TENGGARA april 1968
Dept. of English/ Univ. of Malaya
Malaysia
Cynthia Anthony
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NANNAN
Ten years have passed since Nannan left us. Nannan? The childish name for Grandma stuck. We retain a hazy picture of a nutbrown little Burmese-Portuguese lady with dark hair drawn back in a bun. But the name -- ah, what times it floods back. No, she is not gone. She lives on in the impactshe has made on our sensibilities.
She smiles. She removes her upper and lower dentures for us to gape in wonderment. After, with her broken English, her 'kitchen' smells, her store of weird tales, she is the sun and moon to eight grand-children who come from three broken homes. Nannan knows. She laughs with us. Her 'faces' fascinate us. We press round in awe and amazement. Again rings out the tale of the giant coming down in pieces through the ventilation hole in the ceiling. First a leg falls...then an arm comes through... another leg appears ... the other arm ... a body ... then THE HEAD ... slowly the parts asemble... Huddled close, not daring to breathe, hands grasped for comfort, we wait with parted lips and racing hearts for the grand finale.
Her tales weren't bed-time tranquilisers but there was an element of wonder in them that steered us to look beyond the shoddy life within what constituted the home, beyond the bickerings and the life-lessness. We kept for the littel girl whose stepmother made her eat fried frog. As she bit into the meat, it cried "kong kong bonnie cheh," echoing the baseless futility of her wasted and spoil and eroded little life. Then there was the evil wizard who effected changes by chanting "Tranta sasta fasta sadbul nosta pesta festa." How we grieved for the disobedient little fish being drawn up on a hook and line...."O mother, mother, mother, if only I had heeded you I wouldn't be caught now." Could we alter the fate of the Malay girl caught by an orang utan and forced to be his mate in the tree-top for years? Couldn't their baby be saved before the ape tore it in four in anger and cast the pieces into the river? Why dindn't the heroine collect coconut husk faster to make her escape rope sonner?
Again and again, holiday after holiday, we thrilled to local tales of color and adventure.
When Nannan was five, her mother left home for another man. The woman who took her place subsequently, whipped the small child awake at five every morning. To be the household drudge and a perennial Cinderella or to say "Yes" to the first young man who came along? The decision was soon settled. After all, Eurasians in Penang in the 1880's weren't an expendable commodity and it didn't do to be too choosey.
So at sixteen Nannan exchanged her prison for another, and watched her dear beloved, within the space of a year and one baby later, share his affections with the gay ladies who were ready, willing and able. Her wippings did not stop either. And the Priest urged her to say more Rosaries. Why, Monica had groaned nad entreated for nineteen years ( or was it tewnty... or twenty-six or ...?) and the Powers had produced a St. Augustine to wipe the past -- just like that.
Fifteen babies and six abortions later -- her Siamese neigh-
bour recommended swallowing opium, perhaps that did the trick -- her younger has completed his Education and she can apply for a legal seperation. The old man fights it tooth and claw, hammer and nail. He wants to have his cake and eat it. How can he pay maintenance when he is running other households? The Church knows little about such matters. It sees Mr. Vilez as one of the pillars, an early morning Mass-goer, a regular who helps to weighten the collection plate no mean degree. But it is done and Nannan circulates, a month with this son, a month with that daughter, and always there is the train of grandchildren.
Always for there is the continual reminder before she receives her maintenance. One day she nearly explodes. To escape payments, he has written, proposing a second honeymoon on the steamer from Penang to Singapore and of course a recon-ciliation, It is not easy to erase twenty years of hell. The anguish is very real and alive to Nannan, "Even is he offeredme a million dollars. I could never go back to his cruelty nad his beatings, " she says heavily, and gazes at the scars on her body and arms.
The Japanese are upon us. 1942 is the bad year for all. We are covered with sores. Our teeth are in such a bad state we shall soon be vying with Nannan. My parents have seperated again, this time because mother is angry at father being responsible for getting her into the family way a fourth time. Adrienne and Fleurette, my sisters, and I -- we are bundled off of Nannan. To a hut at Tanjong Bungah. Her son and his three daughters live there. His wife has left to him too, but for her it is the mahjong table, but for her it is the cabaret lights that beckon. "That's what I get for marrying a Chink," he grinds out.
Afraid, bewildered, hurt, in pain -- we little understood the workings of the adult organism. Its machinery was too much too complex for us. We could only register its results in varying degrees of love and hate. But Nannan was the haven. Our little hearts were drawn to her and hers met us more than half way. Perhaps her traditional Burmese reserve did not encourage more than the annual Christmas or birthday peck on the cheek. Whatever it was, I for one can never bring her close by the memory of touch. What she said, said, said --
that was opened up vistas for us. We were led into a world where wishes could come true and where beggars did ride. In the close comfort of the shabby hut we six sat before her. She fed us from a bowl. It was only rice , sambal blachan, kankong and home-caught fried fish. To each"Ahh" she would stop us with her hand a mouthful of never-to-be-forgotten manna. We ate much, listened much, and put aside our unhapiness for a while. Outside the wind in the night tore through the coconut palms.
Suddenly I am fifteen, I go to Penang, Nannan is ageless. We visit the Cemetery. Her son's grave is two years old. It looks recent. If is in the portion the Church allots for suicides and such dubious cases. She kneels, lights a candle, and spread her flowers. "Mike, Mike, why did you do this? Speak to me, son." All around it is hushed, peaceful and timeless. A ceme-tery will ever be to me a sanctuary for the living, a blessed retreat for a quiet time. She made it so. Distinction between those gone and those left behind? We are still caterpillars, Nannan would say. Where should the repugnance lie?
The old magic, the wonder persits even when Nannan does the strangest things. As she grows older they become stranger. Once she puts the statue of St. Christopher head first in water."St Christopher," she warns, " If you don't help me, I'll leave you there for another three days." Finally St. Christopher is rescued, placed right side up and an act of Contrition and a few flowers for him on the altar are appropriate atonement a la Nannan. Mike tells her once in a dream to bed on Horse No. 5 -- Tootsie Wootsie. It is not a hot name. How she regrets not trying her luck when it runs in to first place against great odds. She goes to the grave and asks again. Perhaps Mike is offended. At any way rate he offers no further tips.
When one of her daughters-in-laws was about to be buried, she did an unprecedented thing. She removed the wedding ring ... "Why let a robber steal it? Also she was a butterfly who never really wanted it." (In a way she is right for the poor girl chose not to be caterpillar first. She got tired of being a butterfly whose Roman Catholic husband could not divorce her to let her marry an English doctor. She decided suicide would reserve the process to permit her a cocoon-like peace.) Nannan kept the ring for the small daughter, and she see-ming callousness of the removal was assuaged.
We are grown up. All but me have rushed into marriage as the panacea for all ills. Once again a few great grandchildren, the repentance at leisure, are under Nannan's wing. That Christmas of 1955 we gathered round her. The feeding en masse, the burning stories, our faraway transportation -- everything came back vividly and as fresh as the rolls she had baked, and we were children and unmarred again.
We dispersed. We went our different ways, grownups, adult. mature, spaeking a different language but we carried in our souls a spark of wonder and hope. Perhaps it was something
more too , an unquenchable quantum radiated from, through and by Nannan.
Given a chance, could that spark he allowed to grow? Could one succed in murmuring, "Lead kindly light admist the gathering darkness"? Could it be a sword and buckler for the storms of life -- against the broken promises that lie scattered over every delinquent, every criminal, every broken home and every embittered man and woman?
In all her tribulation she had managed to keep her lamp trimmed and burning. It had flickered low in bad times but had never gone out. Her children had carried the Prome-thean torch but the going was rough. Many felt by the wayside in a repetition of history. Her grandchildren? The look in her face expressed. " In them lies the continuation of my light of being." Some made it. Others foundered. It
seemed we were better at destroying than at building up the life-saving relationships of husband, wife, father, mother. Somewhere in the beginning the source had got fouled up. It was conventional to repeat at yet another estrangement. 'The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the ..." but was that all there was to it ?
Nannan kept her inner self inviolate. From its depths came her light-giving in the way she knew how to give: her per-sonal interest in each child, her fund of outreaching tales, her helping hand streched right across, her compassion and sympathy. It could be emulated but it wouldn't be the same essence. The divine glow had to be kindled from within by a refining experience of passing through the fires, or it had to be lit from an acute perception and penetration into the Life Question such that throbs and pulsates poets to inspiration. Can this vitality, this burning virility of spirit be infused in each of us?
It is a very personal moment of truth, this, and the answer hovers in the air as lightly as thristledown. But in the personal Emanations the answer is readable : Life can be made a gem of breathless, priceless beauty and wonder despite the incipient, insistent ugliness around, or it can be the tragedy that an unfortunate great man saw as a tale "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Perhaps the evil wizard shouted " Tranta Sasta"... to spite the idomitable little lady a year after the Christmas get-together.
Her last words after cooking that morning were, "I think I'll change." Change she did. (Total paralysis of limbs and senses set in.) Her eyes spoke for her. I like to think they whispered, "This is my metamorphosis." Six months later she broke out from the encasing cocoon and left us to soar in the bright blue above.
Part of the gold from her wings keeps snowing down on us.
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CYNTHIA ANTHONY
is an undergraduate in the University of Malaya. (TENGGARA, 1968)
(p. 50- 54 TENGGARA april 1968 volume two number one .)
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