Meat and Memories

I am writing this from my cousin’s computer in So Hour, because I didn’t bring my own laptop—I came in rather a rush and didn’t bring quite a bit of stuff that, in retrospect, I ought to have—and because I have a few spare hours with nothing terribly urgent to do. Really it’s more the case that the things that are urgent, I can’t do right now because I’m not in Spore and I haven’t got most of them. So it’s blogging for me.

If you have me on Facebook, then you probably know that for the past slightly-more-than-a-week I’ve been conspicuously absent from it, owing to the recent death of my paternal grandfather. Really he was the only one of my grandfathers I’ve ever known, since the maternal one died some years before I was born and even if he were alive I probably wouldn’t like him very much, not from what I’ve heard of him. But at any rate my paternal grandfather is dead, and the past few days have been eventful… so I wrote them all down in my notebook, and now I’m transcribing them into words.

Let me therefore begin by saying that my grandfather was a very hale old man, and his death was consequently sudden and unexpected. On the 17th of August, he was hospitalised for the second time in two months, having been found unconscious in the house where he’d fallen down; he was only hospitalised for a short time, because he soon came to and forcibly checked himself out. He was hospitalised both the next days, Thursday and Friday, for equally short periods: on Friday (everybody seems to relish saying this) he was only in the hospital for three hours and then signed himself out and got home somehow. Throughout all of this I was in Spore, not having the least idea that all that was happening, and the worst of my worries at that time were about the impending interview and diminishing finances; my father, off in China, had been calling daily and had been put off by repeated assurances that nothing was happening.

On Saturday morning I woke up unexpectedly early (I don’t quite remember the events of Friday as far as they concern me) and spent the morning online. It was a surprise to receive a phone call from So Hour; it was even more surprising that the voice on the other end was so distorted by franticness and worry as to be very nearly unrecognisable as my cousin’s. And the voice was yelling for me to ask my father to call my Fourth Aunt because my grandfather was in trouble. Some hours and phone calls later, I had found out that my grandfather had been comatose since that morning and in the early afternoon had been hospitalised. Thus I and the Gobbler set out from our respective residences, after a few phone calls to coordinate our travelling and notify affected parties (though, as it turned out, we both forgot various commitments anyway). We left Spore at around 6pm, and arrived at the bus interchange at around 8pm; on the way we were discussing the topic of the hour and the Gobbler commented that it wouldn’t affect me very much, which started something that began as a discussion and turned into an argument about emotions and Being Human and health and so on, and we dropped that topic later as we passed through the customs; I was delayed for awhile because my passport caused a database error (my Students’ Pass only having been replaced with a short-term entry pass earlier that week) and necessitated me visiting the Immigrations office to explain why my passport was

doing that to their computers. But we eventually arrived at the bus interchange, and we ate (my first McDonald’s meal in several months!) and by and by one of the cousins popped by to take us to the hospital where my grandfather was being kept alive.

It was the second hospital he was being held at, the aunts and uncles having unanimously decided that the staff of the first hospital was young, inexperienced, and incompetent; this second one was much larger, and much nicer-looking on the outside, and nearby the customs to boot. My grandfather was in a bed, with various tubes running out of him into various little machines and syringes and with electrodes attached to bits of his skin. He was unconscious, and breathing with the aid of a manual pump which a nurse (sitting beside him) was squeezing rhythmically. According to the nurses his blood pressure was also fluctuating badly, which was delaying them from moving him into the ICU. I sat there with the Fourth Aunt (according to the cousins she hadn’t eaten or left his side since the hospitalisation earlier that day) and prayed, and eventually went out of the ward to talk to the hordes of uncles and aunts and cousins massed around. Eventually discussion occurred and the horde distilled out into smaller groups, and then everybody decided that standing around out there would do nobody any good and we might as well all go back and get some rest, and then come back to the hospital later to take shifts watching our grandfather; so it was decided that some would go to houses and some would go to a nearby hotel to rest. I was in the latter group—I, two cousins, and First Uncle—and so we repaired to a hotel to get a little food, shower, and sleep. The hotel (it really almost didn’t deserve that name, being even more basic facility-wise than the university hostels) was occupied by me for about two hours, and I don’t think I actually fell asleep; but at length I returned to the hospital, arriving at around 1.30am or so.

Fourth Aunt refused to leave my grandfather, but with me around she consented to occasionally falling into a light sleep, while the cousin returned to the hotel to sleep. When I got there my grandfather was already in the ICU, and had gotten an automatic pump to help him breathe; I was only permitted to stay there for a little bit before the nurses chased me out because they had to clean the patients (until then it hadn’t occurred to me that all the people in there were naked under the sterile green blankets). So I sat around, prayed a lot, and occasionally doodled a little; Fourth Aunt sat around, prayed, sniffled, and walked around and popped into the ICU as much as the nurses would allow her to look at my grandfather. This routine was interrupted at some points during the night—at 2am there were fireworks being let off in the distance, visible to us through the window; and shortly after a very noisy old man in a wheelchair appeared, and wouldn’t go away, insisting on wheezing and coughing and hacking as if on the verge of expiring, while his wife tried to soothe him and his son slept on the chairs—and at 5am I fell asleep out of sheer tiredness and boredom, only to wake up when my father arrived and sent me home to get some real sleep while he was there. I went home, fell asleep, woke at around 11am, and arrived at the hospital at 1pm or so to find all the horde right back again.

A lot of talking ensued, and the upshot was that my grandfather seemed to be in a stable condition enough to not need constant supervision. I and the Gobbler returned to Singapore

that evening, and I spent the night rushing around to get documents and clothes and things ready for the interview the next morning.

The Monday morning interview went oddly; it started out with the interviewer asking me how I had managed to spend three months looking for work without being employed, accused my resume of being horribly unimpressive and my explanation for my poor grades of being fabricated, and it went rather downhill from there; still, he said I made a pretty good first interview. (Yesterday I found an email that said I’ve not been selected for the position, though, so maybe that was just consolatory because he didn’t want me to go off in tears or something.) At any rate it’s a learning experience.

I had lunch and then returned to Spore, making calls from the bus interchange because I wanted transport to the hospital; nobody picked up the calls, and I got increasingly irritated, until a cousin’s girlfriend answered his phone, and that was how I found out that my grandfather had died about eight hours before the interview and I should go straight back to the house rather than ask for transport to the hospital. (I think I was maybe a little too brusque over the phone, but it was rather a shock.) I spent most of the journey back asleep, waking up just long enough to get off the bus and get a taxi back (I was overcharged, of course, being obviously in a hurry). When I got back, the entire house had already assumed the mourning appearance.

Allow me to describe the mourning-dress of the house in a little detail. The living-room was stripped of the sofas and wall-mounted pictures and working-table and every reflective surface, even the mirrors, had been draped with what looked like any available towel. The floor was slightly dusty, and the entire living-room was dominated by three major features. The first, immediately visible upon entering the living-room, was the altar; it consisted of a plastic white table behind which was a framed photograph of my grandfather from earlier in the month, dressed in shirt and blazer and tie, and mounted on stacks of sacred paper on a chair. Beneath that was a pair of slacks, and at the feet of the slacks was a pair of barely-worn Crocs. On the table were a few jars; one was full of sand and burning joss-sticks; another two held joss-sticks of varying sizes, and one little platter held pieces of cloth and string in various colours for the mourners to wear to indicate what relation they were to the deceased. There were also a few plaques on the table to indicate the various posts my grandfather had held in his lifetime and consequently the groups that were mourning him. Behind that was the coffin and the body in it; he was dressed in shirt and tie and blazer, a pearl was in his mouth, and a little tape player was playing a repeating chant that I was later told was supposed to help put his spirit to rest. The coffin was a quite nice-looking one, full of little decorations that didn’t do anything except sparkle nicely in the firelight. And behind that was the fire: a small urn, in which one placed folded papers and let them burn up one by one and the whole idea seemed to be that death is a dark place and the firelight would help his spirit find its way to wherever it was going (nobody seemed to be quite sure, apart from that it was a good place). The urn was three-quarters full of ashes by the time I arrived, indicating that the burning had been ongoing for quite a while; and behind that was a giant gold-and-green cloth that announced that he was a Loh. The people were dressed in mourning: uniform plain white t-shirts and uniform long black matte pants that

were secured at the waist and ankles by elastic, with no jewellery, and with strings tied ‘round the left wrist and a cloth square pinned to the left sleeve. Mostly all I remember about that day was that a lot of crying was going on and the family seemed to be bustling around in and out; for outside a large temporary shelter had been set up with electric revolving fans and wooden-and-metal tables with plastic chairs being set up on the stones and dirt. I think I remember hired priests; and the Gobbler went back that night (he’d arrived that morning when my father told everybody of the death except me, presumably to prevent me arriving at the interview teary-eyed and morbid).

Tuesday passed unmemorably in a haze of visitors and reading the obituaries in the newspapers to make sure they hadn’t misspelled anybody’s name, then photocopying the obituaries for all the aunts and uncles and visitors who wanted one too; other than that there were new taboos (on washing hair and wearing red or yellow), burning papers and figuring out how the air currents in the house tended to go so that the people doing the burning weren’t constantly getting a faceful of smoke. I remember standing at the coffin that day, and it was the first time I realised quite how horribly effective the sales of the penitences by the old Catholic church would have been; after all a large part of the money being spent on the proceedings was revolving around trying to ensure a good afterlife, and the family certainly would have bought armloads of those from the local bishop if there were one and they thought it would help. I certainly would have, if only for the promise of the hope, even if it might turn out to be false. My main concern during those early days was to wonder if he had died a Buddhist or Christian; the proceedings and rites were definitely neither, being apparently a mishmash of Taoism and whatever the priests had dreamed up.

On Wednesday there was a fair bit of excitement when a small black butterfly appeared sometime in the late afternoon and alighted on a piece of cloth near the makeshift altar; by a process of throwing coins and guessing (something along the lines of “if X, then let the coins fall heads-up; if Y, tails-up; if Z, one each”) the family proclaimed the butterfly the reincarnation of my uncle (who died four years ago), and proceeded to sacrifice two cigarettes to it and take about forty photos of it, and then beg it to take care of my grandfather. We also spent most of the afternoon going around asking people for small change, for use in a ritual for the next day; so we counted out hundreds and thousands of coins, making sure to compensate the givers, and put away the coins. (If I remember correctly we wound up with something like 12kg of loose change by the time it was all quite done.) The rites and rituals began in earnest, at around 4pm; the priests had arrived a little earlier to set up three smaller tables and place images of bearded beings floating in clouds on them, with offerings and joss-sticks and so forth; they neglected to tell anybody who those beings were or what their significance was, unfortunately, and so I can tell you nothing further about them. There was one larger table with larger images, but it went similarly unexplained. They also set up their musical apparatus—bells and cymbals and gongs and trumpets of various sizes. They summoned the family to the ceremonies at around 5 or 6pm, just when it was beginning to dim, by clanging the bells loudly enough to be heard miles off; I, being Christian, sat by the side on the porch and watched the ceremonies with, I admit, possibly

off-puttingly avid interest. The ceremonies were conducted by four pretty nearly interchangeable priests who changed in and out of robes according to whoever was most in the mood to do some chanting, it looked like. There was a great deal of bowing to the altars and pictures, which I took to mean that the pictures were various gods or deities to do with the afterlife; and then they knelt and cried and the priests shouted. About halfway through the shouting I realised they were speaking very nearly intelligibly, and then I realised there were actually two priests shouting, and they were actually shouting out a roll-call of names, in a very singsong way (“…Third Aunt’s Eldest Son!” “Present!” “Third Aunt’s Second Son!” “Present!” &c.) and I had started listening too late to catch my family. Some of the later ceremonies included things like the ritual bathing of the spirit, or the presenting of tea to a little mobile altar (really just a wooden box with joss-sticks stuck in), and something involving a couple of ribbons. After the ceremonies people looked in the little basin of water used in the ceremony for hair (supposed to have fallen out from the spirit’s head while bathing), put out mats to sleep on, mostly arranged around the coffin, though some of them slept back in the kitchen and dining area where the sofas and lounge chairs were; and some stayed awake to keep the fire in the urn going. I stayed up a little, that night, and cried for the first time that night when nobody was looking because they were all asleep.

I should note, at this point, that I do not make a habit of crying. I read a long time ago about somebody who cried when her mother died, and then was admonished for indulging in self-pity; certainly since then I’ve always regarded being overcome by emotion in any way as a display of weakness—more something to be pitied or embarrassed about than anything really. It’s possibly also the fact that crying doesn’t make anything better, except unless something has got into the eye and needs to be washed out. Even during the ceremonies when the people cried (usually when the priests’ chanting became intelligible and they said something like “cry for your father, who is going away!”) I tended to wonder if it was a really good act or real grief, and either way whether the crying was of any comfort to them.

At any rate I found my own crying to provide me with nothing in the way of comfort, but it did make me thirsty and force me to have to wipe up my face, but it was at least gratifying to know I had functioning tear-ducts. I think I had found out sometime during the day—really there had been a few indications earlier in bits of things my parents had said, but it took awhile for the information to sink in—that my grandfather had died a Christian, and the hope of seeing him again at the resurrection was much better than that of standing around crying. So I stopped, went back to the burning, and eventually went to sleep when a cousin turned up to take over burning-paper duty.

Thursday was when the rites and rituals really got underway, though; the morning was all a hubbub of preparation, I think, and I don’t remember anything happening in the morning—perhaps the gods are late sleepers—but in the afternoon things began to happen. I should caution you, here, that I don’t necessarily remember all the following things in their proper order; they certainly happened, but I don’t really remember exactly what followed what, mostly because I couldn’t understand a lot of what was happening and so it mostly went by in a fuzzy

blur of chanting and moaning and crying with a bit of family drama every now and then. So let’s see… it started off as it had previously, with bells and cymbals to call the family to kneel and cry and listen to the priests chanting, and every half an hour or so they were allowed to go off and wander around a bit while the priests set up the props for the next bit of ceremony. I believe it was around 3pm or so when they started bringing in the really interesting things—the paper effigy houses and servants and cars, the pile of sand for carving, the wooden bridge, the tree—and so it was probably around 4 or 5 that they had the ceremony of the tree. I went through this myself when my uncle died, but this time my father decided that a stand had to be made and I sat it out; in any case it was then, and it was this time, a much too jolly sort of thing (in a macabre way) for a funeral. What happened was that the priests set up a sort of pathway that was somewhat V-shaped, and at the point of the V was a tree to which they attached pink packets with coins in; and the procession would circle around, and as they passed the tree each person would tear off a leaf or branch or flower or pink packet, then shred and cast it aside (unless it was a pink packet, in which case the person kept it), and this went on until the tree was entirely denuded. I think it was meant to be some sort of elaborate metaphor on how life strips people apart, but it certainly looked like great fun for the people in it. (I remember one of the aunts scolding us for looking too obviously happy the last time we’d done that—let’s face it, permitted destruction is rather enjoyable.)

A little after the ceremony of the tree was the lecturing of the paper servants, which consisted of the priest taking several human-shaped (though not human-sized) effigies and sticking them in front of the living-room altar and telling them things like “be broad-shouldered, wake up early, cook properly, get good bargains at the market, etc.” while I got bored and wandered off. And fortuitously I wandered off just as they were sculpting the sand into dragons—really two half-dragons, because the two sculptures were so close to each other that there was no space for legs on the insides. But they sculpted those dragons about five meters long or so, by my estimate, and then they placed four sand shrines around them, one at each cardinal direction (I forgot to check if they corresponded to the real North/South/East/West, but I assume they did), and then plugged in flickering light bulbs for the eyes and turned them on. Then they spraypainted the dragons (around this time the lecturing of the servants finished and the other cousins came around to watch) and the cousins were promptly deputised to follow the spraypainted scales of the dragons and outline them in coins. That took, I think, enough time that by the time they finished it was just about dinner-time, and so they had dinner. After that there was pantomiming, I think (there had been some earlier, but I hadn’t really paid it much attention other than to observe that it looked like one of them was pretending to be the keeper of Hell’s gates and was rambling on and on about how carefully he was going to examine my grandfather’s deeds while living, and then rather anticlimactically pronounced him perfectly innocent and suitable to enter (Hell?)), where one priest was in regular priestly wear and the other had on a long fake black beard and sideburns and was waving a fan, and then went running around while everybody chased him (obviously this was only done by the male mourners) and looked like they were also having a great deal of fun doing it. After awhile everybody seemed to be out of breath and was dismissed, and then everybody (this time

including the female mourners) was summoned, and went walking around the dragons 18 times in the semidarkness while I watched. I later asked about the significance of the number of times they circled the dragons (over stony ground, in nothing but socks!) and nobody seemed to know, or even have counted the number of times they’d walked around. Personally the only thing I know of in Chinese mythology that has the number 18 in it is hell (supposed to have 18 levels), but nobody seems willing to say that my grandfather went to hell, even temporarily.

…it looks like I’ve got the above two mixed up in chronology—I remember eating dinner while watching the running around, which means the march of 18 circles was before the men-only running around. At any rate it began raining heavily during dinner. (Later I found out that my grandfather, like me, really really liked thunderstorms, and one of the things he always used to pray for was rain.) The priests ran off to remove the bits of the dragons that were vulnerable to water damage—things like the crests and horns and fins and essentially everything that made the sculptures not look like oversized monitor lizards—and the aunts went into the living-room to pray for the rain to stop while First Uncle ambled around looking rather aimless. At some point I stepped into the house because I needed the toilet, upon which I was grabbed and taken aside by Fourth Aunt, who asked me to pray for the rain to stop. It took me aback because, as a Christian, I’d not have asked her to light a joss-stick and pray for me to get a job; but I took it as a sign that maybe she half-believed in God, or maybe a sign of desperation, and so I did. In retrospect I should have prayed out loud, rather than just standing there holding her shoulder and telling God I was sorry and I knew they were going to misattribute the rain stopping and anyway they only wanted it to do their rituals with, but if He wouldn’t mind would He please do me a favour and before I had finished praying the rain went from torrential downpour to merest trickle. Almost immediately they had the ritual going again, upon which I muttered to God that it’d be just a little bit showy of Him if the rain started up again the moment they didn’t need clear skies any more.

The next part of the ritual also revolved around the dragons, but consisted of everybody standing around the dragons watching the priests dancing around it and demolishing bits of it at a time; they’d also set up a little bowl of oil standing over a roaring fire, and every now and then they’d leap over the dragons and spit a mouthful of water into the bowl of oil, which always resulted in a giant fireball while they landed dramatically with their backs to the fire. At least, I think that was their intent—their landings were on sand that had just been rained on, though, and so were rather… ginger. But the dragons were eventually destroyed and then everybody fell on the pile of sand, scrabbling for coins while I took photos of them. It wasn’t a minute after I’d gotten bored of taking photos and headed into the house when the rain came back, just as heavily as if it hadn’t let up at all; and I made enquiries and found that while they did still have ceremonies to go through, none of those required clear skies. Which made me want to tell people about God and His sense of humour.

The heavy rains had a side-effect, though: the usual pots and pans that they store rainwater in were filled to full and overflowing, and the drains had got clogged up and overflowed too; so the next half an hour was mostly hoeing and digging new channels so that people could walk around

rather than slosh around, but it kept me grateful that my factory-reject Crocs were rejected because they hadn’t got the usual holes in them… which made them essentially perfectly waterproof in any puddles shallower than ankle-depth, which made me able to go around perfectly unimpeded other than the increased slipperiness. At length the new channels were dug and the water flowed off, and then the next bit of the ritual was conducted while the rains went on.

The ritual of the bridge is curiously similar to Greek myth—essentially there is apparently a river of memory-loss, though it only affects the memory of hurts or disappointments and suchlike; and so the people walked on a little bridge made of wood and coloured paper, wailing as they went although one would generally suppose that forgetting sadness would be a good thing, and when they had crossed and re-crossed and re-crossed again (it did look rather as if maybe the rain had diluted the river and so they needed repeated doses) the priest pronounced the memories adequately lost and they stopped. Some more chanting occurred, during which the rain stopped, and then they moved the effigy houses, boxes of things, and lectured servants out to where the dragons had been, and set them up; then they poured folded golden paper all over the lot and set it on fire, which made a very nice sight (if rather polluting). It burned for a good ten minutes, while the onlookers threw more paper money at the flames, and eventually died down and everybody went to sleep.

Friday morning I woke up to something of a ruckus. Friday morning had been set as the date for the cremation, so I suppose most of the mourners were feeling a bit emotional; still, going straight from slumber to finding people screaming at a corpse about how much they loved it is rather unsettling. And just as unsettling was finding my father roaring right back at the screaming people about how they should just shut up because it wasn’t helping anything and they ought to go off in a corner and repent and think about how they could use all that professed devotion to better the family’s future. I had breakfast while the screaming and roaring went on, and then went out in front to find the roaring still ongoing, except that the other aunts and uncles had now got over and were ineffectually trying to get my father to calm down because my grandfather needed his rest. In a way it’s fortunate that one of my cousins was foolish enough to try to approach my father and act the mature adult, because I don’t think anything else would have got my father to order everybody to get out and not interfere with grown-ups’ business. I don’t think I’ve seen my father that angry in a long time; I suspect if the aunts hadn’t dragged that cousin off he’d be in a pretty bad way. But the screaming people eventually went away, my father subsided from roaring into sobbing (along with Fourth Aunt, who was standing by), I went and got a lot of tissues, and the next hour or so consisted of praying and singing and talking about my grandfather to each other, to me, to my mother, to the cousins (actually this part was—I am completely serious here—more like my father exhorting the grandchildren to be good and studious and everything that my grandfather would want them to be), and in fact to anybody within earshot who would listen.

(Some of the things they talked about during that time made me want to title this post “Farts and All”, because let’s face it, my grandfather was entirely human and sometimes his digestion didn’t agree with him.)

At some point a hired marching band arrived and, in discordant fashion suggesting infrequent practice, played something that attempted to be a death march (I think). My father got me to get them to play Amazing Grace when the coffin was taken out, which happened when the priests arrived. There was a general atmosphere of mourning, because everybody knelt and cried silently (or not so silently, in some cases) while the priests did their thing with the joss-sticks and ritual chanting, then came in to close the coffin-lid (they had opened the glass case and resealed it, I think, the night before) and take it outside. While they were closing the coffin everybody was waiting outside, and my parents and I followed the coffin out. Then some more chanting occurred while everybody knelt on mats on the stone and dirt around the coffin—this not being too terribly ritualistic, my parents and I joined in—and after awhile the priest said something to the effect of “pass around the bier”, so everybody got up and went trooping around the coffin and through the tables and chairs (I don’t know who set the path). It so happened that the marching band had sat down around the tables, and the path passed the leader by (I think they’re called quartermasters?) and every time we passed by, my father would ask them to play a hymn—first “Amazing Grace”, which they definitely knew; then “This is My Father’s World”, and after awhile the quartermaster was evidently trying to look stoic in the face of constant questioning.

We passed around the bier about ten times (yes, I counted); the Buddhist relatives would wipe it as they passed with fistfuls of pink sacred paper, while my parents and I just rubbed the wood slightly (later on I found my finger decidedly shiny with silver glitter that had gone from paper onto the wood onto my finger) and then it was back to kneeling while the priests called out different groups to go and stand in front of the coffin and pay their last respects. For most people this meant burning joss-sticks and bowing; for my parents and me, this meant standing with head bowed. And after every possible group of people had been called, the coffin was loaded into a little van and driven out while the mourners assembled behind and around the van, as many of them pushing or touching it as they could. I was, at first, behind the van, but the jostling pushed me off to the side; so I wound up walking beside the rear left tyre, where for some reason nobody was jostling. I daresay a great deal of the relatives got a lungful of exhaust that day—small change compared to the lungfuls of joss-smoke they’d been having the past few days really—and this whole procession of van-followed-by-crying-people went on for about a kilometer or so through the streets of the village/town, until the town bus-stop. At that point a hired bus was waiting, so everybody piled into that and fell asleep while being carried off to the crematorium.

At the crematorium the Gobbler met us, and then some more chanting went on while the coffin was unloaded from the hearse, displayed to everybody, and then sent into the furnace. At that point people started passing around boxed drinks and bits of food, and then most of them got back on the bus and went off, while my father, an uncle, two aunts, a cousin, and I stayed back

to wait for the body to be reduced to ashes and bones. While waiting I went walking around the compound, but found nothing much of interest; the aunts and my father discussed various family issues, while the cousin and the uncle talked about other things that I wasn’t paying attention to. After a while my father started looking at brochures for houses and discussing the relative merits of each with me, and sometime after we’d settled on one particular estate as being suitably middle-class, the crematorium attendants came out to tell us it was done. Each of us chopsticked a few bones into the urn, then the attendant did the rest, stacking the skull-bones at the very top and sealing it; then we piled into a van and were sent off to the columbarium.

All the way to the columbarium they had to inform the urn whenever they crossed a bridge, and to keep up the chant of “crossing, crossing!” as long as the van was on the bridge, which I took to be an echo of the earlier bridge-crossing ritual, except you’d think he’d already have lost all his memories by then. Maybe they were chanting for him to forget about being burnt, which admittedly would certainly qualify as a traumatizing experience. At any rate we eventually arrived at the columbarium, located the lots we’d reserved for my grandparents, and waited. At length the priest and some other relatives arrived, some chanting was done and payment was made, and we left to go back to the house and rest.

Friday evening and Saturday morning passed restfully; the house was more or less tidied up, the shelters outside were taken down, a smaller temporary altar (still with the photo and the clothing) was set up with the joss-stick urns in the living-room, and we were allowed to wash our hair again. Saturday afternoon my family set out (my father has a serious case of being quite unable to sit around restfully) and we spent the rest of the day looking at houses, dealing with house-related paperwork, and talking to my father’s cousins who’d apparently just ended a 30-year feud with my branch of the family, which is why I’d never seen them before that day. We returned to the house at around 11.05pm, after dropping the Gobbler off at the bus interchange to return to Spore and then getting hilariously lost by missing a few turns and almost ending up in Spore ourselves.

Sunday morning I woke at 8.30am to find the living-room already mobbed with relatives for the ceremony of the first seven days, but it was relatively tame as far as the ceremonies had been going; they simply did more chanting and bowing to the makeshift altar, then stacked food around it (I’m not sure if they cooked it themselves or had it ordered in—either way somebody must have been up early getting it all done) and did more chanting. Apparently the recently-dead have huge appetites. After that they did more burning—this time of a stack of golden sacred paper that had been folded into the shapes of money and things, and after that they did a ceremonial cutting of the hair of the immediate relatives: nothing too cosmetically altering, really, just the barest snip, and I’m still not sure why they did that. Maybe it was to proclaim the no-hair-washing taboo officially over. Some more talking happened, and then all the female in-laws were told to go take a hike and come back later to signify them coming back to a new house; so we went off to the nearest neighbouring town, my parents and the wives of the

uncles, and had a bit of brunch and did some shopping before going back. And then there was lunch.

Monday nothing much happened apart from going to the bank and going through some financial things to do with the recent purchase of the house; and Tuesday we spent the late morning to early afternoon on the farm picking something that looks like the stubbly version of the rambutan but tastes about similar. And by Tuesday evening I was back in Spore, meeting the new room-mate and proving to my landlady that I hadn’t yet died and it wasn’t time to start throwing out my things and advertising for a new tenant.