When All the Lights Are Stripped Away

Sunil Nair

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) PTE LTD
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814398749
• Langue: English

Extrait

When All The Lights Are Stripped Away

2012 Sunil Nair
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
Cover art by Opal Works Co. Ltd
All rights reserved
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Nair, Sunil, 1965- When all the lights are stripped away / Sunil Nair. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, c2012. p. cm. eISBN : 978-981-4398-74-9
1. Fathers and sons - Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons - Fiction. 3. Malaysia - Politics and government - Fiction. I. Title.
PR9530.9 M823 -- dc22 OCN770822193
Printed in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd
To Tita
In memory of Amma and Acha, who were nothing like the Amma and Acha in the book
The Palace on Stilts
Illuminations
Pickled Snakes
The City
Cartoons
Father and Son
Hidden Legacies
The Second Adam
Justice For All
The Final Journey
The End, and a Beginning
Notes and Acknowledgements
About the Author
The Palace on Stilts
The letter summoning him home arrived in an airmail envelope bordered blue and red. There was no return address on the envelope but he knew Aini s writing well enough. The message, laid out squarely in the middle of the page in a coiled and unsteady hand, read:
Come home. I am dying. Acha
Anil expected to feel something, but he was empty and numb, as if this sudden announcement from his father did not concern him in any way.
Santhia was standing at the far end of the room, leaning out of the waist-high window. The dusklight was dull and faint and her shadow draped thickly over the chair behind her. He called out to her. The orchestra of sounds streaming in through the window drowned his voice out. He called out to her again and this time she heard him above the rising din.
What is it? she asked.
I have to go home. My father is dying.
Turning away from him she leaned out of the window again and said, There is nothing left there for you.
She was right. But a month later he travelled south to his hometown, his only companions an old lady and a cockroach. The lady, dressed in the traditional Malay baju kurung and headscarf, impressed him with her silence. She sat perfectly still and stared at the never changing landscape of gentle slopes, rubber and oil palm plantations, mesmerised by the stroboscopic effect created by the perfectly aligned rows of trees and the slow movement of the train. She looked as if she was waiting for the land to speak to her, but it remained as silent as she was. The cockroach darted this way and that, unafraid of human presence and broad daylight. It appeared to him that everything was not the way it should have been. On an ordinary day the old lady would have spoken to him and offered him a goreng pisang or a piece of kuih lapis , and the cockroach would have waited and watched before coming out to play.
There is a knock on the door.
Aini walks into the room, not waiting for him to answer. She chases the dream away with her energy and presence. When he was a child he needed this little ritual with their maid to face the day. Aini would come in and hold him close for a while, his head cradled between her chin and breasts, his mouth pressed against the base of her throat, breathing in the smell of the food she had just prepared on her skin: puttu , dhosa , idiapam , the traditional South Indian breakfast dishes she had learned to cook from his mother, Amma. He would remain in this pose long enough for the last traces of the dream-filled night to vanish. He wants to repeat the ritual but Aini hovers above him, playing the air-spirit.
He s awake and wants to see you.
Why didn t he want to last night?
He was feeling a little weak and he didn t want you to see him that way. At least not the first time. You know how he is.
An image of his father drifts across his mind.
He walks with Aini down the corridor with only a sarong tied around his waist, his face unwashed. He does not want to stand on ceremony during his first meeting with his father. The house is a maze. He allows Aini to walk ahead and lead him to his father s study and bedroom, afraid that he might lose his way and take a wrong turn.
The house was modelled after Jim Thompson s in Bangkok. Acha first saw it in a book five years earlier. He immediately set about building a copy, put together from village houses transported from the nine states with sultanates, connected by elaborate passageways. Acha called it his palace on stilts. Amma said, This monstrosity will be the death of me.
Through the palace on stilts he now walks thinking of the time when Amma exiled herself to a desk in a spare room and Acha was on fire with an architectural dream and Aini was busy running an unfamiliar, rented house and he was left neither here nor there. As he walks behind Aini he looks at her hips which have filled out since the last time he saw her. He runs the palm of his right hand gently along the walls, tracing the grain of the wood planks. Their footsteps echo through the passageway. He expects Acha to be standing erect, dressed in a cream linen suit and tapping his fingers to the tune of some Malay or Indonesian pop song playing on the radio. The sight that greets him as he turns the corner into the study is of a man he does not know.
Surprised, aren t you?
The voice comes from the man buried in the rattan chair, but he imagines a ventriloquist in action in some corner of the room, giving speech to the body that doesn t seem capable of generating sound. He moves closer to the chair and stares harder.
No matter how hard you stare you won t be able to come to terms with how I look and what has become of me. This is what I am now. You won t change me with your eyes, Acha says.
I am sorry.
He bends down and gives Acha a kiss on his forehead. The smell of his skin is not of death but of an object that has not been touched or used for years, so different from the perfumed skin he last kissed, with its smell of strength, vitality and freshness. What connects the man who was his father and the one sitting in this chair?
The air in the room is still. The curtains are drawn and what little light there is has stolen in through the gaps. Each piece of furniture is as he remembers it, sitting where it belongs. He looks around the room for a sign of change but sees none. He feels reassured that the objects around him serve as true and steadfast markers of the past.
Aini is no longer with them; she has slipped out of the room unnoticed.
Sit down. I want to ask you why you took so long to come home, why you didn t call as soon as you got the news about me, why you left so suddenly three years ago, why the deep silence between the letters you wrote once a year. And a hundred other questions. Acha pauses, for effect Anil thinks, before saying, But I will not. It would be too sudden and too easy.
Acha continues talking but Anil loses himself in the pleasure he gets from the sound of his voice and no longer hears what he says. Acha s words form a veil around him. In the dark the initial shock of seeing his father so changed melts away, as he shifts his attention from his father s body and face to his voice. It is still strong and does not betray him. The voice fills the room. He longs to be swept away by its strength, back to his childhood.
I cried a lot when you left, Normah says.
A smile spreads across her face and it creases the skin around her eyes, forming a net of fine lines. She has aged, this childhood friend of his, but age suits her well. The shop her father left her when he moved to Kelantan must be a burden.
Anil and Normah used to play in the rambutan and durian orchard behind her house when they were children, careful to avoid Osman the orchard keeper. She would pretend to feed him the leaves and grass she cooked in a rusty tin can filled with water, saying, Eat, eat, and you will be stronger than all of them. She was like an older sister to him, the one who nurtured and cared for him with simple words and gestures.
I had to go away, Anil says.
It has been so long. Three years, more? I received one letter from you in all that time, two years after you left.
You shouldn t complain. I wrote to my father just three times, once every Deepavali.
What happened to Santhia? In the letter, you said you were in love with her.
She is carrying my child.
Anil steals through the passageways on tiptoe with bare feet, moving towards the tall Chinese vases standing like elegant guards outside Acha s study. H