The Howling Silence

by Catherine Lim

  The report mentioned the parental opposition, from both sides, to the young couple’s relationship, which must have been the direct cause of their despair and suicide. I suppose it was the Romeo and Juliet element of tragic, star-crossed young love that had made the story of Ricky Ong Phui Nam and Molly Tay Min Hwee so unforgettable for me.

  In 1972, when I was an undergraduate in the university, I read about another suicide pact, this time of a couple, both aged twenty, who went up to the thirteenth floor of a high-rise block of apartments, some distance from where they lived, tied their wrists together with a silk scarf, and plunged together to their deaths. The smashed bodies of Sanjay Das and Neo Swee Ping lying on the ground could not have been less horrifying than the pile of blackened cinders that had been poor Ricky and Molly. They had left a joint suicide note to their respective parents; again it appeared to be a case of young love blighted by parental opposition.

  In 1986, the Chinese language newspapers carried a report (somehow the event was ignored by the English language newspapers) of a couple – the man was a businessman, aged thirty-five and married, and the girl, a factory worker, aged twenty-two, unmarried, living with her widowed mother – who had one night waded into the sea together and drowned.

  Mr. Tan Kim Seng and Miss Wong Gek Boey too, had had their wrists tied together with a red handkerchief. (I had wondered about the romantic symbolism of this last act of physical togetherness. Or perhaps it was just a simple means of ensuring there would be no changing of mind at the last moment by either party, no breaking free of a sacred last vow.) No bleak picture accompanied the report, but a cheerful one of the couple, in some happier time, clad in warm clothes atop a snowy hill, on an illicit holiday together in a far-off country.

  Fire, earth, water – I was suddenly struck by the elemental aura surrounding the lovers’ deaths, investing them with a certain terrible dignity and power. I saw the different suicides, happening years apart from each other, suddenly come together in an awesome display of the human connectedness with the elements from which we arose from primeval chaos.

  Only one element was missing – air. And I felt a strange frisson of terror in 1989 when I read about another suicide pact that completed the terrifying picture of love’s despair acted out in the vast churning background of elemental chaos. A pilot and his mistress committed suicide together when the plane he was flying deliberately changed course, crashed into a mountain side and exploded, hurtling one hundred other souls into the pitiless void of air and down into the equally pitiless denseness of jungle and mangrove swamp.

  It was only at a later stage of the official inquiry into the crash that the truth emerged. The pilot, Captain Lam Yew Boon, had apparently incurred immense debts through gambling; his wife, who had discovered the affair, had started divorce proceedings; both his teenage children had openly repudiated him; his mistress, Miss Maggie Oon Han Mee who was herself in debt, was passionately in love with him and had insisted on marriage, which he did not want. In the end, the beleaguered couple planned a suicide. The plan would never have been known if the mistress had not left a hurried note to her sister, which was brought up in the official inquiry. There was such an outpouring of rage from the grief-stricken families of the hundred innocent victims that, for a while, the pilot’s family, even though they were totally blameless, had to go into hiding. The wife became a special target of opprobrium when it was thought that she had benefited from the tragedy by a huge sum of insurance money. In the end, very quietly, she and her children left to settle in Australia. Miss Ong’s sister too, disappeared from public view.

  For weeks after the results of the inquiry were made public, the bereaved ones asked again and again, in outraged anguish, “If they wanted to die, why couldn’t they have just died on their own? Why did they have to kill one hundred others?”

  Today, ten years later, the ghosts of Captain Lam and his mistress Maggie Oon are said to be roaming around the earth still, in punishment for their unspeakably evil deed. Villagers living near the site of the crash, report seeing, on certain nights, the distraught figures of a man and a woman, fitting the description of the pilot and his mistress (he was tall with strong features, she was slim and slight, with long, straight hair). They were always reported as looking lost and confused, wandering aimlessly about under trees or struggling in the swamps. One villager reportedly actually coming face to face with them; he said they looked pale and frightened, opening and closing their mouths in a wordless appeal for help. He fled screaming.

  Another villager, with some friends on a night hunting expedition, saw the couple under a tree weeping together. Their wails were taken up by a sudden rush of cold wind and carried over a great distance, reverberating in the night air and heard by people for miles around. Over the years, the villagers have come to live with these strange occurrences and not be bothered by them. They say the time will come when the ghosts have fully paid for their crime and will be allowed to rest in peace at last.

  The full payment of the crime will take another ten years at least. This is the confident assessment of Madam Low Ngin Hoong whose son, daughter-in-law and four-year-old grandson had perished in the crash. She says that the fortune-teller whom she had consulted shortly after the tragedy told her that the combined strength of the curses hurled at the wicked pair by the grieving relatives of the victims, was a truly powerful elemental force capable of breaking through the barrier separating the worlds of the living and the dead, and of dragging out the ghosts of the guilty dead for punishment. The powerful force continues to operate on the ghosts of the pilot and his mistress, condemning them to a hell on the face of the earth itself, where they will wander helplessly about in the site of their heinous deed, for years and years, long after the soul of their victims have gone on to a peaceful rest, long after the souls of their fellow suicides in fire, water and earth, have paid for their self-inflicted deaths and gone, too, to their rest.

  Madam Low Ngin Hoong says, with still a tinge of bitterness, “I know I should forgive the dead, but forgiveness does not come easy to a heart that continues to bleed, even after so many years.” One day, she says, she will go to the site of the tragic deaths of her family, to bury the bitterness. But not before the elemental power of combined sorrow and anger of those sad days has worked itself out at last and permitted the release, from their torment, of the ghosts of Captain Lam Yew Boon and Miss Maggie Oon Han Mee.

  The Child

  “My daughter, are you well?”

  “My mother, I am well.”

  “My daughter, do you have enough to eat?”

  “Yes, Mother. I am eating well.”

  “My daughter, take good care of yourself.”

  “I will, Mother.”

  For years, Ah Cheng Soh had been going to the Hai Thong Temple to speak to her dead daughter, Ah Lian, through one of the temple mediums. Ah Lian had died in infancy, during the Japanese Occupation, when desperate mothers, too poor to buy milk for their babies, fed them sugar water. Ah Cheng Soh’s husband and brother had been killed by Japanese soldiers. A few months later, the poor young widow saw her sickly, undernourished baby die in her arms, thus losing three loved ones in the terrible war. Continuing to make rice dumplings to sell in the market, after the war was over, Ah Cheng Soh eked out a modest livelihood, living by herself in a tiny, one-room flat in an old block of flats (one of the first to be built in Singapore, and since then torn down to make way for taller, more modern-looking blocks with better facilities).

  While her dead husband and brother had long been consigned to oblivion, being remembered only once a year when the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts came around, her little infant daughter remained dear and close through regular contact via the temple medium. Ah Cheng Soh kept watch, like any loving mother, on the child’s progress in the other world she had gone to, for there too, babies become children and children grow into adults. When little Ah Lian was four years old, Ah Cheng Soh bought a paper doll and other paper toys from a shop selling
gifts for the dead, and burnt these in a temple for proper delivery to the deceased daughter. Two years later, Ah Cheng Soh, with the same motherly indulgence, sent up a gift of a tricycle, beautifully done in multi-coloured paper, complete with a delightful tricycle bell in the front. When Ah Lian was twelve years old, her mother brought her a pair of ear-rings, exquisitely made with fine gold paper. Ah Cheng Soh thought, with a sad heart, that if her daughter had lived, that would be the age of the piercing of her ear-lobes and the wearing, for the first time, of gold jewellery to mark the imminence of womanhood.

  “My daughter, are you well? Are you taking good care of yourself?”

  This was Ah Lian’s fourteenth year, and surely she would have had her first menses. Ah Cheng Soh worried about the difficulties the girl might be experiencing in her initiation into adulthood.

  Her worst anxieties were confirmed. Ah Lian seemed confused and unhappy. The temple medium through whom she spoke to her mother, did not seem at all at ease, once or twice even heaving the immense sighs of an overcharged heart. When Ah Lian turned sixteen, her unhappiness was so great, it overflowed in tears. Ah Cheng Soh watched in alarm as big drops of tears oozed out of the medium’s tightly closed eyes and splattered her cheeks.

  “Oh, I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,” cried poor Ah Cheng Soh, weeping herself.

  “My daughter, tell me what you want.”

  “My mother, find me a husband.”

  So the cause of the poor girl’s distress, which she had been so reluctant to reveal, was loneliness. Alone in the vast drear world of the dead, the girl yearned for a male companion. Ah Cheng Soh immediately set about the task of finding her a spouse. She remembered that some years ago, a woman in the neighbourhood had gone on a similar search for her dead son who had also died in infancy and appeared in a dream, nineteen years later, to make his urgent request. The woman had managed to locate a couple whose little daughter, having died fifteen years ago, would now be about the right age for the young man. A marriage was subsequently arranged and solemnised in a temple that had conducted many such ghost marriages, where the bridal couple was usually represented by paper effigies, the wedding guests ate and drank as at any normal wedding party, and gifts of clothes, furniture, household utensils, jewellery, cash, etc. in ghost paper, were presented, being burnt to ashes and thus delivered to the couple.

  Ah Cheng Soh began asking around for a suitable husband for her daughter. There had not been many deceased male infants who would have reached adulthood at this time but Ah Cheng Soh persisted, determined to make her daughter happy. At last, on the recommendation of someone, she took a bus long ride to another part of the city, and managed to find an old, blind woman living in an old folks’ home, whose grandson had died in infancy and would now be about twenty years old.

  The old woman gave her consent readily. The young man was consulted through the temple medium. He expressed his joy in the prospect of being united in marriage to Ah Lian.

  Relieved and excited, Ah Cheng Soh began to prepare for the marriage of her daughter. It was a very simple ceremony as she could not afford anything beyond the gift of an ang pow each to the temple medium who had conveyed both the crucial request from her daughter and the eager assent of the young man, and the temple priest who conducted the ceremony, chanting prayers and burning joss-sticks. Two long strips of yellow prayer paper bearing the names and ages represented the couple; a modest offering of steamed chicken, noodles, oranges and sweetmeats, represented the wedding feast. But Ah Cheng Soh made sure there was cash in abundance for the couple to spend, burning a huge pile of ghost money.

  Ah Cheng Soh’s neighbours who knew about the marriage, congratulated her and offered good wishes, expressing warm thanks for her friendly sharing of the wedding food which she had brought back from the temple.

  “My daughter, are you happy?”

  “My mother, I am very happy. I thank you for your love and kindness, my mother.”

  One morning, at six, as Ah Cheng Soh opened the door of her little flat to take her rice dumplings to sell in the market, as had been practice these many years, she saw a bundle of something at her doorstep, saw it move and heard small sounds from it. She bent down to look. It was a new-born baby, wrapped in a white towel. Uttering little cries of astonishment, Ah Cheng Soh picked up the baby and carried it in her arms, gently rocking it. It was a baby girl, and it could not be more than a few days old. Ah Cheng Soh’s first thought was to get some milk and warm clothes for the baby, her second thought was to go to the police and make a report. Hurrying back into her flat to get the baby out of the cold morning air, Ah Cheng Soh froze in the shock of a sudden realisation: it was exactly nine months after the marriage of her daughter. She stared at the tiny infant in her arms: This was her grand-daughter. A ghost child, but her grand-child nevertheless. Weakened by her shock, Ah cheng Soh sat down heavily on a chair, still carrying the baby wrapped in the towel.

  The events in the days that followed were too much for poor Ah Cheng Soh to assimilate into her simple, even existence, and she went in a dazed state from one event to the next, gasping, hardly coherent, certain of only one thing so that even in her confusion she asserted the truth confidently, even aggressively, to the police and her neighbours, “I tell you this is my grandchild.” The police had insisted on taking the child away to a hospital and making a search for the mother, necessary and correct procedures in a case like this. They were convinced that the mother was an earthly one, probably one of those factory girls foolish enough to get pregnant and desperate enough to leave their babies at other people’s doorsteps or even throw them down garbage chutes or into rubbish bins.

  “No, no,” said Ah Cheng Soh, “I tell you it’s my grandchild. Nine months. Nine months exactly. How can you explain that?”

  She went to the temple medium for confirmation.

  “My daughter, is it my grand-daughter?”

  “My mother, it is.”

  To her great joy, the police search was unsuccessful and she was allowed to adopt the baby. By the time all the necessary formalities had been gone through with the police and the hospital authorities, the baby girl was already six months old. Ah Cheng Soh was thrilled to bring her home. She paid somebody to sell her dumplings for her at the market, so that she could stay home and look after the baby.

  “My daughter, what name would you and her father like to give her?”

  “It is your wish, my mother.”

  Ah Cheng Soh named the baby “Poh Kim”, meaning “Precious Gold”, for no child brought greater joy to a lonely woman than this grand-child born of a daughter thought to have been lost forever nearly twenty years ago. The trouble came from the neighbours. They looked uneasy at the ‘ghost baby’ and would not let their children go near her. They whispered among themselves, sharing their strange observations about the strange baby who cried differently from other babies, who sprouted teeth well before the normal time, who, even at that very young age, looked at people with a strange look that made them turn away, their arms suddenly covered with goosebumps. Ah Cheng Soh’s assistant at her dumplings stall in the market confided in frightened whispers, that she once held the baby and found herself bearing immense weight that got heavier and heavier until her arms almost gave way, and she had to quickly return the baby to its cradle.

  When the child started to walk, one neighbour claimed that one day, as she looked at the child’s feet, she noticed that they were not touching the ground, the surest proof of ghosthood. Another neighbour who lived next door said that every time the child cried in the night, a response came through the dark silence, in the form of a mournful wail of a dog, a melancholy hoot of an owl, a sighing of the wind or, on one occasion, a distinct cry from another ghost child.

  As the whispered rumours spread, nobody ventured near Ah Cheng Soh’s flat. Walking along the common corridor, the neighbours quickened their steps as they passed her door and heaved a big sigh of relief when they did not have to look upon the ghost child who s
eemed to like sitting on the doorstep, playing with her toys or simply watching people pass by. She was a very quiet child, with large, gentle eyes that could fix themselves for a long time on others, much to their alarm. Unlike other children, she made hardly any noise, sitting by herself on the doorstep, watching everybody and everything with her large, intense, wistful eyes.

  “If you look close enough,” shuddered a neighbour, “you’ll notice that the eyes are different. There’s something very strange about them.”

  Ah Cheng Soh said to her grand-daughter, “My little Poh Kim, don’t worry about what people say. You are my precious grand-daughter, a gift from my daughter.” Ah Cheng Soh claimed that since the arrival of the child, all the aches and pains in her body had disappeared. Moreover, her dumplings business had improved vastly.

  The neighbours were less happy. When the next door woman’s son fell ill, the blame was immediately laid on the ghost child. “My Bah-Bah broke away from me and ran to her. I pulled him back immediately. But it was too late. He fell ill that very night.”

  In spite of their hostility, the neighbours did not dare scold or harm the ghost-child, fearing powerful recrimination. A man was said to have gone raving mad and died a horrible death for just uttering some insulting words to a ghost.

  “My daughter, people are saying bad things about Poh Kim.”

  “My mother, do not worry. Her father and I watch over her and protect her.”

  One day, while the little girl, now aged three, was sitting on the doorstep, playing with a plastic cup and spoon, a man who lived in the neighbouring estate and who had heard of the ghost child, walked slowly up to her. He approached with much cautious and gentle deference. He squatted down in front of her and held out a handful of brightly coloured sweets. Poh Kim stared at them, then at him, fixing her large eyes on his face.