sin writings, 03/04

The New House, or The House That Is Always Dusty

(For Jayanthi, and perhaps Jayasitra too; my primary school classmates who had lice on their hair)


No matter how hard Dad and Mum try to clean the new house, it would always get dusty the very next day. I wonder, and they wonder too, if it has to do with the expressway that is right in front of the block or the construction works that are taking place behind the block, or both. Perhaps, it has to do with the large, clean off-white tiles too, that make every speck of dust and every strand of hair seem more conspicuous than usual. But they would always nag at me for not having helped to clean the house when I actually did; it seems they have yet got used to the idea that the house would always be dusty. Yes, clean, neat and tidy but dusty. Strange sounding as it seems, it is true. It is dusty not in the sense that it is covered with dust, but dusty in the sense that one feels it on his feet and one sees visible specks of dust particles on the floor. In short, it feels very much like a normal house that has not been cleaned for two to three days.

Our new house is a small cosy flat. It is much smaller than the old house we sold even though both are three-room flats. The kitchen alone is about half the size. The living room is about a metre shorter in length and a foot less wide. We have nice windows, nice walls, nice new bedroom doors, a nice new table, a nice new wardrobe and even nice-smelling air-fresheners around the house; but none of us really seems to be enjoying our stay here. Perhaps it has to do with the dust. It is making us frustrated and unhappy.

We have a very narrow corridor outside the house; so narrow you cannot have two cyclists pushing their bicycles along the corridor beside each other. Dad has a bicycle outside; while most of the neighbours grow numerous potted plants, which make the corridor narrower than it already is. Dad went out to the corridor to clean the outside of the windows lately, and commented that the windows were so dusty the dust must had been at least half an inch thick. He was of course exaggerating, but we all blamed it on the expressway as usual. Of course, I got the extra blame of being lazy and not cleaning the windows, but that did not change the fact that the windows got dusty all the same very soon. Still, it is amazing how something so tiny and almost invisible got us all so unhappy.

Besides having to put up with the dust, we have to put up with a terrible smell emitted from the house of our dirty neighbours on our right. They are fruit-sellers, or so Mum said. Their house smells weird. It is not smelly like dirty socks or shoes; neither is it pungent like urine. The only word I can find to describe the smell is weird. It smells like the odour of a bedsheet that hasn’t been washed for a decade. It smells like a decade’s unwashed laundry put together. It smells like the odour of dirt and grime from neglected washing. And it is such a strong smell I believe it is capable of causing nausea, fainting spells, headaches, insomnia, anorexia and vomiting. It makes the air feel thick and heavy. That smell is almost so intolerable that Dad always feels like vomiting every time he walks past the house to get to the lift at the end of our side of the corridor. It’s now wonder we are all frustrated each time we open the door and catch a whiff of that smell that drifts across the corridor. It gets worse on rainy days; the odour gets stronger and more intolerable.

I believe I had seen the couple once, the late middle-aged couple who are presumably fruit-sellers. They looked like nice people and I did not recall having any memory of that unpleasant smell before I moved in here to stay. They looked like honest people who worked hard for their living. I wasn’t sure if they had any children, or if they had, whether or not the children are staying with them. They kept their doors and windows closed most of the time; perhaps that is how that unbearable odour gets thicker every day. How could they tolerate it, I wonder?

I try to imagine their every day lives, getting up early to the distributors to collect fruits to sell in the market, returning home late in the evening with tired and weary bodies. Perhaps they live on frugal meals. They probably seldom watch TV. Perhaps all they do is having a simple bath each day after work and sleep, letting time slip away as the bedbugs and lice slip quietly into their dirty spoilt mattresses. They probably do not have a washing machine. I do not know; all these are my conjectures. But I cannot help feeling a sense of melancholy.

There is an old and bald garbage worker who often frequents the market. I usually see him every morning when I wait for my bus to go to school. He wears the same singlet and shorts every day, and he has THAT smell too – the smell of an unwashed or poorly washed body. That stale odour. But he seems better off than another grey-haired and older man, who smokes and spends his nights near the refuse dump amidst flying wasps, crawling ants, roaming cats and scurrying cockroaches. What are the lives of these people like when they were young? I could not help asking myself.

And ours is a house that is perpetually dusty and a family that is slightly dysfunctional. I remember my primary school friends, a lot of whom are I am still in touch with and a lot of whom I had had been out of touch for more than fifteen years. Where are these people? How are they doing in their lives? There was Jayanthi who had an elder brother if I did not recall wrongly. I cannot even put a face to that name now, but all I recalled was she had lice in her short hair, which got the teacher and all of us very worried. There was V. Sumathi with a long pigtail and shrilly voice and whose mother was a school cleaner. Once she had been accused (rightly or wrongly I can’t recall) of stealing something in class. I wonder how these people are now. They would probably not be shocked that I am in university now, but they would be surprised to know that I am caged in my dusty house during the holidays and thinking about them.

I swept the kitchen more than twenty times over yesterday, if I recall correctly, and it is dusty again today. And my parents are always telling me that I have not cleaned the house. I think of the bedbug and lice that had slipped quietly into my neighbour’s house each passing day. Perhaps, one day moths and snails and slugs and beetles would be taking over the house. Once I dreamt of a gigantic snail, slightly smaller than the size of a tortoise, crawling up from the corridor to my bedroom window and into the house, before it was found beneath Mum’s bed and Dad mistook it for his pet tortoise as the lighting in the bedroom was quite dim. It was quite a frightful dream. I woke up telling myself I shall clean the house again tomorrow, which was silly because I clean it almost everyday with or without the dream.

My niece, Serene, had gone back to China with her mother. She used to enjoy playing hide-and-seek with me while we were still staying in the old house. I wonder if she would get a chance to visit us some day in the near future. There had been a lot of times when I thought of writing children’s stories for her, but I simply had no idea what to write. After all, I seldom think like a child these days; and there are numerous good children’s stories around. Perhaps I’ll buy her a book one of these days when she gets to visit us in this dusty house.

I am thankful! Thankful that my neighbours on the left are clean people and thankful that I have a nice new house with nice windows, nice walls, nice new bedroom doors, a nice new table, a nice new wardrobe and nice-smelling air-fresheners to stay in. Nevertheless, I wake up everyday to see dust; to tell myself I should also be thankful that I am still young and able to do these mundane chores before I get sick and old; or before love grows cold and that I would be left in a filthy mattress unchanged and unwashed for ten years.

University Days

The first week was intolerable. They were doing everything online, leaving a pathetic IT-idiot like myself clueless about everything in the world.

It was July 2001. I was a twenty-one year old freshman, fresh from the army and aimless in life, except to get a degree and hopefully to become a teacher. The campus is a nice place with lots of flora and fauna; I thought I would be very inspired to paint here. And so, I was the artist, the reader of high-brow literature and the doubting Christian, alone in this place called the National University of Singapore (NUS) located somewhere vaguely near Clementi. I did not know what to expect. After all, I came here as a broken young man, having seen enough of the highs and lows in life – or so I thought – hoping to start life anew.

Let me talk about art for a while. Since 1998, I had not done a single decent piece of art for a long time. Perhaps even until today. But back then I thought I was going to have time to think about art and philosophise about religion and the meaning of life and things of that sort. I destroyed my last painting of that year, which was a self-portrait with insects. I saw myself decomposing and wasting away in life. My art was going downhill and hitting a bottomless pit, and so was my social life. My second last painting then was a portrait of Jacelyn combing her hair, which I gave to her on her birthday after which I took a long walk home from Bugis deciding to become the solitary and isolated artist.

One afternoon, I sat waiting for a bus at one of the campus bus stops facing a large green open area with tall trees. The future suddenly seemed so uncertain for me. I was playing the music of Bach’s ‘Air’ in my head, wondering how long the road ahead was and what it was going to be like. Perhaps I should just do a few good paintings and die. Maybe, like Van Gogh, I’ll die at thirty-seven.

‘Now, let me first talk a bit about atoms and molecules.’ And so I attended my first eight-o’clock morning lecture on grammar. This lecturer, Dr Anjuum Salami, was one of the most hypnotizing persons I ever met. He had a vocal range of about, say, half an octave, and a husky textured voice a la Rod Steward. In short he was a total bore. ‘And now, some atoms mix and become molecules, and as we know, molecules like to make friends and become compounds.’ I was wondering for the past ten minutes watching him doodle silly circles about protons and electrons on the transparency and wondering what all these had to do with grammar before he reached his final point: ‘And so, like atoms and molecules, morphemes form words, words from phrases, phrases form clauses and sentences and sentences form paragraphs and essays.’ Great, that was a good fifteen minutes wasted for what I could have said in fifteen seconds or less. I could not remember what went on for the next one and a half hour, but thus ended my first memorable lecture. Two tears later, I would still tell people that Dr Anjuum made Yanni’s music sound like a rock concert.

My subsequent lectures with Dr Anjuum Salami were to become part of my most memorable days in campus. This was because on top of having that hypnotizing voice (if you can still recall he had a three-note vocal range and a husky textured voice), he had this sublime talent of telling jokes that could never make people laugh – that is if they could even be considered jokes at all. I always thought that he could write a bestseller entitled ‘Jokes That Can Never Make People Laugh’ and make more money out of it than being a professor. ‘And so,’ he paused for a long while for his ultimate showdown: ‘the object gets promoted to become the subject after passivisation but it does not get an increase in salary.’ My god, please spare us from such crap. And he waited yet another one minute or so. ‘Now, when the lecturer tells a joke the audience is supposed to laugh.’ What? I couldn’t believe my ears. I almost threw my file into his face to tell him to carry on with the lecture. He finally got to the part on interrogative pronouns. ‘Interrogative pronouns are words like ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘which’.’ He paused for yet another long while. 'Now when I say the word ‘which’ I don’t mean the ugly old lady that carries a broomstick and has a cat.’ What a dry pun. Never mind, I’ll doodle instead. And I doodled through a few lectures without listening to what was going on most of the time. I never knew that on the extreme end of the polarity, when lectures and lecturers could get too exciting, Dr Anjuum was to be greatly outdone by a terror called Tara Mohanan or Terror Mohanan. But she was to come much later, exactly a year from when I was dozing off in one of Dr Anjuum’s lectures.

Nevertheless, I had quite exciting lecturers during my first semester. One of them was Dr Susan Ang; a middle-aged lady dressed in gothic style who was still living in the Middle Ages and spoke at a rate of two hundred and fifty words per minute. Once she read a whole poem and I had no idea if the poem was in English or any other language because I caught not a single word. I guessed she must have forgotten that there were metres and caesurae (pauses) in poems. Every time I attended her lectures, especially in those days when teaching was not so advanced with fanciful IT and all, I would be bombarded with strings of polysyllabic sounds and I would be like a frantic keeper trying to catch whatever shots that came my way. ‘….metaphor…’ I quickly jotted the word down on my notepad. Never mind if it didn’t make any sense or had no reference whatsoever then. ‘… totalitarianism…’ I quickly jotted that down too as I caught the word flying past in a string of polysyllabic sounds and thanked God that I knew she was talking about Orwell’s ‘1984’. In the end, I ended up with notes reading ‘metaphor, totalitarianism, Canterbury Tales, … World War II…’ What was I supposed to make of that? So there was a metaphor which I missed, 1984 had to do with totalitarianism, there was a reference to Canterbury Tales (but exactly which tale?) and the context of something was World War II. Never mind. In those days before the lecturers had fanciful web pages and conducted lecturers staring at their notes on computers, Dr Ang had a notebook which I called ‘Yellow pages’ because the book had yellow papers. Once I sat behind her and saw her jotting down notes that she was preparing to deliver for lecture, and I immediately understood why she spoke so fast. There was no paragraphing in her notes! Like myself, she was not IT-savvy. Once, her computer screen went blank and she shouted ‘Help, John! Help!’ like a damsel in distress to Dr John Richardson who was the co-lecturer and that incident got the whole lecture laughing. The other irony of course was if anything at all, she looked more like a witch than a damsel in distress in her witch costumes. I always wondered where she got her clothes. She had long-sleeved shirts with frills at the sleeves and long black skirts that looked like what might have been used for Dracula-type movies.

Dr John Richardson was a good man and co-lecturer, as Dr Ho Chee Lick was a good man and co-lecturer for the same module that Dr Anjuum was lecturing. My nightmares with Dr Anjuum had not ended so quickly. Once, I went for a lecture which he said he was to cover seven important points about something that I had forgotten. I dozed off and fell asleep halfway, woke up again and dozed off again, on and off for numerous times; and he still had not finished covering his second point. Another time I made a promise to myself to sit through one whole lecture by Dr Anjuum without falling asleep. I was diligently and faithfully copying notes for fifteen minutes when he said something like ‘But all that stuff just now are not important. The important stuff to know is…’which he carried on from there and I felt like tearing up all that I had been copying and throwing it into his face. Can you imagine my sheer exasperation?! And he still had that three-note vocal range; there were times I thought he could not even sing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ with that vocal range. But still, he was to be completely outclassed by the exciting Tara Mohanan who was to come much later.

During my first semester, I guessed my only friend was Janie, who would call me for lunch and take me to walk around the forum bazaars. She was my classmate in college. There were times that I preferred to be alone, staring at trees and grass and occasionally looking at the many pretty girls on campus most of whom would probably be attached. But Janie and I were good friends and I knew we would never be together. We simply had different interests in life. But she would occasionally gossip about her group dates and her friends’ relationships. Anyway, I loved the forum bazaars. I loved to see the crowd of mingling people, the music and of course the free Milo drinks that came in a truck. The Forum is located near a café called Grinning Gecko and a nice park which they called ‘Lovers’ Park’; nice insofar as the park is rid of mosquitoes. Later on I was to find out that the park was one of Dr Ho’s favourite hangouts in the campus. Anyway, Janie was to graduate from university that same year that I had Tara Mohanan as my lecturer. When I had Tara Mohanan as my lecturer, it was the same time that I got to know Ross Krekoski from Canada, Karen or Yong Jue from Twilight Zone and other friends like Lilian and Ter Yang. But this was to come much later.

And my nightmare with Dr Anjuum had not ended so quickly. Once, I made up my mind not to attend the lecture, but because it was the week before the common test, I decided to go and see if any tips would be given. ‘These are the topics that you’d be tested on’…that was Dr Anjuum in his usual three-note voice that still sounded raspy or husky. And he flashed a transparency of the content page of the textbook. What a waste of my time to come! But perhaps he would highlight the important chapters, I thought. And he started reading the contents of the chapters one by one. ‘You’d be tested on morphemes, noun phrases, word phrases…’ I decided to give up on him once and for all. I thought, if I ever become a teacher, I’d better be better than him. And he spent at least the next fifteen minutes reading the content page. He could have paid me to do that. I might have done a better job since I have a loud and clear voice. But he was soon to be outdone by Karen or Yong Jue from Twilight Zone who attended Tara Mohanan’s class with me. By the way, Karen and Yong Jue are different names of the same girl. Still, that was to come much later.

Literature class was interesting with colourful characters even though Dr Ang was not our tutor. There were a few pleasant girls in class, one of whom read Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ for leisure. I thought she would probably end up reading Dostoevsky on her summer holidays in years to come, or perhaps that was her leisure long ago. But she was a really pleasant person, and anyway I read Dostoevsky too. The word ‘Dostoevsky’ alone was probably enough to scare away most people though few really realized that all I read was ‘Notes From Underground’ and not his other books that weigh more than two kilograms and look about four to six hundred pages each called ‘Brothers Karamazov’ and ‘The Possessed’. It was about two years later before I caught sight of a secondary school girl reading the unabridged version of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ in a fast food restaurant before I realized that I had been seriously outdone. Still, I was the high-brow reader who had read a handful of decent classics to be able to put up a I’m-a-serious-literature-person pretension. Of course, I did not know what a thirty-nine lined poem was called, and probably never intended to find out for the rest of my life. There was Eugene who read Auden’s poem exceedingly well and impressed the whole class during a presentation, and there was Marcus who included a fellow classmate’s presentation in his footnotes and made the whole class laughed during his presentation. There was Andrew who said he wanted to go and sing karaoke with me but we never went out to sing together even once. There were a few girls who were present and looked pretty, and later showed that they have brains too. But I was still the isolated and solitary artist, who was to make friends with Dr Ho the artist one morning when he saw me doodling to Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 rendered in a new-age version.

Besides Dr Anjuum, there was a mildly irritating lecturer teaching History of Industrial Design at the Faculty of Architecture. That was Dr Andre Liem or Liam who punctuated all his phrases and sentences with ‘yah?’ and I would go like ‘I mean, how would I know?’ He would go ‘Le Corbusier, yah? In nineteen-something, yah? Came up with this idea, yah? To build buildings in such-and-such a way, yah?’ I mean, really, how on earth would I know? I thought he was supposed to feed me with the information. Did he expect me to go like, ‘Yah, yah, wait, wrong for that one, yah, no wait, that is wrong too’? The other thing of course was that anyone would expect history to be taught more or less chronologically, but this guy simply had no idea of chronology. In the end I got a C grade for that module because my good friend Chenkai only helped me decorate the PowerPoint presentations.

I was in a rather bad mood on that eventful morning when I was listening to Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 and doodling at the speed of the strings in the Mozart piece when Dr Ho Chee Lick descended the stairs of the lecture theatre and saw my doodle.

‘That’s a nice drawing,’ he commented. It was a rather abstract piece of drawing that looked like nothing. Nevertheless, this seemed like someone who understood art; after all, drawing is the act or gesture of mark making. It is not so much about what is being drawn but rather how you draw.

‘Thanks,’ I accepted his compliment graciously. ‘I have a lot more at home; perhaps you might want to look at them. I studied art and I’m an artist.’ I couldn’t quite believed I said that myself.

‘I do a lot of drawings and paintings too. Come down to my office and look at them when you have time.’ He said.

And that was how I became friends with Dr Ho the artist who was disguised as a lecturer. But he was an interesting and good lecturer. ‘And this is called…’he paused and pronounced the word with great difficulty, ‘pro-nor-mi-na-li-sa-tion. But don’t worry; you don’t have to remember this long fanciful word, because sometimes I can’t even pronounce it very well myself. Just know that the concept is basically you have the pronouns to replace the nouns or proper nouns.’ Even though he was an artist disguised as a lecturer, he was still a much better lecturer than Dr Anjuum because he explained concepts clearly by making them simple.

On the very next week after Dr Ho saw me doodle to the Mozart piece, I brought my entire folio to Dr Ho’s office to show off my works. His office had a touch of Nature in it, with weird-looking dried plant specimens and bird nests. He also collected shells and most of the furniture was wooden. I was to learn about one or two years later that he collected some of these things when he took his son Jefri out for walks at nature reserves or Kallang River. Anyway, I left my folio at his place and we did not talk much then. I was also to show him some of my writings and even gave him the link to my website before it was removed a year later.

‘I like some of your works,’ he said after I paid a subsequent visit to his office. He had also brought a lot of his canvas paintings to show me. He began to talk to me in Chinese. ‘These paintings of roast ducks are quite new. I usually paint in a series. These are my spiral staircase series and here are my windows series.’

Wow, that was quite a lot of work. I wished I had enough time and space to do painting with that kind of freedom. I liked a small red tree he painted and hung on his wall, which was later to be given away as a token of appreciation to an invited guest at his exhibition held at Utterly Art gallery two years later. I also loved a piece showing a tortured-looking bird painted on an old discarded washing board. It reminded me of a bird-collage I did more than two and a half years ago before I got to know him. I thought his paintings were good, but like my works, they were not mature yet. And I was thinking of competing against the likes of the famous artists in art history, such as Anselm Keifer or Chaim Soutine or Turner or Van Gogh. After all, I sought perfection in art. My thoughts and sentiments were echoed by Mr Clifford Chua, my secondary school art teacher who taught me everything in art, when he visited Dr Ho’s studio about two years later.

In spite of being good friends with Dr Ho Chee Lick at that time, I was still the solitary artist. Perhaps even I did not understand myself then. I did not know what I wanted. I continued to look at the grass and trees and the string of pretty girls sailing by. I continued to go to forum bazaars to listen to music, look at books, clothes, CDs and accessories and to drink free Milo. I did not even know what to draw or paint. And the Bible did not make life any better. Perhaps it made life worse. I did not recall thanking God when Dr Anjuum left campus about half a year or a year later. And it did not change the fact that I had Tara or Terror Mohanan as my lecturer for this fanciful module called Syntax in time to come.

In those days before I took Syntax under the terrible reign of Terror Mohanan, Dr Anjuum was seconded by a certain Dr Dawson who taught Literature and the other Arts. I mean, one of the texts was this hypnotizing spell called ‘Ivanhoe’ by Scott. Let me tell you about this book. Firstly, Ivanhoe is not even the name of the hero; and till today I have no idea what the name of the hero in the story is. Secondly, it has ridiculous sentence constructions that go ‘Upon this matter I have consulted my legs.’ Honestly I had yet read anything more ridiculous-sounding. Most importantly, I completed the module without getting past the first two-and-a-half chapters of the book even though I tried really hard to read it. I had since ranked it as one of the books that mankind of the globalised age should stay away from. Naturally, I fell asleep in most of Dr Dawson’s lectures. He once said that ‘Ivanhoe’ was the ‘Harry Potter of its time’. That helped to explain why I hated ‘Ivanhoe’; I was never a fan of Harry Potter. In fact I bought the first book of Harry Potter and gave it to my nephew after less than twenty pages. My nephew’s writings were to become entertainment for my friends during lunch and tea breaks in my university days.

Thankfully, I had this exciting text called ‘Camera Lucida’ by Barthes for this same module called ‘Literature and the other Arts’. In fact it was so exciting I could not understand what it was trying to say, but I decided it must be really deep. And there was Dr Yeo Wei Wei who lectured us on Barthes. She was one of the most harmless lecturers one could ask for at NUS. Dr Yeo was a pretty petite lady who was very nice but apparently had difficulties explaining difficult concepts. That aside, when we stared at her and laughed, she would look worried and ask ‘Is my hair messy? Is there anything wrong with my hair?’ In spite of being really pleasant and earnest, she could not explain this scary unknown called ‘The Other’ and this concept of ‘Otherness’ postulated by Derrida, which was much better explained about exactly one year later by a deep Renaissance man called Associate Professor Rajeev Patke. Nevertheless, Dr Yeo remained as one of the persons I liked and respected. She eventually got married a year later from the time I attended her classes.

During the same semester that I attended classes taught by Dr Yeo and Dr Dawson, I took this Chinese module under a certain Doctor or professor Xu Jie, who spoke with a slurred Beijing accent and I could barely catch his Chinese phrases. He seemed to be a pleasant and likeable man, but I skipped too many of his classes to know him really better. After all, I skipped so many of his classes that he did not even know my Chinese name; I thought that was quite a remarkable achievement on my part.

Just when I thought I would see the last of the nonsensical pseudo-science stuff from Dr Anjuum after my first year, especially when I was majoring in English, I had the fortunate or unfortunate experience of being taught by Tara or Terror Mohanan in a Syntax module. Associate Professor Tara Mohanan was an Indian lady with long straight greasy hair in perhaps late forties. She wore huge thick spectacles and grinned from ear to ear when she tried to smile. Since appearances were deceiving, I was totally unprepared for the bombastic fireworks that I was to see during practically all her lessons.

‘That Bilbo tickled Fredo annoyed him.’ She read the sentence with glee. ‘Who does the ‘him’ refer to?’

Seriously, who in the right mind speaks like that? I was about to doze off when she asked what seemed like a question demanding little more than common sense.

‘Why can’t you say ‘Jane is talking to himself’?’ she peered through her thick glasses for a response. ‘Is there any principle which can account for this?’

Principle? She must be crazy. I quickly raised my hand and shouted, ‘That’s easy, because Jane is a girl. That’s so obvious.’ I was beaming with pride of having answered a question correctly.

‘Now, in university we do not expect answers that we would normally expect from primary school children. Perhaps, we can postulate something like ‘the reflexive must agree with the antecedent in terms of person, number and gender’.’ She showed an expression of complete satisfaction having expounded something really profound and that she was superior to everyone else.

WHAAAAAAT? I could not believe my ears. What was that? I felt totally insulted and was dumbfounded. I looked at everyone else in the room to see their expressions. My friends Ter Yang and Lilian smiled and shrugged their shoulders. And Associate Professor Terror Mohanan continued with her ‘postulations’ and ‘theoretical constructs’. Apparently she seemed to have forgotten how to speak like a normal human being, and she was getting ecstatic. I tried to imagine her filling in a Personal Particulars Form, and imagined her writing ‘Syntax’ in the section under Religion.

She went on to talk about this unknown thing called a co-dependent. I decided to interrupt her.

‘Excuse me, but what are co-dependents?’ I asked innocently, having forgotten most of everything I learnt the previous year and confused by her incessant academic pyrotechnics.

She looked seriously at me, and in a most cool, calm and collected fashion, as if chanting a mathematical formula, said, ‘Co-dependents are grammatical functions of the same predicate’, completing the sentence in a single breath in less than five seconds. You may try saying that to yourself a few times and more rapidly each time. You can imagine it must have sounded quite impressive. Great, instead of one question now I have three questions, the original one unanswered.

I sat and tried to draw a portrait of Ter Yang, ignoring Tara Mohanan as I contemplated on how the lives of such academics could be happy or meaningful. Would it really do mankind any good to know that co-dependents are grammatical functions of the same predicate? Really, I did not know. Perhaps, that was just her job. She needed it to feed her family. There was also Dr Madelina who taught the Sonority Onset Principle to explain why ‘bulk’ is one syllable and buckle’ is two syllables. Does such knowledge contribute to mankind in any useful way? Again, I did not know for certain. I could only say that I preferred Dr Madelina to Associate Professor Tara Mohanan because the former was more down-to-earth and humble, while the latter had lost herself in a world of syntax and semantics and phonology and whatever else there might be.

‘Man, she should set up a Syntax Club that solves syntactic puzzles on Saturday.’ Ross Krekoski, the exchange student from Canada, said during one of the project discussions. ‘Did you see how excited and ecstatic she was over those stupid Bilbo and Fredo questions?’

‘How sad that would be,’ I tried to imagine a scenario whereby instead of youngsters strolling along Orchard Road with their friends and dates, they were bending over papers filled with syntactic puzzles and brainstorming with frowning faces. Then I recalled Dr Ho, my artist-lecturer friend, who probably would have a hard time pronouncing a simple word like ‘contemplative’, and wondered how he became a Fulbright Scholar and got his PhD. He was so down-to-earth compared to everyone else. He knew there were more important things in life. I started to ask myself, ‘Why do these people make such simple things so complicated?’ My questions did not end there, for I was to get more surprises from Tara Mohanan later on.

In those days, there was Karen or Yong Jue who was in my Syntax project group along with Ter Yang the scholar from Science faculty, Ross Krekoski the exchange student from Canada and Lilian from Middleearth. Karen was a school swimmer from Twilight Zone. She was two years older than me but she seemed more clueless than me about what had been taught in the previous English modules. She had other personal issues in life as well, but those are not to be mentioned here but instead talked about during a long phone conversation on one of those late nights as well as on a later evening at the Science Faculty and at the field near the Sports Complex. I was told she called Ter Yang and Lilian late at night to discuss her problems too; but none of us did much help really; for she continued to behave as if she were from Twilight Zone and she seemed unable to identify with what was going on in life and school. Nevertheless, she successfully gave all of us a big headache each. It was a headache of the same scale as when Tara Mohanan told me that ‘co-dependents are grammatical functions of the same predicate.’ The similarity that Tara Mohanan and Karen shared was that they were good at giving people headaches by compounding to problems that already existed. And thus that was how Karen outdid Dr Anjuum.

And Lilian from Middleearth tried to get along with Karen from Twilight Zone, while Ross Kre-kos-ki whose name was somewhat difficult to pronounce gave up on her earlier than most of us.

‘We have to give her something really idiot-proof for our presentation so that she would not screw things up,’ he said.

He was indeed accurate in predicting that Karen would screw our presentation up, but we did not realize that nothing could stop what was inevitable. In short, she came up with her own ideas that were not exactly relevant to our presentation and was obviously told off by Tara Mohanan in an unkind fashion.

‘These are assumptions we’ve already made at Level 1000 modules, and what you’ve just presented are completely unacceptable here.’ Tara Mohanan was a hard woman who spoke these words with deliberate sternness; she was not a soft lady like Dr Yeo who would probably be kind and forgiving enough to simply point out your mistakes without giving you a public humiliation. The rest of us nearly fainted on the spot of course, including the audience.

The story of Karen shall be cut short, but her story did not really end here. She was to give Gazali’s group a headache when she took English in Southeast Asia with them under Associate Professor Anne Pakir. I took the module with her too, but I did not have her in my group. But that was to come later, along with the story of how Associate Professor Anne Pakir tried hard to smile at everyone everyday.

One afternoon, it was time for Syntax class again and we went in late. There were visitors from Myanmar or Vietnam or both on that eventful day, to watch how lessons were conducted.

‘Now, coming to class late and making so much noise are completely unacceptable behaviour in this class.’ Tara Mohanan told us off sternly in front of the visitors.

Oh, give us a break. We were not even terribly late and we were not making that much noise.

‘Last week, we talked about the reflexives and how they should agree with the antecedents in terms of person, number and gender.’ She continued to talk about English in what seemed like nuclear physics terminology to me. ‘Today, let me introduce you to the notion of c-command. What is the notion of c-command? It is a configurational prominence…’

A whaaaaaat? Come again? Configurational prominence? She must be out of her mind.

‘Now, let us imagine these units to be mathematical units. This is θ1, this is θ2, θ3….all the way to θ7….’

‘Excuse me,’ I raised my hand and made myself heard. I couldn’t take it any longer. ‘Why can’t we just call those words noun phrases or verb phrases, or subjects and objects? Why do we have to go into all these mathematical abstractions?’

‘Sin Min, you have to understand that we are approaching the study of language scientifically. Noun phrase and verb phrases are just grammarians’ postulations. They do not really exist.’

Right, so I must imagine myself as Miko the Martian (who happened to be her favourite character) who just arrived at earth from Mars and has no idea what the English language is about. I shall tell everyone who takes any of her modules subsequently to imagine themselves as Miko the Martian.

And she continued to draw her tree diagrams with greater confidence than I drew the trees in NUS, but I remained faithful to drawing trees in Nature instead of syntactic trees. It was exactly a year later after I left Tara Mohanan's class before Dawn looked at my drawings of trees and liked them.

In those days, NUS was still a rather pleasant place without curvy corridors, ugly classrooms and strange canteen names. It was about a year later before renovation works began on different parts of the campus and the canteen-naming competition took place. The Arts canteen ended up with this funny name called ‘The Deck’, which I detested and was to complain to a fellow classmate Cheryl about it over a cup of coffee after one of the lectures while we waited for tutorial to begin.

‘You are so cynical!’ I recall her saying that with her soprano voice. Nevertheless, Cheryl was a kind friend who helped me copy lecture notes when I skipped lectures and once I treated her to a chee-cheong-fan for her kindness.

‘Can you imagine? The canteen at the Faculty of Engineering is called ‘Techno Edge’!’ I was so agitated with disbelief at this nonsense.

But that was not the end of the story. They renovated the Arts corridor at AS1 and turned it into a curvy corridor with ugly pastel colours so badly mismatched it really takes more than sheer talent to arrive at that horrendous design. To top that achievement, they replaced the doors with ‘new-age’ doors that took me more than sixteen seconds to figure out how to open. The handle is skewed in an oblique angle; you cannot figure out whether to turn the knob clockwise or anti-clockwise, after which you cannot decide whether to pull or push the handle. The classrooms are even worse; they have bright orange floors and walls, with some glass designs on the walls that serve no aesthetic or practical purpose. In short, that was a great deal good money wasted; but all these were to take place only after I left Tara or Terror Mohanan’s class, which was to happen later.

Before all these changes took place, Lilian had yet left campus or graduated. Lilian from Middleearth was totally infatuated with Legolas, but that is not really important. The important thing is she tried to sell the story of Middleearth later during one of Associate Professor Ismail Talib’s Stylistics class and took up too much time during the group presentation, so much so that I had to rush through my part after which Dawn commented that I sounded as if I was trying to scold the whole class. But Lilian compensated for that earlier by singing well at a karaoke session with her top hit ‘Eternal Flame’ which impressed my fellow friends and me. But her singing talent was not yet discovered at that time when we took the test set by Terror Mohanan.

‘Why can we say ‘The smart are getting smarter’ but not ‘A smart is getting smarter’ or ‘The smarts are getting smarter’?’ I read the question aloud in my head and looked up at Tara Mohanan, seeing her plump body, her greasy long hair, her thick glasses and menacing grin.

I tried to imagine myself as a teacher, standing in front of a secondary school class and telling the young ones how I could end up as their teacher. ‘Yah, I got through my university because I could explain why it is right to say ‘The smart are getting smarter’ and not ‘A smart is getting smarter’.’ And I tried to imagine the kids looking at me as if I had gone bonkers or as if I had been a real genius.

‘Suppose the ‘smart’ here is not the noun but an adjective, and there is an implied noun phrase that is not present…’ I thought aloud in my head and was glad that I got that one right. I looked at Lilian and Ross Krokeski or Krekoski and they seemed confident. Ter Yang looked confident too but Karen was still lost in Twilight Zone. Perhaps she was seeing the Martians from the ‘Mars Attack’ movie running across the papers; hopefully none of those green creatures had the name of Miko.

And so, the long nightmare under Terror or Tara Mohanan’s reign was finally over. Along with the nightmare, other pleasant things were gone too, such as coffee sessions with Dr Ho, as well as numerous trips to the forum bazaars and the free Milo drinks. These pleasant things, however, were to return the next semester; but they would eventually be gone after university days, so one enjoys these things when they are still available.

(to be continued)

My Good Friend Prince Ranker Sky Shaw

(Note: The sequences in this story and the dialogue are entirely imaginary and perhaps wrong at some parts.)

I have a good friend who is twenty-five this year. His name is Shaw Keng Yong but he has given himself a much more impressive-sounding name, called Prince Ranker Sky Shaw. I usually call him Ranker for short.

Ranker is an admirable friend; he is perhaps a hundred times stronger and more determined than I am as a person. His parents abandoned him when he was very young, and he has not heard of them since. He is taken care of by a grandmother and an uncle, with whom he stays in a humble flat in Yishun. He had a primary school education and went on to study at Assumption English School where he learnt some English, Maths and Technical Studies. He loves music, believes in Christ and does much social work. Nevertheless, his singular quest in life is to find love.

Ranker is not your typical attractive guy; perhaps he is the exact opposite. He was once vastly overweight (he has slimmed down quite a bit since) and has a textured voice with muffled articulation. My friend in the army once commented that he sounds like a spoilt signal set. Yes, it was in the army that I got to know Ranker when he was a Storeman and an Armskote Man (one who deals with drawing and returning arms). At that time I was still a Christian.

‘Sigh, nobody cares about me.’ It was Ranker indulging in his usual self-pity which I was to learn to get used to later. ‘Lok, are you free tonight? Do you want to go to my house?’ I agreed. It was just one of those many evenings that I could not remember exactly which one.

It was probably a drizzling evening at Yishun area. The commuters were back from work; everyone looked busy, or important, or loved. There was the perpetually-on-the-handphone group dressed in smart-casual deciding where to spend the evening. There were the teenagers going on dates. There were the families with all their children and elderly. It seemed like a happy world out there in spite of the drizzle.

‘Sigh, the teenagers are getting out of hand these days.’ Ranker commented as a young intimate couple went by. He was the disillusioned adult who thought he had seen enough of the world.

‘Well, freedom and love are not necessarily bad things if handled well,’ I tried to sound like a preacher.

‘And look at what the government is doing. Always digging and filling, filling and digging.’ Ranker was now commenting on the construction sites that had perhaps destroyed his childhood places filled with nostalgia. I thought there is some truth in what he said. The children grow up these days without ever seeing sand on the playgrounds.

He was a weary and disillusioned man, more so than I. There was no one to listen to him talk about his dreams and ambitions, or his crushes on the girls whom he knew. Perhaps no one even cared that he has feelings. He was just ‘an outsider’, ‘a weirdo’, ‘a desperate person’, ‘a fool’ or any other undesirable character. He was just a neglected outcast. And a self-righteous me thought that I was playing the Good Samaritan.

‘And look at these things.’ There were an old jigsaw puzzle, an old picture frame and some unwanted furniture that had been discarded. ‘Look at how wasteful people are. They are surely getting richer these days.’ Ranker decided to keep the frame for himself.

‘Lok, people have no respect for the more senior people these days.’ Right, I was only twenty-one and he was only twenty-three then. What was he talking about?

We reached his place, and I saw that he had a room to himself. Rather untidy, but still acceptable. His uncle and grandmother were very nice. I guessed they just ‘had no time for him’ or could not understand him. After all, his uncle was a young man, with a girlfriend and stable career. Perhaps he would get married soon and move into a new house with his wife.

Ranker’s room was assorted with all sorts of paraphernalia. His CD collection was neatly arranged in a holder on his table. There were magazines and newspapers everywhere. Opposite his table, he displayed his collection of badges on a cloth that he hung on a cupboard. There were some metal-objects (some of which serve a purpose) that he made during his Technical classes. He also collected bus tickets.

‘They are going to change from Transit-link cards to Ezy-link cards,’ he said. ‘The world is always so busy; it keeps changing. Nobody has time to care for friends.’

God, how lonely he must have felt, I thought. It was still drizzling outside. I sat on his bed and ran through some files which contained all his not-so-poetic love poems written for all his different loves.

‘This one is written for a girl I knew in…’ Honestly, I wasn’t listening.

‘Go on.’ I would tell him, pretending to listen and taking pride in playing the Good Samaritan.

Since then many visits passed, with me occasionally treating him to fast-food meals and listening to his stories. Finally, he was going to leave the army.

‘Lok, I hope you’ll remember me.’

‘Of course I will. Here is my phone number, address and email. You can get me anytime.’

‘That’s what they always say, but after that they are always busy. Busy, busy, busy. They do not even have time for a cup of tea or coffee.’

‘Rest assured I won’t forget you, friend.’ I promised. ‘We’ll keep in touch.’

And so he left the army. And I had become good friends with the guy that almost everyone detested in the army.

‘Do you know I saw him yesterday wandering alone in Orchard Road? You should’ve seen him. He was in this horrendous haircut, sunglasses, t-shirt and bermudas with his socks pulled too high. And he thought he looks damn cool. Besides, he had these silly-looking chains on his neck, like dog chains! And he was holding a water-bottle in one hand and a handphone in the other!’ One of the guys started to make fun of my friend who spent Christmas alone.

‘Are you sure he’s not holding a water-bottle in one hand and another water bottle in the other hand?’ Another guy joked and everyone laughed. I joined in the laughter, but deep inside, I was feeling sorry for him. After all, I was supposed to be the Good Samaritan, remember?

One evening, I walked out of camp feeling terribly isolated and lonely for no reason. I started to think of my poor friend and the sessions we had. ‘No, I’m depressed enough already. I’m not going to see him to make myself more depressed with his whining on how terrible and lonely the world is,’ I thought to myself. I spent the evening alone at the town bookstore, drinking expensive coffee and booked in feeling a little better. But it did not change the fact that isolation in life is difficult to cope with.

The rumours or stories about my friend did not end even though he had left camp.

‘You know something? Once he shitted in his pants while he was sending ration. Do you know how disgusting that is?’

‘So he actually shitted in his pants? I thought even if he had vomited it would have been bad enough. I’m sure they stopped asking him to send ration after that.’

‘I pity those trainees who had lunch that day!’

Great, these people are treating my friend like some kind of celebrity, aren’t they? I kept quiet. I guessed they must have been calling him a fat asshole.

Being the Good Samaritan that I was, I kept my promise and looked Ranker up a few times. Or rather I agreed to meet him when he looked me up a few times. I was really busy. Really!

We spent sessions drinking coffee together, taking photographs, listening to each other sing and enjoyed long walks together, though I wasn’t sure if I enjoyed his self-pity musings about life, love, and everything else. One day, I eventually got sick of his singing and his not-so-poetic love songs.

‘I tell you what. You should start drawing. Perhaps you’d end up becoming a famous artist better than me.’ Of course I did not tell him that his singing was unpleasant and out of tune. And it would break his heart more than unrequited love if I told him his poems and songs were bad. Last but not least I never believed he would ever become a better artist than myself. After all, I had spent years studying art and pursuing it. I volunteered to supply him with art materials which I had surplus then. He took my advice seriously.

I was soon to regret my action. Before a few weeks had passed, I was pestered numerous times to visit him to look at his new creations. I went to visit him once and saw some soft-porn pictures a la lingerie ads on his sketchbooks, which he downloaded from the net and presumably thought was ‘artistic’. So, he’s beginning to think dirty these days too, I thought.

One evening, we took a long walk together, bypassing some night market stalls or pasar malam. I saw the place filled with gaiety; it was the gaiety of simple joys without the sophistication of the cosmopolitan life. I contemplated on the lives of these average or below-average income households and I thought about how people could actually be so much happier if only they knew how to appreciate simple joys in life. But it did not change the fact that people without love could never be really happy. People without friendship or family love, or romantic love. I put a hand on my friend’s shoulder. On that starless night, I suddenly realized what a selfish and silly fool I had been. I had been so self-righteous and pompous about this whole enterprise of ‘entertaining’ my friend without genuinely giving him the unconditional love and compassion that he so badly wanted as a fellow human being. At that moment, I felt a terrible sense of loneliness; and for some reason I recalled the soft-porn pictures on his sketchbooks and the two words that came to my mind was ‘I understand.’ After all, is he not also a person of flesh and blood like everyone else, who needs some sexual gratification at some point in time?

We walked through the night market, and for the first time I thought about how we could enrich each other’s lives with just simple presence and kindness.

‘Lok, life is not easy,’ he said. How true. It can never be too difficult but it is certainly not easy for everyone. I could not agree more.

… …

‘So you’re still alive! I tried to get you so many times you did not reply. I thought you were dead!’ He was just joking.

‘Well, I lost my handphone for quite a while. That’s why you couldn’t get me.’

I promised to visit him soon, and I look forward to hear his stories. And yes, some of his drawings are better than mine.

Holidays

So Dad and Mum were going to sell the house after numerous heated quarrels, while I immersed myself in the pages of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Marquez. We packed our things more quickly with each passing day, and soon the living room was filled with red plastic bags containing our stuff. I found myself as lonely and helpless as seven or eight years ago; without a religion, and without love.

Pale sunlight shone through the window into the dim interior, while I stared at the orange door. The two drawings (‘Window’ and ‘Door’) I did of them were about entrapment and despair. Finally, after so long, I am going to leave this place, I thought. Goodbye, window; goodbye, door.

Days of waiting went by, and that eventful morning finally arrived. The house was cleared of our belongings and was clean and empty. The door was wide open; neighbours flocked to bid their goodbyes and well-wishes. The new owners came and took over; while we went separate ways from there. Dad was to stay at his sister’s house, Mum was to stay at her sister’s house while I would be staying with Liang Zhu. At least that was what was planned. That afternoon, Mum and I had a hasty lunch at MacDonald’s, and we went to visit my niece and her mother. We brought the little girl out for a haircut accompanied by her maid, had tea, and soon I found myself alone on the way to Liang Zhu’s house on a bus on a quiet evening, recalling all that had happened in images that went by as quickly as the scenery outside the bus windows whizzed past.

That same evening, I had western food for dinner, and for a long long time, I enjoyed the calm of the evening. I bought two containers to pack my clothes and books, after which Liang Zhu and I had supper and coffee and chatted till three in the morning at the coffee-shop below his house. We were two aimless young men talking about prospects of the future, art, photography and religion while cats and cockroaches roamed the littered floors.

And that was how the first day of moving out went by. The remaining days saw me reading through Ishiguro’s ‘An Artist of the Floating World’, contemplating about frangipanis, post-colonialism and death, taking walks around the Pandan Reservoir and experiencing a whole series of insomniac nights. I was to make successive returns to the reservoir, to see dead fish lying on the tracks, construction work in its ceaseless process, standing trees, and above all, white clouds and blue sky. I was to spend an afternoon there with Janie talking about her work and other stuff later on, to see how the currents of the waters looked like a cover illustration of Iris Murdoch’s ‘The Sea, The Sea’.

One afternoon, while I was doing an illustration of Liang Zhu’s room in a Japanese manga style, I got a message from a friend asking me to join them for dinner and movie. These are my primary school friends Lijun, Zhihua and Zhirong. I quickly agreed. We met up only to realize that the movie we wanted to watch was only available after midnight. Oh well, we shall catch another movie, we decided. I bought Banana Yoshimoto’s ‘Goodbye Tsugumi’ at the Plaza Singapura bookstore and headed to watch ‘Phone Booth’ at Cineleisure. The show, however, was such a terrible disappointment that we decided to watch the horror show at 2 a.m. We had time to spare in the meantime, so we played pool. It had been a long time since I last got acquainted with the night, and I loved the feeling. Zhihua and Zhirong were apparently the more skilful players among us; Zhihua kept himself occupied by browsing through my ‘Goodbye Tsugumi’ while waiting for his turn. The horror movie was good. After the movie, we strolled down to Selegie Road for coffee at the twenty-four-hour café, where we talked about horror movies. They shouldn’t have copied so much from ‘The Ring’, or Zhihua insisted so. ‘One of these days we should watch ‘Event Horizon’ together.’ It was about 4.30 a.m. in the morning; we were feeling groggy and dizzy and I recall ordering an Iced Long Black to keep myself awake. The conversation lasted longer than we thought, and we went on to talk about friends and religion. Later we ended our session in the morning after having kaya toast and eggs for breakfast.

And so I enjoyed greater freedom after Dad and Mum sold the house. Around that time, my friend Brian Gothong Tan was working for his exhibition, which was to be held on his birthday at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). I managed to help Brian illustrate a mural with cat-like creatures and other miscellaneous work like folding boxes and making paper coffins. The work, ‘Heavenly Cakes and Sentimental Flowers’, was an installation that became well-received in the papers and even had a three-paged review in a renowned magazine. In those days, the only decent painting I did was perhaps ‘Insomnia’, which was to become Weiting’s birthday present at a chalet some time later. I was the declining artist, as the fading light that shone through the windows of my old house before we sold it. My art was dying as the fish lying on the tracks of Pandan Reservoir, as the uprooted plants in the messy construction sites, as the dead cockroaches that littered the floors of Teban Gardens estate and as the ashes that was blown in the wind during the seventh month of the lunar calendar. My art was deader than a doornail; and I had nothing more than a broken body tired from all the long nights out and feverish from my wisdom tooth extractions.

In those days that I had insomniac nights, I had a curious interest in frangipanis, trees and potted plants. Liang Zhu’s living room had three potted plants that were set poetically against the window and were resting on an old-fashioned book cabinet. One night, while he and his father were watching television without switching on the lights, I quickly did a pen sketch of the potted plants and the window. That sketch, entitled ‘Potted Plants’, was to become one of the best sketches I did for the year. I even did a canvas of the same scene which Dr Ho likes a lot though we both agreed that the sketch was better than the painting. What I wanted to capture was the feeling of the fading light shining through the window, like the pale fading light that shone through the windows of my old house before it was sold.

Liang Zhu’s place was coated with oil and carpeted with dust. While I enjoyed my freedom, I did not quite enjoy staying there. There was probably more dirt and grime in his place than I could clean in a week. That aside, his father often cooked some pungent Chinese medicine which I suspect Liang Zhu himself could not tolerate the smell either. The only things I loved in his house were the potted plants and the windows. The potted plants looked overgrown and evoked a feeling of ominous uncertainty. Some of their leaves were large and thick; others were thorny, as if belonging to a lush and dense rainforest. My love for windows began about seven or eight years ago, when I saw the window as a paradox of both entrapment and hope. The oil that coated the house was accounted for by the family’s cooking; they had a habit of cooking with more oil than I thought was necessary.

Once, Liang Zhu cooked me some fish and I commented that it was too oily. ‘That is not a valid complaint,’ he replied. He was more concerned with the taste of course, like whether it was too salty or if the flavour was just right.

After I finished a series of good books and a few cups of chai lattes, I made frequent trips to the Botanic Gardens, enjoying long walks and drawing banyan trees in the midst of grass, mosquitoes and sunlight, with occasional drizzles. Around that time, my friends who studied art in the UK just returned. One night, after watching soccer at Kweeps’s house, I went out to paint till early morning, around 4 a.m. I returned to the construction site, one of my favourite landscapes which I had struggled with for years and still struggling, wondering about the ceaseless currents of time and the meaninglessness of terrible isolation. I saw but ruins and fragments before my eyes, like a crumbling city, and I knew it would be restored and demolished and re-built a thousand times. Yet we only have one life to live, and that life is less than a hundred years. On another night, I went to an old folk’s home to paint. The people there were kind and polite. I returned to the canal, yet another of my favourite landscapes that I failed time and time again; this one was not an exception. I laughed at myself. After close to ten years of art I had not been able to draw or paint a single thing really well. I could only hope for a better tomorrow, like the street lamps waiting for morning so that their lights may go out.

In those nights, I drank more cups of coffee than I did drawings.

‘Are you intending to sell this?’ Kweeps asked about one of my abstract paintings which I laboured over for more than a week in the wee hours of the morning.

‘Why, you’re buying it?’ Liang Zhu asked.

‘No, I thought art lovers might love it.’ Kweeps replied. Honestly I thought the painting was no good.

Reunions were generally happy; with the exception that I was told to be more humble.

‘Could you please be more humble?’ I recalled Buan Heng’s scholarly impatience as he said this.

I guess I could not really disagree; after all I had nothing to prove or show, not even a decent drawing or painting, not a single thesis on art and not even decent grades for my English modules. All I had were but a handful of sketches that would probably never sell, though selling is of course a secondary issue to good art. All I knew were a handful of favourite sad songs that I sang repeatedly at KTV sessions. I was glad to see Jace and Liping again.

And so after Dad and Mum sold the house, they bought a new smaller house nearby. There are nice trees around that area, I recalled to myself. Lately, I have decided to return to trees; after all I could not even draw a simple tree well. Perhaps I should do at least a hundred or a thousand drawings of trees. I had given up on becoming famous, or engaging in intellectual discourses which I avoided unless necessary. I had learnt from the reservoir and its landscapes. I had learnt from the joss-papers, ashes and sunset. I started to appreciate croton plants growing in their beauty. I saw trees and their leaves remaining still, without a word of complaint. Somewhere, I knew there would always be white clouds and blue sky.

The books had been read, though sometimes they beckon me to return to them again. The drawings and sketches were completed; ugly meaningless shreds of memory that would be erased away one day but nevertheless serve as stepping stones for better things to come. The new owners had moved into our old house which was then already renovated and furnished, while we waited to move into the new house.

With each passing day, the dust in Liang Zhu’s house grew thicker. The curtain hung sadly in the oily kitchen, as ants started to loiter in the bedroom in search for dropped crumbs of chips or chocolates. Spiders were making webs beneath his dilapidated wardrobe and onto my library books that I left there. The flaking walls were peeling off with visible cracks and scratches. My brushes, unwanted palettes and paint tubes lay scattered on the bedroom floor. The sight of the potted plants suddenly evoked sadness and despair. The room looked like it had been untouched for a very long time, left to its inevitable fate of solitude and decomposition. I returned home one night and found four dead cockroaches in the kitchen and bathroom.

Adrian and Kweeps had left for England after their brief holidays, while Jace and Liping went to pursue their further education at the National Institute of Education (NIE).

At 6.40 a.m. one morning, the alarm in my handphone rang. I woke up and dragged myself to the kitchen. The sight looked like a painting I did of the kitchen at night which I gave to Zhirong some time ago. There, I washed my face and looked into the mirror. I saw a twenty-three-year-old face looking sad and tired; I was not sure if the face looked as youthful as it should. I ran my fingers through my hair, brushing it with sculpting lotion. Satisfied, I washed my hands and went back to the bedroom. Then, I carried my bag, opened the door and walked out of Liang Zhu’s house. The holidays were over.