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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781482826517 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Partridge Publishing Singapore |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 148 |
| File size: | 860 KB |
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Ladder in the Water and Other Stories
By Feroz Faisal Dawson
PartridgeSG
Copyright © 2014 Feroz Faisal DawsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4828-2649-4
CHAPTER 1
at the county library
* * *
I was sitting cross-legged in the library with the French section on my left, the Roman section in front of me and the Japanese section on the top two shelves two sections to my right when a black kid walked into my home with the intention of re-shelving four books I had returned two days ago. I recognized them. 'Late Chrysanthemum' - a book of Japanese short stories from the thirties onwards; two books of Japanese poems, one hundred poems each; one volume also had its hundred poems printed in Japanese calligraphy. The last was a book of French writing with English translations. The same old gang; Voltaire, Balzac, Maupassant.
Naturally I made to move because I was sitting where he had to shelve them. He stuck every single book, side by side, in the English section next to Agatha Christie. French and Japanese in the English section. I would never have found these books again had I not been sitting on the floor in that spot in front of the Romans with the French on my left and the Japanese above. And I wasn't done with them yet.
I was sober. Or rather I did not have beer breath on account of drinking a 24-oz can of Steel Reserve in the men's room. I drink one can a day because my wife doesn't want beer in the fridge. I don't blame her. If it were up to me I would have 15,938 cans of beer in the fridge; so I drink my one beer a day in the men's room of the library. Keeps me from thinking about it all day. And I drink that one beer in the last stall on the right as you enter the men's. I chose that stall because it is larger and is the only one that has a hook on the door and a railing on the side because it is for handicapped people. I've never seen a wheel chair in there so don't judge me dear reader. Yes, once, I saw a man on a walker and I demurred.
I did not have beer breath because there was a pair of shoes in the stall two doors down. There was something going on because when I went in his shoes were pointing out and when I left ten minutes later his shoes were pointing in.
I spend a lot of time in the men's room looking at the floor because I only drink and burp when there is no one else in there. Sometimes I have to wait twenty minutes. I sit quietly. When the door slams and the man in the next stall has gone, I roar my burps like a lion. Guys used to do that when they were young, when girlfriends were scarce and marriage an impossibility. Always drink on an empty gut. I cannot get drunk on one can but I can get a buzz and like the television ad says driving with a buzz is driving drunk so you could say I drive around the library drunk; actually I sit down a lot, shut my mouth, and avoid children.
I didn't drink on account of the pair of shoes in the third stall. And because I did not have beer breath I could go to the proper authorities when I saw what that black kid with the glasses did when he re-shelved the books I returned two days ago in the British section. That's what I told her, a lady with red hair and red glasses, "He put them back in the British section,"
"He put them back in the wrong place,"
"Yeah, yes,"
She nodded very slowly, like a cobra. "Is he back there right now?"
"Yeah, yes, black kid with glasses."
She went after him so fast I thought she was going to fire him and I tried to stop her. "I don't want to get him fired or anything," She said, no, no, she was just going to talk to his supervisor. That's the thing about people in America, they move even before you've finished talking.
The pair of shoes doesn't know it but because of him justice was done today. I went back to the handicapped stall in the men's room. I opened the Steel Reserve, drank it and walked home. Alcohol is not allowed on library premises. You could lose your library card.
The black kid with glasses is still working at the county library. Ordinarily I wouldn't squeal or rat someone out, but it is a question of books after all.
CHAPTER 2a drop of silver
* * *
It was near the end of 1990. Charles and I got drunk, and we decided to take a drive. The government had decided to hold a general election for the grateful, happy and prosperous citizens of Malaysia.
It was also Visit Malaysia Year. A huge success, so they say. Millions of customers, I mean visitors, crowded our shores, spending many millions of dollars on accommodation, transportation and the developing of millions of rolls of film. All this commotion provided millions of jobs for Malaysians (who were previously doing unimportant things) in the lucrative, fast expanding service sector. Malaysians, after all, are such delightfully polite people and like nothing better than to serve people.
There were billboards everywhere, courtesy of the government, reminding us to act our natural, courteous selves when dealing with visitors. Everybody was always smiling on these billboards and the policemen (or were they the tourist police — the idiot cousins of inbred policemen?) were always showing the way to thankful, blissful blonde foreigners. The policemen were always smiling too, and the men, in particular, always had very fine moustaches.
There was also a profusion of election banners and posters bearing political party symbols and photographs of candidates strung from tree to lamp-post to traffic-lights, pasted on walls and bus-stops and poles stuck into the ground.
At first, the agreement was that I would drive and Charles would jump out and cut down whatever campaign material belonging to the ruling party he could find. I got impatient seeing him do all the hard work, and joined him at what he was doing, going my own manic way. We would achieve more destruction in half the time.
Redressing the balance, that was why we did it. Of course, we didn't expect it to make any difference but we had a good excuse (especially after four big bottles of stout) and it was once in four or five years, an Olympian interval, and we were bored.
Don't judge us unkindly. How could anybody match the machinery and labour the government had at its disposal? A mammoth machine of incumbency was up against all these little Davids, these Robin Hoods, these tiny desperate wretched opposition parties. That was what we thought of the situation, especially after four big bottles of stout. So you can't say we were vicious, cowardly hoodlums resorting to childish inane acts and worse, trying to justify it with the excuse of supporting the underdog. Life is not much fun when the favourites win all the time. The slightest chance of an upset and the nerves are all tingling, alive.
After all, we grew up on Enid Blyton, with her Secret Seven and her Famous Five (when I think of how far I've fallen since St. Mallory's; oh, the shame, the shame!), also not forgetting important primers such as Beano, Dandy, Tiger, Battle, Roy of the Rovers, Shoot, etc. The point of this has to do with the R.A.F. outnumbered at the Battle of Britain; going out to bat with a broken arm and scoring 70; the underdog triumphing at Wimbledon. "We like underdogs," say Charles and I.
The axe was mine, the parang Charles'. We set out to cut down and destroy as many Barisan Nasional posters, banners, flags as we could. The rain had stopped, you could hear loud, noisy frogs booming, moaning, in between the hissing of the tyres of cars on the wet road. It was between 2 and 3 a.m., there were very few cars out. The last thing Charles and I wanted was for somebody to see us chopping down banners and posters, and stopping and beating the shit out of us. I could imagine a bunch of tough, bigger guys coming out of their car and I would have to run. What about the Police? What if a police car were to stop in front of us, while we were trashing around? Shit, they have guns, semi-automatic weapons, if they saw us with our instruments and thought we were both Indians, they'd probably blow us away for sport. As it is I'm half-Indian, so that makes us one-and-a-half little Indian boys.
Of course, all these hypothetical situations did not impress themselves upon Charles as he was bounding and leaping from lamp-post to lamp-post, tree to tree and across the road and back again. With me, of course, it was a different matter, not because I was more sober, more inclined to be realistic. It was just plain cowardice.
We decided to concentrate on one particular road. The road was straight, long (so long it had two names), started at the roundabout next to Charles' house and ended at the roundabout near Guru's house. Here, people seem to get around town by landmarks. Not for us the tiresome chore of remembering road names and numbers, as they are so many. At Charles' roundabout it is a billboard put up by Rothmans. Thus, "I went from Toshiba to Rothmans and after that, stopped by F&N. Later, I beat my wife in front of Guinness," and so on. The name of this particular road from the Rothmans roundabout, intersecting Sections 19, 17, and 12 to the University Hospital traffic lights, which is then sawn off by the Federal Highway bursting through underneath it, is Jalan University.
Jalan Gasing begins across the flyover over the Federal Highway past churches, a couple of chicken rice shops, a pub and a 7-Eleven, past the massive gold and white Buddhist temple and boys' and girls' schools, separate of course, Indian restaurants (one of them Rajoo's where my grandfather went every day at 6 a.m. for years until he got too sick and infirm and couldn't drive and nobody would take him there, especially at 6 a.m), to the turning to Bukit Gasing.
Like I said, we started out with me driving and Charles jumping out and hacking down the posters and banners hung on raffia string and thin, green plastic rope. There were posters stuck on squares of plywood with a short wooden spike nailed to the back; these were thrust into the ground, which was wet that night, having rained earlier. These were kicked down and stepped on. The first half of our pointless, but, we hoped, symbolic destruction, was achieved quickly, quietly, smoothly. I kept the engine running while Charles did all the hard work, or had all the fun, tick one answer whichever applicable. I said, "Charles, hurry up, c'mon let's go. Charles!" He would turn around with a grin, parang held aloft, while he half-strutted, half-ladder ran, with chest puffed out. "Wait, hey, you missed that one." He'd turn around, leap, swish, turn, big grin.
I don't remember many cars on the road that night. Four years earlier, election night, Charles' mother wouldn't let him out of the house. Sunny's mother let him go only with the greatest of reluctance. Both mothers never forgot the tumultuous, harrowing carnage and destruction which followed the election of 1969, 17 years earlier, the only time racial riots became loud and dangerous enough to forever undermine the heretofore laissez-faire attitude of the government.
The time had come to examine and monitor the insidious, treacherous activities of people. Henceforth, citizens and politicians would not be allowed to participate in mass gatherings of discontent. These would have to be held behind closed doors, for a limited number of people; no more public marches. The risk was too great, the opportunities for development and growth and advancement too precious to mismanage.
Who's to say they were wrong in doing what they did? Isn't an opinion in hindsight not worth the paper it's written on? Stability, safety, that's all they cared about, not justice, fair-play or truth. God forbid truth. Developing countries can hardly be expected to cope with the frank, vulgar, naked face of societal reality. And they wonder why no respect is given, why the lack of enthusiasm, why the lethargy.
Now, where the hell was I? Ah, yes, reality, truth and lies, what charming, civil, topics. As long as it's printed in the papers, that's truth enough for most; sanctified statements repeated on all three television channels, repeated with a straight face, slight smile, to be taken for the truth, nothing else but; not to be made fun of under any circumstances (nobody ever did), nor to be discussed at length. Which is why we seldom heard the final word on a particular subject or indeed, any opinions with regards to matters that were in the public eye, but which disappeared with all the secrets and chains of guilt attached, sinking with the ship, and its captains out of sight and therefore, out of mind.
Never mind, as long as we have stability, peace, foreign investment. We're in the process of catching up, why nitpick over the details? It was a fait accompli, there was no question that the government would be returned to power, the only question being, the size of the majority.
After three bottles of stout, we felt it was our duty to redress the balance. Cut down the ruling party's banners and posters and leave the opposition paraphernalia standing, then maybe those going to work the next morning might chance to look at the dewy, wet grass with its blue and white posters lying face down in the damp unattractive grass of the dividers, roundabouts and sidewalks of the well-behaved, quiet, peaceful suburb.
It wouldn't have made any difference. It just would have provided those early morning cogs or captains of industry a few seconds of early morning cerebral activity. Eyebrows lifted, eyes opened wider, ears assailed by the news of football matches on the car radio; wondering why anybody bothered to knock down those posters and cut down those banners. Maybe the wind did it, some may have thought, but they would not of thought of that too much, their own lives having to be sorted out first.
Who the hell were we kidding? We didn't do it for anyone. We did it so that we would have another shiny, diffused memory to talk about in our later years, when no one would believe us, when we were left with only our thoughts and deeds to keep us company. We could say and think, with a ripple of pride, "Yes, we were hard core. We did this, we did that, we did such and such." We'd repeat these stories to anyone who would care to listen, until the inflections and pauses would become automatic, identical, the deeds would gradually become mightier, more astounding, and then that too would become automatic, identical, and our memories will then blur the distinction between what did and what did not happen.
My grandfather used to drive his tiny, matte pale green Morris with my cousin and me to the barbershop every time he thought we needed a haircut; which was often, seeing as when we were little our hair did not grow so much as sprout. Rahman's barbershop was in the middle of a row of shop-houses on a crest of the road that we were on that night.
Rahman's had four chairs, with a long mirror covering the entire length of the wall facing the chairs. The wall opposite in this narrow shop with a high ceiling had a narrower, though just as lengthy, mirror which was set about head high for adults as they sat in chairs. The mirror was slanted slightly downwards towards the backs of the four chairs making it possible for customers to see the back of their heads. The front of the shop had two rectangles of glass, the smaller piece, part of the door, had an outline in blue of a man's head in profile, the hairstyle exhibited consisting of short hair at the back, medium sideburns and a voluminous amount of hair in front, combed back yet puffed out giving a somewhat hip Elvis without the ducktail look. The larger pane of glass had the word "Rahman" in large black letters and 'Kedai Gunting' underneath it. No barbershop would be complete without the cylindrical, rotating, candy-striped frontispiece found at the top of the door.
Four chairs he had, but Rahman was the only barber, so there was a lot of waiting. This though, I never minded, probably the only time in my life I never minded waiting for others, for in the first two drawers of the counter on which the long mirror rested, precious as gold, constant as tides, were old tattered, battered copies of Beano, Dandy, Shoot, Tiger; devoured and studied. There were two metal-framed chairs, around which were wrapped thin, multi-coloured strips of plastic, some of them broken, hanging, sticking out defiantly and rigid at all angles, vibrating slightly as weight is shifted. There we would sit, waiting, I head down, scarcely breathing, devouring those crackpot, incredible stories. I'd look up, and Papatok (grandfather) would be sitting, large, relaxed, blissfully silent, loving the quiet, the slightest smile on his lips.
So we were there, at the roundabout. If we went left, we would be on the road called 16/1, the stoically named main road of Section 16. My grandfather lived there, with my grandmother, in the house of his eldest daughter and son-in-law. On the right at 3 o'clock was the road which had two schools, primary and secondary, where I had 11 years of education.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ladder in the Water and Other Stories by Feroz Faisal Dawson. Copyright © 2014 Feroz Faisal Dawson. Excerpted by permission of PartridgeSG.
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Table of Contents
Contents
At The County Library, 7,A Drop Of Silver, 10,
Fill In The Blanks, 35,
No One Has Claimed Responsibility, 39,
This Bar Is Called Heaven, 68,
The Licence, 71,
The Wind Chill Factor, 81,
Fireworks, 109,
Ladder In The Water, 122,