Innocence is so precious. We don't remember the end of it for in recognising the end, it would have had slipped away long before.
We protect the innocence of children for as long as we can. We protect our own inner innocence as far as our minds allow us to. We believe that the world is good, people care for one another, and that love exists.
We refuse to be cynical and hold out bravely, yet somehow, we falter and reality takes over so insiduously that we have not noticed it creeping up our spines, wrapping its steely embrace about our dreams.
We long for the times when life was simple, and all you wanted was to be happy and for the whole world to be happy as well. We wished and prayed for peace and dreamt of a united untied world with no pain, no hurt, no murders.
And.
We believed in love. In marriage. In purity. In honesty.
For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you and you toil to yank its chain. I remember the grey roads that pave the way of learning in the early chirping bird moments. The first proposal I ever got came from the one who drove the white van and owns a karaoke bar on the second level near Jalan Besar.
Jalan Besar, a place which holds too many memories, the first being the thieves market my father had brought me to. Sungei road market, once the haven of thieves, have become a sanctuary for old shoes, clothes, radios, mobile phones, mirror balls and even the odd typewriter or two. If you search hard enough, you will find old tubes for your amplifier, hex keys long seperated from their locks and even semi precious stones like turquoise and the like. Eric's bar was just across the market of sorts, past desker road, which holds some tainted histories, above a coffee shop selling the best fishball noodles next to the smell of car exhuast gases. If only I ate at coffeeshops then! What a feast it would have been.
Since young, I had avoided coffee shops and hawker centers. Not because of the filthy tables or cracked plastic seats, not even because of the curls of endless smoke that filled the air. It was because of a reason more basic than all of these - I was unable to order what I am hoping to eat. Being a really shy child who never had to order at the whims and fancies of canteen aunties or uncles, you can hardly blame this strange teenager with her slew of pet peeves and imperfections. Yes. I was terrified of ordering at one of these places with no menus that come with proper descriptions of the meal you would get, beyond the normal name and price. Often I would point vaguely and say " No Chilli,I am sitting there", and hope that the food that appears would taste as good as its picture. More often than not, I would get something I did not order.
No matter. Eric popped the question when I was just seventeen, and he was just twenty-one and feeling like he had arrived, for he had achieved his dream of business ownership. That freaked me out, and it marked the end of the long conversations we used to have when he picked me up in his big white van and sent me to my junior college in the west, at Dover Road.
I remember the dark grey mornings that will lighten with the short journey, the one time he tried to grab my hand in an attempt to show his sincerity, and his radio blasting chinese music so that we didn't have to make that much conversation, for he and I did not have a common language, and he struggled to impress upon me his intelligence in English.
I am a snob. There it is, an intellectual snob of sorts. Since I was eight, my destiny for something greater and more improbable was apparent. When told to throw away my doll that was with me since I was four, I had defied my mother and hid my lovely doll above my tallest cupboard, just below the ceiling where there is a hidey hole I could crawl into if I climbed up the shelves. After a year of visiting my doll up high, I felt confident enough to take her down and reinstate her position as mistress of my pillow. Alas, that was her undoing, for my mother promptly spied her sitting on my bed that night, and firmly told me to throw her into the dustbin under her murdering eyes.
I cried for days till I decided to join my doll in heaven - she was a good doll, and must be in heaven. I remember that fateful afternoon where I cried and told God I was meeting him and Dolly, said my final goodbyes to the world I was leaving behind, and jumped out of my fourth storey bedroom window.
To be continued...
Falling, I remember telling God that if I died, put me in heaven with my doll. But before I could finish the sentance in my head, I had landed.
Totally injury free.
I looked up at the sky and saw a rainbow, real or imagined, and felt comforted that God was giving me the promise of a new life. I was, from that moment, determined to live, and live gloriously! I was destined for something bigger, better and more amazing!
Walking back up to my apartment in Clementi Ave 6, I knocked on the door and waited for my granny.
She opened the door from behind the chain and exclaimed, " How did you get out? " I didn't want to scare her, so I said, " I sneaked out while you were not looking. " That was the end of that episode and no one was any wiser.
It was the first of many life changing moments of illumination that I would receive.
Also the end of my innocence, of my carefree days.
From that day forth, I sought knowledge for it was my solace. I sought to be able to block all that does not please me and put it into one of the unused compartments in my mind. Compartmentalizing meant I could detach myself anytime I wanted, walk away seemingly unscathed and move on with the rest of the wonderful life ahead. From that day forth, I read all I could about eck Vidya, ancient sciences, the pyramids, the mysteries of the world unexplained and ESP. As a child, I would practice using my mind to move objects, failing which I would imagine a wind that would stir to move the leaf I focused on.
Soon, I was sure that the wind would listen to my inner thoughts and weather could be controlled by that same gesture. It was then that I met Aurora at a church camp, and she told me that she was of royal parentage, a reincarnation of an Egyptian Princess of the sun, strangled when she was only thirteen. She believed in being able to tell the future, so there we were, two little nine year olds who believed in much older magic, racing to church each Sunday to converse and exchange techniques we had developed in tandem. How I loved those Sunday afternoons after Sunday School by the swing.
Aurora was certainly special, she predicted that I would make the masses happy, and somehow, destiny did push me along that path.
Sitting at the swing, one Sunday, with the sun streaming through the leaves of the angsana tree, we decided to do an experiment with our powers. Being hot and humid that day, totally windless, I decided to command the wind to move a sway the leaves of the tree. She decided to bring on the rain with incantations of a strange garbled language after I move the leaves.
" Leaves are moving softly, the wind is gentle. Now wind, blow hard, sway the branches, move the leaves. " The wind came, bidden by my words, and it was then that I felt true power. Giving thanks to God, I told Aurora that it was her turn to bring on the rain.
She started her incantations, but as soon as she was chanting away, her voice took on a strange tone and she was louder and louder till she sounded like a screaming banshee. This brought the deacon running and he pinned her to the ground where she started, to my horror, foaming at her mouth, snarling and throwing the deacon off.
How did she get so strong? The deacon started praying and cast the demon off in the name of God. It seemed to work, before another demon seemed to have taken hold of poor Aurora! She started speaking in tongues in a dark male voice and she stared at me, almost feral.
Once again, the deacon tried to cast the demon out, but this time, nothing happened. Aurora ran away from the Swing, almost getting to the gates of the church when a few church members held her down and they all prayed over her together.
I was astounded, but convinced that dabbling in magic that we knew nothing about was extremely dangerous and I told myself never to invoke or incant.
Needless to say, I never saw Aurora again, the reincarnated princess.
But I knew the wind would fly with me, as long as I believed...
