May 1975
She tells him her story on the very evening of her arrival. She has answered other people’s questions politely enough but with nowhere near the eagerness the soft earnest gush the delicate forthcoming she has reserved for Cyril Dragon.
In the story Reza’s omputeh father quietly packs a suitcase one morning while Salmah sleeps. He leaves a note on the kitchen table with money for one week’s provisions. It would have been better—my mother says—just to leave isn’t it? Just to bugger off without pretending to compensate her as if she were nothing more than a glorified prostitute.
In the story the car engine makes a farce of Salmah’s breaking heart by starting and stalling and starting and stalling again until finally it marshals its resources and bears the whiteman away.
In the story Salmah lies in bed crying until Reza comes in with two slices of toast and a cup of Milo—always that cup of Milo!—on a shaking-rattling tray.
When Cyril pictures this woman crushed by another man’s callousness he has to press down on his chest with the splayed fingers of one hand. But it is hopeless. Like a water balloon his heart fills until indeed it bursts. He cannot lift his hand. He cannot speak. He cannot breathe. His office clock ticks the seconds away. The wooden floors creak.
Oh that Mama of mine! She could have been a tok dalang she could have been a penglipur lara she could have been a tukang karut but she was born a woman so her talents were shunted into lesser channels than professional storytelling.
I am not saying the story was a wholesale fabrication. But a good storyteller knows what to leave out and what to inflate as a glassblower would into marvels of form and colour. An even better storyteller can do all this without the audience ever noticing her sleights of hand. When such a storyteller tells her story we listen as though there were only a single story. As though absolute truth were not only possible but inevitable.
As Salmah puts the finishing touches on her tale the Centre’s goats—tireless lawn mowers and generous providers of fertilizer for the vegetable garden—bleat companionably far below the attic office. A cool breeze moves down the terraced hill like a hand stroking a cat. Up and down the stairs footsteps creak thump slap shuffle. Cyril may not be the only member of Salmah’s audience.
Cyril was no fool. He was not as others have made him out to be a booksmart simpleton ripe for the picking. Booksmart he certainly was. But if you think that to spend your life with great books is to know nothing about the Real World then you do not understand books. Everything a boy can learn about human nature from books—which is a great deal indeed—Cyril Dragon had learned by the age of twelve. He knew about jealousy and desperation and madness. He knew the meandering and tricksy pathways of the mind. He understood that the centre of the heart can be both molten and flinty. And most important of all he knew how clever we are at hiding the truth from everyone including ourselves and this you see is a thing that can be learned nowhere but from books. Out there on the gritty streets of the real world you cannot learn about all the hidden things; they unsheathe themselves only between the pages of Victorian novels. What a thin and trusting idea of the world a man forms without such textbooks!
Not so Cyril Dragon as he sits listening to Salmah in his office. What she leaves unsaid he fills in with crushing detail. The opprobrium a nice Malay girl would have had to face from relatives and friends for marrying a mat salleh. The isolation ensuing from being turned away by her own people yet only superficially accepted as one of the white expat crowd and certainly not when it truly counted. The loneliness at get-togethers and parties when she found herself surrounded by in-jokes and shared backgrounds. The long nights alone with a small child whose father was—of course—carrying on with other women otherwise why would he have left like that?
In Salmah’s face Cyril sees not just the boldness of the storyteller swept up in her drama but also—embedded in that audacity as clearly as a vein of copper in a lump of rock—this other glimmer. An element of exhaustion and loneliness and emptiness. Of lostness and searchingness. That little-bit-mad yet languid desperation that he has seen in the eyes of widowers and jilted women and unwashed hippies from places like Liverpool and Sheffield. For after all just beneath the eyeshadow and the lipstick her face is unmistakably travel-weary; her elegant coiffure, wind-loosened, droops a little.
“Why have you come here?” he asks her.
“Oh!” she says lightly. With a shrug and a faraway smile. “I thought of it a long time ago. I always had it in mind. Years ago somebody told me about this place. I thought, if I can find that kind of peace, how wonderful! My whole life I’ve been looking for it. Not money, not a rich husband and a big house and a nice car. People always thought I wanted all that but actually I didn’t. I wanted … I don’t know how to call it also!”
She gestures around the room with one hand and those wide eyes. This, the gesture says, this is what I wanted but I didn’t even have the words. Tell me. Show me. Help me. She puts her hands neatly together in her lap and looks up at him. Ready and waiting. Do with me as you will.
“But …” Cyril begins and then stops. A half smile on his face. He shakes his head and takes another breath and, still smiling, starts again. “You are not supposed to come to places like this. I am not … we are not the ones who say so. We say our teachings are for everyone. But your people would not approve. Am I right? You are not supposed to follow teachers who do not call themselves Muslim.”
Salmah looks down at her hands. Her eyelids so thin and delicate Cyril can almost see her eyes through them. The lashes like so many blackbird feathers laid side by side.
Up to this point it is still possible for some ghost of the future to turn their faces away from each other and say, “Stop, stop now while you have the chance! Can you not see how complicated this is? A Malay woman and a mixed-up rojak man. A Muslim and a who-knows-what bleeding-heart hocus-pocus God-is-love hippy born in the right century but the wrong country—and look the woman has a son on top of that. Not one single thing about this is going to be easy. You will destroy yourselves. You will destroy each other. You will destroy everything you love and not even realize you are doing it.”
But when Salmah looks up her eyes are narrowed and one corner of her mouth is lifted. Something about this expression—at once cowboy and Hindi film actress, at once sage and small girl—stops Cyril’s breath. All the ways we have of taming these ineffable moments, forcing them into jerry-built frames—somebody did something she put a charm on him she used jampi—are in the end inadequate attempts to describe what the Real Thing itself feels like. Cyril’s stomach drops. His heart burns through the skin of his chest.
“Oh!” Salmah says again. “We all do things we’re not supposed to do isn’t it?”
In the front hall the grandfather clock strikes the hour.
Cyril clears his throat and pushes his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose. He shoots a full two-dimple smile at Salmah. What to make of this smile? It is shy about its feelings yet confident in its intentions. It humbles itself it pledges its service but look closer and you will see that its humility is that of the elected statesman: there in the irises and here in the symmetrical dimples is a kind of gentle arrogance.
The boom of the grandfather clock bullies all the smaller clocks into delivering their many unsynchronized chimes: the Big Ben clock on the staircase; the cuckoo clock far below in the dining room; the Recreation Lounge clock; the prayer room clock upstairs; the front hall clock; and finally the clock in my father’s office. In seventeen years nobody has been able to align the measurements of the house’s seven clocks. A few times Selwyn Foo tried to handle the problem and, once, the young George Cubinar armed with a whole pouch of keys made a brave effort to no avail.
One by one they resume their ticking. Gradually Cyril’s heart steadies itself. It matches the ticking of his office clock exactly: a beat for every tick a beat for every tock.
Salmah looks at him and thinks How decent he is! How kind how patient how different from all the others. This one would never stumble in smelling of someone else’s perfume. This one would never give me a black eye and then swagger off to smoke and drink at the club. And so what if he is a bit smooth and pale and his hands a bit soft—so different from her usual bad-boy type—well that is not to say that he is not handsome in his own way. That refined face with its not-Malay not-Chinese not-Indian features.
And Cyril? For the moment he is only feeling not thinking. He is no Don Juan who pictures himself ripping off Salmah’s lacy kebaya under a mosquito-net canopy as she sits in front of him in his office; on the contrary he maintains a vice grip on the reins of his imagination. To think embarrassing thoughts now would be to spoil the purity of this moment. This blissful connection he feels with this lovely woman in his office as though they might have known each other in a previous life. What he sees in her he has never seen in anyone else; what he feels for her is so different from the shameful and inconvenient urges of his youth that he cannot—he must not—even compare them. In Salmah’s exquisite presence he must he simply must keep his twenty-year-old self at bay. He must exist only in the here and now. The pearl pink of her fingernails the rose pink of her lips the deep brown of her eyes.
It will be weeks before he dares even to kiss her. But make no mistake: it is too late for that ghost of the future to stop them now.