The Weight of Our Sky Read online

  Most people grow out of it, this belief in magic, this reliance on little wonders, and I did too. But then Abah died, and in the echoing space he left behind inside me, the Djinn rushed in, making himself comfortable, latching onto those old familiar cues. He started off slowly: If you tap your toothbrush against the sink three times before you brush, if you take exactly twelve steps to get from your bed to the kitchen, if you flick the light switch on and off six times before bed, then Mama stays well and happy and healthy. And if you’ve accepted that, as I did, then it’s not that much of a leap to think: If you DON’T do these things, then Mama will NOT stay well and happy and healthy. Mama will die. And if you’ve accepted that, then it begins to consume you. That’s all you think about.

  It’s been six months since I first told Mama about the strange, frightening thoughts that had started seeping into my brain, wrestled it into submission, and taken over every inch, filling it with dark, blood-soaked images of death. Her death.

  I’d slipped into her room after she’d come home from work, the room she used to share with Abah but was now hers alone. My stomach was a tight cluster of knots, my head filled with numbers. Every step that brought me closer to her door, the voice in my ear screamed: She’ll disown you, she’ll push you away, she’ll think you’re dangerous and have you carted off to the madhouse.

  No, she won’t, I remember thinking to myself. Mama could always make everything better, from skinned knees to bruised hearts. Why would this be any different?

  You’re about to tell your own mother you imagine her dying—how can that be normal? She’ll think you’re crazy; she’ll toss you into a mental asylum and leave you there to rot.

  The voice chipped away my confidence, exposing my weaknesses in a crisscrossing map of scars and wounds. I moved about her room, arranging the ornaments on her dresser, the makeup on her vanity, lining them just so, fidgety and restless and wanting desperately to throw up.

  “What is it, sayang?” she asked me gently, putting a hand out to stroke my arm. Tell her, I thought to myself. Tell her; you’ll feel better.

  So I blurted it out. All of it: the endless thoughts of her death, the constant counting and tapping and pacing that kept me up at night for fear that doing them wrong meant that I’d wake up in the morning to find her stiff and lifeless in her bed.

  And she’d recoiled.

  Oh, she pretended she hadn’t. She tried to recover quickly, pulling me in for a reassuring hug. But I’d seen her eyes widen in . . . fear? Disgust? I’d seen her flinch and turn away. I’d seen her pull her hand back for a minute, as if worried I’d contaminate her, or hurt her. Or worse.

  “Don’t worry, Melati,” she’d told me, holding me close. “We’ll find a way to get through this. We’ll get help. I’ll make it all better, you’ll see.”

  I let her comfort me and tried to forget the look I’d just seen in her eyes.

  • • •

  Petaling Street is rarely quiet, and today is no exception. The sea of tattered rainbow umbrellas and striped red-and-white canopies offers minimal relief from the piercing afternoon sun. Beneath them, shoppers, wanderers, dreamers, and hustlers weave in and out among cars, motorcycles, trishaws, and a parade of vendors peddling their wares. “Fresh bananas,” an old man yells hoarsely, “Come and try my fresh bananas! Cheap, cheap!” From another corner comes the melancholy cry of the man in black, who calls, “Manja, manja . . .” to all the girls who pass, trying to entice them with the table full of powders and potions before him, each promising more luscious hair, whiter teeth, or a second look from a certain special boy. . . . The air is thick with a pungent mix of odors: the delectable aroma wafting from the famous shredded duck buns on the one side; the mysterious smells that emanate from the jars and boxes that line the shelves of the Chinese medicine hall; the heady, overwhelming cologne that trails behind the college boys swaggering down the sidewalk in their ill-fitting drainpipe trousers, combs stuck in their back pockets; and everywhere, a faint undercurrent of stale sweat and cigarette smoke.

  On days like today, when I’m surrounded by people of every shape and size and color, I often stare at passersby and wonder if they’re all being tormented by their own djinns. Maybe that mother in the orange sari tugging impatiently on her little girl’s hand as they exit the sundry shop is irritable because she can’t stop thinking about how dirty and dusty everything is, can’t stay the aching need to scrub every inch of both her child’s body and her own. Maybe that young man so desperate to speak to the pretty young woman next to him at the bus stop is really doing it because he’s trying to save her from an unspeakable fate dictated by the monster inside him. I can’t tell just by looking, but maybe they’ve learned to hide their demons too.

  Or maybe they really are happy and contented, with minds that tick along from one thought to another, without taking any meandering detours, or getting lost on highways with no exits, or going round and round in unending loops.

  Must be nice.

  We’ve barely walked ten steps before our flimsy school blouses are soaked through with sweat. “I need a drink,” Saf moans, rolling her eyes and clutching my arm as she pretends to swoon. “I’m not going to make it, Melati, I’m just not. Don’t forget me, okay?” She whirls around, looking me square in the eyes. “Speak my name. Tell my story!” Around us, people are looking over and grinning at her antics, and I can feel my face growing hot with embarrassment.

  “Was that really necessary?” I mutter through gritted teeth.

  “Absolutely,” she says airily, tossing her ponytail and making a beeline for the air mata kucing stall a few feet ahead of us. “Should’ve seen the look on your face.”

  While we wait in line, I find myself mesmerized by the fortune-teller across the street. An old Indian man clad in a striped green shirt and loose gray trousers, he sits at a folding card table, a bright green parrot in a bamboo cage by his side. With each customer who sits before him, he taps on the cage and out pops the little bird, as though eager to pick one of the cards spread across the table and determine your destiny. Once it chooses your fate, the old man regards the card solemnly to tell you what it means. Sometimes, that isn’t enough; then he has you extend your palm toward him, sprinkles baby powder on it—the better to see the lines—and lets you know what your future holds. We’ve seen grown men shed tears, young girls blush, and elegant old ladies stalk away in anger from the fortune-teller’s table; such is his power.

  I wonder sometimes what he would see in my palm. I wonder if I even want to know.

  “Such a wise old bird,” Saf whispers, interrupting my thoughts. An elderly gentleman in a sarong and songkok takes his seat in front of the fortune-teller’s table, his back ramrod straight. He nods, and the fortune-teller taps the cage. On cue, the parrot hops out and makes its way to the cards spread across the table, its head tilted to one side inquiringly. “The parrot or the uncle?” I quip, and we giggle as we eagerly accept small steel bowls of the sweet, chilled liquid, generously filled with juicy longan, dried winter melon, and monk fruit.

  “Did you see the parade last night?” Refreshed, palms tingling from the ice-cold bowls, we saunter on down the street, past a row of trishaw drivers snoozing in the shade while waiting for passengers.

  “Heard them, more like.” Mama chokes on a bite of her tiffin lunch and falls to the ground writhing and gasping for breath, her face a mottled purple blue, and I reach up, ostensibly to smooth back a hair that’s escaped from the braid that hangs down my back, but really to tap quickly three times on each side of my head. That’s better, the Djinn coos. “Mama wouldn’t let me go outside to take a look. Said they were just being hooligans, overexcited after winning some election seats.” I care little about politics—it seems to me like it’s mostly a bunch of old men competing to see who has the loudest voice—but just days before, the government’s Alliance Party had won less than half of the popular vote for the first time ever, and the two new Chinese parties had won victories nobody had
expected. The aftershocks from this had shaken our neighborhood to its core, and everyone was still talking about it.

  “What did you hear?” Saf is wide-eyed with excitement. “Was it really bad? Norma said they were waving red flags and posters with Mao Zedong’s face on them! She said they were throwing pig flesh at people’s houses and spitting on the doors all the way through Kampung Baru!” She shudders at the thrill and taboo of it all. Our neighborhood is the largest Malay enclave in the city, and pig flesh is the ultimate insult for devout Muslim Malays, who view pigs not just as meat we’re forbidden from eating, but as the dirtiest of animals, unholy, unclean.

  I roll my eyes. “Norma is such a drama queen. I don’t think they were doing any of that. At least, I didn’t see any pig bits at our door this morning. . . .”

  “My father says they should be shot. He says all it took was their party winning a few parliamentary seats for them to forget how to be grateful, that they need to remember this is Tanah Melayu, the land of the Malays. He says they’re nothing but troublemakers and Communists.”

  I shrug. “Your father thinks everyone’s a troublemaker or Communist.”

  “That’s true.” Saf’s father is a teacher at one of the boys’ schools in town, where he is notorious for being stingy with his praise and generous with his cane. Whenever Saf leaves the house, he forces her to stand perfectly straight, hands at her sides, for the fingertip test: Unless the hem of the skirt comes well past the tips of her fingers, she isn’t allowed to take a single step out the door. Not without reason; Saf’s dimpled sweetness—and as we got older, the way her uniform skimmed over her gentle curves—have always called to the boys like sugar to an anthill. Though she professes innocence, Saf is a notorious flirt. “You girls behave yourselves,” he tells us sternly whenever we go out. “No gadding about, and mind you get home before the azan.” The mosque’s call to prayer that echoes through the village each sunset has been our cue to head home for as long as I can remember.

  “So it was just a parade? Nothing serious?”

  “I guess not. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I mean . . . I didn’t understand all of it. There was a lot of singing, a lot of chanting. They were yelling things in Chinese, saying we should go back to the jungle, that we should leave now that the country is theirs. I know someone was shouting that Malays should . . . should go and die.” I close my eyes briefly, remembering the roar of the lorry engines, the banging of the drums, the shouting, the accompanying wave of nausea and fear. We’re no strangers to violence in Kampung Baru; once every few weeks, Mama locks the doors and windows as the sounds of neighborhood gangs battling full tilt filter through our home’s wooden slats. But those are run-of-the-mill turf wars, arrogant Malay boys duking it out for control of the neighborhood. This felt bigger, somehow, and dangerous.

  As if on cue, the Djinn clicks another movie reel into place: Mama, beaten with iron pipes and run through with sharpened sticks, her head nothing more than a mass of bloody pulp. I shake my head and resist the urge to count all the rambutans piled in woven baskets at a nearby stall. Go away, I tell him. Go away.

  “Are you okay?” My eyes fly open. Saf is staring at me, brows furrowed with concern.

  I feel a sudden urge to tell her, to blurt out everything, all at once. No, Saf, I’m not okay. I haven’t been okay for a long time now. I’m constantly imagining my own mother’s death. I spend all my time and energy wrestling with a demon in my head that only I can see or hear, and anytime I’m not doing that, I’m busy counting and tapping everything in sight just to shut him up. I’m really, really not okay. I’m so far from okay I don’t even remember what okay feels like anymore.

  Yeah right.

  “I’m fine,” I say quickly. “Just daydreaming. So, um, what records shall we look at today?”

  • • •

  We tried to pretend at first that what was wrong with me could easily be fixed. Mama took me to a doctor, where I skated lightly over my visions and concentrated heavily on my inability to fall asleep at night and the way thoughts raced through my head, impossible to capture and examine one by one; he tapped his pen against his chin thoughtfully and prescribed iron pills, a more balanced diet, and exercise.

  “You need to stay active,” he told me sternly. “Some strenuous activity will tire you out, help you sleep better at night, help you not think so much about things.” He clicked his tongue as he wrote on his notepad in loopy, illegible handwriting. “You young people, life is so easy for you. No job yet, no families to raise, no responsibilities. I don’t know what you think you have to worry about.” On the way home we stopped at the shops, where my mother bought more fruits and vegetables than the two of us could possibly eat, badminton rackets, and a can of shuttlecocks. “This will be fun!” she says gaily, and I nod glumly. Sure. Fun.

  And so we went for a while, our meals greener than ever, our evenings spent gamely sending the shuttlecock flying over the gate, which acted as a makeshift net. Sometimes Saf would come over for a game. I even had fun, most of the time, except that through the chatter and the laughter, I was obsessively counting each thwack as racket hit shuttlecock, back and forth, over and over again. Everyone thought I was extraordinarily competitive; they didn’t realize that I was desperate to get to twenty-one, a nice, safe number that just so happened to mean that I also won. Badminton made the Djinn inordinately happy.

  It didn’t take long to realize that it wasn’t working. The badminton stopped the day I lost a game to Mama, fourteen to twenty-one, and spent the next twenty minutes tapping my racket on the ground on my left, then right, three times each, over and over again, because fourteen can’t be divided by three and nothing in the world felt right anymore. That was the day I smashed my racket on the ground and dissolved into a red-faced mass of frustration and tears, and Mama locked the remaining racket and the can of shuttlecocks away in a cupboard somewhere.

  Sure, I was eating better and exercising more, but all that meant was that I was a marginally healthier bundle of teeming, frayed nerves than I was before. The visions didn’t stop, the voice that intruded in my thoughts didn’t stop, and the urgent need to count things certainly didn’t stop.

  In the wee hours of a Sunday morning, when I should have been asleep but was really tangled in a complicated ritual that involved pacing my room in specific patterns, tapping certain objects three times as I passed, all to make sure that my mother would wake up in the morning, I heard a strangled sob through the thin walls and froze.

  Mama?

  I pressed my right ear against the wall that divides my room from the kitchen, trying to ignore the instant, indignant buzzing that demanded I finish pacing. Why was Mama crying?

  “I don’t know what to do,” she was saying through her sobs, presumably to my Mak Su, my youngest aunt, who had slept over the night before. “She’s changed so completely. It’s like her body’s been taken over by a complete stranger. It looks like her, but acts nothing like her.”

  My heart hammered so loud I was almost sure she could hear me.

  I could hear Mak Su’s voice, low and soothing. I imagined her holding Mama close, rubbing her back in little circles.

  “What about the specialist?” she asked. “You know, the one at the hospital. The mental doctor.” She lingered over the last three words, and fresh panic bloomed in my chest.

  “Absolutely not.” Mama was firm. “Those quacks will just send her to the asylum, or worse. I hear they cut up people’s brains, trying to fix them. Nobody’s doing that to Melati.”

  A pause. Then Mak Su’s reedy voice piped up. “We’ve seen this happen before—you know, in the village,” she said in hushed tones, and I strained to hear her. “They say it’s the work of djinns.”

  “Are you serious?” Mama was high-pitched, disbelieving. She’s never been one for superstition; when Saf and I came home bearing tales of fortune-tellers, lucky charms, witch doctors, and love potions, she would scoff, telling us th
at only fools put their faith in magic instead of themselves. “We make our own luck in this world, girls,” she’d say.

  In the kitchen, Mak Su was defensive. “No, it’s true! They possess her, force her to act strangely. Maybe someone’s cursed your family. . . . Do you know if anyone holds a grudge against you?”

  Curses? Djinns? It was the sort of thing that appeared in swashbuckling adventure stories; Sinbad, perhaps, or the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. In a life so devoid of either swash or buckle, how could I, of all people, have ended up with a djinn?

  The thoughts swirling around my head were making me dizzy. I reached out a hand to steady myself and accidentally pushed over a little pile of books neatly arranged on my desk, largest at the bottom, smallest at the top, and spines perfectly aligned. They toppled over with a crash that seemed even louder in the predawn hush. “Shhh,” I heard my mother hiss, then loudly, “Melati? Is that you?”

  I’d come out of my room then, rubbing my eyes and pretending I’d heard nothing. We drank hot tea and Mak Su made lempeng pisang, the banana pancakes sweet and sticky and burning our fingers as we ate them fresh off the pan, and we talked as if nothing had happened and the world hadn’t just shifted.

  But it had, because now I knew.

  The Djinn lives inside me, and he feeds on my rituals. As long as I meet his demands, he’ll keep my mother safe. When I try to resist, frustrated at being in constant thrall to the numbers, he sets off another chain of deaths in my head, then laughs at my horrified reaction. The beast must be fed, and for a year now, I’ve alternated between feeding him and wrestling him into silence.