The Minorities Read online

  Cantona downed what was left of his orange juice. He then moved further down the bar towards Shanti.

  I turned from them. At times, watching the two of them felt voyeuristic, like I was an intruder on a secret that, though open, was so fragile it might crumble under witness. Tights, who was next to Cantona, shuffled over to me, his glass a quarter empty, his manner rigid.

  “You good, Tights?”

  “No,” he replied. “I scared. Many people.”

  “Don’t be,” I told him. “Just be yourself, make new friends and have fun.”

  “But Shanti said—”

  “Shanti said watch what you say, that’s all.” I glanced back towards Shanti, who was deep in conversation with Cantona. “Just talk about your favourite movies and stay within sight.”

  Tights smiled uneasily and shuffled towards the exit of the VIP area.

  I did not see where he went from there, as a voice, magnified by a microphone, rented the air, killing the nebulous buzz of chatter that had simmered in the hall. “Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for this evening’s host and curator, Miss Hilda Auger!”

  Hilda ascended to her dais as “Also Sprach Zarathustra” began playing over the speakers. She took her time, walking slowly, her silver dress gliding along with the swells of the music. I could not decide if the overall effect was godly or gaudy. Everybody else seemed to have already decided, as rapturous applause broke out across the hall.

  Finally, she reached the middle of the dais, a space she occupied with an almost celestial poise and confidence.

  When she spoke, I had the general impression that the microphone was unnecessary. “Friends, colleagues, fellow lovers of art, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the opening night of Toil and Canvas!”

  Hilda basked in the subsequent applause—one that I found myself inadvertently contributing to—and spoke only upon its death.

  “These works of art by expatriates and foreign workers speak of our common humanity, our struggles to find acceptance and belonging so far away from home. Here, at Our Ziggurat, this symbol of our shared ancestry and heritage—” Hilda swept an arm towards the curtains in the middle of the hall, and they came apart, unveiling a multicoloured stepped pyramid made of hemp fibres and earthy textiles held up by wooden effigies of decreasing height; easels were scattered around Our Ziggurat, bearing the works of art that were in danger of no longer being the exhibition’s focal point, “—we have gathered for a homecoming, a return to the soul.”

  Oohs and aahs blossomed and flurried, and amid these erupting invocations, Hilda descended from the dais. She stepped forward and the audience gave her a wide berth—the laity making reverential space for their Divine Being. “You may enter now,” she declared to a crowd that was as enraptured as I was on the qui vive (for Tights), “and I promise you will leave with more in your hearts and minds than you have now.”

  Large swaths of people began to approach Our Ziggurat, pointing, commenting, drinking champagne.

  There was a practised “ahem” behind us.

  Shanti, Cantona and I turned to find one of Hilda’s white-clad assistants. She was a tall, fair lady who was so skinny she appeared narrow. Her nametag said Michaela. Her countenance said Cruella de Vil waiting for a delivery of Dalmatians.

  “Ms Auger would like to speak to you, Mr Nocta,” she said tersely, addressing Cantona only. “If you would follow me.” She turned, and did not start walking until Cantona was next to her.

  I turned to Shanti. “Um, I lost sight of Tights.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll look for him.”

  “All right then, I’m going to look at some art and try my very best to understand them,” I said to her, a listless chuckle betraying my guilt.

  “If you find him, keep him with you,” said Shanti with a heavy voice, before she disappeared into the crowd.

  I headed towards Our Ziggurat. The art littered around it spanned styles, genres, subjects and technique. Some of them popped out to me: a still life of a dirty shovel, an abstract self-portrait painted in hummus, a landscape collection of soaring mountains and dark, smoggy cities.

  On one side of Our Ziggurat, I found the white sign I was looking for. It read: “A. N. Nocta, Bangladesh” in bold black font.

  “The enigmatic Mr A. N. Nocta,” the paragraph under it read, “is a self-taught artist. He started painting at the age of twelve, when he worked as an apprentice at a dye factory in his native Bangladesh. Beyond this, nothing much is known about Mr Nocta, though rumours abound that he is a fifty-year-old recluse who breeds mules. While his style and technique harken to the Renaissance, his subjects are as brutal and raw as they are absurd and surreal.”

  Behind the signboard stood a large landscape, about a metre by two. Painted in strong strokes was a dark, solitary hand, palm stretched open, reaching upwards from waters inky blue and surging, rippling. The hand dominated the canvas, such that I could see clearly every wrinkle upon it cresting and meandering. In every concentric ripple of water around its veiny wrist, there were minute, distorted reflections of beatific life and violent death, every scene tinted watery blue. One ripple curved and skewed a destroyed mule caravan, bloodied bodies strewn around, the red bleeding through the blue. Within the ringed theatre of another ripple was a stout man cradling his baby. Another one depicted a boy kicking a football. Smeared across the top of the canvas like misshapen blue-grey clouds were small hands, reaching for their brethren in the water. The oil and canvas oeuvre was titled Kali Pulls Icarus Out of the Water.

  “It’s not time to make a change. Just relax…” I had been singing along with the radio that dark, breezy night. Reclining on the hood of a rusty old Toyota, I had marvelled at how brightly the stars shone above, this far from the light pollution of the city. “Take it easy…”

  I had parked along an empty stretch of road, far from civilisation. The last car passed me over an hour ago. The last streetlamp blinked impassively at me about a hundred metres back. If it weren’t for my radio renting the silence rhythmically, there would be a harsh hush, a black void of noiselessness. Farther down the road was a Muslim cemetery, the resting place of tombstones etched in Arabic and wretched with dates of birth and death.

  I never understood the practice of setting in tombstone a person’s birth and death dates. Did it matter, for example, how old my father was when he passed? Did it matter how long his bones had been in the ground, farther down that road? What difference did it make if they had been there, rotting, for 42 days (as they were then) or 42 years? Dead is dead is dead.

  It had been one of very few things I had in common with my father. Two years ago, I had been here with him to attend the funeral of one of his childhood friends, Malik. Then, I had met my father’s former teacher, Pakcik Dollah, a sprightly man of about ninety. He had hugged my father, before saying, “Malik died too young.” Malik was in his seventies. My father, insufferable and emotionless, said, “No such thing. Dead is dead is dead.” Pakcik Dollah’s face was unreadable as he gazed at my father after that comment. He then said simply, “As a practising bomoh, I wholeheartedly disagree.” He then threw me a wink and hopped farther along the graveyard.

  Something broke the silence—something outside the car, something not from the radio. Something organic.

  I heard the rustle but, in the dark, barely saw it.

  I sat up.

  The rustle grew louder, rankling in the silent night. The bush next to the car began to shake violently. I cast my phone’s built-in flashlight on the movement. “Hello?”

  Something large erupted from the bush and jumped into the light. Recoiling, I yelled in fear.

  “Wait!” the something large said—well, “panted barely discernible words” was a better way to describe how it spoke. The monster from the chaparral was merely a not-so-monstrous chap.

  He was a tall, skinny man, with a shock of facial hair. He wore what was probably once a clean white T-shirt, and work trousers that were
tattered and dirt-stained, as though he had been running through the jungle for hours.

  “Water?” he gasped, clear and lucid. “Do you have any water?”

  “I don’t have any on me. No, wait. Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘water’. Roughly seventy-five per cent of me is made of water—”

  The man whimpered through his ragged breaths. “To drink. Please. I have been running for four straight hours.”

  I took in his drenched T-shirt, the mottled beads of water on his skin and his wild, unfocussed, deep-set eyes. “Hang on, let me check.” I opened my glove compartment. A flurry of envelopes fell out. I quickly shoved them back in, and slammed the compartment shut. “Sorry, it appears I don’t have any.” I chuckled quickly, nervously. I was hoping that would push him along, but he stayed rooted to the ground.

  The way he looked at me, I felt like I had just sentenced him to death. “Please, sir?”

  I sighed. “I can get some along the way back. Get in.”

  He stumbled into the back seat, and lay prone. I started the engine.

  “Thank you, sir, thank you,” he said with pants more ragged than his trousers.

  “No problem. Just don’t kill me.”

  “I am not a murderer!”

  A small part of me, deeply buried within my id—the part that willed me to spend my time near a graveyard listening to songs my father listened to—throbbed in disappointment. I said nothing as his heavy breathing began to subside.

  “I like the song you were playing.”

  “‘Father and Son’ by Cat Stevens?” I began driving off.

  “Yusuf Islam sang it, no?”

  “They’re the same person. That’s his name after he converted to Islam.”

  He said nothing.

  I asked him, “Are you running from the law?”

  “No.” He paused. “Not yet.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Cantona.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Selena Gomez.”

  “Thank you so much for your help, Mr Gomez.”

  “Damn it, man. I was being sarcastic.”

  “Oh.”

  We fell silent again, the sounds of sparse passing traffic filling the night. At regular intervals, we were bathed in the orange LED lights of the streetlamps.

  “Why?” he finally asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why were you being sarcastic?”

  “Your name can’t actually be Cantona.”

  “Do you know the footballer, Eric Cantona?”

  “Of course, I do. Total legend.”

  “My parents named me after him. My full name is Cantona bin Fawwaz.”

  “Were your parents Manchester United fans?”

  “The biggest in Comilla,” he said with pride, even in his rather dire circumstance, even as he kept his form low in the back seat of the car.

  “You don’t speak like most Bangladeshis.”

  “That’s a bit racist, sir.”

  “Most Bangladeshis I know, at least.”

  “Do you personally know many Bangladeshis?”

  “Just the one.” I thought of the caretaker who tended the garden next to my block, the one with the rusty shears and the sheer vest and the seer-like wisdom and the gap-toothed smile.

  “What’s your name, sir?” he asked again.

  I told him my name—my real name.

  “What kind of name is that?” he asked.

  “The one my parents gave me,” I answered truthfully.

  The blue Toyota cruised down the Pan-Island Expressway. I asked the question that was foremost in my mind. “Who or what are you running from?”

  “My former employers.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Chang and Sons.”

  I paused. “Is that a gang?”

  “No,” he replied from the back seat. “They’re a construction company.”

  I tried to imagine any reason why a construction company would chase an employee across the jungles.

  “Did you steal cement from them?”

  “What would I do with cement?”

  “Well, you could cement your reputation as—”

  “There is nothing to do with cement,” he interjected in a heartbreaking lament. “It’s just the same dull, grey thing every day. You wouldn’t comprehend.”

  “Ah, but I do, my friend. I do understand. Cement—why, it is but a sham. Not as meaningful as, say, green eggs and ham.”

  The stranger—Cantona—remained silent. In my rear-view mirror, he looked perplexed and slightly perturbed.

  “Have you never read Dr Seuss?”

  “No,” he answered.

  “We need to change that,” I told him flatly. As soon as I said that, I regretted it. Why was I making plans for book-sharing with a complete stranger?

  This end of the vernissage, I realised, was emptier than the other sides of Our Ziggurat. Most of the crowd was near the entrance, where some expatriate CEO of a successful financial technology start-up was displaying his collection (I believe it was called Money Talks—charcoal sketches of anthropomorphised wads of cash, portrayed deep in conversation with seemingly prosaic things such as pillars and sports cars and diamond rings).

  I moved towards the painting behind Kali Pulls Icarus Out of the Water. The small rectangle of paper pasted to the easel said this one was called Seventeen Lives. It depicted an upturned red-and-white striped hat and two cats, a calico on the rim clawing at another cowering fearfully inside. The cat inside the hat had a coat of fur like the night sky—a blue so deep it was almost black, speckled with stellar silver.

  I stepped back and studied the rest of the painting. The hat was on a wooden table. Next to the hat, a candle in an ornate pewter candle holder lent light to the scene, casting misshapen shadows upon grey walls. There was something about the shadows…

  “Did you find Tights?”

  I turned to see Shanti, radiant in her long red dress but her face and voice grim as blood.

  “No.”

  “I’m worried. This whole thing was a bad idea.” Her eyes darted this way and that.

  “We’re doing this for Cantona,” I reminded her gently. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s talking to Hilda at the bar.” She dropped her voice to just an octave above helplessness. “She’s making him drink—alcohol.”

  “Well, the man deserves a good drink!”

  “He’s not supposed to,” Shanti said flatly and continued scanning the hall. “I’m going to keep looking for Ying Hao.”

  “Shanti, wait.”

  “What is it?”

  “What is wrong with the shadows here?” I asked her, gesturing at

  Seventeen Lives.

  She let out an expulsion of impatience. “It looks like four people crawling out of a fire.”

  Cantona had said one word, and it had been “pareidolia”. He was lying on his back, having drunk an entire bottle of water and practically inhaling the chocolate bar I had bought for him at a petrol station. He gazed up at the clouds, which remained stationary relative to the world that was zipping past us, as I drove the blue Toyota onto the Bukit Timah Expressway.

  “What’s that?” I had asked.

  “It’s when you see shapes and meanings that aren’t there. Sometimes you see people in shadows cast by fire. Sometimes you see faces in the clouds. Sometimes you hear messages when you play songs backwards. Sometimes you see animals in the stars.” He repeated, “Pareidolia.”

  “Where did you learn about pareidolia?” I asked him. I doubted Chang and Sons had extra-curricular programmes for their workers to study psychological phenomena.

  “When I was doing my first doctorate.”

  I nearly braked just so I could give this conversation more attention. “Okay, firstly, ‘first’? And secondly, ‘doctorate’? What is someone with more than one doctorate doing as a construction worker?”

  “I have three doctorates, but none of them were considered legitimate eno
ugh for me to get an academic job.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Easy PhD dot com,” he replied.

  I almost laughed, but felt it would come across as condescending. “What were your doctorates in?”

  “Art Theory, Philosophy and English.”

  “Ah, yes. Well. I see. Interesting. Mm.” I was saying words and making sounds just to not laugh. I would later find out that Cantona learnt a great deal from these Internet doctorates, from simply researching the theses he submitted to get his easy PhDs.

  We eventually took the exit to Yishun, and weaved through the streets and roads—empty, mostly, at this time of the night—towards its still-coruscating heart. About six blocks from that heart, there was the 17-storey, white brick government housing building I called home.

  I parked the car and escorted Cantona to the 13th floor and that brown teak collection of planks I called the door to my home. I opened it for him, but he stopped and looked positively sheepish.

  “You’re not a vampire, are you?” I asked him.

  “No.” Then, “Why?”

  “Vampires cannot enter a place unless they’ve been invited in.”

  He laughed nervously. “No—no, I am not a vampire.”

  “Then, please, come in,” I said to him. “And remind me to pass you Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

  He took off his shoes. “Thank you so much, sir.”

  I smiled at the younger man. “Please don’t call me sir.”

  We stepped inside. The house smelled of waffles, so starkly, deliciously crisp in the dead of night. I led Cantona towards the kitchen, where Shanti stood in one of my oversized T-shirts, working her magic on the waffle maker.

  Shanti nearly shrieked when she saw us. “You could have told me we were having company!”

  “Well, I didn’t expect you to be up at four-thirty in the morning making waffles!”