On the Southern Road - Redux

The Southern Cross hung brightly in the sky while anothere constellation was being pointed out. tail body heart left claw right claw. Before this, there had to be NS, CD, ERS, Central, BOC, Jurong, OC41 and a credit card. The freebie that came with credit card - an air ticket, from Officer Commanding to NSF Rota Commander of Stn 41 and a plot hatched. An old book found in a store room that said Field Officer's Diary in bold black letters - it is a journal of another sort now. One year and eight months before the introduction of scorpio was a visit to Fariz's and notes kept about that visit. And then the hatched plot became an actual journey (that visit happened before the journey), a flight to Australia on a credit card's companion freebie. And in Australia too-many-things happened, including the Outback-Star-Gazing-Oh-God-Take-Me-I-Could-Die-Now and the It's-Raining-and-Pissing-Cold-and-Dark-But-Let's-Go-Eel-Fishing, but most important of all there was the Change-of-Heart. There was another change of heart in Singapore, where a poor decision was made and then made better by another correct one.

And this Change-of-Heart, after all the fire station and Australia business, is how the Southern Cross came to hang in the sky while scorpio was being pointed out. As I sat there I listened to Achil's astronomical explanations and the scary nearby-faraway waves. I held the line with which we anticipated fish for tomorrow's breakfast. It was easy to see how all these events lined up to bring me here, right here and now. This cannot be an accident, it must have already been mapped out by events which in themselves could-or-could-not-have-been accidents.

It wasn't hard to gain perspective then, with such a strong sense of history and purpose. How simple it was, to look back at the past year, before then, to realise what mattered and what didn't. Did it matter that I did not do Art at 'A' Levels just to keep the Humanities Scholarship? Did it matter that I could've gone to Law School for cheap knowing that a career waited for me? Did it matter that I was finally a Psi U brother (am I really - it still doesnt feel as real as everything else that has happened)? Did it? Did it really matter? No? Yes, no. What mattered was knowing, finally, that at the click of that button, the whole art-or-humans-scholarship-heart-or-head saga was resolved. That click that said no thank you, i will be going to wesleyan instead. You see, it doesn't matter that I don't already have a career. What matters is music - creating out of nothing - and adventure - that thump-thump in the heart - and discovery.

What matters now is learning - from things, on my own, from people. What matters now is the effort put into crew the past year (and can you do it again? i said yes to Jeremy Brown. Things have been mapped out). What matters now is Hannah and her spastic laughter and the way her pants hang on her hips, and Miles and how he drives me crazy but I still love him and can't wait to live with him next year, and Ryan, sexy beast Ryan who makes me feel so loved and whom I know loves me unconditionally, and Jeremy, that boy with his masterful dick-moves, with the girl problems, who was there for me through the Psi U ordeal, and I have a feeling he will always be there for me. And then Chip, the boy that I met too-late-at-the-right-time, Chip the boy I can't wait to see and touch again, knowing he's not judging me.

So that was what happened, how a boy ended up sitting on a beach in a deserted island between the Indian Ocean and Sumatra, listening to waves as the smell of Sampoerna filled the air. This was how I realised some of the things I already knew.

stand-in

this brings me back to a time somewhere in 2004, only it's as if we're so much older now. it feels like... it must've been in the afternoon. i'd say four. i cannot remember because there were so many warm and sticky afternoons, companion to that familiar greasy feeling. rudy and i are a little tired, maybe a food coma, maybe just from all the sums done and left to be done. we walk out from the back gate of mt. sinai, that joke of a gate, to the green-carpeted oasis called the surau. many times i sat there alone waiting for him to come find me, but the law of attraction hadnt started working yet for me. but this day we went there together. there's a slight smell of urine, which rudy insists is algae. there are some scraps on the carpet but we ignore them as together, we press our foreheads to the ground. we worship apart, sometimes together, sometimes one behind the other. i know his back well, his cracking voice and the smooth curve of his bum sheathed in white. there was the desire and there was the distance.

and now we're in our twenties, slightly weathered. we're lying on our backs on the floor of my parents' room, and here is that same back (maybe more muscular now). here is nostalgia, memory, and hope. here is distance bridged, reconciled, and then spread once again. here i am once more, not knowing what i'm thinking about, a quivering seventeen year-old again.

addendum: after he's walked out of the gate, i run after him and offer to walk him to the train station. i want to tell him that i'm sorry we've drifted apart again and that i really do want to stick around to change that, again. instead i ask him if he remembers our afternoons at the surau, and he did.

twenty minutes pass, with aaahs from amina sinai, coming harder and faster by the minute, and weak tiring aaahs from vanita in the next room. the monster in the street has already begun to celebrate; the new myth courses through its veins, replacing its blood with corpuscles of saffron and green. and in delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the assembly hall and prepares to make a speech. at methwold's estate goldfish hang stilly in ponds while the residents go from house to house bearing pistachio sweetmeats, embracing and kissing one another - green pistachio is eaten, and saffron laddoo-balls. two children move down secret passages while in agra and aging doctor sits with his wife, who has two moles o her face like witchnipples, and in the midst of sleeping geese and moth-eaten memories they are somehow struck silent, and can find nothing to say. and in all the cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in the punjab, with the green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like the biggest dias in the world.

Fiction

rumours in the city: "the statue galloped last night!"... "and the stars are unfavourable!"... but despite these signs of ill-omen, the city was poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. august in bombay, a month of festivals, the month of krishna's birthday and coconut day; and this year - fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve - there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation that had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with middle kingdom egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will - except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by bengali and punjabi, madrasi and jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. india, the new myth - a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the other two mighty fantasies: money and god.

hon lyn would really like her camera now because the view is moving. the two of us sit on a jetty in sembawang and the twinkling lights from the shipyard, dickens's fairy lights, sing a rousing chorus with the quiet night, breaking waves and soft wind.

i cant quite decide if i like this place and i tell her that. at times like this, when we are quiet and the weather is not oppressive, there is a possibility of this being home. and then there is the unforgiving crush of humanity, Singaporean humanity, and the midday heat to contend with. here there are annoying 20 year-olds talking nonsense in my mother tongue.

there is a song in that language, its title transliterates to son of the island, and i feel like i could be that guy. but this island city is constantly taken away from me, it calls me an others; i am other-ed, robbed and excluded. when this home expels its sons like that, i cannot see its history and our ties, and that makes me sad. it says to me, you dont actually belong here, you are only fictional.

but i have talked too far, a little too far from hon lyn and the story she is telling me now. she's on a bus full of singaporeans, malaysians, indonesians, thais, and vietnamese. this bus - i can already imagine it - is travelling from thai malaysia to muslim thailand. luscious green trees speed by the windows, rubbish littering the roads. maybe the airconditioning isnt working and a hot sticky stream of air passes the windows bup-bup-bup-bup.

they communicate with a blend of malay and hokkien, maybe a little thai - no? we wish this could happen more, this mixed bag of southeast asian-ness, because we're quite sick of poms, aussies, and german gappers every time we travel. we say it's about time for southeast asia to represent.

but, ah, no, not going to happen. whereas i instantly identify singapore with southeast asia, more people feel related to japan, hong kong, taiwan or korea. after it exiled me, singapore extended its project to itself, and there are now five million mental exiles who do not feel at home in their backyard. the 550 million people around them are too strange, too... brown. their city and their other-ness in their neighbourhood are objects of their diligence and creation and now this place has become too unreal, a fiction of its own creation.

as i write this in my own anglepoise, i'm forced to ask myself if perhaps my state of exile is due to a lack of my own imagination. am i unlike my father, who, at the age of 57, wants to change his name, dreaming up a new identity and history more in line with his self-image? is that what i should learn from that old man, to fight fiction with fiction?

Anglepoised

It seems like a day for big questions. I reply across the unreliable years to S.P. Butt, who got his throat slit in the Partition riots and lost interest in time: 'What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.' True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me: Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us. True was a thing concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman's finger pointed in the picture on my wall, while the young Raleigh listened to his tales. Now, writing this in my Anglepoised pool of light, I measure truth against those early things: Is this how Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what that fisherman would have said?... And by those standards it is undeniably true that, one day in January 1947, my mother heard all about me six months before I turned up, while my father came up against a demon king.
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

You, Revisionist

your story stretches cross the room to me -
i see it come my way.
this place we sit is not quite so big,
yet you can't hear you scream.

you have known me from the day i was born
but you still dont know me.
you have written me my history and
my future you want to see.

is there a girl whom i have met that
i would like you to meet?
is this when we start to pretend
girls are my cup of tea?
(i have a boy for me,
you do know what i mean.)

has it been that long since i said,
"i want a bicycle
and a new lego set."
do you really think that i'd like
a quiet village girl,
an indonesian girl?

you change your tack and tell me about
your quiet village boy dreams,
but i never had a japanese mum and
i've never lived in france.

it's me you say who can change your past
by marrying a quiet girl.
hated your name and you had it changed -
i'm afraid i'm not your name

why, you, revisionist, you
project such power onto the past.
and i would like to help but i am afraid
my dreams are mine to fuck up.
(you had your chance but i'm
sorry i'll need mine too.)

Are You A Chinese?

it's been a week since i got into singapore and already i've been asked for my race too many times. no, i am not a chinese, neither am i a malay and i am definitely not an others. so, yes, you say, i must be an indian

the straits

the straits of singapore come into view and i prep myself for that usual feeling. it's a blend of anticipation, which comes with seeing the green city crisscrossed with lines, and of dread just thinking of the wall of heat that will hit the moment i exit the airport.

this place is really far away. the arctic looks back when i peer out the window flying here, and a few hours later there is the gobi desert right at the same spot. that is a lot of ice and sand between me and the boy i like. that, and an eternity of a week, is what separates me from chip and our sleepovers, tadd pretending to be a robot, ryan singing the chili peppers, miles being intransigent and hannah talking about her girl problems.



it hasnt even been that long since i was last here and i'm already getting excited for full circle moments. back in the fire station, it feels like second nature to lick my fingers at lunch, dash downstairs, gear up, and hop onto the pumper. things are a little different, almost imperceptible, but i'm just glad to be cruising down the city streets at full speed. rudy calls me up tonight and his cracking voice over the telephone is a throwback to younger days and a reminder of why he is always that guy. here and there are little reminders of what i've left - wandering around the city in the sultry heat, sitting by the river with teh love club, and even listening again to dan's diaphanous singing all the way from yorkshire.



in a few days i hit the summer road. my work here in singapore will have been done for now, nieces greeted, parents placated, and old relationships renewed. going across an entire archipelago - the world's largest - i will ask myself, what do you miss? where do you want to be? who do you want beside you? the answer i think i know ("it really doesnt matter") but i would like to believe it and stop feeling so nauseatingly nostalgic. because it's all a big cycle, a kind of tandava and chances are, my one life will blend into the next, nothing to miss, nowhere else to be.