Signing off from Batam, I had an overnight stay in Singapore. Then fly back home next morning. Allowing for the usual delays, I arrived at the hotel at 11 pm and checking out at 8 am.
After the boat ride, I was hoping for a snack bar at the jetty, but we had to hurry out. As a result, I arrived at the hotel with a rumbling stomach! The food courts were scraping out their last meals as I walked down the streets looking for some makkan!
I was hoping that a bucket of chicken from KFC would fill me up nicely for the night and most of the next morning flight... But I was too late and too far for that!
And thus I started my small journey from Sim Lim towers to Bugis village. The only food joint to remain open all night, McDonalds. Considering it was three quarters past eleven; all the hungry stomachs around the area gravitated towards it!
With the outside tables full, and the inner ones mostly occupied by students with books or laptops... and one with a backpacking couple from Austrailia... I made my way looking for an empty table, to find one next to an old lady with a warm wrinkled smile. As I approached the table, she helped by moving aside the coffee sugar packets, and was just at the last sip of her cup. With no one to talk to, she just bowed her heaad and closed her eyes. I asked her if she was olrite; to which she smiled, and said she comes here everyday, has a cup of coffee, and then her son picks her up to go home. She is old enough to have been young and beautiful when the British were in S'pore... and yet she is there all alone at midnight having a coffee at McDonalds! I asked her if her children will be worried, offered to call her son to take her back home, but she just smiled. Remarkably self sufficient, I saw her carrying special napkins to clean her spectacles; a mini bottle of water, tablets for sore throat and drops for her eyes... All this in a tiny little handbag! We got talking, she told me how life was during the war, the separation from Malaysia... Then her husband left her for another woman, and how she coped with 3 little kids. About her daughter in law, who doesn't like her to be around poking her nose... and she likes the time out, maintaining a delicate peace within the family... Her worries that her son is already getting old and working the odd shifts at work...
I am flattered when she shows her surprise at my age... Telling me that I still look like a young boy! She wants to know if I have children, Oh! Why I didn't get married yet? Maybe I should learn Mandarin and get a sweet Chinese wife, she says! I tell her I want someone who can cook me Indian foods, and she just laughs... Her Husband left her because she made aweful Nasi Goreng! She lost her voice, was it the emotion, or the sudden burst of laughter? I offered to buy her one more cup of coffee, but she refused... She asked me about the now filling in people, who just slept at the tables! The manager there shrugged his shoulders, saying it was space that they could do without for the night... Besides, some people looked like they wouldn't have another place to go!
I had almost finished my meal and chips... It was almost 1 am; and yet she was peacefully sitting and looking around. I asked about the time her son would pick her up... and she said it was still a long time more! I was tired from the long day, and another day traveling lay ahead... I asked her name, and she was silent for a long while... She said the children called her Ma always... and it was so long that someone had spoken her name, that she couldnt remember! It was always Ma... Ma... that the people around her used to say!
