When a Flower Dies

by Josephine Chia

  Tranquillity had been restored in the village after the visiting customers had departed. It had been a good day for most of them, the fresh fish and fruit had all been bought; Kim Guek’s nasi ulam was completely sold out, as was the bunga rampay. Teenage Hassim was counting his coins gleefully; to earn money whilst having fun was his idea of a good venture. He was already planning what to teach for the next market day. Maybe he would teach the budak bandar, town kids, how to make their own kites and how to glass the strings for competitive kite-flying. The villagers went about packing up their makeshift stalls, as they conversed in low murmurs. Peace was theirs again, except for the vociferous clamouring and cawing of the sea and shore birds—the whimbrels, sandpipers, black-necked terns and the pacific golden plovers, who had swooped down to fight to feed on the entrails of butchered fish left out for them. But the village folks did not mind the cacophony. They knew that if the birds pooped in the process of feeding, their poo was nourishment for the life in the ocean, sea grass and seaweeds in the sea meadows. All creatures of nature have an intrinsic link with one another.

  Kim Guek allowed herself to rest on the straw mat on the floor by their back verandah, to catch the sea breeze. She lay on her side, her head resting on a small wooden pillow. The serenity of her face and posture made her look like a reclining Buddha.

  “Mak, the pillow is so hard,” said Pansy. “Shall I bring you the cottony kapok or duck feather bantal?”

  “Tak payah! No need. There’s a time and place for each type. Natural wood emits healthy enzymes and a wonderful energy,” said Kim Guek. “The properties in the wood help to soothe my pressure points and rebalance my chi. After the kind of day we had, with all its activity, it’s good to regenerate. Nature is our natural pharmacy. Ask Sister Catherine. Don’t you recall that she believes that her oak tree has similar healing properties?”

  Pansy knew she had so much more to learn about the efficacy of nature. She too was soothed by nature, surrounded by trees, flowers and wild life. That was why she was riding to her favourite spot. Her mother had given her permission to go out on her own, as the place she was going to was not usually frequented by others at this time. It was late afternoon by the time she was making her way to the quarry-lake which she always pretended was Lake Windermere in Wordsworth’s Lake District, though it was hardly even a pond. The lake was created when the earth was excavated for the fine white sand to be made into sheet glass for window panes in town. Kampong houses still had to make do with wooden or louvred shutters that completely blocked out the outside light when closed. The lake was where she liked to sit and ruminate and read her poetry books.

  Pansy rode past avenues of tall fields of maize, the ears of jagong, dangling and tantalisingly ripe for picking. Some city folks expressed a phobia of passing through such paths, as they could not see above or beyond the crops. Although Pansy was dwarfed by them, she did not feel any such apprehension, yet she reminded herself to return before dark, as the depletion of light could turn familiar shapes into sinister shadows. As electricity had not reached the rural villages, there were no street lights. Her bicycle trundled across the wooden footbridge that spanned Sungei Ketapang, making her bum go up and down on the bicycle seat in some discomfort.

  “I thought all Peranakans were rich,’” she mimicked in falsetto.

  In her coconut-frond woven bag, she carried a flask of tea, some epok-epok which Mak Siti had given her, small pasties stuffed with spicy mashed potatoes, and the gift from Sister Catherine. The obnoxious boy had sounded like some of her convent school classmates who spoke with a distinctive, authoritative kind of tone, the kind used by people confident that they lived in brick houses where they had running water, flush toilets, electricity, and full-time amahs. It grated like fingernails scratching the blackboard. Pansy was already intimidated by her posh school, with its colonial façade, and was made doubly so by these schoolmates. Some of them put on airs and spoke as if they had an orchard full of plums in their mouths.

  “Hey, Ulu! Why do you always have mud on your school shoes?” one of those girls had asked Pansy. “Doesn’t your amah clean and blanco your shoes for you?”

  “Look, Ulu! The threads in your canvas shoes are showing,” said one, as if Pansy was unaware. “Time to get a new pair.”

  “Your uniform is all creased!” another remarked with a sneer.

  “Oh dear, your hair is so wild…. Really like orang ulu…”

  Of course, none of them had to ride a bike to school. The girls stepped out of smart motorcars chauffeured by Ahmads and Babu Singhs, with their canvas shoes immaculately blancoed white, as they did not have to traipse through muddy fields, their uniforms in pristine condition, pleats starched and ironed perfectly. And of course, they could afford a fresh blouse and pinafore each day. Standing beside them, Pansy always felt unkempt, always felt her unsuitability for attending such a school.

  Pansy rode past the Canossian Convent Retreat for nuns, a simple wooden house surrounded by a modest garden. The Convent School was in Aljunied, but they used this place as a retreat. The majority of the nuns were still Caucasians. Most of the time, the nuns were unseen and unheard. Except when they went swimming. The village kids turned out in droves to watch and giggle behind the palm trees because the nuns swam fully clothed, in their white habits. The moment the Sisters stepped waist deep into the sea, their habits ballooned upwards from the water rushing underneath, making them look like a bevy of floating white swans.

  Suddenly, Pansy burst out of the lane into a wide, open space. A neat row of rain trees with their parachute-curved canopies greeted her, their lower branches cradling the leafy epiphytes of bird’s nest ferns. Across the field were her two favourite banyan trees, standing tall and proud, presumably like Sister Catherine’s oak tree, though these were strung with the kind of thick vines that Tarzan would have swung from, their crowns thick with large leaves. The village children often came here to pretend they were Tarzan. But fortunately they were not around today. The trees were the same breed and had a similar majesty as the one standing at Bedok Corner. They stood beside each other, yet were apart, and Pansy’s fanciful mind conjured up a story of some wicked witch who had cursed two young lovers because she was spurned by one of them and turned them into trees, so that they were within aching sight of each other, but were not close enough to touch.

  “Good afternoon, Rama, Sita,” Pansy addressed them affectionately, as she normally did upon arriving. She named them after the renowned lovers from Valmiki’s epic Hindu poem, Ramayana. True to its description as an epic, the poem consists of nearly 50,000 lines couched in 24,000 shlokas or verses. Pansy had read part of it in an English translation. She had also read the poetic Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. But these poetic verse epics are not about flowers and nature, but about the human condition and metaphysical aspirations.

  “Don’t despair,” Pansy said to the couple. “Tell me what I can do to break the wicked witch’s spell. I promise you that one day when I meet the witch, I will force her to change you back! And you can be in each other’s arms again.”

  Rama and Sita stood in solemn silence facing the lake, her Lake Windermere— Rama was the nearer one. The banks of the kolam were steep. Enough time had passed since the last excavations, so wild bushes and ground growth masked the hard edges and sheer sides that the bulldozers had inflicted so that the lake seemed almost natural. At its base was an uncanny bright blue pool; apparently its colour was a result of some kind of oxidation of minerals and seashell unearthed during the excavation, though Pansy pretended that the colour was due to the lake being under the blue sky of England. A large signboard by its edge said, ‘Danger! No Swimming’.

  Pansy lay her bicycle down and sat against Rama, who was closer to the lake. All around her were fields of wild lallang, and forests of slim and tall eponymous Changi trees, which gave the neighbourhood its name. Pansy could see the hill across Sungei Bedok, which formed part of Tanah Merah Kechil, with its red earth, that gave the p
lace its Malay name. She could just about see the top of Haji Kahar’s magnificent two-storey wooden bungalow with its green shutters, on Haji Salam Road. The rags to riches Sumatran entrepreneur Haji Kahar had been well respected in the community; his shop in Arab Street was famous, though the road, Haji Salam, was named after the village headman out of respect.

  There was a certain tranquillity about the rustic scene, the tall, sharp-blade grass, a tracery of creepers festooned across low branches of trees, the purple Morning Glory and Marigold interwoven amongst them; grasshoppers leaping in beautiful arcs, butterflies and birds flitting here and there, chattering. To Pansy’s joy, a fairly rare Blue Pansy butterfly came to rest briefly on her shoulder, decidedly male because of its bright blue wings and eye-spots. How uncanny that her namesake should seek her out.

  “Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” she quoted Chuang Tze, the Chinese philosopher.

  Suddenly, a lime green parrot swept past Pansy, its beautiful long tail opened out like a delicate fan, followed quickly by another, the two of them circulating round each other in such a playful way that Pansy fancied she could almost hear them laughing gaily. From the pages of her memory, Pansy remembered a ditty Sister Catherine had taught her, which English people were supposed to have recited to count the number of magpies that flew into their sight:

  One for Sorrow

  Two for Joy

  Three for a letter

  Four for a Boy

  Five for Silver

  Six for Gold

  Seven for a Secret never to be Told

  Apparently it was bad luck to see one single magpie on its own. But there was no such superstition attached to a colourful parrot. Anyway, she had seen two parrots. Pansy was pleased. So joy awaits her then. But wait! There were more parrots flying into her sight. Pansy counted and recited, Four! She counted four parrots. Four for a Boy. A boy. Did it refer to that obnoxious boy, or was it to be another she was to meet in the future? What was the possibility of a boy appearing to her here in this remote part of the coast? Besides, her mother would skin her alive if she should be seen with a boy on her own.

  Pansy sat down, her back resting against Rama as she studied the shape of clouds for a while, imagining seeing a drifting cumulus angel, a dragon and a phoenix. One cloud billowed, formed and reformed, taking its shape as... a full-bodied heart! It was the first time she had seen a cloud shaped like a heart. She smiled dreamily, wondering what it would be like to be in love. Or to be free to seek her heart’s treasures, roam about freely like a man. There were far too many restrictions for a woman, especially an unwed one. She would like to go to Queen Elizabeth’s coronation celebrations at the Padang in June. But how? Young girls could not go out unchaperoned. Unless a contingent from their village was going and she could join them. She sighed.

  Then she took out the book that Sister Catherine had given her and her imagination transported her to a hillside in Cumbria, where Wordsworth had once roamed, and had looked upon England’s largest natural lake, about ten miles across: the real Lake Windermere, which had been formed by a different kind of excavation—by glaciers. Pansy marvelled at the power of a glacier, what would it have looked like, that it could carve a lake out of the hillside? She made it her dream to see the real Lake Windermere one day.

  “Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

  The distressed voice broke into Pansy’s reverie. She looked up in its direction. To her horror, she saw what looked like a runaway bicycle appearing over the far ridge, the rider hanging on for dear life but already giving up control, his legs spread wide, the foot pads and wheels spinning rapidly on their own, as the bicycle sped down the slope towards the sheer drop of the lake. Perhaps he could not see the lake from where he was.

  “Look out! The lake!” Pansy stood up abruptly and hollered, dropping her book, cupping her hands round her mouth like a megaphone. “Look out!”

  In the next instant, an angry buffalo appeared over the crest of the slope. It seemed to be chasing the person on the bicycle. As the bicycle came closer, Pansy saw that the rider was a Chinese male. Whether it was Pansy’s shout or the youth’s gaining some measure of control over the bike, he suddenly managed to turn it sharply down one side of the bank, to escape the sheer drop into the lake. The buffalo’s hooves screeched to a halt at the edge of the lake, as if awakened to its imminent danger by animal instinct. Clods of loosened earth from its hooves plunged down into the lake and plopped into the water below, disturbing its placidity. The buffalo snorted and pawed the ground for a few minutes with one hoof, as if contemplating whether to give further chase, but then decided not to. It turned and went back towards its field, its broad shoulders sagging in disappointment.

  Meanwhile the youth and the bicycle slithered down the muddy bank and crashed into the ‘Danger! No Swimming’ signboard, which thankfully broke his fall. Pansy leapt to the youth’s rescue.

  “You could have fallen into the lake!” she said disapprovingly as she hauled him to his feet, not having time to consider the taboo about physical contact with a stranger of the opposite sex. For some reason, she spoke in English, not the first language that one automatically used in these parts. Perhaps it was because she had been reading Wordsworth and was day dreaming about England.

  “Yes thank you, Nyonya. I was quite aware of that,” the youth replied in perfect English, a little bit put out. “Are you always so bossy?”

  Pansy was mildly surprised that he could distinguish a nyonya from a Malay girl. Most people might automatically assume that she was Malay, from her way of dressing and because she was so tanned. She hated it when people thought she was Malay or Chinese. Pansy was proud of her Peranakan heritage. The sight of a young man made her immediately conscious that she had only her home kebaya on, not the glamorous though fragile voile material which she wore for going out, but one which was more practical in non-see-through cotton, though it was still pretty, patterned with tiny flowers and lightly embroidered at the edges. The width of this embroidered, scalloped edging determined the value of the kebaya in Peranakan circles, as it was painstakingly hand sewn by experts. She looked at the young man with some admiration. This was obviously someone with perception and intelligence. But she wasn’t going to be bullied.

  “I was concerned, you idiot! The lake is very deep. Coming down that slope like an absolute maniac!”

  “You did notice that there was a buffalo hot on my heels?”

  “It’s your fault if you upset him.”

  “I was just crossing the field. How would I know it was his territory?”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t gore you with his horns. You should have seen his face! He looked so disappointed when you veered off down the bank. He snorted and pawed the ground with his hoof…”

  “Gosh! Your English is impeccable. Quite surprising in this region. You do have a way with words…” the youth said admiringly, despite being cross.

  The image of the buffalo, snorting and pawing the ground, angered that it had lost his potential victim, must have entered both their minds at the same time, and it caused them to burst out laughing. And in that shared laughter, alchemy took place—differences were bridged, sheaves of time concertinaed into this moment. When they stopped laughing, they looked at each other with eyes as if they had beheld each other in a past encounter, from a previous life maybe, and they both felt simultaneously that this was not a beginning but a continuum. Pansy became keenly aware that this was a young man standing in front of her, who was maybe a few years older than herself, rather tall, slim and definitely good looking, his coal black hair sleeked back with Brylcreem. He was fair skinned as the Chinese tended to be, though he did not have the flattish nose of some of them, nor were his eyes mere slits.

  “I’m George Chan,” he said, extending his hand for a formal handshake.

  “Named after the king, were you?”

  “Not my fault if my parents are anglophiles,” he said. “These d
ays it’s fashionable, isn’t it, to drop the complicated Chinese names?”

  “I suppose so. Mine’s Pansy. My mother likes flowers. Pansy Lim.”

  “But not a local flower. English I think…”

  “I found out from the Encyclopaedia Britannica that the flower comes in various colours—pink, blue, purple and yellow. The flower looks like it has a happy face and has two upper overlapping petals. But how is it that you know about flowers?”

  “Oh, just an interest. I like knowing what plants, flowers and herbs are good for healing. If I am not mistaken, I believe that a pansy is a natural aphrodisiac…”

  “Oh really?” Pansy said, bemused. “I know that the word, ‘pansy’ is derived from the word ‘to think’. In French, penser; Spanish, pensar or pensamientos, ‘thoughts’. In English, it’s pensive.”

  “I am impressed,” George said, looking at her with renewed interest.

  Pansy was still unsure whether to take his extended hand. Suddenly remembering the taboo and her earlier touching of his hands, she blushed. So she didn’t. There was an awkward moment when his hand was held out but not grasped, so he busied himself by dusting off the grass and mud which had clung to him. His brushing only made it worse, smearing mud all over his store-bought clothes. Pansy laughed.