Diff'rent Strokes

I wrote this a few months ago during the monsoon, so don't send me indignant notes about how hot it is right now!

As I write this, it feels like it’s winter. In the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda, we sleep with the windows closed, the air-con off, and under big blankets. In the mornings, I slip on a sweater whilst the girls walk around enveloped by wool shawls.

            “It’s freezing here!” Saffy told her sister on FaceTime.

            Margot squinted at a corner of her screen. “Siri says its 24 degrees right now in Singapore. How is that freezing?”

            Saffy sniffed. “I know in London, 24 degrees qualifies as a heat wave? But I’m not kidding, I have goosebumps!”

            “My God, you’ve turned into such a lightweight ever since you moved to Singapore!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Ooh, that reminds me about those cashmere gloves you gave me last Christmas. Now’s a good time to wear them!”

             Of course, the air-con in the MRT and buildings are all still set at sub-arctic temperatures which as far as Amanda is concerned, means she might as well break out her fur-lined Fendi coat that’s been sitting at the back of her closet for years. The other day, she showed up at her Monday morning office meeting looking like an extra from ‘Fargo’.

            “Wah, she so ai-sui, hor?” Sharyn said with the kind of admiration she normally reserves for an episode of ‘Downton Abbey’. “When cold, I wear Uniqlo sweater. When Amanda cold, she wear Fendi! Champion, lah, that girl!”

            The cold weather has had other unexpected consequences. Over the weekend, the guy Amanda has been casually dating texted her.

            Amanda gasped at her phone. “Oh my God! Mun Wah’s had a stroke!”

            Saffy looked up from her latest copy of 8DAYS and stared hard at Amanda. “Is this the same Mun Wah who said he had bird flu?”

            Amanda paused. “Yes. Why?”

            “And it turned out he had an allergy?”

            “Uhm, yes. But that’s not the same as…”

            “And did he also not come down with dengue, which turned out to be a muscle sprain from a gym workout?” Saffy pressed on.

            “Uhm…”

            “And now, he’s had a stroke?”

            Amanda sighed. She still looked worried. “So, ok. He’s a bit of a hypochondriac, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had a stroke! He says he’s in a cab on his way to the hospital!” she read from her phone.
            “He had a stroke, but somehow he managed to get himself into a cab, give comprehensible instructions to the cab driver, and he can still text coherently?” Saffy’s voice was icy. “What kind of a stroke is that?”

            At the very moment, Amanda’s phone pinged with a message. She tapped the screen and read: “’I think it’s this sudden cold weather that’s caused it!’ I better go to the hospital and see him!”

            The minute Amanda rushed out the front door, Saffy picked up her phone to call me to complain, not for the first time, that it amazes her that Harvard had ever given Amanda a degree.

            “I’m no doctor, but even I can tell that’s not how a stroke patient behaves!” she stressed.

            As it turns out, the doctors are pretty sure Mun Wah didn’t have a stroke though the results from the lab tests of what he actually did get aren’t back yet. That didn’t stop Amanda from inviting him back to our place for dinner. “The doctor said we should monitor his condition!”

            “Singaporean doctors are such quacks!” he pronounced over a dinner of char kwai teow and prawn noodles that Sharyn had da bao’d from Old Airport Road. “Look at the severe droop on my face! And the whole left side of my body is tingling! If those aren’t signs of stroke, I don’t know what is!”

            “What got droop?” Sharyn piped up. Mun Wah pointed to the precise location. “Aiyoh, that is old skin, lah! You fee-ty fie year old orredi, of course skin got droop, mah! If you get collagen injection, confirm ok again, one!”

            Mun Wah looked a bit put out by this unexpected bout of honest unvarnished medical opinion from an accountant. “And what about the tingling in my body?”

            “Ay, friend! These day is twenty-two degree and you on-nee wear tin tee-shirt, of course got tingle, what! You are cold! And you tink you got stroke you can sit here and eat char kway teow, issit? My mudder-in-law ever got stroke, must feed her through a straw, ah, I tell you!”

            The next day, Mun Wah announced on Facebook he had cholera, “probably from last night’s char kway teow”.