The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  A few of the people in the neighbouring kampongs had seen the explosion in the sky. There were many theories about the explosion – a bomb planted aboard, a hijack, a suicide attempt by a very important government official fleeing the country. The news made headlines in every newspaper. But the immediate task was to pick up the pieces and identify the dead as far as was possible.

  I rang Hong repeatedly, finally someone answered the phone. It was his sister. In a weak voice, she told me that he was under sedation. He had rushed to the airport to find out whether Teresa’s name was on the passenger list; it was. Then he made a frantic call to the Penang relatives, and found that one of them had driven Teresa to the airport. There was no hope now. Teresa was among the 112 victims. Hong collapsed, the receiver still tightly in his hand, and had to be helped to the sofa. A doctor was quickly called in. When I saw him then, still reclining on the sofa and weeping unrestrainedly, I realized that the sorrow could not be over easily.

  In the days that followed, weakened from lack of food and sleep, he nevertheless rushed around in a frenzy of activity, visiting the site of the terrible tragedy, trying desperately to break through the cordon that the authorities had thrown around the dismal wreckage, to see if he could salvage anything that could even remotely connect him to her. Torsos and limbs were strewn over a wilderness of jungle bushes and grass; they were hurriedly picked up and put in large plastic bags of uniform size. Hong, dishevelled and wild-eyed and supported by his weeping sister and her husband, fell down on his knees in the mud – the operation of cleaning up was going on in spite of heavy rain – and in a paroxysm of bitterness and grief, asked Heaven if it would not even give him a part of Teresa’s body to bury in a decent burial, to at least allow him to have something small that he could keep as a remembrance of her.

  As if in answer to his prayers, a small suitcase belonging to Teresa was found and put together with the other salvaged belongings – a forlorn heap of burst suitcases, attaché cases, scattered files and letterheads of business organizations, shoes, handbags, even a child’s teddy bear.

  Hong fell upon it with ferocious possessiveness; the small light-brown suitcase had burst open and was partially scorched, but the name tag was intact.

  He went through a pocket on one side of the suitcase and fished out a letter – a long letter written in Teresa’s close, neat hand, full of endearments, like the rest of her letters to him. She had written it the day before she left Penang, and had probably decided that it would take a longer time by post than if she were to deliver it herself. Hong broke down on reading the letter; it was her last letter to him, written the day before she was killed.

  Hong was at the site every day; what he hoped to do or find, nobody could tell. He hung around, a pathetic picture of grief; he watched every stage of the massive cleaning-up operation, from the gathering of the dismembered parts to be put in large antiseptic plastic bags, to the final laying of these bags in coffins and their internment in a plot of state land amidst prayers offered by a gathering of priests and monks, who formed a complete representation of all the possible faiths of the victims. Hong had asked Father O’Reilly, Teresa’s parish priest, to come and offer prayers for her.

  As if to work out the tremendous sorrow that was threatening to overpower him, he went about in frenzied activity, offering a mass for her in this church, prayers for the repose of her soul in that church, composing a verse for insertion in the obituary column of The Straits Times that would have been maudlin but for the depth of his grief. And still the need to be constantly in motion remained, to put off, as far as possible, that terrible moment of stark awakening to solitude.

  The weeks after the crash were the most anxious for Hong’s relatives and friends, for it appeared that at any moment, he would slip over the edge. He quietened down, and then all his attention focussed on the precious letter rescued from the wreck. He read it again and again and drew comfort from it, for it was as it his beloved fiancée was speaking words of affection to him from the grave.

  He went quietly about his work as a lecturer in the university and occasionally rang me up to talk, sometimes about Teresa, sometimes about inconsequential matters. On the anniversary of her death, he again inserted a message of loving remembrance for her in The Straits Times, and had a mass said for her in the church where they used to attend.

  It was about a month after the anniversary when Hong suggested having lunch together. All through lunch, he was very subdued and I knew that there was something he wanted to tell me but was hesitant to. He finally brought out a letter from his pocket, that last letter Teresa had written and said, “There’s a message in this letter that I should have been alert to; I missed it, and now it’s too late.”

  He made me read the letter, which I did with great discomfort, for here was a very private letter, full of the sentiments of a woman very much in love and wanting, in every word, to give pleasure to the beloved. I hurried through the letter, but there did not seem to be any message of the kind that Hong had hinted at.

  “Read it again,” said Hong rather impatiently, “read those lines again referring to an anniversary.” I skimmed through the letter again; with some difficulty, my eyes picked out, among the mass of closely written lines, this sentence: “Not death will separate us; I shall see you again, dearest, but only on the anniversary.”

  Isolated, lifted out of context, the sentence had an air of foreboding about it; but as part of a letter almost extravagant in its claims and expressions of love and hope, there was nothing to distinguish it from

  any of the other sentences.

  “Don’t you see the significance?” Hong asked. “She had a premonition of death, and there and then decided that death would not separate us. She would return on the anniversary to see me again. But the anniversary’s past,” he added brokenly. “July 19’s past, and I was a fool to have missed the chance. She’ll never come again.”

  “What would you have done?” I asked tentatively, looking at this man still struggling to come to terms with his sorrow.

  “I would have gone to the site; she must, have waited for me and I never turned up!” The last words were uttered in an agonized cry of self-reproach.

  “Are you sure she was referring to this anniversary? Could she not have meant some other anniversary, for instance, the anniversary of your engagement, your first meeting, your first kiss?” I became frivolous in my anxiety to turn this man away from the dangerous drift of his thoughts.

  “Not death will separate us; I shall see you again, dearest, but only on the anniversary,” he quoted slowly without looking at the letter. “It could mean nothing else. Don’t you see how these words cannot be interpreted in any other way? Fool! Fool that I am for missing this message for a whole year.” Again he berated himself for his gross negligence, and this time he pounded the side of his head with a clenched fist.

  “I must go,” he said fiercely. “I must go to the site and find out whether she’s been there. There are some Malay kampongs around. Somebody would have seen.”

  “Let me go with you,” I ventured, “or get your sister to go with you.” Then, fearing he would regard this as offensive patronage by the wise of the weak-minded, I quickly added, “I would like to, really.”

  The site was inaccessible by car; we walked for some distance through overgrown grass and lallang, and I saw that Hong was weeping silently. Here and there were desolate reminders of the tragedy: a small part of the plane now rusting and covered with coarse grass, an object partly submerged in the ground that must have been a plane seat, for the remnants of a seat-belt were still attached to it.

  Hong and I looked around for a while, then walked for some distance towards a small cluster of Malay huts on the edge. In halting Malay, Hong asked questions to find out if the little band of curious onlookers who had gathered in front of us could remember the plane crash. They nodded their heads vigorously. One of them, an old man with brown stumps for teeth, said that he had witnessed the explosion
in the sky. He made a loud sound and lifted both arms to convey the force of the explosion.

  One of the young men cried out shrilly, “Ada hantu! Ada hantu!” and pointed to the site of the crash, while the women showed signs of fear. One of them gestured to him to stop talking.

  Hong’s voice quavered in excitement as he persuaded and then threatened the young man to talk further. But the young man, in response to the woman’s warning, suddenly became tight-lipped. They seemed to realize that they were on the edge of something incomprehensible and dangerous and must withdraw. But there was no stopping Hong. Tearfully, he offered money. The group slunk away sullenly, but the old man with the rotting teeth, sensing the urgency in Hong’s voice, returned to tell him what they had seen.

  About a month before, late in the evening, they had heard cries from the site of the accident – human voices, not the cries of lonely owls or other night creatures of the jungle. The cries gradually became louder: women’s voices shrieking, a child’s wail. The old man had actually walked out to see what was happening; he ran back when he saw figures moving about the waste ground, shadowy figures moving about in great urgency. There was no plane, only a massing together of dark human shapes who appeared to have lost their way.

  “Hantu, hantu,” cried the old man, shaking his head slowly. The hantu of all those who had died in the crash. How else could you explain the large number, the plaintive cries?

  “She was there, as she had promised,” sobbed Hong as we made our way back. “About a month ago, the old Malay man said. That was the anniversary, don’t you see? And I have missed it. I don’t know whether she’ll come for the next anniversary.”

  I was too bewildered to do anything except repeatedly nod assent; this easily perceived and reassuring form relieved me of all necessity of following Hong’s tortured train of thoughts as we drove back, so that I could sort things out in my own mind.

  The sequel to this story is most depressing. Hong suffered a nervous breakdown and was temporarily relieved of his duties at the university. He stays at home, obsessed by the pain of having missed the only chance of granting the last affectionate request of a deeply-loved woman, and waits impatiently for the next anniversary to come. He says she appeared to him in a dream and reproached him for not keeping the appointment. She said that she had waited a very long time for him to come, and asked why he never did.

  Hong’s appearance has all the signs of a man no longer in control of himself. His hair has grown long; he is unshaven and unkempt, his clothes unwashed. He waits for July 19; and only the thought of July 19 keeps him alive.

  “I shall be quite happy to die after that,” he says simply. “I shall wait for the anniversary for her to come again and then I shall see what she wants me to do. I should be quite happy to die after that, you know.”

  The Exhumation

  The notice of exhumation of graves was gazetted in The Straits Times; it was one of a rapid series of exhumation notices, for the government was impatient to reclaim the land from the dead to build houses and offices and supermarkets for the living.

  Before the bulldozers moved in, there was a flurry of activity on the part of my relatives, for grandmother’s grave was one of those in the marked cemetery, and everybody wanted to be assured that the old lady, who had lain in the earth these 30 years, would not be unduly upset by the disturbance.

  The first of the pacification rites was held at home, in front of the ancestral altar, over which hung a large portrait of grandmother.

  As a child, I had once observed a similar rite in which a member of the family expressed his contrition to a deceased relative – I cannot recollect what the offence was – but I remember the family member clasping a handful of lit joss-sticks and moving them up and down in front of the portrait, and repeatedly striking his chest in penitential sorrow. This time, I watched with much interest the efforts at pacifying the spirit of my grandmother.

  Joss-sticks were burnt and prayers chanted, but I took no part in the ceremony, believing it would conflict with my Christian beliefs. So I watched, an interested, curious and sometimes amused observer, especially when one of my aunts, a very old lady of 70, began talking to grandmother in the casual way she must have done when grandmother was alive.

  Aunt, looking up at grandmother’s portrait, and clasping a joss-stick in her hands, delivered a severe tirade on grandmother’s behalf against a merciless government that would plunder the homes of the dead. The speech, interrupted by the loud raucous sounds of the clearing of phlegm from the throat, all the more resembled a natural conversation, and it was hard not to picture grandmother listening and nodding in vigorous agreement. Several times Aunt asked for forgiveness, presumably for the government of Singapore.

  Grandmother, represented by the framed photograph above the ancestral altar with its comfortably familiar joss-sticks, scented flowers and oranges, was not in the least frightening. But grandmother, underneath the huge slat) of grey marble bearing her name, date of birth and date of death, did cause a shiver or two.

  I stood with the others surveying her tombstone, surrounded by tall lallang despite the fact that only six months before, the grass had been trimmed in preparation for the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts.

  I had insisted on coming, impelled more by curiosity and by that combination of adventurousness and frivolity that belonged to that period of life.

  I watched further pacification ceremonies; this time, a priest was called to say prayers over the grave in preparation for the actual ceremony of exhumation. My relatives would not hear of the impersonal business-like mass exhumation provided by the government for only a small charge; a private ceremony was preferable, though much more costly.

  I have almost come to believe that those people who make their living by close contact with the dead, such as morticians and embalmers, resemble the dead. The stereotype of the tall, pale embalmer with the huge sunken eyes, hollow cheeks and sepulchral stare is, I am now almost persuaded, based on truth, for all the embalmers and exhumers I have seen look like this or get to look like this, as if in concession to their calling.

  The exhumers for grandmother’s grave – there were two of them – looked just like resurrected corpses: two old, ashen-skinned men, stripped to the waist for the messy work of prodding about in the soggy ground around a rotting coffin ready to surrender its contents, moving about mechanically with expressionless faces, and now and again looking up with glazed eyes. Awed respectfulness was owing to the dead only if they were remote enough. Here, touching and picking up bones, the exhumers had no need of it.

  The coffin was too deeply embedded in waterlogged earth to be heaved up, and the two exhumers had to prise open the coffin lid, which they managed to very easily and expertly.

  Peering down, I caught a glimpse of a heap of bones, with only the skull distinguishable, covered in muddy water.

  I looked away – for it was the most desolate sight in the world, and I was overcome by a crushing sense of mortality. I had seen death, but somehow this heap of waterlogged bones that had been my grandmother, whom I remembered as a robust, severe-looking woman who bought bondmaids to be trained to work for her in her bridal furnishing business, troubled and saddened me beyond words.

  In the distance, in a cemetery that had just been cleared, the relentless sound of piling had already begun. Grandmother’s remains were quickly removed and taken away by the exhumers to be cleaned properly before they were consigned to the crematorium. Grandmother’s ashes would then be stored in a stone casket and laid to rest finally in a niche in a government columbarium.

  Throughout the exhumation ceremony, we had our handkerchiefs to our noses. By some strange twist of logic, I had persuaded myself that this was a mark of great discourtesy to a dead ancestor, and had been prepared to brave any discomfort rather than resort to my handkerchief. But when I saw everybody else nonchalantly covering up their noses, I did the same – with relief, for the odour was unbearable. Wasn’t it odd, I thought, for the
flesh had long since gone, but perhaps the earth around it had been imbibed with centuries of decay which was surrendered readily, once disturbed.

  That night we had dreams of grandmother – all of us. Some of the dreams were inconsequential, but I, who knew grandmother only from the dreadful stories I had heard about her severity towards the bondmaids and towards grandfather, and also from the one or two visits I had made to her house when I was a child, had the most vivid dream of all.

  In my dream, grandmother was present at her own exhumation. She took me by the hand and led me to a grassy verge from which a small group of people were watching the two exhumers at work.

  We stood there together and I was all the while conscious of a puzzling thought. How could grandmother be standing there with me, holding my hand when she had been dead these 30 years? For sometimes reality intrudes into dreams in the most devastating way.

  I looked up at her face, and it was a corpse’s face; when it slowly turned to look upon me, I was aware of an overpowering sensation of horror though I did not try to break away. Her grip upon my arm tightened

  and finally I burst out with the words, “Please, grandmother, don’t do this to me!”

  I woke up at this point and did not dare go back to sleep, fearful that the dream might return. I woke the family up and related the dream to them. They too had dreamt of grandmother.

  They listened intently to my narration, and then the aunt who had conversed with grandmother at the altar took hold of my arm, looked closely at it and exclaimed that grandmother had left the imprint of her fingers on my flesh. I recoiled, protesting; there were indeed some faint imprints on my arm, but they were not the imprints of fingers, probably the impression of the ribbed pattern of a pillow or blanket pressed closed in sleep.

  Aunt had dreamt of grandmother too: grandmother was on her death-bed, with tears running silently down the sides of her face on to her pillow. This aunt interpreted to mean that grandmother’s spirit was distressed at the disturbance of her grave.