Evening Is the Whole Day. Preeta Samarasan

Suresh offers pleasantly, and returns to the dining room with Appa’s glass of ice water.

      “Thanks, my boy, heartfelt thanks,” says Appa. “I better take this into my study. Hell of a lot of work to do. This case is giving me bad dreams and making my hair fall out.” Chair legs grate on the marble floor, and Appa is gone, into his den with a sweating water glass and a head full of troubling facts.

      There’s a Paati-bum-sized trough in the chair’s sunken seat, and it smells funny, different from the backrest. The piss of a thousand accidents has infiltrated the very fibers of the seat, never to be completely got out, not with all the Dettol-scrubbing and Clorox-splashing in the world, and God knows Chellam tried, because Amma made her. With great difficulty, Aasha clambers up onto the chair and scoots her bottom back, cheek by cheek. In the afternoon lull she begins to nod, just as Paati used to, and her chin, just as Paati’s used to, drops to her chest, and finally she surrenders to the great grey blanket of sleep, leans her head on the arm of the chair, and dozes, just as Paati used to …

      … until Amma—who has gone upstairs and showered and changed, put her funeral saree to soak in a pail in the outdoor kitchen, and attempted to assuage her crematorium headache with repeated sniffs of a handkerchief doused in Axe Brand Camphorated Oil—comes swishing, caftan-clad, past the rattan chair, catches sight of Aasha, and wakes her with a hearty smack on the knee.

      “Aasha! Go and sleep properly on your bed, please!” she snaps. “Sleeping like a dog in the kitchen. When your neck is paining who will you go crying to?”

      Whom, indeed? To whom would Aasha go crying with a crick in her neck? Not to Amma, certainly. Not to Appa, who will be either locked in his study with the quinquepartite ghost of Angela Lim or out (in town, at the club, or on other adventures). Not to Suresh, who will laugh and call her stooopid for falling asleep in an uncomfortable chair. Not to Chellam, who might once have sympathized but who now has greater worries of her own. And not to Uma, who might also once—longer ago—have sympathized, but that was so very long ago that Aasha must make a conscious effort to hold on to the memory.

      The logic of Amma’s argument being thus unassailable, Aasha goes upstairs to sleep in her bed, with its pink gingham sheets and its peeling stickers of the Seven Dwarves.

      Through her window Aasha sees a tour bus parked across the street, outside the Balakrishnans’ front gate. She knows this bus well: it belongs to the (so-called) husband of Kooky Rooky, who rents a room in the Balakrishnans’ house. The bright green lettering on the side of the bus sings in an operatic voice: Sri Puspajaya Tours. And in a softer, breathier, dewier voice, the smaller words sing the familiar tune from the TV ads: To Know (know, know) Malaysia Is to Love (love, love) Malaysia. Twilight begins to fall; the streetlights come on (even the one that will only flicker all night); downstairs, neither Amma nor Appa nor Uma says anything about dinner, so Suresh opens the fridge and lifts two small, bony morsels out of yesterday’s chicken curry, the fat clinging to them in translucent white gobs studded with coriander leaves. He takes them upstairs—Aasha hears his steps on the stairs, the lightest, steadiest steps in the house, light and steady past her door, light and steady down the corridor, light and steady into his room with nary a sound from the screen door—and eats them sitting on his bed in the dark, collecting the clean bones in one closed fist.

      Downstairs in his study Appa considers the evidence against Shamsuddin bin Yusof: his identity card was found, along with a rope and a big stick and a bloodied Kwong Fatt Textiles plastic bag, stuffed in a culvert near the manhole that housed all of Angela Lim’s parts; an eyewitness saw Angela (or at any rate a Chinese schoolgirl with a ponytail) being lured away by a skinny Malay man near the Tarcisian Convent School gates; later that afternoon the owner of a mini-market in the area noted that a small, fair-skinned (yes, yes, probably Chinese, the mini-market man agreed when asked to clarify), anxious-seeming girl came into the shop with a young Malay man in a bush jacket to buy a packet of Kandos chocolates. Shamsuddin, of course, says he’s innocent, says the truth shall soon surface to set him free, says he was at home having dinner with his seven-months-pregnant wife. And she agrees, and rattles off that night’s menu (it’s a short menu, for Shamsuddin and his wife are not well off: plain rice, soy sauce, fried kembung fish), and makes dire predictions of curses to befall those who have framed her husband, and cries in court and wipes her tears with the ends of her headscarf.

      Crocodile tears, the spectators say, shaking their heads. She knows he did it. She’s covering up for him.

      And yet, paradoxically and obediently, they imagine the framers: fat men, rich men, men wearing dark glasses in the back seats of Mercedes Benzes, with thick curly hair on their forearms. Sultans’ sons, ministers’ brothers, industrialists with cushy government contracts. They know the types. In school the good people of Malaysia have been taught: The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight … That part, at least, is true. Not by sudden flight, but by hiring thugs to slit the tender throats of their rivals’ children, by strangling whores who threaten to talk and commissioning generals to blow up their bodies in the jungle, by paying off the police to ignore the drunken indiscretions of their children.

      Appa alone cannot allow the framers to swagger around inside his head the way they want to, chuckling and thumping each other on the back. He puts them firmly out of his mind and concentrates on the face of the dismal little man he must convict: the flat nose, the overbite, the weak chin, all conjured up as clearly as if Shamsuddin were sitting across from him in this silent study.

      Sick bastard, Appa repeats to himself. To do a thing like that to a—how old, how old now?—ten-year-old girl. Ten! Ten is a child! Ten is no breasts, no hips, no nothing. His job is to believe in guilt where guilt is assigned. He clicks the top of his rollerball pen five times in quick succession. It’s hot in the study, boiling hot; once again, the day’s furnace heat doesn’t seem to be retreating with the daylight. Appa rises and turns the fan all the way up to speed five so that it whips around dangerously, hwoop hwoop hwoop