The crash-landee

She was a neighbour I never knew. Was she 30something? Or 20something? I don’t know. (My mother, the HDB detective, hears different ages from different neighbours, some of whom have put their 4D money where their mouth is.) What was her favourite song? What colour were her favourite shoes? What were her fantasies? I don’t know.

All I know is, civil defence was on the way – and still she jumped. Over Cheer Chen songs I am playing, I hear the wood clapper and funereal chant. Namo Amitabha.

A crash-landing

Out of the blue, an ah soh who lives in the next block rang us this morning.

“Where’s your mommy?” she said, as aunties often do.

My father had picked up the phone, so he said, “My mommy? My mommy has been dead for a long time.”

But she had called with some serious news: Someone was dead at the foot of my block, someone who seemed to have jumped out a window.

My father and I walked from window to window in our home to see that someone for ourselves. What we saw, in the end, was bright red newly-spilled blood, a handful of policemen and the contours of a body – man? woman? young? older? it was impossible to tell – that the police had covered with white canvas.

I looked up and down the block, looking for an open window. Which home had he or she fallen from?

“It’s either the 5th floor or the 7th floor. Windows are wide open,” I said to my father.

He went to the next room to tell my mother, who had come out of the bathroom.

I stood at the window myself, feeling nothing. Then, the tears came. If indeed it was a suicide, how desperate had he or she been to think of jumping, then do it? The worst I wished for, the one time I was desperate, was a convenient car accident to end everything. I did not think of jumping, of actually, actively dying. I am sad for this someone. Namo Amitabha.

Truly deeply

The first time I heard of the D spot, I was probably still in primary school. There was some silly Taiwan cartoon about some silly monks which I watched with my brother and cousin and in it, there is an old monk teaching new monks how to breathe very, very deeply.

氣運丹田 – 深呼吸 –

So someone breathes in such depth, sucking in so much air from all around him into his nostrils, towards the dantian, that everything not nailed down flies to his face – including an older monk. Breathing with the D spot was no joke, that much I knew then.

When I was in the choir in secondary school, we were told to stand and sing with the dantian, never mind that we didn’t know where it was. Our teacher said it was the diaphragm. Or she might have said it was the abdomen. I did what I could with my stomach. And maybe my intestines.

In yoga school, I have been learning how to breathe deeply and the trick, I am told, is to leave the nose out of it.

Pinch a point at the base of the neck with the hand when you take a breath, my teacher says. Think that you are breathing in and out there. Your breaths should be a bit deeper, a bit lower, than when you were breathing in with the nose and out with the mouth. You should sound like Darth Vader. Keep breathing but without bodily heaving.

Lie down on a floor with the buttocks against the wall. Keep the legs closed and up on the wall. Breathe. Be here for about a minute.

Keeping the legs on the wall, open them sideways such that they look like a V. Keep breathing. Be here for about a minute.

Keeping the legs on the wall, lower them sideways such that you seem to sit on the wall with the soles kissing each other. Keep breathing. Your breaths are now so deep, so low, you seem to be inhaling and exhaling from somewhere far below your belly button, close to your pubic region?

You are breathing with your dantian now, my teacher announces.

Oh. Oooh. Well, watch out, world.

Life actually

At this large terminal we call life, someone is always arriving or departing. Others are on the way. Some of us are in transit, with an eye on VIP departures.

When Leslie departed (you know which Leslie), I made many calls to many friends just to wail, “Leslie died!”

When Christopher Reeve died, I SMSed Mr T. He was so shaken by the news, he took more than an hour to reply.

On Tuesday night, he called me to tell me, “Dana Reeve died.”

Poor Dana. She died of lung cancer, less than two years after Christopher died. I had happy news for Mr T though. Ms C’s baby boy has arrived, I said.

+ + +

Fortnights ago, we were tasked to pick the nicest picture of my mother from a pile my uncle had taken of her at his studio, which he would then enlarge. That’s about 20 photos of the same woman in the same I-got-it-at-OG-for-less-than-$40 blue kimono-style blouse. But to me, they were all different.

“You don’t look like you,” I said of one picture – and about 10 others.

“Why’s your smile so weird? All your grandkids will say, ‘Why’s Ah Mah’s mouth so weird?’” I said of another. (Ah Mah means paternal grandmother. Even in my hypothetical mentions of my mother’s hypothetical grandkids, I make them my brothers’ kids, not mine.)

She protested, “Your uncle and aunt kept telling me to smile wider.”

Okay okay.

My uncle had numbered the photos. So my picks were No.7 and No.11; my uncle and aunt’s picks were No.18, then No.7; my father’s pick was No.6.

In No.7, she has a soft smile, the smile I like, and is facing my left. In No.11, she has a similar smile and is facing my right. Her smile is even softer in No.6 (my father and I were on the same page, after all), except the picture is somewhat shadowy. In No.18, her beam is wide. She looks nothing like the woman we know.

As for my mother, her pick was No.13. I didn’t get it at first. But then I saw what she saw. Her half-smile here was the same as that in her old photos, when she was young, half-smiling and looking keenly ahead at someone or something off-camera – was it the future?

“You looked like this when you were 19, too,” I said.

“I’ve looked like this all of my life,” she said.

Many ah soh her age prepare nice pictures of themselves. Just in case. I might not have known what she was up to, had I not studied No.13.

+ + +

On Wednesday morning, I picked a nice Washington Post obituary of Dana for publication: the only one that told of the night she swam with Christopher at a pond, after a 10-day flirtation, and gave him their first kiss.

That afternoon, a good girl friend told me that she was pregnant.

That evening, in an old tradition of welcoming new arrivals to this world, Ms H and I went shopping for kid-sized stuff for Ms C’s boy.