the last

When the nice young man with the shiny slicked-back hair, white starched shirt stained with sweat, mud-spattered pants and shoes, and innumerable insect bites, appeared at her door one especially hot day in the middle of an interminable season of hot days, Su realized that life as she knew it would soon come to an end.

She was the last of the humans left on the island.

And she knew the man in white was here to serve her her notice of eviction.

She had been expecting him.

Actually, she had been expecting him since 10 years ago when the first of the families, the Angs, had moved to the mainland.

The Angs left with everything they could carry. There were chairs, some severely crippled, pots, rusty pans, boxes upon boxes of farm detritus, shears, hoes, chains and many more unidentifiable objects of great sentimental value. They left with everything except what was most precious to them, because they could not; the massive durian trees in their substantial orchard with many seasons left to fruit.

Then after the period of rains it was the Abdullahs whose final act on the island was the scuttling of their boats painted with the palette of children. You can still see them where they lay, at the bottom of the rocky inlet to the bay. The yellow decks now home to furtive crustaceans who would betray themselves only with the blink of eyes raised on stalks. And below, the baby blue cabins writhing with sea reptiles sensitive to even the soft refracted light.

Then it was the Teos turn. They who in the end did not bother to close the windows and doors to their precious shophouse, which they had never left unlocked at night through all the years. Even though the family, with their squad of twelve children, fully grown, sons strapping and daughters big boned, all slept there, scattered on floors and tables, and were a formidable deterrent to any would be thief.

The Teo’s shop was emptied of its provisions of course when they boarded the boat never to return. Su was grateful to them for leaving her with all that they could not carry. And some which they could, but for the softness in their hearts. She took whatever that needed no refrigeration for her generator was ancient and could not be counted upon.

Su stretched the last packet of her favourite Digestives biscuits for almost the entire wet season. Then she decided to parcel the spoils and share it with the hungry mould whose initial timidity was no match for its appetite. Until one night a rat from the swamp invited himself into the larder and beat them both to the final edible crumb.

After it was the Lees of the north who left.

Then the inland Lees, whose ancestors were among the first to arrive on the island together with Su’s great-great-grandfather.

And so the island stood deserted save for her.

On long drowsy afternoons, dozing in the window’s glare, Su wondered if it was not a voracious plague that had swept in with the north easterlies over the marsh. Or perhaps a vengeful sea spirit that had come by and made off in the night with the people so he could fill his cavernous submarine halls with the warmth of company.

She did not know why it had taken so long for them to come and get her. She had almost let herself believe that they had somehow forgotten her, seeing as she had no living kin. Or maybe it was because she was so old that they were hoping they could save themselves the trouble. If they waited long enough, surely death himself would relocate her.

Whatever it was, the sudden appearance of the young man with the white shirt after all these years did not raise any rancor in Su. Whatever anger she felt with what they called progress and redevelopment had long since disentangled and drifted from the swamp of her mind.

She had, over the years, met a few of the displaced when they had made trips, primarily of nostalgia, back to the island.

The Angs, in particular, lured by the esoteric perfume of the king of fruits, had actually come back to the island on several occasions and scaled the state-erected fence for the strange pleasure of surreptitiously picking their own spoils.

They seemed genuinely content as they related to Su their new lot in a life far away.

Most of them had been relocated to the same block of flats in Bedok and they would meet each other regularly. That effectively blunted the blade of resentment and took the edge off the pangs of change. Though it was not quite the good old days, sure, they were ready to admit, there was a lot that was good about staying in a housing estate. It was clean and airy and convenient with everything a short walk or bus ride away. And they had plenty to buy, and even more to choose from. And much television to watch.

Of course being the last was not easy on Su.

Every 2 weeks she had to walk to the opposite end of the island to the docks to receive her provisions that the South Coastal Welfare Group, of which the island was a part, had so generously agreed to supply. And then she had to walk the 12 kilometers back with the pack of provisions.

She argued that she had lived her entire life in that hut on the western tip and would have to be crazy to move on her own free will. She had been born there and so had her mother, and her mother, and hers before that.

And as expected, with only one remaining human, the forest and swamps, with gleeful abandon, soon reclaimed what the humans had first taken from them by force and machetes, arriving in tiny improbable canoes, in an age before memory.

Back then the island was only a child and its white bones of granite were still supple and growing inch by steady inch under the watchful eyes of the sun, and pristine waters coursed swift and sure through its arteries, and its forests teemed with abundant life.

And while the humans had unleashed much physical devastation through the years, mining her marrows down to bedrock, raping nubile swamps for mean dowries of meager market produce, defiling her in pestilential waste, they had not broken her spirit.

Now, deep turquoise pools swelling with surprising fish marked the cratered sites of dynamited hills. And in the night, vegetation danced in wild abandon over asphalt tracks and exchanged promises of rendezvous in abandoned human houses at first light. And in the thorny brambles in the lightless undergrowth, vast phalanx of ants marched on perpetual manoeuvres. And prehistoric iguanas, having lived through it all, and wise to signs portentous, vigilantly surveyed the land. And the wetlands wept tears of joy in the glittering wake of their amphibious young. And the garrulous kingfisher flashed his imperious blue perched on improbable boughs. While far overhead, garlands of flowers bloomed afresh each morning like precious jewels on the resplendent crowns of ageless trees.

The island throbbed with the steady pulse of primordial life, once again, free of humans.

Save one.

The swamp in fact was in the process of swallowing Su’s hut.

Because there were no humans to hold her back, because no daily struggle waged over drainage at the estuaries, the swamp was free to do as she wished. So she ventured deeper and deeper inland to reclaim her children lost and captured long ago by humans and brought up in a life of servitude.

Su’s little garden of tear-stained onions and senile limes and chilies and mango trees whose loins were so long barren they had been abandoned by the flying foxes, was returned to its rightful place in the cradle of the swamp. Her shrubs and trees soon drowned in the sickening hothouse sweetness of the marsh. Eventually drifting out with the slow procession of the tide, under arched roots and the cathedral light of the mangrove.

Only the pliant coconut survived where they stood.

In time, Su’s tiny hut on stilts was left far out in the swamp as if it were flotsam that had washed in with the sea and had stranded there.

And then the nice young man in the white shirt finally stopped his nodding and glanced at his shiny watch and informed her that he would be back tomorrow to help her transit to the mainland.

Su had hoped he would stay awhile. She wanted very badly to tell him how he looked exactly like her young son who often appeared on a day like that day when the air was clear and bright and the water undisturbed. Tanned and with one sinewy hand on the steering wheel, he would give the sweetest smile, commandeering the mining company jeep, at the unfathomable bottom of the granite pool.

But she knew he was lost. For the distractions of the mosquitoes that had followed him all the way from the dock, had multiplied exponentially with the impending dusk.

So she bade the nice white man good day and watched him as he waded away in the ankle deep mud trying in vain to keep his muddy pants from getting muddier until she saw him disappear into the sudden mists, and plunge off the edge of the cataracts of her mind.

Then she sat in the falling light and went back to waiting.

And eventually she heard the swamp rise with the fire of numberless strange tongues. And saw the flashes of lightning that signaled no rain. And she wrapped herself in the submarine heat and tender vapours one final time, and relaxed and gently released her heavy heart and lay down at last to die.

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