THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Four

These are a few of my comfort foods: my mother’s rice noodles, Milo with crackers and Meteor Garden. Meteor Garden – it’s Pride And Prejudice lite with Jerry Yen as Darcy – is my chocolate. On downhearted days I pop it into the DVD machine’s mouth and press Play. Instant happiness.

There are days chocolate isn’t enough though. Like when first love crashes, becomes first break-up in a foreign country – a friend’s friend takes you in, gives you a shoulder to cry on – you go broke calling friends back home – you don’t know what to do with yourself. I didn’t know what to do with myself that summer Down Under. Then I found myself buying a book, Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, for the friend’s friend and in the middle of writing her a thank-you-for-everything note, I began to reread the book in her kitchen.

Davies has been one of my friends from the first time we met in NUS. That was where I borrowed my first Davies, that is. I really don’t remember if I found him on my own or only after reading his obituary, an inspiring one by The Economist. But I thank the day we met. His is the warmest and wisest of voices – he wrote his best books late in life when he was in his 50s and 60s – and that day in the kitchen, he wasn’t just telling me about Maria Magdalena Theotoky, this beautiful brilliant scholar of Rabelais and how she gets her man and her manuscript; about the body-personality types, ectomorph (scrawny, sex-starved, intellectual), mesomorph (muscular, go-getting), endomorph (plump, pleasure-seeking); about Simon Darcourt, this professor of Greek who may or may not be in love with Maria after he accidentally drinks coffee mixed with her menstrual blood…

Davies was telling me, it’s gonna be okay girl.