Ode to Broken Things (18 page)

She flung an arm on the coffee table to highlight her comment, and dislodged the
murruku
bowl, strewing the contents on the floor. “Oops!”

Two maids were at the spot almost immediately, clearing up the mess. Jay stepped over the mess to approach the group. “I have to leave now. Thank you so much for your hospitality.”

“You must stay a bit longer!” Mridula insisted. “Especially as we won’t be seeing you at Port Dickson tomorrow! We hardly had a chance to talk properly. I’ve been so busy supervising in the kitchen…”

“I wish I could, but I have an early appointment.” He clasped Ranjan’s and Mridula’s hands warmly in goodbye. “I’ll be back soon! This feels like home already.”

Agni and Abhik watched Jay leave the room. “Why are relationships so complicated?” Agni asked softly.

Abhik felt his heart pounding but he just raised his eyebrows.

“My grandmother and his father being together… while his mother was around… Can you imagine what he went through as a kid? He must have been so traumatized – but, strangely, it was my grandmother who was agitated at seeing
him
.”

“Was she?” He tried to keep his voice level. “So long ago already, and,” Abhik paused briefly, “it’s none of our business. Consenting adults and all that. If the talk in Pujobari didn’t bother them, and they carried on anyway, you shouldn’t let it get to you now.” He looked at her closely and sighed. “Hah! I knew it! You don’t owe him anything, B. Not an apology, and especially not your guilt.”

Agni took a deep breath. “All my life I have had to deal with such traitorous thoughts about Dida, and now that he’s come back, that’s the only thing on my mind.”

“Traitorous?”

“About me, mainly. About Dida making people around her do exactly what she wanted, like not letting my mother marry my Malay father. While she went ahead and carried on with a married man… Maybe my grandmother didn’t do me a favour by bringing me up. If I had a Malay father, I would be entitled to more from this country. Maybe I would have the arrogance to march out of a meeting whenever I wanted.”

“March out of a meeting? Is that the sum of your ambition, Bondhu?”

“Of course it’s more than that!” Agni snapped. “And now the Professor’s here,” she said, “I see someone like me. You know, broken… He seems broken somehow.”

“And you think you can fix this broken old man?”

Agni looked away. “I’m the last person who can fix anyone. I should just fix me first, find out who I am. It’s time I looked for my father.”

Abhik thought for a while. “Isn’t he somewhere in Kelantan?”

“I don’t know. I should find out. I thought I could run away from all this while I was with Greg, you know? New country, new people, but the problem is
inside
me.”

“Not a problem, Agni. Just missing pieces.”

“Right. Anyway, I want to stop trying to blank out my history. I love this country and, as I get older, I think this is the only place in the world that will ever feel like home.”

“Home? Imperfect, unfair…” Abhik recited, counting off the fingers of his hand.

Agni grinned in agreement. “Yep! Imperfect, unfair… but my very own.”

“Okay, Bondhu,” said Abhik. “Then join one of the groups that are making a difference. I am serious! Otherwise you’ll be singing
Rasa Sayang
during the open house season and griping the rest of the year again.”

“At least I’m back here. It’s better than just quitting and leaving, like so many of us are doing?” Agni looked at Abhik archly.

“
Touché,
” said Rohani from behind. “Hey, you two, want to get a drink at Bukit Hartamas and then head home? A Deepavali treat from me?”

“I can’t,” said Abhik, “It’s my party; can’t leave if I want to.”

“I’d love to go,” Agni squeezed Abhik’s arm. “I’ve been behaving the whole day, and it’ll be nice to chill with Rohani for a while. Pick me up on your way back to the apartment?”

Mridula emerged from the doorway to wag a finger in Agni’s face. “Leaving already? It’s high time you got married, and started hosting some of these parties, so old women like me can get a break!”

Agni hugged Mridula tight. “You old, Mriduladida? You’ll outlive us all. Byeeee!”

“
Chee
, grumbled Mridula, kissing Agni on the cheek, “what inauspicious things you say,
shaitan
!”

Another quick squeeze and Agni was gone, leaving the fragrance of jasmines. Mridula turned to Abhik, “That’s what Shapna and Siti were like. One Malay, the other Indian, yet the best of friends.
Durga
,
Durga
, I hope this friendship lasts for ever.”

Abhik put an arm around his grandmother’s shoulders. “No reason not to! They’re very different though, with Rohani so gentle from growing up in a Malay household with all that
adat
. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Their conversation was interrupted by flashing lights and a toot-toot of the horn as Agni and Rohani drove off.

Jay sat in the cavernous office at Nilai, the dark corners of the former factory sheathed in blackness. His lone table was illuminated by a table lamp that cast a round spot of illumination on the sheaf of printouts.

Jay peered at his screen in disbelief. Was this an elaborate hoax of some sort, or something more real on a scale that could plague the rest of his academic career?

Neurotic
Neka
, he scolded himself. Get a grip.

His self-diagnosis had shadowed his childhood. He had always been a total pessimist, the
Lone Loser
. All through college, life was a contest for things that eluded his grasp; but he had learnt that very early, in Malaysia, from Shanti. He excelled academically for an absentee father who would, invariably, remind him of his
Spare
status.

His brother,
The Heir,
called him
neka
, a Bengali term that labelled him both effeminate and pretentious, in one precise bisyllabic word. His brother was happily married, and had heirs of his own now, even as Jay still trawled through the world like a teeming raincloud, waiting for release. His brother, throughout his whole life, had seemed undiminishable by anything. But then, his brother had never been abandoned in a fire, left to the kindness of strangers. His brother had been picked up in their father’s arms and carried to safety, out of the amusement park, that fateful day. He closed his eyes and felt his finger tracing agitated circles in the air.

Unlike his brother, Jay had grappled with women who gave too much too soon and then gave up too soon. The Indian women in America had intimidated him in his early twenties, for they were nothing like the women he had known in the small towns of Malaysia. No matter how many traces he found, no one came close to Shanti. His mother would host lavish dinners, where, delicately dabbing a corner of her lips with a precisely folded handkerchief, she would say, “Well, my husband, he is such a busy doctor, you know…” and vaguely wave her hands in the air. That was all she needed to validate herself and her family, even when they were living in the ghettos of New Jersey, while his father retook multiple exams to prove his medical knowledge.

Then the Bengali women started wearing chunky black oxidised metal jewellery, and stylishly enormous dots on the centre of their foreheads, and said dismissively, “I’ll get this doctorate from Columbia even if it kills me,” and his mother had nothing left to say. These creatures in sleeveless blouses and see-through chiffons that bared their belly buttons agitated his safe world, even as his mother, in her heavy
Tanchoi
silks, was diminished.

When his mother found Rina for him, he was already in his late thirties. Rina was visiting her older sister for the summer in Seattle, and they both pretended it was love at first sight instead of an arranged marriage.

They were separated now, he and Rina. Their twin boys, too, had their own careers now. He had lived apart from their mother for so long that he had never really figured in their lives. He regretted that now, but his own non-relationship with his father had given him the template for dealing with his sons.

By the time the boys were toddlers, Rina had accepted the inevitability of Jay’s detachment. They had seen too many couples entering into commuter marriages to keep pace with changing job markets, or stuck in flagging relationships, all ending in divorce. Then their careers had taken off as Jay was recognised globally as one of the foremost experts in biomaterials, and Rina had done well as a realtor over the years. They had begun to relish the freedom from couplehood that was possible in America. As long as they limited their contact with the Indian community, there were no prying questions. They had tried to keep their marriage outwardly intact, at least for the children, as divorce seemed like an unnecessary complication. When the twins were still living at home, Jay was a guest speaker at their schools frequently so that the boys could be publicly fathered in his fame.

Rina didn’t bother about his women. She understood that first Jay loved only Jay, then his work, then the boys, then his mother, then Rina. A new woman usually placed seventh on his list. When Manjula Sharma had come into Jay’s life, Rina expressed a deep pity for this woman whose eyes had sparkled so brightly at the camera.

But now – finally! – Jay had found someone else like him, in fact even more flawed. Maybe he could finally stop flagellating himself.

He forced himself to look at the screen in front of him again. The collage of pictures: a Tibetan model, black hair gleaming against white orchids in her hair, standing by the Potala Palace with the sun shining blindingly off her intricately-worked silver belt; a fuzzy picture, in Paris, the model with a politician; a barren field with burnt dark patches; a piece of dark cloth, lying on the ground like furry batwings. And below it all, the blogger had posted a document that said in a clear black-and-white type:

My informer states that Colonel S was the person who placed the C
₄
on various parts of the victim’s body…

Jay clicked on the various tabs, all blogs related to Colonel S, and the murder of a Tibetan model. Page after page of the role of Colonel S in the greater political scheme of things. Some of the attacks were vicious opinions; others were substantiated with documents and photographs.

Of all people, it was Manju who had alerted him to this. Manju, whom he had left behind in Boston, sure that they were over, no chance of a reconciliation no matter how much she begged, had written him an email. It was a Manju Mail, full of snide allusions to the ghosts he was still battling, to his impotency in all things… and he had almost deleted that vomit. Then, towards the end, Manju the Poet had written a crude doggerel, saying:

You think your colonel’s such a hero,
Buddy, watch your ass, he’s more like Nero,
Fiddling while a country burns…

He had decided to Google the Colonel with the aim of writing an equally bad-versed reply, telling her how wrong she was. Instead he had stumbled upon this cyberspace of incriminatory evidence.

Jay felt ill. He would never have thought to Google Colonel S by himself; he had known the man practically all his life! No one Googled an avuncular figure who had been a mentor to boot, someone who had rescued Jay from a life dependent on happy drugs to get through the day and given him a career he actually wanted to wake up for.

He thought one knew all there was to know about such a saviour. Clearly not.
Masked Mentor
.

In his ears, he heard the conversation at the Open House, the allegations about a military style execution of the model. He remembered Agni’s face, turning away from him and saying,
In that case, Professor, I really hope I am wrong
.

Jay paced around that solitary puddle of light from his table. What was he supposed to do now? Confront the guy? If this was true, Colonel S would never admit it but, if were untrue, would so many bloggers write about it?

He stumbled on a brick on the floor and found himself flailing in the dark. He felt physically and mentally confused, with no one he could turn to for advice. It seemed significant that the only one who had warned him about such a danger to his career was someone who did not wish him well. He had not felt so alone, or more friendless, all his life.

An hour later, looking through all the research specifications on the printouts, his sense of unease about this project coagulated into anger. He should have known better.

Jay’s expertise was in designing and modifying polymers for biomedical applications. Hemocompatibilisation of polymers had been showing promising breakthroughs, but the only thing that Colonel S seemed to be interested in was the fully biodegradable stent technology. The specifications for what was required for the Malaysian study did not indicate any medical use. It was clearly not going to be used either for gene or drug delivery.

So what else
was
there? What was Colonel S up to?

Yesterday, he had spent much time on a demonstration of the crimping and expansion test. He thought of the burnt field, the eyes of the dead Tibetan model, the black cloth on the ground. How was this related to his own research?

He had left the lab in Seattle when he realised that his mentor’s research in Materials Science was straying into obscure military applications. Once it became clear that Colonel S was growing disinterested in medical applications, Jay had found a reason to leave. At that time, there had been vague hints about developing a cache of superexplosives to be carried within the human body, but Jay had left before the questions became too difficult.

Hutang emas boleh di bayar, hutang budi di bawa mati. Debts of gold can easily be repaid; debts of gratitude are carried to the grave.
He had been taught this Malay saying too early in his life to ever forget it. He could not turn against Colonel S.

Jay felt the agitated circles of his finger as an image of Agni, lit up in the glow of one hundred and eight lamps, crossed his mind. He had left the party about three hours ago, but it felt another world away.

He couldn’t leave Malaysia again, not just now.