The Weight of Our Sky: Chapters 4–6

You could tie your hair wrong one day and be ostracized by your friends the next.

But here’s this kindly-faced older woman, staring directly at me and seemingly unfazed by the bizarre barrage of tapping and twitching she’s just witnessed.

Down the road they come, dozens of them, brandishing knives and sticks, the strips of bright red cloth tied around their waists and heads trailing merrily behind them, flapping in the breeze.

Auntie Bee’s shouts break through my reverie and we dash as fast as we can down the street.

For a second, all we can do is stare at each other in the sudden brightness as the flames spread to lick the wooden cabinets, stools, and tables strewn about the shop.

The door shudders but stays steadfastly closed.

Having successfully deposited me, pliant and unprotesting, into the back seat, she slams the door shut and slides into the passenger seat beside her son.

The little white house sits slightly apart from those around it, its gleaming stone surface a stark contrast to their weathered wooden flanks, marking those who dwelled within as atas: upper-class, affluent, well-off.

He had forsaken me.
God and I weren’t currently on speaking terms.

“Why is God’s plan to make me this way?” I’d counter, and she’d purse her lips at my impertinence.

As my mother knocked hesitantly on the peeling blue door, a stray dog napping in the cool of the house’s shadow peeled open one eye to glare balefully at us, and I found myself muttering, “Sorry,” in its direction.

“Now tell me your troubles,” he said, and listened patiently as my mother poured out my whole story—the counting, the tapping, the pacing, the insomnia, the constant thoughts of her death—with the clinical precision of the nurse that she is.

It all sounded so much worse when I was forced to listen to someone else list each one of my surreal maladies, each item to be handled and ticked off in turn.

It all sounded so much worse when I was forced to listen to someone else list each one of my surreal maladies, each item to be handled and ticked off in turn.

You thought it would be so easy? The taunting lilt barely hid his anger. You will see that you cannot be rid of me so easily.

But now I had learned to distrust that beguiling, early feeling of peace.

My heart begins to pound, and my mind, sensing impending trouble, leaps immediately to the safety of the numbers and occupies itself counting the black-and-white tiles on the floor.

“This is Melati. She’ll be staying with us until we can figure out how to get her home. Now, where’s Baba?”
“Not home,” Frankie says sullenly.

For lack of anything else to do, and desperate for something else to focus on so I can shut the Djinn up, I drift along in her wake, picking things up, putting them down again, tapping everything secretly three times, pretending that this can somehow be construed as helping.

In my defense, it’s hard to be much help to Mama when the Djinn keeps screaming ominous warnings and portents of doom...

Mama’s kitchen is a cacophony of hazards, and I am too deafened and defeated by them, too busy saving Mama’s life with my never-ending number chains to bother with such commonplace tasks as slicing onions.

“Yes, yes, Bee, I’m fine,” he says impatiently, waving her fluttering platitudes away like so many irritating flies.

“No, no,” he demurs, stretching out his arms expansively.

When they return, the five of us huddle around the large transistor radio in the living room, and through the crackle of incessant static we hear the words “emergency” and “twenty-four-hour curfew.”

My palms are damp with sweat; I wipe them off discreetly on my borrowed skirt, tapping as I go.

The chairs and tables are stacked in one corner of the room and piled high with a motley array of bags and baskets.

Uncle Chong spends his time in front of reams of paper spread across the dining room table, the radio always on beside him, making lists, weighing options, sketching plans.

The radio, which is kept on so we can hear the latest news, plays a constant stream of patriotic songs, as though admonishing us for not being better citizens.

While others had spent their time taking us through the basic tenets of our religion, the nuts and bolts of worship, the grace and mercy of God, she seemed to enjoy dwelling on His more fire-and-brimstone qualities, lingering over the agonies that awaited us come Judgment Day.

“And this is why you must heed the lessons of the Quran,” she would intone solemnly, her eyes alight with a righteous fervor.

“And this is why you must heed the lessons of the Quran,” she would intone solemnly, her eyes alight with a righteous fervor.

I can tell Uncle Chong is relieved too at this lifting of the curfew; there have been enough mouths to feed that we’ve all been feeling the pinch of subsisting on watery, unsalted porridge, unripe bananas plucked prematurely from Auntie Bee’s trees, and boiled sweet potatoes and sweet potato leaves.

“Would you stop fidgeting and sit down? You’re making me nervous,” Auntie Bee implores me.

Auntie Bee is on her knees in the middle of the floor, her face ashen, weeping.

In the early hours of the morning, after a night where none of us slept and Auntie Bee merely sat on the settee, rocking back and forth and refusing to eat, drink, or speak, Frankie slips into the house.

The tin of musky pomade and the orange plastic comb that lie on the shelf beneath the speckled mirror on the wall.

The notebooks lining the worn wooden desk like sentinels, each filled from cover to cover with surprisingly neat handwriting, small and straight, each stroke thick and assured.

His choices surprise me: First, an intricate, delicate piano nocturne; then a swinging rock ’n’ roll number; then a keening Chinese melody made no less sad by my inability to understand the words; then the familiar swell and lilt of an old P. Ramlee song.

Some trouble up there, Malay and Chinese nonsense, he told us. They were sending extra personnel from KL to help smooth things down.

For one fleeting moment, I wonder if I should continue—if I should tell him how, ever since we got the call, ever since we buried my father, I dream endlessly of my mother’s death.