A SINGLE MEMORY, REMEMBERED DIFFERENTLY — SUMITRA SINGAM
/Papa is in his wheelchair at the old picnic table. The lawn is overgrown, but we can just make out the beach past the yellowing lalang. The place is dusty, mildewed; like anything left for more than a week in the tropics. The kampung house creaks and groans its annoyance at us for the years of neglect. We’d come every school holiday, shrieking down to the Straits of Malacca, or finding hidey-holes under the elevated house on stilts.
“For Papa’s eightieth, can’t you make an effort?” Sujatha had said. So here we are - father, two daughters, emotional baggage and all.
Papa’s wrinkled arm is flaccid around my neck, a dead weight. It used to be as wide as my thigh.
“Remember, Papa?” Sujatha points at the tall coconut trees flanking the path down to the water.
There was a villager from the kampung who would climb it for us, using his shawl as his only equipment. “Jaga bawah!” he’d bellow as he cut down young coconuts for us. He’d shimmy down and slice them open with a deft flick of his parang, pearly white flesh and crystal liquid glinting in the sunlight. We’d down them in seconds, never thinking to offer him a drink.
A querulous lilt to his voice, Papa says, “There used to be a neem tree, what have you done with it?”
Neither of us answers. The breeze stirs the soupy air listlessly.
Suddenly Papa barks a laugh -staccato, sharp. “Remember that party we had here, Meena? You got drunk on my Green Label! You thought I didn’t know?”
The weather has turned. Ominous storm clouds creak and rumble, shadows lengthen, the trees susurrate. My skin pimples. I hadn’t wanted to come.
I close my eyes tight against the flashes of hairy hands, ice tinkling in a glass, heavy limbs, woozy head.
I unwind Papa’s arm from around my neck and place it back in his lap. “You must be tired.”
“Who’s tired? You are, you old grandmother! Even at the party, Uncle Prasad wanted to dance with you and you made such a fuss!”
A flash of falling, limbs tangled, pushing everyone’s hands off me.
Papa cackles like a machine gun, crescendoing into a breathless cough. His smoke-addled lungs are giving out.
A sudden rush of wind stirs my hair and my veins are electric. I feel like running down to the water and swimming away.
The silence stretches, long as the distance we’ve placed between our hearts.
“I saw Puja the other day,” Sujatha says. “Prasad’s daughter.”
I stand, shielding my eyes with my hand. There’s a ship on the horizon.
“Her parents divorced. She’s cut contact with her father.”
“Oh?” Papa frowns.
“He was not a good man, Papa.” Sujatha says.
It’s probably an oil tanker, spreading its poison through the waters of our childhood.
“Come on, let’s go inside. It’s going to rain,” Sujatha says. I gather myself back together, and walk with them, the waves shooing us off.
Sumitra Singam writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She traveled there through many other spaces, real, metaphorical and transitional; and likes to write about those experiences pretending that it is all fiction. She works in mental health when she inhabits the real world and realises there are bills to pay.
