Frog Under A Coconut Shell Read online

  Her remark wasn’t in the least bit Catholic in nature. We went to church on Sunday, confessed our sins and then took Holy Communion. We said the rosary and called on all the saints, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. Yet, in our hearts, the religion of our ancestors had staked its claim. I suspect it was this long-ingrained belief in karma which motivated my mother, making her rise above the squalor she lived in as though she was living the life of a queen. I learnt from my mother that one’s attitude is of utmost importance. It is the way you look at things, it is your inner eye which colours your situation.

  “It’s not just what you eat that shapes your body and your soul; it’s what you think and what you feel,” she once told me.

  Though uneducated, my mother is a great philosopher. Her philosophy is not academic, it’s of real life. She had the propensity of seeing something bright even in her darkest hour. Though she tried to pretend otherwise in those days of deprivation, I knew she did worry, mostly because I could pick up her worried vibes. I recall a day when the chettiar came to the house to collect the rent, but, of course, she had used the rent money for food. She had just returned from having bathed at the well, her sarong tied across her chest, her hair still wet. You would have thought her enticing. I imagined that she would have looked like a lovely mermaid the night Grandfather found her swimming naked in the sea. Her shoulders were golden-brown and smooth, her neck, slender like a swan’s. I am sure that one of the reasons Grandfather gave her a thrashing was to protect her because he could not bear that anyone should see her like that, so beautiful and vulnerable. When Mak opened the door to the Indian chettiar, I noticed that his eyes widened. He had a look which I could only guess was what the Malays called mata keranjang.

  “Where is the money?” He barked out his words in Malay.

  “Don’t have today. Maybe have, next week, lah. You come, next week, okay?” she pleaded. It was the timbre of her voice which told me that she was anxious.

  “You said that last week. You think I got so much time to come round every week or what?”

  “Please,” she said, hoping that her soft voice would encourage him to lower his, aware that the neighbours’ heads were poking round the corner. “Sure have, next week.”

  “You better. If you don’t have money, I shall personally go to your husband’s office to collect, okay?”

  “You don’t have to. Money ready next week.”

  He did lower his voice then, adding a knife edge to it which I didn’t fully comprehend though I felt from my mother’s reaction that it wasn’t very nice.

  “Perhaps you can find one way or another to pay me,” he said tracing a grubby finger on Mak’s bare shoulders.

  Looking back, I can imagine that she must have squirmed, suffering a feeling of humiliation. I feel the humiliation as if it is my own. Perhaps this is what modern psychologists might call false memory syndrome, that I didn’t really feel the humiliation. But certainly in remembering the scene, I am humiliated in my mother’s place. She and I share a unique twinning of our souls, so that our auric fields overlap, thus our thoughts and feelings flow into each other as naturally as a river flowing towards the sea.

  Now that the anxiety of my mother’s heart attack has dissipated, it would make sense for me to go home, after all I do have a husband back in England. Having two families in different continents is not an easy thing to juggle. You feel torn between one and the other. This has been my heartache for the last 15 years. I was on my own for five years before I decided to marry David and go to England. My ex-husband refused to let the children grow up in a culture foreign to them. As they were very young, the courts agreed. I had a choice of retaining custody of them and continue to live in Singapore or signing over custody to my ex-husband and seeking a new life for myself.

  “Your children will grow up,” Mak said when I presented the problem to her. “Their stepmother will look after them. They’ve got all their family here. David has been waiting for five years for you. He might not wait forever. Give yourself a life.”

  I knew my mother was old-fashioned and that she had hoped my marriage to the children’s father would work but she never took sides, never put my ex-husband down, she just gave me permission to live my life the way I wanted to live it. And it was certainly a heroic gesture on her part when she gave me permission to leave my children — she who gave her entire life for the happiness of her children. How selfish I was next to her goodness. Yet, she never judged me. She continued to sustain me in her love. But, despite her support, there was a great deal of indecision, a lot of pain and insurmountable guilt. Happiness with a man beckoned, yet the imminent loss of my children was tearing my guts out. Until today, I cannot say with certainty if I had made the right decision. The price of my new freedom was high and I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself. Without telling her, my mother understood my dilemma. If she saw one of my boys, she might say to me, “See how much he looks like you.” It was her way of pointing out our connection. Of my siblings, it was Bernadette and Matthew who saw me through difficult times. My separation from my boys was also the beginning of my emotional distance from Jacob. Of all my family, he was the only one in touch with my ex-husband and the boys. Even when my ex-husband was very acrimonious and never gave the boys my letters nor put my telephone calls through, Ah Cob was in touch with them, meeting them regularly. How I was starving for sight of my children, hanging around their school when I was in town, going to places they might go to; how I would have loved to hear their voice, feel their touch. Foolishly, I believed that I was sparing them the pain of a tortured marriage, not wanting them to feel torn in a tug-of-love. I believed that if I told them I loved them, that would be enough. But I didn’t reckon on my ex-husband’s poisonous nature and worse, his mother’s. My brother, Ah Cob, saw the boys, socialised with them because my ex-husband was his friend, yet he would not give them news about me, would not feed me with even one morsel of news about them, not one single photgraph. When I confronted him with it, he said,

  “Aiiyah, forget them, lah!”

  Such a cruel, cruel sentence. How could he expect that a mother could forget children she had carried within her body, children who had suckled at her breast? He was actually upset that I should expect him to ruin his friendship with my ex-husband on account of providing me information about my children! It was then that I realised that Ah Cob was very much like my father, so rigid in his thinking, so remote from people’s feelings. Like my father, there was only one point of view. His. Fortunately, David and I persisted with the courts until my boys and I were finally reunited.

  Matthew said, “There you are. Didn’t I tell you, you won’t be apart forever?”

  Of course, if my father was alive, I would never have been able to go through a divorce. He was an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned ideas. If he had his way, I would have had to marry the man of his choice. I was, to him, a tradeable commodity, to get a good dowry. In some ways, it was fortuitous that he died before I came to be of marriageable age. I had confessed to Parvathi, when we were reading Barbara Cartland, that I would marry a man for love and would run away before I allowed my father to force me into marriage. Pity Parvathi didn’t choose to run away and chose instead the course she had taken. Sometimes in my defeatist moments, I wonder if I should have let someone chose my husband for me since I didn’t make a good choice myself, anyway.

  My father was distant to us emotionally. Though I remembered him taking my sisters and I on outings and bringing home packets of supper, the predominant memory is one of fear, and sometimes loathing. I can never forget the way he behaved the day that I eventually went to the National Library in Stamford Road in the heart of town. A town excursion for us was an event. If my parents took us to the High Street which was the place to shop, it was on the Number 18 STC bus. But they were rare occasions. So I was not particularly familiar with town. But there was a place I really loved to visit. My cousin, George, who lived in the same village as us, told me many times
about this wonderful place that he visited. It was the National Library, where there were hundreds upon thousands of books, all free to borrow. Since I started learning to read, I devoured every book I could get hold of, from the school library to the mobile van that came around the village. I even read tin cans, the back of packages, government notices and anything else that had words on them. The more I read, the hungrier I became. A whole building full of books that I could borrow for free sounded like an unending gift. Although I read Malay books, too, the English language beguiled me and swept me off my feet.

  “I’ll take you if you want to come,” George said. “But you pay your own bus-fare.”

  “Oh, yes, please. Of course, I’ll pay my own bus-fare.”

  There didn’t seem anything wrong in going out with George, he was a relative, even if he was a distant one. We weren’t out on a date or anything. I wasn’t particularly interested in George’s company but was more thrilled about the fact that I was going to see this place that had thousands and thousands of books, more than anything else and didn’t even give a thought to the fact that I was going out somewhere, unchaperoned, with a boy. Surely my father couldn’t object. After all, it was already 1964, although my father’s values seemed to be anchored in the last century. In anticipation of the trip, I saved up my recess money for my bus-fare.

  This was about a few months after Parvathi’s death. I was missing her terribly and I felt that the trip would put me in a better mood. It was my first trip anywhere without my parents or my brothers. I had to admit that the whole thing was like some great adventure for a little kampong girl. My Aunt came by with George and stayed for coffee and bubor kachang with my mother. George and I had a quick bowl each of the mung beans cooked in coconut milk before we left because the fragrance was irresistible. My mother, too, thought that the National Library must have been a wonderful place if they gave away so many books to be read for free. As she read vicariously through me, she too was excited that I would be bringing home lots of books to read. It was our shared pleasure, the first occasion of the mother-child role being reversed. George was only a year older than me but was light-years ahead in street sense. Of my elder brothers, probably only Ah Cob was interested in books, and only those which dealt with Mathematics and Science. When I was 14, he was already married and had left home. Romia was then obsessed with girls and had no time for books, and Matthew was more interested in how his foot flexed in sepak raga than in books. I had no one else besides George who would introduce the National Library to me.

  We took the bus outside our village, along Upper Serangoon Road. The STC was a trolley bus with overhead cables that met other cables overhead in the air like a huge net. It was a day like any other day in the tropics, hot and clammy. The bodies in the crowded bus smelled of sweat and the food they ate. My fare to the library and back cost 30 cents, which was a considerable amount for me in those days. So I was going to make the most of it. At Macpherson’s Third Mile, people came on board having been to the big wet market there, bringing with them the smell of fresh fish, spices and all sorts of food. They carried basket-loads of vegetables and live chickens and ducks whose feet and wings were tied together. Above the loud chattering, the chicken squawked and cackled, and the ducks quacked. I was glad that George had ushered me to the back of the bus. But as the bus made its way towards town, the passengers took turns to disembark, they were not the type of people to live in the expensive part of town. You could see the scenery changing as we approached town, coconut trees and attap houses making way for terraced shophouses with five-foot-ways, then the lovely brick houses with gardens, and finally the office buildings. We passed the Cathay Building, the highest building then at 26 storeys, once the headquarters of the Kempetai during the War.

  I felt like a grown-up, travelling this far without my parents or my brothers. One day, I would do the journey on my own, without George or anyone to chaperone me. But it was a beginning. We got off the bus at Bras Basah Road, whose name was a corruption of the Malay words, beras basah (wet rice), from a Malay folklore about someone stealing rice and escaping with it in a tongkang. But through divine intervention, the amount of rice grew and grew as the tongkang was making its way down the river. Eventually, the thief met his fate when the tongkang capsized and all the rice spilled into the river and got wet. George and I walked a respectful distance apart: he was seven paces ahead, and I walked dutifully behind. As we walked along Stamford Road, my heart began to beat a drumbeat. I was so looking forward to seeing this room that held all these wonderful books which I could take home in turn. Passing some bookshops along the way, we paused to peer at the window displays, the books looked new and grand, especially the picturebook hardbacks, expensive jewels out of our reach. If there was any money at home, food took first priority, storybooks, especially new ones, were not even remotely on the list. Climbing the stairs cut into the small hill leading up to the library was like climbing towards a new planet. For people with a capacity to simply go into a shop to buy a book, this must seem like an exaggeration. But for me, the different worlds upon worlds upon worlds pressed into words, were waiting for my eyes to light them up and bring them to life. Learning to read was such a marvellous skill, I wondered how I had survived before, not being able to read. At the reception, George helped me to register as a member of the library and my hand was shaking when I held the pen. I was signing myself to a new life. Six books! I was allowed to take home six books for three weeks without paying a single cent! It was beyond my wildest dream. If I had not been so conservative, I would have hugged George for making it possible.

  We walked through the turnstile and there it was, this enormous Aladdin’s cave of books. There were reading tables and rows upon rows of shelves stacked tightly with books. My heart flipped over with excitement. I ran around touching the books to make sure they were palpable and real. People shushed me and George gave me a disapproving look, but he showed me how to use the index to find the type of books I wanted, then he left me. I didn’t know where to start. I could learn about England, America or Timbuktu. I could disappear into a world created by Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll or Louise May Alcott. The entire choice was mine. When you have not had a choice before, this was frightening. How do you make the best use of your time? What should you read? The mind raced ahead of itself and I had to rein it in, forcing myself to stay composed and be selective. Engrossed in my books, it was easy to slip somewhere else and leave my painful world behind and emerge in one where I had lots of food to eat, new clothes to wear. So when George came to collect me, he startled me out of my reverie. I had towers of books on my reading table, unable to decide which to take home.

  “You’re only allowed six,” he reminded me.

  In the end, I took Little Women, because one of the characters had the same name as myself, Alice In Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, a book on English nursery rhymes, a collection of fairy tales by Hans Christen Andersen with full-colour pictures which I wanted to show my mother and a Malay book on the legendary hero, Hang Tuah. None of the books were new, some of the pages yellowed, many of the spines weakened from years of handling. But their sad condition did not matter to me, only their content. On our return journey, George and I did not engage in conversation, so absorbed were we in our newly selected books. The printed words leapt up and down when the bus went over bumpy roads, but I was too immersed to care. My cousin’s house was not far from the bus-stop at the entrance to our village. His family was obviously better off than mine because their house stood alone in its small garden which had a mango tree and bougainvillea pots. They had their own bathrooms and jamban.

  “Thank you so much, George. I can’t thank you enough. You don’t realise what a world you have introduced me to.” It was the last I was to see of George. For a time, it was because my father forbade it, then later because his family moved out of the village and we did not keep in touch. I am still not sure what his connection was to our family, whether he was indeed a real cousin.


  I was very proud to be seen walking along the sandy, rutted road with my stack of books. I felt like some great scholar and was showing off that I could read. Pride is a sin and I was to pay heavily for it. Most of the village children were like Parvathi, forced into labour at a young age, either at the paper factory or at the rattan factory so they could not read, never held a book in their hands. I was one of the more fortunate ones. That afternoon, I was beaming and smiling as if I had struck gold. I organised all the household chores in my mind so that I could get time to read each evening before lights went out. I was determined to finish reading my allotted books before their due date and go back for more. Mak Ahyee saw me with all the books and she exclaimed, “Aiiyah! Banyak pandai! (Very Clever!)” Exactly what I had wanted people to say. I grew a hundred feet tall. But I shrank as suddenly when I saw my father’s bicycle leaning against the kitchen wall. What was he doing coming home from work in the middle of the afternoon? When I entered the house, Mak was huddled on the floor, her back against the meat-safe, her hair loosened. My father had obviously unleashed his temper on her again. My blood boiled.

  “Oh, Oh, our madam is back, eh? You so brave to go out with a boy!”

  So he had found out. Why should he be angry anyway? It was not as if I was compromising myself. He had presumed that my mother had given permission for me to go and had already taken it out on her. The seeds of frustration and anger inside me were blossoming. Why should he be the only one to decide what to do and when? Why did he always take everything out on my mother? I started by being piqued, then I became mad. Perhaps I inherited a little of my father’s temper, too, but it had been latent for so long. Now it pushed me to say something. But still, my upbringing buttoned up my lips, stopped me from reacting. We have to respect our elders. We have to respect our elders, I chanted mentally in my head. Even when they are wrong and behaving badly? A small voice in my head asked. And the voice won. Now, if I had been a man, a much bigger man, I could have socked my father right there and then. It was a blasphemous thought! But my father never gave me a chance. He moved towards me with menace in his eyes. Well, I’m in for it now, I told myself. It’s the rotan for sure. I gritted myself for the caning. I would let my mind drift so that I would not feel the lashes on my body. The books would be worth the punishment.