Ode to Broken Things by Dipika Mukherjee Page B

the front desk.
    “Professor Ghosh MUST be in his room. Send someone up. I need to speak to him URGENTLY .”
    The receptionist sounded unflappable. “Sir, I tell you already, Professor Ghosh checked in, but went out… an hour ago.”
    “Rubbish. I NEED to talk to him.”
    He heard the patronising sigh as she began to tell him that she would be happy to take a message, and it was against company policy to disturb their guests by checking hotel rooms. That was when Colonel S lost his temper and pulled rank, barking orders to make sure that the receptionist and her supervisor understood who he was. He insisted that they go check Jay’s room and wake the man if he was merely jet-lagged and asleep.
    He vaguely heard the receptionist’s nervous stutter about Jay asking for a taxi and leaving, before the realisation hit with a force that made him disconnect the call. What a fool he was! Of course Jay had come back to Malaysia for Shanti! Colonel S had, in the long intervening years, forgotten all about that , but Jay never, ever, could. After a thirty-year absence, after everything that happened, would he still want to see those people with such immediacy?
    Colonel S had saved Jay’s life, no doubt about it; even Jay acknowledged a blood debt, for if someone saved your life, it was no longer your own. But the life he had saved was of a castrated beast, still flailing about to make sense of the past.
    Perhaps he should have left the child Jay had been to die in the stampede. He had not seen it then, but that rescue in the amusement park would spark the chain of events that taught Colonel S to kill women, something over which his religion and his conscience still stumbled. The killing of the Tibetan woman two months ago haunted his dreams, but she wasn’t the first woman he executed.
    That evening, so long ago. A confused child in the melee, red ice rivulets running like blood down his arm while he traced the circles of the Ferris wheel in the air in front of him with the tip of his right finger in a crazed frenzy.
    He wondered whether Jay had finally outgrown that nervous habit of agitated finger circles.
    That evening seemed to belong to another time. Those were the days when people danced through lives that seemed uncomplicated and easy. The lights had been psychedelic in the late evening, and the music loud; the noise from the giggling and flirting on the joget dance floor mixed pleasantly with the klink-klunk of the Ferris wheel that held shrieking children. Those days there was a lot of dancing in Malaya, and Colonel S had happily watched the dancers. Plenty of Malay girls, the air festive with colourful kains , extending to their ankles but fluttering open with their movements. Every now and then a girl would flash a shapely ankle in a pointed red slipper, extended like a provocative tongue. Diaphanous blouses glowed ruby and turquoise and amethyst and jade, and the long filmy scarves, loosely flung over heads and shoulders, floated briefly over their partner like an imagined caress.
    There were so many butterfly women in the park with gossamer selendangs floating on slim shoulders, that it became a garden of dancing butterflies.
    Of course, there was no physical contact between the dancers; that is what made it so delicious! The man would lead, doing his best to ensure that his partner followed his movements while the woman tried to distract him. He would try to edge her into a corner where she would have to follow his movements, and she, with mincing steps and an arched look over a shoulder, would dance away; no special steps at all, but the air sizzled with grace and promise and the excitement of a man meeting a woman. The music would be melodic, gentle, Malay.
    He loved the slow rhythmic music of the ronggeng , when everyone on the dance floor seemed to glide, approach, then hesitate, only to turn a few steps later and come back again in a swaying movement. A teasing flirtatious dance, full of looks and