Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday Read online

  I was already an expert on the subject due to some serious Wikipedia reading this morning, but I was surprised that she knew what the dotted-line tattoos, usually used to mark the fighters, were. “I think they started with Hokkien gangs. They call it tiam,” I said, but she had already lost interest. “It means they kill people,” she intoned. “I won’t go out.”

  I debated bringing up our protected status as the relatives of an influential member of this gang, and the fact that the men in our living room were likely to be front line minions while my grandfather had probably been a behind-the-scenes head-honcho-type. I wasn’t sure if she would appreciate this reassurance, so I settled for patting her hand in a comforting manner, and told her I would go check on how my mother was doing.

  I’d taken three steps towards the dining room when I heard my mother usher the last of them out in the fakest cheery voice I’d ever heard. She shut and double-bolted the door, even though we hardly ever had it locked. She saw me and motioned to the table, upon which there was now a new thick envelope, again with the same marking. “Wow,” I said, for lack of anything better, and she shuddered and grabbed some tissue, which she used to wrap the envelope before gingerly carrying it to my grandmother. “Fingerprints,” she said by way of explanation, and I nodded.

  *

  By the time the casket company arrived again to set the coffin up for the wake, two more groups of men bearing similar envelopes had come and gone, and my grandmother had thumbed through all of the money, despite my mother’s faint protests. She sorted through the money on her bed, facing the wall with her back to us, so I had no chance of spotting the denominations of the bills or guessing at the total tally. My curiosity eventually won out over the deeply ingrained sense that talking about money was vulgar, and I asked.

  She shrugged without even glancing at me. “I didn’t count. I was just looking at the money to make sure there were no markings on any of the bills.”

  My uncle heard this as he was walking past and made an exasperated noise in his throat. “Count the money, Dev,” he growled at me, and I groaned and dragged my feet as though it wasn’t the best order I’d ever received. My grandmother was surprisingly willing to part with the money, and just stared at me as I moved the wads of cash out of her reach so I could count it.

  My first shock was seeing that a $1,000 note of Singapore currency existed, and my second was seeing a $10,000 one. I was now primed for a $100,000 bill and was looking impatiently for one, so the third shock seemed comparatively tame: our total takings so far at Thaathaa’s wake were $42,004, and the wake hadn’t even actually started.

  My grandmother barely batted an eyelid when I informed her of this, so I sought the reaction I desired from my mother, and got it. She shrieked and seemed to be deciding whether the moment called for tears or not, before my uncle said sharply that nothing could be done about it at the moment, and that we should all focus on receiving visitors at the wake, and reconvene to discuss the situation later.

  It was clear the casket company workers were not thrilled at the job my uncle had done of dressing my grandfather, and spent a good half-hour silently re-ironing his shirt, arranging his hair and powdering his face. They’d done most of the work in the morning, and the night before— moving all the furniture into one room, draping dark sheets over all reflective surfaces so my grandfather’s ghost wouldn’t get confused, and setting up an elaborate coffin gilded in gold and precious stones. I thought that was an enormous waste until my mother told me it wasn’t the actual box he’d be cremated in. Now they placed his body gently in the casket, and set up a small stand with a picture of him, tea lights and coconuts at his head, and a silver basin full of flower petals at his feet.

  The wake itself was fairly uneventful. My mother and grandmother put on old, faded saris so they would look sufficiently bereaved. Apparently only the women needed to dress the part, because my uncle wore a regular office shirt, now stained with nervous sweat. My clothing choice of a STAY HUNGRY STAY FOOLISH: R.I.P. STEVE JOBS T-shirt went entirely unremarked upon.

  Far fewer people turned up at the wake than I had expected, although I couldn’t quite name specific people who I felt should have cared enough to come. A few relatives were there, scattered among the many Chinese neighbours we barely knew, as well as colleagues of my mother and uncle who were putting in their polite 15 minutes. Some others called to say they would be at the funeral tomorrow. We didn’t have all that many relatives in Singapore, as many of my grandparents’ siblings had died and their children were mainly in Malaysia. Of those who lived here, many were barely mobile. Still, I would have thought that a death in the family would have made people overcome limitations of mobility or distance and come to comfort my grandmother and her children. I said as much to my uncle, whom I had sort of allied myself with for this occasion—what with our shared history of washing my naked grandfather and all—but he pressed his lips together and said nothing.

  When the last visitor left, my grandmother announced that we all had to shower.

  “We are all dirty,” she intoned. “From keeping this money the whole day.”

  My mother sighed and rubbed her temples, as though she had been hoping for a slight break between the wake and the blood money discussion, and my uncle said nothing. I would have liked to take my grandmother up on her suggestion, having shaken hands with and been hugged by far too many people with questionable personal hygiene throughout the day, but the three of them were now circling each other in the living room, as though sizing one another up before making their decision.

  My mother and uncle took their seats, and my grandmother wheeled her chair around to face them. “We will call the police,” she said simply, the matter decided.

  “No,” shot back both siblings. They started talking at once, and for some reason the conversation shifted entirely into Tamil.

  “This money was a gift to us.”

  “We can’t tell the police about who Appa was.”

  “We’re not even sure what we think we know is definitely true.”

  “We may get implicated in all this.”

  “People give us gifts and we get them in trouble?”

  “It will tarnish his reputation forever; what will all your friends and relatives say?”

  In addition to not being able to tell who was saying what, I also was not entirely sure what was being said and was straining to catch every word. My grandmother put an end to it by brandishing her stick and bellowing over them: “Just think about how the money was made, it was bought with the lives of people!”

  My uncle winced and motioned for her to lower her voice. My mother remained undeterred. “We don’t know how that money was made,” she said. “We don’t know what they do.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was supporting her brother or her mother, but this was one question I did have the answer to. I started reciting the litany of BPP’s activities I had found on its Wikipedia page: “Loan shark running, drug running, territory-marking activities, intimidation activities and occasional weapon-assisted violence,” I said, proud of myself for being able to contribute, before the startled look in my mother’s eyes told me that they had all forgotten I was there.

  “Even the boy knows,” screeched my grandmother. “Is this the kind of example you want to set for your son?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” I started saying, but then decided I should just back out of it.

  My uncle took control. “Okay, sure, let’s give back all the money to the police,” he said. “A funeral is a lot of money, but usually a family has some help to pay for a funeral, some monetary gifts their friends and family are thoughtful enough to give. Did many of your relatives come today, Ma? To show their support? To offer their help?”

  I hadn’t been sure whether only I had noticed, but the way the room fell silent proved otherwise. To my surprise, this stopped my grandmother’s rampage in its tracks, and she now bit her lip as tears filled her eyes.

  “Oh Ma, I’m sorry,�
� my uncle started and moved as though to comfort her, but she waved him away.

  Everyone waited for her to dry her eyes and speak again, and in the interim I may have fallen asleep. I woke when my grandmother uttered the only curse word in Tamil I knew, which never in my life had I heard pass her lips. We sat straight up in the newly charged silence in the room as my uncle and mother exchanged looks to decide who would speak next. If my grandmother was embarrassed by her sudden loss of verbal control, she didn’t show it, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms as if daring someone to speak, to refute the sentiment that she had just expressed about their family.

  My mother unfortunately took the bait. “They might have been busy,” she said, and her droopy eyelids indicated she didn’t completely realise what she was saying, but that didn’t stop my grandmother from starting her second outburst in less than five minutes.

  “Busy?” she yelled. “Busy with what, sitting on their butts the whole day because they are too fat to stand up? Those dogs, those pieces of shit couldn’t come for my husband’s wake? Their own relative—when I die are they going to do this too? Make a phone call and pretend to say nice things while being too busy to leave their stupid house to come for a wake? I hope one of them dies next, I hope they all die one after another very quickly so I can sit here and watch and not go to a single one of their wakes—”

  “Okay Ma, I was just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt,” my mother started, trying to talk over my grandmother, but then just giving up. She stood up and looked around at all of us. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “You all do what you want with the money.”

  “I think we all need to go to bed,” said my uncle as my mother left the room. “We’re all tired, we’re still upset about Pa, and we’re disappointed in our family. This isn’t the time to decide about the money.”

  I agreed, although it felt like a cop-out. I expected my grandmother to break into another outburst, but she just sat there and said nothing.

  As I turned off the lights in the living room and started wheeling her out, she suddenly said: “I wonder why they—those gangsters—came before the wake started. We put the time in the notice, you know.”

  I’d thought this was obvious. “I mean, they’re gangsters, right? Someone might have called the police,” I said. I didn’t add: You might have called the police.

  I helped her wash her face and get ready for bed, a task my mother normally did but seemed to have abandoned for tonight. “That’s a pity,” she said quietly as I helped her into bed, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right, but was too tired to inquire further.

  *

  The next morning, I woke up to the sound of my mother screaming. By the time I had stumbled into the dining room, my uncle—who had spent the night on our couch—was standing over the open Tamil Murasu that was the source of my mother’s consternation.

  The newspaper was open to the Obituaries section. Just the day before, we had placed a small 6cm-by-8cm black-and-white notice about my grandfather’s wake and funeral. Today, however, his larger-than-life countenance stared back at us from a full-page coloured obit.

  The picture used was one we had never seen before: in it, my grandfather is not smiling as I always remembered him, but his mouth is set in a straight line and hidden beneath his thick moustache. His eyes are piercing, his hair neatly combed back, and a thick gold chain peeks out from beneath the stiff shirt collar of his sombre black suit, as if donned to mourn himself.

  The words were simple: “Always in our hearts. We continue what he started.”

  I looked nervously at my mother, who had moved from shock to an almost-wry disbelief. “And if that were not enough to tell the whole world exactly who he was,” she said, and flipped the page. “This should remove any lingering doubt.”

  On the next two pages were six more iterations of the same image of my grandfather, in varying sizes, some in colour and some black and white, each with its own inscription. The inscriptions themselves were tame— most were variations of “RIP” or “Always in our hearts”, again—but they were followed by different strings of initials, and then: BPP.

  “Ah,” said my uncle, and that was really all that could be said.

  My grandmother was wheeling herself slowly into the living room, and my uncle tried to block the newspaper from her view, but my mother just grabbed the newspaper and handed it to my grandmother. “What’s the point in hiding it?” she asked her brother. “Like I said, the whole world knows.”

  My grandmother stared at the full-page picture of her late husband with her lips parted, as though she could not quite recognise his face when blown up to such proportions. She flipped between that and the pages with the smaller pictures slowly, repeatedly.

  In the silence, my uncle said: “I can’t believe the Tamil Murasu let them just take out obituaries. Isn’t it against the law?”

  I asked hopefully: “Maybe this means that BPP isn’t a universally recognised acronym?”

  My mother shut us up: “You think that stupid newspaper is going to turn away anyone’s money?”

  I kept my eyes on my grandmother, who still hadn’t spoken yet that morning after her loquacity the night before, and soon we all were staring at her in silence, the only sound in the room the slow flipping of newspaper.

  Finally she looked up and I swear she had tears in her eyes. “They really loved him,” she said.

  *

  The funeral was at Mandai Crematorium and a priest—part of the package we had paid for at the casket company—showed up at our flat at 9am sharp to chant some mantras and then accompany us there. The whole thing could have been done in our flat, but my grandmother had somehow convinced my uncle to spring for the Platinum package with the casket people, which came with a hall at Mandai in addition to some extra priest time and the ruby-encrusted coffin. My uncle had asked to do the funeral the day before, right after the wake, but the priest had refused, saying he would not conduct a funeral on a Saturday. My mother and uncle were not in a position to object, being completely unversed in the best practices for sending a loved one to the afterlife, and we spent one last night in our flat with my grandfather.

  The priest, a skinny prune of a man, arrived dressed to impress: a traditional veshti around his waist, a string taut and diagonal across his bare chest, and every manner of ash and pigment smeared across his forehead. My grandmother seemed mollified by how very holy he appeared, and squeezed his hand and beamed up at him when he approached to give her his condolences.

  The funeral itself was short: sandalwood paste applied to our foreheads, prayers sung by the priest, last rites that my uncle had to carry out that he didn’t know about, and an uncomfortably empty hall.

  During the car ride to the crematorium, my grandmother had stressed to me how important it was in Hindu funerals for the family not to be seen welcoming the other mourners but to instead be lost in their own grief. But she turned around in her seat every thirty seconds during the funeral to see if anyone had arrived to pay their final respects. When it became clear that the priest had finished and was eyeing us for clues as to what to do next, my grandmother closed her eyes and let out a long, sad sigh.

  “I’m so sorry, Ma,” said my uncle, putting an arm around her.

  “It might have been the Tamil Murasu,” mused my mother. “They must have seen the obituaries and decided to stay away.”

  “It wasn’t the obituaries,” said my grandmother. “Please, let’s finish so I can go home.”

  My mother and uncle walked on ahead with the priest as workers from the crematorium came in to take the coffin on its final journey. I wheeled my grandmother to the casket so she could say her final goodbye to her husband. She put her fingers against the glass covering his face. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. And then, to me: “Let’s go.”

  I pushed her wheelchair into the connecting room, following the clearly demarcated route to the viewing chamber. I already had a queasy feeling in my stomach. It wa
s my first time at Mandai and this final part, where the family is expected to watch as their loved one’s coffin goes through the flames, struck me as the most perverse of all. I deliberated wheeling my grandmother into the chamber and then excusing myself, but I stopped short when I got to the small, dark room and found it full.

  My mother and uncle were standing in the middle of the chamber, looking simultaneously bewildered and terrified, while at least thirty members of BPP, dressed in almost identical black shirts and white veshtis, milled around them. Some were in wheelchairs and some had the dotted forehead tattoos that had so frightened my grandmother at first, but they all turned reverentially towards her now as we entered the room. All at once, they raised their hands, palms pressed together at their chests as if to say vanakkam. I spotted two familiar, impassive faces: the casket company workers. I felt a sudden rush of gratitude.

  I pushed my grandmother’s wheelchair into the centre of the room, and she motioned to me that she would like to stand. I helped her up, grabbing one of her arms while my uncle quickly grabbed the other. She walked slowly towards the black-clad man closest to her, one of the younger ones with forehead ink, clasped his hand and shook it. She turned slowly and did the same with the man next to him.

  The BPP members slowly formed a semicircle around us as they realised what was happening. It took almost twenty minutes but my grandmother managed to shake hands with them all.

  The crematorium attendant had been watching respectfully, and as she shook hands with the last of the members who had come, my grandmother nodded towards him that she was ready.

  She shuffled back into the centre of the circle and let go of my hand and my uncle’s, taking hold of the hands of two BPP members instead. I followed her lead and so did the rest of my family, and then we all stood hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, the people who knew my grandfather best in this world, as we watched his body burn.