“I hope we’ve come a little way from the days of crude detention. I’m also hoping that, if the accused thinks what I’m saying is utter rubbish, they will take me to court for defamation.”
“What’s your motive for bringing up something that happened so long ago? Are you trying to bring down this government?”
“My father—”
Right at that moment, there’s a crash. The locked entrance door breaks open and two men burst in. Ling’s heart vaults to her mouth. More men storm into the room. Some yank out all the power plugs from their sockets and others make a beeline for her. The two men who first entered remain by the door.
T. M. Chua goes to the front of the room and addresses the audience with a booming voice. “We are from the Internal Security Department in Singapore and the Special Branch in Malaysia. This is a security operation. All of you are to leave the room now.”
The secret police move around the room with an intensity of purpose that makes them efficient or alarming, depending on one’s world-view. Chairs clatter as the crowd reluctantly makes their way to the door while still craning their necks to watch the ordeal of the woman who has triggered the two countries’ security alarms. One of the journalists, who has not asked any questions but was seen taping the entire proceedings, goes up to Chua and whispers something in his ear. Chua unzips his windbreaker and places his right hand beneath it. He orders the people to surrender the press releases distributed earlier, otherwise his men at the door will have to frisk them. A few journalists remain, standing in a corner, hoping to get the details for their scoop. When no one is watching, they hide the photocopied documents into what secret compartments they can find in their bags. A female reporter folds the last page into the size of a stamp and slips it into her panties. A press photographer snaps several shots of T. M. Chua and his men surrounding Ling, until he is warned and escorted out of the room, together with the remaining journalists.
At the green felt table, the men form a ring around Ling. They whisk her sling bag and the fray-edged diary into a black plastic bag. The female officer yanks Ling’s arms to her back and clamps a pair of handcuffs on her wrists. Ling’s already icy hands convulse. She is in shock at being handcuffed like a criminal. Later, in her quieter moments, she will not remember anything of these moments.
She is shaken from her stupor when Yang appears at her side, screaming at her assailants. “What are you all doing? Why are you putting handcuffs on my sister?”
“Your sister is under arrest. Here is the arrest warrant.” T. M. Chua waves a sheet of paper in front of him.
“Who the hell are you? What fucking paper is this?” Yang snatches it but with the blood pounding in his head, he cannot make anything out. “What are your charges? What has she done?”
“You’d better get out of our way or we’ll arrest you as well,” Chua spits in his face.
Yang pushes the female officer away and grabs his sister’s arm before two beefy men restrain him. Ling watches the melee unfold without resistance. Underneath her blanched exterior, her heart swells to see her brother get into a frenzy for her sake. They escort Ling out of the room.
She holds her head up despite the humiliation of the handcuffs. In the sea of camera flashes going off, she sees the headlines in tomorrow’s papers. How many will print her story and how many the government’s press release? Her only chance rests with the Malaysian and foreign press, whom she prays will not buckle under the threat of having their newspapers banned in Singapore. Even if only one newspaper publishes her allegations and the evidence, her job is done. She will fret no more, no matter what they are going to do to her.
She is led into a lift, which goes down. The lift door opens to more flashes, and finally she is bundled into a car. Even though someone then slips a blindfold over her eyes, she can still see the searing glare. The car races off.
Yang watches the car disappear around a bend of the road, and with it, his chance of redeeming himself. Why didn’t they go for him? Because he was too damned pathetic, sitting in the back row. He screams inside his head to be taken away so that he gets his comeuppance and is quits with himself. He is convinced, now more than ever before, he was flawed at birth. He did not become bad. He is bad. Born into a family with an undesirable background, he now sees his cultural anxiety in England in excruciating lucidity, why Katherine abandoned him, why Judy despised him. He knows he will only go down the same path as his father and his great-great-grandfather. If only he could revoke the story of his whole life.
THIRTY
LING COUNTS THE number of strokes she has scratched on the wall with her fingernails, one stroke a day. Five grids and one stroke. They have kept her in the cell the size of a bathroom in her father’s house, for 26 days now. No family member has been allowed to visit. No ogre has come to grill her either. Her only human contact is the wardens, whose job it is not to talk to prisoners. As she was brought here in a car, blindfolded, she does not know where she is. Maybe Changi. Her hand feels the flour sack prison uniform they made her put on after they took away her shirt and pants, underwear and shoes. The fabric is worn smooth, and the pants are held up by a drawstring at the top. On her fourth day, they returned her underwear and gave her a change of clothes, for which she is thankful. But without a change of undies, she has to go alternate days without.
She looks around her. A single, wooden bunk with no mattress, sheets or pillow, cemented to the floor. The last time she saw something like that was at the funeral of a great-granduncle. The old man was lying in a cheap wooden coffin but even that had some padding inside it. Now she has nothing but time. To do what? The warden would not even give her pen and paper. Actually she wants a pillow most. Sleeping on her side without one has caused the vertebrae in her neck to crunch against one another. Sleeping on her back without a pillow makes her think of her great-granduncle, and that she will never wake up again. But the thought is not as unbearable as the heat in the windowless room. She touches her waxy face and runs her fingers through her straw-like hair. She fancies some gentler face wash and shampoo than the Popinjay soap supplied by the prison, which she also uses to wash her clothes. She has also been given an all-purpose Good Morning face towel, a used toothbrush and a tube of Maxam toothpaste. It seems curious for her to be wishing for beauty soap when she does not know if she will ever see the light of day again.
Except for her arresting officer, whose name she does not know, she has yet to meet her faceless, voiceless, omnipresent captor. Are they putting her through a mental breakdown regime, the way they drove Lim Min Tong to depression and provided the rope for him to hang himself? Why hasn’t anybody come to put her on the torture rack? The cell she is in, designed by the British and “improved” by the Japanese, may not fit the description of solitary confinement in Edward Wee’s diary. But the 26 days of being penned in the hole, incommunicado, not having a book or newspaper to read, are like having her brain eaten alive by a worm, a little at a time. And how many more such 26 days does she have to endure before her mental health limit is reached? Just like there must be a legal limit to the number of lashings for even hardcore criminals. She has heard about the fury of the caged animal. To keep that at bay, she asks to go to the bathroom as many times as the warden allows her, and uses her worn prison garb to scrub out her cell daily. She would then squat naked under the standing tap and let the water loosen her every taut nerve as she rubs out the stains on her uniform. Hanging out her washing gives her the chance to go to the courtyard to breathe in a bit of fresh air and see the open skies.
To fill the vacuum in the cell, she looks forward to every meal, to feel the passing of time, and to have a little chat with the reticent warden. She regrets not having learnt meditation and has to settle for reflecting on what barely passes as life. She thinks about her critical achievements, things that have helped at least one person in the whole wide world, things that have made her proud of herself. She draws a blank. Even with her last attempt at heroism, she thinks, why t
he fuck did I do it? Did I do it for Pa, for Yang or for myself? If I were the secret police, I would have arrested me too for opening a can of worms, bent on destroying everything that has taken a generation to build. I’m sure this is how my arrest has been reported in the local press.
She flashes back to the day of her arrest in Johor Bahru. In the middle of the press conference, even though her courage was abandoning her, she had put on a brave front so as not to distress Yang further. And so she would look honest, rather than stark raving mad, to the press. Once she was out of sight of her brother and the cameras, she had slumped in the car. It was just as well they blindfolded her, for she was too tired to look at the world for another minute. As she leaned back against her handcuffed arms, she felt two other bodies pressing against her on either side. They emitted a sweaty odour but that was the least of her discomforts. She heard the car passing through immigration very quickly, courtesy of their special passes, of course. In her dark, timeless world, perversely, she found peace and rest.
When they removed her blindfold, the first person she saw was the female officer who had handcuffed her in the hotel. All her male hunters were gone. She found herself in a cobwebbed office with the windows chained and padlocked, where grim-faced armed Gurkhas guarded the door. She told herself she must not emerge from the incarceration feeling guilty about what she had done. The officer removed her handcuffs. A male clerk took her mugshot and all ten fingerprints then gave her a bit of toilet paper to wipe the ink off. She was led to a squat toilet inside the office, ordered to strip and put on the funereal outfit. This completed her transformation from civilian to prisoner. She felt one phase of her life coming to an end. Then, escorted by the same officer and two Gurkhas, she was blindfolded once more and walked barefoot to her cell.
The photo taking and finger prints and prison clothes convince her she will be in here for the long haul, so she may as well get used to the cell. But she cannot get used to having absolutely nothing to do except breathe. She shivers as she remembers the kidnap victim in a Hong Kong movie she saw years ago. The woman was hidden in a coffin underground, with only a tube connecting her mouth to the surface to keep her alive. The three kidnappers were killed in a shoot-out with the police, but they could never find the girl. When Ling decided to call the press conference, she had expected the worst. But she could not have expected this, one second joining the next and the next in a sickening continuum, as the minutes dragged to the next, ad infinitum.
The warden had earlier delivered a packet of luncheon meat and greasy vegetables with rice. She has eaten it with relish since it gave her something to do, but she now sinks into despair again after that sole activity. She sits on the bunk, stares at the dark grey wall and waits for her next meal. Nothing penetrates the walls except the afternoon heat. She watches little beads of perspiration form on her lower arms. The guttural shriek of a gecko breaks her concentration. She looks up to the ceiling for her friends and her eyes follow them chasing each other around the cell. They chichak wildly and swish their tails. She tries to figure out if they are mating or fighting. She curses them for fooling around instead of ambushing the mosquitoes that turn her turbulent sleep into itchy mornings. She has developed mosquito smashing into an art form over the past 26 days. Their flattened, bloodied bodies are displayed in a corner of the floor below her scratched-out grids on the wall. She can then work out the average number she kills a day.
She stretches her body, gets off the bunk and bangs on the door. The peephole opens and an eye looks in. “Toilet!” she shouts. The clinking of keys and clang of the bolt follow. The warden takes her to the bathroom as she picks up the face towel hanging on a line outside her cell. She leaves the bathroom door slightly ajar, as she is told, takes off her clothes and turns on the standing tap. She crouches below it. The tepid water courses through her spiky hair and clammy skin, collecting in a pool between her legs and lower abdomen. She opens and closes her legs to dispel and collect the running water.
Then she hears the iron gate to her block of cells clank open. A few seconds later, her female captor, whom she has not seen since the day of her arrest, shouts over the bathroom door for her to get dressed. She gets ridiculously excited. Finally they are going to take her out for interrogation. At least there will be something for her to do, and she can meet the enemy. She dries herself with the face towel and puts on her sweaty prison clothes. The female officer has brought her a pair of rubber slippers and a comb.
“Guess I’ve to look presentable for your boss, don’t I?” she says, to practise speaking again.
The woman points her chin to the gate where two Gurkhas are waiting. Ling combs her entangled hair and asks the warden to keep the comb for her to add to her precious toiletries. She bounces along with the slippers, glad her feet do not have to touch the grimy floor. She only hopes she does not have to return them after her interrogation. She had never thought a day would come when she would covet the small things in life.
With the Gurkhas at their heels, the officer leads Ling through a long, serpentine footpath enclosed with corrugated iron sheets. She is dismayed at the irony that she is tracing the drugged footsteps of Lim Min Tong under similar circumstances, treading frighteningly close to the truth of his death. The footpath leads them into another building. As she walks down each flight of steps, the moon seems to have crossed a little bit further in front of the sun, blocking out light to earth, so that when she reaches the bottom flight, the eclipse of the sun is total. She wants to plunge straight into the maw of darkness but is restrained by the officer, who walks her to the end of a corridor, opens a door and directs her into an unlit vestibule.
Behind the second door is Lim Siew Kian. He is in similar rags. Ling believes the earth must have come out of the moon’s shadow. She feels instant solidarity with him, even though they have met only once before. She holds back her elation in the presence of two other men who must be his guards. But her reunion with humanity after 26 days of emotional and material privation is too much for her to bear. Tears stream from her eyes, with them her dammed up frustration and fear. The two guards and the officer leave the room but stop at the vestibule to observe them through a small glass pane high in the centre of the door.
Ling holds Lim Siew Kian’s hands tight.
As tears sluice down her face, the caged animal in her slowly lets go of its claws on her innards.
“I know. I know what you’ve been going through.” The “inspector” holds her in his emaciated arms and strokes her shuddering back. In the three months of his detention, every strand of his hair has turned white.
“Nobody knows what I’ve been going through.” She sobs even harder. Still holding on to her only friend, she looks around the room, its cork-lined walls with infinite rows of punched holes dancing before her tear-blurred eyes.
Siew Kian leads her to sit on a chair in front of a desk. He pulls up another chair. “What did they do to you?”
“They locked me up in a cell and I asked to see my family and they said no.”
“Did they physically torture you?”
“Isn’t this torture enough?”
“Yes.” He looks closely at her. “What did they question you about?”
“Nobody asked me anything.”
He knits his brows. “So you haven’t been interrogated?”
Ling shakes her head. “What do you think they are going to do to me?”
“I don’t know. Under the ISA, they are given 30 days for their so-called investigation. After that, they will either have to release you or detain you.”
She gesticulates wildly. “So why aren’t they investigating me? Do they just want to torment me?”
Siew Kian holds her hands down. “When you did what you did, you must have expected this to happen.”
Ling drops her head and tears fall to the cement floor.
He puts his arm around her shoulders and prays that her outpouring is affording her some release. When that seems to have calmed her a l
ittle, he says, “What I wonder is, why are they letting us meet? It’s unusual to allow political prisoners to talk to each other.”
“Maybe they know I’m really going mad and this is the 1980s; they can’t just drug me out like they did your brother.”
“I read in the newspaper in here about what you did. I wish I had a chance to talk to you before that.”
“But…this is about your brother. Isn’t that what you yourself wanted to find out too?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I’ve been thinking about it all this time in the cell. I’m afraid history will not remember the victors’ crimes, just as it has long forgotten about my brother. Nobody wants to tear open an old wound. People believe that a few have to be sacrificed to make way for society to progress. Besides… we are ultimately responsible for the things we do. It’s easy to blame it on a higher authority and excuse ourselves.”
“So you’re saying my father did your brother in?”
“Among a few other people, including the PM. But your father was left holding the smoking gun.”
“What about his own death?”
“I’m sorry, but I suspect that your father would like his children to think that he had used his life to pay for his sins.”
“You don’t think anybody pressured him to take his own life?”
“I’m sure they did. And they may have even helped him with procuring the drugs. I posed as an inspector to ascertain that, but to no avail. But I still think we are accountable for the decisions we make. If your father didn’t want to die, nobody could have pressured him to do it. Your father might have used the diary to bargain to be let off. When that failed, he had to decide on his next course of action.”
Fear courses through her body. The monstrous possibility looms, that her father did kill Lim Min Tong and himself. How could a good man destroy the country he professed to love, only to serve the narrow interest of another man and himself? Life has lost its logic.
Death of a Perm Sec Page 23