A candle or the sun, p.2
A Candle or the Sun, page 2
Abandoned in infancy by her Chinese mother, Sylvie had been left to the mercies of her Indian father, who comforted himself for his wife’s desertion with whisky and a succession of mistresses Sylvie referred to as aunts. A year younger than me and living two doors from us, she quite naturally became the daughter my mother wanted but never had. Very early on, the two women decided that Sylvie and I should marry, and I was given neither choice in the matter nor a chance to protest. In adolescence the rowdy games of childhood gave way to erotic ones and, when we finally fell into bed together, it was more an acknowledgement of our changed needs than a consummation of fierce passion. Now in our thirties, we acted like a couple who had a lifelong marriage behind them and, in a manner of speaking, we had. Not that I have any cause to complain. Sylvie, a lovely hybrid, with a laugh that bubbled from deep inside her, was the most companionable of bedfellows and knew me well enough to treat everything about me with a matter-of-factness that only genuine intimacy permits. And, what was more, she talked in mismatched clichés which gave her conversation a jokiness and ambiguity I found intriguing.
As soon as I entered the kitchen, she stopped chattering with my mother and kissed me, putting her right hand against my chest as she always did. (A hundred years ago I had asked her if she did that to stop me getting too close. “It’s the currents,” she had said. “I make another contact so they can go round and round between us and never have to stop for breath.”)
I embraced my mother and asked, “Pa not here yet?” I missed the smell of cigarette smoke that always accompanied my father and was usually strong enough to overcome even cooking smells.
“Ssh!” said Sylvie, touching my lips.
“He’s resting,” whispered my mother. “Pa’s not been too well lately.”
“Flu?”
She shook her head, her face suddenly bleak. “Only the good Lord knows what it is, Hern.”
“Tell him, Ma,” said Sylvie.
“You know the smoker’s cough Pa’s had for years?” said my mother, her manner as subdued as her voice. “Well, it’s been, getting worse and recently he’s been coughing up…” her voice became hardly audible and she paused for a moment before she said, “blood.”
“Good God!” I said, forgetting to keep my voice down. “What does the doctor say? What about having X-rays and things done?”
“The doctor says it could be quite serious.” Her voice was low and accusing. “He says there are suspicious markings on the X-rays.” She nodded slowly several times.
“For heaven’s sake, Ma, what does all this mean?”
“More tests and things,” she said flatly.
“You know what doctors are, Hern,” said Sylvie softly. “They punch a hole in your boat and watch you sinking as your confidence runs out.”
“With no straw to clutch on to,” I said, laughingly, elaborating on her already incomprehensible metaphor.
“Clever boy,” said Sylvie, patting my arm.
“He goes into hospital next week,” said my mother, dragging us away from our complex word game. “For more tests.”
“Where’s he now?” I asked.
“Resting,” said my mother.
‘In my work room?” I asked, my voice rising.
“No, dear,” said Sylvie soothingly. “In our bedroom.” She touched my cheek. “You get on with your typing if you must, but shut the door so you don’t wake Pa.”
Sylvie always referred to my writing as my typing. In part this was disparaging, an expression of her resentment at being excluded from an act in which I so often engaged. Mainly, however, it was proof of her matter-of-factness. Whether or not I was a writer was arguable. A few of my stories had attracted comment but I was, in no sense, established or well known. By talking of typing rather than writing, she was describing an action, not a purpose and was, in her own way, protecting me from my expectations. Comforted by these thoughts, I embraced Sylvie and my mother together.
“I’ll be very quiet,” I said. “Call me, but only when dinner’s on the table.”
She did—twice. I was by then so involved in the story that she had to knock on my door and shout, “The food’s icing over,” before I could tear myself away.
My father, usually garrulous the way retired school-teachers often are, was silent, chewing his food with a thoroughness that betrayed his lack of enjoyment of it.
“Feeling better for your rest, Dad?” I tried.
“A trifle,” he said. “Just a trifle.”
“Do you have pain with the cough?”
“Nothing agonizing,” he said, smiling to convince me. “Just creaky aches and pains and a feeling of intense tiredness.” He smiled again. “So much like sadness.”
“They’ll have you right as rain soon enough, my sweetheart,” said my mother, uttering one of her gutsy little laughs.
“Quite right you are, doll,” he said. “As always,” he added gruffly. He had on his face a look meant to indicate that, whatever his fate, she could be sure he would see it through with courage.
My parents Fred and Clara Perera had met, fallen in love, lived and would die in the spell of the films and music of the 1950s. Even as they talked, I could see my mother rehearse the moment when she finds out that Father’s disease is incurable. “How long has he, Doc?” she would ask. The doctor, grey-haired, his face lined with the suffering-he-has-had-to-share but nevertheless retaining its kindliness, would say with a wisdom that transcends mere personal experience, “It is not the number of days we have left but the use we make of them that matters.” She knew she would be smiling and brave to the end so that Father would never know that she knew. And my father would, right up to the bitter end, remain his gruff, kindly self, sneaking grimaces of pain but only when he thought Mother wasn’t looking, sparing her the agony of knowing. Yet deep down each one knew the other knew and their pretence was but another aspect of their love. Then suddenly would come the news: there had been a terrible mistake, a mix-up of X-rays. The nightmare is over and staring into each other’s eyes they find the happiness-ever-after as the camera zooms out, leaving two figures alone but blissful in a landscape of unending green.
“Right as rain they’ll have you,” said my mother, reaching out for Father’s hand. “Just you wait and see.”
My parents left after dinner and I returned to my writing. I was more than halfway through and the story was by now telling itself, incidents racing ahead of the words I had for them. At each pause in my typing, Sylvie called to ask if I had finished. I answered with a fresh clatter of activity on the machine. Her intrusions, though mildly disturbing, moved me to write faster. After a while she stopped calling out.
The aroma of my mother’s cooking had started me off on the tale of a man who had lost all his senses except his sense of smell. The sensations that came to him through his nose made no demands on him. Instead, each carried with it a fragment of his past which, undistracted, he relived in its original intensity. The man I wrote about was very old and I called my story “Roses in December.” By the time I finished, the traffic and other city noises had died away. It was early for the birdsong that, swelling as it did from the concrete heart of Singapore, awoke me every morning but the breeze that preceded daybreak was beginning. This came from the sea as a steady cool breath on which were superimposed shorter, sharper bursts. A little like applause, I thought, clipping together the typewritten pages.
“YOU GOTTA MEAN problem, man,” said Samson Alagaratnam, leaning across my desk. “A real humdingeroo with spikes on.” Sam had bulging, slightly bloodshot eyes which lent a spurious intensity to everything he said.
I was a little light-headed from staying up to finish “Roses in December” and was experiencing the lethargic relief that comes upon me when I complete a story or manage an overdue bowel movement.
“Have you seriously considered the possibility of your being right, Sam?” I asked.
“Listen, Hernie-Bernie,” he said, eyeing me severely, “you just quit the joke routine, will ya?”
Samson and I were childhood friends. Even as a schoolboy Sam had yearned to be part of what he saw as the established order of things. The headmaster of the mission school we attended was a fundamentalist Christian who invariably found that heathens lacked the qualities he sought in prefects and captains of football teams. Sam had defied his illiterate Hindu parents and embraced Christianity, choosing for himself the name of the Old Testament strongman. On graduation, he had joined the civil service and had rapidly become a highly-placed official in the Ministry of Culture. He also taught Third World studies at the university and was considered an authority on English literature originating in Nigeria, Bangladesh and, most recently, Papua New Guinea. He frequently, if inconsistently, adopted the idiom and accent of a disc jockey. Samson had, initially, adopted this manner of speech to be, as he put it, “trendy”. The pursuit of the contemporary was, however, not its only purpose. It had become a habit with which he disguised the intentions of his words, and the nastier these were the more colourful did his affectation become.
“All right, Sam,” I said. “What have I done wrong?”
“You think you’re cool, don’t you?” he said. “Swinging outside the main scene, like?”
“Sam,” I said. “You make me feel like a chimpanzee ostracized because of herpes.”
“You are,” he said solemnly.
“A herpetic chimpanzee?” I asked.
“No. Ostracized,” he said, unsmiling. “Use your quotient man,” back to his DJ voice, “no columns in the papers, no flashes on TV and you don’t ask how come.”
“Should I?”
“Turn on your headlights, boyo,” he said. “Your stories make waves on the BBC, you group into anthologies of Asian writing, yet back in homesville you’re Mr Unknown. How come, man?” he asked, his voice rising. “Ask yourself, how come?”
“You tell me, Sam.”
“We roll it that way, man. Nothing heavy, mind you. Just a whisper here, a nudge there. Sluice it among the media boys that the big brass don’t love Hernie Perera because Hernie Perera don’t love the big brass.” He grinned. “It’s like you got bad breath, man, and nobody will get near you till they know you’re chewing double mint.”
“Good God,” I said, genuinely surprised. “What have your people got against me?”
“You don’t swing with the group, man,” he said lugubriously. “You make single tracks, you wax one-sided discs, you—”
“I don’t quite understand what you’re—”
“You’re not even a member of the Singapore Guild of Writers, Hern,” he said, lapsing into everyday speech. “My ministry people don’t get a chance to look at your work or advise you about it. The first time we see your stuff is when it’s published in some foreign magazine.” He shook his head several times, then placed a hand on my shoulder. “We are here to guide, Hern. To help you get your thoughts into the proper social context.” He squeezed my shoulder. “We would never interfere with the actual craft of writing, mind you. You say things in your own way. The artist must remain free.”
“Look, Sam,” I said. “I’ll join the guild for your sake, if nothing else. You’re president and you’re an old friend.” He patted my shoulder, and I continued. “And as for my stories, you’re welcome to read them before they get published. You can have the one I just finished last night.”
“Man, oh, man!” he said, beginning to jive around my desk. “Now you’ve got an upbeat number. No,” he waved both hands about wildly, “don’t tell me what it’s about. Let mammy’s Sammy guess.” He screwed up his eyes and pressed his knuckles into his forehead. “It’s about the cool way we’ve jazzed up worker-management relations. Right you are, man. All swinging sweet sounds with no discords.” He stared at me, his eyes bulging towards mine, then shook his head. “No. It’s more romantic like, yeah? Ah geddit, ah shore do. Multiracial harmony’s the beat, right? It’s about an Indian chick slurping with a Chinoise guy, right?” I must have shaken my head, for he said, “Wrong.” He held up both his hands and said, “Two strikes down. I surrender, Hern. What’s it about?”
“Smell,” I said.
“Smell!” he said, his eyes suffused and bulging intimidatingly.
“My God, Hern!” Then, outrage making him relinquish his disc-jockey affectation, he continued, “there are a million things to write about in this multiracial, culturally plenipotential society that retains tradition without losing flexibility. There are our leaders. Merely to recount their historic struggles would be an epic. And you write about smell!” He shook his head, silenced by incredulity.
I am not attached enough to my characters or my plots to feel obliged to defend them, but I felt some kind of explanation was necessary. “Well, Sam,” I began, “it’s really about an old man and how smells—”
“Hern,” he said, holding up his hand, “not a word more. You really need guidance, you know.” He gazed slowly around the room. “Look at all this junk you’ve got up.” He pointed at my Christmas tableau. “I feel so ashamed.”
“I’m sorry, Sam,” I said, doing my best to look downcast.
“Man, oh man,” he said, composure returning. “You sure don’t savvy, do you?” I shook my head and he continued. “You’re in Dullsville, man. Sure as God made little green apples, you’re in Dullsville.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” I said, working a look of contrition on to my face.
“You’re my oldest friend, right? I know you better than you know yourself, right?”
I nodded twice.
“You want out but don’t know how, right?”
I nodded again.
“Now hear this and hear good.” He held up a hand to pre-empt interruption. “You quit this scene, hear? Just pack it in and vamoose. Right? Then get in and get in good with us, the nation’s writers. No ifs, no buts, no attap huts. Hear?” He grasped my wrist. “You do just that, and Sammy here will see you’re in the cookie where the cream is.”
“I’m not clear, Sam…”
“No worries about bread, man. You get bread and butter and jam.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, dumbo, recognition by the writers’ guild, good paid jobs from the ministry and something … an optional extra at the university.” He stopped, scratched his head thoughtfully, then continued, “No problem, man. You can lecture in creative writing, prose style.”
‘“But I’ve no experience…”
He held up a finger. “No attap huts, remember. All this plus, plus … you know.”
“What?” I asked.
“We’ll help out with any little problem that stops the flow of creative juices.” He grinned coyly. “You need a flat. Shazam, we find one. Girlfriend needs job. Alakazam, she’s situated.”
I laughed, “When do I start, Sam?”
“No time like show time, man,” he said, prodding my chest with his thumb. “Culture Week zooms close. You could fly with us that trip. Just call, then check-in, man. Call and check-in,” he said as he left.
With him went the elation I had felt on having a story completed. However, I could not blame Sam entirely for that. I was beginning to worry about my meeting with Su-May. From our talk on the telephone I felt sure that this was going to be disagreeable. I had to be ready to deal with anything her mood threw up: tears alternating with bitter jocularity, recriminations juxtaposed against happy memories, accusations inextricably bound to cajolery. But how could one contend with the vagaries of reality? If a plot went awry I could, with bathos, whittle away sharp corners, smooth, with alliteration, the ungainly contours of events. If a story took a wrong turn, it was possible to move backwards and forwards, massaging away painful bumps with analogy, rubbing down unsightly excrescences with onomatopoeia. Whatever I did, this evening was, however, going to be unalterable and in the final analysis unaffected by apologies or recantations. The moving finger did not write. It acted, and actions could not be erased. Su-May’ actions, I knew, tended at the best of times to be unpredictable. I had great difficulty in following her train of thought, and her manner was on occasion so strange it appeared somnambulistic. I suspect this is what attracted me to her a year ago.
It was around Christmas. My tableau was an adoration: magi, shepherds and a multiracial group of urchins. The magi were draped in short lengths of curtain material Benson’s was pushing that month; the shepherds wore a new line of Italian sandals from our shoe department; the urchins looked uncomfortable in expensive kiddie clothes the children’s department was trying to get rid of before they became unfashionable. It was the time of the year when people drifted through the store, idly looking at things they did not want or could not afford. It was the season for vandals and shoplifters, and I had warned my staff to be on the look-out for them.
It was Ahmad who drew my attention to her. “That girl, Mr Perera,” he said. “No good, I think.”
I had worked with Ahmad long enough to trust his intuition, and asked, “Which one, Ahmad?”
“There, Mr Perera,” he said, indicating the corner that housed the Christmas tableau. “Three times she come today. Yesterday evening also.” He lowered his voice, “Always look at you, Mr Perera.”
A slim, long-haired girl stood staring at the tableau. She leaned slightly forwards on long legs, with her rump sticking upwards, awkwardly, the way a young animal’s does. I was flattered to think that my artistic efforts engrossed her so.
“She hasn’t touched anything, has she, Ahmad?”
“No,” he said. “Just look-look, then go away.”
“OK, Ahmad,” I said, “I’ll deal with her.”
I walked quietly up behind her and said in a loud voice, “You seem terribly interested in our Christmas decorations, young lady.”
She turned slowly, not in the least startled, and smiled. “I was wondering,” she said. “Just wondering.”
“What,” I said in as officious a voice as I could manage, “may I ask, were you wondering?”
“Every time I pass through the big shops at this time of the year, you know…” Her smile broadened.
