I AM AT work before anyone else not because I am conscientious or particularly like my job but simply because it is the best way I have of keeping Chuang from ruining my day. Chuang is the general manager of Benson’s, the oldest department store in Singapore. I run the furniture department. When I first started with Benson’s five years ago, I used to arrive around nine like everyone else. Invariably Chuang was already in the department rearranging the sets we had on display.

I would come in to find him chanting, “Latest statistics has proof that changes is what peoples most want to have.” Then, nodding sagely, he would add, “Variety is one of the spices of life, ah?”

When I remained silent, he would ask, “You getting my points, Hernando?”

If there is one thing in the world that really upsets me, it is being called Hernando. I can still remember the horror of discovering, aged five, that I was not just Hernie as I had supposed but Hernando Perera. “Why? why? why?” I wailed, punching my mother’s body and kicking at her shins. When she did explain, several years later, I was the worse for the knowledge. My parents, Fred and Clara, had fallen in love while dancing to a tango called “Hernando’s Hideaway” and held the tune responsible for all that transpired. Knowing this, I was unable to rid myself of the belief that I had been conceived to the rhythms of a tango and every time someone called me Hernando I was reminded of this.

I had for years agreed with all Chuang’s suggestions (hoping the sooner to be rid of him) until I discovered how simple it was to avoid his early morning attentions altogether. I simply arrived an hour before he did, sent for the workmen and began rearranging the furniture displays myself. By the time Chuang came in, the job was almost finished and it required a much braver man than our general manager to order the workmen to redo a job they had just completed.

I take no special pride in running Benson’s furniture department and would not have minded Chuang’s intrusions except that it took him several hours to decide on the arrangement he wanted, hours during which I was expected to hang around offering suggestions and murmuring approval. Not only did this waste my day but when he finally left I usually found myself no longer in the mood to do what I really liked doing, which was to sit at my desk and dream, occasionally jotting down an idea, an incident or a sequence of words I might find use for in one of my stories.

I don’t write many stories, though there are always several buzzing and bumping around in my head, rather like flies behind a window-pane. I usually write when the buzzing gets intolerable or when a plot refuses to unravel itself till I pin it to paper. Once a story has actually been written, I tend to lose interest in it. It becomes an object which I may like or dislike but which has an existence of its own. I suspect that women feel this way about their grown-up children. I could find out by asking my mother, I suppose, except that she probably regards me as a tango come to grief. Had I known how much my stories would come to direct the course of my life I would have regarded them more seriously. On that morning, secure in the cool basement of the furniture department, I could only see them as little indulgences which I used to fill an existence in which not too much happened.

I sent for the workmen as soon as I got in. It was early December and I had arranged, using our latest dining-room suite as the centre piece, a Christmas dinner tableau. I had situated this in the darkest corner of the furniture department so as to heighten the effect of cosiness produced by the artificial fire. Opposite the fire a false window looked on to a painted snow-covered landscape. To increase the effect of winteriness I had lowered the room temperature several degrees and placed rotating fans at strategic spots to provide chilly drafts. Thus I succeeded in justifying the thick carpets and heavy curtains with which I had decorated the room. Early in my working life I had discovered that salesmanship consisted not of providing people with what they needed, but with what was essential to their dreams. I was confident that our dining-room suite, complete with carpets, curtains and an artificial fireplace, would shortly be snapped up by people occupying oven-hot semis in the newer and, as yet, treeless housing estates on the island. The possibility of winter is essential to the happiness of people living in the tropics.

Chuang bounced into the room just as the men were finishing. “Very excellent,” he said, clapping his hands. “I think, Hernando…”

I gave him a look of such venom that he stopped talking and stepped backwards. It took him a moment to readjust his expression before he again bounced forward clapping his hands.

“Very excellent, Perera,” he began. “Chinese say pupil’s supremacy is master’s reward.” He smiled to himself and bowed slightly to acknowledge my gratitude. “The times I spend for you in your junior days, not wasted now, ah. So tiresome I became that sometimes I could not stand, but not wasted, see.”

He pranced around the room, nodding approval, rubbing his hands together, a full fixed smile on his face.

“Nothing to do to improve,” he said, adjusting the artificial fireplace slightly and drawing the curtains a fraction before he left.

With Chuang gone, I began to settle down. I placed on my desk several design magazines opened at random, a file containing invoices and a pocket calculator. On a pad beside me I jotted down words, phrases, and a complicated system of arrows and hieroglyphics by which I plotted the course of my stories. I was now ready to enjoy my dreams, some of which I might write down. Only very occasionally did Ahmad, our senior salesman, disturb me with a request to authorise payment by cheque or to deal with a difficult customer or a VIP.

I resented these intrusions, the more perhaps because I had been working for some time on a character in whose life there were none. I was trying to fashion a man so totally liberated that he had nothing to do with events outside his imagination. Without friends, job, family, needs, his mind was freed to roam where it pleased. My man would hear sounds but have no need to speak. The images that filtered through his eyes he would distil into their essences and with these he would build his visions. Gradually he would shed all the body’s demands—hunger, thirst, lust—until he was pure awareness, enjoying consciousness for itself. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. It would be lovely but was it possible? I began wondering. A Hindu mystic, ascetic, the world forsworn, taking to the Himalayas, would hardly have enough around him to make pure consciousness worthwhile. Or would he? Would the past he had forsaken help or hinder?

“Mr Perera,” said Ahmad, touching my shoulder, “telephone.”

“Ahmad,” I said, opening my eyes very slowly then looking sternly up at him, “you are the senior salesman here and quite qualified to deal with all telephonic inquiries.”

“But she asks for you by name, sir. Very urgent she says.”

“Who says, Ahmad?”

“The lady, tuan.” Then, getting the point of my question, he added, “She says her name is Su-May, Mr Perera.”

“All right, Ahmad,” I said. “You get about your work. I’ll take the call on my extension.”

I was surprised. Su-May rarely phoned. At the outset of our affair a year ago I had been at pains to explain that the last thing I was looking for was a torrid, nerve-racked romance replete with anxious phone calls and unnecessary trysts. She had laughed and agreed. She said she was nineteen and had got over that kind of thing years ago. Our initial meetings had indeed been marvellously light-hearted and inconsequential but somehow, and quite contrary to our intentions, tenderness and passion crept into bed beside us and sweetened our coupling.

I swallowed several times before picking up the receiver.

“Perera speaking,” I said in a deliberately well-modulated voice.

“Hern,” she said breathlessly, “can I see you this evening?”

She sounded so vulnerably close that it was with some difficulty that I managed to inject a note of irritation into my voice. “God, no, Su-May. My parents are coming over for dinner tonight and you know how upset Sylvie will be if I’m not home early.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice shrinking. “I’m sorry.” Su-May was very sensitive about any suggestion that our affair upset things between me and my wife, Sylvie.

“And you know how I hate you calling me at the office.” I could just make out the small but sharp intake of breath and, without my quite wishing it, let my voice soften. “Won’t tomorrow do, darling?”

“I suppose … but I was hoping…”

“Can’t we talk on the phone then, Su-May?”

“It’s not easy to explain things … on the phone.”

“Just give me a rough idea what it’s about.”

“So difficult like this, Hern,” she said. “No problem when you are with me and I can touch you. Then you understand but like this it’s no good. You know, Hern…”

Suddenly I was afraid, and to quell my fear I joked, “I know what this is all about, Su-May,” I said, “it’s another man, isn’t it?” I forced myself to laugh out loud. “You found yourself a nice young man. You want to chuck up old me and marry Mr Right? OK, you have my blessing but you must invite me to the wedding.” The silence at the other end of the phone was so complete that I thought we had been cut off. “Su-May, are you still there?”

“Yes, Hern.” And after a slight pause, “Yes, my love. Can you meet me tomorrow then, around six?”

“OK, where?”

“Up in Tampines. You know … where you used to pick me up when we first started.”

“Why there?” I asked, my voice rising. “For heaven’s sake, Su-May, don’t say you’ve taken up with that mumbo-jumbo bunch again?”

When we first met, Su-May had been deeply involved with an unorthodox Christian group styling themselves the Children of the Book. I had assumed, obviously wrongly, that our adulterous affair would make it impossible for her to continue with them.

“Hern,” she said, her voice very steady. “I never left the Children, you know. Stopped talking about them, that’s all.” In a voice now almost gay with relief, she said, “See you around six tomorrow.” And hung up.

Su-May’s call upset me more than I was prepared to admit. At the start of our affair I had seen her often enough in the company of her religious friends, young people in their teens or twenties who bubbled with a vivacity I could not remember. I resented this as much as I did their slim, clean bodies smelling like babies fresh from a bath. They laughed often and without cause, frequently tickling a member of the group slow to join the chorus of giggles. The leader was a lad named Peter Yu whom they jokingly referred to as “The Reverend”. Apart from his being a little more intense than his fellows, there was nothing that distinguished him from the other Children, and I had not discovered in what way he was looked upon as a leader. When Su-May was with the group there was an enormous gulf between us. I was excluded from the secret that was the basis of their mirth, and untouched by the wonder they found in each other and the world. I attributed this to the difference in our ages. Today, I told myself, ten years is a long time, the equivalent of a generation, a time-gap that can never quite be bridged. But my explanation never quite satisfied me. Moreover, there was another aspect of the whole business that bothered me. Born a Catholic, I had become a resolute atheist and yet could not, whenever I saw Su-May with her religious friends, help thinking of the lilies of the field who were more glorious than Solomon.

After Su-May’s phone call it was impossible to think of my story. The character I dreamed of had, freed from the directives of his body, possessed a sort of biological weightlessness that enabled him to do with his sensations as his imagination dictated. How could I write about such a person when I myself was burdened with jealousy and trapped in doubt? Everything around me brings me back to my situation. A group of schoolgirls gathers round Ahmad, who is slightly deaf. He obviously does not understand what they want. They burst into giggles. I think of the Children. They, too, laugh a lot when I’m around. Perhaps at me. But why? Have I some mannerism, some deformity, some obnoxious secretion of which I am unaware? I pick up a Christmas card with a picture of Jesus on it. It is a young Jesus, a sexual Jesus but a Jesus possessing a formidable gentleness. He reminds me very much of Peter Yu. Suddenly I know what the Children find so funny about me. Peter and Su-May are lovers. Have been for years. But Su-May’s affair with me was no infidelity to Peter. Oh, no! She had, in fact, begun it at his instigation as an act of charity towards an older man terrified of the passing of the years. I had completely missed the point of the exercise. No wonder the Children laughed…

By afternoon I had quietened sufficiently to begin thinking of the story again. Perhaps my own bondage told me that my man had to be totally aloof if he was to allow his imagination to respond freely to the promptings of his senses. But how could such a situation come about? Taste, touch, sight, smell competed with one another to dominate consciousness. Linked to these were the body’s responses, which were bound to interrupt the process of fantasy. Awareness without strings was only possible in science fiction, in disembodied brains floating in glass jars. But that was not the kind of story I was trying to write. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a situation I had read or heard about which would solve my problem. What it was I could not for the life of me remember. That evening as I made my way circuitously back home, ambling along side roads flanked by the old houses which I love, I cursed Su-May, Peter Yu, the Children of the Book and everything that had interfered with my exploring a theme that was beginning to interest me.

As I entered my flat, the smell of cooking hit me. My mother was making a prawn sambal. The prawns fried in onions, tamarind and red chillies acquired a burning, all-pervading flavour that simultaneously attacked nose and eyes. The pungency of the confection, however, was only an alibi for my tears. The smell of prawn sambal cooking took me far back into my childhood, to the days when I used to hang about my mother’s skirts while she cooked. Now as I stood outside my own kitchen, sniffing the prawns beginning to brown, I wondered why smells often took me to the edge of tears and why they led so often to the days I had spent alone with my mother, days even before Sylvie had begun to be a part of our family.

Abandoned in infancy by her Chinese mother, Sylvie had been left to the mercies of her Indian father, who comforted himself for his wife’s desertion with whisky and a succession of mistresses Sylvie referred to as aunts. A year younger than me and living two doors from us, she quite naturally became the daughter my mother wanted but never had. Very early on, the two women decided that Sylvie and I should marry, and I was given neither choice in the matter nor a chance to protest. In adolescence the rowdy games of childhood gave way to erotic ones and, when we finally fell into bed together, it was more an acknowledgement of our changed needs than a consummation of fierce passion. Now in our thirties, we acted like a couple who had a lifelong marriage behind them and, in a manner of speaking, we had. Not that I have any cause to complain. Sylvie, a lovely hybrid, with a laugh that bubbled from deep inside her, was the most companionable of bedfellows and knew me well enough to treat everything about me with a matter-of-factness that only genuine intimacy permits. And, what was more, she talked in mismatched clichés which gave her conversation a jokiness and ambiguity I found intriguing.

As soon as I entered the kitchen, she stopped chattering with my mother and kissed me, putting her right hand against my chest as she always did. (A hundred years ago I had asked her if she did that to stop me getting too close. “It’s the currents,” she had said. “I make another contact so they can go round and round between us and never have to stop for breath.”)

I embraced my mother and asked, “Pa not here yet?” I missed the smell of cigarette smoke that always accompanied my father and was usually strong enough to overcome even cooking smells.

“Ssh!” said Sylvie, touching my lips.

“He’s resting,” whispered my mother. “Pa’s not been too well lately.”

“Flu?”

She shook her head, her face suddenly bleak. “Only the good Lord knows what it is, Hern.”

“Tell him, Ma,” said Sylvie.

“You know the smoker’s cough Pa’s had for years?” said my mother, her manner as subdued as her voice. “Well, it’s been, getting worse and recently he’s been coughing up…” her voice became hardly audible and she paused for a moment before she said, “blood.”

“Good God!” I said, forgetting to keep my voice down. “What does the doctor say? What about having X-rays and things done?”

“The doctor says it could be quite serious.” Her voice was low and accusing. “He says there are suspicious markings on the X-rays.” She nodded slowly several times.

“For heaven’s sake, Ma, what does all this mean?”

“More tests and things,” she said flatly.

“You know what doctors are, Hern,” said Sylvie softly. “They punch a hole in your boat and watch you sinking as your confidence runs out.”

“With no straw to clutch on to,” I said, laughingly, elaborating on her already incomprehensible metaphor.

“Clever boy,” said Sylvie, patting my arm.

“He goes into hospital next week,” said my mother, dragging us away from our complex word game. “For more tests.”

“Where’s he now?” I asked.

“Resting,” said my mother.

‘In my work room?” I asked, my voice rising.

“No, dear,” said Sylvie soothingly. “In our bedroom.” She touched my cheek. “You get on with your typing if you must, but shut the door so you don’t wake Pa.”

Sylvie always referred to my writing as my typing. In part this was disparaging, an expression of her resentment at being excluded from an act in which I so often engaged. Mainly, however, it was proof of her matter-of-factness. Whether or not I was a writer was arguable. A few of my stories had attracted comment but I was, in no sense, established or well known. By talking of typing rather than writing, she was describing an action, not a purpose and was, in her own way, protecting me from my expectations. Comforted by these thoughts, I embraced Sylvie and my mother together.

“I’ll be very quiet,” I said. “Call me, but only when dinner’s on the table.”

She did—twice. I was by then so involved in the story that she had to knock on my door and shout, “The food’s icing over,” before I could tear myself away.

My father, usually garrulous the way retired school-teachers often are, was silent, chewing his food with a thoroughness that betrayed his lack of enjoyment of it.

“Feeling better for your rest, Dad?” I tried.

“A trifle,” he said. “Just a trifle.”

“Do you have pain with the cough?”

“Nothing agonizing,” he said, smiling to convince me. “Just creaky aches and pains and a feeling of intense tiredness.” He smiled again. “So much like sadness.”

“They’ll have you right as rain soon enough, my sweetheart,” said my mother, uttering one of her gutsy little laughs.

“Quite right you are, doll,” he said. “As always,” he added gruffly. He had on his face a look meant to indicate that, whatever his fate, she could be sure he would see it through with courage.

My parents Fred and Clara Perera had met, fallen in love, lived and would die in the spell of the films and music of the 1950s. Even as they talked, I could see my mother rehearse the moment when she finds out that Father’s disease is incurable. “How long has he, Doc?” she would ask. The doctor, grey-haired, his face lined with the suffering-he-has-had-to-share but nevertheless retaining its kindliness, would say with a wisdom that transcends mere personal experience, “It is not the number of days we have left but the use we make of them that matters.” She knew she would be smiling and brave to the end so that Father would never know that she knew. And my father would, right up to the bitter end, remain his gruff, kindly self, sneaking grimaces of pain but only when he thought Mother wasn’t looking, sparing her the agony of knowing. Yet deep down each one knew the other knew and their pretence was but another aspect of their love. Then suddenly would come the news: there had been a terrible mistake, a mix-up of X-rays. The nightmare is over and staring into each other’s eyes they find the happiness-ever-after as the camera zooms out, leaving two figures alone but blissful in a landscape of unending green.

“Right as rain they’ll have you,” said my mother, reaching out for Father’s hand. “Just you wait and see.”

My parents left after dinner and I returned to my writing. I was more than halfway through and the story was by now telling itself, incidents racing ahead of the words I had for them. At each pause in my typing, Sylvie called to ask if I had finished. I answered with a fresh clatter of activity on the machine. Her intrusions, though mildly disturbing, moved me to write faster. After a while she stopped calling out.

The aroma of my mother’s cooking had started me off on the tale of a man who had lost all his senses except his sense of smell. The sensations that came to him through his nose made no demands on him. Instead, each carried with it a fragment of his past which, undistracted, he relived in its original intensity. The man I wrote about was very old and I called my story “Roses in December.” By the time I finished, the traffic and other city noises had died away. It was early for the birdsong that, swelling as it did from the concrete heart of Singapore, awoke me every morning but the breeze that preceded daybreak was beginning. This came from the sea as a steady cool breath on which were superimposed shorter, sharper bursts. A little like applause, I thought, clipping together the typewritten pages.