In the hotel room where their trunks were packed in readiness for the flight the next morning, she stood in a corner, still in her bridal clothes, staring miserably at him, the tears flowing freely. He, sitting in a chair, watched her, his face creased with extravagant good humour.
“Come, little one. Do not be afraid,” he rasped. “Come. Do not cry.”
She continued standing in her corner, the kohl causing little runnels of black down her cheeks. The sight of the girl, in her bridal finery, her small taut body poised for flight but held still by his mesmerizing power of proprietorship as he sat facing her, stirred his long dormant body to level after level of unexpected energy, surprising himself so that the excitation was both of flesh and spirit. He was monitoring his own bodily stirrings, as much as hers as she began to fidget in her corner, and was intrigued by both. He would wait a while longer, for waiting yielded immense dividends of pleasure.
So with languorous ease, he watched her from his chair, realising that this was the first time he had the chance for a long, uninterrupted and unobstructed view of her budding beauty: he watched her mouth, young and red and just now splendid in its tremulousness, her breasts which he thought, with self-congratulatory warmth, were the result of the good plentiful food he had ordered, her arms and her thighs, nurtured to the same firm, smooth, shiny roundness by the food.
He held out his hand gently to her and said, laughing, “Come, my little wife. Come to me, your husband.”
“You can’t sleep with me. I’ve got a disease!” cried Bina suddenly.
“Eh, what did you say?” cried the old Arab, delighted by this first attempt at communication by the child.
“You can’t sleep with me because I’ve got leprosy, like Abu’s woman,” said Bina.
The Arab, puzzled, said, “Eh, you what?” and Bina, in a rush of hope, exclaimed breathlessly, “I’ve got leprosy! When a woman has leprosy, she cannot sleep with a man. Abu slept with a woman who had leprosy all over her body, but he did not know and he – ” she dismissed from her mind the picture of Old Abu, strong and healthy in his 60th year and replaced it with that of a corpse, “died, because no doctor could cure him.”
The Arab, smiling through this charming recital, said, when she had stopped speaking and was panting and twisting a corner of her bridal veil in her extreme nervousness, “Ah, so you have leprosy, my dear. But how is it you look so pretty, my dear?”
“It’s all over my body, where you can’t see it,” cried Bina desperately.
“Ah, show it to me then!” cried her husband. “Show your pretty leprosy to me!”
By now the combined effects of the child-like banter, the sense of complete possession and privacy afforded by the locked hotel room, and the stimulus of the girl’s mention of her own body, brought about such an excess of pure animal energy that he sprang up from his chair, totally unaided, rushed upon her and dragged her to the bed. She hit out wildly, kicked, flailed, but he pinned her down easily with his whiskery face, his breath, his corpulence, silencing her at last with a stern, “Now stop that, or I shall tell your father.” His soft dimpled hands were incapable of beating or slapping, so he threatened punishment from others acting on his behalf, whether fathers or guards. She quietened down and lay still, pinned under him, her eyes staring wildly.
“That’s better,” he grunted and proceeded to undress her, first the blouse and the vest under it, gaping in awe at the small, firm breasts, the nipples erect in terror, not expectation.
“Ah!” he rasped, and he ‘ah’ed’ all the way down, as his fingers, trembling with joy, undid the belt, the skirt and last of all the underpants. Like the glutton that saves the best for the last, he ignored the prize and instead began nuzzling upwards, beginning with the girl’s belly, smooth as cream, and working the hoary bristles and wet old mouth towards her midriff, her breasts, her neck and finally her mouth. The girl, sick with fear, did nothing and said nothing, only making little noises like a small trapped animal, but at the moment when, in a brutal roar of release, he plunged into her and broke her, she screamed in the extremity of the pain and fear, her cry mixing with his in a simultaneous climax of man’s doing and woman’s receiving. If she had received a hundred scorpions, Bina would not have screamed in greater agony.
“Sssh, there now, not so much noise,” panted the husband, and he rolled off her and settled beside her on the bed, a mountain of soft flesh, quivering in contentment. He lay for a while, then raised himself on his elbow to peer into her face and slap it lightly with his fingers, saying, “There, there, you’re all right, wake up,” for she had fainted.
He lay for a long while, his whole person suffused by a delicious ease. Never had he felt so fulfilled. If he were not so out of breath, he would have got up to do a celebratory jig, so happy was he. To think he had believed his ability was lost forever! No doctor was now needed, only this young, beautiful bride he was going to take home with him. The vision of limbs, firm, supple, luscious, interlaced with his, multiplied in an endlessly stretching vista of pleasure down the years. He was to die, literally, in the throes of his lust, his huge, inert bulk pulled away from the poor little whimpering body under it by his two guards who had heard the child’s cries for help. But it was not Bina; it was another Indian girl brought over from another village, after a few years of his lying low. For what had happened was that Bina, in the plane to her new home, had plucked up enough courage, when her husband had fallen asleep, to tug at the hand of the air stewardess and draw attention to her plight. Her Ugly Face ploy and Leprosy ploy having failed, this third attempt at self-rescue worked. The stewardess swung into a high drama of rescue, and the story made headlines around the world: ‘Child Bride Rescued’, ‘Girl, 11, sold in Marriage to 65-year-old Man’, ‘The $2,000 Child Bride’. Highly embarrassed, the authorities did the needful – the girl was put into state custody; the Arab was disgraced, warned and sent home; the stewardess was commended and promoted and a team of Government officials descended upon Bina’s village to ‘investigate’ and write a report, sending fathers and marriage middlemen into hiding. Three people offered to adopt Bina, including the air stewardess and a well-known Indian feminist; her father, terrified by the publicity, tearfully offered to return every cent of the money to have his daughter back. But it was in the state interest to have Bina in state custody, and everything was promised to ‘restore her dignity as a female and give her a proper education’.
The Child Bride Affair, as it was called died out after a while and was forgotten altogether in the new interest generated by an event in another part of the world, the United States of America, where a remarkable series of Senate hearings was set up to investigate accusations of sexual harassment made by a woman against the President’s nominee for Supreme Court Judge. With or without the ‘Judge Thomas Affair’, as it was called, the ‘Child Bride Affair’ would have died a natural death; as it turned out, it was easily consigned to oblivion by the authorities’ regretful reminder that they could do nothing about such things since no formal complaints had been lodged. Hence ‘such things’ continued, and after a few years of lying low, the old Arab, unable to forget the extraordinary effect young bodies had on his, continued his search in the Indian villages and was able to take back not one, but several young girls, ending with the one on whom literally, as was earlier mentioned, he died in his last act of love. After Bina, he had had no more trouble, through the simple precaution of dispensing larger sums of bride money and enjoining, very sternly, upon the parents, the necessity of warning their daughters to shut up in planes, on pain of ‘serious harm’ to their families if they ‘misbehaved’.
So, given stark poverty on the one side and flowing money on the other, the bride trade continues and Bina’s little baby sister Ameena, just now toddling barefoot outside the house but already showing promise of the same startling beauty as her sister, will have to endure the same fate.
The Paper Women
According to the Chinese, the Goddess Nu Kwa,
during the time when the heavens and the earth shattered, quickly came to repair the damage, using coloured stones to patch up the skies and the four legs of the great turtle to support the earth. Indian records tell us that if the Goddess Devi were to close her eyes even for a second, the entire universe would disappear. According to the ancient Akkadians, it was the Goddess Mami who first placed life on earth, by pinching off 14 pieces of clay, making seven of them into women, and seven into men. Mexican records tell of the Goddess Coatlicue, who gave birth to the moon, the sun and all other deities. The Australian Aborigines explain that it is to the Goddess Kunapipi that our spirits return upon death, remaining with her until the next rebirth.
The testimony to woman’s power is for all time, whether scratched on clay, chiselled in stone, inked on silk or printed on paper.
(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)
“An easy operation,” my friend had said, by way of calming my fears, because I had confided in her the nightmares that started coming as soon as I had made the decision. That was about eight years ago. I saw myself sliced open and my women’s fecundity, a bunch of soft golden eggs, pulled out and squelched up. I would wake up panting in terror and once woke Larry who stirred, grunted and rolled over to fit snugly into any receptive curve of my body, as he liked to do when asleep. I think I had six of these nightmares, each more horrendous than the last; in the final one, I hung, like a plucked chicken from the ceiling, my raw insides being slowly enticed out by gravitational suasion, until someone (a nurse, I think) walked by, looked up and matter-of-factly stuffed them back.
But the reality was far, far removed from the nightmare.
“You mean it’s all over?” I asked. I was still groggy from the anaesthetics, but felt not the slightest pain.
“Yes, it’s all over,” smiled the nurse.
“Can I go home?” I asked.
“You need to rest a day here, and then you can be discharged,” said the nurse.
Of course, Larry and I did not want to talk about the operation which could not have been a very comfortable subject for discussion, but we had talked, weeks before, of the subject that had made the operation necessary. It had begun with Meng’s failing to get into the kindergarten of our choice, the best kindergarten in Singapore. Larry was furious. The principal had told him that Meng was 122nd on the waiting list. It was highly regrettable parental negligence not registering him in that kindergarten as soon as he was born. Now he was three, and it was too late.
“I don’t want the same thing to happen to the boy when he reaches school-going age,” said Larry grimly. I knew he had in mind the best primary boys’ school in Singapore for which parents would have offered immense bribes, but since this was not one of the normal channels for cooperation, they had to resort to other measures.
The surest one was for the mother of the child to undergo sterilisation at a government hospital and produce proof thereof, upon which the school, having been previously briefed, would immediately enrol the child. This measure was in line with the government’s goal to achieve national prosperity through strict population control: Singapore women were alarmingly fecund and Kandang Kerbau Maternity Hospital had the dubious distinction of registering one of the highest birth-rates in the world. A slew of birth control measures, including aggressive sloganeering, public haranguing, employment disincentives and income tax penalties, appeared not to work. Then somebody hit on the brilliant idea: If parents wanted to send their children to the established premier schools of Singapore, the mothers would have to produce sterilisation certificates. For Chinese parents put such a high premium on the education of their children, especially their sons, that they would be prepared to lose an arm and a leg to secure all the opportunities they could for the sons’ advancement in this world. So what was the loss of a pair of ovaries? The population control policy worked like a dream.
I handed over a copy of the sterilisation certificate to the school principal, Larry was very pleased, and our son Meng got into an excellent school of our choice where he did extremely well so that each time he came back with school prizes and glowing report cards, Larry beamed and patted him and gave him expensive presents, while I congratulated myself on the wisdom of my decision.
I wished, though, that other problems in our marriage could have been just as easily solved. Consider: Husband gets angry because Wife is showing too much interest in her career. Wife goes for operation to remove ‘Career Gland’. Husband complains Wife does not love him. Wife goes for operation to put in ‘Love Husband’ gland.
There is no point going into the problems now. They are so complex and yet seem no more than accumulations of the most appalling trivia that they defy analysis. It is best to cut through this marital Gordian knot by simply settling on incompatibility. About 10 years after the operation, when I was 36, we decided that things were not going too well and like many couples before us, we thought to give our marriage a second chance by going on this extended holiday, sometimes coyly referred to as the ‘second honeymoon’.
A tour of Bangkok and Manila could be managed despite our busy work schedules; Larry got ‘special’ leave from his company (he said his boss was very understanding) and I managed to get what is known as ‘no pay leave’ from my company.
Now I confess, to my embarrassment, that the holiday did not have the desired effect and that shortly after we returned, we decided to separate. I further confess, with some self-reproach, that in spite of the very lavish treatment during the 10 days of the tour – Larry took me to the best hotels, most expensive restaurants, most exclusive shopping areas in a frenzy of spending to reclaim lost marital ground – I remember nothing of this second honeymoon.
Except two small incidents, and very inconsequential ones, at that.
We were in a hotel in Bangkok, certainly one of the best in the city and one highly recommended by a business associate of Larry’s. Alas for the futility of a hotel’s expenditure of effort and money upon indifferent guests like myself! I sat in a corner of the hotel foyer, absorbed in thought, waiting for Larry who was supposed to meet me there, impervious to the blandishments of hotel chandeliers and floral extravaganzas and thick carpets.
“Ma’am.” The small voice made me turn round. I saw a young Thai girl standing in front of me and holding something out to me. It was a scrap of paper, a receipt, whatever, which must have dropped out of my handbag when I had earlier opened it to pull out a piece of tissue. She was a very pretty girl, about 14 or 15 at the most. I took the piece of paper from her and was wondering whether to offer her some money and how much, when she turned and walked back to join a small cluster of young-looking girls like herself sitting quietly in a corner. They looked like they were getting ready to go on a trip, and waiting for someone to herd them into a bus or van. They all had the lustrous eyes and hair and burnished skins for which Thai women are famous.
“Who are they?” I asked one of the hotel attendants, a young man who called himself ‘Tommy’, spoke good English and seemed more sociable than the rest.
“Virgins,” he said. “Virgin prostitutes. With good proof. Their price is much higher.”
I puzzled over the contradiction in terms.
“Where are they going?” I asked.
“To Hong Kong,” he said “The next group arrives this evening, to replace them.” I would have liked to know more but decided not to engage the friendly, young man in conversation that could prove embarrassing. Besides, Larry would not approve. I remembered that Grandfather, when he was already 72, still demanded virgins from the pool of bondmaids in Grandmother’s household, for the act of defloration conferred upon an aging man great powers so that he rose from the de-virginised body revitalised.
I saw the girls being herded into one of the hotel vans by a tall dark man. The girl who had returned me the receipt saw me, smiled and gave me a look which I returned – a strange look that established, in some indefinable way, a small bond of affinity that said, “We are going to meet again
.”
I did not tell Larry about the Virgin Prostitutes.
“Ma’am.” It would appear I had got into the habit of dropping things from my handbag. This time it was in Manila, in a busy shopping centre. The woman who was probably in her 20s had one child on her hip and another by the hand, and it was this child who, prompted by the mother, shyly held out the air ticket I had dropped. Larry was aghast at my carelessness; he took over the air ticket for safekeeping in his wallet. I gave the child some money, and the mother smiled and began talking to me. “You from Singapore?” she said cheerfully. “I got a sister working in Singapore. She earns good money.” Filipinas were pouring into Singapore to work as domestic servants, but not before they had given a written undertaking to the Government that they would not get pregnant.
I don’t remember what I said to her, probably some inanity about the beauty of her country and the friendliness of the people. Then she gave me a look, and I swear it was that strange affinity-establishing look again which sent a little thrill through me.
“We are going to meet again,” it said, and I said, “Yes,” before Larry hustled me away. From that moment, the three of us had become curiously linked as a trio in my mind, three women who by no stretch of the imagination belonged together: myself, a 37-year-old woman executive from Singapore with a Master in Business Administration degree from British Columbia University, she, the child-woman prostitute working in a Bangkok hotel and the other she, a young housewife from Manila with two small children, envious of her sister who had come to Singapore to work as a maid.
“How was the second honeymoon?” The slyly good-natured question would have elicited a totally inappropriate reply: I met a little girl prostitute in Bangkok and a young Filipino mother in Manila, and now we seem to form a sisterhood and I am puzzled as to why.
The Catherine Lim Collection Page 36
