part of a film being run off whole for the first time; the pieces at last had knit together. I no longer had gauze in front of my eyes and cotton wool stuffed into my head.
‘With that, it all began to pass away from me - as if I were recalling events from some other person’s life - the dark terrible last days of the war.
That is when I knew that your father was part of my karma, in that first moment I saw him, for I have no remembrance of entering the garrison house, of encountering any British soldiers there before him.’
The Colonel took her home at the day’s end, in the midst of the long shimmering emerald and lapis lazuli twilight, with the city choked with swirling dust, Jeeps clattering down the streets and soldiers running quick-time along the sidewalks while the Chinese and the Malays paused in their homeward journeys, standing quite still, resolute and quiescent and eternal in their cotton drawstring shorts and sloping reed sedge hats.
As usual it was teeming, and the Colonel had the Jeep brought round, though he was often fond of walking. It took him twenty minutes on average to make the journey from the garrison located near Keppel Harbour almost due north through the city to the house he now occupied. As may be imagined, the command was not over fond of his making this trek on foot and dius he was perforce obliged to be accompanied by two armed men from his garrison as escort from door to door. The
Colonel found this a hideous misappropriation of precious manpower but he seemed to have no choice in the matter.
At first he had been assigned an enormous estate near the western tip of the city but he soon found that it was hard by an equally enormous mangrove swamp and being downwind from it was too much even for him. So he had looked around and eventually moved to this current smaller but infinitely more comfortable place.
It was situated on a hill which the Colonel liked quite a bit because when he faced north he could gaze up at Bukit Timah, the island’s granitic core and its highest spot. Beyond that dark mass, the hump of some great leviathan, lay the black waters of the Johore Strait and Malaysia, the southernmost tip of the massive block of Asia. On the days when it was particularly hot and humid, when his shirt stuck like hot wax to his skin and the sweat poured from his scalp into his eyes, when the entire city steamed like a tropical rain forest, it seemed to him as if Asia’s bulk were sliding slowly downwards onto the top of his head, suffocating him in a blanket of endless marshes, mosquitoes and men; the crick in his neck would return, paining him worse than ever.
But this was all before the appearance of Cheong. To the Colonel it was nothing short of miraculous, as if she had come into his room, not from the streets of Singapore, but from the cloud-filled sky. That first evening, when he had turned her over to tiny Pi to be bathed and clothed, and standing by his polished teak desk, taking his first long drink of the day, he felt the tiredness washing away from him like a residue of salt drowned in a hot shower. He thought only that it was good to be home after so long a time at work. Yet perhaps this had been only the most mundane part of it, for when he recalled that time many years later - as he was often wont to do - he was not at all certain of his motivations or his feelings in the matter. He knew only that when she had been brought back to him in his study, when he saw again her face, for the first time since he had left England in the early part of 1940 to come East, he no longer seemed obsessed with Asia. He stood watching her come towards him, feeling like a house bereft of the ghost that had haunted it for so long, now empty, waiting to be filled by new and more substantial tenants. He recognized then his spirit, unchained at last, dancing inside of him and he felt that here before him was his true reason for seeking out the mysteries of Asia.
He studied her face, using the
‘With that, it all began to pass away from me - as if I were recalling events from some other person’s life - the dark terrible last days of the war.
That is when I knew that your father was part of my karma, in that first moment I saw him, for I have no remembrance of entering the garrison house, of encountering any British soldiers there before him.’
The Colonel took her home at the day’s end, in the midst of the long shimmering emerald and lapis lazuli twilight, with the city choked with swirling dust, Jeeps clattering down the streets and soldiers running quick-time along the sidewalks while the Chinese and the Malays paused in their homeward journeys, standing quite still, resolute and quiescent and eternal in their cotton drawstring shorts and sloping reed sedge hats.
As usual it was teeming, and the Colonel had the Jeep brought round, though he was often fond of walking. It took him twenty minutes on average to make the journey from the garrison located near Keppel Harbour almost due north through the city to the house he now occupied. As may be imagined, the command was not over fond of his making this trek on foot and dius he was perforce obliged to be accompanied by two armed men from his garrison as escort from door to door. The
Colonel found this a hideous misappropriation of precious manpower but he seemed to have no choice in the matter.
At first he had been assigned an enormous estate near the western tip of the city but he soon found that it was hard by an equally enormous mangrove swamp and being downwind from it was too much even for him. So he had looked around and eventually moved to this current smaller but infinitely more comfortable place.
It was situated on a hill which the Colonel liked quite a bit because when he faced north he could gaze up at Bukit Timah, the island’s granitic core and its highest spot. Beyond that dark mass, the hump of some great leviathan, lay the black waters of the Johore Strait and Malaysia, the southernmost tip of the massive block of Asia. On the days when it was particularly hot and humid, when his shirt stuck like hot wax to his skin and the sweat poured from his scalp into his eyes, when the entire city steamed like a tropical rain forest, it seemed to him as if Asia’s bulk were sliding slowly downwards onto the top of his head, suffocating him in a blanket of endless marshes, mosquitoes and men; the crick in his neck would return, paining him worse than ever.
But this was all before the appearance of Cheong. To the Colonel it was nothing short of miraculous, as if she had come into his room, not from the streets of Singapore, but from the cloud-filled sky. That first evening, when he had turned her over to tiny Pi to be bathed and clothed, and standing by his polished teak desk, taking his first long drink of the day, he felt the tiredness washing away from him like a residue of salt drowned in a hot shower. He thought only that it was good to be home after so long a time at work. Yet perhaps this had been only the most mundane part of it, for when he recalled that time many years later - as he was often wont to do - he was not at all certain of his motivations or his feelings in the matter. He knew only that when she had been brought back to him in his study, when he saw again her face, for the first time since he had left England in the early part of 1940 to come East, he no longer seemed obsessed with Asia. He stood watching her come towards him, feeling like a house bereft of the ghost that had haunted it for so long, now empty, waiting to be filled by new and more substantial tenants. He recognized then his spirit, unchained at last, dancing inside of him and he felt that here before him was his true reason for seeking out the mysteries of Asia.
He studied her face, using the
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