The Catherine Lim Collection (28 page)

The spirits of the three deceased then
appeared before the Almighty, who sat on his heavenly throne in judgment.

‘You have done great wrong,’ he told the
farmer, ‘and must therefore be punished.’

‘You,’ turning to the nun. ‘have done
greater wrong, for you are a selfish, mercenary, cruel woman. You too will be
punished.’

He looked at the farmer’s wife and, whereas
his eyes had narrowed in severe censure when they looked upon the farmer and
the nun, they now softened upon the gentle, timid woman.

‘You are a good woman,’ said the Almighty,
‘and although you were foolish enough to be taken in by this nun, you will not
be punished.’

The Almighty’s plan was simple.

‘I’m sending the three of you back to earth
again,’ said the Almighty. ‘You will be born and at the appointed time, you,’
pointing to the farmer, ‘and you,’ pointing to the nun, ‘will be man and wife
so that you will be each other’s torment. I can devise no greater punishment
for you. Since your sin is less,’ he continued, addressing the farmer, ‘you
will be freed of the retribution after a time and will be reunited with this
woman, without whom you cannot be happy.’

Then turning to the nun, he told her, ‘You
have been guilty of so much cruelty that your punishment will be extended
further. While this man and this woman enjoy peace and happiness together, your
body will be wracked by the most painful disease, which will, after a long
time, carry you to your grave.’

So the three were reborn on earth, and the
Almighty’s plans for them came to pass.”

Grandfather finished his story and shuffled
back to his room, smoking his opium pipe. He paused, before entering his room,
to continue, “The woman, much beloved by the man, was to die soon, and he will
shortly follow. For them, there will no longer be the pain of another rebirth.”

Fourth
Aunt-on-father’s-side
led a sorrowful life and was
ill-treated by her irresponsible, lecherous husband because of a mole situated
close to her left eye. Second Aunt-on-mother’s-side, on the other hand, enjoyed
prosperity all her life and was always seen with a heavy gold chain round her
neck and a stack of gold bangles round her wrist because of her very
substantial buttocks. Poor Fourth Aunt-on-father’s-side, in addition to the
unfortunate mole near her eye, had flat, truncated buttocks which she blamed
more than the mole for her sad life.

As a child, I expertly explained the
fortunes or misfortunes of relatives and neighbours in terms of their
physiognomy. I had picked up a valuable store of information on the matter from
adult conversations
and observations, and could, at the age of 10 or thereabouts, look pityingly
upon a face that had moles near the eye. I supposed that it must have been
because moles near the eyes reminded people of tears and tears meant sorrow.

I rejoiced having a mole near the mouth; by
the same token, a mole near the mouth meant that food was always at hand, that
the person would never starve. It was better for a woman if the location were
close to one side of the upper lip; that meant she would be the concubine of a
rich, pampering man and would never be in want for the rest of her days.

Fourth Aunt-on-father’s-side’s mole was a
particularly large one; it hung – round, black and grotesque – between her nose
and eye, and I sometimes wondered if, had somebody just twisted it off, would
her fortunes change for the better?

Her husband beat her continually, especially
when he got drunk; her brood of children were, like herself, timid and silent
and resentful. The mole – the mole that was causing all this – couldn’t it be
removed somehow? I had the vague impression that moles could not be tampered
with. They were the seal of judgment of some mighty power, and to try to remove
them was to invite the wrath of this power.

After some time, I gave up the hope of
Aunt’s mole falling off by itself, and the almost daily witnessing of the cruel
hardships and privations she was subjected to convinced me that to have a mole
near the eye was the saddest thing that could happen.

The buttocks could have overcome the evil
effects of the mole, but poor Aunt, although not thin, had extremely flat,
fleshless buttocks.

Now a woman, it was ordained, must have
round fleshy buttocks if she were to bring good luck to her husband and enjoy
prosperity herself. Grandfather used to complain that he never got rich because
Grandmother had unfortunate buttocks; since she enjoyed relative prosperity in
her bridal-wear business, I could only come to the conclusion that other lucky
features of her physiognomy must have successfully cancelled out the perfidy of
the flat buttocks.

But poor Aunt had no redeeming feature. The
elderly relatives had been heard to comment, sadly, on her thin lips, her
manner of walk in which her feet pointed outwards – a really unfortunate thing!
Whatever wealth was coming was always being pushed away – her low narrow
forehead, the failure of the tip of her little finger to extend beyond the last
joint line of the finger next to it. Crossing this line signified the
overcoming of a most crucial life hurdle, and Aunt had again failed in this.
Some people tried to make up for this deficiency by letting the fingernail on
the little finger grow long enough to extend beyond this fateful line, but Aunt
had never bothered to do that.

I remember that on one of the rare occasions
when she joked and laughed – even then, the sad pinched look never left her
face so that when she laughed, the lines gathered in a rictus that was quite
frightening to see – she took me aside, patted me on the buttocks and commented
that unlike hers, mine would see me through life smoothly and would I remember
her once I became the concubine or wife of a rich man?

Second Aunt-on-mother’s-side, who was
enormously fat, always found difficulty in getting up from the low cane chair
that she used to sit in outside her house after dinner, picking her teeth and
chatting amiably with the neighbours. She had extremely fleshy buttocks; I
thought they made her look grotesque, but was ready to concede that if they had
brought in all those heavy solid gold chains and stacks of gold bangles and
goodness knows what else hidden in her jewellery box, there should be little reason
to regret them.

It was debatable whether the prosperity came
from her buttocks or her husband’s, for he too was very prominent in that
feature. Although he was by no means fat, the protuberance was most pronounced,
and husband and wife taking a leisurely walk side by side on an evening, viewed
from behind, would provoke much envy with regard to the double share of Fate’s
favours.

As if still dissatisfied with inflicting
Fourth Aunt’s body with a whole range of unfortunate features, Fate had gone on
to wreak more vengeance by making her marry a man who had numerous moles on his
ears. Fourth Uncle’s left ear, I remember being told, was strewn with moles,
some quite large, some small and indistinct. This was the surest mark of a
faithless husband, a lecher and a scoundrel. Aunt swore that when they were
first married, there were no moles on his ear; they seemed to have appeared at
a critical period early on in their married life.

Much of Aunt’s suffering stemmed not so much
from Uncle’s womanizing, as from the fact that he had no money left to give her
after it. Violent quarrels ensued. Often, Aunt, miserable and humiliated, sent
her children around the neighbourhood to borrow rice or sugar or coffee.

Uncle, after a drink or two, sometimes grew
expansive and called his terrified children to come around him, talking to them
all the time with good-natured garrulousness.

“We are poor,” he said with a chuckle,
“because of your mother’s buttocks – see how flat and useless they are – and
because of the moles on my ear. But then, you know, I can’t help being what I
am.”

The full
moon,
startlingly luminous in the night sky and linked,
in the child’s mind, with fairy maidens who played on magic flutes and bathed
in silver streams, invited the small forefinger to point to it, so that others
too might see and comment on its wondrous beauty.

My forefinger was slapped down immediately,
and then, remembering what I ought not to have forgotten, hid my hand fearfully
in the folds of my dress.

“Do you want your ear cut off?” cried my
older, wiser companion. “Have you forgotten Ah Hee?” I remembered Ah Hee well.
His right ear was almost falling off; an infection was ravaging it and
threatening to sever it from his head. The grocer’s boy had pointed to a full
moon.

I went to sleep with a hand on each ear and
was relieved, the next morning, to find that no such fate had befallen. In my
dream afterwards, the full moon, large and vengeful, converted itself into a
gigantic metal disc, approached me, and turned its cutting edge towards my
right ear so that I screamed and woke.

A nervous child, my elders said, and a
triangular piece of yellow cloth with some prayer words sewn onto it was given
me to wear. Sweat-stained, food-soiled, the amulet rested comfortably against
my chest for the greater part of childhood.

The hospital with its outhouse for the insane
was not far from our house. I was brought along on several occasions, when the
elders visited sick relatives or friends. A woman who had once worked as a
servant for us was in the outhouse for the insane, and from time to time she
was allowed out of the barred cells for she was reasonably well-behaved.

She said to me: “Would you like a biscuit?”
She offered to open the tin my mother had brought for her, but I hid behind my
mother, afraid to look upon the blotched face with the wild masses of hair that
she patted with both hands each time she bent close to speak to anyone.

I remember my mother kept asking her if
there was anything she wanted, and she kept replying, “Thank you very much. You
are very kind, but there is nothing I want.” She got up and did a dance, a kind
of ronggeng with a sad, tearful smile on her face.

On nights when the moon was full, the cries
of the women in the cells could be clearly heard in our house and I heard my
mother say that while Ah Suat Ee was generally quiet and well-behaved, sadly
dancing the ronggeng for anyone who requested it, on full moon nights she
became uncontrollably violent.

Her daughter-in-law, who faithfully visited
her every day with a tiffin carrier of food, told us confidentially that on
those nights, she would throw herself against the metal bars of the cell,
wailing piteously. She would quieten down for a while, her head inclined
against the metal bars, its wild masses of hair streaked with grey streaming
about her face, her hands gripping the bars. Sometimes, however, she wailed
through thenight, and the hospital attendant would shout at her for disturbing
the peace and threaten to cane her as if she were a child.

With the child’s love for stories, I had
always gravitated towards any group of adults who appeared to be telling tales
or exchanging gossip; often they would shoo me away, but I always managed to
linger on the edges of adult conversation, carrying away with me awesome tales
of avenging ghosts and blood and death. The wails of demon women crying for their
mortal lovers became intermingled with mournful cries from the hospital
outhouse on nights of the full moon.

Ah Suat Ee, long before her death, had
become a demon woman howling for her lover. The real cause of Ah Suat Ee’s
mental breakdown had not been love, but money. Having been cheated by an
unscrupulous relative of all her life savings which she had put in a tontine,
she had lost her mind.

On full moon nights, some men repaired in
stealth to graves of women who, like Ah Suat Ee, had died in the violence of
dementia, or who, like the mysterious young woman in our neighbourhood whose
name I have forgotten, had died giving birth and cursing the faithless father
of her child. The spirits of these women were invoked, and requests made for
prize-winning numbers in lotteries. In the light of the full moon, these
spirits sometimes obliged their human supplicants, sometimes exacting terrible
payments for their favours.

As far as I knew, no one had gone to Ah Suat
Ee’s grave or to the mysterious young woman’s grave to ask for numbers. But
long after the ravings of these two unhappy women had been stilled in the
earth, I heard them, saw them, still in their white death clothes. I pleaded
with them but still they would cut off my ear and rebuke me for pointing to the
full moon.

Hong is my
aunt’s cousin’s nephew;
we found that out by pure
accident when we were studying together at the university.

Finding the relationship too remote to allow
for that degree of confidence which he supposed could subsist only between
close kin, he simply cut through all the consanguineous convolutions and called
himself my cousin. This way, he did not lay himself open to the idle
conjectures of fellow undergraduates who saw us together very often – at
lectures, in the university canteen, taking evening walks in the campus. The
other protection was in our very visible incompatibility, for while I appeared
a robust tomboy, Hong was of that species of small-framed, bent and
cowed-looking male that must provoke a certain measure of pity.