Shadow Theatre (2 page)

No historically verifiable record exists of the events they report.

TE HAD HEARD about the diamond woman since forever,
the syllables of her name blowing about the still air on
slow weekday afternoons, just out of reach behind the yam and
pandan leaves spreading along the cemetery's edge across from
our windows. We were living in those days off River Road
(which has since been renamed, perhaps for reasons having
nothing to do with what happened that August, the month Mrs.
Nair's daughter came home, but as our neighbors used to say,
who's to know the government's reasons?). Our road itself had
two names, as it was shaped like the alphabet U and met up with River Road twice. Jo and I lived along the leg of the U facing
the cemetery, with our back gardens lined up against the hack
gardens of houses along the other leg. But nobody we knew
used either name much (only with strangers or when Jo and I
were filling out forms at school), and mostly you'd hear one
neighbor saying to another, "Supposed to be someone from our
road-lah," or "Come, let's go home," as if in those days, everyone looked upon each other as almost family, and the aluminum
fences and hedges of hibiscus and morning glory separating our
gardens were a mere illusion.

And perhaps they were. Whispers floated through doors
and windows every day, hushed gossip and speculative references spinning ceaselessly in the heat like ceiling fans while
shirts were being washed or ironed, or the vegetables chopped
and the meat pounded and seasoned for dinner. Women like the
diamond woman seemed always to have existed, their faces
unknown while the details of their deeds drifted up and down
the road again and again, flattened facts like catechism lessons
unwavering in their warning to us never to take anything for
granted or trespass into the forbidden, because black magic was
not a game and life wasn't meant to be perfect.

Someone might begin, "Eh, you hear about that woman?
She took her own son to see the bomoh?" or, "You remember
that woman? Her husband, caught with the waitress sitting
in his lap?" Whoever was listening would nod, sometimes
add solemnly, "Ah, ya-lah, you see some people, they never
learn." And if you waited and stayed out of sight (in case there
was talk of sex deemed unfitting for children to hear), one by
one the stories would break loose, unleashed like a monsoon
flood, recent stories and old stories or old stories with new
details uncovered or reconfigured, all always secondhand as
none of our neighbors was ever a witness or would want to confess to being one. Eventually, occasionally, a neighbor would get
around to the diamond woman's story, even though it was a story retold so much, there didn't seem anything anyone could do to
it to shed light on what may have happened. And yet,
"Remember," someone might say, "itu woman, she kept complaining how her hubby went out every night, he didn't come
home sampai two or three in the morning, she was afraid he
would leave her for another girl, and then tengok-lah, look
what happened."

What had happened was that the bomoh had put a diamond in the woman's cheek, inserted the glittering stone
beneath the skin and left it there, like a pimple, and then the
woman was given medicine to mix with her husband's coffee in
the morning. But the woman was careless handling the medicine, or perhaps she had mixed up the bomoh's instructions,
confusing the order of steps to be taken. The husband, instead
of falling back in love with his wife, had fallen in love with their
daughter. (Nobody knew how old the daughter was at the time.
Charlotte's mother thought she might have been sixteen or seventeen, but Jo had overheard her mother saying to someone on
the phone that Auntie Coco thought the girl wasn't even menstruating yet, and Auntie Coco was supposed to have a sixth
sense about these things.) So the diamond woman had returned
to the bomoh, frightened and pleading for medicine to alter her
mistake, but as it turned out, not even the bomoh could undo
the effect of the woman's own actions. The woman's only comfort was that as long as she kept the diamond in her cheek, her
husband would not leave her. This was what the bomoh promised her. But it would always be their daughter whom he
desired, because the bomoh had given the woman one of her
strongest medicines.

So the story would go, each time it was retold.

That August Jo was fifteen and I was fourteen, and there
were boys prowling about our daily lives (although mostly it was
Jo whom they found sexy) and I wondered more than ever who
the diamond woman was, how close by she lived or whether she had moved to a neighborhood farther away to save face,
whether she was related to anyone we knew. I wondered who
all those women were, who had "refused to take up their crosses" (as my mother would say at times when Jo's mother came
over and they sat chatting in the kitchen), those women who
had sought cures beyond the scope of priests or marriage counselors or psychiatrists, daring to visit the house that sat behind
the hack wall in the cemetery for powders and tea leaves to turn
themselves beautiful, potions to freeze a vagabond lover's wandering gaze, Lucky Draw digits for a favorite son. I wondered
about the missing details in their stories, the absence of names
and dates that set them apart and left them adrift in a strand of
gossip different from the usual.

All that no longer exists, or so it would appear if you were
to return to our road now. You would see people's houses still
there, bought up mostly by modern Singaporeans with advanced technological tastes and impatient minds, Singaporeans
who used to live elsewhere on the island or in the wider world
and remember nothing about us. And as for the few of our
neighbors who remain, ask them about the stories, about the
diamond woman, and what happened after Shakilah Nair
came home, and they will most likely say it was all just rumor in
the end.

And some of it was rumor, but that doesn't mean it didn't
happen, and it's not as if everything that happened ever became
a story.

There was the thing Jo and I and the other girls who were
in the cemetery saw, a week before Shakilah Nair was supposed
to arrive, which we've kept to ourselves because we couldn't tell
what we were doing in the cemetery in the first place, and the
truth was, we were cowards, all of us except for Jo (who kept
the secret for my sake and for Fay's, even months later when we
heard about the baby).

We were six yards from the bomoh's house, and Charlotte had just emptied the packet of powder into the granite bowl ...

Phillipa was there, and our new classmate Fay Timmerman
(who was from Jakarta and was staying with her uncle on River
Road, next door to the doctor's abandoned house).

Charlotte would want me to say it wasn't her, that it was
one of the other girls who had volunteered to mix the powder,
maybe even that it was me. But it was Charlotte who had procured the powder in the first place. Jo and I were responsible for
the bowl (Jo having smuggled it out of her mother's kitchen that
morning because Charlotte had insisted that it be a granite
bowl), and Phillipa and Fay had brought an unopened box of
white votive candles, and matches.

We had come over together after that Tuesday's choir
practice, and Charlotte still smelled of incense from the
sacristy because she had met Alphonsus Wong for a brief kissing rendezvous (while the rest of us had waited for her outside
the church, Phillipa and I because no boys were attracted to
either of us yet, Fay because she was new and nobody knew her,
and Jo because she wasn't interested in dating boys from the
choir, who tended also to be altar boys). You could smell
the myrrh and rose oil in Charlotte's hair as she crouched over
the bowl and got herself ready to mix the powder, which had to
be done with her left index finger and very, very slowly. I was
kneeling closest to her, on her right. Jo was next to me on my
right, and on Jo's right was Phillipa, then Fay (who had lit the
candles after they were arranged, each balanced firmly in a
depression in the ground, one candle behind each of us). We
were an almost complete circle, with one opening for the spirit
that might join us.

Charlotte had given us the bomoh's instructions and we had
followed them to a T. (Even Fay knew about the diamond
woman, knew the possible consequences of the slightest deviation.) I say this so you'll see there were no mistakes, at least not
on our part.

What was supposed to happen was that while Charlotte was
mixing the powder, the reddish grains would grow warmer and
warmer, swirling into shades of violet and maroon and deepening
until the powder liquefied, after which point we were supposed
to turn our heads and look around (one at a time), to see among
the trees and gravesites the passing figures of our future husbands, maybe even their faces. (Faces weren't guaranteed, but
you were supposed to be able to discern from a man's gait what
kind of man he was, whether he was thoughtful and attentive
and inclined to he faithful, or whether his soul was constantly
unsettled, constantly in search of greener pastures.)

We weren't the first ever to try this ritual, or game, as
the nuns used to call it. Nobody seems to play it anymore.
People leave the spirits alone now, or perhaps it's true what
some believe, that our energy is too interrupted by the noises
and electricity breaking daily across the island, this perennial
slam and crash of unending construction.

Still, you might hear more if you try. Be very quiet, breathe
very slowly. It's possible if you'll let yourself, if you'll leave hold
of where you are and come to where we used to be, smell us
returning like sleep, the air dripping with frangipani and jasmine and fruit, with guava, mango and mangosteen, and florid,
hairy husks of rambutans, promising the most delectable juice.

We had never seen Shakilah Nair, or her photograph, so
nobody thought of her at the time. Aware only that someone
was watching us as Charlotte was about to mix the powder, Jo
turned to see who it was, and that was when she saw a pretty
Eurasian woman smiling at her, about ten feet away, underneath
a banyan tree. I heard Jo gasp, but when the rest of us looked,
the woman was already walking away, and through the trees we
could see she wasn't alone.

There was a child with her, a girl younger than we were,
who was holding her hand. They were heading towards the
bomoh's house, and then they disappeared, vanished like night into the sun as they passed the yellow shrine (the one sheltering
a baby's grave).

That was why we didn't finish the ritual. Jo wasn't afraid,
and I was willing to continue, but neither of us wanted to mix
the powder, so when Charlotte changed her mind and Phillipa
and Fay didn't volunteer, the afternoon was over.