Frog Under A Coconut Shell Read online

  Her inventiveness is a genuine aberration. I can tell from the manner she talks that she believes entirely in what she is telling us. My brother, Matthew, four years older than myself, and I, can see this, but my other elder brothers, Agatha and, sometimes, Bernadette herself despair of Mak’s deviation from the truth. They seemed to think that she’s being difficult or a purposeful liar. Agatha, in particular, cannot tolerate a rendition which does not comply with her own; she feels it a duty to point out to Mak how wrong she is.

  “Aiiyah! Mak!” Agatha voices exasperation. “You are talking nonsense. It didn’t happen like that, lah! Why do you insist on making things up?”

  Her words shoot into Mak’s eyes like arrows, shattering Mak’s confidence in herself and her eyes look confused then pained, as though behind her own fascade, Mak has a vague awareness that there is something going terribly wrong with her own mind. Every time I see her injured, I am injured.

  “Why don’t you just nod and accept what she says,” I say to Agatha. “You know the real facts. Just go along and pretend she’s talking sense.”

  “Of course it’s all right for you,” Agatha thunders in reply. When Agatha speaks, it’s as if everyone else must hear what she says, as though an audience confirms her righteousness. “You don’t have to take this all the time. It’s very hurtful when she tells anyone who visits that none of the children care for her except Ah Phine. She says nobody gives her money except you and David. Who do you think has been taking care of her whilst you’re galloping around the world, huh? Who do you think pays her medical bills?”

  Bernadette bursts into tears and say, “Yes, you don’t know what it’s like. She tells everyone I never give her anything to eat. She says to people that if Ah Phine was here, she wouldn’t have to starve.”

  I didn’t ask to be the goody nor the saint in Mak’s eyes. I shall be the first to say that I am neither, but what Mak and I share is something beyond this space and this time. We have been soul-partners for many life-times and have participated in each other’s nurturing and caring. That is the reason for her instinctive faith and reliance on me. It is true that I don’t have to deal with Mak on an everyday basis, my siblings are not having it easy I know. And yet, I feel that if they understand Mak’s affliction better, they wouldn’t be taking everything so personally and so hard. I feel weary and ineffective. I do know that the more they react, the more they would be hurt for our mother is already inhabiting a world of her own making now and nothing anybody says or does will make a difference. In some way, I feel that it’s probably healthier for Mak to continue to assert her world, at least she has something to identify with. What will happen when that no longer happens? Would she retreat into a world of silence? But I cannot find the words nor the heart to take my sisters to this different threshold of understanding. When I had married and went to England, I had proposed to Mak that she come to live with me but she declined, she had found England too cold, it hadn’t got the kind of hawker food she craved and she could not speak the language. Since I do not take care of her, who am I to judge what is right or wrong for our mother? So I have to swallow the stone of rebuttal and acknowledge to my sisters that they are indeed right. It is inevitable that the disease will take further toll. Then what would become more important than disagreements would be that our mother receives proper care. And my sisters here in Singapore are the ones who will be giving it, not me so far away. I know that they will try their best to keep her at home until it becomes truly necessary to send her to a nursing home. For their concern and their effort, I will always be in their debt.

  Alzheimer’s corrodes the mind day by day, a mental rusting. It’s a true death of the brain cells, never to be reversed. The disease is progressive. As more and more cells die, they affect the function that the cells are engaged in: recent memory, language, judgement, spatial relations, personality traits and others. It can’t get better, only worse. It’s a terrible future. I bleed for my mother. Coming down from my bedroom which is air-conditioned to descend the stairs into the non-airconditioned part of the house feels like I’m descending into a furnace. The rooms are separately air-conditioned and the main hall is kept at temperate air because Mother’s arthritis is made worse by the cold. One morning, as I come down the stairs, I hear a commotion: Dolores trying to pacify Mak. I quicken my steps to find Mak in extreme agitation and in tears, her grey hair loose and not in its usual pathetic knot. There is hysteria in her voice. The calm mother I knew who has always been in prefect control is thrown asunder by her emotions. I have never seen her like that and for a few minutes is rooted in sadness. Dolores is trying to calm her but Mak is fending her off as though even Dolores had suddenly become the enemy.

  “We can’t let them in, lah! We can’t let them in. They’re going to take everything away from us. They’re going to steal everything.”

  Apparently, Bernadette had organised someone to come to fix a faulty air-conditioner and had informed Mak, who has quite forgotten what the visit is about and won’t let the technician in. My nursing training reminds me to distance myself from my own confusion and act responsibly. This woman, my mother, is no longer in charge of her rationality. She is obviously frightened. As far as she is concerned, the stranger who has come to the house is a threat. This irrationality is symptomatic of Alzheimer’s patients, they suffer from delusions; simple situations take on fearful gargantuan proportions, shatters their sense of security.

  “Okay Mak,” I say. “I’m sending the man away. Right this minute. You have nothing to worry. Dolores, can you get her some coffee?”

  It seems the best decision to make at the time. It’s hard to see an old woman cry, let alone my own mother. That is when I realise that my role of child is over, a chapter that is from a different book. It is a signifcant realisation and not without regret, for the only time when one can safely slip back to being a child is with one’s parent. The childhood years are nurturing years and memories with one’s parents provide the foundation of one’s character. (When I am reminded of these things, my heart aches with regret for what I have lost with my own children.) My brothers and sisters have probably learnt that our mother have passed the role of mothering, and that like them, I too have to learn to be mother to my own mother. It is not an easy role to play. I sit her down and talk softly to her, help her to comb her hair, knotting it. In less that five minutes, the creases on her forehead smooth out, normality returning back to her eyes. As swiftly as her disquietude has arisen, it evaporates just as quickly. Until you deal with such lightning changes, you cannot fathom how unsettling it all feels. Now that the fear is gone, her body loses its rigidity, her spine giving in to the soft cushions of the settee, her face returning to the face I know and love so well. Dolores brings her coffee which is well sugared and after sipping it, Mak starts telling me about the time she came to buy this house as if the drama of a few minutes ago hadn’t even occurred, as if she has not told me before about her buying of the house. My mind drifts but I offer her a look of attention. In some ways, it is a blessing that Alzheimer’s sufferers have no new memory, it means that she cannot remember how she had acted only a few moments before. Later, Bernadette calls from her office, the technician had been in touch with her to let her know that he wasn’t given access to the house.

  “Do you know how much trouble I had in making that appointment?”

  “Mak was really agitated and was in tears,” I offer an explanation. “I had to decide. Perhaps next time it would be a good idea to get Dolores to keep on reminding Mak if a stranger was coming into the house.”

  The molten lava of Bernadette’s frustrations must have been building up and building up within her. I am only beginning to recognise it in her voice and mannerisms. Unable to express them, the emotional pressure is starting to peak. So the incident is the trigger she needs for she suddenly erupts in volcanic proportions.

  “Aiiyah! It’s so easy for you to talk. You come here and you make all sorts of decisions involving us and
when you go away again, I have to face the consequences. You really don’t understand what it’s like! I have to deal with this every five minutes, every day, Dolores calling about this or that. If it’s not Dolores, it’s Mak, calling every few minutes to see if I’m coming home for dinner. It’s not easy for me, you know. No matter what I do, you are supposed to do it better. Every single day, I have to deal with Mother’s tantrums. No matter how I handle it, there are scenes and scenes. I have a business to run you know!”

  She bangs the phone down. I stand and stare at the receiver in my hand.

  I go out and buy Mak a durian. It’s her favourite fruit but she doesn’t get to eat it much because Bernadette and her family cannot stand its smell. Occasionally, Agatha or Matthew would buy durians and invite Mak to their homes. A durian is called the King of the Malayan fruit and has its own distinctive smell and taste. It’s the most expensive fruit around. Most westerners are repulsed by its smell, complaining that it smells of sweaty feet. I prefer to say that it smells of ripe Camembert. Yet most Asians (except the likes of Bernadette) awaits its short season in June. During the season, it is usual to throw durian parties where nothing is eaten except durians because the fruits are very filling. It has a hard thorny exterior, duri means thorn in Malay and durian means made up of many thorns. Inside, it is segmented and each segment cradles the custardy fruit wrapped around a stone. At David’s first durian party, thrown by my second brother, Jeremiah, nearly 20 years ago, he had to pinch his nose as he took his first taste. He was glad he did because he genuinely thought it tasted wonderful though he still couldn’t stand the smell. But he has got used to it now. Mak is all smiles as we sit on the patio to eat our durian with our fingers. (I daren’t take the durian indoors because the smell tends to linger and Bernadette might get a whiff of it when she comes home.)

  “You know, huh. Grandfather had durian estate. Our durians tasted so good. Very high quality,” she says, and for a moment slips back into her own past. “Have I ever told you or not that Grandfather used to wear helmet when he went to inspect his durian estates? He said it was an insurance against fruit-fruit dropping on his head.”

  She laughs her delightful laugh and hearing it, I am reminded of how young and stately she once was, so full of joie de vivre. But now the uninhibited laugh seems somehow incongruous with her old skin, her dull eyes, her thinning hair. But still, I love listening to her talk about her parents and the life they used to lead and I would prompt her with further questions. It is amazing how long-term memory is much easier for her to recall than the things that happened to her minutes ago. She describes her past with the same accuracy that she had described them to me all the years I was growing up. Her face literally rejuvenates when she recalls her childhood. She must have loved that bungalow by the sea because she can tell me about it time and time again. Thoughts of one home lead to the other causing her to skip the years and end her reminiscence by saying, “Don’t you think I make a good choice in buying this house?”

  I agree and she proceeds to tell me again how she came to buy this house. She never seems to tire from a repetitive subject, an organ grinder grinding out the same old tune again and again. And again. It must be the 50th time I’ve heard it since I came back, although for her it’s a new subject each time. I realise with a sadness that it’s no longer possible to carry on a sensible conversation with my mother now. Firstly, her memory is short-lived — in the span of five minutes, she can ask you the same question at least 10 times. Secondly, she talks without listening. It’s as if she has a ravenous need to talk — or to be listened to.

  I pack the durian shells in plastic bags and put them away in the rubbish bins outside the house. We go in the house to wash our hands. The phone rings and it’s David. When I am in England and working upstairs from his office, he hardly remembers that I am there. He spends hours on the telephone to everybody else, at meetings and on his computer. We see each other only for meals. Yet, whenever I go away, he would call me on the phone regularly, sometimes twice in a day and for an hour each time. He was doing this so much when he was courting me that my mother said, “You’d better marry him, lah! Less expensive than his calling-calling.” But I am always glad that he calls. I love the sound of his voice. Particularly today. In the turmoil of my mother’s worsening condition, it is reassuring to talk to someone who is dependable, steady and loving. I take the opportunity to spill my heart to him about Mak, how she gets upset because she’s forgetting things.

  “Oh, tell her not to worry, tell her that I always forget where I put my keys and my glasses, that every time we are to go abroad, I spent half the night looking for my passport and driving licence. That should cheer her up.”

  Indeed, his forgetfulness colours our family saga. He leaves spectacles in fridges and house-keys in shoes. To circumvent his problem, he makes duplicate keys and spectacles by the dozen. He has misplaced anything that can be misplaced. If he parks the car in a multi-storey carpark, he forgets which floor it’s on. So far, he has not managed to lose me yet, but he has forgotten to meet me at the right places before, which keep our lives peppered with surprises. If we go out and then part with a time and place to meet, I always carry a book so that I won’t get irritated if I had to wait for him and he’s at the wrong place. At least these days, with mobiles, we can contact each other. But his is a forgetting of non-connection, a distancing of his mind from his body. Usually, his mind is flooded with thoughts, mostly about business and he is unaware of what his hands and body are doing, the only person I know who has such complete separation between mind and body. He can collect cuts and bruises on his body and won’t even know how or when they had happened. So of course, he can’t remember where he had left his keys or his passport. But really, it’s not so much the fact that he can’t remember, it’s more that he doesn’t know, since his mind wasn’t taking note of where he had placed the object of search. But my mother’s forgetting is one of non-adherence, her doing slides away from her mind like paper on poor quality glue, whatever she says or do a few minutes ago cannot adhere to her brain. Nothing sticks so there are no new memories, only old ones which have rubbed into the tissues of her mind, stuck when the glue in her brain was strong. But even then she’s getting them mixed up, her circuits getting crossed, events spliced and joined with other strands of memories, nothing makes sense to other people. Does it make sense to her? It must do, in some way because she speaks them with animation, her eyes lighting up.

  Half an hour later, I join Mak on the settee.

  “You know what,” she says. “I’ve this nafsu (yearning), to eat durians. It’s been a long time since I had them because Dette can’t stand the smell, you see.”

  “Mak! We just had some. Only minutes ago!” I am a little cross. Ashamed as I am to admit it, my voice rises a decibel. I want her to remember, am willing her to remember. I am terrified of her slipping so quickly into the dark corridors of her mind. I take her hands and put them to her nose. “Smell your fingers, lah. You’ve just been eating durians.”

  “Ya, juga,” she affirms that her fingers still smell of the fruit. “But I don’t remember eating them. Ahh, I am so useless now.”

  Her tone tears me apart and I am sorry that I forced her into remembering. And the second realisation hits me, a very sad one, that it seems almost pointless to say or do anything for Mak anymore because she is going to forget it anyway, in a matter of minutes. It appears that there is no future for her, every instant is a now, everything that happens is happening for the first time in her mind, as though she is frozen in Simple Present Tense, all her 24 hours crammed into one single moment. Part of the pleasure of doing something for someone is when they recall you doing so. So if Mak can’t remember if you have done something nice for her, is there any point in doing it? It is then that I learn that when I am doing something for someone, I am really doing it for me, because my action gives me pleasure.

  “Mama is very happy when you’re here,” Dolores tells me. “Not one d
ay pass when she doesn’t mention your name or Sir David. She always says you’re so good to her. When you’re not here, there is trouble every day, she will lose her temper, and scream and cry. And she will scold everybody.”

  “It’s her way of getting attention,” Agatha says of these episodes.

  It’s as if she’s talking about someone else, a person I don’t know.

  Bernadette invites me out to dinner the next day, apologises for putting the phone down so abruptly, “Must be my period,” she says. She is not the type to bear grudges. She and her family take me to a food centre where I pig myself on local hawker fare. For me, the most wonderful thing about Singapore is its local food, which is so varied and colourful. I can eat three or fours times a day and in multi-racial Singapore, never have to eat the same dish twice in a month! It makes eating an exciting adventure. Often when David grumbles and say, “I don’t know how you can eat so often.” I reply, “Because we have such variety in our food.” There is just nowhere in the world like Singapore for its hawker food, with its high standard of hygiene. Hawker food is the one thing I get really nostalgic about when I’m on distant shores. Hawker food is so called because they were peddled by itinerant hawkers in the old days. Before bicycles and tricycles became available to common folk, hawkers used to carry their goods slung in wicker baskets attached to a pole that they carry on their shoulders. When they progressed to using push-carts, they congregated in open spaces, thus giving birth to the first hawker centre. One of the most famous one was called “The Carpark”, literally the carpark in Orchard Road, just in front of what used to be called Cold Storage, the first air-conditioned supermarket in Singapore, catering mainly to the English and expatriate community. About 20 years ago, the distinctive building was ripped apart to make way for a new shopping mall named Centrepoint. In the old days, the carpark space in front of Cold Storage was cleared of cars by 6PM to make way for the hawkers. It was quite a sight to see the hawkers dribble in at intervals, arriving with their push-carts, tricycles and on foot to set up their stalls, yelling greetings to one another or instructions to their helpers. Each stall was lighted up by a hurricane, kerosene or carbide lamp, each spluttering its own characteristic sound. It was a special treat for our family to go to “The Carpark”, where one could select from a myriad of dishes: Malay, Chinese, Indian, Western, hence the place was also called “Glutton Square”. After setting up their stalls, the hawkers put out some tables and chairs. Then the cooking began and the lovely aroma of different foods would rise and fill the air, making mouths water and even those who had not wanted to eat would begin to get a craving. The stallholders squatted by huge pails of water to do their washing-up, china bowls, spoons and chopsticks sitting patiently in metal buckets waiting to be washed. Stray dogs and cats, and even rats would turn up to scavenge for leftovers, running round the feet of customers and hawkers alike. Yet nobody minded then, the atmosphere was festive and unbeatable. Today, hawkers are no longer itinerant and are given stalls in sanitised food centres with running water, and electricity or gas. If so much as a cockroach is seen on their premises, the food inspector who does a regular round would pounce on them and their licence would be in jeopardy. There is still a festive, jolly air about most of the present-day food centers, but it’s not quite the same as the atmosphere at the “The Carpark”.