hallelujah jesu... tagore and villa

'Your father told us that he was a practicing agnostic,' a former student of his once told me. He would start teaching a class and end up telling all sorts of anecdotes about places he's traveled to, things he's done. 23 years since he died and I'm still running into his students all over the world. 'I knew your father,' they tell me. 'He was very funny.'

My Dad, to me, was a gorilla of a man. That is, from the vantage of not being much higher than knee level when I was around four. I was fascinated when he shaved in the morning, and by the way he bounded up and down the stairs, or whistled as he tended to the orchids and the garden. He told off-color jokes in the car as we drove to Church on Sunday mornings. After a long day at work, he'd dispense with niceties, grunt and point at food on the table to be kindly passed over to him. 'What do you say...?' we'd giggle, four girls, prim and proper. 'Kanin', he'd growl--rice--brooking no dissent.

Many years ago, I smoked something that had a really strange effect on me. I regressed to my childhood. I spoke in an odd, high-pitched voice--which left my throat sore for hours afterwards-- in secondhand, international school English.

I was three at first, scared of the dark and not recognizing anyone around me. I talked about my family and how I so badly wanted to go to school with my sisters but wasn't allowed. As the night deepened, I grew up. Four, five, six, seven, eight. As I chattered about this and that, I would once in a while realize that something bad was about to happen. Something was coming.

Thirteen. I re-live knocking on our gate as usual. Tat-tat-a-tat-tat, tat-tat. May opens the door and starts weeping. 'Daddy died,' she barely manages to say. Heart attack. I push past her, asking 'Where's mommy? Where's mommy?' They were still in Ulan Bator. The phone keeps ringing. Arrangements were made to fly Dad's body back via Beijing. Mom would be home in a few days. Gay was on her way home from UP, Anna was still at school and didn't know what was happening. Anna was just eight years old.

At some stage, I retreat upstairs to my room, crack open my Biology textbook and read about earthworms, phylum Annelida, as if it were the most important thing in the world.

by Gabriel U. Iglesias, undated.

The Cat

He grimaces, reaches over and grabs the cigarette from between my lips. I just shrug.

'I should be fuming,' I tell him. 'Literally.'

'Why would you want to do such a thing at such a young age?'

'Precisely because I am fifteen,' I tell him evilly. 'I am beautiful and invincible; nothing can mar my perfection.'

'Be that as it may,' he drawls, 'but you stink of stale tobacco.'

I roll my eyes. Always the same routine. I arrive at his house. The maid brings us some coffee or tea. The books and sheets are on the table as props. After some banter, he will eventually ask her to leave us in silence for the hour of our lesson.

'My boyfriend doesn't mind you know...' I doodle with practiced casualness on the corner of my notebook.

'Your boyfriend is an imbecile.'

'To be fair, he is a moron.'

'I am sure that must be a relief to you.'

Today is math and I am bored, so I decide to play cat-and-mouse. And today I would be the cat.

I stand up and walk around the table, sit on his lap and wind my arms around his neck.

'Not much. That's why I enjoy my time with you.' 

He sits unmoved and methodically extricates me from his body, first one arm then the next before easing me off his lap to the chair beside him.

'Indeed,' he says, 'trying to get out of your geometry tutorial, I see?'

I would have pouted if it could have made a difference. 'I'd rather continue our last lesson on literature or film. Geometry is boring because there is no challenge. The way we're tested in school is just to see how we we memorize the formulas and how they are applied. Proof isn't about discovery--it's rote imitation of what the text book says.'

'Quite the contrary, my dear. The elegance of the proof is in the fewer steps it takes to reach your conclusion.' He smiled. 'Like chess.'

'Unless you were a slave, it must have been fascinating to have been in ancient Egypt around the time they discovered all these spatial relations and patterns et cetera. But in any case, I think I'll be able to pass without having to waste another hour of my life on it. 

'Especially when it's my one hour of the week with you.'

He relents and walks to the shelves. 'Fine,' he sighs, 'pick one that you wish to discuss.'

I slink over and pull out a copy of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. It is about an inch thick, cloth-bound and features little more than the title and author on the cover. Almost imperceptibly, he raises an eyebrow but says nothing as he takes it from me. He gestures toward the sofa by the bay windows, a loveseat, and we sit. I snuggle against him and tuck my legs underneath as he flips through the book.

I stare at the pendant lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling and slowly curl a lock of hair around a finger as I speak: 'Let's start with the assumption that my interest doesn't merely stem from the profanity, vulgarity and sexuality of the text. While I do think that the literary value of Miller's early work is exaggerated, the only interest I see in it is what it means, but doesn't say, about the nature of art. 

'He talks about him being a writer in Paris, metaphorically and literally prostituting his talent for his next meal. The part with the Indian that defecates in the bidet summarizes the necessary ugliness of his writing: the book is at the same time about his being a writer but without explanation of the art of writing. Instead, he focuses on the painful and human hunger for food, sex, shelter.'

I feel him laugh, I hear that there is no mirth in it. 'Straight out of an online study guide' he comments to himself or to me.

I'm glad that he can't see hot tears immediately spring out of my humiliation and acute hatred for him. I struggle to breathe evenly while waiting for him to continue.

'The book is worth something simply because of the sex in it' he says. I turn halfway to see if he is joking. He's looking at me with some mix of arrogance and pity. I want to rip his face off and turn away, forcing myself to maintain our physical contact. 

I am the cat, I say silently to my body: stay still.

24 October, 2009. Singapore. Dusted off, proofread and published.