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2002-04-06 - 4:57 a.m. Oh mother, who wakes at dawn while everyone else is still suckling on dreams; who blushes at vulgar jokes told by loud Bawean women but cracks her own at home (why do you keep losing things, if your balls weren't attached to your body you'd have lost it long ago); who goes for brisk walks with other Malay women in aerobics shoes of dubious brand names; who has sworn not to bring my 11-year-old sister to religious classes at the mosque anymore after some attendee asked the ustazah the obligations of performing oral sex in the context of being a dutiful, husband-fearing woman; who worked in factories, one of them a typewriter-repair job, which might or might not have turned her son into a writer, fascinated as he was that the spidery footprints of the machine's feelers were letters of the alphabet; who cries at Hindustani melodramas (the jasmine-bedecked bride weeping at the altar, the white-haired mother begging her policeman son not to hunt down his own bandit brother) and laughs at Hong Kong comedies (Stephen Chow and his nonsense deadpan, Sandra Ng and her hysterical man-hungry waaaah); who hangs clothes with a system nobody else in the house can decode (and we always do it wrongly, always), an astrology of laundry where trousers and skirts and underwear occupy specific celestial positions on suspended bamboo poles; who rubbed chillies in my mouth when I told lies as a kid, forcing me to rinse my mouth for half an hour, teary-eyed, to extinguish my dragon breath; who kept the umbilical cords of her children in pink paper, powdering them with talc, in the hope that they will love one another; who always gave us warnings by counting, ONE, TWO, but never reaching three, because then the spell would be broken, it was the mysterious wrath of Number Three that kept us obedient and meek; who believes that St Michael's shortbread biscuits and pasar malam popcorns and off-season durians are rare treats; who loves babies, especially the fat spaced-out ones, as proud of milk-vomits and drool-stains on the shoulders of her blouses as a soldier is proud of his rank; who like all Malay mothers is an expert at exaggeration and emotional blackmail, once taking out a knife and asking me to plunge it into her chest, so great was the grief I was causing her; who took a trishaw to her primary school, her pinafore starched and her hair braided by a cluck-clucking Cantonese ma jie; whose favourite story was how she was kidnapped by grandchildren-less relatives from Seremban and packed into a train, and for the next few weeks treated like a princess, caressed indulgently, as she pointed and whooped at buffaloes grazing in the flooded, shimmering rice fields; whose nightmares are always of her stepmother who locked her in the toilet with the echo of her voice as her only solace; who doesn't know that sometimes I am awake before her, listening to her shuffle out of bed (bleary-eyed, dragging her feet, scratching her tummy) wondering if it's her stretch marks itching again, and I am shedding a tear I want hidden from her forever, because perhaps before we were even born we had already hurt our mothers, by stretching their bellies, a globe she could have charted and understood if only its axis didn't keep on moving so much, and finally move out of her body, imagine that, an axis, a mathematical plane in space, a nothing, yet how much it wants to be a planet, to be discovered and picked out from the galactic vacuum, to be christened, so hungry for its own name.
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