Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 24

  In real life, there are no neat beginnings nor endings. Events are sometimes held in suspension for an extraordinarily long period. It is the same with my mother’s illness. At first when I arrive back in England, I fear a sudden phone call that will summon me back to Singapore. But as time lapses, I relax, picking up the threads of my life with my own family, a business, new writing. Obligations to fulfill. One isn’t an island unto oneself. It is seven o’clock in the morning and the phone rings. Both David and I wake up with a start. Such an early call suggests an urgency, and is probably made by someone from a different time zone. I am seized with fear. But it’s only my stepdaughter Sadie. She believes that because she is up, others have to be too. Someone should teach her that it’s not sociable to call at this sort of time in the morning unless it’s an emergency. Consideration has never been her strong point.

  “Where have you guys been? We don’t see enough of you. The children don’t get a chance to know their grandfather.”

  Her voice is like the persistent whine of a mosquito. I put David on the telephone to his daughter. I have enough in life to deal with.

  Telephones transmits a voice but not a face nor a heart. Every week, I would call Mak. She used to remember that I always call her on a Monday afternoon and would eagerly await my call. When her days became blurred, she only knew what day it was when I called or whether Bernadette was working that day; daily events becoming her calendar, her way of measuring days and time. Her life is reduced to this, a notching of each small thing that takes place in her day which has become the entire sum of her coconut shell. The weeks and months pass. Each time I pick up the telephone to call her, I am apprehensive that she may not know who I am or that she will not recognise my voice. It’s a kind of gamble. Deterioration plays roulette with her memory, some days she remembers, other days, she is vague, unsure of where I am. But she has not forgotten me yet. I have to be grateful for these things.

  “How are you, Mak? It’s Ah Phine.”

  “Ah Phine, ah! Are you coming round for dinner? I can cook some rasum.”

  It is touching that although she has forgotten so much and can’t remember where I live, yet she can remember my favourite foods. It is instinctive for her to be caring, concerned about others. Alzheimer’s scalps her memory and parts of her personality, but her true nature is still hanging on. There is an intrinsic part of her which she hasn’t lost. Is there a continual struggle within her to hang on to bits of herself? Is she aware that her personality is splintering, disintegrating? I hate to think of her being aware of this. I am in a cleft stick. If I don’t remind her that I am in England, she will expect me for dinner; if I do, it will wake her to the fact that she has forgotten. I feel a need to try to make her remember because otherwise she might slip more quickly into a vacant mind.

  “I live in England, Mak.”

  “Oh, ya? When did you go there? If you’re free, come and see me some time. I don’t feel so good you know. My eyes are watering a lot and I get very dizzy. Especially when there’s so much to do. You know, all that cooking. People coming and going. I get really tired nowadays, not like I used to be. I have to watch that Andy you know, it’s Deepavali and I don’t want him to get under the cow’s hooves.”

  For a few seconds, she has lost me. I cannot follow her train of thought. But the word association of cow and Deepavali, the Indian Festival of Lights, sparks an image in my mind, of a cow, beautifully decked out with floral garlands, tributes from its Hindu devotees. Then I remember it. She’s talking about the religious procession that used to wind through our village in the evenings during the Indian Festival. The cow, which is a holy animal in Hindu scriptures, was garlanded by the villagers on its journey along the rutted road, carrying a small statue of a deity on its harness. The priests in their dhotis walked bared-footed along the sacred cow, drumming and playing their cymbals. The villagers would join their singing and chanting. And though we were not Hindus, we all turned up to watch and to benefit from the fruits of the occasion. Every now and again, the procession would stop and the priests handed out sweets and roasted chickpeas to the people lining the sandy road. As a child, I did not understand the significance of the procession. In fact, I had quite forgotten about it, if Mak had not reminded me. But her words triggers my own memory and I can see the bright lights of the shrine, the statue of Krishna smiling, his neck wreathed with several garlands. The music was cheerful and dancers danced bare-footed along our mud-packed road. Every now and again, the procession stopped for devotees to come forward to slam fresh coconuts on the ground. The husked coconuts would break, sending shattered pieces across the ground, its water pouring out to wet the thirsty earth. Then children like myself would rush forward to pick up the jagged pieces, white kernel on hard brown shell, jostling and pushing to get at them. I never knew then why the coconuts were smashed so violently, but now I do. Like the process of Raja Yoga, Hindus believe that to attain spiritual enlightenment, the ego has to be eradicated or as one of my gurus laughingly called it, “an ego-dectomy.” The coconut is supposed to represent the ego and smashing it is symbolic of the intention to do away with the ego. Hindus still practise this at the entrance of their temples before they go in to worship.

  Mak must have the festivities in her mind’s eye when she speaks to me about it. She sees the crowd and the noise and fear that Andy might get under the cow’s hoofs. Of course, in reality Andy would not have witnessed such a procession since they don’t hold them anymore in the same way. I was always pleased when I could collect enough coconut pieces for my mother to clean the sand off them, scrape the kernel off the shells so that they could be grated and used for cooking. We depended upon such gifts for our treats. It would be interesting to find out what had triggered these memories for Mak. Nonetheless, I am grateful to her for reminding me of some of my happier days in the village. There were happy days. Though we were deprived materially, there was such a camaraderie in the village that living elsewhere didn’t generate. Our doors were always open in the day, unlike in the blocks of flats when they remain shut. Everybody knew everybody else, not stuck in their own flats, oblivious to their neighbours.

  “Mak Ahyee! Sudah makan belum? Mari, lah, saya ada masak bubor kachang!”

  When she had finished the day’s work of washing and cooking, Mak would take a rest, sitting on the threshold of the kitchen and she would invite our Indian neighbour to sample her bubur kachang, a sweet dessert made from mung beans and coconut milk. They sat cross-legged on the floor and would occasionally share a sireh together. Preparing the betel nut leaf and its condiments was carried out like a ritual and they would chew and talk and spit out its reddish juice. (When I became a dental nurse after I finished my Senior Cambridge, I learnt that chewing sireh caused cancer of the buccal cheeks, so I made her stop.) But she had never chewed it regularly like my Aunts anyway, so it was not difficult for her to give it up.

  While the mothers sat on the threshold of the houses, talking to each other across the lorong, the children would thrash each other in hantam bola, using the hard tennis balls for the game. It was really a boy’s game but up until I was 12 when I was made to wear a dress, I was allowed to play only because I looked and acted like a boy, climbing trees, playing marbles, my bare chest as flat as our sandy yard. My sisters preferred teng-teng, hopping and skipping over the rectangles. Hatam bola required an ability to run. Each player was allotted a hole the size of the tennis ball. One person would roll the ball into the hole whilst the others crowded around the holes which were dug side by side to each other. The moment the ball entered a hole, whoever the owner was had to retrieve it, whilst the others ran away. Then he would have one throw at us. The person who was hit got to roll the ball next. The rule was that we should only hit the legs but more often than not, the rule got broken and it could turn out to be quite painful.

  “If you don’t fancy having rasum today, I can make you some asam pedas.”

  Mak is going through a list of my favourite food
s. The she talks about Mak Ahyee although they haven’t seen each other in years. But I let my mother talk even when I know that the talk is not about actual things happening to her right now. It is good to hear her voice because some days when she is really unwell, our conversation is brief. Sometimes when I telephone, she seems to have difficulty speaking to a disembodied voice. It is far better that she continues to extract memories from her past and to thread them to the present than for her to have no memories at all. I am told that at some stage, she will eventually lose the capacity to extract old memories. Then she will retreat into a cave of silence with no echoes of a lived life to bounce off its empty walls.

  I wonder if people like my mother or other mentally handicapped people, like those who suffer from autism or Down Syndrome, are already journeying between the earth and the etheric plane. They are not understandable to us only because their body is in this plane but their mind isn’t. Perhaps they are freer than us. A while back, I used to work with the mentally handicapped for a few years in Guildford, Surrey, using yoga as a therapy. My main task was to help them and their carers cope with mood swings by encouraging them to breathe longer breaths rather than the short, sharp ones they take when agitated. Except for the outbursts that threw them off-centre, most of them exhibited a child-like capacity for joy, their faces almost angelic and free from earthly stress. I often used to wonder if it meant they could disconnect with our earth plane by choice. Therefore, should I be unhappy when my mother reached that stage of disconnection?

  We are all connected to other human beings in so many different ways. If we see each connection as a ray of light, then each person radiates a multitudinous array of lines to people they interact with at all levels, some connections stronger than others. It is a light network that links the spirit. The ray of light between my mother and myself is bright, keeping the two of us within sight of each other although we may be thousands of miles apart. We don’t just see with our physical eyes. She and I share the same soul space. Spiritual twins. Of course I am aware that ours is not the only connection, she is obviously connected to my brothers and sisters and to the people she tended in Kampong Potong Pasir, but the intensity of their light is different. Sometimes, I suspect that she and I are spiritual Siamese twins, attached to each other by our spiritual hearts, our anahata chakras. But even Siamese twins have to be separated to live a fulfilling life, and develop their own personalities.

  Sixteen

  Mak has made it to the new millennium. Amidst the world’s celebrations and fears of the Y2K Bug, I too celebrate my mother’s will to survive, yet fear the bug that will end her life. Is it instinct which causes a person to continue to fight to stay alive or something more, an unfulfilled task that the soul has to finish? What guides our life to fruition? There is a Chinese superstition which says that if the ill survives the Chinese New Year, they will survive the whole of the new year. Thankfully, my mother sees the Dragon Year in. So it’s not surprising that she also manages to notch another birthday on 3 March. Amongst the many things that she and I share, we share the same astrological sign in the English calendar. Is it her 85th or 86th? No one knows for sure. What does it matter now? Her mind is already arrested in its growth, no matter what her chronological age is. How long can the ship of the body last without its captain, the mind, to provide the directions? Will it rock amongst the tempest of her illness, and ram into ice bergs?

  Winter has come and gone, the bare branches beginning to show life, tight buds poised to unfurl. I feel lucky that I have the opportunity to walk through the Common with its expanse of land and sky. In between the shivery showers, the sun steps out with great daring, the sky so blue and the clouds so fluffy and still that it looks devised by human hand. Earlier, as I crossed our drive to get to the Common, I was touched by cold water. The garden hose had been left on to fill the swimming pool in the optimistic hope that we will have a lovely spring and a warm summer. As I pass, a break in the hose sends a delicate spray of water to wet my ankles. Standing at a particular angle, I could see a rainbow arc into the air in brilliant colours from the small hole in the tubing. Ever since I kicked rainbows out of puddles with my bare feet in the kampong, I have loved rainbows. I look for them in the glint of cut-glass, on any shiny surface, on water. It gives me such a thrill to see a rainbow whatever its size, whatever it falls on. I consider it a gift! The kind of gift I would like to take to my mother because she, too, looked for these small things in her daily life with her watchful eyes. Tired as it may sound, money and success do not bring happiness. True wealth is the ability to appreciate the throbbing vibrance of living things around you. Sometimes when I see David chained to his principles and his desk, with hardly a moment to relax, especially when the sun is shining brightly outside, I feel sad for him. He is stuck in his office, glued by obligations and needs. He lives and works in a beautiful house with a beautiful garden surrounded by beautiful countryside and yet he has no time to see our cherry tree in bloom, fat pink clusters of blossoms along its branches. With so much space outside, all he breathes is the stale, confining air of his office. He might as well be in prison.

  “But I have to earn a living,” he says.

  It is what he believes. I keep asking him to cut down, sell up our big house, have a smaller garden, fewer cars. But I think work is an excuse for him to fill his emptiness. I want to love him by taking him on my walk so that he can smell the sweet scent of the gorse bushes, feel the grass under his feet, hear the twittering of the birds. But he rejects my offering. Nature is a healer and I am convinced she can slow down the carousel of his frenzied thoughts, untense the muscles that pull his mouth tight. He hunchs at his desk, weighed by his view of responsibility, his need to see his children in comfort and luxury. Perhaps, like me, he fears having to return to the poverty of his youth. He does not understand how wealthy he already is.

  Though I walk alone, I am never lonely on these walks. I save the treasures that I see to present them to my mother. I feast my eyes on the bright yellow flowers on the gorse bushes, leaves looking silver when they turn on the wind, new growth on firs standing upright like brown candles on a Christmas tree. I thank the One above for plucking me from the confines of a small congested city to release me into this green and lovely countryside where flowers and trees are left to grow wild and straggly, where animals run unhampered. My mother comes with me on these walks, her spirit and mine sharing a love of nature. She was so connected with the earth before, she loved to dig into the dark loam soil with her bare hands, birthing chillies, green beans, tomatoes, coriander, curry leaves, papaya, rose and jasmine bushes. She reared chickens and ducks for their eggs, clucked and quacked with them as if she spoke their language. Only when they were old did we slaughter them for their meat. Mak respected life in all forms. In our village in Potong Pasir, our garden was no more than a small bed in the sandy compound, yet my mother treated it like royal grounds. When she came to England and saw our large garden, totally without fruit trees and vegetables, she said in a sad, disbelieving voice, “Aiiyah! All this land and no fruits, no vegetables. What a waste, lah.”

  Once I was be able to describe what I experience on the Common and she would drink in the scene, her face lighting up with joy. She would be able to see what I see, pinch the landscape from my mental frame and our sharing would be complete. But these days, it’s impossible to tell her what I see. It’s as if the palette of her mind has run out of hues to paint pictures that are not before her eyes. A blindness of her inner senses. What she can just about grasp these days are the shadows of reruns from old films, images of her life that had been captured in her mind. But even then, they are not smooth running, they fuzz, snap and crackle. She cannot remember today but she can recall yesterday.

  It is late May and Bernadette calls to say that Uncle Kanchil is ill. For me, he is a name from the past, the uncle who fled to California to start his own history. One of his daughters went out to live in Singapore and has been in touch with my brothers and si
sters in Singapore but I missed out. I had not seen him for more than 30 years. He’s my mother’s youngest brother and thus her only living sibling since Fourth Aunt, then Great Aunt and Second Aunt died. Now only he can tell me if what my mother had told me about their shared life are facts and not the fantasies of her mind. Uncle Kanchil had continued to make annual visits to see Mak and once Romia took her to see him in San Francisco. But lately, he has had several heart attacks and is living on knife edge, continually linked up to an oxygen tank.

  “I’d like to take Mak to see him before it’s too late.”

  Did Bernadette mean it would be too late in the sense that Uncle Kanchil might be dead before Mak could make the trip or too late in the sense that our mother will not be able to recognise her own brother? Some things are better left unsaid, words can make real what is still in the future. There isn’t any point in tasting the bitterness before biting into the fruit. I can sense that it is necessary for Bernadette to make this trip with Mak; away from home and the ever attentive Dolores, it is her opportunity to mother our mother all by herself, create a stronger light connection.

  “Yes, if Mak is able to travel, why don’t you go? You haven’t been to America. It will be a good holiday for you as well. I’ll pick up the tab for her fare.”

  “No, it’s all right. She has enough in the bank.”

  Bernadette never ever takes advantage.

  I don’t know if my mother remembers how much she has told me about her brother. And I don’t even know how much she has told my sisters and brothers about that part of her life. Did they know that our mother arrived in Singapore with her mother who was in shock over the loss of her husband and fortune? Was I the only one whom Mak shared her confidence with? Or was I the only one to commit her words into my memory? When we are dots within a pattern, we cannot see the whole pattern. Do we have the capacity to step outside the pattern and see our own place in it? Looking back at my mother’s life, it seems as if she is somehow aware, on a different level, of the pattern she is to weave. When she told me her story, was she already acting according to a divine blueprint that was already drawn out, telling me her story so that when she stopped remembering, I could regurgitate it and authenticate her life?