The Catherine Lim Collection (46 page)

I want so much to know why this woman who
obsesses me has given such fatal advice which has been received down the ages,
and retrospectively, right back to the Cave Woman who died with her baby. I
want the years between us – 186, to be exact – to melt away, so that I can meet
her face to face and talk to her, this intense, strange, small woman who
obsesses me.

Her only existing portrait shows a
pixie-like but strong face with small, purposeful mouth and dark brown hair,
probably her best feature, neatly parted in the middle and utterly smoothed on
each side, in the manner we have come to associate with Victorian spinster
ladies (she married but was dead within a year, owing to complications in a
pregnancy that her doctor thought could not be sustained by such a tiny body,
almost like a child’s). There is a small smile playing around her intense
mouth, perhaps of triumph at overcoming the scorpion at last.

Over the years, these words of hers have
become points of reference by which I try to have a clearer understanding of
her thoughts and feelings.

“You held out your hand for an egg and fate
put into it a scorpion.” By shifting the blame to fate, she had absolved her
Christian God of the responsibility for going back on his own promise. She must
have asked for good health for her beloved sisters; she watched them die, one
by one, undernourished, lonely, broken. She must have asked for strength for
the brother to turn over a new leaf, to stop the drinking, the opium addiction,
the irresponsibilities which were draining his sisters of their strength and
meagre resources; she watched him die too, a raving lunatic, and bv that time
her thoughts must already have shaped into the philosophy of that proud claim
of endurance of her sex: “This would never have happened with a woman.”

But the egg she held out her hand most
eagerly for and had a scorpion put into it instead, was the gift of a man’s
love. She had fallen secretly, passionately in love with a professor, a married
man. No, to ask for his love was too much. She asked for mere friendship,
expressed in just a few letters that would be enough to sustain her in her
desolation. There was one which she had read so many times in the privacy of
her room and solitary rambles on those wild windswept moors that she knew every
word by heart and every meaning accreted around every word by the heart’s
yearning. She sent off one letter after another, and waited, but received none.
She became desperate, comparing herself, in one of her letters, to the starving
beggar who will not dare ask for the food from the table, only wait for the
crumbs to fall off it.

Still, no letter came and at last she gave
up hope and fell into a dull despair. Unknown to her, her letters had been torn
up and dropped into the wastebasket by the professor and later secretly
retrieved by the professor’s wife, a most formidable woman who meticulously put
the pieces together.

“Close your fingers firmly upon the gift;
let it sting through your palm.” The gift of a man’s rejection can be too great
for a woman to bear, and then fantasy, as only a lonely woman can weave, must
come to the rescue. In one of her novels, Charlotte Brontë describes how a
young woman secretly falls in love with a professor (who is not married)
teaching in the same school as herself. The secretive, jealous headmistress of
the school watches her movements closely. One cold, bleak afternoon, as she
sits alone at her desk, she falls asleep and in the gathering gloom wakes up to
find that somebody had tenderly placed a warm shawl round her shoulders as she
slept: she has no doubt who that somebody is, and that her love for him and his
for her will grow and overcome all obstacles in a touching fulfilment at the
end.

Now I am certain nothing of the sort
happened in her real life: the professor never approached her as she was
sleeping, with that thoughtful, comforting shawl. She made it all up, to
distract herself from the sting of the scorpion through her fingers.

There must have been a time of secret raging
against the cruel gap between dream and reality, before the calm clarity of
that advice, for Charlotte Brontë once described herself as a ‘hearty hater’. I
copied the words down when I first came upon them and then tested them upon the
tongue, struck by the powerful mutual reinforcement of sound and sense. If you
pronounce the words slowly, deliberately, you too will be struck by the effect
of the repeated ‘h’ and ‘t’ sounds: they swell the already charged meaning of a
hate that needs to be continually fed, like an appetite insatiable of food or
sex.

And then the anger must have subsided into
resignation at last, not the confused, contemptible kind but the proud
acceptance of destiny – ‘the great lesson: how to endure without a sob.’

‘Never mind.’ But the body minds, surely,
when it is stung, bitten, poked, battered, invaded, infibulated, bound, burnt,
burst. If it were not smaller and weaker, or continually convulsed and drained
by childbearing and childfeeding, it could have fought back. But as it is,
women have to endure by biological fiat.

‘Never mind.’ It is not the body only. The
mind minds, too, and women grow mad from their fears and longings, for women’s
mind is one fibre with her sensitive, convulsive, procreative, nurturative
body. Perhaps the mind minds more than the body.

I see them now and hear them, hardly images,
rather fragments as from recollected dreams, and faint cries, like the
ancestral voices calling from afar. The woman standing by a storm-lashed coast
waiting on a promise that will never be kept; the woman ghost seen with her
baby near the pond where she drowned 20 years ago; the four Korean sisters who
took poison together because, as they said in their note, they were sad that
the expense of their upkeep was depriving their only brother of a higher
education; the battered Singapore housewife who went back again and again to
her husband because he sobbed on her shoulder and told her he couldn’t live
without her.

When a friend of mine was frantic to get
back her husband who had gone to live with a younger woman, her family took her
to consult a fortune teller who advised her to do nothing rash but wait, for he
would come back. She waited for eight years and true enough, he came back, and
they said, “See, we told you.” When my marriage was about to break up, my
relatives and friends counselled patience and waiting: it seems a woman waits
all her life, she waits to get married, she waits for her first-born, she waits
for the children to grow up, she waits for a husband or lover to come back.

I walk into a bookshop and I see, in the
section called ‘Inspirational’, books by women for women, with heartbreaking
titles – ‘Women who love too much’, ‘Women who can’t forget’, ‘Women who can’t
say no’.

“But men are scorpion-receivers too.” This
from a male friend when I told him of the stories I wanted to write. He being
very dear, I did not want to quarrel, so I merely said, “Yes, but men are never
told to endure. It would be unthinkable for men to endure.”

“You know,” he said, not wishing to be put
off, “that there are other ways in which you women receive the scorpions. Are
you going to write about these too?”

“I know,” I said, “and yes, I’m going to
write about those too. We can fling the scorpion back at the giver. Or de-fang
it and be comfortable with it. We can secretly fatten it and return it as a
gift. We can domesticate it and make it serve us. But mainly we endure, with or
without a sob. We don’t have much choice.” Life and literature are full of the
superlatives of woman’s endurance, also of her revenge.

“I don’t like you very much when you talk
like that, and I don’t want to read your stories, they sound horrible,” he
said. And was not the less dear for saying that.

“That’s the trouble,” I sighed. “The stories
you perpetuate of us are so unreal. You sing paeans to us; you put us on
pedestals, in the shining clouds of myths and legends as your goddesses,
warrior queens, glorious martyrs, virgin brides. They have nothing to do with
the reality. Perhaps they are to compensate for the reality.” We were silent
for a while, not wanting to risk a quarrel, the secret time of our being
together being so rare and therefore so happy.

“Are you going to write about women who
receive the eggs?” he asked suddenly. “I should think you would want to write
about the egg-receivers, too.”

“Yes,” I said, “but not yet. Not yet.”

0 Woman! How should we even begin to extol
your beauty that has kept us in thrall through the ages? I, Love’s humblest
acolyte who have pledged myself to your service am, alas, wordless in the
commencement of that service. But I shall not be daunted. I shall begin with
the beauty of your breasts. And I shall make bold to borrow the words of the
Creator Himself, for was it not He who inspired this loveliest of descriptions
of a woman’s body, to culminate in the breasts themselves? ‘How beautiful are
thy feet with shoes. 0 prince’s daughter! The joints of thy thighs are like
jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round
goblet, which wanteth not liquor; thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about
with lilies. Thy two breasts are like roes that are twins. This thy stature is
like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.’

0 Woman!

0 Woman nonpareil!

(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

The girl
hated her breasts
because they were the cause of all
her troubles. Confronting her now in the bright afternoon light in her bedroom,
they shocked by their newness and rawness: two hard cones, pink-tipped,
suddenly grown out of the flatness, and warning of a rampage of further growth
by the little eager shooting pains inside them. She picked up a towel hurriedly
and draped it over the mirror, blocking them out.

The sweetness of her days was gone, stolen
by the breasts. In the classroom she sat hunched, her chest drawn in, her
shoulders pushed out to force a retreat of the enemy, and in the playground, it
was the same, whether she was skipping or running. She watched for their
bouncing and was relieved to find that as yet that was not happening, no matter
how vigorously she skipped or hopped. Would they soon grow into a size and
softness when the bouncing would begin and the skipping and laughter end?

The thought filled her with dread. Oh, the
innocence of flatness! Her flat friends, when they got hot and sweaty in the
playing field, pulled up their blouses to wipe their faces. She could not do
that now.

They were defiant breasts, constantly
defying the concavity of the hunched chest. She had an idea to defeat them.
First, she slipped over her head a small singlet and unrolled it down over
them, flattening them out. Next she slipped on one more such singlet and a
sleeveless T-shirt that effectively erased them and finally, she put on her
white cotton school blouse, carefully buttoning it all the way up front. She
looked at herself in the mirror and was satisfied. Defeated at last.

Thus barricaded, the enemy gave no more
trouble. But the weather did. In the blistering heat of the cement-box
classroom of 40 pupils and one weakly rotating fan, the sweat trickled down her
face and neck and gathered in a hot pool at her breasts. She went on resolutely
doing her work at her desk, a calm centre in a frenzied sea of fluttering paper
fans and blowing cheeks. Her wet hair clung to her face and neck in sorry
tendrils but she went on quietly working, aware that Mrs Tan’s eyes had come to
rest on her and were studying her closely.

“Pei Yin, I would like you to see me in the
Counselling Room after school today.”

In the Counselling Room, Mrs Tan made her
take off each sodden layer, until the breasts, newly released, burst into view
once more, and she hung her head in shame.

“You could have been over-heated, bundled up
like that in this weather, and got a seizure. Tell your mother to get you a
proper bra. Young growing girls like you must know how to take care of their
bodies. And don’t hunch again. I’ve been noticing.”

The breasts, now snugly fitted and cupped,
poked triumphantly through the thin cotton cloth of her school-blouse, and she
took to carrying around a large paper file which she held, clasped to her
chest.

And then, through a happy discovery, there
was no more need for the file and the embarrassment. She discovered that three
other girls in her class had sprouted breasts and were wearing bras. To
ascertain the fact, she had pretended to pat each of them on the back and then
had surreptitiously felt for the bra strap: she was not alone! Shared misery
was that much less misery; within months, breasts spread as in an epidemic and
by the time the last girl to have them had them and came to class wearing a
bra, Pei Yin’s misery had vanished completely.

Mrs Tan singled her out from among all the
rest for warm praise: “You look very healthy and pretty now, Pei Yin and how is
the project coming along? I see you are working very hard at it.”

A rare radiance broke upon the girl’s face.
Yes, she told her teacher, the project for the School’s Family Joy Competition,
was coming along very nicely, and she had got some new pictures to paste in the
book and found a suitable poem to write under one of the pictures.