Chapter 23: Ol’ Man River

The day my father died, across the world in the US, former Dallas, Texas policeman Maurice Baker was found dead from gunshot in his home. It was 11 days since the assassination of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. On the street where Baker’s home stood, resided Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of assassinating Kennedy. Baker was also a friend of Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald dead while he was in police custody in the Dallas county jail, two days after Kennedy was killed.

JFK’s killing was all anyone talked about for the few days before Dad’s passing. As casual a listener as I must have been at six years of age, I do remember it remained the news at Dad’s wake, in the 42 Kovan Road, Singapore home of his parents, Ernest and Victoria de Cruz.

All my life, JFK has been a magnet to my imagination, and his death will always haunt my father’s funeral. It’s all part of my DNA, along with the American dream we came to hear and read so much about in our formative years, along with the notion of what you may do for your country. The Indian in me, who clings to his own cultural heritage knows I am the better for it, speaking generally, and not being overly generous towards one of the Caucasian tribes to embark on the dastardly business of colonising.

My first birthday, with Dad, Errol and Portia.

Eric Ross Peter de Cruz was a stenographer with the British Royal Air Force section stationed in Kuala Lumpur (KL). I don’t know much about this period, beyond Mum saying she often accompanied Dad to RAF parties on the weekend. At one of these, she told me, Dad jumped across the wider side of an office desk. A British man had dared him and Dad didn’t back down. Later, Dad worked as a proof-reader, announcer and stand-by news presenter with Radio Malaysia.

In the six years or so that we lived in Jalan Pipit, I was allowed to stay up late, waiting for Dad to return from his late-night national radio shift. I did not yet have school to wake up for, like Errol. Every once in a while, Dad carried a wide-bottom brown paper bag when he came home. I always asked what was in it, and he always said, “Don’t open. There are moths in there.”

It was his way of keeping me from prying and finding out that these were the bags they gave when you shopped at Chinese medicine shops, which also sold liquor. Dad favoured brandy (TST Hospital Brandy) and gin man (Gordon’s Dry Gin), and he also loved his Guinness. And it would be one of these that Dad would bring home in those ‘moth bags’. Moths are still off-limits for me, given the choice.

Occasionally, he earned money by copy-painting cinema posters. I remember sitting by his side as he did his copying work. He pencil-lettered the words, or sketched the lead actors, always working with two grids of squares. The original poster was held to a wall, and to this he would fasten one grid. He drew the second grid on blank paper himself, with the lightest touch of the pencil. Then he would copy the original, grid by grid. By the time the copy was painted, the grids could not be seen and any pencil markings that remained were erased. I don’t remember his radio voice, but I saw his posters at the Odeon and Golden City cinemas in KL.

Dad was born on 30 August 1926, in Georgetown, the capital of Penang island, off Malaysia’s north-west coast.  He died on 3 December 1963 in Singapore. Dad was 37. I had turned six a few months earlier. My only sibling, Errol, was nine and a bit.

Within a few years, days before I turned 11, JFK’s younger brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, was assassinated, by a shot to the head. We heard the news on our return to KL from a day-trip to Port Dickson (PD), a beach town south of KL. The beach party comprised people from the congregation of St Joseph’s Church in Sentul, which I attended. We were all in a bus and Uncle Gilbert was up front, next to the driver, but facing us. He held a transistor radio to his ear, catching the BBC news. Suddenly, Uncle Gilbert shouted for us to keep quiet. We knew it was the news. And my uncle said, “They shot Bobby Kennedy.” Uncle Gilbert was visibly upset. The rest of the trip was less noisy. Barely two months before, another legend of the fight for justice, Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated. JFK, Bobby, King, they had all been part of that American dream. It must have been dark times for the whole world back then.

*****

A lot of what I know about Dad I was told by Mum, her brothers and sisters and family friends. Dad loved to cook for family and friends on Sundays. He was a ‘joker’, the life of the party, cheeky and easy to smile. His dish of choice was pork trotters stewed in thick soya sauce, lots of dried chilli, onion, garlic and ginger. I remember a tall, big man who liked his big-checkered, long-sleeve, soft-collar shirts, which he would not tuck in. His hair was very curly, and it began to thin early, giving him a wide forehead and those two, deep inlets of bare skin that so many men on my side of the family could not keep at bay.

Mum & Dad are married at St Joseph's Church in Sentul. Uncle Inny,
first cousin to my maternal grandmother, is far left in the second row. He
will soon marry Mum's sister, Aunty Teresa, who stands in front of him.
The witnesses, Romance and Jane Netto, in the second row, eventually
become my godparents. The parish priest at back, and dear Aunty Floby
(front right) complete the picture.

He was affectionate, and he never hit me. I used to sit on his lap after his late-night returns home, while he tuned into the BBC and Voice of America. We’d sit in the kitchen, a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling, until we heard Mum call out from their bedroom, “Eric”. Time for bed.

He loved the cinema. Saturday mornings were often outings for the ‘cheap matinee’ — family viewing sessions with discounted tickets. Dad, Errol and I regularly trooped off to the latest show in town. He loved Westerns and what we used to call ‘detective films’. More often than not, we would get back in time for lunch that Mum would have prepared for us.

While Dad was with RAF, Mum worked as a stenographer for the electric goods-maker GEC, and later the drinks manufacturer Fraser & Neave. A lot of their friends were of the colonial breed, and we picked up a lot of things British. Every pay-day, Mum shopped at Weld Supermarket, and came back with ham, bacon, sausages, marmalade, shortbread biscuits and other British imports. When we had sausages, mash potatoes and baked beans for dinner, it was our ‘English dish’.

Dad loved to sing and was always ready to do Ol’ Man River. Knowing it was his favourite makes the renditions by The Temptations and Jim Croce that much more vivid, as they evoke the black man in the US, slaving for the white master. 

*****

So much of those first few years of my life with Dad is a blur, if that. I have photographs in which he is carrying me, and there is one of the four of us seated on a bamboo settee, Errol on Dad’s lap, I on Mum’s. It looks like it was someone’s birthday because of the clothes my brother and I are wearing. We are happy.

There is one photograph burned into my memory, and I am glad for its loss. It was taken in 42 Kovan Road. About 30 people are gathered in the photo, and the setting is the covered compound at the entrance to the ground floor home that Dad’s parents lived in. 

I am looking at the camera. In the centre is Dad’s coffin. Mum and Errol have returned from KL, where she has held on to her job. Uncle Joe has brought them by taxi from KL.

Picture a cement-floor double garage with no roller door, two stone pillars in front, and you have that compound. A few old, wood chairs, a low cupboard that housed all manner of household items no one wanted anymore and a fluorescent-tube ceiling light. On one side is the door that leads to our living quarters. On the other is a spiral staircase; cast-iron banister and stone steps. This compound is shared by the two households that occupy that double-storey brick property — our family and that of the landlord, who lives on the first floor with his brood.

Ever since, I have loudly discouraged all funeral photos. They just don’t sit easy with me. It’s very difficult to forget, or erase from your mind, the image of a loved one, dead. I prefer them alive, smiling at the camera, and it’s not easy to think of them in the living years when there exists a photo of them dead. I have seen my brother and mother in their coffins, and I simply don’t want to remember them that way. In Dad’s case, I was a little boy, and it’s a vague image, but he’s in the coffin. The lid was put on just before the cortege left for the funeral service in church.

*****

It must have been in late 1962 that the decision was made for Dad to leave our family home in Jalan Pipit, which is a residential street a short walk from Jalan Ipoh in KL. He had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. He must have been told it was a terminal condition because he decided to leave for Singapore, to be with his parents in Kovan Road, where he would live out whatever time he had left. Underlying it all was the need for Mum to remain in KL as the bread-winner. Mum moved out of the Jalan Pipit home to live with her parents, Dadda and Amma, in 85 Station Road, Sentul.

Errol and I accompanied Dad to Singapore. Years later, in the 1990s of Sydney, where I had migrated with my family, Mum recalled some of these days, speaking into a tape-recorder. My wife’s sister, Peggy, had decided she wanted to capture my Mum’s story in her own words. Peggy had planned to have it all transcribed, to accompany another set of recordings she had made, of her own mother, in Poh-Poh’s own words. Mum spoke into that tape recorder of how Errol had managed the transition to a Singapore school very well, and how proud she and Dad were of their elder son.

Dad, Errol and I moved into the front room of that Kovan Road house, right next to the compound. He was not yet bed-ridden and the three of us would continue to go for Saturday matinees at the cinema.

On one of these excursions, the end began. Dad came out of the cinema and couldn’t walk anymore. We returned in a taxi, driven into that compound. I recall the driver carried Dad in his arms, out of the taxi and into our bedroom. Dad’s elderly parents could only stand by. I remember Grandpa’s belly shook as he cried. Grandma stood by silently in a white sari.

*****

I have precious few memories of my paternal grandparents. I knew they loved me. Grandpa was very dark and portly, often in a sarong, bare-chested, and the hair on his crown had thinned to almost nothing, though he had a thick, silver mat on his chest. Grandpa liked his cheroots, was cheerful, and he passed on his taste in brandy and gin to his son. His laughter shook his not-insignificant belly. He was into reading palms, and I remember a deep voice telling visitors what he saw in the lines etched into their palm. By the time we had moved in with them, Grandpa had written a book on palmistry.

My grandmother was the blouse-and-sarong type, when she wasn’t in a sari. Victoria de Cruz was fair-skinned, tied her hair in a bun, used a ‘pottu’ — a circular mark on the forehead made with the tip of a finger, using natural dye — and occasionally wore what we now refer to as John Lennon glasses. In the evenings, after dinner, she would put into a bowl a teaspoon of little white tablets that came out of a tall, glass bottle with Chinese characters on the label. She would dissolve the tablets in water, and smash it all into a paste which she would spread it on her face with her fingers, like women today do with face cream.

They were both literate and the daily newspaper was always around, well thumbed, sitting in disarray on the kitchen table by dinner time, stained with the cooking and spices of that day. Grandma preferred to cook fish, which was the subject of endless jokes among my maternal family. In those days, fish was cheaper than the meat of land animals, and chicken, goat and pork were the preferred staples on Mum’s side, about 360km away in Sentul, across the Singapore-Malaysia causeway linking the island with peninsular Malaysia. The joke was Grandma saved a lot of money buying mostly fish. Whatever.

Grandma made a lovely sweet rice porridge, dressed with dried raisins and nuts. I think she used a combination of coconut milk, grated coconut (roasted) and condensed (sweetened) milk to make the porridge, which usually started with left-over cooked rice. She also had a way with pickled ‘karavade’, which is Malayalum for salted fish. Hard, sun-dried and salted portions of the appropriate fish are cut smaller than bite-size, added to a hot, spicy masala as it sizzles on a wok and cooked until the fish pieces have thoroughly absorbed the gravy that comes out of the masala. There is nothing better than a plate of steaming, plain rice porridge dressed in the spicy salt-fish pickle to dry out the worst cold, bring down a burning fever or put a complete stop to diarrhoea. Yes, yes, I know a spicy meal is the last thing that you may want when you have an upset tummy, but it worked wonders for us Indians. Years and years later, Mum’s sister (both have passed on) came up with her own recipe that was so well spoken of in our community it was eventually bottled and sold in the Christmas season. Nothing comes close to Aunty Floby’s karavade.

I know Grandpa and Grandma showered me with love, and my memories are indelibly of a chuckling Grandpa telling Errol and I jokes, and Grandma smiling at us, her chin resting on her palm as the kitchen becomes our living room after dinner. There is no TV, and if there were in other homes, we could not afford one. Instead, I would go to sleep with the BBC in the background.

It was a playful childhood. I don’t in any way remember being aware that Dad was dying all the while. Even when Mum came to join us permanently, after she had gotten a referral from her British employers in KL, and secured a post in another British firm in Singapore, the idea that Dad was dying had no place in my life. I think Mum and her in-laws protected the little one. Errol, of course, was the first-born in the new generation, and he would have had to man up.

 Portia's birthday: Errol's in a tie, my cousin, Ann, sits in front of him, I am at

 right; I don't know who stands behind me.

The de Cruz home in Singapore also housed Dad’s sister, Aunty Evelyn, and her daughter Portia, elder to me and the first of all my cousins. She was a constant playmate and on weekends we often scrapped in sand, tried to climb a tree or two. Like many other children, we made up our own games. One involved us both sitting in a big cardboard box, and I would make like I was driving. There was nothing to resemble a steering wheel, but I would drive and drive, making car sounds, faster and faster until that inevitable corner in our minds, which I approached at breakneck speed, of course. When we crashed, we made like the car has rolled, and we are unconscious, next to one another. Years later, when I was schooling in Malaysia after Dad died, we heard that Portia was working as a model. The one or two photographs of her in magazines showed a young woman who looked very exotic to Malaysians and Singaporeans because of her Jamaican-south Indian heritage. I have not seen Portia ever since those Singapore days.

While Grandma and Grandpa were at the back half of the house, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floors, out marketing, whatever, Dad was bed-ridden in our room at the front. On the days I did not have the watchful eye of my brother, and to keep me safe whenever she couldn’t look after me, which could be for two or three hours at a time, she locked the bedroom door from the outside. Dad and I would have a flask of Milo, or Horlicks, or hot water, and perhaps a simple sandwich or biscuits in a saucer. Whenever I needed to pee, I would climb onto a table and piss out of the window that overlooked a patch or grass by the side of the room. The window was barred, and I think I was a pretty good shot.

Often, either Grandma or Grandpa would stay with Dad, and I was free to roam outside. Which I did, sometimes playing marbles by myself, flying kites I had learnt to make myself, or just kicking a ball around. I don’t remember any friends of my age in Singapore.

I discovered fire-crackers in Singapore, where the majority Chinese lit them for all sorts of occasions. There were two types: the big-bang red ones and the smaller, multi-coloured variety. One day, I wondered what would happen if a fire-cracker were lit in someone’s hand. So, of course, I had to find out myself. I lit a candle and put it to the fuse of a red cracker I held in my right hand. I have no idea if my fingers could have been blown off, but the pain was numbing and my hand swelled and turned purple. I ran to Grandma. I don’t remember if she panicked, but she put my hand into a wide, tin bowl of cold water. I think it was all fine by bed-time.

One morning, alone in the compound, I hear a commotion from the first floor of the house, where the Eurasian landlord’s family lives. There are two male voices — one is shouting, the other is responding to some sort of pain he was suffering, grunting, like when the breath is physically forced out of you. There is the thud of a body falling.

Then, I can see both men at the top of the stairs. I see the younger man first, the more quiet one, and he is stumbling down, backwards, looking up to an older man, who is shouting.

Both are red in the face, the younger man’s already marked, swollen and bruised. The older man is punching him in the face and on his body, the blows reining down on him so fast he cannot escape, the sound of fist hitting flesh making a sickening sound.

I can’t move, I can’t run back into our house because it will bring me too close to these two men. I just can’t escape. I try not to move at all, and I hope the older one doesn’t see me. My recollection tells me the younger man has a problem — he can’t speak very well at all, he is just not ‘normal’.

The older one, memory registers him as the elder brother, keeps punching him as they come, stumbling, down the stairs. There are other people upstairs, and I don’t understand how come they are not coming down, or just shouting to make it all stop. There is only the sound of that horrible punching, and the grunts that are only as loud as the forced expulsion of air, so sad, so wrenching.

When the younger one falls, or just sits on a step because he can’t move anymore, the other one pulls him up and punches him again a few times, and the whole thing repeats itself until the younger man is bleeding profusely from his nose and his mouth and his body is limp. He can hardly open his eyes. The life has gone out of him but I can tell he is not dead.

Then it all just stops. The other man slowly goes up the stairs, turning to look back once or twice. The younger is in great pain, but he also looks like he doesn’t know where he is, what has happened, like he just doesn’t understand anything that has just occurred, except that he is in great pain because it did. Is he crying? I don’t know.

He eventually goes back up. His shirt and pants were torn, his elbows scraped and bloody, his arms scratched and bruised. I hear the voices of women. He downs down again, picks up his spectacles, and puts them back on. I haven’t seen them on him and I haven’t seen them fall. He is fair-skinned and now I can see that so much of his chest and stomach is also blue-black. And he walks up again.

Total silence. I must have waited a few minutes before I dared run back into our house. It didn’t happen again. My recollection of the entire episode includes a sense of a scene in which ‘elder brother’ leaves the house, and he’s putting two suitcases into the boot of a car. I don’t know if this scene is in my head because it’s how I would have wished the story to end.

*****

I recently came to know that Ann Lopez, the first cousin closest to me in age, also spent at least an overnight stay in Kovan Road, with her Dad, Uncle Inny (short for Innocent). Ann is the eldest in the family that began with seven Lopez children, and her father had come to Singapore, Ann in tow, travelling from Telok Anson (now Teluk Intan) in Perak. They had visited to attend the wedding of Uncle Gilbert (he of the transistor radio) and Aunty Susan, my father’s sister by adoption.

As Ann herself tells it to me: ”After the wedding, I remember on the day of our return, we were playing outside your Grandpa's place. The boys climbed up a rambutan tree and I too followed suit.

“On the way down Miss Clumsy fell down. My Dad and Uncle Gilbert took me to the hospital. Came back to KL in a sling.

“Dear Aunty Floby [Mum’s sister] got one of her Chinese friends to come daily to rub [Ann’s arm with] samsu. They also bought me a small piano (my first music lesson) to play on, as my fingers started  swelling. When it was time to remove the cast, they realized that I had my bracelet on and that was the cause of the swelling.

“My first visit to Singapore. I will never forget.”

The “samsu” Ann refers to was a traditional Chinese medicine with an alcohol (samsu) base. You would rub it gently into the skin to help ease the pain of a fall or a bad bump, even a fracture. It had a strong medicinal smell, pleasant because the aroma said, This is good for you.

The story about how Ann’s plaster of Paris was applied over the wrist and arm carelessly, without removing her bracelet, is also a typical old world story, though some of you reading this now may rightly say, Still like that lah!

That was the family back then, like so many other Malaysian families. Someone would travel hundreds of miles to attend a wedding, or some such occasion, to represent the rest of the family. It was most respectful if the person attending was an elder, and Uncle Inny surely qualified — he was first cousin to my maternal grandmother, Amma.

For such events, you always stayed with relatives, no matter how crowded it might have been at a particular home, because not to do so was to betray the idea of ‘family’, and sharing whatever you had with whoever turned up at the door. There was always room at the inn at the home of my maternal grandparents, where I eventually lived many years.

My grandparents very often hosted a visitor who stayed for an extended time. We have hosted a novice nun from the extended family, who needed to take time off to seriously (re)consider her chosen vocation. I remember how shocked she was to see the cover of a double-album I had bought and brought home one night. It was Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night. Google it. You’ll see Diamond in denim, embellished with American Indian beads and other similar acroutements. His hair is long, his hands look like they are trying to conjure flames from his crotch. The denim jeans are tight. One time, an athlete from India stayed with us for weeks, in preparation for his competing in the long-distance walk of the SEA Games, south-east Asia’s own ‘olympics’. Another of Mum’s brothers, Uncle Marcel, was a senior figure in national sports associations and a former hockey player himself, and the Indian athlete was his ward, so to speak. I remember him, M. Solaimuthu, waking early every day. From the mattress on the living room floor where I slept, I would hear him wash up, and walk past me to open the door and the collapsible metal gate that was the entrance to the home. He would then exercise by the street, doing his squats, push-ups, stretches, before setting out on a long jog. He woke up early enough to be back home by 8am for the vegetarian breakfast in our kitchen-dining room. It was a time when we all ate a lot of dhal (lentil curry) and dhalchar (a curry of lentils and an array of vegetables). I remember one Uncle Stephen, who stayed with us while he completed his degree in medicine. He was well built and exercised daily with the Bullworker. In the room where he slept was a photograph of himself, looking quite handsome, with boxing gloves.

Uncle Inny also lived with us, in 85 Station Road, Sentul, the first Emmanuel home I stayed at after leaving Singapore. He was an employee of Malayan Railways, and had worked at the station-stop in Teluk Anson. A first cousin to Amma and 29 years her junior, he stayed with us when a work transfer brought him to KL. 85 Station Road would also have been where Uncle Inny met Mum’s younger sister, Aunty Teresa. They would marry within two years of Mum’s wedding, which was the first in the Emmanuel family.

Uncle Inny would later move up the ladder to become station master, serving in various towns across peninsular Malaysia.

Dadda and Amma were elders in the community, and it was simply what was expected of them, whenever someone in the extended family, a close friend or associate, needed a roof over their head and three square meals a day, for whatever may have been considered a reasonable amount of time.

*****

In the early Singapore days, when Dad could still walk and we did the occasional Saturday matinee run, there were nights when the two of us would sit on the culvert that bridged the deep monsoon drain just outside our house. Errol was probably in the house doing his homework. There was a game we played for a couple of nights. We’d sit there on the culvert looking at cars head towards the junction just up Kovan Road. And Dad would say to me, “Guess which way the car is going to turn, left or right.” I only sometimes guessed correctly, Dad always got it right, and he kept telling me, “Go on. Look.” I just couldn’t figure it out. Then it dawned. The light went on in my head just like the car indicators.

The little I remember about my time in Singapore is divided into ‘when he could walk’ and ‘after he couldn’t walk anymore’. A lot of the ‘before’ was Saturday matinees. I do remember lighting cigarettes for Dad, in the ‘after’ time, because his hands shook so badly he couldn’t strike the match on the box. He smoked Rothmans, Rough Rider, a brand called ‘three-fives (the brand was 555), Gold Leaf.

I also learned to mix my old man a gin and lime cordial with ice. Occasionally, not often at all, Grandpa would bring Dad a small bottle of Gordon’s at night, small enough to fit into the trouser pockets of those days. It was a “suku”, Malay for a quarter measure of the standard, full bottle. And he would leave it by the bedside. Dad would show me how to mix his drink.

I remember these times as very very special, and it made me feel incredibly important, not least because I knew Dad was getting me to do certain things that were very much adult, otherwise forbidden to me as a child, and that he trusted me not to smoke or drink behind his back, which I never did. He needed me.

Dad never went to the kitchen again, as I recall, and he certainly did not cook. Apart from the few excursions to the cinema, I don’t remember Dad moving around very much at all. I have no idea how his toilet needs were taken care of, but I know he was always clean, so Grandma must have been doing the necessary.

Mum sometimes visited her parents in KL, on weekends, and Errol the elder had the honour of accompanying her. It was on one of these trips when Dad’s condition must have worsened beyond hope. I remember because Uncle Joe brought Mum and Errol by outstation taxi from KL to Kovan Road, which would have been at exorbitant cost. They could not wait for the night-train or the bus. Then, one evening when I was at the dining table with Grandma, Grandpa and Errol, Mum came to join us and she had that look. “Eric is gone,” she said to the old folks.

Dad's grave on the day of exhumation.

The decision was quickly made that Mum, Errol and I would move to KL to live with her parents. We left soon after the funeral and I remember we took the night train, with sleeping berths for each of us. In the morning, the same first class tickets that gave us individual berths allowed us a table in the dining car, where we breakfasted on bacon, eggs, baked beans; Mum’s English breakfast was her way of helping us forget. Malayan Railways was still being run by the British in 1963. We had thick, white, ironed and folded linen napkins, heavy metal knives and forks, salt and pepper bottles, white plates with the crest of Her Majesty, and the waiters wore starched uniforms. On the plates, and on the labels of the jam bottles that came with toast were the words, “By Appointment to Her Majesty, Elizabeth II of England”.

For the next several years, Mum, Errol and I would take the night train from KL to Singapore on December 2, visit Dad’s grave at Bidadari cemetery the next day. Then, we would pay our respects to Grandma and Grandpa and depart for KL, again on the night train. On one of those trips, Mum bought Errol and I our first pair of dungarees, and Beatles boots. For a family like ours, the pants and boots were luxuries. This was Mum, making up for the Dad we no longer had. After Dad died, Mum was always two-in-one.

*****

Soon after the turn of the 21st century, sometime in February 2000, I had been residing in Sydney about 20 years. Back home, in KL, local newspapers began to report on a major public infrastructure development in Singapore. All graves in Bidadari Cemetery on the island state would be dug up and the remains exhumed, in order to prepare the ground for an extension to the island’s fast-growing mass rapid transport (MRT) system. The same newspapers also carried prominent notices announcing the project, placed by the Singapore Government. The notice broiught attention to the exhumation process, and invited relatives of people buried at Bidadari to be involved. It also offered various points of contact for people residing in Malaysia who wanted to be involved.

Errol contacted me in Sydney, telling me he had made preliminary contact with Singapore on the matter, identifying himself as the son of a Malaysian buried at Bidadari. Shortly after, Errol received an official letter. Marking the efficiency of that government, and recognising the sensitivities involved, the island department managing the project had written to offer Errol two options. The first allowed him to nominate a day when he would make himself present at the cemetery in Singapore. That day, officials would oversee the digging and exhumation in his presence. The letter said the remains would then be taken to a crematorium, and Errol would be handed the ashes in a sealed urn before the end of the day. The second option involved the Singapore Government undertaking the same exercise, and later informing Errol when and how he could collect the urn with Dad’s remains.

   Aunty Susan and Bhaskaran at Bidadari.

We chose to be present for the exhumation together. I caught a flight to Singapore to meet up with one of my best friends, Bhaskaran Nair. Bhaskaran, a Malayalee like I, was a fellow student when we had both undertaken our HSC studies at Vanto Academy in Petaling Jaya. We had become very close over those two years of high school, and we would often visit one another’s homes. Bhaskaran and his young family had migrated to Singapore a few years before my move to Sydney. We had not seen each other for almost 30 years.

Bhaskaran picked me up at Changi International Airport, and we drove north into Malaysia, heading for the town of Malacca, about halfway between Singapore and KL. There, we met Errol, who had come down from KL to meet us. It was pouring when we arrived in Malacca and it took some time to find Errol, who had booked us a room in a hotel with three beds.

The next morning, Barshy drove us back to Singapore, in time to make the appointment with the government official in Bidadari. Again, the efficiency of the Singapore government was on display — the official and the gravedigger were waiting for us. Joining us during those few hours in Singapore was Aunty Susan — Dad’s sister, by adoption, and the estranged wife of Uncle Gilbert. The four of us passed the time between the exhumation and collecting his ashes over several beers at a coffee shop in Singapore, roast pork and friend chicken on the side. It must have seemed a motley crew at that place, Indian woman, three Indian men, slugging beers talking like old friends.

Everything went like clockwork and we drove back into Malaysia that evening, Dad’s remains in the urn, after saying goodbye to Aunty Susan. This time we stayed at a hotel in Johore Baru, the first big Malaysian town across the causeway. It was 31 May 2001.

By the time we sat down to dinner in JB, we were very tired, physically and emotionally. That night, Dad’s ashes in our hotel room, and another couple of beers down, we spoke from the heart. Errol said he had actually been afraid that morning, that the “the ground near the grave would open up”. He felt guilty because he was the elder, and had not made the time or effort to visit the grave after Mum stopped taking us on our yearly overnight train sojourns. He thought Dad would show his anger, or that God would punish him, for not paying his due respects as the ‘elder’ man in the family. He said he felt like his knees would buckle as the three of us approached the grave. He was that scared.

I talked about migration, how difficult Sydney had been in the beginning, all the horrible, bad turns, how much I had missed everyone at home, just leaving Mum’s well-being to Errol, not visiting Mum more often after I had left for Australia. Like Errol, I had also not visited Dad’s grave for more than 20 years. I broke down, just sobbed and sobbed, and Errol and Barshy knew enough to just let it happen. Then we ordered another round of beers. I couldn’t eat much of the Chinese dinner, and we returned to our hotel.

Errol and I parted ways with Barshy the next morning, and headed back to KL. I stayed at Errol’s home. Mum was living with Errol, almost from the time of his marriage, and the three of us were under one roof for the first time in decades.

*****

In a serendipituous prelude to the exhumation, Colman Emmanuel came into the picture in the late-1990s. Colman is the second son to my Mum’s brother, the Malay Mail sports journalist, Francis Emmanuel. This first cousin had long since married a lady called Shirley Lopez, migrating to Singapore to begin his family with her. (Amma’s Lopez roots loom large in the extended Emmanuel family: Shirley is the daughter of Amma’s brother, LB Lopez; Amma’s first cousin, Uncle Inny, married Mum’s sister, my Aunty Teresa.)

Colman recently reminded me of a work trip Errol had made to Singapore, about a year before we attended to the exhumation…

Errol stays at a grand hotel on (wait for it…) Coleman (with an ‘e’) Street in Singapore. Colman takes him for a drive, and they pass Bidadari when they decide to stop, to see if they can locate Dad’s resting place.

“The heat was terrible and so unforgiving. We walked for about an hour trying to locate Dad's tombstone,” Colman wrote to me on WhatsApp. “Not a soul was in sight.

“Out of the blue, from the horizon of granite crosses and statues, walks a tanned Malay man with a hoe in his hand... He asked what we were doing there as it was state land gazetted for re-development. No trespassing.

“I told him our intentions and, lo and behold, another classic example of Singapore efficiency…” They bury people according to years and months. Colman told him, 1963, December. “He took us to the area. This was not along Upper Serangoon but more towards Mt Vernon Road. That Malay man led us to the exact spot... Daddy was there. Errol looked hard and showed me the fence line where he would alight from the bus and sneak in when he was a child.” After all the years, Errol had recognised the place.

“The Malay man offered to clean up and plant some shrubs around the grave. So we agreed. Never negotiated the price. He just agreed to have it done. We told the man we would return the next day at about the same time.” As it turned out, this was only the first step in Errol’s private journey to return and pay respects to our old man.

“We get back to the car,” Colman writes, “and drive off to the area around IHoM Highland Road. Somewhere there, Errol shouts, ‘I used to live here.’ We stop in front of a house and he was playing with his thoughts. As we were driving in that area, he points to his primary school. That old bldg was still there.”

As Colman tells it, everything became too much for Errol and my brother broke down, just couldn’t stop crying for a while. “The next day, we return all composed and the Malay uncle did a spectacular job touching up. He even used a black marker or paint to rewrite the words, name, dates on the tomb. Pretty shrubbery all around the grave. All cleaned up and whitened... We paid the man.

“My sons were seated on the tomb. Boys kept asking me whose tomb it was. I said, one of their grandpas.”

It was not long after that Errol responded to the public notices about the exhumation program in Bidadari.

*****

Within a week of the exhumation, Errol and I organised for Dad’s ashes to be interred at the columbarium at St Francis Xavier’s Church in Petaling Jaya, as Mum wanted it. Marking his spot at the SFX columbarium was the marble headstone that Mum had commissioned as a grave marker when we buried Dad at the Bidadari cemetery in Singapore. When the Singapore grave was properly built, that headstone was replaced with a two-foot high marble cross that stood at the head of the slab that covered the grave. The cross had a simple inscription that carried his name, date of birth and date of death. A photo of Dad was at the centre of the cross. Everything was made of marble. The headstone was brought to Kuala Lumpur when Mum, Errol and I left Singapore to stay with Dadda and Amma, most likely in late December, 1963.

On 9 May 2002, a mass was celebrated at The Church of the Assumption, in Petaling Jaya, to commemorate Dad’s final return to the land of his birth. To mark Dad’s “Homecoming”, as it said on a commemorative card, Mum, Errol and I hosted a luncheon on 9 June 2001, at Mike & May’s, a Malayalee restaurant in Petaling Jaya. We invited as many of Dad’s family members as we could find, and, of course, all Mum’s brothers and sisters. Bhaskaran drove up to join us.

“After 38 years”, to quote the card, which was also the invitation to the luncheon, Dad’s remains were exhumed and brought home. The card was signed, “Affectionately, Margarita de Cruz”.

*****

It brought a closure of sorts for Mum, Errol and I. The exhumation and interring of remains held so much more meaning for me than his funeral. I could say my farewell to Dad. Errol and I were very happy to relieve Mum of that marble headstone, which she had taken back to KL with her in 1963, when Dad died. It had remained within a compartment of the headboard to the same double-bed one she had shared with Dad in the few years of marriage. Mum had kept that headstone for 38 years.

After being too young to realise the matter of his death, I was old enough to think it important that we keep a record of the exhumation. I bought a telephoto lens for my Nikon camera. I shot a whole roll of that episode. The gravedigger found small pieces or black cloth, with stripes. Errol and I decided the pieces were parts of the suit Dad had beeb buried in.

The remains of the crucifix we

found in Dad's grave.

We also found a piece of the crucifix — part of the rosary that must have been placed in Dad’s hands. It was a broken-off sliver of luminous plastic — part of the form of Jesus on the cross. It was no more than an inch long, but the significance on two Catholics could not have been bigger. I carried it for years in my wallet before I lost it.

The earth did not open to swallow Errol. But some form of redemption came for two men who had done less than their filial duty to their father for about 30 years. The exhumation had helped us dredge up and finally bury our own failure. We had both made our confessions at that dinner with Bhaskaran. My breakdown was not from pain and loss. It was from the gratitude for being able to atone, to do away with another bit of the past, another failure, to move on.

*****

I returned to Singapore on an important family mission I had set for myself, in 1980. I had to see Grandma and Grandpa again. I had to introduce them to the girl I had decided to marry. Errol, who had kept in touch with Dad’s nieces and nephews, was able to tell me where they lived. A few months before our marriage on 7 June that year, Helen and I made our way to a modest, well-kept, single-storey terrace house somewhere in Singapore.

I remember it was near the water. I don’t know if that imprint in my mind is because of a river or the sea, but I saw water. Grandma and Grandpa were the same people I remembered, and of course older. Grandma recognised me, but Grandpa was in the fog of old age. We bought them a bottle of Gordon’s Gin and an assortment of fruits.

I like to think Grandma would have gently put her fingers to Helen’s face and smiled in approval, because Eric’s son was obviously happy. He had grown up, he was a journalist, making his living, making his way. We put a little money in her hands and said goodbye. Helen and I left assured that they were well, despite their age, that we had brought a bit of our light and love into what look liked easy, comfortable lives that breathed their own special love. I felt a better person for attending to this family duty. It must have made Dad happy. I never returned.

As we are all fond of saying, they have gone to join their son, the others in the family who had gone before them, and they are all with the angels and saints. Any respectable Emmanuel or de Cruz might add, they’re having a party up there.

*****

Ol’ Man River keeps flowing in me. Dad’s still with me. I still see him, and it’s not the coffin I see first of all. He put his big arms around me. We had our late indicator evenings in Singapore. I like baggy, chequered shirts, soft collars, which I don’t tuck under my pants. He must have loved my mother like something else. I can tell because she missed him so much all her life, and she did all she could to bring us up in his name.

I didn’t know Dad, like many may know their fathers, but his has been a huge presence in my life. He’s always smiling. The stand-by newsreader would have been proud to see his two boys become journalists. The life of the party would have lived to see his sons bring their own justice to bear on the Everly Brothers, see them marry two girls who brought up seven grandchildren. He would have tapped his thighs, listening to us make music at family parties. Dad would have been there for me when we lost Christian. I could have asked him what to do a hundred times when I didn’t know what to do. I would have liked to sip on a gin with him, take him to the pub, sing to him, take him to a cinema with reclining seats, turn him on to John le Carré, Leonard Cohen, buy him a really good Hainanese chicken chop at Coliseum Cafe, take him to the doctor for his check-ups. Be there for him, as he stayed here for me.

*****

Two days after Mum passed away on 7 May 2015, Aunty Beatrice and I found ourselves alone together, beside the coffin, during one afternoon of a three-night wake. In the room was a guitar that Brendan, Errol’s No 2, had left behind at the funeral parlour for accompaniment during the hymns. It was a hot afternoon. Aunty Beatrice said to me: “You know what she wants you to do now, boy?”, she said, nodding at Mum. I shook my head side to side, I did not. “She wants you to sing for her that song, about the man with the white hair.” I knew immediately what Aunty meant. I picked up the guitar. And there I was, singing Silver Haired Daddy of Mine at Mum’s wake.

*****

MAKING A SIMPLE KITE: It was in Singapore that I learned to fly a kite, and to make one myself. You can make one too.

WHAT YOU NEED

• tracing paper, or plain, light paper, about two-and-a-half feet long and one-and-a-half feet wide — tracing paper is better because it is firm and light
• two thin bamboo sticks, one about 2.5 feet long and the other about 1.5 feet
• two or three spools of standard strength sewing thread
• pin, or sewing needle
• non-toxic glue
• scissors
• a short, thick and smooth stick.

METHOD

• form a cross with the the two bamboo sticks
• use one end of the thread to tie the sticks 
• cut the paper into a diamond shape, as shown in the diagram
• wrap the paper over each point of the sticks, using glue
• using a pin or sewing needle, make four pinpoint holes around the cross joint (marked 5 in the diagram)
• similarly, make holes on each arm of the cross (1, 2, 3 & 4)
• at all these points, use thread to tie paper to the cross — don’t pull too tight to make the knot because you may tear the paper
• tie the thread in your spools to make one long length of thread
• tie one end to the cross joint
• wind the joined thread around the thick stick

You can use a tin can, instead of a thick stick. For this option, I removed the lids on both sides with a can-opener. Then, I used a hammer to smooth down the sharp edges. To be extra sure that you don’t cut your fingers on the can, line the rims of the can with cello-tape.

There you have it then. It’s not easy to get a kite up in the first place and it helps if you have a partner to launch it. Once it’s up, tug gently on your line of thread, slowly letting free more and more thread to allow the kite to climb higher, and watch it swoop and climb, swoop and climb.