The Catherine Lim Collection (56 page)

She was singing a song softly to herself and
he thought he understood the words.

Stones, pretty stones

Bright stones

Fingers, nimble fingers

But why did you have to open

Like legs?

He moved; he was not sure what he was going
to do or say, except that an overpowering feeling of compassion for her and
loathing for himself needed expression. The involuntary movement caused the
child to look up with a start; she saw him and let out a loud gasp. The stones
fell from her fingers and she stood up trembling, staring at him with the
terror-stricken look of someone caught in a heinous act and for whom escape was
impossible. He pushed open the door, said “Porntip” and she fell down on her
knees and began to cry, rocking her small body to and fro in her terror. He
tried to touch her, to say comforting words, but the child’s panic had gathered
into one obsessive thought, that here was another thing done wrong, for which
punishment would be immediate and painful, so that all his efforts to calm and
reassure by tone or touch were futile and washed uselessly over her. She became
hysterical, speaking very rapidly in her own language, still on her knees and
alternately holding out her hands pleadingly and wringing them.

“Oh, please, please – ” cried Andrew, and
then thinking to get her out of her hysteria more effectively, he said, in a
sharp voice, “Now, now, no need for all this,” at the same time firmly gripping
her shoulders to pull her up from the absurd kneeling position. She screamed,
and began struggling with him as with an adversary, finally breaking free and
running out of the bathroom and out of the room, in choked sobbing.

“Oh my God,” cried Andrew, pale with shock
at this sudden turn ofevents. He sat down on the bed, breathing heavily, in a
turbulence of emotions from which two, guilt and fear, detached themselves to
shape into an overpowering certainty that this would not be the end of the
adventure, that something was about to happen to him soon. The sense of dread
overcame him, and he fell back on the bed, gasping.

He jumped up upon hearing loud shouts coming
from the street below, and without understanding what they were all about, he
knew they were in some way connected with him. He listened, horrified. The
shouts grew; he could visualise a massing of people in the scene of the
tragedy, whatever it was, in the light of the street lamps. He put on his shirt
and his trousers and heard a soft polite knock on the door. It was the young
polite-looking man again, and this time the man’s smile was strained by the
seriousness of the news he had come to give, and by his earnest desire that his
valued guest should not be at all inconvenienced by it. The girl, Porntip, in a
quite unaccountable fit of madness, had run to the hotel balcony and fallen
over a ledge. Quite unaccountable, the young man emphasised, and smiling
reassuringly at Andrew, repeated that he was not to worry about it at all, as
these things happened. It was best that they kept quiet about it and went on as
if nothing had happened. Andrew rushed past him through the open door and he
said, “Sir, but – ”

Andrew stood with the cluster of onlookers,
but the body on the wet road was already covered with a piece of canvas, a
small foot peeping out from it. He felt a tide of nausea rising, and returned
quickly to the hotel to throw up in the bathroom. He saw the five stones still
on the floor and he began to cry. The next day, he left for home.

“You what – ” Benny was aghast. He repeated,
“That’s utterly crazy, Andrew, and I advise you not to do it.” For Andrew had
told him the whole story and confided to him his decision for reparation. Guilt
needed reparation which was its only solace.

When he was a very small child, probably no
more than five or six, he suffered enormous guilt over the death of a sister.
He had nightmares of his little sister’s ghost coming to haunt him; it did not
help that one of the bondmaids who took care of him, a young spiteful woman,
often told him the story of how he was responsible for the baby’s death,
embellishing her narration to frighten the little hypersensitive boy into a
state of sheer terror. What had happened was that during the post-war years
when he was a mere toddler, milk was scarce, and whatever milk could be
obtained was first given to sons, then only to daughters, if there was any
remaining. He being the only male child had first preference; while he grew
sleek and chubby, his sister dwindled away and finally died from an illness
brought on by malnutrition. He had a recurring dream in which he saw a pan of
milk being heated on the stove, then poured into a bottle, then put in a bucket
of water to cool. His little sister cried for the milk but each time she tried
to reach it, she was slapped down and finally pulled away. He saw himself
drinking from the bottle of milk and being carried in a bondmaid’s arms, and
urging the bondmaid to take him to the window to look out upon the yard outside
where he was sure his sister had been taken. Still drinking his milk, he looked
out and saw her dead on the hard earth of the yard, like an enormous insect on
its back, her arms and legs stiffly sticking out.

When he was older, he found out that there
was a way by which the living could feed the dead and thus make atonement:
every year, during the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, people went to the graves of
their relatives and laid out enormous feasts of food and drink.

His grandmother, taking him with her on her
rounds of the graves, was surprised to see something drop out of his shirt and
fall clanking to the ground where it hit a stone. It was a tin of condensed
milk.

“Why, little grandson!” she had laughed.
“Whatever have you got there?” He did not tell her, but it was an offering of
propitiation to the dead sister who had died because of him.

The frightening dream disappeared. The ghost
must have drunk the milk and forgiven him.

There was to be more guilt and more need of
the solace of expiation.

His mother employed a servant, a remote
relative who had a little adopted daughter. The child must have been about
eight then, but was very small for her years, looking no more than five or six,
and he was 12. The Clever Scholar, the women in the household called him as
they looked at him with pride, and all their energies were put to the service
of his comfort and pleasure, he being the sole male child. Their attentiveness
embarrassed him; their readiness to punish the servant’s child on his account
embarrassed him even more. Thus if the child followed him around in hopes of
being given some of the bread-and-jam he was eating, or stood and watched him
while he was doing his school homework and he frowned for her to go away, her
mother would appear in a noisy display of the deference expected of the poor
relative, shrilly scolding the child or slapping her till she cried. Between
his genuine pity for this unfortunate little girl who was always sickly and
never without scabs on her spindly legs, and his utter revulsion at her idiotic
adulation of him, he grew irritable and difficult, often locking himself in his
room for hours. One day he lost a favourite colouring pen, and was certain that
the girl had taken it because he had seen her looking at it with intense
interest. He asked her sternly, if she had taken his pen; the child blubbered,
and immediately the incident was taken to a high level of adult antagonisms,
his mother making insinuating remarks and the relative responding by beating
the child in a frenzy of transferred hate. The child began to vomit and the
distressed relative would still go on with the beating, until his mother coldly
went up and removed the piece of firewood from her hand. He had meanwhile found
the missing colouring pen; he had put it away in a drawer and had forgotten
about it. Lacking the courage to tell the truth, he brooded in his room for
days. The child was taken ill, and he remembered that his guilt was so keen
that he emptied his money-box of its coins and went out to buy an enormous
packet of biscuits which he hurriedly left beside the mattress on which the
sick child was lying. He never saw her again and was told that she had died in
hospital.

He did not tell Benny of these two childhood
incidents, but he said, running his fingers through his hair in his deep
distress, “You know three females have died on my account, and they were all
children. I have been responsible for the deaths of three innocent children.
How can I forgive myself?” Ignoring the histrionics, Benny said, “But Andrew,
listen. You can’t go to the family and offer money. They would fleece you dry.
I know their kind; you would be a heaven-sent opportunity to them.” For Andrew
had told him of his secret intention to return to Bangkok and get the help of
the hotel manager to locate the girl’s family. He would then visit them and
offer to pay for the funeral expenses and for whatever else was needed.

“That’s the least I can do,” said Andrew
sorrowfully. The incident had changed him drastically. His wife wondered and
agonised about this sudden change in her husband – his hair was greyer and he had
aged overnight – but he would not tell her.

“Listen,” said Benny again, with greater
urgency in his voice. He worried about Andrew being mercilessly exploited by
‘those people’ and tried to dissuade him with all the horror stories he could
muster: the American engineer who befriended a Thai bar waitress, sent her
money faithfully for three years, only to be dumped by her; an Englishman who
was cleaned out by his Thai wife and her family; a Singaporean businessman who
returned from a trip totally disoriented and was later found to have been the
victim of a magic potion administered by his Thai mistress.

“Don’t,” pleaded Benny, and this time there
was exasperation in his voice: here was a guy making a big to-do over nothing
and possibly ruining it for the other guys.

“Planeloads of Japanese go there every day,”
he said, still trying hard to dissuade Andrew from a patently futile mission,
“and planeloads of French too. You only have to read the newspapers to know. It
happens everywhere in the world. Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that each
and every one of us should come home weeping with guilt and sorrow?”

It was with great difficulty and a
considerable sum of money that Andrew managed to persuade the polite young man
at the hotel to take him to see Porntip’s family. He looked around at the
squalor of the huts clustered on the muddy banks of a river; they seemed to be
constructed of the same foetid substance as the debris washed up by the river.
A group of small children with large, round bellies, matted hair and dirty
faces gathered round him, giggling, and he began to dispense coins from his
pocket. The group rapidly swelled into a crowd, and the children, jostling with
each other, and tugging at his hands, shirt and trousers, clamoured for more.
The young man shooed them off with both hands and led Andrew hurriedly to a
small, ramshackle hut some distance from the river. Porntip had no father; he
had died in an accident in a stone quarry a year back. Porntip’s mother, a
thin, dried woman with a grief-pinched face pointed to a table on which stood a
picture of Porntip, smiling, with a frangipani in her hair, side by side with a
picture of the dead father, and in front of the portraits, a saucer with flower
petals and a lit candle. Porntip’s mother began to weep; the tragedy of her
life condensed into a long, thin wail as she sat beside the pictures of her
husband and daughter and began beating on her chest. Pale with shock, Andrew
drew out from his pocket some money, handed it to the young man beside him and
requested him to explain to the woman that he would be grateful to be allowed
to help out in the funeral and other expenses. The woman looked up sharply,
looked from one face to the other and stared at the wad of money which
represented remission from years of back-breaking work at the quarry; her
cluster of children, similarly attracted, gathered round her to watch silently.

“It’s the least I can do,” said Andrew
gently, and the young man translated. Andrew’s eyes wandered and rested, with
horror, on a young girl by the side of the hut, visible from the doorway,
squatting on the hard earth, playing Five Stones. It was the same round face,
the same abundance of hair, the same dexterity of hand in the sweeping up of
the four pebbles to catch the falling fifth. Andrew stared, and a strangled
sound came from his throat, as he raised a finger to point at her. The mother,
following his finger, raised her voice and called shrilly. The name sounded
like “Porntip.” The girl heard, looked up, gathered her five stones and came
in. She stood shyly before Andrew. The mother, smiling through her tears,
introduced her. Her name was Wantip, and she was Porntip’s younger sister. She
smiled shyly and looked on the ground. The mother said something to the young
man and he translated: “She says that you are a good and generous man. You can
have Wantip. She is a virgin and will be a very good woman to you. She says she
knows you will treat Wantip very well. She says – ”

“No, you don’t understand,” blurted Andrew.
The woman who understood very well, again said something to the young man who
translated: “She says another man has already come to ask for her, and if you
don’t take her now – ”

Wantip, on cue, walked up to Andrew, and
stood before him, head bowed, hands reverentially clasped, then looked up at
him with that mixture of pleading and promise in her large eyes and soft mouth.