Grandma's Funeral (A draft)

The house was a two-storeyed house along a crackly and sandy tar road. It faced a dingy coffee shop and an abandoned construction shed, where a lonesome thin tree, leafless and bare, quietly waved a faltering branch. The tree would be gone soon; like smoke, like ashes.

An old dying fence separated our house from the neighbours.Creepers and vines sprawled all over the fence, causing it to lean and bend. Uncle and Cousin had parked their motorbikes and van at the porch. The family dog, Boxy or Brownie as I used to call him, lazed in the sweltering heat with half-open eyes, oblivious to the flies buzzing around him. Two ghostly white lanterns swayed lightly above the doorway -- someone from this house was dead.

A narrow walkway surrounded the house. To the right of the porch, dripping wet laundry hung from thin bamboo poles. An old stone well, damp and overgrown with moss and algae, rested behind the laundry area. To the left, Uncle had piled dusty runny sacks, junk metal, rubber hoses, and deflated tyres. The back of the house was crammed with broken buckets, tubs, wooden boxes, old woks, and crates of used glass bottles. Pigeons and crows scattered themselves on the weathered zinc roof, while the drain was crawling with centipedes and black ants. 'Remember to pay your respects to Grandma,' Father said. I nodded, but remained silent. A feeling of dread and impending despair filled the air.

Inside, the aunties and cousins folded joss papers in quiet gloom. No one lifted a head when we entered. An unearthly smell of incense filled the hall, as thin wisps of smoke drifted like spirits in the shadowy darkness. The stiff wooden coffin was placed in the centre, right in front of the alter, which was then covered with large pieces of crisp red papers.

Without a word, I lit the joss sticks and paid my respects. Dad went alone to the kitchen while I helped the rest fold the joss papers. 'Hi,' Cousin Yun broke the silence at last. It was a restrained sob, and her red eyes averted my gaze. I could only forge a wistful smile.

We folded the joss papers beside the wooden staircase. If one had walked straight to the kitchen and turned left, one would see a slightly ajar door, leading to a tiny and poorly-ventilated room. This was where Grandma had slept and died. The room was cluttered with decade-old furniture and worn-out mattresses. It smelled of medicated ointment and urine. Grandma's prayer beads were strewn about in disarray. An old radio was moaning in a monotonous drone, 'Namu-Amida-Butsu, Namu-Amida-Butsu...' repeating itself in an endless cycle, as one would mourn for the dead. However, it was perhaps Grandma's only source of comfort and solace when she was still alive.

As I carelessly folded the joss papers, I tried to conjure memories of Grandma in my mind. I tried very hard, but nothing came. I could not even imagine her face clearly. Were her spectacle rims golden or silver? Did she wear a bangle on her right wrist, or on her left? All these I could not remember. To me, Grandma was only a kindly old lady, with a gentle smile, bending over a plump and aged body, dressed in a floral blue shirt and black pants.

... ...

Evening came. 'Come and eat,' Grandma would call out when she was still alive, and the children would flock to the dinner table. But the laughter and gaiety was gone; it was replaced by a sombre silence. We had all grown anyway; we were no longer children. 'Eat,' Auntie said gravely when she passed the bowls of rice around. She had prepared a table full of food for dinner -- a dull-looking pomphret steamed with plums and ginger, a half-cooked white chicken oozing with blood, poorly-chopped slices of roast duck, a dish of preserved vegetables, fishball soup with thin lettuce slices, and a pot of fat pork braised in oily soy sauce. I stuffed myself with the white rice and plain water.

After dinner, Auntie Hun's sons and daughters came over. Their loud voices and boisterous laughter filled the hall. 'Where's the mahjong table?' Ah Leong asked as he put aside a can of beer. 'We'll stay up till dawn to accompany Grandma.' Ah Hong, who had recently won in a pageant, sashayed across the hall in a tight black T-shirt that clung snugly to her curvaceous figure. 'It's sad that Grandma died,' she remarked casually after offering her joss sticks. Then she purred a 'hi' to my mum, sat on an old sofa and switched on the television. Soon, the hall was drowned in the noise of clattering mahjong tiles, tossing chips and drunken voices -- right next to Grandma's coffin.

It was cold and damp outside, for there had been an evening drizzle. My parents and I left the hall. In a tentage, the temple priests and nuns were conducting a prayer ceremony. ‘Na….mo…..’ the chief priest began to chant in Chinese syllables, as I knelt and leafed through the pages of an unknown sutra. It depicted fantastical things of the Afterlife, describing parrots in a myriad of colours and peacocks that had a thousand eyes on their feathers. It spoke of flowers that were more fragrant than all the perfumes of the world, and lights that shone more brightly than all the stars in the heavens and cosmos. I did not know why, but an image of a bridge suddenly appeared in my mind. For a while, I thought I saw Grandma. She was holding a cane in one hand, and taking small deliberate steps from one end of the bridge to the other. At midway, she turned and smiled, and waved a goodbye before she continued her way. It was a calm and peaceful smile -- full of assurance and wisdom -- and I thought that was the most beautiful smile I had seen of Grandma. ‘I saw Grandma,’ Cousin Yun whispered to me secretly after the prayer ceremony. I smiled at her, but said nothing. The hall was still noisy with the gamblers and the television. I stole a glance at Cousin Hong before I climbed up the stairs, my feet making a thumping sound with every step I took on the wooden steps. That night, I could not sleep well. I fell off my bed once. I also dreamt about black cats.

... ...

The Old Cabinet

Many years ago, we had an old cabinet. It stood quietly in the shared bedroom (Dad and I shared the bedroom); its legs rested on the ugly green tiles and its back almost leaning against the dirty cream-white walls. It was a sturdy old cabinet, about five feet in height, of a light brown colour, and coated with a thin layer of varnish. It had one large shelf on top and two smaller shelves below. The shelves had sliding glass planes. Next to the smaller shelves there were three drawers, one with a lock and the other two without.

 

One day, while cleaning the shelf, Mum removed a glass pane from the top shelf in an effort to wipe it. As Mum was wiping the glass pane, a lizard suddenly appeared from beneath the cabinet, and, momentarily startled by the lizard, she loosened her grip for a second, and the glass pane fell and broke into pieces. After the incident, Dad removed the other glass pane from the top shelf. The cabinet looked somewhat awkward or incomplete since then.

 

In those days, Dad put a lot of things on top of the cabinet. There were friends’ name cards (but he never contacted them), medicine bottles, court letters (Dad was an illegal hawker), and Dad’s favourite picture of Brother when he was a year old. The picture was framed in a yellow plastic frame. When Brother left home a few years back, Dad was so upset he smashed the picture with a hammer and threw it away.

 

Dad also occupied the large shelf with other items. He collected crystals, scissors, nail clippers, knives (yes, knives), old photographs (most of these were black and white) and other curios, such as wooden carpenter pencils, Taoist and Buddhist talismans and fishing lines (Dad was probably a good fisherman when he was young). However, when the cabinet was still around, I never understood that the objects have their stories to tell.

 

The cabinet also contained some of Brother’s belongings: these were left behind after he had left home. There was a chocolate box containing old bus passes, a few fake Harley Davidson handkerchiefs and stickers of ninjas and skulls. An old postcard from Bendemeer Secondary School dated back to 1993 read: your child has not been in school for seven days. Those were days of family violence, and the cabinet contained these memories. Each time I picked up the postcard, Dad’s beatings and Brother’s cries replayed in my mind, though I was the only one who could hear the voices in the quiet room.

 

The locked drawer belonged to Mum. It contained needles and rolls of thread of different thickness and colours. Mum used to have sharp eyes and soft fingers. She was once a beautiful and lively lady, then a dutiful and conforming housewife, but now what was left of her was a jaded and forlorn ageing woman resigned to her fate. She also kept a few very old song books in there. In the recent years, she still sang some of these songs to my niece, who was with us for a short while, but had left for China a year ago.

 

The other two drawers belonged to me. The act of opening and closing the drawers drew me into a world of memories and untold stories contained in various memorabilia. These stories and memories changed as I added new things or removed old ones. I used to keep stamps and old chewing gum wrappers, and I concealed love letters in the drawers. New Year cards came and went with each New Year; letters came and went as friends did the same. I kept cassette tapes and lyrics of love songs. All these things are gone now.

 

It was exactly two years ago when we decided to sell the house. ‘Come, help me dismantle the cabinet.’ Mum said. I used screwdrivers to pry the pieces of wood apart and hammered them loose. Then I emptied the drawers of their contents and removed them, after which I carried the drawers and wooden planks downstairs to discard them. All that remained of the cabinet was a wooden box with four legs, like an empty shell. It was quite heavy and bulky, and Mum and I had to carry it to the bin compound. I imagined it being shoved into the incinerator – a large angry fire consuming it as thick black billowing smoke continued to rise, consuming it with all its memories and family history, reducing them to ashes that blew about in the dry wind, and finally to nothing.