“Thank you. You’ve taken a weight off my mind. But come for tea before you go off, so that I can give you the photo of my mother. And I shall bake you a pie. I miss doing it. There’s no proper oven in this apartment. Your grandfather used to say that my pie was the most mouth-watering. I used to pick blackberries from the wild.”
Though they do not cover many physical miles in the pursuit of the old kampong, Pansy and Goldie cover many emotional miles as they exchange portions of their lives with each other. It is late afternoon when their car meanders through the various roads in the new housing estate of condominiums and smart three-storey town houses. But they cannot find the way to the river, ending up in blind corners and cul-de-sacs. The coconut, mango, papaya and cherry trees are all gone now. There is no evidence left that this was once a sprawling Malay kampong with muddy lorongs and attap houses, whose doors and windows were always thrown open, the houses by the river propped up on stilts, like the ones by the sea.
The place is quiet, no sounds of happy chatter or laughter, no resident visible, unlike the old days when people spent many hours outdoors, working and milling around as a community. The modern residents are locked inside their gated houses and high concrete walls. Goldie finally gives up her faith in the GPS and has to stop the car to ask someone how she can get close to Sungei Bedok. The GPS is a useful tool when it works, but it has its failings. When we rely too much on technology, we lose our own innate navigational wisdom.
“You can’t drive right up to the river,” says the young Indian woman in her running shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, her mobile phone strapped to her upper arm, her headband catching drops of perspiration. “You have to park along the road here and go through that gap between the walls of the houses there. That will take you to the Park Connector, which runs alongside the river. The footbridge that you’re looking for is at the end of the Connector, before it turns back to Upper East Coast Road. It is near the Laguna Golf Course. You can’t miss it. There’s only one footbridge in these parts.”
“Yes, I remember Anthony mentioning a golf course.”
Goldie parks the car where there is no yellow line. Pansy takes out the packets of bunga rampay to carry with her. The gap between the houses is a paved pathway, softened by overhanging pink bougainvillea and fragrant jasmine. The moment they step out onto the Park Connector, the scent of salt and wet earth hits Pansy’s nostrils, evoking her youth. Metal railings border the river now, which is at full tide, the water fresh and swift moving. Across is the NEWater plant that they had been to earlier, great round towers of steel next to a modern building.
The Park Connector is designed for walkers, joggers and cyclists; beds of flowering shrubs like the bright yellow allamanda and red ixora are interspersed along the edges of the track to make it look less utilitarian. Several Malay folk are standing by their fishing rods, boxes of worms and shrimps waiting to be hooked, buckets of water by their side, ready to put their catch into. One or two of them even set up tents for their wives and children to sit, rest or snack, whilst the men fish.
“Apa khabar?” Pansy greets a youngish man in Malay, with a smile. “What kind of fish can you catch here these days?”
“Oh, various kinds,” he answers in an amicable manner. “Ikan selar, ikan pari… mackerel, stingray…”
“My father was a fisherman,” Pansy says, and the man looks at her curiously, as if she doesn’t look like a fisherman’s daughter. “In the old days when the kampongs used to be here…”
“My grandparents used to live in Kampong Padang Terbakar…”
“The words translate as ‘field-that-caught-fire village’,” Pansy explains to Goldie.
“Maybe you might remember them,” the young man continues. “Razak and Fauziah?”
The names are nondescript and do not bring up any images for Pansy.
“My memory sudah koyak,” Pansy confesses in part English and part Malay. “I’m sorry. I might have known them but I can’t remember now…”
“Don’t worry, aunty.”
The loss of memory is also the shredding of one’s history. Yet, swathes of the past do return to Pansy. She remembers the times when she had squatted next to her mother to scale pail loads of fish with a steel brush, making scraping sounds, the brittle scales flying out in all directions, sometimes into their faces. Then they had gutted the fish and steamed them right away, to make the Teochew salted fish. How her hands used to smell of fish for a long while afterwards, until she learnt to wash them properly with lime juice, then with water that had been infused with the fragrant bunga rampay! They even bathed with the flower-infused water to get rid of the smell. At other times, her mother would bathe her with the infusion of seven flowers, if she had a fever, or to get rid of other infections or bad luck.
“There it is!” Goldie’s excited voice brings her back. “Grandma! The footbridge!”
And so it is. The metal railings stop just at the edge of the footbridge. A short flight of steps leads to it. Beyond it is a tall green fence that opens out to a view of the artificially created grassy mounds and hillocks of the new golf course. But it is the location of the footbridge that Pansy knew, though now it is no longer wooden but a solid concrete bridge, with protected sides. When it was first installed so many years ago, it was only a log from the tall trunk of the Changi tree, which was hazardous to cross. How she had feared falling into the river when she crossed the bridge as a
