20 years later, Alfred Nambiar is back on Coal Island. 20 is nothing, not even half an eye-blink, but the human head has distorted time, it has stopped learning from the grindings of the earth, from how it has been cooking, baking, designing itself, slowly, dramatically, over and over again, reincarnating.
His return to Malaysia, to this dot of an island, is his biggest regret in a long, non-geological time.
His sister squats on the edge of the cliff they sometimes played on as children, smoking a funny-smelling cigarette. She coughs out spit down the space where if she moved two-three inches, he’d inherit Mother’s house.
“You people with brown arses speaking like colonial masters don’t deserve the welcome we give you,” she says through coughs, voice as rough as an Essex builder. “Now that Mother is dead, I can say it.” She clears her throat deep from its base and hurls a rounded mucus ball down the fall that could save Alfred from this woman’s loneliness. “You can abandon your home country, live like a black coolie prince in some hole with a string of jiggly spray-tanned white girls, and even after all this time, nothing in you changes. You keep your sense of privilege. You think just because Amma hosted you inside her body first that you can swing your dick around and get everything you want.” She creates a cackle specially for him, for this moment she’s curating.
It can take millions, even billions, of years for a rock to form minerals. And in a matter of days, the human hand can extract it, pulverise it, hang it on a woman’s neck. So much care, patience, genius goes into the design of the earth.
The earth lives big.
Human beings live small.
And then there are people like Agnes Nambiar. Smallest of the small.
She’s more interested in the ancient story she’s squashed into a little box full of his old toys, old dreams, his beauty, his profundity—the glaring reality that he’d made it.
Alfred had even offered her a room in his flat in London, a chance for her to make it also. What could he do if she chose to dwell on an island of 10,000 small-minded ingrates, and then wear pantaloons and loose T-shirts punctured with holes to KL to assert her rights as a minority race, a woman, a stewardess of the planet and whatever else that comes with people who claim they’ve been treated unfairly by life.
It takes hundreds of years of fossil sunlight to create petrol to fuel a journey from Coal Island to the capital city. It can take the human mind half of a blink of an eye to drop resentment and choose happiness.
Staring at his sister’s wild unwashed hair, sticky now from sweat, he wonders why she can’t be more like a rock, patient, receptive, open to transformation, recycling.
“You need to let go, Agnes,” he says. When she doesn’t respond, he continues, “Maybe then you’ll finally be happy. Live and let live.”
She swings her squat around to face him. She bites the fat cigarette between her upper and lower front teeth. She could be hissing, he isn’t sure. “And what do you need to let go off, big brother, before you can accept that your mother died chanting your name, saying her biggest regret was that she’d never see you again, her beautiful first born boy?”
Alfred’s fingers scratch the soil, gathering fist-sized stones.
“You can keep gripping your stale story that I stole your life, Agnes, but that story stands nowhere against the story of the earth—
“Keep your geological crap to your toilet sessions, Alfie. When are you going to admit that renewal as you like to call it can’t really happen when you’re shitting on people’s lives—
“And you will always believe that someone, somewhere, continuously, is poisoning your right to live.”
Last night, in the middle of his sleep, Alfred saw two channels on a river rock twisting and merging. He was witnessing, in action, the geological processes that made him feel alive. A voice whispered, maybe from the dream, maybe from outside it, “Human time is filled with worry and psychology. That’s why there will always be trouble. Do you know what real reincarnation is? It’s when one voice blends with another and a new voice emerges. That is the deathless space, and that’s how the earth makes life.”
Alfred releases the fist-sized stones in his hands. He holds his right hand out to his sister who is looking less like his sister and more like an animal.
“It’s okay, Aggie,” he says in his gentlest voice, “I’ve learnt a lot about people in my time in England. I can’t expect you to know these things. You’ve just been living on this tiny little island full of tiny little people. Come, I can teach you things. You know what’s the irony? I learned about people from the earth itself. But also of course from the laws and ways of people who have conquered half of this world. What can you say for yourselves? You allowed yourselves to be conquered. And then you go to protest, insisting on rights. Live and let live, Aggie, let go of the past.”
Agnes removes the cigarette from between her teeth, takes a long, deep drag, blows smoke out in one slow exhalation, gathers more phlegm from her throat and pauses. She glares at her brother. The world stops. Silence impregnates time.
She whirls out of her mouth a large globe of spit. It lands on the tip of her brother’s nose.
“I’ve baptised you, dear brother, into the religion of my people. Let the recolonisation begin. Isn’t that the real meaning of reincarnation? To do again?
For justice?”
In a half-blink, Alfred sees just how deep the caverns of his sister’s suffering are and he feels himself drowning in pity.
Live and let live. Some people never change.
