The owl’s cry in the dead of night – she had heard it only once as a child, and it had remained a terror ever since, despite the weaning from the ancestral superstitions starting from the girlhood years in school, despite even the strong, enlightened stance of reason in adulthood. In the morning her mother asked her, then the maid, if they too had heard it, to confirm the final sign in a long series of an imminent death in the house.
Por Por had not been behaving like herself, a welcome sign only in the case of very old and sick people, that their release was in sight. Watching Por Por suddenly becoming quiet and subdued, sitting by herself in dark corners for long hours, she remembered the many tales she had heard – of the kindly, gentle old neighbour, aged eighty, who turned nasty and cursed everyone in the household for a whole week before he died, of the nasty mother-in-law who suddenly stopped scolding her long-suffering daughter-in-law and died actually holding the young woman’s hand. It was as if they needed to give warning of their approaching death in the most conspicuous way possible – a total reversal of personality and temperament. External signs like the owl’s cry, a sudden discharge of scent into the air of pale nocturnal flowers, even the sound of knuckles knocking on coffins, were all but secondary warnings.
She bent down and looked into Por Por’s face, offered to take her shopping, to the playground, to the White Heaven Temple, and watched in dismay as the old woman silently and resolutely shook her head, like a dispirited child, to each offer. Bernard, whose kindness in searching for and bringing her grandmother back home almost three years ago she would never forget, joined her in trying to break through the thick silence that the old one had wrapped round herself, like a warm, comforting blanket. Both were able, just for a while, to step out of their world of silent conflict, growing more fearful by the day, to stand side by side as a pair in a unity of concern and compassion for another.
The pleasant thought was interrupted by a sombre one: could tension between two persons in a household spread outwards, like a dark and pestilential cloud, to infect others? Could even very young children in their cribs and cradles succumb to slow, silently spreading adult poison?
She spoke about the owl’s cry to Bernard, and he dismissed it, as he regularly dismissed the superstitions of elderly relatives like his Third Aunt, as just so much of the traditional nonsense forbidden by the Church. Nowadays he turned every statement, every question, no matter how innocuous, into yet one more painful reminder of the hopelessness of their marriage, a continuing supply of fuel for an angry furnace that needed to be fed constantly. She waited with weary resignation and it came as expected, accompanied by a bitter laugh: if the owl’s cry was a sign of his impending death, it would be no bad thing. She thought grimly: wallowing in self-pity only made a person sink deeper in the regard of others.
She wondered how much her memory had been influenced by her ever active imagination to fix permanently in her mind the recollection of a little girl who had died the morning after an owl’s cry was heard. The girl and her mother had rented part of a room in a large rundown house with many rooms, endlessly partitioned by a greedy landlord, to take in as many as possible of the near destitute that regularly came with small children and belongings hurriedly stuffed into baskets or wrapped in sarongs. To this house her father had once taken her, her mother and Por Por in one of his frantic attempts to escape the loan sharks. She vividly remembered the thin, sickly-looking, sad-eyed little girl who was about the same age as herself, always wearing ragged, oversized clothes and rubber sandals, and sleeping with her mother on a dirty mattress in a tiny corner of a room.
In the middle of the night, at least six people woke up to the long, drawn out cry of the owl, and in the morning they looked upon the cold stiff body of the little girl on the mattress, and the mother squatting beside her, crying softly. She remembered her parents quickly packing up to leave, her mother pressing some money into the hands of the weeping woman; within a day, the house of death had been emptied of all its tenants.
No, it was nonsense. No bird’s cry would take her Por Por from her, and no change of behaviour in an old woman who habitually swung from one mood to another, like a temperamental child, should be cause for alarm.
Then Por Por suddenly emerged from her solitude to launch upon a series of activities that were alarming, not for any portentousness but for sheer danger to her life. She managed to slip out of the house several times, displaying the cunning of a sly caged prisoner intently watching for the smallest slip in vigilance of the prison keeper. She was on one occasion found near a Hindu shrine and on another, near her favourite haunt, the White Heaven Temple. ‘Por Por, you could have been killed by all those cars and buses, don’t you understand?’ said Maria in tears, examining her for injuries. Bernard had once suggested putting her in a home, the best and most comfortable in Singapore, but spoke no more on the matter when he saw his wife’s distress.
Then Por Por’s escapades took on a strange focus and urgency that only later Maria understood, in a return of all the old fears of tradition she thought she had left behind. Heng had managed to track the old woman down at the White HeavenTemple where she seemed to have gone with a special purpose. ‘What’s that? Show me,’ he ordered, but she insisted on hiding something behind her back. It turned out to be nothing alarming, only a joss stick that she must have taken from one of the many urns in the temple.
‘Por Por, what are you doing?’ Anna Seetoh asked as she saw the old woman stirring some ash in a cup of water with a spoon. The maid said it was ash from the joss stick; she had been trying to make a mixture for some time, like a small child engrossed in make-believe cooking.
‘Por Por, what on earth –’ Maria had opened the bedroom door in response to the frantic knocking.
The old woman was holding the cup of joss stick water and walking towards Bernard who had sat up, fully awake.
She put the cup to his lips, saying clearly in her dialect, ‘Drink this, it will cure you.’
The strange incident could have been dismissed as yet one more harmless eccentricity of demented old age if it had not been followed by a similar one, this time while they were having breakfast. Por Por walked straight up to Bernard, removed a packet of something from her blouse pocket, and said, ‘The gods have blessed this. Wear it close to your heart. It will save you.’
The packet contained some dried marigold petals which Maria instantly recognised as those from a garland that Por Por had some time ago removed from a stone god in a Hindu shrine and which she and the maid had hastily put back.
If Bernard experienced any frisson of terror in being singled out as one in dire need of supernatural help, he showed no sign of it, merely receiving the packet calmly and murmuring something to humour the old woman. Por Por watched with keen intensity; when he did nothing with the saving gift and continued eating his breakfast, she burst into a frenzy of scolding and had to be led away. Maria watched with mounting anxiety.
The ancient fearful world of darkness and owls and portents had come back to trouble her, and distilled into a single deadly chill that froze all power of speech and thinking, exactly a week later, when she had a call from the office of Dr S.K. Chiang to whom her husband went for his regular medical check-ups.
Dr Chiang said, ‘I need to speak to your husband; it’s urgent.’
She said, her mouth suddenly very dry, ‘What’s wrong? Could you tell me, Doctor?’
Dr Chiang said, ‘I really would like to speak to your husband personally. Tell him to call me as soon as he can.’
She made a frantic call to his office where he was having an important meeting and could not be interrupted. ‘Please tell him it’s extremely important,’ she begged the secretary. He came on the phone, none too pleased about having to leave a meeting that he was chairing. ‘Alright,’ he said when she told him. ‘I’ll call Dr Chiang after the meeting.’
‘Will you let me know as soon as you can?’ she asked, and he could not resist the opportunity to say, with the habitual hard-edged cynicism, ‘Why this concern for me all of a sudden?’
‘Please let me know,’ she pleaded. ‘Alright,’ he said in a softened tone.
She did not want to share her fears with her mother, in case they turned out to be unfounded: her imagination, in a wild flight of hope, pictured her husband coming through the door talking with unaccustomed good humour about wrong prognoses and alarmist doctors.
If she could, she would have shared her fears with Por Por, to draw out the explanation for those weird actions that now seemed like some dreadful portent. She looked at Por Por who was looking at her with the quizzical half frown of someone trying hard to remember something. An old woman rapidly losing her mind, who had suffered much in her youth, who must have a huge store of secret hopes, dreams and passions that would finally go to the grave, unknown and unfulfilled, together with that frail body: were women like Por Por, at the last stage of their bitter lives, given the gift of the owl, the harbinger of death? Were they also given the power to avert doom? The image of Por Por offering Bernard the saving joss stick ash from her temple, and later, the holy flower petals from an alien shrine would not go away. In different circumstances, could Por Por have become like the powerful Venerable Mother in the White Heaven Temple, dispensing hope to the hopeless? The dark forces of tradition that modernity’s vanguards of education and technology claimed they had routed, were unroutable.
At the sound of the key turning in the lock, she rushed to the door to face her husband. He did not look at her; his pale taut face told her everything.
‘Dear –’ It was the first time in their married life of nearly three years that she had used any term of endearment to the man she had promised to love, honour and obey, elicited by none of these imposed vows, but a natural compassion that swelled and overwhelmed her. ‘Dear,’ she said again and took his arm. She said it in the fullness of heart; if her heart had never had any place for this thing called love for which men and women supposedly married, it could at least enlarge now to fill itself with kindness.
Kindness was superior to pity, to sympathy, to empathy, maybe even to love itself, for unlike any of these, it was never self-serving but translated immediately into action to help, relieve and comfort the sufferer. No other human feeling had been compared to milk, for indeed it was one with that life-giving sustenance: she saw herself, from that moment onwards, being impelled by this purest of motives to do everything for her husband. If love was a talent she did not have, kindness was the compensating gift of which she had been blessed with plenty.
‘Dear,’ she said, and her husband turned once to give her a brief forlorn look that said, ‘Too late.’
They were dreary days which she would remember with much sadness, filled with anxious waiting never rewarded with good news. The prognosis, confirmed by two other cancer specialists, was even worse than expected.There was an initial period, expected in such circumstances of shock and disbelief, when the sufferer lashed at all and sundry in the sheer incomprehensibility of it all. How could Dr Chiang have failed to detect the cancer in all those regular check-ups? How could it have spread so rapidly and virulently without notice? All those expensive tests, all those reassurances. Anna Seetoh, always awed by her son-in-law, readily joined him in castigating the doctor.
There was a moment of wavering faith when Bernard turned his cynicism in another direction, dismaying the parish priest Father Rozario who had come to comfort as soon as he heard the news.
‘Father, why does God punish those who have always served Him faithfully? Can you explain that?’ His tone of grievance was by turns plaintive, savage. For a while, the very sight of life itself was too cruel a reminder of his impending loss of it, so that visitors, by the mere fact of their being alive and in good health, gave offence and were not welcome.
Facing death, he hated the living. Por Por, her mother, herself, the maid Rosiah, the delivery boy coming in with the groceries, the caller on the phone, the TV news presenter – each, as he saw and heard them, still a participant in the greatest human enterprise called life, must have squeezed out of him, again and again, the wrenching cry, ‘Why me?’
It would only be a matter of time, thought Maria, before he turned upon her, in blame’s desperate escalation: ‘Cancer is brought on by stress, as the medical literature has proved. For the last three years, I have never been so stressed in my life.’
When the accusation came, in all the remaining bitterness that had to be expelled from his system, she received it humbly, thinking only of the relief it gave him. Third Aunt came on an urgent visit, pulled her aside and said in a rebuke she was able to receive with equal humility because it bore no malice, only love of the suffering man: ‘I told you my Ah Siong not happy, so thin. Why you never take care of him? Why you never tell me?’