The Moonlight Palace by Liz Rosenberg Read Free Book Online Page B

and little Danai was wilting like a yellow flower. She wore a hand-me-down silk shawl the color of marigold petals that had belonged to Nei-Nei Up. The girl had clutched it around her proudly all night long, but now even the shawl drooped. I touched Uncle Chachi’s arm and nodded toward her. He winked at me and then faked a big yawn.
    “An old man like me can only take so much excitement on one night,” he said.
    Nei-Nei steered Danai around, like a boat. “Too much excitement is bad for your heart,” she told Uncle Chachi sharply.
    “There is absolutely nothing,” he declared just as sharply, “wrong with my heart.” But Danai sagged between them, and off they went, practically carrying the girl between them. Dawid offered to walk with them, but the old people waved him off.
    “See that Aggie gets home safe!” Uncle Chachi called.
    Wei slipped away from us when his Chinese friends from the university strolled by. In fact, I think the only friend he had in the world who was not Chinese was Omar Wahlid. The Chinese students ate together, studied together, dated one another, and supervised one another to be sure things stayed that way. I imagine they must have looked upon the stolid Wei as quite a rebel for having a Muslim friend. Unless, of course, he kept it a secret. One night, he showed me some poems he had written, and I was surprised. I had expected traditional Chinese landscape verse—odes to peonies and mountains, lines as stiff and formal as Wei himself. These were not like that. He wrote sad poems about his mother who had died. In the poems, she was always bent over and coughing, hiding in corners, as if her illness were a shame to the family. Perhaps it had been—since Wei’s father was a well-respected doctor.
    On the hill above Kampong Glam, Dawid stopped, and we breathed in the clearer air. It was good to get away from the crowds and the smoke. He took my hand in his, and for a moment I felt like a little girl again, in dancing class.
    “There is something I want to ask—,” he began. But he never finished that sentence, because it was then that he interrupted himself.
    “I smell horses,” he said unexpectedly.
    “Horses?” I smiled. Not since I was a child had the city been run by horses and carriages.
    Dawid took a few steps forward, pulling me by the hand. Then I saw them, gathered at the horizon. At first, the horses looked like distant hills looming up in the darkness. There was something ghostly about them being so high above the ground, not where my eyes expected to settle. On the backs of dozens of horses sat mounted police. Their badges glittered in the moonlight, like many pairs of eyes. They had surrounded the Kampong Glam Mosque.
    I pulled my hand from Dawid’s. “What’s happening?” I asked.
    “Halt!” a voice commanded, one of the mounted police. His strong voice came from on high. There were more policemen on the ground, pacing around the mosque.
    “Step into the light,” a voice instructed us. The man’s voice came straight out of the darkness, like a blow in the face. “Move quickly.” He raised a lantern and illuminated my face, then Dawid’s.
    “Are you Muslim?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I answered.
    “No,” said Dawid. “Hindu.”
    I am still not sure why I had said yes. I was only one-quarter Muslim, after all. I visited the mosque a few times a year. I never prayed on my own, the way Uncle Chachi did. But the way the policeman asked me, I had no choice. He made the word Muslim sound like a shameful thing. If he had asked me in the same tone of voice, “Are you a Negro? Are you a rabbit?” I would have answered the same way.
    “I am Agnes Hussein,” I said. “We live here. What’s wrong?”
    The officer was young. He took off his cap and rubbed his hair. It was cut short and stuck up in the back, like a baby bird’s feathers. I wanted to poke Dawid and joke about it, but of course I did nothing of the kind. The Singapore police are famous for their