“I’ll think of something,” Kenneth said, squeezing her shoulder before turning off the light. “We should get some sleep; we both need to work tomorrow.”
Hui Shan turned to her side, facing away from him. This would never have happened if her mother were still alive, she thought grimly to herself.
The keys slipped from his grasp as Hui Shan’s father tried to unlock the gate. Breathing heavily, he bent down to retrieve them from between the terracotta pots. His head was spinning. With effort, he staggered into the flat and fell into his rattan chair, forgetting to lock the door behind him. He buried his face in his hands and let out a howl of anguish. He wished the entire morning had been a bad dream from which he could awaken. He would give anything to be able to wake in a world where he hadn’t met those officials from the Singapore Land Authority.
He shook his head violently. Tears and snot spattered across his age-spotted hands. He didn’t—couldn’t—understand. How could fulfilling his wife’s one and only dream constitute an offence? What did they know of the life they had shared together, of the years he had spent building with his bare hands their little garden in the heart of the forest, the verdant shrine with which he commemorated her life? How could they possibly expect him to now destroy everything he had created with those same hands?
He balled his fists so tightly that his fingernails dug into his palms, leaving angry white crescents on his calluses. In all the hours he had spent in the garden, he had never seen anyone in the vicinity. He wondered how the authorities had found out, whether there was a way out. He squeezed his eyes shut, his greying brows furrowed in concentration.
Then, in a flash, it came to him.
Reaching for the phone, he dialled Hui Shan’s number.
Hui Shan put down the phone, distraught.
Her heart was pounding. She considered applying for family leave for the rest of the day, explaining to her boss that it was an emergency. But was it really? Besides, she had an important meeting to attend later that afternoon and couldn’t afford to be absent from it. She drew in a deep breath. As she exhaled, her gaze fell on the wallpaper of her mobile phone. It was a family photo taken at Gardens by the Bay two weeks ago, a visit they had made at her son’s request. She stared at her son’s beaming face against the backdrop of metallic trees—a miniature copy of Kenneth’s. She had birthed him, nourished him, sacrificed everything for him. Yet he had taken everything but her features.
Hui Shan shifted her gaze to Kenneth’s face, and for a moment, contemplated calling him. She picked up the phone, then dismissed the thought, knowing he wouldn’t have time for her now. But even as she returned to the amendment memo she had been working on before her father had called, Hui Shan couldn’t get his accusations out of her mind. They refused to leave—not for the rest of the day, not even four days later, when she finally managed to speak to Kenneth about it.
By then, her distress had dulled to a discomfort that niggled at the back of her mind. Still, as Kenneth brushed his teeth in their en-suite bathroom at half past eleven that night—the first time that week that he returned home from work before midnight—she briefly recounted the phone conversation to him.
“It’s tough,” Kenneth said, frowning as he inspected a burgeoning patch of mould on the bathroom ceiling that she had conveniently ignored. “But he’ll get over it.”
“I don’t get why he’s blaming me for it,” Hui Shan said, sitting up in bed. “It’s not like I told on him, and what can I possibly do? I may be working for the government, but it’s not like I can influence SLA’s decision or get permission for him to continue what he’s doing.”
“There’s a limit to what you can do,” Kenneth agreed as he climbed into bed. “Good they acted on it so quickly.”
She turned to him, uncomprehending. “What do you mean?”
“What your father is doing isn’t just illegal, it can also cause unwanted effects to the community. Mosquitos could breed, rats could multiply, the natural order of things could be upset—”
“And so,” she said, mustering all her effort to keep her voice from trembling, “you took it on yourself to tell on him?”
Hui Shan could no longer hear what the stranger next to her was saying. An icy shard of regret pierced her chest. A numbing chill spread to her feet. She got out of bed, and without checking on her son, she left the apartment, not knowing where she could now go.
The sun had yet to rise, but already Hui Shan’s father was walking.
On and on he walked in the dusky light, fully focused on the motion of bringing one foot in front of the other, over and over, trusting that this would take him slowly but surely to his destination. In his arms was a red plastic bag brimming with seeds. Seeds he had never tried planting before. They were extremely delicate and difficult to grow, especially in the unforgiving heat of the tropics. But now, more than ever, he was determined to try.
When he arrived at the garden, he set to work right away. He began at the periphery, where there was sufficient but not excessive sunlight. He tilled the soil, set up the draining system, pressed three seeds gently into the earth each time. He was careful not to bury them, having learnt that light was crucial for their germination. He worked for hours with ferocious focus, his heart aflame.
By the time daylight began to wane, the expanse of earth was filled with hundreds of tiny hydrangea seeds. He straightened his back and examined his work, a defiant smile illuminating his face. He made his way to the shelter and took a swig of water. As he set the bottle down, his eyes fell on a note, dictating that he remove all “items” on the “site” within two weeks.
He let out a laugh, then tore the paper into shreds.
No, he would not make disappear his wife’s garden the way they had erased those vast swathes of Kranji woodland. He would go on planting, every single day of what was left of his limited days. He refused to concede. The forest was his limit. One day, hydrangeas of all shades of blue and pink and violet would bloom all over the land, and no one would be able to stop him, or them.
Hui Shan paused at the entrance to the columbarium. Today marked her mother’s ten-year death anniversary. For the first time in a decade, she was visiting her mother without the men in her life. Wordlessly, Hui Shan followed the squat, middle-aged attendant down an urn-lined aisle. The keys jangled loudly in his hand, but he made no attempt to deaden the noise. His face contorted with displeasure when he realised that the niche holding her mother’s urn was located at the topmost row, and he didn’t stop grumbling under his breath the entire time he retrieved a ladder and climbed up to open the niche.
“Don’t know why don’t want to all come together,” he muttered when he stepped off the ladder.
Before Hui Shan could utter a word, he began walking back down the aisle. She narrowed her eyes as the clank of keys reverberated around the space. You needn’t worry about that, she retorted in her mind. There would be no other visitors, no need for him to climb the ladder again after she was done.
Hui Shan placed the bags of food and the flask of tea on the floor, taking care not to let anything spill over. The sight of neat lemon wedges in a small plastic container made her smile. She wrapped her fingers around the sides of the ladder, which was cool to the touch. With no one around to rush her, she took a deep breath before slowly making her way up.
When Hui Shan came face to face with her mother’s portrait, what struck her first was the burst of blue that lent a glow to her mother’s cheeks: a small bouquet of fresh hydrangeas, not unlike the one she had brought with her. She felt a sob rise in her throat. There could be no one else who had placed it there. Trembling, she reached out one hand to stroke the soft petals of her mother’s favourite flowers, feeling—for the first time in years—a tug of connection to her father.
WHEN WHAT IS LINEAR MEANDERS
SONYA WAS TEN years of age, queuing outside one of the classrooms that had been temporarily transformed into a space for the health screening to be conducted. With her inky blue health booklet in hand, she chatted languidly with her classmates about a new movie that would be showing in the cinemas next week. It was a horror movie that didn’t particularly interest her, but she was glad to have any excuse to be out of class. Clearly, the rest of her classmates felt the same. Sonya was wondering how long the health screening would take, and if it might be possible for the process to drag on for one more period, just in time for recess, when a loud voice called out, “Register number 28.”
That was her. Sonya stepped forward and entered the room. First, they measured her height and weight. Next, they checked her eyesight and colour vision. Then she was directed to a corner of the room, concealed by curtains of dusty blue. There she was asked to raise her shirt and bend forward. Sonya hesitated for a moment before doing as she was told. She felt the coldness of what seemed like a ruler against her bare skin as a medical professional placed it over different parts of her back. It didn’t hurt, but the experience wasn’t exactly pleasant.
When she was finally allowed to straighten her back, Sonya saw the medical professional frowning. He handed her a slip of paper, one she later discovered wasn’t given to the rest of her classmates. It was a notification to be read and signed by her parents.
That was the day Sonya was first diagnosed with scoliosis.
Two weeks later, Sonya was with her parents at the hospital they had been referred to. It was the first time she was in a hospital for a medical condition of her own. She wasn’t sure what to expect. She sensed that her parents were nervous, and their anxiety seeped into her. But it couldn’t be so bad, could it? From what Sonya had gathered, she simply had a curved spine. In school, she saw so many of her classmates hunched over from their oversized, heavy schoolbags. Some looked like they were on the brink of toppling over. Their postures were so much worse than hers. She just needed to remember to sit and stand straight instead of slouching from now on.
Five hours passed before they left the hospital. There had been a lot of waiting—for the registration, for the measurements and X-rays to be taken, and eventually for the consultation with the doctor. The diagnosis was reconfirmed. Sonya had a curved spine. But not any ordinary curved spine. Hers meandered to form three curves, the most severe of which measured eighty-seven degrees. Eighty-seven. Nearly the full ninety degrees of a right angle. As the doctor hung up the X-ray film against blinding white light to expose her serpentine spine, her father cupped his hand around her mother’s elbow.
In one afternoon, Sonya’s life changed. She learnt that hers was a form of congenital scoliosis, the signs of which had already been present at birth. One of her vertebrae had failed to fully form in her mother’s womb. In the middle of the film, the doctor marked out in blue ink the triangle where a rectangle should have been. A missing wedge of bone had caused the neat rectangles above and below it to yield and bend. The man in the white coat used words like deformity, defect and abnormality. There was no known cure. Typical treatment options included observation, customised back braces or spinal surgery, depending on the severity of the curve. But Sonya had three, including an almost right angle tucked in the lower half of her back, so surgery was apparently the only option. Urgent surgery.
The man with his perfect posture adjusted his coat, then flipped through his agenda with one hand to spot his next available surgery slot. Next Thursday at two in the afternoon. They should book it as soon as possible, he advised. These slots were hard to come by. Some of his patients had waited months for one. Sonya was very lucky, it seemed. He had another spinal surgery scheduled that same morning, but he was used to doing several surgeries a day, so everything would be fine. On the bright side, she would be at least ten centimetres taller after the surgery, he added. Perhaps even twelve, or fifteen.
Only things were not as simple as snatching up the next available appointment and scoring a bonus of ten centimetres in height, were they? Sonya was terrified. She, her mother and her father. They had so many questions. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. They were also conscious of the briskness of the doctor’s manner. Her father ventured to ask what the surgery would entail. The man proceeded to answer, his response littered with medical jargon, speaking so quickly Sonya could barely catch his words.
This was what she managed to hear but could not yet process:
