Grandpa tried to glue Yin Yin together again. The worst part was the doll’s torso. It had shattered into too many fragments to reattach them all and he was unable to fill a large cavity on Yin Yin’s back. After the sections of her body were reconnected, the figurine was returned to its position. But Grandma’s expression grew more wistful. Yin Yin’s beauty looked artificial. Her wounds left her with a rough, ugly scar on her neck. Anyone who flipped her around would discover a crater in Yin Yin’s back.

The red-cheeked porcelain doll had been transformed into Sundel Bolong, the prostitute of legend, the ghost with a hole in her back. And so she was taken down from the chest and shut away in a drawer. They locked it tight. The darkness is long for those who are not whole.

—

The cat was initially called Sweetie. Not because names for cats in the area were limited to Sweetie, Kitty, Puss and the like but because she acted sweeter than her mother, Bandit. Bandit had earned her name after wandering off for days and swiping a fish from Grandma’s kitchen as soon as she returned. But Grandma did not chase her away. They needed a cat; the old house was plagued with mice. Besides, cats were beloved by the Prophet.

Bandit gave birth in the house. Like all cats, she was shameless: she’d been impregnated by a dozen toms over the years. When she mated the racket was deafening. Grandma was used to being disturbed by the caterwauling of coupling felines but she had never heard wilder, fiercer howls than Bandit’s. A cheap whore. Her offspring were scattered everywhere. God knows how many of Bandit’s kittens Grandma had given away to neighbourhood kids. But Sweetie looked so funny at birth with the trio of stripes on her body. White, yellow, black. People said that calico cats brought good luck. Grandma and Grandpa both wanted to keep her.

Sweetie turned out to be far sweeter than her mother, perhaps because she had been trained in the niceties of human civilisation from kittenhood. She faithfully carried out her duty of catching mice. She knew where to relieve herself, although Grandma from time to time had to clean up her poo outside the bathroom door. Annoying, but forgivable. We can’t expect a cat to be too perfect, can we?

But after the tragic shattering of Yin Yin, Sweetie encountered bitter treatment. Every time she wandered onto the terrace or into the kitchen, it was as if a placard had been hung around her neck, saying:

For a cat whose motives carried a whiff of vandalism, there was no more fitting sentence than banishment.