my uncle, dying by wong phui nam
TENGGARA april 1968
Wong Phui Nam
My Uncle, Dying
(When they heard it, said " this is a hard saying;
who will listen to it ?" -- JOHN 6:60)
It has always been there.
I guess you sensed it, that dankness
softening the base about the packed
piling of your bones. Between the closed room
where all the sick smells sat on our face
and the pitch tide coming through
you could only crawl back into the mountain
of your much used body, and groan
you could take it, if you had only to keep
your mind between the legs drawn up
of just one more woman on her back.
How your puffed hand tugged
at the damp bed-clothes. Heavy
on your mattress, the far world of relatives
beyond that fog could not keep you now
from thinking you no longer could hod
your insides together again.
How would you use your palms and fingers
to hold down that terror
that you would have no more body with which
to know they were come pack you,
prop you up against the pillows
to strip and comb you; turn you over
to slip the paper trousers up the thighs.
*
You would hate to be laid out, to meditate horribly
beneath the square of joss-paper
clapped to the face. Someone in his mercy
should let you to crawl
if only as a spider over the arms and face,
when you became so thoroughly flooded out by death.
Yet I would not know any better, Uncle.
I now keep these questions to myself,
why we children were scolded, pushed
so unceremoniously out of your sick room.
* According to Chinese custom the dead are dressed in paper clothes for burial.
Remembering Grandma
i
When yellow deepened in the cheeks
of Mother's sharp, dry face, Grandma
knew; a canine instinct
nosed out all the soft parts
that death already has slightly smudged.
How would she conduct herself?
Mother would leave her to herself
in the impending wilderness of our house.
How then would she conduct herself
being but old flesh persisting on the bone?
A son-in-law, improbable, yet Chinese.
Off-accent. His
Malacca sister regularly rose
to plague him, out of the ashes
of a painful past. Grandma had no claim
on their intense, murky quarrels in Malay.
ii
Grandma' s window faced the kitchen.
Under her bed
always stood her night spittoon.
She kept folded in a trunk
her back silk trousers, those
she had on when first she came.
Above all she nursed that heavy belt
hammered out of silver melted belt
from Mexican dollars and old Straits coins.
Slung from the ceiling
it could take
more than the weight of our rattan cradle.
Nightfall. She frightened herself,
spooning mush and orange juice to Mother's
mouth.
iii
Yet Grand ma would not think of
moving down into Uncle's house in town.
She could not quit brace herself
for the descent.
Those walls were dark with photographs.
How they escaped her,
those cousins, those in-laws,
their faces so durable and wooden ...
Uncle now would never shock the dead,
bringing home his women.
iv
She was nothing, yet was more nervy
than the cats she remembered
in Uncle's kitchen, kicked
into the ashes underneath the range.
Grandma panicked at the thought.
She was never much good,
a bitter ghost forever coming back from comers
a trouble Uncle;
to trouble him when he was intent,
sockets afire, at the mahjong table;
to trouble him when he had no other wish
than to think, to sit
and ruminate on all the likely medicines for his sores,
for that numbness -- settling,
it would lock stiff the hard base of his spine -- like stone.
v
In those last weeks
Grandma was much absorbed by dreams,
She could not help but be concerned
with them only. Each night
She had to drag her way back
from
Sultan Street.
Circular, descending, in her dreams
it reaches that level for the broken ...
One night
it was only my Uncle's daughter.
Out of that unease
she came -- a kind of light,
she faintly shocked the darkness of our house.
In the morning, Grandma
inexplicably, was much relieved.
vi
Sometimes I wonder how it could have been
we too were there. Baba children,
animal and tartar,
breaking out in a strange babble of tongues.
Yet her grand children. In my head
still swims that otherworldly darkness
that held our house. We were then
only children. Nothing terrible would come to us.
vii
So it was that father,
much looked up to for his
Baby Austin 7,
the one person in our street
who clild talk properly, flying
our vague asiatic complaints
in the pipe-smoke
in the office of the Comptroller, Mr. D.J. Wainright-Jones;
so it was that Father, who, tiring of his shelf of
Pitman
manuals
turned to the business
of grappling with his one real book
Robinson Crusoe,
without quite realising when he did it,
took to wife my mother's neice,
and she barely fourteen.
wong phui nam
p. 55-58 TENGGARA APRIL 1968
