LONTAR issue #2 (5 page)

Marianne, Ravi, Fatima, and Bee Eng excelled at adding sensory embellishes and flourishes to the world of Edwin's recounting. Permit to waft into your ears, they would tell us, the delicate notes of the music they play in the mornings to gently wake Scholars from their slumber: perhaps the flute or the violin, perhaps the koto, the pipa, the sitar, or the lovely droning harmonium. Walk through the conservatory to the evergreen wing and feel the tang of fresh pine smack your nostrils with the force and sting of a saltwater wave. Amble to the library and slowly run your fingers up and down and back up the leathery spines of the library books; gently spread apart their covers and inhale that intoxicating "old book" smell. Musty vanilla and dying grass.

Koh Meng and Ismail, more cunning, sociable, and daring than the rest of us, spent much time—far too much time—actively gathering impressions and rumours from the dormitory staff, like magpies snatching up shiny bits of overheard chit-chat and the odd glimmering tidbit that one of their sources would accidentally let drop in the course of an ingeniously distracting conversation with the wily pair. They spent too much time on their "research," and eventually, they paid the price; but how we missed them afterward. What characters they were! What colour they provided during that stage in our lives! And what information they brought back to us, even if we suspected that three-quarters of it would come to signify nothing. (Though after we entered the Tower, we found it was
all
true! Every bit of it!) Koh Meng's voice—already so melodious—would drop lower, richer, each word the jewel-like peal of a miniature church bell, each sentence the rippling phrases and cadences from a human cathedral tower, ringing, shimmering, soaring through a Sunday morning sky. Ismail's voice provided a curious contrast—a sonorous oboe whose notes liquefied upon contact with the air into warm pools of molten gold.
 

Truly, the two were born storytellers. From their gleanings, the world within the Ivory Tower sprang to life. It had people—real-life people like us. They spent most of their time reading, analysing, and writing—the joyous lot of a Scholar's life. But in the time they had to spare, they wandered the conservatories and the arboretums; they formed community tennis and polo clubs; they held evening get-togethers, music recitals, and poetry readings. Inevitably, they grew old and lived out the remainder of their lives in the Tower as retirees; but not before they had enjoyed the life of the mind to the fullest.
 

The most spectacular of Koh Meng and Ismail's descriptions of Tower life were those of the elegant banquets thrown in honour of Scholars whose services had been engaged by a head of state or dignitary. The food served was determined by the country from which the client hailed. Once, it had been the President Pharaoh of Egypt, and as an apéritif, each guest was served, in a martini glass, a pearl dissolved in vinegar. When the King Minister of England had engaged the services of our top Asian and African politics Scholar, the Tower authorities had thrown a medieval-style banquet: roasted peacocks, richly spiced porpoise pudding, platters piled high with custards and cakes, goblets of mead and ale. The latter affair had been so tastefully done and well-researched that the King Minister had promptly decided to also schedule an impartation with the European Medieval and Renaissance Scholar who had served as the organiser.

 
Koh Meng and Ismail also provided anecdotal glimpses into life in the Tower. There was the time an enormous Burmese Python got loose from the menagerie, slithered into the rooms of one of the more senior Scholars, and coiled up for a nap in his bathtub. The high-pitched shriek Ismail would produce as the climax of the story always sent us into fits of uncontrollable laughter.
 

On a more mournful note, there was the Scholar who somehow got pregnant and tried to keep the baby, successfully concealing her swelling belly for a full six months before her colleagues found her out. How she'd gotten pregnant, nobody knew; there must have been a mishap or an oversight in the sterilisation procedure every Scholar underwent the week before Tweeding. In any case, it happened, and it wouldn't necessarily have posed a problem if she'd simply offered to let the government place the baby in a good home. A child with a Scholar's genes was far too valuable to society to abort. But the woman demanded that she be able to keep the child
and
continue living in the Tower, even when the father—another Scholar—counselled her to give it up. In the end, she insisted on turning in her tweeds.
 

It was Koh Meng who told us this story, and she told it so beautifully that by its end, there wasn't a dry eye among us.

"Imagine choosing to leave the Tower," Bee Eng murmured. "I couldn't bear to do it. Especially not for a baby I wasn't even supposed to have."

"Not 'supposed to', but she
did
nonetheless. A difficult decision, I'm sure," Edwin protested, always even-handed in his judgements.

"But all that hard work for nothing!" replied Bee Eng. "Imagine going through all of that—all of
this
—and finally making it. Then choosing to give it all up!"

Koh Meng gave her own commentary. "I don't see why she couldn't have just stayed and raised the baby in the Tower."

"Oh come on," Edwin scoffed. "That doesn't make any sense. It would have been disruptive. It would have distracted her and the whole community away from their duties. There's a reason why Scholars undergo sterilisation."

"But isn't it a natural right to have and raise one's own child?" Koh Meng asked, one eyebrow arched.

"Perhaps," Ravi chimed in, "But it's also a right that Scholars forgo voluntarily in exchange for the honour of being a Scholar, of becoming part of the Tower community. We all know what we'll be getting into, Exams willing. We don't have to get sterilised, but we don't have to become Scholars either."

Ismail looked at me. "You're awfully quiet, Grace. What do you think?"

I smiled. "You know me, I'm always quiet."

"It doesn't mean you don't have opinions. If you were her, which would you choose? The baby or the tweeds?"

"The tweeds, of course," I replied. There was no doubt about it. I'd already made my decision to forgo parenthood a long time ago for the sake of the Ivory Tower. But it turned out to be a decision that Koh Meng and Ismail never had to make. Ironically, the time they spent doing research in order to prepare for life in the Ivory Tower detracted from their ability to ever partake in it. They failed their Exams. Naturally, there were tears shed when they found out the news, but in a way, they seemed relieved as well. Perhaps they subconsciously wanted to fail—to get married and start a family together, as they did end up doing. There was something to be said for the fullness of life in the outside world. Four children and a grandchild before they departed from this world. The circumstances of their death were tragic. A lorry smashed into their car on the PIE. I read about it in the paper. They never even caught the driver.

Of course, you're probably not interested in all of this, are you, Grace? For all I know, you still remember all of what I have already recounted, and you're quite frustrated with me right now. You were preparing for an impartation, reading Hanker's
History of British Colonial Administration in the East Indies
, when you spotted the tiny scribble in one of the margins, pencilled in so faintly that it looked as if it had undergone a half-hearted erasure. It told you to look behind the books on the top shelf above your desk. Intrigued, you followed the directions, and found this notebook, a common blue-covered spiral-bound thing with "For Grace" scrawled across the front in black marker. You opened it and read the entreaty on the inside of the front cover: "Please believe me when I tell you that this book contains information of the utmost importance." And you kept going.

I apologise for the disordered and rambling quality of this account, but I don't think it can be helped. Believe it or not, I used to be much better at ordering my thoughts, at knowing which information to prioritise, when to provide more detail and when to get to the point. But since the perfection of the technology utilised in knowledge impartation, these skills have become obsolete for us Scholars—still necessary, no doubt, for passing Exams, but surprisingly unimportant after one actually starts living in the Tower. Yet, I think this writing style will work to our advantage. For what is memory if not a jumble of countless impressions, details, scenes, and words that glow with the persistence of a dying ember? What is history if not an overwhelming heap of minutiae and trivia from which we can shape coherence and significance? If the purpose of this notebook is to restore, at least in part, what of ours is being erased, then perhaps rambling will be just the thing.
 

 
If someone had told me a few years ago (or who knows how many years ago at the time you're reading this) that I would be writing an account to my future self for this purpose, I would never have believed it. Of all the things I feared about being a Scholar, this was never one of them.
 

My greatest worry when I received news that I had qualified for the pre-Scholar programme was that I would miss my—or should I say our—family.
 
One of my most vivid recollections, though I'm sure I once had many more, is of us all going out for breakfast the day I had to register at the dorms. We went to a hawker centre just five minutes' walk from our flat.

"Just simple family breakfast," Father told me. "You don't mind simple, hah?"

"Simple can, what." I answered before quickly correcting myself. "I mean: Simple is fine."

He smiled—a broad nicotine yellow grin laced with pride. "Clever girl."

We piled out of our flat into the narrow corridor: me, Father and three brothers in their usual t-shirts, board-shorts, and flip-flops, and Mother in a pretty green dress and sensible black dress-shoes. (She was to take me to the dorms after breakfast.) Our grandparents came along too, though they rarely left our flat. Gong Gong wore a white singlet and a pair of khaki shorts, all skin and bones except for his middle, the white cotton fabric stretched tight over his pot belly, as densely packed and spherical as a bowling ball. I see him in my mind's eye walking down the corridor, leaning slightly backward, hands planted firmly on the small of his back in a manner reminiscent of a pregnant woman. Po Po, guided by my mother's arm, bent in the opposite direction, her small frail body forced forward and earthward by an unrelenting and severe weeping willow of a spine—decades of untreated osteoporosis. Earlier that morning, over the hump of flesh that had formed atop the apex of her back, my mother had draped a dark brown floral blouse, and I had helped her into one of the seven identical black polyester trousers she owned.
 

I still remember the colour of the table we sat at: melamine orange. The hawker centre was already crowded, with long queues outside the more popular stalls. To make things easier, Father and the brothers were assigned the task of fetching food for everyone while Mother and I minded the old folk: chicken porridge for Gong Gong, who was on a diet, an assortment of
chai tow kway
,
chee cheong fun
, and wonton noodles for everyone else to share, and
kopi
and soya bean milk for all.

Mother pushed a five-dollar bill towards Terrence. "Get some fish slices from the fish soup stall for your sister."

"It's okay, Ma," I said. "Not eating fish for one day won't hurt."

She shook her head and waved the bill insistently at my brother again. "You think you got so clever how?"

Terrence gestured towards himself and his brothers and smiled. "Ma, every day you feed us fish too, but
si beh
hopeless."

Father's hand came down across the back of his head—not heavily as it could, just as a warning. "Don't talk back," he grunted. But I noticed he didn't insist that my brother buy the fish. It was too special an occasion for any earnest squabbling.
 

We continued eating. Light banter was made. ("Wah, become Scholar must study every day, I cannot
tahan
!" exclaimed my younger brother Clarence. "Yah lorh. We know you cannot
tahan.
That's why your marks so low," Mother retorted.) When we were done, I kissed everyone goodbye, and Mother and I boarded the bus to the dormitories.
 

"Grace, you make us very proud," she told me before I went through the security checkpoint. She was never a very expressive woman, and I now know how much effort it must have taken to come up with the words she did. "I know you will make us even more proud. Study hard. And don't forgot to eat fish. Good for brain."

"'Forget'," I corrected her softly. My eyes were welling up with tears at that point.

"Yah, yah. I mean 'forget'. Clever girl." She kissed me on the forehead and gently pushed me away.

I am ashamed to confess that it ended up being all too easy to grow apart from them, and most of my colleagues have admitted that they have experienced the same thing. It's certainly not intentional; it just happens. In the pre-Scholar programme, one grows accustomed to being away from home and one is too focused on the bright future ahead to permit any nostalgia for the past. And after Tweeding, we found that life in the Tower was everything we ever wished it to be and more: our new jobs ensured constant intellectual stimulation and we were permitted access to the most wonderful resources and facilities imaginable. The demands of the job were rigorous—it takes a Scholar about six months to a year to prepare for each impartation—but we chose our own hours and could work from our quarters, the common rooms, or anywhere else. How could we look back? Where else but the Tower could life like this have been possible? And where else could we have been so confident that our work was contributing significantly to society?