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2002-09-09 - 9:45 a.m. In the dream, I was inside an office, and some instinct told me it was one which probably existed during colonial times. I cannot remember whether I had actually seen or heard typewriters around me, but I was assaulted by the impression that they were quaint, and proudly obsolete. Again, by instinct, I stepped into one of the cubicles (an historical incongruity, since cubicles at that time did not exist; workers were moored to individual, unfenced desks. However, I surmised that this detail was necessary for the privacy of my encounter.) Inside the cubicle, a Malay man beckoned me to sit opposite him. He wore a songkok that was taller than the ones worn by my contemporaries; I read this as the mark of a time when the Malays in Singapore were less abashed about the regality of their dressing. Modern-day songkoks tended to be an inch shorter, and were less ceremonial. They had little effect in exaggerating the height of the wearer. I recognized the man to be my father’s father, even though we were separated by two generations, and more importantly, by his premature death when my father was a still a child. In actual fact, though, he was an official with the British Navy, and I inferred his present inappropriate location to my exposure to documents that stereotyped the work of Malays during the colonial government as schoolteachers and clerical officers. The man smiled at me. He was youthful, but had crow’s feet lining his eyes. I cannot recall if the presence of a moustache had given him that kind yet melancholy air. He was graceful, like how my father, with a tinge of chauvinism (which I resented), would often describe the Javanese people. The man told me, with regret, how sad he was that he had to abandon my father at such a young age (at the age of eight my father was semi-orphaned after his father apparently consumed some food poisoned by his jealous colleagues). He told me, his voice forceful, yet calm, how I should learn to forgive my father for his occasional bursts of temper. My father was the eldest, and had five younger siblings to look after. Life was difficult for him and his widowed mother, who worked as a seamstress to feed the family, he said. And suddenly a spectral hand placed itself over mine. The man told me never to bear any ill-will against my father, and to look after him, since his own father had been unable to. There is a Malay word for this sort of request, called ‘pesan’. It carries the force of a last will and testament, although without its legalistic overtones. A ‘pesan’ is almost always conveyed orally, and involves a certain code of trust. There is an aspect of it that breathes as lightly as an advice given to you by a mother leaning out to your playing area on the verandah, and another aspect that sits on your back like a heavy and fragile inheritance. After that, the man smiled again at me, and it was at this moment that I woke up. While getting accustomed to the sight of my room’s curtains fringed by the light of daybreak, I traced the seed of my dream to an argument that I had with my father before I went to sleep. I could not recall his exact words, but I remembered how they had cut me like broken glass. As light soaked up my curtains, I was suddenly overwhelmed by one sadness after another. The first: that I was offered, through an improbable visitation, the enduring idea that the man who had so gruffly hurt me before bedtime was actually once a child. Secondly: that the meeting had taken place in my father’s absence, when a reunion between the two would have been much more crucial in healing my father’s unaddressed longings. And a third: that the whole time the man spoke to me, I could not muster the Malay word ‘datuk’, or the Javanese ‘ya-yi’. I saw myself as only the serious-browed trustee of my father’s father, and not his grandson, overjoyed at this precious glimpse through time, space and (whose?) memory.
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