eight to sixteen

I am never early, as most of you are well aware. Yet for some unfathomable reason I was early yesterday, so in half an hour I traced my footsteps from eight to sixteen. There’s something about one’s age that is very sacred and irrevocable. It is one of the few things you carry with you and absolutely cannot change about yourself in this day and age. It is all of yourself you have ever given; all of others you have ever received. It is all the tears you have ever cried.

Look – that’s the old cobbler by the road who bears – bore – an uncanny resemblance to grandfather when he died, at 69, when you were nine. The sign hanging over his little stall is still misspelled. Even when you were nine you were like the grammar police. You used to be unable to keep your eyes off him when you walked past him on your way home after the school bus dropped you off along the main road. So striking was his likeness to the grandfather you so loved (irrationally, simply). Today you let your eyes linger again, but not because he looks like Grandfather, although perhaps if he’d lived till today, twelve years later, this is what he would look like too – older, vulnerable, hunched, liver-spotted pink scalp showing through tufts of soft white hair. But that is something you will never know. When he died he was tall and robust, with thick grey hair and lots of prickly stubble. You always were his favourite. Why? That is something you will never know; that was not something you ever thought to ask.

Look – that’s where the little kitten was stuck for half a day. You know you can see the spot clearly from your bedroom window when you sit cross-legged on your green and pink bedspread. It is in your mind’s eye. You remember hearing the fretful little mews getting weaker as the afternoon wore on. You remember sneaking out – ma would not have approved, she hated cats – with your younger brother, picking your way along the big drain until you found a way to cross it, or rather, got so sick of the thorny mimosa scratching at your calves that you just decided to make a leap for it. You scraped your knee that day, but you saved the kitten. You remember the cooing noises you made to the frightened animal, you remember the delightful, unexpected warmth of the kitten’s body (you’d practically never touched an animal before – so tyrannical was mother’s fear of them), the way the soft, slightly damp fur felt between your fingers. You remember the way its deep blue eyes looked, huge in its tiny face. You remember thinking incredulously, contemptuously to yourself, ‘How can Ma be afraid of this?’ (But at that point you didn’t know half of it; oh no you didn’t).

Look – that’s where you sat with your primary school classmates, that stone table beside the playground, which always stank insalubriously of wet sand and cat shit. Those were the days before those nice rubbery spongy type things they now put on playgrounds came in. That’s where you sat trying to make Plasticine coconut trees, part of a Malay kampong to be created on a large, thin wooden board, for one of your school projects. You were wishing for more nimble fingers, brighter Plasticine colours, more cooperative group partners. That’s where you learnt the meaning of compromise. That there was – is – always going to be a yawning gap between the heart-breaking beauty and perfection and joy that the human mind can envision and the reality of your own ineptitude (damned, clumsy fingers) and that of other limitations that are entirely – furiously! – out of your control (damned, dull, tacky Plasticine).

That’s where you also realised – shock, horror! – that not everyone’s idea of a perfect Malay kampong is the same.

So I went on – here’s the route you took home from the bus stop everyday when you were in secondary school (that was a sticky, stultifying time), here’s where you learnt how to cycle on your cousin’s purple bike (she got very pissed off with you for dismantling, without her permission, the two extra little wheels supporting the bike. “But if not for that we would never learn to cycle!” I remember retorting; I was always a presumptuous, bossy little shit), and look, here’s where daddy used to park his car, under the closed canopy of the raintrees, and wipe it down in the fading twilight.

And I thought to myself - I fear no grief and no regret in this spent habitat.