Get There
I was told this story at a young age: “Life is a gamble, son. But don’t you ever give up. Keep at it, you’ll get there someday.”
That was one of those cliché adages often spoken, but it was the beginning of my youthful entrepreneurial journey. One of my earliest memories was of laying on a yellow sponge mattress on the floor of my bedroom, disembodied song and vapour drifting to me from the cold winter air below the street. Through the sliver of yellow light cutting a strip through the room I spied my mother sitting on the toilet, counting and straightening her handful of crumpled bills, my father staring with shining, hungry eyes. Soon the world fell away and the stars turned and turned dizzily above us.
When I turned twenty-eight, I lived my father’s dream. I took out a big loan with full intention of making this my last hurrah. Thus began my wild plunge into the energy business, specifically coke and coal, though if you wanted more details, I could not provide them. I had invested here and there, bought some stocks in the energy enterprises, then the prices rose and burst into big money, that sweet black gold, so much that you knew the government was plucking their hair out about the bombshell of the whole thing. This twenty-eighth year was a hazy whirlwind that dragged me into it and tossed me about, and when it vomited me out, I had in my savings bank a small fortune of fifteen million dollars.
I didn’t know what to do. So I sat on the toilet in my dingy apartment and counted bills till my hands grew numb and my saliva ran dry, wondering if anything had changed at all between then and now, or if anything will change between these fifteen million dollars and the next. I didn’t know how to spend it or save it or multiply it– I had never been taught.
“You’re rich now,” my friend said, pushing down three mahjong tiles– two, three, four dots. “Richer than me, pal.”
“Say, the inflation…”
“The inflation won’t be a problem as long as you earn more than you lose.”
“I’m thinking of transferring my hukou to Shenzhen,” I said suddenly, throwing down a tile. “And a new house and car. What do you think?”
“Try Shanxi instead,” he said after some time. “Oh, look, I win.”
I decided against asking him why.
“Another game?” I pushed down my own tiles with a dejected clack.
“Nah, I’ve got to go. There’s work tomorrow.”
After he had left, the house was again dark. I left the mahjong tiles on the table that took up half the living room, and squeezed my way to the balcony, lighting a cigarette. Work, I thought with an inexplicable self-pity. What a wonder it would be, to work.
Even with my entrepreneurial spirit, I struggled for a doubling or tripling of my existing fortune, slowly settling into the realisation that it was much easier to lose money than to earn it, and that in my lifetime it was unlikely that I would ever come across a stroke of luck quite like that of my twenty-eighth summer. Even with all my frugality and cultivated feelings of financial insecurity, I had lost a total of ten million dollars out of my fifteen million to failed investments.
It seemed that everyone was in a fervour to get to Shanghai these days, so I claimed my success by the merit of being contrarian, turning my telescope to the smog-ridden alternative: Beijing. You’ll get there someday, my father had said. Only now do I understand the meaning behind his words—there meant Beijing, and though he was well-meaning, my last remaining memory of him was soured.
I went.
“Pal, look,” My friend slapped the paper on the table, nicotine-stained fingers tumbling a cigarette and gold lighter out of his pocket. “The lousy bastards are building an airport here.”
I flattened the paper out on my thigh. The construction of a new Beijing airport had been planned at a flat slice of orchards on the outskirts, gearing to start at the beginning of next year.
“Is there anything I should do?”
That seemed to be the question I was always asking nowadays.
“God, I wish I could be as free as you,” he said. “Why did you have to move to Beijing? You could have settled down in the countryside. There’s enough in your bank to last a few decades more like that.”
“Why did you move to Beijing?” I retorted.
We ordered another round of coffee and sipped it in silence.
“My advice? Buy some land,” he said and that was all for our conversation, encapsulated in a few fragments and moments, but it was enough to light a spark in me.
Land turned out to be buying a hundred thousand acres of orchard with the five million I had left. I had a house built, lay down in my bed and prepared myself for the incoming wait.
Summer, then fall, passed in a languorous haze. The days consisted of me putting my foot up to watch the news, raking the garden occasionally, watching the sky when it was clearer and imagining the faraway roaring of a jet engine flying above. The orchard’s leaves fell in green and orange and finally shrivelled black. I’d put my hands on my hips and stroll through the endless miles of land, imagining myself as its most benevolent owner, conjuring up the thought of straw-hatted men and women raking the fields. By the time the next year rolled around, all mention of this airport had faded from the news—the land was dead. Still I waited. All good things take time—that was a new quote of mine, to be passed on to imaginary descendents of a one-man bloodline.
The years went on, and my savings could not hold out forever. This would work, I thought to myself, but all I could see was the wait and not the destination. Even after the third winter I spent at this orchard, the airport was not constructed. No officials approached my door to buy the land from my willing hands – perhaps knowing that if they did, I’d have sold it for fifty million, not one dollar less. I sold my apartment in Beijing and moved to the orchard in some sort of stubborn-willed rebelliousness and prepubescent resentment: I had taken the gamble of life, and I had not given up, yet my future was neither here nor there.
My friend came to visit again another year later. “You ain’t doing so well, pal,” he said in the half-chiding, half-joking manner we reserved for serious conversation.
“I’m down in the dumps, but I’ll get myself out of it,” I told him. “You’ll see. When the airport is built next year—”
“Well, it’s never going to be built, huh.” He tapped his well-oiled leather shoes on the floor impatiently. “Either do something about it, or say you want to do nothing at all. What’re you stalling for? You’ve sold your house, haven’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You better do something about it, pal, or you’ll be out in the streets in no time.”
The streets. God, the streets. For some reason it was the thought of those cold, scratchy stones and blue fingernails that brought out a shudder in me. The realisation of it hung over me like the Sword of Damocles, impossible to dispel. In every direction I looked I could see the extent of my failure: miles and miles of the wizened skeletons of trees, dry hard land covered in sheets of ice.
Two months later, after the ice had melted, I began to, in his words, ‘do something about it’. Bank loans and tractors and farmers and seeds, with a little agricultural ingenuity that was taught to me by my peasant father, the same ingenuity that I had grown to resent as a child. The land would not grow green again in a day or a year, but it was all I had left and I began to cultivate it as if it were my own.
In the fifty-sixth spring of my life, I finally, fully realised what my father meant, when I earned by hand my first half a million dollars. That day, I opened the door of my home, looked outside, and strolled down the line of irrigation channels, and with the winding song of birds in my ear, began to smile. The saplings of the orchard—pear and persimmon and apple—led my eyes into the distance where the gold sun was just beginning to rise, laying light over endless acres of green, green, green.
9th October, 2022
Roses
I ask the children this every year, when I bring them out to see the palaces: Where do roses bloom?
Roses bloom where the soil is red, where the land has been watered. We have one such piece of land here, a long thick line of spotty dark soil that separates the royal palace and our towns, parallel to the mine shafts criss-crossing underground, baked into a reddish-brown crust by the angry burning deity up above.
Roses bloom on well-trodden, well-ploughed ground. This piece of land too, had been gouged and ploughed, first with arrows and then with swords, looking pockmarked like the pox that routinely plague the children in our schools.
I tell them that there once ruled a tyrant that stayed in his great white palace.
The King was a murderer. For that, he must die. And only with his execution, will debts be repaid.
The King’s rule offered no room for politics, no room for negotiation. We serenaded him with the shrill singing of scythes and pickaxes, and we took him down.
First to go were the rich bourgeoisie, the gluttons who took our food and monopolised it for themselves. And they saw us coming— how could they not? They knew the King could not protect them. Ah, yes. They tried to flee. Alas, they were fat and swollen with suckling babes. We came to them at the border, and they all fell in a jumble of jewels.
Second to go were the commanders. The King’s Hounds, we called them.
Their longswords used to be our pots— melted down and reshaped. Outside the camp were bodies laid out like julienned carrots and chicken bone- muddled tresses and shrivelled breasts, the spoils of war. At the break of dawn, we stormed their tents, while the commanders were still muddled with spirits- and we gutted them and bled them like pigs.
Last to go were the fake prophets. They sang naught a hymn as they saw our approach, nor did they brandish their crosses at us. They went quietly. I saw their great forlorn sadness as we descended, an overpowering thing- and was nearly knocked to my knees. Great irony was to be found in the places their God was not. The house of God was no silo.
***
I hold the children’s hands as we breach the border where the coal-tunnels run, and we sing the hymn of the future, skipping down the line of roses.
At this juncture, there is something I must confess to you, my dear children.
You must know why we plant roses between the towns and the palace. It is so that the thorns will keep the ambitions of greedy men at bay, so that even brushing it is like being pricked with a sewing needle, drawing blood. It has been many years since the revolution, and our roses grow thick and strong, in gales they shudder and hiss like coiling serpents. But why is it that you cut their stems and shave their spines as we go through these bushes, and expose the naked red earth? They must be so frivolous to you.
The children present a bouquet to me at the end of this field trip.
I am fond of them alright – it’s just not a comfortable sort of fondness.
27th March, 2022
Mary Jane
One Michelin star was offered the other day to Rocco Adalin, ghetto-startup chef, a 32-year old owner and chef to a powdered and weary establishment on the borders of New Mexico, which had been chugging along stubbornly since the 90s.
The news was delivered to him directly at the restaurant, through the front door to the cash machine where he took his elixir of might— gin and soda— every morning while counting bills and writing checks. He had done so religiously every day for years, so much so that everyone knew that whatever (and whoever) went into the restaurant, they went through Rocco first.
That Wednesday, Rocco was taking a smoke out back of his restaurant, when a little girl approached him, opened her cherry lips- and started talking. Rocco had startled, passed it off as some hallucination of his fatigued mind, until she started shouting. You see, Rocco was the only one who could hear her, and she looked awfully familiar indeed.
“I know you can hear me, Rocco,” the girl said, blinking her wet marbly eyes. “You look tired.”
He could. And he was quite tired. Someone was showing him concern. That was new, although not unwelcome.
“What’s your name, lassie?”
“Mary Jane.”
Rocco’s cigarette slipped from his fingers. He trembled. He knew those wet green eyes very well. He remembered the shape of their seduction. His friends and acquaintances had told him enough about her. The first time they introduced her to him, they were in an apartment. The last time, they were on the streets. A few months later, she was with another man, a married one this time. She was a player.
And Rocco was her next game.
He escaped from her by running into the kitchen. That night, he huddled under his desk in the office, shivering, unable to close his eyes without thinking of her.
Mary Jane was there the next morning, waiting for him.
“You look tired, Rocco,” she said. “Don’t you want to feel better? I can help you with that.”
He did. God help him, he did want it. He wanted lips to kiss and a warm body to lean on, someone soft in his bed and his waking moments, telling him that everything would be alright.
They’d call her filthy for such debauchery- but he had ceased to care. With her he’d be rolling in filth. And it was alright, because he’d be rolling in gold at the same time.
She stepped closer, cocked her head with bare, ripe innocence. “What’s your fantasy?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Oh, Rocco.” She giggled softly. “Everyone has one. Aren’t you curious about yours? I think it must be quite special. Don’t you want some help, darling? You want to be the big man? I’ll take care of you. Let me take care of you. Let me treat you right, give you what you deserve.”
Then she kissed him, sweet smoke coming from her throat and her lips, and he let her.
He pretended that he let her.
–
They rented a motel, and she taught him how to love.
How to make love.
They were in the tub, water sloshing past the ceramic sides, and she was naked. Somehow, he was naked too. His tummy was flabby and his hair greasy, to which she said— there’s no shame in it, Rocco. Let yourself feel it all. Open up your mind. You’ll go higher than you ever have. And trust me, it’s so good up there.
She kissed him, and she dragged him under the water, smoke bubbling past both of their lips, bringing him up, up, up-
And later in their bed he wrapped her up tight, rolled her up in the sheets, her hair splaying out, green eyes hazy— she breathed smoke into him and they began burning together.
–
Rocco Adalin, 33-years old, is the owner and chef of a deteriorating restaurant on the borders of New Mexico. Competition is heating up, and Rocco is the pig speared with an apple in its mouth, slowly roasted as his fat drips down into the fire below. He is being carved, consumed.
It’s hot in New Mexico, in the sweltering kitchens.
But Rocco shivers. He always shivers when she isn’t around.
And every day, Rocco drifts. He drifts through the rusted pots and pans. He drifts through the spluttering fires and the leaking stoves. He drifts past the newly installed microwave and hears it beep and whir as it churns. He drifts through the afternoon, through the evenings, his eyes always wandering towards the back of his restaurant… waiting.
Waiting for her twinkling laughter, and her green eyes. Waiting for the moment when he is finally awake, alive, and time starts passing again.
Waiting, for Mary Jane.
27th March, 2022
The Wait
‘I am a joyous person by nature. I love life, everything about it. You, for example– I love you very much. And I love money, I am a connoisseur of red and green bills alike, I am excellent at spending it for other people.’ This was what I told my lovely spouse of twenty years when I gave her my proposal.
‘You’ve bankrupted us!’ She howled now with terrible excitement. ‘What about our child?’
‘Tom’s playing on the porch, so lower your voice!’ I snapped. ‘Trust me, I am certain it will work. And we are not poor. We are people who have a considerable amount of capital, not a tiny sum of net worth.’
‘Oh, you…’ she whimpered and collapsed into a chair bonelessly, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief, cleaning off flyaway spittle. ‘Even now you still say this. Haven’t we been living here for years in this god forsaken field? Years, and now we still have nothing.’ An ominous moan emanated from the plastic chair underneath her and she leapt up with a start, ruffling her pilled grey skirt, kicking up concrete dust from where she was sitting.
I took the chair and began to guiltily fix more duct tape around its legs.
‘Surely it must be this year that we get our returns,’ I said helplessly. ‘They can’t hold off forever on building that airport.’
The plan was to buy land where the government would build an airport next year. Then as rites of transition went, they would purchase it from us above market price, and then we could go on our merry way.
‘But they did,’ my wife said. ‘I told you, I told you…’
‘Now it’s my fault!’ I stood, rousing her into frenzy:
‘Yes! Yes, god, yes. It is your fault that this whole thing fell through! You bought too much land. You went too far. It was— after the second year that they didn’t come— that should have been your warning.’ She whirled around, wringing her hands, a crazed wild look swirling about her, bumping into and bouncing off the peeling wallpaper as though she were a fly buzzing around the room.
‘It was enough to buy one hundred acres, more than enough. But you just had to be so clever! Said we would all be “rolling in dough…”
My stomach growled. At the same time we looked towards the kitchen. But our dining table had been auctioned off two days ago, leaving two lonely chairs. We both took our place on them, sighing heavily and abortively before I broke the silence.
‘For the record it was clever…’
‘The plan was clever, I suppose,’ she said tiredly, finding the next words on the ceiling. ‘But you grew quite dumb.’
‘Well…’
‘They didn’t come and buy the second year. So do you know what happened? I received a call at my office, and this operator, this young operator called me, saying that you had withdrawn two million dollars from our bank account.’ She grimaced as though the mere utterance of the sum physically pained her.
I was in a daze. A tense corkscrew smile was still on my face. It had the effect of giving me a supercilious, patronising appearance, which I intended as innocent appeasement. I was faintly aware of the sore under my thumbnail, my neck itching and smarting, the stickiness and discomfort of my toe through the hole in the sock…
‘Then the third year…’
‘I know what I did,’ I pleaded. ‘Not another word, please.’
‘You sold our house.’
I deflated. ‘I suppose I did. What else now?’
‘I don’t know. Guess we wait. Nothing else to do, is there?’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all this time.’
‘I’m very sick and tired of you, and I’m going to pray.’ She clasped her hands together in a sign of prayer, murmuring with such fervency that I thought she had somehow picked up the bible when I wasn’t around.
‘Pray with me, Nicholas,’ she beseeched, the harsh ugly cut of her lips trembling. ‘Pray with me. Pray that before the sun sets, they will come to the door and say— “We have decided to buy what you’re selling, the land, all five hundred acres of it…”
And I did.
When the knock at the door came I opened my eyes and the sun was slowly spinning below the horizon. My wife sprang to her feet and was there in three steps before I could stand up. She took a deep breath, straightened her blouse and her pilled grey skirt, pulled up her dotted socks, and then she set her shoulders all straight like the first time I met her.
My heart and my hands were trembling with excitement.
A few sharp raps again at the door. ‘Mommy?’
It was at this moment that Catherine whirled around, and taking measured steps, walked out the room.
27th March, 2022
A Day of Learning
“The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of understanding.” — The Kybalion, by Three Initiates
The ringing of the alarm brought me into wakefulness. The clouds were drooping low outside, sky darker than a moist sponge. Emerging from my blankets brought me an utterly freezing feeling of remorse, and I supposed this was the revival of my consciousness past the death of sleep, and the beginning of my morning.
I found that I could wholly claim it to be my morning, upon emerging into the solitary kitchen with its wooden dining table lit by pale chalky light. My mother was out on the couch.
This was where I’d pull out my phone to check the messages, alas my heart sank as I remembered — it was still at the repair shop.
Howling wind was beginning to pick up as the car turned out of its driveway. The ashen condominium towers of yesterday’s memories shrank and shrank till they were devoured by buildings and the haze of rain. Soon we — my uncle and I — were picking up speed up the expressway.
He was uncharacteristically quiet this morning, and where he would be making some comment about the ERP or asking for my dismissal timings it was all silence and the sound of rain kissing the window with its wet smack-smack-smack. I followed the water droplets down with my fingers till they gathered speed, rolling down the glass and away from view.
The fabric of my skirt was as cold and smooth as ice, and the plastic puffs of the air conditioner put me to sleep.
Thirty minutes later I was walking down the wide, open corridor, something like a floating veranda overlooking the trees and the study tables. The sparrows were chirping and flying all about and playing in the puddles below. I put my hand on the wet frosted glass, then I was in the classroom, and the ritual was complete.
Xingye was at the desk behind me. We looked at each other curiously, as though examining a specimen of interest — I was waiting on his words, and he was waiting on mine — it should have been odd because he was usually a loud person, but on this day I felt perfectly aligned with a quiet corner of the universe, there was not a single thing that could disturb me.
The Greeting Slice was a horizontal slice carved out between two sets of open walkways, with gardens and grass running beneath it. I thought I’d be faced with disappointment that day, but the sun arrived, albeit a little unpunctual, giving its usual greeting, illuminating a sunny stripe between the two walkways.
Ashley entered with a morning greeting, her voice a foghorn — ‘Morning, everyone.’ — and the white room was suddenly awash with colour.
The stripe of sun cascaded down on my fingers through the glass door, and I could hold its warmth in my palms.
This was the first voice I had heard all morning, and an absurd suspicion stirred in me — that all the events preceding this had been carefully orchestrated and set in motion by some sleepy mysterious being, blanketing the world with its silence.
‘Good morning,’ I replied, testing out my tongue, hardly believing myself capable of speech.
But before I could continue the teacher had stepped in.
During break time, the thought was forgotten between mouthfuls of waffle. We moved on to more interesting topics and the air was filled with talkative fervour and clamouring voices, snaps of it everywhere, shimmering and vibrating, the buzz rising and falling like waves. I did not find it necessary to speak. It was better to listen to them talk instead, it was lovelier to be still.
(Though in recollection my heart was skipping between people and sounds so violently that my teeth could have started chattering the moment I opened my mouth.)
One of my classmates let out a booming laugh, and the raucous crowd was snapped into deafening quiet as though by the sweeping swivel of a compass needle.
Slowly the presence of water came into existence. It was still steadily dripping down the pipes by our table into a thicket of bamboo with its pat-pat, but the rain had long moved past, advancing into different territories or perhaps dancing and scattering out over the open sea of the Singapore Straits.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Xingye said, standing up. His voice was always tempered but now it struck me in a different way…
In retrospect the correct word was ‘tall’. His voice was tall— it seemed to shoot up all the way to the ceiling and coil round the spiral staircase to the second floor, intent on devouring the spaces of air that my classmates had left.
My mind had some of its own suggestions. ‘You can go first,’ I told him, ‘I’ll stay for a while more.’
‘Why?’
I shrugged. The answer evaded me.
A look of utter bewilderment and suspicion came over his face, and I was both awed and amused when he decided to take his seat again. Suddenly the atoms that were drifting around school congealed into a single being, and I had come into tangible existence — I was a voice of convincing, a mover, a causer, and now I had done the single most powerful action of changing someone’s mind.
This self-importance was unbecoming, so I quickly halted that thought before it had a chance to gather speed.
On the way back home I was thinking about the events of the day again, but there was no answer to be found in the expanse of cloudless blue sky…
27th March, 2022
Glad tidings
I am happy, I think to myself. The air hangs heavy with moisture, the seasonal rain pours down the maroon roof of the science building, drips down the fire-hydrant-red plumbing vent. Inside the classroom is a lovely furnace, hearth burning and crackling with the laughter of friends. Oh, it is awfully warm in here.
Let me describe myself from the inside out. There are two rows of windows in here, never opened, on one side the protective film has never been peeled – it sticks purple and pastelike against the sky. The air conditioning has never worked. Out of five fans, one is broken, the other four wobble dangerously when switched on. Inside here is its own ecosystem, carefully formed clusters of creatures, curling around the metal legs of tables with twitchy eyes and wet noses, and their coltish legs. The teacher enters into our little glade, and the creatures scatter away from the clearing into the undergrowth, peeking out. The bolder ones creep closer, slinking along the ground, giggling and chittering away.
We get ready for Civics lesson.
“Now, today is International Friendship Day. So what are some of the traditional games that children play? Come up and take them, each one of you.” The madame gestures to a small pile, from which I choose a yellow wooden top, a gasing. It settles, warm and small in the palm of my hand. Some of them take the five stones, printed with multicoloured patterns. My friend throws one up in the air, up and curling in an arc, while he scoops up the second with nimble fingers and the first lands with a pat on his open palm. There are many of us watching, experimenting, and we laugh all at once with unhinged raucous energy. It is something of a human imprint, a Jungian archetype of sorts which dictates that one’s fingers must start itching once we see something small and light and colourful. ‘Simply delightful’ is the astute observation our primate brain makes.
The spinning top goes flying, so do the stones, and we migrate down to the floor where the boys start hurling things around the classroom and my girl friends roll their eyes, exasperated. We are eighteen! Eighteen, for gods sake, and still this schoolyard humour, still this manic giggling. I am happy, I realise. Yet it is impossible to be aware of one’s happiness without feeling melancholy.
“Pen fights,” Ethan is saying, “Do you remember? All the time, last time.”
Of course I remember. All the time, last time. I had never thought about it before, but I remember it like yesterday. The sound of it, hard plastic smashing against hard plastic, the creaking of the metal springs, and the cadence – crack, clack-clack. Like rotary blades, spinning through the air on impact, and bouncing off the floor. It was something of an art, the fingers poised up in the air, taking aim with their own stationery weapon of choice, and coming down like a guillotine, lever action, one finger the fulcrum and with a bang it had moved my world.
“There was the erasers, the flags,” I said.
“Country erasers!”
We used to fight with that too, competing who could flip one eraser on top of the other. These erasers couldn’t erase at all, had their flag printed on it – a red which was more pink than vermillion, creamy white, moon and stars – and my flag too, among many others. The word SINGAPORE was printed at the bottom. Even now, without closing my eyes, the scent of rubber is fresh in my mind, resistance as I drag my nail along the edge, making thin white cresents as I sink into its springy flesh.
A large mynah – or perhaps a crow judging by that large beak – lands on the window, its wings flaring and tucking in. “Oo-woo,” it calls. “Oo-WOO!”
“Shush,” I whisper. “Not now. It’s just getting good.”
“Let’s throw it into the fan while it’s spinning,” My friend suggests. We all look towards the fan, which looks rather apprehensively back at us, quivering. A beat, then their lips split into a grin, rolling back to reveal rows of sharp teeth– “Oh, yes!” The scent of blood is in the air, spreading low through the forest floor, saturating the shrubbery.
“Oo-WOO! Oo-WOO!” The mynah begins pecking furiously at the window.
In me is a happiness wild like water, a kite in the thunderstorm conducting electric fire, and I hurl open the window and fling myself out into the monsoon rain.
This is the thing no one tells you about downpours. My uniform is drenched almost immediately, soaked to the bone, stinging as the wind blowing from Malaysia brings with it the smell of highlands and mangroves, and dust and smoke is bore to the ground. It’s nothing like a light drizzle or a sunshower where water shoots down like threads of glass. The dark grey clouds lie low and move with surprising speed, languidly rolling across the sky in large swathes. The expressway, packed full of cars, a dull industrial knell of thundering on metal boxes, windshield wipers moving in furious tandem, and the rain lit red. A thousand bamboo sticks drawn into open windows, a thousand blue buckets placed out under roof sills, water rushing through longkangs all in an instant with no inkling of where it came from. An uncle, wifebeater on his back, sits out at the bottom of his old HDB flat, stuffing nuts through the bars of a cage containing a yellow-crested cockatiel, teaching it ineffectually to sing. At the other end of Singapore, along Orchard Road, shoppers are driven into the cold air conditioning of malls, shivering, eyes sparkling with a newly curated commercial view – Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton – always something more to want, and all of a sudden handbags seem much better than umbrellas. The locals do not like the foreigners who run in from China, swoop in and drive up property prices. The foreigners do not like the locals, who they say are spiteful and habitual complainers. Here the government has said there shall be headlights in case of rain, and so there are headlights when there is rain.
Over the Causeway in Malaysia, the flood is coming, and I am sure it will be the same as any other year: there will be those who drown in carparks, in their homes, as they are sleeping. The printing presses prepare to ink, as they will every day, the new headline.
A young girl sits smiling at the steps of the school gate, rain splashing on her legs. Amidst the deaths of the world she heard nothing but the warbling calls of her mynahs.
I walk past her, into the gates of my primary school. It is the same as before, but the small aquarium is gone, and the lights are changed. I made my way up the steps that said, Respect, Resilience, Responsibility, Care, and it is at the second floor that I see her, a meeting of old friends.
I stammer out something of a greeting, and her eyes lit up in delight. “I know, I taught you while you were in primary one and two,” she says.
“How can you still remember? That was more than a decade ago, Miss Seow.”
She laughs, like it was obvious. “How can I forget? Even back then, you were a very interesting child. It was a lot of fun, with your class. How have you been, dear?”
I am at a loss for words. “It has been such a cultural shock, being in Junior College.”
We sit together.
I remember this place – it was where I played Charlie Charlie as a child. I continue, “It’s strange to grow up. Not yet, though, but I can feel it. Something’s happening up there, in the prefrontal cortex or something like that. Things are beginning to change.” Like a little worm, gnawing at me. I’ve always felt like I was walking in a dream – someday I’ll trip and all of a sudden sounds will be softer, colours duller, and I’ll wake up in media res, in the Real World, with ideas of social order and role and duty firmly downloaded and coded, suddenly knowing why I must produce a child, why it is imperative to work before play, why bad people are made into this world, and all these answers which form the foundation of our civilisation.
The corners of her eyes crinkle in a smile. She is growing older. An ancient guardian walking these halls – a pagan god who has been here for decades. “Two years in junior college can be an eye-opener for you. Suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life, no matter what happens. Growing up is natural.”
“I don’t want to forget,” I say. “But my head is small. My brain is the size of two fists. There’s not enough RAM. And when I grow up, I’ll become another digit in a table. And so will all my friends.”
“Oo-woo,” the mynah sings. “Oo-woo.”
“Ms Seow, I wish I can be your student again,” I tell her.
“Tomorrow is Monday,” she says gently. “You have to go. I know you are tired. There are days when we are exhausted. After a short break, we will spring to life and continue the journey.”
“I’ll stay a child,” I say. “I’ll be the first child that never grew up.”
Ms Seow smiles. “No! No! No Monday blues! Let’s have a cheerful Monday. Take care, dear.”
And then I am waking up in my bed, and rolling over to turn off the beeping alarm. Shuffling out in slippers, and making the first pot of coffee for the day. 7AM. I accidentally dislodge a pen from its holder, clattering to the ground. The sound reminds me of something but I cannot remember what it was. The weather report says it’ll rain. An accident on KPE leading to Upper Serangoon Road. Drivers should stay clear. No Monday blues, I think with a sigh, and dig my closet for a blazer. Let’s have a cheerful Monday.
20th April, 2023
A Day’s Journal
Waking up today, I left my skin between the sheets, as I went to school.
In PE they were boys and girls on coltish legs, faintly muscled and life shifting under the skin. I don’t remember whether it was cold, but a clear gale swept past us, peals of laughter lost to it.
Beside me, she was laughing, fingers clutching the net and watching the batters. A swing. The ball flew. It was one of those moments I’d remember, because she was so beautiful.
Now it is 1.34AM, and I am lying in bed, feeling cold. I slide into the sheets, but my skin was not where I had left it. When I close my eyes I will see nothing.
A few days ago Singapore hit 37 degree Celsius. Today we had rain for the first time after a hot month. Sleets or curtains of them, I could see it moving diagonally. It poured down the black glass.
Consequence
I’ve learnt that I do things by consequence,
Not by my liking, rarely whim,
And any flavour of morals or sense,
Lingers sourly on my tongue to be rinsed,
Whenever bread is broken.
Not black and white, I live
In shades of grey, and once in a while,
rosy pink.
I struggle to see right from wrong.
Wrong invokes ancient anger,
Right brings slightly less worse consequences.
I remember once, you asked for my time,
But time is not mine to hold or yield,
It clawed a pound of flesh, round as a dime,
Clattered into the iron bowl,
My time is better spent in your hands.
Able hands that can sculpt, make rosy pink,
My world of colours.
You saw that I was bleeding:
Do what you want, not what I want, you said.
But I felt it would be wrong to tell you.
I am a coward, consequence-fearing,
So is there a difference between what I want,
And what I should want?
Another knows best.
31st July, 2022