Balestier benevolence
By Chua Mui Hoong"Cold and hungry, please be generous."
The sign was handwritten in a large, scrawling script.
The girl sitting on the floor, with level eyes staring straight ahead, was playing a flute.
She had long, streaky dirty blonde hair, set off by her dark clothes. A black terrier sniffed at her ankles. A cap lay in front of her, with the sign.
I almost stumbled over her.
I know nothing about her history. But she looked like an average English middle-class girl, like many of the girls I met at university in England.
She could have been one of the students, instead of a wanderer now reliant on the kindness of passers-by.
That was Oxford, more than a year ago.
SINGAPORE, Balestier.
The facade of this dentist's office in Balestier looks run-down, its signboard faded. Inside, a plastic plant tries valiantly to brighten the dingy interior, where an old mock-leather sofa takes pride of place. The place reeks of proud independence, the kind of establishment where the elderly dentist has lived out the formerly thriving practice, and is now content to serve just a few patients.
Most mornings, the dentist of this Balestier office stands in the doorway, or sits in the sofa in her amah clothes, one leg propped comfortably in front of her.
She is old and a little deaf, but loyal clients from the neighbouring housing estates will have no one but her to attend to their teeth problems.
Her age-spotted hands are no longer steady enough to extract teeth, but her clients need her for a different reason: to make dentures. She is one of a dwindling number of what the Health Ministry terms "registered dentists": dentists who learnt their skills on the job, and are allowed to practise, but who do not have the same paper qualifications as dental surgeons. Madam Tay took over the practice when her husband died many years ago.
She has an assistant, a quiet, taciturn man who makes the mould for the teeth, using a naked jet flame, the edge of an old, hardened teak desk, and some tiny tools.
They have worked together for many years.
Behind the office sprawls the backyard, also used as the living quarters.
Here, at one time or another, live a motley crew of three or four old folks, whom the old lady dentist, let us call her Madam Tay, has agreed to house.
When I dropped by some weeks ago, I saw a backyard lit by naked fluorescent bulbs. The dental assistant sat in the living room.
An old woman, who looked about 90, walked to and fro. The other lodger, a young 70-something woman who limped, busied herself in the kitchen. The three did not speak much. One was Hokkien, another Cantonese. "Like a chicken talking to a duck," one of them commented.
These were old folks brought together by circumstance, living under the same roof because of the kindness of a stranger.
The dentist, Madam Tay, has her own home, and a family, somewhere. She has chosen to open up her place to strangers, or to old friends, or to old neighbours, or to old friends of old neighbours. A household of elderly people with no blood relation to one another, living, almost, like a family.
Blood relations are the primordial ties that bind us. It is the basis of the belief that the family is the basic unit of society.
Yet, we sometimes forget that family, or blood relations, begin only when two strangers decide to be kind to each other, and to make family out of each other.
In the past, there was a better appreciation of the ties that bind strangers.
They call it a sense of community. That was a time when neighbours were closer than relatives, the whole village knew your marital problems, and your neighbours' children swore to be eternal brothers or sisters with your own children.
My generation has lost much of that intuition.
BACK in Oxford, the same evening, I was walking past one of the numerous Blackwell's bookshops in the city, when I saw another girl, huddled up on the floor, leaning against a lamp-post. This one looked too dazed to beg.
I looked almost in amazement at the surrounding well-shod feet of expensively clothed students and tourists who strode past her with barely a second glance.
This stranger, too, was not kind. She walked on, with many rationalisations, hoping that some other stranger would stop and lend a hand. I do not know if anyone did. I left Oxford the next morning.
It was not till months later, in heartland Singapore, that I met in Madam Tay a woman who was kind to strangers, and whose kindness provided shelter for the homeless.
Copyright © 1998 Singapore Press Holdings. All Rights Reserved.
