Aunty's Back!
When my classmate's auntie died during labour, he accompanied his parents to Malacca to attend the funeral. His uncle was very sad, and the newborn baby had to be taken care of by the grandmother. It was my classmate's first funeral, and he was very curious as to the meaning of the rituals. There was a bomoh in the midst of the crowd. He conducted the ceremony. He scribbled some Quranic symbols on her finger nails and mumbled prayers over the dead body. When my classmate asked his father why this was necessary, he kept silent and shook his head. The whole affair was extremely mysterious.
Later, after the ceremony, everybody mingled and went on with their conversations. My classmate and his cousins were examining the corpse. A typical child whose hands loved fiddling with forbidden objects, he picked up one of his auntie's fingers and boasted that he didn't believe in such superstitious magic. He dared the other children to clean off the Quranic verses.
His cousins looked at him with admiration. Encouraged by the whispers of "ooh" and "ahh", my classmate went ahead to scrub away the ink on the nail. Once the mischief was done, a guilty conscience gripped the group all of a sudden. Everyone dispersed without a word. There was a sense of having committed some horrible wrong. An uncomfortable feeling weighed on all of them, till it was time to go home. My classmate heaved a sigh of relief when he got safely back.
But things did not end there. About two weeks later, he heard the news that his uncle had killed his child and was under police custody. The authorities were giving him a psychiatric examination to determine his sanity. Apparently, this was what had happened.
The uncle kept rambling about his wife coming back to visit him. One evening, while he was in the sitting room, he heard harsh, shrill laughter coming from the bedroom. He looked in and saw his dead wife squatting on top of the dresser. In her arms was their baby... and it had been bitten to death!
His mother had discovered him staring out of the window in shock, talking nonsense, his hands holding the dead baby. He kept repeating that his wife had devoured his child, his wife had devoured his child... She was sure her daughter in law had turned into a vampire.
She confronted the bomoh, who insisted that he had completed all the essential rites. He had professional pride, and liked his job well done. And the police, not knowing what really happened, classified the case as accidential death. According to them, the baby was bitten to death by rats.
When
my classmate heard about it, he was awfully frightened. If only he had
not been so full of mischief! But what was done could not be undone. He
has to live with the tragedy plaguing his conscience for the rest of his
life.