Eventually, I had to leave Mersing to attend university in Kuala Lumpur. I took my good luck bottle with me.
I can't remember how it happened, but one day i returned to my dormitory and found the bottle smashed on the floor. The little ship inside had vanished. I've always suspected that one of my fellow students was respondsible.
That night, quite late as i recalled, i was summoned to the office. My mother was on the telephone, her voice shaking with grief.
"You must come home quickly," she begged. "Bomoh Charles is asking for you..."
"But I don't understand..." I begun.
"Bomoh Charles is dying. You must hurry. He doesn't have long!"
It took me a full day to travel back to my village, switching from bus to taxi, arriving at the old man's house in the evening, as the sky turned a gloomy purple and grey. A crowed was gathered outside. Lanterns burned in the silent dusk. My mother stepped forward and urshered me inside.
There he was, Bomoh Charles, stretched out on a bunk, older than i could ever remember him, his skin drenched with sweat, his eyes feebly searching for mine. The veins on his bony hands were as thick as cords. His touch was weak and clammy. At the sound of my voice, a smile flickered over his deathly face
"The ship is no longer in the bottle, i believe," he croaked
How could he have known, I wondered. And then i shuddered with a fearful realisation. "Is that why you're... like this?" I asked him.
he fixed me with a stern gaze.
"Is that why i'm dying?" he corrected me. "We have always told the truth, you and I." His body convulsed with a rasping coughing.
"I put the ship in there when i faced death, many, many years ago. I was a prisoner of war, and I expected the Japanese to kill me anyday. They had almost killed me with their torture..."
Again his body shook with a coughing spasm. "I had made the ship with little scraps of wood and paper I'd found in the POW camp. It kept me occupied, I suppose. And then i found an old bottle in the prison hospital."
His hand feebly gripped mine.
"The ship was like my life. When it was in the bottle, I was safe. And so were you, when you were that sick little boy I firstr met. I suppose the ship has served its purpose, wouldn't you say? It's out of the bottle, and free to sail anywhere..."
I sat there beside him, listening to is fragile breath as his life ebbed away. His name was Charles Thomson, or was it Thomkins, his words had become so slurred.
He was a British doctor, that's how he'd known so much about medicine and first aid. After the war, his body broken by his Japanese tornentors, he had been unable to find work in England. So he had returned to Malaya, as it was then called, and worked in a hospital. But the work taxed his weak physique.
When he contracted a bout of fever, he had been taken to a Bomoh with whom he become good friends. A few weeks later, When the Bomoh himself had almost died from a heart attack, he had nursed his friend back to health. In return, the Bomoh had shared secrets with Charles.
"It seemed the most natural thing in the world to become a bomoh myself," the old man gasped. "So I stayed in the village, and when the bomoh died, i took over. With all his knowledge, and with all my training in western medicine, I suppose I did have specal power..."
A contented smile played over his features and his eyes fluttered. Suddenly he grasped my hand.
"You won't forget me, will you Faizal?"
"Never, I swear." I promised with tears.
A moment later, I reached out and closed his eyes. The shallow breathing had ceased, and the most extrodinary bomoh in all Malaysia had gone to his rest.
-=STORY ENDED=-
