Frog Under A Coconut Shell Read online

  All these weeks spent with her and she doesn’t even remember I have been here. This is our personal tragedy because it robs her as much as it does me. I pay the taxi driver and start to unload. Always quick to respond, the angelic Dolores opens the electric gates and comes out to help with the shopping. Mak doesn’t know how to operate these modern things. In the initial years of her move from the kampong to Bernadette’s HDB flat, she didn’t even know how to use the gas hob. Nor wanted to. In a beautifully fitted kitchen with running water and all modern amenities, we would find her squatting at one corner of the kitchen fanning the coals in her clay stove. Although Bernadette had a washing machine, Mak washed her clothes by hand and hung them to dry on bamboo poles outside the eighth floor flat. She was in a time-warp then, she’s in a time warp now. But for different reasons.

  “Aiiyah!” Mak exclaims. “Why buy so many things? Cannot eat finish, lah.”

  My mother still lives in the days of want, so excessive expenditure is anathema to her. I want to surprise her the next morning with her buffet of fruits so I just say that I’ve bought things that I am taking back to England, which is partly true as I always take spices and other ingredients home.

  “You mean you’re going back so soon? But you only just got here!”

  Sometimes it seems futile to do something for someone whose memory is already in shreds. They can’t remember what you have done and you are left with a feeling that perhaps it was not worth the effort after all. I am saddened to think like this but I have left my husband and son for six weeks and my mother can’t even remember that I’ve been around for that long. So I can imagine what it must be like for Bernadette, who has to do things for her day after day only to hear Mak say, “If Ah Phine was here, she would take care of me.”

  Surely, there is a karmic debt between the two of them. There must be some lessons that they need to learn together. All the same, it can’t be pleasant for Bernadette to have her efforts canceled by Mak’s remarks.

  Potong Pasir was razed to the ground in 1976, bulldozers coming round like cattle on stampede, kicking up a flurry of dust. The seeds were sown for the skyscraper buildings that would sprout from its soil. Mak went to live with Matthew and his wife in a flat, looking after their baby daughter when my sister-in-law returned to work. When Agatha married and had children, she went to live with them to look after my nieces. Her life, in her youth, had been one of slaving, rearing and nurturing, and her life in her old age, was still one of rearing and nurturing. My own children were taken care of by my mother-in-law whilst I worked. When Agatha had a maid, Mak went to live with Bernadette who was still unmarried and needed to get a HDB flat. Under Singapore law, an unmarried person under 40 was not entitled to a flat unless she had an aged parent living with her. So that was how our mother came to live with Bernadette. My sister has had more physical years with Mak than I have had with our mother, yet Mak still harks back to the times she and I had with each other. I try to salve Bernadette’s pain by explaining that our mother is not being deliberately hurtful, that she is unaware of the things she says, that she is somehow steeped in the past where I was the one who was there for her.

  “It’s all right for you, you’re always the goodie and I’m the baddie.”

  I am neither the goodie nor the baddie. Some roles in life seem chosen for us, without our consent. Perhaps in the wisdom of our soul state, we ourselves made the choice, but why don’t we know? What I do know is that I’m not just my mother’s daughter. I am her hope and dreams. When I separated from her at birth, she passed her baton to me to complete her race. The handing over of the baton didn’t happen in one quick changeover, it has taken years, years of subtle learning through which she feeds me her desires, her hopes, her dreams, her life which has not been. When I divorced, I felt that I had failed her as well as my sons and husband. Only in retrospect have I learnt that if I had stayed in that marriage, I would have thrown my life away — and my mother’s. So I lived life to the full because I was like a pregnant woman, carrying another life within me, eating and living for two. When I used to relate to her my activities, learning to drive, swim, ski, sky-dive, her eyes would glow and her face brightened, the corners of her mouth lifting. She lived on a borrowing of my life, licked with pleasure off my plate. And I must honour her.

  “Look, it’s Ah Phine, jumping off aeroplane,” she would show my pictures to the neighbours or anyone who called on her. “Look, this is book Ah Phine has written.”

  Even after she left Potong Pasir, there were many who called on her, those who had known her in the kampong, known the woman who had put others before herself, the one who had delivered babies in the middle of the night and attended to calls for help. But the visitors are getting fewer, nobody feels like making a journey to call on someone who can’t remember anything about it afterwards. Of my brothers, only Matthew continues with his weekly Sunday visits, bringing Mak’s favourite nonya kueh for her to eat. Today, if I tell her about things I do, she would not be able to grasp their significance. The world beyond the coconut shell is irrelevant to her. And that is how I know that our joint race is over, I have taken our baton to the finishing line. From now on, the race is my own and I must now run for myself. A twin soul pulled asunder. There is a kind of grief that comes from this tearing, like a Siamese from its twin. I am a gosling on uncertain feet.

  When you know of someone who is ill, you do not know what the morning would bring. You live by the hour, by the day, thankful that there is yet another respite from that final reckoning. When each of my sons was a baby, I used to spend many nights awake, watching for the rise and fall of their tiny chests, terrified of cot-death, a fear that every mother would know. When it became too dark to see, I put my finger to his nostrils so that I could feel the faint spray of air onto my finger. I breast-fed both of them throughout their first year to give their immune systems an added boost. Each day that they continued to live and grow was a small miracle to me. There is nothing anymore which would give my mother’s immune system a further boost. So each day she lives is a small miracle.

  I rise early but Dolores is earlier. I know she is preparing breakfast for Bernadette and her husband before they go to work. Some days when I feel lazy in England, I think of how nice it would be to come downstairs and have breakfast already prepared; and after a day’s work, to have dinner on the table like my sisters. David has suggested that we bring a Filipino maid over to England, but I don’t want her to feel alone in a vast country. Where we are in the countryside, a distance away from cosmopolitan London and Birmingham, there are very few Asians. In Singapore, the maid can mix with other maids at church or Lucky Plaza each Sunday, speak her own language, and meet her own kind. I know the loneliness of being a foreigner in an alien country, I can’t inflict that on another. As I descend the stairs, I can smell the aroma of coffee percolating. It’s a lovely smell which reminds me of Potong Pasir. I am surprised how the trail of thought leads me to my father. So many incidents of his foul temper have occupied my mind that there has been no space left for his acts of kindness, but now it appears that these memories are squeezing through, demanding to be remembered. The picture of my father’s face in my mind’s eye is one which is always distorted with wrath, but there is another emerging now, a softer face, smiling as he served breakfast. He did not do it all the time so when he did allow Mak to lie in, it was a weather-vane to indicate his good mood. It was a particular treat when he visited his mother the previous evening to return with minced meat patties which he would save for our breakfast. He’d make moey, a Teochew rice porridge cooked in water until it is soft, to go with the minced meat patties. Whilst the moey was cooking on the clay stove, he would brew the coffee in an enamel pot and if the aroma didn’t wake me, he would come and tickle the soles of my feet till I awakened. He was a different father to the one who haunted me. Why had I not allowed myself to remember this before? And why am I retrieving the memory now? Did I really hate my father or was I just very angry and wou
nded by him? Probably hate is too strong a word — there must be a word that describes this filial feeling I have for him but which is still coupled with this strong aversion to his behaviour. But I don’t know the word.

  Dolores helps me with skinning the fruits, slicing them and laying them out onto platters. When my mother had told me about her family buffet, she said something that made the image of the rainbow stick in my mind, so I try to fan out the sliced fruits to create a suitable effect with its rich colours: red pomegranates, orange papaya, pink jambu ayer, yellow pineapple and mangoes, green honeydew and seedless grapes, dark purple mangosteens.

  “What’s all this?” Bernadette asks when she comes down for her toast and coffee. Unlike myself, Bernadette loves her toast in the mornings, whereas I never eat bread if I can help it, preferring the huge variety of Asian breakfasts: nasi lemak, roti prata, thosai, ta mee, kway chap and many others. I learnt to reproduce them in England and David is always amazed that I can eat curry and chillies for breakfast, that I wouldn’t eat bread for breakfast even when he ran a bakery business. Bernadette is dressed in a very smart red suit which contrasts beautifully with her cream-white complexion, a complexion that is much favoured by the Chinese, unlike mine. She is meticulous over her make-up and her choice of accessories is rather becoming. When she sweeps down the stairs that morning, she reminds me of my schoolfriend, Elizabeth, when she had invited me to her house, looking like a queen, or a grand lady with impeccable taste and wealth.

  “Mak used to tell me that when Grandfather was alive, they had a selection of fruits for breakfast, so I thought I’d surprise her.”

  “She never told me anything like that.”

  Her voice trembles with the knowledge of having been excluded from a shared confidence. It is difficult for Bernadette. She is nearly five years my junior and, therefore, further from our mother. I was there first and had staked a strong claim in the relationship with Mak. Perhaps Agatha feels this sometimes, which would account for her reactions as well. But there are responsibilities that a first daughter has which subsequent siblings may not have. Before I was 12, I was already involved in housework, helping to wash the clothes of a family of nine by hand and had to empty the smelly chamber pot. Because of Robert’s illness, Mak had to go to hospital with him often, so I had to do all the cooking and cleaning, fetching water from the well or the standpipe, clear the drains of slimey, green water, and bathe and feed my younger siblings. I was the one who had to help Mak in the sale of her cakes and nasi lemak. Because Mak had set the precedence by having me educated, schooling for my two sisters was a natural progression and not the traumatic issue which had been mine. Though they had the hand-me-downs of my school uniforms, at least they were of the right colour. Therefore, it is inevitable that what I remember of our childhood may not be what Bernadette remembers. Our perceptions cannot be the same. By the time she was of an age to understand things, Jacob, Romia and Matthew were already contributing financially to the home, so food was not as scarce as it had once been. Better drainage and hygiene facilities provided around the village by the government meant that rats weren’t scuttling around the houses at night. When Bernadette was six in 1963, things were already changing: Singapore had just shed its colonial cloak to merge with Malaysia; in August 1965, when she was eight, Singapore broke off from Malaysia and became an independent country. Electricity was fed to villages like ours. Our father even bought a black-and-white TV, the first in our part of the village and every evening, we would invite all our neighbours in to sit on our cement floor to watch television. We even had a small refrigerator! Matthew and I filled the ice trays with syrup water and we called these blocks ayer batu Malaysia (Malaysian ice cubes) and sold three squares for 5 cents to the village children. It was very popular and gave us the money for our exercise books. Bernadette had been too young to know all this; she had been too young to worry.

  In the old days, Mak was always up with the sun. She was up before us and went to bed last, a typical, slaving homemaker. When she came to England in the summer David and I had our garden party to celebrate our wedding, she did the same, waking up when the sun lit up the sky to cook breakfast for everyone. Until we explained to her that we did not have equal days and equal nights as in the Equatorial regions. It was hard for her to comprehend. How do you explain the concept of the earth revolving around the sun or of solstices to an uneducated person? These days, time for her is measured by when she is fed or when Bernadette or Andy comes home. She cannot remember what day it is even if you had told her earlier, her days running into one another like spilled paint merging. When she wakes is dependent on the kind of night she has had, like all ill people, whether she has had a bad night or a good one, whether she slept at all.

  I hear soft shuffling sounds in her room, not the sure, confident steps of her youth but fumbling, uncertain steps. Limbs needing to be uncoiled and stretched before they allow movement. She goes to her ensuite bathroom and a little later, I hear the tap water running, the toilet flushing. I am glad she no longer has such distance to walk to the well to wash herself or to the jamban or to have to share it with the other village folks. She has no difficulty in squatting but will not be able to raise herself from a squat position, her bones weakened and depleted by osteoporosis, her muscles having lost their tone. Somewhere along the way, the clear skin and eyes and full head of hair have deserted her. Her door is ajar and I push it open slowly. She is sitting on the bed, loosening her pathetic, little bun.

  “Shall I help you comb your hair?”

  When I was a child, it was one of my greatest pleasures when she would let me brush her hair. Unfurled, her hair would spill down her back right up to the waist, a rich cascade of beautiful, black silk threads. I would stand behind her and run the comb through again and again, the ends of the comb massaging her scalp and she would close her eyes as if in bliss. I have watched that head of hair as it took on silver streaks which turned to pure white, witnessed its autumn as the strands of hair fell away. They are near winter on her head now, sparse white hair remaining on a barren landscape.

  “No!” She says too abruptly. “I can do it myself.”

  She is still spirited, momentarily jarring me by her tone. But I realise that it is her last stand at independence, her final claim to self-hood. She hates being dependent. Often, she used to tell me how terrible she would feel if she was an invalid, her body an object to be ministered by someone else. If she could, she would walk to her death. Sometime ago, I saw a play at the West End in London, where a daughter smothered her sick mother with a pillow. The audience laughed, albeit a nervous laughter and I walked out on the play. The scene disturbed me for a very long time. Now faced with a mother who is suffering, I can empathise with the daughter, understand that she was helping her mother to leave the world in a dignified way. So many children dealing with aged parents who are terminally ill or severely incapacitated are often caught in a dilemma of indecision about whether to prolong their parents’ lives artificially or otherwise. I am praying I will be spared such a decision.

  “Come out here. I have a surprise for you.”

  “Aiiyah!” She exclaims when she sees the spread of fruits and her favourite foods. After Bernadette and her husband had finished their breakfast, Dolores has placed a crochet-tablecloth over the wooden dining table and the platters are arranged in the order of the tiers of rainbow colours. It is impressive.

  “So much food, so much food,” Mak says as though in disbelief, the joy in her voice lighting up her wrinkled face, her almost-opaque fish eyes. She claps her hands childishly. “And all these lovely, lovely fruits! It’s been a long time since I have seen something like this. Grandfather used to own fruit estates that spanned the whole of Malaya, you know. Did I ever tell you that when I was a child, we used to have a buffet of fruits for breakfast? Just like a rainbow. Just like a rainbow.”

  Fourteen

  Though I enjoy being in Singapore, I also like the thought of leaving it. When I first
felt that way, I felt guilty, as if I was being unfaithful to my family and my fellow Singaporeans. Although I love the hawker food here, enjoy the lack of formality and the ability to slip into my old tongue, it is no longer home. I find it hard to cope with the constant battering of traffic sounds, the claustrophobia of buildings and the mass of people. This is not just peculiar to Singapore but to every big city I know, and both David and I avoid them like the plague, accustomed as we are to country ways and country peace. During the past six weeks, when I had found myself being hemmed in, I took drives to the East Coast so that I could look out to a long vista of trees, beach and sea. There is something healing about an open sky, raw countryside and a huge body of water. Here, at the East Coast I was still blighted by noise, by the huge freighters that plied the international waters that is so close to shore. Both Bernadette and Agatha’s families belong to a private club which is by the sea and they have very kindly taken me there, but the club looks out onto land where trees are being up-rooted for more buildings, exposing red earth as though its heart is bleeding. A short distance away, across the waterway, on the shores of Johore Baru in West Malaysia, oil refineries are spewing out acrid smoke. I miss my regular walks down Ludshott Common, right behind my house, with hundreds and hundreds of acres of rolling hills belonging to the National Trust. I miss my meditation seat, a sawn off tree trunk by the side of the lake at Waggoners Wells, where I can watch the wild ducks paddle and then fly off as quickly as they had landed, the branches of trees dipping into the water. Nearby, under the wooden bridge, there is the sound of a small waterfall cascading into the lower lakes, the chirping of the birds, the call of the visiting cuckoo. I could lose myself in the sounds of nature, all mechanical noise outside my perception. I love being there in autumn when the leaves turn into gold and red, detach themselves from the branches and eddy softly down from the trees like red and gold feathers. Or when the trees are bare, poised to yield new life. Or when tight buds slowly uncurl to show two small, green leaves. Above all, I miss that freshness in the air, clean and sharp, sometimes smelling of wood-smoke, gorst or heather. But I don’t say this to my family. Like many people here, they have the propensity to misinterpret liking other things, another life and another place as criticising Singapore and Singaporeans. Preferences and opinions should comply with the general norm. It’s the way they have been taught to think. Country before self. You don’t find this mass devotion anywhere else, this moving as one united body, one brain.