The Malachite curse 6 : I know who killed Cuifen 15 August 2025
Courtesy freepik.com
Eu-Meh increased the pressure on Chow’s shoulders as this latter stopped in her tracks and turned around to face her.
- Don’t turn, don’t attract anyone’s attention, said Eu-Meh - What do you mean you know who killed Cuifen, said Chow - I said I think I know who killed her, though I am not certain - Tell me now, I cannot wait to hear this - Promise me first that you will not do anything as I only have a suspicion, not a certainty on who the killer is - Tell me, tell me or I will go mad - Calm down Chow, people are starting to stare at us - Let us go to your house and talk then
Chow could hardly contain her impatience and it was now her who was leading the way towards Eu-Meh’s house. She glanced back and saw Ju-Long scowling at them and she wondered if it was him, Eu-Meh’s nephew who had done it. She knew how hot headed the boy could be despite all of his aunt’s efforts in raising him to be a good young man. She had also overheard him speaking to his aunt of his aspirations regarding Cuifen and wondered if he had killed her in a fit of rage after she had refused his love. She too knew that Cuifen wanted to go to the big city and make a name for herself as a singer. Other people who had heard of Cuifen’s aspirations thought it a scandal but Chow had always wanted Cuifen to remain free-spirited and not weighed down by tradition like she had been, having to endure a lifetime of beatings because she could not divorce her husband. She would never have let anything similar happen to her beloved daughter but all of that was so far away now.
Chow’s shoulders heaved and she started to cry again, her ugly and usually expressionless face contorted into a hideously sorrowful mask as she let out a wail that seemed to never end. Eu-Meh grabbed her again by the shoulders and half-dragged, half-hauled her to her house. As soon as they entered, Eu-Meh removed her and Chow’s shoes and pulled Chow towards the kitchen. She sat her in front of the fire that she had left burning and prepared some tea for both of them. Chow was prostrate again, her eyes staring emptily at the fire in front of her. Eu-Meh thrust a cup of tea into Chow’s hands and slowly put her fingers around the cup so that she could actually hold it. Chow seemed to slowly emerge from her lethargy and looked at Eu-Meh with renewed tears in her eyes.
- Who was it, she said - I told you I think I know who it is but I am not sure. Do you remember Fang, the little girl who used to come and play with Ju-Long when he first came to my house after his mother died? - I am not sure, what does she look like? - It is the young girl whom you might have seen at my house when I first introduced Cuifen to Ju-Long. She was also at the burial today, sitting just behind Ju-Long. A young girl whose braided hair was topped with jasmine and peonies. - Why would she want to kill Cuifen? Why now? - I think she never forgave Cuifen for stealing away Ju-Long’s heart. After he had met Cuifen, he never bothered to meet with Fang again and every time he received written messages or gifts from her he just threw them away in front of the door. I have seen her many times cry when she saw those discarded items and have scolded him many times for being so cruel to her but he could not care for anybody else than Cuifen. She was his whole life. - Why would she kill her now if not before? - The night of Cuifen’s murder, Ju-Long had come back home in a very sombre mood. He looked so angry that I later thought that maybe he had killed Cuifen but it was not the case. I overheard him some days ago fighting with Fang and he was telling her that whatever she had done, it would not make him love her as he would always love Cuifen and not her even though Cuifen was dead. - So did Fang tell him she killed Cuifen? - No, but from what I heard, she had seen him watching Cuifen and Ming-Hoa in what he thought was an embrace, not realising that Ming-Hoa had actually assaulted Cuifen. When he had started retreating, disgusted and angry, she popped out of her hiding place and tried to take his hand but he had broken away and started running towards his home. Later on, she had told him that Cuifen had not been embracing Ming-Hoa and that, on the contrary, she had been struggling to get rid of him before he covered her mouth to stifle her cries and caused her to faint. - I still don’t understand. Why did she kill Cuifen and how did she do that? - I think that she had tried initially to help Cuifen by pulling away Ming-Hoa by his hair and hitting him on the head. It might be that later, on seeing Cuifen lying still and helpless, she decided to get rid of her rival in order to win back Ju-Long’s heart.
Chow jumped up with amazing agility for her age and started to run towards the door. Eu-Meh realised that she meant to go and attack Fang and rushed towards the door blocking Chow’s exit. The two women stood face to face, one with her face contorted with rage and the other with dismay that she could be the reason why Chow might commit a murder. She would have to find a way to calm her down although she realised it was going to be very hard to reason with Chow now…
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For the longest time ever, I have felt I have no kinship with Earth and it felt like a foreign land. Even in my childhood, I would look up at the stars and know in my heart that my true home was out there and I was the proverbial “million miles from home”. As a young child I did not have many friends and tended to always sit on my own when there were breaks at the school I was going to. It was called the Good Shepherd Convent and was, as you could guess, a school for female students only. My parents were of opposing religions and from countries that did not see eye to eye with each other. He was a Tamilian black Indian Hindu and she was a white Tunisian Muslim. They couldn’t have been further apart and their life together was a story in itself but I might talk about that later.
As a teenager, I still had that yearning feeling to go back home but I was able to mask it better and was sociable enough to make friends although I could count them on one hand. The friends I made, I was very loyal to and shared a deep connection with. Later on, as a young woman in a University in Nabeul this was still the case. At University, I tended to embrace what others called lost causes and one of them consisted of a direct clash with a special group of Muslim brotherhood called “Ekhwan Al Jihad” or the brothers of the Jihad (holy war). These people, whose shortened name was “Khwanjia” for all of us Tunisians resisting their backward rules and oppression, had gained a disproportionate level of power and Bourguiba, the President at that time, did not seem able to easily get rid of the hold they had – something that Ben Ali had been able to do after he orchestrated a coup against Bourguiba several years later.
Meanwhile, one of the higher level recruits of this brotherhood who lived on the same campus, had gotten besotted with me and decided I was to become his wife. He was very surprised at my resistance and later on, he joined those who would stop us from going to the University in our western attire and threw the large and heavy lid of a dustbin at me in one of his hate-fuelled acts against me. We were all wearing just jeans and normal sweatshirts or shirts that were buttoned to the top but they could not bear the sight of us, refusing to cover our heads and wear long dresses or skirts instead of what they perceived as “figure-hugging, male-enticing jeans from hell”.
There were other happenings where this madman tried to hurt me but I evaded most of the time his hateful attacks. I then changed University to go to ENSI in Tunis, a University for IT engineers but decided to leave after two years because the level of power and hate-fuelled acts of the Khwanjia had gotten too much to bear. With my very Hindu name of Geetha which related to the Bhagavat Gita, one of the holiest books in Hinduism, I stood a lot to lose if the Khwanjia were to seek me out and do God knows what to me. My path had always been one of peaceful resistance but that did not stop them from beating us, attempting to tear our hair out of our heads or throwing stones and other large objects at us.
I finally left for Geneva rather than Paris because I felt I could not handle Paris after being in such a small place as Tunis. Geneva was a lovely quiet town which I enjoyed living in a lot even though the immigration rules were quite tough in order to get there. Throughout the time in Tunis as a young woman, it had always been about resistance and avoiding getting into trouble with the Khwanjia so I had not thought much about my ultimate goals but as the quiet of Geneva seeped into me, my previous levels of extraneity took over and I started to feel homesick again, wanting to be out there in the stars.
Life took over while I still stayed firmly entrenched in my dreams of going to sleep and waking up in a planet I could call home again. I went through two marriages and had children from my second marriage whom I loved more than myself to the point of concentrating all my energy on them and almost feeling at home on Earth. Things had gone awry with my first husband because the values we lived by were at odds and he had issues he had never disclosed to me before our marriage. Things went awry with my second marriage as well leaving me in a situation where I was taking care of my children almost single-handedly and our expenses as well as the tax situation were making our financial situation stretched and our relationship as tense as it could ever be.
A break came in the form of a posting I was given in Dubai in 2007, where I was told there were no taxes on income and it seemed like a good idea to go there and at least ease the financial burden on us. Initially, my ex-husband was supposed to come and see if this could change things and he did come to visit in September 2007 but he did not want to lose his position as a Partner in the law firm he was working at so he decided not to join us, after which I decided to file for divorce in the fall of 2008.
In Dubai, I gained more financial freedom initially and was able to start reading again, not having to clean up everything and have to always cook like I was doing during my time with my second husband. I had a cook and a maid taking care of everything that needed to be taken care of. It was lovely to be able to keep my mind occupied with more than just my work and the children’s needs and I started even envisaging to write again. Suddenly things got out of hand in 2010 and I then created a blog to report most of what was happening, share literary produce such as poems and short stories I wrote or share my artwork. What happened from that fated date of August 12, 2010 (note that my birthday is August 12) is mostly laid out in my blog so I will not reiterate what I already wrote. This break in my life, though deeply disturbing and painful, brought out the spiritual side of me again and all that I had been thinking about during my teenage years and as a young woman began to take shape again.
After 2010 I became involved in several charitable endeavours and worked towards trying to make the Earth a better place, one person at a time, changing the sides of myself I felt did not sit well with the person I wanted to be. So many things happened, the culmination of which pushed me to the path of healing which I embraced wholeheartedly starting first with the study of Pranic healing after having experienced healing people with just the healing touch – later on, I became a Reiki Master and worked with Bach flowers remedies. The more I healed people, the more I felt myself being drawn into what I perceived as myself roaming the Earth in sleep, healing others in my dreams. At one point in Dubai, while I was doing a distance healing I felt inclined to create an energy pattern that was all around me. This became a daily work and I was given to know that I was building a Merkabah using Indian mudras.
Several months later, the Merkabah was apparently ready and I experienced in my dreams what I later understood were astral travels. I did not remember much of those travels which I relegated to the dream world so as to keep my drive to work and take care of my children during the daytime. As the years passed by, I started having the conviction that I had to build more points of energy in the Merkabah so that it could work for much longer distances. This was achieved in January 2017 and I experienced a great deal of light entering my body after which my astral travels became clearer. After a few days, around end January, however, I realised that the Merkabah had been ruined and I could not get back to weaving it.
The points of energetic alignment using mudras were no longer leading anywhere as if my mind could not make them properly anymore. My Merkabah had truly been broken beyond repair and I could do nothing about it as my correct weaving of mudras had been damaged. The years 2017 to 2019 dragged on until the passing of my mother in summer of 2019. Somehow, her demise triggered something that made my pattern of mudras able to align correctly to create the Merkabah again. I am still weaving slowly but surely and I know the Merkabah should be fully ready at least by 2026, perhaps for my birthday in that year to be a day of fulfilled hope again. I had fallen but I may just be able to go home and bask in blue again.
The winds carried me
delicate wings fluttering
in ascent of skies
Dark clouds gathered tight
In graceful touch of the night
while the moons surged sleek
The days’ rise upturned
sunlit landscapes glittered white
The tides washed the beach
Sparkling sugar straits
reflections of sandy slopes
swell under the sun
Bright eyes stretch inwards
gathering the suns rays’ kiss
irises spotless
The sea progresses
my body in solemn vow
meets dizzy waves’ pull
Reading of the poem
Only the question
mattered more than the answer
Twined cause and effect
Common inquiry
A probe into grey matter
Symptom of the quest
Pillars of queries
Symbols of the need to know
A trace of lives lived
Myriads of half-truths
Sign of the times etched in blood
Reality blurred
Picking up the clues
Omen of a time gone by
Skies high in bosom
She survived inquests
Her mind a token of light
A flag flying high
Reading of the poem:
Strings of a Bard (acoustic) - Estas Tonne (2021)
Written in the context of Ronovan writes weekly haiku challenge using the words question and sign or their synonyms. More on the rules and other poets’ contribution here https://ronovanwrites.com/2021/08/23/ronovan-writes-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-372-question-and-sign/
Outlook opening
within the mind a sparkle
zest of life’s vigour
Growth of energy
in landscapes of a picture
hanging in my head
Seascapes designs show
outline of an entity
forming from essence
Contours’ perspective
a vision of a being
prospect of morrows
A quick glimpse to view
aspects of the living soul
The look of the heart
The stretch of the sight
A scene of silent beauty
The way of the breath
Reading of the poem:
Dinka - Mute Your Life And Float
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