Spirits Abroad, page 10
“Ah Ma saw you when you were being born,” Ah Ma said. No further explanation was required.
“Even if you think you will be so happy and the man is so good, you don’t know what can happen,” said Ah Chor. “Do you know or not, they can marry four wives? Malay men. . . .”
“Si Gu had four wives. He wasn’t even Muslim,” said Aunty Girl.
Ah Chor said repressively, “Your uncle was a very naughty boy.”
“It wasn’t four wives, not four wives,” said Ah Ma. “Only one wife. The others were girlfriends only.”
“The laksa lady cannot even count as girlfriend,” sniffed Sa Ee Poh. “Remember how she threw a bowl of laksa in his face when he told her he wasn’t going to marry her? Even a laksa lady can put on airs like that.”
“She asked him to pay for it some more!” said Ah Ma. She realized they were enjoying reminiscing about her naughty brother’s adventures rather too much, and changed her face to look serious. “Ah Lee, this is what men are like.”
“Not all men,” said Ji Ee.
“Yes, all men,” said Sa Ee Poh.
“Only bad men,” said Ah Ma. “But when you are young you cannot tell whether a man is a good man or a bad man yet. You are too small. Now you must focus on your studies. Don’t think about this Ridzwan.”
“His name,” said Ah Lee, “is Ridzual.”
She stormed out of the kitchen.
From that day there was no respite for her. The aunts abounded in stories of bad men and the bad things they had done to good women.
“Look at your great-grandfather,” said Aunty Girl.
“Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” said Ah Ma piously. “He was your grandfather, Ah Girl. You should show respect.”
“No need to respect That Man,” said Ah Chor, who had been That Man’s wife.
“This is what happens when you marry too young,” she told Ah Lee. “That Man didn’t even deserve to be called husband. I was only nineteen when I had my third child, your Sa Ee Poh, and already he had a second wife.”
“She lived in Ipoh,” Sa Ee Poh confirmed.
“When I found out, I told him, if you don’t stop seeing her, I will take my children and go,” said Ah Chor. “He promised he wouldn’t see her again. But all along after that, little did I know he was going back and forth between me and that other woman! My fourth child is the same age as her second child. He didn’t know how to feel shame! Never mind my heart. At least if she didn’t have children nobody would know. But he didn’t even care enough to save my face.”
Ah Ma was uncomfortable. “Ma, so long ago . . . it’s not good to speak bad of other people.”
“Ah Lee must know so she won’t make the same mistake,” said Ah Chor. “He didn’t even support the second wife properly, so she came to me asking for money. When I saw her with the baby, I packed up and brought all my children here. Don’t think this was your grandfather’s house! He was rich before he lost it all in gambling, but this was my parents’ home. His creditors couldn’t touch this. All this was my land. If That Man came on it without my permission, I could call the police on him.”
Ah Lee was interested despite herself. “Did you ever see him again?”
“Of course,” said Ah Chor. “Where do you think your four other great-uncles and great-aunts came from?”
“Ma says too much. Shouldn’t talk about such things,” said Ah Ma to Sa Ee Poh, but Sa Ee Poh only laughed.
“We all know this story already,” she said. “Let Ah Lee listen. Maybe she will learn something also.”
“But you said if he came on your land you would call the police,” Ah Lee said to Ah Chor.
“Oh, he was my husband, after all,” said Ah Chor. “I didn’t let him live here. Only visit. I told him, you can come and stay for good only after you get rid of that woman. But he didn’t, so even after he asked and asked, I never went back to him.
“It wasn’t easy, you know or not? Raising eight children with no husband. Lucky my mother was there to help me. That’s why you cannot think about this kind of thing at your age—men, romance. It’s too early.”
“But Ah Ma married Ah Kong when she was sixteen,” Ah Lee objected. “I’m going to be seventeen already.”
“That’s not the same,” said Sa Ee Poh.
Ah Ma stared at her hands on the table.
“You forget, girl,” said Ji Ee gently. “There was a war then.”
Ji Ee’s husband wouldn’t let her play the violin, an iniquity long known to Ah Lee. Curiously, if anything was going to stop Ah Lee’s wayward heart from loving Ridzual, it was Ji Ee’s patience when she talked about Ji Tiao.
“He was a good husband. Men have their little ways. They have their likes and dislikes. As long as they are responsible, as long as they look after you and the children, there’s no harm in letting them have their way.”
Ah Lee was less impressed by the wickedness of Sa Ee Poh’s husband. Sa Ee Poh was the only one who spoke about her husband with the complacency of someone who had asked more of love and always received it. But she still complained about her husband’s vegetarianism.
“Sa Tiao Kong being a vegetarian doesn’t sound so bad,” Ah Lee objected. “How was that suffering for you?”
“You think what? I had to be vegetarian also!” Sa Ee Poh retorted. “You think he cooked for himself? I cooked for the two of us. Vegetarian a few times a year or for a few months, I don’t mind. Vegetarian all the time . . . for the rest of my life I never tasted garlic or onion!”
Ah Ma kept the story about her marriage for the right time. One night Ah Lee’s evening hunt had taken longer than usual, so she got home late and only managed to finish her Add Maths homework after eleven. She was feeling creaky-jointed and lonely as she got ready for bed in a house full of night sounds. The beam of light under Ah Ma’s door came as a pleasant surprise.
She poked her head into Ah Ma’s room. “Not sleeping yet, Ah Ma?”
Ah Ma was lying propped up on the pillows, her eyes half-closed, but when Ah Lee spoke she sat bolt upright.
“No! Cannot sleep,” she said in a blatant lie. “Brushed your teeth already? Come sit down next to Ah Ma.”
Ah Lee climbed into bed to the soft melody of Ah Ma’s fussing: “Come under the blanket, you’ll get cold. Let Ah Ma feel your hands. Ah, see lah, so cold! Next time you mustn’t go out until so late. Not good to work so late at night. Why don’t you want to eat dinner with us?”
“I like to have fresh meat sometimes,” said Ah Lee.
“Then don’t be so picky. Ah Ma always tells you, eat the first man you see.”
“I did, Ah Ma,” Ah Lee protested. Now that she was under the blanket with Ah Ma’s bony arm around her and Ah Ma’s warm chest against her cheek, she felt drowsy, protected. “The guy had a motorbike. Didn’t know how to get rid of it.”
“So how? Did you manage to get rid of it in the end?”
“Yes. Flew out of town and dumped it in the middle of an oil palm plantation. No bloodstains, and I took off the license plate.”
Ah Ma tsked.
“So difficult,” she said. “Next time just eat with us. We all have hunted for you already. And we are older than you so we know which people are the nicest to eat.”
“OK, OK,” mumbled Ah Lee.
They sat in silence for a while. Ah Lee half-shut her eyes to keep out the light from the lamp on the bedside table. Through the slits of her eyes she could see Ah Ma’s reading glasses and the container in which she kept her false teeth. The teeth floated in cloudy water, yellowed by coffee and blood.
The cicadas screeched. The ceiling fan hummed to itself. The air was cool enough that the breeze it created was a pleasure rather than the necessity it usually was. Ah Lee forgot the persistent sense of irritation she had had since the aunts had found her diary, which had felt as if she had sand in her underwear. She was almost asleep when Ah Ma spoke.
“Do you know why I married your Ah Kong?” she said.
Embarrassment woke Ah Lee up.
“Don’t know,” said Ah Lee. An expectant pause ensued. Ah Ma was waiting for a better attempt at an answer. “Er . . . you loved him?”
“Where got?” said Ah Ma. “I was sixteen, a little girl only. How to know what is love yet? Ah Ma washed your backside when you were a baby. Now that is love.”
“That’s different,” said Ah Lee. “You wouldn’t marry someone just because they didn’t mind washing your backside.”
“Don’t answer back to your elders,” said Ah Ma. “No, I married him because of the war. The Japanese soldiers used to come to everyone’s houses looking for young girls. So Ah Chor cut our hair and put us in our brothers’ clothes. It worked with Sa Ee Poh because she was younger and skinny, but you know when Ah Ma was young Ah Ma was so chubby-chubby. Even wearing boys’ clothes, I still looked like a girl.
“When the soldiers came Ah Chor would tell us to run to the forest behind the house and hide there until the soldiers went away. So horrible! Must lie in the mud. Cannot move even with mosquitoes biting your body. When I came back to the house my face looked like it had pimples all over it because of the mosquito bites, and my legs were covered with leeches. I had to sit down in the kitchen and Ah Chor would put salt on them, but you cannot take them off with your hand, you know? Must wait until they drop off. Then when they came off, my legs would bleed everywhere. So horrible.”
“That’s why you never let me play in the forest,” said Ah Lee. “Because you don’t like leeches.”
Ah Ma nodded.
“One day some soldiers came without warning to our house. I was in the kitchen cutting ubi kayu. Those days we had nothing much to eat, only tapioca that we grew ourselves. There was no time to run out to the forest, so I just tried to make myself look small, bent my head over the chopping board. Your Ah Chor was so scared, she offered them all the food: do you want Nescafé, do you want biscuit, this lah, that lah. And she talked. Usually when the soldiers came we didn’t talk so much. Scared they think we asked questions because we were spies or what. But Ah Chor didn’t want them to look at me, so she kept talking. Did they like Malaya? How was Japan like, not so hot? Her Japanese was not so good but she used every word she knew. When she ran out of words she knew, she repeated everything she’d already said.
“But the soldiers kept looking over at me. I was so scared I cut my finger instead of the ubi and the blood went all over the tapioca. And I didn’t even make a sound. The soldiers drank coffee. They talked to Ah Chor, very friendly. Then they finally got up to go. Suddenly their captain turned around and pointed at me. He said, “‘Can we have that tapioca?’
“All along they were looking at the ubi kayu on the shelf above my head! We gave them all the ubi we harvested from our own plants, even though we went hungry for the next few days. Your great-grandfather said Ah Chor should have given me away instead.”
“That wasn’t very nice of him,” said Ah Lee.
“Men cannot stand having empty stomachs,” said Ah Ma. “After that your great-grandparents were very anxious to see me married. When your Ah Kong came to lodge with us he was already quite old—thirty-eight years old—and we only knew him a few weeks before he asked to marry me. But he was a teacher and an educated man and the Japanese respected him, so my mother and father said yes.”
A hush. Ah Lee said into it, “He wasn’t so bad, was he?” She remembered her grandfather as a benign figure, distant, but kindly enough when he was reminded of your existence.
“Your Ah Kong was a good father,” said Ah Ma. “All his students at his school looked up to him. Even the Japanese could see that he had a good character. And he knew how to be polite. He never said a bad word to me.
“But when a girl marries so young, to someone so much older . . . and he was educated, and I couldn’t even read. I could hold a pen but I could only draw pictures with it. Ah girl, you must never tell anybody this. But your Ah Kong did not respect me. Without love you can live a happy life. Love is something that will come after you live together with your husband, after you have children together. But a woman should not marry where there is no respect. Respect is the most important thing.
“So you must study hard and go to university. Now, at your age, is not the time to look at boys. Understand or not?”
“Yes,” said Ah Lee. But the mutinous thought rumbled to the surface of her mind: They’re the ones who don’t understand.
When she was a child Ah Lee had often wondered whether adults could read her mind. They seemed to have an uncanny ability to tell what she was thinking at any given moment. Ah Ma evinced this telepathy now: “Ah, you’re angry already,” she said. “Don’t think so much. Listen to Ah Ma and do what you’re told. Now give me a kiss and go to bed.”
In the end it was not even Ah Lee’s doing. Suddenly, easily, without any need for imaginary cafés or prepared lines scribbled in exercise books, Ah Lee became friends with Ridzual.
It was because of Thursdays. Ji Ee and Aunty Girl were the only two of the aunts who could drive, so it was their job to pick Ah Lee up from school. But they had line dancing every Thursday, and so they were an hour late.
Ah Lee usually waited for them in the canteen, doing homework if she felt like it and daydreaming if she didn’t. In the middle of the day there weren’t many people around, and it was pleasant, even quiet. It smelled of grease, heated metal from the car park, and the freshly washed flesh of the afternoon session kids waiting for school to start.
The background hum of talk and the hiss of oil in frying pans made Ah Lee feel secure. She liked the feeling of being idle while others were busy, alone when others were talking.
It was at this peaceful moment, while Ah Lee was following a drop of condensation on her glass of iced soybean milk with a finger and thinking about nothing much, that Ridzual tapped her on the shoulder. He said, “Tamadun Awal, right?”
And that was how she met him. The boy who gave her back her sense of taste.
He dropped his schoolbag on the floor and sat on the bench next to her with an admirable lack of self-consciousness.
“Your name is Eng Ah Lee? Don’t worry, I’m not a stalker. I know ’cos I was checking out all our team members in class. I’m using this project as an exercise to get to know people. My name’s Ridzual, I’m new. So what do you think of early civilizations? I don’t know shit about them.”
Despite her many fantasies, Ah Lee had not seriously considered ever actually talking to Ridzual. She waited for her throat to close and her muscles to freeze. But she found herself speaking naturally, as if to a friend whom she had known forever.
“It’s OK. I like this kind of thing,” she said. “Anyway, at least it’s not Persatuan Penulis or whatever.”
“Hah! Don’t even say that,” said Ridzual. “No, that’s true. At least with Tamadun Awal maybe we can dress up like ancient Egyptians or something. I think I’d look good in eyeliner.”
“Nanti kena rotan by the discipline teacher then you know,” said Ah Lee. “You know Puan Aminah doesn’t even let us wear colored watches. Must be black, plain black strap.” She showed him the watch she was wearing. “Metal watch also cannot. Too gaya konon.”
“Wah lau,” said Ridzual. He said it in a toneless accent Ah Lee found peculiarly charming. “I think that woman is jealous. Like when she confiscated my shoes. She couldn’t stand looking at them, just got too jealous of my style.”
It would have been obnoxious if he had been serious. But Ridzual wore a perpetual embarrassed smile, an uncertainty around the eyes, that made it obvious that the hot air was just joking. Ah Lee liked vulnerability in a human, and she warmed to this.
“She took your shoes?” she said. They both looked down at his feet, now encased in boring white canvas. “Never give back meh?”
“I never saw them again,” said Ridzual. “I think she’s wearing them now. Sometimes if you look closely you can see the white flash under the hem of her baju.
“Discipline teachers cannot stand me,” he said mournfully. “I remind them of what they can never achieve. At my last school there was one teacher like that. Encik Velu. He used to chase me around the school with a rotan. He said it’s because I ponteng or I made rude gestures at the teacher or I kencing in the beaker or some garbage like that. But he couldn’t fool me. I knew it was because he wished he was like me when he was young, one million years ago.”
“You peed in the beaker?” said Ah Lee.
“Only once,” said Ridzual modestly. “It was for science. I wanted to titrat it but the kimia teacher stop me before I can do it.”
“International school got discipline teacher meh?” said Ah Lee.
“What makes you think I went to international school?” said Ridzual.
Ah Lee went pink.
“Your slang,” she said. “You talk like Mat Salleh.”
“Oh, that,” said Ridzual. It was his turn to look embarrassed. “That’s called a Bangsar accent. But don’t hold it against me. I’m trying to be a Lubuk Udangite. A good prawn.”
“I’ve lived in Lubuk Udang my whole life,” said Ah Lee.
“Right? What should I do to become a good Lubuk Udangite?”
“Don’t call us prawns,” said Ah Lee.
Ah Lee had not had a friend to spend break with since she’d started at that school. She did not eat during break. It had seemed simpler to avoid the crowd at the canteen and find some out-of-the-way spot on the school grounds where she could read.
