K. C. suddenly went abroad for some months. He wanted to see the shrines of Nepal and Bhutan, and he just packed up and left. He did ask if I wished to come along. Deeply gratified that he did not consider the presence of an inept, absent-minded and unpredictable female a hindrance, I sorrowfully declined for I had work that would occupy me for at least six months at a stretch.
K. C. returned, much thinner. The onslaught of the cancer that was to destroy him had already begun, but characteristically he told no one.
He lived in a modest rented flat, although his parents were always pestering him to return to their big house, and his mother was always trying to get him to at least come home for a meal with the family.
K. C. was not fighting his cancer in the dogged manner of a person determined to go on living. He simply did not take heed of it in his pursuit of this and that.
At the time that he collapsed and had to be taken to hospital, he was still giving lectures and was deep in research on some aspect of psychic phenomena. His sparkling wit and sense of humour remained with him till the end, and after his death, I was told of practical jokes that he had played on one of the hospital nurses.
I went to see K.C. at the hospital several times. His family had transferred him to the best private hospital, and they tolerated my presence in the hospital room only because K. C seemed so happy to see me. The cancer was spreading throughout his body; he was almost skeletal, racked continually by painful coughing. Yet there was a serenity about him that was almost reassuring.
It was hard to reconcile that I was about to lose someone whose friendship I had learnt to treasure. And once when I could no longer control my tears (it also made K.C. uneasy to see a woman cry), I walked out swiftly from the hospital room. I was around on the day of his death. He was already very weak, but was, as always, still alert.
“This is for you,” he said, handing me a sealed white envelope with great effort, “and you are not to open it till a year after my death.”
I took the letter sadly and then I could see that K.C. wanted to be alone; he died alone, by choice, in the large, spacious hospital room. I went home immediately afterwards, and attended his funeral and cremation the next day. His ashes were strewn over the sea, as he had wanted.
How could I not have wanted to see what was inside the sealed white envelope? I had never outgrown the childhood predilection for secrets and the tendency to be completely unsettled by the tantalizing promise of secrets not yet revealed.
This sealed letter now in my hand, from a friend on the clay of his death – it triggered off emotions at once gratifying and awesome. It was fraught with portentous possibilities – sentiments never before expressed? Some mighty secret revealed? Some insight that only people about to die were privileged to have? Some direful warning about my life? Yet there was this superstitious fear of breaking faith with the dead.
Many times had I taken out the envelope, scanned its surface for clues, even held it against the light hoping to catch some words that would provide the answer. But I saw nothing, and then it occurred to me that it could have been a huge joke being perpetrated by the irrepressible K.C.
One day, I was suddenly overcome by the desire to rip open the envelope, to put an end, once and for all, to the suspense.
I took the envelope out of the drawer; my hands trembled a little and then strangely I could not open the envelope. It may sound strange, but I could not open the envelope. My fingers seemed to have been suddenly benumbed. A sensation difficult to describe, but my hands seemed to have been independent of the rest of my body and not coordinating with it at all.
I had the curious feeling that something odd was happening, quite independently of me. If it was indeed K.C. who was preventing me from breaking a promise to him, it was quite uncharacteristic of him.
Since then, I had only been tempted at one other time to touch the envelope, but that morning, try as I would, I could not open the drawer. It appeared stuck, although that had never happened before. I struggled with it for half an hour, then gave up. Then I tried again, and this time, it slid open easily, with the envelope lying inside.
Small signs, these; they could almost be interpreted as signs of displeasure, and I have no desire to provoke them further.
It has already been six months since K.C. died; another six months before I can open the envelope. I have never told his family, fearing, perhaps groundlessly, an attempt to break into the privacy of a communication meant only for me.
O Singapore: Stories In Celebration
The Malady and the Cure
This is the strange story of one Mr Sai Koh Phan, one of the faceless thousands in Singapore, rescued from the facelessness by a malady. Mr Sai Koh Phan, civil servant, is now a celebrity of sorts in the country and region, and since his case will be presented by his doctor at the next Geneva International Conference of Remarkable Disorders, there is a chance that he will be known to the world as well, at least the medical world.
The malady has, moreover, created considerable ripples in the political world. But for adroit top-level manoeuvring, it could have resulted in serious political repercussions for Singapore.
“I’m only a humble civil servant. I suffered much, but I’m glad that in the end it was for the good of so many Singaporeans,” says Mr Sai Koh Phan, when he is interviewed by a reporter from Newsweek who asks him how it feels to be the centre of so much attention. And he repeats, “I’m only a humble civil servant, and I’m glad to be of service to my country,” when another reporter, from TIME, asks him how it feels to have helped avert a national crisis. He adds, with a sudden access of gratitude. “I must express my deepest thanks to my government and to my doctor, Dr Sindoo, without either of whom this miracle would not have been possible.”
Now gratitude has been the abiding principle of all Mr Sai Koh Phan’s actions, a gratitude constantly evoked by the daily reminders of his secure, well-paying job as the principal of a school, his well-furnished two-storey semi-detached house where he lives with his wife, four sons and mother-in-law, his other equally well-furnished apartment which he is renting to a Japanese bank executive, his sizeable bank account. To comprehend the full extent of his rise from the deprivations of his childhood, Mr Sai Koh Phan matches each deprivation against the solidity of present comforts, so that daily routines in the home become so many cautionary tales to his children.
“Chicken? I never ate chicken except once a year, on the first day of Chinese New Year, so eat up all that chicken on your plate, and be grateful,” he would admonish his children.
“Air-conditioning? I shared a room with three brothers and two sisters on the top-floor of a shophouse in Chinatown. We had two mattresses to share among us. Most of the time, I slept on rice-sacks. Now my son says he can’t study except in an air-conditioned room!”
Mr Sai Koh Phan’s gratitude to the country that has given him and his family this good life, is of the deep-welling, not the merely perfunctory kind, and extends retrospectively on behalf of those ancestors who had come from China with nothing but the proverbial shirt on their backs, and on their behalf, Mr Sai Koh Phan’s eyes fill with grateful tears.
Mr Sai Koh Phan’s position as principal of a large primary school offers him plenty of opportunities for the expression of this emotion, for the school is in the constituency of a very active Member of Parliament who likes to make visits to show up Mr Sai Koh Phan’s school as the model of a well-run, well-disciplined school. Mr Sai Koh Phan is all effusiveness when the Member of Parliament comes calling, he is even more fervid when the Minister of State for Education drops in one day, and when the Senior Minister for Education himself indicates that he would like to come for a visit, Mr Sai Koh Phan knows that he has reached the apotheosis of his career and there is nothing more that he could wish for in this life. The depth of the gratitude expressed in his welcoming speech that day has been without parallel.
Now so powerful an emotion must have a channel for its proper ordering, and Mr Sai Koh
Phan has found the perfect channel in the national campaigns. The comprehensiveness of the campaigns, covering nearly every aspect of the Singaporean’s life, from the way he grows his hair, to the size of his family, together with the regularity with which they occur in the course of the individual’s life, has provided the ideal framework within which the awesome power of Mr Sai Koh Phan’s emotions can be organised and structured. Hence the campaigns have provided the guiding principle of Mr Sai Koh Phan’s existence, and he has never felt more contented and happy. The campaigns have provided an overriding philosophy that can be expressed concretely in 101 ways in his daily life at work and at home. Mr Sai Koh Phan needs not the posters and advertisements and handbills to remind him of what he must do and must not do. For the injunctions and admonitions are etched deep in his consciousness so that any infringements, no matter how small, are instantly felt and appropriately responded to. Long hair is frowned upon, so a single hair springing up in defiant growth out of the neatly cropped head of a pupil, is immediately noticed and seized upon by Mr Sai Koh Phan in his vigilant rounds of the school. Mr Sai Koh Phan likes to be a good example to his pupils, so he wears a crew-cut and no hair of his will be seen to even remotely violate the official stipulation of the above-the-back-collar hair length, and he continues to keep the crew-cut long after the campaign against long hair is over. Mr Sai Koh Phan prides himself on being different from those who are quite content to fulfil only minimum requirements or who grudgingly comply because they fear the fines that come with non-compliance. Mr Sai Koh Phan believes in going the extra mile; indeed, his sense of gratitude will not let him do less. And that is why he not only cuts his hair very short, but keeps it that short, beyond campaign time. And that is also why he has four children when the campaign urges Singaporeans to have three. The age gap between his two elder sons and the two younger ones matches exactly the time gap between the campaign to ‘Stop at Two’ and the campaign to ‘Have Three – or more, if you can afford.’
This full, total and whole-hearted response to the campaigns has not been without personal sacrifices, but it would take more than personal sacrifices to daunt Mr Sai Koh Phan. There is the Incident of the Bee, and there is the Incident of Xiu, both of which vividly testify to Mr Sai Koh Phan’s readiness to put up with any discomfort in his commitment to the campaigns.
The Incident of the Bee: Mr Sai Koh Phan stands at attention during the singing of the National Anthem at the morning school assembly in the school field, his chest pushed out, his shoulders pushed up, his fists clenched, his facial muscles taut with the effort of a full display of patriotic fervour. Now this position of ramrod straightness is not without cost to a body long trained to respond to a built-in dictum that crawling is a more effective mode of locomotion than walking, and the constant demands made of that poor body in terms of abrupt changes from the bowing, bobbing and scraping motions to perfect erectness, must be great indeed. But that is of little concern to Mr Sai Koh Phan. He stands, muscle-taut, singing the National Anthem, when suddenly a bee works itself up his left trouser leg and stings him right up there. It is a large and most vicious bee, and the pain it inflicts is excruciating, but Mr Sai Koh Phan’s disciplined patriotism will not allow even the smallest tremor in that superbly erect frame, so he goes through the whole morning’s ceremony, perhaps only a little paler than usual, and it is only when the last strains of the song have faded away in the air, and he is back in his office that Mr Sai Koh Phan groans a little, slumps back in his chair and calls for help.
The Incident of Xiu: Mr Sai Koh Phan gets a directive that school children should have their names changed to their Hanyu Pinyin forms, in line with the ‘Speak Mandarin, Avoid Dialects’ campaign. Mr Sai Koh Phan, always careful to set the example, immediately changes his name to the desired form, posts it up outside his office, and proceeds to change the names of everyone in his school and household. His two older sons are aggrieved at the loss of the western names that they have given themselves, and protest that they will not be known by the new names which they find difficult to pronounce and which they say will make them feel ridiculous.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snaps Mr Sai Koh Phan. “‘Ricky’, indeed. ‘Chester’, indeed. Evidence of the harmful moral influences from the West. From now onwards, you will respond only to your Hanyu Pinyin names, both at home and in school. Is that clear?”
The younger of the two, a rebellious, sturdy fellow of 15, ignores the father and runs after his dog, a handsome Alsatian.
“Bonzo! Bonzo!” he calls, pointedly ignoring his father.
“‘Bonzo’, indeed!” cries Mr Sai Koh Phan, smitten with guilt because he has not been vigilant enough about his children’s behaviour, allowing them, like the rest of Singapore’s young people, to slide into western decadence. But it is not too late to effect corrective measures.
Bonzo, a highly spirited dog, is unable to respond to its new Hanyu Pinyin name of Xiu, undergoes an identity crisis, and shows increasingly bizarre behaviour.
“If that stupid dog of yours does not stop it, I shall send him to the vet to be put to sleep!” roars Mr Sai Koh Phan who, for the third time, shakes his leg free from the warm stream of Xiu’s piss. Xiu’s disorientation is very real indeed; he takes to barking at the cageful of canaries whose names of Goldie, Chirpie, Louie and Randy have been changed to Jin, Xuan, Lie and Ran respectively.
But domestic crises of this sort are quite inconsequential to Mr Sai Koh Phan, and he continues to be a very fulfilled and happy man. Alas for him! The fulfilment and happiness are less real and enduring than he thinks. In the 20th year of the total service of himself to the campaigns, the Malady strikes Mr Sai Koh Phan. It is no ordinary malady. It strikes with a vengeance, so that not a single organ in Mr Sai Koh Phan’s body is free from its vicious power.
Mr Sai Koh Phan suffers stabs of pain in his legs that travel rapidly up his spine and cause him to contort his facial features grotesquely; wild ragings in his stomach tie up all his intestines into impossibly tight knots of pain that cause him to double up and gasp for help; fiery streams course up and down his throat, threatening to burst through its walls.
Now even such sufferings would have been tolerable to Mr Sai Koh Phan if they served his ambition, an increasingly urgent one, of winning the Ideal Civil Servant of the Year award. But instead they frustrate this ambition, for they render him totally incapable of attending meetings, hosting the friendly meet-your-Member-of-Parliament sessions, supervising the school’s Community Consciousness activities, etc., all of which would certainly conduce to the winning of that award. Mr Sai Koh Phan is most distressed, and so is his Member of Parliament who is anxious for him to have that high honour. No doctor is able to help Mr Sai Koh Phan, and then in despair, upon the recommendation of a friend, he goes to see Dr Sindoo, who is known as the best doctor in Singapore, and also the most eccentric.
“The cure for the malady is simple,” says the doctor, and Mr Sai Koh Phan’s eyes light up with hope.
“Spit,” advises the doctor, “Preferably three times a day.”
“What?” says Mr Sai Koh Phan.
“Be discourteous to your mother-in-law,” says the doctor. “Also three times a day, and in dialect.”
“What?” cries Mr Sai Koh Phan and now he is thinking that all those rumours about Dr Sindoo being a little mad must be true.
“Litter – once a day will be sufficient, I think,” says Dr Sindoo, “And when you next watch TV and the National Anthem is sung, scratch your leg. And your armpits if you like.”
“What?” shouts Mr Sai Koh Phan, now convinced that the doctor is mad. He falls back on his chair, thoroughly distressed. “How can I do that,” he wails, “I’m a civil servant!”
“And getting less civil and more servant,” mutters the doctor. “You have to do all these, I’m afraid, if you want to be cured of this malady.”
“You ask me to spit, to litter, to swear, to go against the very campaigns that I’ve been so faithful to for the l
ast 20 years?” gasps Mr Sai Koh Phan. “Spit? Litter? How can I desecrate the very soil that I worship, both on my own and ray ancestors’ behalf? How can I scandalise my fellow Singaporeans? Doctor, you are asking me to do the impossible!”
“You don’t have to do it publicly,” says Dr Sindoo. “I never asked you to. You can do it privately, in your own home or garden at night. Nobody need see. But it is important that you do it. Unknown to you, your body has not reacted very kindly to all those years of subjugation to the campaigns, and has been building up a mechanism of protest that is only now beginning to manifest itself in these angry knots and twists of pain. They could get worse, I warn you. The only way to break up this mechanism is to do precisely the opposite of what the campaigns have been making you do. In this way, slowly but surely, you will placate your body and calm it into a state when it will have no need of this mechanism of defiance, and thus dispense with it. I am afraid that this is your only hope.”
“Oh, how can I? How can I?” wails Mr Sai Koh Phan. “How can I defile my beloved country by doing all these dastardly things on her soil? I am a son of the soil!”
The doctor gets a little impatient, mutters, “Night soil, more like,” and then says aloud, “Don’t be silly. I never told you to do all these things publicly. You can do them privately, very privately, in your bathroom, for instance. The most important thing is to pluck up enough guts to do the exact opposite of what you have been trained to do for the last 20 years.”
“I can’t! I can’t!” weeps Mr Sai Koh Phan. “I’m a true son!”
The Catherine Lim Collection Page 25
