BEFORE MY FATHER fell in love with anyone, he fell in love with John Lennon, and when my mother came into the picture, she was the mistress in a love triangle. When my grandmother’s near-constant urging, nagging and shoving achieved the desired effect of marriage, my mother had determined there was only room for two of them and Lennon would have to go and she was ready to ship him in a well-sealed cardboard box to some godforsaken country on the other side of the globe. She was the soulmate, the wife, signed in black and white, a holy sanctioned union forsaking all others, an inviolable institution. So my mother declared. But she never packed anything into a cardboard box. Instead, she had my father help pick out some rattan shelves on which his precious collection of LPs would be displayed, though his say in the matter was firmly delimited by stylistic clashes in the living room. Lennon could stay, under sufferance. Though by her telling, it was she who suffered, and me.

     When I had survived my first month outside my mother’s womb, the time when parents are supposed to throw a party and hand out red-dyed eggs and cut cartoon cakes, my father was in mourning. John Lennon was dead, snatched from life by two well-placed bullets. My father placed a newspaper cutting in front of my mother, who was bent over the kitchen counter in her tunic nightgown, waiting for bread to leap from the toaster. With his hands cupped over his face at the dining table, he told her there would be no celebration because it was the end of the world as we know it. He had decided to lock himself in the study and host a solitary vigil with the record player. Get a grip, my mother said. Of course, this is what my mother tells me later and none of it could be true. She peppers her story with phrases like “gird my loins” to explain how she single-handedly booked the caterer, saved the party and blew all the balloons with her own breath, for crying out loud, all for me – regardless of the fact that I was too young to comprehend or appreciate such monumental gestures. My father did not lock himself in the study, but instead was sullen for the entire time, slouching, staring blankly into the camera, “absent in spirit” – another phrase my mother was fond of using. ‘There,’ she says, and tosses the photo album as if it was a slab of cold meat into my lap, ‘the pictures prove it.’

 

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My mother is a firm believer in the camera, the Greatest Invention after our green, top-loading washing machine. Pictures help us remember so we never forget, such as the year I got my period, the weekend when we awoke to the smell of a thousand rotten devilled eggs, the morning we awoke to what we all thought was the threat of another of our neighbour’s deadly soy sauce pork stews. We ran to the kitchen as one, our hands clamped over our noses, sleep in our eyes. ‘What in the world?’ my mother asked in a loud if muffled voice. Our lush if unkempt backyard had become a stinking pool of brown, the sturdy pandan and aloe already visibly wilting before the onslaught. ‘Shit,’ my father said. Indeed. Gossamer strips of toilet paper and bloated maxi pads floated like sailboats away from approximately where the septic tank was buried. My mother, always quick to recover from anything startling, turned on me. ‘Did you throw your pads into the bowl?’ And then, by default, she launched into a tirade and delivered a prosecutorial litany of my failings, of all the many things I’d forgotten, misplaced and lost – stationery, her Tupperware, telephone numbers, Scrabble tiles – one exhibit after another, in the clear, carrying voice of an auctioneer calling out antiques to potential bidders. The whole block had to have heard. I cried and cried and cried. Then, to learn from my lack of experience in disposing of menstrual absorbents and as punishment for my general forgetfulness, I was ordered to collect each and every soiled sanitary napkin with my bare hands. I cried some more as I waded through the pool in my oversized T-shirt  pyjama, and even more when I spotted our neighbour’s son, the boy with the slitty eyes as narrow as papercuts, watching from over the fence, giggling. My mother fetched her camera and, declaring, ‘Now you have no excuse to forget,’ captured me ankle deep and mid-bend, face shiny with tears and hands full of maxi pads.

     That picture still haunts me. In hindsight, it was probably child abuse. It could have unleashed a host of psychological disorders and bred hours of therapy involving unguarded, mortifying group hugs. My mother deserved a criminal record. Slitty Eyes called me Maxi until we finally moved away.

     Slitty Eyes was not favoured by a photograph, but my mother’s unforgiving memory needed no prompting. We had a Pekinese named Dusty. He was a gift to my father from a friend, well-meaning or otherwise. Dusty was named on account of his dirty colouring and an uncanny resemblance to the soul singer with the beehive-do Dusty Springfield. Dusty, too, was a tortured soul, which had a lot to do with being male and still in possession of all that goes with that, which manifested in futile raids on the yards of neighbouring dog owners and a generally cranky temperament, no doubt fuelled by frustration as was manifest in his public lovemaking with whatever took his fancy – his food bowl, my mother’s gardening glove, the shoe rack. One sultry evening, alerted by what sounded like someone dragging a foot around the cement porch, we caught him clumsily articulating his passion on my father’s tattered running shoe. Slitty Eyes, somewhat of a parasite of other people’s embarrassment, was there over the fence to observe the commotion. He gawked and chuckled, half amazed that he had discovered something better than 5:30pm cartoons. His witness made my mother’s blood boil, whether from fury or humiliation, and despite it being an extraordinarily humid evening she drew all the curtains and made us sweat it out. My mother decided she was not going to be a martyr and the next day Dusty was castrated.

     She holds up a photograph of Dusty now, examining his scrunched-up face. ‘I never liked that dog,’ she says.

     We used to take him with us in a kitty carrier whenever we went back to visit my grandmother, who never left her vegetable farm in the Cameron Highlands. We brought his food and toys to keep him occupied. My grandmother doted on him after I got too old to be patted and carried.

     One night after surviving my grandmother’s cooking yet again, my mother took me to a street market. It was drizzling, but she said she just needed to get out of “the house”. She refers to it in a tone reserved for red-light districts and spooky places. The house, being the one my father grew up in, fell between the two. Keepsakes from his past filled the walls – a framed picture of him shirtless during a Boy Scout expedition, of him beside a gorilla at the zoo, of him at a barbeque pit with sunglasses – each memory hanging with the resignation of cured meat, somewhat yellowed with age. Everything was left intact by my grandmother since my father’s moving out, but as far as my mother was concerned, the only thing intact was his shell while the rest of him had already been vacated. It was a museum dedicated to the memory of a dearly departed and my mother preferred the life-affirming, gut-churning roads around the highlands.

     The road back was wet and slippery and my mother drove cautiously with headlights on high, much to the audible annoyance of oncoming traffic. I’d found a Simon & Garfunkel cassette, one of my father’s favourites and for that reason alone a bad choice; it made my mother yawn so much she looked like she had heroin withdrawal. Nearing my grandmother’s house on the homeward stretch the headlights of the Civic caught on fresh road-kill, entrails smeared across the asphalt, terrifyingly pink. My mother slowed, as if trying to get as little death on her tyres as possible, which only accentuated and made the more audible the fleshy bump. My mother commented that this reminded her of how Abraham cut the animals in half so God could pass through the carcasses. ‘God appeared in a smoking oven and a blazing torch,’ she helpfully recited, pleased that such details had not eluded her. When we got back, my father said Dusty was missing. We searched bushes and behind trees until my mother put two and two together and realised what, or who, the roadkill was. She never told my father, probably right in thinking he’d want to throw a funeral party on the farm and go on to ruin a year’s worth of Lunar New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival and Winter Solstice for everybody. My mother warned me into silence – Dusty’s disappearance was one of the family things not spoken of, along with miscarriages and my uncle’s autism. But the truth will out and the morning light brought my father silently back from his jogging. He went out again with a trash bag. In stoic silence he dug a hole on my grandmother’s farm and buried the contents. The next year, I was sure we were eating Dusty in the lettuce.

     My father was not one to handle well the death of a loved one, unable to get beyond the pointlessness of it all. John Lennon was the cause of annual mourning. He was also not one keen on expressing his feelings, especially not to us, his most immediate human contacts. He’d rather confide in Dusty while picking out ticks from its back and underarms. After Dusty’s death, when there were no more ticks left to pick, he started painting. He brought home some of the watercolour paints he sold at work and began dabbling on office letterheads, graduating to scrolls of dot-matrix paper, creating intricately abstract kaleidoscopic shapes. He had never painted before, not deliberately. He was forty-two years old when he emerged from artistic hibernation, something my mother noted with dread. Forty-two is the number of months the Beast will have dominion over the Earth. Forty-two youths who mocked Elisha for his baldness are mauled to death by bears sent by God. The number was as ominous as my father’s receding hairline.

     It sometimes felt that my mother was a single parent; my father was lost in his own world. He would not eat with us, instead taking his evening meal in front of the TV, his back to us, watching the news. After my mother cleared his plate, he would light up – a cloud of cigarette smoke perpetually enveloped his head. He was God who must hide His face from His children lest they die. ‘No one can see me and live,’ it is written. My father awkwardly communicated his love by buying me otherwise pointless gifts: a stack of origami paper with the instructions missing; a faulty Rubik’s cube; a Chinese wire puzzle forever left unsolved; an entire set of encyclopaedia – The New Joy of Knowledge, volumes one to fifty-four. ‘Brush up on your reading,’ he commanded. As if knowing the world my father inhabited could be as effortless an endeavour as the teenagers who stumbled into the Lascaux cave, their oil lamps revealing the previously unseen, or the shepherd girls out gathering firewood who encountered the apparition of the Virgin Mary and were given a message for mankind. I absorbed these rare and highly coloured illuminations from the books my father gave me, but I was starved of such serendipitous enlightenment. We were solipsists, a notion that perhaps spurred my mother’s enthusiasm for photographs and their documentary properties as means of verifying our individual subsistence. My father is a blurry figure in photographs, a smudge on the gelatine that ruins the entire print. I can derive from this only one certainty: domestic life was the crash after his excitement boom.

 

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I had never realised the tension between my parents until I returned from my first church camp. As I sat down for dinner, my hands came together for a short prayer. ‘So you decided to join the fanatics too?’ my father asked, halfway to stuffing a cauliflower in his mouth. After five days of morning devotions and Amy Grant, this prayer ritual was on its way to becoming a habit. My mother glared. ‘So you’re persecuting your daughter now?’ She was certain he was the Grand Inquisitor, the minion of the Antichrist. My father called Sunday school and youth camp brainwashing, my mother said it was spiritual conditioning, which made me think of the TV commercial for Follow Me shampoo: wash and condition, wash and condition. I went up to my first altar call at that camp. The preacher said he was going to ‘baptise us in the Holy Spirit’, and I made my way to the front, persuaded that this was what was missing in my life. People were dropping like clear-felled timbers. They called it being slain in the Spirit, which made me imagine some foggy spectre with a long sword, slitting throats as it breezes without losing form in and around people. When my turn came, the preacher placed his sweaty palm on my forehead. I fell down too, not from being caught up by an otherworldly power, but by a combination of following the herd, the preacher’s nudge and his imposing bad breath. I lay on the floor, worrying about carpet burns, nervously hoping for divine arson to light my tongue so, even if I couldn’t understand my father, I could at least and at last, with the audacity of seance, converse with God, my purported real Father. Soon I heard “the Foggy Spectre” rupturing like a swollen appendix in the bodies beside me, but my larynx did not quiver nor was my mouth inflamed. I still have not spoken in tongues – a fact that I had not told my mother for fear she would feel responsible for my lack of faith, my lack of purpose, and my lack of anything in general.

     It was only as I grew older that I was able to recognise and identify the renaissance of my mother’s faith and its wanderlust. She moved from Lutheran to Methodist to Episcopal and, finally, to Pentecostal. I was brought along on her nomadic pursuit despite having diagnosed myself “spiritually bi-polar” – a condition which manifests in switches from sincere believer to adamant agnostic as fickle as weather. I managed to keep myself at a distance, but my mother wasted no time and was soon assimilated into the refreshments ministry, that team of the devoted found in all denominations responsible for churning out litres of coffee for the somnolent faithful. She also became a regular member of the church’s pot-luck gatherings, which she refers to as “pot-bless”; she doesn’t believe in luck, though she wasn’t truly comfortable with “pot” either.

     After rededicating her life to Jesus, my mother started testifying. When Penny Hew came to the front to talk about her daughter’s recovery from leukaemia and her beatific, demented father, my mother told of God’s Hand, which poked and prodded its way around our narrow single-storey, three-bedroom house. She recounted how the honey jar fell from the top rack, landing upside down on its lid, defying physics by refusing to break. Then there were the randomly arranged alphabet fridge magnets, and how they spelled out “saved”. My mother told everyone how my father woke up one night and cleaned the kitchen of its years-old stains. The congregation clapped at that, for her and our little miracles. But unlike Penny Hew who knew how to keep an audience by using puns, cheesy or outdated they may be, for comic relief, my mother was devastatingly humourless. She would deliver her testimony with the deadpan urgency of someone who only takes her steak well-done, her coffee extremely dark – everything in life is serious. This was the period of my mother’s spiritual puberty, when her new-found soul came to fill out the loose clothing of its physical self and shed the baby fat of immaturity.

 

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Physically, yes, my mother was growing – sideways. She purchased a bathroom scale to keep herself accountable, but no matter how hard she tried, through prayer, fasting, Diet Coke, my mother never became anything less than hefty and more often heftier. As a safety net, she devised a to-do list: wear only vertical stripes; never look down, lest your double chin slides out; cultivate bangs to frame the face. She always wanted to look good in photographs, so added to the list: do not press flabby arms to the body, blink enthusiastically to refresh the eyes before the flash goes off. But because she blinks so much, in most pictures her eyes are a blurred flutter.

     It didn’t bother my father, just as it didn’t bother him that her toes were misshapen or her elbows rough. But it would become my mother’s obligation to make sure he personally saw to her bouts of bodily maintenance; he was the restorer of artefacts, a job that became increasingly laborious with age. She would send him out on errands for tubs of St Ives moisturiser, Vaseline, curlers. Her hair was a particular vanity. She would employ my father’s hands for the dyeing, which required him to sit behind her with legs apart, a bowl of dye mixture in one hand and a brush in another. He whips the dye into her hair, slapping it on as if icing a cake. He flicks his wrist with each brushstroke, as if he were working on one of his paintings, transforming her frizzy, greying straws into a mop of dark meringue. My mother’s eyes close as the brush massages her scalp, soothing her nerves. She feigns reading the newspaper, secretly indulging herself. It is the only intimacy I’ve witnessed to transpire between my parents.

     My mother is looking at her picture now. ‘Where are my eyes?’ she asks, as if she was looking for lost keys. I could remind her about the need to restrain her overactive eyelids, but I don’t. ‘Do you think I look blind?’ she asks, not to me nor as rhetoric, but to my father who is standing beside her lumpy body, staring back from the picture between her fingers. She takes out the incriminating photograph and brings it closer to her face. Her brow furrows and deeply clawed lines frame her squinting eyes. She dislikes her reading glasses. Then, in a move of incredible dexterity, she shreds the three-by-five glossy into so much confetti and, as if by sleight of hand, the pieces are in her mouth and down her throat. Lately, photographs to her have become more than an obsession; they are her Ouija board, a direct line to the netherworld where my father now resides. I have stopped counting the number of seemingly innocuous photographs lost in her digestive tract. As I watch the briefly masticated pictorial remains of my father move slowly down her oesophagus like a rat in a python, my mind lights on the indigenous Venezuelans of my childhood encyclopedia, how they would stir the ashes of a dead loved one into a banana soup and drink them down. Maybe that’s what my mother is doing when she consumes the starchy pulp of a still life that connects us to the ones we lost. I only hope, for my mother’s sake, life is fat free.