Nury Vittachi: The Feng Shui Detective

Wong had started to operate in English late in life, having lived most of his life in Guangdong, moving to Hong Kong ten years ago, and five years later being transferred to Singapore. He prided himself on his ability with languages (he could speak six Chinese dialects). Yet he had long struggled with English idioms which he nearly always found baffling and totally lacking in logic. Ms McQuinnie, perhaps because of her age, used a great many English slang expressions. He recognised several from the book he had been studying the week before: How’s Tricks? Colloquial English II. He was adamant that the next book he wrote would be in English (he had already written two feng shui books in Chinese) but felt his grasp of English was not firm enough. He was convinced that a knowledge of modern colloquialisms was the key to being considered a good writer.

He asked her the meaning of several of the strange words she used, and she watched as he wrote them down.

She immediately adopted the role of a harsh teacher, correcting his every utterance. ‘It’s the only way you’ll learn,’ she said. His initial irritation started to dissolve when he learned that she generally explained things well, and could possibly enable him to impress his teacher and fellow students at the English Conversation Club.

Once, when she was on the phone to one of her friends, she came out with a string of terms which he did not understand at all. He jotted them down, and resolved to make enquiries later.

She said ‘cool’ all the time, which he knew. But she also said: ‘way’, ‘good fish’, ‘yo’, ‘hunky’, ‘ratted’, ‘soupy’, ‘pass the bucket’, ‘gloppy’, ‘wally’, ‘mega’ and ‘wowser’, none of which were in his textbooks. Her word for ‘yes’ appeared to be ‘whatever’.

He was furtively thumbing through a dictionary to translate something that sounded like ‘trip hop seedy’ when the phone rang. On the line was Laurence Leong, deputy chief executive of East Trade Industries.

‘I’m just sending you a fax,’ Leong said. ‘The brief, C F, is to give a swift opinion on an estate called Sun House, in a village just outside Melaka. The fax should be just coming through now.’ The machine next to Winnie’s elbow immediately began to growl.

Wong looked at the thin, curling papers for five minutes before phoning back. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a yin house. Very big problem. Very negative. Even if we really clean it up nice. People never forget. Very hard to re-sell. I recommend you not buy.’

Leong energetically attempted to change Wong’s mind. First, it had only been used as a mortuary for less than a year; some six to ten months, he said. Second, only two bodies had been dealt with at the building. Less than a month after the present tenants-a mature couple from Kuala Lumpur by the name of Wanedi-had bought the property, they had both fallen ill. ‘It was almost as if the building had bad feng shui before the morticians had moved in,’ he said.

‘Often this is true,’ said Wong.

Leong explained that the Wanedis’ ill health caused them to close the business-temporarily, they hoped. The local residents were pleased, as they had been uncomfortable with a funeral house so close to their village. The wife, whose money paid for the house and grounds (she had been a medium-sized heiress) had recovered, but her partner had not, and was continuing to be in extremely poor health. In other words, they were distressed sellers-always an attraction to property buyers.

‘The husband is at the door of death, in a figeral and literal sense,’ Wong had commented, delighted at being able to show off wordplay skills in English.

‘What? Oh yes, I see, that’s right,’ said Leong. ‘Listen, C F, I’d really like you to fly down and take a look at this. Mr P is really keen. The Wanedis are still really sick and last week made the decision to sell the place and go back to K L. That’s when our man in Melaka swooped. Hang on a minute, C F, I’ve got a call on the other line. Hel-?’ A monophonic tone played ‘Greensleeves’.

Wong knew the corporation would be more interested in the large plot of land surrounding the property than the house itself. The geomancer also knew that when they were dealing with a place of death, his services, normally seen as an optional extra, suddenly became essential. His mood brightened. He could claim to have a full schedule already booked, and charge a premium for an express reading.

And it might even be fun. Old Malaysian houses were often interesting from a feng shui point of view. It might be a Peranakan townhouse, or a Dutch colonial dwelling. Besides, he had a good friend in the area: Jhoti Sagwala, a former pupil of his who was now a senior police officer somewhere near Melaka. He thought about phoning to tell him to get the ingredients for banana-coconut curry-a dish for which Sagwala was justly famed.

‘Greensleeves’ stopped abruptly. ‘Wong, you still there?’ Laurence Leong’s voice was excited. ‘The old man’s died: Wanedi, the owner. That was our agent on the other line. The wife has agreed to let the surveyors and you visit the place, although the body may still be there.’

Wong nodded to himself, pleased that the corpse would be in place. Seeing precisely how and where the bodies were kept, and where the old man had died, would help with his reading and cleansing of the place. ‘Okay. I come.’

The following afternoon, C F Wong and Joyce McQuinnie found themselves in a rather run-down taxi, struggling up a hill near Melaka. Joyce had insisted on accompanying him, explaining that her daddy would pay her share. Although only a bridge away from Singapore, Wong felt that they were on a different planet, or at the very least, on the same planet in an earlier century. He looked out of the window and could not help but feel that the dazzling, mirror-glass skyscrapers of Singapore could not be the habitation of the same species which lived in this lush, green-brown land, pock-marked with a small number of charming old houses, a larger number of rather ramshackle huts, and a distressingly great number of small, new, ugly two- and three-storey blocks.

The geomancer gazed at the pestilence of new structures and despaired. Each was an identical rectangle, designed to squeeze into the ‘perch’ of the owner, and erected at high speed with no thought to feng shui or aesthetics. There was much pride in the speed of Malaysia ’s development, but he was worried that some intangible spirituality was being lost forever.

‘Like, so many new buildings going up everywhere,’ remarked Joyce. ‘There should be loadsa jobs for local feng shui men.’

‘Very sad, these are beyond hope, I think,’ replied the geomancer.

They had some difficulty locating Sun House, and their spirits were not helped by the building’s namesake being too much in evidence.

‘Phew, what a scorcher,’ remembered Wong.

Joyce chuckled.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Wong, insulted. ‘It means it is very hot.’

‘Yeah. It does mean that. It’s just-it’s just funny to hear you say it.’ She could not explain why it was funny, and they lapsed into uneasy silence. He noticed her looking sidelong at him over the next few minutes, and he leaned slightly to one side, where he could study her expression in the driver’s mirror. Underneath the girl’s loud, relaxed air of self-confidence, there was an unsureness, a nervousness, a palpable sense of discomfort. He could see it in the way her eyebrows moved together when she spoke to him; she seemed to be straining to communicate. Her movements were slightly awkward, as if all her limbs were 2 or 3 centimetres longer than she expected them to be. He decided that she was younger than Winnie Lim, despite being taller.