Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 20

  “I went to the National Library to borrow books. They’re important for my studies. Look!” I thought it wise to explain in case he had the wrong idea why I went out, unchaperoned. I held the books out as proof of my outing. “George took me straight there and then we came home. That’s all.”

  “Don’t talk to me about your studies. This is all your mother’s fault, encouraging you to think. I said education is bad for women, poison their minds, make them less meek. Before, you wouldn’t dare answer back. Now you open your mouth like a chicken backside! You let other people see you walking alone with a boy and you say ‘That’s all’? You disgrace me, behave like a slut.”

  I didn’t know what slut meant. But I knew he was angry and wasn’t listening to reason. His arm shot out and knocked the books out of my hands. I was startled. I had expected him to attack me not my books. My beautiful, precious books. Their pages opened like wings to take flight. But like wounded birds, they flapped uselessly then tumbled to the cement floor. I quickly squatted down to rescue them. In the next instant, I received quite a shock as my father kicked the books out of my hands. The books took second flight and in the process, some of the weakened spines snapped and the books came apart. I was horrified.

  “No! No! Stop it! They don’t belong to me. I have to return them.”

  In response, he picked up one book, Little Women, I think, and started tearing its pages. The sight of him, so nonchalantly destroying something I love, brought up all the frustration and anger I felt towards him. What had the book done to him that he should hurt it? At the same moment, all the times that he had beaten my mother, my brothers and myself flashed before my eyes. Okay, so he had his reasons. But we were always wrong, never him. He was always right. Suddenly, his bad temper and injustice grew to huge proportions in my mind. Now he had committed the greatest atrocity — tearing my precious book. He had done everything possible to thwart my education; and now that I had one through my mother’s efforts, he was still not going to let me enjoy my love of books. I saw him as unreasonable and purposely wicked. That was when I lost it, years of upbringing and respect and tradition flew out of my mind. Now all I wanted to do was hurt him in the same way he hurt my mother, my brothers, my books. I did the unthinkable. I raised my fists to my own father. With a cry that rose from the well of disappointments, I lunged at him. Caught off guard, he crashed into the meat-safe, nearly toppling it over.

  “Ah Phine, ah!” I heard my mother shout to restrain me, but I was beyond caring. My anger propelled me forward like someone crazed and I hammered my fists on his chest. He recovered very quickly, seized my wrists and kneed me in my belly. He was very strong. All his weight-lifting was not for nothing. Besides, I was still only a young teenager. I fell onto the floor. Then he kicked me hard. Like a football, I rolled over. He kicked me again. I think I heard my mother pulling at him to stop. He pushed her away and she must have fallen down because I heard a soft thud. He took off his belt and began whipping me. I shielded my face with my arms and they took the lashings. I decided to move out of his sphere. I raised myself but he kicked me and I doubled up. Determined to get away, I got up again and he kicked me and I went down. This occurred repeatedly and I knew that somewhere in-between I ceased to be his daughter and he ceased to be a man. My ears were buzzing. I felt blood flooding my mouth. At some stage, I passed out.

  Thirteen

  My greatest fear when I came to was that my father would not let me return to school. As long as my father was alive, my entire schooling hung on the thin thread of his approval; if he disapproved, I could not continue school. He knew this, knew that I had to behave, compromise if I wanted to continue school. So I learnt that the way of open aggression was not always the best. There is a Chinese proverb that says, The river flows gently but can erode mountains. It is the Yin way, not the Yang. I had to learn to be subtle. I wouldn’t let my father see that I was hurting inside more than I hurt outside, though internal wounds are not so easily exposed. Patches of blue turned green around the edges on my skin. Because I was so brown, bruises didn’t usually show. Like our dark unfathomable eyes, our complexion does not betray our emotions. Even when the heat rises from my neck to my face, no blush is displayed. So we appear to be deceptively inscrutable. But that altercation with my father was mapped all over my body, the straps of his belt making its mark, the weight of his foot, his fists. In our world, the welts and the bruises were testimony of my disobedience, not necessarily of his character.

  “Cannot go to the library anymore!” My father commanded. “If you don’t listen to my words, you will not go to school at all!”

  Some privileges are better lost to win the war. Matthew returned the books for me and paid the fine for the damages. For the next four years, my feet did not touch the hallowed grounds of the National Library again until after my father died.

  “Never mind,” Mak tried to console me. “You have enough books to read anyway from your school library.”

  I wonder if she understood that it felt as though I was thrown back into prison, the sunshine of a wider world of knowledge shown then taken from me. Years later, when I read Richard Lovelace’s To Althea From Prison which said that “Stone walls do not a prison make”, I resonated with the words, understanding that a prison could indeed be created without walls. My mother knew what it was like to earn my father’s wrath, so she sympathised with me but she would never have said anything against my father, nor allowed any of us to say anything against him.

  “He’s the one to put food in your mouths,’ she said.

  She was loyal to him to the end. I had just turned 16 when he died. All of his working life when I was a child, he had cycled to and from work, between Potong Pasir and Bukit Timah and around the island. He had strong leg muscles and a superb physique formed by his weight-lifting. The only evidence of his age was his smooth frontal pate. His downfall came eventually from his cigarette-smoking. Thank goodness, our front and back doors were usually left open, otherwise he would have polluted our small house with his fumes. He retired from work at 55, gave up all those miles of daily cycling. In one year, his muscles turned to flab, he developed a duodenal ulcer, which gave him a lot of grief for two years; in the third year, he was dead. I had been at the hospital earlier that evening, sitting by his bedside. His face was bleached of colour, his abdomen bloated.

  “Phine,” he said. “Ah Kou (his mother) is here. Do you see her?”

  My grandmother, his mother, was long dead. When he said that, the hairs on my flesh stood on ends and I knew he would not survive the night. My mother and sister-in-law took over from me to stay by his bedside for the night. When Mak came home at three o’clock in the morning, I knew that Lao Ee had come for him. They brought him back in a casket, the lid open during the period of the wake. I stared at the corpse, remembered thinking how deeply set his eyes were, though I had not noticed it before. His anger and his life had left him deflated and he looked much smaller than when he was alive. I can still see the day of the funeral as his coffin left our attap hut. My father had come in poverty and left in poverty. I was sure that my mother would sigh with relief that he was gone and she was freed of her tormentor. So I was surprised to hear the anguish in her cries.

  “Why are you leaving me alone? Who is going to take care of me and these children?”

  How little I knew of human nature. For years, her words rang again and again in my brain, it was as though she has somehow betrayed me by being so loyal to him, that her pain and my pain, which resulted from him was imagined, not real. Little by little, through my own experiences, through being married do I understand that a wife’s loyalty to her husband is unique, no matter how he treats her, he is still her husband. Linked and bound through their bodies and emotions, through many of the trials they share in their life together; it’s a cleaving that is not like any other even if they don’t bring forth any children. What we saw of my father was not all that she knew of him. Life is not black and white, it is about light and
dark with many flickering shadows.

  The real Catherine Koh Soon Neo is in shadow now, eclipsed by a self which robs her of her true light. The doctor and every one else who has experience of the disease tell us it will get worse. It’s a sentence with no possible escape except through death. It’s hard to know what to wish for, an early death for her so that she doesn’t have to suffer anymore or for her to continue in a shadow of a life so that we would not miss her? It is one of love’s great dilemmas.

  “They’re not aware of what they’ve become, you know,” people say.

  But I’m not entirely convinced. I believe that the despair and anger she sometimes displays stems from a deep frustration at her decreasing ability to remember. Though I don’t want to, I have to leave her. I have another life now, in a place where she cannot follow. It is terrible when you’re going away from someone who is ill, you never know if you’re going to see them alive again. And it is worse when that someone is ill and also suffers from an increasing loss of memory. Double-edged. You never know if you’re going to be recognised when you next come back. That is my concern. I wonder though if it is a selfish worry. Does it matter if I am not recognised? I cogitate upon this. Yes, it does. If she doesn’t recognise me, it means that the mother I know will no longer be present. The thought descends upon me like an ice-cold shower.

  How much can you do for your loved one? How much is enough? Length and breadths are for measuring static things, things which can be seen and boxed. It is impossible to measure things which hold no shape and is only a space in your heart. I try to think what I can do to please her, my last chance to spark her face with joy before I leave. And then I remember her telling me about the fruits her family used to have for breakfast in the mornings when Grandfather was alive and owned fruit estates. I go out to the wet market not far from where Bernadette lives to buy Mak a selection of fruits. It is a special excursion for me, too, because I really love the sound and the chatter and the laughter that normally permeate the stalls in these markets.

  When I was a child, wet markets gave local lives colour and fun. Even the rich shopped at them, servants trailing to carry the heavy baskets of their employers. If you ever saw a European, he would stand out like a white egg amongst a nest of brown.

  Lao Pasar and Tekka were renown markets housed under wrought-iron Victorian roofs, with numerous stalls selling a plethora of goods, heaps of fresh vegetables from the farms of Chua Chu Kang or from Malaya, beautiful flowers from Cameron Highlands, spices from India. However, the hanging bloodied carcasses of goats and pigs were not as palatable a sight. Live chickens squawked noisly in their cages until they were selected to be killed; a cauldron of water was kept on the boil to dunk the slaughtered chicken in, so that they could be easily feathered. Fish of all kinds, with giant prawns and squids lay on beds of shaved ice to keep them fresh. Embroidered clothes from Indonesia would compete with local batik and Chinese silks and all sorts of other crafts. And, of course, there were the food stalls, Indian food, Malay food, Chinese food and even fish and chips were temptingly available. The different smells were often delightful, except for those of dead meat and dried blood. Mak favoured Tekka which was at Serangoon Road and not too far from home. It was where she went if there was money available and Chinese New Year was around the corner. When I accompanied her, I hung about in the hope that she would buy me one of my favourite treats, a lovely soft-boiled turtle egg. I always tried to manoeuvre her to that stall where the wizened old man would be boiling the eggs. It was delicious straight from the boiling pot, the old man would pierce a hole at its top and hand me the egg. I would stand there and suck out the soft inside of the egg with a slurping sound. If the empty shell was boiled again quickly to give it back its shape and then cooled, it made a suitable ball for playing ping pong, the sound echoing in the hollow shell as it pinged and ponged across the wooden table.

  My mother was good at making a little food seem like a lot. It was a necessary skill. A few slices of meat or fish could look plentiful with lots of vegetables. Where greens were not affordable, we got food laced with tubers, normal potatoes, sweet potatoes, tapioca or yam. They were the stuff that filled your belly, made you think you were not hungry. On bad days, we ate boiled rice with soya sauce and nothing else. But Mak always served it with a smile. She shone light into our darkness. Our evening meals were a family ritual, all of us sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, eating out of enamel plates. She would regale us with stories of the life she knew or of traditional folk-tales. After dinner, she became a minstrel playing her guitar and reciting us some pantun. Sometimes a neighbour would join her and they would recite a playful pantun which was a duet of remark-and-response. On such evenings, my father would watch her face and the way her hands fluttered in the air delicately like some Chinese wayang singer. More than not, after such evenings, late in the night, he would scuttle across the room to join her in bed. It was obvious that her beauty and manner had aroused his lust or could it be that he was indeed a man who was much more attuned in emotions that I gave him credit for? Why should I be surprised that he should be so sexual when he was so firm in his body, riding miles on his bicycle and exercising every day? Whatever moved him to action, it could not have been easy for him to show his love or assuage his lust in a small hut where our two beds lay head-to-foot with one another, he and my brothers in one, my mother and sisters in the other. If I had not been awake on my canvas bed beside them, the sound of the wooden bed creaking would wake me, as I am sure, would have awakened my brothers and sisters. There were whispers in the dark which suggested that he wasn’t just ruthlessly possessing her without preamble. My father usually wore a singlet and sarong at home and the sarongs probably helped to expedite their love-making because neither of them wore anything underneath their sarongs. They tried to suppress their moans, which in some way intensified their feelings and intensified the feeling of tension in the hut. But more than not, he could not stop himself from calling out her name or her for that ultimate sigh which signalled the end of his short escapade and a return to his bed.

  I search for my mother’s favourite fruits: mangoes, papaya, pineapples. Oranges, apples and grapes, which had to be imported, were not for the common folk during our youth; they were sold mainly in the posh Cold Storage on Orchard Road, the first supermarket in the country, a place beyond our reach until I worked there many years later, which brought me into contact with my present husband. When my mother came to England all those years ago to eat grapes which were seedless, she thought it was marvellous since the ones with seeds used to get caught under her dentures. Seedless grapes were a novelty then and were quite costly, so they became a special treat to get for Mak. I buy some to remind her of those early days and many of her other favourites. She told me that they didn’t have durians for breakfast, so I am not going to get them. Whilst looking round the fruit stalls, buying this and that, I recall how much she loved jambu ayer, those small, bell-shaped fruits which were translucent and tinged with pink. They used to be resplendent on trees in our kampong. I rarely see these fruits now. When bitten into, their juice would flow like sweet water, hence their name. Mak used to love them sliced and dipped into a saucer of soya sauce with fresh chillies and salt. But I can’t find them in the wet market near Bernadette’s place. So I take a taxi to Geylang Serai where they are more likely to be available.

  There is a made-up Malay village near Geylang Serai now which purports to display life as it was in the kampong. But the sheaves of attap on the roofs look too new, the huts too regulated and pristine. Our village, Potong Pasir, like many other kampongs of that time, were a tangle of lorongs or sandy passage-ways which fed into huts made from unpolished planks washed with kapor, and sheets of corrugated asbestos or zinc patching broken walls or roofs. Bathrooms were open to the sky. Voyeurs would climb the surrounding coconut trees to peep out from in-between its fronds when the village beauties go there to bathe, while the really desperate would even watch old ladies strip. Vill
age life had its own unique amusements.

  I buy the briyani and other foods which Mak like. I know she can’t eat them all, her appetite is small, like a sparrow’s. But I buy them anyway. Still, I can’t find the jambu ayer, the search for them now becoming like a search for the Holy Grail. At last, when I am about to give up, I see a small bunch at one of the stalls.

  “Manis, tak?” I ask to ascertain its sweetness.

  “Tolong chuba,” the woman gives me permission to taste one. I bite into it and the juice of the fruit flows down my chin and I am happy because it will make Mak happy. It’s the small things now which delights her heart; she is past huge incidents and events. Her life is strung around small beads of daily happenings, whether she has been fed or whether someone has sat down to talk to her that day. It is life trimmed down to the minimum. Her world is now the coconut shell of her reduced mind.

  When I arrive at Bernadette’s place in the taxi, Mak is sitting on the settee looking out the French windows. Left alone with Dolores all day, she finds excitement in the activities on the street outside the house. She hastily gets up to open the front door to see better and walks with her painful gait down the short drive to the gate.

  “Oh, it’s Ah Phine. Dolores! Dolores! My daughter has come from England,” she cries out as though she has not seen me around for the last few weeks. Then to me, she says with genuine surprise, “So you have arrived!”