Neon lights glistened quietly on the blackened waters of the river which snaked through the city’s concrete-jungle wilderness, culminating in an embrace of the glittering banks of the Marina Bay district, with its sentry-like silver and chrome skyscrapers juxtaposed against the quaint old tugboats that wove past each other on the river.
I watched as one of them trundled past, carrying its usual load of camera-toting tourists. I’d taken a ride on one of them before, when I was younger. My parents had wanted to show my late grandmother—Nyai—the sparkling Clarke Quay area after its gentrification.
Nyai had sat silently on one of the wooden benches on board the tugboat, white lace headscarf tied loosely around her face, dressed in one of her signature floral pastel baju kurungs, hands in her laps. In her eyes was a mixture of incomprehension, sadness, and awe—the kind that somehow always finds its way into the eyes of the elderly—and on her tongue a constant stream of “eh-eh!”s and tut-tuts. Whether they were tuts of disapproval or of amazement, I’d never been sure.
Still, it was always a treat to watch those animated expressions on Nyai’s face as she watched the kaleidoscopic restored Chinese shophouses lining the bank pass by. Where once they had housed warehouses storing everything from nutmeg to pepper, they now hosted a bevy of Western pubs, watering holes and overpriced Oriental restaurants.
But that was half a decade ago. Nyai had passed away alone on her deathbed in the maid’s room at home. I’d been the only one by her side when she breathed her last, though not out of devotion or filial piety. I just happened to have been the only one at home that day, along with Kak Mah, our helper, who stood, petrified, just outside Nyai’s room.
I sat there watching Nyai in the throes of death, my cheeks damp with tears of confused pain, interspersing my prayers with hoarse whispers: “Nyai?” I combed the empty corridors of my memory for an appropriate prayer to say, a chapter of the Qur’an to recite; something, anything.
But as I watched her life ebb, slowly but surely, out of her small body, my mind only drew blanks. I could only utter the only that came to mind: Surah al Fatihah. The Chapter of the Opening; the first chapter of the Qur’an. I didn’t know if it would suffice, but it would have to. I couldn’t recall any other special prayers to recite for the occasion.
When Nyai breathed her last, only the ringing silence in the house stood witness beside Kak Mah and I. Afterwards, I helped my mother and aunts give Nyai’s body the customary ritual bath. It was one of the most surreal and heartbreaking things I’d ever done, yet it had also been necessary because it cemented the grieving process. There was no avoiding, running away from, or dismissing the fact that a loved one is gone when you’re touching their lifeless body.
Nyai lay before me, her body so shrunken, bent, withered, as a fallen tree branch might lie cushioned in the grass. They bathed her again and again in musk-infused water, wrapped her entire body in an earth-brown batik cloth, swaddled her in layers of cotton and white shroud, tied a white scarf around her head, and drew kohl on her eyes.
I’d touched Nyai’s wrinkled skin, ran my hands through her sparse grey hair, and stared at her face. The same face that used to scold me as a child when I stole homeopathy pills from the kitchen to eat.
Nyai’s lips—the same lips that had kissed my forehead and cheeks countless times since infancy—were now pale and lifeless.
Nyai’s once chubby fingers were now long and bony, almost skeletal. Those were the same fingers that had cooked me porridge every time I was sick. The same fingers that slipped me my favourite snack when my parents weren’t looking, or maybe just a few dollars for ice cream, or maybe a chunk of the money my parents gave her every month (“I don’t need the money. I’m old. What am I going to do with money?”)
Those were the same fingers that had gripped my wrist so tightly when she was first hospitalised. The nurses had asked me to help hold her down so they could give her her medicine, which she was refusing to take. “You useless child!” Nyai had screamed at me afterwards, and my heart had crumpled, knowing it was not my soft-spoken, timid grandmother who’d uttered those words, but her dementia.
Age had crept across the landscape of her mind like poison ivy, and death, which had first slipped its hands into hers on that hospital bed, had now claimed her whole.
They carried her body out into the living room for the final goodbyes.
She lay there on the floor, encircled by her family, while her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren took turns kissing her for the last time. I watched my uncles tremble as they bent down to kiss her forehead, I watched my mother’s and aunt’s faces crumple, I watched my cousins wipe their tear-streaked cheeks, and I felt my own face burning with hot tears.
Love. Love all around. Every face adorned with the inevitable agony that accompanies love. Grief knows no language, neither does it need to. Love knows no utopia, neither will it ever, at least not in this world.
Five hours after she closed her eyes for the last time, Nyai was laid to rest forever.
And that was that.
