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  • Grandmother
  • Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (bio)

Hui Yen’s grandmother was smoking again. She wasn’t supposed to, for the usual health reasons, but she told the doctors that she had been smoking for most of her life and wasn’t about to stop now. Hui Yen’s mother didn’t like the smell of cigarettes in the flat, so her grandmother smoked at the bus stop downstairs. She sat perched on the edge of a dull-grey plastic seat, one leg elegantly crossed over the other despite her age and her thin, weakened limbs, puffing languorously on her cigarette, as if drawing every last gasp of flavour from it. She cut a cryptic figure in the neighbourhood, with her salt-and-pepper ringlets of tightly curled hair, her out-of-fashion samfoo-style pantsuits in a discreet dark-green or dark-blue print, and her soft black-canvas shoes, the kind more likely to be worn by a kung fu master in an old Hong Kong movie than by a wiry, sun-faded woman in a sleepy, sallow Singapore housing estate. The only splash of colour on her was the crimson packet of cigarettes, clutched in one hand with a rumpled handkerchief.

It was against the law to smoke at the bus stop. Hui Yen knew this from assembly talks in school, when cheerful policemen in stiff, sweaty uniforms warned them about the dangers of smoking and dutifully listed all the public areas where smoking was banned. Hui Yen didn’t know if anyone, policeman or otherwise, had ever tried to reprimand her grandmother for smoking at the bus stop. Probably not, given the crinkled, sour expression her grandmother typically lapsed into when she was by herself. It was the same expression that had intimidated Hui Yen into petrified silence whenever she visited her grandmother as a child, back when her grandmother still lived in her own little flat in Chinatown.

Hui Yen was fourteen now, old enough not to be so easily spooked by her grandmother, and also old enough to know that the way the ends of her grandmother’s lips disappeared in that downward twist, the deeply etched arches of skin that appeared between her nose and her mouth, merely meant that her grandmother was preoccupied with her own thoughts. “Ah Ma is used to living alone,” her mother had told Hui Yen when her grandmother moved in with them. “You try not to disturb her. If she wants to be by herself, it’s okay.” [End Page 180]

Hui Yen didn’t often see elderly women by themselves in the housing estate. Most had their grandchildren in tow, or were huddled with their friends at the ground-floor void decks of the apartment blocks, trading in gossip or furtive games of chap ji ki (it was also against the law to gamble in public areas). In comparison, Hui Yen’s grandmother was alone whenever she was at the bus stop. Sometimes Hui Yen saw her there when she came straight home from school, around two p.m. Other days she was there when Hui Yen got home close to dinner time, after spending the afternoon at band practice or dawdling at the neighbourhood McDonald’s outlet with her friends.

At first Hui Yen pretended not to see her; after all, her mother had said not to bother her grandmother unnecessarily. After a couple of weeks, though, as the cool of the northeast monsoon was superseded by the relentless middle-of-the-year heat, Hui Yen began to feel uneasy about her grandmother exiling herself to the bus stop on the worst of these scorching, sweltering afternoons. One day after band practice, when Hui Yen’s white school uniform shirt was sticky with perspiration and clung greasily to her back, and her black-and-white-checked skirt felt heavy and curtain-like against the back of her knees, she spotted her grandmother’s lone figure at the bus stop and, instead of going upstairs to their flat, continued straight towards her.

“Ah Ma,” she called.

Her grandmother turned slightly to look at her and nodded, then turned back, exhaling cigarette smoke away from her.

Hui Yen hovered...

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