“Oh my goodness,” Pansy says. “Look at that! I remember it when it was a family home. Your grandpa and I used to stand on the beach behind it, right on the sea’s edge. We used to walk all the way from my village, Kampong Tepi Laut, to this place when we were picking cockles, gong-gong, mussels and clams when the tide was low. Just near here were two pillboxes that the British army had built, thinking that the Japs were going to invade Singapore by sea. But they came through the causeway so the pillboxes were never used. We also harvested seaweeds all around this area to make agar-agar. We were naughty really. Unmarried maidens were always chaperoned and supervised, so we pretended to be so absorbed in our search for the gong-gong, but we artfully strayed from my mother’s watchful eyes…”
“Grandma! I can’t imagine you as a naughty, wilful girl!”
“I guess young people can never imagine their parents or grandparents ever being young,” Pansy says, smiling. “I was like that at your age.”
“I guess we modern girls are really lucky to have so much freedom. Gosh, I wish that I had the opportunity to pick stuff from the sea for food,” Goldie says. “It must have been amazing to have done that. How sad it is for my generation not to know such an experience. At the most, we pick our food from the shelves of supermarkets! And worse, they’re not really fresh or natural anymore. So much of our food is imported, cultivated and manufactured from elsewhere, genetically modified blah blah blah! Oh, we do have some farms around here, but they’re token farms rather than real ones which feed thousands. That’s another reason why I enjoy going scuba diving. We sometimes catch fresh lobsters and fresh seafood to eat.”
“Let us stop and have lunch there.”
Goldie pulls into the restaurant’s car park.
“Table in air-con upstairs, or outdoors at the back?” the waitress asks.
“I know it’s hot but is it okay if we sit at the back?” Pansy asks Goldie. “I want to see what it’s like now. It will definitely take me back a bit though I know we can’t see the sea anymore from here.”
“Sure.”
Round tables are set in the courtyard behind the house. Umbrellas provide shade for diners. But there is no longer any sea behind the house. It had been pushed back a mile away. The first prime minister was more powerful than King Canute who had tried to command the waves in West Sussex. Without the sea breeze, it is much warmer than Pansy remembers. Instead of opening out to the beach and sea, the back gates now open out to a small copse of trees, coconut palms, casuarinas, and sea apples. Pansy is thankful that condominiums haven’t taken its place yet. But in Singapore, this is not a guarantee that the situation will last.
“Well, I’ll be blessed…” Pansy says.
“What, grandma?”
“This view. Your granddad and I used to stand just there, on the beach where the trees are now, and look upon this beautiful, imposing house.”
It seems appropriate now, and because Goldie is interested, to share with her how George had given up his family’s wealth to be with her. How he came to live with her and her mother in the house on stilts. And how he had come to love the sea as much as she did.
“Wah! So romantic,” Goldie says. “I’ve never heard this story before. Dad never tells us anything. So this is the part of me I inherit from you and your side of the family. Besides our complexion. Now I am beginning to understand why I have been having certain feelings.”
“Come on, let’s order, and I will tell you more. You have to taste the gong-gong,” she tells Goldie. “I guess these days, they won’t be directly from the surrounding sea here, but I must show you how I taught grandpa to skewer out the meat. We used to boil them fresh and eat them with sambal belachan.”
In her telling, Pansy relives her youth, and for a while she loosens the stranglehold of old age. The past is so much clearer to her than the present. She can’t remember what she ate for dinner yesterday but she can remember making the sambal belachan for George’s first meal with them, and how she had laughed when he gagged on it because of the chilli padi. In recounting that incident to Goldie, she laughs again at the memory, and Goldie chuckles.
There, Pansy thinks with relief. Now George will not die when I die. His granddaughter will remember him and keep his memory alive.
“Oh, I absolutely love the story,” Goldie says. “Tell me more, grandma. I feel that being with you, the missing pieces of my life’s puzzle are falling into place.”
“You know, something is falling into place for me too,” Pansy says. “I’ve been trying to figure out why I find you so familiar. Now I know. You look just like my mother had looked at the same age.”
“Oh, do I?” Goldie asks, preening.
“Not your hair style or earrings, I mean, but your slight figure and your features. She was so feminine and beautiful. If your hair is long as hers had been, I’m sure I won’t be able to tell you apart. I made her have her photo taken on her thirtieth birthday. I paid for it with my bonus from work. It was not easy in those days to take photos. People had to go to a photo studio to get it done. And they were all in black-and-white. I have it somewhere in my apartment, I’m sure of it. Give me time to look for it and then you can come and visit me and I will show it to you. Would you like a homemade pie? I will bake one for you.”
“That would be lovely,” Goldie says, smiling broadly, the smile rubbing out all traces of boyishness and making the girl in her come alive.
“By the way, did you know that my mother’s name was Kim Guek? It’s Teochew for ‘golden moon’. How interesting that your mother should pick Goldie Hawn’s name for you. Maybe she is quite perceptive after all.”
“Oh, what a beautiful name! I love that,” Goldie says. “Maybe I’ll change my name to Golden Moon. Mum would probably get into a fit. Would you mind if I take on the name of Kim Guek?”
Pansy is overwhelmed. Not only will George live on through his granddaughter, now Kim Guek too will live on through her great-granddaughter.
After lunch, Goldie drives up the hill into Haji Salam Road. It’s not difficult to find Haji Kahar’s house. It is a splendid Malay wooden mansion, the shutters still painted green. But a fence blocks closer access to it. Trees and bushes are planted along the fence, so the house has privacy and is not easily visible, except for its roof and upper floor. What used to be the servants’ quarters and outside kitchen are still within the compound, though it now looks as if it has a different owner from the main house.
“Wow, it’s still beautiful!”
“Well, I’ll be blessed!” says Pansy. “That this should still be standing here all these years. Especially in a place like Singapore, with its penchant for getting rid of the old to replace it with the new.”
Pansy gives Goldie the background of the house and its famous owner who had it built, one of the early immigrants who had made good and was a benevolent landlord and businessman.
“We do have a great deal of history in our small island,” says Goldie. “I’m glad that there is now a heritage board which stops the destruction of our historical places. These places need to be preserved for future generations. I’m glad people are protesting about the exhumation of Bukit Brown. So many of our famous pioneers are buried there. Fancy trying to destroy that to put in a road! I wish people could see this house and appreciate its beauty and history. I wonder if this is a heritage house yet.”
“We used to have a clear view from here to my village,” Pansy adds. “No high-rise condominiums to obstruct the view of the river and sea. That’s how I could see the green shutters whilst standing at my favourite lake. Talking of heritage, we must stop at the heritage tree your father was talking about…”
They get into the car and Goldie drives past the Bedok Camp, then the Bedok Food Centre. The Minangkabau-design food centre is an impressive building compared to the shacks of the old food stalls that used to be across the road on Long Beach. Unusual for Singapore’s buildings, the toilet stalls are surrounded with a brown wooden wall to emulate kampong
structures.
“Oh, this place has really changed,” Pansy says, pointing to the army camp and its surroundings. This was all white sandy beach before. This sharp turn on the corner marks the very spot. The tree must be just here on the left…”
True enough, as soon as the car turns the corner, the tree comes into sight. Goldie parks the car and they both step out. The sea fig tree is still magnificent, with its sturdy propped roots and a beautiful crown of leaves. But it seems to have lost all of its vines.
“When it used to have vines, your father used to swing from them...”
“Oh, wow!” Goldie says, reading the small interpretive board at the base of the tree which confirms that Pansy was right about it being at the spot where the tree could see the sea in the old days. “Imagine my dad playing here! It’s so amazing that this tree is older than me! That it stood here even before I was a twinkle in my father’s eye.”
Pansy stands there pensively whilst Goldie goes and checks out the food stalls in the centre. Pansy recalls that Kampong Bedok used to be across the road. Of course it too is defunct now. In its place is a modern shopping precinct with a spanking new air-conditioned supermarket and shops. She tries to visualise the place as it had been in the old days and some scraps of memory surface. She seems to remember that there used to be a petrol station located here, and a police post. But she’s not too sure. Too much time has passed and her brain is not as sharp as it used to be.
“Lots of Malay food stalls,” Goldie says when she gets back. “And the ju her eng chye and cheng teng stalls, like dad said. We must try them one day. But I’m too full right now. Where to now?”
“Well,” says Pansy. “The village that used to be all around here and up to Sungei Bedok is now taken over by this housing estate. If we stood on this side of the river, near the wooden foot bridge in the old days, we could have seen my village, Kampong Tepi Laut. But I can’t see the bridge from here. However, the main access to my village was through Koh Sek Lim Road, so let us go and find that first. We should also pass the two banyan trees, the ones near where the old lake used to be…”
“Okay.”
“Your father was right. This place has changed radically,” Pansy says with a sad voice, as if the changes have violated her youthful memories.
The car passes more and more condominiums, both on the left and right side of the roads. The old forests and lallang fields are all gone. When they reach Upper Changi Road, the American-accented computerised voice on the GPS instructs Goldie to turn right and another right to Koh Sek Lim Road. They cross a bridge that spans a river.
“We must be going over Sungei Bedok,” Goldie says.
“This used to be a wooden bridge,” Pansy says. “When cars went over it, it used to make a sound like a drum, gedung, gedung, gedung. That’s what they say Bedok means, you know. The sound of a drum.”
“Oh, really?” says Goldie. “Funny how I never even question its meaning. It’s just the name of a place. But now you’ve opened my eyes to new things, grandma.”
“There’s so much more to tell.” Pansy says. “The town folks who came to buy our famous Teochew salted fish and bunga rampay had to use this bridge to come into our vicinity. But they had to park before the lake to walk to our villages because there was no motorised vehicular access to our kampongs. Our kampongs could not be seen from the road because of the vegetable farms. That’s why they were called ‘hidden villages’.”
“Goodness, grandma, they sound like they were in a different world!”
“It was a different world. And to think it was not that long ago, less than fifty years…”
“It’s Singapore’s fiftieth birthday next year, in 2015,” Goldie informs Pansy. “So the changes to Singapore must have been rapid. You know that LKY is sick? His health deteriorated rapidly after his wife’s death. We’re all hoping he will stay alive to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of our independence on 9 August.”
“Yes, he has done a lot for Singapore. The change has been staggering,” Pansy says. “A tsunami of reformation.”
Instead of the sprawling old forests, the area where they are driving through is now a forest of landed properties and industrial buildings—not at all as what Pansy remembered. These days the MRT track sweeps overhead on its way to and from Simei, Tampines and Pasir Ris. Another track separates at Tanah Merah above ground to burrow underground to and from the exhibition halls at EXPO, and Changi Airport. And the trains are now the ones producing the rumbling noises, replacing the drumming of yesteryear. The tall, slim Changi trees have all been uprooted. The hill that George had scrambled down on his runaway bicycle when chased by the buffalo has been flattened. As they turn into Koh Sek Lim Road, now truncated, they are greeted by the MRT trains reposing in their depot. Instead of open fields and a mud-packed road, the depot is behind a boundary fence and the road is surfaced with tarmacadam. Fortunately, many of the beautiful rain trees, with their split trunks like sturdy fingers cradling the bird’s nest ferns, still line both sides of the road. They are the forlorn vestiges of the past.
Goldie follows the single track road.
“Wait! Stop!” Pansy says excitedly, pointing to the left. “There they are! Rama and Sita. My banyan trees.”
“Who?”
Goldie pulls the car into the space in front of the gates which are padlocked. Before she can get out, Pansy is already there, her hands clutching the fence, looking out to her beloved trees which used to stand overlooking her lake. They look imprisoned behind the fence but are still magnificent, their vines intact. They no longer look upon Windermere but face the steel hulks of the MRT trains. Here was where she had met George and where her new life had begun.
“Oh, Rama, Sita. You’re still alive!” says Pansy softly. “And you will live beyond me. But I have failed you. I did not find the wicked witch who had turned you two into trees. I couldn’t force her to change you back so that you can be in each other’s arms.”
Pansy is amazed at herself, at how she manages to pull the silly promise out from so many years ago. She closes her eyes and leans her forehead on the fence, as the other memories come scuttling back, how she used to sit with her back against Rama as she read Wordsworth’s poems. She still has the book that Sister Catherine had given her. She remembers seeing George coming down the hill that afternoon, and how she had leapt to his rescue when the bicycle threw him off like a rodeo horse. And how the signboard had stopped him from falling into the lake. What did the sign say? ‘Danger. No Swimming’? Or ‘Dangerous. Swimming Not Allowed’?
Goldie has given her some distance but now she says, “You okay, grandma?”
“This was where the lake used to be,” Pansy says, her voice tremulous. “You see these two banyan trees? The way they stand? No other trees in this area stand side by side like them. That’s why they’re distinguishable and tell me where the lake used to be. I nicknamed them Rama and Sita after the great lovers in the Indian epic Ramayana. There was no fence earlier, of course. I used to ride my bicycle and come here to read William Wordsworth’s poems and sit and lean against Rama, as he’s nearer to the lake, and pretend that the lake was Windermere. This was where I met your grandfather, that incident your father mentioned about the buffalo took place just there.”
“Windermere is in the Lake District, right?” Goldie says. “Let me google it.”
“Google? What does google mean? We didn’t have the Internet before. We had to use our imagination. I never knew what the real Windermere looked like until years later when we moved to England and your grandfather took me there. Let me recite to you our favourite poem:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
“That’s beautiful, grandma,” says Goldie. “It seems so old fashioned recitin
g a poem. There’s something peaceful about doing that…”
Pansy looks round at the current landscape. So much has changed. Of course it is no longer possible to see Haji Kahar’s house on the hill, as in the past, with the tall condominiums obscuring the house and altering the view. The old landscape is gone but Pansy tries to repaint the old canvas, so that her granddaughter can see the picture that lives in her mind. More importantly, she tries to impart to Goldie the happiness she shared with George and the love they had for each other.
“True love does exist,” she says. “I want you to know this, Goldie. It’s not an easy world that you have inherited. Everything is so fast paced, the focus is on what is outside, not inside. People don’t pay attention to each other in the same way as before, as attention is always given elsewhere, to one’s mobile phone, iPad, or other sensory distractions. But there is someone out there who is your true love. As your grandpa was mine.”
“Oh, grandma…” Goldie says, then for no apparent reason at all, she bursts into tears, covering her face with her hands.
Pansy takes Goldie in her arms and lets her sob and sob.
“I’m sorry,” she says afterwards, blowing her nose and wiping her eyes. “I don’t know what came over me. As if a sluice has been opened, and all the times that I’ve felt unloved simply poured out. It’s as if you’ve provided me a space to do so…”
“No apology needed,” Pansy says, kissing her on her forehead. “It’s good that you can unburden yourself to me. I am honoured. When you harden up and close your heart, you can never feel love coming to you. Now that you have opened your heart, you can feel my love for you. When there is love, you feel safe. This is how you will recognise your true love when he comes to you.”
When a Flower Dies Page 16