Ode to Broken Things by Dipika Mukherjee Page A

the child, I scolded him – all with a passion that left me spent.
    Until the day Shanti came out of the mists of a turbulent monsoon morning. This was at dawn, when I was visiting the grave of my child by the sea.
    We, too, have our immaculate conceptions.
    In Malay folklore, rich with the animism of treespirits and water-wizards and bolsterghosts, long before Islam and the suppression of things originally Malay, there were spirits called toyols. These little beings were stillborns, exhumed in the dead hours of the night, and brought back to life with incantations and the sacrificial blood of a pure white rooster. Emerging out of graveyards, they had to be whisked into genie bottles so that they could work their black magic, masked by the scent of incense to cover the smell of death.
    I had heard about these beings, for in Malaya the spirits have as much presence as mortals. Houses are haunted, ghosts rise from graves shrouded in their deathcloth, and thieves still use black magic to put a spell on a home.
    So when my Malay friend, Siti, offered me a toyol, I clutched at the lifeline.
    “There are rules for this,” Siti warned, digging her nails deeply into my skin. “This one, it can really kill you.”
    That is how I happened to be in the graveyard, at four o’clock in the morning, as the mist hung heavy and floated past the vision in a dreamworld. What else could I do but weep in front of the earthen mound of what I had carried in my womb for nine months that was no more?
    But then, out of the mist, out of that lifeless mound, there was a sound. A single syllable that rose like a breath from the ground and froze my blood.
    Ma.
    Uttered the child. Then again, Ma.
    The breath of the morning was so sweet. A hint of damp rain fell on my hands and I squinted at the moisture, willing it to be real so that the child would be, and I wouldn’t find myself waking in an empty bed, the bolster damp with tears. I looked up and there was a child, gazing at me, and I knew it was a girl-child, not my son, though in the mist they looked the same. I knew then that my son had come back in a different body, but he had come. He was there, and so I hugged the child to my parched breast, squeezing out a sound of pain.
    Long before the Japanese pocket monsters and Pokémon trainers, long before all that, this country had its own pocket monsters, grown in avarice and often in hate, trained to be unleashed at their owner’s will. They had magic; they were magic – enough to bring a soul back from the dead.
    And that was how Shanti came to be my child. I gave her a simple name for I, burdened with my own name, wanted my child to be lighter in life. I, Shapnasundari, as beautiful as a dream, named my daughter Shanti, a name that evoked the peace she brought into my life and into her new home.
    My husband treated this new addition as he treated everything else in life – with a detached sense of inevitability. He reported to the police that a child had been found. Who she was no one knew or cared. In the poverty of war years, no one wished to reclaim this lost girl-child.
    Shanti remained my magical child, one who was different and treated so. I had to make her special, especially as everyone knew she was an illegitimate part of that pure Brahmin tradition from which we sprang. So Shanti grew up playing on my heartstrings with her infant fingers, for she had given me back my life.
    Jay woke up with a start. There was a gentle knocking on his door, and then a scratching sound as someone slid a white envelope under his door. He watched with tired disinterest, registering the padded feet retreating along the corridor. It had to be a message from Colonel S. Jay felt the ache in his limbs pulling him into a foetal curl in the comfortable bed. He wanted to fall deeply asleep and hoped there would be time for that, soon. But not yet.
    He padded across the room and reached for the envelope. Tearing it open, he skimmed to an address in