She drove back to Potong Pasir via Aljunied Road, past Mount Vernon where the crematorium used to be, where the Christian cemetery and its dead slept in peace, where love had made the evening air fragrant when Rose held her hand as they walked among the tombstones and kissed in front of the dead.
She slowed as she turned onto Serangoon Road, and let the trucks and buses roar past her. New condominiums and shopping malls had replaced the black-and-white colonial bungalows. No remnants of the dairies, duck farms, vegetable gardens, and attap houses remained. Rural disarray and abundant greenery had given way to concrete flyovers, congested roads, and blocks of flats built by the Housing and Development Board. The only real village left in Potong Pasir was St. Andrew’s Village, a school complex with a chapel and an artificial rugby pitch. Butterfly Avenue and Sennett Estate, on the other side of Upper Serangoon Road, were part of the Potong Pasir constituency now, although this could change in the next general election when boundaries would be redrawn, and the authorities would once again deny that such redrawing of electoral boundaries was gerrymandering.
Cha-li thought of going to see the opposition MP, but changed her mind. She doubted that the old man, Chiam, could save the temple sitting on land slated for development. The temple was famous for its support of the opposition. Since the early 1980s, Kai-yeh had invoked the spirit of Lord Sun Wukong to help Chiam See Tong win in every general election, and Chiam’s success was credited to Lord Sun Wukong’s benevolence to the people of Potong Pasir. Cha-li smiled. So many stories had circulated to explain how Chiam, a humble lawyer with less-than-stellar school results, had held his own against the might of the PAP in general election after general election. No, the temple was doomed. The authorities would sooner bulldoze it to the ground than preserve it.
Cha-li parked her car and went into the temple, surprised to find Robina Lee among the women praying at the altar of the Monkey King.
“Good morning, Wong Sifu,” the women greeted her.
In their eyes, she would always be Sifu or Master Wong, who channeled the spirit of the Monkey King. That she was also a private investigator was irrelevant to them; it was just a job to fill her rice bowl. Periodically, Cha-li suffered pangs of unease. She was a fraud burdened by a sacred duty that had been imposed on her as a child. As the chosen one, selected by Kai-yeh, who had consulted the Monkey King’s spirit before anointing her as his successor, she had to serve in his absence. Years of performing the rituals, the chanting, and the comforting had won her scores of grateful devotees, women who respected and adored her. Some had even been her lovers when she was young, handsome, lonely, and pining for Rose.
“Good morning, Sifu!” the women called out to her again.
“Good morning, good morning!” she said, laughing as she opened the door to her office. Robina followed her inside and closed the door. She was wearing a dark pantsuit and sunglasses. When she took off her glasses, Cha-li saw the wretched look in her eyes. Her face was puffy, and there was a dark bruise on her right temple.
“Did your husband do this?”
Robina shook her head, and Cha-li didn’t press her.
“He slept in the baby’s room last night. He didn’t want me near him.” Robina’s voice was flat. “You must give me a ritual cleansing. Please.”
Shocked by the request, Cha-li tried to focus her attention on the case instead.
“I have checked out your husband’s new office in Shenton Way. His clients are all Indians. Rich fat cats who are buying up our luxury condos.”
“Robert is repulsed by the sight of me.”
“He’s running some kind of consultancy that includes real estate.”
“Help me, Wong Sifu,” Robina pleaded, kneeling suddenly.
“No, no, please. Please stand up.”
“Our little boy is only six months old. Robert owes people a lot of money. My father-in-law does not know it yet. I fear... I...”
“Wait, Robina. I know. I ran a check—”
“He’s bewitched. It’s that vixen. Please, Wong Sifu, help me. The family... the... the scandal will ruin his father. Please, Sifu!”
Cha-li sighed. She was hoping it wouldn’t lead to this. “Go into the prayer hall, Robina. I have to change.”
She did not move until the woman had left the room. Then she locked the door.
The anointed are never free. They must respond to the cries of the broken and lost — Kai-yeh had drilled this into her from a young age. They sought her, these broken hearts. She had tried to tell them that Lord Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was a figment of an author’s imagination, but all to no avail. Besides, there were the women’s testimonies. Lord Sun Wukong answered my prayers, some claimed. He granted me a son, declared another. He made my husband stop seeing that woman and come back to me.
She sighed. The women’s beliefs had tinted their perceptions and shaped their universe; Lord Sun Wukong was the godly spirit who came to their aid. If she was tempted at times to tell them to pray to a rock, which would work just as well, she restrained herself. If praying had helped these women to sit still long enough for their problems to work themselves out, what right had she to destroy their faith in something higher than themselves? No bloody right at all! She yanked off her blue jeans and pulled on a pair of gold-colored silk pants. Then she took off her red checked blouse and slipped on a white silk shirt and the Monkey King’s bronze headband. She gazed at the woman in the mirror, dressed in silk pajamas.
Would her features turn simian when she was as old as Kai-yeh?
She was six when Lord Sun Wukong, through the intercession of Kai-yeh, chose her to be his young messenger. Thrilled and scared that she, and not Rose, was the Chosen One, she had knelt before his altar and drunk a cup of tea mixed with holy joss ash. Lord Sun Wukong was a wise, courageous, shape-changing god in the Taoist pantheon of deities, Kai-yeh told her. Capable of forty-nine changes; he could change himself into a fly, a beautiful woman, a monster, or a rock at the blink of an eye. That’s what I want to do, she declared. Kai-yeh laughed: That you will, my child. That you will.
Later, in school, she discovered that the English storybooks referred to the deity as the Monkey King. In the temple, however, he was respectfully addressed as Lord Sun Wukong. His altar was covered with a red velvet ceremonial tablecloth embroidered with the Eight Immortals. The cloth reached down to the floor, hiding anyone under the altar from view. This was where she and Rose had slept as teenagers, hugging each other close each night, especially after Kai-ma’s death when Rose refused to sleep in the kitchen alone. Kai-yeh sleepwalks and touches me, she complained.
The temple’s drum boomed. Her assistant called out in a loud voice: “Make way for His Excellency, Lord Sun Wukong!”
Cha-li took her rod and glided into the prayer hall.
3
The following week, on Monday evening, Cha-li waited in the parking lot of Tower Block One, Shenton Way. Outside, a thunderstorm was pelting the city hard. After two weeks of blistering sunshine and high humidity that caused her shirts to cling to her back, the weather had finally turned. The storm raged as she sat in her car, watching Lift Lobby Two and the white Mercedes parked near it. Robert Lee should appear at any moment. By seven, the storm petered out. Several men and women walked out of the lift, got into their cars, and drove off, leaving large gaps between the remaining cars. Bored, Cha-li continued to keep an eye on movements in the lift lobby as a light drizzle started to fall on the city’s gray towers now gleaming wet in the lamplight. Another hour passed, and still no sign of Robert Lee. Lift Lobby Two was brightly lit and empty, most of the executives having left the building by now. For the past two weeks, Robert had left his office between six and seven. Tonight he was late, but he could dash out of the lift any minute. Two evenings ago, she’d had to duck her head and pretend she was reaching for something in the backseat when he’d come out of the lift suddenly with an Indian client in tow. Tonight she was better prepared. She had donned a wig and changed her glasses.