Now You See Us, page 4
Donita: How did you come across these?
Flor: A couple of us made fake profiles so we could see what they were saying.
Donita: Clever. What else do they talk about?
The bubbles of a reply in progress dance in the white space, and then a series of screenshots arrive in quick succession. Does this maid belong to you? shouts the header of the post from one irate woman named Anchita Chowdhury. I was with my toddler in this playground in Tampines today when I saw this Filipina maid talking with some foreign workers, either Indian or Bangladeshi. Worse, she had a child with her! Didn’t get her name, but here’s a picture.
There are many more screenshots like this, taken from various ma’am groups all over Singapore: Yummy Mummies SG, Mothers of West Coast, Singapore Parenting Community of North-East Region.
My maid is in debt and wants a salary advance again; if I say no, will the loan sharks come after me?
Is it true that the Indonesian ones can use black magic? After I scolded our maid today, I heard her reciting some kind of chant, and since then my husband has had nonstop diarrhoea.
There is some sort of beauty pageant all the Filipina domestic workers are participating in this Sunday in the Ngee Ann City atrium—has anybody heard about this? They dress up by region and parade around? How come our government is allowing this? Do they have permits?
Mrs. Fann is continuing to shout on the phone outside. “I will not calm down! This is not what I signed up for.”
You and me both, Donita thinks.
When she made the decision to apply for this job and leave the Philippines, Donita had been hopeful. On the bus ride to Laoag, she saw reelection banners with pictures of a local congressman who was known for sending off record numbers of Overseas Filipino Workers, and it felt like a good omen. Slits were cut into the canvas banners to keep the wind from ripping them, and when the gusts swept in from the West Philippine Sea, the congressman looked as if he were laughing. In the recruiter’s office, a mounted screen on the wall played a video—music swelling over images of nipa huts turning into solid brick houses; three generations of one family at their reunion, all dressed in matching imported T-shirts provided by one woman. Donita had her eye on a poster showing a skyline of buildings against blue mountains that appeared to be carved out of sea and sky. In comparison, Pasuquin’s rice paddies were waterlogged descending steps, taking her nowhere.
“Vancouver?” the recruiter asked, following her gaze. “They want nurses, not maids.” He told her that a domestic worker needed to swallow her pride. It’s what Corazon Bautista had advised her to do as well—but how? If Donita sets aside her pride now, she loses something precious, and look . . . look at her life scattered across this room. How many precious things does she have to lose?
The Pokémon sticker on the closet has been stuck there for so long, it has fused with the wood. Donita shakes the closet door, and the Pokémon stares balefully at her. She can hear the roller rattling around back there. It’s useless. In anger, she smacks the door. It shudders, and there is the sound of something dropping. Donita tries to slide the door open again, and this time, it goes all the way. She crouches down and pats around the closet floor to pick up the loose roller, and she’s surprised to find a long, chunky, lightning-shaped earring studded with pink and blue diamantés. Donita rolls it around in her palm, briefly considering a small way to gain Mrs. Fann’s favour—Look, ma’am, I found this. Then Mrs. Fann’s screeching voice pierces the air again and Donita knows that hell would have to freeze over before she makes any attempt to appease the woman. She tosses the earring back into the closet.
“Fine,” Mrs. Fann shouts into the phone. “I can cancel the maid’s contract if she breaks the law, right?” There is a pause and then Mrs. Fann’s feet can be heard padding rapidly across the flat. She appears in Donita’s doorway with her phone. “From now on, you can expect frequent spot checks,” she says. She goes on a rampage, rifling through Donita’s drawers, pulling the sheets off the mattress, knocking things over with fervour and spite. She is looking for evidence that Donita has stolen something. Donita can feel the rage rising within her now and she clenches her fists so hard, her nails dig into the soft flesh of her palms. Mrs. Fann picks at each item in the closet, knocking the hangers carelessly together and screwing up her face in disgust at some of Donita’s clothes. In Donita’s mind, a voice shouts, Stop it now!
As if Mrs. Fann can read her thoughts, she freezes. She crouches down slowly and picks something up. Donita sees it glistening in her hand—the lightning-bolt earring.
“Where did you find this?” Beneath the makeup, Mrs. Fann’s face has gone pale.
“In the closet,” Donita replies. Is Mrs. Fann really going to accuse her of stealing one useless cheap earring?
“Did Mr. Fann see it?” Mrs. Fann asks.
Donita shakes her head. “No, I find in the closet, so I leave it there.”
Mrs. Fann’s fingers fold around the earring and she storms out of the room. The bag from Donita’s trip to the market is slumped at the foot of her bed. She knows the fish needs to be put in the fridge right away, but judging by the receding volume of Mrs. Fann’s footsteps, she is making her way to the kitchen. Donita sits on the edge of her bed and scans the disarray of her room. All the work Mrs. Fann insisted on, undone by her own hand.
From the beach, there is cheering and scattered applause, followed by thumping music. The students from the junior college on the other side of the canal are having a Sunday sports event. In the kitchen, the trapdoor for the rubbish chute creaks open and then slams shut.
Did Mr. Fann see it? What would be so offensive about a gaudy old earring to Mr. Fann, whose face barely registers any emotions? Donita hears it now, clanging against the inner walls of each floor of its descent.
Three
I can’t wait to see you tomorrow! Orchard Station, twelve o’clock?
Angel waits while her old friend Corazon Bautista answers her text, the three dots blinking as she types. The reply is a few squares and a goat emoji. Another message quickly follows: Sorry, I was trying to give you a thumbs-up! Angel smiles, recalling the things they used to laugh about while they waited, towels in hand, for their employers’ children to tire of splashing in the pool in Reverie Residences, the gated condominium community where they worked.
Angel pushes Mr. Vijay’s wheelchair along the walking trail until she finds a shaded spot. She gently pries his fingers open and wraps them around the handle of the badminton racket. They will repeat this action for the next ten minutes or so until Mr. Vijay grips the racket, and then Angel will show him how to swing it. One day, it will be effortless again. He had been playing badminton when the stroke seized his body. Doctors said it was due to an undiagnosed heart condition, but Angel believes it was grief over Mrs. Vijay’s death from cancer last year. It was a double tragedy, but doesn’t that mean that they are due for something good to happen? Whenever Angel watches physiotherapy videos on YouTube, she is drawn to the suggested clips of people rising to their feet after years of paralysis. Miracles are possible.
Angel’s sister, Joy, is more sceptical of miracles. Last night, she sent Angel this message: Flight for Riyadh confirmed. Angel sank into her bed, defeated. I will be with you wherever you go, she finally replied to Joy after many unfinished and deleted messages.
The air is tinged with the loamy scent of wet soil from last night’s downpour. A man wearing a fluorescent-yellow vest is aiming a high-pressure hose at the drain. The water jets out in a solid white blade, blasting away the dirt before it can settle. Angel exchanges a wave with Rubylyn, the new nanny from the floor above. She is walking along the trail with one napping baby slumped in a carrier on her chest and a toddler in a stroller picking apple slices off a contoured tray.
Mr. Vijay is making progress with grasping the racket. “Good, good,” Angel says, wiping the sweat from Mr. Vijay’s brow. Together, they trace the racket along a low, invisible arc over the sparks of honeysuckle flowers bursting from the crouching shrubs. He allows her to guide him. It was his wife who used to grumble when Angel made her do her physiotherapy routine. Sometimes she’d swear under her breath, and they’d both break into uncontrollable giggles. Mrs. Vijay would wag her finger: You started this. Cora used to give Angel that look of warning too. “Don’t make me laugh,” she would say, the corners of her lips already twitching.
Cora has been on Angel’s mind ever since she learned that Cora’s nephew Raymond died. She couldn’t believe it—Raymond, whom Cora returned to Manila to raise after her brother abandoned his own child. The wife had had enough of his drinking and had run off, and when Cora returned to the Philippines, she found that most of the money she’d sent home had gone towards gambling and seeding foolish business ventures that never materialized. Angel was shocked to hear that anyone under Cora’s wing could suffer an untimely death. He had been nineteen years old, the same age that Angel was when she arrived in Singapore. In those days, Cora had soothed her homesickness with comforting words and advice, and Angel felt safest in her care.
It was even stranger how Angel had found out. A friend of Cora’s had posted a message on Cora’s Facebook wall: My condolences for your loss, Cora. May God forgive Raymond’s sins. Moments later, Cora’s Facebook profile was gone. Angel looked up Raymond’s name on the internet but couldn’t find any information on his death. All she saw were school announcements about his achievements—his scholarships and prizes—and a small picture of him and Cora hugging at his graduation ceremony. There was also a news article about him and a classmate winning full scholarships to the University of the Philippines. That boy had so much promise.
Then out of the blue this morning, Cora had sent Angel a message: Hello, Angel, remember me? Is this still your number? It’s Corazon Bautista. I’m back in Singapore, working in Bukit Timah. Let’s catch up on your next day off. Angel wasn’t surprised to hear from Cora. This was how it worked when you thought of somebody; eventually that person reappeared in your life. The two women haven’t seen each other in over a decade, but Angel just knows they’ll pick up where they left off. Of course, Angel won’t ask Cora anything about Raymond, especially if she doesn’t want people to know. (May God forgive Raymond’s sins—was it suicide?)
No, Angel doesn’t have to know anything. She just needs to concern herself with Mr. Vijay, whose wrist is trembling slightly. “Too heavy?” Angel asks. “Come, we rest for a while, then we start with the other hand, okay?” Mr. Vijay’s forearm, the muscles atrophied, is limp and soft as a bird wing. “Okay, you’ve worked hard already,” she tells Mr. Vijay as she kicks up the locks on the wheels of his wheelchair. They take the longer route home, passing mesh nets tethered across an adventure playground and the tiered canopies of pulai trees crowded with creamy whorls of new flowers.
Mr. Vijay lives in an older private apartment complex on the park’s edge called Jacaranda Gardens. On the ground floor, there is a function room, a gym, and a two-lane bowling alley for residents. Outside, there is a tennis court covered in yellow leaves that look like tiny flames. At the gate, Hassan the security guard presses the buzzer to let Angel and Mr. Vijay in. “Hot weather today, Angel,” Hassan says, and Angel replies, “Really hot. Hope it rains.” Sometimes Angel wants to break the pleasantries and tell Hassan that she has no hard feelings about what happened last year. She knows it was a resident who saw her walking on the treadmill in the gym and made a complaint and that Hassan was just doing his job when he rounded up all the maids and scolded them on the building management’s behalf. “You have a nice day,” Hassan says, tipping his head towards Angel, which is probably his way of saying that there are things he cannot help.
On weekday mornings, the Mass Rapid Transit car is a silent sea of pressed shirts tucked into the sharp edges of waistbands and the soapy fragrance of the freshly showered workforce. The office workers and schoolchildren peer into phone screens or listen to earphones while staring into any slivers of white space in the crowd.
Sundays are different. Angel boards the train at Choa Chu Kang Station and feels it pick up momentum as it slices through the sun-bleached suburbs. Clouds of greenery billow beneath her feet, and she is brought to eye level with the silvery edges of the apartment buildings that loom over her throughout the week. On Sundays, Angel owns the city, and she’s not the only person who feels this way. A glance at the trimmed parks below shows women spreading out picnic mats, weighting the corners with tall steel pots and boom boxes. Dressed in their best clothes, they croon their favourite songs from home and serve buffets of home-cooked food, relishing the freedom of being outdoors. Angel knows she looks her best too. Her chin-length hair is brushed smooth of bobby-pin dents, and her small lips break into an easy smile. Watching her reflection in the train window, she turns her head from side to side to let her silver earring cuffs catch the light.
Two Burmese girls get on at Bishan Station. Their cheeks are streaked with tree-bark paste to protect their skin from the sun, and they hold on to each other as the train judders and picks up speed again. Construction workers arrive at the next stop, in checked shirts tucked into trousers, clutching their mobile phones. The carriage seems to rock to the chorus of this crowd, and Angel feels that she’s part of every conversation, even the ones in Bengali and Burmese. The suburbs peel away and the train plunges into the night of the underground.
Angel is spilled into Orchard Station with the crowd and she lets the surge carry her towards the escalators. She is early because she always tries to leave home promptly if the Vijays’ younger son, Raja, is on Sunday duty. Raja hadn’t paid much attention to Angel when she started working for the family three years ago, but something changed at Mrs. Vijay’s funeral. Angel had spotted him sitting alone on the steps of the crematorium and sobbing into his long shirtsleeves, so she’d held his hand and told him that the pain would get more manageable over time. Her own mother had died when she was in her early twenties, only a little older than Raja. Since then, he’s been lingering too close.
Police officers in bulky vests patrol the station entrance. “No loitering,” says an officer to a cluster of Indonesian women near the ticketing machines, and the women scatter like raindrops.
Angel pats her purse instinctively. She knows where her employment pass is if she needs to produce it. After the officers move away, she takes out her phone to let Cora know exactly where she is. Back when she and Cora used to have days off together, they would wait near the station control booth until all their friends arrived. Orchard Road was a glittery shopping district then, but now it is a wild competition of pulsing lights and frantic, churning crowds. New underground tunnels shoot like fireworks in every direction, fanning out into mammoth shopping malls.
There is a text from Joy: A picture of herself wearing a traditional Saudi abaya. The black cloak is unbuttoned and the sleeves flare like bat wings. The material swallows her up. The message says, Borrowed this from my friend Pilar, who worked in Jeddah for a few years. What do you think?
Looks like a graduation gown, Angel replies. Joy needs a cap with a tassel, then maybe the image will be easier to accept.
My real graduation portrait is gone, Joy writes back.
Is there anything that wasn’t destroyed by the flood last year? Angel had watched the news footage while frantically exchanging messages with Joy, who assured her that she was all right even as the murky water began to seep into her living room. Luckily the pictures of Joy’s kids survived because they were backed up online. And your diplomas? Angel types, but she deletes the message. No need to remind Joy of her business degree, the fact that she was running a company before disaster and debt swallowed her career.
Another wave of passengers comes crashing through the station. Angel spots a portly woman with short silver-streaked hair clinging to her purse. Angel waves and calls out in Tagalog and sees recognition wash over Cora’s face. “It has changed, huh?” Angel says after they hug.
“But you haven’t changed,” Cora says warmly, stepping back to look at Angel. “Not one bit.”
“Ay, don’t lie,” Angel says. In a few years, she’ll be forty, and she knows her body has become soft in places. “All of this has come out, and all of this has gone down,” she says, pointing to her tummy, then her chest. Cora laughs and hugs her again. Angel catches a whiff of Cora’s perfume and it brings her back to their days in Reverie Residences, when Cora would always leave for church first thing on Sunday morning, while Angel preferred to sleep in and go for a later service with the younger crowd.
“Are you back at Blessed Sacrament?” Angel asks as they navigate their way out of the station and into one of the malls.
“No,” Cora says. “I’m not really . . . I don’t go to church anymore.”
That’s a big change. Angel doesn’t attend church either, but it had never felt like a place for people like her. She waits for Cora to elaborate on her reasons, but when she doesn’t, Angel moves on. “What are your ma’am and sir like?”
“Just ma’am, no sir,” Cora says. “No other help either.”
“Thank goodness for that,” Angel says. “You don’t want to be fighting with someone all the time.” It was hard enough being hired by the Vijays after their previous maid, Erni, retired; Angel felt as if she were competing with a ghost. “You’re dusting the house now?” a bemused Mrs. Vijay would ask, implying that Erni dusted later or earlier in the day. Their daughter, Sumanthi, who had a corner in the pantry for her tubs of pea protein powder and Himalayan pink salt, once asked Angel to pick up a pack of keen-wah from the supermarket, and when Angel called her after pacing the aisles (was it a type of gourd? A brand of spice?), Sumanthi spelled it out for her: “It’s q-u-i-n-o-a.” Sumanthi laughed it off, but Angel was embarrassed, knowing that Erni had probably never called the Vijays on the verge of tears over a packet of grains.
