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2002-03-27 - 1:42 a.m. Dear Friends, It is 6 plus in the morning, and I am at TAPAC (Telok ayer Performing Arts Centre). Beside me is a lemon tea can I am using as an ashtray. I am barebodied, with the fan on full--and these things make TAPAC so much more than an office; there is the illusion of home. I miss all of you, and I wish there was a better way to say it than through e-mail. Actually I have very little idea of why I'm writing this, but I'm guided by the impulse to just write and commit my thoughts to words. I'll see where this takes me... (Drags a puff from cigarette...) It would be nice if we could just go out and have breakfast now. It would be nice--the birdsong suddenly rising out of the gloom, the imperceptible way the sky turns to light. It would be nice to sit at a table, all five of us, just drinking tea or coffee--milk staining the lip of the glass, the comforting tinkle of the teaspoon, maybe we'll have kaya bread or a runny soya-sauced half-boiled egg (even though I know I'll commodify this humble breakfast as something postcard-nostalgic--Katong bakery, strainers made from stockings, antique wooden chairs, napping cats). There'll be a strong slanting ray of sunlight stretched across our table, our eyebags will reveal themselves, we'll be tired from sleeplessness, yet that fatigue will be a happy one. I like the idea of happiness when it's hardest to define. When its sources are at its most obscure. There's happiness of course, that comes from accomplishment, there's a titillating happiness when you receive a certain phone call, there's happiness when tragedy is averted, there's drunken happiness. But the one happiness I cherish best is when it seizes you out of the most commonplace of situations, and it flushes through you in a way I can only describe as poetic. Suddenly things make sense. You realise the present you are inhabiting is the intersection of your past and future. That it is possible to make peace with the ghosts of your decisions. That this moment has been orchestrated with impeccable harmony for you--strangers look kind, trees look wise, your own hand wants to tell its story--the first finger it clutched, the first time it held another hand and conducted a current through your every nerve, the violence it is capable of yet has mercifully avoided. You are here. Now. In the company of people you love. Who reflect your warmth back to you. But even the notion of who you are dissolves--you are part of something larger, something more multiplicitous and mad than you could dream of--canyons, waterfalls, ocean swells, forest fires, moon haloes, solar eclipses, famines, street carnivals, dolphins, bridal dresses, yo-yo's, talcum powder, bubble gum, tulips, iodine-tinted scars, sprinting at dawn, push-ups on hard gravel, movie ticket stubs, pacifiers, cowbells, ice cubes, silver tinsel, hot showers, clean bedsheets, shoulder rubs, anklets, butterflies... I spent my childhood in a kampung. It was my grandmother's in Pasir Panjang. The entrance to the kampung was a slope leading up an then down again. You would pass by a market, where there was this boulder, I remember, with a red sash around it, and various joss-stick offerings and other religious paraphernalia at its fringes. There was a n old Chinese man with one leg who walked around with a crutch. He always greeted my mother as we made the trek to grandmother's house, showing us all that was left of his teeth. In the kampung, you had to always watch your step because of the chicken shit--green and white, looking like they were squeezed out of toothpaste tubes or cake-decoration funnels. There was a mad rooster once, with one blind eye, that would suddenly chase you for no reason and peck at your calves, and it was an effective deterrent for us kids to stay indoors. My grandmother's house was one of the prettiest--she had a garden with a papaya tree (whose fruits would be wrapped in pink plastic bags to hasten its ripening, and had litle air-holes my uncle made with the end of his cigarette), and those chilli plants whose leaves somehow always attracted ants. The outside walls were a creamy yellow, with green trimmings round the windows, decorated with those light lace curtains kampung people prefer. The roof was zinc--and when it rained, it conducted a symphony of falling water--there is something urgent about rain suddenly pelting metal, and you really felt what a house was for--shelter against the elements. It's not the kind of rain that comes to HDB flats--muted, deflected, making a polite request for you to draw the windows shut. Rain on a kampung house was bossy and boisterous, it hammered the zinc, gushed down the sides of the roof abundantly in sheets. In the kampung house also, I was vaguely introduced to the idea of ecology--there were other non-human tenants beside us. Hence the larder cupboard (with screens of green gauze, skilled carpentry allowing the doors to shut tight without needing a latch, filled with plates of fried fish, or chicken liver) had four legs which were placed in bowls of water. This kept ants at bay, since to reach the food they would have to crawl into the bowls first. And my grandmother devised a way to deal with bloodsuckers--a plate with a raised rim (so one could hold it, like a tambourine) coated with a thin layer of cooking oil. One simply had to swipe in the buzzing air with the device and after a while you'd get a plate studded with dead mosquitoes, all looking like tiny hieroglyphs in gold. And more kampung memories--the bonfires built to burn the week's rubbish, my grandmother looking like a trembling mirage behind the shimmer of heat; the TV with bad reception and the different antennae that was used, from the one looking like a mini-obelisk with feelers, to the one that actually looked like a satellite dish; my grandmother's quilts, painstakingly made from hexagons of scrap cloth (she was the village seamstress, and she had a butter-cookie tin of thread of every imaginable colour and lots of brown paper and a heavy pair of Singer scissors that really made classic scissor sounds as it cut through cloth); the Singer sewing machine, with its butterfly motif and the foot-pedal that I loved to play with, rocking my feet back and forth on it, believing it was good exercise; the Jacob's tin where my grandmother kept her money; the sarong cradle attached by a spring to the ceiling beam, which I used to rock my baby cousin to sleep; the chickens that kept on straying stupidly into the house and had to be shooed away; the bathroom of slippery cement floor and Popinjay soap (also the yellow soap bought in a block and which had to be cut ito smaller pieces--for laundry, always comes with the coconut-fibre u-shaped brush) and dragon urn where you scooped water from; the seashells one found if one dug in the dirt--evidence that the kampung was once very close to the sea. Now there are no kampungs left in Singapore. I did a play with Teater Ekamatra on this once, about a kampung called Kampong Wa' Hassan , located near the coast of Sembawang. Sometimes I feel this inevitable sense of loss when I think of my childhood. My kampung childhood was innocent, carefree, sensuous, with nature just at the doorstep. And I know even before me, my father had a kampung childhood that now seems so absurdly removed and irretrievable--fathers who hung thick leather belts on nails in the wall to beat errant children with, kids dismounting from their bicycles and pushing them when they passed by an elder, Indian bread sellers who peddled from door to door on their bicycles, selling French loaves that were still inexplicably warm, burning Benjamin-gum incense to 'smoke the house' on Thursday nights, a Pontianak who turned into a white goose and whose presence was always indicated by the odour of frangipani. Gosh, it's eight. Memory excursions can take so long. Daylight has now exposed the blue facade of TAPAC--seen through the partially-screened windows. It's time for me to go home--I'm meeting H at 2.30 later today, we're working together on a play. It'll be the first time I'll be seeing him in 6 months. What did I learn from it? That it's not worth it. So many things we could have done together, if only I didn't allow my stubbornness to rule my life. On the door to this office there's a sign that says 'NO DUMPING--PRIVATE PROPERTY--TRESPASSER WILL BE PROSECUTED'. We stole it, Teater Ekamatra people and me, when we went to Kampong Wa' Hassan to observe the ruins. It's a sign screaming out an irony--it's not me who did the dumping, someone else has put my childhood and my childhood's kampung into the dustbin of history. What else will go in 20 years' time? TAPAC? Amoy St Market? Time will pass, but I pray some things won't change. Ever. And that includes K's moments of insight (especially when he takes the blinkers off my eyes and makes me realise what a prick I can be as a friend), B's mischievous grin and the infinite attention he pays to you, M's deep inscrutable sighs and the way he goes to the ends of the earth in caring for other people, and A's generous trust in others and his unexpected humility. I'll end off with Ben Okri, who said, 'Destiny is your friend.' And I say, my friends are my destiny.
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