©
All poems
and stories
© 1988,
1989, 1990,
1998 by
Advaeta.
All rights
reserved. |
I met a German yogi in Singapore. He only looked like a yogi, though, when he was in his flat. The rest of the time he tried to look like a tourist. His shapeless Salvation Army pants contradicted that idea, however, and anyway he always stood out in a crowd: pale, erect, with a truly vulture-like nobility.
One time I asked him what meditation was like. He said it was always different. He had written a little poem which, according to him, said it all --
To My Guru
Lord, where will I find you next?
You never stay where I expects.
When I look for you in your old haunts,
You never give me what I wants.
He also wanted to save the world. Though he knew it was not a one-man job, he thought he had a certain role. What did the poor countries need, he would ask, that the rich countries could give up at present without a fight? Their used machinery. Their Kapital. Everything from bottling machines to Apple II screens. It was not time for a fight, he said. So his warehouse on Shaw Road was a litter of spare parts of a million kinds, cables, accessories, specification sheets. The parts were a constant. The machines themselves would march in, stay for some repair to be made, some paint to be sprayed, some deal to be hatched, and march out. The cargo planes and freighters moving in and out of Singapore grew accustomed to their oxidizing cargoes.
Of course, there was a profit in it, too. What was not rolled over in the business went as donations to Cambodia or the Philippines. On himself he didn't spend much. Only on flutes, dried fruits, and magazine mountains in the living room.
Singapore was a place where the trees were green and the younger women moving through the heat were like rainbow mirages, like the northern lights. It used to take my breath away. But he was beyond such things. One afternoon a mercenary approached us in the park along the coast. She was young. Her skin looked smooth as a feather.
I should say she approached Victor. She probably sized me up as a trekker, with sunburn and old khaki shirt. Trekkers on their way to Nepal were not known as big spenders.
"Hi, I like tall guys," she said to him. Her little rosebud smile, real or not, hit me like a brick. I don't know how Victor could stand it.
"I'm tall, yes," he said, "but life is short. We have to make choices in this world."
I went away together with him, but I tell you my mind remained stuck to the spot. We walked toward the bus stop. Victor was telling me something about the benefits of yoga exercises, but I couldn't pay much attention.
We went different ways, because I had to do some errands. I took a bus to North Bridge Road. I went to an art supply place and got a few things. Then I went to a hardware. Then to a bookstore. In the bookstore was a collection of illustrations I had been wanting, with some nice airbrush work.
But actually, wherever I went, it was as if that girl from the park was following me: or I was following her. It's really strange being human, with a mind of pesky pictures.
I decided momentarily to go and patch up my differences with my Melinda. She had called -- she was just back from India, with her videotapes of the dances. I dialed. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. I stood at the pay phone in the open front of the restaurant, gasping a bit from the smell of the fried pork.
I called Victor. "I'm still doing meditation," he said. "Come over and open the door and I'll be finished soon."
He was sitting straight up like a stainless steel bayonet. I sat on the couch and tried to find some entertainment in his computer magazines. Soon he finished.
"Here's a poem I wrote a little while ago," he said. He produced a square torn from a manila envelope and handed it to me.
When I Was a Child
A thousand times of ecstasy,
Eating oatmeal.
Forgetting now the oatmeal,
Spoon the ecstasy straight.
"But anyway," he said, "let's eat something. Not oatmeal, though . . . I found some nice figs and cashews today -- let's have that and this cheese and some papaya."
Once we were full of these things Victor started talking about flutes. He showed me one of the biggest ones. It was a different kind of bamboo, without knots. "It breaks your fingers to play this," he said. "But it has range. The normal Indian flute is small, it doesn't have the range of the Western concert flute.
"But the Indian ear can never be quite satisfied with a Western flute. They always want to preserve the perfect fourth from D to G. D is four-thirds the wavelength of G. And the other perfect fourth from A to the next D. Now if you preserve both fourths, that next D will be a little lower than exact D, by a difference called one shruti. This interval is one twenty-second of the octave -- it works out like that. If you have a fixed D like flute keys with hinges will give you, it will always be a little low, or else you have to stretch the fourths a bit. But with a wood flute -- "
He started to blow the D. With his eyes he told me to watch his last finger. That finger gradually uncovered a few millimeters of hole and covered them again.
"With a metal flute, you have your twelve notes per octave and that's it. With this flute you have as many as you want. The whole continuum. They're called microtones. Theorists start with twenty-two, then sometimes they say it's sixty-six. Twenty-two each have their own character, like words. The ear can't really distinguish sixty-six. But my guru says that in the future the human ear will evolve.
"And if it's the right kind of wood, like this bamboo, it sounds like gold."
Though Victor could demonstrate his points, he wasn't really a musician. But he had all the tapes. For three hours, while he clicked away at his correspondence, I sat and listened.
Victor didn't seem to know many people who shared his yoga hobby. One time when I went to his warehouse, a girl with a very short haircut was there, sitting cross-legged on a bench on the loading platform. Covering her legs was a long black skirt with some fading embroidery at the bottom. She was talking excitedly in German, gesturing with her hands and laughing as she acted out some person in her story. She just smiled when Victor introduced us in English, and soon she picked up her backpack from the platform and trudged on her way.
"She's just seen our guru in India," Victor said. "He was in a beautiful mood. She was telling me some of his jokes. She's lucky. She speaks better Hindi than I do."
A couple of times Victor asked me to receive some item in my name in order to get it through customs. By now, they were starting to recognize him. Once a two-ton lathe came in my name. I declared it as Personal Effects, and showed them the invoice: 2000 US dollars. I ended up paying 30% duty, a big chunk out of Victor's profit.
"I wanted to send something to Mindanao this week," he chafed. He was supporting a free clinic and some kind of experimental community in Mindanao. "Oh well, you did your best. I'll find that money somewhere."
When Victor went to clear his machines, the story he would tell would be no different, but with him there was some ingredient. He never paid a cent.
This was a quality in him I admired very much. With a lot of things it was like that. If I asked about it, he would just say that God did everything.
And you know, he sincerely thought that. But he also thought there was a reason that God did everything in his case, and not in mine.
The time came when Victor needed a delivery van. Now in Singapore, anybody selling anything is naturally going to try to make money, but the guy who had the van was almost in a class by himself. Replying to a Times ad, Victor came in contact with Henry, a South Indian who owned a mechanic's shop. Henry's East Coast Workshop, said the sign, a floral and faunal, violet and yellow creation. Inside the shop there were always two or three friendly, smiling workers who didn't know when Henry would be back. It was almost like a theme song:
He's gone to tow in a wreck,
Yes, he may be in Upper Pheng Geck,
He'll be back here by three
Or by January,
And his pager don't work, what the heck.
The van was in Henry's shop at the time the classified ad appeared. Victor got it very cheap. He bargained Henry down from fourteen hundred to just eleven hundred Singapore dollars. Eleven hundred, plus four hundred fifty to finish the repair work. Then, a few days later, Henry called and said he needed three hundred dollars for the change of ownership. Then after another week, he needed five hundred for the road tax.
Victor just exploded. He drew up from his usual six feet to about seven. Waves of white heat came spewing from the deep creases where his forehead was invading his nose. "What is this nonsense?"
I was with him at his warehouse when the phone call came. "What is this road tax? Why didn't you tell me before about the road tax? Why should I give this road tax to you?" Then, "In that case I'll go down and pay it myself. Where is that office? And why isn't the van ready yet?"
By now I was working for Victor part time. I needed a little income to extend my holiday. After grinding the handset into the phone cradle, Victor asked me to go to Henry's and pick up the registration certificate. "And tell him to stop the monkey business and why isn't the van ready yet."
This time Henry was in. He handed over the registration certificate, in the name of Tan Chih Pen, Victor's Singaporean friend. It said, "FEE PAID $250."
"I thought the registration was three hundred dollars," I said.
"Registration two hundred and fifty, processing charge fifty," he said.
"Do you have the receipt for the processing charge also?"
"Sure, sure, I show you, wait." He got on the intercom and spoke in Tamil. "Just wait, I show you everything."
Henry was about thirty years old, but his angelic sincerity made him look hardly twelve. Only his eyes wavering a little at the end of a sentence showed the intricacies of his brain. I asked him when the van would be ready.
"You see, the U-joint, there's no stock, you know what I mean? I ordered, but it take a long time. We can get from Japan direct, but then have to pay air freight. Tell Victor, why not pay a little more. You think it's okay with Victor? Then he gets the van very soon, makes a lot of money, better for him, you know what I mean?"
I imagined conveying this thoughtful offer to Victor, but I had my own safety to consider. I didn't want to be the messenger with the bad news. "No," I said. "No, no, no. You just get that U-joint as soon as you can. What about second-hand?"
"Okay, okay, I do my best."
We sat for some time. I was still waiting to see the receipt. Suddenly Henry got up. "Wait," he said, reassuring me with an indulgent smile, his palm held up as if to keep me in my seat. He went out the office door and down to the shop.
I waited. After half an hour I went downstairs. Henry was not around. Another man was there who looked something like Henry, and seemed to be supervising things. "Henry have to go out," he said. "You want the receipt?"
"Yes!"
"Receipt is coming. Wait." He smiled happily.
I waited. I got out a poetry anthology, one of a number I had located one day in the second-hand places opposite the museum. I read the entire "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and some other things. An hour and a half had passed. I went downstairs. By this time I had some moral force built up. "What is this?" I said to Henry's brother, or whoever he was. "It doesn't take this long to find a receipt. Just see how much of my time you've wasted. Where is Henry?"
"Look, okay, just wait five minutes," the Henry-like person said, with almost, not quite, as much smile as before.
I went back up to the office. In less than five minutes this Henry the Second came in.
"Henry just rang up," he told me. "He said he looked everywhere, he couldn't find the receipt. He said it's his mistake, so he said, you want, we give you fifty dollars." He handed over the fifty. "For customer relations. We lose the money. It's for you and Victor, you're our customers, you know what I mean?"
That night I was going for dinner to Victor's place. In order to get the subject off Henry's moral deviations, I picked up a video along the way, 2010. Anything with a lot of special effects Victor would love.
He watched it with close attention, and I thought he liked it. But his only remark was, "You know what I liked about that first movie? I liked that big spaceship with hardly anyone in it. Jogging completely alone -- eating colored nothing, same thing every time -- now there are how many people? at least eight -- some romantic suggestion, too -- Jupiter is spoiled."
Finally Victor was driving the van. After a week, when I returned to the warehouse from some late-afternoon errand, I found Victor there, the lemon-yellow van, the hood up, Victor's friend Kwee, and an eloquent array of tools on the asphalt. Kwee was the one who had helped Victor check out the van in the first place. He knew something about cars, and had pronounced himself satisfied at the time. "Just have them do this and that and replace the U-joint," he had told Victor. "Everything else is all right."
Victor was hopping around. This time he looked really murderous. I asked Kwee what had happened. Better to puzzle with Kwee's English than to get the full blast from Victor right now. What had happened, Henry had impudently cheated him. Everything in the van was replaced with old junk: carburetor, distributor, generator, even the radiator.
Victor took me aside. Blue eyes can be terrible. The voltage is so high. He explained that what Henry had done could not be proved, and anyway he, Victor, couldn't go to the police. He was in Singapore on a tourist visa. He was not supposed to be running a business. "But we would be completely wrong if we let this kind of thing go by. Don't you agree!"
I quickly agreed.
He sketched out his plan: smashing Henry's sign and plate-glass window with bricks.
Various words came to my mind. "We're outsiders." "It's a useless revenge." "We risk a lot and gain nothing." But from my mind the words wouldn't externalize. His force was too much. I felt enveloped. My throat was off-lined somewhere. True that this Henry was a slimy fellow, I thought.
So around one in the morning I started Victor's motorcycle, and he got on the back, his shoulderbag heavy with bricks. We entered Henry's part of the city the same way we planned to leave, to make sure the coast was clear. Passing Henry's by a hundred meters, we made a U-turn, came back, and paused right opposite the shop. The loud noise of the idle upset me. Victor slid off, ran right up to the shop -- did he have to go so far from the bike, I thought -- and flung two bricks, his whole body getting into the act.
At the sound of the two crashes I felt panicky. Voices stirred up in the nearby places. Victor got back on. We were out of sight in the dark before any door opened. We drove without lights, zigzagging through the empty small-scale industrial streets. Before Sims Avenue we switched the headlight back on.
Victor was elated. He tried not to laugh but it escaped from him. "I haven't had so much fun since I was in high school."
I told him I was taking a couple of days off. Life with him was exciting, no doubt, but it wore me out after a point.
Following my short vacation, I checked in at the warehouse.
"Have you written any poems lately?" He could usually oblige this kind of request.
"I started one," he said.
Far from the scene of those Christmas mistakes,
We swayed freely to pagan strings.
We didn't see the price of our escape,
We ate honey and lotuses and things.
When the helmeted colossus hit us with his fist,
Some thought it best that they call it a day;
Some crouched forever in the covering mist,
While others sold their souls to get away.
"And are there still others?" I said.
"A few."
"And what do they do?"
"Ahhh," he said, very guttural. "That verse is for you to write."
That evening after work we ate with one friend of Victor's, a distributor of medicinal herbs. The acrid smell alone in the man's place was enough to get one up out of the grave. After learning what we could of this science, we went back to Victor's part of town by bus.
We got off and were heading for his flat in the dark street, with a few white pools from the streetlights. Suddenly four or five men surrounded us. I recognized someone from Henry's workshop. Then a punch landed in my solar plexus. I yelled. I couldn't believe the pain. I was never hit in the solar plexus before. I was sitting on the ground. I couldn't breathe. Then I heard some shouting from a house. The men ran. I got up.
Victor's shirt was torn. His hair had taken on a different style, and his beard was sticking out in belligerent spikes, like some feisty gray sea anemone. "I got in a good kick," he informed me. "I never practiced this, but I think it was a good kick. Quite a good kick! Oh, how are you?"
I still could not speak. By this time a few wary, polite Chinese faces had gathered around. Perhaps one of them had saved us by shouting. Victor gave another defiant kick at the nearest lamppost as we went on our way.
Someone was there at Victor's place. I had seen him before. He had a key to the flat. A gangling Indian with one eyebrow, straight as a Texas highway, across the top of his face. He liked to pace, deeply pensive, around the room. With every step his foot would give a vigorous outward flick. Usually he would go to Victor's only for a short meditation, then leave. I had always wanted to ask him what he was thinking that seemed so compelling, but somehow had missed my chances.
When he saw our condition, he was shocked -- "Oh!" -- taking a breath. And when Victor started to speak, he was angry. "Do you think this will help the world, starting a war on the streets like this? If you want to fight, fight something worthwhile. This is not the time or place and this Henry is not the person. This is Singapore, stupid. And you involved this boy in this. Look at him, he still can't talk. What if he'd been killed?"
Before I was only feeling irritated at Victor. At the man's words, though, I immediately took on his same moral indignation about the matter. But at the same time I tensed up. Victor was not a person to talk to like that. Looking at him, though, he seemed to be listening rather respectfully. He hastened a bit to explain himself.
"You've got to do something with a criminal like that one," he said. "Should we just tolerate those kinds of dealings? Then what will happen to human society?"
"Human society!" Victor's friend mocked him. "You didn't do it for human society. You did it because you're a conceited -- "
He stopped, though he didn't seem finished. I excused myself as soon as possible.
The next morning I went to the warehouse. Victor was sitting at his desk doing nothing. There seemed to be dark smoke around his forehead, though where the fire was I could not see.
He pulled out of his mood enough to apologize for having endangered me with our little escapade.
"It was my decision," I said. "Anyway, nothing happened."
Then he said, "I'm going to leave Singapore."
I was astounded. Actually, he was annoyed that I took it as such a big thing. His frown told me to calm down and listen. He said that he was going to withdraw for some time. "There's one Sufi center in Lebanon that I know. By paying something, almost nothing, I can stay there for four or five months. I'll just meditate and plaster the mud on the wall. That will cool my head in such situations. Then I'll see what the world is ready for. I think I'll come back after a while. But I'm going to close the warehouse for now, that'll be simpler."
"Victor, tell me, was this your idea?"
At this his forehead smoked up a bit more and I decided not to pursue the subject.
But after a while he became brighter. "Listen, you should come with me. It'll be really good for you. It's a chance to deepen that meditation practice I taught you."
"Well, I'm doing more, little by little. I don't think I would like Lebanon."
"The point is, if you get established in your meditation, you'll like anything. That's what meditation is for, to enjoy the world. Most people don't enjoy because of their fears. By meditation you overcome your fears."
Once again I couldn't say no to him. We started discussing logistics and things. Anyway, I'd seen enough of Singapore. I was just staying around to help Victor.
The next day I was just about to buy my ticket, when Victor asked a question. "You understand about the silence, right?"
"Silence?"
"One of their rules. I thought I told you. Everyone has to maintain silence. Except for some chanting, or if you're sent to market."
"Silence for four or five months?"
"Well, I'll stay four or five months. If you like, you can leave after three months. They expect you to stay at least that much."
"Victor, my spinal cord would shrivel up. They've done scientific studies. When white rats don't get affection, their spinal cords shrivel up."
This time, Victor's persuasiveness could not touch me. By a couple of phone calls I ascertained that if I reached Milan in time, I could get a job as an illustrator through a contact there. If I didn't do illustrating again soon I would get rusty, I thought. So I bought a ticket that stopped in Dubai, and passed by Lebanon at about 30,000 feet. In fact my flight was to leave one day before Victor's.
Disposing of Victor's remaining goods and settling his bills took four days. For me it was the most draining kind of work. There was no poetry in it at all. But it seemed to rub the depression off Victor. On the third night he smiled like some Teutonic king of the sky. "It's better to be tired all the time, isn't it?" he said. "You can't think so well, but your intuition takes over."
"Then why did I make that right turn into the traffic?" I said. In Singapore they drive on the left. That morning, in the baling-wired van, with horns honking behind me and Victor telling me "No -- this way. No -- that way," I had forgotten the fact.
"It's because you're resisting."
"It's easy to talk like that. I know your philosophy. Your philosophy is simple: if anything is upside down it's all right, otherwise it can go to hell."
"You have to understand that the world is basically organic. There are living forces ready to help us at all times. But if we don't give them a chance -- Look, it's like yogurt. Just be like the yogurt."
"God! What got into your culture this morning, anyway?"
But later on I thought, this is something I should know about. I tried to get him to tell me about the organic forces. He was very happy at my interest. But he said it was an involved subject. Finally time ran out. He said he would have to write me a letter about it. I got a taxi, and we shook hands. I was a bit impulsive. Actually, he didn't like anybody to touch him.
An airport is always a twilight zone. You can't think about the country you're in or the country you're going to. Everything is cool and factual. Aisle or window? Explosives or non-explosives? They say sir while they frisk you.
Finally we took off. I listened to the country-and-western channel for a few minutes. Then, with a laugh, I thought I'd have a glass of champagne. Perhaps they would serve Italian champagne.
The stewardess came. The close-fitting paisley purples of her dress swam flickeringly on my mental plate. I ordered champagne and an aerogram.
The champagne was all right. It had a taste of inevitability about it. Was the world effervescent, or only evanescent? With the give-away pen I put Victor's address on the aerogram and wrote this little poem --
Roads
They lure you so,
Sunny, meandering, studded with flowers;
And every detour must end, after some hours.
The duration, I suppose, is anybody's guess;
Well, what's another lifetime, more or less?
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