I SEE THINGS different from other people. The sky talks to me, sends messages in rainstorms and lightning. The Singapore night, warm and damp like a dog’s tongue, licks my face and tickles the side of my ear. People gushing out of MRT stations dance to secret harmonies and fingers working a keyboard have a choreography only I am aware of. Unconnected images string themselves into pictures and events, willy-nilly, lie one against the other till sequence is unavoidable. This is how the world has always been to me; this is how, I hope, it will always be. I keep my thoughts to myself, however. If I didn’t, people would think me mad.

Not Vanita though. She listens, tries not to smile, though I sometimes sound outrageous even to myself. This is one of the many things I love about Vanita. One of the many lovely, unbelievable, heart-stopping things.

I look to the east over the tops of the ships and beyond the shadows of the islands. Look right to the edge of the world, where a gigantic red ball is emerging from the sea. A thought strikes me. An odd thought, something which normally I would have kept to myself. But I loved the woman beside me and trusted her not to laugh, or at least not to laugh too much, at the goings-on in my head. So I spoke up. “I think that moonrise looks so much like sunset that it is impossible to tell one from the other.”

Vanita stopped what she was doing. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Moons rise in the east, which is there.” She pointed to the open sea. “Suns set in the west.” She held my face and turned my head sharply round till it faced the city “… which is there.” Vanita has a lovely voice, lilting with highs and lows jumbled, like a boy’s at puberty. She makes music without meaning to. I waited for its spell to subside before turning to stare at the full moon again.

For some reason it made me uneasy. Not full moons generally. This full moon. It stained the clouds which had hung about all evening a deep purplish-blue. A lovely colour, in most circumstances. Round their edges, however, were mean yellow tinges which made them look like bruises growing old. I was disturbed by this moonrise, wondered what it was trying to say to me.

I turned away from it, back to Vanita. “I have been looking at it for a long time and I can’t see how I can tell without turning my head whether it is moonrise or sunset.”

“My sweet, sweet boy, you are lovely to love but that doesn’t stop you being a dumbo. You can’t tell anything from anything unless you look around you.”

“What if you don’t want to? What if you can’t…?”

“Never mind,” she said, fishing out a piece of fried chicken and popping it into my mouth. She put another into my hand for good measure and went on with what she was doing.

Vanita treats me like a child. Perhaps, she has a right to, for she is my first girl.

When I met her a year ago, I was twenty-seven and a virgin. Vanita was surprised, though she need not have been. I am not hungry for experience, have never gone out to “grab” life in the way that is recommended these days. I tend to let things happen to me, allow myself to be buffeted this way and that by events. I must confess that I really don’t pay too much attention to what goes on around me because I am confident that, when things are right and without my searching for it, a pattern will emerge and I will recognise it; and in it the time, the place, the person. And, when this happens, I would know what to do.

As soon as I set eyes on Vanita, I knew that the person I had been waiting for had arrived. I slipped into the sequence of events that followed our meeting easily; as easily as I, though totally inexperienced, slipped into her body.

I was, nevertheless, glad that she had some expertise in these matters and, to put things in her own words, “knew what went where and how things worked”. I was grateful that she was knowledgeable but was never moved to find out how she had come by her knowledge or how many lovers she had had before me though she had said often enough that she would be only too happy to tell me. Vanita is not coy about such things. I discovered this very early on.

I am tall, unmuscular, and pale skinned. I have always been worried about looking effeminate. After our first night together, Vanita told me that I had nothing to be ashamed of. She assured me that I was, in the area that really mattered, better endowed than any of the men she had been with. This may have been why she handled my body with the kind of care that collectors reserve for their prize pieces; how she got it to do things I didn’t think it capable of. I was flattered; pleasured beyond my wildest dreams. Now, as I watched her unpack the food she had cooked, I felt the rush of desire and was impatient to begin making love.

I tore my eyes away from her and looked around the park.

Singapore is so small that it is easy to visualise it as a diamond-shaped island lying sideways at the tip of the Malay peninsula. East Coast Park runs along its south-eastern edge where the waters of the Indian Ocean merge with those of the China Sea.

We had been coming to the same spot in the park for nearly a year. Vanita had chosen it. It was some distance from the beach and away from the teenagers and their noisy Sony compos, almost far enough for the smell of barbecue sauce not to reach us. From where we were, I could see the ships riding at anchor, smell the turning of the tides and, when I listened really carefully, hear voices speaking in strange tongues.

Our tiny island is the busiest port in the world and the destination, at some time, of every craft that sails the seas. And ships bring with them the sounds of faraway places, hints of exquisite pleasures, suggestions that impossible dreams can somewhere be realised. From where we sat, I felt that I could reach out and touch the world, feel it breathe, take its pulse. It was the perfect spot for making love to the woman for whom I had waited so long.

I stretched out on the grass and looked at the rising moon. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Vanita spreading the heavy waterproof sheet on which we would spend the night. At one end of this she placed the sleeping-bag which we would pull over our naked bodies when it got cold, as it sometimes did just before dawn. Then she began unpacking the food she had cooked.

I knew what this would be and knowing made my appetite as sharp as my desire. Besides the spicy fried chicken there would be chapatis wrapped round mince and peas, fish grilled in banana leaves, dry curried vegetables and an assortment of pickles. For dessert we always had semolina cooked in milk that had been sweetened with rock-sugar and spiced with cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. To this Vanita always added a generous helping of Benedictine, a liqueur which Singaporeans believe increases desire and improves sexual performance. I do not know what it did for my lovemaking but it certainly made me sleep soundly once this was done. And the depth of my slumber contributed to the horror I was soon to know.

Innocent of what was to come, we ate, fed each other and felt one with the sea and the dancing lights of the ships.

The food tasted better than ever. Vanita is a marvellous cook and I was especially happy that evening. I knew, from the moment I met her, that I wanted this woman for my wife but I waited several months before asking her to marry me. I was surprised when she turned me down.

“We should spend more time together and really get to know each other before we decide on marriage.” Seeing the look that crossed my face she winked and added, “Ask me again next month and I’ll see how I feel about it.”

I did on the same day the following month and every month after. Four days ago she agreed to marry me. I now looked upon myself as her husband and this our first night together as man and wife. I think Vanita saw it that way too. I smelled her excitement as we neared the end of our meal and my need for her became unbearable.

My mother’s Chinese genes must have got the upper hand when I was fashioned for I am odourless and almost devoid of body hair.

Vanita, in contrast, is hairy and exudes a symphony of aromas in the course of making love. I think of us as Yin and Yang, two fish-like creatures coming together to create, against all odds, the perfect circle. I turn to my love, moved not only by lust but by a yearning to complete the design that is a part of the nature of things.

We were both impatient and came quickly, Vanita making the strange choking noises that signalled her climaxes. I recalled how alarmed I had been the first time I heard them. I thought she was having an epileptic fit or a heart seizure. I feared she might die and wondered what I would do if she did. Now I waited for them because they told me we were at the rainbow’s end, that I was free to reach for my own pot of gold.

Sometimes she made orgasmic noises when asleep, groping for me, grinding herself against my body when she found it. If we woke sufficiently I saw to it that what had begun as a dream climaxed in reality. Usually, however, our eating and drinking and lovemaking saw to it that once asleep we remained so till the dawn.

As soon as we finished, Vanita began working on me again. I was surprised. We usually lay around a bit, enjoying the ebbing of our pleasure, remembering the high points of its tide. Tonight, Vanita wanted things differently. I should even then have noticed the slight disturbance in the pattern, the tiny shudder of the plate-glass window before it is shattered by the earthquake. But I was too full of Vanita. Too willing to do her bidding, too happy to go with her yet again over the edge of the world.

I was quickly ready. She turned me on my back, impaled herself and rode me. Vanita liked it this way. I did too, knowing how happy she was to be able to control the rhythms of her pleasure. There was another reason why I liked Vanita on top.

I knew the Egyptian creation legend, had read of Nut and Geb and Shu. Nut, the goddess of the sky, was so in love with her twin, Geb, the god of earth, that she mounted him, impaled herself deeply and refused to be separated from him. This terribly disturbed their father, Shu, the god of wind. So terribly disturbed was Shu, that he drew an enormous breath with which he forced the lovers apart. Thus was created light and space. When night fell, however, Nut would creep up and embrace her lover, protecting him with her body till the break of dawn.

The same instinct that caused me to see us Yin and Yang made me think of us as Geb and Nut. The notion that unions such as ours had existed from the beginning of time seemed to guarantee that Vanita and I would survive for a long while if not nearly for ever. Beliefs based on arrogance are always wrong and mine proved to be so more quickly than most.

Making love a second time was a long luxurious business and we fell asleep as soon as we were done, Vanita’s body lying heavily and protectively on mine. I thought I heard her choke and cry out in the middle of the night, half woke to see if she needed me, then, feeling her quiet in my arms, decided that we would wait till dawn before making love again. How was I to know that we had made love for the last time?

I woke with a start.

I realised how one could tell moonrise from sunset. It was a matter of direction. Not direction in the sense of orientation, the way one faced, but direction in the way satellite and star moved: the moon up and out of the sea, the sun down and into it. There was no need to look around. No need to compare. All one had to do was wait. Time was more important to identity than space. I had the answer to my question.

Problems prevent you sleeping; solutions don’t shake you awake. Vanita is a big girl and she lay heavily across me. My left arm was numb and my left leg which was pinned down at an awkward angle ached unbearably.

I tried to shift her. As I did, I became aware of something warm and sticky seeping from her body. It smelled like the goo one encounters in a meat market, and a lot of blood seemed to be pouring out of her. I had to get her to a doctor before she bled to death.

I shook her shoulder, at first gently but with increasing violence. Her blood-covered breasts made squelching noises against my chest and her head flopped against my shoulder. Her mouth hung open and from it a warm fluid trickled on to my body. I thought it too was blood. Then I smelled cinnamon and clove; Benedictine under the heavy flavour of curry. Vanita was bringing up the meal we had shared.

I prised myself from under her. The sleeping-bag which should have been covering us lay tangled at our feet. The moon sheltered behind a cloud and a mist obscured the lights of the ships. It was pitch dark. The teenagers were asleep, their Sony compos silent. Somewhere, far away, I could hear the soft scratching of the sea as the tide changed.

I am not strong and it was with difficulty that I turned Vanita on to her back. I shouted into her ear. She did not stir. I slapped her face. Her head lolled from side to side. Her skin felt cool and tacky the way plasticine does.

I think I realised that my darling was dead but I continued to shake her. When I saw that this was having no effect, I put my ear against her heart. The silence within was complete. Blood trickled on to my cheek and a little got into my mouth. I rubbed my face against her breasts and put both my arms around her. Then I felt it: a tiny mouth just below her left shoulder blade from which a little blood still drooled.

I do not know how long I held my love for I was unaware of anything but a sense of loss. When I finally managed to let go of her, she was beginning to stiffen and there were grey streaks across the horizon.

I pulled on my T-shirt and jeans. I did not have on underwear. Vanita preferred that I wore none when I was with her. I walked a few steps in the direction of the beach then returned to rummage among our clothes for the ten-cent coins I needed for public phones. The first phone I came to accepted only cards. The second had been vandalised. Finally I found one that worked. Only then did I remember that for emergency calls neither card nor coin was necessary. I reached the main police exchange which transferred my call to the duty sergeant of a nearby police station. I told him that my girlfriend had been stabbed.

“Is the injured party male or female?”

“Not injured, dead. And it’s a girl that has been killed.”

“Are you sure?”

Who could be more female than Vanita, I thought, a lump of pain rising in my throat. I forced myself to say, “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Where is the location of the corpse?”

I shuddered. Only moments ago she was bouncing on me, talking of marriage, of children, thinking she would live for ever. Now a stranger called her a corpse. The pain in my throat became unbearable. I found it impossible to breathe.

“Hello, sir. Hello, sir. You must stay on line, sir. Mustn’t hang up till you have given police all the info.”

“Yes, yes,” I managed to say. “We are near the three-kilometre stone in East Coast Park.”

“Near the jogging track, sir?”

“Quite near the track and not far from the beach.”

“Okay, sir. You stay near corpse. We send patrol-car round immediate. And don’t touch anything, sir.”

“I won’t,” I assured him.

My arms and face were covered with blood and my T-shirt was stiff with it. The clots on my face began to itch as they dried. I licked the corner of my mouth. The crust was salty-sweet. It was the last thing of my darling’s that I would taste.

By the time I got back to Vanita the world was turning grey. Away to the west I heard the city sigh and stretch itself as the first wheels began to roll. Soon pink cracks would appear in the east and I would begin the first day of my life without the woman for whom I had waited so long.

I knelt beside her and put my hand on her breast. The skin was cold and beginning to tighten in death. It already seemed improbable that she had ever been alive. I wanted to kiss her one last time. I was looking into her face wondering if I dared to, when the two uniformed policemen arrived.

As soon as I looked into their faces, I knew that something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Nor could I understand why the cops looked at me in the way they did; staring straight ahead without speaking, hands just touching their revolvers. I looked at Vanita’s body and then up at the policeman.

I wanted to burst into tears then, tell them of the cataclysm that had destroyed my world, shaken apart the pieces I had so painstakingly put together. If they waited, things would again fall into place and I would talk to them, explain things. Right now I couldn’t find the will to do so.

I looked around me hoping that even this grey world, this mindless dawning would say something to me. When it didn’t, I told myself that I would begin to see if I were patient, if I could force myself to wait.

The cops, however, weren’t waiting. They moved forward and took up positions, one in front and one behind me. They were both Chinese though different in appearance.

The one standing behind me was fair and chubby. The man facing me was long and lean. He was darker than I and, surprisingly for a Chinese, sported a thick moustache. He was clearly in charge and on his shoulder I noticed three metal chevrons.

The moustachioed sergeant was the first to speak. “Do you have the weapon with you?”

I was bewildered by the question; more by the way he asked it: standing stiffly in front of me, not a muscle moving, eyes staring into the distance. I had read somewhere that our police force were trying out a new interrogation technique where they asked questions which had no direct relation to the crime but which told them something of the psychology of the persons affected by it. This, I thought, was what they were doing. I had become so removed from what was going on that it took me a while to realise that the sergeant stared straight ahead to avoid looking at Vanita’s naked body beside which I was still kneeling.

“No,” I replied. “I haven’t looked for a weapon. I merely called the police.” I wanted to add that finding murder weapons was police business but didn’t. The sergeant’s manner did not encourage chat.

He took a step closer to me and I heard the man behind me do the same. The sergeant drew his right leg back a little and even in my confused state I realised that he was getting ready to kick me in the face should this become necessary. There was a change in his voice and he snapped, “IC? Have you got your identity card on you?”

Before I started going with Vanita, I rarely carried my IC with me though we are required by law to do so. Vanita insisted that I should. She said that the police were peeping Toms who spied on lovers then justified their voyeurism by arresting those who did not have their ICs on them. I didn’t ask her how she got to know all this but saw to it that I had my IC with me whenever we were together.

“In the back pocket of my jeans.” I began to rise so I could fish out the laminated plastic card.

“Don’t move,” the man behind me commanded. I knew that his revolver was out of its holster. “Just take it out with your left hand then pass to Sergeant Wong.”

The sergeant studied my IC for a bit then handed it over to his partner. I sensed that they disbelieved the document in their hands was genuine and I understood why.

My mental processes are peculiar and in times of crisis tend to drift from the immediate. Instead of dwelling on the immediate situation, I found myself thinking about how it came about that I got my name and various other features of my life.

I am called How Kum Menon. My name, as with so many things in my life, was the result of a string of mishaps.

My father, Ma tells me, was a man called O.K. Menon. He was a Malayalee from the west coast of India. Ma spoke of him infrequently and always referred to him as that “Malayalee scoundrel”. I think with good cause.

Menon had seduced her when she was fifteen and abandoned her as soon as she got pregnant. We have not heard of him since, though I am convinced that it is in the nature of things that some day we will meet. My maternal grandparents, traditional Hokkien folk, aghast at having an unmarried pregnant daughter on their hands, demanded that Ma leave home rather than bring shame into it.

Abandoned by parents and lover, Lim Li Lian, as Ma was and still is, was given sanctuary by a kindly creature called Oscar Wellington Wu, who was then thirty-two and more than twice her age. To him Ma became cook and housekeeper among other things, though she never admits to being anything other than the first two and to this day tends to call Oscar “Mr Wu” in the company of strangers. He has always been “Uncle Oscar” to me and more of a father than anyone has a right to ask for.

Oscar was born into money and lived off the family business. Much to the relief of his brothers, he took little interest in this, for Oscar was a drunk. That is not to say he was messy about his drinking. He never turned violent and was rarely incapable of looking after himself. I have, however, seldom seen Oscar without a drink in his hand and alcohol fumes seemed to follow him around like a private atmosphere. His drunkenness did not prevent him from giving my pregnant, teenage mother the support she needed and to this he added generous helpings of loving concern, which he had in abundance.

Ma recalls that, as the time for my birth drew near, Oscar became increasingly nervous and needed to drink even more than usual. On the morning when her labour pains began, he was quite drunk and had difficulty getting her to hospital. He sobered up somewhat when the crisis was over and, on seeing me for the first time, remarked that I was an uncommonly handsome fellow. Ma agreed and as she did not have a name for me thought to call me “Hao Kan”, which in Mandarin means goodlooking. Uncle Oscar, because he heard wrong or for some reasons which are no longer clear, wrote “How Kum” on the certificate registering my birth.

That has been my name since. I know that I can change it by deed poll but have never bothered to. I tell myself that this is because the deed poll involves a tedious legal process but this is not really the case. I have grown to like the name and, what is more, it is a name that suits me and seems to fit me better into the scheme of things.

A name like “How Kum” inspires puns even in those not given to word play. The obvious, like “How come, you’re late”, I look upon with resignation. Those with a semblance of originality I enjoyed. I generally tend to ask a lot of questions: inspired by my name, perhaps.

At a barbecue once, I pestered a young lady with questions, asking, several times over, how her beauty remained unaffected by the heat and smoke around. My style was, however, not to her taste and she replied, “How come doesn’t turn me on.” I enjoyed the rebuff more than any encouragement she may have offered. It was something that was specially designed for me: a tiny piece of the pattern falling into place.

Right now, with a man holding a gun to my back and his mate trying not to laugh at my name, it was difficult to explain the circumstances under which I came by it. All I could manage was, “Yes. My name is How Kum Menon.”

“You Indian?” he asked staring at my IC. “You look Chinese.”

“I know, lah,” I said, lapsing into the vernacular. I was not clear what was happening but could not fail to sense the hostility of the cops. Perhaps, using the local patois would make them more friendly. “My mother Chinese, what.”

The ploy did not work.

“You stay still,” snapped the sergeant. “PC Yeo has a revolver, yah. He will shoot if you try anything funny. You stay here. I go phone OC in station.”

I could not understand what was happening. The woman I loved had been killed and, instead of looking for the man who had killed her, these men were being unkind to me. I looked at Vanita lying on the ground and felt more sorry for myself than ever. Her mouth was open and brownish spittle trickled from it. The puddles of her blood on the waterproof sheet were beginning to dry, their edges turning crinkly and black. My eyes were pricked by little thorns. I wiped them with the back of my hand. It was only a slight movement but I felt the man behind me stir. I knew that he did not need too much of an excuse to shoot me. I wondered why.

Then it hit me. It should have been obvious from the outset. I was indeed an idiot. Vanita was right to call me a dumbo. Only an idiot would take so long to figure out what was happening. The question about the murder weapon, the sergeant’s hard voice, the nervousness of the man behind me … It all made sense. These men actually suspected me of murdering Vanita.

When Sergeant Wong returned I had no doubts whatsoever.

“Up,” shouted Wong, grabbing me by the hair and pulling me to my feet. “Hands on backside.”

I was handcuffed and dragged unceremoniously to the police car. There we waited for the forensic team to arrive before driving off to the station.