Mending Lies

Winnie Teo had spent the last five years shopping for clothes she disliked. Each time she complained to her neighbour, friend and part-time seamstress Pushpa Rajasamy, she would tell of how each cheongsam had inevitably met with its disastrous end. Pushpa would tell Winnie she knew no other woman who looked as miserable when she got a chance to go shopping for new clothes.

There was the elegant maroon outfit that reached just below her knees that had suffered an untimely death from a rip all down one side. It had been afflicted, she told Pushpa, when a male customer at the Peony Pavilion — or "The PP" as she called it, according to the national style of abbreviating everything — had grabbed on to its hem and tried to shove his hand underneath her dress. She pushed, he fell, the whole thing ripped off its seam so that it was beyond repair. The next night he came back and asked for her, she had to continue serving him, her boss had commanded “without giving any more trouble”.

Another night, Winnie had become the subject of a fight between two thugs who had decided to bet on something else besides their usual soccer game: getting Winnie to remove her dress in their private dining room. Winnie pushed her way out of the room, but caused the scrawny one to misplace a kick aimed at her to the belly of his friend, and punches ensued. Winnie was, as her boss told her later, very lucky to get away with just a bruised thigh, broken jaw and only a few days in hospital. That and irremovable bloodstains all down the front of her white-and-yellow cheongsam.

Pushpa had tried to mend both dresses on those nights, just as she had tried with all the other casualties Winnie brought by.

Sometimes they survived, but mostly they did not. Pushpa always worried about her friend, and could always be counted on for the sympathetic cluck and dramatic head shake, but she knew sometimes the best balm was a lie.

“I think this one can fix, lah. I have some strong thread.”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. Just put some Fab powder on and let it soak overnight. Wash a bit, sure come off.”
“I have some cloth that can match this material colour. Only thing it’s linen. Never mind, we try.”

Many times, it was the threadbare promise of a try that saved Winnie from her life. She knew the dresses were never going to leave Pushpa’s nearly overflowing sink cabinet, which was where she had discovered them in neatly bound stacks when she had tried to locate some dishwashing liquid. She never told Pushpa she knew where they were buried. She never opened the cabinet again.

“Ai-yooh kadevallei! Winnie ah, I tell you truthfully seriously lah, I never met a woman who get so miserable so soon after buying new clothes,” Pushpa said most recently, tying her sari around her wide waist as the typical opening to her it's-not-looking-so-good speech.

“So many times already I suggest to you to get a job with a uniform. Those you can just clock in and clock out, do your work, go home. What’s wrong with working in a factory or a small office? You are still young! Only 35 years old. Can learn new skills. I know the pay is good at this PP palace place. But money isn’t everything. Look at me, I work in the hospital, it’s not as violent. I don't suffer so much.”

This time, Winnie held up a two-week-old emerald green garment in one hand, its collar in the other — the latest victim of another night at the PP. “So how, what do you think? Can fix?”

As the brocade got stripped off by a customer whose feet Winnie refused to massage, her neck had very nearly followed. She pushed his foot away from her face when he held it up. He tried to strangle her. She choked and threw up on his dinner jacket, he slapped. But she had been lucky he let go of her neck.

“You can tell me if it’s not possible, Push,” Winnie had said hopefully.
“Next time better you don’t buy such expensive dresses lah. Wasting money only.”
“I have to look nice for the PP guests.”
“Maybe this one I can stitch some binding on first to strengthen the material.”

Winnie left to get ready to go shopping.