Please tear up this letter after you read it.
Your ever-loving son,
Raman
*
She was in pain as she was carried back to her house and dropped rather uncertainly on her bed, where she stayed, in pain, as the doctor came from the city, clicked his tongue, shook his head at her and gave her tiny pink pills that did little to eliminate the jolts that started at the base of her spine and radiated to the far reaches of her body, until even her little finger seemed to be rendered immobile.
She was in pain when her husband opened the long unused drawer, when she heard the laboured, clumsy strokes of an old fountain pen’s nib against even older paper, when she opened her eyes briefly to look towards heaven and breathe a thank-you to the gods in between the spasms.
She was in pain when the village mailman brought the letter bearing the postmark from Singapore and the small, neat handwriting on the envelope—too much in pain to jump out of bed and snatch the letter out of her husband’s hands as she would have liked to, too much in pain to clap and laugh for joy and raise her hands to the heavens in a dance, too much in pain to have noticed the excessively tattered state of the envelope, or that it had already been opened.
She was in pain as she cried from the shame of learning the letter’s contents, as she vehemently denied its truth, as her husband stood awkwardly by her bedside, patting her shoulder, wearing a look that seemed to convey embarrassment and triumph and guilt all at once.
She was in pain when they arrived, within a day of the letter arriving, no sooner or later than she had expected them to, and yet her stomach sank and tears sprang to her eyes unbidden when the first tires screeched to a halt in front of their house the next morning.
She heard them, even from her bedroom, and closed her eyes and tried to imagine that they were lost travellers, or even more well-meaning missionaries, but once she heard them crowding around the well—the familiar soft splash of the bucket hitting the water, the creak the pump made if someone leaned against it, the thump of a head knocking against the wooden post, and the choice expletive that followed it—she knew it had to be the police.
She heard her husband’s flustered voice, talking rapidly to the police, explaining, apologising, cursing, acquitting himself of all blame, and the men joking around the well about pushing another in, or climbing in themselves to claim the treasure.
She heard the creak of the pump turn into a slow, groaning crescendo as the men—at least three or four, she judged, by the sounds of the grunting involved— turned the wheel that started it up, a laborious process that the missionaries hadn’t counted on, and a job made harder still by the rapidly rusting metal it was made of.
She heard this symphony of creak, groan, grunt, curse, groan, squeal, pant, until it was broken momentarily— trickle of water, yelp—and then continued in the same manner before the final movement: a light, happy finale in which the sound of water being sprinkled over dry earth on the verge of cracking was interspersed with selfcongratulatory cheers.
She heard the commotion as the policemen calculated how long it would take for Raman’s mystery chest to be glimpsed, and as she closed her eyes in despair, she had the fleeting thought that perhaps her fields, at least, would now be watered.
*
His mother had sat up for the first time since her accident on the day she got Raman’s second letter, two months after her fall, two weeks after the police had searched the house thoroughly, started up the water pump no one could start, watered the farm, drained the well and climbed into it themselves in puzzlement to search for a locked, waterproof chest full of money.
The letter was just as tattered as the first, had also been opened, and smelled like it had been spat upon. It read:
Dear Mother (and Father),
I trust your problem has been solved.
Your ever-loving son,
Raman
REGRETTABLE THINGS
WHEN THE INSTANT message arrives at 6.30pm— COME OVER PLS—I close my eyes and will it to be something else. My editor has a small question about the story I filed earlier. My editor wants me to cover an event tomorrow. My editor simply wishes to inquire after my health.
I take my pen and notebook out of my bag, which I had optimistically started packing five minutes earlier, and try not to trudge over to his desk. I smile and try to look eager, like a news hound hungry to see my by-line on the front page. This is what I should look like, or so I’ve been told.
Gary spins around in his chair and doesn’t waste any time. “So I’m sure you’ve read our story today on the guy who murdered his wife in Clementi while the kids were out,” he says. “We ran one yesterday too. Really fucked up case. Guy tried to cover her on the bed with a blanket later, like maybe he could leave and no one would know.”
He’s watching me carefully, so I nod. Of course I’d read it. Everybody had.
“Yeah,” I say. “It was blurbed on the front page.”
He pauses. I realise I’m holding my breath.
“Jess,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell us you knew the family?”
My held breath drops into my stomach like a stone. I wish I’d thought of what to say before coming over to his desk.
“I don’t know them that well,” I say. How in the world did he find out?
Gary reads my mind as always, and shakes his head. “Brian saw on Facebook that you’re friends with the daughter,” he says. “Close?”
I shake my head. I’m not friends with any of my bosses on social media, but Brian had been a regular journalist until just two months ago. That’s what you get for thinking your friends don’t change when they get promoted to assistant editor.
“No,” I say. “We haven’t talked in years.”
This is one hundred per cent true. We haven’t talked since primary school, in fact. But a more honest person would also add that when Nithya and I were in primary school, we were extremely close.
“Still,” Gary says, and that one word tells me all I need to know about the rest of this conversation. “You have a connection to the family. The family that has been stonewalling us and every other publication for two days.”
For good reason, I want to say. Why would two siblings whose father just killed their mother want to talk to a newspaper?
“I think I remember them being quite private, in general,” I say. Not only is this true, it is an understatement. In primary school, I was one of only two friends Nithya ever let inside her family’s flat.
Gary immediately takes my vague explanation as yet more evidence of my lack of go-getter attitude. “It’s our job to make private people, talk, Jess,” he says. “And while the family may be private, the case isn’t anymore. A man killed a woman, and the police are investigating. The whole country is reading about it.”
He stops again. “I think there’s more to this case,” he says.
A hazy panic takes hold of me. He’s not a mind reader, I tell myself. Calm down.
“It doesn’t add up,” he says. “A couple is separated for, what, years? The guy comes over casually, neighbours say it’s not uncommon for him to come over. That’s in our story today. So the couple had an amicable split, but not a divorce. Over what? We don’t know. Then one day he kills her, runs off, but just goes right back to where he lives like nothing happened?”
Gary’s still studying me, as though I might offer a clue. I pray I don’t. We stand in silence for a while.
“Police say he put up no fight when they arrested him,” he says finally. “They won’t tell me more than that. But a source says he’s saying a lot of weird shit.”
I nod, and start writing everything he said down in my notebook, my pen shaking a little more than it should.
“You know what I think?” he says. “I think the guy had some sort of mental illness. A long-term, chronic one. Like schizophrenia.”
I keep writing.
“Police won’t tell us that,” he says, more carefully now than before, if
that were possible. “No one will tell us that till a psychiatrist testifies during the trial.”
He waits for me to stop writing.
“But a family member can.”
I take a deep breath. “You want me to ask them if their father has schizophrenia?” I say.
“I want them to verbally confirm their father has schizophrenia,” he says. “Because you already know that.”
Any control I thought I had of the situation slips out of my grasp, as does my pen, which now clatters to the floor. I bend down to pick it up, trying to steady my heartbeat, which seems to have raced ahead some place else and left my body behind.
“The family is very private,” I say again when I stand up, and my voice sounds like a desperate whisper. “They’ll never tell a newspaper that.”
“That’s why they’re not telling a newspaper,” Gary says, and I don’t know if he doesn’t understand or understands perfectly. “They’re telling a friend.”
It may be career suicide, but I have to at least try to get out of it.
“I’m not sure I’m the best person for this job,” I say, in the most confident voice I can currently muster. “I may be too close to the story.”
I realise this is the exact opposite of what I’d said before—that I wasn’t close to the daughter at all—and hope against hope that Gary doesn’t notice. But of course, my luck is never that good.
“Jessica Joseph,” Gary says slowly. “Are you a journalist?”
He doesn’t wait for me to nod.
“Do you like this job?” he continues, almost casually.
No, I want to say. I write about dead people for a living. But I don’t want to be fired, so I open my mouth, ready to be as enthusiastic as he needs me to be, but he cuts me off.
“Your job here is to get the story. And because you’re close to the story, you’re going to convince this family that news is going to get out anyway, and it might as well be told by the most sympathetic ally in the Singaporean media industry they will ever find. Got it?”
This time, he waits for me to nod.
*
Gary makes me go immediately to Nithya’s family’s flat in Clementi. My feeble protests that it was too late in the day to show up at a grieving family’s house were dismissed with a wave of his hand and a disappointed shake of his head. The disappointment was, of course, that I’m not the sort of reporter to be ready at all hours of the day to stake out a murder victim’s residence.
So I take a long taxi ride over, my stomach roiling the entire time, and I rehearse what I’m going to say when I get there. The language of death should be familiar to me by now after nearly two years on the job, but it still doesn’t come as easily as I need it to. I’ve said at least one thing I regretted at every interview with a grieving family, and I can’t afford to do that this time.
As we enter Clementi, it startles me how easily the directions come to me even after moving out of the neighbourhood 12 years ago—straight here, Uncle, turn left at the Shell station, yes, near the kopitiam, not this building, the next one.
Nithya and I lost touch after we went to different secondary schools, the same year that my parents decided to move to the other end of the island. But before that, we lived just one bus stop away from Nithya’s family, and I had walked this route to her flat enough times for it to have taken hold in my memory, and for that memory to have taken on the sepia tone of nostalgia. At first, she hadn’t invited me into her family’s flat, suggesting every time that we stay in the playground, or walk to get ice cream from a nearby shop. I hadn’t found it strange until I suddenly did, and then it was as if she sensed the shift too. When she finally invited me up to her family’s flat, her mother warm and fussing over us to eat a snack, her brother desperate to play with us, her father awkward and distant, I understood instinctively whom it was that she was trying to shield me from. She never had to say anything to me, or I to her, so that the first time her father locked himself in his room and started screaming that the man reading the Tamil news on TV was spying on him—while her brother whimpered and her mother darted between calming her husband through the door and reassuring me that nothing was wrong—I grabbed Nithya’s hand and squeezed it, and we both knew that whatever this was, I was never going to talk about it.
It was a conspiracy that had begun on the very first day of our friendship. It was the first day of Primary 3, and everyone was in a new class, sorted according to how well we’d done on the final exams in Primary 2. I already knew who Nithya was due to an administrative mishap at the end of the previous year. I’d placed into the best class, and had been able to be proud of it for a full week, before being called to the principal’s office with my parents during the December school holidays and told the scheduling just wouldn’t work for students who took Tamil as their mother tongue. “But we can put you in the second-best class, and you’ll be the smartest of all of them!” said the vice-principal brightly. I nodded, already deflated, as my parents argued. I wished they wouldn’t make a scene, and noticed Nithya and her mother, called in for the same meeting, quiet as I wished my parents would be.
As each class formed two lines that first day before going up to our new classrooms, I found myself standing behind Nithya, mesmerised by the navy blue ribbon knotted neatly around her ponytail. When we arrived at class and she turned around, I noticed she had a bandage over one eye. Some of the other kids were already giggling about this, when Nithya’s mother arrived in the classroom. I immediately felt sorry for Nithya as their giggles intensified, realising that probably none of them had mothers who looked anything like this petite, darkskinned lady with thick, curly hair hanging loose to the hem of her salwar kameez.
“Hello, Miss Wee?” she said, her voice surprisingly sweet. “I just wanted to explain about Nithya’s eye.”
The teacher’s gaze travelled over to me, and upon ascertaining I looked normal, searched the room for the other Indian girl. Miss Wee got up uncertainly and started walking to the doorway, but Nithya’s mother continued talking, loud enough for the class to hear.
“We went to a crocodile farm, over the holidays. She had an accident there, but the doctor said she will take her bandage off by next week,” she said. “She may have some trouble seeing the blackboard, or with her work for just this week.”
Miss Wee nodded, clearly taken aback by a conversation she thought should have been had in private. Nithya’s mother smiled shyly, a contrast to how confident she had been so far. “I just wanted you to know what it was,” she said, before waving goodbye to Nithya, and leaving.
Nithya’s falling star suddenly burst into a supernova. She had been injured at a crocodile farm. To nine-yearolds, that could only mean one thing: a crocodile had tried to eat her eye. Miss Wee lost total control of the class as everyone burst into easy chatter. Boys started re-enacting what they imagined had happened. Girls now crowded around her, brimming with concern that had been noticeably absent before.
If Nithya was shocked by the change in her fortunes, she didn’t show it. She caught my eye with her one good one across the room, and gave me a small, shy smile, before turning back to the others’ attentions.
At recess, later, I caught up with her as we both walked towards the chicken nugget stall. “Did you really hurt yourself at a crocodile farm?” I said.
The directness of my question may have caused her to read a knowing look in my eyes.
“Yes,” she said, with no trace of defensiveness. She then lowered her voice: “But not in the way people think. I was running and crashed into a tree.”
I started laughing, both from the absurdity of the situation, and the delight of someone trusting me so quickly and completely. She started laughing too, and it was the first of many things she never had to tell me to keep a secret.
*
I walk through the void deck of Nithya’s block and press the button for her floor as if on autopilot. I am struck again at how familiar and strange these motions simultaneously feel. The fam
iliarity of the neighbourhood, the block, the buttons in the lift, almost lull me into believing Nithya would be familiar to me too, but the feeling comes to an abrupt halt when I arrive at her flat. The front door is open, but the gate closed, and through it I can see Nithya on the couch. She rarely posts pictures of herself on social media, but even without them, I feel sure I would have been able to recognise her immediately. The whole interior of the flat intensifies the senses of the familiar and the alien battling within me—there’s a new red couch, but that dining table with the scratches on the legs is the same; I recognise an antique chest of her mother’s that we had to be extra careful around, but the framed photographs on the wall are all different; the gate in front of me is a shiny, new-looking green-and-gold contraption with bars formed to resemble creeping ivy, but the heavy front door behind it still bears a dent that looks like a smile.
I stand in front of the open door for too long. I’m halfhoping Nithya will look up from the book she has in her hands and see me, but she never flips the page.
I smooth my hair and push it behind my ears. I straighten my skirt and adjust my handbag. I’m going to get through this by being professional, I tell myself. I’m not here on a condolence visit. I’m here to get the story.
“Nithya,” I say, and my voice sounds surprisingly sure of itself.
She looks up and I watch as her face passes through detachment, puzzlement, recognition and surprise. “Hi,” she says and gets up to come to the gate. She stares at me through the locked gate for a second. “Jess?” she says slowly, as if to make sure, and I nod.
“Hi, Nithya,” I say, and I can’t remember if I’d rehearsed what I was going to say to her in the taxi.
I should have prepared better. The words tumble out of me: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
I want to kick myself. It was one of the first things my colleagues on the crime beat had told me when I started: Don’t talk in clichés. It makes you seem inauthentic. People can always tell when you don’t mean what you say.
Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday Page 11