1000Words - Scenes

 
Scenes—Jakarta / Singapore / Ubud

Word: 1000

Summary: Exercise in short forms. Caught-in-the-act, deer-in-the-headlight, I-saw-you-watching-me-watching-you moments. Snippets of memories. Thoughts. The good, the bad, and the fugly.

*

At the MRT, a middle-aged, silver-haired man wearing blue-striped polo shirt and grey pants walked passed by. He shouldered a backpack that had one side-pocket open. From inside of that pocket, a white girls underwear peeked through the slit.

*

In slow-motion now. The ball rolled on the lane, keeping a steady pace, heading towards the pins, braving the pull of centrifugal forces, ignoring the gutters. Pulse raced, your voice caught. The ball hit. The pins fell. Three swayed then stood still. We bowled.

*

The club was dark and throbbing. Music strummed through the speakers—loud and uncompromising. The girl was out of it. She was only standing because a man was holding her by the armpits. When asked, he shyly said he was her friend and it became apparent he was embarrassed on behalf of them both. But still he held on.

*

Inside the lobby elevator there were a blond gentleman, a hotel staff, and a lady. A second after we entered, the lady, half-bowing, mumbled a quick, “Excuse me,” and slinked outside. The hotel staff gave the gentleman a knowing look, pressed a button, and the world went back to normal.

*

This is the internet. There is no past tense. Words recorded, words uttered, words written, words with meanings altered. People losing reverence for the ability to opine. The speed is changing. To think before replying is old-fashioned. Everybody’s screaming and one day, one of the screams will end up in YouTube, goes viral, picked up by CNN, and recycled. This is today’s news.

*

The screen was flashing a montage of old movies and suddenly Yul Bryner came back to life as the King of Siam, holding fictional Anna’s hand, and her ridiculously large gown, where dreams of the 1950s rested, swayed as they made to the dance floor. For an instance everything else was forgotten and the world was good.

*

Arthur Flowers was singing, reciting, story-telling the monkey, the tiger and the jungle into life. The words blurred and their meanings had ceased being essential the moment the sounds took over. That was the sound of my heart beating fast, my blood in turmoil, my feet shuffling, my fingers tapping. That was the sound of my ancestry remembering its origin. Rhythm rules.

*

The crackle when my teeth bit into the pork skin. The juice sprouting out from the marinated flesh. The galangal and cilantro shavings resting on my tongue. The white rice, ordinary yet without it the whole thing wouldn’t be complete. The fried pork meat and the blood sausage with herbs chewed together. The spices seeping into every crevices of the banana leaf plate. This is babi guling at its finest.

*

At Bras Basah complex, there’s a secondhand bookshop. In front of the store, there’s a display of novels, romances, fantasies, sci-fi series, biographies, how to get pregnant books and many more. These boxes of orphaned books waited for someone to pick them up—someone who sees beyond the tattered covers, someone who reads the words and understands. I’m not that someone.

*

How does one describe the joy of finding out that the library is having a program where one can borrow the double amount of books?

*

Monday Morning Meeting. There were many questions running through my head, but none of them were related to the topics presented. Whenever somebody came up to the podium and started speaking, my brain automatically dissected their speech. How many times did they say ‘you know’? Why couldn’t they pronounce ‘ah’? Where did they think of placing the gerund? Why was there a pause between syllables in a word? Was that lisp intentional or psychological? I never got the answers. The only takeaway from such meetings was that I stopped caring a long time ago.

*

When did drinking become an obligation? Can’t it be just the bottle and I, alone in mutual camaraderie again?

*

Getting lost was part of the job. It wasn’t as much as getting lost in the geographical sense as it was in thoroughly losing the thread of a conversation or being in a complete darkness of the topic at hand. They paid us to cover the fact that we were lost by smiling, displaying confident body language and saying some pretty words about “I’ll check it and get back to you.” Sometimes it was fun, but recently more often than not it had become dishonest. The words got lost too—and that was one unforgivable thing about this job. It made liars out of the people in it. It made the words hollow when they were supposed to be sacred and solid. Losing respect was easy then.

*

Where do you think is the best place to watch fashion catastrophe? Answer: MRT stations.

*

Forty bucks for a book? Are you Siddhartha Mukherjee? Are you Terry Pratchett? Are you Frank McCourt? Are you my beloved Peter Mayle? Are you A.S. Byatt? Are you worth it? Is your book in the library? Yes? Well, a dollar fifty-five for the reservation fee is the most I will pay. What? Not in the National Library yet? What madness is this? Do you know how many plates of chicken rice I can buy with forty bucks? Don’t be a plebeian, you say? Fuck you for thinking that books are everything. They are not.

*

Books are luxury.

*

I had never seen an iris before. The deep purple petals, tainted with a burst of bright yellow at the center and hidden by layers of long leaves, winked at me as if to say, “I am something you will never have.”

*

Each day I think about the furnace in my belly. It is never fully stoked, only enough to last the day. Is there a way to grow the fire and keep it going? What sort of fuel do I need to consume in order for the furnace to function at maximum? How do other people do it? Do they respond to the same furnace or do they follow what the whip tells them to do?

Singapore
October 2011