The Moonlight Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

dark glasses. It was a strange thing to see him walking the streets alone, a blind man. I never got used to the sight, nor did it ever stop making me feel uncomfortable.
    I watched him push through the front doors of the jewelry shop and make a right turn, his shoulder grazing the wall of the shop building. He walked slowly, with a stiff back.
    I checked to make sure the light was on at the back of the store. I supposed it had something to do with Jewish ritual. Then I spotted a pile of papers that he had forgotten.
    I ran out of the shop and chased after him. He had gone no more than nine or ten steps when someone on Serangoon Road approached him. It was a young woman. They spoke a few words, and then Mr. Kahani took her arm and they walked on together. I decided to return the papers to the store.
    A few days later, I happened to leave the store at the same time as my employer. He turned right, and again, after he had walked no more than half a block on Serangoon Road, someone joined him, this time a shabbily dressed man. Mr. Kahani took the man’s arm, and they walked off together like two old friends.
    Mr. Kahani came and went as he pleased, and he often disappeared for an hour or two in the middle of the day, but he never went anywhere entirely alone. Even Sahhdie, our grim floor manager, accompanied him on occasion. Sometimes he accepted the company of some shady-looking street characters. It seemed as if the denizens of Serangoon Street had organized themselves to escort him without ever seeming to do so.
    Even if I had not been transported into a genie’s treasure trove, with diamonds waiting to be plucked and carried home, I liked Kahani’s, and I liked my work there. Things were orderly and reliable. It was my task to double-check the shop’s receipts and file them in a wooden cabinet, to copy the invoices onto cream-colored store stationery and mail them out. It was also my responsibility to keep track of what had been sold the day before and to copy it into a large black leather ledger. I opened Mr. Kahani’s mail and read his letters aloud to him slowly and clearly, and also the newspapers. Mr. Kahani had great contempt for most Singapore papers. A London Times arrived daily at the store, among several other British papers.
    Mr. Kahani also paid attention to what was happening in the United States of America. He was even interested in China, and in the fate of the man he called the Black Cat. This was a play on the name Mao, which meant cat in Chinese.
    I had heard my Uncle Chachi and Omar Wahlid discussing this man Mao as well. Soon there would be a change for the better, Omar Wahlid declared. The seeds of revolution were being planted in China, but eventually they would spread throughout the world.
    “Sun Yat-sen is the Father of China,” Nei-Nei Down put in. She seemed angry about something.
    “Mao is a great man,” answered Omar Wahlid. “An idealist.”
    “Ideologues are not necessarily idealists,” my Uncle Chachi said.
    “Mao will conquer all,” Omar Wahlid insisted.
    “There is more than one way to skin a cat,” said Nei-Nei Down, and again that night Omar Wahlid left the table without finishing his meal.
    I wondered if this was a trick they had devised to economize on food expenses. Whenever Omar Wahlid stormed off, it was only a matter of a few bites until the quiet medical student Wei followed.

    I began my work at Kahani’s in Little India shortly before the Hindu holiday of Deepavali, Festival of Lights. Deepavali was a time for buying extravagant numbers of gifts—Hindu husbands for their wives, parents for their children, brothers for their sisters.
    Serangoon Road was brimming with tempting merchandise: roadside stalls crammed with terra-cotta lamps, flowers, purses, firecrackers, and silk saris in red, blue, green, and gold. The sweetmeat displays were laid out like delicious gardens of candies, planted in glistening pastel-colored rows. My favorites were the gulab jamun and Sugar