Sacred Waters

by Meira Chand

  ‘Are you comfortable here? Is the food adequate? Are you warm at night? Do you need more blankets? It gets cold at this height.’ Her smile and concern left them unprepared for what she said next.

  ‘If casualties keep arriving at this rate in Maymyo, we will need more nurses, and I will have to call on you to help at the hospital.’ Lakshmi’s eyes were eagle bright beneath the thick eyebrows that dominated her face. There was a gasp of distress.

  ‘We want to fight.’ Sita said at last, shocked like everyone else around her at what Captain Lakshmi was suggesting.

  ‘We are not nurses, we are soldiers,’ Muni spoke up beside Sita, and behind her, everyone murmured approval. Lakshmi nodded but pursed her lips.

  ‘I hope I will not have to call upon you, I hope casualties do not rise, but if they do, then the care of our men must be our first duty.’ Lakshmi’s voice was firm as she turned on her heel, and Prema hastened after her.

  19

  SINGAPORE, 2000

  It was difficult to concentrate; the sun pressed hard against the window and fell in a fiery weight onto her left cheek and shoulder. Within half an hour the sun would have passed beyond the Arts and Social Sciences building, and Amita moved her chair slightly to avoid its blaze. She had a headache; most days now she seemed to get a headache, though she was not a headache type of person; it was the stress of living with the secret of Rishi. Whenever her nerves were frazzled, she found it best to focus on work. An early class was already behind her, and she had put aside the rest of the morning for preparing PowerPoint slides for the next lecture, and grading students’ work.

  With her undergraduate pupils, she was discussing an extract from a novel by a well-known Singaporean woman novelist about early Chinese immigrants to nineteenth-century Malaya. The extract concerned a young woman in a tin mining village in the state of Perak, bought cheaply from a brothel by her mother-in-law to be a wife to her idiot son. Married to a husband with the mental age of six, the young woman is soon accused by her Cantonese community of adultery with a man from a rival Hakka clan. Physically abused and vilified, she is thrust into a pig basket by the village men and brutally drowned in a nearby river. Amita began to speak into her Dictaphone, sorting out the main points she would later transcribe to the PowerPoint slides.

  ‘We enter the narrative from the male perspective of Tuck Heng, who is a spectator along with all the villagers, while the woman, who is the spectacle, is pinned under the gaze of all the village men… Kneeling before a temple (note the symbolic attitude of supplication) she is positioned both in language and in social context in the object position — in other words, she is objectified. She is also under the gaze of the village women, who take a position of superiority over her, because they are not adulteresses like her. Figuratively, she is abused in language as the whore, the bitch. Literally, she is abused by being plastered with mud and dung, and bleeding from the beating inflicted upon her by the village men. Her identity is reduced to her sexuality and sexual parts as they yell, cut off her cunt. She is commodified; indeed, all women in that community are commodified. We are told, A dagger is better than a wife in this jungle. A wife you can buy any time. However, there is a resistance built into this narrative. At its centre is the silence of the woman. Why is this silence pivotal to the tale?’

  Scanning the extract, Amita began marking words that would illustrate her points when she came to deconstruct it in the classroom, and then paused to check her watch. It was already eleven thirty. She needed to get to a doctor’s appointment at twelve o’clock. The National University Hospital was part of the university campus and at the far end of Kent Ridge; it would not take her long to reach there by shuttle bus. She left her desk as it was, and hurried from the room, hoping she would not have to wait too long at the clinic. The thought of seeing Dr. Wong irritated her. He was a man, and she had hoped to see a woman who, she was sure, would discuss female issues with the right measure of sympathy. The American professor who suggested she take HRT had told her to see a woman doctor because, she said, a man was more likely to be obstructionist in anything that kept a woman vital, especially after menopause. And, she continued, it was even likely that an Asian male doctor might not agree to write a prescription for something that was an everyday thing in America; the professor had heard terrible things about the attitudes of male doctors in Japan.

  As she feared, when she had laid her list of complaints before Dr. Wong a week back and suggested firmly that it was time for her to start hormone replacement therapy, he had refused to accommodate her without first taking a blood test to check her hormone levels, and also a urine test. With an effort she had controlled her annoyance; it was her body and she knew what it needed. There was no option but to go along with the process, and this forced compliance had put her in a bad mood. Now, on arrival at the clinic, she was relieved to see it was not too full. Her ankles were swollen and her feet felt tight in her shoes. She was glad to sit down to wait in the cool of the air conditioning. While she had struggled to endure the freezing cold of New York winters during the years she lived in that city, the heat and humidity of Singapore was no less easy to tolerate.

  After so many years away, it had not been easy to return to tiny Singapore, with its conservative ways. She was grateful to America; the time there was an awakening, for which her sheltered life in Singapore had offered no preparation. In the beginning, the intellectual choice and stimulation encountered was so heady she felt her sanity was being attacked. The freedom to pour out her views, to freely agitate and protest for a cause, was like nothing she had known in the subdued and politically correct environment of Singapore, where such openness of opinion was frowned upon. It was as if a different self had emerged from her, fully formed and waiting for that moment to materialise.

  At Columbia University she was immediately pulled into the exciting rhetoric of feminist groups and, almost before she knew it, found herself an active agitator for women’s rights. A floodgate opened within her, and she filled this new self with joyous abandon, seeking the most extreme positions. Sexuality, the family, the workplace, reproductive rights, legal inequalities, domestic violence and marital rape, changes in custody and divorce laws were what the women who befriended her were talking about. The importance of these issues fell about Amita in an entirely new and aggressive way, as if she woke from darkness into light. Suddenly, she saw everything differently and, as a token Asian presence in the midst of such heated debate, she was seen as a budding proselytiser who would take the feminist doctrine back with her when she returned to Asia.

  Yet, on her eventual return to Singapore, she soon realised that the doctrines preached in the Western world were not readily adaptable to Asia. Her proselytising zeal was quickly muted. What had seemed normal in America appeared outlandish in Singapore, and she saw the need to dilute her views or keep them to herself. Even the women in Singapore whom she was prepared to fight for, did not always appreciate her strident arguments and opinions. Problematic questions of culture, cultural identity, cultural difference and cultural diversity soon made her aware that feminist issues in Asia needed to be approached on their own terms and in their own context. She swallowed down opinions, and tamed her argument to suit the role she was now called upon to fulfil as a teacher, while still devising subversive strategies to plant radical thoughts in the young minds around her.

  Men too, she found, seemed unable to cope with the directness of her attitude. Those she took as lovers, seemed frightened of her capacity for fulfilment. Life narrowed, and she strove to rein in the instincts that she had so recently worked to release, adapting back to the familiar environment of Singapore, keeping her rage for her classes.

  She remembered the number of men she had so easily slept with during those student years in America, throwing herself into every opportunity with a recklessness she looked back upon now in wonder.

  In New York she had also volunteered at a local rape crisis centre, joining protests in the cold of winter a
nd the heat of summer, agitating to keep threatened abortion centres open. She remembered the rush of adrenaline as she stood her ground against aggressive opposing groups, faced police cordons and the threat of tear gas, holding up a placard and shouting, ‘Pro-Choice. Pro-Choice.’ She believed in all she stood for, defending Asian pragmatism where abortion was often used as a form of birth control. As she recalled her conduct at that time, it seemed she remembered a different person who had come into being for a specific purpose, and was lost to her now. It was as if she grieved for a dead friend.

  The bus drew to a stop outside the hospital and Amita stood up and made her way down the aisle to the door. For some reason her mother now entered her mind, and she thought with a pricking of both pride and shame, that the access she had to her body must be something her mother had never known. Her mother might never have experienced an orgasm, nor even known that such pleasure might exist. The thought filled Amita with immediate discomfort and she thrust it away, climbing down from the bus and hurrying into the antiseptic depth of the hospital.

  Dr. Wong looked up as Amita entered his small consulting room. A skeletally thin man with sucked in cheeks, he gave her a brief, assessing glance from behind his rimless spectacles. The hospital was government owned and, unlike private hospitals, where consultants filled their rented rooms with personal family photographs and memorabilia from grateful patients, Dr. Wong’s room was bare of such accessories, reflecting the impersonal nature of government employment. Such austerity was both a relief and a disappointment, for while she was thankful the doctor’s private life was not thrust at her, the lack of such hooks prevented Amita from making a cursory judgement of him in her usual way; she hoped he would not be obstructionist. She noticed he wore a wedding ring, and on the lapel of his jacket was pinned a small metal insignia with a cross. From this she deduced he was a churchgoer, and a family man, and this information did not reassure her.

  Dr. Wong lowered his head and, opening her file, glanced at the paper of test results before fixing his gaze upon her. Behind his spectacles his eyes had a detached and glassy quality, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Amita met his glance and prepared herself for argument, she could already see he might be one of those men the American professor had warned against, who might not easily give a woman the kind of medication she was asking for.

  ‘Are you aware you are pregnant?’

  Amita started in shock, her heart pitching in her chest.

  ‘Impossible,’ her voice was deep and fierce, the blood felt as if sucked from her body.

  ‘You can’t get pregnant at my age,’ she heard the screech of her own voice. Her heart was fluttering about in her throat like a bird trying to escape its cage.

  Dr. Wong’s eyes remained upon her. Desperately now, Amita tried to remember the two times she had been with Rishi. He had worn a condom at the Bencoolen Street hotel, and in Amsterdam she was sure he had also worn one, but she could not be certain of anything that night. She had not even remembered the stumbled return to her own room. Steadying herself, she tried to think clearly about Amsterdam, but remembered little except an urgency of emotion that transcended everything else. The last few years she had ceased to worry about pregnancy on those isolated occasions that might give her cause for anxiety. The occasional hot flush and the growing irregularity of her bodily cycle over the last year or more, and the blessed immunity from pregnancy that she thought menopause had brought her, was a house of cards collapsing about her now. Her heart beat in new panic.

  ‘We verified it twice to be sure,’ Dr. Wong confirmed in a detached tone of voice. ‘And yes, it is rare to conceive at your age.’

  ‘It’s impossible.’ Her voice was full of accusation before Dr. Wong’s unemotional gaze.

  ‘Most late pregnancies are due to IVF treatment, but it can also happen naturally, if rarely.’ Dr. Wong continued to observe her with an interest she was becoming averse to.

  ‘Not married?’ he queried. She shook her head.

  ‘But you can afford to keep the child?’ His eyes never left her face, and his voice was detached.

  ‘I don’t want it. I can’t have it.’

  How would she tell people, what would she say to her mother, to Parvati, to anyone who knew her? Singapore was a traditional society that, as yet, had no place for even premarital co-habitation, leave alone single mothers of her kind. Everything inside her was collapsing; tears smarted in her eyes.

  ‘I want a termination.’

  The words sprang from her, and at once she knew that this was what she must do. She was desperate to smooth out her life, ease from it this wrinkle, to be as before. Dr. Wong looked up from her report to fix his gaze upon her again.

  ‘It is not something I like to recommend. It is legal of course, and the option many women choose, but I usually advise patients in circumstances like your own, to consider well before making a decision. You can put the child up for adoption. We can offer you counselling.’

  She caught an edge of censure in his voice and looked away, acutely aware that beneath the professional steadiness of his gaze he must be wondering about her. In his eyes she was probably what, in Biblical terms, he might call a loose woman.

  Cut off her cunt! Drown the bitch! Slut! Slattern! Whore! The words she had transcribed to her PowerPoint just an hour ago filled her now with new force. She could not meet his gaze but sat in silence, looking down at her hands in her lap. Dr. Wong began to speak again.

  ‘At your age, however, childbirth has many serious risks both of foetal abnormalities, and for yourself. I will give you a note for Dr. Tay in the obstetrics department. I’ll see if they can fit you in right now for a preliminary examination, if you have time. They will then arrange a day and time for the termination, if you are sure that is what you want.’

  Of course it is what I want, she wanted to shout the words out loud to him.

  Dr. Wong picked up the phone and made the arrangement, then reached for a sheet of headed paper on his desk and began writing in a spidery hand, a note to take with her to Dr. Tay. Amita sat unmoving in the chair, relief pounding through her with an intensity equal to the desperation she had felt only moments before. Dr. Wong nodded as she stood up, but in her haste to be free of him she failed even to say an obligatory goodbye.

  She made her way to the obstetrics clinic, following signboards with directions, wandering down the wide corridors of the hospital in a daze. People walking on the opposite track pushed against her, a gurney with an elderly patient hooked to a drip rolled past, accompanied by two nurses, an old man in a wheelchair approached and was gone, snatches of chatter filled her ears as people overtook her. She walked as if in a dream, but at last she found herself in front of the clinic and was obliged to push open the door.

  ‘You’ll have to wait. We’ll try and slip you in between other patients,’ the receptionist told her.

  She did not want to wait. Waiting was time to think. She would have liked to do whatever had to be done, immediately. Then, she could put it all behind her and leave the hospital in the frame of mind she had entered it, and go back to transcribing her notes onto the Powerpoint presentation. She sat down on a chair and looked at the other waiting women, some in advanced stages of pregnancy, none of whom appeared to be in her own agitated frame of mind. They read magazines or watched the pictures flashing mutely over a television screen on the wall. All seemed calm; some even appeared to be bored. A young woman in the chair opposite occasionally stroked the prominent mound of her belly, caressing the child within, smiling gently. A drinking fountain stood in a corner and, on the excuse of getting a cup of water, Amita crossed the room to sit down on another chair with her back to the woman.

  When at last her name was called and she entered the consulting room she found Dr. Tay to be a good-looking young man whose professional pleasantness filled the room. There was none of Dr. Wong’s cool detachment; Dr. Tay leaned forward towards her over his desk, all briskness and compassion.

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nbsp; ‘Let me have a quick look, and then we will decide how best to go about this,’ he reassured her, after reading Dr Wong’s letter.

  A thick head of hair rose from a widow’s peak to crown his broad face. He showed no censure, no hesitation, and Amita warmed to him immediately, filled with hope that what had so suddenly descended upon her could also depart with equal alacrity. She stripped down as told behind a curtain and climbed up onto the examination table. A nurse appeared and placed a sheet over her nakedness, settling her feet into the cups on either side of the couch, pushing open her thighs and readying her for inspection.

  While Dr. Tay prodded and pushed inside her, his shoes squeaked on the tiled floor. Legs spread wide apart, feet raised high and strapped into place on the stirrups, Amita turned her head away from him in distress and humiliation.

  ‘It’s all very healthy in there,’ he announced, his shoes squeaking softly again as he turned discreetly away, releasing her.

  ‘I’d say you are probably about four months pregnant. It would have been better to terminate earlier. Normally we would send you for counselling before making a decision, but at your age, in your circumstances, I am sure you know what you are doing,’ he said, when she was dressed and sat again at his desk.

  ‘I didn’t know I was pregnant,’ she mumbled. Dr. Tay nodded agreeably.

  ‘Periods irregular? Early menopause? Then it’s difficult to know. We’ll take some blood for testing, and do a quick ultrasound. The hospital will call you with a date to come in, maybe early next week? The sooner the better.’