The Catherine Lim Collection (57 page)

Various are the legends of how Attis, the
son-lover of the great goddess Cybele of Anatolia, met his death. The most
appealing is the one that tells how one day as the young Attis was looking
after his grazing sheep and playing his flute, unknown to him, the monster
Agdistus was watching his youthful beauty with lustful eyes. Unable to control
his passion any longer, Agdistus tried to force himself upon Attis. Utterly
revolted, the pure Attis tore the genitals from his own body, bleeding to death
under a free rather than be unfaithful to his great goddess mother. The goddess
on seeing the lifeless, emasculated body of her son-lover wept with sorrow.
Picking him up gently from the ground that had sprung a thousand violets where
the blood had spilt, she carried him, wrapped in woollen mourning bands to the
mountain cave where she lived. She also took with her the tree under which he
had died, planting it at the entrance to the cave and burying the body in the
earth beneath. Every year, sitting under this tree on the anniversary of his
death, she mourned for him, this faithful, loyal, devoted lover of hers who
would rather deprive himself of his maleness than betray her.

(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

The daughter
came home
from the date tearful, and the mother guessed
what had happened.

“He’s not going to marry you after all,
right?” she allowed herself some malice through the maternal concern. “Am I
right or not?” And when the daughter set up a howl of desolation, she knew she
was right.

“I told you so! I told you a hundred times
that as soon as he had his way with you, he would dump you. They’re all like
that!” – remembering the time when her own husband would have dumped her once
the disgrace of her growing belly was discovered, except that, upon the secret
administration of the temple medium’s magic potion in his drink, he suddenly
turned docile and married her.

“How many times did he have his way with
you?” she asked sharply.

The girl said, “Four.”

The mother shook her head in exasperation.
“I told you, didn’t I, to be careful. A girl’s gift is not for foolish
squandering, and now you’ve spent it on a brute of a man who then leaves you,
smacking his lips in search of others! You young women will never learn.”

Her daughter wept noisily, unable to bear
the loss of the young man and the folly of a squandered gift.

“Will you be seeing him again?” asked the
mother after a while, and the daughter, hearing purpose in her voice, looked up
and asked, “No – but why do you ask?”

“Because,” said the mother, “you will need
to put something in his drink.”

It was a small packet of very fine ash,
sifted from the remains of a prayer paper burnt together with a piece of the
napkin that had touched the most secret part of the daughter’s body.

The magic did not work. On the contrary, it
hardened the young man’s resolution not to marry the girl, but not before he
had had his way with her again, making it the fifth time.

The daughter was disconsolate, and the
mother furious. She paced the house at night, as restless as a caged animal.
She had to take revenge on behalf of her daughter. Since the magic did not
work, she would have to move to the next weapon in her arsenal. It was going to
be extremely difficult, but she would know no peace till it had been
accomplished.

Mother and daughter got together to work out
the plan carefully, the daughter by now galvanised to an irrevocable fury and
pitch of bloodthirstiness. The plan was in five steps: Step 1, invite him to
dinner, lulling any suspicion with a show of genuine friendship and desire to
forget the past; Step 2, he comes for dinner, feed him with his favourite food;
Step 3, ply him with his favourite drink, but in a way as not to arouse any
suspicion; Step 4, he feels sleepy, invite him to sleep on his favourite sofa
in the sitting room, promising to wake him up soon; Step 5, he is snoring in
his sleep, strike.

Everything went according to plan, until
Step 5, when instead of snoring, he seemed to be sleeping fitfully, crossing
and uncrossing his legs, and tossing about. However, after a while, the full
effect of the drink was felt, and he began to be still and to snore loudly, his
mouth wide open, one arm dangling at the side.

“Just a few minutes more, we need to be
sure,” said the mother, and the daughter stood by, on the ready, her blood up.
The mother held the knife, sharp, shining and deadly, in her hand.

“Ready,” said the mother and the daughter carefully
prised his legs apart, deftly unzipped his fly and brought out the offending
member, now limp and helpless in her hand.

“You wronged me five times,” she addressed
it severely, as if it had a life of its own – and indeed, during those times,
it seemed it did, rearing and moving its head like some predatory animal.
“Here,” said the mother, handing over the knife, and in simultaneous explosions
of blood, screams of pain and shrieks of triumph, the target object was cut off
and held aloft, between thumb and finger, a little nondescript trophy. The
young man jumped up, screamed and screamed even more when he saw himself thus
denuded. Covering the spot with both hands, his body bent double over it, he
hopped about, wailing, not unlike the cartoon character or the comic hero of
film and TV slapstick, who has just been kicked in the groin by the little
lady, except that in this case, the groin was just not kicked, but killed, with
the blood-spattered hands to prove it.

“Police! Call the police!” screamed the man,
while the two women ran away, still carrying their prize. Outside in the
darkness, they stopped near a drain that was sometimes half-filled with water,
and threw the pathetic little piece in it, gurgling with demonic glee at the
successful completion of their revenge.

“In Thailand,” said the mother, “they feed
it to the ducks. I wish there were a duck or chicken just now.” Then the women
returned to the house and gave themselves up.

The manhood was lost forever, for after
looking for it in the drain for almost an hour using powerful torches, the
police called off the search and assumed that it had been washed away or eaten
up by a fish or frog. The frantic young man, who had had hopes of it being
found and reattached, settled into a state of permanent despair.

The women were unrepentant, and when asked
why they did it, said they had to, giving the impression they would do it
again.

The newspapers in Singapore were full of the
story for days. It brought letters of sympathy which were equally bestowed upon
the wronged women and the equally wronged man, but when there appeared a
picture of the man, looking very depressed and saying that it was a fate worse
than death, the sympathy shifted in his favour. Then somebody wrote in to ask
the intriguing question: Why did the women choose a form of revenge that
invariably led to their being caught? The letter provoked a flurry of replies
which examined the causes from a variety of angles – psychological, cultural,
biological, political – from the need to turn penis envy into real action, to
the instinct to preserve fellow women from the same sad fate, to the pure joy
of proclaiming woman’s only area of monopoly of power, since men could never
retaliate in kind.

Wrote a very upset male, “It boggles the
mind to think what women are capable of doing; they can claim the superlatives
of violent revenge!”, followed by another, equally anguished: “Men, be
forewarned. It may be necessary for us all to go around wearing groin guards!”
Both the women of course went to jail, the mother getting three years and the
daughter five, and the last thing heard about the poor dispossessed young man
was that he was seeking help from a witch doctor somewhere in a mountain
village in Thailand.

“ ... now consider the paucity of language in
this respect. ‘Purest’, ‘Fairest’, ‘Wisest’, ‘Bravest’, ‘Gentlest’. This is
about all we can manage. How can the mere addition of three pitiful little
letters ‘e-s-t’ hope to capture the full depth and width and breadth of the
excellence that is Woman? Until we devise an adequate linguistic system for
this purpose, we would have to be satisfied with the so-called superlatives in
the language.”

(From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

A visitor
would be struck by
the grandeur of the building and
even more by the grandeur of its purpose: to house the remains of one woman who
had died more than 50 years ago. It was an immense structure with the
inescapable curving pagoda roof to remind the Chinese emigrant of home, and to
allow the gratification, since Filipino law did not permit him to own land, of
owning great houses. When the house was ready to receive his dead wife, he must
have further gloated, as he supervised the ceremony of transferring the remains
to its new and permanent home, on the contrast between this house and the
surrounding hovels of the natives. Indeed, the contrast would strike the
visitor as positively obscene: the fully air-conditioned building with its
tiled floors and marble pillars for one dead woman, and the tin-and-cardboard
shacks clinging to the sides of denuded hills, home to hundreds of ragged women
and children who regularly emerged to scrabble in the rubbish dumps close by.

But the real obscenity of contrast lay in
the food: for the dead woman, one Madam Teh Siew Po, the altar table creaked
with an abundance of roast pig, young white fowl steamed in their own pristine
juices, the most finely spun rice noodles, herbal soups, pink sugared buns,
peanut sweets, almond paste puddings, rare fungi, and even rarer sea cucumber
cooked with fragrant cabbage, oranges, lichees, pomelos whose thick, soft skin
was carved into a ring of delicately curving petals to reveal the succulent
pink fruit inside, and for the living woman, one Mrs. Raphaela Santos and her
family of seven children, ages 10 to one, fistfuls of rice, boiled vegetables
that had been salvaged from the rubbish dump and one fried fish which they were
all to share.

This was the time of the annual Chinese
Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, when Heaven and Hell emptied themselves of the
spirits of the dead to allow them to return to Earth to be fed by their
relatives in a continuing show of remembrance and love. No ghost was better fed
than Madam Teh Siew Po; every year, since her death in 1936, the ghost feast
had been held for her (even during the war years) and each year she came and
partook of the magnificent spread. That she had actually returned could be
ascertained by the simple procedure of leaving a tray of ash overnight on the
altar table and checking it the next day for footprints (very small, for Madam
Teh had bound feet). The caretaker, once he was assured of the fact, was free
to dispose of the food as he liked. Over the years, the practice of packing the
food in separate parcels to be distributed among various relatives had become a
hassle for the old man, and lately, he had simply dumped the food outside the
house and closed the gates again, in the full knowledge that within minutes, it
would be grabbed up by the beggar woman with the seven children.

For three years running, Raphaela Santos and
her brood had whooped with joy at the sight of the ghost food; in a highly
efficient division of labour, they had, within minutes, packed up the good
stuff in their paper bags, cardboard boxes, tin buckets and plastic mugs, and
were carrying it home in triumph for a succession of family feasts. By
gathering up the unfinished remnants and boiling them in a rich stew, Raphaela
Santos was actually able to extend the annual celebration by a few more days.

Then disaster struck. That year, no
footprints were seen in the ash, therefore the ghost had not come, therefore
the food could not be removed. Raphaela waited in great anxiety, straining her
neck to peep through the window. She saw the splendid offerings on the altar
table, the centrepiece being always the roast pig, in their porcelain dishes
and tureens, amidst flickering candles, joss-sticks and flowers, and the old
caretaker snoozing in his folding chair nearby. She saw him get up and go to
examine the tray of ash, and held her breath, as he closely turned the tray
this way and that in the sunlight, to catch any imprint. No, there was none,
and he put back the tray and returned to his chair.

Raphaela fretted fearfully; if Madam Teh did
not appear soon, the food would surely spoil. The weather was hotter than
usual, and the air conditioning would be no guarantee.

On the fourth day, the caretaker, squinting
at the ash and detecting a faint print near the centre of the tray, decided
that the ghost had at last appeared. But it was too late! With a heart near to
breaking, Raphaela and her seven children, her newest baby on her hip, watched
the caretaker empty each plate and tureen into large black plastic bags, tie up
the bags securely, then carry them to dump into the refuse bins outside. They
waited for him to get back into the house, then closed in, making frantic
little noises as they untied each bag to see what could be saved. It was no
use; all the food had gone quite bad.

The next year, as the Feast approached once
more, the hopes rose again. The eternal roast pig, roasted to precisely that
point when the crispy, crunchy skin detached itself to provide a separate,
purer eating pleasure, the shiny white steamed chickens carried in a bunch by
their necks, the mountain of pink, sugared buns shaped like peaches and women’s
breasts – Raphaela’s children could describe each item in perfection of detail,
as it was carried into the house by the caterer. She said to them, “Hush, we’ll
wait and see; we don’t know what will happen,” remembering the bitterness of
the previous year’s experience.