Singathology

by Gwee Li Sui

  “Investment?”

  “Yah, you know, the club.”

  “I thought that it was to have a place to play tennis and go swimming with the kids. We’re not going to sell our membership, are we?”

  “No, of course not. Not unless it’s worthwhile, I mean. It’s gone up to $180,000 now, you know.”

  “$180,000?”

  “And who knows how much it will fetch after the construction work. With more facilities and a new clubhouse – maybe $200,000?”

  “$200,000?”

  “Maybe more. After the construction is finished.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I wish they would hurry up. It’s an awful mess.”

  As they play on, Mark is distracted by the construction work. He appreciates that it should enhance his investment. But Mei is right. The ungainly plywood hoarding; the dented metal barriers; the gaps through which you can glimpse the muddy, bare earth; the rubble and dismantlement of what is coming down or going up; the ramshackle huts of wood and corrugated roofing where the construction workers sleep; the dust when the weather is hot; the chunks of mud on the road leading into the club, left from the tyres of the trucks that go in and out, ferrying the earth that is cleared: no matter how polite the signs that ask forgiveness for any inconvenience, the place is an awful mess.

  Distracted, Mark hits a ball too hard. It sails well beyond the line, smacks against the side fence, and rolls to a corner. They rally on with another ball. Then, when he mis-hits an easy volley, they stop to recover them all.

  “It’s gone out,” Mei yells from the corner.

  “What?”

  “Out – it’s rolled out.”

  “Cannot be,” he says, coming over. “Cannot be.”

  “There,” she stoops a little and points. The ball sits just outside the fence, a bright fresh yellow against the wet, muddy grass, at the lip of a grey concrete drain. “See it?”

  “Damn. How did that happen?” Mei just shrugs.

  The fence is all right, Mark notices, but the ground below it has eroded during the construction work, and a gap yawns, through which the ball slipped out.

  “Damn construction work,” he mutters. He stalks off to the gate on the side. It is meant for times such as this when a mistruck ball sails out and has to be retrieved but it is locked. To get to the ball would require walking right around the clubhouse.

  “Damn!” he erupts.

  The groundsman Mei finds and fetches explains that they locked the gate because of the construction. They do not want to let the construction workers who live on the site, just behind the ugly hoarding, to wander in and out unsupervised. This is to prevent theft and who knows what other mischief, the man says. The swimming pool and changing rooms are right near the construction site.

  Mark nods, he sees what the groundsman means, but his anger does not go away, especially when the groundsman does not have the key. He offers to get it from the manager, but Mei says it is all right.

  “We’ll get the ball on the way to the carpark when we finish,” she says, “Remind me.”

  Mark fumes. He knows he will be the one to make this detour. He also knows that his anger is out of proportion to the incident, but that knowledge does not help it abate.

  They play on, and he pulls no punches. Mark’s drives keep Mei running from corner to corner. She comes up to the net to volley, and he drills a forehand right past her ear. She is a steady player, more consistent than he is; she plays more often. But today Mark wins.

  ***

  Mei always takes longer to dry her hair and change. He has a drink while waiting and flips through the newspapers. There is a cyclone in Myanmar that has devastated homes across the delta, from the winds and flood waters, but, coming so soon after the regime aggressively shut down the protests led by monks, no one is keen to help them, and the generals say that they do not want help. Mark read and wondered about the hotel project, whether it might be impacted.

  The waitress brings a tall glass of watermelon juice for Mei and chin chow for him. Mark has to send it back because the Filipina waitress doesn’t understand that his order should have soya bean mixed in – a concoction that is a speciality at the club, which the girl should know. When it returns corrected, he signs the drinks to his account and then complains to the manager, who has been around many years. Then he leans back in the poolside chair, sipping the black and white mix.

  Usually he just waits here, soaking up some sun and people-watching while skimming the papers. But he doesn’t want to read, and, with the children taking their classes in the Olympic-size pool, the poolside of this smaller, curved pool, is empty – only the cleaners walk up and down in their grey overalls and rubber boots, jabbering away in some strange language. Mark finishes his drink and orders another. Still, there is no sign of his wife.

  “I’m going to get the ball,” he walks up to the ladies’ changing room and yells through the half-open door. He hears only the roar of the hair dryer in reply. “Did you hear me?”

  “What?” she says. Her voice echoes off the tiles, sounds faraway, barely audible.

  “I’m going to get the ball!” he yells.

  “What?” she asks again.

  “I’m going to get the damn ball!” he yells again, before realising the hair dryer is silent.

  “No need to shout,” her voice comes back cool and tinny. “See you back here.”

  Mark does not think that he is angry. He has spoken loudly only to be heard but needing to speak so loudly has made him angry. That, and the icy touch in Mei’s voice. He slams the door to the ladies shut and stomps off.

  He notices that there is a gap in the hoarding. He looks through. Beyond the flat tiles at the pool, there is a steep path down a grassy slope, into which someone with a changkul has cut slabs out to serve as rough steps. The way leads straight down to the labourers’ huts. If he cuts across along this path, it will take him fairly directly to the drain behind the tennis court where the tennis ball lies. The way is a little muddy, but it will save a long walk around the club house. The gap is not large, but it is big enough. Mark takes one step into the gap in the wooden siding sideways. His white Polo T-shirt catches a little on the rough, splintered edges, but he passes through.

  He goes down the path carefully. The wet grass slicks his white shoes. The sling bag, with racket and change of clothes, pulls slightly to one side. He bends a little to lower his centre of gravity but does not stoop and use his hands because of the mud. Looking down, Mark notices pieces of glass and bits of metal on the ground half embedded. Looking up, there is a mound of sand and gravel ahead, congealed in the rain.

  Gravity forces his steps to quicken, and he runs the last few feet down. Then his leg muscles work against the forward momentum, stopping him right in front of one of the huts. He glances in. It is dark. There is a single, bare bulb that is on in the daytime and yet still does not light up the space. A double bunk can be made out. No, two. Two double-bunks in the small room. A musty and humid smell wafts outwards. He turns away.

  There is a man standing in the doorway of another hut. He stands, wearing just a pair of black shorts, bare-bodied and barefooted, his ankles discoloured by mud. The labourer is as tall as Mark but more muscular and darker from working in the sun. Mark nods and waves his tennis racket in the general direction of the drain and the ball. There a little nod in reply. This must happen quite often, Mark supposes, and moves on.

  It is quite a scramble to get up the slope, but he makes it. There is a narrow cement apron, then the green fence and, beyond that, the tennis court. He stands there and peers down. There is the ball, slightly below his foot. He begins to lean over, but it feels like he might topple if he should stretch further. So he stoops first. With the tennis racket, Mark reaches out and gets the ball. Then he notices a few others, also in the grass, a few inches further along on the drain. They are not so new. But they are still serviceable, and he stretches for them too. He almost tips over for an instant but regains composure. He
gets all the balls. There are five of them, six including his own. They are awkward to hold but too damp to put inside his new sports bag. Mark clutches them against his chest. Turning to go, they juggle in his arms. He notices the gap through which so many balls have been lost. What a waste, he thinks, what a stupid waste.

  A wooden plank lies there. Someone must have once put it there, at the bottom of the fence, to cover the gap, but it has fallen over. Useless, so useless. With one foot, Mark tries to push the plank back into position. Then, as he stands there, one foot in the air, racket and six balls in his arms, and bag slung on one shoulder, Mark’s foot – the other one, on the slope of the narrow cement apron – slips. It touches but does not hold the surface of wet grass and mud.

  His knees bend automatically. His elbows too. Otherwise, he would have been flat on his face. As it is, he lies there, with the balls still in his arms. He can feel a few scratches on his arms and legs from the cement, but he is surprised that nothing worse than that has happened. Then his legs start to slip.

  Somewhere, there are men laying tiles. They have drawn in chalk where each tile should sit and then, with trowels, spread a thin layer of fresh cement, looking like grey mud. The foreman bends and place his thumb onto the mud like cement. It should feel tacky but not actually stick to the thumb. Then it is ready for the application, and, bending over in the hot sun, the men press the tiles into the layer of mud as neatly as possible, following the chalked lines.

  Somewhere, a man is pushing a wheelbarrow up a ramp made of a single wood beam. The standard wheelbarrow can hold six cubic feet. If that is gravel, as it is for this worker, the load will be about 220 kilograms, far heavier than the man. He struggles and sweats to push the wheelbarrow up the incline. He frowns and strains along the narrow beam, fighting not to let it tip to one side or the other.

  Somewhere, two men are putting in doors onto the toilet cubicles. They squeeze tight against the prefabricated plastic walls of the stall and then screw in the doors, one after another, when just three months ago, in their village, there were hardly doors and no door frames of this kind.

  In the corridor off the pool, the Bangladeshi cleaners are mopping the floors.

  In the clubhouse, while a woman and her fat son snack on fried chicken wings and satay sticks, the Filipina waitresses get another briefing from the manager on the drinks and snacks that members typically order, and, in the kitchen, the cooks from China are figuring out how to make the club char kway teow taste more authentic.

  Elsewhere, the working day continues for the waiters and sales staff at shopping malls; cleaners in office buildings and roadside sweepers, labourers at construction sites, road repairs, shipyards; bus drivers, masseurs at spas or humble foot massage parlours; the domestic helpers in the households cleaning, cooking, looking after children and aged parents; the workers in the assembly lines of factories; the cashiers in supermarkets; the hair wash girls at the salon; the clerks and bookkeepers in the office from Malaysia, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and just about every place.

  But Mark Tan sees, hears, and thinks nothing of them, any of them, all of them. Of nothing at all.

  He slips and reaches out to grab at something with his hands, but, full of tennis balls, he flails. With a sudden gravity, he goes right down the slope feet first. The grass is soft and tickling. The mud is slick. He notices these things, amazed at how quickly speed builds. Then he no longer notices or is amazed by anything. There is a pool of muddy water and gravel at the bottom, part of the construction work site, where the workers mix concrete.

  At full speed, dressed in tennis all-white, still holding onto his racket, bag still slung and dragging after him, he stumbles and slides right down the slope, plunging into the muddy pool.

  ***

  I did not hit my head or pass out. I don’t think that I did. But, when I woke up, I am standing under a hose with the jet of water turned full on. Or, rather, I am stood up there; someone is holding me in a firm grip around my chest, propping me up, under the shower. I open my eyes despite the spray and look down.

  The water is brown-grey, like a river thick with alluvial. There are also small traces of red. My knees are cut and bleeding. They smart. I stand up, and the grip loosens. I turn, and a man is standing next to me, getting wet from the water that splashes off me. He is the labourer I saw briefly. He is still wearing just that black pair of shorts, and, as I thought, he is almost exactly my height.

  I try to speak, but the jets of water pour into my mouth as it opens, and I cough and cough. He switches the water off and helps me walk to his room. There he sits me down on a bunk. The striped mattress is lumpy. It soaks up the water from my shorts. I look around the room. It is even smaller and darker than I had thought from the outside. It is hot and stuffy even in the early morning. A sour smell permeates everything.

  “OK?” he says.

  “Yah, thank you.” I nod.

  “OK,” he replies.

  He points to my legs. I look down, and rivulets of watery blood are running from the cuts of my knees down to my feet and then into the bare ground beneath the bunk. I try to stand up, and he gets up, holding my arms. He has a wooden box open, and inside there are strips of bandages. He applies them to my knees.

  “Are you Thai?”

  He smiles and says “OK” again, nodding. That is about the extent of his English, I think. “You? Thai? Bangkok?” I mime extravagantly.

  He smiles. “Burma.”

  “It is far. Faraway. Far from here.”

  “Far?”

  I try to tell him that I have been to his country to visit the project site and then stayed to see the Shwedagon. I do not know how much he understands but the talking distracts me from the tinges of pain I feel as he tends to my injuries.

  “Thank you,” I say when he finishes.

  “OK.” He smiles.

  My headache begins. The dizziness starts and will not stop until everything is swirling around me like the special effects in a cheap movie.

  “Are you all right, sir?” the construction worker begins to speak to me in perfect English. “You look rather faint.”

  “I do?”

  “It might be a head injury, old chap, concussion. Let’s hope that it’s nothing more. We should get you to a doctor.”

  After that, after I don’t know how long, I wake up in the bed, the bunk. For a while, I cannot remember where I am, how I got here, or even who I am. Then, like a light switch going on, it comes back to me. I look around for my bag and racket. I slap my back pocket, searching for my wallet. They are gone, I think frantically. He has taken them, I think, my benefactor is also my thief. I stare at him. He smiles, unblinking.

  “See?” he says, pointing to the upper bunk.

  I turn and find my bag and racket, wet and slightly muddy. There is my wallet, open, and all its contents spread out in a row – my credit cards, money, my IC and driver’s license, even my business cards – all set out to dry on the bunk.

  “OK?” my benefactor says, smiling.

  “OK. See, I see.”

  I get my things together slowly, preparing to leave this small, dimly lit room, and return through a gap in the thin plywood of the hoarding to our country club where I came from. I can see it from here; the gap is that large. There is a grassy slope, then the fence. Beyond it, the swimming pool beckons blue and cool in the growing heat and sweat of the day. The tennis courts echo with the calm plop-plop of bright yellow balls bouncing back and forth across the net, between two figures dressed in white with computer-designed rackets. On the patio, an endless line of waiters carry trays with long glasses of fruit juice and plates of food. I can smell it cooking in the kitchen, I swear that I can. It is a steep and slippery slope to the country club, such a treacherous journey to another faraway world.

  “Swim?” the foreigner labourer asks, his simple question interrupting my thought. “I swim. In Burma, many rivers. I swim.”

  ***

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nbsp; Mei has taken charge of the boys after their class and seen that they have showered, changed and are ready to go. Then they have all been up to the restaurant and the reading room, where she leaves them both playing some game on a computer, while she heads back to the tennis courts to look for me. By the time she finds me by the poolside, my wife is quite anxious and, even more, exasperated.

  So she does not notice the borrowed T-shirt I wear, blue and thin from many washings but dry and clean. Nor the slightly tattered denim shorts. Or the plates of chicken wings, satay, and char kway teow on the table that I have ordered. Instead, she launches into a small tirade about where I have been and how worried she was. Then she stops.

  Perhaps her eye catches sight of the bandages on my knees and the bloodied clothes hanging near my sling bag, no longer new or clean. Or it may be the big and slightly dazed smile I have.

  But I like to think that she does not see just me, that instead what she sees finally is the splashing and turbulence in the crystal clear, elegantly curved pool of our country club as a man goes up and down in a thrashing, wild windmill of a swimming stroke learnt in the rivers of his country.

  My wife must say something when he stops at the edge, pops up, walks toward me with a casual smile, and takes a crispy chicken wing from the plate I hold out. She may have been calling for a doctor on her mobile phone even as she’s asking me if I am OK, if everything is all right.

  Everything is all right.

  It is all so clear to me, in that instant. It is as if I have put on a pair of spectacles that I have always needed and now can see what I need to see.

  But even at that moment, I know that soon I will not remember what it is.

  Anggerik

  OLEH ISA KAMARI

  Denai yang menghala ke kuil itu diteduhi barisan pohon cendana yang rimbun. Cahaya mentari pagi menyelinap dan melompat-lompat antara dedaunan yang dipuput bayu. Aku mendongak dan terlihat setangkai anggerik hutan yang melintuk dari dahan pohon yang dipaut akarnya. Langkahku terhenti sejenak. Aku menikmati keputihan kelopaknya yang segar. Dedaunnya yang tebal dan lebar menawarkan keyakinan yang mantap pada kehidupan. Aku mengimbas sekeliling. Tiada kembang anggerik lain. Udara lembab menatang keharumannya yang lembut dan segar. Dadaku mengembang hangat. Jiwaku yang tadinya berat terasa ringan sedikit.