A better 25-year-old

On Christmas Eve everything happened and nothing did.

In the morning it was cloudy, not yet rainy, I was on the train, on the way to dim sum with the whole clan, half-seeing all the new lines on my aunt’s face as she spoke to my mother and half-hearing them as well as Jay Chou’s Chrysanthemum Terrace on my MP3 player – as my uncle and father, my cousin and two brothers, five men with five phones, talked to each other and many others – when A, the bride-to-be, SMSed me: Her grandfather died yesterday, would I go to the wake today?

I would, I said. My grandfather had died years ago on the Winter Solstice. His funeral was on Christmas Day, as A’s grandfather’s would be. Lots of ha gau, siu mai and pigs’ trotters later, half the clan headed home; one brother had gone shopping with his girlfriend and the other, with his cousin; another friend SMSed me with news of her grandmother’s death.

The train we were on went on. My wrangle with my mother went on. My aunt and uncle, professional photographers, had taken my picture months ago for my new identity card. (“Re-registration is required for all Singapore IC holders who have attained 30 years of age.”) When I tried to show them the new IC, my mother tried to snatch it and when I snatched it back, she hissed, “But you haven’t shown me! Why don’t you ask your aunt to be your mother?” I hissed back, “Why don’t you ask P to be your daughter?” (P is One Brother’s girl – an aspiring daughter-in-law.) The train saved us by drowning us out. No one else heard our nursery-level war.

Then who should I see but my colleague and her freakily tall five-year-old. “She’s eight. She’s in Primary Two,” the mother said. Oh. The last time she had told me of the child was more. Than. Two. Years. Ago. I was on a junket to Korea days after a break-up, we were on the bus, and I was happy to hear her story, which she was happier to tell me: She met a Korean man in Turkey; they have a child and haven’t married; they live apart, he in Korea and she with the child in Singapore, and they have stayed together, a long-time long-distance couple. She told me she would spend one day with him after the junket. I said, “One day only?” She said she would rather spend the second day with her child. Meeting them now, I could see how closely they clung to each other, girlish giggles and all. I saw what I could have been. As she stood with her child and I sat with my “children” – who go with me to Ho Chi Minh on the eve of New Year’s Eve – I could hear myself blithely saying, “Primary Two! So tall! So pretty!”

In the evening the storm clouds couldn’t keep themselves back any more. I was rained on on my way from the wake to a party, where I would see Ms O, who would ask me, “How was 2006?” Mine were all non-answers. “Like that lor.” “Good friend had a kid.” “Like that lor.”

In 2006 everything happened to everyone else (K became a mother, A got a proposal, L became a magazine boss), I got nowhere – and I am okay with being here. To maybe misquote Nancy Chan, I have become a much better 25-year-old than I was at 25. Next year I may become a better 30-year-old.

Father and son

I’m slow, so slow, it’s taken me 29 years to notice how alike my brother and father are. On the morning Fei was 29 years and a handful of minutes old we three were heading towards breakfast and I was at the tail end. From the front they had never looked alike. (I look more like Pa: I have his pale skin. We are also honest-to-goodness exaggerators: not good enough not to exaggerate but too honest to lie.) But from the back, I noticed for the first time, they had the same skinny arms, which they swung, when they strolled, at the same angle – like the pendulums of two clocks striking the same time.

They talked their men’s talk, of tax, tax, tax, which went over my head. Which was okay. I was happy to watch them and wonder: Nature, nurture, how does it all work? Thirty years apart, without always getting along, they made the same calculations and came to the same decision: of working on a degree in accountancy while keeping the day job. As far as I know, Fei didn’t talk to Pa about it; he just went for it, with a vengeance I could never have worked up. He hits the gym with the same vengeance…Pa’s vengeance.

Weeks ago his girlfriend was in Tokyo. She came home with clothes for us all and all the clothes (sweaters for Pa and Ma, slacks for me and shirts for Fei and Bak) were a perfect fit. Fei has always been a charmer who turns it on for his nearest and dearest – and girls – and of all the girls he could have charmed and brought home, he has chosen a girl who has gone and bought us all clothes. As I slipped into my new black velvety slacks, which were a better fit than a similar pair I bought myself, it struck me: She reminds me of my mother.

BOOKS | The movements of unchanging things

The New Yorker on R.K. Narayan:

With his fourth novel, The English Teacher (1945), Narayan’s point of view began to change, and this change is almost certainly related to a tragic event in his life. In the novel, Krishna, the protagonist, is, like earlier Narayan heroes, unhappy with his place in the world, “constantly nagged by the feeling that [he] was doing the wrong work”. One day, Krishna and his wife, Susila – their happy marriage nothing like the miserable one of The Dark Room – go house-hunting. Strolling through the grounds of one property, Susila takes leave of Krishna to use an outhouse in a distant corner of the garden. Once she closes the door, though, it jams, trapping her in the fetid, fly-filled dark. When Krishna, who grows concerned at her absence, hears Susila’s cries and locates the outhouse, kicking in its door, his wife is frantic: A fly, then a carrier of incurable diseases, has landed on her lip. Weeks later, she dies of typhoid.

Narayan, once an English teacher like Krishna, lost his own young wife, Rajam, to typhoid, in 1939, after just such an encounter with a fly. Her death affected Narayan deeply. “The world appears very vacant and vague now,” he told Greene in a letter, “and I too feel dead.” For years, Narayan was unable to write, but, when he resumed, his books had changed – a change that was both a function of what he had lost and what, through the nature of that loss, he discovered. Narayan had first seen his wife on a street corner and had courted her against the conventions of the time, which favoured arranged marriages. Having already ignored convention, the couple then learned that their horoscopes – the consideration of which was essential to marriage – deemed them incompatible: Narayan and Rajam were told that they must not marry. Were they to defy the stars, their charts made clear, Narayan would be a young widower. Deciding that superstitions and conventions did not apply to him, Narayan married the woman he loved. When the tragedy came, it seems to have instilled in him a deep sense of the inexorability of fate, a conviction that, naturally, influenced his view of character. “We are what we are,” Narayan later told a biographer. “Whether you grow older, more decrepit, inside, the sense of awareness, of being, is the same throughout. I don’t see any difference between myself when I was seven years old in Madras and now here in Mysore. The chap inside is the same, unchanged.”

If the novels that Narayan wrote before the death of his wife were all documents of frustrated flight, those that came after chart the comedy of trying to resist fate at all. Now resistance isn’t so much futile as fundamental to our humanness: We are always resisting only ourselves, a fact that – once you get over the abject horror of it – is really very funny. As the titles suggest – The Printer of Malgudi (1949); The Financial Expert (1952); The Guide (1958); The Vendor of Sweets (1967); The Painter of Signs (1976) – the protagonists of Narayan’s mature novels are all defined by their lot in life. All the books are comic, animated by the degree to which the inner self, however much it might question its place in the world, is constantly shown to be stubbornly consistent. These are not documents of frustration but, rather, delicately tuned farces of being.

The richest of these is The Guide. Upon his release from prison, a man must once again find a place for himself in the world. Raju, when we meet him, is sitting on steps that lead into a river, the very river where Savitri failed to end her life. Raju has no suicidal thoughts, only worries and sorrows. At the opening of the novel, a stranger approaches:

Raju welcomed the intrusion—something to relieve the loneliness of the place. The man stood gazing reverentially on his face. Raju felt amused and embarrassed. “Sit down if you like,” Raju said, to break the spell. The other accepted the suggestion with a grateful nod and went down the river steps to wash his feet and face, came up wiping himself dry with the end of a checkered yellow towel on his shoulder, and took his seat two steps below the granite slab on which Raju was sitting cross-legged as if it were a throne, beside an ancient shrine. The branches of the trees canopying the river rustled and trembled with the agitation of birds and monkeys settling down for the night. Upstream beyond the hills the sun was setting. Raju waited for the other to say something. But he was too polite to open a conversation.

It transpires that the man, a villager named Velan, is not being polite but reverential: Raju’s seated pose by the shrine has led Velan to mistake him for a holy man. This initial error furnishes the book’s premise; Raju, content to be misconstrued, begins dispensing advice to Velan, and then to his neighbours. It is, after all, to Raju’s profit: His worshippers bring him offerings of food, leaving him no reason to go anywhere else. Sweetly comic sections in which Raju shares his wisdom—inscrutable non-answers that exhort the villagers to seek answers within themselves—are all narrated in the third person. They alternate with Raju’s first-person account of the life that has brought him to this pass: his childhood in his father’s shop; his work as a successful tour guide, ignorant of history but adept at spinning colourful lies about attractions; his seduction of a tourist’s wife; and his attempt to defraud the woman by forging her name. This is the act that lands him in prison, and there is a comic counterpoint between the legal punishments for not being oneself and the worldly rewards that such behaviour attracts. As Raju concludes his life story, and as his fame as a spiritual guide ironically reaches its apex, we realise that he has been confessing his misdeeds to Velan. Raju asks if Velan has heard his confession:

“Yes, Swami.”
Raju was taken aback at still being addressed as “Swami”.
“What do you think of it?”
Velan looked quite pained at having to answer such a question. “I don’t know why you tell me all this, Swami. It’s very kind of you to address at such length your humble servant.”

In a Western comedy of mistaken identity, the revelation of the hero’s falsity would be a likely dénouement. But, in Narayan’s comedy, the joke is that Raju’s sense of who he is is trumped by the world’s view of him. After all, if one acts as a guide – dispensing wisdom, fasting when appropriate, attracting followers – one is a guide.

It is through this idea – that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one – that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not – indeed, cannot – chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land”, are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things.