That Back Room

“Memory believes before knowing remembers”
William Faulkner


That back room was where my grandmother
would sleep in her wooden bed on a raised platform
beside the glow of her high, hermetic altar.

She would confess her fears in dreams
and sometimes she would wake and look up at it
and compare the worlds of her unarticulated sorrow

with, more often than not, her anticipated destiny.
She was held captive by a life so deceptively simple
but most of her dreams by that time were desolate.

That back room was where, after she'd moved on
to continue her unvarnished life elsewhere,
my mum's youngest brother would sleep in late,

after coming home from the pub each night.
He'd entertain men within its walls at all hours
of the day, men whom I would refer to as uncles.

With books unthumbed, it was a space permanently
fixed on the past, or on a stasis of incompletion,
which I think unsettled my eldest brother ─

one weekend he painted the furniture in it a bright,
scarlet red, as if it were some kind of omen
to all who entered, especially to the women

he’d bring to be stroked and endeared
with such fluency as in some feverish perception
(usually after my parents had gone out for the night).

It was a back room which had a jackfruit and
a mango tree outside which flowered seasonally
but produced fruits full of ants and worms.

It was there at night that I would learn about
the mysteries of the printed page and in the morning
the sun would enter at angles to drown out

the dialogue of the narratives of the night before,
much to my dismayed, twentysomething dreams,
lost usually in the transience of the word.

At night the neighbourhood cats would
voice out their territorial claims and sometimes,
out of loneliness, I would entertain

strange men in all manners of undress.
Often, after they had left, I would think about them
by way of endless reflection. Those were times

that seemed to come out of a tune,
like the fragments of a melody, with no chime.
Thirty years later, the mango tree remains rooted

in its dying but the red ants still sweeten its fruit.
The worms just grow rounder each year,
wanting no amendment to their lives.

Memory remembers,
before restless voices return
to give themselves up to unfinished images.

Encounters 1


A strange thing happened to me about a month ago. I was at my travel agent in KL Sentral one weekday morning waiting to pay for my hotel bookings (of my last holiday) when suddenly I noticed a twentysomething smiling at me. He looked like some tall kid, fresh out of college.

I smile back. He gives an even broader smile, making me feel something like the radiant rays of Malaysian sunshine i haven t seen in a while. He comes over and the following conversation ensues:

Sunshine: Hi.
Me: Um, er… hello.
Sunshine: Can I ask you something?
Me: What s that?
Sunshine: Can I suck ur cock?

I not one to shy away from such encounters but that morning I simply looked at that sweet twentysomething and noticed some thing else I didn t see at first. He did not have that usual depraved, hankering look on his lips (I mean face) I ve seen on gay men in clubs. In fact he looked so innocent that I was beginning to suspect I was in some episode of Touched by an Angel.

Now for the sake of genuine autobiography I ve to say that nothing happened that morning (if this were fiction, then we would have gone off to the restroom getting down and dirty). I just looked at Sunshine and smiled again, giving him my usual blur look which i excel at, especially when having to listen to a foreign language I d like to understand but don t. Then I saw him disappear behind the gilt-edged, celestial clouds in the sky….