The Howling Silence

by Catherine Lim

  I pressed Boh Yuen to go to another medium who might be more adept at interpreting the wishes of the dead. This medium was equally unhelpful. What a frustratingly complex culture I had unwittingly wandered into.

  One evening, I suddenly had an idea. I decided to appeal to the ghosts directly. I spoke aloud, in English which I hoped they would understand; after all, it is the working language in Singapore and the language of communication among its diverse ethnic groups. Besides, communication between ghosts and humans supposedly transcends language and culture. So I, an Indian, spoke in English to three little Chinese ghosts. I spoke slowly, expressing my feelings of frustration and concern simply and honestly. Above all, I begged the ghosts to lead me, whenever they were ready, to that something still present in the flat, whatever it was, so that I could return it to them, however they wished it to be done. I ended by saying that there was nothing which would make me happier than to be instrumental in freeing them from their sad captivity on earth and releasing them to eternal peace and rest. (I almost wanted to add that if I were them I wouldn’t care to go join that undeserving father.)

  That night, as I lay in bed, I kept hoping to have a dream in which the three little Chinese ghosts would appear to me and give instuctions. I had heard that for the Chinese, the dream was one of the most effective conduits of information and advice from the other world. No luck. No dream.

  The next night, I thought I heard noises and woke up. The noises stopped. I couldn’t get back to sleep. Then something made me get up and make my way out of the room and into one at the back of the flat, which Kamala had been planning to convert into a study for me. I could feel myself being helplessly borne along on a tide of energy not my own. In the room, I made straight for a small table in a corner. It was an item of furniture that somehow we had forgotten to get rid off, together with the rest, when we moved in. There were two drawers; I opened one, put my hand inside and brought out a small bundle of something, wrapped in soft cloth. Till now, I was in darkness. I switched on the light and looked at what was in my hand. It was a neat bundle; the wrapping was a piece of faded pink satin. Slowly I removed the wrapping. Inside there were three identical small white paper packets, each containing something which my fingers, feeling gently through the paper, could not identify. Then I noticed that on each packet was written, neatly, a name. The names of the three boys with what must be their dates of birth. Jek Wen Yong, 14/2/72, Jek Wen Kee, 12/6/74 (he was killed on his birthday!), Jek Wen Shin, 7/11/76. Tremblingly my fingers opened the packets. Inside each was a strange-looking thing – a dead worm? a dried piece of intestine? each tied in the middle with a piece of lucky red string. I stared in puzzlement. What on earth was it? Then I knew. Umbilical cords. Or rather, the dried shrivelled remains of new-born babies’ umbilical cords.

  It was only later that I learnt from Boh Yuen the traditional Chinese practice of saving the cord of each new-born, usually a son. The mother, still in the throes of after-birth, treasuring the cord that had bound the child to her for nine months – I was moved by the symbolism.

  Boh Yuen was rather vague when I asked him about the reason for the saving of this little bit of birth’s detritus, and said it had something to do with parents’ wish for success and prosperity for their sons in life.

  I attended a simple temple ritual in which the three cords were burnt and thus ceremonially returned to the rightful owners. I could almost see the three spirits in joyful flight at last, winging home. So for months three little ghosts in my flat had been in torment to be reunited with their birth-cords. Did that mean they were going to be born again?

  For their sakes, I hope so. I want to believe that wherever they have gone, they will be free from those monstrous parents (especially the dastardly father) and they will have the good fortune to be born, in their second birth, to genuinely loving, caring parents. For I understand from Boh Yuen that in that other of the Chinese, the primary concerns of this world, such as eating, sleeping, living in comfortable houses, spending money, getting married, having children, etc. go on in much the same way.

  Kamala says, pointing to the table with the two drawers, “Strange. How come we didn’t see this when the men came to take away the furniture? Shall we get rid of it now?”

  I say, “No, I’d like to keep it, if you don’t mind.”

  Gentle into the Night

  When old Madam Ong Sim Heok’s favourite grandson, Benjy, was killed in a freak accident during a National Service training exercise, nobody dared to break the news to her. She was old and ill, and the shock of the news would surely kill her. The family hoped that she would go to a peaceful death unaware of the terrible tragedy.

  So all the time that they were going through an unspeakable grief, they had to put on a brave face and attempt some jocularity in the face of the old lady’s persistent questions. Why hadn’t Benjy come to visit her for so long? Didn’t he know she was ill? Was he too busy with friends and girlfriends to even drop in for a few minutes to see his old grandmother?

  The family made all sorts of excuses on Benjy’s behalf and told all kinds of lies, to pacify Madam Ong. They had to get together and work out a proper coordination of their lying, for the old lady, despite her years, was sharp and could detect inconsistencies straightaway. Once, she said to Benjy’s mother, “How come you’re telling me Benjy’s in Taiwan for training when Lillian (Lillian was Benjy’s sister) just said he’s staying with ‘Tiku’ (‘Tiku’ was Benjy’s best friend) preparing for some exams?” Then of course there had to be a quick scramble to undo the damage, offer fresh explanations, tell new lies to cover the old. Old Madam Ong frowned in vexed perplexity and suspicion. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said peevishly, “but you all had better stop making excuses for that young man and tell him to come and see his grandmother before she dies. Can’t he even make a phone call?”

  The story agreed on by the family was this: Benjy had been sent with some others to Taiwan for a special programme as part of the National Service training. It was a very stringent programme meant for only the best and most promising servicemen. They would not be allowed to contact their families, whether by writing or by phone. If they survived the training, they would be immediately promoted to very important positions. Benjy was enjoying the programme but missing everyone, especially Grandma. He had told a friend who had completed the programme and returned home to Singapore to send his love to Grandma and tell her that the first thing he would do back home would be to take her on the long-promised holiday to Canada.

  The lie about Benjy’s message through the friend was meant to comfort the old lady and bring a smile to her face. Doting on him, she liked to hear about his love for her. Before she went down with old age and illness, she regaled friends and relatives with an abundance of stories about her precious grandson, her fondness of him embellishing the stories extravagantly to his acute embarrassment. She liked in particular to tell about Benjy’s promise to do this or that for his grandma. She had brought him up from infancy and the special bond between them was touching to see.

  “What will you do when you grow up?” To the invariable adult question, the little boy’s immediate reaction was to run and hug his grandmother and yell shrilly, “I’ll build a big house for my Ma-Ma to stay in, and I’ll be a policeman and shoot all those who steal Ma-Ma’s handbag!” This was a reference to an incident when Madam Ong had her handbag snatched and suffered severe bruises grappling with the robber.

  When Benjy was in secondary school, his grandmother one day told him about a friend of hers who had come back from a holiday in Canada, breathless with praise for the beautiful country. Immediately, the thirteen-year-old boy said solemnly, “As soon as I get a job after university, I’ll start saving to take you for a holiday in Canada, Ma-Ma.”

  She wept when he left home to begin his National Service training, and worried endlessly about whether he would have enough to eat, suffer from poisonous insect bites in the jungle, suffer from the bullying of superio
rs, collapse in the hot sun, meet with an accident etc. Once she tried to sneak a packet of his favourite nonya kueh past the sentry, and was politely that no gifts of food were allowed.

  On the day of Benjy’s funeral, it was arranged that some relatives would stay with her and join in the family conspiracy of placating her with yet more elaborate lies.

  Benjy’s face had almost been blown off by a grenade in the freak accident. At the mortuary, his mother, looking upon the shattered face, had fainted. At the funeral, she fainted again and was held up by his father who looked ready to faint himself. His sister Lillian, aged fourteen, had suddenly become the strongest one in the family, running around doing the necessary things in a house of sudden mourning, making phone calls, answering calls, comforting her parents. As she prayed for the soul of her poor brother, she also prayed for their grandmother: “Please, God, don’t let Ma-Ma know. Let her die peacefully.”

  But old Madam Ong Sim Heok refused to die without seeing her grandson. Her questions became more persistent and fretful. Then she became truly angry.

  “I don’t care what his National Service superiors say,” she said, her face flushed with anger, as she lay on her deathbed, “but I want my grandson to come and see me right away. Don’t they have any heart? An old lady is dying, and her beloved grandson can’t get permission to come and see her! And don’t you all have any guts, letting them get away with this?”

  Madam Ong lay quietly for a while, plotting a strategy. “Lillian,” she said, “I want you to do something at once. Write a letter on my behalf to the Prime Minister of Singapore. I want to go right to the top to complain! Maybe only then will those fools do something.”

  Lillian sat down and wrote the letter. Old Madam Ong signed it. She closed her eyes, heaved a deep sigh and murmured, “One shouldn’t have to do these things on one’s death-bed.”

  She was sinking rapidly. But the crying need to see her favourite grandson for the last time kept the remaining life flickering in her frail body, the continuing hope burning in her eyes.

  A few days later, she appeared much calmer. Indeed the family noticed a peaceful, contented air about her.

  “I knew it would work,” she said. Her voice was growing weaker and Lillian, who happened to be the only one in the room then, had to bend down to put her ear close to the dying woman’s mouth.

  “Always go straight to the top with a complaint!” said the dying woman with spirit. She said that Benjy had grown much thinner and paler.

  “When did you see him?” said Lillian. “When did he come?”

  “Didn’t you all know? Only this morning. He sat right here,” she made a weak movement with her head to indicate a spot on the bed, beside her, “and he held my hand.”

  Old Madam Ong smiled contentedly. Then she suddenly opened her eyes and said with a worried look, “Lillian, he looked sad. He was covering part of his face with a piece of white cloth. I said, ‘Benjy, why are you covering your face?’ But he wouldn’t remove the cloth. He wouldn’t tell me anything. He just sat there, holding my hand and saying, ‘Ma-Ma, I’ve come.’”

  Lillian, unable to hold back her tears, continued listening with her ear almost pressed to her grandmother’s mouth. She was already thinking, with an unbearable heaviness of heart, “I can’t tell Mom this. It will break her heart.” She would tell a lie if necessary. Lies to the dying about the dead. Lies to the living about the dying and the dead. They were part of the whole reality of coping. The dying needed to go gentle into the night.

  Old Madam Ong, with a last flush on the rapidly failing flesh and a last gleam in the rapidly fading eyes, said, as happy memories rushed back and turned the last, almost inaudible whisper into a chuckle of joyous merriment, “He says he will be a policeman when he grows up to protect his grandmother from crooks! And he says he’s saved enough money for our long journey together!”

  The Ghost of Miss Daisy Ooi Mei Lang

  Miss Daisy Ooi Mei Lang, the principal of Pin Yun Secondary School, was killed in a car accident at the junction of Dowling Road and Pek Moy road in 1987. She was excitedly testing her new Mazda when it began to rain heavily, and she drove straight into an oncoming truck, and was instantly killed.

  For eight years, up till 1995, the ghost of Miss Ooi was seen in her school. The dead who are not aware that they have died are said to continue their habitual activities in familiar well-loved places on earth. Awareness, when it comes, is often extremely traumatic and is usually initiated by the living who then have the awesome responsibility of easing the confused ghost’s entry into the other world.

  Poor Miss Ooi was clearly not aware that she had died.

  She had been in Pin Yun Secondary School as a student, a teacher and finally a principal, the principalship being the crowning achievement of a simple life of hard work and service to others. Miss Ooi never married, in order to be in a position to care for a household of old dependents, comprising her aged parents, aunt and godmother. Over the years they died, one by one, gradually freeing Miss Ooi to live her own life. But she remained single and channelled all her energies to the managing of her school, taking a personal pride in every aspect of its life, from the welfare of her staff and students, as well as that of the school clerks, cleaning woman, canteen operator, gardener and caretaker, to the cleanliness of the buildings and grounds. Miss Ooi would stay back till the evening, watching the students at their various extra-curricular activities of sports and games, and drive off home only after she had made sure everyone else has left. In her plain light-coloured blouse and dark-coloured skirt, sensible shoes, neat short hair and silver-rimmed glasses, she was a familiar figure in the school buildings and large sprawling compound, always doing her rounds of inspection with indefatigable energy. Her last act in the school, on a Saturday afternoon, was to alert the old gardener Vellu to the presence of a bee hive in one of the branches of a tree at the back of the school, and to make a note to remind herself to warn students at assembly on Monday morning.

  On Sunday, she was killed in the accident.

  On Monday, while her body was still lying in the coffin in the parlour of her home, attended by grieving relatives, friends and colleagues, her ghost was already seen in the school. It was the gardener Vellu who was the first to see her. Informed about her death only on Monday morning itself, after the school assembly when the vice-principal Mr Chionh had made the sad announcement to staff and students, Vellu looked puzzled and said, shaking his head, “No, no. I see Miss Ooi only just now. Miss Ooi walking there,” pointing to the spot near her office, “and she say ‘Good morning, Vellu.’” Pressed for further details, Vellu said she was in a white blouse and grey skirt and was carrying her usual flask of coffee and lunchbox of sandwiches.

  Then it was the turn of the gardener, Mat. He said he had seen Miss Ooi standing near one of the flower-beds in the well-tended school garden, inspecting a row of cannas. He actually saw her bend down, and pinch off a dead leaf on a flower stalk. The cleaning woman Ah Moi was next. She ran to tell the vice-principal, her face ashen with shock, “She’s in there, sitting at her desk,” pointing to the principal’s office.

  By the time of her funeral, three days after the accident, the ghost of Miss Daisy Ooi Mei Lang had been seen by all th servants in the school. “Not surprising,” said one of the teachers. “She was always going to the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Labour to demand better wages or working conditions for them.” The servants, though, were not exactly happy about the signal honour of being singled out by a ghost for first viewing. They looked nervous, whispering among themselves.

  Then the teachers and students began to hear strange sounds. Walking along the corridors outside the classrooms, some of teachers would hear the familiar sound of Miss Ooi’s footsteps, turn around sharply and see no one. Or the equally familiar sound of Miss Ooi blowing her nose into a handkerchief. She had sinus problems and always carried a neat white handkerchief in a skirt pocket. Sometimes they would smell her presence. Miss Ooi
never used perfume in her life, but she often rubbed a certain very pungent-smelling embrocation oil on her elbows and knees, to relieve aches and pains. Once, during assembly, the distinctive smell of the oil filled the hall. For a few seconds, the staff and the students stood very still, not daring to move or say anything.

  Only a handful of teachers, including the vice-principal Mr. Chionh, reported actually seeing Miss Ooi’s ghost.

  Mrs. Moreira, a science teacher, one morning saw Miss Ooi climbing up the stairs leading to the music room, easily recognising her by the blouse, skirt and hairstyle. The vice-principal said that one afternoon when he went into the principal’s room (left vacant for months) to get something, he saw her standing by the window, looking out. A new student from a foreign country who came to the school nearly a year after Miss Ooi’s death, reported seeing a lady who exactly matched her description, adjusting a chart hanging on the wall of her classroom.

  Miss Ooi’s ghost had so far been benign. But benign or not, a ghost’s presence is seldom welcome. Two teachers had nervously asked for a transfer to another school; four parents had quietly removed their children. The new principal, a Mr. Seng Song Tee, decided, a month after his arrival, that the time had come to cleanse the school of the presence. The language used was gentle – “helping Miss Ooi’s spirit find its way home.” It was a decision at the purely private, unofficial level, since the Ministry of Education would not approve of anything that might be even remotely construed as a superstitious act, quite at odds with the secularism and rationalism of the society. Some troublemaker might even write to the newspapers about it, and start a hullabaloo in the ‘Forum’ pages of the Straits Times, something that the Ministry would avoid at all cost. So Mr. Seng only privately informed a ministry official, in order, as he said, “to cover himself” should there be any inquiry later. He quietly informed only a few trusted members of the staff, the whole idea being to play down the event as much as possible, and speed up the resolution of an increasingly intolerable situation in his new school.