoes, takes a step, laces trailing.

‘Come here,’ says Kuat. He gestures at the door of the toko.

Teen Boy glances in uncertainly.

‘Go in,’ says Kuat.

The boy still hesitates.

‘Don’t worry about them, they’re Chinese, filthy commies,’ Kuat says, ‘They do as I say.’ Kuat enters.

The boy follows him in.

Through the window, Fitri watches Kuat order the owner to sit Teen Boy on a chair, and to teach him to tie his laces. In the back of the shop, Hati is still holding her tinsel for the state competition.

Outside, the boy’s mother waits with her packages. She doesn’t look at Fitri, or at the market-goers passing, baskets on their heads, the vendors crating their chickens back up for the long trip homewards on foot. The prayer-call sounds from the mosque. Fitri looks away from the woman, from the window, from the toko, from her own mother inside waiting in silence, like the Chinese owner, for Kuat to move safely out the door.

Fitri stares instead at the greasy banana leaves scattered across the concrete floor of the market, dogs lapping at left-over grains of rice. She waits, too. Grey water, littered with fish guts and kretek butts, trickles into the gutters.

Ten minutes later, Hati finally appears from the shop. She carries her own parcel, wrapped in brown paper. Fitri picks up the basket with food. They walk back home, under the fronds of the palm trees lining the Nolo road back to their own kampung. They don’t speak.

When they pass the field of the State Competition, they exchange glances. A large sign announces the event next week.

Fitri brightens. ‘Can I see the tinsel?’

‘When we get home.’

They don’t talk for another half-mile.

‘Orang Koramil itu,’ Fitri starts finally, ‘That Koramil man, did he pay for those things?’

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Her mother shakes her head.

‘And then he just gave them away to that boy?’

Hati nods.

Fitri continues, ‘And to the mother?’

Hati nods again, her jaw tight.

‘Why?’ Hati just shakes her head. ‘Diam aja,’ she says. ‘Just hush.’

‘Why was the Koramil man with that boy’s mother?’

‘Aduh, shush! Susah,’ Hati sighs. ‘Too complicated.’

Fitri gives up. She doesn’t want to ask things that will upset her mother, so she tries not to say anything for another while. Then she says exactly what she had tried not to mention all along. ‘Did Daddy have to leave too because we are reds?’

Hati doesn’t answer. Grabs her package tighter, glances over her shoulder, back at Nolo.

Fitri tries to think of something more childlike, more cheerful, to say.

‘Will we get a radio too?’

Her mother gives her such a hard look that Fitri says nothing at all for the next two miles. Then Hati bends over and takes the basket from her.

‘Diam aja, sayang. Hush, sweetheart. Forget about that officer. I am not that lady. And that boy is nothing like you.’

4. 2010, New Year’s Day, Mawar BANG. The door bursts open. BANG, BANG, BANG— I don’t move. My mother Sefia is sitting upright in the bed beside me: wide awake. All I see is her great black eyes. She can’t speak. Just sits there, upright, fat as a whale. Her thick thighs, spread wide on the mattress, threaten to crush me.

Next, they’re inside: two men. Rifles.

That door doesn’t even lock properly. No time to think, to regret the makeshift lock. There’s only that door between us and the alley outside: they banged it, kicked it in, now they’re in the room, poking those guns at the bed.

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They ignore my mother Sefia, her great rump in a pink housedress frozen in the middle of the mattress.

‘Up, up,’ they point the rifles at me. ‘Hands on your head.’ They kick the foot of the bed, shaking the metal frame. They are boys, I see now, up close.

One has acne. I struggle to get out from under my mother’s leg, to clamber out of the deep furrow of her imprint in the mattress.

The two men keep yelling.

My mother does nothing, doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, lifts not a finger to protect me. Her silence rings in my ears, almost drowning out the shouting police officers. I feel her paralysis: her big heart banging out to me, like whale song, a life-line, her way to keep me safe. Her eyes have not left my face.

Finally, I find my feet. Stand on the palm-leaf mat beside the bed, in a pink housedress like my mother, one of hers in fact. There’s barely room for the three of us to stand in the house, the two boys and me, without them lowering their rifles. Still, they refuse to yield. I try to weave past their barrels. If they kill me now, I think, they’ll have to shoot any number of things, including themselves.

I squeeze past the boy with the acne. He looks at me like he wouldn’t mind blowing my mother’s fat shape all over the ceiling, or even his partner’s, just for the pleasure of emptying his weapon into me. I know that look. Officer Rizal’s. If I can’t fuck you, it says, at least let me pump you full of this.

No time to dress. On bare feet, still wearing the pink batik, I step outside, grateful for my flip-flops waiting on the small island of the concrete doorstep, out in the mud.

Hujan. Rain. And banjir, flood.

Our narrow alley is a covered sewer, a ditch, with loose slabs of concrete which have disappeared in the December monsoon. It’s a red, two- or three-foot wide river now. Reeking. The boys and I wade through the tepid water, feeling with our feet for the concrete below as we make our way between the low houses. I look down, away from the neighbours’ windows.

Each low shack, like ours, has several doors, some improvised; one door, one window per family. I know the faces who live behind each, but the

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doors, I see, are all closed, the windows empty holes. It’s New Year’s Day, too early for anyone but two children sitting out on a doorstep, playing in the foul, red water.

In the car, one of the boys growls, ‘Rizal wants to question you,’ as if I hadn’t figured that out. Pasar Minggu, the sprawling South-Jakarta market, slops as we pass, a red pool of stalling trade soaking in the rain.

Hours later at the Pasar Minggu police post I’m still waiting for Rizal’s questions. Sitting in the empty little front office. The two boys are sleeping in their chairs before me. It smells awful. I watch the hands of the clock and listen to the monsoon. January First: of course the police post is deserted.

Beside the clock hangs a framed newspaper portrait of Julian Shrignell, Star Indonesia’s British producer and owner of the Star Planet franchise. My boss, of sorts. I barely see the portrait. Don’t want to look. Don’t want to think about the Grand Final, in just six days. Keep staring at the clock, right next to it, patiently chipping those six days away. The languid tick of the second hand makes a kind of pattern with the rain. The corrugated roof must have several holes: the ceiling leaks in various places. The familiar plastic buckets on the floor are filling up, but very slowly.

Monsoon, floods: busloads of people drown every year, all over the city.

Come hell or high water, Indonesians don’t swim, won’t swim. We just sink to the bottom.

The boy with the acne wakes and glances at me. I don’t know him. I’ve seen the other boy, of course, from being made to report to this office for five years. But this one looks new. He falls asleep again.

I come here every Thursday. But not like this, not at gunpoint. I don’t want to go anywhere near Rizal’s questions yet, the ones he might have today. Least of all in my own mind.

All the while, a windowless little back-room waits for me at the end of the hall. The interrogation room. Its door is closed. Another thing I’m refusing to look at from my seat in the front office. Still, I can feel that room pulling at me like it’s hantu, haunted. I keep expecting the door to be flung open if I do look. But there is still no sound from that end of the building, just the rain clattering on the roof, and in the office here the second hand,

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the soft snoring of the two boys. The stench of old alcohol and fresh, warm mould.

Finally, when even the big hand on the clock has done more turns than I can stand, I shift my gaze to the foreign face on the wall, Julian Shrignell, the Star-franchise mogul. The framed newspaper portrait. I stare at that for a long while. At those godless eyes. Then at the door of the interrogation room down the hall. Willing it to fling open, now: for that face, or one almost supernaturally like it, to appear at last. To get this over with.

An hour later, Rizal finally walks in, from the street, not the back end of the building. The boys shoot up from their desks.

Officer Rizal has the same eyes as Shrignell, and he knows it. They stare at you, but with a look that seems to think you cannot really see them, cannot see through them. (Some three-year-old boys will look at you like that while they’re stealing kerupuk, prawn crackers. One paw in the glass jar on the table. They think you won’t notice: that they’re too clever for you to see what they’re doing, like that paw is somehow invisible. They think they’re inventing stealing, that the rest of the world is just too stupid to catch on, that if everyone was as clever as they, we’d all be gorging ourselves sick on crackers. Or, as in Shrignell’s case, we’d all be rich as rot.)

Rizal has a square jaw, a straight, un-Indonesian nose, which too look like Shrignell’s. Rizal must believe they give him some sort of edge, that he is handsome, a Casanova. I’m sure he’s the one who framed that newspaper portrait. Just to make us blink.

Rizal waits for the boy with the acne to pull up my file from the rusty cabinet. The boy, still new, fumbles around. He stares and keeps saying my name, ‘Mawar “Rose” Rudiyanti’, as if it spells ‘Kuntilanak’, ghost.

Rizal takes the file from the boy without a word, leads me down the hall, into the back room, where he smacks my records on the table. Sits and starts the computer, an old, yellowing IBM the colour of bruises. Lights a clove cigarette, a Dji Sam Soe, waiting for the machine to warm up.

‘Are you a virgin?’ Rizal begins, blowing out smoke. He’s just making conversation. He likes asking me that question, usually in front of the computer, while making me watch some hantu, horror movie.

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As always, I stay silent. For a man who hates having to repeat himself, he sure likes revisiting his own favourite topics, returning to them over and over, like a dog with an old, stinky bone.

I take a breath. The bone may stink, but today it feels almost homely, on the safe side, at least so far, of Rizal’s probing.

‘I saw you and your partner last night. On Star Indonesia,’ Rizal bangs the bruised IBM with his hand to make it go faster.

I nod. He knows I’m a contestant.

‘Pacar?’ he raises his fist, in an obscene gesture.

I look away. A flag hangs on the wall.

‘You sleep,’ he leans in closer, ‘with Angger?’

I don’t say anything. Angger is my partner. My dance-mate.

Over the red-and-white of the national flag on the wall, there’s another clock. I ignore the flag, watch the second hand make a full circle.

Rizal studies me for a moment. Teasingly kicks my foot. ‘What does Tomi think?’

I say nothing. Tomi. My coach on the show. Hantu-veteran: thin as a rake, nimble still as a snake, at sixty-nine. Star of countless supernatural sinetron: Javanese horror-soaps.

‘You know,’ Rizal starts after a while, ‘That we have new copyright laws.’

I look up, disoriented.

‘And a new law on pornography.’

Now I nod again, slowly.

‘You’ve broken both.’

‘Pak?’ He sits smoking his Dji Sam Soe. His turn to be silent.

I wait.

Nothing comes. I know a little about the new law on pornography, banning lewd behaviour, indecent exposure. Iconic images pop up in my head: shadow-arms, shadow-legs; Kuntilanak, the witches Tomi fights in his soaps, Srikandi. Black wayang-legs, wayang-chests, flick against the back-lit screens from my youth, back in my village. Wayang theatre Stickwoman fingers, curled blades. The images blend in my mind. Indecent exposure. A movie, Treason, I’d seen back in school Dancing, sex-crazed women. Black shadow-breasts, gyrating around a Hole—

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‘You think you own that stage?’ Rizal bursts out.

‘Pak?’ Nothing. The computer buzzes.

Rizal exhales a train of smoke from his kretek. Watches me. ‘For years,’ he sighs at last, as if suddenly exhausted, ‘I’ve looked after you.’

I look away. Glance back at the clock. It moves, but not very fast.

‘Nak,’ he says, ‘Child. Bapak pernah salah?’

I don’t answer or look at him, don’t take my eyes off the minute hand.

‘Pernah salah?’ he repeats, ‘Have I ever wronged you?’

He does hate repeating himself. You can hear it in his voice.

I make a sound at last. ‘No, Pak.’ ‘Kau sudah seperti keluarga.’ He draws on his kretek, that look in his eyes again, ‘You’re good as family,’ The smoke makes my stomach feel strange, like my guts are just hanging from my belly.

‘Your performance last night,’ he continues, ‘on that show.’

‘Jejer,’ I mumble. The name of the dance.

‘Filth,’ he says. ‘Porn.’

I don’t say anything.

‘You’re not like those other contestants, Mawar. They can do what they like. But you’re a State dancer. You get paid by the Minister. You should set an example.’

I gaze at my feet. I’m still wearing that housedress I slept in, my mother’s.

With the flip-flops.

Rizal waves his kretek at the flag, then at me. ‘You think you own your body?’ he spits. ‘Think you own your work?’

‘No, Pak,’ I finally say.

‘You’re a State dancer. A Civil Servant.’

I nod.

‘Your work is copyrighted. Protected by law.’

I notice I’m holding my breath, still thinking of that movie perhaps, those shadow-women dancing around the Hole. Kuntilanak. Srikandis with blades.

I exhale, my gaze now fixed on the door.

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‘Know who owns your work?’ Rizal stamps out the Dji Sam Soe. Opens my file. ‘I do.’

He takes out two sheets of closely typed paper. ‘Act 19, article 10.

Regarding traditional dance, the copyright belongs to the Indonesian State.’

Pause. ‘That includes,’ Rizal continues, ‘the right to alter, modify, or make any changes at all.’

He lowers the sheet, smiles at me. ‘So watch your step.’ Another pause, as he lights up a new kretek, blows out a small ring, ‘One foot out of line. . . .’

Without thinking, I rise from my chair. I’m sick of that smoke.

‘Sit down,’ he snaps.

I sit, arms round my knees in the housedress.

‘I’m not done,’ he smiles. ‘I can charge you with corrupting a national art-form. State property. I can throw you in jail for a year.’

I look down at the floor. As long as I keep my mind blank, steer well clear of myself, of my own thoughts, this interview might end at some point.

‘Or I could charge you,’ he smiles at my bare feet, pulled up under me on the seat, ‘with porn.’ He pulls out the second typed sheet. ‘Law 40,’ he continues. ‘Indecent behaviour, lewd dancing. Pornoaksi.’

Pornoaksi. Again I see the scene from the movie in school: horror – the Hole – women dancing round it naked with knives – 1965 – their bodies covered in blood— ‘You’re a State dancer, a cultural envoy,’ Rizal interrupts. ‘You represent this nation.’ He adjusts his belt, glances down at my files. ‘You are also my charge. Like keluarga, family. You exemplify this,’ he repeats, pointing at the red-and-white, the flag on the wall, but he’s already losing interest. Glances back at my bare toes, then back along my front, up to my face.

I haven’t moved, but there is some hard, metal glint in that gaze, something almost as hantu as those women, those shadow-witches in the film with their blades.

‘Your work belongs to the state,’ Rizal resumes. ‘But your body,’ he breaks into a real, genuine smile. ‘Belongs to me.’

I stare at the time, ticking on the wall. Rain pummels the roof.

‘Nak,’ he exhales, ‘Child,’ that look again on his face, of the boy staring straight at you, his hand in the kerupuk jar. ‘I’ve known you since you first moved to Pasar Minggu.’ He pauses. ‘That’s five years.’

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from Malindo

I nod.

‘You live less than a mile from this station.’

I nod again.

He smiles, waving his kretek around. ‘Guess you know every road in Pasar Minggu, every bus route.’

Again I nod, glancing at the computer, at my records on the desk. He has lost me.

‘How do you normally get here?’

‘I take a mikrolet, a minibus,’ I say, weary.

‘Which one?’

I shrug, uncomprehending. ‘The 36.’

‘Ah,’ Rizal exhales, blowing smoke just beside my face, ‘A-ha.’

I nod.

‘Gitu,’ he says, ‘Like that, ya? The 36?’

I nod again.

‘Doesn’t it stop at the. . . .’ Rizal starts.

My blood goes strange, like some noxious cocktail has been shot into my veins. Salihara Centre, I think, so loud I swear I’ve finished his sentence for him.

There. I’ve done it. Thought it.

Almost.

He stays silent.

I wait. No Salihara Centre.

More silence.

No further questions.

As Rizal smokes, I exhale.

No Malindo.

I listen again to the rain. It pelts, relentless, as it has for weeks, its monotone drone sounding almost robotic on the roof.

‘You have a history,’ Rizal explodes, ‘of insubordination.’

‘Of what?’

‘In-sub-ordi-nation,’ he shouts. ‘Kamu terlibat,’ he points at my chest, ‘You’re implicated. Tainted. It’s in your blood. Pengkhianatan. Treason!’

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Nada Holland

Treason – horror: the film from school – Crazed women – Knives as they dance, satanically, around the Crocodile Hole: Lubang Buaya— Over Rizal’s head, the downpour gains pace, positively pounding the roof now.

‘Honest,’ I say, ‘I don’t understand. I came up through the State competitions. My family. My father, Mr Rudi, fought for Independence, he was a hero.’

‘Mr Rudi,’ Rizal laughs, ‘Who cares about him?’ He draws on his cigarette.

‘I’m talking about your blood. Your mother, Sefia. Your Aunt Fitri. Your grandmother. Hati.’

I hold my breath. For a few seconds, all I hear is the rain. My grandmother Hati. A dancer too. Dead since ’65. Genocide.

‘You’re a civil servant,’ Rizal looks at his kretek, then at me. ‘And your blood is terlibat. Implicated. In Treason.’ He makes to chuck his Dji Sam Soe on the floor, then changes his mind. Offers it to me. ‘For your grandmother Hati,’ he says. ‘The Srikandi of Lubang Buaya.’

I look at him.

He gets up. ‘Sundel,’ he swears. ‘Whore.’

In my confusion, I find myself taking the cigarette from him, and now it sits burning in my hand. I stare at the smoke.

The door slams, and Rizal is gone.

I breathe. He has come dangerously close to my family – my real family, my mother Sefia, my Aunt Fitri, our East-Java kampung.

I hold my breath once more, watching smoke curl up from my fingers, as I replay Rizal’s questions in my head – questions far too close to the things I’ve cast from my mind since childhood: that movie, Lubang Buaya, Treason. Genocide. Far too close, too, to my own crimes, my real crimes.

To my bus, the 36; to the market, Pasar Minggu. To Malindo.

I look again at the smoke twirling up from my fingers. ‘For my grandmother Hati,’ I think, and finally throw down that cursed Dji Sam Soe.

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Poetry

Zhu Zhu translated by Dong Li

Zhu Zhu

The Creeper She runs wild, soft palms now morphed to tiger claws and suckers which, from the first leap, cover, overlay, devour the whole wall, stitch up the whole room, dim all the lights; she never backs off; even if stepping into a void will turn into a shield of corkscrews; even if all the leaves wilt in winter, she still decorates her body with a string of holes after the sewing threads are pulled out; her tenacity holds up in a stalemate, she takes pleasure in being crushed, and her self-congratulation expands in spring like tightly-spaced pennants stuck in a sandbox as if thorny waves think they have slit the shoal; she despairs, unable to enter the room but at least she camouflages everything outside: year after year, she truly loves.

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Zhu Zhu

Zhu Zhu

Island in the Sea Who was not born on an island?

—Su Shi Exile: this is the outcome of telling truth before authority but no need to idealise him, and assume his political wits were as developed as his poetic faculty.

Given a country, he would never have slipped the trap of despotic ways.

Now he reaches the southern extreme of this country or centuries after his time reaches today a poet’s place: completely marginalised like a radio left on a table at twilight on an empty beach. The continent across the sea, like a suspension bridge drawn up waves embracing like mountains, ebbing back like an avalanche of ruthless snow, leaving behind foam, coral and shores of trash.

He plants bamboos as if soldiers on the frontier bring locks of lovers’ hair, brews South-of-Yangtze in rice wine

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and reads Tao Yuanming, reading him here like having a telescope push Orion out of the blue into the heart.

A lane outside the village links desolation, poverty, malaria.

Heat overbearing, enough to melt down, shed cover and psyche.

Only the moon is grateful for his immortal praise and visits often, healing his loss of memory in the long night.

Alas, he must put away Crusoe arrogance and find new tones in the alien environment.

He must cheer himself up, not to act like civilisation’s castaway not to become a ghost, not to traffic in suffering but to clarify life’s wellspring – and take it as a scale to re-measure the land and draw a map of the new world, or like seagulls that carry nothing, glide carefree.

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Contributors Contribut ors Contribut ors

SHUJA ALHAQ was born in Pakistan in 1952 and has lived in the UK since 1987. He also writes under the pen name Raakha Javaar and is the author of four collections of poetry, in Urdu and Panjabi. He has also published a work on the history and philosophy of religion, A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of Islamic tradition (Vikas, New Delhi, 1997).

BAE SUAH was born in Seoul in 1965 and graduated from Ewha Women’s University with a BA in chemistry. She is the winner of the Hankook Ilbo and Dongseo literary prizes, and has over ten short-story collections and five novels to her name. She translates literary works from German into Korean, particularly those of W. G. Sebald. She has participated in the PEN World Voices festival and the Worlds Literature Festival in Norwich, UK, where she was also writer in residence. English translations of her work include Nowhere to be Found, translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Amazon Crossing, 2015), A Greater Music (Open Letter, 2016) and Recitation (Deep Vellum, 2017).

O THIAM CHIN is the winner of the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize, the richest literary award in Singapore, with a prize of S$20,000 and a publishing contract with Epigram Books. He is also the author of five collections of short fiction: Free-Falling Man (2006), Never Been Better (2009), Under The Sun (2010), The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It (2011) and Love, or Something Like Love (2013, shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction).

NADA HOLLAND is a London-based former journalist of mixed Indonesian descent, currently working under a pseudonym. She produced features about books and culture for a leading newspaper and has lived and worked on several continents, reporting on arts, digital culture and literature. Her work deals with how our intimate canvases – sex, families, loss – shape the bigger picture: ethnic bonds, transience, equality.

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JANET HONG’s fiction and translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, The Malahat Review, Kyoto Journal, Azalea, and The Korea Times. She received PEN American Center’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund for her translation of the novel The Impossible Fairy Tale by Han Yujoo, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2017.

SREEDHEVI IYER has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her literary work. Her writing has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Drunken Boat, Asian American Literary Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Two Thirds North (Stockholm), Free Word Centre (UK) and elsewhere. She has also guest edited Drunken Boat’s Hong Kong Special Folio and the March 2016 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

BALLI KAUR JASWAL is the author of Inheritance (Sleepers Publishing, 2013), a universal story of family, identity and belonging, newly re-released by Epigram Books. Born in Singapore and raised in Japan, Russia and the Philippines, she studied creative writing in the United States. She has received writing fellowships from the University of East Anglia and Nanyang Technological University, and was named Best Young Australian Novelist of 2014 by the Sydney Morning Herald. Her next novel, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, will be published by Harper Collins/William Morrow in 2017.

SEO JIN was born in Busan, South Korea, in 1975. He majored in electrical engineering and worked as the managing editor of the literary magazine VioLa. In 2007, his book Welcome to the Underground won the Hankyoreh Literature Prize. His other works include Heartbreak Hotel, New York Book Wanderers, and Atomix.

ABHAY K. is an Indian poet-diplomat and the author of five collections of poems. He is also the editor of CAPITALS (Bloomsbury, 2016) – a poetry anthology centred on capital cities of the world. Widely published, his poems have been translated into a dozen languages. His latest collection, The Seduction of Delhi (Bloomsbury, 2015), is a poetry bestseller. His song, Earth Anthem, has been translated into twenty-six languages. He received the SAARC Literary Award 2013.

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Contributors

DIMMI KHAN is a graduate of the London School of Economics and has master’s degrees in Islamic Studies, Information Systems and Creative Writing.

He is currently studying for an MLitt in Terrorism Studies. Khan also has a lifelong passion for archaeology, human evolution, ancient history and Bollywood.

A published short-story writer, he is also part of The Whole Kahani writers’ group.

KRYS LEE is the author of the short story collection Drifting House (2012) and the novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), both published by Viking, Penguin Random House. She is a recipient of awards including the Rome Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was shortlisted for the BBC International Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera, The Guardian and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Yonsei University, Underwood International College, in South Korea. Her website is www.kryslee.net.

DONG LI was born and raised in the People’s Republic of China. His honours include fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude 2015–17, the German Chancellery/Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2015–16 and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. He has work in Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, manuskripte (Austria, in German translation), and elsewhere. His book of the Chinese poet Zhu Zhu’s work The Wild Great Wall in English translation will be published by Phoneme Media in late 2017 and his trilingual anthology of contemporary American, Chinese and German poetry in response to a poem by the late poet C. D. Wright is forthcoming from Matthes & Seitz in Germany.

C. G. MENON is a winner of the Asian Writer prize, The Short Story award and the Winchester Writers’ Festival award. Her work has been broadcast on radio and published in a number of international journals and anthologies. She is currently working on her first novel and studying for an MA in creative writing at London’s City University.

SIMON PATTON translates Chinese literature. He lives with his partner, two cats and Sealyham the Terrier near Chinaman Creek in Central Victoria, Australia. An essay on Yu Jian appeared in Australian Poetry Journal in 2014, and his translations of five poems by Yu were published in Renditions 84 in 2015.

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Contributors

RUSHDA RAFEEK was born in 1990 and is currently based in Sri Lanka. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Harpoon Review, The Rumpus, The Bangalore Review, Monkey Bicycle, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Mandala Journal, The Missing Slate and elsewhere. She serves as a fiction editor for The Missing Slate.

RAJESH REDDY holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University and is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia. He is currently also a JD candidate at Lewis & Clark Law School, where his focus is in animal law. His fiction has appeared in Mandala Magazine, Interlochen Review, and the Yellow Book, among others.

SEBASTIAN SIM spent his twenties backpacking around the world to soak up different experiences and cultures. He has since published three Chinese wuxia novels between 2004 and 2012. As a former prisons officer, with a strict schedule that had little room for writing, Sebastian remembers having to ‘wake up early, open a can of Red Bull and start writing’. Let’s Give It Up For Gimme Lao! (Epigram Books, 2016) is Sebastian’s first English novel. He is working on a second, which will have a contemporary Singapore setting.

JOHN THIEME is a British author, of part-Canadian parentage, whose journalistic, academic and creative writing has been published in some twenty-five countries. He has held chairs in British universities and has also taught in the Caribbean and, as a visiting professor, in Hong Kong and Italy. His most recent book, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

JASON WOODRUFF is a literary translator based in his home town of Salt Lake City, Utah. He graduated from the University of Utah where he studied Anthropology and English. His translation of the writer Kim Kyung-uk’s short story ‘Spray’ was runner-up in the 2016 Close Approximations translation contest hosted by Asymptote Journal.

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Contributors

XU XI is author of five novels and five collections of fiction and essays.

Forthcoming books include an ekphrastic essay collaboration, a memoir and a story collection. She has also edited four anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English.

A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, and a US citizen, she currently lives between New York and Hong Kong. Her website is www.xuxiwriter.com.

YU JIAN is one of China’s major contemporary poets. He has published several collections of poetry and a five-volume collection of poetry and essays. His poems have been awarded prizes in China and abroad, and widely translated. Flash Cards (Zephyr Press, 2010) – selected poems from his collection Biantiao shi (Poem notes) – was published with an introduction by Simon Patton.

ZHU ZHU was born in Yangzhou, China. He is a poet, critic and curator of art exhibitions and has published numerous volumes of poetry and prose, among them Drive to Another Planet, Salt on Wilted Grass, Blue Smoke, The Trunk, Stories, Vertigo, and Grey Carnival – Chinese Contemporary Art since 2000. Zhu’s honours include Liu Li’an and Anne Kao national poetry prizes, the French International Poetry Val-de-Marne Fellowship, the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Critics and the Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center.

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Essential Reading | Subscribe to the

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Available in all major bookstores www.shop.epigrambooks.sg

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ASIA PACIFIC WRITERS & TRANSLATORS PRESENTS

IDEAS & REALITIES (2016) CREATIVE WRITING IN ASIA TODAY

GUANGZHOU (CHINA) NOVEMBER 24-26 HONG KONG NOVEMBER 27 MACAU NOVEMBER 28 Find us - apwriters.org contact us - admin@apwriters.org join us - apwriters.org/apply-to-join

Poster illustration ‘Nomads 2015 (detail)’ by Mongolian artist Baatarzorig Batjargal, courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art’s 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and Griffith Review.

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Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insider’s perspective.

Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn

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The political winds of 2016 rage in from the extremes of right and left. Too many latch onto labels that blow away the subtleties that define and differentiate opposing platforms and the individuals that stand on them. Yet no person can ever be less than a unique and complex nation-state in microcosm. Literature, at least, provides a means for expressing this diversity.

No. 31 SUMMER 2016

Extracts from the winner and finalists of Singapore’s Epigram Books Fiction Prize Korea’s Seo Jin on the anguish of an amnesiac trapped in the New York subway A virtual gigolo falls prey to love – Dimmi Khan Interview – Krys Lee on How I Became a North Korean Hong Kong’s Xu Xi searches for a protagonist who disappears Poetry from Yu Jian, Zhu Zhu, Abhay K., Rushda Rafeek, Shuja Alhaq and John Thieme ‘The ALR fills an important gap. We’ve grown used to reading about Asia. But through a kaleidoscope of stories, essays, poems, polemics and photographs, finally we can hear Asians talking about themselves.’ – David Pilling, former Asia Editor, Financial Times

Fiction | Non-fiction | Essay | Poetry

Featuring:

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