HDB Tales of the Maid

The girl Wendy likes plain water for her drink; not the boy Darren. He likes sweetened barley. Very particular. The drinks cannot be confused. Must be careful to avoid trouble.

         Brown doll! Brown doll!
         They are thirsty. Not surprising in the heat. Still, picking them up from school the rule is never to buy them drinks outside. No matter how they pester.
         Brown doll! Brown doll!
         They can't wait, sitting at the table kicking their feet at each other. Good children in the main like any other. They are never any trouble. Very fond of Auntie. Sometimes Brown doll, Brown doll.
         Well behaved. They can be a little cheeky when the others are around, Mummy and Ah-ma. Ah-ma especially. When their real auntie Winnie is around they never do it. Ah-ma more than any one. Ah-ma particularly.
         Confusing the two drinks would cause trouble at the table at the best of times. Having Ah-ma there makes it a disaster.
         Auntie; Brown doll never confuses the two drinks. Careful and deliberate. Right hand water; left barley. They don't even look the same. How could one confuse them? The boy however can be a little devil. A good boy. But nevertheless. A dash of his heavily sugared drink in his sister's water can cause all hell to break loose. The girl tosses her drink onto the table. YUK!
         Grandma over in a flash. What? How?... Ah, the telltale sweetness in the wrong glass.

         — Vashti!... All the maid's fault... Roundly she is berated.
         Getting the kid to own up is difficult.
         — Look into my eyes Darren. Did you put your barley in Wendy's glass? Tell me the truth. Do you want Auntie to go back home?... Tell us now...
         Minor triviality; heart-break the result for the maid.
         The damn old Serangoon witch can be a nasty bitch far worse than this too. Into her sixties, a stupid old vain cow.
         — This facial of mine, you know how much it cost? Girly, you know how much?... Preening herself if you can believe it before her make-up compact-mirror. At her age!
          — ... You wouldn't know it's three months of your salary.
         Old grandpa hasn't given her a touch how long. The fat old cow.
         The maid is skinny and ugly as well as brown. Her grandchildren are fond of her. Somehow she has wormed her way into their affections. God knows how. They call her Brown doll.
         — She's not a doll! How can she be a doll, ugly and skinny and black like that? Yuck!
         Deserves to have her head put in the oven with the duck, just to singe her tattooed eyebrows. Silly old fuck.
         Someone's "spoilt" the toilet. (The language used by these daughters of coolies!)... It could not have been one of the grandchildren. Could only be the maid! They shit in the bamboo where they come from.

         — VASHTI!....
        They are all Christians in the house, by odd chance maid included. The old bitch's sisters attend regularly and donate. Prayers before meals, thanks for what they are about to receive, Lord save us, guide and protect us.
         Always scolds the maid. Never can do anything right.
         Poor girl is confined to cheap, labelless clothes. Look at mine! This is a blouse. You couldn't dream of something like this, not if you lived for a hundred years.
         (Yes, bought in the market, the maid knows. Haven't you dragged me along five hundred times on your shopping expeditions? Scared and lonely going alone... They are scared of the smallest cockroaches in Singapore.)
         They buy the maid all her clothes, underwear, her toiletries, tampons. It's the usual arrangement here. If it weren't for them she'd be back in the dirt where she was born, hungry and dirty and forlorn. A begging bowl.
         The old witch suspects her son-in-law's having it off with the girl possibly. You never can trust a man, right enough. Where did she get that pink hand phone, an eye one? Some bullshit story... The younger daughter is gay. The old witch knows like all the rest of them. Can't hide anything from her. She might be in love with the maid like the rest of them. Is she putting something in the food! She's taught her herself to cook.

         The maid Vashti thinks it’s because of poison and charms. That’s why the rule about outside drinks. Still sometimes she relents. Sometimes she can’t refuse them.

          The old witch rarely berates her in front of her daughters. Usually when they are alone with the children. Other times she’ll buy her little gifts or treats. The devil only knows how it goes.

                 

NB. HDB are Housing Development Board government flats; lower end of the housing market.

Dayak Head-hunter

.... Eleven something it seemed from the chap on the parapet wall outside Enak, Enak—Tasty, Tasty—this morning. Two upraised forefingers chosen after a momentary shuffling of the hands, something like a goal-umpire’s signal. From four or five metres it was a wise decision. The more or less that followed left some doubt: might have been three or thirteen minutes either side. Roundabout all that was needed, Terima kasih. Thumbs up…. The word of Malay had been unexpected. (Similarly finding himself in the ascendant position with the wrist-watch.) Shortly afterward when the man comes over to try a witticism, with all the gaps in the mouth the English again problematic.... A single fang it looked like on the upper row, wide and to one side. We missed each other there. Evidently the man was left disconsolate at the failure himself. Rounding back one more time on his way out, in a slightly more intelligible articulation for farewell, chap lets it be known, keeping a firm, hard face all the while: — My name not Bye-bye.... A couple of repetitions were sufficient. Got it! You cheeky old devil, playing the head-hunter from Borneo…. Smiles for miles and miles across those broad features, man well into his seventies, the latter reaches almost certainly. How can one fail to love these Malayu?

The Bomoh (Jan25)

 

 

Much of the guesswork in this case was not difficult. A quick look at the man told you more or less instantly. You would give Botak a wide berth if you could help it, avoid eye contact and cross to the other side of the street. Last year there was more than a little shock when he was unexpectedly spotted wrapped in a towel on the second floor of the hotel, helping himself to something from the attendants' trolley. A paying guest on the same floor.

Running a food-stall across the way at Geylang Serai; neat clean shirts counteracting to some degree the other indicators. Reformed and on the straight and narrow, perchance. Turning his hand to legitimate business ventures.

One needed to be cautious in judgement.

Wild from early years. Botak is Baldy in bahassa Malay. When Botak was in his teens shaving the scone was not a fashion statement. By seven after his father died he was out of the house and on the streets. Schooling got along the way, hit or miss you could say.

From one uncle to another, never staying long—the orphan knows when he is not wanted. Those years young Botak (perhaps before the shaving) was diving from the head of the locally famous Merlion for the coins the tourists threw into the Singapore River.

A performing seal. On Clifford Pier—now Clarke Quay—opening taxi doors and carting hotel luggage. Yes sir. Thank you madam.

The turned eye had associated scaring in the socket, out from the corner and over the brow. Surgeon had done a good job.

A difficult question that could not be ventured for some time. You could get that from a knuckle-duster, or fighting-stick. Not necessarily enough to put down a bull-at-a-gate hurricane fighter.

Street brawler Botak, sure as the sun shone in the Tropics. Burly, rounded shoulders, jerkily puffing a cigarette. The swivelling schoolboy gait appeared an exaggerated put-on; you never saw a middle-aged adult sashaying along the street like that.

Botak was of his own kind.

In fact the eye was a legacy of a motor-cycle accident in Batam, under the influence of ganja.

 

Scene Two. The Dato Raja—Grandpa King. Nightclub in Lorong 4 at the other end of Geylang; the old Chinese quarter. (The real Chinatown of contemporary Singapore, rather than the one advertised in the brochures featuring the re-built temple.)

Year of 1991, 3 - 4AM.

From dish-washing, clearing tables and serving, Botak had graduated to standing the door. Music, beer and prata going all hours.

The antagonist was a Chinese friend under the influence of something that had him really going. Really, really going. And a friend this guy.

For all the draconian prohibitions, there has always been a fair degree of choice available for the gear in Sin’pore. Hangings, long jail terms, strict parole & rehab. Notwithstanding.

— I fuck your mother! You're a stinking filthy c___, you dog.

Chap spinning and spinning. Scores of people at the outdoor tables.

Botak's fingers raised and extended for the numerous listeners.

Music ground to a halt.

Let's get our asses outta ‘ere. Musicians slinking outta the joint.

Lashings added to lashings that seemed would never stop. On the fellow went, wound up on backyard lab product it must have been. None of the common gear.

From a spot where he had placed it for just such necessity, Botak drew out the badek.    

Not the common parang; the badek. The former was longer and heavier, become as fetishised and prized as the Indonesian kris and Japanese samurai sword.

Every tough needed one close at hand for eventualities.

In these parts across the archipelago, chop-chops in the back streets were dealt mainly by the twelve-sixteen inch parang. In the earlier period there had been a range of blades, the usual fighter-warrior codes, territorial demarcations, hierarchies and shenanigans with the cops. 

These blades were the weapons with which the white devils had been resisted in the Philippines, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, China, Japan, Sulawesi and every other place you'd care to name.

The badek was more or less the classic sickle; or half-sickle. Unlike in the former wheat-fields of the Ukraine, used mainly for harvesting coconuts here, splitting timber and clearing the compound.

In 1991 as now, strictly prohibited in Singapore. Up in Malaysia and over in Indonesia, where the kampungs could still be found, the badek remained a common tool.

Flaying at the end of Botak's windmill arm—sparks from the blacksmith's forge in the dark.

The people aghast, jumping from their seats.

The man, the foul-mouthed former friend, dropped dead, everyone thought.

Botak didn't run from the police. Take me away officers. And duly obliged.

Thirteen years & four months; originally sentenced to twenty. Had the man died, Botak would have hung.

Wry smiles unavoidably all these years later telling it to a stranger. Everyone at Geylang Serai knew the story. It must have been many years since Botak had delivered it himself.

A couple of months earlier Botak had told of his younger brother's hanging. Botak himself had never done heroin. Ganja had been enough for him; even the drink was moderate.

There was little to offer of that episode. The amount was enough for trafficking.     

Lawyers and  appeals. Photographs in the newspapers. Two or three times the brothers saw each other inside.

A limp hand raised into the air that had been witnessed in these parts before for No-more.   

If there had been a rub of thumb and forefinger, it was brief. More like a ribbon released onto the current of air.

The life Botak had lived had taken other sudden turns and plunges. Ten plus years of jail-time was one thing; there must have been a great deal else in the buried past.

A few times Botak had been asked about lock-up. Possibly he had not comprehended.    

Crossed wrists had been laid on the table more than once. It seems unlikely Botak held back any. Botak’s life was an open book. Everyone knew Botak at G. Serai; nothing to hide. Others would give various details about their time at Changi. The cane, the regime, various screws, devices in order to get by. Botak though was not a great talker.

Go-to man at that corner of the market. There was a good deal of to-and-fro. Someone wanted something; the foreign workers needed handling. New girls from Indonesia always drew Botak’s interest.

Marlboro Reds. How did a man like Botak do time without cigarettes? (No smoking policy currently inside.) Botak was simply uninterested in such delving.

Islam, prayer and strict discipline would have been unlikely in Botak's case. How did a live-wire endure it?

The somewhat unusual tale to come was not as shocking as it may have been without the insights of anthropology and cultural practice. After the Egyptians, the Homeric Greeks and the Aztecs, this was nothing new or surprising. Botak provided the particular details of the local practice on the Equator.

An impressionable fellow who learned from the streets and the elders. Even in Botak's time in the early seventies, the remnant kampungs in Geylang and the local Bomohs made a large impression on a fatherless boy. Understandably.

 

 

There was a particular old chap in Jalan Passe—Road of Sadness; Vale of Tears. A man of authority.

Vale of Tears was both the name of the main road in the kampung and also the kampung itself. Pretty much within the block of the current “Malay Kampung”—Malay Village at the very bottom of Geylang Road, the last remnants of which were currently being bulldozed. A cultural centre of some description was on the drawing boards; the Indians were getting their own out in their quarter. No great loss in fact, this mock-up of a kampung that was built in the 1960's, just as the destruction of the traditional life of the island was nearing completion.

By the time of the exploits ahead, the old bomoh of Vale of Tears had long passed on. Gone, but not forgotten.

You could assemble a perfectly adequate portrait of the traditional bomoh from the composites at the eatery tables around Geylang Serai, evenings and weekends in particular, when the men returned to their home turf.

Songkok at a rakish angle; bedecked with a spray of creeper. Straggly shoulder-length hair, perhaps threads entwined. A dozen rings on the fingers was not overdoing it. (All the regular chaps were adorned with the gleaming rocks in various colours. Street traders come over from Indonesia regularly plied the eatery tables.)

Pendants on the ears; necklaces and pins. The bomoh failed the mark without bangles on both wrists, tighter on the biceps like the trannies sported in some of the middle lorongs of Geylang still.

A latter day man might mix and match—cowboy shirt with dhoti.

Impressionable young Malay lads were supposed to listen to the Imam instead? Boys from traditional homes maybe, with strong parental models.

 

 

The bomoh was a healer, fortune teller, mystic and seer. Every kampung had one at least.

Sometimes the regalia were restrained and modest; some of the bomohs couldn’t be told by their raiment.

The bomoh in Vale of Tears was more bewitching. Watching him slice a kaffir lime and flip it for judgment could leave a viewer breathless. Under the bomoh’s watchful eye coffee grounds and chicken bones told the mysteries of fate & the unknown. Fretful pregnant women, infertile women, the possessed, ill & dying were treated by the bomoh.

 

 

 

Such exploits as these (Scene Three, the graveyard) are performed within the bonded group, if at all.

Hush now.

A gathering of braves in a party of eight, Botak at their head,.

The Thursday night of the twelfth was moving toward the thirteenth. (No room for deviation in these stories; this particular bomoh might have heard ghost stories that had been brought over from distant shores.)

The thirteenth. Friday possibly. The timing was right; lads underway.

The headstone said Patima; a girl-child. The gender was important.

A child's was neither here nor there; it did though need to be female.

Eight pairs of eyes satisfied themselves under the flicker of cigarette lighters.

PATIMA.

By the position of the marker the lads knew where to dig.

When it was uncovered and lifted from the ground, the skull was clean, and bare. Brushing off the dirt, a gleaming trophy was revealed. What was there to be frightened about?

How body and spirit was strengthened was well-known. Back the lads went with the spoils to the house, where all had been prepared.

The seven flowers, limes, tray and cloth.

The fabric needed to be cut: 8 x two; a square for each.

Two of the lads scissoring, while the others polished the trophy again.

Vacant eye-sockets. Lower jaw had not been mentioned. What they had in hand would do nicely.

Kaffir limes come in two varieties, one of either gender. One could tell the difference by the protuberances and hollows on the bottom. Again, for the charm to be effective, only juice from the female fruit could be used. Pristine clean was needed.

More rubbing, polishing & buffing. Done finally.

Now the division. Hammer was not employed here; the fists of the young lads were as good as forged steel.

Easy. An eggshell.

Each of them took the fragments and wrapped them in the yellow cloths, twisted in the centre and the ends for tying. These went in the crooks of the elbow, one either side.

All together now. One for all and all for one.

Heave-ho, Heave-ho, Heave-ho.

All the strength a man would ever need in the back lorongs, come what may. Let whoever wanted to try step forward. Chinese, Indian, whatever.

The headstone read Patima, with a P. (Indian variant of Fatima.) Botak had the alphabet before prison.

 

 

Last week there had been a warm invitation for a fishing trip on Batam, where Botak's fifth wife lived. (Not a polygamous case; Botak’s earlier wives had been divorced.) Four natural children and seven step. 

Another standing invitation in a couple of weeks, in that case the wedding of Botak's nephew in Johor Bahru.       

Three or four days Malay weddings lasted. The door would be open; welcome attendance. Another orang sampan the bride to be there.    

— Like you!... Botak laughed, throwing back his head and taking another puff on his cigarette.

It was an odd joke. A spontaneous little play that was all Botak's own. Giggles trailed some belly laughs. Heehaw. Heehaw. Heehaw.

Orang sampan?...

 

NB. Orang asli were the indigenous inhabitants on the island of Singapura and the Malay Peninsula. Darwin, Wallace and the other naturalists of the era adopted the Malay orang (orangutan) for the common breed of monkey in the region. Historically, in Bahasa Malay the term was used loosely for man and his nearest evolutionary relative both. Orang laut on the other hand were other indigenous people who had clustered along the Singapore River, even into the ‘60s. At some point in that decade the small, remnant community had suddenly vanished, more or less overnight and without trace. Concerned citizens even now were troubled over the matter. What had happened to the orang laut?

Sampan was a type of traditional boat used formerly in the region. The English had adopted the reference to these Malay/Chinese boats; aka bumboats. The English galleons of course were far superior, mounted with guns and canon that provided entry to any port of their choosing. Pirates par excellence; orang asli with whom one could not mess.

A boat-person—orang sampan. What kind of joke was this of Botak’s?

It was a moniker that struck home as much as the macabre rites in the story. If one was of British stock, Dutch or Portuguese heritage here, no offence could reasonably be taken. The late-comer Yankees the same.

 

 

NB 2. At the Pasar one morning Rahim the busker confirmed what Mohammad the stockbroker had revealed the night before: the former hard-boy Botak was back in again. Done for dope this time. Confirmation too of the term. Raised thumb & pinkie from Rahim—seven years.  Relatively small quantity involved it must have been. Late-forties would make it a tough stretch for Botak now.

 

 

 

                                                                                       Geylang Serai, Singapore 2011-25