Some months earlier, Bernadette had bought an electronic piano whose keys have the capacity to light up to assist Andy in his learning. The computerised piano also has another function which allows the piano to play on its own. You select a tune, throw the switch and it plays by itself. We put Mak in front of the piano and turn on this switch, select one of her favourite tunes which she used to play, a song called Rasa Sayang. So she sits in her wheelchair all animated as she depresses the keys and she thinks she’s playing the tune. But her face lights up and she smiles, sometimes even laugh as she tosses her head as if her hair is still long and glossy. She even stretches up perceptibly so that she is not as slumped in the wheelchair as she had been. I see her too as she must be seeing herself, in her teens, sitting on her piano-stool in my grandparents’ bungalow by the sea, when there was serenity and security in her life, when all she had to do was play the piano.
Now that her body is healing, there is not a great deal I can do by staying on. It is already the end of October and I have been away from England since June. Besides, my husband and elder son are already back home. I have to share myself with them, too. After showing her the technique, Maria is quite capable of putting Mak in her wheelchair by herself. She washes her, changes her diapers and cleans her without complaint. We are truly fortunate to have Maria sent to us. I pray that somewhere in the Philippines, someone is taking care of her mother as she is taking care of mine. Once a week, Bernadette and I have to shampoo our mother’s remaining head of hair in a special basin and Maria can assist Bernadette in doing so. Andy tries to persuade me to stay on until Christmas, but it will be too long away from my own family. So I make plans for my younger son to come to England and I book my flight.
Except for her check-up at the hospital, Mak has not been out of the house since her return. Now that she feels comfortable enough to sit in the wheelchair for an hour, I decide that I would wheel her to the path along the canal in the late afternoon so that it is not hot but yet light enough for her to enjoy the view. At first she’s unsure of my intention and is a bit apprehensive. But I prattle on and give her assurances. In case of any emergency since it’s our first time out, I take Maria with me. Andy has a day off from school so he comes along on his push-bike. We manouvre the wheelchair up and down concrete pavements, across the tarmac-estate roads and arrive at the park which leads to the canal. It’s like taking a child out for the first time on a pushchair. We point things out to her and talk incessantly so that she doesn’t get frightened. We travel along the cemented path right by the tidal canal and she starts to relax. Across the canal is a golf course and across the expressway is the beach and then the sea. So she can look out to water, some grass and trees.
“Look, Mak,” I say. “Look at that colourful bird!”
It’s a lovely omen. At my voice, the kingfisher takes flight from its perch on the bank to display its beautiful feathers. I am especially thrilled because this city is walled in by so many buildings and strictures that it is hard to think of it as having anything wild and free.
They say that Alzheimer’s patients need a routine to provide stability in their lives, so I make the trip out as part of her routine. I establish a particular route, too, so that she can come to see some kind of pattern, I hope. If Andy does not come with me, my mother is entirely mine for that hour and it grows into our special time together. I would walk her down the path and she would chat to me, although sometimes, her talk doesn’t make any sense. And that is when it occurs to me that people can have words coming out of their mouths without them creating any meaning. But in my mother’s case, it doesn’t really matter now.
“Hello, ada baik? How are you?” she asks astonished people as we travel along the canal. And worse, when she talks as if she knows their relatives. “How’s your mother? Is she any better?”
But I am no longer embarrassed. She seems happy enough and that is all that counts. I take her to where the tracks of the MRT run overhead and will wait until she sees at least two trains before we leave. She has a fascination for trains because in her time, there was only one train that ran out of Singapore to the Malay Peninsula. And Alzheimer’s had already attacked her brain when the MRT started running. But she loves the colours painted along the sleek trains and the speed at which they run. I make sure that at this rest-point, I give her a drink from the water bottle Maria has filled with ice water for us. Then I wheel her along to the other end of the canal to watch the aeroplanes as they take off from Changi Airport. If she is still in the mood, I would sit at a stone bench so that she can enjoy the breeze and tell me tales from her old days and hear more news of the dead people who come to talk to her. I point out the flowers to her and before we leave will always pluck a few for her to take home.
“So beautiful,” she says, holding the flowers like a bouquet in her hands. “So beautiful. I love flowers. I have always loved flowers.”
The hibiscus and bougainvillea are prolific and are public property in the park. But when she starts admiring flowers that are cascading down from someone’s garden-walls, I have to practise more stealth in stealing them for her. But it doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters now but that I can bring a smile to her lips, brighten her face for a fraction of a second. That is all that matters now. One afternoon, Gloria, Agatha’s younger daughter, who has just turned 18, comes with me on our walk. She exhibits a real keeness to learn the routine I had set for Mak. Her elder sister, Joanna, who so looks much like Mak and is devoted to her, is away at University in New Zealand and keeps in touch with her grandmother’s progress via e-mail.
“Don’t worry, Aunty Phine,” Gloria says. “When I finish school early, I can take Mama out too, when you’re not here. But do I have to steal flowers for her, too?”
My niece is a lovely girl and I am touched by her thoughtfulness. Members of my family have shown such camaraderie that I am so proud that they are my brothers and sisters, my nieces and nephews. Last Christmas, I had been a bit disappointed by the behaviour of two of my nieces and a couple of my nephews, but their respect for my mother is still evident, the Confucian ethics of family still lingering. I am glad, too, that the younger generation is here to provide the continuity when the older one has moved on. After all, this is truly the way of the world, as in nature, that one generation must go to make way for the next, that all creatures live and then must die, so that the soul can be propelled to the next stage of its learning.
“Your mother is so lucky,” Sylvia says on another visit, this time dragging Lenny along; Lenny who has grown as tall as he is wide. “It’s because of what she has given of herself that so many people love her. She is a special lady and she is blessed, indeed.”
Twenty
The damp, English cold is a shock to the system when you have been in warm and sunny places for months. But the visual impact of Autumn with its beautiful colours scattered in the trees make up for the loss of warmth. My mother has always shown me that you need to colour your life with an attitiude of joy, so that in most situations you can find something positive, something beautiful. She lived her life by example, not by mouthing platitudes, and for her, doing the most banal or unpleasant chore like clearing the chamber pot, became a meaningful action for the spirit. That was when she was in control. Is her spirit in control now or has her damaged brain overruled its influence? To us who lead ordinary lives, living in this mortal world, it appears that her mind has mutated to something that we don’t recognise. It’s the same with the English weather, when the clocks move back at the end of British summer time. England is deluged with heavy rainfall and unexpected floods. The rivers run riot and overflow their banks. And so I return to scenes of chaos, of stalled vehicles, flooded high-streets and dispirited people. It is like the 1950s flood in Singapore all over again, but on a much larger scale. People blame the greenhouse effect caused by pollutants and carbon dioxide, some scientists agree and some don’t, attributing other factors. Is this a mutation or is it a pattern that has repeated itself with
hundreds of years in between so that we can’t recognise its warp and woof?
Emotional climate can change, too, by the pollutants of anger, a negative thought, a wrong word. Or it can change with a sunny smile, a jewel of praise, the treasure of confidence. A mistral must have swept through the hearts of my stepfamily when we have been away from them all these months, causing a change to the dry landscape. Perhaps the wind sighs and says it’s better to tolerate a stepmother than not seeing their own father at all. We have a call from James, the elder twin, inviting us to lunch. Of all the stepchildren, he has been the least judgmental, the least troublesome. Whatever problems we had encountered with him were the normal ones of parents with a teenaged son flexing his emotional muscles. A keen cook, he promises me a delicious vegetarian meal.
“The kids missed you guys,” he says of his son and stepdaughter.
Laden with presents, we drive up to his home in Buckinghamshire, where the atmosphere is lovely, his partner very warm and welcoming. Lunch is a beautifully baked aubergine stuffed with cubed vegetables served on a bed of rice. When I hug the grandchildren, they smile and call me Grandma, although shyly. For the first time in years, I have a sense of family here in England. And the tsunami of it all is when Sadie rings up a few days afterwards on my home telephone. Usually, she only calls her father’s office telephone which is in the annexe to our house, so that she never has to speak to me. Her voice is light and cheery, her tone unmistakeably friendly.
“Hi! How about coming to lunch next Sunday? By the way, how’s your mother?”
I am so stunned, I am at a loss for words for a few moments. She has never asked after my sons or my family. I was treated as if I didn’t have a life beyond her father. For three years, while my elder son was in England at college, she had neither asked after him nor invited her stepbrother even once to her place for a meal. She complained when she thought I had forgotten a birthday present for her younger son one year, yet she has never bought any of my sons either a Christmas or birthday present. So this tide of change is overwhelming. A year ago, I had treated her to the Body and Mind Spirit Festival in London, which impressed her a lot, after which she had taken up Reiki, learning to be a Master over a weekend. Perhaps in finding herself, she has let go of her fears and prejudices. But so many harsh words have been spoken, so many deplorable acts have been perpetrated against me that I dare not allow my heart to melt so easily. Together with her mother and the younger twin, she has shot me with nearly 20 years of pain and loneliness. When your flesh has been flayed, it takes a while to heal. Yet I cannot rebuff a proffered hand. This is my mother in me, her gift of the spirit.
“Sunday lunch would be nice. I’ve already wrapped the Christmas presents so I’ll bring them. And one for Alex’s birthday in January.”
“Phine, it’s only November.”
“I know. But I’m going into hospital in a fortnight for my right hand and it might be out of action for a while.”
And so we take that first faltering step towards a new kind of relationship. But David insists on calling Sadie and reminding her that the last time she invited us for a meal, there was nothing for me to eat, and would she make sure that there is food for his wife, who doesn’t eat meat. For David, too, this is a change, to stand up to his family about their treatment of his wife. But that is another story.
Life is about change, about movement. It is when we stay rooted to old habits, old thoughts and old prejudices that we are stunted in our spiritual growth. It is the security of familiar things, familiar environment, which chains us to our past. When we move on, we move to a different viewpoint, like further up the hill so that we can see our past as if in the valley below us — and things look different from that perspective. It is time for me to walk up the hill myself to look at where my life and my father’s crossed, to try seeing him with an adult eye from this new vantage point.
I had a grotesque view of my father. He was a spectre that used to loom huge and dark over my childhood figure like the oversized shadow of an evil cartoon character splashed across the wall. For years, I only remembered the worse of him, denied his spirit my smile, afraid to allow him access into my heart. I was to him what my mother dared not be. I argued, disobeyed and rebelled. I would not allow him to shape me, twist me into form the way he shaped and twisted my mother. I defied him for her. When he caned or belted me, I was not submissive but kicked back, bit into his arm. He would hit me senseless, my ears ringing. I was angry with him for what he did to my mother, for the honour he denied her. I don’t know if the anger I used to feel against him amounted to hate. But I know that as much as I love my mother for giving me the ability to read, I hated my father for his continually destructive attitude over my education. I cannot forget the way he punished me for going to the National Library, making me feel so wrong, as if I had been doing something nasty or wicked. When I read books, he would snatch them away from me, telling me that the words contained in them were poisonous and would corrupt me. I cannot imagine my prospects now if my father had succeeded in taking me out of school — he would have denied me all the pleasures of the written word, all the mind-training of education, all the freedom to think. I still have nightmares of a parallel world where I am an ignoramus, unable to read, unable to write, unable to express the thoughts that swim around in my head.
“Education is bad for women,” he often said. “Poisons their minds. Makes them less meek.”
My father died when I had just turned 16. George had been the only boy I had been out with and I had paid severely for my small excursion. Ah Tetia made sure that no boys came near me or I, them. He impressed upon me that I had to keep myself pure for my husband, that any contact or relationship between a boy and a girl before marriage was wrong. Not only was I not allowed to date, I was not even permitted to go out in a group that included the opposite sex. It was straight to school and back. I was a frog under a coconut shell that my father had created. But now I force myself to remember that my father was a product of his time as we each are of our own. Many parents in the kampong did not approve of dating. Although it made good moral sense to keep oneself pure, it also meant that I had very little experience of men. Or as the Bible puts it, I do not know men. My ex-husband was my first boyfriend, my present was my second. I was too scared and insecure to date even after my father had died and released me from his dictatorial ways; his influence extended beyond his grave. Though Ah Tetia disapproved of me being educated, eventually he came to recognise its value as a bargaining tool.
“You will certainly fetch more money now,” he said, as though I was cattle. “I can marry you off to a rich man.”
If he had lived, I would have met my husband only on our wedding night. Like Parvathi would have, if she had lived if she had not been betrothed to her uncle. As far as my father was concerned, a daughter was less like a wife, to fetch and carry, to cook and clean, a liability that he had to feed and clothe until she came to be of marriageable age when she would be bartered off. From then on, she is assumed to belong to her husband’s family as if she no longer has any blood ties with her own parents. He had no idea that our genetic blueprints matched, that even if he had sold me off, I could always be linked back to him. During my fits of rebelliousness, he denied and disowned me. And the memory of that near sale when I was six months old kept returning, making me feel hurt and insecure. He would sell me at any excuse. And that made me harden my heart towards him. But it is wrong to carry hatred in your heart. Hate is putrefied love and oozes black in your blood stream, contaminating all the other tissues and organs. Hate shapes your mind and shadows your views. It does not allow you to be free, but forms a curtain between yourself and the real circumstances. But time and maturity does take the edge off anger and I know now that it was not my father I hated but his deeds, unthinking and violent. His words about my worthlessness and my pursuit of an education are less hurtful now. I have proven myself to me. I am not worthless. Black and ugly, I can’t do anything about the way I
look, but I can try to look good by being fit and looking fit. That should make me passable. Though I don’t believe it to be true, I am grateful that David keeps on telling me that I am beautiful. So my father’s words begin to weigh less on my mind now as they recede into the background of my life.
David and I live in a small English village on the borders of Surrey and Hampshire. Between our kitchen and the stable block of our 100-year-old house is an area of uneven ground where rainwater collects, making the place muddy. With the help of a good local builder, we decide to make something of this area and decide to turn it into a cobbled patio with a fountain, which can be seen from the kitchen. The builder works well and before long, the patio is finished, transforming the area. We add a wrought-iron bench, where you can sit to catch the afternoon sun, a couple of planters with flowers, and water plants trailing down from the fountain. The 30-something builder and I are chatting, admiring his handiwork when out of the blue, he asks, “Have you heard of that actor-chap who is famous for his old horror films in them black and white days?”
“Which one?” I ask. “Vincent Price? Christopher Lee?”
“No, no. Short guy. Wrinkly and horrible looking.”
“Oh, you mean Boris Karloff?”
“Yes, that’s the one. His real name is Henry Pratt, actually, and he lived near here, not far from Passfield. I did some work in his house once. There’s a blue plaque by his front door.”
Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 29