Ponti

by Sharlene Teo

  Walking home from the bus stop I feel like I have stones in my chest. I pull open the rusty gate and it screeches like a small dinosaur. I drag my feet down the long driveway. Just as I’m walking the sky darkens from milky brown into an inky blue-gray, as if with the flick of a switch. This city is so full of neon lights, beaming off the blocks of HDB flats, the high-rise office buildings. You can’t see the stars, too much glare. I have never experienced proper nightime, never left the country. The idea of a holiday is foreign to me. Real skies are the stuff of stock images: stars spread out in dizzying constellations. None of that here. Too much artificial light.

  I turn the key in the lock, step into the entrance hall. Now that my mother is in the hospital the house is even quieter. It’s not like she made much noise when she was awake at home, but now it’s as if a muffler has been lifted and you can hear everything within the walls. Pipes and plywood exposed, ugly old clanking. The lizards scamper behind the plaster. They seem to come out more now that my mother is away. Now they seem unabashed, unafraid.

  I help Aunt Yunxi set up for an evening appointment. Today she is seeing a woman whose child has a hole in her heart. I dust the altar. Everything must go in precisely the spot my aunt dictates.

  “You look so unhappy,” Aunt Yunxi says to me. I put down a plate of betel nuts and turn towards her. She’s just been meditating and looks drowsy. She’s been old for as long as I can remember but now she is an ancient ruin. Her features are so wan and crumpled. I wonder how many years it will take for my own face to fold this way.

  She comes over and presses one cold finger under my right eye, gently. “You look like you need more sleep. Don’t worry, ah girl. Why not have some fish soup? Auntie can set up on her own.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “It’s hard to see your mother like this,” Aunt Yunxi continues. “For me, too. A long time ago, I told her it was bad luck to put on white clothes and act like a bad thing. And now what.” She stops talking and exhales sharply.

  “Now what?” I ask. “Will she get better? Can you divine it?” I sound like one of her clients.

  Aunt Yunxi takes my palm and squeezes it. Her hands feel dry and cold. I search her eyes but she looks at my throat instead.

  “We can pray and wait, Szu,” she says in her plain, real voice. “I can’t force things.”

  9

  AMISA

  1976

  It was her eighteenth birthday tomorrow and so what about it. When she arrived for work at the Paradise Theatre, she watched her manager Pok Hian strutting around, instructing everyone to call him Rocky. He was feeling especially brutish with his new name and made her scrub a diarrhea-conquered toilet; she didn’t even get to catch the tail end of a screening.

  When Amisa got home that evening the woman who lived in the room beside her had left her door open. Her name was Yunxi and it was impossible to place exactly how old she was. She came from Fujian province, near the mountains, and had moved to Singapore twenty years ago. They spoke in Mandarin. Yunxi had a thick Fujian Wuyi accent that sounded so much better and more refined than Amisa’s; it was the way she intonated. Her hair seemed to change color, going from pitch-black to peppered with white and gray. On some days, Amisa thought she could pass for twenty-five. On others, she looked twice that age, and so hollow-eyed and exhausted that Amisa didn’t even try to speak to her.

  Yunxi was a slight, wiry woman who banged shut the kitchen cupboards and went about her day in a buzz of energy. Although they had never explicitly discussed what it was she did for a living, Amisa had heard the stream of mumbled male voices that filled and left her room all night and into the early hours. Now Amisa was surprised to see Yunxi lying prone on her hard wooden bed, with her gray blouse ridden up to expose a strip of jaundiced, waistband-imprinted flesh, strangely obscene.

  “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ve been poisoned,” Yunxi said. “Food poisoning,” she added. “Dirty meat. Old bones.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Just some tea.”

  Amisa boiled some cheap black tea and brought it to Yunxi. She perched on the edge of her bed because there was no other chair in the room. Amisa thought of Yunxi’s visitors, the men who snuck in late at night. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for Yunxi with her sunken cheeks and skinny arms, blowing the tea to cool it. Who knew what she had been through?

  “How are you, Xiaofang?” Yunxi asked her.

  “It’s my birthday tomorrow,” Amisa replied, eyeing up the small altar in the corner of the room, which had a joss stick and a painted squatting figurine she didn’t recognize.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “You’re just a kid,” Yunxi replied, and drank her tea. “You have so much ahead of you, you won’t even believe it.”

  Two hours later, Yunxi had a visitor. Yunxi referred to the woman as her mother to Amisa, but called her Laoshi to her face, in a deferential tone. The old woman had visited only twice before, which led Amisa to think that Yunxi was suffering from something serious; she wasn’t the type of person to call for help otherwise. Laoshi wore brown linen and a beleaguered expression, and was as wordless and shrunken as a dried shiitake mushroom. She hunched by the stove boiling a bloom of sickly fungi and thickly coiled black herbs.

  “Do you need help?” Amisa asked.

  Laoshi turned around. She smiled to reveal a set of small, perfect, grayish teeth and shook her head. Amisa went back to her room to try to sleep between shifts. But she kept hearing Yunxi’s hacking cough at intervals, and even after Laoshi had taken the pot off the boil the pungent medicine filled the narrow corridors with its smell, as heady as paint thinner, though hard to place definitely, disturbingly more animal than vegetable.

  Hours later, Amisa woke for work. She shuffled out into the kitchen. She peered into the pot and decided to wash it for Yunxi. She tipped it over the drain. The remaining herbs clogged the drain hole and reminded her of gigantic strands of pubic hair.

  “Don’t do that—I was saving the herbs,” Yunxi said, in a broken voice. She rubbed her eyes and came over to the sink. She wore a thin nightdress with yellowed stains all over it. As Yunxi peered into the sink at the herbs, Amisa noticed the florid insect bites and tracks of bruises down her arms.

  “Sorry,” Amisa said. “I had no idea. I was trying to help.” She tilted her chin out, expecting the harshness of a rebuke; that familiar, accosting look her mother gave her that indicated stupid behavior was all but expected.

  Instead Yunxi sniffed and shrugged at her. “That’s okay. Thank you, Xiaofang.”

  When she came home after her shift, Amisa found a bottle of plum wine outside her door with a note wishing her happy birthday. She knew Yunxi would wave her away if she thanked her. Alone in her narrow room, Amisa toasted the mirror with practised braggadocio, just like Amisha, the arch-browed bad girl from Lomari. Amisha strutted around in her sari unapologetically, refused to follow her father’s instructions, and stole every musical number she participated in, finally eloping with the painfully handsome stranger who turned out to be a crook, a scoundrel, a love rat. By the end, they had stabbed each other and died. It was a huge flop but Amisa loved it.

  She cocked an eyebrow seductively to no one before she took a glug from the glass. Even though it tasted disgusting, the wine was still a gift, so she decided to finish it all at once. She swigged straight from the neck like one of the weathered, nicotine-stained gamblers who scared her on the way to work. It was her first time drinking a whole bottle of alcohol. She was glad it was small. The burn and the cloying sweetness almost made her sick.

  She lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling. The gray water stain above her bed seemed to bloom and lengthen. Eighteen years. Childhood was this long, murky pool that she had only just climbed out of. Her body still ached from the effort of escape, and every day, even from the first moment awake, she already felt tired. She would send money home when she had enough to go round. She would
return to Kampong Mimpi Sedih to visit one day and bring Didi back to Singapore with her. But so far she had been putting off calling home. She had accomplished nothing yet, and it was easier for her family to speculate in the silences. The distance between where she was and the glossy point where she wanted to be stretched and stretched.

  From the left wall came an insistent thudding. One of Yunxi’s clients. She had thought Yunxi would be too ill to receive anyone. Amisa never caught the men coming up the narrow stairs and entering the room beside her, never heard anything from Yunxi herself—only the clients, who often sounded like they were sobbing, or trying to reason in unintelligible dialects. Amisa couldn’t make out what languages they mumbled in, only that the indistinct, pleading male voices brimmed with sadness and shame. She hadn’t been with anyone since she moved to Singapore, and the hot, feverish memory of body to body that had so consumed her over the past few years had loosened its grip. If this was what desire sounded like, she was happy not to reacquaint with it.

  Still, when the men left, Amisa tried to catch a glimpse of them, even just their backs. They retreated so quickly—doleful shadows trailing downstairs and out of the door, swallowed whole by the muggy evening air. She sensed their weight and presence, heard them, but never saw them. Sometimes she worried that they were a figment of her own perverse imagination, or she wondered if Yunxi was actually alone in the room beside her, rattling the wooden bed frame against the wall, bouncing on the creaky springs, playing garbled voices from a damaged tape recorder.

  *

  The next morning she wanted to die. She couldn’t imagine how old, frail men like Ah Huat, her long-dead neighbor, had made a pleasure and a pastime out of heavy drinking. Standing at the stall, her chest hurt and her muscles tightened, as if the market heat had crept inside her ribs and wrung her heart dry. Everything was unbearable. She just had to try to keep on breathing. One breath at a time. That’s it. The smell of shellfish made her so nauseous she wanted to retch.

  “What’s wrong with you, ah girl? You’re green in the face,” Mr. Lim chided. Mrs. Lim looked up from the piles of cockles and tutted.

  “That won’t do. Look, why don’t you go home early,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” Amisa replied, and put one gloved hand in front of her mouth as she felt bile rising in her throat. Her head pulsed as if there were worms thronging her brain, threatening to push her filthy thoughts out of her ears.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Mrs. Lim said. “Go home, lah. Wait got your germs go into the seafood. We will be fine on our own for the rest of the day. Get some rest.”

  Amisa took the 985 back home instead of walking. Every time the red-and-white bus went over a speed bump her head felt like it would explode. Amidst the tumult of her hangover she felt the niggling heat of eyes on the back of her neck. She turned around with a scowl.

  “Miss, are you okay?” a man asked in Mandarin. He stared from a row behind, across the aisle, head cocked like a concerned Alsatian. It took her a second to recognize that pockmarked face inscribed with rude lingering longing. The young man wore a striped short-sleeved shirt with a crumpled collar and chinos. He looked less ugly than she remembered. His expression was softer, more lidded. Amisa glowered at him. She wondered about the ponytailed girlfriend; it had been a while since they had come to the theatre.

  “Sorry to disturb you, but you don’t look well,” the man said. He seemed shy, couldn’t hold her stare as he spoke. “This might be strange, but I remember you from the Paradise Theatre. You work there, right?”

  She pressed her temple and considered telling him he was mistaken, but it would be more of a hassle to deal with his protestations. They had crossed paths too many times for any doubt about it.

  “Do you need a doctor?” he tried again.

  “I feel fine,” she replied. She didn’t need help, and even if she did, it wouldn’t come from him. “This is my stop,” she said, glancing out of the window. “Nice to see you. Bye bye.”

  She was about fifteen minutes from home but she could manage the walk, if that would rid her of him. She stood and steadied herself on the metal bar of the seat, but when she let go her legs crumpled with a speed that alarmed her. Her right kneecap hit the floor and sharp pain sang. The man rose quickly and gently hoisted her up, hooking her arms around his shoulders. She still couldn’t speak as the doors hissed open and he helped her off the bus.

  “Let me walk you home, you’re not well,” he said. It was around 7 a.m. and the sun had just emerged, dominating the blunt gray clouds and jagged skyline. She said nothing and leaned into his arm as they walked down the boulevard of HDB flats and a row of tire shops, the coffee-and-crockery clatter and chatter of kopi tiams.

  “I still got time before work,” he explained. “It’s along the way.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Yep.”

  At the overhead bridge, he turned to her and said, “I’m Wei Loong, by the way. What’s your name?”

  “Amisha,” she replied. The kohl-lined eyes of the girl in the movie swam behind her own.

  “Amisa?”

  “Yeah. Fine. Amisa,” she said. It was easier to pronounce. If that dumb bastard Pok Hian could rebrand himself, why couldn’t she do the same?

  She spent the remainder of the walk in a dreamy, satisfied stupor, turning the syllables over and over in her head. Amisa felt original. Amisa felt shiny. Her hangover lifted itself above the scaffolding and dissolved into the crisp bright air. By the time they reached her door she had agreed to meet Wei Loong at the Kallang Theatre for a movie later on.

  10

  SZU

  2003

  Time seems to pass in fits and starts. It breaks into a sprint before stumbling to a halt. The first Wednesday in March is the day of our school excursion. I had to fill in a depressing little consent form and get it signed by my aunt. It seems so ridiculous to me that our level is still sent on school trips. Surely at sixteen we are too old to be packed into a coach and given the morning to wander around an educational site with cartoonish signs and an activity sheet.

  Everyone knows Haw Par Villa. Everyone loved it once, but would never admit to it. Most of us visited as children, keen and bug-eyed, back when it was a big deal, in the early nineties. The brothers who owned Tiger Balm designed and built it. They had millions to spare and so they decided to create a dream space. I first saw the photos of the newly reopened grounds in the newspapers. The bright colors, the lacquered statues, a log flume in the shape of a smiling dragon. I begged to go and eventually my father took me. I was only six. It took a long drive to get there, about thirty-five minutes, which I consider lengthy because Singapore is so small that you can walk from one end to the other in half a day.

  Haw Par Villa was shrouded in trees with its spires sticking out, like a badly kept secret. The entrance was gleaming and gigantic. I held my father’s hand as we walked up to it. The gateway was an elegant pagoda, painted in orange and red and dark gray. I was glad my mother had stayed at home, although I didn’t say so. I could imagine her calling the place tacky, bringing up some other park in some other city that she’d maybe been to as a young actress. If she came out that day she would have been wearing a scarf, a hat, and sunglasses, and cooling her night-creamed face with a paper fan.

  There were a few other families milling peacefully, but the place wasn’t too crowded. The paint on the lacquered wood still smelt new.

  “Don’t breathe in too much, Little Bunny,” my father had said. His old nickname for me, derived from the White Rabbit Creamy Candy that I used to love: cream, blue, and red wrapper. “The fumes give you brain damage.”

  The fresh paint on the scalloped walls and engravings gleamed, highlighter-luminous in the afternoon light. At the center of the gate was a roaring lion. Even the ground seemed to shine. Later on my father bought me a stuffed toy, a small tiger with a pink tongue. I think I left it on the bench of an MRT statio
n or on the back of a bus, at some drowsy point over the years. From time to time I wonder where it is.

  Now the coach pulls up in the car park with a hiss and our class files out of it. A cluster of clouds shifts to reveal the sun, which renews its scorching and makes the ground blinding white. I drag my shoes along the concrete. My throat feels so dry. I haven’t been able to form sentences all day.

  I stand to one side as Trissy and Weili, the swim stars, stride before me towards the park entrance. I look at their tanned, shapely legs, immune to mosquito bites. I marvel for a split second at the unfairness of genetics, mysterious spirals of DNA coiling and cohering into life sentences: You will be plain. You will be beautiful. You will repulse mosquitoes. You will have an iron gut. You will be sickened by crabmeat.

  Circe takes my arm and pulls me along, and I allow her to steer me towards the park. The once-grand gate looks small and shabby. The paint has faded and flaked away in unpleasing shapes. The avenue that the entrance opens out onto is broad but flanked by green dustbins and half-dead patches of grass. Everywhere, the chirrup of crickets and the low machine-hum of power generators. There is no one else around in this sad, shitty place.

  “No one stray too far off,” Mrs. Tay says. She is a youngish new mother with bushy brows and dark bags under her eyes.

  We file off in pairs. Circe keeps on making sarcastic comments about the figurines scattered around the park in half-neglected dioramas, reenacting morality tales, Chinese legends. I half listen. I can tell that Circe is enjoying herself, despite her protestations.

  Twenty minutes later Mrs. Tay comes to find me by the pagodas. She advances with such severity and purpose that my first instinct is to flee, but she locks my gaze. She has her Nokia clasped in one hand. She is frowning.