Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 16

  “You’re so clever,” Mak says. “How come you can still remember Singapore roads when you’ve lived in England for so long, huh? You know I used to go to Geylang Serai by myself before. But now, I’m so useless, lah, roads have changed, buses are different. Even buildings have changed. I can’t recognise anything. And bus fares! Wah, they’re so expensive now, more like prices of taxis.”

  My mother is one of the walking wounded, people out of their time, suffering because they were young in another era. Most old people are like that, all over the world, out of sync with the new, with technological developments outside their ken; sometimes made to look stupid by the youngsters because they cannot keep up. For someone like my mother who had no freedom to do what she wanted when her husband was alive, she never even came close to achieving her potential, let alone realise them. A woman’s ability to drive was to her a huge achievement. It represented everything she could not have, could not be. It’s a measure not only of success and attainment, but of freedom as well. When she visited David and I in England, I drove her around the twisty country lanes where one couldn’t see around the corner. She was very impressed by that and rather proud of me. I was pleased to make her proud. I know that given the chance in her youth, she would have loved to learn to drive. So when I drive a car, I’m driving for her, her desire has seeped into mine. Sometimes, I feel that I am her, as though our spirits overlap. Don’t ask me how I know. It is just so. I ache when I see her looking so tiny in the front seat of Bernadette’s BMW, a shrivelled brown leaf fallen from some great tree. It is not just that the lustre has gone from her once beautiful eyes, but the fierce energy that was once there has also dissipated. Her body which had once stood erect with confidence is now sagging with weariness. It is almost as if her spirit is begging to be released. The thought clutches at my heart fearfully. I am not ready to let her go.

  Geylang Serai, where most Malays live, is Mother’s favourite place to shop for the kind of outfit she wears and the spices she loves. It is where they sell batiks for the sarongs and embroidered voile for her kebaya; where there are special tailors who still know how to sew a kebaya the Peranakan way. Although the sarong kebaya is Malay in origin, the Peranakan kebaya is shaped slightly differently and needs an expert tailor for the technique of ketok lobang, where a series of holes is punched into the fine seam of the material from shoulder to hip. Geylang Serai was once a kampong like the one we had lived in but now, it too has been overtaken by towering blocks. These changes have affected my mother’s generation a great deal, a way of life they know and love, swept away too suddenly by modernisation. In September 1963, Singapore gained independence from the British and became part of Malaysia but in August 1965, she broke away to become an independent nation. It was a traumatic time of uncertainty. That uncertainty entered people’s souls, made them concerned for superficial wealth, made them fear to be solitary so that they congregated opinions and thoughts. Today, people live in closer proximity in the tower blocks than they ever did in the villages, but their hearts are miles apart. Every home has electricity and running water, but the quality of life has changed.

  A wet market still exists in Geylang Serai, where numerous stalls sell fresh food and vegetables and Malay food. When we weave in and out of the stalls, Mak is voluble, making remarks and talking to total strangers as she did in the old days. She asks people how they are, if they have eaten. The latter is a common subject in Singapore, like the weather in England. People are so concerned with food here that they would be shocked if you said you were on diet or have not eaten. My mother, suddenly plunged back into an atmosphere that she is comfortable in, is capturing her past when people were neighbourly and everybody talked to everybody. So her greetings would not have seemed strange or eccentric before, but these days when people are used to being cocooned, when people wrap themslves up with their own concerns and opinions, they get uncomfortable at such a display of open friendliness. Some respond briefly whilst others totally ignore her prattling, looking at her askance. Once or twice, I make a move to stop her but I realise that she is happy again, reliving her life in the kampong. So I step aside and try not to be embarrassed. One of Mak’s indulgences is bunga rampai, a mixed cluster of fresh petals of roses, chempaka, bunga melor and other flowers. She loves to have this on her Catholic altar where its lovely fragrance fills the house. If I am ever near the market, I will always try to buy the potpourri for her. For me, the scent of the bunga rampai is synonymous with her, especially the yellow bunga chempaka which she used to thread into a chain to twist around her bun on special occasions. She also uses flowers like a good luck charm. If we need to pass exams or were sick, she would bath us with seven varieties of flowers. It is interesting how the image of her, all dressed up, her youthful face powdered with bedak sejok, her eyes soulful, is permanently printed in my mind. I wish I had a camera then to capture her beauty so that I can show you today how elegant and fine she looked. In the market, Mak loses some of the dejection that seems ever present in her eyes. The sounds and aromas of people chatting, the sizzling of food being fried, of spices and food, must have transported her back to a time when she had been in greater control of her faculties. Being amongst familiar objects reminiscent of the life she led, she is somehow restored in herself, the sense of loss that she must sometimes feel is left behind in the other world of fast moving cars, skyscrapers and changing landscape.

  “Look! A kueh baolu achuan. I haven’t been able to find my old one, perhaps I ought to buy another.”

  She talks as if she can remember how to make the kueh. She picks up the cake mould and look it over. My mother used to make the most lovely cakes in the village. In the days before electric cake mixers, she would whisk the eggs by hand and gently fold in the flour to pour into her heated iron-cast mould that had individual pools in the shape of animals and flowers. Standing there in the market with her as she examines the mould, the wonderful smell of her kueh baolu being baked comes back to me, the hot coals on top of its lid and in the clay stove, serving as oven. Remembering, I can almost taste its lightness as each baolu melts in my mouth. My throat tightens when I think of how proficient my mother had been and how utterly incapable she is now. I wonder sometimes if I might be grieving for my own imminent loss now that I am middle-aged. Do we all look at elderly people and think sometimes how life seems such a waste that for all our achievements and endeavours, this is how we are going to end? Even I, who believe in an after-life sometimes despair, what about those who don’t?.

  “I’ll look for your old one at home, Mak. They don’t make the mould as good as yours.” I didn’t want her to buy something she would never ever use again. “Meanwhile, if you want some kueh baolu, there’s a Peranakan shop in Katong which sells very good ones. I’ll buy you some.”

  I regret that I never got her recipes for her cakes because they were superb. It could be that I, like my sisters, was tired of spending weeks before each Chinese New Year slaving over the hot clay stove making cakes. Although we sometimes had very little to eat, there was a ritual of mother’s which she kept up all the years she lived in the village. She would scrimp and save so that every New Year, she would be able to get new dresses for her daughters, even if they were from last year’s curtains; and distribute her variety of cakes and favourite dishes to the neighbours. My sisters and I had to each carry a tray laden with small plates of the different items to deliver to each of the neighbours in the kampong. It was a reciprocal arrangement and during Hari Raya, the Malay neighbours would bring their cakes to us; during Deepavali, our Hindu neighbours would send us their food. So everybody’s New Year was a time of excitement for everybody else. Life in the kampong was like that.

  We had no oven and had to bake over a clay stove using an aluminum pot for an oven, the hot coals below it and on the lid. (When I started work as a nurse and had saved enough, I bought her a Baby Belling to put over our kerosene stove, but she never learnt to use it.) Every process was long and tedious, with no mechanic
al assistance. We had to pound the mung beans by hand and pressed them into moulds manually for the kueh koyah; for the kueh tart, we had to grate the pineapple and fry it in gula-melaka or palm-sugar till it caramelised, then pinch decorative patterns on every single pineapple tart with pincers. We grated numerous coconuts to squeeze the milk from them to make the kueh bangkit; rolled the thin crepe hot as it came off its mould to make kueh belanda. The kueh belanda or love letters was her piece-de-resistance. Legend has it that lovers in the olden days, when love was not openly permitted, used to smuggle love letters in the rolled up crispy crepe to send to their sweethearts. So to emulate tradition, a strip of paper was placed on the crepe before rolling it up, usually with a blessing or prophecy. (That is probably the origin of fortune cookies.) The technique of making love letters is very precise. A thin film of batter made from mixing flour with coconut milk is poured into the mould and as soon as it is cooked, has to be lifted gently off the mould and quickly rolled into a cigar-shape before it hardens. It meant that by the time we have done a few, our palms would be blistering from the heat.

  “I used to make the best kueh. Look at that decoration on that kueh tart,” she says, pointing to a batch of machine-made pineapple tarts. “It’s so coarse, too hastily done.”

  For her, artistry is the key. She never cuts corners. Even if a cake is tiny and will be consumed in minutes, it had to be done properly. In all things, she taught me to be fine, that to be coarse is to be no better than being an animal. It is better to eat in a refined manner from a banana leaf than to eat out of expensive china with no thought for the food. It is better to live in a hut with mud-packed floor where the hut is clean than in a brick mansion where there is filth. It is not the clothes you wear or the way you live that marks you as a fine person, it is integrity. The way you would behave even if no one is watching you. You can’t lie or cheat yourself. You can pretend to others, but never to yourself.

  “You are talking about a different person,” Agatha has said to me many times since my return. “You are romanticising because you don’t see her as she is now.”

  My younger sister has the knack of putting me in my place. Like children who always feel they are children in their parents’ presence, no matter how old they are, I always feel like the younger, inexperienced, unsuccessful sister in Agatha’s presence. It is strange how all the stories abound about my mother’s bad behaviour and yet, she hadn’t exhibited it since I arrived. I have seen Mak raving though I have not seen her mouthing the swear words that both Agatha and Bernadette claim can ensue from her mouth. But it won’t change my perception of my mother even if I did, I know my mother for what she truly is, a wonderful woman who has lived a life of service to her family and to others. Even if the disease causes her to mutate into some kind of monster, I will always see her as she was. I may not like what I see in her today but that won’t stop me loving her, I shall take it that her damaged brain is simply suppressing all that is fine and good in her.

  Deep in thoughts, I have lost sight of my mother. She is like a child who needs looking after and is easy to lose in a crowded market. I experience a moment of panic. If she should discover that she is lost, she will panic and will not be able to find her way home. I remember losing my younger son, who was then six, at the newly opened Changi Airport and when I found him, relief turned into cross words because I had feared for him. Our relationship was newly founded and brittle in the early stages of our reunion and I remember the bewilderment in his little eyes. Oh, the mistakes I make in life! Is there a way of retrieving them to sprinkle some fairy dust to make them turn out right? I scuttle round to find my mother, telling myself not to be cross with her when I do find her. She is so frail and small now that she curls into herself so she is not easy to pick out in a crowd. Where she would have stood out in her sarong kebaya in the Chinese community, here amongst the Malays who wear the same type of outfit as herself, she is not readily distinguishable. In my urgent haste, I push people out of the way and receive a backlash of rough words. Then I hear her animated voice, which I recognise immediately above the din of the market-place. It’s like when your child cries in the night and you wake up even when you have been sound asleep; or when you hear your own name being called in a crowded, noisy room. She is my child now, mine to look after. I can afford to slacken my pace. I do not want to convey my distress to her. She is talking to a wizened old man, the skin on his bare chest, ribbed and brown. She must have tuned in to my presence because she turns to face me without surprise, as if we have not been separated. I am amazed how many times she exhibited this link with me, even when we are thousands of miles apart — I know when to phone her, when she needs to hear from me.

  “Ah Phine, ah, look what I have found. This datok here knows all the herbs that I have used before. Datok, this my daughter, this my daughter. Come all the way from England to see me.” She speaks in Malay for the benefit of the old man.

  Datok. Our people address the elders like honorary relatives. We never call them by their first names as in the West. My sons call David, Uncle David, whereas his children call me by my first name. In the East, his children would be seen as unmannered, it would be seen that they do not hold me in regard. In the days when I was growing up, the manner of addressing elders was more structured, the very way in which we address a person in Chinese, for example an aunt, told the observer exactly whether the aunt was a sister on the mother’s or father’s side and which rung in the family ladder she was on. My Great Aunt, for instance, was called Tua Ee, this meant she was the eldest of my mother’s sisters. If she was my father’s eldest sister, she would be called Tua Kou. These days, the manner of calling has been simplified and anglicised, an older man is an Uncle, an older lady, an Aunty. But in Malay, the traditional language is still retained, an old man like the one my mother is talking to is Datok or Grandfather. Mak has discovered an ally in the old man, someone who, like her is out of his time, tending a stall of dried herbs which few people have any use for. The walking wounded. In their heyday, both Datok and Mak were respected for their expertise, they healed with herbs and poultices, not with pills and injections. Amongst her many skills, my mother was the village herbalist. I don’t remember the names of all the herbs she used, but I remember the dokong anak because she always got me to collect it from the fields after she had taught me how to identify the herb.

  Our family rarely went to the doctor. Firstly, it was because it was expensive; and secondly, because my mother was a naturally gifted herbalist and healer. It was Agatha and Robert who required the most medical attention, Robert because of the infection which damaged his brain, and Agatha because she had rheumatic fever which affected her heart. For someone who spent her lifetime being ill, Agatha is admirable in not letting her illness get the better of her and rising to be the most successful member of our family. She has a shrewd mind and an acute business acumen. Compared to her, I am hopeless in managing my finances whilst she has investments in strategic companies and homes in many places. For both Agatha and Robert, Mak spent a great deal of time to-ing and fro-ing the hospital. Only once was it for herself, when she had to go into hospital to have her goitre removed. I remembered the occasion well because Robert was already born then and she folded her used sarong to place near him and when I asked why, she said that her spirit was caught in the web of the sarong and would help Robert go to sleep.

  If we had a fever, she would mix herbs and flour to extract the fever from us. If we had stomach ache, she would boil some foul-smelling herbs or the scrotum of a goat. I carry a scar on my right foot where ankle meets foot. Today, I am surprised that I still have my foot. Then, I placed all my trust in Mother’s skill. My big brother, Romia, earned his allowance after school by bringing in drinking water for the neighbours. The nearest public standpipe was about a quarter mile away. People use well-water for washing and ablutions and some of the old and infirm could not manage bringing in the drinking water from so far away. So they paid a few cents for their wa
ter to be brought to them. When he was not working, Ah Cob used to do it, then Romia, then Matthew. They cleaned out two kerosene tins and fixed each with a handle, roped them to a pole and they could carry two kerosene tins of water each trip for 20 cents a tin. I must have been about 10 or 11. All of Ah Cob’s efforts and Mak’s efforts and my own was not bringing in as much money as we needed when Agatha was also in school. My exercise books were running out and I needed some new ones. I thought if I sold some pails of water and charged perhaps 5 cents a pail, I could buy my school exercise books. The metal pail was almost as tall as I was. The base of the pail was a raised ridge. Without anyone knowing my plan, I carried the pail to the standpipe. When I filled up the pail, I had to use both hands to lift it. It was heavy. The water sloshed about and I lost most of the water on my journey home. I thought, well, I may not even get 5 cents for it but someone might pay me 3 cents for it. A quarter of a mile was a long way for a little girl with a huge pail of water. But I was determined, though I grunted and groaned. My arms felt as if they were coming out of their sockets. I had to stop now and again to regain my strength. A few yards from home, I was near jubilant. And then it happened. After a short rest, I lifted the pail up but my arms were so weakened that the pail came down almost immediately. The problem was that the pail came down with a thud to land on my right foot and the metal ridge sliced cleanly through my ankle. I screamed. Rani came running out of her house and in true Indian fashion, she wailed, “Ah, yo, yo! Ah, yo yo! Apa lu buat! What have you done!”

  The sand around me was soaked with blood, my foot was nearly dangling from my ankle. I did not pass out but I seemed to have floated away from my body to watch the commotion like a spectator. Someone brought a towel to bind my foot which quickly coloured red. Abdullah, one of our other neighbours, carried me straight to my mother who let out a shrill cry when she saw what had happened. In all honesty, I cannot recall being taken to either a doctor or a hospital. I was completely treated by my mother. How she sealed the gap of my wound, I don’t know. All I remember is that she bound my ankle tightly with smelly herbs for weeks, changing the bandages and herbs regularly until I could walk properly again. All I am left with to remind me of my foolishness is an inch-wide scar across where ankle meets foot.