The Catherine Lim Collection (52 page)

(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

It was the last peaceful hour of the day for
the family before the quiet of the vast rubber plantation would be shattered by
the drunken roaring of the father on his way home from the town, the roar
swelling to the preternatural howl of the doomed beast if he happened, in his
crazed plunge through the dark forest, to hit his head against a tree trunk or
drive his foot through a sharp root. But the hour of the father’s coming was
not yet, so the mother and children could still be together, sitting quietly on
the cool cement pavement outside their house, one in a long row of low wooden
huts. Once painted a bright yellow to lend some domestic cheer to the grim
lives of their inhabitants, the rubber tappers making their endless rounds in
that vast implacable interior, they had lost the brightness and now stood in
the dereliction of peeling paint, broken shutters, and faecal smudges left by
children’s hands.

In the dim light cast out by the one
unshaded bulb in the house, Meenachi and her six children huddled together,
waiting. The growing hunger for the one meal of the day, clumps of curried rice
washed over with milk, laid out on banana leaves on the floor but forbidden to
all to touch until the father came home, caused the group to unhuddle and
disperse, to look around for something to do, so as to distract themselves from
the hunger. The three small boys, all with shaved heads to make for easier
application of ointment on persistent scalp boils, and all with very hard,
round stomachs above their tattered khaki shorts, wandered off and soon
returned with an unripe jackfruit which they tried to prise open; the eldest, a
girl named Letchmy, aged 10, had pulled out a plastic doll with one eye from
under her blouse and was rocking it in her arms; the younger girl, a small
skeletal child with matted hair, was unsteadily walking around a sleeping cat
and prodding it with a twig, and the youngest child, a baby, naked except for a
dirt-encrusted string around its buttocks, was crawling towards something with
investigative interest.

Meenachi sat on the ground and leaned
against the doorpost, dreaming of a nose stud which she had once seen in a
goldsmith’s shop on one of the very rare trips to town: it was the most
beautiful nose-stud she had ever seen, a rich red gem set in gold. She pictured
it in all its resplendence, securely fastened on her nose above the left
nostril.

Nose-stud vanished in the reality of
head-lice: her daughter Letchmy, still carrying the doll, drew near for the
regular exercise of de-lousing, lowering her head for her mother’s deft fingers
to search her hair, pull out each hidden denizen and expertly crush it between
thumb and forefinger. Then it was the mother’s turn to unloose her large knot
of hair and spread out the long, dark strands for the daughter’s fingers to
sweep through. It was an exercise of mutual comfort, and Meenachi once more
leaned back, closed her eyes and dreamed, as Letchmy, with small, eager cries,
kept count of her catch.

Nose-stud and head-lice vanished in the
greater urgency of food: The baby, unseen by anyone, had crawled into the house
towards the dinner on the banana leaves and was now sitting on it and eating it
in fistfuls. Meenachi shouted, scrambled up and rushed to rescue the food, and
it was in the midst of the pandemonium of the mother shrilly scolding, the baby
screaming and the rest of the children crying over the despoiled dinner that
the father appeared, unannounced. He stood at the doorway, one hand on the
doorpost to steady himself, his blood-shot eyes trying to take in the meaning
of this unwonted scene, his huge, glistening chest heaving with ominous energy.
The noise stopped immediately, and a circle of pale frightened faces turned
towards him.

That was all that was needed to trigger an
explosion of that terrible energy: a tremendous roar and a huge fist raised to
strike sent the children scattering in all directions, Letchmy adroitly pulling
the baby up from the floor with one arm and grabbing her little sister with the
other, leaving the mother alone to meet the impact of the hurtling fist. It
crashed into her left cheek, then her left eye and sent her reeling to one end
of the room where she hit the wall and slid down to the floor in a crumbled
heap, crying softly, her long hair plastered to her wet face.

“Ai-yoooh! Ai-yoooh! ” moaned Meenachi.

Her husband, his breath coming out in short,
sharp rasps, his fists still clenched with unspent fury, stood over her. She
should have thought better than to moan; piteous sounds of supplication, like
terror-stricken looks on faces, only goaded him to greater fury. He lifted a
foot and dealt her a kick which sent her body skidding crazily across the now
wet floor. Her cries subsiding to a thin, almost inaudible wail, she put her
arms tightly around her belly and pulled up her legs around it in further
protection, like the jungle creature that curls up into a tight ball in an
encounter with the enemy.

The sight of his wife thus curled up in
self-protection had the effect of a gesture of open defiance; with another roar
he rushed upon her to smash at that defiance, forcing open her arms and legs.
Her blouse, held together by three safety pins, burst open, flinging out her
breasts and her sarong ripped to expose her nakedness.

“Aaarh-rh! ” he roared, and the violence of
attack became one with the violence of sex, so that the pain of his fist upon
her face and his foot upon her head was one with the pain of his thrusting
ferocity between her legs.

She did not dare tell him that she was
pregnant.

He was soon asleep, snoring and slobbering
on her in his drunken wetness.

Raising her head slightly, she saw the
frightened faces of her children at the doorway, and silently signalled to them
to come in. She then eased her body out from under his, taking care not to wake
him, stood up, adjusted her clothes and got ready to feed her children with
whatever could be saved from their dinner.

The goddess with the kind smile was her
hope. In the morning when her husband had left for work, she gave instructions
for Letchmy to take care of the other children, and with her offerings wrapped
in a piece of cloth, she stole out of the house to the shrine, a small stone
structure on the edge of the plantation where the goddess, no bigger than a
doll but imposing in the wisdom of her enormous eyes and full breasts, and in
the proliferation of flower and silver tinsel garlands round her neck, stood
with one arm raised in blessing. Meenachi tremblingly undid the cloth bundle
and brought out half a coconut, and some flowers which she arranged carefully
at the feet of the goddess. Bowing her head in deepest supplication, she told
the goddess of her troubles and begged for her help.

And this was what she told the goddess: her
husband got drunk and beat her every day of the week. He smashed things in the
house; there was no unbroken cup or saucer left and the pots and pans were
dented and twisted beyond use. He wanted sex every day even when she was
feeling very sick; her pregnancy this time was the worst and she felt sick all
the time. He wanted sex with his daughter Letchmy whenever he was drunk. So far
she had succeeded in getting the child out of the way, but she was not sure she
could go on doing that much longer.

Meenachi’s litany of sorrows ended with her
lighting a cloth wick in a small saucer of coconut oil, and raising it in final
pleading with the goddess. She longed for a sign. If at that moment, a wind had
arisen and swooshed around the stone statue, or a petal had suddenly detached
itself and floated away or a bird alighted near the offerings, that would have
constituted a divine promise of intervention to check her husband’s excesses.
But the goddess, resplendent in her green, pink and purple paint and load of
tinsel garlands, gave no such sign, only continuing to smile benignly.

Meenachi, parting the tangled masses of hair
from her face to place the lit wick at the feet of the goddess, refused to be
discouraged. Suddenly struck by an idea which gathered the sorrowfulness in her
eyes into a look of clear purpose, she said: “Most merciful goddess, if you see
fit not to do anything, I will understand and will still come with these humble
offerings. If, however, you will be so kind as to take pity on me and do
something to help me, I will return with better offerings – a full coconut, not
this wretched half.” A coconut cost money, unless she searched the grass in the
nearby coconut plantation for any that had fallen, but she was reckless with
the need to complete the bargain with the goddess.

She looked beseechingly into the purple and
pink face and thought she saw a smile of approval.

“I shall come back in a week,” said
Meenachi, carrying the negotiations to a further stage by shrewdly setting a
deadline for the goddess.

“One week,” repeated Meenachi, whose
conceptualisation of time was always in terms of this unit, it being the basis
for the paying out of wages on the rubber plantation and hence the chief
regulating force of husbands’ moods: husbands beat wives more frequently
towards the end of pay-week when the money had run out and no more trips could
be made to the toddy bars in the town.

That night, a Tuesday and pay-day, her
husband came back more drunk than usual, as expected. He slumped into a chair,
eyes closed, then roared for his daughter Letchmy who had, in anticipation, gone
to hide in a neighbour’s house. The sex after the beating was more painful than
usual, as the pregnancy was proving to be unbearable; she begged to be allowed
to get up, but he restrained her, laughing. She managed to slip away when he
dropped off to sleep at last, and was violently sick as she squatted over the
drain outside the house. On Thursday, he hit her on the spot where a swelling
from a previous punch had barely subsided but with a mixture of mashed wild
forest plants and coconut oil, she was able to get the swelling down. On
Friday, the beating was after the sex, when he wanted more and she demurred,
and he pulled her towards him by her hair and then slapped her. Two teeth were
punched out on Sunday when she came to the protection of one of the boys who
had annoyed the father but was able to wriggle himself free and run away.

Tuesday came round again, and with it, the
visit to the goddess’s shrine, as agreed on. Meenachi, nursing a bruised eye,
hurried out of the house with her cloth bundle of offerings. She fell at the
feet of the goddess and opened the bundle, revealing a very large coconut,
whole not half.

“Thank you, Goddess,” she breathed in the
fullness of gratitude. “Thank you for helping me.” For during the week she had
been hit only four days, not the full seven, a tremendous improvement, and
besides, the hitting had not been on the belly, not even once, but only on the
other parts of her body. Best of all, her daughter Letchmy had gone to stay
with the neighbour’s mother, a kindly old woman who lived in the town, so that
was one big source of worry out of the way. She aggregated her gains – three
full days without any beating. A substantial bonus indeed, for which she was
deeply grateful.

“Thank you, Goddess,” she said again, and
with the same shrewdness of the week before, she added, “Please continue to
help me and lessen my troubles. Next week I shall come again and maybe this
time I will be able to bring a better offering than this humble coconut, maybe
even a – ” Meenachi did not want to commit herself to such an expensive gift
but it came out, “garland”. Garlands were unaffordable, but her recklessness
grew with the conviction of the goddess’ growing concern for her.

That night nothing happened; her husband
though drunk, went to sleep peacefully, and the next night, still nothing
happened. There was only one moment of anxiety when he suddenly roused himself
from his stupor to ask for his daughter. She told him where the girl was,
trembling in her nervousness and readying her body for blows, but instead the
man became all sentimental and maudlin, calling upon God to bear witness to his
love for his child, bemoaning his unhappy life and wiping off the tears in his
eyes with the back of his hand. He fell asleep soon afterwards, snoring loudly.
Two nights later, the destructive energy reasserted itself fully: he bellowed
his way home through the dark plantation, plunging through the trees with
ferocious impatience to reach home and vent that energy.

The cause this time was a secret raging
anger against larger forces beyond his control. There had been rumours of
retrenchment because of the declining price of natural rubber brought on by new
claims of synthetic, and he knew, from the general hostility of the plantation
superintendent towards him, that he would be among the first to go. He tried to
forget his fear and anger in drink, but by the time he staggered out of the
toddy bar, neither had disappeared, and he was soon on his way home to make
sure they were properly discharged. Several of the children who got in his way
were thrashed, but Meenachi bore the full brunt of it. He sent her flying to
the end of the room; she was too preoccupied with staunching the flow of blood
from a reopened wound on the cheek, to remember to clasp her belly tightly and
curl up into the protective enfoldment of arms and legs, so that the next
moment he was kicking her all over her body. He watched her writhing and
moaning on the floor, his muscles rippling with ancient hates and lusts.

Then she stopped moaning and lay very still.
He bent down, peered at her and dealt a few vigorous slaps on her cheeks to
wake her up, but when she continued to be totally motionless, he took fright,
ran to the bathroom, came out with a bucket of water and splashed her face with
it. Still she did not move, and then he noticed a pool of blood under her which
was spreading outwards. He became panic-stricken, running hither and thither,
clasping his head in his hands and blubbering in his indecisiveness. The
hostile, hateful face of the superintendent loomed before his eyes and added to
his panic: if the enemy should come to know that he was responsible for his
wife’s death, there would be no end of trouble for him. The prospect of prison
was frightening.