The Weight of Our Sky Read online

  Mama. I can feel the tiny bubbles of relief floating up through my murky thoughts. “Thank you,” I say.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He straightens up, brushes dirt off his dark trousers with two brisk strokes, and heads back inside, leaving me to contemplate the night sky.

  In the silence, the Djinn stirs.

  Told you he’d leave you.

  I’m too tired to fight him off. Instead, I let him enfold me in a beguilingly soft, dark blanket of misery, and cry and cry and cry until my head is heavy and my throat is sore and my eyes swell so that the city lights blur and merge into a beautiful, chaotic mess.

  • • •

  The Standard has been through a lot in the past few days, and it takes a bit of work to get it up the gentle incline toward Stadium Negara. The stadium sits in all its stark, modern splendor upon its hill, its windows reflecting the dim streetlights around it.

  Vince frowns as the car sputters and coughs along. “I hope this thing makes it to Kelantan in one piece,” he mutters, frowning as he clutches the wheel. “Otherwise I’m going to have a hell of a time figuring out how to get us there.”

  A hell-of-a racing-story. A hell-of-a-romance. I’m swept away by a tidal wave of memories so intense that I gasp; it’s like the Djinn has socked me in the stomach. One by one, I watch the pictures float by: Saf, throwing her head back to laugh her raucous laugh that her father always thought so terribly unladylike; Saf, bobbing her head in time to the beat of the latest Top 40 tune; Saf, giggling uncontrollably as she plotted and schemed to steal one of the hand-painted Paul Newman posters from the cinema.

  All that time you spent worrying about your mother, the Djinn whispers, and in the end it was Saf you gave up.

  My thoughts won’t stop racing, but one keeps coming up again and again: Was it all a trick? Was it Saf I was meant to be protecting with my rituals all along? But what about Mama?

  Why think about her at all? She’ll be dead the minute you stop counting.

  Shut up, I think. Shut up, shut up, shut up. I count the interlocking triangles decorating the stadium’s façade in increasingly complicated groups and patterns, sweating slightly as I do it. It used to be that the numbers were what the Djinn demanded in return for keeping my mother alive; these days it seems they’re the only way I can keep him quiet long enough to see straight, long enough to take back my thoughts and make them mine again.

  Silly girl, the Djinn says. Who says I’m ever going to leave you? You’re mine. And he wraps his arms around me in a tender embrace.

  No. No, no, no. I double down on the counting, tapping lightly, furiously on my knees, a symphony of beats to accompany the numbers. I can see Vince observing me out of the corner of his eye as he drives, but he doesn’t say anything, so I ignore him.

  I need to focus.

  • • •

  There’s a tap on Vince’s window as we roll up to the entrance. A uniformed police officer gestures for him to roll it down. “What’s your business here?” he asks pleasantly.

  “I have a pass, sir,” Vincent says, handing over the slip of paper. “I’m just dropping her off.” He nods in my direction. “She’s looking for her mother, sir; they got separated when the troubles began.”

  “Malay?” he asks, glancing in my direction. Vince nods.

  The officer glances at the paper, nods, and hands it back. “All right, then,” he says. “Go ahead and drop her off, but you’d best be on your way. There are some who may not look too kindly on you in there.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I’ve been silent throughout this entire exchange, but only because I need to get this right. Concentrate, Melati. Deftly, my fingers tap and stroke, weaving my safety net all over the car, all over Vincent. If I can’t be with him, the least I can do is help protect him. Again, the Djinn says, wrapping cold fingers around the base of my spine. That’s not right. Again. I go over it again and again, counting and tapping until everything feels just right. Then I sit back and exhale.

  Just in time. Vince pulls up to the main entrance and kills the engine. The sudden silence seems loud, unnatural, stilted. It’s like we haven’t just spent the past week in each other’s company.

  “Well . . . ,” he begins, then stops, unsure of what to say next.

  “Thank you,” I tell him. “Thank you for everything. You and your family, you all saved my life. I won’t forget that.” I can’t look at him. I think if I do I may cry.

  “Take care of yourself,” he says.

  “Good-bye,” I say.

  And then there really isn’t much more to say. I open the door, slide off the cracked vinyl seat, and close it firmly. No silly nonsense, Melati; it’s better that you leave. You failed them. And you need to find Mama, so you won’t fail her, too.

  I turn around and walk away without looking back, so that he doesn’t have to see the tears when I finally let myself cry.

  It’s just you and me now, sayang, the Djinn purrs, reclining in the pit of my stomach, a look of smug satisfaction on his face.

  • • •

  When I finally push open the heavy double doors to the stadium, the first thing that hits me is just how much bigger it seems. Then I realize that it isn’t that the stadium is that much bigger—it’s that there are fewer people here. Unlike the packed walls of the Chin Woo Stadium, where people had to shrink themselves to fit somewhere between one another and their belongings besides, here families can move around more freely, taking up larger spaces to create some semblance of home for themselves. There is less tension in the air. There is room to breathe.

  I head straight to the table in the corner where volunteers are presiding over food rations. “Excuse me,” I say timidly to one of them, his armband marking him as a member of the Red Cross, like Vince. Even thinking his name sends a sharp pang shooting through my chest.

  No, stop, Melati. Don’t think about Vince, not now.

  The man turns to look down at me, his expression impatient. “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt. I just got here. . . . I’m looking for my mother.”

  He rubs the back of his neck. “Impossible for me to tell you where one person is in all this mess,” he says, gesturing to the hall. “No time to be flipping through lists and things. Why don’t you wander around and take a look? Let me know if you can’t find her and we’ll try to help.” Then he turns back to his work.

  Okay. Let’s take a look.

  I begin wandering the hall, picking my way through the pockets of spaces marked by the refugees. There may be fewer people here than at Chin Woo, but they all bear the same scars: cuts, bruises, bandaged limbs, tearful faces, haunted looks. I pass one old man with snow-white hair and his right arm in a sling, sitting with his back against the wall and his eyes shut, reciting passages from the Quran from memory. The melodious lilt of his voice wafts along behind me as I make my way through the hall.

  I recognize the lines; this is surah Yasin, what my mother often refers to as the heart of the Quran. Every time I hear it, it conjures up memories of my father’s funeral and the house full of men and women swaying as they recited Yasin in unison around Abah’s stiff body, wrapped tightly in white cloth and laid out on a mattress in the middle of the room. Every week since, I’ve heard my mother recite the surah every Thursday night, her voice low and sweet. She says it’s in memory of Abah, and for her parents, the grandmother and grandfather who died before I was old enough to retain any memories of them. A dirge for the dead.

  The word “dead” sets off a chain reaction of deaths in my head; the Djinn sets them up like rows of dominoes, and one by one I watch them fall, as if in slow motion: Abah, Saf, Jay, Auntie Bee, Uncle Chong, Vince, Mama. I grit my teeth and count each person as I pass, sorting them mentally into groups; first by gender, then by age, then by the colors they wear, then by wounded versus nonwounded. . . .

  Then I stop. Wounded number twenty-one, a woman sitting with an ankle wrapped in gauze propped up on a wo
oden carton. Her white nurse’s uniform is spotted with grime and, here and there, blood. That must be . . . surely that’s . . .

  “Auntie Tipah?”

  The woman looks up, her hands still holding an open bottle and a cotton pad that she’s been using to dab some small cuts and wounds along her legs, her brows still furrowed in concentration. It takes a minute or two for her to recognize me. The minute she does, her eyes widen. “Melati?”

  That’s her, all right; I’d recognize that raspy smoker’s voice anywhere.

  I go to kneel beside her and she envelops me in a warm but awkward hug, given the position she’s in. “What are you doing here, my dear?” she asks me, gripping my elbow as though she’s worried I’ll run away. “Where’s your mama? Is she all right? I’ve been wanting to see her, to thank her properly.” Her eyes are bright, feverish.

  My heart, so light just a minute earlier, turns to lead and thuds to my feet. “You mean . . . you mean she isn’t here?”

  A shadow falls across her face. She turns away from me and busies herself tidying the loose ends of the gauze that binds her ankle. “No, she isn’t,” she says.

  “Do you know where she could be?” There is a tremble in my voice I can’t quite mask.

  Auntie Tipah sighs. “We left the hospital together that day,” she says. “Your mother wanted to go and see if you made it home safe, and I wanted to be with my family. Everyone did; we were so worried. To see so many dead and wounded come in—they looked like they’d been in a war.” She pauses to tuck a stray hair behind her ear; she still won’t look at me. “So we started out on our bicycles. We were both scared, but we were trying not to show it. ‘They won’t hurt us,’ she told me. ‘We’re no threat to anyone, you and I.’ And she was right, you know, how could we be a threat to anyone? Your mother’s just about fifty kilos, if that, and look at my skinny little arms!” She pauses to flex a barely noticeable muscle. “See? Some threat.” She sniffs and lets her hands fall to her lap.

  “I didn’t notice the stone in the road,” she says, lacing her fingers together, then apart, together, then apart. “I rammed my bicycle right into it and went flying. Cuts and bruises everywhere, and somehow managed to twist my ankle. And I bent the front wheel of the bike so badly that it couldn’t be used. We weren’t too far from Kampung Baru at the time. I was crying by then, so worried I wouldn’t make it to safety, wouldn’t make it back to my family.” Her fingers never stop moving. “Your mother said we should walk. ‘I’ll help you,’ she said. ‘I won’t leave you, Tipah. We’ll make it in no time!’ ”

  She pauses, and I feel as though my heart stops until she starts to speak again. “We weren’t more than ten minutes away from Batu Road when we heard them.” She swallows hard. “The Chinese mob, coming through Chow Kit to attack Kampung Baru. My heart stopped then. I knew that if they saw us, they’d kill us. And I couldn’t run, not with my ankle. So I turned to your mother and I told her she had to run, to get away, as fast as she could. At least one of us would make it. But your mother refused.” In the darkness within, the Djinn chuckles.

  Auntie Tipah wipes away a tear from her cheek. “I could kill for a cigarette right now,” she says, smiling shakily. Her hands tremble. In the time it takes for her to pick up her story again, Mama dies a million deaths in my head. “Anyway. We tried to hurry along, but the noises were getting closer and closer and she knew I couldn’t go any faster. We were passing these abandoned houses, some all burned down, and she shoved me into this outhouse. Told me to keep the door shut and to be as still as I could. I told her, ‘No, no, you have to hide too, where are you going?’ But she just shushed me and told me to lock the door.”

  She takes a deep breath. “I thought then that she’d run far, far away, or at least go and hide. But no, not your mother. I peeked through the crack in the door and I saw her walk along for a little while, and then just stop. Like she was waiting for something. I thought to myself, What in the world is Salmah doing? And then I figured it out.”

  She looks at me then, finally, her smile achingly sad. “She wanted them to see her,” she says quietly. “She wanted them to keep their eyes on her, to chase her if they wanted. She let herself be bait to lead them away so that they wouldn’t find me.”

  She shuts her eyes then, and two more tears ooze out and trickle slowly down her cheeks; quickly, she fumbles about in the pocket of her wide skirt for a pale pink handkerchief to wipe them away. “I need a damn cigarette,” she mumbles under her breath. I can feel my chest rising and falling convulsively; I’m having trouble sucking in air, and my pulse is starting to race in response. Somewhere within, the Djinn whistles a merry little tune.

  “Did it work?” I manage to ask, at last.

  She nods. “The mob ran past where I was, shivering with fear in the outhouse, trying my hardest not to scream. I heard them shouting, ‘Who is that?’ ‘What is she up to?’ I tried to see what was happening, but I couldn’t. After a few minutes, everything was silent again.” She half smiles. “That outhouse stank of piss and shit, but I stayed in there for what seemed like hours, even though I couldn’t breathe without feeling like I was going to vomit. When I finally worked up the courage to open the door, I made my way to the main road and managed to hitch a ride here.”

  She falls silent then, her fingers spreading out and smoothing the little square of cotton over her lap, seemingly determined to rid it of every single blemish and wrinkle, and I stare down at my own feet and concentrate on tapping each of my big toes in counts of three, starting on the right, the better to swallow back my own tears.

  “I’m sorry.”

  My head snaps up. “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says again, barely above a whisper; she’s still looking down, and I see her hands tremble as they worry away at the little pink handkerchief. “She saved my life, and I have no idea where she is or what happened to her. I’m so sorry.” A single tear falls onto the hankie, and as the Djinn screams obscene thoughts of my mother’s death in my ears, I watch the moisture creep slowly across the fabric, rendering it sheer and fragile-looking—as thin as a spider’s web.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IN THE CORRIDOR OUTSIDE THE hall, where brightly painted murals gambol across the walls in lurid technicolor, I sit with my back against a scene depicting a traditional Malay dance and try to capture the thoughts flying in all directions, like pieces of paper in a storm, and pin them down. Every once in a while, the Djinn waves his arms about, trying to distract me from the process. But I ignore him.

  I think about how it felt to help Roslan back to his kampong, how it felt convincing those soldiers to help Jee. I try to remember what it felt like to be courageous. I beat the Djinn before. I can do it again.

  I need to focus.

  At this point, I decide, my options are:

  A. Stay here, where it’s safe and there’s food and water readily available, or

  B. Leave the guaranteed safety of this place to find Mama.

  Any sane person would choose A. Any sane person would reason that Mama, knowing those who are left without homes or places to turn to, would come here. Any sane person would opt to stay safe rather than take on gangs, soldiers, and who knows what else in the streets outside. Choose A, Melati.

  Then again, any sane person doesn’t spend sleepless nights counting in groups of three, go into conniptions at being unable to tap things, house djinns in their bodies, or imagine their own mother’s death.

  The only way I know I’ll feel better is by being with Mama. And if out there is where Mama is, then I guess I’ll just have to head out and find her.

  B it is.

  The decision made, I do my best to quash down the wave of panic and endless questions the Djinn starts firing into my head—How? Where? What if you get hurt? Who will help you? over and over again, like an increasingly screechy tune—and try to concentrate on formulating a plan.

  I wish Vince were here.

  So you can watch him get hurt again?
>
  I tap quickly on the cold concrete floor to appease him. Think, Melati, think. The thoughts come sluggishly, as if they’re swimming to the surface of a sea of sludge. I get up and start pacing, as though to help jog them along. How to get around the city? No buses. I can’t drive. A bicycle, then. I’ll commandeer a bicycle.

  Good. Next step. Where to go? I frown, tapping my fingers incessantly against my left wrist, trying to concentrate, capture every thought. Mama was going from the hospital to Kampung Baru, from Kampung Baru to Petaling Street. Our home was burned down, and nobody saw her come back, so she must have headed to the cinema.

  Okay. So that means that Mama is somewhere between home and Petaling Street.

  Sure, the Djinn says agreeably. Lying stiff and cold on the ground somewhere between home and Petaling Street.

  Shut up, I tell him fiercely. Shut up. And before he has the chance to say anything else, I head quickly for the door.

  Time to steal a bicycle.

  • • •

  As it turns out, stealing a bicycle proves to be harder than I thought. Most people were shuttled over to the stadium in cars, ambulances, buses—safe, covered vehicles that made it harder to be pierced by blades or bullets.

  Fair enough. But it does mean that I lack options.

  I lean back against the wall, feeling defeated. Thwarted before you even begin, the Djinn says tauntingly. Why not just head inside, curl up into a ball, and think about how you just let your mother die?

  I shake my head to shut him up, then grit my teeth. Fine. I’ll walk.

  The straightforward route along Davidson Road won’t do—the FRU soldiers are everywhere, patrolling along with their helmets and truncheons, and I can’t take the risk of running into anyone. So I decide to cut through the smaller roads toward Chin Woo, then work my way around it and onto Petaling Street.

  Okay. Deep breaths.

  I wait until the guard patrolling the outside of the stadium turns the corner before dashing quickly across the parking lot, ducking behind trucks and cars as I go, my heart pounding in my ears, convinced I’m going to hear shots whizzing through the air at any minute. I have one big road to cross before I can get to Chin Woo; I can see the round building in the distance, the streetlights glinting on its many windows. You’ll never make it, the Djinn whispers, but I quash him back down. I’m too busy for his nonsense right now. I need to focus.