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2004-04-09 - 3:13 p.m. I once had a grand aunt who I called Nyai Minah. My father would tell me how she used to look after me when I was a child, at my grandmother's kampung house in Pasir Panjang. Nyai Minah had looked after my father when he was young too, and by the time I came along she already had white hairs on her head. I can vaguely summon her face: a wide forehead, pouches under her eyes, and her sagging cheeks, giving her an overall doleful expression. She had a melancholic aura--although it was impossible to tell if this was secreted from within, or whether it was a cloak: sadness simply flocked towards her like moths to a source of light. In photographs, she would have a faraway expression. If she ever smiled in those photos, it was with an ancient, weary stretch of the lips, not the automatic one we display when we know an image of ourselves is being transported into the realm of the aesthetic. It would be a smile of amusement, perhaps muted surprise that there existed such a contraption as the camera. I cannot recall her voice. Nor what she must have smelt like as I was held close to her bosom. I can remember a towel thrown over my head after a shower, a magician's trick, the entire world disappearing from view. I remember rough hands pressing on the towel, the friction on my hair like an eraser smudging cross-hatches. If I did not hold my neck still, my head would be swept up in that vortex of blindness and confusion. The contact she made with me, separated by cloth, did not allay the fear that she had also vanished. I remember panic and suffocation, the relief when the towel was later removed and my eyes assembled her again in front of me, leaning towards my ears to blow them dry. In Malay we call it 'hembus telinga', to gust the ears. Memory is a magician too. Remove the towel and who do I see? My own mother. My grandmother herself, Nyai Asnah. My babysitters: the hoarse-voiced Wak Alos, and then later the teary-voiced Mami. Where is Nyai Minah? I wrote a poem about Nyai Minah once. Maybe I did it because she seemed so remote in memory, and poetry was supposed to resurrect her. But I confused details of her with Nyai Asnah. The women seemed so alike: the hair buns, the floral blouses in shades of browns and greys, the green Indonesian canvas belts they wore which were fitted with a buttoned pouch, the missing teeth. There is one detail though, which has stayed with me. Nyai Minah cracking the knuckles of my toes. There was nothing therapeutic about it, merely a child's game. I remember how painful it was. And yet how I masochistically wanted each of my toes to pop, as if it was a rite of passage. The big toes were mute, but a satisfying click had to be coaxed out of the eight remaining ones. Pulled, extended to their limits, and keletik. Keletik was the word I used for the procedure. Nyai, make that keletik sound with my toes, I would ask. My father frowned on it, he believed it would give me arthritis in old age, but left us alone. How could he sound his objections to the woman who had helped to raise him? At Nyai Minah's funeral, my father kept reminding me of how Nyai Minah used to bathe me, rock me in the sarong cradle, change my Pampers. (We lived in a world where proper nouns had taken the place of general nouns, hence Pampers, Kotex, Fab, Dracula, Jaws.) But the memories stubbornly refused to register. What do we gain from remembering? For my father, it gave credulity to his grief, his mourning found a shape, joining the dots from one pinprick of recollection to another. What had I lost? Sensations of being cleaned after I had soiled myself, the oscillations of a sarong cradle which reassured me of presence, the restoration I would have felt after having been passed through water, the caresses of a world I was only beginning to understand. Impossible to have known it then as love. And this will always be part of my experience of childhood. Nostalgia for the unremembered. A certain asymmetry where the adult will always belong to the domain of universals, their actions stripped of motivation and feeling. Out of the many memories I should have retained of Nyai Minah, only one remains, or is retrievable, or has stepped into the foreground. I think of Nyai Minah when I look at my toes, and try to picture the hands that once held them. It's asymmetry again; would she ever be able to recognise my recollection of her as a kind of love? Some Muslims believe that each time we offer prayers to the dead, a light comes on within the darkness of their graves. Would the keletik I replay in my head reach her as the eight mysterious clicks of an insect in that eternal night? She is the infant now, and all my overtures are faraway, unrecognised, indistinguishable from the silence or the chaos that is now her world.
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