Harlo, these are some of my stories. I like them. You can see if you like them too. All these stories are also available on my Blog
My grandmother was an ordinary person without any particular power, influence, or authority, like most of us. She was the quiet, unassuming matriarch of my small family, and I miss her dearly. This is a story of a life well-lived, where the narrative, like most interesting ones, begins at the end.
Isn't that where we tend to think about life? We never ponder our purpose and meaning while we run the race. There just isn't any time. Deadlines, obligations, desires, and fears consume our attention. It's only in the quiet moments, the spaces between life and living, whether we're staring out the window on a bus or in bed, desperately urging our brains to be still so we can rest and run again tomorrow, that we truly wonder. It's in these pauses that questions of purpose and values arise. Introspection gives rise to doubt, allowing us to glimpse at the story we're writing with the sentences we write every day. I, too, had a moment like this while I bore her coffin on my shoulders down 12 flights of stairs in her HDB block.
Indian funerals in Singapore are an expression of community and solidarity in the face of loss. The deceased is usually brought to their home, to be with family and friends for the last time before they are cremated. My grandmother was brought home to her flat on the 11th floor of an HDB estate in Yishun. The funeral director, a friend of the family and my grandmother's, stayed with her through the autopsy proceedings and brought her home in a decorated hearse adorned with Hindu deities. There she lay, in the coffin she was to be cremated in, adorned in the best saree her daughters could get her and looking like a poorly made wax cast of herself.
As I sat on the cold tiled floor by her side, looking at her ashy skin and heavy makeup, I wondered if it would bother her to appear this way in front of almost everyone she had known in life. My grandmother never struck me as someone who gave an undue amount of thought to her appearance. She mostly wore a sarong, which we Tamils call a Kailee, the batik uniform of the elderly in Singapore, and a loose-fitting flowery blouse. She dressed for comfort and convenience, the many pockets of her shirt containing everything she needed to get around by herself. Keys, a small purse with loose change and folded up notes, a handkerchief for the thrills and spills, loose buttons, and usually a seedless conserved plum candy that I knew as Bokkana. Armed thus, she roamed the estate to her heart's content when she could, walking everywhere as a form of exercise and because her poor eyesight made taking the bus more effort than it was worth. Her territory was limited to our estate, however. She was familiar with the train systems but did not like taking the escalators. This I learned in the most vivid of ways when bringing her to visit our relatives once. The grip she applied to my arm left the bony imprints of her fingers there as she stalled and worked up the courage to leap onto one of the moving rungs of the escalator. Of course, these limitations never stopped her from going anywhere if she wanted to; they just meant that, for the most part, she stayed within Yishun.
With her daily patrols of the area, whether she intended to or not, my grandmother became a friendly and familiar face to everyone she came across. Sitting at her feet during her wake, I slowly learned what that meant.
Our neighborhood was not exactly upscale. Mostly working-class families lived around us, and there were always people under our block that we would give a wide berth to. One such person I recognized from the time I was a boy was a ratty-haired Chinese man who often slept on the bench under the block. He never bothered anyone but had a habit of rapidly mumbling to himself aloud at seemingly random intervals.
Often, he would be unwashed and smelling of urine. As a boy, I would often take a circuitous route home to avoid having to walk past him. Though I was never rude or confrontational, I actively avoided him, sometimes even choosing to take the stairs up eleven floors if I saw him waiting for the lift.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this man, wearing his usual torn and patched clothes but with his hair neatly combed, pacing nervously along the corridor outside of my grandmother's flat, as though waiting for permission to approach. My aunt, a kind and generous soul, wondered if he wanted a meal as we were serving light refreshments to the mourners. She approached him with a small Styrofoam cup of coffee and a plate of vegetarian bee hoon and asked if he would like to sit and eat. He accepted the food and requested if he could enter in a broken amalgamation of English, Hokkien, and Malay that we know as Pasar Melayu, a colloquial tongue for those of us who could not communicate in English or our mother tongues. He gestured towards the house, and my aunt signed back that he could enter if he wanted to. He placed the coffee and food along the inner ledge of the corridor and walked nervously into the house. He seemed nervous and wore an expression that said, "I may not be welcome, but I will be here for this."
He walked towards the coffin, lying in the middle of the house weighed down with garlands and loose flower petals in accordance with the funeral customs.
The man stopped at the foot of the coffin and bowed, clasping his hands and moving them in a Taoist gesture of prayer. Then he took a handful of loose flower petals placed on a silver tray beside the deceased and, kneeling at the base of the coffin, gently laid them at my grandmother's feet.
As this happened, I sat beside her and wondered why this man, someone who appeared to be ill and who was not even in the right state to care for himself properly, would want to brave a crowd of strangers to pay his respects to a small, old woman. Were they friends?
After the man left, I went looking for my aunt to quell my doubts. She had lived with my grandmother towards the end and was sure to know. My aunt said that often, while she walked around the estate, my grandmother would speak to the man, asking him in her own broken version of Pasar Melayu if he had eaten and inquiring after his health and family. She told me how sometimes when the man lay on the bench at the Resident's Corner at the base of their HDB block, my grandmother would sit on the opposite bench and talk to him.
She said nothing of importance, seeing as she could not really understand him. Instead, she would simply talk about whatever took her fancy, telling him of the fruit trees nearby that had bloomed for the season, telling him of the lady who had passed away in the block next to theirs. In this way, the man came to recognize my grandmother and, I suppose, saw a friend in her. He would wave to her as she walked past.
My aunt even told me of how once, she saw him jump up from the bench he usually lay on when he saw my grandmother ambling towards the lift lobby. He walked her to the lift and waited for her to board before returning to his bench. This friendship, odd as it was, seemed to have had a profound impact on this man, giving him the courage to sit in an unfamiliar house to pay his respects to his departed friend.