The Catherine Lim Collection (27 page)

The midwife had run out of the room,
screaming for help; his wife continued to lie motionless on the bed. And now
her look of placidity aroused him to a new pitch of rage, and he began shouting
“Whore! Whore!” at her. He wanted to strangle her with his bare hands.
Something in her expression prevented him from doing so, and he could only
stand at a distance, his half-clenched fingers straining towards her in
impotent fury. Suddenly, as if inspired by an idea that would put an end to all
the misery, he grabbed the child and ran out of the room.

“Oh, do be careful –” cried his wife,
showing agitation for the first time, but he was gone.

With the bundle in his arms, he ran through
the darkness of lanes and paths, all the way until he reached the church. He
ran to the back where the priest’s sleeping quarters were (a tiny room with
only a plank bed and a table and chair) and pounded the door furiously with one
hand while holding the bundle with the other.

“Open up – open up this very minute!” he
gasped. When the priest appeared, blinking uncertainly in the haziness of
roused sleep, he pushed in and confronted the priest.

“Take what’s yours,” he said, thrusting the
bundle at the priest. The priest barely had time for an audible gasp before the
bundle was flung at him. Fortunately he caught it and discovered, for the first
time, that it was a new-born child, naked and beginning to squall.

“What – ” he began, his mind still unable to
give meaning to the night’s strange happening, and then he found himself
fighting off blows with his right arm, while he held and protected the baby
with his left. The blows were savage, but he could still fight them off and not
let any touch the child. But when he saw the wooden chair lifted and descending
on him, he sank to the floor and covered the child with both arms as well as
his arched body. A terrible pain seemed to explode through his whole body – and
then all was, mercifully, darkness.

They later found the child dead in the
towel, the priest, battered and soaked with blood. They found Lai in the far
corner, taunting the priest with a maniacal glee as he kept repealing, “Take
back your bastard! Take back your white-skinned bastard!”

Whether he was sent to prison or not, nobody
could quite remember, but it was said his mind had come unhinged, and it seemed
his father kept him locked up in a special room at home. Till the end of his
days, he could not or would not understand what had happened; even his old mother
tried to tell him that the child was his, that in her time she had come across
several instances of these poor unfortunate white-skinned children with the
white hair and pink eyes, and they were no less loved by their parents. But he
would not listen; he would only-shake his head and say, “Whore!” or “A white
man’s bastard,” and “A foreign hairy devil’s bastard.”

As for Father Monet, the incident left him
permanently blind and paralysed. He was to have been sent back to France, but
died before arrangements could be made.

Mary returned to her parents, and it was
said that she ran to the hospital one night to see the priest, but he was
already beyond recognizing anyone. Not only was he blind, but his eardrums had
been badly damaged. Rumours arose about there having been something between the
French priest and the beautiful Chinese woman who loathed her husband and
secretly loved the priest.

The circumstances of Mary’s death were
shadowy. Some said she died after an illness, some said she killed herself in grief
after having seen the priest.

When I passed the church that evening and
saw – or thought I saw – the priest, Mary and the child in the bundle – they
must have lain in their graves for at least 50 years.

Once, not so long ago, I paid a visit to the
modern church that now stands where the old one was, and asked the priest, a
very friendly and talkative rosy-cheeked fellow, if he kept records of all the
priests who had served in the church, including the old one. He said he did not
have any that went as far back as 50 years.

“Is the story of Father Monet true?” I
asked. He replied: “I too have heard of the strange story of Father Monet and
of people who claimed to have seen his ghost and the other ghosts. But I assure
you this church has been blessed with holy water. No ghosts will ever be seen
in its precincts.”

Grandmother
died when I was
about
10
. I had always been in awe of her, mainly because of the stories I had
heard relatives and
servants whisper about
her atrocities towards the many bondmaids she had
bought as infants, and reared to work as
seamstresses and needlewomen in
her rapidly expanding business of making
bridal clothes and furnishings.

Grandmother’s embroidered silk bed curtains
and bolster cases, and beaded slippers for bride and groom were famous and
fetched good money. The more nimble-fingered of the bondmaids did the sewing
and beadwork; the others were assigned the less demanding tasks of cutting,
pasting, dyeing, stringing beads, or general housework.

It was rumoured that one bondmaid had died
from injuries sustained when grandmother flung a durian at her. The story had
never been confirmed, and as a child, my imagination had often dwelt on the
terrible scene, giving it a number of interesting variations: grandmother
hurled the durian at the bondmaid’s head and it stuck there; the durian was
flung at the bondmaid’s stomach, thus disembowelling her; the durian thorns
stuck in the bondmaid’s flesh like so many knives and caused her to bleed to
death.

Whatever the circumstances surrounding her
death, the bondmaid was certainly dead at 15 and quietly buried at night in a
remote part of the huge plantation in which stood grandmother’s house.

Grandfather, who had been separated from
grandmother for as long as anyone could remember, often said, “Look at her
hands. Look at the strength and power in them. The hands of a murderess.” And
he would go on to assign the same pernicious quality to each feature of her
body: her eyes were cold and glittering, her mouth was thin and cruel, her
buttocks which by their flatness deflected all good fortune, so that her
husband would always be in want.

I think I unfairly attributed to grandmother
all those atrocities which rich elderly ladies of old China committed against
their servant girls or their husbands’ minor wives and concubines. Thus I had
grandmother tie up the ends of the trousers of a bondmaid close to the ankles,
force a struggling, clawing cat clown through the opening at the waist, quickly
knot the trousers tightly at the waist to trap the beast inside, and then begin
to hit it from the outside with a broom so that it would claw and scratch the
more viciously in its panic.

I never saw, in the few visits I remember I
paid grandmother, any such monstrosity. The punishments that grandmother
regularly meted out were less dramatic: she pinched, hit knuckles with a wooden
rod, slapped and occasionally rubbed chilli paste against the lips of a child
bondmaid who had been caught telling a lie.

Grandmother did not like children. I think
she merely tolerated my cousins and me when we went to stay a few days with
her. When in a good mood, she gave us some beads or remnants of silk for which
she no longer had any use.

I remember asking her one day why I never
saw grandfather with her and why he was staying in another house. Not only did
she refrain from answering my question but threw me such an angry glare that
from that very day I never mentioned grandfather in her hearing. I concluded
that they hated each other with a virulence that did not allow each to hear the
name of the other without a look of the most intense scorn or words of abuse,
spat out rather than uttered.

Indeed, never have I seen a couple so
vigorously opposed to each other, and I still wonder how they could have
overcome their revulsions to produce three offspring in a row, for according to
grandfather, they had hated each other right from the beginning of their
marriage. It was probably a duty which grandmother felt she had to discharge.

“It was an arranged marriage,” said
grandfather simply, “and I never saw her till the wedding night.” But he did
not speak of the large dowry that grandmother brought with her, for her father
was a well-to-do pepper merchant who had businesses in Indonesia. As soon as
her parents were dead and she had saved enough money to start a small business
on her own, she left grandfather, took up residence in an old house in a
plantation that she had shrewdly bought for a pittance, and brought up her
three children there. Her two daughters she married off as soon as they reached
16; her son, who turned out to be a wastrel, she left to do as he liked.

She had put her life with grandfather behind
her; from that day, he was dead to her, and she pursued her business with
single-minded purpose and fervour, getting rich very quickly. She had a canny
business sense and invested wisely in rubber and coconut plantations.

Grandfather took up residence with a
mistress; he had her for a very long time, almost from the time of his
marriage. It was said that she was barren, and he was disappointed for a while,
for he wanted sons by her, but his love remained unchanged.

There were other mistresses, but they were
merely the objects for grandfather’s insatiable appetite, while this woman, a
very genteel-looking, soft-spoken woman whom I remember we all called ‘Grand
aunt’, was his chosen life companion. I saw her only once. She was already very
old and grey, and I remember she took out a small bottle of pungent-smelling
oil from her blouse pocket and rubbed a little under my nose when she saw me
cough and sniffle. She died some three years before grandfather (and a year
after grandmother).

Grandfather howled in his grief at grand
aunt’s funeral, and was inconsolable for months. In all likelihood, he would
not have attended grandmother’s funeral even if she had not objected. As it
was, she had stipulated, on her death-bed, that on no condition was grandfather
to be allowed near her dead body. She was dying from a terrible cancer that,
over a year, ate away her body.

“Go, you must go,” urged grand aunt on the
day of the funeral, “for in death, all is forgotten.” But grandfather lay in
his room smoking his opium pipe and gazing languorously up at the ceiling.

When grand aunt died – quite suddenly, for
she was taking the chamber pot up to their room when she slipped, fell down the
stairs and died – grandfather was grief-stricken and at one point, even blamed
the sudden death on grandmother’s avenging spirit. He became withdrawn and
reticent, and sometimes wept with the abandon of a child in the silence of the
night.

The change was marked, for grandfather was
by nature garrulous and, on occasion, even jovial. He liked to tell stories –
especially irreverently obscene tales of monks. In his withdrawn state, all
storytelling ceased, except on one occasion when he emerged from his room, to
the surprise of the relatives who were sitting around idly chatting after
dinner, and offered to tell a tale.

“Once upon a time,” said grandfather, grey
eyes misting over and the wispy beard on his thin chin (which he always tied up
tightly with a rubber band, much to the amusement of us children) moving up and
down with the effort of story-telling.

“A very long time ago, perhaps a thousand
years ago, there lived in China a farmer and his wife. He loved her dearly, for
she was a gentle, loving woman who would do anything to make him comfortable
and happy. They had no children; the woman’s barrenness, which would have
compelled any husband to reject her, did not in the least irk him. He worked
hard to save for their old age, knowing no sons would be born to look after
them, and he and his wife watched with satisfaction the silver coins growing in
the old stone jar, which they took care to hide in a hole in the earthen floor.

Now near the farm was a nunnery, and the
head nun, a most cruel and mercenary woman who spent all her time thinking of
how much in donations she could get out of the simple peasants, began to eye
the growing wealth of this farmer and his wife. She knew that they were an
extremely frugal couple and surmised that their savings were a goodly sum.

Knowing that the farmer was a shrewd fellow
who regarded her with deep suspicion, she waited one morning for him to be out
in the fields before paying his wife a visit.

So convincing was she in her promise of
heavenly blessings upon those who would donate generously to her nunnery that
the farmer’s wife was quite taken in. The foolish woman went to the hiding
place in the earthen floor, brought out the stone jar and handed it, with its
store of silver coins within, to the head nun. The nun thanked her effusively
and left.

When the farmer came back, his wife told him
what had happened, in her extreme naivete expecting him to praise her for what
she had done. Instead, he picked up his changkul and repeatedly hit her in his
rage. When he saw that she was dead, his rage turned into an overpowering pity
and he knew he would never be at peace until he had killed the one who had
brought about this tragedy.

He ran to the nunnery with his changkul and
there struck three hefty blows on the nun’s head until she fell down and died.
In his panic, the farmer ran to a tree and hanged himself.