Jazz and Aruna enter the hospital shortly after Khalid Shah leaves; Jazz recognizes the avuncular figure making his way through the car park, and hangs back to avoid having to talk to him. ‘Who’s that?’ asks Aruna in amusement.
‘Just Baba’s friend’s son, Khalid,’ says Jazz. ‘He’s possibly the most boring man in KL.’
Aruna goes to the office, and asks about seeing Hari Hassan, and Jazz can’t stop himself smiling when he hears her speak. It feels good to smile, to be someone who feels humour rather than pathos between them; he enjoys the smile so much that he practically allows himself to grin. ‘What’s so funny?’ Aruna asks, in an annoyed tone.
‘The way you’re speaking Bahasa with that clipped oh-so-lovely-scones-and-tea English accent. It’s hilarious. It’s even thicker than it was when you came back from college.’
Aruna looks at him, and smiles back indulgently while she waits for the administrator to fill in some paperwork. ‘Speaking of college, what did you mean, in the coffee shop, when you said that we had things to fight about after college? What was there to fight about?’
‘You know what,’ says Jazz, ‘We just never talked about it.’
‘Oh.’ Aruna realizes. ‘Of course. That.’
‘It was just so obvious, the moment we first got together once you were back, that you’d slept with other people.’
‘I did it for us, in a way,’ says Aruna. ‘I wanted to know that I wasn’t frigid.’ She pauses and says, ‘It was obvious you had too.’
‘I wanted to be sure that I really knew what I was doing,’ says Jazz, ‘but there wasn’t any point discussing it, as we both knew anyway. We didn’t even fight about infidelity.’
‘We were never about that,’ says Aruna. Jazz wonders, as she says this, what she thinks that they really were about.
When Jazz was ten years old, his parents moved to Singapore for his father’s work, where they were to stay for the next nine years; they went from a rambling house in KL with an overgrown garden, to a humid but modern apartment, with a small patio. He had left all his friends, and although he could speak English and Bahasa, he felt that his accent was somehow wrong, and that no one understood him; he was a foreigner in an unfriendly country, where everything moved too fast, where there were too many inexplicable rules, and where children were swatted aside like flies. Just a couple of weeks after their arrival, Jazz started at an English-speaking international school, and went through the motions of the school day without feeling it was anything to do with him, just waiting until he could return to the strange apartment for the comforting smell of his mother’s cooking, and bask in her delight, fresh-baked and warm every day like new bread, at seeing him come home. Jazz sat at the back of the class, and noticed that at the front was a girl with two long plaits and braces, who looked vaguely familiar. He wanted to ask her if he knew her, but didn’t, as that would have been stupid; of course he didn’t know her. But sometimes she glanced back at him as though she had the same question. She was given the first coat peg and locker in their cloakroom, as her initials were AA, Aruna Ahmed. His peg was next to hers, Ejaz Ahsan.
One day, an obnoxious, chubby girl called Winnie was being mean to Aruna, pulling her long plaits, possibly with jealousy, because Winnie’s own hair had been economically cropped to a bowl-like bob. ‘Piggy-piggy pigtails,’ taunted Winnie, ‘you’ve got hair like a five year old!’ and when Aruna pushed her away, Winnie pushed her back, harder, so that she fell and grazed her knee. ‘Oink-oink,’ crowed Winnie in triumph, but was pushed away in her turn by Jazz, who had seen what was happening from his usual lonely place on the low wall. He had run over, and instinctively gave Winnie a casual but firm shove in the chest, so that she fell back on her comfortably cushioned rump, and then he took Aruna by the hand to the cloakrooms, to wash her bleeding knee. It was when they were there, propping her knee up to the long white sink, that he looked at their faces side by side in the mirror and realized what had been so familiar about her; she looked just like him.
‘Thanks, Ejaz,’ said Aruna. ‘Winnie’s just such a moron.’
‘Yeah, she’s a Pooh!’ he replied. ‘Geddit? Winnie-the-Pooh?’
Aruna nodded, grinning with the slightly goofy expression she had before her braces finally came off. She looked back at the mirror, and pulled at her plaits. ‘I hate these. It’s the only way Betty knows how to do my hair.’
‘Who’s Betty? Your sister?’ asked Jazz.
‘No, I don’t have any sisters. Betty’s the housekeeper, but she looks after me before and after school, when Dad’s working. I haven’t got a mum,’ said Aruna. She mentioned the last fact mildly, without reproach or sadness, as someone might say that they haven’t got a cold, or an umbrella. Jazz couldn’t imagine the horror of not having a mum, and his childish heart went out to her yet again.
‘You should come back to mine after school one day,’ said Jazz. ‘My mum will probably know how to fix your hair in lots of different ways; she’s got really long hair.’ He said this last fact with pride. He had always been in awe of the beauty of his Amma’s hair, and when he was little he used to borrow her combs and clips and sparkly grips, and snag them into his own hair, thinking he might look as pretty as her.
‘Sure, that would be cool. I’ll check with my dad,’ said Aruna. The bell signalling the end of break went, and she said, ‘You coming back to class, Ejaz?’
‘It’s Jazz, not Ejaz,’ he said, ‘Everyone calls me Jazz. I mean not here, but my friends back home, and my family.’
‘My Baba calls me Rooney,’ said Aruna, with a shrug. ‘It’s what my mum called me before she died. It’s a baby name, really, I suppose. I was only three when she went.’
‘I like Rooney,’ said Jazz, ‘it suits you.’ They went together to class, and later on they sat together for lunch, sharing the snacks they had brought from home. And Jazz, for the first time since he had come to Singapore, didn’t feel alone in that strange city. Jazz had appointed himself as Aruna’s protector that day without really realizing it, and without being aware that he had already set the tone for their whole future relationship; it was a role he never really gave up.
Jazz looks at Aruna now, and feels that same protective sense he had all those years ago, an urge to protect her that was so deep and invasive it was almost a physical instinct, like the one that had set him running across the playground that day, in the first week of school. Perhaps that was what they had always been about before – he the carer, she the cared-for – but for two years now Aruna has survived without his protection. She had been a stranger in a foreign country, just as he had once been; and she had found employment, friends, a home, a husband. She had mismanaged her own medical treatment, she had drunk and smoked too much, she had considered and retreated from suicide, she had returned with determination to where the bodies of the past were buried; she had made mistakes, but she had also made brave decisions, and she had done it all on her own. He recognizes now that it was always his need to protect, rather than hers; he had played her keeper, but perhaps she had never really needed to be kept. And that if he hadn’t been there that first day, Aruna wouldn’t have missed his protection at all; perhaps she would have simply got up, dusted herself off, and carried on.
‘OK, you can go through now,’ says the hospital administrator, passing them both visitors’ badges. They go up in the lift, but when they reach the door to Hassan’s ward, Aruna turns to see that Jazz has stopped walking.
‘Well, are you coming?’ she asks.
Jazz shakes his head. ‘I think it would be better if it was just you,’ he says.
‘Because you don’t want to see your dad?’ she asks. Jazz knows that it seems ridiculous, after having come all this way.
‘Not just because of that,’ he tries to explain. ‘It’s because this is all you, Rooney. This is your journey. I’m just going to sit down here and wait for you. I’ll watch out for you.’ He adds without malice, with a luminous smile, ‘It’s what I do.’ Aruna reaches out for his hand impulsively, and squeezes it, before stepping through the swinging doors.