The Pontianak

by Lucinda Leyshon (Australia)

Making a local connection Malaysia

Our street in Kuching is wide and flat and choked with red dust. My cousin Ashraf leads me out into the middle of it. It’s empty apart from four or five scrawny cats skulking under sago shrubs and in the nearby doorways, doing their best to avoid the all-consuming heat and humidity bearing down on us. “There’s no one here,” I say. “They’ll come,” Ashraf tells me. “Just wait.” And sure enough, over the next few minutes they come slinking out of the battered houses, lithe and skinny, just like the cats, peeking out at us with shy, dark eyes brimming with curiosity. Our neighbours—the children of suburban Kuching. They gather together down the street, giggling and pushing each other, as if making dares about who will approach us first. Ashraf grins at them, holding up our cricket ball for all to see. They know him well. He’s been living here for months now, doing international school in town, and many of them already knew his grandmother, his aunts, his cousins and uncles. Ashraf’s family all live crammed together in one of the big, air-conditioned houses nearby, spending their days watching Balinese soap operas and playing Candy Crush. Over time, Ashraf has become one of them—a slightly exotic big brother. He speaks their language and he looks like them—a half-Sarawak by blood. Yet still their little cluster does not approach. It’s me they’re unsure of. “They only want you, Ashraf,” I say. “I don’t think they like me being here.” The giggling in the little group intensifies, and some of them even laugh and point at me outright. “It’s how we’re talking, in English.” Ashraf smiles. “They think it sounds silly, like a made-up language.” I smile, then, too. Just as many south-east Asian dialects might sound odd to me, so must English to them. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s so easy to think of western culture—of western language—as standardised, even if you don’t mean to be bigoted. Slowly, one by one, the children come closer to say hello. Their bare, calloused feet are crusted with earth, and they tip-toe over the rough, rubbled street without difficulty. Some of the younger ones curl their hands into mine or stroke the hem of my shirt, looking up at me with big Bambi eyes. Soon, they've all gotten over their unease, and they start setting up the street for our cricket game. That’s when I notice the boy sitting some way down the street, alone, crouched in the dubious shade of a corrugated metal fence cooking under the hot sun. His hands are pressed over his eyes, and he’s rocking back and forth on his feet, wining. “Is he okay?” I ask Ashraf, concerned. Ashraf looks over and away again, unfazed. “That’s just Syam,” he says. “Don’t worry about him. He’s got autism; it’s pretty normal for him to behave like that.” He pauses for a moment, as if unsure whether or not to go on. “And, well . . . apparently he thinks you’re a pontianak—a ‘white ghost’.” I absorb this for a moment. “He's scared of me?” “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ashraf says. Then, completely casually: “It’s just that he’s never seen a white person before.” For a moment, this stuns me. It’s hard to imagine, in this day and age, someone having never laid eyes on a person of a different race before. With TV, with phones and billboards, how could someone grow up not having seen all the colours of the world? It’s funny, I think, to imagine ‘whiteness’ being perceived as something other; as something undesirable and unlucky. As a curse, even. Growing up in Australia, this idea was never introduced. But of course, our people have been the white ghosts throughout history, the pontianaks, the ones who bring misfortune to the world around us. We have been the discriminatory, the selfish, and the cruel. I come from a long line of pontianaks, I realise. Of ‘white ghosts’. A symbol to be feared. And if I am feared by this boy, then it is my responsibility to turn that symbol around; to pave the way for an unprejudiced, more equal future. I smile and walk towards him.