LONTAR issue #2

by Jason Erik Lundberg (editor)

  The most spectacular of Koh Meng and Ismail's descriptions of Tower life were those of the elegant banquets thrown in honour of Scholars whose services had been engaged by a head of state or dignitary. The food served was determined by the country from which the client hailed. Once, it had been the President Pharaoh of Egypt, and as an apéritif, each guest was served, in a martini glass, a pearl dissolved in vinegar. When the King Minister of England had engaged the services of our top Asian and African politics Scholar, the Tower authorities had thrown a medieval-style banquet: roasted peacocks, richly spiced porpoise pudding, platters piled high with custards and cakes, goblets of mead and ale. The latter affair had been so tastefully done and well-researched that the King Minister had promptly decided to also schedule an impartation with the European Medieval and Renaissance Scholar who had served as the organiser.

  Koh Meng and Ismail also provided anecdotal glimpses into life in the Tower. There was the time an enormous Burmese Python got loose from the menagerie, slithered into the rooms of one of the more senior Scholars, and coiled up for a nap in his bathtub. The high-pitched shriek Ismail would produce as the climax of the story always sent us into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

  On a more mournful note, there was the Scholar who somehow got pregnant and tried to keep the baby, successfully concealing her swelling belly for a full six months before her colleagues found her out. How she'd gotten pregnant, nobody knew; there must have been a mishap or an oversight in the sterilisation procedure every Scholar underwent the week before Tweeding. In any case, it happened, and it wouldn't necessarily have posed a problem if she'd simply offered to let the government place the baby in a good home. A child with a Scholar's genes was far too valuable to society to abort. But the woman demanded that she be able to keep the child and continue living in the Tower, even when the father—another Scholar—counselled her to give it up. In the end, she insisted on turning in her tweeds.

  It was Koh Meng who told us this story, and she told it so beautifully that by its end, there wasn't a dry eye among us.

  "Imagine choosing to leave the Tower," Bee Eng murmured. "I couldn't bear to do it. Especially not for a baby I wasn't even supposed to have."

  "Not 'supposed to', but she did nonetheless. A difficult decision, I'm sure," Edwin protested, always even-handed in his judgements.

  "But all that hard work for nothing!" replied Bee Eng. "Imagine going through all of that—all of this—and finally making it. Then choosing to give it all up!"

  Koh Meng gave her own commentary. "I don't see why she couldn't have just stayed and raised the baby in the Tower."

  "Oh come on," Edwin scoffed. "That doesn't make any sense. It would have been disruptive. It would have distracted her and the whole community away from their duties. There's a reason why Scholars undergo sterilisation."

  "But isn't it a natural right to have and raise one's own child?" Koh Meng asked, one eyebrow arched.

  "Perhaps," Ravi chimed in, "But it's also a right that Scholars forgo voluntarily in exchange for the honour of being a Scholar, of becoming part of the Tower community. We all know what we'll be getting into, Exams willing. We don't have to get sterilised, but we don't have to become Scholars either."

  Ismail looked at me. "You're awfully quiet, Grace. What do you think?"

  I smiled. "You know me, I'm always quiet."

  "It doesn't mean you don't have opinions. If you were her, which would you choose? The baby or the tweeds?"

  "The tweeds, of course," I replied. There was no doubt about it. I'd already made my decision to forgo parenthood a long time ago for the sake of the Ivory Tower. But it turned out to be a decision that Koh Meng and Ismail never had to make. Ironically, the time they spent doing research in order to prepare for life in the Ivory Tower detracted from their ability to ever partake in it. They failed their Exams. Naturally, there were tears shed when they found out the news, but in a way, they seemed relieved as well. Perhaps they subconsciously wanted to fail—to get married and start a family together, as they did end up doing. There was something to be said for the fullness of life in the outside world. Four children and a grandchild before they departed from this world. The circumstances of their death were tragic. A lorry smashed into their car on the PIE. I read about it in the paper. They never even caught the driver.

  Of course, you're probably not interested in all of this, are you, Grace? For all I know, you still remember all of what I have already recounted, and you're quite frustrated with me right now. You were preparing for an impartation, reading Hanker's History of British Colonial Administration in the East Indies, when you spotted the tiny scribble in one of the margins, pencilled in so faintly that it looked as if it had undergone a half-hearted erasure. It told you to look behind the books on the top shelf above your desk. Intrigued, you followed the directions, and found this notebook, a common blue-covered spiral-bound thing with "For Grace" scrawled across the front in black marker. You opened it and read the entreaty on the inside of the front cover: "Please believe me when I tell you that this book contains information of the utmost importance." And you kept going.

  I apologise for the disordered and rambling quality of this account, but I don't think it can be helped. Believe it or not, I used to be much better at ordering my thoughts, at knowing which information to prioritise, when to provide more detail and when to get to the point. But since the perfection of the technology utilised in knowledge impartation, these skills have become obsolete for us Scholars—still necessary, no doubt, for passing Exams, but surprisingly unimportant after one actually starts living in the Tower. Yet, I think this writing style will work to our advantage. For what is memory if not a jumble of countless impressions, details, scenes, and words that glow with the persistence of a dying ember? What is history if not an overwhelming heap of minutiae and trivia from which we can shape coherence and significance? If the purpose of this notebook is to restore, at least in part, what of ours is being erased, then perhaps rambling will be just the thing.

  If someone had told me a few years ago (or who knows how many years ago at the time you're reading this) that I would be writing an account to my future self for this purpose, I would never have believed it. Of all the things I feared about being a Scholar, this was never one of them.

  My greatest worry when I received news that I had qualified for the pre-Scholar programme was that I would miss my—or should I say our—family. One of my most vivid recollections, though I'm sure I once had many more, is of us all going out for breakfast the day I had to register at the dorms. We went to a hawker centre just five minutes' walk from our flat.

  "Just simple family breakfast," Father told me. "You don't mind simple, hah?"

  "Simple can, what." I answered before quickly correcting myself. "I mean: Simple is fine."

  He smiled—a broad nicotine yellow grin laced with pride. "Clever girl."

  We piled out of our flat into the narrow corridor: me, Father and three brothers in their usual t-shirts, board-shorts, and flip-flops, and Mother in a pretty green dress and sensible black dress-shoes. (She was to take me to the dorms after breakfast.) Our grandparents came along too, though they rarely left our flat. Gong Gong wore a white singlet and a pair of khaki shorts, all skin and bones except for his middle, the white cotton fabric stretched tight over his pot belly, as densely packed and spherical as a bowling ball. I see him in my mind's eye walking down the corridor, leaning slightly backward, hands planted firmly on the small of his back in a manner reminiscent of a pregnant woman. Po Po, guided by my mother's arm, bent in the opposite direction, her small frail body forced forward and earthward by an unrelenting and severe weeping willow of a spine—decades of untreated osteoporosis. Earlier that morning, over the hump of flesh that had formed atop the apex of her back, my mother had draped a dark brown floral blouse, and I had helped her into one of the seven identical black polyester trousers she owned.

  I still remember the colour of the table we sat at: melamine o
range. The hawker centre was already crowded, with long queues outside the more popular stalls. To make things easier, Father and the brothers were assigned the task of fetching food for everyone while Mother and I minded the old folk: chicken porridge for Gong Gong, who was on a diet, an assortment of chai tow kway, chee cheong fun, and wonton noodles for everyone else to share, and kopi and soya bean milk for all.

  Mother pushed a five-dollar bill towards Terrence. "Get some fish slices from the fish soup stall for your sister."

  "It's okay, Ma," I said. "Not eating fish for one day won't hurt."

  She shook her head and waved the bill insistently at my brother again. "You think you got so clever how?"

  Terrence gestured towards himself and his brothers and smiled. "Ma, every day you feed us fish too, but si beh hopeless."

  Father's hand came down across the back of his head—not heavily as it could, just as a warning. "Don't talk back," he grunted. But I noticed he didn't insist that my brother buy the fish. It was too special an occasion for any earnest squabbling.

  We continued eating. Light banter was made. ("Wah, become Scholar must study every day, I cannot tahan!" exclaimed my younger brother Clarence. "Yah lorh. We know you cannot tahan. That's why your marks so low," Mother retorted.) When we were done, I kissed everyone goodbye, and Mother and I boarded the bus to the dormitories.

  "Grace, you make us very proud," she told me before I went through the security checkpoint. She was never a very expressive woman, and I now know how much effort it must have taken to come up with the words she did. "I know you will make us even more proud. Study hard. And don't forgot to eat fish. Good for brain."

  "'Forget'," I corrected her softly. My eyes were welling up with tears at that point.

  "Yah, yah. I mean 'forget'. Clever girl." She kissed me on the forehead and gently pushed me away.

  I am ashamed to confess that it ended up being all too easy to grow apart from them, and most of my colleagues have admitted that they have experienced the same thing. It's certainly not intentional; it just happens. In the pre-Scholar programme, one grows accustomed to being away from home and one is too focused on the bright future ahead to permit any nostalgia for the past. And after Tweeding, we found that life in the Tower was everything we ever wished it to be and more: our new jobs ensured constant intellectual stimulation and we were permitted access to the most wonderful resources and facilities imaginable. The demands of the job were rigorous—it takes a Scholar about six months to a year to prepare for each impartation—but we chose our own hours and could work from our quarters, the common rooms, or anywhere else. How could we look back? Where else but the Tower could life like this have been possible? And where else could we have been so confident that our work was contributing significantly to society?

  We were allowed to leave the Tower one afternoon every month, but my visits, I believe, became less frequent with the passing of time and with Father's death which, shamefully, I can no longer remember anything about. I infer these two facts from a particularly painful scene that has not yet disappeared from my memory. And as if to compensate for my inability to remember all the events surrounding it, its details have become as pointed and uncomfortable as fish bones. Mother must have been asking something about my brothers and me: why we didn't get along or something like that. I must have tried to explain to her something about how people grow apart when they're living in different worlds.

  "What different worlds?" Mother had asked, puzzled. "Same world, what. Same island. Not so far lorh."

  We were sitting in the kitchen in Terrence's flat, where Mother was living. (In the scene, I do not remember any trace of Father's presence, and since Mother had apparently moved out of our old flat, I conclude that he must have passed away at some point prior.) My sister-in-law and the children had gone out for some reason or another, and Terrence was still at work, so we were left to ourselves. I remember looking out the window at the flats across the way, at the damp clothes hanging out to dry on long poles, absorbing the last of the setting sun's warmth.

  "That's not what I mean, Ma," I explained. "My life is a Scholar's life: reading, writing, thinking. They do...other things. Practical things. We don't have anything to talk about."

  She sighed. "They are still your brothers." Then more decisively: "You must come visit more. Family is family."

  Then Terrence burst in. "Wah, mei mei, you're here! See? My in-tu-i-tion so good, I brought a fish home for dinner!" With a ceremonious heave, a blue plastic bag landed on the table between Ma and me. The ice inside made a crunching sound as it landed. I peered into the bag: an enormous orb—cloudy and stiff and blackish grey—returned my gaze. "You join us, meh?"

  "Oh," I replied. "I don't want to impose. I wasn't planning on staying for dinner." I put on my blazer and began to gather up my things, hoping he'd take the hint.

  "No, no, you must stay! We never see you, what! Clarence and Winton are coming for dinner too! And see?" He gestured at the corpse on the table. "It's fate! Must feed your brain!"

  I was on the verge of saying that dinner with them would certainly not feed my brain, when he bounded over, gathered me up in a sweaty, smelly embrace (he must have done some sort of manual labour for a living) and ruffled my hair. I almost vomited into his armpit, though I knew he meant well. I really did.

  There are no more visits. That much I know. What exactly put an end to them is more difficult to say. Perhaps a quarrel between me and my brothers. Perhaps my mother died and I didn't see the point of it anymore. In any case, the holes in my memory have become too gaping, too embarrassing. Calling on my brothers would be like calling on people I barely knew, whom I apparently grew to not like very much anyway. I don't think I even know where they live now.

  It's impossible to tell when the gaps first started. When you really think about it, there are so many small things one forgets just as a matter of course. The name of your maths teacher in Primary Four. What your parents gave you for your fifteenth birthday. The exact name of the TV show that you and your brothers would watch every afternoon as children. What the weather was like the day you received the news of your grandmother's death. It would never occur to you to attribute these to the impartations. Impartation technology has a perfect safety record. There have been no mishaps. There are absolutely no side-effects. It is impossible for your entire memory to be accidentally erased. The only information extracted is the knowledge that will be transferred to the client, nothing more. In school, every child learns the facts and myths about knowledge impartation. It makes as much sense to be afraid of undergoing impartation as it would to be afraid of getting a haircut. On the contrary, you learn it is a privilege—a procedure that only the best and the brightest will ever be permitted to experience.

  And yet, when the day finally comes for your first one, you are inevitably nervous. All young Scholars are. But you find out that impartation is a surprisingly pleasant experience—much more so than you would had anticipated. They ensure that you are as relaxed as possible. One hour beforehand, you have a light meal with the client to whom you'll be imparting knowledge: a cup of tea and perhaps a warm slice of toast spread with butter and jam, or a small slice of cake. A satisfied stomach, not too full, helps ensure optimal results. As our clients are always important—prominent politicians and intellectuals, talented figures in the arts—conversation is always interesting. You often ask why they want to learn about your particular subject area (in my case, nineteenth-century colonial British history), and they ask what about the subject drew you to make it your area of expertise. From there, your banter meanders in other directions: family, career, life aspirations, and sometimes, current events. Before you know it, the hour is up, and both of you are being invited into the next room.

  The interior of the impartation chamber is a serene beige. You lie down on one cream-coloured divan and your dining companion lies on the other. The necessary apparatuses aren't brought out until after you've fallen asleep, and you appreciate the
delay. For all you know, you could be sitting in any comfortable room anywhere having a nap with a newfound friend. The light meal had a sedative in it, and you remember the fact only now as your head slowly falls to one side and your eyelids gently lower themselves and you into emptiness.

  When you wake up, a physician comes in to check your vital signs and ask how you are feeling. You feel perfectly normal, and you aren't conscious at having lost anything at all. More often than not, you feel very refreshed; after all, you have just woken up from a deep and pleasant sleep. They feed you another light meal: more toast or a biscuit with some juice. Then they recommend you go back to your rooms and take it easy for the remainder of the day.

  You return to your rooms. You take off your shoes. Maybe you pour yourself a glass of water or make yourself a cup of tea, trying as long as you can not to succumb to what you will inevitably do. But the inevitable cannot be put off for long. You saunter to your study and survey the bookshelves. You sit at your desk and open the files and notebooks you've been keeping from the past few months. And you know that these are books you must have read at least a few dozen times over. And you know that these notes, in your handwriting, are your own thoughts and insights. Some of them are exquisite, even though you aren't familiar with the subject matter. You can't quite believe that you've researched, and pondered, and written on something in that much detail, and that now it's someone else who possesses that knowledge, leaving you with nothing. You feel, briefly, mournful. You mope for a while; you can't help yourself. If it's your first time, you're inconsolable for as long as a week. The grieving process goes more quickly as you gain more experience: a few hours at most. You never bypass the grieving stage entirely. It's a natural and healthy part of a Scholar's life. But whether it goes slowly or quickly, you move past it and are overtaken by a new realisation: that your world has been made new. You have the chance to start your work afresh, to read everything with new eyes, to ruminate on it all as if for the first time. You have been, in a sense, reborn.