The Catherine Lim Collection (30 page)

About a month before, late in the evening,
they had heard cries from the site of the accident – human voices, not the
cries of lonely owls or other night creatures of the jungle. The cries
gradually became louder: women’s voices shrieking, a child’s wail. The old man
had actually walked out to see what was happening; he ran back when he saw
figures moving about the waste ground, shadowy figures moving about in great
urgency. There was no plane, only a massing together of dark human shapes who
appeared to have lost their way.

“Hantu, hantu,” cried the old man, shaking
his head slowly. The hantu of all those who had died in the crash. How else
could you explain the large number, the plaintive cries?

“She was there, as she had promised,” sobbed
Hong as we made our way back. “About a month ago, the old Malay man said. That
was the anniversary, don’t you see? And I have missed it. I don’t know whether
she’ll come for the next anniversary.”

I was too bewildered to do anything except
repeatedly nod assent; this easily perceived and reassuring form relieved me of
all necessity of following Hong’s tortured train of thoughts as we drove back,
so that I could sort things out in my own mind.

The sequel to this story is most depressing.
Hong suffered a nervous breakdown and was temporarily relieved of his duties at
the university. He stays at home, obsessed by the pain of having missed the
only chance of granting the last affectionate request of a deeply-loved woman,
and waits impatiently for the next anniversary to come. He says she appeared to
him in a dream and reproached him for not keeping the appointment. She said
that she had waited a very long time for him to come, and asked why he never
did.

Hong’s appearance has all the signs of a man
no longer in control of himself. His hair has grown long; he is unshaven and
unkempt, his clothes unwashed. He waits for July 19; and only the thought of
July 19 keeps him alive.

“I shall be quite happy to die after that,”
he says simply. “I shall wait for the anniversary for her to come again and
then I shall see what she wants me to do. I should be quite happy to die after
that, you know.”

The notice
of exhumation of graves
was gazetted in
The Straits
Times
; it was one of a rapid series of exhumation notices, for the
government was impatient to reclaim the land from the dead to build houses and
offices and supermarkets for the living.

Before the bulldozers moved in, there was a
flurry of activity on the part of my relatives, for grandmother’s grave was one
of those in the marked cemetery, and everybody wanted to be assured that the
old lady, who had lain in the earth these 30 years, would not be unduly upset
by the disturbance.

The first of the pacification rites was held
at home, in front of the ancestral altar, over which hung a large portrait of
grandmother.

As a child, I had once observed a similar
rite in which a member of the family expressed his contrition to a deceased
relative – I cannot recollect what the offence was – but I remember the family
member clasping a handful of lit joss-sticks and moving them up and down in
front of the portrait, and repeatedly striking his chest in penitential sorrow.
This time, I watched with much interest the efforts at pacifying the spirit of
my grandmother.

Joss-sticks were burnt and prayers chanted,
but I took no part in the ceremony, believing it would conflict with my
Christian beliefs. So I watched, an interested, curious and sometimes amused
observer, especially when one of my aunts, a very old lady of 70, began talking
to grandmother in the casual way she must have done when grandmother was alive.

Aunt, looking up at grandmother’s portrait,
and clasping a joss-stick in her hands, delivered a severe tirade on
grandmother’s behalf against a merciless government that would plunder the
homes of the dead. The speech, interrupted by the loud raucous sounds of the
clearing of phlegm from the throat, all the more resembled a natural
conversation, and it was hard not to picture grandmother listening and nodding
in vigorous agreement. Several times Aunt asked for forgiveness, presumably for
the government of Singapore.

Grandmother, represented by the framed
photograph above the ancestral altar with its comfortably familiar joss-sticks,
scented flowers and oranges, was not in the least frightening. But grandmother,
underneath the huge slat) of grey marble bearing her name, date of birth and
date of death, did cause a shiver or two.

I stood with the others surveying her
tombstone, surrounded by tall lallang despite the fact that only six months
before, the grass had been trimmed in preparation for the Feast of the Hungry
Ghosts.

I had insisted on coming, impelled more by
curiosity and by that combination of adventurousness and frivolity that belonged
to that period of life.

I watched further pacification ceremonies;
this time, a priest was called to say prayers over the grave in preparation for
the actual ceremony of exhumation. My relatives would not hear of the
impersonal business-like mass exhumation provided by the government for only a
small charge; a private ceremony was preferable, though much more costly.

I have almost come to believe that those
people who make their living by close contact with the dead, such as morticians
and embalmers, resemble the dead. The stereotype of the tall, pale embalmer
with the huge sunken eyes, hollow cheeks and sepulchral stare is, I am now
almost persuaded, based on truth, for all the embalmers and exhumers I have
seen look like this or get to look like this, as if in concession to their
calling.

The exhumers for grandmother’s grave – there
were two of them – looked just like resurrected corpses: two old, ashen-skinned
men, stripped to the waist for the messy work of prodding about in the soggy
ground around a rotting coffin ready to surrender its contents, moving about
mechanically with expressionless faces, and now and again looking up with
glazed eyes. Awed respectfulness was owing to the dead only if they were remote
enough. Here, touching and picking up bones, the exhumers had no need of it.

The coffin was too deeply embedded in
waterlogged earth to be heaved up, and the two exhumers had to prise open the
coffin lid, which they managed to very easily and expertly.

Peering down, I caught a glimpse of a heap
of bones, with only the skull distinguishable, covered in muddy water.

I looked away – for it was the most desolate
sight in the world, and I was overcome by a crushing sense of mortality. I had
seen death, but somehow this heap of waterlogged bones that had been my
grandmother, whom I remembered as a robust, severe-looking woman who bought
bondmaids to be trained to work for her in her bridal furnishing business,
troubled and saddened me beyond words.

In the distance, in a cemetery that had just
been cleared, the relentless sound of piling had already begun. Grandmother’s
remains were quickly removed and taken away by the exhumers to be cleaned
properly before they were consigned to the crematorium. Grandmother’s ashes
would then be stored in a stone casket and laid to rest finally in a niche in a
government columbarium.

Throughout the exhumation ceremony, we had
our handkerchiefs to our noses. By some strange twist of logic, I had persuaded
myself that this was a mark of great discourtesy to a dead ancestor, and had
been prepared to brave any discomfort rather than resort to my handkerchief.
But when I saw everybody else nonchalantly covering up their noses, I did the
same – with relief, for the odour was unbearable. Wasn’t it odd, I thought, for
the flesh had long since gone, but perhaps the earth around it had been imbibed
with centuries of decay which was surrendered readily, once disturbed.

That night we had dreams of grandmother –
all of us. Some of the dreams were inconsequential, but I, who knew grandmother
only from the dreadful stories I had heard about her severity towards the
bondmaids and towards grandfather, and also from the one or two visits I had
made to her house when I was a child, had the most vivid dream of all.

In my dream, grandmother was present at her
own exhumation. She took me by the hand and led me to a grassy verge from which
a small group of people were watching the two exhumers at work.

We stood there together and I was all the
while conscious of a puzzling thought. How could grandmother be standing there
with me, holding my hand when she had been dead these 30 years? For sometimes
reality intrudes into dreams in the most devastating way.

I looked up at her face, and it was a
corpse’s face; when it slowly turned to look upon me, I was aware of an
overpowering sensation of horror though I did not try to break away. Her grip
upon my arm tightened
and finally I burst out with the words, “Please, grandmother, don’t do this to
me!”

I woke up at this point and did not dare go back
to sleep, fearful that the dream might return. I woke the family up and related
the dream to them. They too had dreamt of grandmother.

They listened intently to my narration, and
then the aunt who had conversed with grandmother at the altar took hold of my
arm, looked closely at it and exclaimed that grandmother had left the imprint
of her fingers on my flesh. I recoiled, protesting; there were indeed some
faint imprints on my arm, but they were not the imprints of fingers, probably
the impression of the ribbed pattern of a pillow or blanket pressed closed in
sleep.

Aunt had dreamt of grandmother too:
grandmother was on her death-bed, with tears running silently down the sides of
her face on to her pillow. This aunt interpreted to mean that grandmother’s
spirit was distressed at the disturbance of her grave.

How could it be explained, except by the
presence of a dead rat in the house or a dead cat outside whose odour the wind
wafted in through the window at the time of our talking about grandmother? But we
were, all at once, aware of a powerful smell.

I had heard of people smelling jasmine at
the precise moment of the death of a loved one, but this smell was frightful.
It lasted more than two or three minutes, during which we shifted and sniffed
uncomfortably.

Someone whispered, “She’s here,” and then
broke into the same chant of propitiation that had been uttered days before in
front of the altar.

“May she vomit blood on her death-bed, and
may she then die!”

The curse, rendered in English, loses a
great deal of its alarming vehemence; there probably are not words enough in
the English language to convey the sheer force of Chinese vituperations. It is
the totality of facial expression, the physical act of dragging the words out,
as of a monstrous birth, and above all, of the whole force of tradition going
back to countless generations, that invests each image with a power and a
terror that cannot be explained by meaning alone.

“May she vomit blood on her death-bed, and
may she then die!”

I remember the utterance, made amidst great
convulsive sobs by a young woman against an elderly woman who had done
everything in her power to thwart her husband’s taking in this young woman as
his second wife. The weeping woman was standing in front of an ancestral altar;
by thus inviting the spirits to bear witness, she had put the stamp of
irrevocability on the curse.

Sometimes, for the same purpose, a curse was
uttered in the presence of thunder and lightning. The picture of a dying man or
woman spewing blood – that was one of the most terrifying images of my
childhood.

I once heard of a coffin that somehow
slipped the grasp of the pallbearers so that it crashed to the ground, burst
open and threw out the corpse, a very fat old woman. And I had read somewhere
of a degenerate English king whose deceased, bloated corpse had to be squeezed
into the coffin which actually burst open in the church itself, flooding the
church floor with blood.

All these images had fused in my fervid
imagination into a scene of the most frightful kind, and for a long time blood
became associated with all that was sinister and direful.

I had an aunt who had attended, though never
participated, in seances with the dead at gravesides. The purpose of calling up
the dead was often to seek their help in getting the winning numbers of
lotteries. Aunt was an inveterate gambler and claimed that she had won on
several occasions with the numbers given by the spirits.

What did they look like? Very often you
could not see them distinctly, said Aunt. Once she saw a faint colour of smoke,
and another time, she felt a strange indescribable chill overcome her and heard
a kind of rasping voice.

How were the spirits called up? What had to
be done first? Blood, said Aunt. The blood of a white cockerel freshly
slaughtered at the graveside. This was absolutely indispensable. The blood was
then poured through a hollow bamboo stick stuck near the grave, certain prayers
were chanted and the spirit would then rise.

Blood to make a man die, blood to bring him
money – and blood to make him a good husband. For blood from woman was the most
potent, it was claimed, to make a man love you and treat you well.