That was the chorus that greeted me as I stepped into the ward at Mount Elizabeth Hospital. It was almost 10 p.m. The health care assistant on duty was at the nurses’ station, head bent over the charts, updating patient parameters. She looked up, spotted me, and waved in recognition, we’d shared the same night shift during my first floor duty here.
The sounds were coming from one of the single rooms. They were so loud, so insistent, that they carried easily to the station.
“What was that?” I asked the health care assistant. She just giggled and pointed toward the single room.
“Staff Nurse is in there, attending to him. You’ll see.”
The moaning carried on for another few minutes before the she finally emerged, accompanied by an enrolled nurse, a young Indian girl both of them laughing as they walked back to the station.
“Well, hello there!” the she greeted, spotting me. “Nice to see you again. How was your trip to Pangkor?”
“I just stopped by to give you something and to thank you,” I said. “But tell me… what was that noise I just heard?”
She raised an eyebrow and deadpanned, “That? Oh, nothing. We just had a sex session. Threesome.”
The enrolled nurse and the health care assistant burst out laughing. I gave her a look. She grinned, waving it off.
“Relax, I’m joking! Severe cervical spondylosis with temporary paralysis. Patient can’t turn himself, so we have to help him every two hours. And every time we do, he makes those noises. Daytime, he’s quiet as a mouse. But at night? He does it on purpose. Teases us.”
“Looks like it,” I said, shaking my head. “Thank goodness they’re evacuating him back to the US tomorrow,” she sighed, though her eyes were still dancing with amusement. “If he stays any longer, I’m afraid one of our cardiac patients might collapse just from hearing all that moaning.”
The others burst out laughing. She went on, shaking her head. “It can be stressful, you know. One night of groaning, maybe we can live with it. But every night? It wears you down. You hear it in your sleep.”
I told her about the Budak Pantai boys, the trawler, and the fishing trip. She smiled knowingly.
“Ah, so they’re still around,” she said. “Maybe one day I’ll pay them a visit again.”
I left her a small bag, dried cuttlefish and keropok from Pangkor. “For the night shifts,” I said. Her eyes lit up. “Perfect. These will be gone by tomorrow morning. Night snacks never last long around here.”
She asked about my next trip to Malaysia. I told her honestly I wasn’t sure , I’d need an assignment, a reason to go.
“Then how about this,” she said, her eyes bright. “We go backpacking. Start from Penang and work our way down south. No coaches, no luxury buses. Only local buses. Cheaper, and better we’ll meet the kampong folks, the paddy-field people. Bus to bus, town to town. We leave by JB causeway, back via Pengerang and boat back to Singapore Changi Village"
The idea hung in the air like a dare.“Sounds interesting,” I admitted. She had tempted me. The thought of kampong roads, of green fields swaying in the wind, stirred something in me a scene straight out of Shahnon Ahmad’s novels.
I could almost hear his words in the rhythm of the land. “I’ll look into my schedule,” I promised her, “and get back to you.”
I decided to take the bus home. A long journey, yes but I needed the distance, the hum of the road, to clear my thoughts. Mom had told me about Sharil’s visit. She wanted me to reconsider his proposal. She was so forgiving, after everything after all the embarrassment he had put us through.
I wasn’t ready to forgive, not yet. But I also didn’t want to wound my parents or his mother. Their intentions were good, I knew that. Still, unmarried at thirty plus by Malay standards, I was already branded an “old maid.”
No family wants an old maid in their family. There had been other proposals after Sharil’s disappearance. I rejected them all. But once, to please my father, I agreed to meet his close friend’s elder son. Apparently, he was “very interested” in me.
The evening turned into a disaster. We argued. How could I agree with a man who declared that women had no business pursuing higher education? That a woman’s place was in the kitchen, making babies, his words. His smug talk of “the perfect wife” made my skin crawl. I couldn’t believe the arrogance, the smallness of it.
Then there were the old family friends from kampung childhood playmates. We used to play hide-and-seek and bola hantam together, so I thought, maybe this one will be okay. We went out once for a show. That was enough. He turned out to be overprotective and worse, he never stopped talking. He called me at home three times a day. For what? To talk. Endlessly. What he ate for dinner, what time he was going to bed, even the smallest details. Why on earth would I want to know all that?
Eventually, I developed my own strategy: I parked my bicycle right at the front door. As soon as the phone rang, I’d grab it and pedal away before anyone could hand me the receiver. It ended, of course, with a quarrel. He wanted to know why I was avoiding him, why I spent so much time in the library instead of being with him. He even complained to my parents that I was “difficult.”
I told them the truth: he simply talked too much. I had never met a man who drained me just by moving his lips.
Then there was the male registered nurse at SGH. ICU-trained, single. I thought, maybe this one will be okay. At least we’re in the same line.We went out for a show once. But the whole time he walked so fast I was always trailing three to five meters behind. I walk quickly too, but honestly we were supposed to be dating, off duty. Why couldn’t he slow down, walk beside me?
One evening, after yet another show, he did the same. He strode ahead, completely absorbed in himself. I don’t think he even noticed when I quietly took a detour, slipped away, and caught a bus home on my own.
We crossed paths again in the hospital the next day. I tried to explain, but he didn’t see the problem. To him, it was “normal.” So I told him, “Look, you’re a nice guy. The problem is me.” And just like that, my dating experiments with male nurses came to an end.
Eventually, my parents and relatives stopped trying to find me a husband. Proposal after proposal had failed, and I think they finally grew tired of pushing.
I never spoke about Suresh. Not once. Somehow, my parents seemed almost in denial as if refusing to acknowledge that their daughter was spending so much time with someone who was neither Malay nor Muslim. They dared not ask how serious the friendship was, and I dared not tell. So Suresh’s name became a silence between us. An unspoken presence. Off-topic, always.
So when Sharil re-emerged after more than four years full of apologies my parents gave in almost instantly. And I grew even angrier. Not only at them, but at him too, for knowing exactly where their weakness lay, and using it to reach me.
To please them, I agreed to meet him for dinner on Monday. Maybe my mother is right when she says, “You still have feelings for him.” Maybe I do. Who can truly forget a first love? They are the treasured part of our lives, the permanent mark on our consciousness we can never fully erase. I would be deceiving myself if I claimed there was never a moment I stopped thinking about him despite all the pain, all the disappointment.
Somewhere, buried deep, a soft spot still remained.
It’s been almost four years now. Time flies. Between my work and my classes, the days blurred together, and somehow I didn’t feel the years slip past. I pulled out Suresh’s latest letters from the bag and began reading them again for the fourth time. When I returned from Pangkor, three had been waiting on my desk. Inside were photos of him with his friends, standing on the platform with Niagara Falls thundering in the background.
These letters had become my constant companions. One after another, week by week, carefully numbered, each one carrying his humor, his warmth, his stubborn way of making me laugh even from halfway across the world.
I kept them in a medium-sized box I had bought from the Singapore Post my treasure chest. They were my most precious belongings, guarded with care.
In my loneliest moments, I would open the box, run my fingers over the envelopes, and remember: I was not alone.
Now he writes that he will be graduating soon. He wants to come home. Back to Singapore. Back for good.
