I Remember the Hibiscus Tree

Title: I Remember the Hibiscus Tree

A mother-daughter story set in Singapore, with love, sacrifice, and a twist at the end

Chapter 1: The Flat in Jurong

I remember the hibiscus tree.

It grew stubbornly outside our old HDB flat in Jurong West—right next to the corridor railing, its roots stretching under the concrete cracks. Amma used to water it every morning with leftover rice water. "For strength," she said, "Hibiscus doesn’t bloom unless it struggles."

It was her favourite flower. Bright, unapologetic, fiercely red.

Like her.

Amma—Saroja—wasn't the warm, storytelling kind of mother. She was the kind who fed you before feeding herself, scolded you for your late nights, and hid laddus in old pickle jars during Deepavali because she didn’t trust the neighbour’s kids. She married young—fifteen—and moved to Singapore in 1965 with a man twenty years older. Appa was quiet, practical, and completely devoted to his family in India. Not us.

She was widowed at 32, with three children—two boys and me, the youngest. I was eight. And I watched Amma transform overnight. From someone who folded laundry with the radio humming in the background to someone who barely slept.

Her life was survival. She worked in a canteen at a nearby school, took ironing from neighbours, and sold dosa batter on weekends.

I was too young to understand her sacrifices. All I saw was her absence. And by the time I was old enough to understand, resentment had taken root like that hibiscus tree.

Chapter 2: The Daughter Who Stayed

My brothers left early. The eldest got married to a woman Amma never approved of. The second divorced quietly and moved to another house nearby with his son with weekly visits.

I stayed.

Not by accident.

I stayed because I saw what she built, what she became. And I began to understand the cost of everything she gave us.

She never bought anything for herself. But she bought us education, kept the house, built a savings fund, and even bought insurance plans. "Just in case," she used to say, clutching those Great Eastern envelopes like they were gold.

We were strangers until I was 25. And then one night, I found her quietly crying over her CPF statement, squinting at the numbers under a fluorescent tube light.

"Why are you crying, Ma?"

She looked up, startled, and then said softly, "I don’t want to leave you with nothing."

I sat down beside her. That was the first time we talked—really talked.

From then on, I became her shadow. Her daughter. Her nurse. Her mother.

Chapter 3: The Fading Light

At 80, Amma’s health began slipping through my fingers.

Liver cirrhosis. Left heart failure. Failing kidneys. Every month, we made the same trip to Ng Teng Fong Hospital. Every admission, she came back weaker, smaller.

But her mind remained sharp.

She still nagged the nurses to give me Milo. Still refused to let anyone else handle her bank passbook. Still told me to "buy gold, not handbags."

I watched her fade in slow motion.

At home, I bathed her. Fed her. Read to her. We watched Sun TV serials together, her head resting on my lap, her fingers wrapped around mine. I gave up marriage. Not because I had to. But because no love could feel as urgent as hers did.

I began to forget what my own life looked like without her.

I didn’t mind.

But I feared the end.

Chapter 4: Her Last Gift

One morning, Amma asked me to bring her an old red tin box from her cupboard.

"This one?"

She nodded, eyes half-shut.

"Don’t open it till I’m gone. Promise."

I frowned. "Amma, don’t talk like that."

"Promise."

I nodded.

Later that night, she began gasping.

I called the ambulance.

At Ng Teng Fong, the doctors stabilized her. She was admitted to HDU.

The machines beeped. The oxygen mask hissed. But she was alive. Fighting. Still here.

I sat at her bedside, the red box untouched, and whispered, “Not yet, Amma. I’m not ready yet.”

Chapter 5: The Twist

While she slept, I opened the box.

Inside, I found letters.

Not to me. But from me.

Every note I had ever written as a child, folded neatly.

A picture I drew in Primary 2: me holding her hand, standing beside the hibiscus tree.

A dried flower. A faded birthday card. One strand of my hair from my first haircut.

And beneath it all, a sealed envelope addressed in her handwriting:

"To my daughter. My only one."

The letter inside was short. But what it said will echo in me for the rest of my life.

“You were not born to me. But you became mine.

You were just a baby when I took you in—your real mother, my cousin, died in labour. She begged me with her last breath. No one else knew. Your brothers were too young. Your father agreed, but he never accepted it. That’s why he never kept anything for us.

I kept the truth from you not because I was ashamed, but because I didn’t want you to ever feel ‘less than’. You were my daughter in every way that mattered. More than any bloodline could explain.

If I did anything right in my life, it was raising you.”

I sat there, frozen.

The woman I called mother was not the one who birthed me. But she was the one who stayed. Who fought. Who gave. Who became.

And now it made sense—why she was always hardest on me. Why she feared not leaving me with enough! Why she kept everything I had ever touched.

She loved me harder because I wasn’t hers by blood.

But I was hers by choice.

Chapter 6: The Bloom

A week later, Amma opened her eyes slowly.

She was still in the hospital. But stronger.

“Did you open it?” she asked faintly.

I nodded. I couldn’t speak. I only held her hand and kissed it.

“You were always mine,” she said. “Always.”

The hibiscus tree outside our flat was in full bloom when I returned home that night.

I watered it with leftover rice water, like she used to.

Then I lit the lamp.

She was still here. Still fighting. And I still had time.

Time to show her everything she had given me.

Time to love her back.

And in that memory—in this present—she lives on.

Forever Amma. Forever mine.