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2002-04-08 - 8:58 p.m. "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" Leo Tolstoy 1) The day I found out my sister had grown up: I was in the kitchen, and I was making faces at her, spastic-scary, conjuring childhood trauma memories of parents leaving house and me acting possessed and forcing her to recite Quranic magic-words over and over, or me switching off toilet light and telling her flying piranhas were going to swarm out of the toilet bowl. (I was the nastiest sadist brother, tag-teamed with my male cousin and made her a bundle of eight-year-old hysteria). So there I was with my Linda Blair-Living Dead-rabies act, and she just turned nonchalantly at me, struck me down with a look of utter contempt, and asked, 'Is that your true form?' 2) Mosquito coil memory: Burning the end, watching the flame eat its way along the length, waiting until it would take two whole lungfuls for me to blow it out, wow what a big flame, until mummy would come in and see her son all incandescent like an altar saint and scream at me, and I'll puffpuff hastily but by that time a quarter of the coil is all ash. 3) Stupid game to play with overweight sister: When she walks, make boom-boom sounds to coincide with her footsteps. When she uses her hand to wave you away, make whoosh sounds. Everything should be in Dolby Surround, THX, the-audience-is-listening amplification. When she sits down, and stares at you triumphantly, totally still, no movement to sound-sync, wait for other sister who has been watching the whole game amusedly to chip in with thump-thump, thump-thump, aha! the heartbeat of the motionless giantess on the sofa. 4) My mother's fondness for animals: On my spiked-up hair: 'if a lizard falls from the ceiling the thing will die on your head', on my sister's panties: 'if you throw that into the sea all the fish will die', on why we can't keep cats: 'they will shit all over my house'. 5) The big lie: That circumcision feels like an ant bite. Failed to mention: an ant with jaws like blunt hedge-clippers. 6) Belated conclusion: After plucking dad's white hair (one cent for each strand), and then passing the baton over to my little sister who would shave him (brown goosebumpy neck lathered white) and finally down to my youngest sister who would powder his face and tie his hair up into bunches (hairstyle reminiscent of what a djinn would look like), I have finally discovered that my dad likes this sort of thing. It helps him sleep, being tended by small, child-labouring hands, amidst the smells of Gillette Lime and Yardley's Lavender. But I bet he wouldn't enjoy it if he was the uncle I had, whose daughter was so fascinated by the way he snored that she placed a chick pea on his lip, watched it edge closer and closer to the nose-magnet, going almost insane with delight, until the poor man's nostril met the chick pea in one colossal vacuum snort and he had to see an ENT surgeon later to remove it. 7) That one Hari Raya: In the photograph, I am on my knees, wearing my baju kurung (that year we decided not to wear the same colour for the whole family, thank god, and mummy, with her selective amnesia, would point out of car windows at colour-co-ordinated families and call them boria-dance troupes), holding mummy's hand, my nose touching it, and she is doing her best to look the part, dowager-mother-in-law-Negri-Sembilan-matriarch, face turned away, that was the year I was supposedly the naughtiest ever, she was never going to forgive me, we have this atonement ritual every year but this one was the most special because was she or was she not accepting my prostration? But the camera caught it: amidst the formidable haughtiness, the embarrassed trace of a smile, she can't keep up an act like this for long, my mummy, in fact she looks like a fifteen-year-old girl being proposed to by the clumsiest of her admirers. 8) Aunt's house: Crocheted tablecloth, crocheted chairbacks, crocheted coasters, crocheted tissue-box holder, crochet doilies for the TV and the hi-fi set and the speakers, crochet dochet coily doilies. My aunt the spider-woman, expert eight-fingered host, we didn't want to leave, my sister and I playing Nintendo, my mother gossiping, my father sound asleep in the guest's bedroom, while a table fan rippled his borrowed sarong. 9) In the lift: I would hide behind mummy, staring timidly at the woman who had a patch of furry pigment on her arm; fed on a diet of Channel 8 superstition, I believed she was a fox spirit in disguise. 10) Love: You wake up after an afternoon nap and the house is in total darkness. Where did the whole family go, shopping in Johor, dinner at Clarke Quay? The desolation is acute, you think maybe dying is like this; waking to an empty house with all the switches off. You turn on all the lights in the house before entering the bathroom, as if to spite anyone who had the heart to leave you (you're 25 but you're still a child) like that in the dark.
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