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Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Grandmother

Hui Yen’s grandmother was smoking again. She wasn’t supposed to, for the usual health reasons, but she had told the doctors that she had been smoking for most of her life and wasn’t about to stop now. Hui Yen’s mother didn’t like the smell of cigarettes in the flat, so her grandmother smoked at the bus stop downstairs. She sat perched on the edge of a dull grey plastic seat, one leg elegantly crossed over the other despite her age and her weakened, thinned-out limbs, puffing languorously on her cigarette as if drawing every last gasp of flavour from it. She cut a cryptic figure in the neighbourhood, with her salt-and-pepper ringlets of tightly curled hair, her out-of-fashion samfoo-style pantsuits in a discreet dark green or dark blue print, and her soft black canvas shoes, the kind more likely to be worn by a kung fu master in an old Hong Kong movie than a wiry, sun-faded woman in a sleepy, sallow Singapore housing estate. The only splash of colour on her was the crimson packet of cigarettes, clutched in one hand with a rumpled handkerchief.

It was against the law to smoke at the bus stop. Hui Yen knew this from assembly talks in school, when cheerful policemen in stiff, sweaty uniforms warned them about the dangers of smoking and dutifully listed all the public areas where smoking was banned. Hui Yen didn’t know if anyone, policeman or otherwise, had ever tried to reprimand her grandmother for smoking at the bus stop. Probably not, given the crinkled, sour expression her grandmother typically lapsed into when she was by herself. It was the same expression that had intimidated Hui Yen into petrified silence whenever she visited her grandmother as a child, back when her grandmother still lived on her own, in a little flat in Chinatown.