Frog Under A Coconut Shell Read online

  There are food centres completely under shade but I favour the outdoor type, particularly in the evenings when they open to the sky and stars. So Bernadette and her family take me to my favourite one, which serves the best Chye Tow Kuay. Generally translated as carrot cake, it is a savoury dish made with freshly grated moolie, which is called a white radish/carrot in Chinese. It is absolutely delicious when fried properly with crispy eggs, chilli and fresh coriander. Coupled with a bowl of ice-cold chendol, a dessert made with fresh coconut milk, I’m in my heaven. One of my dreams is to go on a luxurious cruise ship where I can eat all I want and gamble all night. I certainly have inherited one of my grandfather’s characteristics. Chomp Chomp is in Serangoon Gardens, which used to have the best fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. The area was home to British soldiers and their families, houses which I thought were palatial compared to our leaky attap huts in the kampong. When either of my parents struck the 4-D lottery or when my father had a bonus at Christmas, we could afford one packet of fish and chips, which was shared amongst the whole family. So it was wonderful to sit in the food centre and be in a position to order whatever we wanted to eat. I am continually grateful for such things because I can never forget my beginnings. Bernadette always means well and I am rather fond of her although we are miles apart in interests. We have a lovely evening and she buys a packet of Chye Tow Kway as well to take home to Mak. We get home late, the main chandelier lights have been switched off. When we walk in, Mak is pacing the floor, torchlight in hand, looking frantic. Dolores is already in bed, which suggests that Mak had gone to bed and then re-awakened.

  “Where have you been, huh? Why doesn’t anybody tell me where they’re going? I’ve been so worried. There’s no one here to give me my food, one. I’ve been so hungry. Nobody cares for me.”

  There is no way that Dolores would have neglected to give Mak her meal.

  “We did tell you we were going out for dinner, Mak,” Bernadette explains softly. “We even asked you along. Look, here’s some Chye Tow Kway for you.”

  “Nobody tells me anything, lah. I am left here on my own. Hati saya hanchur sekali. (My heart is in smithereens.)”

  My own is sliced by her words. I am pained by her anguish, her sense of being abandoned. It’s her old wound weeping again. A small incident can prise it open, but I can see it and understand. Not because I am either observant or wise but because I am her twin soul. I settle her and take her a hot Milo. Her mood has influenced mine and I cannot sleep, so I take my Laptop downstairs next to her bedroom to work, to somehow be closer to her. Her bedroom is her first ever ensuite bedroom. When Bernadette moved in and allocated her the room, she was overjoyed. So used was she in sharing a room, she could not imagine an entire bedroom to herself. She thought she was sharing it with Dolores. She extolled the ease in which she could go to the bathroom and was happy that she needn’t climb two flights of stairs to the bedrooms upstairs.

  “So big-big this room,” she had said. “Like my old room in Grandfather’s bungalow.”

  At last, we have returned her to the kind of grandeur she was used to. At least Bernadette has. After about half an hour, I hear Mak shuffling about in her slippers. The light comes on in her room and she walks out, her scanty, white hair in tendrils around her face. I expect more loose emotion, fractured words and girt myself for them. Instead she smiles broadly and says, “Ah! Working late again, huh? You’ve always been like that, one. Do you remember many-many nights you kept me awake reading by candle? I was worried that you might fall asleep and set attap on light. Oh, did I hear Dette say we have some Chye Tow Kway? Shall we have supper?”

  Four

  There was a Pathe News clip in original black and white film which, for some reason, stays etched in my memory. It was one which featured Mahamat Gandhi who was becoming known for his philosophy of gentle persuasion and ahimsa or non-harming. During that colonial era, Pathe News always preceded a film screening of the cartoons and main feature. The film would crackle and the cock would crow before a very English voice started to give us news of the world and especially of Britain. It was a great day when we got to go to the pictures when I was a child. It wasn’t until I was much older that I actually visited a proper cinema auditorium, like the Alambara, Lido or Cathay; and especially one which had air-conditioning. The first cinema auditorium that my father took me and my siblings was somewhere in Geylang whose name escapes me, but it was an like an amphitheatre with a half-roof that covered the more expensive seats. But it was a step-up from the village film screening so we loved it. My father loved the cinema and it was he who instilled that same love in me. But before that, we could only afford the freebie films screened outdoors. We would all wait anxiously by the wooden shack which served as the village club-house. When the film van arrived, we would shout and hail it like it was some messiah. We must have seemed like street urchins to the projectionist, our feet bare, many of us half-dressed; the boys clad only in shorts, and us little girls in cotton panties, our torsos deeply brown and naked. I wore a dress only when we had visitors or were going out or when the weather was really cool. How I sulked when Mak told me to wear dresses all the time when I turned 11. I resented the loss of freedom in feeling the breeze lick my bare skin and the rain trailing its delicious fingers down my back and chest. Clothes are such encumbrances, they fence you against nature. In England, I feel imprisoned by winter clothes, which stop the sun from finding my skin. I particularly detest the rough scratch of wool and its suffocating warmth. But there was no need for wool or leather in my days in the hot sunny kampong. We wore mostly cotton, put together by our diligent mothers proficient on the Singer sewing peddling machines. There was a lovely camaraderie living in the kampong; our front and back doors were hardly ever closed till bedtime and people talked to neighbours and looked out for one another. There was a genuine sharing. The film van only came round once a month and those who witnessed its arrival would spread the news so that no one would miss the treat.

  “Uncle is here! Uncle is here!”

  Adults and children alike waited patiently, watching the projectionist anxiously as he unloaded the reels of films and screen. One full length feature film would probably take up to two or three of the huge reels. Often in the screening, the film crackled and groaned, and sometimes, it would even snap, raising moans amongst the audience eager to know what was going to happen next. The audience also grumbled when each reel ran out and the projectionist had to unload one reel to replace it with another. If we were in an auditorium, the lights would come on, raising still more protests as this replacement was taking place. Couples smooching with each other would leap apart as if the bright lights burned them.

  At our kampong, the film man hoisted the screen onto a stand which had been set up on the cemented outdoor badminton court. Around him was a buzz of activity and excitement, people arranging their seats, from low stools to straw mats. Like all the other children, we were allowed to sit on wooden benches fashioned from a single plank crossing the tops of two kerosene tins. We had to be careful not to fidget too much, otherwise the plank would slide off the kerosene tins and we would land on our bottoms on the hard cement floor.

  “Oi!” Inche Samad, a well-respected elder of the village called out. “Taller children behind please.”

  We got off our places on the planks reluctantly and scuttled to change seats, the little ones went to the front with smirks on their faces. In the kampong, I was considered quite tall.

  “Please don’t rain, please don’t rain,” we chanted in Malay. Those of us who knew some English sang, “Rain, rain go away, come again another day.” Usually immigrant Indians, the baker, the ice-ball man and the kachang putih man plied their trade near the badminton court. Sometimes, the lady selling muah chee set her stall close by so that we got a whiff of sesame oil and seeds. The baker and the kachang putih man carried their wares on their cloth-bound heads in a square wooden tray. There was something enticing about the aroma of freshly baked bread. Th
e baker sold tin loaves, French loaves and slices of bread which he slapped thinly with home-made kaya, an amber-coloured egg-jam. Sometimes he had nonya kaya, a delicious Peranakan version which was made with the addition of coconut milk and pandan juice. The kachang putih man set his wooden tray down to display the variety of freshly roasted or steamed nuts which sat in small separate sacks. Both children and adults would crowd round him, even when they could not afford to make any purchase. When I had five cents, I would buy my favourite, the kachang kudah, steamed chick peas: golden nuts with their translucent loose skins.

  “Banyak, banyak chilli,” I would say, asking for more of his special chilli sauce to go with it.

  The seller made a paper cone out of squares of newsprint, filled it up with the nuts, then shook his bottle of chilli sauce over them.

  “Can I have some or not?” Parvathi asked.

  She was my best friend in the kampong and lived next door but one to us. Although she was three years older than I was, she seemed to act as if she was younger. Her eyes were like round black marbles and her long hair was always sleeked with coconut oil. My earliest memory of Parvathi was when I was six and she was nine. But her dark brown fingers plunged into my paper cone as if she was only five. How could I have known the fate that was to befall her?

  “What about me? What about me?” Agatha rushed at my paper cone.

  We sat there in delight eating the nuts and watching the film. When the nuts ran out, we sat there sucking each of our fingers until they were clean of the chilli sauce. We split open the paper cone to make sure that we hadn’t missed any nuts, picking small bits of nuts or their loosened skin that might be stuck on the inside of the cone. “There’s some more! There’s some more!” We shouted with glee if we found even a fragment of a nut.

  On evenings when the first drop of rain started to fall, people looked round in trepidation. If it drizzled, waxed umbrellas mushroomed upwards to block our view of the screen. If the rain got heavier still, the film man would pack up the screen and we could not see the end of our movie which was always a disappointment. There was a kind of suspense generated as we never know if we were to see the end of a film or not, and so we were much more appreciative when we did get to see the entire feature.

  The news clip that is etched in my memory showed Mahamat Gandhi walking in leather-thonged sandals through feathery rain on the hard streets of Liverpool. He smiled for the workers at the mills for spinning their cloths, something he advocated in his own home-country. Even in the cold, he was shrouded only in his dhoti, a length of white cotton draped around his thin shoulders, his chest bare. I’m not sure why that clip made such an impression on me, I hardly understood what his beliefs were then, though I do now. I didn’t know that he was an eminent lawyer, I thought he was some kind of peasant-saint. The way he was clothed and the colour of his skin and the manner of him made him so incongruous in that environment — as if he did not belong there, even on so short a visit. Like the other village children, I did not know where Liverpool was, except that it was somewhere in England where we believed everybody to be rich. We knew there were white people there and, of course, from our history, we knew that the Mat Sallehs were lords and masters, queens and kings. We knew they all lived in brick houses, where there was running water and electricity. Obviously, everybody had lots of food to eat because they could afford to feed their dogs with huge chunks of meat that our families didn’t see for weeks.

  Years later, when my mother came to England to attend our garden party to celebrate my new life with my English husband, she looked to me as Gandhi had looked in the Pathe News clip, somewhat lost, somewhat displaced. In her embroidered voile kebaya and her batik sarong, with open-toed sandals on her feet, she was shot to the bone by the chill of an English summer. That was in 1986 when she was 70, eight months after David and I were actually married. We had waited for kinder weather to accommodate my family coming over from Singapore. Mak came with Bernadette and my two elder brothers. My ex-husband didn’t allow my children to attend, whilst David’s showed their disapproval by not attending. I know the fact that I was not accepted by David’s children grieved my mother, but we didn’t discuss it. Her visit was a lovely occasion. Prior to the party, I had sent a petition out with the invitation. I said that we would prefer not to have wedding presents, but if people felt generous, they could donate to an orphanage that David and I supported in Pattaya, Thailand, which was run by Father Brennen, an old Irish priest. I enlarged a photograph of the orphans and pinned it to the main marquee. Mak pointed to the picture and asked me what it was about. When I explained, she said, “I’ve raised you right, lah.” The response to my petition was phenomenal and the local bank manager took charge of all the cheques and provided his bank’s services for free to send the cheques on to the orphanage.

  I was pleased that Mak was pleased. It was not just a case of seeking or needing her approval but it was a larger thing, as if in doing things right, I am somehow feeding her spirit, our spirit. She who has fed and clothed me must now be fed by me, even if it is through her spirit. Our relationship is one that has spanned millenniums and I feel this truth in my bones, our sinews forged by the shared high notes and pitfalls of our mortal lives. It is a shame that she was not suited for England. Hugging the cardigan tightly round her, she looked tiny in the vast landscape. The English summer was Singapore’s worst winter weather. Mak’s lips and heels cracked, weeping blood. Her digestive tract quarreled with English food. She could not understand the language, nor why the sun rose so early and set so late. She was so used to getting up with the sun that it took a while to persuade her that she didn’t have to fix breakfast the moment the sun rises, especially when the sun rises at 5AM.

  “You’ve done well to cope,” she said. “No neighbours, no hawker centres. This biting cold-cold. You must have been English in one of your incarnations, lah.”

  She was still able then, so she cooked for me everyday, cutting, chopping, frying, steaming — all the food she thought I had missed, so that by the time she left, my freezer was crammed with jars and tupperware containers. In feeding my body, she was feeding my spirit, the preparation of food an expression of her love.

  I had already been in the country for eight months by the time my family arrived. I was proud to be able to drive them everywhere to show them the various interesting places. I was striving to give my family and particularly my mother the impression that I was settled and happy in my adopted country, in my chosen destiny. I did not voice the utter feeling of loneliness and desolation when you marry into a stepfamily who didn’t welcome you, didn’t want you there. Having being raised in a family of nine where there’s always someone about, someone to talk to or argue with, it was a shock to the system to find myself alone with my new husband in a 30-acre property with no family members dropping in or visiting. I did not mention the discomfort that arose when people looked at me because I spoke differently, looked different. The loss of my children, the price that I had paid for a second chance at marriage was so high that I had to make it a success. I radiated newly-found happiness, exceptional confidence. My mother must never know the truth. It would hurt her.

  “Isn’t Phine clever, huh?” Mak said to Bernadette and my brothers. “Look at her driving round all these twisty and narrow roads.”

  Because she loved flowers, we went to as many garden centres as her legs could manage. She oohed and ahhed over the brilliant mauve and lilac petals, and flowers which were rare in the tropics. She marvelled at the size of roses and bought seeds to take home to Singapore to plant. But of course, the humidity and strong temperature cut their life before they had a chance to grow. Her disappointment permeated through the telephone when she told me they had died. But while we were at the garden centres, she gathered flowers by the armful to take back to our guest cottage so that she could fill vases of all shapes and sizes with them until the cottage looked like a florist shop. Something clicked into place inside me that time. I have always loved
flowers, whether they are fresh or silk or made out of crepe paper. I love their colour, their shape and their smell. It’s a joy to handle the stems, to cut and trim and arrange. And I suddenly realised that it’s a love that had sprung from my mother to myself. I often wondered how much of me is really me and how much of me is really my mother or even my father? Do I own something that is solely mine? Where does the off-shoot of my own personality begin?