The strategy worked. The newlyweds enjoyed conjugal bliss for the first few years. As a young bride, the chatty and affable Aunty Seah thawed and mollified the dark and taciturn Black Cougar. All the neighbours were invariably fond of Aunty Seah, and Black Cougar remained comfortably silent in her shadow. Although his towering frame dwarfed his wife, he looked tame standing beside her, as an ominous and brooding cougar would, standing beside its trainer. The two came across as an odd couple blessed with a perfect match.
Things changed after Aunty Seah suffered her miscarriage. During her subsequent spell of depression, the uncommunicative Black Cougar was ill-equipped to lend her the emotional support she needed. The couple began to quarrel bitterly. Black Cougar quickly regressed to a surly state and started to pick fights at work. Before long, he was asked to leave. His brother-in-law, Boss Kwok, realised that Black Cougar could not function in a congenial environment. He spoke to someone he knew at the Apollo Night Club and landed Black Cougar a job working as a bouncer.
For the first time in his life, Black Cougar’s combativeness became his strength. Not only did he win respect from the other bouncers, he won the admiration of quite a few hostesses. They began to pamper him and brew him herbal soup with black chicken or fusion tea with powdered deer penis. In contrast to the ongoing cold war with his wife, these warm gestures from the ladies proved too much of a temptation. Black Cougar soon took up with one of them. When it became necessary to reciprocate with gifts of jewellery and chilli crab suppers, Black Cougar stopped bringing money home. That marked the point of no return for his dwindling marital bliss.
Over the next two decades, Black Cougar learned to compartmentalise his life. Between sundown and midnight, he was a carnal creature and respected bouncer at the Apollo Night Club. In broad daylight, he regressed to a shadowy existence at home, detested by his wife and ignored by his neighbours. He could not remember the last time he had a proper conversation with any of them. That was, until Mary Lao suddenly decided to start one.
Black Cougar’s initial confusion and suspicion quickly diminished as Mary Lao made clear her proposal. She wanted him to introduce her to the hostesses at Apollo Night Club. For his effort, Mary Lao would compensate him with a commission cut for every policy she sold.
Brows furrowed, Black Cougar took a long, hard look at Mary Lao. He could detect a fire in her eyes, a hunger for money and success. Beyond that, he could not imagine how she could possibly connect with the ladies at Apollo Night Club. They were of an entirely different world. Wordlessly, Black Cougar shook his head. She would only be wasting her time.
Mary Lao persisted. She stayed up late and waited for Black Cougar to return from work. A freshly brewed cup of tea in one hand and a chilled can of Tiger Beer in the other, she proceeded to join him for his night smoke. Mary Lao kept talking, but Black Cougar kept quiet. By the end of the second night, Mary Lao was reduced to begging. Still, Black Cougar said no.
“Can you at least tell me why you won’t give me a chance?” Mary Lao pressed.
“Because,” Black Cougar sighed, “you will only end up embarrassing yourself.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Black Cougar jiggled his can of beer and gestured at Mary Lao with his cigarette. “Let’s say I agree, and I bring you to the supper place where the girls go after their shift. They will offer you a cigarette, but you will say no. They will order a jug of beer to share, but you will choose to jiggle your tea bag over your cup of boiled water. Do you think the girls will warm up to you when you make no effort at all to blend in? You will only be embarrassing yourself.”
Mary Lao was stunned. It felt as though Black Cougar had just hit her with a hammer and cracked open her skull to let in necessary light. It was also suddenly clear that the man was willing to help her.
The next two nights saw Mary Lao come prepared with a six-pack and her own packet of Marlboro Light. Her initial attempts left her choking and coughing, and she saw Black Cougar guffaw for the first time. The noise they made woke some of the neighbours. Mary Lao spotted them adjusting the window sashes and peeping through the gaps. She knew her behaviour and the company she kept would no doubt trigger a scandal among the neighbours. But she chose not to be concerned.
The following week, Black Cougar arranged for Mary Lao to join him at the open-air seafood eatery near Apollo Night Club shortly after midnight. Mary Lao was surprised when Black Cougar introduced her as his goddaughter. But the reason soon became apparent. The ladies from Apollo warmed up to her immediately, offering her cigarettes and constantly refilling her beer mug. They teased Black Cougar and interrogated him over how many more ambiguous ‘goddaughters’ he had hidden all over the island. It was all in good fun.
Mary Lao heeded Black Cougar’s advice to keep quiet and listen. The ladies gossiped about their clients, boasted about the gifts of jewellery they received and cursed the misers who tipped badly. They bantered about the newest bouncer to join the team, a tense and shy young man and jestingly challenged one another to tame the stud and diffuse his tension. There was no lack of laughter throughout the supper. Mary Lao did not get a word in about insurance, but enjoyed herself thoroughly. At the end of the night, the ladies warmly bid Mary Lao farewell and asked her to join them again.
Mary Lao did just that. She took time to get to know the ladies. By the time she revealed that she was in insurance, they were already fairly comfortable with her as a friend. Mary Lao had also learnt to speak their language. Instead of discussing death and illness, Mary Lao discussed buying 20,000–30,000-dollar jewellery in instalments, leveraging on the mechanism of an endowment policy. Over the weeks, Mary Lao became the person they went to for advice on how to invest in a jewellery fund.
Mary Lao’s husband was unhappy that she stayed out till four in the morning and slept in late. He was also uncomfortable about her spending so much time with the sinister Black Cougar. He complained that she was setting a bad example for Gimme Lao by picking up drinking and smoking. Was she even aware that the neighbours were gossiping about her?
Mary Lao sighed silently and made a tired attempt to make her husband understand. The reason all the neighbours were gossiping was because they were ordinary people living ordinary lives who abided by ordinary codes of conduct. Mary Lao herself had no intention to be ordinary. Neither did she want her child to be. If anything, she would be disappointed if Gimme Lao turned out to be an obedient student who abided by all the school rules. She would rather train him to challenge the status quo and grow up to be a thinking man.
That became the fifth of Mary Lao’s Five Rules of Success. Always question the boundaries.
As her husband unfurled the morning papers and hid his look of anger behind the news headlines, Mary Lao suddenly felt sad. She was certain that she was destined to reach new heights in life. She just wasn’t certain that she could bring both her husband and her son along with her.
FIVE
GIMME LAO AND Omala swore to be friends forever. The two shared the best bites in their lunch boxes, reserved buddy seats on the school bus and kept one another’s secrets. No one but Gimme knew that Omala was already betrothed. No one but Omala knew that Gimme had committed murder.
Omala’s father had two brothers. The older one who bore Sabitha and her siblings had passed away. The younger one had never married, but devoted himself to serve at the Hindu Temple of Krishna at Waterloo Street as a keeper. His name was Anandan, and as far as his nieces and nephews were concerned, he was the greatest storyteller ever. Once a week, Omala and Sabitha’s mothers left the children at the temple while they did their night shopping. For an hour or two, Uncle Anandan would entertain the children with mythological tales. He allowed them to sit, sprawl or lie down on the cool cement floor and pointed his finger upwards to draw their attention to the many painted portraits that lined the ceiling. He swirled his finger around in random patterns while the children giggled in anticipation, until he suddenly straightened his arm and pointed at one
of the portraits. The child that could shout out the name of the deity won himself the privilege to lie down with his head on Uncle Anandan’s lap. Omala was the quickest among the children. More than anyone else, she loved to bury her cheek in Uncle Anandan’s folded thighs and hear him spin his tales.
Among all the Hindu deities, Hanuman the Monkey God was their collective favourite. Uncle Anandan serialised the Hanuman tale and spun it over the course of many weeks. From his very first act of mischief, plucking the sun out of the sky, to his amazing courage and wit battling mighty demons in the epic Ramayana, Hanuman was an inspiration to the children. The boys took turns playing Hanuman as they re-enacted the Battle of Lanka and led an army of monkeys to defeat Lankini, Lord of the demons. When Omala grew tired of playing the captive Sita awaiting rescue, she asked to play Hanuman. But her brothers and cousins would not hear of it. Whenever they ran short of female roles, they allowed the girls to play soldiers or demons. But never Hanuman the Monkey God.
When Omala complained to Uncle Anandan, he chuckled and confessed that there was a limited choice of heroic roles for little girls in Hindu mythology. Powerful goddesses, like Saraswati and Lakshmi, were invariably the wives of even more powerful male deities, like Brahma and Vishnu. Kali, the goddess of time and death, was a trifle dark and violent, while Durga, who had 10 arms and rode a tiger, was too fierce. “Why don’t you like playing Sita? She is a very nice lady, and Lord Rama loves her very much,” Uncle Anandan added.
“But Sita does nothing useful!” Omala whined.
“She does,” Uncle Anandan defended the poor Sita. “She is the humble wife of Lord Rama. I am sure she cleans and cooks and looks after her husband like your mother looks after your father. That keeps her busy and useful.”
“But I don’t want to clean and cook,” Omala frowned. “I want to join in the battle, like Hanuman does.”
“You can join in the fun after you finish washing the dishes,” Uncle Anandan teased. “It is the duty of all wives to keep the household clean. Of course, you will be lucky if you are the wife of Chandra the Moon God. He has many, so they can take turns washing the dishes.”
“How many wives does Chandra have?’ Omala enquired, her eyes as round as dinner plates.
“All of 27!” Uncle Anandan laughed. “They were all princesses of King Daksha Prajapati. Chandra the Moon God visits one a night, which means you are only kept busy one night per month serving your husband. You are free the rest of the month to do whatever you want.”
Omala did not get that Uncle Anandan was teasing her. One week later, she leaned close to Gimme Lao in the school bus and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone, but I just got married. I am now the wife of Chandra the Moon God.” When Gimme Lao gave her a blank look of incomprehension, Omala had to explain herself. She had spent several nights thinking about it. If she only had to wash the dishes once a month, she would have so much time to do what she wanted. She could have all the adventures denied Sita, the lovely but useless wife of Lord Rama. So she found out from Uncle Anandan which portrait belonged to Chandra and in a private and unsupervised moment mimicked a quick ceremony to betroth herself to the deity-husband she needed to see only once a month. Gimme Lao was the only person she disclosed her secret to. He was to keep it to himself. If he betrayed her, she would unleash her fury on him with the violence of Kali the Goddess of Death and strangle him with the 10 hands of Durga, the one who rode the tiger.
Gimme Lao paled upon hearing Omala’s threat. He had been consumed with guilt over a dark secret for the past two days. This threat by Omala was all it took to break down his defences. Gimme Lao took in a deep breath and told Omala he would be the keeper of her secret if she promised to reciprocate likewise. Two days ago, he had committed murder.
The chain of events was triggered several weeks ago, when a regular customer suffered a fatal heart attack while Barber Bay was shaving his sideburns. By the time the paramedics arrived, the old man was unequivocally dead. Barber Bay knew that the old man occupied a single bedroom unit in the adjacent block all by himself. None of his neighbours had seen anyone visit him, so there was no way his relatives, if there were any, could be contacted. In the end, the town council took over and dealt with the burial and property disposal matters. In the midst of the confusion, Barber Bay neglected to inform the town council that the deceased had left a caged bird at the barbershop. It was a hopping little yellow eye finch that sang incessantly. By the time he remembered, the town council refused to take in the extra item of trouble.
Barber Bay was a kind and considerate man. It was his habit to keep the radio on the entire day for the stream feed of news and music, and he felt that the yellow eye finch would not enjoy the noise. He imagined that if Grandma Toh took in the caged bird, the daily toasting of sambal chilli in the kitchen would be torture to the poor creature. In the end, he approached Gimme Lao’s father for help.
The novelty of having a singing bird in the house intrigued Mary Lao for two days and Gimme Lao for two weeks. By the third week, the duty of feeding the yellow eye finch and cleaning the cage became the exclusive responsibility of Gimme Lao’s father. Unlike the other two, Gimme Lao’s father grew increasingly attached to the yellow eye finch. He located a coffee shop in the neighbourhood that provided a trellis framework for hanging birdcages and made it his Sunday routine to bring the yellow eye finch along for a breakfast gathering with other bird lovers. Mary and Gimme joined him once, but failed to discern the music from amidst the cacophony of competing vocals from two dozen singing birds. Thus, the Sunday routine remained his alone.
The yellow eye finch could have lived the rest of its natural life in the cage in Gimme Lao’s household, were it not for the quarrel Gimme Lao’s parents got into over dinner one night. Mary Lao again urged her husband to sit for the certification examination for insurance, so that she could enlist him as a sales agent. She did not even require him to do actual sales. She would close the sales herself but park the cases under his account, so that the company would pay them twice, once under his direct sales commission and once more under her managerial cut. But Gimme Lao’s father stubbornly refused. Everyone in the company would know he was a dummy agent and laugh at him behind his back.
Frustrated, Mary Lao launched a tirade. How could he, at the age of 36, harbour no ambition whatsoever? Was he content to settle for the meagre pay of an administrative clerk for the rest of his life? Did he not notice that all the other bird lovers who gathered for their Sunday routine were either retirees or bums who would amount to nothing in life? Did he understand the meaning of ‘wan wu sang zhi’?
Gimme Lao did not understand the meaning of ‘wan wu sang zhi’. By the blush on his father’s face, it could not be anything but a derogatory term. The next day, Gimme Lao asked his Chinese language teacher in school about the term.
The teacher took the opportunity to explain to the entire class the historical background to the idiom. There once was a Chinese emperor who was so enamoured of cranes, he reared a school of them in the palace gardens. Not only did the emperor spend all his time admiring the cranes to the point that he neglected his duties, he declared that the cranes had the right of way when they crossed paths with the ministers and generals. By so doing, the emperor unwittingly incurred the silent wrath of his subjects. Eventually, when the northern barbarians launched an invasion, the generals refused to obey the emperor’s order to take up arms. As a result, the poorly trained army, led by the incompetent emperor, was swiftly crushed and defeated. Historians picked up the lesson and condensed it into the idiom ‘wan wu sang zhi’—one who is excessively enamoured with one’s hobby will neglect one’s true calling in life and amount to nothing respectable.
“The generals should have killed all the cranes before the emperor got too involved,” Gimme Lao opined. “They could have saved the country.”
“Oh no, that would be an unnecessarily cruel thing to do!” the teacher exclaimed. “The generals could perhaps have released the cranes in th
e wild. That is the humane thing to do. But then they would incur the wrath of the emperor and bring danger to themselves and their families. Politics is really too complicated.”
Gimme Lao contemplated the teacher’s solution and decided it could be applied to the problem at home. He waited patiently till he found himself alone one night when his father was out for his weekly chess game and his mother had left for an insurance sales appointment. Gingerly unhinging the birdcage from the hook in the ceiling, he brought it to the kitchen window and lifted the cage door. The yellow eye finch had to be coaxed to abandon the comforts of the cage and head out into the unknown. Gimme Lao then hung the cage back and proceeded to do his homework in the living room.
It took Gimme Lao’s father all of two minutes after he stepped into the house to discover the horror of the empty birdcage. He let out a shriek and retraced his steps into the living room. “The bird’s gone! Do you know what happened?”
Gimme Lao looked up with practised bewilderment and asked what was the matter.
Gimme Lao’s father sat down heavily on the sofa and stared unseeing at the blank television screen. The look of shock was frozen on his face. Gimme Lao made a show of going into the kitchen to investigate. Upon his return, his father was angled forward, his face hidden in his palms.
“You must have forgotten to lock the cage door, Dad.”
Gimme Lao’s father shook his head slowly. When he finally removed his hands, there was a look of furious hatred in his eyes. “Never mind. I know what happened. Just do your homework.”
Let's Give It Up for Gimme Lao! Page 9
