“No! Better if he knows nothing.” The old man grasped Ren’s wrist. “It must be taken or stolen.”
* * *
Ren is sweeping the floor with careful flicks when Ah Long comes by to tell him to do the master’s study as well. Pushing the door ajar, Ren stops short. In the dim light of the half-closed shutters, he sees glassy eyes and an open mouth, fixed forever in a snarl. Ren tells himself that it’s only a tiger skin. The sad remnant of some long-forgotten hunt.
“Does the master hunt?”
“Him? He only collects,” Ah Long mutters. “I wouldn’t touch it myself.”
“Why not?” Ren is uneasily fascinated by the tiger skin. Despite the indignity of being draped across the floor, its fur worn away in patches, the glaring glass eyes warn him away. Tiger eyes are prized for the hard parts in the center, set in gold as rings and thought to be precious charms, as are the teeth, whiskers, and claws. A dried and powdered liver is worth twice its weight in gold as medicine. Even the bones are taken to be boiled down into jelly.
“Aiya! This tiger was a man-eater. It killed two men and a woman down in Seremban before it was shot. See the bullet holes in the side?”
“How did he get the skin?”
“He’s keeping it for a friend who told him it was keramat. Cheh! As if a keramat tiger could ever be shot.”
Ren understands only too well the meaning of these words. A keramat animal is a sacred beast, a creature with the ability to come and go like a phantom, trampling sugarcane or raiding livestock with impunity. It’s always distinguished by some peculiarity, such as a missing tusk or a rare albino color. But the most common indicator is a withered or maimed foot.
When Ren was still at the orphanage, he once saw the tracks of the elephant Gajah Keramat. It was a famous beast, a rogue bull that had ranged from Teluk Intan up to the Thai border. Bullets were magically deflected from Gajah Keramat’s mottled hide, and he had the uncanny ability to sense an ambush. That morning, the sun’s burning rays had dyed the dirt road blood red, spotlighting the men huddled over the tracks leading out of a culvert, across the road, and then into secondary jungle. Ren stopped to goggle at the excitement.
“Tentulah, it is Gajah Keramat.” There was a hiss of agreement.
Wriggling his way to the front of the crowd, Ren saw how the elephant’s shrunken left forefoot had pressed a curious mark in the damp red earth.
Later, when Ren entered Dr. MacFarlane’s household, he’d related the incident to the old doctor. Dr. MacFarlane had been fascinated, even writing it down in one of his notebooks, the words inked across the page in his careful copperplate. Ren hadn’t known then just how deep this interest in keramat animals would run.
A shudder travels up his spine now as he regards the tiger skin on the floor. Is this, then, the link between the old doctor and the new one? And is death now coming on soft feet, or has it roamed ahead, like a shadow set free from its owner? He hopes, desperately, that it’s merely a coincidence.
6
Falim
Saturday, June 6th
One of my mother’s conditions of boarding at Mrs. Tham’s dressmaking shop was that I would return home to Falim often. Each time I did, I brought a treat to make up for the fact that I wasn’t homesick at all. Today it was rambutans, the hairy, red-skinned fruit that snapped open to reveal a sweet white interior. They’d been selling them by the bus stop, and I’d bought a bundle wrapped in old newspaper. As I sat on the bus I rather regretted it, as the rambutans were crawling with ants.
Once, Falim had been full of vegetable gardens, but the outskirts of Ipoh were encroaching every year. Already, the tin tycoon Foo Nyit Tse had built a new housing estate as well as a grand mansion on Lahat Road that was the wonder of the neighborhood. My stepfather’s store stood in a row of narrow-fronted shophouses, their upper stories jutting out to form a shady five-foot walkway or kaki lima. Though only eighteen feet wide, it was surprisingly deep. Shin and I had once paced out its length and found it to be almost a hundred feet.
When I arrived, Ah Kum, the new girl that my stepfather had hired to replace me, was penciling notes into the ledger.