by Yeoh Jo-Ann
against the currents, gnashing with frustration,
its furious mane bleached
the colour of a drowned sun?
But take a second look at it,
how it is poised so terrestrially,
marooned on this rough shore,
as if unsure of its rightful
harbour. Could it be that,
having taken to this unaccustomed limpidity,
it has decided to abandon the seaweed-haunted
depths for land? Perhaps it is even ashamed
(But what a bold front!)
to have been a creature of the sea; look at how
it tries to purge itself of its aquatic ancestry,
in this ceaseless torrent of denial, draining
the body of rivers of histories, lymphatic memories.
What a riddle, this lesser brother of the Sphinx.
What sibling polarity, how its sister’s lips are sealed
with self-knowledge and how its own jaws
clamp open in self-doubt, still
surprised after all these years.”
“Yet…what brand new sun can dry
the iridescent slime from the scales
and what fresh rain wash the sting of salt
from those chalk-blind eyes?”
A pause.
“And why does it keep spewing that way?
I mean, you know, I mean…”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said,
Eyeing the blond highlights in your black hair
And your blue lenses the shadow of a foreign sky.
“It spews continually if only to ruffle
its own reflection in the water; such reminders
will only scare a creature so eager to reinvent itself.”
Another pause.
“Yes,” you finally replied, in that acquired accent of yours,
“Well, yes, but I still do wish it had paws.”
When he finishes, they are all looking at him. How many of them are thinking about the poem he just read, he wonders, and how many of them are just wondering whether they should bother? How many of them will remember this? Abi—when she’s a hotshot lawyer, will she remember that she once had to suffer his reading of “The Merlion” as the afternoon sun beat down on her and twenty-two other students?
Sukhin’s stare shifts into the middle distance for a split second. I must really be getting old—I’m starting to anticipate my exclusion from the next generation’s bouts of nostalgia. “Okay, let’s get started. What does the poet have to assume the reader knows about the Merlion, for this poem to work? Any ideas?”
To his relief, there are. The quicker they get through this exercise, the sooner they’ll be out of the sun and on their way.
Later, he and Dennis sit under a large umbrella at a café on Siloso Beach, trying to forget they’re supposed to be babysitting a bunch of seventeen-year-olds. Dennis is on his phone, scouring online shopping sites for a pair of loafers he thinks he saw on someone who might have been a local fashion designer at either Books Kinokuniya or the lobby of Mandarin Orchard. “I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he looked really good and those loafers will go with everything I own.” Sukhin is reading a book about the evolution of baking and doing his best to ignore Dennis.
Their drinks arrive—lime and soda for Dennis, ice lemon tea for Sukhin. After much discussion, they’ve reluctantly agreed not to consume any alcohol until the bus takes the children away at nine.
“Why did you become a teacher?”
The delivery is abrupt, but the question has been on Sukhin’s mind for hours. While his class broke into groups to discuss the poem, he watched Dennis prance around the Merlion, somehow managing to look ready to hit the beach clubs in a school T-shirt, bermudas and a straw hat. Completely incongruous with the way he taught—shooting questions, clearly and logically positioned, demanding curiosity, demanding proof of knowledge, demanding participation. (“At that height, at h=7.2, is that the minimum speed of the water in order for the Merlion to be spewing? Not dribbling, not dripping—we want it spewing, spouting, gushing, whatever. Is it? Prove it. Peng Siong, how would you begin? What would you define first?”) The students looked starstruck; they all wanted to be part of the dialogue without knowing why. Sukhin wanted to be one of them just for five minutes.
Dennis takes a sip of his soda and leans back in his chair. “I couldn’t think of any other way to meet you—so I stalked you all the way to NIE and then to our lovely institution, and now here we are.” He waves dramatically at the café patio, half-filled with tourists half-heartedly sipping cocktails, half-wishing they had gone to Bali instead. “Sentosa, land of excitement and passionate affairs.”
Sukhin sighs. “Dennis.”
Dennis stares. “Oh, you’re serious. Sorry, sweets.” He fiddles with his straw. “You really want to know? I warn you—this isn’t a very exciting story.”
Sukhin waves him on impatiently. Why do so many people preface their stories like this?
“Okay, so I desperately, desperately wanted to go abroad.” Dennis doesn’t look at Sukhin. “I know it sounds so awful, sweets, but I wanted to get away from my family so badly. They were driving me nuts.”
So when the Ministry of Education offered Dennis a scholarship that would take him out of the four-room flat he shared with his parents and three brothers and deliver him to Cambridge, he jumped at the chance. “I had gone ahead and applied to all the big universities, even though we couldn’t afford it. Ballsy, yes? I figured, who cares? If I don’t get in, I don’t get in.” He grins. “So I got in, then I went fishing for scholarships. Took the first one that came through. Everyone was so mad at me. My mother went into full Taiwanese-drama mode—went on and on about how I had grown up into this evil, secret-keeping little turd.” Dennis rolls his eyes. “Such a drama queen. But she came around.”
“So, no regrets?”
“Sweetie, please.” Dennis waves down the waiter and points at his drink. “Are you seriously asking if there’s nothing else I’d rather do than teach F Maths to snooty brats who are constantly waiting for me to mess up?”
“You’re so good at it.” This comes out sounding like an accusation.
“You sound like a jealous old fishwife talking to a young whore.” Dennis puts a hand on Sukhin’s shoulder. “Sweets, thirty-five is not that old.”
It is. And he’ll be thirty-six in two months.
“Anyway, your turn. Why did you want to be a teacher?”
“My father said I couldn’t.”
The distilled version sounds incredibly silly, so Sukhin ends up having to tell Dennis the much-less-abridged version of the tale. He realises he has never told it to anyone, apart from Jinn. No one has asked him in years why he decided to be a teacher; in the early days, in the first year of teacher’s training when everyone wanted to know why everyone else wanted to teach, he had kept his story dim-witted and believable—“It’s a stable career and I like working with kids”—and completely false.
And the distilled version isn’t completely true. His father hadn’t exactly said that he couldn’t. But he did say, when Sukhin announced he might go for a degree in English Literature and Linguistics: “But what will you do with it?”
The “but” rankled, that introduction of argument into a topic that Sukhin had not thought of as open to dispute.
“I don’t know yet. Something meaningful, I hope.” Oh, the naïveté. He understood now why this particular choice of words had confused and frustrated his earnest, practical father, the frame-maker’s son who had worked all his life for a place in medical school, who just didn’t know how to shoot down his son’s loose approximation of ambition without also shooting at his son.
“Meaningful? How?”
Sukhin knew he was on muddy territory—he couldn’t answer this for himself. But to his father, he said, “I’d like to make a difference to the way people think, live, operate.”
“Med school, Sukhi
n. Go to med school and be a doctor.”
He hadn’t expected this total abandonment of subtlety by his father, the articulate Dr Jaswant “Got-the-gift-of-the-gab” Dhillon. The switch of tactic left Sukhin stupefied, unable to continue the free-form development of this idealistic, altruistic train of thought.
“I’d make a horrible doctor,” he snapped. “I’ve been thinking of teaching.” He had not, but it was worth the shock on his father’s face.
“Teaching? You?”
“Why not?”
His father threw up his hands. “Why?”
They stared at each other across the kitchen table, a fine pair of caricatures— the broad-shouldered, bearded giant and his fine-boned, bird-like son.
“You can do anything you want, Sukhin. Anything.” A pause, as his father appeared to search for the right words to move him. “You have an excellent memory; you have a knack for learning; you have always been so logical, so quick, so good with details. Everything you’ve ever set out to learn, you’ve learnt. And you have good hands. When we went to to see that school play and I saw the machines you made, all the large and little parts fitting together, moving together, I said to your mother, ‘Look at that, he will be a fine surgeon.’”
Sukhin had to force himself not to be carried off by his father’s narrative. He felt helpless and angry—why was guilt always his first and strongest emotion when it came to his father?
“Listen to Papa. Don’t do this—you’ve never wanted to teach; you’ve never shown the slightest interest in teaching anyone anything. All your life, you’ve only learnt what you want to learn—being a teacher means learning what other people need to learn. You won’t like that. Listen to me, Sukhin. Do something else. Listen to Papa.”
That was the lowest blow, Sukhin felt—the regression to “listen to Papa”, the calculated appeal to his boyhood instinct, his unquestioning trust in the one who taught him to walk swim cycle play dead if approached by a bear.
So he refused.
“Oh my god, how Oedipal.”
“I don’t want to kill him, Dennis.”
“You want to discredit him. You’ve spent—what, ten years, yes?—doing all of this”—big gesture that includes the students in the distance playing some odd fusion of volleyball and football—“to prove him wrong. Sweetie, you are so fucked up.”
“I am so fucked up.” I might have been a fine surgeon. Sukhin brings his forehead down to the table and shuts his eyes.
“Okay, now you’re worrying me. I’m going to reel in the children and we’re going to get food.”
Sukhin’s head is throbbing. Everything is spinning. Dennis is next to him in bed, snoring, his arms thrown wide. Sukhin realises with distaste that they’re both still in yesterday’s clothes. He runs a hand through his hair. Sand and something sticky. Ugh.
Stumbling out into the living room, he finds the front door wide open. What the fuck.
The clock in the kitchen tells him it’s nearly eleven. Good thing it’s Saturday. He puts the kettle on, feeling like death. His head is so, so heavy.
A noise from the bedroom. Dennis. Sukhin has almost forgot about him.
“Oh wow, you look like shit.”
Sukhin locks himself in the shower for half an hour.
“You look terrible.”
“Shut up. I brought you cake.”
“Rough night?”
Jinn laughs at his recount of the evening before—the chaos of feeding the students and rounding them up when the bus arrived to take them home, the endless rounds of piña coladas (two for twenty dollars), the free shots of rum (the consequence of Dennis buttering up the bartender), the big black gap in his memory between the fourth shot and waking up to find Dennis in his bed.
“He made breakfast and asked if he’d been gentle enough. I should have stabbed him with my teaspoon.”
“You’d have missed.” She holds up a slice of cake. “This is good. It’s been a while since I had lemon cake.”
He doesn’t tell her that he made it, or that it took him three dry runs to get the texture right.
They chain her bicycle and her backpack to a bench and go for a walk. On the red steel bridge leading to the wetlands reserve, in the fading daylight, they stop to watch dragonflies dart about like manic little biplanes, and he tells her about telling Dennis why he became a teacher.
He repeats that conversation’s rather dismal conclusion: “I am so fucked up, Jinn.”
“No.”
He can’t look at her. His heart is suddenly pounding exactly like it did that night so many years ago when he told her about wanting to be a palaeontologist.
She shocks him by taking his shoulders and pulling him closer, then putting her arms around him. He stands quite, quite still. A dragonfly whizzes past and collides with the bridge.
“You’re not fucked up, Sukhin,” she says, her mouth close to his ear, her face nearly touching his. “You haven’t spent ten years trying to prove your father wrong. You’ve been proving to yourself that you can teach. And you are teaching. You’re tired, you want it to be easier, you wish you loved it. But you’re not fucked up.”
He can’t hug her back; he’s too busy trying not to weep.
“If you tell me you’re fucked up again, I’ll beat you. I’ll throw you into the river and tell the otters to eat you.”
He weeps.
It is a long, low, deep wall in the middle of a garden of long, low, deep walls. It is polished rock, with five rows of rectangular marble tiles, all identical. The tiles on the top row are all inscribed, each one bearing a name, a pair of dates and a small photograph.
Only one tile on the second row is inscribed. The woman reaches out and runs a finger over the name.
“I’m sorry.”
She turns. A strange man is standing next to her, carrying a small bunch of flowers. His face is kindly.
“My mother is over there.” He points, with the flowers, at another wall close by. Bending a little, he looks closely at the photograph on the only marked tile on the second row. “Sister?”
She nods.
“She looks exactly like you.”
The woman and the stranger look at the photograph for a few minutes. He divides his bunch of flowers into two and puts them on the narrow ledge in front of the tile. “Mum won’t mind.” He walks away.
She raises a hand to her face and finds it wet.
XII
HE RUNS IN the evenings now. One of the PE teachers told him it’s time he added some distance to his route.
“Push yourself,” she said. “Or your muscles will get lazy.”
He doesn’t understand how muscles get lazy while they’re supposed to be working, but he agrees to push himself. Nisah must know what she’s talking about—she’s done the Ironman Triathlon twice. Not that he’s considering signing up for anything even approaching competitive endurance.
Running, Sukhin has decided, is for the uncoordinated, the stubborn, the posturing. In essence, it’s an undemanding sport, requiring no special skill, no more than basic agility, no strategy, no understanding of other players— to be good at this, to want to be good at this, Sukhin thinks as he struggles through the final third of his new six-kilometre route, you’d have to be driven completely by ego or desperation. A woman bounds past him, all lean limbs and designer sportswear, her phone blasting an upbeat, high-pitched song that he doesn’t recognise. Sukhin grits his teeth. Or you’re a sociopath, or a maniac.
Another runner draws abreast. A man of about his age, a bit stockier, tanned and lean and muscular. Gym monkey. For a short while, he matches Sukhin’s pace—not hard; Sukhin is slow—and then speeds up, pulling forward. Sukhin quickens his step and lengthens it; the man easily keeps up. Stupid fuck.
They don’t make eye contact. They don’t turn to look at each other. But it’s clear that the race is on.
They run, strides matching, past a couple making out on a bench, past a group of in-line skaters on a break, past a family crowde
d around barbeque pit, kids screaming and pushing each other. Sukhin cringes. Beasts. He loses focus and stumbles over a stray paper cup. The man takes the lead. Sukhin draws a deep breath and lunges forward, but it’s too late—the paper cup has cost him his momentum and now his feet feel like sandbags.
He ambles along a while, steadily losing speed, the distance between him and the stranger growing with each uninspired step. The race is over, but Sukhin will not go gently into that good night. He silently counts to a thousand, then tries to recall the periodic table to distract himself from the burn in his legs, the rapid constriction of his lungs. But there’s no point. Get past the next dustbin, he tells himself, just one more dustbin. Where are the bloody dustbins? Finally, he sees one, bright green even in the darkness. He lopes towards it, a mess of limbs, sweat and desperation. Passes it, passes the near-luminous plastic vessel for refuse that’s become the anchor of his entire run.
Done. Sukhin comes to a complete stop.
He looks around. He’s well past his planned end point, which involved making a loop somewhere way back, and is now in a much quieter section of East Coast Park, well beyond the barbeque pits and the seafood restaurants and the water-ski simulator pond. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around and he’s never explored this part of the park before, so he walks on, feeling a little like he’s breaking into new territory.
But it’s just more of the same park—the same trees, the same dustbins, another public shower, another bicycle rental shop, the same pavement guiding the way through polite, coiffed clusters of plants. The only deviant from government-groomed parkness is a group of tents crouching parallel to the shore under a clump of trees, well out of the glare of the street lamps lining the pavement.
As he approaches for a closer look, he sees people outside the tents, some cooking over portable stoves, others talking softly. A small lamp hangs from a branch. A couple of tents are all zipped up, flip-flops arranged in a row outside.