The Catherine Lim Collection (29 page)

So, thus doubly defended against the
speculations of our friends on the campus. Hong, with all the earnestness of a
young man in love, confided in me. He was deeply, hopelessly in love with a
girl named Teresa; she had been an undergraduate for only a year, having failed
her first-year examinations. A quiet, pretty girl, she had attracted at least
half-a-dozen young men in campus, including her tutor, but had shown not the slightest
inclination to reciprocate that interest.

Hong persevered to worship her from the long
distance imposed both by her coolness and his shyness. Teresa applied to go
into the Teachers’ Training Institute. It was a two-year programme, which
combined coursework and practical training. She spent much time at the library,
preparing lesson notes, making teaching aids, and was apparently contented and
happy.

All this Hong knew, through whatever secret
device he had set up to monitor her movements. He seemed to know exactly what
she was doing, when and with whom. He told me one day, with an ecstatic glow on
his pale thin face, that he had seen her at a cinema with her sister, and had
briefly greeted her. She had smiled in response.

Hong talked about her incessantly in my
presence; it had occurred to me long before that he sought no advice, desired
no encouragement. All he wanted was a ready listener, and somehow the discovery
that I was a cousin of sorts fitted me for that role. He confided that as soon
as he had obtained his degree, he would approach her and make clear his feelings.
He was very firm on the point that he would make no approach till he had
obtained his degree, obviously believing that this would vastly improve his
chances.

After graduation, the opportunities to meet
lessened as we went our separate ways. Our paths crossed every once in a while,
though, and on one occasion he mentioned having met Teresa and that he had
reason to be hopeful.

Almost two years elapsed before we met
again, and this time it was to announce, with all the fervour and intensity
that a habitually shy and reticent man could muster, that Teresa had agreed to
marry him. Her grandmother had passed away at about this time, and there would
have to be a six-month wait, in compliance with some old custom.

I met them once during the period of their engagement.
He had gained weight, and looked much better. There was a new confidence, a new
happiness. Whereas Teresa had been merely pretty in a quiet sort of way, she
was now glowingly beautiful. It was clear that they were deeply in love. During
the lunch, I was constantly aware of being an obtrusive third.

Teresa was to fly to Penang at the end of
the six months and perform some rites at her grandmother’s grave that would
signal the end of the mourning period. There were a whole host of elderly
relatives in Penang who would be very pleased by this show of filial piety.
Then she would be ready to fly back to Singapore for her wedding, a very quiet
and private affair to which they had only invited their closest friends. As the
confidante who had patiently listened to Hong during all those years when his
timid heart was ready to burst with the secret love it harboured, I felt
entitled to be part of that select circle.

I teased the happy couple mercilessly about
the letters they were always writing to each other, even when they were
separated for only a few days. During the four days when she was in Penang for
her grandmother’s funeral, Teresa wrote no fewer than six letters, and no doubt
received as many.

We did not meet again for some months,
although Hong rang me up several times ‘just to talk’. His engagement had made
no difference to the ready flow of confidential talk; only now it was the
happy, accepted lover talking of future plans, not the uncertain restless young
man driven by doubts.

I remembered, in a vague sort of way, that
Teresa was due to fly home from Penang on the 19th. Therefore when the news of
the terrible crash was broadcast in the evening news bulletin, I had an
uneasiness which I could not dispel until I had rung Hong up. He was not at home.

Meanwhile, more details about the crash were
carried over the radio and television; there were no survivors. The plane had
exploded in mid-air and scattered over a radius of several kilometres, in a
desolate area of lallang and secondary jungle. All the 112 people aboard had
been killed.

A few of the people in the neighbouring
kampongs had seen the explosion in the sky. There were many theories about the
explosion – a bomb planted aboard, a hijack, a suicide attempt by a very
important government official fleeing the country. The news made headlines in
every newspaper. But the immediate task was to pick up the pieces and identify
the dead as far as was possible.

I rang Hong repeatedly, finally someone
answered the phone. It was his sister. In a weak voice, she told me that he was
under sedation. He had rushed to the airport to find out whether Teresa’s name
was on the passenger list; it was. Then he made a frantic call to the Penang
relatives, and found that one of them had driven Teresa to the airport. There
was no hope now. Teresa was among the 112 victims. Hong collapsed, the receiver
still tightly in his hand, and had to be helped to the sofa. A doctor was
quickly called in. When I saw him then, still reclining on the sofa and weeping
unrestrainedly, I realized that the sorrow could not be over easily.

In the days that followed, weakened from
lack of food and sleep, he nevertheless rushed around in a frenzy of activity,
visiting the site of the terrible tragedy, trying desperately to break through
the cordon that the authorities had thrown around the dismal wreckage, to see
if he could salvage anything that could even remotely connect him to her.
Torsos and limbs were strewn over a wilderness of jungle bushes and grass; they
were hurriedly picked up and put in large plastic bags of uniform size. Hong,
dishevelled and wild-eyed and supported by his weeping sister and her husband,
fell down on his knees in the mud – the operation of cleaning up was going on
in spite of heavy rain – and in a paroxysm of bitterness and grief, asked
Heaven if it would not even give him a part of Teresa’s body to bury in a
decent burial, to at least allow him to have something small that he could keep
as a remembrance of her.

As if in answer to his prayers, a small
suitcase belonging to Teresa was found and put together with the other salvaged
belongings – a forlorn heap of burst suitcases, attaché cases, scattered files
and letterheads of business organizations, shoes, handbags, even a child’s
teddy bear.

Hong fell upon it with ferocious
possessiveness; the small light-brown suitcase had burst open and was partially
scorched, but the name tag was intact.

He went through a pocket on one side of the
suitcase and fished out a letter – a long letter written in Teresa’s close,
neat hand, full of endearments, like the rest of her letters to him. She had
written it the day before she left Penang, and had probably decided that it
would take a longer time by post than if she were to deliver it herself. Hong
broke down on reading the letter; it was her last letter to him, written the
day before she was killed.

Hong was at the site every day; what he
hoped to do or find, nobody could tell. He hung around, a pathetic picture of
grief; he watched every stage of the massive cleaning-up operation, from the
gathering of the dismembered parts to be put in large antiseptic plastic bags,
to the final laying of these bags in coffins and their internment in a plot of
state land amidst prayers offered by a gathering of priests and monks, who
formed a complete representation of all the possible faiths of the victims.
Hong had asked Father O’Reilly, Teresa’s parish priest, to come and offer
prayers for her.

As if to work out the tremendous sorrow that
was threatening to overpower him, he went about in frenzied activity, offering
a mass for her in this church, prayers for the repose of her soul in that
church, composing a verse for insertion in the obituary column of The Straits
Times that would have been maudlin but for the depth of his grief. And still
the need to be constantly in motion remained, to put off, as far as possible,
that terrible moment of stark awakening to solitude.

The weeks after the crash were the most
anxious for Hong’s relatives and friends, for it appeared that at any moment,
he would slip over the edge. He quietened down, and then all his attention
focussed on the precious letter rescued from the wreck. He read it again and
again and drew comfort from it, for it was as it his beloved fiancée was
speaking words of affection to him from the grave.

He went quietly about his work as a lecturer
in the university and occasionally rang me up to talk, sometimes about Teresa,
sometimes about inconsequential matters. On the anniversary of her death, he
again inserted a message of loving remembrance for her in The Straits Times,
and had a mass said for her in the church where they used to attend.

It was about a month after the anniversary
when Hong suggested having lunch together. All through lunch, he was very
subdued and I knew that there was something he wanted to tell me but was
hesitant to. He finally brought out a letter from his pocket, that last letter
Teresa had written and said, “There’s a message in this letter that I should
have been alert to; I missed it, and now it’s too late.”

He made me read the letter, which I did with
great discomfort, for here was a very private letter, full of the sentiments of
a woman very much in love and wanting, in every word, to give pleasure to the
beloved. I hurried through the letter, but there did not seem to be any message
of the kind that Hong had hinted at.

“Read it again,” said Hong rather
impatiently, “read those lines again referring to an anniversary.” I skimmed
through the letter again; with some difficulty, my eyes picked out, among the
mass of closely written lines, this sentence: “Not death will separate us; I
shall see you again, dearest, but only on the anniversary.”

Isolated, lifted out of context, the
sentence had an air of foreboding about it; but as part of a letter almost
extravagant in its claims and expressions of love and hope, there was nothing
to distinguish it from
any of the other sentences.

“Don’t you see the significance?” Hong
asked. “She had a premonition of death, and there and then decided that death
would not separate us. She would return on the anniversary to see me again. But
the anniversary’s past,” he added brokenly. “July 19’s past, and I was a fool
to have missed the chance. She’ll never come again.”

“What would you have done?” I asked
tentatively, looking at this man still struggling to come to terms with his
sorrow.

“I would have gone to the site; she must,
have waited for me and I never turned up!” The last words were uttered in an
agonized cry of self-reproach.

“Are you sure she was referring to this
anniversary? Could she not have meant some other anniversary, for instance, the
anniversary of your engagement, your first meeting, your first kiss?” I became
frivolous in my anxiety to turn this man away from the dangerous drift of his
thoughts.

“Not death will separate us; I shall see you
again, dearest, but only on the anniversary,” he quoted slowly without looking
at the letter. “It could mean nothing else. Don’t you see how these words
cannot be interpreted in any other way? Fool! Fool that I am for missing this
message for a whole year.” Again he berated himself for his gross negligence,
and this time he pounded the side of his head with a clenched fist.

“I must go,” he said fiercely. “I must go to
the site and find out whether she’s been there. There are some Malay kampongs
around. Somebody would have seen.”

“Let me go with you,” I ventured, “or get
your sister to go with you.” Then, fearing he would regard this as offensive
patronage by the wise of the weak-minded, I quickly added, “I would like to,
really.”

The site was inaccessible by car; we walked
for some distance through overgrown grass and lallang, and I saw that Hong was
weeping silently. Here and there were desolate reminders of the tragedy: a
small part of the plane now rusting and covered with coarse grass, an object
partly submerged in the ground that must have been a plane seat, for the
remnants of a seat-belt were still attached to it.

Hong and I looked around for a while, then
walked for some distance towards a small cluster of Malay huts on the edge. In
halting Malay, Hong asked questions to find out if the little band of curious
onlookers who had gathered in front of us could remember the plane crash. They
nodded their heads vigorously. One of them, an old man with brown stumps for
teeth, said that he had witnessed the explosion in the sky. He made a loud
sound and lifted both arms to convey the force of the explosion.

One of the young men cried out shrilly, “Ada
hantu! Ada hantu!” and pointed to the site of the crash, while the women showed
signs of fear. One of them gestured to him to stop talking.

Hong’s voice quavered in excitement as he
persuaded and then threatened the young man to talk further. But the young man,
in response to the woman’s warning, suddenly became tight-lipped. They seemed
to realize that they were on the edge of something incomprehensible and
dangerous and must withdraw. But there was no stopping Hong. Tearfully, he
offered money. The group slunk away sullenly, but the old man with the rotting
teeth, sensing the urgency in Hong’s voice, returned to tell him what they had
seen.