Sketch in the Dark

He leaned back against the musty upholstered chair and sighed, inhaling the stale smoky air trapped within the air-conditioned room. He rubbed his bleary, injected eyes wearily and tapped the fingernail of his right index finger on the left-hand button of the greasy mouse. The flickering images on the computer screen darted back and forth. He swore softly as his avatar, a young English soldier, hit the ground in a hail of bullets and slumped down woodenly into a pool of digital, pixelated blood.

His glance flitted towards the road beyond the glass walls. It was still dim but he could see the incipient dawn peeping above the tops of the shophouse roofs and skyscrapers. A few cars were zooming past on their way to work. He could see an elderly Chinese gentleman, skin burnt brown by years of exposure to the harsh equatorial sunlight, rummaging through the dustbin outside and salvaging aluminium cans, placing them inside a stained white sack. The fruit seller across the road was setting up his stall for the day, arranging waxy luscious pineapples, apples, oranges and pears under a makeshift fluorescent lamp swinging precariously overhead.

He drew out a few crumpled red notes from his worn leather wallet and slipped them under the ashtray next to the keyboard. Abu would know where to find the money, as always. He pushed his chair back and stood up to leave. In the cavernous space behind him, a few other avid night-owls were still typing away furiously or manipulating their game personas mechanically, peering at the giant illuminated screens glowing softly in the darkness.

His stomach protested, growling hungrily. It was time for breakfast. He had skipped dinner the night before, not needing physical nourishment while he was engrossed in his virtual existence. He opened the glass door and stepped outside, the sharp fumes of the city hitting his nostrils and jolting him from his state of reverie. KFC would be a good choice, he thought. It was just down the road. He would have the porridge, he thought to himself. Yes, it would be an imminently good choice. He would return to the cybercafe again after breakfast…

Reunion

Part 1

I bit my lip. Tears rose in my eyes unbidden. He turned away and faced the moonlit window, shoulders shuddering. I did not attempt to switch on the lights. Perhaps we did not want to face each other in the harsh vanilla fluorescent lighting. Perhaps some things were better left shrouded in shadows, unspoken. He had always been the strong, silent type who rarely betrayed his emotions. Perhaps he did not want me to see him crying.

The house was empty, quiet. There was now no one left except for the both of us. The cacophony of crickets singing in the grass was deafening. I thought of the casket in the living room and turned livid.

“It’s all your fault! If you had been more careful with your driving, she would still be alive today.”

He leaned against the wall, hunched and broken. In his left hand, he held a cane. The only sign that he had been party to that horrific accident which had claimed her life. The bold headlines and intrusive photographs which were published in The Star and the News Straits Times bore no witness to the turmoil that engulfed our little family after the fateful crash along the Karak highway. Both Dad and Mom had been driving home from attending his old college mate’s daughter’s wedding reception in Kuantan. I know, that road was infamous as an accident-prone stretch. I know, it was almost midnight and the street lamps were not functioning. Yes, it was raining and the road was slippery. Any driver could have made mistakes given those harsh conditions. Moreover the lorry driver was drunk. The lorry had swerved into Dad’s path. But yet, I could not forgive my father for his role in the whole affair.

He did not defend himself. I dabbed at my red-rimmed eyes furiously.

“You should have seen the lorry coming at you! I’m sure the headlights were on. Couldn’t you see?”

“Son, it was raining…” he began.

“Dad, enough of your excuses! You should have looked after mom properly. Now, it’s too late,” I turned and stormed out of the room, with nary a glance at Dad.

I packed my bags and left to return to university in London immediately after the funeral. Upon graduation, I landed a succession of increasingly well-paid jobs in the banking sector. Life was good. I managed to buy myself a Porsche and got myself a wife. A Malaysian Chinese girl who was in the biotechnology industry and whom I had met at a mutual friend’s party. I didn’t bother to invite Dad to the wedding. In fact, since the day I left home, I had barely thought of him. And one day, I got a job offer from an international company which had offices in Kuala Lumpur.

“Dear, I think it’s a good idea. My family is in Seremban and I would love to be closer to home,” Claire enthused over pasta one night.

I nibbled at a mushroom and said nothing. Family? What family? Anyway, the package was good and I didn’t mind moving back to make the wife happy. The contract was just for a few years. If things didn’t work out, we could always move back to the UK.

I received his e-mail during a meeting. The iPhone let out a sharp buzz, vibrating violently in my right trouser pocket.

“Sorry, excuse me, gentlemen.”

I stepped away from the round table, stood by the sun-kissed ceiling-to-floor length glass window and opened my Gmail app. In the streets below me, I could see the traffic building up. Strings of bulbous red lanterns were strung across the road and cheery Chinese New Year music blared from loudspeakers at the entrances of the shops. Of course, all I could hear in my air-conditioned bubble was a mere tinkling echo from the chaos below. Happy shoppers bustled along the walkways, bloated shopping bags in their arms. A wizened old lady sold furry pussy willow branches from a makeshift stall along the street. Her business wasn’t doing very well, I observed from my aerial vantage point.

I thought of my childhood celebrations. Mom would decorate the house with origami fish and paper lanterns that were crafted from red packets. The extended family would crowd into our home on the first and second days of the festival, snacking on peanuts and guzzling litres of fizzy orange Fanta. My cousins and I would run around the compound with sparklers in the breezy evenings while the adults lounged on the front porch in large rattan chairs, chatting and playing cards. And inevitably, the tall white ceramic vase at the corner of the living room would be filled with droopy pussy willow branches – angulated dark brown sticks dotted with conical soft downy catkins.

“Son, please come home for New Year Eve’s dinner. I will be waiting for you,” the e-mail read. As it had every year.

I hit the delete button swiftly and turned to rejoin the meeting.

I returned home late that night. There was much to follow-up from the meeting. The response from the Norwegian client had been positive and I wanted to sort out the job as soon as possible in order to beat the competing offers from the other firms. I opened the door to our apartment to find it plunged into darkness. It was quiet. Most likely Claire had gone to bed early, knowing that I had to work late that night. I silently chastised myself for working too hard. She was a very understanding partner. I would have to make up for my constant absences by bringing her on a vacation once I had settled this Norway job. Perhaps Maldives; she had always wanted to go there as she loved beach holidays. I opened the refrigerator door. There was no dinner there. I was slightly annoyed. Had she forgotten to prepare food for me? She knew that no matter how late work ended, I would still head home for dinner as I wanted to spend as much time as possible with her.

The phone rang and I almost tripped over an electrical power cord as I rushed to pick up the receiver. I swore loudly.

“Helo, saya Sarjan Ahmad Tajuddin dari Balai Polis Pantai. Boleh saya bercakap dengan Encik Wong Koh Sing?”

“Ya, saya,” I replied.

“Kami telah menemui isteri Encik Wong. Beliau telah meninggal dunia dalam keadaan yang sangat mencurigakan. Bolehkah Encik Wong ke balai untuk membantu siasatan kami?”

I dropped the phone receiver at this point. My whole world spun and I fell against the sofa. Suddenly I had flashbacks of that night when my Dad and I had shared a common grief, when his world had similarly collapsed around him and all I had done was to lash out at him.

The next few days passed in a blur. Claire’s mother and sister from Seremban came to KL by KTM Komuter to help with the funeral arrangements. The post-mortem revealed that Claire had an undiagnosed heart defect, which led to her sudden and untimely demise. We found out from CCTVs installed in the mall that she had collapsed while shopping at the Aeon departmental store. Someone had initiated CPR, the paramedics had come as soon as they were informed, but it was too late. Nothing could have been done. Perhaps, that is what one would term ‘fate’.

And one morning, while packing up Claire’s belongings, I suddenly remembered his e-mail.

Part 2

“Aiyah, that silly old man spends all his time and money every year on food for the New Year, hoping that his son will come back,” Auntie Chan the vegetable seller whispered to her neighbor, Puan Ramlah. They watched his back disappear into the crowd, his creaky metal trolley laden with mushrooms, vegetables, fish, prawns, chicken and soybean sheets. His gnarled and liver-spotted left hand clutching a bent walking stick as he navigated the maze-like wet market complex with hesitant shuffling steps.

“Ya, I know. His son abandoned him after the wife died kan? There was an accident, right? It was all over the papers,” Puan Ramlah gave her friend a knowing wink. They both shrugged their shoulders. Stupid old man, wasting his time. Did he really think his son would return for the New Year reunion dinner this year? Wasting money and effort.

“Might as well donate to the old folks home lah,” Auntie Chan grumbled. Then as the customers came, the two ladies forgot about Uncle Wong and got back to business. Sales were always brisk before the Chinese spring festival.

Uncle Wong tottered into his single-storey bungalow with red plastic bags filled with the raw produce he had purchased from the market. He got to work promptly. The arthritis had slowed him down, but had not stopped him. Anyway after his only son left for UK, never to return, he had to survive on his own. He cleaned the chicken, prawns and fish under running tap water and soaked the vegetables in a stainless steel bowl. Then, removing the blackened wok from a hook on the wall, he hummed softly as he started to prepare the feast. He had the menu in his mind’s eye: Ah Sing’s favorite roast chicken, steamed prawns with ginger, deep fried fish in a sweet-and-sour sauce and lor hon zhai.

He laid out all the dishes on the Formica-topped table in the dimly-lit dining room. Then he sat and waited as he had for the past ten years. Every year, he had ended up eating a small portion of the feast and freezing most of the food to be slowly consumed over the next week. But he never gave up hope. As long as he was still alive, he would try to cling on to any possibility that his son would return home one year.

Uncle Wong glanced up at the clock ticking on the wall. Half past seven already. The food was getting cold. A stumpy-tailed lizard scarpered across the wall and disappeared into the crack between the wall and the plaster ceiling. He sighed and picked up his chopsticks.

He heard the roar of a car engine pulling up into his driveway. The sound of a car door opening and slamming shut. Brisk footsteps heading towards the house.

The old man quickly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and reached for his trusty walking stick. He reached the living room just in time to see a tall shadow darken the doorway and slip off his shoes at the threshold.

“Ah Sing,” the old man called out happily.

“Dad, I’m home,” the younger man simply said.

No cockles, bean sprouts, prawns or sausages please

I stood in line at the noodle stall, tapping my foot impatiently on the grimy tiled floor which was stained with at least a thousand overlapping footprints. I glanced at my steel Casio watch. Eight thirty p.m., the slim silver hands indicated on a background of deep Prussian blue. I had looked around at the dinner options available at the food court – roast chicken rice, yong tau foo, pepper soup in black claypots, mixed rice, kimchi noodles, Hainanese chicken chop – and none had appealed to me. I finally settled on this stall, deciding to order some steaming hot yellow Hokkien Mee to warm my rumbling tummy. This hawker never failed to disappoint, serving up decent portions of noodles crammed with crunchy bean sprouts, squid and prawns drenched in a decadent lard-infused sauce. He would dish out the freshly-cooked food onto a fragrant brown Opei leaf and top it with a dash of spicy sambal and half a tangy green lime.

It had been a long day at the hospital, with admissions pouring in till five p.m. Then, we had stayed behind to finish off the afternoon rounds, finally leaving the premises against a background of a quickly darkening purple sky and the fading diffuse glow of the setting orange sun. Briskly walking to the train station, I had then tapped my bulging wallet containing my commuter card against the turnstile sensor, joining the throng that jam-packed the trains after the long workday.

I heard the electric swoosh of the train arriving and quickly sprinted down the escalator steps, squeezing past the motley crowd of people at the platform and heaving a sigh of relief as the train doors slammed shut just as I stepped into the air-conditioned carriage. I gripped the greasy pole with my palm and dropped my beige canvas Coach bag at my feet, trying to catch my breath. The carriage was full of salaried folk heading home from their offices and workplaces like myself. Bleary-eyed, exhausted and sweaty with an almost identical stony expression on their faces. Some flicked at screens on their smartphones, some listened to muffled music through their earphones, a few browsed serenely through magazines or newspapers, and many merely stared blankly at the dark walls of the tunnel whizzing past.

The soft ‘ping’ of an incoming Whatsapp message brought me back to the current moment. The young man ahead of me in the queue shifted uneasily as he tapped on the screen of his iPhone, replying the message that he had just received. He was in his mid-twenties, hair styled conservatively and gelled tightly against his scalp with a few scattered acne scars marking his cheeks. He wore an open-collared pale striped blue business shirt tucked into a pair of neatly-ironed black slacks. He held his leather messenger bag tucked under his elbow.

“Eh, leng zhai, yao chi shenme?” the hawker at the counter, a ruddy middle-aged Chinese ‘uncle’ in a thin white T-shirt stretched over his prosperous pot belly, gestured at the young man with his dripping ladle. The young man looked up from his phone, paused for a few seconds then raised his voice to drown out the clatter and chatter of the bustling, fluorescent-lit food court.

“Char kuay teow – mai hum, mai taugeh, bu yao xia. Oh, and no lap cheong as well,” he hollered back.

Char kuay teow? No cockles, no bean sprouts and no prawns? No Chinese sausages? What culinary sacrilege was that? Was he ordering just noodles in dark soy sauce then?

Curiosity got the better of politeness. I gently tapped on his shoulder. He turned around.

“Why ar? Like that, what’s the point of ordering char kuay teow?” I asked.

He looked at me with a sheepish grin, which somehow appeared rather mournful yet comical to me.

“My girlfriend is very fussy,” he sighed.

Kampung

She stifled an incipient yawn and padded sleepily into the living room, footsteps resounding on the loose floorboards. She threw open the windows and looked outside.

The sun was already shining brightly but the rest of the family was still asleep. Soon, it would be time to get breakfast ready for them and rouse them from slumber. But not just yet. It was the weekend and they often went back to sleep after prayers. These were always the precious few moments she had to herself each day. She could hear the splashing of the well water onto the concrete ground as the neighbor took his morning shower next door. A cock crowed lustily.

She leaned against the windowsill and soaked in the gentle breeze. She had always loved this time of the day. The air was cool and fresh, carrying the evanescent scent of dew and wet grass. Fluffy white clouds drifted lazily across the canvas of the overarching turquoise blue sky. The lush green paddy fields were criss-crossed by a network of laterite bunds, interspersed with small wooden houses on stilts and bent coconut palms. She waved at Ahmad, who was cycling on his rusty old red bicycle to town. He grinned and waved in return, soon disappearing from sight.

She looked at the paths stretching into the vast horizon and sighed. She rested her chin against her cupped palms, propping her elbows against the weathered horizontal wooden bar.

She could almost see him, running along the narrow bunds leading to her house, dressed in a floppy white shirt and black pants. His skin was tanned brown from helping his father in the fields. He wasn’t a great scholar, and had stopped schooling after Form 3 to become a farmer like all the men in his family. They had known each other since they were toddlers. Their mothers often stopping by each other’s homes to chat and exchange gossip while the children chased the chickens around the dusty compounds. He was the first one who had shown her how one could use a blade of grass to create music by blowing across the edge. How to climb a tree and look into a nest for eggs. How to catch little muddy frogs by using bare hands. How to pin a grasshopper down by the nape of its neck.

She remembered how they had sat on the bench overlooking her father’s land on that fateful last day. He looked into her eyes.

“I will be going to town to find work. Rahman and Yusof have gone there to work on the construction sites. Look how rich their families are now. Astro dishes, new motorcycles, new brick houses. Perhaps it’s time I try something new,” he said.

She looked away, not wanting him to see the emotions flooding her face. She felt as though she had something stuck in her throat.

“Don’t worry, Mimi. I will come back for you. Promise me, you’ll wait for me? When I have made my money, I will come and look for you again,” he had vowed.

She nodded, twisting her hands in her lap.

The cock crowed again, interrupting her reverie. Once again, she looked to the edge of her known world expectantly. Her village and its never-ending fields. The mountain that stood stoically against the sky. She knew that her hope was in vain. He never came back. Not even for Raya. She had tried to write to him. She had even asked his family for news of his whereabouts. No one could tell her. As far as she was concerned, he had vanished into thin air. Swallowed by the bright lights and gleaming skyscrapers of the city.

“Mak, mak. Nak makan ni, dah lapar,” a plaintive small voice called out from within the house.

“OK, nak,” she replied. And turned from the open window.

The Leap

I slipped on the thin flimsy green top and pants, tying a knot at my waist. “Looks like pyjamas,” I thought. The ‘baju’ had been washed and rewashed a hundred times at least. The green faded to a pale apple green and the light yellow lining stained grayish brown. Thanks to my small size, I often had to make do with scrubs a size larger, making me look like a sleep-deprived dwarf in dilapidated, baggy oversized pyjamas.

I snapped the elastic band of the cap round my hairline, tied the mask around the lower half of my face and slipped on a pair of purple Crocs left by the bench. Then I quickly shuffled into the cold corridor.

“Come, quick, time to scrub in,” my boss hustled past me, carrying his silver tumbler full of coffee in one hand. We swung past the automated doors and leant over the stainless steel sink. Hands covered in frothy foam, I tore out a brush from the sterile pack and started to scrub my nails.

“Hurry up,” he said. “We have a long list today.”

I wiped my hands with the hand towel, slipped on the blue cotton gown and the pair of size 6.5 yellow rubber gloves prepared for me and backed into the theatre with my hands clasped to the level of my chest. The patient was on the table, waiting. My boss was already there, cleaning the operation site with povidone iodine and clipping the blue drapes onto the area.

 “Come la. Your turn to do it today.”

I was still new. The ink on my degree had hardly dried. I looked around anxiously. The nurse glared at me from beneath her mask and cap.

“OK,” I said.

I stepped up to the table, heart thumping wildly. A scalpel was handed to me. Technically, I knew what to do. But I had never done it before in real life. Cold sweat beaded on the elastic lining of the cap covering my head. I looked at the blade, then placed it against the patient’s clammy skin.

“Eh, cut la,” my boss said.

Trying not to tremble, I tentatively nicked the skin with the sharp edge of the scalpel blade. I could see the ochre-coloured epidermis part, giving way to the whitish dermis beneath. Tiny spots of blood appeared along the track, like miniature roses blooming on a carpet of snow. I stared, mesmerized. Then recovering my wits, I took a piece of gauze from the metal tray and dabbed at the wound.

“Woi, no need to be so scared one. Just cut deeper only. Like this,” my boss grabbed my hand and guided my next cut.

“Diathermy please,” I said, just like how I watched him say a couple of times before. I racked my brain, trying to recall the next steps which I had read in that thick lavender-covered textbook heavy enough to fracture my toe should I drop it on my foot. The textbook I had often fallen asleep on, leaving smudged drool across its pages.

“Calm down, you know what to do. Just go for it,” I tried to convince myself. Inhale, exhale, inhale. Just do it.

Finally it was over. As I tied the last knot using the instrument tie, I felt my boss beaming from across the table.

“Not bad,” was all he said, “Finish up and write your op notes in the folder.” Then he left. Tumbler of stale coffee in his hand.

I stripped off the damp gloves from my shaking hands, disposed of them in the gaping yellow bin and wiped the sweat from my brow with my elbow. I grinned. Then I washed my hands, strode over confidently to the table by the side of the room and started entering my notes.

“First Surgeon: Dr. Teoh WK”