The Weight of Our Sky Read online

  “Who are they?” I ask.

  “Let’s just call them the neighborhood watch,” Vincent says grimly, raising a hand in salute as he drives past.

  The little white house sits slightly apart from those around it, its gleaming stone surface a stark contrast to their weathered wooden flanks, marking those who dwelled within as atas: upper-class, affluent, well-off.

  We slip off our shoes and enter through dark wood doors set with colorful stained glass, and Auntie Bee pauses to kiss her fingers and touch them lightly to a simple wooden cross that hangs beside the entrance, bowing her head in prayer and gratitude. I am both mesmerized by this little gesture of faith and jealous of her intimate relationship with God. It always bothers me that I can’t seem to connect with Him the way people like Auntie Bee and Mama can. The way I used to.

  • • •

  My first memory of God is watching my parents pray together. I loved their sejadahs, the prayer mats Mama set out each time the call to prayer came drifting through the air. Mama’s was a deep green, Abah’s a soft blue gray, and each was woven in gold thread with pictures of a mosque, intricate flowers and vines intertwining all along the edges. I’d run my fingers along the pattern, playing with the fringe on the end of each, as they bent and straightened and bowed and kneeled toward Mecca. Abah would recite the verses aloud, his voice turning the unfamiliar words into a song, and I remember sitting close and letting the words wash over me and feeling . . . safe.

  Mama taught me the letters of the Arabic alphabet one by one—alif, baa, taa—and I used to sit with her each night after the evening prayer, concentrating hard as I tried to decipher the pretty swirls and curls in the pages of the Quran until I, too, could recite them all on my own.

  The day I could recite the Al-Fatihah all by myself—the very first surah of the holy book, the surah that asks God to guide us to the straight path—I got my very first sejadah, its rich blue green set off with a golden-domed mosque.

  Prayer meant asking God for his blessing and his forgiveness. Prayer meant thanking Him for everything he’d given us. And even I knew He’d given us so much.

  But then Abah died. And I began to wonder what it was that I was supposed to be thankful for. And I haven’t prayed since.

  After the failed trip to the doctor, Mama read the Quran to me each night, determined to chase away the mischievous spirits wreaking havoc on my brain. No longer was she the scientific-minded nurse, once so skeptical of djinn and the supernatural; with no other options, my increasingly worrying symptoms had turned her firmly into a desperate, faithful believer. I didn’t mind her doing it—I’d always found the verses beautiful, after all, and soothing—but I knew it wouldn’t work. He had forsaken me.

  God and I weren’t currently on speaking terms.

  “Don’t say that, Melati,” Mama would say. “God has a plan for all of us.”

  “Why is God’s plan to make me this way?” I’d counter, and she’d purse her lips at my impertinence. But I went along with it anyway because it made her happy, and I’d do a lot worse to make my mother happy.

  So we knocked on the door of every religious teacher and healer she could find, asking for their guidance, their wisdom to defeat the invisible enemy who held me so firmly in his grasp.

  The first time, we had to take the bus out to Seremban, a two-hour journey on bumpy, winding roads. Our appointment was for two p.m.; we arrived nearly a half hour late, hot and tired, bones aching from the rattling of the bus. I was pale and queasy, having spent the ride fighting off both the Djinn and motion sickness; my mother was wound as tightly as a spring, tense from the stress of worrying about me and the bus and whether either of us would fall apart before we get there. “We’re late,” she said in clipped tones, clutching me by the arm, the better to both prop me up and hurry me along. “Come on, quickly, come on.”

  Our destination was one of a cluster of nondescript wooden houses on the outskirts of Seremban town. As my mother knocked hesitantly on the peeling blue door, a stray dog napping in the cool of the house’s shadow peeled open one eye to glare balefully at us, and I found myself muttering, “Sorry,” in its direction.

  A young woman wearing a bored expression answered the door and ushered us wordlessly past a row of men and women waiting for their turn with the healer, into a dim, musty room lit only by two flickering oil lamps in the center of the room. The Djinn immediately reached up to clasp his cold hands around my throat, and I was suddenly, suffocatingly claustrophobic.

  “Can’t we crack open a window?” I asked Mama in a strangled voice.

  “Shhhhh,” she hissed back, staring expectantly at the door.

  Soon enough, the healer swept in—Mama called him Ustaz, a title I’d only ever heard used for religious teachers and scholars before this. His floor-length robe was snow white and pristine, his straggly beard streaked with gray. “Sit, sit,” he said, and we sat cross-legged on the woven straw mat across from him. “Now tell me your troubles,” he said, and listened patiently as my mother poured out my whole story—the counting, the tapping, the pacing, the insomnia, the constant thoughts of her death—with the clinical precision of the nurse that she is.

  Throughout it all, the ustaz nodded, regarding me over the top of his glasses, his gaze never wavering, while my cheeks burned and I looked down at the ground, trying to pretend none of this was about me. It all sounded so much worse when I was forced to listen to someone else list each one of my surreal maladies, each item to be handled and ticked off in turn.

  “I see, I see,” he said, once Mama was done. “Not to worry, madam; you’ve come to the right place.” He turned to me. “Lie down, girl.”

  He made me lie flat on my back on the straw mat, my arms at my sides. Then he muttered verses from the Quran, all while swirling his arms and pulling vigorously at the air above me, his eyes closed in concentration. I knew it was meant to be a serious situation, but every time he flailed and grabbed at nothing and yanked at it, I felt perilously close to giggles. A snort escaped, and I quickly turned it into a cough-groan as my mother glared at me.

  The ustaz stopped and opened his eyes. “There,” he said, with great finality. “Now let me see here. . . .” He grabbed my toes and prodded each one hard, causing me to yelp in pain. “Yes, yes,” he muttered, nodding. “You feel pain? That means the Djinn is there, definitely, definitely. Yes. I will help you with that.”

  He’s not in my toes, I wanted to tell him. He’s in my chest, and stomach, and mostly in my head. My toes don’t really have anything to do with it. But I kept my mouth firmly shut. Adults rarely like being told that they don’t have all the answers, or worse still, that the answers they do have are all the wrong ones.

  He rummaged in the wooden chest beside him and emerged with three glass vials. “This one, you dab behind your ears and on your wrists, like perfume. One day, three times,” he said, handing me the first one. “This one, you mix a little bit into your bathwater every time.” I held the second vial to my nose and inhaled; it smelled like limes. “This one, I blessed with all the good Quran surahs already. You drink every day.” The vials clinked against one another in my arms. “Okay,” I said, then “Thank you.” Should we shake hands? Was I supposed to bow? I didn’t know what the etiquette was for a spiritual healing—I still don’t.

  He turned to my mother. “God willing, the Djinn will have completely left her body within the next three months.”

  “Three months? That long, ustaz?”

  “You cannot rush God’s work.”

  “Of course, of course,” she said, subsiding hastily.

  Before we left to catch the bus, I saw her slip a handful of notes into his outstretched palm. It was more money than we could really afford, and I felt the tips of my ears grow hot. Tears stung the back of my throat.

  “Come on, Melati,” she said, smiling at me. “Let’s go home.”

  Truly, I did feel better that first time. I let the words of the holy book wash all over me, and came out
feeling virtuous, cleansed, purified. I let myself believe that the Djinn was gone. This false sense of security meant I was unprepared for the onslaught when he returned later that night. You thought it would be so easy? The taunting lilt barely hid his anger. You will see that you cannot be rid of me so easily.

  I couldn’t stop counting that night. Couldn’t stop tapping every third item in our house three times, and then again, and then again, caught in an exhausting loop I just couldn’t break, my head filled with visions of Mama dying over and over and over again. I wailed and I raged and I sobbed, but I could not stop. And all she could do was stand there and watch, weeping quietly with me. “Take me to the madhouse, please,” I told her at one point, weak and weary. “I can’t live like this anymore.”

  “Never,” she said, shaking her head firmly, the tears still visible on her cheeks. “And nobody ever will, unless they plan on killing me first.”

  She meant it too. She was determined to find something that would work. And so we went on, spending time and money on all sorts of treatments. I was subjected to cupping and needles, poked and prodded and induced to puke my guts out into a waiting basin, made to bathe with water laced with salt, with lime, with leaves and herbs and flowers. Each time, I willed myself to get better, to heal, to chase the Djinn out and leave me with my own thoughts at last. But now I had learned to distrust that beguiling, early feeling of peace.

  And all the while, I watched as it took a toll on my mother. Mama used to be gay and vibrant; when she walked into a room, she drew your eyes to her like moths to a flame. My father’s death a year before had diminished her light a little, but it was as if she’d gone from a wild, raging bonfire to a delicate, tapered candle—she was still bright and beautiful, but somehow more elegant in her grief. My situation took whatever light she had left and extinguished it. Before my very eyes, she shriveled and shrank until all that was left was shadows. The Djinn might inhabit my body, but he held us both captive.

  By the fifth treatment, I finally figured it out. When Mama asked me how it went, guarded and cautious, I told her what she needed to hear. “I’m better now, Mama,” I said. “I think it’ll all be fine from now on.”

  “Really?” she asked me, her eyes filled with joyful tears, her voice high with grateful disbelief. “Really,” I lied. And the Djinn smiled a vicious little smile and wrapped his scaly arms tight around my chest, as if he would never let go.

  The day I gave my mother back her light, I vowed I would never let her know my darkness again.

  • • •

  “Who is this?”

  We are barely five steps into the house when we are greeted thusly by another young man. Vincent might not have been too thrilled to see me earlier, but compared to the venom I can hear dripping from each word this one utters, we’re practically best friends. My heart begins to pound, and my mind, sensing impending trouble, leaps immediately to the safety of the numbers and occupies itself counting the black-and-white tiles on the floor.

  “Is this how you say hello to guests now, Frankie?” Auntie Bee regards him calmly, her hand hovering protectively on my shoulder. “This is Melati. She’ll be staying with us until we can figure out how to get her home. Now, where’s Baba?”

  “Not home,” Frankie says sullenly. “He hasn’t come back yet. And we can’t call him. All the phone lines are down.”

  My heart sinks at this; I was just about to ask if I could use the phone to call the hospital and speak to my mother. She’s not there anyway, the Djinn insists, jabbing at my stomach with sharp spikes of fear. She’s dead. You didn’t protect her. Just like you didn’t protect Saf.

  My eyes fill with tears, and I concentrate even harder on the way the tiles fit together, counting off their perfect squares in threes.

  “Okay, then—home soon, I’m sure,” Auntie Bee says, making her way into the house and gesturing for me to follow. “Better make sure we have dinner ready by the time he gets here. He’ll be hungry. Come, Melati,” she says, turning to me. “I have some clothes you can change into.”

  I drift along behind her as she leads me down a long, narrow corridor. We pass three closed doors before she opens one on the right. It’s a box of a room, just big enough to fit a narrow bed, a small vanity with an oval mirror and a white stool, and a chest of drawers. Auntie Bee rummages about in this for a while before emerging with a white blouse and a gray skirt. “My niece’s clothes,” she explains, handing them to me. “She studies at the university. Her parents are in Johor, so she stays here sometimes when she has a break. Aiya—” She breaks off suddenly, clicking her tongue. “I’d better find some way to contact her and make sure she’s safe,” she mutters. “The bathroom is there, across the hall. You change and come to the kitchen when you’re ready, girl.”

  She disappears down the hall and I quickly slip into the bathroom. After I use the toilet, I wash my hands at the clean white sink and stare at myself in the mirror, taking in my disheveled hair, half out of its usual braid; the blue shadows under my eyes; the tracks of clean lines my tears have left in the layer of soot and dirt on my face. The face of a betrayer, the Djinn snarls, a traitor, a deserter, a girl who runs away when the people she loves need her.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, gripping the sides of the sink for balance, tapping each with my fingers, three times on this side, then the other, then again, then again, then again. Then I strip off my filthy school uniform, folding the blouse and pinafore, which reek faintly of drain water, and placing them neatly on a little table by the door. I grab a blue washcloth hanging on a knob by the sink, and I scrub and scrub and scrub until my skin tingles and the stranger in the mirror disappears.

  Back in the room, there are no underclothes, so I suppose the ones I’m wearing will have to do. Then I put on the other girl’s clothes. The blouse is some type of linen, scratchy against my skin; I tuck it into the cotton skirt, which stops below my knees. I rebraid my hair, tidy myself up as best I can, and make my way out of the room, trying to ignore the fact that the Djinn hasn’t stopped his steady stream of dark whispers and that my heart hasn’t stopped its exaggerated beats since I got here. I don’t even realize that I’m tapping to them as I walk, my fingers hidden in the depths of some strange girl’s pockets.

  In the kitchen, Auntie Bee has changed out of her elegant cheongsam into a high-necked cotton blouse in a soft blue gray and loose black pants. She whirls about, adding a pinch of salt here, tasting there, stirring this, chopping that. “Oh good, they fit!” she says when she sees me. “Come, help me get this dinner on the table. Uncle will be hungry when he comes home.” She says this calmly, but I have a lot of practice in hiding how I feel, and I can spot the telltale signs of worry any day: the white knuckles that grip the dishes tightly as she sets the table, the pauses between conversations that go just a hair longer than they should.

  For lack of anything else to do, and desperate for something else to focus on so I can shut the Djinn up, I drift along in her wake, picking things up, putting them down again, tapping everything secretly three times, pretending that this can somehow be construed as helping.

  There was a time when I loved being in a kitchen, when it was the center of our household, emanating delicious, mouthwatering smells and filled with laughter and conversation. Once upon a lifetime ago, I wasn’t totally useless, either—I’m handy with a knife, which Abah taught me how to use properly years ago. “You hold it like this, Melati,” he’d say, demonstrating. “You see? Curl your fingers against the blade like this, and then cut the onion like this.” And there they were—perfect slices, every time.

  These days, there’s not that much laughter, and I’m not that much use. In my defense, it’s hard to be much help to Mama when the Djinn keeps screaming ominous warnings and portents of doom: That knife could slice a major artery and she would be dead before you know it. She could have a previously unknown, fatal allergy to one of her ingredients for this curry she’s made a million times. She could choke, she could burn, she co
uld scald. Mama’s kitchen is a cacophony of hazards, and I am too deafened and defeated by them, too busy saving Mama’s life with my never-ending number chains to bother with such commonplace tasks as slicing onions.

  “Lazybones,” Mama would tease me as I sat watching her wash the rice for dinner, mesmerized by the sure, graceful movement of her hands sifting through the grains to remove the dirt and grit. I’d just laugh and let her believe it, counting each grain as it slipped through her fingers.

  • • •

  Finally, Auntie Bee makes us sit down around the marble-topped dining table laden with rice and dishes—chicken stewed in an aromatic brown sauce, deep green leaves of kailan sautéed with chili and garlic, steam rising gently from the fragrant white rice in the bowl. “Eat, eat,” she tells us. “Everything is better with a full stomach. Don’t worry,” she whispers to me, passing me a spoon in place of the chopsticks I have no idea how to use. “Everything you can eat, no pork in anything. Got chicken lah, but this is darurat—emergency—surely God will forgive you.”

  “Thank you, Auntie,” I whisper back. Obediently, Vincent and I grab our bowls and begin to fill them; I stay clear of the chicken, as if God cares anymore what I do, and load up on vegetables. It seems strange to enjoy food at a time like this, but each bite of the crisp greens, the crunchy garlic, the heat of the red chilis, is such pure pleasure that I could cry.

  As we eat, I keep my head bent and my eyes on my food; I can feel Frankie’s eyes boring into my forehead from across the table. An explosion, I realize, is inevitable.

  And so it is. “This is ridiculous, Ma,” Frankie spits out, flinging his chopsticks down and crossing his arms tightly across his chest. “Why invite this Malay girl into our home? Why must we share our food with her when her kind don’t even want to share a country with us?”

  “Frankie.” Auntie Bee clicks her tongue, her brow furrowed with irritation. “Show some respect.”