Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 17
The first time I ever remember seeing a doctor was when the World Health Organisation (WHO) sent a health team to my school to give all the pupils a medical examination. The doctor declared that I was suffering from malnutrition and fed me a diet of pills, milk and cod liver emulsion. The latter two were equally disgusting to me. The pupils who were considered in need of vitamins and medicine had to queue up to drink the milk at school supervised by the teachers. I nearly threw up when I drank my first pint of milk which was made from powdered milk. The next day, I brought a packet of sugar to put into the milk before I could even manage to keep it down. There was no such solution to the cod liver emulsion. This was usually dispensed by the nurse who came to the school and she would pour out a tablespoonful and each of the malnourished pupils had to line up to be spoon-fed. There was no escape and we had to swallow the emulsion before we were allowed to leave in case we spat it out. The emulsion was like thick cream but had a horrible fishy smell and just as horrible a taste. It felt like torture to be given it rather than a boon. As we stood in line, we tried to scheme to find a way of escaping it but we couldn’t. We felt our stomachs become squeasy at the thought of that emulsion and we made faces as we swallowed it. After a few months of these and various other vitamins, my cheeks puffed outwards and my waist disappeared. The medical team was very pleased at my progress but I wasn’t. I was so fat that the kids in the kampong started to chant a limerick every time I passed by:
Fatty, fatty bom-bom.
Malam, malam churi jagong.
Bom-bom was supposed to be the sound of the earth moving as I walked. And the second line said that every night (malam), I stole corn (jagong) to eat, which was the reason why I was so fat.
Mak and Datok compare old notes, discussing the various herbs they had used for the different ailments. She takes the herb he proffers, smells it and cogitate about it. A smile when there is an agreement, a wave of her hand and a sidelong look when she disagrees. Whether the two of them are hallucinating or play-acting or they genuinely remember their past, I cannot tell. I just rejoice in their animation and their brief companionship. It is so fascinating that my mother who, occasionally, cannot remember the name of her son or grandchild can recall the names of herbs from 30 or 40 years ago. But she has come alive, surfacing from the mildew of her cave and it is enough for me that she can still find a small measure of joy. Joy scalps age from a face more easily than a surgeon’s scalpel.
“Must go now, Datok. I’m taking my daughter to eat nasi bryani. She can’t get it in England, you know.”
She is suddenly sure of herself, leading rather than being led. A little trip out of the house, back into an environment she can cope with has given her back some confidence. I had noticed that when I took her out to places familiar to her.
“Why don’t you take her out to these places more,” I asked Bernadette once.
“Aiiyah! You think I’ve got nothing to do all day. I‘ve a business to run, you know. It’s so easy for you to talk. You don’t live here. And when you are here, you’re on holiday. Where have we got time?”
We cross the road to the Haig Road food centre where Mak’s favourite bryani stall is. I notice more and more that she walks with a shuffling gait as if she has little strength to pick up her feet. Like me, she loves the bustle of people around the food centre, the rows of stalls selling different foods with their colourful neon signs, showing pictures of the food they sell, unlike the basic stalls of the old days. I order the bryani, mutton for Mak because she loves it, and fish for me because I don’t eat meat. The saffron-flavoured Basmati rice is served in the traditional way on a square of banana leaf. In deference to modernity, the banana leaf is placed on a dinner plate. Mak’s appetite has dwindled over the years so though she eats often, the amount she eats is birdlike. She scoops up a portion of her rice with her fingers and puts it on my banana leaf. It’s an act of love, a habit she has not outgrown, always giving us a portion of her meal in case we go hungry. She has stopped doing that with Agatha, who is strict on hygiene, as she would tick her off.
“It’s good to see that you still know how to eat with your fingers, lah. Except for Maretiu, no one in the family does that anymore. Do you eat with your fingers in England?”
“Yes, but only at home, when we have good friends. Not when we have business associates or people who don’t know me well. I don’t want to embarrass David. It seems peasant-like to Europeans to eat with our fingers.”
“They don’t make love with forks and knives do they?” Mak laughs at her own jocularity. “You know what Grandmother used to tell me? ‘Feel with your fingers. You eat with them and you make love with them’.”
I am astounded. It is as if the years have not fled from her mind and in that moment she is once more the mother I knew. She had repeated those same words to me so many times when I was a child that they were etched in my heart. But I have not heard them since. The waters of her life have carved away so much from the banks of her mind, so what bait had she used to lure a fragment of memory to the surface of her diseased brain?
Eleven
A close friend of mine in Haslemere, a private nurse, nurses a man who had suffered a severe stroke which left him half-paralysed. The tragedy is that this man was once one of Britain’s top cardiologists with a thriving practice in Harley Street. One would have thought that an eminent cardiologist would know enough to prevent himself from being struck by such a disease. Sadly, that’s not the way of nature. Healers are not exempt from the diseases they are skilled at healing. This must be one of life’s greatest ironies. My mother, too, cannot stop or fight the disease that is gripping her own brain, although she has healed many people through her own efforts. It is interesting that looking back at those years in the kampong through the telescope of an adult eye, I can see her role as a healer, yet had accepted it as not being anything particularly special when I was a child. Having resource to New Age beliefs these days, I am led to believe that my mother was truly a natural healer (after all, she was neither tutored in the use of herbs nor in the art of healing), but she has never set herself up as one nor allowed anyone to proclaim her so.
“I just do my best to help,” she said.
Perhaps true healing is an instinctive thing and medical science only augments that natural skill. Perhaps, also, the milieu of the kampong where medical help was not easy to come by and where people were largely uneducated was an environment where my mother’s skill could come to the fore. The village people trusted her and I have a vague feeling that trust is a huge factor in the healing process. The Malays were usually the last to come to her because they have their own resource, the bomoh, a kind of witch-doctor who prescribed potions and herbs to accompany specific rituals. Mostly male, the village bomoh could help you beat fevers and colds and make you sexually attractive or repellent, as each case may have required. Through the thin wooden walls of our hut, I once overheard a woman confiding in a neighbour that the bomoh helped her save her marriage through a potion and daily ritual. I did not understand the meaning of secret garden, but the words sounded mysterious and they pulled my ears to the gap between the wooden planks.
“He made me stand naked over a steaming bowl of rice and then asked me to feed the rice to my husband. The bomoh said that the steam from the rice entering my secret garden would keep my husband attracted to me.”
Of course, we have all heard about bomoh rituals. Village folks were careful where they discarded their nail and hair clippings, old clothes and other personal items — these were said to be potent for making spells work. Pak Hassan, who was our village bomoh, was so thin that his belly was a hollow cave under his bony ribcage. He usually received payment in kind for his work: a couple of chickens, some eggs, vegetables and fruits or a new sarong, depending on the service he rendered. (The sarongs presented to him were patterned differently from those of females’, usually in stripes and bold checks unlike the females’ which tended to be designed with trees, flowers or birds.) Pak
Hassan had no real need of money since there were no rates to pay as he was just like everybody else, without water and electricity in his hut. When he needed a wash, he availed himself of the village well. He housed himself in an attap lean-to in the shelter of the sweeping angsana trees. If the monsoon rain should batter his fragile attap roof, he might get donations of freshly stitched attap or a sheet of corrugated zinc. Most of the time, he would be bare-bodied, wrapped only in his sarong, sitting cross-legged and staring into space, which I came to learn signified that he was meditating. He was a figure of ambiguity because although he was a healer, it was said that his knowledge of healing came from dark forces. He was reputed to simpan polong, ie nurture a familiar. He would sit in deep meditation until the familiar left his physical body at night to roam across roof-tops to steal souls. That was why many villagers fixed a cactus on their roof-tops so that the needles of the cactus would snag at the polong as it passed by. Knowing this, anyone who simpan polong would shave their heads to prevent their hair being caught on the cactus. All bald-headed people were suspects. So when Pak Hassan shaved his head, it reiterated the belief that he did indeed nurture a familiar. I remember my mother being very convincing when she told us the story, although I am not sure if she used it to keep us indoors at nights.
“Folks swore that they had seen polong leave his body,” she told us. “One evening, two boys creep-creep to Pak Hassan’s hut where his empty shell of a body was sitting upright on the straw mat. Jahat sekali! They were so wicked! They leapt under the lean-to and turn-turn body over. Next morning, when polong returned, it could not re-enter body from top of head because body now not upright, what. So it let out such a wail that goosebumps rose on flesh of kampong people, including flesh of bad-bad boys. After long-long, one heroic villager went to hut to re-position body. So polong could return home. For weeks, bad-bad boys suffered from raging fever that nearly killed them.”
It was the kind of rumour to make the village children wary of Pak Hassan. Children would scatter whenever he approached them, myself and my friend Parvathi, included. He was the bogeyman of the village. Our hearts would thump as we hid behind doors to watch him shuffling in his wooden clogs down the sandy paths creating clouds of dust. He became more and more eccentric and his methods of curing became quite bizarre: for instance, for heavy period flows, he recommended a drink of fresh blood from a newly slaughtered chicken. I have seen the poor chicken thrashing about on the dusty ground, its throat cut, its head lolling about uncontrollably. (The image came back to haunt me years later, and was one of the factors which turned me into a vegetarian.) People preferred more conventional methods of cure, so they turned to my mother.
“Nonya, ada sakit, lah! (Nonya, I’m ill!)” The villagers might say and my mother would put everything aside to tend to them, a Florence Nightingale who provided hope and comfort, if little else. Besides tending to complaints of stomach aches, headaches and other aches, she tended to babies with bloated bellies, women with runaway husbands, men with battered egos. Where she got her knowledge and her wisdom from has always been a mystery to me — this uneducated, illiterate woman who could read no books. The wonderful thing was that she was entirely unassuming about her skills, it was as if she was passing on what was simply flowing through her from a higher source, expecting no returns. My friend Parvathi and her family, who received her closest care, lived only three doors away from us. If I had ever considered moaning about our family’s dire straits, I would only have had to look at my friend’s family and would realise how lucky we were. Sleeping with rats was nothing compared to the way this family lived. Parvathi, who was the eldest, had 11 brothers and sisters. The floor of their hut was earth-beaten, with neither beds nor furniture. They slept on straw mats. Once on one of my trips to Atas Bukit, Top-Of-The-Hill, where the rich English people lived, I saw an old mattress with pockets of broken springs, discarded lying by the rubbish bin. Matthew, Parvathi and I dragged it all the way down so that her sick brother, Gopal could sleep on it. Their mother, Letchumi, was in her 30s and always pregnant and listless. She had a part-time husband who turned up like a bad omen every now and again. Rajah would bring with him a waft of toddy which came out from his breath and pores. The smell of the illegally distilled alcoholic drink made from palm-sugar oozed out from him like slime. Usually unshaven and dressed in clothes that had been slept in, he would stagger into the village, calling for his wife in a drink-sodden voice,
“Eh, Letchumi! Letchumi! Your husband is here.”
How they manage to copulate on the straw mats with all the other children in the same small space was an interesting feat. It must have been a particular skill of men living in the kampong, because my father too was very virile and got his own way often, although he and my mother did not share the same bed. From the number of pregnancies that my mother was supposed to have had, she would have had to have a child every two years since she got married at the age of 17. Many women in the village were in the same situation as my mother, being objects of their husband’s sexual urges and the instruments for bearing their children. Necessity, rather than love, kept these women where they were. Since Rajah paid the rent and bought the food, Letchumi had little choice but to make her body available for her drunken husband. He gave her babies and left her to rear them herself. Her youngest, Gopal, suffered from epileptic fits and my mother often had to attend to the little boy holding him whilst he thrashed about wildly, his mouth foaming. Letchumi was unable to cope with this and would just watch and cry. The visiting district nurse supplied Letchumi with some sleeping tablets for little Gopal. No one could have anticipated the tragedy that was to occur, a tragedy that is seared into my brain. Sometimes, a word, a name, an image would flutter through my mind and I would recall that very sad and painful day.
Parvathi was Letchumi’s eldest daughter and hope. She was a very pretty teenager with huge eyes and shiny black hair which snaked down her back in a single plait. Parvathi worked in the paper factory in the village ever since she was 12, cutting, pasting and folding envelopes. It was amazing how such seemingly harmless work could result in such pain for her. Paper slices thinly like a sharp razor and her fingers and hands would often bleed from her work. Like her other colleagues, she was paid according to the number of envelopes she finished per day, so in her rush to complete more, she could not afford to pay undue care, resulting in little nicks all over her hands, small but deep nicks, which were not helpful when you then had to scrub the family’s washing. Although she was three years older than I was, we were the best of friends. When I began school, I became her teacher. Not all the village children was as privileged as I was to go to school, in fact the majority didn’t. Parvathi and I would sit in the hissing light of a carbide lamp and I would teach her how to read and write English. If you knew a carbide lamp, you would know that it spat and spluttered so that the flame was never constant. So your eyes had to chase the light to the illuminated part of the book so that you could read the words. The long-term effect of this was to make your eyes go funny. Perhaps that is why I have one lazy eye which manifests itself when I am tired. Juling ayer, it was called. Though Parvathi never went to school, she spoke Tamil and Malay, the latter being the language that unified the villagers. The village folks were largely uneducated, but many were bilingual. This is a fact that puzzles me today. Do we humans have this natural capacity for language, for healing, for listening?
“Paper. P-a-p-e-r,” She would repeat slowly after me.
At nearly nine, I learnt what a responsibility it was to be a teacher, your pupil expecting that what you teach is the truth. You become an authority. Of course, she envied me being able to go to school. It was only natural. After all, she was just a little over 12 years old. Two people shared my school days intimately with me: my mother and Parvathi. Through me, they too learnt. I stored each thing that happened in school to bring home as a gift to these two hungry minds. But my mother did not learn to read, she simply absorbed my words and my experiences at
school. My first visit to the school library was a memorable occasion which the two of them lapped up voraciously. It was not a big library but it was the first I had seen, six short bookshelves crammed with books that you did not have to pay to read. As soon as I could read, I borrowed all the number of allocated books, which was two a week and finished them before the week was out. My cousin George, twice removed or something, told me about the National Library in town, where there were thousands of books waiting to be read. It sounded like paradise to me but up until then, I had not been allowed out on my own without my parents or my brothers to chaperone me. So a visit to the National Library became an ambition. Youngsters today don’t realise what a milestone it was for us to go out on our own, visit the library or cinema when they have all this freedom today. This is such a modern world of Internet, e-mails and Bluetooth devices that to imagine a world without electricty, just a couple of generations ago, must be unthinkable for them. Reading by poor light was the cause of my bad eyesight today. In the evening, our house was lit by a hurricane lamp and after ten o’clock it would be replaced by oil lamps. Because we shared one big room, the lights would be put out when it was bedtime, so that those who wanted to sleep could go to sleep, and late reading was not exactly encouraged. When I started sleeping on the floor in the living room where the orange crates were, I was more able to read into the night in candlelight, and when we eventually had electricity in 1965, when Singapore finally became independent, I used the electric table lamp. Between the two periods, our house was lit by a flourescent lamp powered by a village generator. The generator had its own personality and every now and again, it would throw a tantrum and refused to work. So we kept candles and oil lamps handy.