The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  “Yes, of course, Mr Ong. Oh Mr Ong, please forgive me if I sound too ... too unreasonable but I wish you’d stop touching me ... you know ... touching me ... ”

  “Oh!”

  “Mr Ong, I don’t mean to sound rude or accusing, but I get very uncomfortable when you touch me on the ... on the behind and ... and ... in front – ”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Lee. I had no idea I was making you so unhappy. I offer no excuses for my behaviour. I assure you it will not happen again. Will that be alright?”

  “Yes, Mr Ong. Thank you so much for your understanding.”

  “Mrs Lee, I can’t tell you how truly sorry I am. I deserve all the contempt you can show me, and it will serve me right if you now speak your mind and tell me to my face what you have been suffering all these months because of me.”

  “Oh, Mr Ong, it will do me good to tell everything, since it has been a wretched secret burdening me. I had nobody to tell it to, knowing nobody would believe me.”

  “But I do believe you, Mrs Lee, and I believe you must have suffered intensely. So now tell me. There is no greater punishment for a sinful man like me than to have his sins flung in his face.”

  “Last month, Mr Ong, you called me into your office to handle a fax from Germany. While I was sitting at your table, you suddenly got up, came up to me and sat on the edge of the table, facing me, your fly unzipped. I did not know where to look, and kept my eyes down, but I knew you were looking at me all the time, enjoying my discomfiture.”

  “I’m really sorry. Mrs Lee. I’m indeed most ashamed – ”

  “On another occasion, Mr Ong, I was standing beside you with some letters when you suddenly remarked on the pearl necklace I was wearing, got up and pretended to examine it, all the time letting your hand slip lower down my blouse. Fortunately, someone knocked on the door then.”

  “Mrs Lee, I’m thoroughly ashamed – ”

  “Then just last week, Mr Ong, you called me into the office and told me you had something interesting to show me and you pulled out of your drawer a magazine opened to show a most disgusting picture of a copulating couple. You asked me, did you not, whether my husband and I had ever tried that position – ”

  “Mrs Lee, I beg you to stop. I’m most ashamed. I can hardly believe I subjected you to all these indignities – ”

  “Mr Ong, the very next day after that disgusting picture, you again called me into your office. You were not at your table and as I was looking around, wondering where you were, you called again and this time I saw that you were in the toilet and you said, in a voice that will haunt my worst nightmares, ‘Come here, there’s something I would like to show you! Quick, it’s waiting for you!’”

  “Mrs Lee, please forgive me. I’m ready to do anything by way of reparation. Please forgive me.”

  “Promise me you will never ever do any of those things again, or tell dirty jokes or touch any part of me.”

  “I promise.”

  “Promise me you will never do that to any other woman.”

  “I promise.”

  “That is all I ask of you, Mr Ong. Thank you.”

  Helen Lee’s fantasies, as she sat half dozing in the bus on the way to work, never shaped around roses and moonlit tenderness, only around a man’s understanding of a woman’s pain and a sincere promise to stop causing the pain.

  Today, she was going to try to make her fantasies come true.

  She knocked on the boss’s door, her heart pounding wildly.

  “Ah, Helen! Here you are! You are a little late, but never mind. Come in, come in.”

  “Good morning, Mr Ong. There’s something I would like to talk to you about, if I may. It’s very important.”

  The tone during the rehearsals was firm; now her voice went all unsteady and her hands began to feel cold. But the opening words had come off right, thank goodness. He looked up and grinned.

  “Sure, Helen. Do sit down.”

  “Mr Ong, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to be extremely frank.”

  He continued grinning at her.

  “Hey, this is a new you. I’ve never heard you speak like this before. But of course I don’t mind. In fact, I rather like you in this new mood. Shoot!”

  “I’ve been thinking about the matter for a long while, Mr Ong, and in fact have been quite unhappy about it, wondering what I should do. I thought it best to discuss it with you, rather than with my husband.”

  “Ah, so I take precedence over your husband? That sounds very promising, Helen!” And he gave her a wink.

  “Mr Ong, I want to talk about – I would like – ”

  “What would you like? Goodness, Helen, your hands are trembling! You must be very cold. Come, let me rub them. I’m very good at rubbing.”

  “Oh, no! No thank you, Mr Ong. Mr Ong, I ... I hope you will understand ... I’ve been here six months and I enjoy working for you very much – ”

  “Well, my dear, I’m glad to hear that! So you enjoy working for me? Well, I enjoy working with you too, dear, and perhaps one of these days, it will not be just with you, but on you and in you, I hope. What do you say to that? I love the versatility of the English preposition ‘in’, don’t you? Have you heard the joke about the couple in their cabin on a ship bound for India – ”

  “Mr Ong, please forgive me if I sound too ... too unreasonable, but I wish you would stop touching me ... you know ... touching me – ”

  “Ha! Ha! Ha! So that was it. Ha! Ha! Ha! How funny you are. But of course it’s unreasonable of you, Helen, to ask me to stop touching you. Very unreasonable indeed. A beautiful woman like you simply cries out to be touched. Look at yourself. Do you look at yourself in the mirror every morning, Helen? And I don’t mean with all those clothes on. I suggest you do. Only women with gorgeous bodies like yours have a right to. Excellent way of building self-esteem. But tell me, my dear, when did I last touch you? Where? How? Show me, my dear.”

  “Mr Ong, you mustn’t make fun of me. I’m very serious. I’m very unhappy.”

  “Tch, tch, tch! I don’t want you to be unhappy. You know that’s the last thing I want for my efficient, hardworking, totally loyal little secretary. But my dear, you still have not given proof for your accusation. You accused me of touching you. When was that? What did I do?”

  “Mr Ong, I was wearing a pearl necklace and you touched it and admired it, but you were only interested in ... in ... ”

  “In what, my dear? Tell me.”

  “In touching my breasts, Mr Ong!”

  “Ah, how strange the word sounds coming from you. But I like it. You know Helen, I’ve never heard you say ‘breasts’ or ‘thighs’ or ‘penis’ or ‘screw’. It’s okay to say them, you know. This is the age of emancipation for women. You say and do exactly what you like. So I touched your breasts, Helen. How did I do it? Like this?”

  “Please, Mr Ong. Don’t do this to me. This is no time for joking or playing. I’m very unhappy.”

  “But surely it does no harm to admire a woman’s lovely breasts? And you have the loveliest breasts I’ve ever seen, Helen. Nicer than my wife’s. I tell her to use those bras that improve the shape and thrust. What size – ”

  “Oh, please stop, Mr Ong. I’m only a simple secretary and I have to work hard to support my child who is in hospital and my husband who is at present unemployed – ”

  “But happily employed in other ways, my dear. How I envy him! While I go home quite tired out and unable to perform my husbandly duties as well as I would like to, he is all fresh and ready for you. How many times – ”

  “Oh, please stop, Mr Ong!”

  “Look at this picture, my dear. Isn’t it wonderful that they can do it in this position? I couldn’t if I tried. Maybe I should try – ”

  “Stop, Mr Ong, please stop!”

  He was once more sitting in front of her, his fly unzipped. She ran out, sobbing.

  At her desk, she quickly dabbed powder around her eyes, applied fresh lipstick and prepared for the day’s wor
k. Appealing to a man’s compassion for a woman did not work. Indeed a supplicant woman raises a man’s blood so that he wants to hit harder, rape more. She would have to think of some other way out of the bitterness. Tomorrow would bring its fresh store of bitterness, and the day after tomorrow yet a greater, but she would have to endure. The sobbing could not be in the open, only in the Women’s Room. Meanwhile, she would write to ‘Agony Aunt Aggie’ of The Evening Star. She would end her letter with, ‘Please advise me, but please don’t advise me to give up my job, because my husband who is at present unemployed gets violent every time we have money problems and also because I have a three-year-old son who was born with a defective heart and who will need a very expensive operation.’

  “Helen, would you please come in for a minute? And bring the Meyer file.”

  “Yes, Mr Ong.”

  Bina

  Woman, know that if you are a subject race socially, you move in the ancient literatures with the nobility and dignity of godlike spirits.

  Know that your womanhood has been held as sacred among the Athapascans and the Anatolians, among the Chinese and the Chibcha, among the Irish and Iroquois, among the Japanese and the Jicarilla, among the Egyptians and the Eskimos, among the Mashona and the Mexicans, among the Semites and the Scandinavians, among the Zulu and the Zuni. Woman, know this: that you hold up half the sky.

  (From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

  Bina, her baby sister on her hip, was nevertheless able to manage the 20 skips, and so claim the prize which was the skipping rope itself, a length of hemp rescued from the garbage bin outside old Abu’s shop. Her two friends, Fatimah and Zakira who had been turning the rope and counting in perfect unison, “One, two, three, four – ”, graciously handed over the prize which Bina expertly coiled and prepared to take home, to save against any future need. Meanwhile, she Jet her baby sister play with it, setting the baby on the hard earth of the playground, under a tree, where it sat contentedly chewing one end of the rope.

  “I could do 30 skips if I wanted to,” she said with happy confidence, adjusting her blouse which was held together in front by a row of safety pins, as well as the skirt which was too long and rimmed by dirt where it touched the ground.

  “Is it true that you are going to be married soon?” “Will your husband take you away, like Khalida’s?” The two interrogators, with solemn faces, faced Bina solicitously, touched by a sense of her tragedy and their own impending loss. For who could be a more wonderful playmate than Bina who skipped better than anyone, told stories and was ready to share her possessions? Once Bina saw a rupee at the bottom of a dried up well, in a clump of grass. She slid down, agile as a monkey, picked up the coin and clambered up, announcing the treasure and sharing it. Another day, she found a pencil, almost new, in old Abu’s garbage bin. Old Abu provided good things in his overflowing bins and good stuff for gossip in his odd ways: it was rumoured in the village that he went to a beautiful woman in the darkness of night and then discovered the next morning that she was a leper. The frantic preventive treatment by the village doctor had cost him hundreds of rupees.

  “You are going to be married. Your mother told our mother.” They dealt out, sadly, the confirmation of her fate.

  “I need not be married if I don’t want to!” cried Bina with a defiant toss of her head. The sheer impossibility of this claim left her two friends speechless, and they gaped at her. Their turn would come too, they knew, if the Arab men asked for them and offered their parents good bride money. Khalidah fetched $1,000, and Fauziah before her, only $800, because she was darker. The men, they were told, liked their brides fair-complexioned.

  “Keep away from the sun,” admonished a hopeful mother and, to reinforce Nature’s largesse, applied fine white powder liberally on the face of her 12-year-old, preparatory to the line-up of daughters for

  the inspection. In Bina’s case, Nature’s munificence to her parents had thrown up a startlingly fair child amidst a brood of dusky daughters; she had, moreover, a face like a doll’s, hair like heavy jet curtains, and breasts which though as yet no more than buds under her thin cotton blouse, had the promise of full-blown fruit within the year. Her price would definitely be more than $1,000 dollars, maybe $1,500, maybe even $2,000 – who knows? Her father’s hopes settled on this precious daughter. Soon the Arab men would be coming; his hopes soared.

  “I don’t want to be married,” cried Bina and now her large doll’s eyes were two limpid pools of terror, for she had heard the whispers, after Khalidah’s wedding day, of how the girl had to be rushed, torn and bleeding and hysterical, to the hospital. They were whispers only, started by the women and ending with them, with no risk of their ever being blown into a village controversy that would invariably involve the men: The men did not want controversy to put an end to a highly lucrative practice by which daughters converted into hard cash that in turn converted into immediate businesses, motor cycles, dowries for other daughters, educational opportunities for sons, food for the whole family for years to come. Bina, with her astonishing beauty and promise of more beauty, was all these. Already a courier, acting for a very wealthy Arab, had expressed interest, and the Arab himself was coming to see with his own eyes, before the final offer.

  The picture of Khalidah bleeding in ‘the secret place’ swam into Bina’s mind with frightening vividness, blending with the picture of a rag doll she had once, torn into two between the legs where her sister had tried to wrench it away, so that the stuff inside its body spilled out, making it limp and lifeless.

  “I don’t want to be married!” The cry had lost its defiance; it was now all frantic pleading, and the two interrogators who had started it all, suddenly lost their nerve and turned to run away, just in time to escape blame, for Bina’s mother appeared suddenly, looking very hot and cross.

  “So there you are!” she scolded. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Where’s Ameena? Oh my God, she’s eating dirt. How irresponsible you are, Bina! But quick, come home now. Quick!” She picked up the baby and pushed Bina in the direction of home, all the time shrilly scolding, “I told you, didn’t I, that today was the day, and you were not supposed to go anywhere and get all hot and dirty. Look at you! They’ll be here in half an hour, Father says. Oh child, why do you always give your mother so much trouble?” The mother, 32, had the furrowed brow of an old woman.

  In half an hour Bina was ready. The mother smiled through her furrows of care to remark, “My child, God has given you so much beauty. Thank God for his blessings.” She looked with pride at her daughter standing docilely in front of her; bathed, scrubbed, talcumed, wearing a new blouse and skirt, her hair properly oiled and coiled and decorated with a cluster of fragrant jasmine, her large eyes kohled to immense dark and luminous pools, and a little gold ring attached to her nose, she looked every inch the Child Goddess.

  Her father said, “$2,000, no less,” and severely warned the mother, “and don’t you appear too eager.” He was a peanut vendor, plying his trade in the dusty streets of the nearby town, saved from despair by the sudden and tantalising prospect of large and immediate profits that had nothing to do with peanuts. He watched the Arabs making their shrewd reconnaissance surveys in his village and the villages around, their white flowing robes hiding corrupt, corpulent flesh, and he prepared to match them, skill for bargaining skill.

  Looking at his daughter standing demurely with her eyes on the ground, he mentally adjusted the asking price to make it commensurate with her rare beauty, and looking at the prospective son-in-law, a 65-year-old Arab so corpulent he had to be helped, wheezing, in and out of the chair, he adjusted the price further. The old man, slumped in the chair, his soft dimpled hands folded tranquilly upon his enormous belly, looked at the three girls ranged before him, their heads bowed, and, as everyone had expected, instantly picked Bina, indicating his preference by a slight movement of his forefinger.

  “That one,” he rasped, “and tell her to look up, I want to see her face,” upon
which Bina’s father rapped out an order and she looked up. The Arab frowned, the mother gasped and let out a little scream, for they looked upon a contorted visage, eyes crossed horribly, mouth twisted grotesquely, and, for good measure, one cheek smudged black by a quick upward movement of the hand. The father shouted angrily, the mother ran up and shook the features back into normality, at the same time scrubbing out the smudge with one end of her sari. Bina, her stratagem of escape thus foiled, settled back into mute sullenness.

  The Arab laughed. “I like her spirit,” he said, and laughed again, this time in anticipation of the pleasure from that young, beautiful, vibrant body.

  “She’s too thin,” he said, for he liked his females both fair and plump. “Feed her well, I’ll be back in six months,” and he got up to go, his huge bulk disengaged from the chair by three pairs of helping hands. He threw some money at the father. “For her,” he said, “remember to feed her well. I come again in six months.”

  In six months he was back. Bina was two inches taller, 10 pounds heavier. She stood before him, dressed in a pink satin blouse and red satin skirt, a veil over her head, radiating so much health and beauty that he was almost moved to tears.

  The wedding was fixed for the following week. It was one of the most memorable events in the village for its lavishness, for the old Arab, thoroughly pleased with the bride whom he was going to take home with him the next day, spared no expense. At the wedding, fathers compared daughter prices: none matched Bina’s and her father was pronounced the luckiest man and her mother the luckiest woman, for from the abundance accruing to the father (who was able to pay the deposit for a sweets business) was allowed her a gold nose ornament which she proudly wore for all the neighbours to see.

  At the wedding, the bride, all the time she was sitting down and looking at her hands spread demurely on her knees, thought feverishly about what else she might do, having failed in the Ugly Face ploy. She kept thinking of Khalidah and the rag doll and went cold in her terror.