Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 8

  “No, lah!” Mak said. “My one.”

  “I make good offer. How much you want? You’re young, strong womb, you have many more. You have three sons already, what. I have no children, I take many care of her. Give her everything.”

  “Ya, lah, why don’t you?” Ah Tetia said later when my mother told him about the offer. “She’s only a girl. We haven’t got enough to feed the others as it is. Hara Singh has plenty of money, he will give her a better life than we can give her.”

  “No!”

  My future was balanced on that single word. Histories are made on single words. If my mother had been any less forceful, I might have been raised a Bengali child, with kohl under my eyes and clad in Bengali costume, with a name like Indrajit Kaur, Surindar Kaur or something to that effect. Mak stood tall and erect then, not yet beaten by life or age. She confided in me once that she lost three daughters before me. But she could tell I would fight to live and she would live to fight my life. We are linked in more ways than one. Although she lived within the constraints of her species, she would show her mettle every now and again. This was the first but not the last time she fought my father for me. I remember many such incidents, carry them in my heart, my debts to her. She gave me a life I would otherwise not have had. Because of this, I give her a life that she definitely could not have: I learn languages, philosophy, literature, roam the world, hike, ski, parachute, and I describe to her each experience, each moment so that she can live my life alongside me. Her eyes would glow and her face would brighten as she fed on my living. That was after we have left the kampong, after Ah Tetia had died, releasing her, after I made my own escape from the man who fathered my sons.

  Is it possible for a six-month-old to recall her memories? Is there an observer within the child? Ah, the age-old philosophical question — is a human being just his mind or is there another part of him which is more than his mind? I cannot say that I know the answer. However, I am still perturbed by the fact that I cannot sort out the ownership of the images in my mind — have they been placed there by my mother’s suggestive words or are they a result of my own direct experiences? Does it really matter? I tell my story as the picture unfolds in front of my eyes.

  My mother was 36 when she gave birth to me. I wasn’t the first girl but was the first to survive. Ah Tetia assumed I was going to go the same way as the others, so he didn’t consider registering my birth. When he eventually did, he was so flustered because the English clerk told him off for registering late that he forgot my Chinese name and gave only the Christian one. He was also so intimidated by the English clerk that he dared not disclose that I was born a couple of days before and gave my birth date wrong, so that I was made younger by two days by the State. From experience, my father learnt that if I should die without being registered, it would mean no unnecessary paperwork and no hassle. An unrecorded event. Just a personal tragedy. Mostly my mother’s, rather than his. He wanted only boys to carry his name into posterity. “Girls waste rice,” he said. “And then when they grow up will belong to someone else.” His was a working man’s philosophy. It didn’t occur to him that if all men thought like him, he wouldn’t have had a wife to marry.

  By the time he married my mother, the three sisters were already married. My father had taken Grandmother and Kanchil into the fold of his household because he couldn’t have had my mother without them. They weighed on his meagre resources, but he still sent Kanchil to school. My parents began their married life in a tiny attap hut in Genting Lane. From this moment until the time he died, my father had no privacy, sharing the one single room with the rest of the family. How he manoeuvred his way into my mother’s bed without the others knowing, I cannot imagine. But he did, for my mother was pregnant every other year which added to their cost of living. Grandmother had long ago lost her spirit and soon her body followed. At 18, Soon Neo was mother to her own child and to her little brother. Even when pregnant, she drew water from the well, beat down the earth that made up their floor, washed her own clothes by hand and was still clean and beautiful for my father when he returned, her mother’s words hammering in her brain about keeping your man at home. Amdist all her concerns, she worried about Kanchil, who seemed to have shrivelled up even more, saying very little and doing very little.

  “Are you okay?” She asked him.

  “I am hungry, lah,” Kanchil said with his soulful eyes.

  “Here, have some of my food.”

  When my father saw that my mother was giving away her own food when she was pregnant, he became concerned. But he never expressed that concern. Instead he said, “Why are you always giving him more food? I am hungry too, you know, and I have to work. Is it not enough that I give him a roof over his head and educate him?”

  On bad days, he would raise his hand to her and Kanchil would register all this but said nothing. He felt responsible. He hated my father, yet was also obliged to him because of his generosity. When he was 16½, he left home never to come back until after my father died. This period and right through the war is vague, because Mak found it hard to talk about the children she lost. In later years, the pain comes out in spurts like blood from a cut artery. Especially about the baby she was forced to give away because they could not afford to keep him. I don’t know if my other brothers and sisters know about this. I never discussed it with them. My mother told me so quietly as if she was either ashamed or in such severe pain. It must be a particularly bad time for my parents because my father would never have chosen to give away a boy-child. My mother suffered anguish, she tried to busy herself, pretended she didn’t care about his whereabouts, how he looked, how he was growing, whether he was well-cared for, whom he was calling Mak. Because we don’t know the identity of our brother, I often wondered what would have happened if either my sisters or myself fell in love with a man only to discover that he was our brother. As though doomed to share her sorrow, I picked up my mother’s pattern and knitted it into my own. When my first marriage disintegrated, I was forced to act in order to survive. I had no money, no means of bringing up my children on my own, so when I left their father, I had to leave them behind. And when I emigrated to England, the split became permanent. From then on, I trod on sharpened blades as I walked through life, always searching the crowd for children who could be my sons, my heart mangled by the heavy rollers of seeing young mothers doing small things for their little ones, like wiping ice-cream from their lips, tying their shoelaces. These ordinary acts were denied me. I did not have the sheer pleasure of a child’s arms around my neck nor the simple joy of being called mummy. I was living in a hell of my own making. I wondered if my ex-husband made them call his wife, mummy.

  My husband would have preferred me to remain the naive 17-year-old that I was when he met me. He tried to cage me to his opinions, walled me in because of his fears, possessed me because of his insecurities. And I wouldn’t let him. Unfortunately, only after we were married did I see the same signs in him as I did my father. I couldn’t let him do to me what my father did to my mother. I had to break out, for my children’s sake, for my own — and for my mother’s. “If you leave me,” my husband said. “I’ll make sure you never get to see my children ever again!”

  He was true to his threat. My guilt became enormous. I was a mother and not a mother, orphaned by the loss of my children.

  At least my mother had us, my brothers and sisters, to occupy the vacancy left by that other child. I had no such consolation. When I first arrived in England, I yearned to fill that void with my three stepchildren, but they were too old to mother and far too antagonistic to love.

  My mother gave away her son because she wanted him to have a better life. I gave mine away because I wanted a better life. This is my sin for which I cannot forgive myself, guilt scraping me raw on the occasions of their birthdays, even though we are now reconciled. Each of their birthdays is a commemoration of my birth day, the day when the child who had fed and slept with me for nine months was ripped from me. Like my moth
er’s spiritual bond to me, I am bonded to my sons even when I don’t see their faces. People launched verbal attacks for my callousness, but they did not know the shadows within the marriage, the desperation of a trapped spirit. Only I know that I had tried to spare my children the same kind of scenes that had terrified me as a child, of one parent wielding his fist on the other. For years, I was haunted by the sight of my four-year-old screaming as his father and uncle wrenched him from me. My heart still shreds at the memory of the bewildered eyes of the younger one who was not quite a year old. They grew up believing the lies they were told, that their mother left them because she did not love them, that she died soon after, not knowing that a continual attempt at telephoning was censored, that frequent letters and presents lay in a solicitor’s office, court cases across 10,000 miles dragging on. But that is another story.

  Just before I was born, my family became Catholics. Peranakans were commonly Buddhists or Taoists. The white missionaries might have liked to believe that it was their God and talk of fire and brimstone which brought the pagan natives to the road of conversion, but in reality it was much more prosaic. Food. Hunger was a great motivator to accept a different God. The colonial government was not as giving as the missionaries in providing food and education. Aunty Mabel, who was a Eurasian, told my mother about it and she told my father.

  “Our boys can be educated if they’re Christians, lah. And we can get food — rice, milk, margarine.”

  “I suppose the food will come in handy,” my father said.

  On his day off, Ah Tetia took the family to church where they were greeted by a man in a black frock who watered their foreheads and stuck a pin in the pages of the bible to come up with their Christian names. My father became John and my mother, Catherine. My elder brothers became Jacob, Jeremiah, Matthew and Zacchariah. Mak could not say their English names properly, the English sounding foreign to her tongue, so she latched on to the endings of their names. That is why I am not a Jo. So 13-year-old Jacob was transfigured to Ah Cob, nine-year-old Jeremiah to Romia, five-year-old Matthew to Maretiu and three-year-old Zacchariah to Ah Iya. But even the solicitation of the Catholic God could not repair the damage that TB had wreaked in Ah Iya’s lungs. He left before I came.

  Perhaps three or four of Mak’s babies had died in the war. She could not remember the number, only the pain. Once, she told me that when the Japanese bombs were exploding around her, she was exploding with the birth of a still-born child. She never spoke of it again and I had forgotten it, only to recall it now. It is very interesting how I can slip her words into folders into my memory and not even be aware of the information until years later, when I suddenly have access to them when an associated thought triggers them off. I know that in this writing of her story, I am illuminating bits of my brain for the memories that are crouching there waiting to spring up. In this writing, I am knowing her again so that I have more of her to hold before she leaves me forever.

  “Your father was so foolish, lah,” she said. “He kept all banana money in wooden chest. When British came back, Japanese money was totally useless!”

  It was her one direct criticism of my father which I will always remember. If he had been wise enough to convert the Japanese printed money into commodities, like gold, perhaps we would have been spared the kind of childhood we had to go through. If they had been poor before the war, after the war, they were paupers. Ah Tetia found a small attap hut in Kampong Potong Pasir; kampong meaning village in Malay, Potong is to cut, Pasir means sand. It was thought that the name arose when a small hill was leveled to site the village. A river cut a broad swathe through Lai Par, the inner reaches of the village feeding the vegetable farms. Whenever Mak talks about the flood, she is remembering the flood caused when this river broke its banks in the late-50s. The hut they called home was not big enough for a proper bed. Instead, a wooden platform was raised off the mud floor where the rats and cockroaches ran about. This was where they slept with the four boys. There was no bathroom, toilet, running water or electricity. Mak cooked under a lean-to outside the hut. During the monsoons, when the heavy rain lashed the spindly wooden walls and soaked the clay stove, Mak had to cook indoors, causing the small hut to fill up with kerosene-induced smoke. The whole of the hut which was like a bedsit without either bathroom or kitchenette, was less than half the size of the kitchen in the bungalow my grandparents used to own in Malacca. Yet my mother cared for her home as if it was a palace. Each morning, she would clear the hut of mice and rat droppings, she would carry the chamber pot outside to the monsoon drain to empty its contents.

  “As long as you have water, you’re not that poor that you have to be dirty,” my mother told me many times. It was one of her sayings which stole into my being and became mine.

  In front of the hut were the jambans or outhouses which served all the villagers. On public holidays when the buckets hadn’t been collected by the night-soil man, the wind would waft the stench into their hut and they would be unable to eat or sleep. Fortunately, before I was born, Ah Tetia was promoted to a store clerk in Williams Jacks, an English company selling industrial weighing scales.

  “This unborn child has brought me luck,” he said.

  Our people are very pantang, shaping our activities around omens and superstitions. It was good that my father had a positive sign before he saw me. Otherwise, it would have been easier for him to have me sold off to Hara Singh and his wife. A short distance away from the smelly jamban, Babur Singh was converting a wooden cow shed into five living quarters. He exalted them by calling them houses. Each of these living quarters was about 800 square feet, comprising of a small living room, bedroom and kitchen. There was no door between bedroom and living room and he charged $15 a month for rent (about £2 when sterling pound was high). The roof of the kitchen was zinc, which turned the kitchen into an oven at mid-day. On rainy days, it was like living in the hollow of a drum and the rain was the drummer. A well surrounded by a wooden wall, which opened to the tops of coconut trees and the sky, served as communal bathroom. A quarter of a mile away was the standpipe which provided drinking water for the whole village. We had to use the same jambans that were in front of my parents’ old hut.

  In 1992, when I became the first Singaporean to win a prize in the UK Ian St James Awards for short fiction, I was interviewed by a young reporter when I went back to visit my family in Singapore. I told her about my life in the kampong and how we had to organise our visits to the toilet.

  “You can’t wait till you’re really urgent,” I told the young girl. “Because you might arrive at the jamban and find that there is a queue ahead. And then you have to hug your tummy and cross your legs. You see, we had to share the toilets with the rest of the village. Going to the toilet was quite an experience. You had to be careful of your footing or you might slip down the hole, especially at night, because there was no light and we had to use a carbide lamp. And when you are squatting over the hole, you have to grit your teeth and ignore the smell, the scuttling of cockroaches and rats. In some ways, it was better to go to the jamban at night so that you don’t have to see the over-flowing bucket with all the rats running round the sodden and disgusting mess. We had to use cut-rectangles of old newspapers as toilet paper.”

  We were seated in the coffee house of a plush American-style hotel in modern-day Singapore, already one of the richest nations in Southeast Asia. The girl’s jaw dropped. She was only 20 years younger than myself, yet seemingly generations apart. She stared at me in disbelief, unsure if I was spinning a yarn. I guess she assumed that someone like myself living in comfortable Surrey would have always been rich. She had also never seen a kampong in Singapore during her lifetime because by the time she was born, Singapore had gained independence and had propelled herself out of third world status through providing cheap labour for the manufacturing industry. The young lady had only seen sanitised versions of Malay villages smartened up for tourists. The reporter’s eyes enlarged, “Josephine,” she said. “You must
have lived on a different planet!”

  In contrast with my lifestyle today, it was a different planet. Back in 1951, it was upward mobility for Mak and Ah Tetia to move into 52B, the second last house that was once a section of the cow shed. This was where I grew up and I only left it when I got married. I can still remember the gutter in our cement floor that served as the urinal for the cows. Babur Singh had not bothered to fill this in to save on cement. The urinal, at the foot of the wooden walls, ran all the way along the north side of the houses, in some ways, uniting them. It was great for playing marbles. Us children, each in our own home, could play a game without seeing each other’s face. We took it in turns to run our marbles down the gulley. We could also send notes and little toys to our friends along this cement-conduit. If you lay on the floor and tilted your head to one side in the gutter and the other kid did the same in his house, you can actually see each other. It was great. Wooden planked walls separated the five houses. We white-washed ours with kapor before we moved in, and every year after that in preparation for the Chinese New Year. Babur Singh skimped on the building of the separating walls, so there were gaps between the planks and we could quite easily look into our neighbour’s home. As children, we had no qualms about peeping into each other homes. Oh, the things we saw! Of course, we heard everything as well because we had no ceiling and the wooden walls stopped short of the roof. We must have had many sick neighbours because in the night, we often heard lots of moans and groans. All the five houses shared one common attap roof shored up by timbers. Like my parents’ other hut, this had neither bathroom, toilet, running water nor electricity. Washing up was done in a small area in the corner of the kitchen and all the waste water would run into a pit outside the house which we had to clear. Usually the waste water became green and gungy. Babur Singh was really enterprising. This was where I was born and this was where I lived until I left to get married.