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2006-09-16 - 2:07 a.m. In the month of September in 2001 he met a woman who was a resident at the Institute of Mental Health, where he was posted for his psychiatry attachment. She was an attractive lady, in her 30’s, her long hair tied in a ponytail. When she sat opposite him in the interview room, she placed her hands in a stately manner on the edge of the table, much like how a Malay bride would display her henna-stained fingers on an embroidered cushion. ”They cut my fingernails,” she informed him, as if an explanation was required for her stiff pose. Her brittle dignity suggested to him a naked woman explaining how her clothes had been taken away. She answered his questions politely: her date of birth, marital status, her place of origin. She could accurately tell him of the day’s date, month, and year, as well as her present surroundings. And then, as if to prevent him from being lulled into routine data-collection, she voluntarily offered to him the date and circumstances of her death. It was three years ago, she claimed, when she had blacked out after giving birth to her child. An uncontrollable episode of postpartum haemorrhage was the coroner’s report. As for her child, it (she was unsure of its sex) too failed to survive, on account of its premature status. As her family was not wealthy, mother and child were buried in the same plot. Furthermore, since they were not superstitious, they had failed to observe the proper precautionary rites, which included placing an egg in her mouth and two under her armpits. True enough, when she woke up, she found ample space in her mouth for the growth of fangs. These, she claimed, could be retracted at will, like a cat’s claws. Also, with her arms unimpeded by eggs, she had managed to wrestle free from her confines of tight-swaddled white and batik cloth, as well as her canopy of packed earth. She found that that same lightness which had allowed her to seep between particles of loam also allowed her to climb the air—gravity for her was no longer a law, but a toy. And like a perverse version of the Prophet’s ascendancy to the seventh heavens from Jerusalem on the night of the miraj, she had her own visions as she travelled vertically through the soil: of beetles whose multi-segmented bodies and innumerable legs made them undulate as smoothly as black lacquered tongues, of hermaphroditic worms which seemed to telescope in two opposite directions, torn as they were from the pulls of conflicting libidos, of the lattice of roots forming its own network of roads and aqueducts in a subterranean city. Her first task, it seemed, was to seek nourishment for her child, who as it turned out, had been returned to her womb. But she would take no chances this time—during her first pregnancy, the problem was a kind of placental insufficiency, which denied her foetus its adequate nourishment. It was her maternal duty to now seek redress for this; she would hunt for sources of transfusion. The student scribbled furiously, devouring every detail. He knew that much of what she said was technically redundant, since he had already landed on a provisional diagnosis: delusion, with possible schizophrenia (he would need to find out later if she was also prone to auditory hallucinations). But in the margins he had written his own notes: ‘Fascinating. Patient actually believes she is a pontianak. Re: Malay ghost who died during childbirth. Interesting how she perceives ghost’s blood thirst as retaliatory. Against what? Her inseminator—a man, and hence all men? Or against fate, which claimed two lives during an act initially designed to bring life into the world? Must write about this. An encounter in an asylum where instead of a Self becoming the Other (diagnosed, filed, exiled from the ‘normal’), here I meet someone who has made the Other (a figure of superstition) a figure sitting just opposite my table: humanised, with a subjectivity, a countenance, and a voice! Can also write about feminism: bloodsucking as draining the phallus of its hydraulic fuel. Hence male panic and impotence.’ After his interview (she did indeed experience auditory hallucinations, although these were in the form of the famished wails of a baby), the student thanked the patient and proceeded to the trolley where the case files were kept. He had already fulfilled his daily quota of case interviews, but he was curious as to what other characters roamed this serendipitous ward he had been assigned to. In his lab coat, and with a stethoscope slung around his neck, he looked like any other medical student. The nocturnal secret he kept from the patients was that he was also a writer, who wanted to hear their stories because he too wanted to feed his own child—namely his voracious imagination. He would be the first to admit that it was an act which could only be described, in its duplicity and neediness, as vampiric.
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