The Catherine Lim Collection (31 page)

I had often been fascinated by this method
of securing a man’s love; a woman, desperate for the charm to work, actually
made use of each monthly emission. The blood was mixed in food which was then
offered to the unsuspecting object of desire. The charm was said to be the most
potent of all the charms to win the total love of a husband or lover.

I remember that there was a half-Thai woman
who lived in the town for a while; an old, fat, gross-looking woman whose mouth
and teeth were a permanent bright red from the betel nut and sireh she was
always chewing. She had had three husbands; her fourth was 13 years younger – a
handsome, quiet and refined fellow who had a good job in some government
department and who never looked at another woman. The half-Thai woman,
complacent in this man’s total love and devotion, made no secret of the means
by which this subjection to her will had been secured, and actually taught
other women how to go about achieving the same happiness.

As a girl, I could not see beyond the
bizarre element of this charm; it was only later that I saw its terrifying
symbolism. Woman, who had always been held as inferior and was expected to be
subject to her menfolk – her father, her brothers and later her husband – and
who during her menstrual period was regarded as so unclean that any major
disaster was attributed to her failure to stay away during this period of
uncleanliness, was now having her revenge. She was having a secret and
malicious chuckle against men who wanted her body but blamed it for misfortunes
that happened to them. Fishermen would never allow a woman near if they wanted
a successful expedition; timber-loggers venturing into the vast wilds where
spirits dwelt in every tree, would never permit the contaminating presence of a
woman.

And now, said the woman with a secret glee,
you who would have my body but condemn it as unclean, drink this or eat this!
The half-Thai woman embodied, in the most revolting way, this dark triumph of
woman. She spoke in a rough, raucous voice to her husband, demanded his full
pay packet and if he so much as looked at another woman, berated him soundly
and hurled obscenities at him. He took it all meekly; people shook their heads
knowingly and spoke of the secret source of the woman’s power.

Perhaps only once in her life was blood of
woman not considered evil, but actually good and even capable of driving away
harmful spirits. Hymeneal blood, ultimate proof of chastity on her marriage
bed, and captured on a clean white piece of linen, was reverently stored and
put away, its presence thereby repelling evil and attracting prosperity for her
husband and harmony for the household.

Lee Geok Chan was one of my students in
pre-university. One of the many for whom long hours of study ensured, at most,
a scraping through the examinations. She was a pale, small-sized,
earnest-looking girl, always seen with a book or a sheaf of notes in her hand.
Her father was a tailor, her mother a washerwoman; there were three brothers
and two sisters. Geok Chan was the second in the family and the eldest girl.

Her desire to pass the examination, get a
job and help the family put her in a constant state of nervous effort, so that
she was to be found at all times blinking anxiously as she took down a
teacher’s lecture verbatim, copying notes from the blackboard with extreme
diligence, or writing an essay with a concentration all the more remarkable for
the noise and complete abandon of those around her in the classroom.

I always found it painful to have to tell
Geok Chan, in response to her timid inquiry of how she could improve in her
written expression, that her English was rather weak, her use of words
frequently inappropriate, and that she often strayed off the point in her
essay. She would nod in docile agreement, but at the same time the
disappointment showed visibly on her face. Additional lessons did not seem to
have helped and each week it became a special pain for me to hand back a piece
of work, to see it snatched up eagerly and checked for its grade, and then to
see the crestfallen look on the thin, pale face.

Like so many others, Geok Chan was preparing
for the A-level examinations at the end of the year. In the last month before
the examination, she often came up to me with a quick nervous smile and handed
me a sheaf of essays to mark.

One of the essays caught my attention. It
was better than the others; in fact, it was the best she had ever written, and
there was hope yet, for her, if she could produce something like that in the
examination. I forget the exact words of the essay topic she had picked from
somewhere, but it was about happiness. Geok Chan had written simply and with
conviction about her concept of happiness; some parts of the essay were, I
thought, beautifully lyrical. I suddenly realized that, freed from the
constraints of conventional essay topics, she wrote with ease and obvious
pleasure.

I called her up and commented favourably on
her essay. She glowed with pride. “If I write like that in the General Paper,
will I get a credit?” she wanted to know. I had to warn her, rather sadly, that
the essay topics in the General Paper were not of the kind that permitted this
spontaneity. I encouraged her, though, to go on expressing her innermost
feelings.

“They’re in me all the time. I couldn’t
express them before, now I think I can,” she said, blinking not with
nervousness but, instead, with a kind of feverish joy.

On the morning of the essay paper, Geok Chan
was killed in a road accident. She was walking along the pavement just outside
the school and was about to enter the school gates when a lorry came racing
along, crazily jumped the road divider and crashed into her. She died
instantly. It was the most cruel death I had ever known; my colleagues and I
wept long for this earnest, good girl who had always tried her best and whose
only ambition was to earn enough to support her family.

The essay on happiness that had astonished
me by its power and lyricism lay, among a pile of unmarked papers on my desk,
almost like a keepsake, for she had collected all the other essays, and had
somehow left this one with me. When I went to see her parents, who were too
grieved to say anything, I brought this composition with me and handed it to
her eldest brother, who just put it aside with her other school things heaped
on a little wooden table in the small two-room HDB flat.

The recollection of that small body under
sheets of newspapers on the road disturbed me for many days afterwards. The
blood had flowed copiously; it was a moment’s glance before I turned away and
quickly walked back to the staff room from where we had been summoned by the
frantic cries of those students who had witnessed the dreadful accident. But
the scene stayed in my mind for days, and it was inevitable that some of us
would have had dreams about Lee Geok Chan in our sleep.

I dreamt that she approached me with a poem
on sorrow or something like that and asked me to grade it. Another colleague
dreamt of her exactly as she was that day, under the newspapers on a wet road
just in front of the school gate.

In the bustle of a new school year when new
eager faces crowded the school corridors, Lee Geok Chan was soon forgotten.
Occasionally, however, something or other cropped up to remind us of her and
then we recollected that terrible day in December.

One occasion was the release of the
examination results in March. Students started coming to the school very early
in the morning, as soon as they had learnt from the newspaper that the Ministry
of Education would be releasing the results that day. The computer print-out
with Geok Chan’s name showed the grades for these subjects – History, Chinese
Language and the General Paper. She had obtained a credit in Chinese Language,
but had failed for History and the General Paper.

There had to be a mistake regarding the
General Paper – how could there have been a grade for that subject? Geok Chan
was killed before she could sit for the paper. Her death was in the morning;
the paper was at two in the afternoon.

It was a very low grade, in fact the lowest
on the scale. If a computer had to make a mistake about one who was already
dead, some of us laughed uneasily, surely it could have erred on the side of
generosity?

Geok Chan’s elder brother came to collect
the results slip, which he did desultorily, without a glance at the statements
on the slip, and was gone almost immediately.

I first of all ascertained from the Minister
of Education that there had been no mistake in the printout; then I wrote a
very polite letter to the Cambridge Syndicate of Examiners, asking them to
explain why the essay of the candidate Lee Geok Chan had obtained such a low
grade. It was a laborious process involving excessive red tape, for there were
certain formalities to be gone through, including the payment of a stipulated
sum of money.

It took Cambridge a month to reply. I
received a plain official statement on how the candidate had gone entirely out
of point in the essay section, for she had written a piece on happiness when
there was no essay topic even remotely resembling this. The statement added
that by itself the essay was commendable for its expressiveness and strength of
feeling, but since it was written in total disregard of the given examination
topics, it could not be awarded any marks.

The mounting sensation of excitement and
terror that gripped me as I read the statement was something I had never
experienced before. It was impossible to contain the thoughts that were now
crowding my mind, and I soon found myself in urgent consultation with my
colleagues. It cannot be, it cannot be, we said again and again. And yet again
and again, no matter how hard we tried, no matter how many theories we tested,
there was no accounting for the fact that the essay which had been sent to
Cambridge together with thousands of other essays, and which had been marked
and given a grade, was the essay of a dead student.

Unable to let things lie, I wrote to Cambridge
again and requested, urgently, to have the essay script of candidate Lee Geok
Chan returned. I added that I was prepared to pay any amount of money that the
authorities might deem reasonable to compensate them for their pains.

Probably fearing that a move of this kind
could set the precedent for anxious parents or teachers intending to
fine-toothcomb a marked script and argue for a better grade, the Cambridge
Syndicate turned down the request. It had never been and would never be their
policy to return marked scripts to candidates. All they were prepared to do was
furnish a statement about the script, and they had already done this.

But this is no ordinary script, a dead
person wrote it, I wanted to cry out in exasperation when I read the reply.
Then I realized how nearly impossible it would be to give this explanation in
the circumscribed language of formal correspondence. I tried, though, so eager
was I to get to the bottom of it all, but after a while Cambridge chose not to
reply to my requests, probably dismissing me as a crank.

I almost pleaded with them to send me a
typewritten copy of the candidate’s essay, so that the marking and grading of
the script could remain confidential, but they must have misinterpreted the
tone of the letter and taken offence, for they finally wrote back to say that
they would no longer entertain any correspondence on the subject.

I tried to enlist the help of Geok Chan’s
family, but it was to no avail. The elder brother had been posted to some other
town; the younger brothers and sisters did not seem able to understand me and
the parents spoke only a dialect I could not comprehend. In any case, they were
still too sorrowful to do much beyond shaking their heads mournfully or raising
their voices to curse the driver of the lorry that had killed their daughter.

It is now more than 10 years since Lee Geok
Chan died. I am not satisfied with the explanation that my colleagues finally
settled on. A coincidence, they said, somebody’s essay was mistaken for Geok
Chan’s; after all, there were thousands of essays to be graded and confusions
of this kind were not at all surprising.

But the topic was so specific. It was on
happiness, I protested, the very same topic she wrote on just before the
accident. And the qualities of freshness and expressiveness were precisely
those I had noted in that last essay she showed me. That could not have been a
coincidence; there must have been a mistake then, said some of my colleagues. A
coincidence, a mistake – the words threw a blanket over all that remains, to
this day, a mystery.

The house
bulged with people.
If there were too many people, it
was not the consequence of want but choice, for the patriarch had insisted that
all the married sons continue to stay in the family house while married
daughters could leave if they so wished.

He had grown up in China, where married sons
and their families stayed with the parents. But whereas over there a certain
amount of privacy was afforded by the separating courtyards, here the families
piled into the rooms of two adjoining double-storeyed shophouses, the dividing
wall of which had been torn down to form one continuous unit.

The old patriarch was very rich, for he had
invested shrewdly in coconut and rubber plantations and owned row upon row of
shophouses in town. But he had fixed ideas about how money was to be spent, and
comfortable living conditions were not one of them. At a time when much less
affluent families were buying Dunlopillo mattresses and pillows, refrigerators
and even Ford cars, he was still sleeping on cotton-stuffed mattresses and the
women in his household were depending solely on wooden food-cupboards with
wire-netting doors and legs standing in thick earthen bowls filled with water
to prevent the ants from getting at the cooked food kept in the cupboards.