“Well, we want you to feel even better before we release you—”
Astrid cut in. “Professor Oon, I think my grandmother would be so much more comfortable at home. Can’t we just have things set up for her at Tyersall Park?”
“Er, it’s not that simple. Step outside with me for a moment, will you?” the doctor said a little uneasily. Astrid followed him out of the room, slightly annoyed by the ungracious way he had handled that. Now of course her grandmother would know they were discussing her condition.
Professor Oon found himself staring at Astrid. This woman was so blindingly pretty, it made him nervous just to be around her. He felt like he could lose control at any moment and say something inappropriate. “Er, Astrid, I must be very…um, blunt with you. Your grandmother’s condition is extremely…touch and go…at the moment. There’s been a tremendous amount of scarring on the heart, and her erection…I mean, her ejection fraction is up to twenty-seven percent. I know it looks like she’s getting better, but you need to know that we are making monumental efforts to keep her alive. All those machines she’s hooked up to…she needs them, and she requires nonstop care.”
“How long does she really have?”
“Hard to say, but it’s a matter of weeks. Her heart muscle is irreparably damaged, and her condition is worsening day by day. She could go at any moment, really.”
Astrid let out a long exhale. “Well, it’s even more essential that we get her home then. I know my grandmother would not want to spend her last days here. Why can’t we simply move all the machines? Let’s set up a medical suite just like this one f
or her at home. We can have you and the rest of her medical team stationed there.”
“Something like that has never been done before. To set up a mobile cardiac intensive care unit in a private home with all the equipment we would need and round-the-clock doctors and nurses—it’s a huge undertaking, and it would be extremely cost prohibitive.”
Astrid cocked her head, giving him a subtly eviscerating look that said: Really? Do we really need to go there? “Professor Oon, I think I can speak for my entire family. The cost is not an issue. Let’s just make it happen, shall we?”
“Okay, I’ll get to work on that,” Professor Oon replied, his face flushing red.
Astrid reentered the Royal Suite, and Su Yi smiled at her.
“All taken care of, Ah Ma. They will move you home as soon as possible. They just have to set up the medical equipment for you first.”
“Thank you. You are much more efficient than your mother.”
“Hnh! Don’t let her hear you say that. Anyway, you shouldn’t be talking so much. You should rest.”
“Oh, I feel like I’ve rested enough. Before I woke up, I had a dream about your grandfather. Ah Yeh.”
“Do you dream about Ah Yeh often?”
“Rarely. But this dream was very strange. Part of it felt so real, because it was a memory of something that really happened during the war, when I had been evacuated to Bombay.”
“But Ah Yeh wasn’t in Bombay, was he? Didn’t you only meet him when you returned to Singapore?”
“Yes, when I went home.” Su Yi closed her eyes and was silent for a few moments, and Astrid thought she had drifted back to sleep. Suddenly she opened her eyes wide. “I need you to help me.”
Astrid sat up in her chair. “Yes, of course. What do you want me to do?”
“There are some things you must do for me at once. Very important things…”
* * *
* Called Moti Mauli, or “Pearl Mother” in Marathi, legend has it that the statue was brought to India in the sixteenth century by the Jesuits from Portugal but was stolen by pirates. One day, a fisherman had a dream in which he saw the statue floating in the sea, and this is how it was rediscovered.
CHAPTER NINE
TYERSALL PARK, SINGAPORE
The lid on the enamel kettle started rattling, and Ah Ling, the head housekeeper, reached for the kettle on the hot plate and poured some boiling water into her tea mug. She relaxed into her armchair and breathed in the earthy, musky scent of the ying de hong cha before taking her first sip. For the past two decades, her younger brother had been sending her a parcel of this tea every year from China, wrapped in layers of brown paper and sealed with old-fashioned yellow Scotch tape. These tea leaves were grown in the hills above her village, and drinking it remained one of her last connections to the place where she had been born.
Like so many girls of her generation, Lee Ah Ling left her tiny village on the outskirts of Ying Tak when she was just sixteen, taking a boat from Canton to an island far away in the Nanyang, the Southern Seas. She remembered how most of the other girls who were crammed into that stifling little cabin had wept bitterly every night on their voyage, and Ah Ling wondered if she was a bad person to be feeling not sadness but a sense of excitement. She had always dreamed of seeing the world beyond her village, and she didn’t care if it meant leaving her family. She was leaving a difficult home—a father who died when she was twelve and a mother who seemed to have resented her since the day she was born.
Now at least she could do something to quell that resentment—in exchange for a modest sum of money that would enable her brother to go to school, she would go abroad, take the vow of celibacy that every black-and-white amah was asked to, and be tied to serve an unknown family in a strange new land for the rest of her life.
In Singapore, she had been brokered to work for a family called the Tays. They were a couple in their late thirties with two sons and a daughter living in a mansion more lavish and luxurious than she had ever dreamed was possible. Actually, it was a rather unspectacular bungalow off Serangoon Road, but to Ah Ling’s untrained eyes, it might as well have been Buckingham Palace. There were three other black-and-white amahs like her in the household, but they had been there for years. Ah Ling was the new girl, and for the next six months she was assiduously taught the finer details of the domestic arts, which for her meant learning how to properly clean varnished wood and silver.