"This was taken when I was one. And this was the one and only birthday I celebrated with my mum,"she said.
Suri (not her real name), 20, was just 16 months old when her adoptive mother was killed in a brutal stabbing.
Madam Bibi Noor Jahan, was 32 when she was attacked and stabbed 26 times, including fatal wounds to her neck.
To the family's horror, the killer turned out to be one of them - he was Madam Bibi's brother-in-law, Teo Vincent alias Abdul Aziz Abdullah, 61.
But the truth took years to come to light. The killing took place in 1992, but Teo was arrested only at the end of 2009.
To Suri, learning the identity of her mother's killer in April last year was merely a piece in the puzzle of her life. Up to that day, she had also been in the dark about her own identity as an adopted child.
Her life was a tightly spun web of what Madam Bibi's sister termed "protective cover-ups".
Fear of revenge
The sister requested that she and her niece not be named as she feared that Teo might take revenge when he gets out of jail. He was jailed 10 years for manslaughteronMay13.
Said Suri's aunt: "If you love someone, you want to protect the person. Suri was very vulnerable."
On Thursday, in a flat in the west where she lives with her aunt, Suri spoke to The New Paper on Sunday about her life since her mother's death.
She was too young to recall the bloody assault in her home then, a Bukit Batok flat, but family members said she could have suffocated to death.
Suri was told she was found sandwiched between the mattress and bed frame, with a towel wrapped around her head and neck.
She said: "(My family members) said if I had arrived at the hospital five minutes later, I could have died."
After Madam Bibi's death, she was taken in by her aunt, whom she calls "mummy". Her cousins - two girls and a boy - were her "sisters" and "brother".
When Suri's curiosity led her to ask why she was fairer than her "sisters", the answer was: "Because you drank more milk as a baby."
Her aunt said: "I treated Suri as though she were my own. In fact, I gave her more attention because of what had happened."
When Suri was in primary school, her aunt told her that her mother had "passed away" from illness when Suri was a baby and that her father was Mr Ja'afar Sulaiman, 52, a crane operator.
But Suri continued to live with her aunt as her father had remarried within a year or so of Madam Bibi's death.
He has three sons, aged 17, 16, and seven, with his current wife and did not tell Suri anything about her mother's death.
But as fate would have it, when she was 13, Suri chanced upon an old newspaper clipping while cleaning the flat. It was a report about her mother's killing.
Psychologists say the impact of such traumatic discoveries varies, depending on the person's involvement and personality.
Said Suri: "I thought such things only happened in television dramas. I never imagined something like that would happen to me. It was a big bomb."
She recalled being very emotional and sad, and could not understand why anyone would do such a thing to her mother.
While she hardly knew her mother, she had been told by her aunt that Madam Bibi was a "loveable, generous and timid" person who had no enemies.
Suri said she got over that emotional hurdle by focusing on her "loving family" who had been behind her all the way.
In 2007, she nearly found out that she was an adopted child when she asked her father for money to pay for her studies at an ITE.
By that time, Suri and Mr Ja'afar were already partly estranged, although he gave her about $200 every month.
She said: "I was sad that my father never wanted to see me. He never wished me happy birthday, and his sons had so much more than me, his first child."
She has seen him fewer than 10 times in her life, she said.
When she went to him for help to pay for her ITE studies, he angrily turned her down.
She said: "He chased me out and as he did so, he kept screaming, 'You are not my daughter. I am not your father.'"
Although the words stung, she did not take them literally. So the truth eluded her for a while longer.
By the end of that year, he stopped giving her money altogether, she said.
Then came the call from the police in April last year informing the family that a suspect had been arrested over her mother's death.
That was when her aunt decided it was time for Suri to learn the truth about herself.
When Suri found out that she was adopted, her heart broke.
"I cried so much, I think I could have flooded an entire estate. It was as though the television drama of my life had now won an award," she said.
She was shocked, then angry that the truth had been kept from her.
"But then I thought about it and understood why it had to be done. These were people who had raised me, who were there for me and who have always loved me.
"Whether or not I was adopted wasn't important anymore. In fact, the word 'adopted' was never said to me. I'm part of this family. I'm in all the family pictures and my birthday is celebrated every year," Suri added.
She recognised that in trying to shield her from the truth, her aunt and cousins were the ones living in fear.
Said the aunt: "All those years, the case was not solved. We didn't know who or where the killer was. We were so afraid that he might try to attack Suri."
Although the killer is now behind bars, the family still has unanswered questions.
They want to know why Teo, who barely knew Madam Bibi, would commit such a heinous act?
And why did Madam Bibi, a timid person, let a man she was unfamiliar with into her home, especially when even family members had to call ahead before being allowed in?
In court last Friday, Teo had said he decided to kill Madam Bibi because he saw her as the cause of their mother-in-law's incessant complaints, crying and mumbling.
For Suri, there are many unknowns too. She wished she knew her adoptive mother better. So her aunt filled in those blanks for her.
She was told her mother was fashion-conscious and was very good with styling hair and applying make-up for others.
Pointing to the photograph taken at Suri's first birthday, the aunt said: "She was also a great baker.
She loved you and baked that cake for you."
Suri also found out that Madam Bibi could not conceive despite trying with Mr Ja'afar for eight years.
She said: "So when I came along, she really wanted me. Today, I'm glad to be alive.
"And no matter what has happened, I'm thankful that I'm in this family because with them, I've never felt alone."
 |
| Vincent Teo (left), lias Abdul Aziz Abdullah, was convicted of killing his sister-in-law Madam Bibi Noor Jahan, in 1992. |
 |
| The 32-year-old housewife was killed after being stabbed 26 times in 1992. The case was unsolved at that time. |
 |
| Teo admitted to repeatedly stabbing Madam Bibi Noor Jahan with a knife in her Bukit Batok flat on June 25, 1992. |
This article was first published in The New Paper.
