The Catherine Lim Collection (53 page)

“Meenachi!” he yelled, shaking her by the
shoulder. She stirred, and an eyelid opened.

“Meenachi, don’t die!” He laid her head on
his lap and began rocking her gently, but she had lapsed into unconsciousness
once more.

* * *

“Forgive me, dear goddess,” said Meenachi at
the shrine, two weeks later, still looking pale but otherwise recovered from
her miscarriage, “for not keeping the appointment, but I was in hospital and
was only discharged yesterday.” It was redundant information to an all-knowing
deity, but deference required it. She had with her a large brown paper package
which she now placed before the goddess with trembling self-consciousness.

“See, you have kept your promise, and so I
have kept mine,” she said, smiling with growing pleasure as her fingers pulled
out a garland of jasmine and gold tinsel and put it reverently round the neck
of the stone statue, on top of heaps of the other garlands, but all definitely
inferior.

The garland had been bought for her by her
husband in an uninterrupted flow of amiability since her being rushed to the
hospital in an ambulance. He had hovered by her bedside, had been visibly
nervous when he heard her being questioned by the hospital authorities about
her miscarriage and the various bruises and swellings on her body, and had at
last heaved an immense sigh of relief when she explained everything in terms of
her general carelessness when moving about in the house doing housework so that
knocks and bruises and other injuries were now second nature. She exceeded her
husband’s expectations when, in reply to a blunt question by a sceptical nurse,
she said that her husband had never laid a finger on her once in her life. He,
too, on his part exceeded her expectations, indeed, to such a degree that she
was now breathless in her impatience to tell all to the goddess.

“Thank you, Goddess, for it must be owing to
you that he gave me this,” she cried, pointing, not to the broken nose but the
nose-stud sitting unsteadily on it.

“Oh, Goddess, thank you!” She had with her a
small broken piece of mirror which she carried in a fold of her sarong, to
provide the continuous pleasure of gazing at the beautiful red gem set in gold,
nestling precariously on the nose not yet healed, a bonus breathtaking in its
munificence.

“ ... to teach in song the lessons you have
learned in suffering.”

(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

Golden Frond
who died
more than 40 years ago sang a joyous song
because she was special.

She was left on Grandmother’s doorstep when
she was three by a very frightened woman who was either her mother or
kidnapper; the woman asked for the promised money and left quickly. Grandmother
brought the child into the house and scrutinised her closely, noting the scabs
on her head in between the poor tufts of hair, the swollen belly, the legs
crooked from malnutrition. The child stared at Grandmother, biting a corner of
her dress. She had no knickers. Grandmother was not daunted. Proper food,
regular baths, large doses of her home-made brews to de-worm even the most
infested stomachs: the transformation could be startling so that within a year,
the child would no longer be recognisable. The evidence was there in the
semicircle of her healthy-looking girls of varying ages, just now watching and
giggling at the newcomer: in their time, their scabs and lice and worms had
disappeared under Grandmother’s capable hands. Grandmother had a household of
eight bondmaids then, the most skilful being put to work in her business of
making hand-sewn beaded bridal slippers, and the rest to all manner of
household work. As the older ones left to be married off, Grandmother
replenished the supply of labour by taking in new ones, the youngest acceptable
age being about that of Golden Frond, as Grandmother had no patience with
babies.

But that was not yet her name when she
appeared before Grandmother and the semicircle of giggling fellow bondmaids.

“Dustbin.”

“Dumb. Call her ‘Dumb’. She has not answered
any of our questions.”

“Bad smell.”

The bondmaids, when they were sold into the
household, were given new names, but not nearly as humble: ‘Pig’, ‘Prawn’,
‘Wind-in-the-Head’, ‘Female’.

“My name is to be ‘Golden Frond’.”

The sheer audacity of the claim, lisped
through lips still rimmed with snot and dirt, was not without its appeal.
Grandmother, taken aback, laughed. Her laughter being a most rare departure
from a severity of mien all the more fearsome because it always preceded a
resounding knock on the head with powerful knuckles, the bondmaids quickly took
advantage of it, and laughed in their turn.

“And why is your name to be ‘Golden Frond’?”

For answer, the child broke into song, her
voice a pitiful little quaver, accompanying her words with well-rehearsed
clapping and stamping motions. She stopped, stared at the audience, and when
nothing happened and nobody came forward with money or food, she began to
recite a poem or bits of poems put together, and when still nothing happened,
in desperation the child lifted her dress, waggled her bottom and gathered her
lips into a soft flower bud for a kiss, completing the ‘Bad Woman’ routine.

Grandmother laughed again, shaking her head.

Golden Frond was allowed to keep her name
and over the years rose in beauty to match the splendour of that name while the
others correspondingly sank to match the grossness of theirs: Golden Frond,
like a bright-faced, slender-limbed goddess moved among a brood of squat,
snub-nosed peasant girls with names redolent of rice fields, latrines and
life’s meanness.

Some suspicion attached to her unusual
beauty, especially her very fair complexion and curling hair.

“Serani” the bondmaids whispered. There was
probably some Eurasian blood in the child; Grandmother once told the story of a
village woman whose child was born with blue eyes and was immediately given
away.

Golden Frond, thus special, stood apart from
the rest. When she was five, she was put to simple tasks such as separating out
the bridal slipper beads according to size or colour. Sometimes she nodded over
the little piles of beads but was jerked awake by Grandmother’s knuckles on her
head, but mostly she completed her work well and did not make mistakes.

When Golden Frond was five years old,
Grandfather was 60, First Uncle, Grandfather’s firstborn, was 38 and First
Uncle’s firstborn, Older Cousin, was 13.

Golden Frond’s work, at five years, was to
serve the three men in the household in the following ways: in the morning, she
listened for the first sounds of Grandfather’s waking up, crackling sounds of a
prolonged and laboured clearing of early morning phlegm from the throat. She
then brought up to his room a tray with a mug of hot tea and a hot face towel.
She would wait for Grandfather to finish drinking the tea and wiping his face,
neck and armpits and then take the empty mug and used towel downstairs. The
same routine was followed for First Uncle whose room was just across the
corridor; the alerting sound in this case was the gush of morning piss into the
chamberpot. Golden Frond listened for the last hiss, then went up with the tea
and towel. There was an extra towel for Older Cousin who shared the room with
his father. In the evening, Golden Frond took up two chamberpots, one for each
of the rooms, in readiness for the night. She could manage only one chamberpot
at a time, and once, she dropped the large enamel utensil, which went clanging
all the way downstairs. She watched, frightened, as it finally settled at the
bottom of the stairs, badly dented. Fortunately, Grandmother was not at home at
the time, and the bondmaid called ‘Pig’, who did not like her, said, “I’ll tell
Grandmother when she comes back, and she will give you more knocks on your head
and pinches on your thighs!”

At five, she was too young to carry the
filled, sometimes overbrimming pots down the long flight of steps in the
morning, and an older bondmaid was assigned the duty, but when she reached the
age of 11, the duty fell on her. Her beauty was already conspicuous at that age
and visitors, watching her arrange beads or cut paper patterns would say to
Grandmother in a whisper, “That child’s very pretty. She looks different from
the others,” and Grandmother would say, “Ssh. Don’t put ideas in her head. She
has to earn her keep like everybody else.”

When Golden Frond was 11 years old, Grandfather
was 66, First Uncle was 44 and Older Cousin was 19.

“Come. Come here.”

The young man who had been watching the
child all the while that she was carrying the chamberpot to his room and
placing it carefully on a little square of mat, sat on the edge of his bed with
his fat legs wide apart and a smile playing on his face. He had been handsome
only up to his 15th year and then an illness which no amount of help from the
temple mediums had been able to cure, blew his body up into grotesque
proportions and sank his eyes into appalling cushions of fat. Some said his
brains too had been softened by the illness which accounted for his odd
behaviour. Grandmother had grimly sent for his mother (who had gone back to
live with her own parents when Older Cousin was but a child), but the woman
under one pretext or another put off the day of return, until Grandmother saw
through her wiles and dismissed her completely from all family matters. “He has
no mother; he is to be pitied,” she would say.

“Come here.”

Bondmaids never disobeyed masters, young or
old.

His trousers were unbuttoned and he watched
her, grinning. She stood facing him uncertainly, conscious that he was doing a
bad thing and wanted her to be part of it.

“Come here!” His voice rose to an imperious
shout; the grin disappeared in a rictus of pure annoyance.

At that moment, somebody from downstairs
called her name and the child, unlocked from the terror, spun round and ran
downstairs, and into a circle of light and loving in the centre of which was
old Ah Por, her gentle protectress. Old Ah Por, almost blind, a mere wisp of a
woman, was more spirit than flesh in the last years of her life spent in Grandmother’s
household. She was Grandmother’s much revered half sister who had gone into a
nunnery in China as a girl and then, in her old age, returned to die in the
house where she had been born. She did not die till six years later, when
Golden Frond had reached the age of 17, and during this time, the girl, put to
the task of taking care of the old, half-blind, helpless woman, combing her
hair, feeding her, massaging her legs with embrocation oil, felt the thrilling
sense of being protected herself. Old Ah Por’s presence threw a golden cordon
of security against the menacing shadows around.

For the truth was that as she grew into
womanhood, she felt the dark, turbulent world of Grandfather, First Uncle and
Older Cousin with their incessant demands and appetites, closing in upon her,
as it had already closed in upon her sister bondmaids, pulling them into its darkness.

One day, when she was about 12, she passed
Grandfather’s room and saw through the door that was only partially closed,
Grandfather on the bed on top of the bondmaid Pig, Pig’s trousers lying in a
round heap on the floor and her waist-string a snake-coil on the heap, and a
few days later, as she was walking down the stairs, she again caught a glimpse
of Pig (or was it Bun?) being pulled into First Uncle’s room and saw the door
firmly closing upon them. Older Cousin, monstrously fat, prowled the house,
sniffing and gurgling, wanting his rightful share of the spoils. Grandmother
moved resignedly in this turbulent world of men and appetites not of her
making.

“They are farmyard roosters, all,” she said
grimly by way of explanation, “that go mad with the smell of first blood. What
do you expect of roosters in the midst of hens and pullets?”

The sinister shadows drew closer and were
repelled by the radiance of Ah Por’s gentle goodness, for Ah Por, incessantly
praying to the deities, had become one herself. Still in this world but no
longer of it, she spoke to Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, as to an intimate. No
meat touched her lips, in order to be worthy of the Goddess. Golden Frond loved
to prepare her meals of rice porridge and soya bean curd, and get ready the
joss sticks and flowers for her daily worship at the Goddess’s altar. Upon this
incense-filled world of the pure of heart, the tumult of blood and groin could
not intrude, and so Golden Frond stayed close by the side of Old Ah Por. She
could feel the heavy breathing of desire sometimes come very close, and hear
the sharpness of thwarted desire in the men’s curses upon a burst button or a
missing penknife or soup that was too salty, men’s curses ringing with the full
scatology of the most private parts and odours of woman’s body. Yet she felt
safe and at ease, and sang a joyous song as she moved about in her duties.

When she was 17 years old, Ah Por died.
Golden Frond, returning with a warmed bowl of porridge, found her slumped in
her chair, her spirit already flown, as she had so often intimated, to be with
Kuan Yin.

Golden Frond wept, her heart breaking. Who
was to protect her now? The world of the howling blackness would break upon her
soon. This was when she had reached the age of 17; Grandfather was 72, First
Uncle was 50 and Older Cousin was 25.