- Bystand
You’re actually alternating standing-by like the rest and being pinned to the bed mooning, with some mental equivalent of running down the road flapping your hands and mute screaming like the napalmed Viet girl sixty years ago. (God forgive the comparison.)
So much was foreordained.
Bucket loads, street after street some days in endless array. Wherever, every which way you turned. All sides & little variation. Caps, crosses, jade bands, silver bangles, didn’t matter, all were deep in together.
Win an aspic 5-Day K-Pop Experience.
Government notices, commercial, motivational, spiritual / religio. Blurred.
The karung guni were never idly standing-by. Recall the elderly HK-er or Shanghainese cleaner reported in the paper, delivered to her job in her wellies & apron back of the family Bentley. Say die? Never those ones. (The Yanks would have no chance against them.)
For some reason there were more of the myrmidons here. Some kinda misadventure had cowed the populace. What had undone so many? The coolie past? Meritocracy rammed down throats? Unbroken sixty-year one-party rule you would have to call political by-standing, big time.
Dyeing & comb-backs. The heat brought the dopiness, yawning and collapse at the tables. Shop assistants, the gold-shops particularly, epitomised the matter, perhaps especially post-Covid. Like hungry dogs hanging over their empty bowls, Bab would have observed.
Going by one of the bathroom supplies the other day, you actually swung an arm indoors to scoop some cool. Downplaying the heat was State policy.
The gap between morning & night teeth-brushing had become razor thin; calendar days peeling like scraps in the wind.
Hal was wonderful, but there was no flame. For Yani & Rina fortnightly management tided over.
All the strife from the demented Bhutanese down in Melbourne the last six months didn’t help. More troubling still was the looming sale of Bab’s. It could not be avoided; the hour had dawned, obliteration of the last physical remnants.
With their pigeon holes, no such attachment applied in Sing. In SG the past clung on in the various observances, the ceremonials & festivals. Foisting the alien tongue had done its darndest—remorseless deracination.
Pulverising over-work. The lass at Toast Box told of her hours: she would finish at 10. But she had not started at 10. In fact, she had started at 7AM.
Die, she laughed, in the usual, choking way.
Die. You die, they mock-moaned at their ordeals.
Once more the library had become a refuge. Twelve years later a return to Toast Box. The Serangoon KV was far less congenial than Buffalo Road, which the pandemic had killed off. Ice cream now in a traditional Tamil resto.
Shirt & shoes guys showed ugly the way they ordered their drinks. MENU. Abrupt tone reminding of the caste system. It was abruptly repeated when the waiter couldn’t hear over the hubbub. Only the cashiers wore saris. Queues, plastic cups for water, the uppuma rarely lasting to lunchtime. No doubt the place featured in all the government promo; ( recent years Modi had visited). Less punishing than elsewhere. And the colour helped. Rarely was it countermanded entirely; it usually took more than a single generation. In the inner-city down south colour almost always dressed passable white; the immigration arrangement guaranteed that. Lashes & body art remained rare at KV; even nails. And nothing of multi-coloured & speckled. By the stairs around Tekka, the faded loitering signs hinted at livelier scenes in the past.
Eyelids, shy smiles beneath baseball caps, look-aways on passing. The hints of the entrapment made it more painful here. Before the purpose-built dorms the Mainland construction workers in Geylang had indicated the richness of the Han past.
Regular scenes of urban slaughter at tables, benches, the concrete at the Voids.
In Jogja a sculptor off Sosrowijayan had mounted on a little rooftop the only representation of the heat sighted in near a decade: three tin men in poses of utter exhaustion.
Lately you were pulling some house of horror faces yourself too, Bud. Very little headway on the serene. The old Buddha continued to defy imitation. How did the artists ever get it in that semblance in the first place? More mysterious than Mona’s smile. Living humans bearing such visage, really? Once or twice you had caught something approaching it, memorably in the old painter in Malacca, up on the Peninsular.
You would think soulful ease could be carried a few hundred metres from the library to the Box. Awareness Place. Evernew on the other side, with some decent shelves at one end. (Decent tag for old classics.) Passing by there was like a breeze. The portraitist Eric’s art supply opposite was not hobbyists either—artists actually grappling.
Just so happened we had whip-cracking thunder on arrival at the Box that particular afternoon. Made the gal at the register cringe, hunching her shoulders. Window glass vibrating; sprays drifting in. Magnifique. More refreshing than any of the spa retreats up the road in the Arab Quarter.
Bucketing rain always released animal spirits. You wondered endlessly how the pours were received by the old folk in the lee of the karst up in the hills with the flocks.
The ancestors were commemorated yesterday with a fast for Orthodox Veliki Petak—Great, rather than Good Friday. More than a little inspired by the example of the Muslims, who carried it all through the whole of the Lent equivalent.
