“To make the baby strong,” she said in her happy, lilting voice.
One morning the master came with the news that First Wife wanted to meet the fertile tree that had given life to her husband’s seed. She was a large woman with loose folds of flesh around her jowls, an arrogant tilt to her flat nose, and small, shrewd eyes. Old Soong’s home was filled with furious activity. Choice dishes were cooked, the floors washed and polished, and the best china cleaned and laid out for the scrutiny of sharp eyes.
“Have you eaten?” she asked in the customary polite Chinese greeting. Her voice was gruff, and her face, though proud, had known sorrow. The sorrow of being replaced in her husband’s affections, the sorrow of being unable to bear children.
“Yes, she has a very good appetite, elder sister,” Mui Tsai’s mistress replied quickly.
“How many months more till the baby comes?” First Wife asked regally.
“Three months more. Have some more tea, elder sister,” Third Wife replied with humble politeness borrowed for the occasion. She rose gracefully to pour the tea.
First Wife nodded her approval, and thereafter she made a few more visits, always sitting under the assam tree with Mui Tsai. She was kind, seemed genuinely concerned, and showed more and more interest in the unborn baby. She even brought it presents, expensive imported baby clothes in blue and a small quacking duck. Mui Tsai was pleased to have the grand old lady visit. It was an honor to be accepted by First Wife. Perhaps her luck had changed after all. Things would be different after the baby was born. She would be the mother of the heir to the vast fortune.
One day a fair came into town and settled in the football field by the market. Mui Tsai and I slipped away while her mistress, sluggish after a heavy lunch, dozed under the whirling fan.
Twenty cents to get in.
The sweet smell of egg and nut cakes mingled with the greasy smell of fish cakes frying in large vats of oil. The makeshift stage where, nightly, comely girls sat in a smiling row waiting for bashful young men to pay fifty cents for the pleasure of an energetic dance with his chosen girl was deserted in the afternoon heat.
“See the Amazing Python Lady!”
screamed a big poster of a giant snake wrapped around a beautiful girl with fiercely penciled eyes. We paid ten cents and entered the covered tent. Inside it was stifling. A naked bulb burned in the stuffy air. In an iron cage, a lackluster middle-aged Malay woman sat cross-legged on a bed of straw. She held a disappointingly small snake in her hands and tried to drape it around her, but the bone-idle thing only flicked its tongue and slithered lazily back into the straw. Bored and hot, we left quickly.
The drinks vendor filled the enamel containers we handed over with chilled coconut water, and Mui Tsai persuaded me to join a line to enter a Chinese fortune-teller’s tent. Outside his tent were drawings of different types of palms sectioned off into various categories, their relevance to one’s fortunes explained in green Chinese writing. We were handed red tickets with numbers on them. Mui Tsai and I shared a ticket. We wanted to be seen together. Mui Tsai’s head brushed the wind chimes at the tent flap, and we were still giggling when we entered the brown tent.
An old Chinese man with a sparse goatee smiled enigmatically from across a folding table. His skin was very yellow and his eyes black and flat. He indicated toward some chairs in front of the table. We sat awkwardly, sliding our containers of coconut water to the grass, our silly giggles swallowed by his staring eyes. On his desk was a small red altar with burning joss sticks and a small bronze figurine.
He raised his right hand and said, “Let the ancestors speak.”
The wind chimes trilled softly.
Expressionlessly he reached for Mui Tsai’s hands first, clasping them between his own wrinkled hands, and drew a deep breath. Mui Tsai and I shrugged and made faces at each other to relieve the sudden tension in that oppressively hot tent. I rolled my eyes comically, and she pouted back.
“Sorrow, much sorrow, much, much sorrow,” he cried hoarsely.
We were startled by the sudden cry in the still tent.
“You will have no children to call your own,” he added in a strange, hollow voice.
The air in the room died. I felt Mui Tsai go rigid with fear. As if her small hands had burned him, the old man released them suddenly. Then he turned his vengeful eyes on me. Caught off guard and unnerved, I automatically slipped my hands into his outstretched, waiting ones. I felt dry leathery skin close over my damp hands. His eyes closed. In the stifling heat he was as still as a statue.
“Strength, too much strength. You should have been born a man.” He stopped to frown. Behind his closed lids his eyeballs moved wildly. “You will have many children but never happiness. Beware your eldest son. He is your enemy from another life returned to punish you. You will know the pain of burying a child. You will attract an ancestral object of great value into your hands. Do not keep it and do not try to gain from it. It belongs in a temple.” He dropped my hands and opened those expressionless two-dimensional eyes. They gazed at us blankly. Both Mui Tsai and I stood up shocked and frightened. Goose bumps spotted my arms. The heat was unbearable.
We stumbled outside, our containers of drinks forgotten in the grass. I looked at Mui Tsai, and her eyes were round with fear, her hands cupping her abdomen. Though she was seven months pregnant, her bump was not obvious like mine. In her loose
samfu,
she could fool anyone.
“Look,” I stated bravely, “it’s obvious that he’s a fake. Why, he said you would never have children when you are already pregnant. We’ve just thrown good money away. Everything he said was rubbish.”
“Yes, you are right. He must be a fake.”
“A horrible fake who likes scaring young girls,” I said.
We were silent on the walk home. I tried to forget about the old man with the lips that hardly moved, but his eerie words were branded into my memory like a curse from a stranger. I held the bulge in front of me protectively. It was ridiculous to think that my unborn eldest son, already so beloved by me, could possibly be my enemy.
Pure nonsense, if ever I heard any.
And life went on. My husband’s wood carving very slowly became an oval face. At first I looked at it every day, and then, because progress was so slow, my impatient nature took over and I lost all interest.
Oh, wait, I must tell you about my encounter with a proper python. It happened one muggy afternoon while I was sitting on the cold kitchen floor, separating and cleaning the insides of dried anchovies. Anchovies were cheap and plentiful, and I used them a lot in my cooking. Curried anchovies, aubergines with anchovies, and anchovies in coconut milk. Almost without thinking I added the curly, nutritious things into everything. Anyway, that afternoon, Mui Tsai’s face appeared at my kitchen window. Her eyes were big in her face, and her hands waved excitedly about. “Quick, come and look at the python.”
“Where is it?”
“Behind Minah’s house.”
We rushed out to the back of Minah’s house, and in the bushes quite far away from the house three small boys were huddled together, pointing at something on the dry ground, their eyes shining with a mixture of fear and excitement. Although it was aware of our presence, the thick, curled python appeared unable to move. The sun and a very big meal had made the beast sluggish and heavy. Unblinking, burnt-orange eyes in a diamond-shaped head observed us.
It was huge and beautiful.
So beautiful I wanted to keep it. Inside me was no fear of snakes.
In a flurry of urgent shouts some men arrived and beat its head to a pulp. Its thick, shiny body writhed and twisted in pain before it died a bloody death. They uncurled the dead animal and measured it by using the length from the tip of their fingers to their elbows as a ruler. They declared it more than twelve feet long. Then they ripped open its belly and found a half-digested goat, bloodied and crushed almost beyond recognition. I stared in pure fascination at the absurd lump of mangled purple flesh covered in slimy stomach juices with the odd hoof and horn sticking out of it. A strange thought occurred to me. Soon my belly would be bigger than that, I thought. And sure enough my belly grew at a rate that alarmed me. By the ninth month I was so big and uncomfortable I felt sure that I would burst like a smashed melon any time.
Finally the real pains began. Water gushed out of me like cheap rice brandy in a busy brothel. The back of my neck tingled. It was time.
Oh, but I was brave. I called out to my husband to summon the midwife. For a few seconds he stared at me with a blank expression, then he turned suddenly and dashed out of the house. I stood at the window and watched his speeding bicycle wobble dangerously on the stone-filled path.
In the kitchen I put two fresh towels and some old but clean sarongs out. In a large pot I boiled water. Clean water to wash my son. I bent my head and prayed once more for a son. While waiting for my baby’s arrival, I sat on my bench and unfolded an old letter from Mother.
My hands were trembling. I stared at them, surprised. I thought I was being adult and calm. Seven thin pages rustled in my hands like a secret, a gorgeous sprite walking over dry leaves. Mother’s small neat handwriting shook and blurred in my hands.
A sharp pain tore through me. My hand jerked. Seven tissue-thin pages filled with Mother’s longings, hopes, prayers, love, and wishes, whispered softly and scattered onto the kitchen floor.
Very quickly the pains turned vicious. And still I was calm. Even Mother would have been proud, for I bit hard on a piece of wood and stifled all my screams so that the neighbors would neither see nor hear anything. Suddenly I would be standing on the veranda with a flat stomach and a baby in my arms. How they would marvel. But another lightning cramp inside my body made me clutch my stomach in helpless pain. Beads of sweat grew on my forehead and upper lip. Then another one. So quickly.
“Ganesha, help me, please,” I prayed through clenched teeth.
Worse than the pain was the fear. Fear for the baby. Fear that everything was going wrong. Another ferocious spasm, and I began to panic. I was standing inside a small Ganesha temple with not a soul in sight and ringing the bell for a god’s pleasure. I rang it until my hands were bloody. “Oh, Lord Ganesha, remover of all obstacles, let my baby be safe,” I begged over and over again.
I felt the baby kick inside, and hot tears squeezed past my tightly closed eyelids.
I cursed my slow, stupid husband. Where was he? I imagined him sitting in a ditch somewhere. The baby began moving inside me, urgent, impatient, and dangerously vulnerable. A painful pressure was building up between my hips, and freshly brewed, all-consuming terror bubbled in my brain.
The baby was coming. There was no midwife, and the baby was coming.
Without any real warning I was standing in the eye of the whirling storm. The stick fell out of my mouth. The edges of the room were going black.
God had forsaken me.
I became certain I was dying. I forgot the neighbors and the seductive idea of suddenly appearing on the veranda with a flat belly and a baby in my arms. I forgot to be brave or proud. The hard coconut shell of pride is so easily smashed into so many pieces when it is hurled on the hard cement of pain.
A shivering mass of sweat and terror knows no pride. Squatting like a frightened animal, I opened my mouth to howl long and hard, but a sudden tearing pain knocked the breath out of me. I could feel the crown of the baby’s head.
“Push. Just push,” the midwife’s gray voice said inside my head. Her voice made it all sound so simple. Easy. The storm in my brain ceased unexpectedly. It was magic. “Push. Just push.” I gripped the edges of the bench on either side, took a deep breath, and pushed. I pushed and I pushed. The head was in my hand. The frightening lonely struggle I have now forgotten, but I remember the magic of quite suddenly holding a whole, purple baby in my bloody hands. I held the slime-covered thing up over my stomach and looked in dazed wonder at it. “Oh, Lord Ganesha, you’ve given me a boy,” I gasped happily. My hands, as if they had done it a thousand times before, reached for the knife lying by the chopping board. That morning I had sliced an onion with it, and it was stained with onion juices. I grasped it firmly in my hand and severed the umbilical cord. The cord dangled from the baby. The baby was free from me.
His eyes still screwed tightly shut, he opened his tiny mouth and began to howl, the thin sound going right through me. I laughed with joy.
“You simply couldn’t wait, could you?” I said with pure wonder. I looked at that toothless, ridiculously angry little creature and thought him the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Motherhood ripped open her body and showed me her furiously beating heart. And I knew from that moment on that for this wrinkled stranger I could tear the heads off male lions, stop trains with my bare hands, and scale snow-peaked mountains. Like a surreal comedy, Ayah and the midwife appeared in the doorway, breathless. I smiled broadly at their gaping faces.
“Go home,” I told the midwife proudly, thinking of the fifteen ringgit I had saved by forgoing her services. I turned my beaming face impatiently away from their plain faces so I could drink in the beauty of my new, wonderful creation. In fact I wished they would go away for a little while longer, but just then a hard, bunched-up fist smashed into my lower belly, making me double up in agony, almost making me drop my precious bundle. The midwife ran forward. She grasped my baby expertly and laid him on the pile of clean towels. Then she bent over me. Her hands on my body were quick and precise.
“Allah, be merciful,” she prayed under her breath before turning to my husband and muttering, “There is another baby in her belly.”
And that was how simply my son’s twin was born. She slipped easily out of me into the midwife’s waiting arms. The midwife was an old Malay woman Minah had recommended, called Badom. “Her hands are her gift,” Minah had said, and nothing could be truer. I shall never forget the strength that flowed like a charging river from her sinewy hands or the confident knowledge that shone from the depths of her rheumy eyes. She knew everything there was to know about mothers and babies. In her withered skull lay intimate and vast knowledge of all that counted, from forbidden cucumbers and powdered flowers to shrink the womb to magical potions of boiled nettles and herbs to return a stretched body to its former bloom.