The Scent of the Gods

Five

'Five I could hear them, somewhere out there, young men's voices, restless, wakeful, hungry in the promise-heavy evening light that dripped wet through the coconut leaves and splintered the shadows on the ground. The road lay silent, empty behind the coconut trees and the fence. Auntie Daisy's boyfriends had stopped coming to the house, because I was eleven and Grandma had told Auntie Daisy that it was time she set me a good example. It was time she stopped lying on top of young men's cars. But I could hear the jungle trees twitching in the heat, growing so close to the house, bringing back the sounds of those past afternoons, sweaty teasing sounds of young men laughing. When Grandma came into the red room to turn on a lamp, I watched her bend towards the porcelain man sitting 94 on a table near the door. She reached into the lampshade and pulled the chain switch, and I heard the light click on, bright yellow instant light that fell on the porcelain man like a blessing. The porcelain man, an old Chinese sage, sat staring happily at the world with his hands folded neatly over his hard round belly. He had tiny eyes filled with glass. In the sudden light the eyes shone like mirrors, seeing nothing. "Su Yen," Grandma said, when she noticed me standing at the windows. "What have you been doing in here in the dark?" "I was watching the road," I said. She came over to me and pushed my hair behind my ears. "What are you thinking about?" she wanted to know, while I stood looking at her spectacles, two round circles of glass balanced gently on her nose. Her hair sat in a bun pinned to the back of her head. It always looked neat, because she wore a black hairnet held in place with bobby pins. "Is it boys?" I walked my finger up the side of the curtain, watching the heavy red silk dimple beneath my fingernail. Something had happened that morning at St. Catherine and I was trying not to think about it too much, afraid of the strangeness that seemed to flow, bubbly cold inside me, when I dared to think about it even a little. "Do not think about boys yet," I heard Grandma say. "You are too young. Boys are trouble for you, you understand ?" She slipped her hand under my chin and turned my face to make me look at her. "I will let you know when the right time comes for you to think about boys." She dropped her hand. "Concentrate on your studies." I looked outside the window. During recess that morning my classmates and I had THE SCENT OF THE GODS 95 THE SCENT OF THE GODS 96 noticed a kite caught on a branch near the back wall at St. Catherine. It had been a fighting kite, the kind that Malay boys made by hand using stripped-down, carefully weighed bamboo splints and brightly dyed tracing paper, the kind they attached to a spool of thin cord coated in crushed beer-bottle glass for knife sharpness in kite wars fought among the neighborhood gangs. My classmate Patricia Wee had noticed it first. She had pointed to where the kite was quivering blue, green, yellow, and red, up there among the leaves. Then as she began climbing up the tree to get it, my other classmates and I had cheered her on, hanging back at the edge of the love-grass and shouting out, Be careful. Don't fall. "Do you like this room, Su Yen?" "Yes." In my head I could still hear the loud clapping that had broken out as soon as Patricia had reached out to disentangle the kite from the branch. "It was your grandfather's favorite room." There must have been at least twenty St. Peter's boys waiting on the other side of the wall, crouching down on the grass. In the midst of their wolf-whistling I had heard a camera snapping frantically. Patricia had hurried back down, sliding and crawling as fast as she could, leaving the kite still in the tree. Marching red-faced through the love-grass, she had yelled over her shoulder, Bloody bastards . While my other classmates were trying not to laugh, I had wondered how much a Catholic schoolboy would pay for a photograph of...