The Bondmaid

by Catherine Lim

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A little girl - Han - is sold, aged four, as a bondmaid or slave into the House of Wu, where she grows up and falls in love with the young heir. But the idyll of childhood attachment turns into a nightmare as Han, beautiful, proud and uncompromisingly loyal, struggles against the forces of tradition and tyranny in a large household where patriarchs and matriarchs wield inexorable power, lustful male relatives watch young bondmaids to claim their rightful share of pleasure, visiting monks devise ingenious schemes to combine holy public duty with unbridled private indulgence, and gods and goddesses smile to see the human drama unfold.

Release date: September 22, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 347

Sample

The child Han was about to be taken away.


Just now, in the darkness of dawn, she lay asleep with her five brothers and sisters on the large plank bed, in an enormous
entanglement of arms, legs, pillows, bolsters and small possessions impossible to unclutch even in sleep – a bright pink plastic
doll wedged between her left cheek and Oldest Brother’s right buttock, a blue caterpillar that had wound its way to Little
Sister’s toes and stuck there, Little Sister’s rubber teat, sucked thin, flat and dry, fallen from her mouth but not from
its string around her neck.


But no matter; they slept soundly on. They had begun the night neatly enough. They had each lain down in their assigned places
on the bed, taking care to curl up their legs and make the necessary adjustments in sleeping positions to fit into the curves
of each other’s bodies so that there would be place for all. Oldest Brother, ever the buffoon, had assumed a mien of severest
censure and shrieked, ‘Remember, phoo-oot time’s over!’, meaning that they should all have done their farting for the night; the one whose face was farted into had
right of reciprocal action.


They had, moreover, abided by the strict rules of the rotational sharing of the three pillows and two bolsters; that day being
a Wednesday, it was the three oldest ones’ turn. But in the course of sleep, they had all moved outside their allotted territory
and had engaged in either defensive or attacking moves in relation to the much coveted pillows and bolsters, so that by morning
all had come together in this untidy, indistinguishable heap. The child Han, the youngest, lay on top of the heap, victoriously clutching a blue bolster, one small fist thrust into the cheek of an older brother who, in turn,
had a leg draped over a sister’s shoulder.


The bed bore all the distressing signs of overpopulation. It creaked and sagged; its mattress, stuffed with coconut fibres,
had burst under the continuous pressure of six pairs of stomping feet in play, releasing little tufts of stiff hairs that
poked out and chafed young skins. The mother’s mending needle had tried to poke them back in, but to no avail. Polluted beyond
saving by its endless absorption of the night’s detritus of urine, sweat, saliva and hot dreams, the mattress swelled with
the growth of a whole parasitic colony, hidden deep in its many folds, invisible to the eye. In the dead of night, the bedbugs
came out in hordes and attacked the sleeping children, twisting arms, legs and thighs in a convulsion of scratching. A thin
child looked fat, a pale child rosy, from the bites.


Bedbugs never bit those from whose bodies they had spontaneously arisen. The children blamed their presence in the mattress
on an old, obese, flatulent neighbour who lived next door and who slept peacefully every night of her life while her bugs,
created to her corpulent image, marched outwards, like an invading army, and ravaged other bodies in the village.


Revenge was particularly sweet when, under the creative leadership of Oldest Brother, the children mounted a counter-attack,
digging the enemy out with their mother’s hairpins and subjecting them to a slow death in a saucer filled with kerosene. Otherwise,
death was by the simple process of squelching, the innumerable brown stains all over the mattress testifying to their rich
squelchiness. Afterwards the children thrust victorious thumbs or forefingers under each other’s noses and laughed to see
the spluttering recoil from bug-smell.


They did it to their mother sometimes and laughed when she slapped down the offending finger. But not to the father. In his
absence, his space beside their mother’s on the other bed in the house, which had a cotton, not a coconut fibre, mattress,
and a pillow of its own, ought to have been seized upon; indeed, on a few occasions, in the middle of the night, a child, tearful
from too many bug bites or the feel of spreading wet underneath, had wandered into the parents’ room and climbed up into that
free space.


The mother had warned, ‘Make sure you don’t kick me,’ by way of protecting the unborn child in her now fearfully swollen belly.
Unborn children too jostled for bed-space, amniotically safe against the knocking and buffeting from unruly sibling limbs
in sleep. But not always against the invasive fumes of raw opium or the spasms induced by young pineapple taken with beer,
or the pummellings of determined fists. The mother had tried the entire despairing range and had come home in a trishaw, pale
and beginning to bleed, from the abortionist’s house at the far end of the village. Still the child would not be dislodged
and continued its robust kicking. The abortionist said it had never happened before; mostly, the little things fell out after
the first pellet of opium, without aid of pineapple or beer. Truly, this was Sky God’s sign that the child should be allowed
to live.


‘Don’t kick me,’ she warned the children. But they preferred to remain together on their own bed. They feared their father
and, by extension, his bed. He came home seldom and went into a roaring temper if he prepared for sleep and suddenly caught
the smell of dried urine in his nostrils which would twitch menacingly as he bent to sniff his mattress and then flare with
vengeful anger as he rose and roared for the culprit.


Only two of the six children bed-wetted, but he punished all. He liked to punish his children in a group, his large knuckles
descending ripplingly upon a sea of small heads, or his thick belt, ripped from his waist, lashing at a forest of skipping
legs. But mostly he made them range themselves in order of age in a row before him, as he sat by the table, in his white singlet
and pyjama trousers, drinking his beer. The warmth of Guinness Stout suffused his whole body, relaxed it and settled it lugubriously
in the chair, draping his long arms over the sides. Deceptive warmth: without warning, it distilled itself into a tight knot of pure malignant energy in the man’s right fist,
making it shoot out suddenly, in a tremendous roar, pulling the rest of the body up bolt upright. The father was now wide
awake once more. He glared at the row of small frightened faces in front of him and one by one, they moved up to meet his
raised fist.


Not solidarity alone, but total dependence on each other for solace prevented each child, after the impact, from running away
with the red cheek bruise and the hot tears; instead he or she stepped out and waited patiently by the side as the next, and
the next moved up, until the row at last came to an end, and they could all come together and run in a body to their bed,
scramble up, huddle together and set up the much delayed but perfectly harmonised howl of grievance and hurt.


The mother had, on one occasion, appeared later, after the father left the house, with a plate of bread sprinkled generously
with sugar and a bottle of F & N Orange Crush, uncapped to yield exactly six equal portions, to comfort the children and unhuddle
them.


In his time, the father too had stood, trembling, in punitive assembly with his siblings, and his father before him, in a
long tradition of that cruelty, not just of parents, but of deities and gods themselves in their temples and river shrines,
which sees fit to visit upon all the sins of one.


Once the child Han saved all of them. They were as usual ranged before the father sitting at the table, his beer before him.
The mother stood at the kitchen doorway, looking on dully.


Oldest Brother stepped forward, his face in taut and quivering readiness to meet the impact of the strong hand always made
stronger by drink, but the child Han struck first. She broke off from her position at the end of the row, ran to her father,
stood before him, then began a comical little dance – a similar one had earned her two biscuits from a smiling neighbour only
the week before.


She had picked it up from somewhere and knew its movements perfectly, swaying her hips, clapping her hands and providing her own accompaniment in a clear, shrill treble:


The bird looks

The bee cries

The ants yearn

For my little flower

My sweet little opening flower.

She finished with a bold rump waggle and a flawless imitation of the coquette’s classic fluttering eyelash peep from behind
a fan. The rest of the children tittered and glanced nervously at the father. The man whose stream of drunken energy had been
stopped midway by the sudden approach of the child and had subsided into a vague, slurred murmuring for the entire duration
of the dance, seemed not amused and stared at her.


‘Eh?’ he said as the child suddenly rushed forward, climbed up on his knee, kissed him wetly on the cheek and said, with the
artfullest winsomeness of any four-year-old, ‘You are my father and I love you very much.’


The man said, ‘Eh?’ again and gazed with frowning melancholy upon the little girl who kept her arms resolutely around his
neck. He repeated, thickly and stupidly her words of endearment, then his brutality collapsed inwards into a soft centre and
dissolved in a puddle of tears. The huge man blubbered about the sadness of his life and rubbed his eyes with a fist.


‘Don’t cry, Father,’ said the artful one, glowing in the triumph of the massive rescue.

The man was capable of much generosity to his wife and children. On those days when he came home in a good mood, with money
in his pockets, he liked to enter the house roaring, pull out an impressive wad of notes, stuff it down his wife’s blouse
or collar and watch her pull it out and count it in tremulous joy. With the same buoyancy, he scooped coins out of his pockets
and rained them upon his children’s upturned palms, laughing to see them go down excitedly on all fours to retrieve missing
coins from under cupboards and feet.


‘Come get it.’ The perverse man had the idea to wedge a large coin between his buttocks; the jollity of drink and sudden fortune
made him indulge in horseplay of the most childish kind, the idea being to let out a tremendous fart at the moment of the
coin’s retrieval.


His wife shook her head at the man’s inanity.

‘Siau, siau,’ she muttered but was thankful for that wad of notes that would enable her to go to the provisions shop to settle old debts,
replenish her supply of Tiger Balm for rubbing on the constantly throbbing temples, and try her luck in the village lottery
on numbers based on the date and time of her husband’s largesse or on the number of times the child inside had kicked or turned.


The father had an enormous tattoo of a black-faced demon-warrior on his right arm. The tattoo-maker had pricked in a grotesquerie
of horns, fangs and coiled snakes which uncoiled and danced to the rhythm of moving muscles. The father liked to push up his
sleeve, flex his arm and invite his children to come and watch, laughing in great merriment to see them break into a screaming,
giggling run for their bed.


Sometimes he liked to gather his children around him to tell them stories.

Long, long ago, it was the men who bled every month, not the women. The men obviously could not use the cloth pads worn by
the women but protected their penises with long bamboo shields. These proved very inconvenient in their work of ploughing,
sowing and harvesting. So they begged Sky God to take away the inconvenience and give it to the women instead. Sky God pitied
them and granted their request.


‘Siau, siau,’ muttered his wife. ‘Telling such stories to children.’


His wife cursed him, but never in his presence.

‘Sky God, bless my husband with good health

Sky God, bless my husband with prosperity

Sky God, bless my husband with good behaviour.’

Every morning she lit a joss-stick to the great god who manifested himself in fiery rumbles of thunder and lightning across
the skies, which children were taught to greet with soft reverential ‘pup pup’ noises with their lips, to catch some of this sweeping divine energy. The energy was also in the god’s huge staring eyes,
the immense streams of black hair and beard, the sunburst of gleaming victorious spears on his back, and most of all, the
mighty feet laid on a heap of crushed, yowling demons, as he sat, legs wide apart, on his golden throne and received the obeisance
of a thousand worshippers.


The god might consider it presumptuous of her to hitch three major requests to one little joss-stick with its pathetic wisp
of smoke when he was used to billowing clouds from a hundred golden temple urns. But he had only himself to blame for the
continuing meagreness of her offerings: if he was omnipotent, why had he not changed her husband’s fortunes or character?


‘Sky God has no eyes nor ears.’

Even gods had to be reminded of their remissness, in her case, of an unconscionably prolonged blindness and deafness to her
pleas. From her marriage at sixteen, she had lit joss-sticks and never known a day of peace or happiness.


Oldest Brother was the one to peep through a narrow slit in the plank wall of their parents’ bedroom and signal to the others,
by a quick wave of the hand, to come and watch too.


They watched, six faces pressed against the slits in the planks. The child Han, not seeing anything and determined always
to have her share of spoils, clamoured to be held up and was clapped on the mouth by Oldest Brother.


Later they discussed what the heaving and thrusting movements meant. Oldest Brother who was nine said he knew what it was
all about and duly demonstrated, guffawing, with a few thrusts of his own thin hips inside flapping khaki shorts. That was
how babies were made, he said, and by way of further demonstration, he made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his
left hand and thrust the forefinger of his right through it repeatedly. The others followed and for some minutes there was a lively competition to see who could go fastest, until their
mother, hearing their screaming laughter and rushing in to see a frenzy of finger pistons, descended upon them, yelling, ‘Don’t
ever let me catch you doing that again!’ But Oldest Brother, through the wisdom of his clowning, had enlightened the rest
by drawing for them the indisputable link between their father’s panting exertions each time he came home and the subsequent
swelling of their mother’s belly.


Indeed, the father’s rare visits home and the mother’s regular manifestations of those rare visits had combined to offer an
example of unparalleled fecundity even in that village of fecund women, where every gathering, at the water pump, market stalls
or provisions shop, invariably threw up a clutch of rounding bellies in varying stages of roundedness.


The mother’s belly, large, smooth and firm as a melon, pulling up her cotton trousers from ankle to mid-calf, was the most
familiar sight and drew light-hearted analogies.


‘Pok,’ the neighbours teased. ‘Why, you go pok every year!’, in perfect imitation of the sharp exploding sound of the ripened rubber seed-pod when it burst and scattered
the hard, smooth brown seeds that children liked to pick up and play with. It was inappropriate to make comments to children
about their mother’s condition, but the loudest and idlest of the neighbours, chewing a piece of sugarcane and watching the
children walk by on their way to the village shop, stopped them, crudely poked out her stomach and flung out playful arms
to encircle a huge space of air in front. The children said nothing and walked on sullenly. The woman shouted, ‘Why are you
always together? Can’t you do anything separately? Why, you even shit together!’ For the story, told by the mother herself
in a rare mood of jocularity, was that all her children feared darkness and never ventured alone at night to the toilet outside
the house. They woke each other up and went in a body, one lit candle among them. The small wooden outhouse on stilts proved
too small for six jostling bodies: one fell into the bucket below and was hauled up screaming. The mother who was seldom in the mood for laughter had provoked gales of merriment
describing how she depleted the village well cleaning up the little fool.


The neighbours joked about the pregnancies but never about the births which were squalid and pitiful, invariably taking place
in the absence of the father who could never be found and brought home. Each baby, in its turn, had tumbled on to a heap of
donated torn towels and sarongs and thereafter gone on to depend on donated milk powder and swaddling clothes which came in
a steady stream of neighbourly generosity.


The midwife who would have liked to give her services free but could not as her livelihood depended on them, was nevertheless
kind enough to make the rounds of the neighbourhood to secure the needed baby things. Even the rough sugarcane woman came
with strips of a bedsheet and a bowl of nourishing herbal brew.


‘They simply refuse to come out, not even with three pellets of opium,’ said the awe-stricken midwife who was also an abortionist.
‘So she will go on having babies. Who can go against Sky God’s will?’


The mother, all the while, lay white and helpless, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Only one of the babies had been lucky:
a computation based on the day and hour of the birth had provided a winning lottery number and brought in a small sum of money.
She had had two more babies after the child Han, and she gave both away for adoption; they were girl babies, anyway.


This cold, dark morning, pregnant yet again, she lay on her bed, wide awake, staring into the darkness, while her children
slept soundly in the next room in a harmonious disorder of bodies.


Outside, the old bald village rooster began to crow. It crowed its poor old heart out each dawn in its two-fold duty of banishing
the night’s ghosts and waking up the still living. A cemetery lay outside the village. The rooster broke up trysting ghost lovers and sent them back weeping into their tombs;
it disrupted seances at graves and left transactions uncompleted, for the vaporous forms of the dead, pushing their way up
through the hollows of the bamboo stakes driven deep into their graves by the hopeful living, had to stop halfway and go down
again.


The night soil man saw a female ghost. Up long before anyone in the village, with his large collecting buckets strung at each
end of the long pole across his shoulder, he froze as the shape loomed before him. He saw a woman in a long white dress, swaying
in front of him, an immense curtain of hair pulled over her face, which she slowly parted with both hands as she came closer
to peer into his face. He shouted, ran and fell, dropping his buckets which splashed over a wide area of ground so that for
days the village reeked of the evidence of the ghostly encounter. Some said she was a young woman who had been raped and killed
by Japanese soldiers during the Occupation, some that she was the crazy woman who had killed her child, then run screaming
under a full moon to jump into a well. A little jar of joss-sticks and a plate of oranges and flowers later appeared on the
spot where the night soil man had seen her.


Children passing the cemetery on their way to the town quickly pressed their palms together and moved them rapidly up and
down in prayerful contrition and supplication. The contrition was for any inadvertent offence, for spirits were known to reside
in grassy mounds or tree trunks that children might heedlessly step or urinate on; the supplication was for fathers to make
money, for death conferred upon even the humblest man or woman the power to give winning lottery numbers in dreams. A servant
boy, imbecile and mute, a grandson of the flatulent, bedbug-generating old woman, was killed by a falling rubber tree and
thereafter dispensed wealth through such lucky dream numbers. He asked in return for only a meal of suckling pig and roast
fowl, and was given all he could eat – for days his grave was suffused with the delicious aroma of a dozen sizzling meats. His grandmother, pleased beyond
words, was given some of the food to take home. Parents also taught children not to say anything should they smell mysterious
flower scents in the air. Tight-lipped, grave-faced, the children walked on, avoiding the sight of the rows of granite and
marble slabs rising out of the tall stiff grass, with their remains of food, tea and joss-stick offerings rotting into the
earth.


Only the rooster was unafraid; it cleared the way for the living each day by sternly despatching the dead back to their abodes.
Its call was a lonely, persistent one, always ending with a cry, very like a human sob that hung tremblingly for a long time
upon the cold morning air. After the last ghost had fled and the first lights appeared in kitchens, the old faithful heart
gave out, and the rooster keeled over and died. But it had already set in motion the reassuring sounds of life’s continuity
– the chopping of firewood in readiness for the day’s meals, the barking of a dog, the fitful crying of a baby. Of life’s
endurance too: for somewhere, the wracked coughing of the consumptive widow determined to stay alive for her crippled son
floated out to swell the dawn’s affirmation of hope.


The children slept through the noise and death. The mother got up, pale and trembling, threw a towel around her shoulders
and walked out of the house to where Sky God’s urn stood on the ground. The remnants of a joss-stick stood forlornly in the
ash, sending no more smoke up to heaven. Beside it was a little saucer of decaying pink balsam petals.


Years ago, her widowed mother, who took in mountains of washing everyday to support eight children, so that the skin of her
hands hardened, cracked and bled, had said, ‘Sky God has ears and eyes,’ not as a statement of truth but of hope. ‘Who will
dare deny that Sky God has the largest ears, the brightest eyes?’ Gods too were susceptible to flattery and lapped up praise
like children.


The wretched woman had died in the full conviction that all those who had contributed to her sufferings, including an evil-hearted
sister-in-law, would in due time receive divine retribution.


Her mother was a fool. She would not be like her mother.

With one deft toe, she tipped over the urn and spilled the joss-sticks and ash. She spat into the ash. Then she turned and
walked back into the house, in final renunciation of a hopelessly inept god that women had cried to from time immemorial.


Now it was time for the child Han to be taken away.

The mother went to the children’s room and made straight for the bed and the child. Extricating her from the heap, she pulled
her up to a sitting position, bent down and whispered urgently, ‘Get up. We have to leave soon.’ The child, her eyes closed,
swayed in the heaviness of sleep, then fell back and was once more absorbed into the warmly breathing heap, safe against the
terrors of the coming day. The mother yanked her up by the armpits and lifted her off the bed and on to the floor. She stood
unsteadily, then her legs gave way and she went noiselessly down on the floor where she would have continued sleeping if her
mother had not hurriedly pulled her up and carried her out of the room, her head lolling, her legs astride the enormous melon
of a belly. ‘I say get up; we’ve a lot of things to do,’ said the woman, keeping her voice low so as not to wake the others.


She set the child on her feet in the kitchen and dealt a few sharp taps on her cheeks to wake her up. The child murmured and
opened her eyes sleepily.


‘Take off your clothes,’ she ordered. She went outside, in the darkness, to the well, drew up a large bucket of water and
returned to find the child still fully clothed and rubbing her eyes with her fists.


‘Bad child, I told you to take off your clothes,’ muttered the woman. She squatted down and began to unbutton the blouse and
loosen the strings of the trousers. The child, her eyes half-closed, her hands grasping her mother’s shoulders, lifted one leg, then the other, to step out of the trousers. Her mother dipped
a piece of cloth into the bucket of water and began to clean her face, neck, body, downwards to the small spaces between her
toes. The touch of the wet rag woke up the child at last; she looked around in bewilderment, puckered her face and began to
cry.


‘Sssh, sssh,’ said the mother in a fierce whisper. She dried the child hurriedly with a small towel, then began to dress her.
The clothes had been laid out on a chair the night before. They were new clothes, such as were given out only for wearing
on the first day of the New Year. The child knew it was not the New Year, but the morning’s confusion was too much for the
asking of questions, so she was silent, obediently stretching out an arm to put into a sleeve or lifting a leg to put into
the trousers, as her mother ordered. It was a bright red cotton suit with pretty yellow frog buttons, and it made the child,
with her round, shiny, four-year-old face and large dark eyes, look like a doll.


The mother took a step backwards and surveyed her.

‘They’ll say you’re too thin and pale,’ she muttered. She went to a small cupboard in a corner and brought out a quilted cotton
jacket. It was several sizes too big for the child but it had the desired effect of adding some bulk to her small frame. ‘Wait,’
said the mother, still not satisfied, and she went to the ancestral altar at the other end of the room. No urn of regard and
remembrance stood before the ancestor whose framed photograph hung overhead, draped with wisps of cobwebs. The woman wanted
no more traffic with gods and ancestors; her business was the living. She searched among the jumble of objects on the altar
turned utility shelf, pushing aside combs, hairpins, powder boxes and buttons to pull out what she wanted – the bright red
wrapping paper that the joss-sticks had come in, saved for an occasion such as this. She tore off a piece and moistened it
on her tongue. Then she returned to her daughter and rubbed the moistened piece on the child’s cheeks. Two spots of colour appeared, making the child more doll-like than ever. The woman again stepped backwards for another quick
look. Something else was missing – the child had no shoes.


She looked around for shoes. She found a pair but they were too small. Then she saw a pair of rubber slippers under a cupboard
and dived for them. They were, like the quilted jacket, several sizes too big for the child but they would do. She found a
piece of pink ribbon, worked it into a dainty butterfly and pinned it to the child’s hair. The entire exercise was now completed.
The child Han was ready. ‘You must eat something and then we should start out. We don’t want to be late.’


It was at this point that the child’s sullen perplexity cleared for a look of understanding which lit up into pure joy. The
transformation filled out her cheeks, brightened her eyes, irradiated her skin. She was a child of heartbreaking beauty. ‘Oh
Mama, I want the Peanut Balls and the Sugar Man and the Rainbow Sticks and the Green Melon Monkey,’ she cried excitedly, in
vivid recollection of the mother’s promise the day before.


The mother’s impatience gathered into a bursting knot of exasperation at so much nonsensical talk in the midst of such serious
business, then checked itself. It subsided into the sheepishness that mothers need not feel if they were only tricking their
children into going to school or the dentist. Years later, recounting the incident in the calm of a ravaged life coming to
its close, the mother, by way of self reproach, spoke of the remorse that even a cow innocently following its keeper to the
slaughter-house might excite.


‘But at that time I felt nothing,’ sh