On that day, just as Hock Chye was about to leave, someone had shouted urgently, “Nyonya, Nyonya Kim! Nyonya, Nyonya Kim! Tolong! Tolong! Help! Help!”
“Don’t worry! You go and attend to it,” Hock Chye said.
“Be safe!” Kim Guek said in a rush. “Come home to me.”
Kim Guek and Pansy scrambled to the front of the house. Che Tokoh was carrying a small boy, whose foot was bleeding profusely. The boy had climbed the banyan tree with his friends, playing at being Tarzan. He had held onto a thick vine and swung himself back and forth. But the vine was old and dry and it had snapped, throwing the boy down, and his foot landed on a rusty, broken piece of enamel plate.
“Pansy, quick. Get the aloe vera. Warm it over the coals till the sap is loosened, so that I can apply it to the wound. Meanwhile I will clean up the wound…”
Kampong folk had no recourse to a doctor due to the distance into town and lack of funds. A mobile clinic did make the rounds of villages, but day-to-day medical emergencies were tended to by herbalists like Kim Guek, or bomohs, traditional medicine men. By the time the boy’s wound was bandaged and a potion made for him to drink to combat his shock, Hock Chye was gone from sight. He had to get to his fishing grounds before nightfall. Kim Guek had stood at the water’s edge trying to catch sight of Hock Chye in the inky blackness, but she could not even make out his silhouette. In the dark distance were small lights bobbing up and down, the kerosene lamps that the fishermen carried in their boats to light their way. That was all. Kim Guek never saw Hock Chye again.
The Sumatran squall had come up unexpectedly and taken the fishermen by surprise. Several of the fishermen had limped home in exhaustion, back to safety, but Hock Chye and Ismail never came back. Their wrecked sampans washed up on the shore days later as floating debris, half of Kim Guek’s name, painted in red on one plank. Kim. Golden. But her life lost all lustre after that. Not having Hock Chye’s body back or to be able to bury him made it impossible for Kim Guek to have closure. She keened wordlessly, hugging herself. If not for the fact that she had a thirteen-year-old child to bring up, Kim Guek would have given up too. Khatijah had five to bring up on her own.
That was four years ago.
Pansy had seen her mother sitting on the back verandah, day after day, night after night, her eyes scanning the horizon, hoping hopelessly, watching and waiting for Hock Chye’s imminent return. As the days stretched into months, the likelihood became less and less possible, and hope floundered like a fish flapping out of water.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” George said. “That was really awful.”
“He was so special,” Pansy said softly.
“I can imagine,” George replied. “Now I’m here to look after you and your mother. I hope you will let me?”
Pansy gazed up at him, her eyes brimming with unshed tears.
It seemed like a small miracle to eat what one had harvested only minutes before. That day was the first of many days when George began to value every meal that was fresh from the sea, the fields or the vegetable patch. Every hour the natural produce is distant from its source, its vitality is already seeping from it. After too many hours or days, what remains is the physical carcass of what had once been energised and alive.
“You know,” George said to Pansy. “Eating something natural and fresh awakens new sensations. You can taste its freshness and crunchiness and become absorbed by the experience. It’s like what we experience when we read a good poem that stirs our senses. Eating in awareness is the poetry of eating.”
“The poetry of eating,” Pansy repeated, smiling. “That’s what I like about you. You use language in a creative way.”
“Everything done without awareness becomes a mechanical act,” Kim Guek said. “People who do so are mere machines and go through life like the living-dead. The Buddha equates awareness with being alive. To be aware is to be present. People can do things with their bodies but when their mind is not engaged with what they are doing, they are not present.”
“Wow!” George said. “Bibik! You are a philosopher!”
“Well, as a philosopher, I say it’s time to prepare our lunch!”
Kim Guek prepared a meal of asam pedas, a hot and sour tamarind based soup, and when it boiled, the aroma filled the small hut. Then she put in three slices of freshly caught tenggiri, swordfish that she bought from Pak Wan’s boat. Then she blanched the shellfish that George and Pansy had picked. Meanwhile, Pansy roasted a sliver of belachan cake over the hot coals, making the shrimp paste release an aroma that titillated the palate, and made the tongue salivate. After it became crusty on the outside, she pounded it in the granite batu lesong with fresh red chillies and limau perut, to make sambal belachan, a spicy chilli-prawn paste which Malays and Peranakans alike loved to have as an accompaniment with their rice meals. For added oomph and zest, Pansy added a few chilli padi to the regular chillies. She finished it off with a drizzle of lime juice, pressed from the limau kasturi.
“Take out the gong-gong flesh with this hook, then dip it into the sambal belachan,” Pansy said, demonstrating the technique, after the conch-shaped gong-gong was ready.
Pansy and her mother ate with the fingers of their right hands.
“Your left hand is used for ablutions,” Kim Guek explained. “Never touch food with the hand that is used for other ministrations. If you’re left-handed, then you use the opposite hand. You have to treat food
