Nury Vittachi: The Feng Shui Detective

‘Are you going to, er…?’

‘Am I handling it myself? Yes of course. I was always his assistant. We had a young man working for us when we first came. Sam Ram something, we brought him from K L, like Ms Tong. But when it became clear that business was going to be slow, he left to do something more exciting or interesting. I assume he went to Singapore. But Henry said that I could be the assistant. I’ve been his unofficial assistant many, many times.’

She moved over to the box and gazed down with loving eyes at the shadowy corpse inside. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone else do you, darling Henry,’ she said.

Wong felt he should have guessed that the corpse was in the room: it was air-conditioned to a temperature noticeably colder than any other room in the house. ‘I will go?’ Wong asked, and started to move towards the door.

‘No. You don’t have to go. Let me ask you a favour. Saya hendak ke… I need to go down to the shop to get some things, and I am scared of driving. Can you lend me your driver?’

‘Yes, of course. It is time we go too. Joyce and me will take you where you want to go. I just call my driver. We come back tomorrow, is it okay?’

‘Yes, of course. Come any time after eight. My niece will be here to take me away at lunch time. And she’s arranged for someone to take my dear Henry. I hope you can be finished by then. If not, I am leaving the keys with the property agent. The removal wan will come for the furniture probably the next day.’

‘Yes, madam,’ said Wong.

A twilight breeze caused the palm trees to wave slowly at the car, as the geomancer, his assistant and their new friend rolled down the peaceful country roads, past small houses with yellow-lit windows, each containing a little scene of a family eating its evening rice. The night was cool, and Wong kept his window rolled down. The two women sat in the back, chatting quietly, while the geomancer studied lo shu diagrams on the house’s birth in the front passenger seat. But he found it difficult to focus in the gathering darkness, and slipped his papers into his bag.

Dusk in the Malaysian countryside is always enchanting. Wong had always felt the country to be vastly underappreciated in terms of its physical beauty. In many ways, its vistas were as striking as those of Thailand or Indonesia, and its general efficiency level, he felt, was considerably higher than those two countries. Night fell quickly, as if a giant hand was turning a dimmer switch. Invisible cicadas raised a sound like static, and a night-caller in a forest nearby could be heard making its characteristic tooee-tooee-tooee cry. There was a smell of frying in the air.

Mrs Wanedi talked a little, and then fell silent, and then got out her handkerchief and wept, and then started prattling again. It became clear that what she wanted was food. After two days with nothing to eat, she needed nourishment, but could not face tackling Ms Tong’s abandoned oven to cook anything.

Wong immediately offered to buy her a meal at any eating house in the area.

‘There’s only one,’ she said in eager reply. ‘Henry and I went a couple of times when we were first looking at this place, a long time ago, but we never got into the habit of socialising here. We thought we would fix up Sun House, get the business going, and then there would be plenty of time to get to know the neighbours. Henry was a friendly man. He would be sad to know that he would… before he would get a chance…’

She buried her head in her wet handkerchief and started sobbing again, and then, with a watery sniff, jerked upright and took hold of herself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m all right, really. It’s just that… Well, this whole episode here has been strange for me. I guess, in a way, I am glad we weren’t wery sociable to the neighbours. It meant that I could have him all to myself for these final months.’

In a neighbouring village, they found Chin’s Chicken Kitchen, a small tongue-twister of a restaurant with round tables and uncomfortable stools. It was busy, but a table was found for the party towards the back. Chin’s was a noisy place where diners gorged on kari ayam goreng and mosquitoes gorged on diners. Mrs Wanedi tried to keep in control of herself, but found it difficult. She ate a large amount of plain noodles, but could not touch any of the main dishes she had asked for. Her earring fell off her left lobe and landed in her soy sauce dish. She kicked off her shoes under the table and then couldn’t find them. Joyce had to get on her hands and knees to retrieve them.

‘Excuse, I must make a little visit to the ketandas,’ Mrs Wanedi sniffed, and left the table. A few moments later, she was back, having lost her way, and then started to move in the opposite direction. Joyce leapt up and did her gallant young person bit, taking her arm and guiding her to the ladies’ room.

The young woman returned with a grim expression. ‘I wonder if, like…’

‘Yes?’ enquired Wong.

Joyce looked at him with sadness in her eyes. ‘She says she’s fine. But I think she is in a bad way. Like, totally. She was leaning so hard on me I was practically carrying her. You don’t think she would like, top herself? I mean, is it all right for her to be alone in that house?’

Wong nodded. ‘I agree. She is a strange mix of the strong and the weak,’ he said.

After a quiet, low-key meal, the driver dropped Mrs Wanedi off at her lonely dark house-and that corpse in a box-while Wong and his assistant headed back to their hotel on a coastal road in Melaka.

‘I think it’s a horrible house and I think that Mrs Wanedi is mad. If she wasn’t mad before, I think she definitely would be after living there. Brrr,’ Joyce said, giving a shiver of horror. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to be like cruel and stuff. She may have just been driven crazy by losing her husband. I mean, it must be so awful to have nobody to talk to. How long were they married?’

‘I think twenty years. Perhaps she does not want to talk to anyone. She had Ms Tong to talk to, remember? She got rid of her. And that neighbour is there. Gangan.’

‘Wonder why she got rid of the cook? You’d think she’d be dying for some company, you know. And that young guy, he looks as weird as… I dunno.’

They arrived at the hotel at 9 p.m. and stopped in the coffee shop for a nightcap. The geomancer had a cup of green tea. His assistant had a mochaccino, which turned out to be a dangerously over-filled cup of what Wong was convinced was shaving cream.

The hotel was quiet. ‘You don’t like me, do you, Mr Wong?’ Joyce said suddenly.

Wong did not know what to say. ‘No, no. Not so.’

‘Be honest. I get up your nose.’

‘No, you don’t get up me at all. But we are quite different. It is not too easy to… talk. I think maybe you are a bit yang.’

‘I’m seventeen. That’s not young.’

‘Not young, yang.’

‘Oh, I see. Yeah. I guess I am a bit yang. I reckon Asian men often find Western women a bit yang, but I have a yin side as well. But never mind, I’ll try and be less yang, if it helps.’

She took a long slurp of her drink and expertly licked the foam off her upper lip. ‘You know, my dad was like, “Mr Wong’s gotta vacancy for an assistant this summer,” and I was like, “Great.” But it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t really want anyone, did you? I can disappear, you know. Just say so. There are other ways I can spend my time. I could just do the research in libraries, or I could apply to some other feng shui masters. There are lots in Singapore these days, and they even have them in New York and London now.’

‘No, no, no,’ said Wong. ‘It is my pleasure to have you accompanying me this summer, Ms McQuinnie. Please stay.’