Maid In Singapore

by Kishore Modak

  After a week, I decided to leave, go back to London and settle back into my routine. Before I went, I wanted to see Eve once, just speak to her, not necessarily try and influence or probe her, just meet her before I went away.

  On the following day, I went back to Jay’s apartment.

  ‘I am looking for Eve in eighteen-o-three, can you please check if she is in? My name is Mrs Rashmi Kettlewood,’ I announced to the concierge, not knowing if Eve would want to see me.

  She did, and I was let into the elevator lobby.

  She, Eve, was in home clothes, shorts and T-shirt, with little or maybe no makeup on, stunning and sexy as ever. Would she have guessed that I knew she was my son’s female avatar? If she had, she concealed him well.

  ‘Hello, Eve. Thanks a lot for seeing me. I am on my way back to London and wanted to leave this envelope for my son. I thought of leaving it with you, in case you saw him in the future.’ It was a dangerous approach, leaving a package with a person’s female persona to be delivered to the male persona, which was hopefully dead, as far as she was concerned. To me, it did not matter; all I wanted was a child.

  It was exactly the kind of thing that could push Eve to confront her male identity, her male personality and along with that, all of her male past, and her uncertain future.

  ‘Sure, I can do that, if I see him. Not to worry, I shall keep it safe,’ she responded well, with no signs of stress or psychic fatigue on her face. To my relief, she also asked me in, offering me a glass of water. The living room was bright with sunlight streaming in from the bay windows.

  ‘I hope you found what you came here for?’ she asked, settling into the couch besides me, her waxed legs neatly folded under her curvy back-bottom, like when two ladies settle down informally.

  Men tend to sit with their legs spread wide apart, knees jutting out, and upwards.

  ‘Yes and no. I have found enough, enough to know that my son is well and healthy, and that is what matters to a mother. I will head back in peace,’ I said, eyeing the envelope lying in front of us on the table. ‘I have left the envelope unsealed, so you know what the contents are, only a few pages from a mother to a son, and nothing else,’ I added, pointing to the envelope.

  If she decided to read what was in the envelope, would it not be an acknowledgement of her maleness, since she was reading what was directed at her male self. Then again, she could read it as if she were spying on other people’s letters, inquisitive about others’ lives and matters, which would be quite normal as well.

  She must be preoccupied with what is natural and what is not, all the time.

  ‘That is no problem. I have your email id and I shall drop you a line if I see him,’ she said.

  What if Eve stopped paying rent for the premises to Jay, would they confront each other?

  I sipped from the glass of water ‘You have been very kind to see me. I must not keep you,’ I said, looking up at the clock on the wall.

  ‘No that is fine. I was about to get a spot of lunch. I can offer you some, too, if you are hungry,’ she asked.

  I grabbed the opportunity, and consented to stay, making fake outward gestures, resisting her invitation on the flimsy pretext of not wanting to be a bother.

  ‘Where are you from? Are you from New York?’ I asked, was it not normal to make chit-chat over lunch.

  ‘My father was Irish, and I have been in this city since childhood. I like it here,’ she replied, continuing our little game of cat and mouse. I was winning; she had no clue that I knew him and sensed the him in her.

  Inside her, the him would know that it was me, his mother, sitting opposite him. Yet, she continued on this path of lies, not letting her guard down. She had not guessed that I knew about the him hiding in her; she must gloat at the idea of even his mother being taken in by the transformation. My visit would have added a new confidence to her current identity, cementing faith in the perfect disguise.

  For him and for her, wasn’t this meeting with the past the ultimate exam, one they would have desperately wanted to clear, like a test taken for a dreaded disease?

  What if I became rude and declared that I wanted see my son, asking for her to go to the bedroom and fetch him? If she refused, I would tell her stories of his past, especially the ones where he defiled my maid and bore her children, like only men can do with women.

  That would break her, leaving me victorious when I did not want to win against my own child.

  ‘The salad is very nice, so good to be able to eat a home-cooked meal, after so many days,’ I continued with small talk.

  She smiled, picking a morsel on the edge of her fork, with dainty lady-like moves.

  Soon, I decided to leave. She saw me to the door.

  ‘Goodbye, Eve. Look after yourself,’ my eyes welled, I could have cried, but I held myself, reaching out and giving her a hug, faint feminine perfume from her body rose in my nose.

  ‘Oh, thank you and take care of yourself, too,’ she was surprised by the hug and caught the moisture in my eyes. ‘Are you okay? Would you like me to fetch you,’ she added, with concern.

  Fetch, a typically Singaporean expression, no doubt picked up during his stay in Singapore.

  ‘I will be fine,’ I turned and left. The door closed behind me with a gentle shutting sound. I was crying by the time I reached the elevator lobby, not turning once to see Jay’s facial expression.

  That afternoon, I called the airline and reconfirmed my travel plans back to London. At the pharmacy, I produced an old prescription and got some more sedatives. I visited a few dispensaries before I thought I had enough.

  At the ISKCON, I made a substantial offering, commensurate with the extended stay that I had enjoyed there. I sat down with the caretaker for dinner, a vegetarian one, a satisfying one. The priest- cum-keeper, he never once became inquisitive or even hinted at wanting to know the root of my travails. I told him I would leave on the following day and he simply wished me the best.

  That night, I read and re-read this manuscript, correcting and polishing it like a fastidious author. I would finish it on the flight back home.

  Manuscripts are never finished; they are simply mailed, as best as they are, which is infinite, since they encompass a person, naked and revealing for others to judge—mostly harshly, because one cannot accept another without doubt and ego.

  At the terminal, I arrived well before my flight was scheduled. At the check-in counter, I asked for a window seat and an upgrade to business class, ensuring that I could buy and use a broadband connection while on my way to London. All was in order.

  After boarding, I asked for champagne and booted my computer as soon as I possibly could, completing the last bits of this journal.

  With the first sip of champagne I also popped a sedative, asking for my glass to be replenished almost continuously, taking a pill with each glass, like a champagne cocktail.

  I thought I forgot to run a spell check.

  After dinner, I felt groggy, nodding, but not before emailing this journal to my son, to Eve, to Officer Joe Brown, to Mary and to my lawyers in London.

  Weary and tired, I gave up, knowing now that children with troubled childhoods don’t . . . grow up just fine.

  Eve Costello

  The problems posed by the inadequacy of money were well managed, for a person for my age, thirty-three, through a few fortuitous investments and eventually the inheritance that fell upon me.

  She had died on the flight back to London, my landlord’s mother, mailing me her journal, which I ignored for many days. I thought it natural not to become inquisitive about a life that was not linked with mine; moreover, it was a lengthy scream and simply languished on my computer. I had moved on well and forward, confident than ever before, that I was no longer a work-in-progress. I was complete and enough for the closest association in my life to be taken in by the new me, my landlord’s mother.

  Naturalness, or being oneself, it crumbles as soon as you think about being yourself, measuring what i
s and what is not natural, before acting, leaving a constant doubt as regards the nature of actions is concerned. I had conquered that battle, and stood just a step from a complete transition, till I was forced to read that email, and its shattering contents, as far as I went.

  What triggered it, I mean the reading of that email? It was the inheritance, and its communication, by the lawyers from London, who refused to be taken in by me and my new beautiful self. They bludgeoned with a force that is unimaginable for simple words to create over a phone line, a force that set me back-a-ways, as far as the journey of me was concerned.

  Words like ‘We wish, you’d please cooperate, all we want is for you, Jay, to accept the assets and the sum that is rightfully yours and then we can all move on.’

  When I grew stubborn, refusing to acknowledge that it was Jay, on my end of the phone line, they sent their representatives to see me, from their New York office. When I refused to see them, they got the police involved, who came with lawyers and settled in the couches of my living room.

  Naked, that is what it felt like, when men peer away at any exposed inch of skin on your body or the breasts on your chest, searching for bristly body hair and the trueness of nipples beneath the clothes that cover you, knowing well, that they are looking at a man who has chosen, and dared to become a woman. That morning, I had dressed carefully in jeans and a sleeved T-shirt, tying my hair up, ready to conduct the business at hand, the business of inheritance. They would joke, raunchy and raucous, when they brought me up over drinks, leering about my sexiness, and how they could never get themselves to have sex with me, no matter how sexy I now was; after all deep inside they knew I was a man.

  Deep inside, was I still a man?

  I did not blame them, thinking the way they did, knowing what they knew, because in their own exterior demeanour they were suited and business- like, males, explaining the paperwork, collecting information and concluding with signatures. It would be at the bar, later that evening, that the bringing up of the strange case of the Kettlewood inheritance would become inevitable, dwelling on the detail of the beneficiary’s sex, a detail which would grow vivid and raucous with each drink.

  When they left, I felt completely humiliated, hating her for not letting me be, when all I wanted was to be left alone. She had pulled me back to the hell I had escaped from, forcing me to face what I had left far behind, my ugly, grotesque maleness. In the present, yet well back-a-ways, as Jay, I sat down and opened her email, reading it over and over for a few days, hating her for having done what she did, as regards her final attempt at murdering me was concerned.

  I knew if I stopped the medication, hints of a stubble would return in a few days, and before weeks, I would become a eunuch.

  My mother had failed in keeping her home and her marriage straight; she could not keep a husband satisfied or a child safe in the space of her home. If you have any sympathy for her, I will not forgive you, because her journal, the one you may have read, like all arguments is vehement and one-sided, meant to create a martyr of an old woman, where only a failed wife and a heartless mother walked.

  She thought that I never grew up to be a man and remained the bastard in the family, no more a man than I was at fourteen. Why, because I refused to acknowledge or adopt the son that I had borne with her domestic maid, the one whom she left me with, while she headed to the club for drinks and the perverse merriment that followed afterwards.

  In large part, my sexual failure is because she chose to let things be, not speaking about or helping with what got bottled inside a child’s mind. She should have helped me open up, when she could, by becoming maternal and delving into the convolution of folds that a corrupted child’s mind turns itself into. Instead, she got me educated and settled me on Wall Street, sleeping easy, imagining that all had worked well.

  In some ways it had worked out well, all up to the point she fired that email to the lot of us before dying, pulling me back to the madness of my past life, one that I had forgotten and left behind, believe me with infinite effort and resolve, as I built a new one. It had seemed silly, chasing the impossible dream of becoming a woman; but, when I did get there, it was ridiculously satisfying.

  The guilt of semi-raping the maid, at gunpoint, remained with me through all the years of my past life. The images of a fourteen-year-old, gun in hand, kept flooding back, intense and alive, each time I made love or lusted for women. Sex, at least as a male, became a game of trying and conquering that guilt, subduing the violence that I had unleashed when I was fourteen. My maleness was a complete failure; it remained a sin, one that I thought could be wiped and cleansed, by leading a female life for the rest of my days, accepting as punishment what I may have burned and looted through the pleasures of a male past.

  It was the right thing to do, but now she had ruined it, leaving me pacing my place, sometimes for hours, before my fumbling-uncertain hands reached for the pills that helped me remain a woman each day.

  No matter what I did, I could not get back with her anymore, since she was the first to dream upon the discovery of a larger plan, that of killing oneself. With her suicide, that final blow, too, was left for me to receive, reeling as if with the time bells for a defeated fighter, ringing all the time, like a boxer’s tinnitus, simply leaving me apace in the apartment, viewless with the curtains drawn opaque.

  I had visited her, for her funeral, incognito, gaining access to the clerk at the ISKCON in London, who had helped organize the small event. There were people who paid respects and spoke at the ceremony, before the machines took over, incinerating her body. There were murmurs, of the missing son; it did not bother me much.

  Mary was there; dressed in a salwaar-kameez, fitting well, within the ethnic diversity that the mourners brought in, South-East Asian face, with fake doll nods, on an Indian dress. She looked well, not having put weight, simply a bit wizened and grey with the years. No one noticed me much, beyond the presence of an acquaintance, and the pleasantry of food and water that they offered me along with the others in attendance.

  The Hindu priest was in a dhoti with threaded strings around his body, hanging symbolic, diagonally across his chest and looping back, up his back, confirming his caste. ‘Are there any who would like to say a few words, for a liberated soul and a devotee of Lord Krishna?’ he asked, mellifluously, pausing for a few seconds.

  In the background, rock music hung weak . . . a mantra, Hare Krishna, by George Harrison . . . it was appropriate and soothing.

  Mary, she got up and moved towards the small podium, holding a small piece of paper in her hand with talking points.

  Hindus believe, all are born Hindu, birth itself being a Hindu reality, some choosing other religions, which are mere tributaries of Hindu rivers, diversions, incarnations for Hindus to pray, too, accepting as they seemingly spread away, draining back into Hindu oceans where religions meld into Hindu ancientness.

  ‘I have wronged her in many ways but mum has always been forgiving, forgiving enough for me to feel the continuous pain of my misdeeds throughout my life. Sometimes I wish she had shouted and screamed at me, maybe even sent me to jail. That may have made my guilt lesser. But she never did, and now she has moved on . . . and wherever she is, I want to let her know that I will always respect her and I owe almost the whole of my life to her.’ This was the gist of her uninspired talk. She was tearing, which was disarming, and then she stepped down.

  In the end, I remained unmoved and stoic, pondering the silliness of her little speech.

  What I did feel though, at my mother’s funeral, was surprising, even to me. It wasn’t any deep sorrow of her passing, neither was it a mild respect that the living hold for the dead, even the ones they never knew. It was Mary, and her visions, naked and comely that suddenly gripped me, making me a bit wet, and embarrassed at myself, with myself. Her walk and her accent, it took on a shiver, sending a ripple of delight through my body. At fourteen, I had had her, quite a few times . . . and now at thirty- three, after two decades,
she became alluring again. In the intervening years, from then till now, I had never once lusted after her in my mind. She had never repulsed me either.

  I dwelled on every and each part of her body, surreptitiously, as I lifted the spoon of vegan food to my lips, striding aimlessly across the small hall for views of her, throughout the ceremony.

  Later, outside, I strode up to her and did what I have never done in my life: hold a trivial conversation while my mind toyed with sexual possibilities and positions with the subject of my engagement.

  ‘Hello, my name is Evelyn, and I knew Mrs Rashmi very well. She was going to introduce me to you, before she passed away,’ I started up the conversation, knowing not why, other than to stand a bit closer to her, smell her, see her up close, take her in, with all of the senses that I had.

  Senses, and the taking in of subjects with the senses, have levels, kicking in with sight and then a bit closer with smell, before graduating for a longing of taste and touch. Sound is ambient, sexually important, but controllable by means.

  ‘Oh, okay, what was it regarding?’ she answered, a bit surprised, unsure of my relation to or knowledge of her situation, with the deceased.

  ‘You are Mary, right? I thought you might be her Filipino friend, picking up from your accent . . . when you were speaking earlier,’ I said, smiling, trying to warm up to her, tucking the strands of my hair behind my ears, the ones that had fallen across my eyes.

  ‘Yes, I am Mary, and it is nice to meet you, though I confess Mrs Kettlewood did not mention you to me at any point,’ she said, quizzically, wanting to come to the point of this conversation.

  ‘I was planning a visit to the beautiful isles of Southern Philippines, and was hoping to have some local contacts while I was there, just in case I need any help since I am travelling alone,’ I said, sizing her up, creating a picture of her in my mind, trying hard not to look or act distracted by the divinity that the image held.