MRS SUNHA gave Daud another shot of her late husband’s words of pragmatic wisdom, catching him in the kitchen one Sunday when Philippa had to go to some uncle’s birthday lunch.
“Mr Sunha always said, you cannot mix different foods. Indian curry is Indian curry. Ceylonese curry is Ceylonese curry. Malay curry is Malay curry …”
“And Hainanese curry is European curry?” Daud cut in.
“Aiyah! Chinese curry is not curry lah!”
“What about the Baba-Baba curries?”
“That’s an exception to the rule.”
“And the Eurasian curry devil?”
“Every rule has its exceptions, as the late Mr Sunha used to say.”
She said it in her tone of finality, her absolute faith in the late Sunha’s wisdom Daud now recognised.
“RADIO’S GONE phutt, Daud,” Philippa said, slipping off her blouse.
“Yah …”
“I’m sure it’s something simple … some loose wire.”
“Yah.”
“Why don’t you look at it. Try to fix it …”
“I don’t know the first thing about electricity … worse still, radios … I’m not in tune with those things … Besides, my friend Zak says one should never open the back of a radio and fiddle with it. Four hundred volts, he says. It can kill you.”
He had spoken of Zaccaharia before. Zak fixed everything that went dead on you. Motorbikes, ceiling fans, dynamos on your bike, broken gramophone springs and even kerosene ’fridges. They had coined the verb, ‘Zak it’, for repairs to all the new gadgets.
“Don’t be a clot, Daud. We’ve all got to learn about these newfangled things. The trouble with you is that you just close your mind to what you think is outside your kampong, your village.”
“Electricity frightens me, Phil. It’s got nothing to do with the earth, trees, mountains or the sky or the sea. Or waves and tides or the moon which have rhythms, sounds, highs and lows we can feel.”
Philippa just looked at him. She lost herself in poetry and the lilt and rhythm and words, but her feet stayed earthbound. As practical as Daud was with his architectural detailing, he put his hands over his eyes and shut them tight when he did not want to see. At least she knew what the earth-wire meant. She sighed inwardly.
But it was she who turned her face away from the blinding white-clear reality of their raging, soaring emotions, when Daud looked at her, standing naked in the bathroom as she wiped her body dry, and asked, “What’s to become of us, my love?”
“Right now, my darling Daudie, you’ll become Clark Gable and I will be whatever blonde idol you want me to be,” Philippa replied, falling into his arms again.
He brought it up another night.
Philippa had had a tussle with one of her students but what rattled her more than anything was that a mere chit of a pimply lad had stood up to her, challenging her analysis of Lady Macbeth. It was not the right night for Daud to raise the irritating question again.
“Hey, you missed the turning!” Philippa shouted into his ear above the roar of the motorbike engine.
“Changed my mind,” he shouted back at her, turning his head round.
“You’re always changing your mind these days.”
He had told her they were going to Anamalai Avenue near the racecourse to try a new curry man. Philippa knew which wooden shack he meant. Brian Prior had said the fellow sold a toseh out of this world in the mornings. And now Daud was heading for their regular place near the Arab Street mosque.
“Do you mind if I have a small beer for a change?” Philippa asked as they sat at the rough dirt-stained wooden table.
“No. You know I don’t mind your drinking. Tiger?”
He signalled to the serving youth and ordered the beer with crushed ice.
“Not feeling so great today, my lovely?”
“No. I’m O.K.,” she lied. “Just a bit disappointed we are not trying your new find.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“I’m busy tomorrow.”
“Another day, then.”
The lanky Indian youth placed the small bottle of beer, a glass filled with crushed ice, and a bottle opener in front of Daud. He smiled but didn’t say anything. He waited for the youth to leave, opened the bottle, poured the beer into the glass and slid it across the table to Philippa.
“I’m sorry about that. You know, I was thinking as we were coming here about what you said. About my changing my mind so much these days. Funny thing. You’re right. On Monday I wasted the whole morning fiddling around because I could not decide on the windows of a sewage pumping station …”
“You designing a sewage pumping station?”
“Yah. The pumping station building.”
“But I thought that was the Municipal Sewerage Department’s job,” with Duncan on her mind.
“Yah. But this is for the Rural Board. Though I have done one for the Municipality before. And last week it was the same with the new porch of the Colonial Secretary’s bungalow.”
“Why, Daud?”
She frowned. His problem had pushed hers into the background.
“Maybe it’s … it’s the indecision about us, Philippa. About what’s to become of us, my lovely.”
They started eating.
He was determined to thrash it out. “We know all the quicksands of our loving. We have to resolve it, Philippa. I can’t go on like this without a dream to live by. I want to hold you all my life. For ever and ever … till I leave this world. … and walk through the gates of heaven …”
“I’ve been thinking too, Daud,” Philippa sighed and continued, “I’m sure of one thing. It’s far, far more difficult for you to become a Roman Catholic than for me to become a Muslim. Not just shifting gears in religion. Family. Society.”
Daud nodded and let her continue.
“Though the beliefs are so much the same … like the Jews.” As soon as she said it she regretted her unguarded tongue. “The same Bible and Koran … and all that … I love you so much, Daud, but throwing out part of my guts, my insides will make me another Philippa … not the me you love.”
“I’m not asking you to …”
“I will be what the Catholics call excommunicated if I marry you … I think so … I’m not absolutely sure. But you, my darling, will be really cast out of your whole world … your Daud world …”
“Need we marry? I mean in the registry and all that … Couldn’t we just set up house and …”
“And hope the world will change?”
“It will …”
“Not before our children are branded bastards …”
“Can we not wait for that bit?”
She put her hand on his left forearm. “Oh God, Daud. I want you inside me. I want all that fire and music and body of yours to meet me inside me and give you all my love and flesh … an us, … if you know what I mean … We both have so much to bring out … to merge … to give ourselves …”
“And our parents …” Daud added.
It rang harsh as a discord in Philippa. She saw his pain.
They finished their meal in silence. And as they washed their hands in the bowl of water on the table, she said, “The kurmah was really good today, wasn’t it?”
He regretted bringing the subject up again there at the street-side table. We should talk it out at home, he thought. Not here. Not at a place like this. We have got nowhere again. Like last week.
She regretted the night she brought the composition books in Barnabus’s old kitbag to Daud’s room. He had his back to her experimenting with new sounds on his clarinet, letting her get on with it, sliding into a myriad variations of Basin Street Blues, keeping it deep, hugging onto the minor keys, leading one to expect the sudden soaring to a clean, clear, slicing high note, but leaving it … leaving it unresolved, leaving one suspended, waiting for the full round-sound return of the major core-chord to bring one home and back to the earth-key.
In spite of the distraction, she finished her corrections sooner than she would have done in her flat. Because she wanted to close the last brown-covered book to rush to him and hold him? It was a lesson she learnt.
SHE HAD blown a good excuse. Duncan, after dinner, over his Drambuie and her Port, had leant heavily on her.
“So you can’t make Tuesday. And you have your cousin’s — or is it a second cousin or a one step removed relative — birthday party on Wednesday … and corrections on Thursday …”
Philippa waited. The scene was so green in her memory.
“Look, why don’t I go over to your flat and help you with those essays — you call them compositions? I’ll chew them up before you can say Jack Robinson.”
She would have to think of something better.
Daud kept bearing down on her. Monday, Monday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday … every day, every moment of her living.
She leant against her door, safely inside her flat, herself again, one night after Duncan dropped her off at twelve, exhausted, and said to herself, “I can’t go on like this.” Homework, family commitments, domestic things, even headaches cannot be procrastinated forever.
SHE LOOKED forward to the dance.
She decided black was best. With a really strong lipstick and a subtle nail polish, just a maiden’s blush, in contrast.
And Ma’s mock pearls. No metal accessories. It was a softness she wanted with a crimson on her lips like a trumpet screaming above the dark, mellow wood-winds.
The very minimum of eye-shadow.
“If there’s one thing I do have it’s my blue eyes.”
The huge Raffles ballroom with the long bar at the far end. The officers in their full dress blacks. Only a few daring to be unconventional with white-top sharkskin tuxedos. “See that bod over there, Philippa. No, there. By the pot-palm. That’s a V.C. he’s wearing.” Jenny with orange-red flaming hair she had never seen in real life before, bubbling, carefree, returning the men’s quips with sparkling repartees.
“I’m a sister.”
“A nun?”
Her rippling laugh.
“No, duckie. Alexandra Hospital.” The military hospital.
Philippa had never met a woman standing bluntly, brutally direct on her own, like a man, but fully feminine. And winning the hearts of all the other WRENs. The ultimate extension of Vicky.
Fergus, whispering with his soft Irish accent that she was a godsent vision tonight. Asking if there wasn’t something Irish in her. Refuting her reply that all her European blood was Portuguese. Saying he would be crazily in love with her if there wasn’t that wonderful girl in County Cork waiting for him.
She guessed that Cork would be a town in Ireland. Funny name. A stopper. But the billboards telling the British soldiers there was a sweetheart back home waiting for them came back to her mind. Vera Lynn, too.
She walked in with Duncan and said hello to Antonio and Gloria. Gloria murmuring in a private undertone that she was looking stunning. Or did she say sexy? Voluptuous? It was her tone. Gloria had never uttered a sarcasm like that before. The Singapore Eurasians changing her? Her disapproval? Because Duncan was a foreigner? She forgot Gloria’s barbed remark at once as she was introduced all round and the group swung into a carefree party-time spirit like in the prewar days of Malacca.
The beat of the band was electrifying. The drums and the guitar quickened one’s blood. They played the Glen Miller pieces, the Benny Goodmans. Duncan excelled himself in the quickstep medley of Louise, Bye bye Blackbird and The Sunny Side of the Street.
Perspiring, panting, she returned with him to their table as the M.C. announced that after all that heat, one needed, “a long cool gliding, a floating, drifting, pale-moon, melody. So, a blues …”
Duncan gripped her forearm. As she had anticipated. She looked at Antonio with the faintest of winks. She saw him respond with a nod no one would have noticed, and said loudly, “Sorry, Duncan. Tony has booked this one. Blood is thicker than water, you know.”
As she stood up when Antonio came round the table to her, from the corner of her eye she saw Jenny mouthing a silent invitation to Duncan, her eyes shining. She had to see if he picked it up and her first steps were in discord to Antonio’s smooth movements which she had taught him years ago in Malacca.
Antonio was a beautiful dancer. Within a minute she was back to feeling the signals of his hand, the way he danced to the melody more than the rhythm, and began to let herself go.
Then, like a thunderbolt, a clarinet took the lead. Basin Street Blues. The tone, the slow mergings of majors and minors, the lazy turns, muffled appergios squashed in between … Daud!
For the first time that night she looked at the band. Yes. There was Daud, pouring his soul out, throbbing to every deep thud of the double base and the big drum. Sliding in with the suppressed fluid ripples and runs of the pianist’s fingers.
“’T-t-t-t-onio, that’s Daud!”
“Yah.”
She broke away from Antonio’s hold and started towards the stage. She would have run if Antonio had not kept his grip on her right hand. She almost dragged him behind her.
“DAUD!”
Daud stopped in the middle of a lazy drawn-out note and stuttered with the last of the air in his lungs, “Ph-lippa!”
“Hoi!” the band leader called out as the rhythm broke.
“Hello, d’Souzas!” she shouted, with her hand high and waving. There was a muffled laugh. Someone shouted back, “Hoi, Rosarios!”
Daud was down from the stage on the dance floor. He was about to embrace her with his clarinet in his right hand in a spontaneous move but held himself back when he saw Antonio.
“Fancy meeting you here!”
The pianist took over and the band cruised on again.
She explained excitedly.
“Where’s your table?” he asked.
Duncan had been at the bar with some of his friends and did not notice the hiccup in the music. He was still there when Daud came over and they chatted after she introduced him to the others at the table.
“What about a late supper after the dance?” Daud asked.
Antonio overheard him asking Philippa and heard her reply in an undertone, “No, Daud. These Mat Sallehs, these foreigners don’t go for that sort of thing …”
They talked for a little while then Daud said, “Gotta get back. My Lilli Marlene will be for you, to you, Phil.”
But his eyes cried with pain, Why didn’t you tell me?