Son of Singapore by Tan Kok Seng

Author:Tan Kok Seng
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789810768331
Publisher: Epigram Books
Published: 2017-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

• • •

The fifth day of the fifth moon, a Saturday. We had all received two months’ pay that evening. In addition, it being the Dragon Boat Festival, the stall closed earlier than usual. All of us coolies decided to celebrate by going to a movie. It was after dinner, and I was the first to go to take a shower before putting on clean clothes and going out to the nine o’clock show. As I stepped into the dimly lit bathroom, my bare foot slid on something slippery, and I fell full length. In the bathroom was a cracked old kang, one of those very large earthenware jars used in China for storing water or rice. My feet crashed straight into the kang, smashing it to pieces, and the next instant I was on top of what remained of it, with the jagged edge of the broken base rammed deep into my left buttock. Clambering to my feet, I felt a stabbing pain where I had hit the jar, put my hand to the spot, and felt a deep hole in my flesh.

I looked at my hand. It was soaked in blood, and blood was gushing out of me all over the bathroom floor. The pain was so intense I nearly lost consciousness. Somehow I managed to get a towel round me and open the door. I shouted for help. Two of my colleagues dashed forward, instantly lifted me beneath the arms, and bore me to a wooden bed of bare boards, on which they set me down.

“What happened?” I heard our fat Madam call out. “Seng fell and cut himself in the bathroom,” one of the coolies answered. “He’s bleeding badly.”

“Have you any medicine?” another of them asked her. For a few moments there was no answer. Then she came from her room with a large biscuit tin, in which she kept ground coffee grains.

“This is good for stopping pain,” she said, “and it’ll stop the bleeding too.”

She opened the tin. Inside it there was a kitchen ladle which she scooped full of coffee, and emptied all over my wound. The pain was so terrible I again nearly fainted, and I dared not scream. Only my fear of screaming in front of the others kept me controlled. Again and again she ladled out the coffee, till on top of my wound there was a small black mountain of coffee grains. From a sideways position I watched as blood, welling up from beneath, seeped into the coffee, not changing its colour, but converting it from a pile of dry grains into a wet, black slab. For a moment it held. Then the flood broke, and from every side blood—black blood—poured over the wooden bed.

Desperate with pain, I could not control myself any longer. The boss was standing there with my colleagues. “Why can’t you send for an ambulance?” I begged them. “Take me to hospital!”

“If you want to go to hospital,” the boss said grudgingly, “I’ll take you. But in the van.

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