‘Ah, these women, always going shopping to Hongkong … they can’t resist it … Hongkong is so cheap, and there’s everything there.’
He turned away. Luke saw his back, more weary than his face. The car drove up, the chauffeur opened the door. Then Luke was there too, helping the old man in, his hand gentle with unconcluded motion of tenderness. Quo Boon sat back and closed his eyes as the car drove away, leaving Luke with the remote pang of all partings lingering in his breast.
* * *
9 p.m. to midnight. Zodiacal Sign: Fish and the Water.
Mystic Significance: Root and Rebirth.
Possession is not achieved in the first embrace. It is continual surrender to see, to hear, to know. Seeker groping to a renewal fresh as Creation’s first instant, return to the hour when Light was new on grass and leaf, water skin and sky. The world is yours to own.
Heat-bloated, the fragments of a heat-dazed day lie untouched till sundown, when earth no longer cowers beneath the demon eye of heat beating its glare in sap and blood. The world explodes its heart of colour before night’s dark peace.
Amber, jade, and vermilion, saffron melting into rose, apple-green, amethyst, and lilac, ripple round the astonished orange globe revolving above indigo coconut palms and hills; boats are ebony arcs etched on water glowing opal; fishermen deep to hips in luminous water hold black nets like ploughs, driving the solid light of the water before them; sibilant swifts whisk orderly evolutions above the domineering rose-grey government buildings; the green China-tile roofs of the Sultan’s palace are a technicolour castle on a hill. Cosy Asian family cars wheel along the lavender road, crammed with mothers, multiple babies, assorted children, a score of pointing hands, a parcel of leaning bodies, a bevy of bobbing heads, an exultation of laughing mouths, oscillating in all directions and in happy swallow twitter giving Father enthusiastic suggestions above the head of his instructor, while behind the vehicle rattles the big L plate of the Learner. This is sundown.
Sundown is soft reconciliation, content, sky and earth like spent foes looking upon each other with lovely peace. It is the time of makan angin, eating the wind; the promenade, the swim, the drive, the amble; the game of tennis at the club; sitting on doorsteps in smile and talk and silence piecing friendship; official time for the first stengah; the time of Malay Chinese Tamil young boys plunging similarly gleaming bodies naked along the goldlit shore; a time for cobras to wake, dangle meek heads above their baskets, flick slivered tongues as the flute gathers volume and a few white-shirted good-tempered spectators; a time of smart rap and chop of knives at ambulant food stalls waking to swift lively music of supper; the blue smoke of charcoal grids, where satay sellers spit meat chunks on bamboo sticks for roasting; on the green lawns called padang, the school-children crowding to play; time for the rebirth of the watcher, dream-spinning day’s fragments into woven coherence; reflecting in coolness on the time of the sun; sniffing the chilli-pepper smell of a tree, the undertow of sour-sweet sewers, the frangipani, feeling the bird-sifted breeze swell the chequered sails of the russet junks, the swelling canvas of Malay racing boats, finger the thatched roofs of the boats of the aborigines, who row with crossed paddles their shallops up-current to sell deep-sea crabs at the market; watching the Tamil grass-cutters swing their scythes, aureate with sundown gold; discovering the loveliness of Ah Mei’s face, gold pink in the garden near the hibiscus blooming red stars over its protuberant greenness, Ah Mei fumbling an orange peacock flower, looking at the orange sun whirling above the palms and laughing because she is free.