Hope

In 1958, they had travelled by sea from England onto the shores of newly-independent Malaysia. These teapot, cups and saucers were part of a dinner set that was no doubt carefully packed and placed on a ship, in fulfillment of an order placed by a young man, a planter of Indian origin. Like many others, he was part of a migration of workers during the colonial regime that had started rubber estates and peopled them with workers from India. This young man, recently married, had ordered the dinner set as a surprise for his wife. She was to arrive from India shortly. He had chosen the soft blush of roses over the baby blue and white, as the colour seemed suitable. Fine and feminine, as the gentle curves that were, discreet yet desirable. He hoped that she would take pleasure in their lines, and take pride in placing them on the table each time they sat down to a meal. He wanted her to be proud of the life they would share together.

And so through the years, I am told, they moved through several places. They raised four children. The dinner set grew. Dishes, cups, saucers were added. Family, guests, people from far, near, workers, friends gathered at the table. Plates were raised and filled. The teapot poured steaming milky tea into waiting cups balanced carefully on saucers. And so they bore silent testimony to each passage of their lives – from boisterous talk to whispered confidences, from joy to sobriety.

And now, as the plates are raised and filled at my dining table, I feel the echo of the past in their still smooth surfaces. And as I tip the beautiful teapot to pour steaming tea, I imagine old conversations rising from the tender rim of each cup.

Some days, as I sip my tea, I can almost feel his hope again.

Home

Home, they say, is where the heart is.

So how does one put one’s heart in a space?

Fill it with music I say. The lilt of a melody that reaches high and wide. By day, at night, but best surely at the twilight hour. When the light turns gold and night swoops down. Let the music lift you gently as the evening breeze.

Fill it with scents. Stews simmering on stoves. Bread browning in the oven. Coffee. Incense and freshly laundered linen. Cempaka flowers that perfume the night. Do not forget the Stargazers, those pungent lilies, brazen and overt.

Fill it with sounds. The hidden cricket in the bathroom. Magpie robins and their punctual symphonies. Water on the boil. Laughter. Friends. The clinking of glasses at the dinner table. Mortar on pestle and lidi broom on the concrete floor. The spin cycle in the final passage of a wash.

Fill it with quiet. Contemplation. Poetry. The devotion of dogs. Raindrops on leaves. Orange light slanting onto your bed.

In the night, before you close your eyes, know only clarity.  And in your heart, know only peace. This is home.

Sees

She sees me. This Chinese woman, blonde pretender. Reclining on a green couch. Music filling the space around. Reading. Leaving the house, never leaving the house. Days, nights. Smells coming from her kitchen. Daily. Coffee at 4am. Toast at 8am. Garlic stir fries. Meat bones simmering on a stove. Curries.

I see her. Reclining. Prancing, yes, prancing. Dances with wolves. Running her long loping strides across my garden. Beauty, she is beautiful. Elegant. Never snatching, always waiting for her food to arrive. Never rushing.

She sees me. And maybe sometimes, she still sees her. The other woman she loved. The one who raised her, the one who taught her to sit. To wait. Patiently. The one who left her when she was two. Never to return. Never to toss the bone in play. Never to touch her face, nor ever to run her gentle hands along the muscled curve of her back.

I see her. Reclining. Her head between her paws. Her world ended. She is thin as a rake. Her eyes see nothing ahead.

She sees me. I lift her into my car. We come home.

And if she sometimes sees her face, she also sees me now. And I see her.

And the bone flies, and she runs as if she’s never run before.

White

There’s a peculiar satisfaction once the laundry is on the line.  In my case, particularly the whites. The parade of the virginal. The easy sanctity of the cloth. No matter if between them the shade freely ranges from creamy white to the blinding splendour of the newly purchased. I have noticed that the unutterable clarity of the morning sunlight bathing on their damp folds often creates an illusion of equality that eludes them once they are dry, folded and sitting on my bed, ready to be transported into the wardrobe where they lie in hushed quietness till they are raised once again to be worn. Their service is often summoned on unbearably hot days, when only white cotton will do. Against skin, damp and starved of the redemptive quality of a breeze, crisp white cotton is the saviour, the knight on a white charger who will deliver salvation from the fires of a hellishly hot day.

It may be just me but I find the power of white on a line to be irresistibly evocative. I sometimes put this down to my mother’s own predilection to dressing us in white singlets and shorts when my siblings and I were little tots. She would train us to play within the verandah of our home, never staining the whites with forays into the sandy and grassy areas beyond. I have always marvelled at her capacity to contain us in this way, and maintain us in white.

Maybe this explains my own pleasure. Why the sight of a row of white cotton on the line gladdens the heart. Why my mother would have felt the same way.

Half hidden from the eye

Every morning, I water the plants in my garden just before the sun dips in like a magical wand, transforming dewdrops on leaves and grass into jewels.

It is by nature a selfish act. One in which I suspect I gain more in well-being than the verdant stalks that are scattered carelessly, in pots and on ground. For few pleasures are so easily found, or bought at so menial a price that even a scrooge would take delight.

Every morning, I walk the line, marked by hanging pots of mint, rosemary, petunias and money plant to the floundering eggplant in the vegetable patch to the cannas and heliconias. I alternate between using a blue watering can and a long green hose that trips me over some days when I feel as though getting out of bed was the most unnatural thing to do. There are better days of course when the frangipani goes full throttle after a spell of sun and rain and their yellow, white and red flowers leave a carpet on the ground.

Today though, I suspect the prosperity plant is giving the frangipani a run for the money. For in my half-sleep state early this morning, I saw a rather splendid and rare sight. Couched low, a single stalk held out the inflorescence of this leafy plant. I felt grateful and given my oriental proclivity, also expectant of a windfall not too far around the corner.

 

 

 

April evening

Its quiet now except for the whirr of a fan by my feet. The trickle of water down an unseen drain. The intermittent cricket somewhere in a hidden bush.

Here is my life. Fifty, writing incessantly, and yes sometimes obsessively into nights, alternating between early mornings when I am working on a book.

Working on a book! A phrase that I had always hoped to use to describe myself, and now I can. Legitimately, cross my heart and hope to die. To die and hope for a remembrance. Someday, long after my body has become ashes and my spirit is traipsing on air, free as a bird, conquering rainbows, I hope for a hand to turn the pages on which are inscribed with words that I once turned out, ever so painstakingly in one of my four a.m. sessions. No one will ever know of course that a large cup of hot coffee would have been my only companion, warming me with its darkness, its fragrant bitterness. No one will ever know that I had stumbled out of bed half an hour earlier, switched on the computer and made my way into the kitchen to put the kettle on. No one will ever know how I often relished the stillness, staring out into the darkened houses, their edges made soft by the light from the slender lamps that stood silent and patiently in a row by the rising road not far away. No one will ever know, because such memories are mine alone kept alive in the foursquare of my mind.

What I hope for though, is that person whose hand will turn my pages will travel the way of my words. That a thought, a dream, a whisper I once had will move into another’s thought, another’s dream, another’s whisper.

This is what I am thinking this quiet April evening.