"Toilet Paper" by Booi Carlyn
Photo Credit: Max Michatz, obtained and licensed through Unsplash
Incense smoke interspersed with fluorescent lights produced a foggy glare that would have made Mui highly uncomfortable in her previous form. In her current form, she was unaffected. Her body laid in a wooden coffin in the middle of the room. Her family had opted for the open-casket display. She had always been a small woman at four feet ten, but with the last drops of moisture evaporated from her body, she grew even more miniscule. They had removed her fake teeth, giving her appearance a matching macabre flavour and one could see her tongue sticking out a little. Very fitting with the overall theme, Mui nodded approvingly. She chuckled to herself as she thought of the annoying relatives she would be able to horrify with her final appearance.
As the doors to the funeral hall swung open, Mui hovered in a corner against the wall trying to make her tiny self even smaller. It was an exercise in redundancy. Nobody could see her. Not even her eldest daughter, Lian—the one who claimed she could see the spirits of the slaughtered chicken at the fast-food joint she worked at. Lian was in the midst of picking out joss sticks from a pack. She stood in front of the altar lighting them up one by one. Solemnly, she placed all ten joss sticks between her palms and bowed fervently, mumbling something to herself in Hokkien.
Lian’s previous display of what Mui felt was ‘primitive superstition’ had induced great waves of repulsion. Now that it did not matter anymore, Mui let out an amused smile recalling the time Lian started walking like a chicken. With her hands folded by her side, she would bob her head slightly while declaring that the chickens were taking over her soul as revenge. Mui had responded with angry rebukes. “What is wrong with you? This is what happens to women who don’t get married! I told you you would go crazy.” That was Mui’s war cry until Lian decided to take action to prevent the chicken takeover of her soul. She donated all her life savings to the Tan Yee Lay Temple and quit her job on her fifty-seventh birthday, a job she had held for twenty-five years. “This will cleanse my soul and I will be able to walk properly again,” Lian had insisted. It has been five years since Mui stopped talking to her eldest daughter and started a whisper campaign against the temple establishment.
Mui felt lingering resentment towards the monks inside the funeral hall. Their loose orange robes could not hide the equally loose folds of their flesh. The tallest of the three monks got up from his chair with some difficulty and started hitting a small gong, signalling that the prayers were about to begin. Her one and only son, four daughters, ten grandchildren and four great grandchildren shuffled to their feet. With varying urgency, they got up from the different tables outside and walked into the funeral hall.
There was nowhere for Boon to run off to today. As the only son, he was the only progeny that mattered according to the Chinese funeral rites decided by groups of bearded men some hundreds of years ago a few thousand miles away.
Mui remembered the last time they were all gathered in the same place. It was the first day of Chinese New Year three years ago—the last Chinese New Year she spent at home. Her son, Boon, had gone to Bangkok as he did every year during Chinese New Year. “It’s the only time I can go on leave,” was his usual reason given for why he absolutely had to travel during this time. However, Mui had been a witness to her son’s suffering as a result of being afflicted with intrusive relatives since his twenties. “Not married yet ah?” “You are going to be fifty soon!” “Have some kids for your mother to play with la.” And so, off he would go to Bangkok. It was Bangkok every year. Some relatives started joking that he must have a Thai girlfriend in Bangkok. Others loudly whispered with barely concealed disgust that he must be gay, “Bangkok a lot of gay people, you know.”
There was nowhere for Boon to run off to today. As the only son, he was the only progeny that mattered according to the Chinese funeral rites decided by groups of bearded men some hundreds of years ago a few thousand miles away. He had been the one to make arrangements for the funeral. He had called up all the intrusive relatives one by one and gathered them here today in the tropical city of Kuala Lumpur to observe these ancient rites from a foreign land. Boon was up front and center despite being the youngest child. Flanking him to his left and right was Lian, the eldest child and Ying, the second child. The other children and grandchildren arranged themselves according to their ages.
The monks begin chanting in Sanskrit while hitting their respective gongs and cymbals. Mui grimaced at the monks singing out of tune. “Pay them so much money and they can’t even sing properly,” Mui mumbled to herself. She watched as her children and grandchildren kneeled down, bowed their heads to the floor and stood up again at the instructions of the monk. Their mourning uniform of white shirts and white pants made them look like a ghostly sheet floating in the room. The monk was unrelenting. Over and over again, they repeated the same movements while being choked by the gently wafting incense smoke. A few of her children visibly struggled with the movements. They were well in their fifties and sixties and experienced pain in a variety of joints.
Mui spoke softly at first, “Ah Boon.” No response. “Ah Boon!” she yelled. There was still no response. She concluded that she must truly be invisible now. She thought the apex of her invisibility was when she was sent to stay at the old folks’ home but it turns out she would only reach the apex in death. When she was first sent to the old folks’ home, the children and grandchildren visited her weekly. She was still relatively healthy, had a good appetite and although she complained a lot, had the mental energy to inject humour into her complaints. That made her palatable to her children and grandchildren. They even took her out for meals at times. However, it never felt enough as she knew Boon had chosen to place her in the background—he only visited her once a month and these visits became more infrequent as time went by.
About a year after living in the home, Mui felt her reservoir of good will and hope dry up. Every day, it was the same cycle of boredom and futility. The herd of unwanted elderly were officially woken up at seven though most of them would have been up before the sun rose. They spent the rest of the day in a state of perpetual dysfunction. All day long, they stared at a twelve-inch television mounted on the wall from their bamboo chair. This provided the illusion that life existed in the room. The chairs were arranged row by row—each its little island of misery. It was just as well as all Mui could hope for in this dreary place was to be left alone to drift in and out of consciousness. Mui had not slept well since living there due to the choir of snoring, grunts and groans that occurred every night.
The baritone groan and soprano grunt were silent the entire time. Mui slept extremely well but when she woke up, two of her roommates had passed away.
There was one exceptional night in which she found herself doing a solo performance. The baritone groan and soprano grunt were silent the entire time. Mui slept extremely well but when she woke up, two of her roommates had passed away. She dreaded but also hoped to hasten the arrival of the end of her performance. As her mind and body deteriorated, she realized her children and grandchildren visited less but here they were now, spending seven nights bowing and kneeling for her. Mui wondered if they felt they deserve this punishment after having neglected her for a few years.
The monk pressed together both cymbals, signifying the end of the first round of their torture. The monk with the shiniest head announced that the next session will start in another hour’s time. The children and grandchildren shuffled back to their tables outside the funeral hall. The younger ones crowded around the fire pit excitedly feeding joss paper into the flames. The rest laboured to fold infinite supplies of joss paper into the shape of gold ingots. Mui wandered over to the second table where the latest episode of passive aggressiveness was unfolding between a mother and daughter pair in the family. Mui’s second daughter, Ying was seated next to her twenty-something-year-old daughter. The first round of intrusion was launched when one of the loudmouthed cousins of Ying inevitably asked the young lady, “When are you getting married? No boyfriend ah?” Ying, without missing a beat, answered, “She doesn’t have boyfriends. She only has girlfriends.” The young lady in question shot a look at her mother before silently leaving the table to join her cousins at the fire pit.
Mui’s still heart ached as she recognised where Ying had learned this behaviour. She had said the exact same thing about Boon the last Chinese New Year he chose to celebrate at home. “He doesn’t have girlfriends. I think he has many boyfriends though.” Boon had also kept quiet at her retort. They had never spoken about this for no one had taught Mui how. Any deviation from the norm was a shameful thing that needed to be buried deep in the storeroom of countless taboos—only to be dug out and flung as ammunition at opportune times. He never brought any of these boyfriends to the apartment he lived in with Mui but Mui knew and she had not been kind about it. Unable to speak directly, she had found creative ways to criticize his deviation. Perhaps the most unjustified way was when she had derided him for being seen carrying toilet paper. “What kind of man carries toilet paper! Do you know how unmanly it is!” she had yelled at him as he disappeared into his room. Boon stopped buying toilet paper for the household.
This was also why Boon, seated at the other table had his body turned away from the man next to him. Mui knew who this man was. She had seen the photos which Boon accidentally left open on his laptop. Circular glasses framed his eyes which were locked on Boon most of the time. Boon was trying a little too hard to ignore him. She moved closer to the table and sat down on the floor next to Boon’s chair. Underneath the table, hidden behind the table cloth, the man whose name Mui would never find out had clasped his hand over Boon’s hand. It provided a protective layer against the attack of the intrusive relatives. A sense of relief washed over her. Maybe she had not done collateral damage. Mui stood up, looked Boon in the eye and said, “Boon, I am leaving now. You can buy all the toilet paper in the house from now on.” Although Boon could not hear her, it looked to Mui as though he nodded.
Mui looked around. There were four other funeral halls down the same road. She strolled past them easily – delighting in the ease with which she could now walk. She read the names and ages of those who had passed on just like her. They were all younger than her eighty-seven years in her previous plane of existence. She felt as though she had won a gold medal in the longevity contest. Taking one last look at the funeral hall in which her body lay and her children and grandchildren congregated, Mui decided to walk away from the people and things that had been familiar to her. She knew she was supposed to wait for the seventh day to depart but she could no longer wait. After all, there are many places she has never been to before.
Booi Carlyn is a graduate student in the MA Creative Writing program at Sheffield Hallam University. Originally from the muddy confluence of cultures that is Kuala Lumpur, she hopes to harness the chaotic energy of her wonderfully frustrating city to generate stories.