Shadow Play (2 page)

He knelt next to the body and lightly touched the man's cheek. He'd known Ghani since he was an eager boy with a gift for drumming, begging to be allowed to follow Dollah as he played around Kelantan and southern Thailand. Dollah was taken with his enthusiasm and his talent, and promised Ghani's father he would care for the boy on the road. Though Ghani was now in his early twenties and therefore a man, Dollah still felt protective towards him, and had trouble looking away from the body before him. “Call the police,” he ordered, not turning his head from Ghani's glazed eyes, his own filling up with tears.

It was his duty to inform his sponsors there had been a murder on their land, and he dreaded it.
Wayang Siam
had a something of wild reputation, mostly having to do with women rather than with murder, but this wouldn't improve it any. He walked reluctantly up the stairs of a large wooden house, the front of which perched high off the ground
on stilts to avoid Kelantan's yearly floods. The kitchen in the back sat flat on the ground, closer to the backyard well and chicken coops: the
kampong
organic trash collection. The house was painted a light blue, and sported a bit of floral carving over the door. A prosperous village home, comfortable and unpretentious. The lady of the house sat on the porch preparing to leave for work.

“Abang
Dollah,” she said politely, clearly wondering what he was doing here at this time of the morning.

“Kak
Maryam,” he answered slowly. “Something's happened.”

She raised an eyebrow, and waited patiently for him to continue. He sat down on the stairs and pulled out a pack of Rothman's cigarettes, offering her one. Most Rothman's smokers were men: women tended to roll their own. Smoking a store bought filtered cigarette was a bit of a treat, but it signalled that this was clearly going to take longer than she hoped, so with an inward sigh, she smiled and took one. It would help her get through this conversation, coming as it did at a most inconvenient time: she had to get to work to open her cloth stall in the market before the day got underway. She inhaled and looked at him expectantly, willing him to make it brief.

“One of my musicians was killed.” He surprised himself saying it so bluntly and his throat seemed to be closing as though he were sobbing. He did not want to lose control, in front of a client no less. It was important he remain calm.

Maryam was still and silent. Had she misheard? Apparently not, since Dollah looked close to tears, which was not like him at all.

She stammered around her reply, not knowing what to say, but feeling she ought to offer something. “Where? When?” she finally managed. Before Dollah answered, she turned and called into the
house, “Mamat! Come here.”

Her husband emerged from the house, looking hard at both Maryam and Dollah, trying to gauge the situation from their faces. He dropped onto his heels, taking a cigarette out of his own pocket and lit up. “Well?” He turned to Dollah.

“One of the musicians is dead. I've sent someone to call the police.”

“Dead?” echoed Mamat.

“How?” asked Maryam, recovering from a rare bout of speechlessness.

“Stabbed,” Dollah mumbled to the porch. “Do you want to come and see …. it?” He turned to Mamat, who rose immediately. Maryam followed immediately behind.

“Don't tell me not to go,” she preempted. “This is on my property. This was our performance!” She frowned at Mamat. “What will we say? We have guests …” she trailed off as they entered the hastily fenced rice field and saw the clump of men gathered around Ghani. Dollah shouldered his way through and brought Mamat and Maryam up to see him.

Ghani looked younger than he was, and utterly vulnerable, lying on the hard ground. Now he'd reverted to an earlier boyishness, his hair dusty, and his expression vacant.

“Has anyone sent for his wife?” Maryam asked practically. “She needs to know.”

“Which one?” one of the men asked.

Maryam gave him an evil look. “Which one do you think?” She had no patience for semantics right now: let them figure out which would be the correct wife to contact. That the question rose so quickly
gave Maryam her first inkling of how complicated this man's life might be.

The police arrived, drawing yet another crowd of neighbors, craning to see what was happening. A young policeman stepped from the car, dark-skinned and narrow-faced: skinny, like a kid. He walked over to them, carefully stepping over bumps in the ground.

“What's this?” he asked, immediately branding himself as a stranger to Kelantan by his accent. Kelantanese, a Malay dialect heavily influenced by nearby Thailand, is a riot of guttural affirmatives and glottal stops which makes West Coast Malay seem anemic and colorless by comparison. This boy was clearly from the West Coast. Maryam wondered if he'd be able to understand any of them.

Dollah began the explanation, as slowly and carefully as he could, trying to speak Standard Malay, but forgetting as he got more excited and more involved in his story.

“We were performing here,
Wayang Siam
,” he began. “Shadow play. We're playing here for five nights and tonight's the end.” He nodded toward Maryam and Mamat: “They've sponsored it, and this is their land.”

“Sponsored it?” the boy in the police uniform asked.

“It's my son's circumcision,” Maryam added proudly. “This is the celebration. You know,” she continued as he looked blank, “you always celebrate a circumcision …” Surely he knew that; he looked Malay, after all.

The boy nodded. “And this morning,” Dollah continued, “When we came down from the
panggung
, we found him here. He's our drummer.” Dollah stopped, threatening to tear up once again.

“You found him like this?” The policeman squatted on the ground
to more carefully examine Ghani. He put his hands over Ghani's eyes, a strangely sensitive gesture in an otherwise cold, professional atmosphere.

“I'm Police Chief Osman,” he said, turning the body's head slightly to get a better look at the wound. “I've just come here from Ipoh.” They all nodded. Ipoh was a large city on Malaysia's west coast; it explained the accent. “It would be best if you'd all move away from here for a little while,” he suggested, rising. “We've got to look over the ground.”

As the troupe began to drift away, Maryam asked Osman, “Can I get to work? I've got to open my stall. I sell
kain songket
in the market and I'm so late already.”

Perhaps she'd seemed too cold, she thought, worrying about her stall when a man had died. But she didn't know the victim and there was little she could do to help. On the other hand, she could do a great deal of good at the market where she belonged. He sighed, and looked around. “Can you open it and then come back here? Get someone to cover it for you?”

She nodded, relieved, and waved Mamat over to drive her to the market. Her children couldn't help her: Ashikin, her eldest daughter, was recently married and no doubt already at work at her in-law's
songket
store, and Aliza, her younger one had left for school. She wouldn't consider either of her boys to help; she didn't trust any man's business ability, and her sons had never done anything to reverse her opinion. Rubiah, her cousin with a coffee stand on the second floor of the main market, might be able to help. She'd ask as soon as she opened for the day.

She hopped onto the back of Mamat's motorbike, decorously
arranging herself side-saddle with a pile of fabric on her lap. The fruit and palm trees of their
kampong
gave way abruptly to Kota Bharu's dark, cramped Chinatown, pushed hard against the river as though space were at a premium, though there was plenty of it. Three-storey shophouses further narrowed the road, blocking the light, giving a barrack-like atmosphere to this brief stretch. It was Maryam's least favourite part of the city; though the downtown around the crowded market was hardly more attractive, its energy and constant activity made up for its lack of aesthetic as far as Maryam was concerned. For she was born a market woman, and this was her element.

Maryam strode into the
Pasar Besar
, a cavernous, two-storey building in downtown Kota Bharu, and the nexus of its busy commercial life. She sold cotton batik
sarong
made by her older brother, and more importantly,
kain songket
woven in her own village, the heart of the
songket
world. She'd inherited her spot in the cloth section from her own mother in the centre of the market's frenzied activity.

She brought down the plywood planks with which she closed her stall at night, and restacked the batik to make a seat for herself:
songket
was far too expensive to sit on. She extracted her cache of hand-rolled cigarettes from the folds of her
sarong
, placing them conveniently near for easy access, set out the tin plate she used for an ashtray as well as her box of matches, checked the cardboard box she used as a cash register, and went to work.

Like many of her fellow businesswomen, Maryam eschewed frippery, both physical and behavioural. She was plain-spoken—in business only, of course, since Malay courtesy demanded a more roundabout approach to things—and busy. She dressed practically, in a batik
sarong
and long blouse, a
baju kurung
, and kept her hair wrapped
under a cotton turban. However, a pragmatic approach to work attire did not mean a lack of jewellery, and Maryam was almost never seen in public without a respectable number of bangles and small but heavy earrings. She had thick black hair with just a few touches of grey (which she removed when they got out of hand) and beautiful large, brown eyes with sweeping lashes. Her face was round and pleasant, with a small nose and wide lips, and she had grown a bit stocky as she moved into middle age.

She was determined and energetic: the primary support of her family, as were almost all the market
Mak Cik.
These older women dominated the economic as well as the family life of Kelantan, and went about their business with the no-nonsense attitude of people aware of their own worth. Kelantanese men were famous for letting their women make money while they sat in coffee shops talking politics. Mamat was himself an accomplished coffee-shop lawyer, a mainstay of his favourite establishment, and a prodigious drinker of the sweet, milky coffee beloved in Kelantan.

Maryam called to customers, waving them over to buy her cloths. She'd promised that kid – Osman, was it? – to be back as soon as she could, but what could be the harm in making at least some money today? She'd missed the early morning hours, and once she went home, she'd miss the rest of the day. She wasn't sure to what purpose, since she was no policeman and had no idea what happened or why. Just a few sales, and then she'd go upstairs to the prepared food area on the second floor and find Rubiah, her cousin, though more like her sister and best friend.

Asking her next-door stall owner to watch her stall for a moment, she ran up the stairs to Rubiah's coffee stall. It was quiet: the lull
between breakfast and lunch, with only a few men sprawled on stools flirting with younger women stirring their pots.

“Guess what?” Maryam dropped onto a chair in front of Rubiah's miniscule counter. “You won't believe it!”

“Tell me,” she leaned towards Maryam, her eyes alight, her hands still polishing some glasses. Rubiah was of an age with Maryam, and they resembled each other with stocky builds, snub noses and large brown eyes. Rubiah's were hidden behind thick wire-rimmed glasses, which gave her an academic air, and her turban was unwound, draped around her shoulders rather than covering her hair. “What happened?”

With a cup of coffee laden with sweetened condensed milk comfortably in her hand, Maryam told Rubiah what had happened earlier in the day, weaving a dramatic tale of death and betrayal. She'd caught the mention of a second wife, which provided a sterling motive for murder. She sorrowfully related her impression of the new Police Chief, an untrained, unsure kid, thrown in over his head in a state where he couldn't understand the local dialect. How did the authorities think he'd be able to tackle this job?

“I promised this kid policeman that I'd come back after I opened my stall. Could you look after it?” Rubiah looked around her tiny store as if to calculate what she might lose by abandoning it.

“We'll split the afternoon's money. Take some of your cakes with you,” Maryam cajoled her. Rubiah was renowned for her baking. “Maybe you can sell some downstairs. I really need the favour,” Maryam pleaded.

Before she'd finished the sentence, Rubiah had already started closing shop, gathering her cakes to bring downstairs. “Go on, go on,” she waved at Maryam. “Don't worry.”

Chapter II

Osman was running his investigation of the scene with as much bravado as he could muster. He was new at his job and new in Kelantan: he'd done remarkably well in his two earlier postings, and his superiors were ready to see what he could accomplish on his own. The Malaysian police made a point of stationing more senior people away from their homes, in order to avoid entrenched favouritism. Osman was nervous: at any moment he might be found out and people would laugh at him, a
budak makan pisang
, a banana eating baby, thinking he could pass himself off as a police officer. Even worse, he could barely understand a word people said when they spoke Kelantanese, as they all did, though he tried to look thoughtful when he heard their answers.

This was Osman's first posting out of his native Perak. His mother had not taken the news of his transfer to Kota Bharu well, though Osman was delighted when he heard: he was young for a police chief and excited about the responsibility. His mother, however, feared her son would fall in love with a Kelantanese girl, or worse yet, under her spell and never return. She had other plans in mind for him, beginning with marriage to a nice Perak girl, preferably a distant cousin, and many grandchildren she could oversee. She warned him often and in detail about remaining aloof from the local women and the benefits of keeping his mind on his work.