Ode to Broken Things Read Free Page B

ordinary human traces embedded in the couch and the carpet, the inner crevices of a memory that would not be exorcised? He had to force himself back inside the shower, to turn the hot water on and vapourise the images, but the ghost hovered over the soap dispenser and in the scum of the tiles. He had always known there was no reclaiming his space, only the certainty of sharing it. He had shared it with a dead woman for almost three decades.
    Should he go back to Malaysia and make peace with Shanti’s ghost? Shanti, his first love, whose mother had banished him so imperiously, but before all that were his sweetest, earliest memories, of a home in Kilat Tanah, the land of lightning, which two thousand years ago, long before it had become a Malayan Kingdom, had been a part of the mighty Sri Vijaya empire. Where the Thunder Demons had shaken the earth with incandescent ferocity before unleashing barbs of rain and smothering the land. Jay had lived his childhood within this ancient countryside where, after each flood, the river spit up stones, clearly artificially shaped, and he and Shanti had spent hours looking for this batu lintar , the teeth of the Thunder Demons, gnashed in fury and spat out over the countryside.
    Although schoolbooks taught them that these were the axe-heads and chisels of the stone-age man, they had grown up with a fear of the Thunder Demon. The demon’s teeth were especially powerful when casting spells, for age made them potent. Yet, when they had brought Shanti limp and dripping from the water, and she still had the demon’s teeth pendant around her neck, he had ripped it from her lifeless body and sworn never to believe again. Then he had devoted his life to science, his work disproving the notion of any power higher than human genius.
    Jay softly rubbed his fingers over that familiar bulge at his chest. He still wore the demon’s teeth torn from the body of a dead girl, so very long ago. It was an albatross he could not shake off.
    Maybe he had not tried hard enough, despite his twenties and thirties being filled with shrinks and happy pills. Maybe now was the time to lay this ghost to rest.
    Shanti had a daughter before she died. The daughter, Agni, he calculated quickly, must be in her late twenties now. He imagined a face like Shanti’s, but older, the familiar curve of a cheek at the tips of his fingers… he flexed his fingers into a closed fist.
    No, this time, he would return because Colonel S had called. It was a challenge to work with Colonel S, and the last phone conversation had made that clear.
    “Come for a month, Jay, that’s all lah , the only thing this old man is asking from you.”
    “I have projects in summer, I need to try and reschedule things… I don’t think I can, not for a month.”
    “Ah, come on! You have tenure already, it can’t be so hard.”
    He had tired at incessant wheedling. “This is not Universiti Malaya.”
    A shocked intake of breath. Jay had not thought himself capable of such insolence and regretted it instantly. It was a relief to hear Colonel S speak again.
    “As you wish, Jay. I just wanted to see you again. Think about this, please, I am an old man. I still feel like a godfather to you, and you, a child squirming in my arms…”
    Jay felt his fingers looping circles in the air and knew he could not let Colonel S talk about the fire. “Three weeks. I can do three weeks. Maybe.”
    “Excellent! I look forward to your arrival. Somebody will send a ticket…”
    “I’ll call you back. Don’t send anything yet.”
    “As you wish. Inshallah, it will be a pleasant three-week holiday for you, even if nothing else develops. But we are working on some biomaterials you will only have read about and I guarantee you’ll be intrigued.”
    Three weeks. He would have time to see Shanti’s daughter – he felt a warming of his blood – even time to see Shanti’s mother again. Three quick weeks, and he would to be back in Boston… how bad could it get