I did a slow blink.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Cat got your tongue?”
The class laughed. They were enjoying this. But she was growing annoyed, which was not in her nature. Does silence really have this power to change people?
“Mel,” she said again, lower, more firmly. The fun Mrs. De Souza was fast disappearing, leaving behind only the teacher. The authority figure. The disciplinarian. But how does one discipline silence? Is silence submission or dissent?
“Pick up your book and read the next passage.”
I picked up the English textbook, staring down at the jumbled words. The passage had something to do with a criminal getting caught and going to jail. For some reason, I felt like that criminal. I wanted to cry, but no tears would come, no matter how hard I tried.
Next to me, Annie raised her hand with a sigh. “Um, Mrs. De Souza, I think she’s not feeling well.”
Ah, the sickness card. It was a card I never played, but it might prove handy this time around.
Something softened in Mrs. De Souza’s face. “Oh. Well, why didn’t you just say so, Mel? Do you need to go see the school nurse?”
I shook my head adamantly.
“Are you sure?”
I switched to nodding.
“Well, OK, if you say so. School will be over soon, so why don’t you just sit down and you can go home soon?”
Released from my impossible task, I sat down, and someone else was called to read instead – a tall, friendly-faced boy named Joe. Annie turned to me with a frown. “Mel, don’t you think you’re taking this a bit too far?”
I put my pencil to my notebook, scribbling furiously and underlining the words before showing it to her:
NO. I MADE A PROMISE.
She didn’t say anything else, folding her arms over her chest. Now, my silence became hers.
×××
On Saturday night, Papa took me out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant so we could spend some time together. I couldn’t remember the last time we had done this. It was just the two of us now, and I felt guilty just for going out to have a fancy meal.
“This is nice,” he commented, fiddling with everything on the table available for fiddling purposes: napkin, chopsticks, soy sauce.
I nodded a few times, staring at the menu. The waiter came – not Japanese, not even local, which I found ironic.
Papa ordered first – it was one of our unspoken rules. Then wordlessly, I pointed at what I wanted, while Papa’s brows furrowed more and more.
“That’s all?” the waiter asked. I nodded.
“Mel,” Papa said disapprovingly at my rudeness, before turning to the young man. “I’m sorry.”
The waiter smiled and answered in halting English. “No need to say sorry. I have a sister like her. Deaf since baby.”
“Deaf??” Papa was stunned.
The waiter sauntered off, leaving Papa no room to say anything else. He turned to me. “What’s wrong with you, Mel? Why are you not speaking?”
I laid my elbows on the table, lifting my shoulders in a shrug.
He gazed at me, pensive for the longest time. “Are you punishing me? Is that it?”
Not you, Papa. I shook my head, reaching out and laying my hand on his. He looked down sadly at my hand, then said: “I’m hoping ... that if we do happy things, maybe we can remember how. To be happy again, I mean.”
He was trying. That was something at least. But I didn’t believe it would work. Here we were while Mama was lying in a hospital bed, alive and yet not alive. I’d been keeping track of the days in my notebook – 118 days, or almost four months. Almost four months of not moving or eating or talking, just lying there, living through machines.
What about us left behind? A part of me was stuck with her on that hospital bed, trapped, waiting for what would come next. In my dreams, she was a tightrope walker, balancing high in the sky, and I was watching to see which side she would fall on: ours, or the side where we would never see her again.
×××
My exams were coming up. I studied hard, because I knew it was what Mama would want. In my mind, I thought that maybe if I was a good student, a good daughter, she’d choose to come back to us instead of going to that other place.
The real problem cropped up when it came to my oral examinations. We laughed at them of course. They don’t matter, we’d say. You’d have to be an idiot to fail. I called in sick on the day of my oral exam, but they just rescheduled it. There was no running from it.
This was like Mrs. De Souza all over again, I thought, as I approached the table and sat with the examiners. A passage to read. A picture to describe. The examiners looked at me, waiting. A man and a woman. The woman gave me a smile that was meant to be encouraging. She reminded me so much of Mama in that moment.
After a few seconds, I got up and turned around.
“Wait, where are you going?” the man asked. I didn’t answer or so much as look back.
When Mrs. De Souza heard what had happened, she called Papa. He left work early to come down to the school and talk to her. They talked for almost an hour, while I waited in another room.
I imagined the things she was saying to him: Something’s wrong with her. I’m concerned. You need to get her professional help.
More trash.
As I sat there, a few boys from my class walked by.
“Mel, heard you failed your oral!” one of them said to me, laughing. “Got a zero! A rotten egg!”
I wanted to tell him to shut up, but that would have meant speaking.
“Are you dumb?” another boy crowed. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t talk? Huh? Just move your lips and T-A-L-K lah! Not so difficult, right?”
They broke into laughter, until one of them – Joe – said, “Enough. Let’s go.” He looked at me apologetically before they left for soccer practice.
After they were gone, Papa emerged from the classroom, his face grave. “Mel,” he greeted me tiredly. He looked at me, waiting for something, it seemed. Probably something that would prove Mrs. De Souza wrong.
Instead, I slipped off my chair, took his hand and nodded for us to go. I saw the way his shoulders deflated as he led me away.
×××
The next day at school, someone passed me a note in class. I thought maybe it was from one of my friends, but that seemed unlikely because they now treated me as if I didn’t exist. They allowed me to sit with them in assembly and recess, but I was just there. Invisible.
I opened the note. It said, ‘Sorry those idiots bullied you. – Joe’
His handwriting was looped and a little messy. I wrote below it, ‘It’s OK. Thank you.’ I passed the note back, but soon it came my way again.
‘Good luck with your exams! Jiayou!’
He’d drawn a goofy smiling cat, and I couldn’t help laughing. The sound drew Annie’s attention, as well as my teacher’s. Mr. Lee looked at me for a moment, blinking. “What’s so funny, Mel?”
I shook my head a few times, looking away, and he ignored me and resumed writing on the whiteboard.
This was the first time Joe and I started passing notes, but not the last. We kept it up almost every day, sharing our thoughts, dreams and worries. I found out that he came from a big family, unlike me, and wanted to be a businessman when he grew up. I told him about my dream to travel the world. I told him about books I liked to read. But I didn’t tell him about Mama. That was something I was not yet ready to face, much less share in a note.
×××
In a city as noisy and fast-paced as Singapore, it’s hard to find somewhere you can have a moment to yourself. A moment to think. A moment to cry.
It was nighttime, and I was sitting by a stretch of road, tears on my cheeks. The accident happened on a road just like this. That accident put Mama to ‘sleep’, and when she wouldn’t wake up, Papa did the unthinkable. He pushed her off the tightrope to the other side.
Mama was gone.
No more going shopping with
her. No more rushing home to have dinner with her in front of our favorite TV serial. No more listening to her tell the story of the day I was born.
I had run out here after Papa came back from the hospital and told me what he’d done. I was angry ... or heartbroken ... or both. I couldn’t be sure.
At least out here, I could finally hear myself think. More importantly, I believed Mama would be able to hear me think as well. I looked up into the night sky and told her that I loved her. I told her that I was sorry. I said goodbye to her.
Close to midnight, they found me. Not Papa, but a pair of police officers. I was exhausted from crying, so I got up and let them take me home.
Papa was furious, but I knew that his anger came from fear. Fear for what could have happened to me in those few hours when he didn’t know where I was.
“She seems OK,” one of the police officers said. “Just tired.”
“She wouldn’t say a word,” the other police officer said.
“I know. She’s like that. She ... hasn’t been talking since we were in an accident a few months ago.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that, Sir. Please talk to her and make sure she doesn’t run away like that again.”
“I will.”
The police officers left, and now it was just us. Papa sat me down in the living room, saying that he wanted to talk. Insisted on it. “If you don’t want to talk, Mel, it’s fine. Just listen. I need you to know that what I did today with your mother was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t want to do it, but I believe it was the right thing to do, and hopefully, one day, you will understand that.”
I said nothing, pursing my lips tightly.
“I haven’t sent you to see a counselor, even though your teacher advised me to, because I think it should be me who talks to you, not some stranger. And if you’re not ready to talk to me yet, it’s OK. I understand. I know why you stopped talking. Do you think I don’t know? It wasn’t your fault, Mel. It was an accident.” He remembered.
He remembered my jabbering and laughing, my distracting Mama’s attention in the car that night. The other car seemed to come from nowhere. There was no time to react. I remember the urgent blare of a car horn, exploding glass, and a scream that pierced the air and was cut short just as quickly.
“It was an accident,” he said again.
An accident. He really believed that. He had let Mama go.
I observed his tired, bloodshot eyes, and saw pain in them. Pain that reflected my own.
“I hope she forgives me,” he whispered, looking directly at me.
I hope she forgives us both, Papa.
×××
‘How, your marks?’ It was a note from Joe after my exams.
‘I failed my orals. But I got A’s and B’s in everything else,’ I wrote back.
‘Wah! Mine all C’s. But never mind. So happy no more exams! Wanna celebrate? We go McDonalds, just you and me.’
‘Really? But you know I don’t talk.’
‘Never mind lah. If you want, we can even Whatsapp at McDonald’s. How?’
I thought a long time about that. You often see people sitting together in silence at restaurants because they’re too busy texting. At least Joe and I would be texting each other.
I did want to go, so I looked up, caught Joe’s eye from across the classroom and nodded. Yes.
Joe and I hung out at McDonald’s for a few hours, where our entire conversation took the form of traded words, emoticons and funny videos we shared with each other. I felt that with time, I might be able to tell him about Mama. I liked to think Mama would like him. And maybe one day, I might even be ready to use my voice again and talk to Joe in person.
The next day, I was up early, earlier than Papa as always, and went about getting ready and making my own breakfast. But this time, before I left, I pulled out a Post-It note, wrote on it and pasted it on the fridge.
Good morning, Pa. — Love, Mel
Hopefully, it will be the first of many notes between us. Little notes, little pieces of trash to someone else, entire conversations to me.
Silence doesn’t take us away from the world. Silence brings us closer to it. Silence lets us find the things we need, especially within ourselves.
As I headed out to go to school, I thought to myself that bad things may happen, but silence will always be my strength.
BABY’S BREATH
DIPIKA MUKHERJEE
It wasn’t very clear to you, exactly, when the trouble started.
The photographs on the mantelpiece are arranged in chronological order, because your husband likes them just so. There’s his kindergarten picture, hazy black-and-white faces in which you recognize him because he has claimed an image with an indelible finger smudge. Then the pictures of his family, his two brothers and four sisters, through the years in crisp collars and frilly frocks and tamped-back oil-slicked hair, later with bell-bottoms low on hips, and psychedelic shirts. A creamy birthday cake foregrounds the baby years; the teenagers pose back-to-back, like the Bay City Rollers. His parents, when present, always looked dour, his mother as chunky as the brick logo of the studio, Great Wall City on Batu Road in Kuala Lumpur, the logo sometimes the only spot of color. Then the wedding pictures, the four sisters married first, and finally the two brothers.
Your first appearance on this mantelpiece is with your head bowed as your husband ties the thali around your neck. Your face is indistinct, shiny, as if you may have been crying, but you weren’t crying that day, not at all. You couldn’t grin as widely as your husband – you were the bride after all – and the aunties were clucking about, commenting on how low your cleavage was, and how short the sleeves of your blouse, and the women on his side were openly appraising how light your wedding bangles seemed, how very cheap. But on that day you were struck dumb by the wonder of it all; of marrying a man so handsome, one who had a degree from MIT, and his family had all gone to college, a family so rich that they lived in a huge mansion in Damansara Heights, where you, miraculously, would also be living from this day onwards. You felt like the Gods themselves were showering marigold petals and rosewater on you as you took seven steps around the fire. Your fate had led you to this and you were most perfectly happy.
His home in Damansara Heights had a lot of rooms, but a lot of people too. Your mother-in-law did not approve of any of the doors being closed during the day. Besides your brother-in-law and his wife, there was always at least one sister’s family in residence, due to marital or financial problems. You lay on your bed, dizzy from the frequent migraines, which grew worse after your marriage, and anyone in the house felt free to come in and inquire whether you had been throwing up, because of good news.
It became clear that you were expected to produce an heir, as soon as possible.
Outside the large electric security gates of this mansion were other women who were working in Malaysia; women who had been in school with you and now ran banks and NGOs and taught and healed, and had families too. The government was urging the Malays to have more children to bolster the Muslim majority of votes in the future, especially as the Chinese women seemed to have large broods of children. You were the tenth of thirteen surviving children and your parents seemed to have stopped registering the births after the sixth child. Your mother would allocate a new baby to the oldest sister, until it was time for that sister to be married. Your father had worked his whole life as a clerk with the Railways, Keretapi Tanah Melayu, and your childhood was spent in Brickfields, in cramped government quarters, with the jasmine and vada smells of fresh flowers and fried dough mingling in the narrow alleys. Your life, until your marriage, had been full of jostling people, in too-cramped spaces, where there was always someone cooking, and the smell of smog.
You were used to the babies in the house: your sisters’ and your mother’s, as well as the progeny of cousins and visiting relatives. But when you met your husband in the cool air-conditioned offices of an American oil company (where you were a secretary, and he was
the new MIT-returned engineer) you thought your life would be about weekend getaways together and dinners for two. That’s how he had courted you, for all those seven months, taking you first to Cameron Highlands, to feast on fresh cream and scones at the quaint old English Tudor house in the middle of the terraced tea estates, then, for four magical days, on the remote cabin on stilts on Pangkor Island, where you could have loud sex, which tested your boundaries in surprising ways, and no one could hear you except for the translucent white fish that came to lick your toes when you dipped into the sea, naked, at three o’clock in the morning. This was the life you had said yes to; actually, you would have said yes to an MIT-returned engineer even if he wasn’t this perfect, but it was written on your forehead that you would marry this perfection and so you did.
It took you by surprise that you were expected to have a baby so soon. Even your husband started to say things like Have one baby lah, just to shut them up, then can relax a bit. You even tried to imagine having a baby as perfect as those on the tins of powdered milk, but your body lapsed into daily migraines which had you retching miserably into the toilet bowl, while the pregnancy tests remained resolutely negative.
You heard your sister-in-law whispering to a visiting relative about your hypochondria – What to do, these low class people like that only, we have the same problem with the stupid maids.
Your mother-in-law was a socialite who knew all the top doctors in town, so it was only the best gynaecologist for you, at Pantai Hospital, and he had to squeeze you in between a Datin and an MTV VJ who was about to marry into a royal family. During the car ride, your mother-in-law delicately patted her lips, and glancing once at the Malay driver, who had been driving her Jaguar for 12 years, she switched to Tamil from English and asked, Ummm, does my son...know... what has to be done to you so that you get pregnant?
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