Maid In Singapore

by Kishore Modak

  At home, I fell silent, busy with household chores that had fallen upon us, with the departure of the maid. The possibility of a new maid did not exist, even if I approved, since the Ministry of Manpower had cancelled David’s maid license.

  Jay was in his room, reading. David was in the living room, reading, with half-hearted offers of helping around the house.

  Later, I took David down to the poolside, well away from Jay, before I told him.

  His initial reaction was shock, but as we spoke, acceptance crept in. He would know better, after all, now they had both tasted the same cheap wine.

  ‘Let me speak to him, he needs some rational man- to-man talk that is all. He needs to understand, what he has done is natural and no fault of his. Let me also ask him if he has any girlfriends at school already,’ David was being reasonable, but I also thought he was bringing on male bravado, a misplaced one, a stupid one, one that could spoil the entire game.

  Was it not better to let sexuality develop naturally, through talk with school friends and clicks on the computer? It was not like in our times, when there was no Internet. As regards his unknown girlfriends, the only reason one would want to check was to warn them of possible venereal infections, the communication of which could be pre-empted if the doctor thought our Jay was safe and unaffected.

  As regards nature, I wish he did not blame all unexplainable shortcomings of humans on beautiful Mother Nature and her course.

  Why take on the risk of handling a growing boy’s sex life openly with him? Would it not delineate him from us, possibly for life, wanting him to shy away from the embarrassment, avoiding visiting home in his term breaks, when he left for college?

  Adolescents are awkward and ungainly, unable to accept and move on, clinging to things that should be discarded. Once life delivers a few blows, that art is perfected by adults.

  The matter was best left a joke, shared deep into a pub night.

  ‘David, I don’t think we should speak to Jay about this matter. I don’t see any reason why we should bring it up?’ I delivered my verdict; maternal decisions usually take an upper hand in such matters.

  ‘What if he is exposed to any sort of infection or medical risk?’ he asked.

  ‘That we can tackle. Dr Paul will know what to do without having to reveal anything to Jay,’ I answered.

  ‘What if he has a girlfriend, she may be affected too?’ it was a fair, unselfish question from David.

  ‘We can check with Dr Paul. If he thinks there is a need to take heed, we will, otherwise just let it be,’ my answer was logical.

  ‘What about Jay himself? I have to be sure he has not been impacted, mentally I mean. I have to ensure he sees the entire growing-up-sex thing in the right light. I don’t want him to be confused,’ David stopped abruptly as if in mid-sentence, swallowing the last two words ‘. . . like me . . .’ It would have been a slip, a Freudian one.

  ‘Jay will be fine; he is probably more educated with this incident, than without it. I am sure he knows exactly what he has done and will be able to tackle it mentally. Look at him, he has given us no reason to guess anything’s amiss,’ I was convinced; not miring him in this, was the right thing.

  I meant, this mess of words. Of course he was at the centre of this mess; just that it was better to let him believe that we did not know about his involvement with Mary. Leave him to his devices, letting him work through the embarrassment of his own adolescence, without help from snoopy over- protective parents. Protection was late in coming— in this case, useless, an after-thought, given the reality of his premature loss of virginity, to my maid.

  You may have guessed by now, given the candid account in these pages, I am not good with secrets. They haunt me, especially the ones that don’t close out logically in the mind; they resurface every now and then, uncomfortably, begging nosey discovery. Once the answers present themselves, I can let things pass, but until that point secrets bother me.

  At Dr Paul Ng’s clinic, the awkwardness of the subject was limited to the waiting area. As soon as I saw him, confidence overtook me. I asked Jay and David to wait outside, while I spoke to Dr Paul.

  ‘Hello, Doctor, we have reason to believe that we may have been exposed to sexually transmitted illnesses. We are not sure, but for precaution I wanted my entire family to be screened. This is only for my peace of mind,’ I emptied, readying myself for his interrogation, reading his eyes, which turned kind and paternal.

  ‘You mean, even your son? I see here that he is only fourteen.’ he asked, pointing at the registration forms, which I had filled a while ago.

  ‘Yes, Doctor, it may be excessive and I may be just paranoid, but I want to screen the whole family,’ I evaded the incident, focusing on the health screening.

  ‘Do you have any specific illness or ailment in mind that you suspect? Any symptoms?’

  ‘No, Doctor, we just want to preclude commonly known diseases.’

  ‘Okay, that should not be a problem,’ he got busy, measuring temperature, drawing blood, asking for urine, examining us, here, there, everywhere, one at a time and reassuring me later, ‘Don’t worry, you don’t seem to show any outward symptoms. We will call you in a day or two after all the reports have come in. In the meantime, I will prescribe a course of antibiotics, just precautionary.’ We left, relieved for now, but anxious about the test results. At home, Jay headed back to school, wanting to be with his friends rather than at home with us.

  David called his office, explaining that he would have to be away for the day, before re-joining work on the following day. It gave us time to talk, try and make plans for the future.

  Plans, we have to make them, knowing well that they will push us into unknown, unforeseeable waters; yet plans are better than simply meandering, floating about life.

  ‘We should head back, I don’t think we should live here anymore, after all that has happened,’ I told him, wanting to move back to London.

  ‘Why?’ he simply asked, a question meant to spawn a mild disagreement, healthy for a domestic debate.

  ‘Well, for one, I feel suffocated in this city, after all that has happened. For another, I don’t think anyone of us is happy here. Are you happy, after all that has happened?’ The happenings had all happened to me; David and Jay stood on the side of doers, doing what they did in whichever frame of mind they did it in and for whatever period of time it takes for men to do what they do to women.

  ‘You know I will play along with whatever it is that will make you happy, just that our income back home is not guaranteed. It will be back to square one, looking for work, reconnecting with friends, asking for favours,’ he was stating facts. It would be like that. It would be better that way; he needed the process of rebuilding before we settled down again.

  ‘Yes, I agree. You are absolutely right. But, we will be happy. It is not like we have not made any savings, or planned for rainy days. In time, all will be well,’ I convinced him, not really going anywhere near my real fears.

  In Singapore, Mary was too close for comfort, physically too close, just four hours away, maybe pregnant with our stuff, with the very real possibility of turning up at our doorstep once she was able to, rekindling the past, ruining our mending lives, sucking us into her poverty of refinement.

  In London, we were safer, though only relatively. I made a mental note—get on top of all our security settings on Facebook, blocking us from snoopy Asians, if the site allowed settings by region, else I would simply block everyone out, at least for now. In London, we would be ten hours away from her, with our address untraceable without significant effort. We would feel secure in the false security of home turf, with new mobile numbers and new emails ids.

  ‘I do understand, but what am I supposed to tell the folks at work?’ he fell back to the realm of the mundane, easily tackled by conversation and logic.

  ‘I am sure they have guessed you are having issues at home, with the newspaper articles and all. They will understand when you say it is on p
ersonal grounds. Just ask for the separation package that they offered you earlier and wait to hear what they have to say,’ I answered, confidently, pushing him along to where we were heading.

  On the following morning, I got the men out of the house, neat, with packed sandwiches, and then waited for the phone to ring, cradling the instruments in their respective chargers, the mobile and the home phone, ensuring they were charged when the clinic called. Housework, it is a burden that is easy to give up, tough to pick up, building back the habits of domestic labour.

  I had the urge to call the clinic, asking for the good Doctor, but sense prevailed and I settled in front of the tele, after many days, bridging gaps, picking up where I had left the soaps off. He had said one or two days, best to wait while we took the medication. Sometimes, it is best when you don’t hear back from the doctor’s office.

  The phone rang soon enough, but like it is in most cases, the news that it carried was not definite. The receptionist at the clinic simply asked me to come when I was free, since the Doctor wanted to speak to me.

  I did so at once, simply shutting the burners off, closing the windows, and rushing to the clinic.

  The waiting at the clinic was agonizing, with all nature of possibilities dancing in front of me. Medical matters, which we usually don’t understand, are like that, simply playing with our imagination, forcing us to panic with the half information that is available on the Internet.

  When I finally saw him, he was calm, asking me to sit down, telling me not to worry. ‘It is your husband, and it is not what you think,’ he said, interrupted by me before he could finish his sentence.

  ‘Does he have it?’ my voice carried the tremble of panic and anxiety, my eyes wide with fear.

  ‘No, he does not have it, and all the tests have come up negative,’ he told me.

  I sighed in relief, too soon, because he was not done yet.

  ‘It is his blood counts. They are elevated, particularly the leukocyte count, which is abnormally high. I would not worry; it could be a mild infection that is causing it. But I will strongly recommend a few more tests, just to be cautious, that is all,’ he added.

  ‘I am a grown-up adult, Doctor. Please tell me what you suspect. Are you looking for something in particular?’ I had put on my brave face by now.

  ‘Like I said, there is absolutely no need to panic. Not yet, at least, since there could be a host of reasons for elevated blood counts. But, I strongly recommend that you bring him in again, after he has finished the course of antibiotics that I prescribed. It could be a simple infection that goes away in a week. Why don’t we check in a week’s time?’ he sounded reassuring.

  ‘I will do that, Doctor, and what about the rest of us?’ I asked.

  ‘All seems fine. Just finish the course of medication since you have started it, but I would not think about it anymore,’ he touched his stethoscope, growing impatient, wanting to work through the patients waiting outside, before heading home.

  At home, my predominant state was one of relief. There was housework to be done, but with Mary gone, there was calm and peace again. I remained private, alone at home all day. Also, with the medical reports coming through well, at least as regards the events of the recent months, I felt a door shutting, a chapter closing.

  It was only by evening that I bothered getting an appointment for David to meet Dr Paul, that too, only after a week. Till then, I would personally administer the useless medication that had been prescribed, on all three of us.

  A week down the road, a new door opened.

  Mum’s Journal, Part Two:

  Acceptance

  Time, it simply moves away from us, leaving us in a rut of petty personal tangles, forcing us to look down, down where there is

  nothing but the mundane to toy with, while on top, things move steadily away on the waves of time, reaching the horizon before moving out of sight, forever, never once waiting for us to look up. For many years, my rut of worthless entanglement imprisoned me in the shallow triviality of infidelity, shame and sexual perversity; I was uplifted to much deeper mysteries by the process of cell-division. Everything simply paled in comparison.

  Yes, cell-division, something you may not have stopped to think about when you read your level six textbook; it became the instrument that awakened me to the meaning and passage of time. It simply made important things urgent, relegating everything else to the ordinary.

  In the end, isn’t every story the same, built around being lost and in the search of meaning, before finding answers to all our childish doubts?

  Cell-division, when controlled, is life-giving, kicking in at conception and working through the growth of the foetus in the womb, till organs differentiate, leading to a fully formed infant. In life, the process of division repairs and runs the body efficiently, when and where physical repair and mending is required.

  However, in the lives of cells, every once in a while, one cell decides to divide and pass on its quality of divisibility to its progeny, setting in motion an uncontrollable army of dividing cells, leading to incommodious cancers, growing in progression, just like the one that killed David. His pertained to skin and finally blood cells, though a cancer can appear in practically any part of the body.

  An exponential progression of rice grains, laid on the squares of a chessboard, left kings paupers; David and I did not stand a chance.

  David’s diagnosis and treatment stretched over a few years, starting in Singapore and ending in London, where I currently reside. He got better, before he got worse. The fact remains that most people diagnosed with cancer eventually die of cancer; the question is one of average lifespan from diagnosis. In David’s case, it was less than three years.

  He was brave, when he could be, but mostly he was despondent, asking questions that have no meaningful or pointed answers.

  Why me? Because, me, you and anyone else are insignificant in the scheme of life. Time, it simply moves away from us, at best forcing us to swim with it, for a while.

  What now? At best, a normal lifespan of sixty- seventy years and at worst, a greatly diminished one, or maybe something in between, attributable to that what we as yet do not know. Promise, in either case, it will be a flash.

  What about my unfulfilled duties? You have done well, leaving enough for your family after you are gone.

  The toughest question—Is this punishment, for the deeds that I have done? No, your illness is not divine justice meted out against your misdeeds, because what you consider misdeeds are trivial when one considers time, and how it simply keeps moving away. You yourself said it, ‘All of our misdeeds are natural acts,’ acceptable, if one believes in a natural order. I, for one, do not.

  However, in one final act of redemption, before leaving Singapore, David handed over the gun to Inspector Tan. He headed to the Kallang River and hurled the bag of toys into its waters. A commuter train thundered past on the narrow river ’s rail bridge, its passengers ensconced in air-conditioned tubes, peering at screens and listening through headphones. No one noticed a broken man weeping on the pedestrian bridge and a lady standing by him, a lady with a resolute exterior and a well-concealed but fragile, helpless, crumbling interior.

  He was ecstatic, when the remission briefly led to complete symptom-less recovery, needing no more of the poisonous medication that was killing the cancer along with my husband. David, in some sense, resisted the poison, while the cancer succumbed to it, like a race of survival to the finish, between the cancer and him, both fighting a common enemy, the drugs. The disease reappeared within months, fulminant and deadly as if with a vengeance, at which point he gave up.

  During that brief period of wellness, there was wine and joy, including pleasures of marital life, without the aid of any mental or physical contortions. David could love me normally, if I may say so, though the word is misplaced in the context of copulation.

  Jay and David spoke, quite a bit through their period of brief wellness, of what I know not, but it seemed like a
conversation of some substance, like the ones we carry for a lifetime, for Jay stopped being melancholy and simply grew up.

  Further on down the line, when he got really sick, I cared for him when everyone else gave up, sending him back home to me, back home to die. Each time I left home, for unavoidable tasks that demanded my presence away from him, he asked ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ when all he could physically do was lie down and wait for me to return, after I had run my chores. I loved the man, to his bitter end.

  He died in unimaginable pain, the medication unable to counteract or even mitigate the effects of malignancy. The pain made his demise acceptable; at least there was relief from it, for everyone.

  In the first few days of aftermath, visits from people filled with gratitude and concern made his loss seem far less vacuous than it actually was. The church service and the mass, sepulchre and the stream of visitors gave way in just over a week’s time, leaving an empty space at dinner, and a stillness all about the household. It was like removing the words sung in a song, leaving tunes bland and dull with only the chime of hollow wordless music. Jay fared better than me, with school and a steady ring from friends for him to fall back upon, well beyond that first one week. The young move on, with life to look forward to; it was I who was continuously pulled backwards into the past. It was I who was left all alone, still sleeping on my side of our bed, as if he were still there on his side, when I could have easily moved towards the middle, spreading out in comfort, knowing he was gone.

  In the beginning, when I was still young and sexually active—at least biologically—invitations from married friends dried up. After all, who wants a sexually starved widow in the vicinity of their menfolk. They needn’t have worried, not on that count; I had learnt to tackle the problems posed by sex quite well, that too without the need of a partner.

  Seeking out married men, the thought repulsed me, after what I had suffered at the hands of a married man, my husband. For some reason, the alternative of seeking gigolos is not mainstream; if it was, I may have considered it, but it isn’t like female prostitution, which is accessible and almost acceptable, at least in certain situations. Male situations, like when you are travelling alone, or when your family is away and you are by yourself.