Authors: Fiona Cheong
Madam's rosewood stand was underneath the window with
the mango tree outside. It was hand-carved (found in the same
shop in which Madam had bought her jewelry boxes), with slim
notched legs to resemble bamboo, and three square shelves.
Phone hooks sat on the bottom shelf, the phone was on the
middle shelf, and on the top shelf was a miniature jade tree
(freed, like the Italian sculptor Michelangelo's angels, from a
rock of pink jade), its opalescent leaves upturned as if surrounded by rushing wind. (Madam used to keep the tree
wrapped in brown paper and stored in a cupboard in her bedroom, to protect it while the children were growing up, but in
1982, while Malika was helping Madam clean out various cupboards around the house on the weekend that Michelle was
leaving for Australia, the tree had been taken out and set on the
rosewood stand as a temporary measure-"Just till I can find the
right home for it," Madam had said. Michelle's husband had just
been transferred by the textile company for which he worked to
Perth, and Madam and Malika had had only had a few months
to get used to the idea. On that weekend, the thought that none
of the children was likely ever to live in Singapore again had
exploded with such ferocity in both of their hearts, only the
most mundane and repetitive of tasks were manageable. Malika
would remember how before it had occurred to Madam to clean
out the cupboards, the two of them had dusted and polished all of the furniture and mopped the floor in every room. Even the
windows and sliding doors had been washed, Madam getting
down on her knees and scrubbing the steel grooves with the
mindful attention of a servant. She, Malika, couldn't explain
why the jade tree was still on the stand, where it had since lost
six and a half leaves, the tip of the seventh most recently. This
last one had been broken by the youngest of Michelle's girls,
Nicole, who had started learning to walk last December.
Caroline's and Francesca's boys had each had his turn when they
were Nicole's age, all except for the eldest, Brendan, the gentle
and musically minded one, the one Madam would not admit
was her favorite).
She fingered the jagged nub left by one of the missing
leaves as she lifted the receiver with her other hand.
"Malika?"
It was Madam, sounding worried. Malika glanced over her
shoulder at the clock and saw it was half-past nine. "Yes,
Madam, everything's okay at home," she said promptly. "Sorry,
Madam, I fell asleep while reading."
"Alamak, you. Gave me quite a scare, you know."
Malika could hear in the background the papery rush of
wind through treetops and a scattering of leaves on a hard surface (perhaps a cement pavement or the tarmac of a car park).
"Sorry, Madam," she said again, wondering where Madam was
and what had led Madam finally to use the hand phone
Caroline had given to her at Christmas, which Caroline had
programmed so that her own hand phone number, Francesca's
and Michelle's, and Madam's home phone number could each
be dialed with a single press of a button. Madam had been carrying the phone around in her handbag, insisting she didn't
know how to use it-"One can't teach an old dog new tricks,"
Malika would hear her say, whenever the topic of computers
arose, particularly the topic of the government's mandating the
use of computers in the school curriculum. (It was Caroline who was paying Singapore Telecoms directly for global service on
Madam's phone, afraid that if she left it up to her mother,
Madam would willfully let the account lapse.)
Madam didn't tell Malika where she was or whether she had
been driving around all the while. What she told Malika was
that she was going to stop at the Newton hawker center for a
bowl of tau suan. She had called to ask if Malika would like
some tau suan or another kind of dessert (as Malika had several
favorite desserts and one couldn't easily guess at what she might
have a taste for, and Madam would know this, having had
Malika in her house since Malika was twelve).
Malika imagined the sweet, glutinous lentils sticking to her
palate, too sweet for what she wanted on this night. She pondered her other options (knowing all the stalls at Newton well,
where each stall was situated and which might be closed due to
an illness or a family vacation). A slice of tapioca cake? She
wouldn't have minded a slice of tapioca cake, but as her favorite
nyonya stall was nowhere near Madam's favorite tau suan stall,
Malika settled on pulot hitam from a stall just down the aisle
from the latter. She realized as she gave Madam her answer that
she would have preferred tapioca cake to the sweet rice, craving
suddenly the aftertaste of coconut milk when baked, but then
what she wanted more than a savory comfort was for Madam not
to weave her way around more tables than was necessary, traipse
past all those hungry eyes, listen to the carnivorous longing
manifested in sighs and low whistles (although from what I've
heard and to which Malika would agree eventually, Madam herself didn't appear flustered by the men, so accustomed was she to
their intrusive stares, to their cheap gestures of desire in the fluorescent public light-boys had been following Madam home
from school and whistling at her from hawker tables along the
Malaccan roadside ever since she was a young girl, when her
breasts were only just starting to grow and she was wearing basic
cotton bras of the market variety, size 28, three for fifteen cents).
"Malika, if you're tired, don't wait up for me-ah?" Madam
was saying. "I'll put the pulot hitam in the fridge and it'll be
there for your breakfast. Okay?"
When Madam hung up, the click at the end of the line was
so quiet, Malika almost missed it. She listened for a moment
longer, then put the receiver back in its cradle.
Beyond the lower branches of the mango tree caught in a
splash of light from the living room windows, Madam's garden
was a sea of black and gray leaves (Malika's own words when
later she described the darkness outside). There was a stillness
to the air interrupted only by the slender shimmer of the white
posts of the car porch, and a glint of fencing at the edge along
the hibiscus bushes of the family next-door. (Malika thought
she could see the umbrella tops of the family's papaya trees as
well, but she wasn't sure if this was only because she knew the
trees were there.) Nothing was moving in the sugar cane, not a
frog or a snail or the tremor of a breeze. The British gentleman's
house over the wall on the other side of Madam's garden was
silent, as were all of the neighboring houses, and even the
insects seemed asleep in the grass.
It was then that Malika recalled her earlier sense of foreboding (realizing at the same time that the patio lamp was out, she was
turning away from the windows to get a new bulb from the storage cabinet in the kitchen when she noticed the upper windows in
the next-door family's house, and the head of one of the children
leaning over a windowsill-Malika wasn't sure which child it was,
but when she thought about it later, she would wonder if something in the child's posture had hinted to her it was the daughter,
who must have climbed onto a chair to look out at something in
the garden. But at what was anyone's guess, as all Malika could
hear when she looked back upon this night was its soundlessness,
and a soft trickle of rain, peculiar only because the rain would fall
elsewhere on the island, miles away in the vicinity of Miss Shakilah's neighborhood, where Sali and I were).
Malika switched on the light in the corridor and made her
way towards the kitchen, past the photographs of Madam's
grandchildren on the walls. (Some had been taken during their
visits to Singapore, a few when Madam had gone to visit them,
always without Malika because much of the family's savings had
been depleted by Madam's husband's illness and because visas to
Western countries were hard to get for someone suspected of
travelling as an employee, which was why the photographs of
Madam's trips were for Malika inexplicably painful and pleasurable, as on the one hand she missed how things used to be,
when Madam had taken her on all of the family's vacations-to
Cameron Highlands, Bali, Sydney-and on the other hand
Malika missed the children, both Madam's daughters and the
grandchildren. She missed seeing and hearing them wandering
about the house, sweat gleaming off their faces like the shine off
freshwater pearls).
She paused as she often did at the last of the photographs,
which showed Madam and Brendan laughing into the camera
on their way to Sentosa Island in September of 1978 (the year
Brendan was three and Francesca had flown home after only
eight months in London, armed with complaints about the lack
of spice in English food, which Malika hadn't doubted had been
one of Francesca's reasons for coming home for a visit so soon,
but as Madam had suspected as well-she had confessed as
much to Malika-it probably hadn't been the only reason).
One could almost hear Madam laughing in the photograph
as she pressed her face into Brendan's curls and sniffed at the salt
and sunshine in his hair. It had been a windy day. There were
waves in the water and Malika could feel the tickling of the wind
through the collar of Brendan's blue-and-white-striped T-shirt.
She could feel Madam's happiness, absolute and full, as if that
visit of Francesca's hadn't been at all worrisome for her, which
Malika knew wasn't so. (It had been completely out of character
for Francesca to leave her job, even temporarily, more so for her to stay with her parents for two months. When asked how it was
that her husband didn't mind, Francesca had replied airily that as
Gareth had been promoted recently and was overwhelmed with
new responsibilities at his father's law firm, he had welcomed the
opportunity not to have the children underfoot for a whileBrendan wasn't much of a problem, but Bryce at eighteen months
was prone to throwing tantrums. "Gareth's not used to living in
the same house as someone with a temper," Malika would
remember Francesca's saying to Madam. Both she and Madam
had intuited that Francesca was referring to her father, in his
healthier days. Everyone in the family had been used to him.)
Malika didn't know if Madam had ever asked Francesca
directly if there was turmoil brewing in her marriage. (Francesca's
other visits home weren't clouded in the same way. She would
never again return for more than a week's holiday, although the
boys would sometimes stay a month. Whatever marital distress
there was appeared to have dissipated over time, and the topic
had not arisen since. If there was anyone who knew for sure, it
would be Caroline or Michelle, but the sisters were loyal and
Malika knew one would never betray another's confidence.)
A breeze lifted the hem of the window curtain above the
sink as she stepped past the photograph of Madam and Brendan
and entered the kitchen (before her hand touched the light
switch). Malika saw the ashy white lace shudder like a naked
shoulder across the room. She would speak later of the impression she had had of moonlight grazing a collarbone, and of
a scar nestled at the base of a throat, a tiny white scar shaped like
a clipped cuticle. Then her thumb had hit the switch and the
fluorescent light came on, and Malika could not determine if she
had only imagined there had been someone in the room. (And
so there would always be loose ends when she talked about this
night. Even the shape of the scar was a loose end, as when Sali
asked, "Why compare it to a clipped cuticle, Malika? Why not
use something more poetic, like a crescent moon or something," all Malika could do was shake her head and caress her red bead,
smiling inwardly at the endless fraying of clarity. Was it simply
her imagination or was there some truth to the somewhat visionary texture of the moment? Was enlightenment possible only if
one endured fracture and incompleteness of meaning?)
Of course such thoughts would occur to Malika only later.
As the kitchen light flooded the room she reminded herself
visions were bestowed only upon saints or poets (of any religion, and only later would it occur to us to wonder if when
Westerners spoke of visions, sometimes they had seen ghosts).
Malika stepped towards the storage cabinet, flipped open the
pale oak door, took out the box of light bulbs, and plucked one
from its cardboard pocket. As she set the box back on the upper
shelf of the cabinet, she sensed again a chilling foreboding, this
time like the blunt tip of a knife against her tailbone. Malika
could feel then the existence of a common world between the
girl in the sugar cane and the shoulder, the collarbone, the
throat and the scar. But as she was neither poet nor saint, for
months (until the birth of Miss Shakilah's baby), Malika would
ascribe these sensations to her imagination, overflowing wave
upon wave like the heartache in Madam's house.
She closed the door of the cabinet, switched off the kitchen
light and as she left the room, a lizard crossed the floor behind
her, flicking its quick, small tongue.
~c »t I : I I M L ti l i i t MAN wearing the songkok would visit Malika
only for a minute. At those times he wouldn't enter the room,
but remain outside in the passageway, his scent stealing across
her floor from the crack underneath the door (a syrupy blend of
rose oil, sandalwood, and some kind of fruit). At other times
Malika would open her eyes to see him standing by the windowsill, the bone of his arm visible through his sleeve as he rested his hand (always his left hand) palm down on the narrow ledge. (When the moon was full the massive shadows of the
flamboyant trees would waver against the translucent glass, the
separate branches indistinguishable at this hour. On the floor
by Malika's bed the moonlight would fall in a broken square as
it passed over the top of the man's songkok, grazing the tip of
his shoulder and the line of his arm. Malika would remember
these facts in plodding fashion when the day arrived on which
she began to doubt the rationale of boundaries prescribed
between truth and imagination (Miss Shakilah's words to
Madam during another of their conversations). She would wonder then (as she would remember Miss Shakilah wondering) if
beyond one's cognitive senses there was a door swinging back
and forth between the two, if truth was a cave within what one
perceived to be merely a memory, or a nightmare or a dream, or
a fantasy inspired by a library book. The flamboyant trees
looming outside her window, the cut of moonlight on her floor,
the tilt of the man's songkok and the angle of his arm, even the
way the cuff of his sleeve touched the windowsill-they would
return to her with a significance inarticulable to anyone else,
but from what we could see, it brought her moments of peace
and in the end that would have to be enough.)