Part 14 (2/2)
”Please,” Shalimar beseeched him silently. He looked up and saw people looking at him expectantly. He saw Ghazali, his mother and father, their faces anxious, pleading. Let her go, they all seemed to be saying to him. A momentous silence followed. People held their breath. The seconds ticked by. Then he turned his back on the departing figures to face the crowd. A sigh of relief went up from the group of people around him. They began to clap.
Chapter 30.
Casey and Jeremy met at the Merlin Hotel in Jalan Treacher. The coffee house was almost empty. A waiter hovered near their table waiting for their order.
”Coffee,” they both said, anxious to get rid of him.
”Just coffee? Anything to eat? We have specials today. Durian cakes made just this...”
”Just coffee will be fine.”
The waiter closed his note pad with exaggerated slowness and leaned over to rearrange the coffee cups and cutlery already laid out on the table. Casey looked at Jeremy and broke out in a wide grin. She waited until the waiter left, and then shook her head in amus.e.m.e.nt.
”I thought he would never leave us alone.”
He returned her smile; but he was preoccupied; he seemed to be looking at her, yet she felt he was not seeing her. He had called her to set up the meeting.
”I am leaving for Rome in two days time. My time here has run out, so I have to go back to the old grind,” she said. Please, she pleaded in silence, say you do not want to see me leave.
”I called to ask you what happened,” he replied. He seemed not to have heard her say she was leaving. He was wrapped up in his own thoughts and distracted from all things except for the one thought on his mind; An Mei. She had not answered anyone's calls.
Hurt and embarra.s.sed, Casey replied quickly. ”Of course! We went to Kemun and it was while waiting for Hussein to join us that, out of the blue, An Mei announced that she did not wish to go on with the farce and that she wanted to be out of the situation she was in. I can't blame her. No matter whether Hussein has lied or not about his actual relations.h.i.+p with Shalimar, the future seems bleak for An Mei. The thing is I did not say that to her. In fact, I did not say much at all. I just let her talk it out of her system and, it would appear, that talking has enabled her to make a decision.”
”Do you think she will stick to her decision? She has made similar ones before and each time he has been able to talk her out of it.”
”An Mei is very, very hurt. She is also very proud. I think, this time, she has been pushed too far. If he had run after us as we were leaving, she might have had a change of heart. But not now; not when he publicly let her go.”
Jeremy said nothing.
”Don't get me wrong. I didn't think that she was only trying to make a statement when she stormed out. She genuinely wanted to end it all. Even then, if he had run after us, he might still have stood a chance,” continued Casey. ”It was very painful for me to watch her vacillate; one minute she believes in Hussein and was making excuses for him, then the next, she was uncertain, even suspicious.”
”It hurts me too,” Jeremy said.
Casey looked up sharply.
”Only because I care for her; she was a daughter to my mother,” he said quickly, conscious that he had to explain himself.
”Of course,” said Casey. Her eyes did not leave his face.
”What was your impression of Hussein?” asked Jeremy. He was anxious to s.h.i.+ft attention from himself.
”Obviously, I have little to report on Hussein. I did not have time to observe him, except that he is changed, at least in his dress and manners. Not the rebel he was in Oxford. On the contrary, quite a conformist.”
Jeremy shrugged. ”It is not important now. I know enough. You are quite right. He conforms; and that is why he is such a fast rising star. He is just made out to be a symbol of dynamism because he has the ability to talk. But what he says is all planned and mapped out for him.”
Chapter 31.
Nelly opened the door. She peeped in. It was dark in the room; the curtains were drawn tight. There was utter silence. She went straight to the windows and drew back the curtains. Not satisfied with the paltry light that seeped in, she threw open the wooden shutters causing them to rattle and creak. The window catch that anch.o.r.ed them shut swung loosely. Light flooded into the room and the curtains moved gently with the breeze that blew in. She took a deep breath and then turned to face the bed. There was no one in it. Alarmed, she looked to the other end of the room.
”h.e.l.lo Aunt Nelly,” said An Mei in a small voice. She was in a corner of the room in the armchair where she normally sat to read. But there were no books or magazines in sight. Her feet were drawn up and tucked under her. In her pyjamas, and with her hair, ruffled and loose, she looked young, lost and vulnerable.
”You have locked yourself in this room for the past two days, ever since you came back from Kemun. Ah Kun said that you rushed out yesterday and came back again in the afternoon and locked yourself in again. What's going on?”
”I needed to be alone. But I did come out and I did eventually unlock the door.”
”Well, that's a good start.” Nelly went over to An Mei and kissed her head. ”Can you talk now?”
”Yes. I just needed to sort myself out. I just needed time to myself.”
Nelly saw the empty tray on the coffee table and smiled.
”At least you have had something to eat,” she said.
”Yes, I asked Ah Kun for food when she knocked on my door. You see I needed to eat.”
”Of course you need to eat, silly girl,” said Nelly holding An Mei's head to her bosom. ”Shall I send for more food?”
”Later, I want to tell you why I needed to eat. Please, let me,” she said as she saw that Nelly was about to interrupt. ”I need to eat because I am expecting and I do not want to hurt my baby by starving.”
Nelly grew very still. Her arms fell to her side. They hung lifeless. She sat down heavily on the pouf next to An Mei. ”Are you sure? How did you...? When did you find out?”
”Yesterday. I was sick and suddenly I realised that my period was late. It never dawned on me until I became sick that I could be pregnant. I went out because I needed to see a doctor. We did some tests. He confirmed it.”
An Mei was calm and collected; her face was serene and her gaze direct.
”I plan to have the baby.”
”And Hussein? Are you going to tell him? Are you going back to him?”
Uncertainty showed in her face. ”I have to wait and see.”
In the weeks that followed, An Mei returned to work with the bank. Her daily routine a.s.sumed a normality not unlike before she was married. In an attempt to forget, she threw herself into her work both at the bank and in her father's shops. Hussein did not contact her. Through the media, she traced his rise in the government. Photographs of him and Shalimar featured regularly in the newspapers. Glamorous and exciting were the words used to describe them. Rumours abounded that he would soon become a full minister in the Prime Minister's department. Her acceptance of the inevitability helped her to accept that her marriage was over. She buried her sadness deep inside and, if she felt bitter, she did not show it. She directed her energies to the child growing in her. She was still not showing and hence invited little comment or questions. But she felt the change in her body. She examined it when bathing; she saw the filling out of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the little blue veins in them. A tiny bulge developed in her abdomen. She felt it timorously, caressing it with reverence and wonderment.
An Mei realised that as her womb expanded and the bulge grew, people would notice and word was bound to get back to Hussein and her in-laws. Still, she postponed telling Hussein because she did not know what she wanted to do. She knew what she did not want. She did not wish to have her child grow up in an environment where it could see its own mother despised by the family that she had married into. She did not want her baby to be the centre of a tug of war for affection. She also did not know if her parents-in-law would welcome her child when they were already expecting a grandchild from a daughter-in-law they favoured. She did not want to share her husband's love. Yet did she really want to give him up, now that she was having his child? So she waited for her mind to clear.
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