My mother wasn’t looking at the time. She was what, 18 or 19, staying with a kinswoman for a couple of days, putting the rubbish out in the alley. She wasn’t well. She thought she was looking a little wan. But someone in the alley kept looking at her. Some boy next door, having a smoke outdoors. The boy who would be my father. Reportedly – according to my mother’s reports – he clapped eyes on her in the alley in Kota Bharu and he knew they were going to be together. He just knew.
This was the mother of all tales I grew up with. It wasn’t a fairy tale but it was fantastic enough to have damaged my brain. This was, I thought, proof of destiny, proof that it was knowable. You could meet the love of your life just like that; he would know just like that, even if you didn’t; and you could live happily ever after or not-unhappily for decades. Not-unhappily isn’t shabby.
I was fascinated by fate. I was a fan. One of my favourite films, when I was 18 or 19, was Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red, in which a young model and a youthful judge don’t quite meet. But as she connects with an old ex-judge it becomes profoundly plain the three are connected by the dotted lines of destiny. You know she is meant for the judge, even if she doesn’t. It was a movie after my own heart.
Away from fiction I saw more dotted lines. A friend studied at the same poly as her Mr Right, lived in the same district as him but never got to know him, not until she resigned from a company, he replaced her – getting her work, her desk, odds and ends like her slippers – and they got to know each other as almost-colleagues. Where some would have seen chance I saw fate.
If a friend’s faith in her relationship wavered I would recall the fortune teller’s positive prognosis. I wouldn’t be telling her, “The fortune teller said so.” I wouldn’t be thinking it. I would be thinking about the science of relationships – thinking about psychologist John Gottman, who can analyse 15 minutes of a married couple talking, track negative emotions from defensiveness to contempt and predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married 15 years later – thinking about the absence of contempt in the friend’s relationship – and quietly believing the fortune teller.
I was sold on the idea of cosmic certainty, the bigger the more inevitable the more inescapable the better. I am still. Of course, in my lucid moments I don’t think my father knew. He was as old then as Bak is now: Would Bak know destiny if it kicked him in the face like a football hooligan? Maybe my father said the same thing to a lot of girls. Maybe my mother was the only one who believed him. It might have been luck that a hardworking woman like her happened to a high-maintenance man like him. (I also don’t think Oscar knew. He said a similar thing to me and I now think – I now know – it was talk.)
In my normal moments, however, you can still sell me a show by titling it Destiny Love or I Was Fated to Love You. It gets me every, every time.
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