My father was diagnosed with cancer.

After the modern medicine failed, and the experimental drugs, and the Chinese herbs, we went googling, my brothers and I. We burned up the virtual engine, searching for the alternative cure. You name them, we tried them. We pumped Dad full of distilled water with silver molecules floating in them. Zapped him with low volt electricity to fry them bad parasitic cells. Practically force-fed him sixty raw apricot seeds a day. (I wonder if Dad wanted to live after that.) But it worked! We weren’t sure which one! Then, after a couple of months, his PSA level went back up again. Dad lost his appetite, and he developed severe and humiliating diarrhea. I caught him crying one day.

My Mum began praying. Actually she went on a hunger strike. She didn’t eat for three days, beseeching with the Almighty for her bridegroom of almost fifty years. My Mum comes from that Christian tradition, that takes hold of deity by his lapels and shake him until one of them gives in. I, the closet romance writer, practise a more modernised and sophisticated form of religion. I camouflage and blend into our relativistic, pluralistic society with impressive ease. But I have participated in a couple of desperate religious hunger strikes in my younger days. By the third day of fasting, I knew I was going to meet my Maker a lot sooner than I’d intended—unless I ate. I was fifteen. My Mum is almost seventy.

My stress level began climbing up. I woke up in the middle of the night. Whatever I ate tasted bland. And my makeup sat on my tired skin. My husband whisked me to a coastal holiday to cheer me up. It didn’t work. I came back unhappy and constipated. I began write a romantic comedy in an effort to beat the depression. A story of a matchmaking session gone wrong between a cougar and a young hunk, partially based on my own experience, the cougar, and a slightly dysfunctional friend of mine. I thought it was a hilarious story. But no one was laughing. I got even more depressed.

Then Mum declared that she found the cure for Dad. She saw the recipe in a book—a concoction of vegetable soup, Japanese style. Oh, please! We, my brothers and I, my husband and my sister-in-law, the degree holders in Science, Theology and Business Admin—nine mostly useless degrees in total between the five of us—scolded her for her foolishness. Mum went ahead anyway amid our scoffing and rebuking. She bought herself a huge steel pot I could almost swim in, began carefully drying radish leaves with the head attached, and went searching through oriental grocery shops for diabolical looking roots with holes in them. Her house soon began smelling like cabbage soup lake, as she boiled the concoction day and night and fed her husband the horrid liquid.

I must interrupt the story here to say, my parents’ perpetual endless marriage is not the stuff of inspiration I look for in writing romantic tales. I understand most people share similar sentiments about their own parents. When my mother told me once that she actually had a quasi-boyfriend before she married Dad, I felt slightly ill. He was from an exceptional family, she said. Moreover he had a university degree—equivalent to today’s PhD from Harvard in those days, according to Mum—and he liked her. He serenaded her with harmonica, and called out her name outside her window when the dusk fell.

But she told him she couldn’t marry him because she wasn’t good enough for him or his family. (What then makes Dad, whom she married?) She came from no good family, and had no dowry. I later found out Mum didn’t even finish primary school. Her schooling was interrupted by war. Then she looked after her dying mother while her siblings, most of them older than her, went to school. Mum taught herself to read and write, and to use abacus to do math. She was so ashamed of her lack of formal education, she lied about it. Dad didn’t find out until he married her! That constitutes a major matrimonial fraud where they come from. And she forever regretted telling him.

Anyway, Mum and her former suitor parted ways. They met just once, years later after they had married other people. Mum’s best friend and her prankster husband invited Mum and her former beau to dinner in their house. They insisted that Mum come alone, and not bring her husband. Mum’s one-time suitor went as red as beetroot when she walked in through the door, Mum said, and she had a near coronary failure. She ran out of the house on bare feet. That was the last time she saw the man.

I didn’t ask Mum how she met Dad. I didn’t want to know. She told me anyway. I felt even less inspired and a little queasier afterwards. They met through family-arranged matchmaking. Dad was an airforce officer, who was awkward with women and beyond redemption in the romance department. A genetic deficiency I later discovered, that afflicts the males in the family line. Dad proposed to Mum. (I honestly feel scarred for life, remembering the corny lines Mum recounted for me.) She told him no. Dad was devastated, Mum said, and she felt worried for him. So she stalked him all day. He hopped on a bus, any bus, then hopped out somewhere, anywhere. He wandered down several streets, then stopped, and leant against a street lamp. Mum felt sorry for him, she appeared to him and told him she would marry him, so please go home.

Now, this is not the kind of report a romance writer needs for his or her inspiration. In fact, I must work hard to erase a story such as this from my subconscious mind if I’m going to seriously pursue my aspiration.

Now back to the Japanese vegetable soup.

Dad obediently drank Mum’s concoction day and night. Then to our cautious shock, after a month he began to get better. Now, two months on Dad eats better, looks stronger, talks louder. He can now walk around the block unaided. Soon my brothers began swallowing the concoction—and eating their own words. They are determined to annihilate any genes they might have inherited, that would predispose them to prostate cancer. I tell Mum to get a blood test for Dad, find out his PSA level, make sure this is not a passing phase or an illusion. She says yes, but they still haven’t done it. I suspect they don’t want to know.

The bamboo baskets full of wilting radish leaves, and the giant pot simmering away in the kitchen, have become permanent fixtures in my parents’ house. We now scold Mum for telling everyone who would listen, that she found the cure for cancer. And I watch Dad, afraid he will start collapsing again. And I ache for Mum, who refuses to let him go.

Some people call my parents lovebirds. I tell them they are of the cockatoo variety, big, loud and noisy—the kind that drive you nuts early in the morning with their squawking. But I’ve watched Mum wash Dad’s soiled sheets and underwear. And she will go on boiling the vegetables—forever if she has to, to keep her husband by her side.

I know I can’t sell this story. The market for romance genre is rather thin for the non-hero and non-heroine. But more importantly, I know I am not big enough to write a story such as this.