Nury Vittachi: The Feng Shui Detective

‘We don’t wanna disturb you,’ said Joyce.

‘You won’t. I’ll be in the front bedroom, packing suitcases.’

‘Do you want me to help?’

‘Thank you, dear, but no need. My niece is coming tomorrow to help me move the bags and boxes, and, and someone will take Henry away. I’ll be fine.’

She left the room with a curious noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

Wong looked at Joyce in a new light. She had been good, talking so nice-nice to the old lady, holding her hand and all that. Sort of thing he couldn’t do. Perhaps she could be useful in certain circumstances, as a sort of public-relations girl. He wondered whether he could send her out onto the streets of Singapore in a sandwich board or something to drum up business. She was certainly more polite than Ms Lim.

He turned to the plans and perused them with pleasure. The house, actually, was beautiful. It was a real find, with large rooms, big windows, and a natural flow of energy. It was a Hum Kua House, with its back to the east and full of water energy. The presence of so much wood ch’i in the walls of the building kept the water ch’i beautifully supported. The main problem was that its major living area, a large, open-plan room, was in the northwest, the direction of the six shars, leading to loss and delinquency, if the negative influences were not properly countermanded.

After drawing up a lo shu diagram following the Flying Star method, he found that the house was entering a positive phase, with a pair of sevens at the entrance. It was thus quite possible that it could be turned into a residence with highly positive feng shui, as long as its brief period as a yin house could be dealt with.

The plans showed it to be an unusually old structure, built internally in the Dutch style, with an open air-well section designed in the middle of the living area. This had since been roofed over, but something could be done with it, he was sure. The Dutch had always been his favourite of the European house builders. He believed there was such a thing as natural, instinctive feng shui, a basic, low-level skill which needs little teaching or training, and he thought several of the Dutch designers of the past centuries had it.

Nevertheless, he knew that the building’s age and design made it unlikely that East Trade would save it. Far more likely would be a quick razing, and then the erection of a block of flats on the spot. In this sort of situation, it was hard for Wong to decide what to do. Should he do a detailed analysis of all the rooms of the house, in the hopes that his report might inspire one of his corporate overlords to use the premises as they were? Or should he simply do his work more like a spiritual exorcist, help the company to get rid of any dark forces here, so that nothing negative would remain if the grounds were cleared and a new, inevitably uglier structure went up in the space?

There was no time to ponder such issues, and the presence of his impatient young assistant drove him to set to work, to do a reading of the house and grounds. The next few hours were spent drawing charts, taking compass readings, notes, measurements and photographs, watching the sun, studying the shadows, calculating the squares, and moving slowly from room to room.

Wong was not sure whether the householders had always been eccentric or whether the events of the recent past had unhinged Mrs Wanedi, because there were many signs of clutter and ill-organisation. In the corridor, he stepped on a sharp pin which painfully pierced the slippers he always carried to walk around other people’s homes. It turned out to be an earring. In the kitchen they found everything in disarray, with perishable food on the table and tinned meats in the cool box. The kettle which had produced their undrinkable tea was still boiling away in one corner, almost dry.

In the back bedroom, they found a used condom behind some furniture. The second door of this room led to a corridor which communicated directly with the passage leading to the kitchen. The finding suggested a reason why Ms Tong the cook might have been so noisy. ‘She was banging away with more than pots and pans,’ quipped Joyce, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the condom. Next to the kitchen the washroom was in an untidy state, with cosmetics and damp towels on the floor. ‘A guy’s been in here,’ said Joyce, lowering the toilet seat, and Wong had to agree. Clearly a male in the area-a servant or a neighbour-had recently visited the house. That Mr Gangan, perhaps?

In a room with a floral curtain, they found a pretty four-poster bed. ‘This is nice,’ said Joyce and then noticed that Wong was grimacing.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘This is where Henry Wanedi was, and where he died,’ the geomancer said. ‘The southwest corner of a Hum Kua House is the location of the force of death. Often you have bad health if you sleep in such a spot. And look, look here.’ He pointed to a jutting edge made by an extension that had been built on to the west of the house. ‘It points straight to the bed. Makes cutting ch’i right on the person in the bed. Very bad.’

‘Like, this would have made him ill?’

‘It would have made it hard to get better. And the ceiling. It slopes down here. Squashes the ch’i. Squash-squash. Very bad.’

Even without a technical knowledge of feng shui, Joyce evidently found the house oppressive, because she soon tired of her tour and went out for a breath of air in the garden.

It was late in the afternoon when Wong stepped into a room on the west of the house and found himself in a study which appeared to have been converted into a laboratory. The walls were scarlet. Bottles of chemicals filled shelves, and there were tins of powders and other technical equipment that he did not recognise. There were some large boxes on one side of the room, and some trestle tables in the centre. He assumed that this was a room where the corpses would be worked on-he never really knew what morticians did to bodies. He supposed they would beautify them, put powder on their faces and dress them, rather as a department store window dresser would clothe a mannequin. The walls were lined with an old-fashioned scarlet flock wallpaper, which introduced fire ch’i into a Li room, causing a disturbing, destructive clash between fire and metal energies.

‘Have you met my husband?’

Wong turned suddenly to see Mrs Wanedi looking at him from a door on the far side of the room. Her silent arrival had taken him by surprise, but he tried to smile and look composed. ‘I hope I do not disturb you,’ he said.

‘Not at all. This is where the dead bodies were handled, so you being a feng shui man, it stands to reason that this is the room which you will have to check out most carefully. It used to be the study. Have you met my husband?’

She was looking at a large box on one side of the room and he noticed that it was open-topped. He peered in to see a dead body in the shadows. It gave him an involuntary shiver, which he hoped did not show. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I did not know this was the room in which the dearly departed is staying.’

‘Oh, I should have put him in the living room for a proper wake, if we knew anyone here, but we don’t. All our people are dead or emigrated, except for my niece from overseas. There wasn’t any point in laying him out for wiewing. After all, who is there to wiew him? So my own dear Henry is here, where I can work on him.’

He was listening for a hint of madness in her voice, but found none. She spoke calmly, and with a clearly detectable vein of affection.

‘Henry loved his work, and although we did not do much business here, he enjoyed setting up this room. We did a couple of funerals for people nearby, before he became ill. It seems fitting that Henry himself should be dealt with in the facilities he set up.’