Frog Under A Coconut Shell Read online

  “Hello, Marm. How are you?” Dolores, the Filipino maid, rushes up to wrest my cases from me. Like many of the imported maids, she is extremely diligent and is a science graduate in her own country and aspiring to be a teacher.

  “Hot,” I say. “How are your children?”

  “Growing up very fast. Imelda is eight now, Carlos five.”

  She has left behind husband and children in the care of her mother to find more lucrative work here. Four months after she arrived, she had received a letter from her sister to say that her husband had run off with another woman. Wherever you turn, you see people worse off than yourself. It keeps you in perspective. Though she is paid a month what we pay our part-time house help in England a week, Dolores works days and evenings without complaint. She never goes to bed unless the whole family has gone to bed and is up before anyone else. She never takes a single day off (though Bernadette has persuaded her) because she is saving up every cent to send home to her family. There are many maids like her in Singapore, some from her country, others from Sri Lanka and Indonesia. They are creating a sub-culture in Singapore, meeting at churches and shopping centers, but Dolores thinks that to join them is a waste of hard-earned money. Employers have to pay a bond to the government to allow the maids into the country on a two-year permit with the understanding that they can’t work elsewhere and will never become citizens. If by any mishap they should get pregnant whilst being employed, they will be deported immediately and the employer will lose the bond. Dolores is small and thin, a heritage of her life in Manila. Unlike Agatha’s maid who is put into a black uniform with a white apron, Dolores wears a loose T-shirt and shorts. She is a jewel with Mak because she is patient and genuinely caring. I am particularly indebted to her because she accords my mother the dignity she deserves. On my last visit, I discovered that she loved to read so I bought her stacks and stacks of popular novels. This time I came with Helen Fielding’s Edge of Reason and Jilly Cooper’s Score and two nine carat gold studs for her dainty ears. Like other maids in this country, her spoken English is stilted and she addresses me as Marm and David as Sir David.

  “I didn’t realise I was knighted,” David said when he first encountered her, embarrassed at such a quaint practice.

  I step barefoot onto the cool marbled floor of the living room and Mak rises from the settee to greet me. She has been watching our arrival through the French windows that open onto a handkerchief size tiled patio that has a plastic table and two chairs. A wind chime hangs above the table and when there is a breeze from the nearby canal, it tinkles a delightful tune. Both the presence of the canal which carries water or shui and the wind chimes that sound the wind or feng were Agatha’s influence on Bernadette. Agatha is a devout feng shui believer who will not move house or office or change jobs until she has consulted a feng shui expert. Once she even changed the angle of the door to her house because the feng shui expert said that the positioning of the door was letting out all the good luck. That was what was said about the Hyatt Hotel on Scotts Road where I was working in the early 1980s. The ailing hotel was an American hotel run by a French-American general manager at the time. On the advice of the feng shui expert, all the glass doors fronting the street were ripped out and new doors put in their places, individually angled to deflect the bad luck and to bring in the good. To augment that, a row of water-fountains were set between the doors and each fountain had to spew water that rose to a specific height and volume. Feng shui is an exact science. The placement of the furniture in the general manager’s office was most extraordinary, with the desk slanted in the middle of the floor. After the makeover, a team of saffron-robed Chinese monks filed through the hotel chanting Om and dispensing incense. I can testify to the fact that after the effort, the hotel did indeed prosper, although I cannot vouch for its cause.

  I’m taken aback by my mother’s shrunken appearance, although it’s only been six months since I last saw her. An accelerated deterioration. Her head is a skull under translucent rumpled flesh, strands of white hair spread thinly over her scalp, her bun a pathetic knot. What used to be bright inquiring eyes are now dulled with cataracts.

  “Mak, how are you?” I say to her in our Peranakan creole.

  “Ah Phine, ah, you’ve arrived. Have you eaten or not? I couldn’t come to airport. My head is always spinning-spinning. No, don’t hug me, lah. I don’t feel well enough.”

  I am deprived of the comfort of her touch.

  “At least she remembers you,” Bernadette says sotto voce.

  A sense of loss shoots through me. Mak has changed, both in body and mind. She looks weak and fragile as though rough handling would break her. When I start talking to her, I realise that although she tries to appear normal, her mind has loosened its connection, sometimes here and other times, not.I sit with her and try to make conversation but I get the feeling that I am talking through her, like a breeze passing through a sieve. It disconcerts and unsettles me. Is this somebody I used to know? When I was a child, I had spent evenings with her folding crepe paper into rose buds and flowers. We used coloured cat-gut to wind round thin wires for the stems. Or we would sit chatting while making lace or crocheting blouses. Before the days of television, families spend evenings doing things together, talking, telling folk-tales or reciting pantun. We sold the finished products for cash to buy us the exercise books we needed in school, the uniforms or the occasional treat. So whenever I attend craft fairs in England, I look for these things so that I can see the corners of her mouth lift when I give them to her. This time, I had found a decorative straw hat with silk flowers sewn into its wide brim. I explain to Mak that this is for hanging in her room. She enthuses about the yellow and peach flowers, her eyes widening. The next instant when Dolores walks into the room, she acts as if she doesn’t understand why I have brought her the gift. She speaks to the maid in English in the syntax of the Malay and Chinese languages.

  “Look what my daughter bring. Very pretty hat, huh? Pity this face old-old. And my hair all nearly gone. So white, my hair. What for have hat, one?”

  She puts the hat on, tilts her head this way and that, preening like some supermodel, except that she cuts such a tragic figure. She seems unaware of what she’s doing. I am staggered and have to leave her to compose myself. I make an excuse that I need a shower. Not that I needed an excuse. Indeed, my blood has thinned to adjust to the English weather, so the sweat is now pouring from me, making my blouse stick in clammy patches to my body. I can climb up the Chilkoot Trail in Alaska with 50 pounds on my back without getting out of breath but in this humidity, climbing up the stairs to the second floor where Bernadette has allocated me a room is an effort, my breath coming out in spurts. Bernadette has a heart of gold. She has said many times that there will always be a room for me in her house. She doesn’t like to think of me being old and alone in England, if my sons decide to live in Singapore or elsewhere. In the room, she has placed framed photos of David and my boys by the bedside chest of drawers and on the dressing table. She’s that sort of person. She has certainly inherited our mother’s caring ways. I run a cold shower and stand naked under the delicate spray. Cooled and freshened, my heart armoured, I go down the stairs to see what might await me.

  Mak sees me and she exclaims with tremendous enthusiasm, her words fresh as if she is saying them the first time, “Eh! Ah Phine, ah! When did you arrive, huh?”

  My good friend Sharon, who lives in Surrey like myself, often talks about her mother to me because we share the same sentiments about our mothers. She expresses the fear that she would not know what to do when her mother’s time is up. Her mother, like Mak, is already in her 80s. Sharon knows I tried to channel the energy of my worries into writing a cookery book for Mak. Unschooled, Mak cannot read anything I write. When she was much more coherent, she used to show off my books to anyone who visited. She pointed proudly to the author’s photo at the back of a collection of short stories, though she hadn’t a clue what the words said. When I took her to the loca
l bookshops in Singapore to show her the display of my books, she smiled from ear to ear, ran her hand over and over again across them. Catching a customer going past without picking up my book, she would tug at their arm, point to my book saying in either Teochew or Malay, “My daughter write this one, my daughter write this one.”

  It occurred to me that writing a cookery book with the recipes she taught me would be to honour her. Also, she can look at the coloured photos and have more pleasure from the book than seeing meaningless squiggles. David had the marvellous idea of having her picture on the dedication page. I took two years to work on the book, testing every single recipe several times. It was going to be a book of Singaporean recipes for Western kitchens, using ingredients that were easily available in the West. A special feature of the book is that each of the recipe can be converted to a vegetarian one. I wanted to show that you needn’t eat boring, colourless food when you’re a vegetarian. Also, there are so many vegetarians these days that many families have one or know someone who is one. Therefore, it seemed sensible to write the recipes in such a way that it can be worked for both the carnivore and vegetarian, simply by changing the main ingredient whilst using the same sauce. Since I acquired a stepson who is a coeliac, I also made sure that the recipes can be used for all those who are allergic to wheat. I wasn’t going to compete with eminent cookery writers in Singapore. I worked through my angst by writing the book. It was my way of coping.

  “This curry puff is delicious,” I say.

  Dolores has prepared some local coffee to go with the curry puffs that Bernadette bought. The coffee is commonly known as Malaysian coffee, though I’m not sure why, after all Malaysia as an amalgamated nation didn’t exist till 1963 and the coffee blend has always been around, 50 percent coffee and 50 percent roasted maize. It is inevitable that when you are in Singapore, you will have plenty to eat. Instead of commenting on the weather, people ask, “Have you eaten?”, when they meet. One of the first things people do in this country is to offer food. A visit without your guest having something to eat is inhospitable. That is why my stepdaughter had seemed doubly rude to me on the occasion she denied me any vegetarian food.

  “Ahh, I used to make such good curry puffs,” Mak says wistfully.

  She was indeed renowned for her cooking in our village. When times were hard, she made nasi lemak which she packaged and sold. It was laborious work, de-husking the coconut, then shelling it, removing the kernel then grating it by hand, before she could squeeze out its milk to boil the rice in. Coconut-grating machines were not available then. Nor blenders. So the onions and chillies for the sambal had to be ground either in the mortar-and-pestle or on the batu gilling.

  “Oh, I do remember that. And you make sesagun like nobody can. In fact, I don’t know that anybody makes it anymore, do you, Dette?”

  “No. Perhaps we can go to Geylang Serai sometime and look for it.”

  Talking about food and seeing me must have triggered off something in Mak’s mind and she gets up from the settee and shuffles across the gleaming marble floor towards her room, one hand pressed against the small of her back. She doesn’t walk upright like before, her spine is a soft curve, her torso, a sloping “C”. We hear drawers being open then shut as she searches for something. “Mama, what are you looking for?” Dolores asks, addressing her in the same way as all the grandchildren do.

  “Got something I want. Can’t find, lah. Aiiyah! So troublesome.” Then a little later, we hear her say, “Okay, okay. Got already.” She comes out of her room looking pleased with herself. She has the cookery book that I wrote in her hand.

  “Ah Phine,” she says. “Have you seen this one? So beautiful, lah.”

  “Yes, Mak. I have seen it.”

  She opens the book to the dedication page which has a photo of her in a green kebaya. She is sitting on the bottom stairs right here in Bernadette’s house, when they first moved in.

  “Look at this. There’s even picture of me! Old-old already. Do you know what my picture is doing here? Do you know who wrote this?”

  Three

  Much as I love my mother, reality is a shock to the system. I’ve wanted to be with her, wanted to hear her voice and here I am and I find the minutes ticking by so slowly when I’m sitting with her. How can you love someone so much and yet find that being with them is a strain? What trick of nature is this? I am riddled with guilt for feeling this way. I had expected that the love I have for my mother will be so much greater than the illness that it would teach me patience. Alas, I am a poor pupil. The doctors say that people with Alzheimer’s repeat themselves because they cannot create new memory. This is because the disease starts in the hippocampus, a small area of the brain, no larger than a thimble, which is believed to be the main recorder of new memories. Because an action or word has not been recorded in the sufferer’s brain, she will repeat the same thing again because to her, it’s as if she doing the action or asking the question for the first time. But it’s one thing to know this medical fact but quite another to have to deal with it. Doctors don’t teach you how not to get irked by the repetitions. In one instance, my mother might say, “Is David here or not?”, “No, he’s working,” I say. “How’s his mother, huh?” “She’s having trouble with her legs.” “Oh, that’s bad, what,” she says. In less than five minutes she starts all over again, “Is David here or not? How’s his mother, huh?” Or she’ll say, “Eh? When did you arrive?” Her short term memory is like soap bubbles, it take seconds to blow them, then they float away and burst into the air, then she has to start again. There is absolutely no respite. After answering the same questions about a dozen times, I have to force myself to keep irritation out of my voice. I can see why Bernadette and her husband or Agatha find it trying; they have to live with her. On better days, she goes into long monologues, her most creative phase, she picks a thread from the past and sews it onto something from the present, the images, dates, times and places getting muddled in her mind.

  “I’m glad I bought this house, lah,” she says. “Ah Tetia’s retirement money, I’ve put it to good use, what. Now when I die, there’s something to be left for children and grandchildren. But, oh, so many trouble I had finding this place! Flood water was high-high. I had to hitch up my sarong. I waded through muddy bottom. There was gibbet next to this house and it looked like someone might have been hung there. That would have been bad feng shui. But I went to church to offer novena and I was told that this house is protected from evil spirits. Don’t you think there is so much light in this place? How airy it is. Look at this marble on the floor, I thought how easy it is to clean, not like our cement floor in Potong Pasir where you have to scrub and scrub. That’s why I put the down payment straightaway.”

  There are variations to the theme, but mostly the flood waters remain an integral part of her story, the flood waters which rose in our village, Kampong Potong Pasir back in the early 1950s from the Kallang River which fed vegetable farms. It was during the monsoons and it had been raining for days and days. The fat droplets forced their way through old attap, splitting the dry leaves, to land on our heads. Sometimes centipedes, lizards and insects living amongst the folds of attap lost their foothold and came tumbling down with the rain. Once a lizard landed on three-year-old Bernadette’s head and she leapt around screaming, a child crazed. Filled with fear myself, with no adults around, I forced her to keep still and plucked the wriggly thing from her head. Its coldness to the touch disgusted me and it stayed on Bernadette’s head fiercely, unwilling to be removed. Eventually it came off with a loud sucking sound, then it leapt out, leaving me to hold its vacant tail. The majority of the kampong folks could not afford new sheavings of the entire attap roof, so they had to be repaired by inserting slats of tin to seal off the gaping holes, but these got easily dislodged by the heavy rains and monsoonal winds. When it rained through our house, we all raced around to find containers, alluminium pails and decapitated kerosene tins to catch the indoor waterfalls. The volume of these delu
ges depended on how large the hole in the attap was: it could be a thin dribble or a raging torrent. When the first large drops hit the empty kerosene tins, they drummed a most unique tune, a sound that is ever present in my own memory, reminding me of home. The drainage system implemented by the colonial government was insufficient to cope with the heavy rainfall and the subsequent rising water. We were not the only village that was affected. The heavy rains pushed water out from the rivers and monsoon drains onto fields and streets. The boundaries to the main canal in Bukit Timah Road were so hidden by the swirling, muddy water that bicycles, trishaws and cars missed their mark and became capsized boats instead, floating on the swell. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when the floods occurred. All I remember was seeing the muddy water rise and filling up the attap huts, then lifting furniture out of the huts. And the one image that had stayed stuck in my mind’s eyes was that of an ugly Chinese coffin, bobbing up and down on the flood waters. I often wondered whether it held a corpse. But as we were half-a-mile away from Lai Par, where the river broke its banks, our row of huts were left intact and so I wonder why the flood had impinged itself on my mother’s mind. It is also interesting that Mak even deemed it viable for her to have bought Bernadette’s house. My father had been an impoverished store clerk in an English firm and later in his career, just before he died, was a bill collector. We had lived in an attap house that had neither bathroom, toilet, electricity nor running water. The pension that my mother inherited from my father upon his death in 1968 was less than $5,000 Singapore dollars (a little over £2,000); the house that Bernadette and her husband bought cost more than $2.5 million dollars! So it is not even remotely possible for Mak to provided the down payment. So why is there a need in her to feel that she has bought the place? Is it because she feels that providing a place for us to live is part of her nurturing responsibility?