The Moonlight Palace (3 page)

FOUR

Meeting Mr. Kahani

I
have to find work,” I told Uncle Chachi.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “You are still a child. Still in school.”

For once, Nei-Nei Down, British Grandfather, and Uncle Chachi all agreed.

“Much too young to work,” Nei-Nei Down declared. She set her lips closed, like someone shutting a door.

“A good education comes first,” British Grandfather muttered into his toast. He always ate the same breakfast—triangles of white toast and weak tea. It was a Sunday, so our young boarders were out and about. This was a good thing. Dawid would have been too eagerly on my side, and Omar Wahlid would have expressed his strong disapproval. He thought of me purely as a young Muslim woman, and, as such, my place was in the home.

“I have free time after school,” I persisted. “And on weekends. I have all of Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Even on weekdays, I’m free after two o’clock. They don’t give us enough to do at school.”

That was exactly the wrong thing to say.

“If you are bored, you can help with the housework,” declared Nei-Nei Down. “You can polish your embroidery skills, which are terrible. You can help with the baking. Sanang is not young anymore. She can use any extra help you can spare.”

Sanang, our housekeeper, the lone survivor of what had once been an extended staff, was bent and brown skinned, like an ancient toad. She had been around since before I was born and was treated as a member of the household now. She lived on the third floor, in a tiny room with tilted ceilings. Some days she kept entirely to her own room, even to her own bed. I helped her as much as she would permit. Sanang was very proud and irritable. The rest of us talked from time to time about hiring a young girl to help her, but it was a delicate matter, and we did not want to risk offending Sanang and losing her—or rather, abandoning her to the harsh world outside the palace compound.

“I need to make money,” I insisted. “—Just spending money,” I added quickly. None of us could admit how poor we were. We would never acknowledge the desperation of our situation. That was unwritten law.

British Grandfather gazed over my head, holding his toast. His expression was sad and distant. I saw that I had upset him, a man who’d dedicated his life to keeping other people happy. He had his small pension from the British army; that was all. Well, he had many medals also. He’d been a British lieutenant colonel in the Great War; his mother country had recalled him to duty long past the age of military retirement, and he had acquitted himself with honor. In fact, he was rather famous in Singapore for his bravery. To British Grandfather, the world became bewildering after that war.

Nei-Nei Down and Uncle Chachi exchanged shrewd glances over Grandfather’s bent head. I saw my grandmother give a slight nod.

“Well, now,” said Uncle Chachi. “Let me make a few inquiries. Perhaps one of my business associates needs help from a clever girl like you. But let me take care of this. No searching on your own.”

“No on your own,” Nei-Nei Down said, waving her arms, lapsing into the Pidgin English she used whenever she was flustered. I had upset her in three ways: I had made British Grandfather unhappy; I had referred to our poverty; and I was venturing out into the dangerous, mystifying world beyond the palace walls.

“All right,” I agreed.

“You must promise,” said Uncle Chachi.

“I promise,” I said with a sigh. If I had to rely on Uncle Chachi’s “business associates,” I thought, my case was doomed.

But a few days later, Uncle Chachi called me into the small overstuffed room he called his “office.” It was the room in which he prayed three times a day and made his telephone calls—the telephone was still new enough so that he treated it as a plaything—and also where he read his daily paper, hidden from the rest of us, and napped. The “study” held all his peculiar collections: stamp albums and old pieces of machinery; books of Persian love poetry and sheet music, none of them worth more than a Straits dollar. The wallpaper was faded and brittle; soldiers on horseback ran around and around the walls; like everything else in the palace, it was slowly but surely falling down.

“I have found you a lovely secretarial position,” he told me without preamble. Uncle Chachi was in his eighties now, but looked and acted younger, a spry insect hopping about. He was a natural-born enthusiast. Work was a practical form of education, he said. He held forth on the virtues of labor as if a job had been all his own idea. A girl my age must learn some responsibility, must not fritter away her time, and so on. Rationalization at its best. Perhaps he even believed some of what he said.

“My special and close friend, Samuel Kahani,” he said, “is in need of help in his jewelry store on Serangoon Road, Little India. Mr. Kahani”—a man I had never before heard mentioned—“is a gentleman, an old-fashioned gentleman. A diamond merchant of the first order. You will like him very much.” He paused and looked at me expectantly.

“I’m sure,” I said. I pictured somebody in top hat and tails.

The store was within walking distance, Chachi explained; I would not even have to expose myself to public transportation. All of the wealthiest Indian families bought their jewelry at Kahani’s—princes and rajahs. Uncle Chachi made it sound like the seventh wonder of the world. I began to imagine a glamorous emporium dripping with diamonds and rubies, sapphires and pearls. Perhaps, like some enchanted place in a fairy tale, it would provide me with an endless source of wealth to bear back home.

“No sales,” Uncle Chachi emphasized. He said it more than once. “I would never allow my great-niece to stand behind a counter serving others. This work is most respectable. It will strengthen skills you already possess, mathematics and accounting and so on. Skills that every woman needs in order to help run a household.”

In fact, my skills at mathematics and accounting were dismal. I earned my lowest grades in exactly these subjects. But I did not argue. The hours were flexible, Uncle Chachi said, and I could begin as soon as I liked.

I hurried to Kahani’s right then, before anyone in my family had time to change their mind. First I changed out of my school uniform. It made me look too young and plain. After all, I was about to enter a great center of trade and commerce. I put on a simple navy skirt with a white blouse tucked into the wide waistband. But I worried that this looked too much like a schoolgirl’s uniform, so I changed to a teal-blue cotton sateen skirt and my favorite rose-colored silk blouse. I was proud of the colors I chose. Not every young girl would have thought to put the two shades together.

Inside Kahani’s, my puffed-up pride lasted less than three minutes. I barely had time to register my own disappointment at finding myself inside an ordinary place of business—more like a modern bank than the Taj Mahal. A dark-haired woman standing at the front tightened her lips at me. She glanced at my outfit, up and down, and shook her head as if in pity. Then she disappeared into a back office, came back, and spoke.

“Mr. Kahani will see you now,” she said, baring her teeth. She paused at the door of an office adjacent to the sales floor, rapped twice, and left me standing there alone.

“Come in!” chimed a musical voice. I opened the door. A dark-skinned man put his hand out straight in front of him, as if to shake mine across the room, and made his way forward. He bumped against a small rolling tea table placed between us. It was then that I realized my new employer was blind. One eye was bright blue. It looked like a stone marble. The other was dark brown, directed more or less my way.

What a vain, silly peacock! I thought of my careful attention to the colors of my outfit. My only comfort was in knowing that he could not see me blushing.

I scuttled around the offending table and stood next to Mr. Kahani, unsure what to do next. “Lovely to see you,” he said, turning his face in my direction. He kept his chin tilted slightly upward. His smile was as wide as a child’s. “Please sit down. I have been friends with your uncle for more than half a century.”

“Thank you very much for seeing me,” I said, and blushed again. He sat beside me, on an overstuffed sofa upholstered in gold cloth.

“Would you care for some tea?” he asked. He pronounced the
t
as a
d
and the
w
as a
v
, like many Indians did when speaking English. “Vould you care for some dee?”

“No, thank you.”

“I wish you would,” he said.

“In that case, yes,” I answered.

“I will ask you to do the honors.” He gestured toward a tray set out on the low rolling table, with cups and saucers, a plate of sugared biscuits, and a silver teapot. I poured the tea for both of us. He thanked me and then ignored his tea. I sipped mine nervously while we spoke.

His office seemed almost like a Hindu shrine, it was so filled with figurines of goddesses and embroidered wall hangings and religious Hindu paintings, and it smelled overwhelmingly of incense. There were two or three statues of Ganesh, the elephant god, and Shiva, the many-armed god, and others I did not recognize. Mr. Kahani seemed to feel me looking at them.

“An interesting collection, yes?”

“Very,” I agreed.

“Blessings come from many sources,” he said. “Won’t you have a ginger cookie? Do you like sweets?”

Mr. Kahani asked many questions. Most seemed to have nothing to do with work, or with my qualifications as an assistant. What kind of athletics did I like? he asked. What was my favorite meal of the day? Did I have trouble resting, or did I sleep through the night? Was I given to stomach ailments? Moods? I gave up trying to give the right answers. It was like taking a quiz in a ladies’ magazine.

Early on in this peculiar interview, we were interrupted. A tall, moustached man rapped on the door and was introduced as Mr. Kahani’s long-term employee, Ron. It seemed a strange name for an Indian, and I was not told his last name. The man had a business question for Mr. Kahani, he explained, but while they spoke he looked at me closely. I had the idea that he had been sent especially to study me. After that, Mr. Kahani asked questions about books we had both read. At no point did he tell me I had gotten the job, but he began to speak as if I would be working there.

“Of course, it is a secretarial position,” he said. “Very definitely. Only I hope that from time to time—if the paperwork is slow for some reason—you may be willing to help out in the store as well. I will consider it strictly as a favor. Of course, you will be paid for your time just as if it were wholly secretarial.” I understood from this that I would be working behind the counter, and that neither of us would mention it to my Uncle Chachi.

The clock struck the hour. “I must let you go now,” said Mr. Kahani. He sat without moving. I did not know if I was supposed to offer assistance. Some instinct made me wait. “You have been worrying about something,” he said.

I was startled. “I have been worrying about everything.” Could this man read minds? I wondered. Perhaps he was gifted with second sight?

“Well, you must not worry anymore,” he said. “You should get plenty of rest, chew your food thoroughly, and relax.”

I think it was the musicality of his accent that made everything he uttered sound wise and portentous. There was a hypnotic sleepiness about his voice. The smell of incense around us was almost intoxicating. I wondered if people always invest the blind with special powers.

Mr. Kahani escorted me to the door, stepping carefully this time around the tea table. He steered me by the elbow. I would learn that he never used a cane or a guide of any kind. He might take someone’s arm, but he always made it appear as if he were leading them, and not the other way around. Just before I stepped through the doorway, he spoke again.

“You are too young to be so anxious about the future. The only sure thing in this life is change. That is the one thing you may rely upon.” He spoke slowly and dreamily, like a man talking in his sleep. “And tell your uncle he can count on me as well.”

I thanked him.

“You see?” he said. “Things are looking better already. If you think you have come to an unhappy ending, it is not the true end. Keep going awhile.”

FIVE

Tschuk!

C
ouldn’t you have warned me he was blind?” I chided Uncle Chachi that evening at supper.

Nei-Nei Down made a soft, characteristic noise of disapproval. It sounded like “Tschuk!” I never knew if it was Peranakan Chinese or some sound of her own devising.

“I do not draw attention to other people’s disabilities,” Uncle Chachi said. Nei-Nei made her soft “Tschuk!” sound again.

“What did you think of the place?” Uncle Chachi asked. “In a general way.”

“I liked Mr. Kahani very much,” I admitted. “And I’ll like working there.”

“Working where?” asked Omar Wahlid with a frown.

“At a jewelry store in Little India,” I said. “But you might have given me a warning, Uncle. The poor man tripped over a tea table coming forward to greet me.”

“You work at a jewelry store?” Omar Wahlid asked, his frown darkening. Really, he was the grumpiest young man I had ever met.

“Strictly secretarial,” said Uncle Chachi, waving his hands, as if to make the words
jewelry store
disappear. “Highly respectable.”

“What’s wrong with jewelry?” I asked.

Wei was looking down at his plate, studying it intently. Dawid had stayed late to work in the Raffles library.

“You are a descendant of the Sultan of Johor,” said Omar Wahlid. “A Muslim woman. Consider that in all your actions.”

“I am also one-half Chinese. And one-quarter British,” I added.

“Yes,” said British Grandfather cheerfully. “Feel free to use that whenever it comes in handy.”

“Your great-great-grandfather built the Masjid Sultan,” Omar Wahlid went on, ignoring us. Back to the Sultan Mosque again. As if I needed reminding. “Mr. Hussein, you know better,” he said pleadingly to Uncle Chachi.

“Strictly secretarial,” Uncle Chachi said. “And for a most respectable gentleman. An old friend of mine.”

Omar Wahlid threw down his napkin. Then he folded it. He was truly a peculiar young man. He pushed his chair back from the dinner table.

“You have barely eaten two bites,” Nei-Nei protested.

“I have no appetite,” spat Omar Wahlid.

When Omar had left the table, Wei let out a sigh as if he had been holding his breath.

“A peculiar fellow,” said Uncle Chachi. “Next time I must check the references more carefully.”

“Did you make rice pudding?” British Grandfather asked Nei-Nei.

“Tschuk!” she said again.

“He seems to be a very observant Hindu,” I said. “Mr. Kahani.”

Uncle Chachi laughed. Even Nei-Nei Down smiled.

“Mr. Kahani is a Jew,” Uncle Chachi said.

“That’s impossible.” I was thinking of his Hindu shrine with the elaborate statuary and paintings and incense.

“All things are possible,” said Uncle Chachi. “Haven’t I taught you anything? —You will find he never works on the Jewish Sabbath.”

“But he is Indian, isn’t he? His accent—”

“There are Jews in India. There are Jews all over the world. But there are not people like Mr. Kahani all over the world. You are lucky to be his employee. He is a great man. He started out as a boatman, and then bought several lighter boats. Now he is the premier jeweler in all of Singapore.”

Nei-Nei set the heavy bowl of rice pudding in front of me—she had made it with currants and walnuts and cinnamon, just the way British Grandfather and I liked it—with a noise that sounded remarkably like “Tschuk!”

Uncle Chachi was right about Mr. Kahani’s religion. On Friday afternoons, he would mysteriously absent himself. He always had some pressing engagement that sent him rushing out of the store early. Once, before he left, he said to me, “Be sure to leave the light on above the back jewelry case.”

“But no one will see it,” I argued.

“Kindly leave the light burning,” Mr. Kahani said. He patted down the pockets of his coat, making sure that he had his light-colored gloves there. Mr. Kahani never went anywhere without gloves and a hat. Yet he did not wear dark glasses. It was a strange thing to see him walking the streets alone, a blind man. I never got used to the sight, nor did it ever stop making me feel uncomfortable.

I watched him push through the front doors of the jewelry shop and make a right turn, his shoulder grazing the wall of the shop building. He walked slowly, with a stiff back.

I checked to make sure the light was on at the back of the store. I supposed it had something to do with Jewish ritual. Then I spotted a pile of papers that he had forgotten.

I ran out of the shop and chased after him. He had gone no more than nine or ten steps when someone on Serangoon Road approached him. It was a young woman. They spoke a few words, and then Mr. Kahani took her arm and they walked on together. I decided to return the papers to the store.

A few days later, I happened to leave the store at the same time as my employer. He turned right, and again, after he had walked no more than half a block on Serangoon Road, someone joined him, this time a shabbily dressed man. Mr. Kahani took the man’s arm, and they walked off together like two old friends.

Mr. Kahani came and went as he pleased, and he often disappeared for an hour or two in the middle of the day, but he never went anywhere entirely alone. Even Sahhdie, our grim floor manager, accompanied him on occasion. Sometimes he accepted the company of some shady-looking street characters. It seemed as if the denizens of Serangoon Street had organized themselves to escort him without ever seeming to do so.

Even if I had not been transported into a genie’s treasure trove, with diamonds waiting to be plucked and carried home, I liked Kahani’s, and I liked my work there. Things were orderly and reliable. It was my task to double-check the shop’s receipts and file them in a wooden cabinet, to copy the invoices onto cream-colored store stationery and mail them out. It was also my responsibility to keep track of what had been sold the day before and to copy it into a large black leather ledger. I opened Mr. Kahani’s mail and read his letters aloud to him slowly and clearly, and also the newspapers. Mr. Kahani had great contempt for most Singapore papers. A London
Times
arrived daily at the store, among several other British papers.

Mr. Kahani also paid attention to what was happening in the United States of America. He was even interested in China, and in the fate of the man he called the Black Cat. This was a play on the name Mao, which meant cat in Chinese.

I had heard my Uncle Chachi and Omar Wahlid discussing this man Mao as well. Soon there would be a change for the better, Omar Wahlid declared. The seeds of revolution were being planted in China, but eventually they would spread throughout the world.

“Sun Yat-sen is the Father of China,” Nei-Nei Down put in. She seemed angry about something.

“Mao is a great man,” answered Omar Wahlid. “An idealist.”

“Ideologues are not necessarily idealists,” my Uncle Chachi said.

“Mao will conquer all,” Omar Wahlid insisted.

“There is more than one way to skin a cat,” said Nei-Nei Down, and again that night Omar Wahlid left the table without finishing his meal.

I wondered if this was a trick they had devised to economize on food expenses. Whenever Omar Wahlid stormed off, it was only a matter of a few bites until the quiet medical student Wei followed.

I began my work at Kahani’s in Little India shortly before the Hindu holiday of Deepavali, Festival of Lights. Deepavali was a time for buying extravagant numbers of gifts—Hindu husbands for their wives, parents for their children, brothers for their sisters.

Serangoon Road was brimming with tempting merchandise: roadside stalls crammed with terra-cotta lamps, flowers, purses, firecrackers, and silk saris in red, blue, green, and gold. The sweetmeat displays were laid out like delicious gardens of candies, planted in glistening pastel-colored rows. My favorites were the
gulab jamun
and Sugar Diamonds. The colonial section of Singapore was getting ready for Christmas, but the Christian celebration could not hold a candle to Deepavali.

On Bhai Doo, the fifth day of Deepavali, Hindu brothers invited their sisters to their houses and gave gifts. The idea made me sad and happy. I once had an older brother, too. I kept a photograph of him cuddling against my mother. Yes, a brother, and a male heir, would have made a great difference in our lives at the palace.

Kahani’s Jewelry Emporium was the brightest thing on brilliant Serangoon Road. Mr. Kahani had an eye for making things look their richest and most beautiful. Now and again it occurred to me that perhaps, just perhaps, he wasn’t really completely blind. It might be an elaborate ruse concocted for some reason. I was willing to believe that he had poor eyesight but could still see something.

For instance, one day Mr. Kahani told me, “You look good in black and white. You should wear it more often.” —Did Ron sidle up to him each morning and say, “Oh, by the way, Agnes is wearing black and white today, and Sahhdie has on a rose-pink sari, and I myself am wearing a navy pinstriped suit.” It seemed possible.

But there were even stranger things. For instance, Mr. Kahani could hold up any piece of jewelry and point out its virtues in detail. “Look at how this center emerald shimmers. And do you see that blue fire, flashing at the heart of it? That is the sign of an excellent stone.” He would angle his palm to catch the light on the jewel. Or he might take the hand of a woman trying on a ruby ring and comment on how the crimson brought out the gold in her skin tone. And he was always correct. No one had a better eye for beauty than the blind man.

You could see the shock on the faces of new customers. They would crane their necks to get a better look at Mr. Kahani—as if he couldn’t feel them breathing close to his face, as if he didn’t know what they were doing. But the shock would turn into wonder. A childlike belief in the otherworldly. Mr. Kahani became a magical figure to us all.

In the weeks leading up to Deepavali, most of our customers were those who lived in or near Little India, among the Hindu population. But as the holiday grew closer, the excitement spread, and every kind of Singaporean stopped in our store—the British colonials and the Chinese, Eurasians and foreigners. It was a great, sparkling party, and everyone was invited. We moved an enormous statue of the elephant god Ganesh into the front of the store—Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. It reminded me of the large bronze elephant outside of Parliament, the one visitors asked to see when they came by mistake to our palace.

The November nights grew longer and darker, but Little India kept getting brighter. Hindus burned oil lamps to drive away the evil spirits and welcome Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. We were so busy at the jewelry shop that I was able to get my school friend Bridget a part-time job. Bridget’s family was large and her father was a notorious skinflint. She was a tall, dramatic-looking Irish girl with red hair, freckles, a long nose, and pale greenish-blue eyes.

Sahhdie, the only other woman at the store, was so severe it was good to have a friend nearby, even if only to wave at her across the floor. Sahhdie was always fussing at me to fix my hair or adjust my blouse, or sending me into the ladies’ lounge to make sure the seams of my stockings were perfectly straight. Bridget and I took our breaks together and snuck out to one of the alleys so Bridget could have a smoke. Bridget would have died without her hourly cigarettes. The opium addicts also wandered in these alleys, but these poor souls were too dazed to trouble us, and Mr. Kahani was kind to them, bringing them plates of food or cups of tea.