Shadow Play — A Short Story
Bangkok, Thailand, 1942
The smell of incense tickled my nose.
It was twilight — the time of the Jinn. My grandmother hated that time of day. Each nightfall Nyai lit incense to chase away the evil spirits. It was her way of guarding her soul and mine.
The rhythmic beating of an animal skin drum came from the direction of the neighborhood mosque. Soon after, the rich melody of the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer from Masjid Java punctured the air. It’s Maghrib.
Nyai towered above me, a lantern in her hand. The night drew harsh lines on her face, making her look like a puppet in a shadow play.
A word began to form at her mouth. Sofia. It was the name my mother gave me with her last breath. Sometimes I wondered whether it was what she said. It could have been something else, like Safa or Safwa, or Safia. Any Arabic name. A dying woman’s last word.
Nyai rarely spoke of my mother, her only child. It was as though she existed just to give me life. Nyai was not a woman of many words, especially regarding the dead. We’re not supposed to talk about them.
I got up from the floor and stretched. “Cold tonight.”
Nyai drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders. The spot between her eyebrows folded like a fan. She did not look at me. She never looked at me squarely in the eyes since sometime after I turned thirteen. I did not know why. Maybe because I was beginning to resemble my mother. It’s bad luck for a girl to look like her mom.
I wished I was more like my father. That way I would know what he looked like. Sometimes I searched for his face in those of the men I came across. Around the neighborhood. In the market. In the films they showed outdoors.
I looked for my mother’s face in Nyai’s sometimes. Her thin face bore traces of a once celebrated beauty. People told me that at the age of sixteen she had three neighborhood men vying for her hand in marriage. She did not end up with any of them. Instead, she chose my grandfather, an outsider.
The beauty of her youth was gone. Years of exposure to the harsh sun made her skin leathery. Four well-defined lines were etched like deep scars between her dark eyebrows. She had a wasted face — cracked like parched earth. I wondered sometimes if she thought her life was wasted. All the potential and not much to show for it except for the scrawny girl of thirteen in her care.
We performed our ablution before prayer alongside each other without words. I poured the frigid water over each of my hands.
One, two, three.
I brought a handful to my face.
One, two, three.
Nyai’s movements mirrored mine. I glanced at her from the corner of my eye. I would have given anything to be able to read her mind. But she was an impenetrable rock wall. Solid. Never changing.
We walked in silence toward the prayer room. Nyai’s steps were small, like those of a toddler afraid of falling. It was a strange sight because she was an unusually tall woman — almost the same height as most men. Old age made her back bend. She gave the effect of a sunflower past its prime. Wilted. Dying.
The lantern in her hand cast odd shapes that shifted and changed on the walls. I was careful to not look too long at the shadows. Evil lurked in the dark, Nyai said.
The large plank floor creaked beneath our feet. I breathed in the same rhythm as the hundred-year-old teak house, probably ever since I sucked in my first gulp of air. It was constantly moving, restless, like me.
The small prayer room sat next to Nyai’s bedroom. On the floor was a threadbare rug with elaborate patterns of vines and flowers. One photograph hung on a wall — the only photograph in the house. It was a black and white image of a striking man in a light colored suit taken at a proper studio. My grandfather.
He died when my mother was a child. I did not know how or why. Just that he was still young. Too young. But what’s an appropriate age to die? Seventy? Eighty?
Most everyone in my family died young. Except for Nyai. I did not know her age. She could just as well be as ancient as the house.
Our dilapidated home was the oldest and biggest in the neighborhood. Kids did not like walking by it. Sometimes I could hear them from the second story window of my bedroom telling each other fictional tales of their encounters with the spirits here. I did not blame them. If I did not live here, I would have thought the same. Our house looked haunted. Most of the rooms had been shuttered for years, abandoned to the spiders. Furniture draped in dusty sheets. Forts of mildewed boxes. Moth-eaten curtains. Relics of Nyai’s past. It was not always this way.
The house was built for children, many of them. Over the decades, as the children grew, sections were added to accommodate multiple families and generations. At one point there were over twenty souls under one roof. Sometimes I imagined this house filled with the sounds of life — kids screeching, chasing one another; a father bringing in wood for burning; wives making dinner in the kitchen. The house remembered those sounds too and would mimic them as it settled and creaked.
The handsome dead man in a fancy sterling silver frame stared at me with smiling eyes. He looked as if he had a secret he wanted to tell but could not. I did not know much about him. Nyai did not speak of him either, but the echo of my grandfather’s presence was everywhere in our house. His books. His furniture. His paintings.
In our white telekung we prayed. Nyai stood in front of me and recited my favorite verse from the Qu’ran as she did every Maghrib prayer:
Qul a’uudhu bi rabbin naas
Say, “I seek refuge with the Lord and Cherisher of Mankind,”
Malikin naas
The King of Mankind,
Ilaahin naas
The God of Mankind,
Min sharri waswaasii khannas
From the evil of the retreating whisperer,
Alladhee yawaswisu fee suduurin naas
Who whispers into the hearts of Mankind,
Minal Jinnati wa naas
From among Jinns and among men.
Nyai said this surat to keep the evil spirits at bay. My grandmother and I, we were surrounded by ghosts. Kampong Java was a perfect site for that. Four cemeteries hemmed in our Javanese neighborhood in the heart of Bangkok, forming an imperfect rhombus.
The biggest of the four was a Chinese burial ground. It had elaborate stone crypts and a multi-storied pagoda with bright red roofs. Next to it was a wat, a Buddhist temple where monks chanted in the ancient language of Pali to send off the departed. The wat had a tall incinerator used for burning bodies.
The farthest cemetery, about a fifteen-minute walk away, was the oldest Catholic churchyard in Bangkok. The orange brick church had a high pitched roof modeled after the roof line on a traditional Thai house. It had a bell in the tall white tower. I never saw the bell but I heard it many times, so I knew it was there.
The closest to my house was the Muslim cemetery — what everyone in my neighborhood called a kubor. Many hair-raising ghost stories came out of this section of Bangkok. This was not a place you walked alone after dark.
We finished the prayer and Nyai began her duah, a request to God. I watched her get lost in that one-sided conversation and wondered what she asked for. She could sit there for hours.
She had a tendency to disappear in her own silence. When she got that way, I would picture her walking around in a maze inside her head, hitting dead ends and turning around many times before finding her way out.
A knock on the door and my heart jolted against the bones of my chest. I looked at Nyai but she was still absorbed in her duah and dialogue with God.
“Who could that be?” I asked.
She said nothing back.
Maybe the neighbor needed something.I got up. Blood rushed back into my legs, sending pinpricks of pain through them like ants biting my skin with their pinchers.
I trekked toward the front of the house past a row of paintings so real they looked almost like photographs. A vast expanse of a green forest; bright blue ocean with a cloudless sky; temples with faces etched in stones; a bare-chested dancer with red flowers on her crown. My prayer outfit billowed in the breeze that snuck in through the gaps between the shiplap walls, sending chills up my legs.
The heavy teak front door stood formidably like a dark gate to the netherworld. I unbolted the iron lock and yanked it with all my strength. The door swelled after the rain, which happened as often as not.
There was no one there. The only living thing was a skinny cat patrolling the garden. He saw me and darted away.
The bright colors on the step below caught my attention. Flowers. White, red, yellow, and blue. They sat like passengers stuffed tightly inside a small boat-shaped basket made of palm leaf. I squatted to pick it up. The sweet scent of roses and jasmine touched my nose. I prodded the garland with my finger, finding pleasure in the velvety softness of the petals. A feeling of peace, anesthetizing and warm, draped over me like a blanket.
Strange rumblings like distant thunder startled me out of my stupor. At a distance, in the direction of the Chao Phraya river, spots of bright orange lit up the sky.
Fireworks?
I gathered the skirt of my telekung above my knees so it would not touch the mud puddle from the last rain and stepped into my sandals. Outside, the air was crisp and I could see my breath in white puffs. The moon hung round like a lantern on the deep indigo sky. A few wispy clouds floated along like ghost ships on a vast ocean.
It could not be fireworks. The First of January was last week. The Japanese had control of the city and there was no celebration.
A series of sharp blasts perforated the night and a half ball of light lit up the horizon. The ground purred beneath my feet. The brightness died down, replaced by a band the color of sunset. Red and orange flames slithered up the sky like sinuated snakes. The Chao Phraya was on fire.
My heart thumped violently inside the cavity of my chest. I began to suck in gulps of air. The sound of someone else’s scream and my beating heart competed against each other in my ears. A hundred thoughts raced around in my head, trying to be the first to get my attention. The loudest won out.
This is it. This is when we die.
I recited my favorite surat. The orange spots in the sky faded. The rumbling ceased. My breathing began to slow.
Suddenly a different sound — thunderous like a fast-approaching violent storm. The deafening roar grew until it overwhelmed everything. I looked up and saw several groups of small planes flying overhead. No matter how hard I tried, I could not take my eyes off them. I was exposed like a rabbit frozen by the sight of a hawk above.
For a moment I thought I was standing underneath a lightning strike. The brightness hurt my eyes. It was like staring into the sun. Then just as fast, the planes disappeared, taking the sound with them until it was but a memory of a bad dream.
My grandmother’s face came to me, jolting me back. A wave of goosebumps travelled down the planes of my body. I ran inside and slammed the heavy door against the frame.
Nyai was still sitting on the spot I left her in the prayer room. She was no longer wearing her telekung. Her disheveled white hair draped like silk threads over one shoulder. She looked wild, like an ancient creature one could find in a primordial forest. Her eyes were wide with fear. In them, an overflowing winter river.
What do I tell her?
“I saw planes flying above our house. They came from the direction of the river. There were orange lights in the sky,” I said it in a tone I imagined a brave person would use.
She said nothing back. Her hands were stroking her chest. She was trying to stay calm too.
“It’s over though. It’s quiet again,” I said and sat down across from her.
I looked down at my lap and noticed my left hand was not empty. In it was the small basket of flowers. I had forgotten about it.
“I found this on the front step,” I told her as I massaged the soft petals. “I don’t know who left it.”
Outside, the morning had evolved into a busy day. From my second-story bedroom window, I could hear for kilometers — fruit and vegetable sellers paddling boats up the stream to the market, the dinging of the trolley bells on the main street, the shouting of the Chinese man who went door-to-door offering knife sharpening service. But the most prominent sound that came through my window, what woke me up each morning, was the Muslim call to prayer from the mosque.
Nyai told me we were lucky to be living so close to the masjid. It was the center of life in our neighborhood. Everything happened there: babies’ head shaving ceremonies, animal sacrifices, Qur’an graduations, circumcisions, funeral prayers. The place was constantly humming with people. We lived and died by the mosque.
In a distance, I saw a plume of white smoke spewing out of the tall incinerator at the Buddhist temple. There were deaths last night — people killed by the bombs dropped from the British and American planes. The farang were warring with the Japanese, the Japanese were in Thailand, and so they were warring with us. Everything had changed. The war was no longer something that happened thousands of kilometers away in the lands of snow-capped mountains.
Buddhists believed in reincarnation. After death, they would return to this earth as another form of life, depending on the karma they had accumulated. The good ones moved up in status until they reached nirvana. The horrible ones came back as a Pred, a ghost as tall as a coconut tree with a mouth as small as a pinhole. They wandered cemeteries in the middle of the night, moaning from a painful hunger that could not be tamed.
Nyai told me none of it was true. She had her own version of life after death that sounded just as gruesome. I preferred to think the deceased rose up into the sky and became rain clouds.
The day spread out like a prayer rug in front of me. There was no school today. There had been no school since the Japanese occupied the city. People moved out in droves to their relatives in the country. Nyai and I had no one so we were stuck in our dilapidated house in the flight path of bombers.
I navigated the garden in sandals that splattered wet dirt onto my calves as I walked. Nyai did not allow me to leave the grounds of the house. There were rumors of young women raped by Japanese soldiers and left for dead. Even though my body, flat chest and straight hips, still resembled a child’s, my grandmother did not want the worry.
I wished for my mother. I missed her — or whatever feeling one could have for someone they have no memories of. Against Nyai’s order, I decided to let my feet carry me past the masjid and across the street. Just for a little bit.
Through a creaky green gate with a crescent moon and star, I entered the kubor. The temperature was cooler here. Several mature trees dominated the ground. Large jade green leaves spread like umbrellas over the rich black dirt beneath. A small white gazebo stood lonely in the middle of the cemetery.
The dewy smell of wet earth commingled with the sweet scent of jasmine permeated the air. I breathed in a lung full of the floral bouquet. Flowering plants of various colors were scattered around different types of tomb markers. White, red, yellow, and blue. Some markers were simple wooden stakes. The names on some were faded from age. Some did not even have a name. I walked toward the area where my mother and grandfather were buried.
In mid-step, a fear overcame me — irrational and palpable. It felt eerily similar to last night when every bone in my body rooted me in place as the planes flew overhead. I thought of Nyai, turned and ran.
I did not stop until I reached the gate of the house. After I crossed it, my eyes caught sight of a familiar object sitting on the ground at one corner of the house. I walked closer to it and recognized the small basket of colorful flowers. I picked it up. The tiny boat of woven palm leaves looked to be made by the same hands as the one I found last night. Except this time there was a tiny lump of palm sugar, hardened into the shape of a chedi, a stupa on temple ground.
Sugar was hard to come by in the time of war. Why would anyone leave it on the ground as if it had no value? I looked side to side and over my shoulder. No one was around. I picked up the candy and dropped it on my tongue. The nugget melted, setting an explosion of intense sweetness inside my mouth. For a moment I was reminded of a time before — of friends, school, and life outside the house.
I continued strolling. At a different corner of the house, I found another basket of flowers with a lump of palm sugar. By the time I made one loop around the building, I had eaten four nuggets. My spirit was high when I reached the front door.
On the steps I saw a pair of woman’s shoes. A guest! Nobody visited us anymore. I shook off my sandals and splashed some water from a small earthen pot just outside the door threshold onto my mud-stained feet. The freezing water made the hair on my arms and legs stand up. I forced open the stubborn door and entered.
The house was quiet. Having remembered my grandmother received visitors in the formal living room, I walked toward it. It was the richest room in our worn house. In it were western-style sofas the color of pink lotus and matching chintz curtains. Between the sofas was a large round wood table, polished to a gleam. A pair of silver candleholders stood proudly on it.
I heard whispering coming from the room connected to the living room — my grandmother’s bedroom. I walked toward the sound and looked through the gap of the door. My grandmother was sitting on the bed with her back to me. In front of her was a woman.
“Hello,” I said and pushed the door open.
The woman smiled. “Sofia. You’re here.”
It was Pa Mali, Nyai’s friend and the local witch doctor. She lived across the street from the kubor — ironic for the only non-Muslim in our neighborhood. If a house could look more haunted than ours, it was hers. It sat far back from the road, half hidden by several mature mango trees and overgrown shrubberies. It stood high above ground on four stilts and had a high pitched roof with ends that curved up like a man’s mustache. It was the only traditional Thai home left in the neighborhood.
She had many gifts, but the one most often used was her doctoring. I had been to her a few times for magic bananas to ease stomach pain and herbs for headaches. Many went to her for all types of ailments. It cost too much to go to the hospital. Almost nobody I knew went to the hospital unless they were dying. Sometimes not even then.
A feeling of doom descended — sticky and bitter like tree sap.
“Is she okay?” I asked, my voice trembling. She had to be. Nyai was the only family I had left.
My grandmother’s back was still turned to me. She was silent as if made of stone.
“She will be,” Pa Mali said.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s grieving.”
I did not blame her. Nyai’s life was one intimate with loss. She had to bury her husband and daughter sooner than anyone should have to.
“I went to their graves today — my mom’s and grandpa’s,” I said and remembered the rule. “Well, I turned back before I got there. I’m not supposed to be away from the house.”
I looked at my grandmother’s back. Melancholy leached off her. It thickened the air, making it hard to breathe.
“I never knew them,” I said. Could one properly grieve someone without knowing them?
“You haven’t seen them?” Pa Mali asked.
“I’ve never met them.”
It was odd she asked me that question. She was the one who delivered me bloodied and slicked from my mother’s womb and watched her die afterward. The thought was quickly eclipsed by an abrupt intense desire to know my mom.
“What was my mother like?”
“Beautiful with long hair that blanketed her entire back. She was very smart. The first girl in the Kampong to have gone to a university.”
My grandmother’s back shook from the force of her sob. I knew I should stop my questioning. Nyai did not like talking about the dead.
“I want to go to a university,” I said wistfully. Once the war was over. Once schools opened again.
Pa Mali’s eyes welled up. She was not one accustomed to crying. I looked at her, perplexed by her emotion.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She did not answer. Instead, her eyes were focused on the stack of flower baskets in my hand.
“It’s the weirdest thing. I keep finding these on the ground all around the house,” I said.
“They’re spirit offerings. The flowers all have meanings. Jasmine for purity. Roses for spiritual joy. Marigolds for auspiciousness. Blue lotus for wisdom — like your name.”
White, red, yellow, blue.
“But ghosts are dead,” I said.
“The spirit world perceives differently than the physical world, but that doesn’t mean they can’t experience things in ways the human mind remembers.”
“So they like flowers?”
“It can be anything. Burning incense, candles, food. It’s a way to honor the memory of the deceased.”
My face warmed.
“I ate the candies that were on the offerings,” I confessed.
“It’s okay. They were for you.”
The space between my eyebrows folded together like the way my grandmother’s did when she looked in my direction. “You left them? For me? Why?”
“Your grandmother wanted me to.”
Why would Nyai do that? I looked at her back. The wordless woman continued to ignore my existence. I walked toward her and placed my palm on her shoulder, intending to make her turn to acknowledge me. But my hand could never quite reach her. Her body was in front of me yet it felt far away.
I looked at my hands. The flowers were gone. Where did they go? These hands — this body — felt as if they belonged to a stranger. My head throbbed to the beat of my heart. Thm. Thm. Thm. Thm.
“Something’s wrong,” I said, my voice trembling.
“Tell her I miss her,” Nyai said.
The war had changed everything.
Thank you for reading Shadow Play, the first of ten tales in my book, Shadow Play: Ten Tales from the In-between.
In the space betwixt reality and the fantastical, ghosts stalk, lost spirits linger, and the living search for a meaning to life.
Set in the United States and Thailand, these stories explore the lives of those dealing with absence, loss, grief, life after death, and self-doubt. On these pages, the past, present, and future coalesce — juxtaposing American life with those in a Javanese enclave in Bangkok where Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism coexist. In this world, all things are interconnected and intertwined. Decisions, however small, can affect the course of the future.
Shadow Play: Ten Tales from the In-between is available where books are sold:
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