good atlas

1.

My mother’s dressing table. Lacquered in soft pink, like a layered jelly cake inspired by the regal necessities of an era before. Like Princess Diana’s dress– orthodox and bought in a set with its master bed and bedside tables. 

I sat in front of its long, curved mirror, the one I grew up with, seeing myself in it. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty; I watched my hair grow, examined each pore, stood on my side to see the thickness of flesh, or the way my skin hugged each visible rib, arms stretched out toward the ceiling. 

Below the mirror is a drawer lined with sponge boxes of ornaments and jewellery. There was a ruby ring, a sapphire one, another with a row of faux diamonds, and then my favourite– a thin gold band, only a millimetre thick etched with sectional, patterned ridges like a secret code from the past. 

It was my grandmother’s ring. My mother had kept it aside, thinking it too simple for her liking. She liked rings that glitter. Girlish ones, colourful ones, like the ruby and emeralds in her stash.

When I turned 22, my grandmother had already gone for almost a decade. Yet I never missed the ritual of opening up that dresser drawer. Many of the rings had lost its lustre but the gold, thin band remained there still. That day, it called out to me in a voice. Can I have this ring? I asked my mother, nonchalance feigned poorly in my eagerness. It’s popo’s one you know, she reminded me. What are you going to do with it? I want to wear it I said, this time pressing. 

I tried it on. It didn’t fit too well on my ring finger, still too loose. But perfectly, it fit my index finger. 

2.

My grandmother died when I was thirteen. A news that came through the phone to my mother, and then to rest of the family while we were lounging in our own rooms. It was the school holiday then, and I was working part-time in a sundry shop selling baking goods. I was appointed to pack chocolate chips and flour into bags, seal them, and tag them with stickers. A repetitive gesture that earned me RM5 an hour. I did the same thing everyday, for 8 hours a day, including lunch break. 

When I heard the news, I knew we were needed at the funeral in Muar, our hometown three hours away by car. My mother was already making arrangements, packing and pacing. The first thing that came to my mind: I had to skip work, and that meant I couldn’t earn money. The thought frustrated me, and so I cried. 

My parents aren’t stern on rituals. I never went for my grandfather’s funeral, and never went for the annual Qing Ming to pay my respects to the deceased. My mother, seeing me distressed asked me why. I told her that I can’t bear to see my grandmother’s dead body. Even then, I knew I was lying. I just wanted to earn some pocket money. 

I said it so often it became a truth I embodied. What I never gave thought to, now became a fear so real and felt in my body. I couldn’t stand it, and I wouldn’t bear to see a dead body lying in a coffin, especially if it was my grandmother’s. I believed in the fear that I cried and cried, and it didn’t take much for my mother to believe me. 

The next day, my mother and father left for Muar. I stayed home, ready to head to work in the morning. My sister stayed with me too. The shopkeeper I worked for was a neighbour and a church member. They too had made plans to drive to Muar and pay a visit to my grandmother. It was odd perhaps, that I stayed to work and so they questioned me. Are you sure you don’t want to go? You can follow us there and back. You can come back on the same day. 

I remember what I felt, not I what I said that led me into the car on the way to Muar by lunch time. It was guilt dissolving into my skin, gnawing at my flesh. I didn’t say it because I wouldn’t. By that time, everyone knew I had a fear of facing the dead. You don’t need to see her you know, my family would say when I arrived to the funeral parlour with my sister and my neighbours. I remember being very quiet. I remember it was oppressively hot, the scent of burning joss stick and paper money choking the still and sturdy air. I sat at one of the stone tables with my cousins, peeling groundnuts and eating them, watching the prayer procession my Christian family chose not to partake in. I was feeling things I couldn’t name, so I sat there quietly, a gulf of silence between me and the world of the living, mourning the dead.

Then it was time for each family to walk around the coffin. 

3.

I was thirteen then, but my memory always seem to betray me. I often think of myself as a lot younger than I was. A girl young enough that she couldn’t understand what was happening around her. A girl of maybe six or seven. I think in fact I did understand, I just refused acknowledgement. 

I carried a guilt in me that I wanted to silence. A small, silly decision that rippled its way into my body, and then sealing them shut a mere fact I refused to admit: That when I was thirteen, I valued my pocket money more than my grandmother. I let it sink until it disappeared. 

4.

A few fond memories of my grandmother: 

She had the habit of saying celaka in frustration. Coming to Subang Jaya to live with us, she lost most of her Hakka dialect to suburban life. Her friends now mostly the neighbourhood kakak whom she’d gladly share recipes with, a community of elderly people spearheaded by an aunty from my church. And an aunty living down the road who did her perms. 

Popo often spoke in Cantonese now, and a smattering of Malay. Celaka was a her favourite cuss word. I remember her saying it, even as she cut my hair on our front porch, empty because my parents were at work and had taken the car with them. Her steps were methodical. First a newspaper where she’d folded into half and cut a semi-circle right in the middle. This would be where my head goes, the newspaper a cape that held my cut hair. 

I didn’t ask her where she had learned to cut hair. I was too young then to be inquisitive about family. But I enjoyed the ritual.

Popo was a habitual lady, maybe because there wasn’t much to do outside. So the television kept her company. She had her evening slots, and often had rows with my maid when it came to television time. Phoebe, my maid kept at her telenovela slot, popo reigned over her TVB slots. 

6PM and 7PM were her prime time, which meant, they were mine too. Every evening we would sit together to watch TV. It was how I spent time with her. In those many years of her living in our house, these were the clearest memories I had with me. 

5.

Another memory, of scent and smell. 

Often, I’d snoop into popo’s room to get a hold of her underwear. I found them funny because they were so large it always surprised me just how large they were. In the same cupboard storing her underwear, she’d keep a long white-orange tube of Cuticura talcum powder, a cheap talc you could find in any traditional sundry shop. She’d cake them on her face and neck and I would see moist lines of powder in the folds of her neck and back. An old people thing, I thought. A thing that only ever reminds me of popo, this Cuticura powder, the scent and sight of it. 

But beyond this floral talcum scent that seemed to permeate each room she enters, is a gentle waft I couldn’t quite identify. It smelled only of popo, and ever more distinct if I’d sit close to her or kiss her cheek. It’s most prominent at the nape of her neck, this smell, a kind of musky, papery smell that seems only to stick on her skin. No one else in the family had it. 

Later on when I hit my mid-twenties I would catch a waft of that smell again, this time on my father. It caught me by surprise, I thought I had seen a ghost. But I later learned that’s what old people smell like, because it is the soft, sweet smell of slow and silent disintegration. 

8.

My grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes and then, kidney failure when she was at our home. I saw it all happen, this disintegration from a woman so lovable and so full of vibrance and vitality to one robbed by disease. I saw my mother and her siblings fight about who should take my grandmother in. My mother, too busy to tend to her needs, her siblings too poor to afford help and care. In the end, they resorted to sending popo to an old folks home in Old Town PJ, then back to Muar because dialysis would be cheaper there.

From a resident and friend in my home, I then visited her only once every few months. We were both growing older, stranger to each other. 

I remember two visits distinctly. First, at a dialysis centre in Muar. After a miserable stay at an old folks home in PJ, she demanded to go home. The loneliness was eating at her, and she needed to feel comforted by the fact that at least she was back at where she spent her fondest memories. Muar was home to her. 

Her dialysis routine was merciless– a four-hour session, four times a week. She would sit next to a machine, pumping and cleaning her blood, together with a lot of other old or sickly people in the same vicinity. 

It was painful to even be there to watch, let alone be there to be watched. It was quiet, and she was weak, but even then tried to keep at her cheerfulness. She asked me to put my fingers on her pulse. I remember it still– a river coursing rapidly in her veins, like a torrent. Her papery thin skin, as if a little more pressure would bruise her. I asked her out of politeness if it was painful, she said not really. 

Another memory. It was hot. The sort that was heavy in your skin and veins, rushing up to the head only to clot there. Sleep pressed against my eyes, I demanded for it. Popo was in her last old folks home, an airy bungalow in Muar with a large compound. I remember it had a pond, filled with lotus plants, murky with moss and algae, its water no longer transparent. Wheelchairs were scattered on the compound, as if a rapture struck and every old person on it disappeared mid-activity. I often took one and raced around the open space with my sister. 

That hot day, popo had called for us to visit. She looked smaller than I had remembered, her shoulders frail, back bent, hair thin, still smiling while complaining of pains. We sat inside this time, just me, my sister, mom and dad and popo at the living room. Final image, before I headed into her room to sleep on her bed. When I woke up, it was time to leave. We said goodbye, me and her full of formality, a sort of wave goodbye, and we left, never having to return.

7.

You don’t have to go to the coffin, my mother told me, but I said it’s okay. Guilt and longing took my feet to her. 

Everyone, friends, family, friends of family, would say their final goodbye, as if the last time we saw her alive wasn’t what’s final. Goodbyes are constructed language for the living, so how do you say it to someone who’s already dead? In her casket, she smiled, lipstick a blush meant for brides. A smile I’ve never seen on her face. Curved and fixed in a way that meant nothing, carried the weight of nothing, nothing apart from death.

I said nothing and let my tears fall on the glass that separates her dead from me. 

8. 

I often think about my grandmother, that is to say I’m putting her pieces together. Stitches, tangled in the same stitch of an heirloom blanket I never had when I was a child. 

Memory edges up to us like surprise ice. My grandmother was a story I never told, especially after she died. I thought about other things, and lived my other lives, seeing the gold ring in the cupboard, then closing it again. 

I was 26 when a compulsion signed me up for a silent meditation retreat in Gambang, a small town in the state of Pahang, three hours from home. It was my third time crossing borders alone. In each of them, a stubborn intention to let something inside of myself heal. I wanted to bleed from inside and spit out my wounds until I am less wounded, thinking it possible. 

The mediation camp was a 10-day regime of routined silences and practice. We meditated for 8 to 10 hours a day, with intervals of breakfast, lunch and tea, laundry time, shower and sleep. The first two days, my back hurt so much I wanted to quit. I told myself in my head to breathe and breathe and breathe, flashes of thoughts and memory jabbed at me from every corner imaginable. I watch them and I tell myself inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. 

On the fourth day, I meditated for a full two hours without moving an inch, my upper lip the entirety of my universe. Annapana mediation meant we felt our breath and focus only on the edge of our upper lip, and that was where we learned to rest ourselves, no longer telling ourselves to breathe. When it was all over, I stepped out of the hall with fifty other women, my feet soft, eyes like a new born baby. The skies were bluer, grass greener, the wind on my skin the first whisper I’ve ever heard. 

Images still flit by but by day five, we’ve learned to watch them go. It was evening. I was tracing my head, all the way to my toes, circling back again in plain Vipassana fashion. Then an image. The white-washed walls, compound the size of a house, lotus pond sitting at the edge of my eyes, wheelchairs dotting the scene, empty, like a long abandoned home. I let that image linger a little longer against my will. Then I shifted my weight, breath heavy, saying to myself, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

In the silence of my single-bedded room, I cried for the next four days. 

9. 

Forgiveness from the dead is a story we tell ourselves. Then we tell it to others, and our voices soothe, even ourselves, like a warm salve against the skin, an embrace of kind words, the kind of words we arrange amid death, and loss and guilt. 

Adrian, a good friend of mine and I were in the car. We were heading towards the airport, a wedge of time we had before he departs for Singapore, back to work again. I wanted to talk to you about my dad, he said. We would like to believe that amongst other things, our friendship was found on the estrangement we shared toward our fathers. The only difference now is that I hug my dad goodbye every time I see him, and that Uncle Wong is dead.

A sort of silence pressed between us, the air-conditioning humming, the smooth tar road a music on its own. Have I told you about this ring, Adrian? No, what’s it about? 

It’s my grandmother’s…

10.

I’m really sorry, I said out loud to popo the night of the meditation camp. As if she were never gone, I spoke to a listener, to a gracious receiver, like a child admitting her wrongs, embarrassed for snooping around or stealing a wad of hard-earned savings from a Milo tin under a bed. I told her everything I ever remembered– her smell, her hair cuts, her laughter, the part time work, the lying about my fear of dead bodies, the last day I saw her and napped instead– and I let my words linger and coil around me in the room, tears receding. When I felt that I had said enough, I looked at a distance toward the ceiling and whispered, I love you. I wiped my face, smiled at her, and went to sleep.