The divorce was as amiable as any under the circumstances; we shared rights to Meng, for whose sake we had delayed the divorce until after he had finished the all important PSLE examinations which he passed with flying colours. Even before the divorce had come through, I was already seeing Y, and to this day, Y is branded by my family and Larry’s as being the one single rogue factor in the otherwise happy equation of our marriage. I got the house, the car, a sizable bank account – but oh! I would have given up all these, indeed, 10 times all these – if I could have got it back. But they said the operation was irreversible.
The puzzlement disappeared as soon as we met again, and I recognised both instantly. There we were, the three of us, in the clinic waiting for the doctor’s nurse to call us, sitting facing each other, our respective pieces of paper in our hands. I with the Sterilisation Certificate, hoping against hope that it would not daunt this doctor from attempting to reverse the operation and give me back my womanhood, she, the Virgin Prostitute holding her Virginity Certificate and waiting for a renewal before starting work in a Singapore hotel, and the other she, holding the Certificate of Non-Pregnancy now invalidated by the small swell beginning to show and hoping that it would be sufficient justification for a quick abortion.
We were a band of women whose sexuality had been reduced to pieces of paper signed by men.
We are the Paper Women.
The Rest Is Bonus
It was thanks to the Goddess Ukemochi that the people of Japan always had food to eat, for from her came the abundance of the rice in the fields, the animals in the mountains and the fish of the rivers and seas. One day, the great Amaterasu sent her brother, the moon God Tsuki Yomi, to serve Ukemochi in her heavenly palace. Now this was a great insult to his pride. Arriving at Ukemochi’s palace, he was presented with rice, fish and meat in a great banquet, but he refused the food, insisting that Ukemochi had vomited it out of her own body. Then his anger became very great indeed and he took out his sword and murdered the Goddess Ukemochi. So gentle and magnanimous was the goddess that even as she lay in death, she continued to bless him with abundance: from her stomach came rich harvests of rice, from her head came horses and oxen, from the black silk of her eyebrows came the threads for the weaving looms. When the Great Amaterasu heard of the murder, she was filled with rage against her evil brother and banished him from the heavens. He began to be ashamed of himself, and repented so deeply of the dishonour of his act that he remained hidden in his shame.
(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)
It was the last peaceful hour of the day for the family before the quiet of the vast rubber plantation would be shattered by the drunken roaring of the father on his way home from the town, the roar swelling to the preternatural howl of the doomed beast if he happened, in his crazed plunge through the dark forest, to hit his head against a tree trunk or drive his foot through a sharp root. But the hour of the father’s coming was not yet, so the mother and children could still be together, sitting quietly on the cool cement pavement outside their house, one in a long row of low wooden huts. Once painted a bright yellow to lend some domestic cheer to the grim lives of their inhabitants, the rubber tappers making their endless rounds in that vast implacable interior, they had lost the brightness and now stood in the dereliction of peeling paint, broken shutters, and faecal smudges left by children’s hands.
In the dim light cast out by the one unshaded bulb in the house, Meenachi and her six children huddled together, waiting. The growing hunger for the one meal of the day, clumps of curried rice washed over with milk, laid out on banana leaves on the floor but forbidden to all to touch until the father came home, caused the group to unhuddle and disperse, to look around for something to do, so as to distract themselves from the hunger. The three small boys, all with shaved heads to make for easier application of ointment on persistent scalp boils, and all with very hard, round stomachs above their tattered khaki shorts, wandered off and soon returned with an unripe jackfruit which they tried to prise open; the eldest, a girl named Letchmy, aged 10, had pulled out a plastic doll with one eye from under her blouse and was rocking it in her arms; the younger girl, a small skeletal child with matted hair, was unsteadily walking around a sleeping cat and prodding it with a twig, and the youngest child, a baby, naked except for a dirt-encrusted string around its buttocks, was crawling towards something with investigative interest.
Meenachi sat on the ground and leaned against the doorpost, dreaming of a nose stud which she had once seen in a goldsmith’s shop on one of the very rare trips to town: it was the most beautiful nose-stud she had ever seen, a rich red gem set in gold. She pictured it in all its resplendence, securely fastened on her nose above the left nostril.
Nose-stud vanished in the reality of head-lice: her daughter Letchmy, still carrying the doll, drew near for the regular exercise of de-lousing, lowering her head for her mother’s deft fingers to search her hair, pull out each hidden denizen and expertly crush it between thumb and forefinger. Then it was the mother’s turn to unloose her large knot of hair and spread out the long, dark strands for the daughter’s fingers to sweep through. It was an exercise of mutual comfort, and Meenachi once more leaned back, closed her eyes and dreamed, as Letchmy, with small, eager cries, kept count of her catch.
Nose-stud and head-lice vanished in the greater urgency of food: The baby, unseen by anyone, had crawled into the house towards the dinner on the banana leaves and was now sitting on it and eating it in fistfuls. Meenachi shouted, scrambled up and rushed to rescue the food, and it was in the midst of the pandemonium of the mother shrilly scolding, the baby screaming and the rest of the children crying over the despoiled dinner that the father appeared, unannounced. He stood at the doorway, one hand on the doorpost to steady himself, his blood-shot eyes trying to take in the meaning of this unwonted scene, his huge, glistening chest heaving with ominous energy. The noise stopped immediately, and a circle of pale frightened faces turned towards him.
That was all that was needed to trigger an explosion of that terrible energy: a tremendous roar and a huge fist raised to strike sent the children scattering in all directions, Letchmy adroitly pulling the baby up from the floor with one arm and grabbing her little sister with the other, leaving the mother alone to meet the impact of the hurtling fist. It crashed into her left cheek, then her left eye and sent her reeling to one end of the room where she hit the wall and slid down to the floor in a crumbled heap, crying softly, her long hair plastered to her wet face.
“Ai-yoooh! Ai-yoooh! ” moaned Meenachi.
Her husband, his breath coming out in short, sharp rasps, his fists still clenched with unspent fury, stood over her. She should have thought better than to moan; piteous sounds of supplication, like terror-stricken looks on faces, only goaded him to greater fury. He lifted a foot and dealt her a kick which sent her body skidding crazily across the now wet floor. Her cries subsiding to a thin, almost inaudible wail, she put her arms tightly around her belly and pulled up her legs around it in further protection, like the jungle creature that curls up into a tight ball in an encounter with the enemy.
The sight of his wife thus curled up in self-protection had the effect of a gesture of open defiance; with another roar he rushed upon her to smash at that defiance, forcing open her arms and legs. Her blouse, held together by three safety pins, burst open, flinging out her breasts and her sarong ripped to expose her nakedness.
“Aaarh-rh! ” he roared, and the violence of attack became one with the violence of sex, so that the pain of his fist upon her face and his foot upon her head was one with the pain of his thrusting ferocity between her legs.
She did not dare tell him that she was pregnant.
He was soon asleep, snoring and slobbering on her in his drunken wetness.
Raising her head slightly, she saw the frightened faces of her children at the doorway, and silently signalled to them to come in. She then eased her body out from under his, taking care not to wake him, stood
up, adjusted her clothes and got ready to feed her children with whatever could be saved from their dinner.
The goddess with the kind smile was her hope. In the morning when her husband had left for work, she gave instructions for Letchmy to take care of the other children, and with her offerings wrapped in a piece of cloth, she stole out of the house to the shrine, a small stone structure on the edge of the plantation where the goddess, no bigger than a doll but imposing in the wisdom of her enormous eyes and full breasts, and in the proliferation of flower and silver tinsel garlands round her neck, stood with one arm raised in blessing. Meenachi tremblingly undid the cloth bundle and brought out half a coconut, and some flowers which she arranged carefully at the feet of the goddess. Bowing her head in deepest supplication, she told the goddess of her troubles and begged for her help.
And this was what she told the goddess: her husband got drunk and beat her every day of the week. He smashed things in the house; there was no unbroken cup or saucer left and the pots and pans were dented and twisted beyond use. He wanted sex every day even when she was feeling very sick; her pregnancy this time was the worst and she felt sick all the time. He wanted sex with his daughter Letchmy whenever he was drunk. So far she had succeeded in getting the child out of the way, but she was not sure she could go on doing that much longer.
Meenachi’s litany of sorrows ended with her lighting a cloth wick in a small saucer of coconut oil, and raising it in final pleading with the goddess. She longed for a sign. If at that moment, a wind had arisen and swooshed around the stone statue, or a petal had suddenly detached itself and floated away or a bird alighted near the offerings, that would have constituted a divine promise of intervention to check her husband’s excesses. But the goddess, resplendent in her green, pink and purple paint and load of tinsel garlands, gave no such sign, only continuing to smile benignly.
Meenachi, parting the tangled masses of hair from her face to place the lit wick at the feet of the goddess, refused to be discouraged. Suddenly struck by an idea which gathered the sorrowfulness in her eyes into a look of clear purpose, she said: “Most merciful goddess, if you see fit not to do anything, I will understand and will still come with these humble offerings. If, however, you will be so kind as to take pity on me and do something to help me, I will return with better offerings – a full coconut, not this wretched half.” A coconut cost money, unless she searched the grass in the nearby coconut plantation for any that had fallen, but she was reckless with the need to complete the bargain with the goddess.
She looked beseechingly into the purple and pink face and thought she saw a smile of approval.
“I shall come back in a week,” said Meenachi, carrying the negotiations to a further stage by shrewdly setting a deadline for the goddess.
“One week,” repeated Meenachi, whose conceptualisation of time was always in terms of this unit, it being the basis for the paying out of wages on the rubber plantation and hence the chief regulating force of husbands’ moods: husbands beat wives more frequently towards the end of pay-week when the money had run out and no more trips could be made to the toddy bars in the town.
That night, a Tuesday and pay-day, her husband came back more drunk than usual, as expected. He slumped into a chair, eyes closed, then roared for his daughter Letchmy who had, in anticipation, gone to hide in a neighbour’s house. The sex after the beating was more painful than usual, as the pregnancy was proving to be unbearable; she begged to be allowed to get up, but he restrained her, laughing. She managed to slip away when he dropped off to sleep at last, and was violently sick as she squatted over the drain outside the house. On Thursday, he hit her on the spot where a swelling from a previous punch had barely subsided but with a mixture of mashed wild forest plants and coconut oil, she was able to get the swelling down. On Friday, the beating was after the sex, when he wanted more and she demurred, and he pulled her towards him by her hair and then slapped her. Two teeth were punched out on Sunday when she came to the protection of one of the boys who had annoyed the father but was able to wriggle himself free and run away.
Tuesday came round again, and with it, the visit to the goddess’s shrine, as agreed on. Meenachi, nursing a bruised eye, hurried out of the house with her cloth bundle of offerings. She fell at the feet of the goddess and opened the bundle, revealing a very large coconut, whole not half.
“Thank you, Goddess,” she breathed in the fullness of gratitude. “Thank you for helping me.” For during the week she had been hit only four days, not the full seven, a tremendous improvement, and besides, the hitting had not been on the belly, not even once, but only on the other parts of her body. Best of all, her daughter Letchmy had gone to stay with the neighbour’s mother, a kindly old woman who lived in the town, so that was one big source of worry out of the way. She aggregated her gains – three full days without any beating. A substantial bonus indeed, for which she was deeply grateful.
“Thank you, Goddess,” she said again, and with the same shrewdness of the week before, she added, “Please continue to help me and lessen my troubles. Next week I shall come again and maybe this time I will be able to bring a better offering than this humble coconut, maybe even a – ” Meenachi did not want to commit herself to such an expensive gift but it came out, “garland”. Garlands were unaffordable, but her recklessness grew with the conviction of the goddess’ growing concern for her.
That night nothing happened; her husband though drunk, went to sleep peacefully, and the next night, still nothing happened. There was only one moment of anxiety when he suddenly roused himself from his stupor to ask for his daughter. She told him where the girl was, trembling in her nervousness and readying her body for blows, but instead the man became all sentimental and maudlin, calling upon God to bear witness to his love for his child, bemoaning his unhappy life and wiping off the tears in his eyes with the back of his hand. He fell asleep soon afterwards, snoring loudly. Two nights later, the destructive energy reasserted itself fully: he bellowed his way home through the dark plantation, plunging through the trees with ferocious impatience to reach home and vent that energy.
The cause this time was a secret raging anger against larger forces beyond his control. There had been rumours of retrenchment because of the declining price of natural rubber brought on by new claims of synthetic, and he knew, from the general hostility of the plantation superintendent towards him, that he would be among the first to go. He tried to forget his fear and anger in drink, but by the time he staggered out of the toddy bar, neither had disappeared, and he was soon on his way home to make sure they were properly discharged. Several of the children who got in his way were thrashed, but Meenachi bore the full brunt of it. He sent her flying to the end of the room; she was too preoccupied with staunching the flow of blood from a reopened wound on the cheek, to remember to clasp her belly tightly and curl up into the protective enfoldment of arms and legs, so that the next moment he was kicking her all over her body. He watched her writhing and moaning on the floor, his muscles rippling with ancient hates and lusts.
Then she stopped moaning and lay very still. He bent down, peered at her and dealt a few vigorous slaps on her cheeks to wake her up, but when she continued to be totally motionless, he took fright, ran to the bathroom, came out with a bucket of water and splashed her face with it. Still she did not move, and then he noticed a pool of blood under her which was spreading outwards. He became panic-stricken, running hither and thither, clasping his head in his hands and blubbering in his indecisiveness. The hostile, hateful face of the superintendent loomed before his eyes and added to his panic: if the enemy should come to know that he was responsible for his wife’s death, there would be no end of trouble for him. The prospect of prison was frightening.
“Meenachi!” he yelled, shaking her by the shoulder. She stirred, and an eyelid opened.
“Meenachi, don’t die!” He laid her head on his lap and began rocking her gently, but she had lapsed into unconsciousness once more.
; * * *
“Forgive me, dear goddess,” said Meenachi at the shrine, two weeks later, still looking pale but otherwise recovered from her miscarriage, “for not keeping the appointment, but I was in hospital and was only discharged yesterday.” It was redundant information to an all-knowing deity, but deference required it. She had with her a large brown paper package which she now placed before the goddess with trembling self-consciousness.
“See, you have kept your promise, and so I have kept mine,” she said, smiling with growing pleasure as her fingers pulled out a garland of jasmine and gold tinsel and put it reverently round the neck of the stone statue, on top of heaps of the other garlands, but all definitely inferior.
The garland had been bought for her by her husband in an uninterrupted flow of amiability since her being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. He had hovered by her bedside, had been visibly nervous when he heard her being questioned by the hospital authorities about her miscarriage and the various bruises and swellings on her body, and had at last heaved an immense sigh of relief when she explained everything in terms of her general carelessness when moving about in the house doing housework so that knocks and bruises and other injuries were now second nature. She exceeded her husband’s expectations when, in reply to a blunt question by a sceptical nurse, she said that her husband had never laid a finger on her once in her life. He, too, on his part exceeded her expectations, indeed, to such a degree that she was now breathless in her impatience to tell all to the goddess.
“Thank you, Goddess, for it must be owing to you that he gave me this,” she cried, pointing, not to the broken nose but the nose-stud sitting unsteadily on it.
“Oh, Goddess, thank you!” She had with her a small broken piece of mirror which she carried in a fold of her sarong, to provide the continuous pleasure of gazing at the beautiful red gem set in gold, nestling precariously on the nose not yet healed, a bonus breathtaking in its munificence.
The Catherine Lim Collection Page 37
