The Catherine Lim Collection (25 page)

“The coffin knockings were meant for him,”
she wept, “but he did not want to go, so my husband had to go instead. You mark
my words, there will be more deaths yet!”

When the coffin knockings were heard once
more, Ah Han Chare and Ah Kum Soh again sat up and listened intently. The
knocks came distinctly in the middle of the night – knock, knock, knock —
becoming more and more faint until they were finally absorbed into the
stillness of the night.

Ah Kum Son’s son, a frail little asthmatic
child of seven, had a fainting fit and was rushed to hospital. He did not die,
but the whole town – whichby this time had heard of the mysterious knockings at
night, and which was talking about Ah Kum Soh’s husband’s death in awed
whispers – started rumours about a small corpse being brought home, and of
another of the relatives about to die, in response to the coffin’s call.

“Why doesn’t the old man answer the call?”
they asked. “How many must go in his place?” Ah Kum Soh, weeping, stood before
the old man as he was crouching half-naked on the balcony, and began to berate
him for his heinous crime. He stared at her, eyes grey and rheumy, and once or
twice he looked around and called pathetically, “Ah Han! Ah Han!” for his
daughter-in-law’s name was the only one he could call now.

Ah Han Chare fell ill shortly after, and the
town was gripped with tense expectation. The coffin had called again, impatient
to have an occupant after the long years of waiting, and now it was the
mistress of the household herself. I remember the anxiety communicated to us
children, for we did not venture near the coffin any more, nor look at the old
man whose stubborn refusal to answer the coffin knockings resulted in the
tragic deaths of others.

A priest from the town temple was called in
to appease the coffin and persuade it to end its persistent calls, for the
knockings had persisted for several nights. Ah Han Chare lay in a stupor,
surrounded by weeping children and relatives.

“Ah Han! Ah Han!” came the whimperings from
the old man, hungry and terrified, for in the days of confusion following her
sudden illness, he had neither been washed nor fed. Nobody heard him.

On the fourth day, a child ran in to
announce: “He’s dead! He’s dead! I saw him myself! He’s all stiff and there are
ants in his eyes too!” They went to see, and true enough, he was dead, fallen
on his side, his thin legs doubled up under him.

They rejoiced to see Ah Han Chare out of
danger. She was able to sit up in bed and take a bowl of porridge. The
knockings ceased, the old man was laid in the coffin and buried next to his
wife, who had died 30 years earlier.

Ah Han Chare, when it was all over, was able
to speak about the coffin knockings as if they had been everyday occurrences,
it being part of her exuberant nature to be able to weave the coffin incidents
into the ribald tales she invariably carried away with her after the wedding
festivities that she organized with much zest. But her popularity as matchmaker
and bridal helper declined sharply, for she became connected with coffin
knocks, and few were prepared to risk the taint of death in a house of
marriage.

I was so
used to calling
my playmate ‘Ah Mooi’ that it took me
years to realize that ‘Ah Mooi’ was really a name suitable for girls. But by
then it was too late to ask him why, for the expansiveness of childhood had
narrowed into the awkward tentativeness of adolescence. And the tiny gold
earring that his mother made him wear on his left ear – that had never struck
me as odd.

I don’t suppose he is called Ah Mooi now –
his real name translates into something like Prosperous Dragon-Lord – or wears
the gold earring. I wonder whether he remembers the story of the time when the
devils, in their insane jealousy, nearly caused his death?

His mother, frantic with fear, had consulted
the temple medium who immediately went into a trance and said that the devils
would stop tormenting the baby boy only if they could be deceived into
believing that he was not a male child.

Male children, treasured by their parents
and grandparents and doted on, were objects of intense jealousy of the evil
spirits; female children, being considerably less valued, were left alone. So
Prosperous Dragon-Lord from that day was called Ah Mooi. To make doubly sure
that the spirits would be deceived into believing that he was a common, useless
female child, his mother had made him wear the gold earring on one ear.

The deception must have been totally
successful, for Ah Mooi grew up strong and sturdy and was seldom ill. I
remember that as a very small child, he sweated under a multitude of vests,
shirts and a jacket but was allowed to run bare-bottomed. And it was in later
years that I wondered at the stupidity of fiends who could be deceived into
believing he was female when there was such explicit proof to the contrary. Ah
Mooi had four older sisters. The girls were nothing in the eyes of his parents
and grandparents; he was everything, being a male child.

Throughout his childhood, he was protected,
with ferocious dedication by the whole household, against the evil spirits
which were everywhere. One of his sisters, a talkative feather-brained girl,
once made a comment on his plumpness and healthy appetite as she was watching
him being fed. She was immediately slapped across the mouth and warned that any
more such foolish invitation of the jealous spirits to come and harm the child
would entail a punishment even more severe. Fortunately for her, Ah Mooi did
not fall ill after that or lose his appetite, and she was never again guilty of
the folly of openly praising her baby brother.

Ah Mooi fell near a large stone in a piece
of waste ground that the servant girl had taken him to; when he had a fever the
next day, the servant girl was dismissed and Lau Ah Sim, a pious old woman in
the neighbourhood, was called upon to conduct the propitiatory ritual at the
spot where Ah Mooi had fallen.

I had never seen any of these rituals in my
life, though I often saw, usually by roadsides, signs that they had taken place
– reel candles, joss-sticks and once a small mirror. Lau Ah Sim was always
performing them for the neighbourhood children who had fallen ill. In an old,
quavering voice, Lau Ah Sim, I was told, chanted prayers to placate the evil
spirits and to request that they leave the child in peace.

Round Ah Mooi’s neck must have been a whole
armoury of amulets and charms against these dreadful beings – I remember seeing
little metal cylinders and triangular pieces of yellow cloth with some words on
them. He also wore a tiger’s claw surrounded by a delicate band of gold and a
jade bracelet: these purported to ward off evil influences. Thus securely
protected, Ah Mooi went through a healthy childhood, and at some stage, his
parents must have felt that he had passed the danger period and could now
afford to doff name, gold earring and amulets.

Although mere females, Ah Mooi’s sisters
must have been valued enough for their parents not to want to take any chances
with the evil spirits, for they were given such names as ‘Bad Smell’, ‘Pig’,
and ‘Dumb’, although their registered names were redolent of the best of
oriental virtues and treasures.

One of them – I think it was Bad Smell – was
often sickly as a child. The reason was that her destiny and her mother’s were
ill-matched; in fact, they clashed violently. So Bad Smell had to call her
mother ‘Aunt’ and her father ‘Uncle’, and once again, evil forces were deceived
and their work undone.

What did they look like – these much feared
spirits that infested the air, the trees, grassy mounds, stones and every
cranny of the house? I had never thought much about their appearances until I
saw a mirror hanging over the doorway of a relative’s house and was told that
it was there to keep the evil spirits away. Thus the fiend, upon reaching the
doorway, would not fail to see its reflection in the mirror, and be so alarmed
by its own grotesque appearance that it would immediately disappear from the
premises.

I thought that this was an extremely clever
plan to get rid of evil spirits and, for a while, my imagination dwelt long on
the image of a hairy, large-eyed creature with fangs (an impression derived
solely from the cheap comic books that I was beginning to devour) sailing
through the air and suddenly stopping short in front of the mirror above the
doorway, staring incredulously at the ugly visage, and then making a quick
about-turn with a howl of anguish.

Ah Mooi survived the evil; Ah Khoon did not.

Like Ah Mooi, Ah Khoon was the longed-for
male child after several daughters. His mother, despised by her mother-in-law
for being able to bring forth only female children, swore to the Nine Deities
that if she had a male child, she would go to the temple for the Feast of the
Nine Deities every year and show her gratitude by fasting and taking part in
the tongue-skewing ceremony.

Ah Khoon was born a sickly, puny baby, not
expected to live. But his mother, her confinement hardly over, went to the
temple to offer prayers and gifts of gratitude to the Nine Deities. That was
the cause often brought up to account for the poor health of the child and his
eventual sad end, for she was still in her confinement and therefore impure when
she went before the presence of the Nine Deities. She should never have
committed the sacrilege. That negated all future acts of propitiation, so it
was useless for her to have taken part in the tongue-skewing ceremony. She was
the first woman in the town’s history to do so; the deities were probably not
pleased, for she developed ulcers on her tongue when there should have been no
skewer mark.

Desperate when Ah Khoon developed asthma,
she consulted a temple medium who prescribed herbal cures that probably
contained a high percentage of arsenic. For years Ah Khoon was given this
herbal mixture over which the temple medium always chanted prayers before he
sold it in packets to Ah Khoon’s mother.

One morning the boy was found dead, and his
mother, overcome with grief, unleashed a torrent of abuse at the deities who
had played her out so cruelly. She was stopped by the scandalized relatives who
feared more harm would come to the unfortunate family.

Ah Mooi’s mother, who generously rendered
help during those trying days, was secretly convinced that had Ah Khoon’s
mother taken the simple precaution of changing his name to a girl’s instead of
doing those useless, crazy things at the Temple of the Nine Deities, he would
have lived.

Ah Hoe Peh
was my
grandfather’s
opium ‘
kaki
’. A
kaki
was, in a sense, more than a friend.
Without
kaki
, the pleasures of certain activities such as opium-smoking,
durian-eating and mahjong-playing were considerably diminished or rendered
impossible. With
kaki
, it was likely for one to reach the zenith of
these pleasures.

Grandfather, Ah Hoe Peh and some other kaki
smoked opium for hours in grandfather’s room or sometimes in Ah Hoe Peh’s room.
From the outside, you can hear nothing save the bubbling of the opium liquid in
the cups of the bamboo pipes; if you’d peeped inside, you’d have seen the men
lugubriously reclining on their mats and inhaling the opium, a languorous look
in their eyes. Both men had been smoking opium from their youth. Grandfather,
it was rumoured, had spent a large part of grandmother’s dowry to support the
habit.

Ah Hoe Peh did likewise with his wife’s
jewels, and when these were gone, he had managed to beg or borrow, for the
profits from his small dry-goods business were barely sufficient to bring up
his four sons.

All the boys went to school; it was to the
credit of Ah Hoe Chim that she never allowed her sons to go hungry, or be
humiliated in school because they could not pay their school fees. As for
herself, she ate plain rice with warm water, sometimes a few pieces of
vegetable. For a time, she helped grandmother sew beaded bridal slippers for a
small payment.

Ah Hoe Chim, thin and dry as a stick,
outlived her husband by many years, but never enjoyed the rich legacy that he
had promised to leave (but which in fact he did, according to his sons, who
were only too willing to indulge their father’s expensive habit once they had
started working and bringing money home).

“I’m leaving a rich legacy, you’ll see,” Ah
Hoe Peh had said time and again, “and it will be more than Soon Huat’s rubber
and coconut plantations and shophouses,” alluding to the enormous wealth that
the town’s only millionaire had left behind for innumerable wives, children and
grandchildren to squabble over.

Ah Hoe Chim clucked her tongue with
impatience and skepticism; she always did when her husband spoke of the legacy.
But she was not a quarrelsome woman and said nothing, preferring to spend her
time and energy supervising her sons while they were doing their homework by
the light of the oil-lamp, and knocking her knuckles on their heads if she
thought they were wasting their time. Never educated herself, she believed
wholeheartedly in the value of education and would soundly discipline any child
if he got a bad report from school. When she caught them listening to their
father’s idle tales, she shooed them back to their books, to which they would
return with wry faces.