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Nury Vittachi: The Feng Shui Detective

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Nury Vittachi The Feng Shui Detective

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Mr. Wong is a feng shui consultant in Singapore, but his cases tend to involve a lot more than just interior decoration. You see, Wong specializes in a certain type of problem premises: crime scenes. His latest case involves a mysterious young woman and a deadly psychic reading that ultimately leads him to Sydney where the story climaxes at the Opera House, a building known for its appalling feng shui. A delightful combination of crafty plotting, quirky humor, and Asian philosophy, the Feng Shui Detective is an investigator like no other!

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As they topped the hill, a Chinese-tiled roof showed through the trees a kilometre down the road, the driver gave a yelp of triumph, and Wong knew they had arrived. As they approached, he saw stone walls surrounding the grounds, and realised Sun House was a relatively imposing residence. They turned in to gates which had been propped open, and pulled up outside a low but stately house, elderly rather than historic. It showed signs of having been recently spruced up, with several of the window frames looking new. He sighed. He could not help but feel sorry that his employer, as so often happens in the business world, was taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune. It must have cost money to convert this building (formerly a run-down farm) into a mortuary, and there was a poignant irony in the way that one of the very few bodies that the house had seen was its owner’s.

He ran his trained eyes over the facade. From the outside, the house was clearly built on the European model, although it had several features from the Peranakan terrace style. There were louvred window shutters, a design innovation originally introduced by the Portuguese, but adopted by the older generation of local builders. The house had pintu pagar, traditional Malaysian half-sized saloon gates, in front of wooden double-doors inscribed with Chinese couplets. It had a raised front porch that ran the length of the building, wood-clad sides, and a steeply sloping roof in dark red tiles. The upper windows, which were sharply arched, poked through this roof, slicing the ch’i. The curtains in all windows were shut. It appeared that no gardener was employed, as leaves littered the steps and the porch. However, there was a youngish man in work clothes visible near a shed on one side. He watched the arrivals with a blank expression, neither hostile nor welcoming, and then turned to enter the shed.

As Wong gazed at the house, the front door swung open and he became aware of a figure in the shadows. Mrs Elmeta Wanedi was a small, thin, fussy woman with a mass of untidy hair barely visible under a hood which formed a sort of nunlike mourning garb. Although he had been told she was a Roman Catholic, she looked more like her Muslim sisters, in her ground-length black mourning robes.

There was a certain fidgettiness about the way she stood, and this effect was redoubled when she spoke: ‘ Selamat tengah hari. Are you the East Trade people? Feng shui people? Come around the front here. No, let’s go through the back first-no, which do you want to see first?’ She spoke in a cultured, contralto voice, with an accent which was a mix of Malaysian and something else-Sri Lankan, perhaps? For the letters V and W she used a single sound somewhere between the two, giving the listener the impression that she used the wrong one in each instance. The words tumbled out so fast that Wong found her hard to understand. ‘What do you want to see? The section where the-the-the work is done, or the main body of the house?’

Wong was slightly thrown. ‘Er, I first want floor plan and deeds.’

Joyce stepped forwards. ‘Please accept our condolences on the loss of your husband. We’re like, really sorry and stuff.’

‘Oh, oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘The sooner you people do your checking and sign for the house so that we can get away, the better. The surveyors have been and gone. They told me you would take a day or so. Did I say “we”? Oh, I keep doing that. I can’t get used to “I”, oh dear.’

The widow shook her head and looked down, momentarily at a loss. Then she raised her eyes and smiled. ‘Saya minta ma’ af, I’m sorry, I am not behaving with the common courtesy here. I understand that you must have had a wery long journey, coming from Singapore. Please come in and have a cup of teh or kopi first, Ms…?’

‘My name’s Jo. This is Mr C F Wong. He’s like the real geomancer. I’m like, just his assistant, helping out, you know? Cool house.’

‘Joseph and Mr Wong.’ Without a further word she marched to the front of the house. Wong paused to tell the driver to take a few hours off but keep close to his phone.

Inside the gloomy, dusty house, the woman, who seemed to be about fifty, began to relax. At first Wong thought she must enjoy entertaining, because she energetically busied herself getting tea and teacups, quickly overcoming the lack of focus which had been so evident outside.

But she knocked over the teacups and splashed tea everywhere. She explained that she used to have a woman who doubled as cook and maid, but had dismissed her two days ago, on the morning that her husband had died. ‘It seemed ridiculous to have a cook when I didn’t feel like eating anything, ever again,’ she said. ‘And I needed quiet in this house. Ms Tong-that was her name-was a noisy soul, always banging away wit’ the pots and pans, you know?’

‘You have a servant outside?’ Wong asked.

‘What? Oh, that boy in the shed? That’s Ahmed Gangan. He’s from next door, a few miles. There’s a farm down the road and the Gangans asked if they could borrow the old trailer-what he meant was could they have it, now that the man of the house was… Of course, I told them to take it away and keep it.’

She made an extraordinarily bad cup of tea-amazingly, it tasted of wet goat-and then sat down opposite Wong, throwing herself back into an armchair in an inelegant way, almost as if she had been pushed.

Then she suddenly sat up. ‘Forgive me for my manner,’ she said. ‘But I am not myself these days. Hen-Hen-Henry and I did everything together and it is so hard to start again, when you have no one to help you.’ The utterance of her husband’s name had immediately caused her face to crumple and her voice to crack. She rubbed her eyes with a handkerchief and began to cry.

Joyce immediately went over and sat next to her, taking one of her hands and squeezing it. ‘Aww, don’t cry. It’s an awful thing to lose somebody. My mum left my sister and me when I was nine and I still cry for her. Losing a husband must be like, even worse.’

Mrs Wanedi nodded tearfully, but said nothing. She gripped Joyce’s hand tightly and then leaned over and put her sobbing head on the young woman’s shoulder. Wong watched with interest, noting with amazement how quickly women can conjure up intimate relationships.

‘This must be an awful time for you,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m sorry we have to like, intrude and all that. Do you have any family members here…?’

‘No, no, no,’ said the woman, suddenly ceasing to weep with a long, wet sniff. ‘I’m fine. I wept for two days solid and finish this morning. I couldn’t believe how much I could weep. I have eight blouses, all sodden wet with tears. Mr Wong, you would not believe how many tears there are in a wife’s body-are you married, Mr Wong?’

‘Not married.’

‘Well, your ibu’s body, in that case. But this morning I woke up and I said, to myself, El-El-Elmeta, old woman, you have wept quite enough. Get up and do what you need to do. Sell up this old house and go back to the old kampong. And you, Mr-Mr-Mr-are part of what needs to be done, so your presence here is good. And you, dear, thank you for being so kind. I’m sorry about your ibu.’ Mrs Wanedi squeezed Joyce’s hand.

‘We’ll just be as quick as we can and then scram like sharpish,’ the young woman said, with a reassuring smile.

‘Yes, let us begin,’ Wong said, gratefully putting down his still-full teacup. ‘Do you have any papers on the house which we can see? Floor plans, ground plans, deeds and other things? Anything like that? I want to know the date it was built, so I can make a lo shu chart.’

The old woman retrieved a fat file and left the visitors looking at the papers in a stuffy, odorous drawing room. She told them to take as long as they needed, and to feel free to wander around the house to take measurements or photographs.

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