Balik rumah sekarang.
“Come home now.”
One evening, months after my mum’s death, I stood at the foot of my parents’ HDB block — my family home — making the smallest of talks with the next door neighbours.
It was Ramadan and I had just ended iftar with my two sisters and father. An Uber was coming to pick me up and drag me from my first life to my second, where I lived with my secret boyfriend in a two-bedder we could only just afford.
I did not know either of their names — the neighbours I was speaking to, the father and mother of the household— but I had known them my entire life. They wore faces I would recognise anywhere in the world. I grew up with their children, our skinny half-naked bodies pressed against cool and peeling HDB flat gates, a corridor between us that occasionally became battlefield between the two families. Plants encroaching on another’s territory to show the other who the boss was. Slippers and sandals an inch past the invisible marker, silently taunting.
My memories of them are of silent, hostile, neighbourly wars; of awkward lift-sharing; of loud banging doors and scorned looks; of my parents’ scathing words about the couple across the corridor. But they are also of shared home-cooked snacks and food; of friendly nods in Sheng Siong supermarket; of ‘hello’s as we passed their Taoist worship shop throughout the years; of help extended when their front door was painted red by illegal loansharks; of sincere condolences when tragedy, inevitably, introduced itself on our floor.
And so, I found it completely natural, as I stood there waiting for my Uber and spotted them across the road, to cast my eyes downwards to my phone and pretended not to notice them. But the man stopped as he walked by me and said, “Eh, what time you all come back home usually ah?”
I was startled, and readied myself for an aggressive attack. What was it this time? The cat that we occasionally lured up to the shared corridor and fed? Did it take a shit on their welcome mat? Was this a noise complaint? Has someone in their family been a victim of black magic and are they looking for someone to blame? I said, “Huh?”
“What time you all come back? I want to give you all something lah,” he said, his face mean and kind at the same time.
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “I don’t know. I don’t actually live with them — I live alone. I think after seven should be okay.”
“Okay after seven ah, everyone’s home,” he said. “I drop by. Why you never live with them?” He asked this accusingly.
“I work very far. Dover area. I live closer to work,” I defended myself. Bartley was as far away from Dover as Tampines was, but he did not need to know the details.
“Ok ok,” he nodded accepting my reasons for living a sinful life away from my family. “You take care ah.”
“Yah ok. Thank you. Bye.”
I looked at his wife’s face for the first time since the beginning of the exchange and she smiled openly, nodding her agreement, mirroring his request for me to ‘take care’. I smiled back, though nervously. They walked off and I was left trying to locate the Uber that had gone off to find me.
My mother died about three months prior to that conversation with our neighbours at the foot of the block. I wasn’t there when she died; I was at home. Home, then, was a shared flat in Tiong Bahru, with five housemates including my boyfriend, and it was a sundry mix of comfort, dread, anxiety, friendship, companionship and love. Home involved fewer strained yet strangely affectionate relationships with neighbours, with a private stairwell up to our walk-up apartment that meant we saw no one as we left and returned, except the occasionally naked and screaming European couple who lived next door and could only be glimpsed from our bedroom. Home was a carousel of twenty-somethings who came and went, untethered by any familial bond to the household, or their names on a lease.
When my mother died, home was about to change, too, as George and I signed onto a 700-square-feet two-bedroom condo in Bartley, an estate much closer to my family’s home to facilitate me caring for my mother, only days before she died.
I received the call from my sister when I was sitting at the kitchen table in the last month we were in the Tiong Bahru houseshare, slurping udon soup and watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. When I saw her name on the phone screen, I didn’t need telling twice. I picked up and she said, quietly, “Balik rumah sekarang.” Come home now. Then she hung up.
Maybe there could have been many ways I received the news that my mother was dead — or dying, for at that point, in that brief phone call with my sister, I could not be sure of either. I called her for more — for information or confirmation, I could not be sure — again and again, but received nothing else. The next few minutes — though it felt like hours — I stood in my bedroom by the wardrobe, whimpering, panting. I called my other sister, then my father, then our domestic worker who had been caring for my mother full-time for almost three years, again and again hearing only the endless ringing of phone lines that didn’t tell me anything. I guessed, instead: my mother was dying. I had to return home. There was still time, surely?
I remember yelling out to George, sobbing manically, grabbing at clothes in my wardrobe mindlessly, not sure what I was doing and what I had to do. I was shaking. I was in my pyjamas. I could not leave the house the way I was dressed, not because of vanity or even a sense of dignity, but because of the visible tattoos on my arm, and I could not be around my family from whom so many parts of my life were deliberately hidden, with my tattoos seen. Even at that moment, I held on to the knowledge that being so obviously myself would result in tumult in the family. That I could not be my full self even when my mother was dead. Or dying. Dying, I convinced myself. Not dead.
We burst out onto the street in the night, me in my pajamas and a cardigan thrown on. It was 8.30pm. I could not get an Uber, so I half-ran aimlessly with George to the end of the street to the main road, still calling every member of my family. When every unanswered phone all, I hung up, pressed the number again, and listened. Hung up, called again, listened.
Eventually, I called my brother whom I haven’t spoken to in months, and I sobbed, “What’s happening? What’s happening? No one’s picking up. No one’s telling me anything.”
He was crying loudly back. “I don’t know. I just came home. Just come home now…”
There were no taxis on the road that had their green light on, indicating they were available to take passengers. I was running and crossing roads where cars were hurtling towards me, with George was by my side. We found a cab eventually, and jumped in without waiting for it to stop completely. I shouted the address of my family home. My home. And then cried and cried and cried.
After a minute, the woman driving us said, “Why are you crying? Why?” She did not sound sympathetic, just angry.
“My mother is dying,” I said, not caring who she was, wailing like a wounded animal. “My mother is dying. Hurry.”
“Aiyah why you cry?” she snapped. “My mother is also dead. No need to cry. Stop crying. So loud. So loud. Stop crying.”
I pressed two fingers against my ears to shut her out, and repeated,“Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you.” Somewhere in the din, I heard George telling her, severely, “She doesn’t want to you to talk right now. Just stop talking.” Later, I found out from him that the driver had claimed she was distracted by my noise. I wonder if she, too, could hear the cacophony in my head.
The journey home was not a short one. Throughout, I alternated between thinking, “My mother is dying, my mother is dying, and I’m not there” to saying it out loud.
“My mother is dying,” I said to George, over and over, breathless. “I’m not there. I’m not there.”
He rubbed my shoulders, held me close, said, “We’ll be there soon.”
“She’s dying. I’m not there.” Did he hear me?
Somewhere in a tunneled expressway, I found myself stroking the handle of the car’s, unthinkingly, lightly at first then with more conviction. I remember feeling a glimmer of something. The urge to open the door and end the ride then, worlds away from my mother, but closer in our journeys, in this common state of losing all that life had given us, all of its blows and joys, seemed natural and injected hope in some faraway place inside me. I just had to open the door.
I felt hands pull mine back. I didn’t mind so much; there wasn’t enough inside me to fight. In the end — after bursting out of the cab while it was still slowing down, under the block of my parents’ flat, right where I would months later stand making small talk with my neighbours — I was too late. At its hardest, the reminder that there was no changing that ending, strikes like a blow to the face. My mother had sighed her last breath even before I had gotten into that cab.
I thought of that the evening I stood at the bottom of the flat, her flat, with my neighbours. Her neighbours. I wonder if they knew parts of her I don’t.
Something seeps between you and the people around you when death strikes; sometimes it is spoken, in tiny conversations that imply care, imply an offer of food or gifts, affection and shared humanity. Sometimes it lies in smiles from a strange man and woman, in a look that demonstrates cordiality and peace between families. And other times, rarer times, it is complete coldness, dead sympathy, a severe demand to be quiet and hide grief like a secret lest it unravels, shameless in its body.
My neighbours barely factor into my bereavement journey, but that memory is something I’ve thought about a number of times. Grief and loss have reputation for creating chasms between those with whom we were once close. I’m only starting to appreciate the ways they can also form connections, however long they take to form, however bad they are. Some calls are persistent.
Like the literal calls my father has taken to making, almost-daily, his long rants filling me both with affection and anxiety, love, familiarity in the familial, and heartache. The addled words of a man I once hated and am learning to know.
And how some calls are an exchange of heart-shaped, kiss-blowing emojis between me and my mother’s former caregiver, who now works round the clock with a different family, one with two happy young children. We speak a similar language — her Bahasa is Indonesian while mine is Melayu — but a language that required no words prevailed in our relationship instead.
They all ring the same: come home — to myself, to my flesh and bones, to loss that sits patiently waiting on the living room floor, in the form of my mother’s still-warm body. Come home, and nothing else. I could call again, and again, desperate to hear more but there was nothing new I needed to know. I just had to return.
