I look down at the cover, and open it. This is worse than reading her diary, I understand, worse than prying through her drawers. But I’m doing it anyway, skimming over the pages. A spice of gossip here, an apprehensive confession there. A little bleeding, she’s written, a little pain – and I turn the page quickly before I need to think. And then something right near the end, a recent entry, catches my eye. It looks like another one of those left-behind shopping lists – and I frown. Mother Agnes doesn’t make lists in her red exercise book; she talks.
Sweets.
Dolls.
Socks, five packs at least.
Some clothes, a blouse or two. T-shirts.
Floss? (check Cold Storage)
Robinson’s toys: light-ups? But what about batteries?
Picture-books. (Maybe pony ones? Little Twin Stars?)
Little Twin Stars. That gives me a jolt. I turn the page with fingers that are unaccountably sweaty, and see what’s written on the other side.
Francesca Panikkar, in Kampung Ulu
I’m cold. My lips feel numb and goosebumps are sprouting on my legs like mosquito bites. It feels like hours that I’ve been sitting here, staring at that page. Floss, I could recite. Socks, five packs at least. Francesca Panikkar, in Kampung Ulu.
Except that she isn’t. Toys might be in Robinson’s, certainly. Floss, without doubt, available in Cold Storage. But Francesca Panikkar, if she was ever anywhere near Kampung Ulu, was there in handcuffs and under protest and thirty years ago.
I switch the torch off and sit there in the dark. I must have stared too long, because now I’m seeing colours and starbursts and rings of light. Shapes, faces. Francesca in her handcuffs. And then, out of the past, Mad Ahmad. I remember his drooping eyelids and loose red lips; I remember the burn scars on his neck. He was the only one rescued when the San caught fire. A miraculous survivor, the Straits Times said. They even took his photograph.
I take a deep breath. Francesca’s an old story, I tell myself. Her picture’s in the prayer-room shrine. She was my Amma-friend. We kept her things in a biscuit tin. All that makes sense, in a sad and twisted way. But this list doesn’t. Dead people – even burnt-up mothers, even drowned housewives and Pahang’s take-your-pick medley of ghosts – don’t brush their teeth. They don’t eat sweets or wear clothes, and if there are any nightmares going round, they’ll be the ones who give ’em.
Which means this list – brand new, written now, not thirty years ago – is for someone else. Some other child, some other children Mother Agnes would beg, borrow and steal for. Children she’d lie about even in her sacred red exercise book, if that’s what it took to get Ammuma’s interest and her money. Because charity – she’s always said – begins at home.
The left-behinds.
I pick the book up again and start to turn through the pages, angrily ripping the edges and glad about it. But there’s nothing else in here except Mother Agnes’s health worries and her money troubles that I’ve no sympathy for, not any more. There’s a chill rage inside me, the sort that’ll build until it lights me up like a firework. Ammuma hates the left-behinds. She wouldn’t give them the time of day, let alone some socks and dental floss. She’d have to be tricked into it; she’d have to be cheated and lied to and begged-from borrowed-from stolen-from, because charity – she’s always said – begins at home.
I wonder just when Mother Agnes decided to do it. Did she see a left-behind girl – like Siti, with her dolls and sanitary pads and all-too-alive needs – that she couldn’t afford to help? Mother Agnes can’t say no to the left-behinds, but perhaps she reached a point where she couldn’t afford to say yes. Did she think that someone else could, if only that someone would take her eyes off her own dead daughter?
I wonder how long it took to convince Ammuma, who’s halfway to believing in ghosts without being given any encouragement at all. A second chance, Mary, Agnes would have written. That left-behind girl is your daughter, your grown-up-and-dead daughter resurrected; brought back to life with a tomboy grin and dirty knees. It’s Francesca before her hair was cut off; before the Japanese walked in and common-sense and common decency walked out. Before she got herself pregnant and everything went wrong. Francesca in Kampung Ulu, of course, because ghosts in Pahang stay where they died. And charity begins at home.
24. And Another Princess is Born (A Tale)
You can’t lie in mathematics. A lie gets you nowhere; tangles you up in your own proof and dumps you out again at the beginning. In mathematics, lies are pointless. In stories, of course, it’s different. Lies are practically required.
But mathematics and stories need the same things, when you come down to it. A premise, to get you started on your way. An inference or two, to keep you on your toes. And a conclusion, a suck-it-and-see, to tell just how badly you all went wrong.
So, let’s take a story that Ammuma’s told me again and again. ‘How You Were Born, Durga’: a sweet little tale of beginnings. Let’s stand it up in the light of facts – facts about left-behinds, for example, facts about handcuffs – and see just how well this tale really hangs together.
Ammuma’s Tale: The Premise
You can’t argue with premises. They’re not amenable to interpretation; they’re factual and feet-on-the-ground. You can look them up in reference books, you can cite them without fear of contradiction. They won’t get you far, premises, but perhaps that’s no bad thing.
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