Boey Kim Cheng (b. 1965)
SELECTED POEMS
Little India Dreaming
To begin. Wade into the river of dark migrant bodies at nightfall.
Ride on the perfume trails of jasmine and sandalwood, on the
kemenyen incense flourishing in the five-foot way, through
which veils you have a fleeting glimpse of Grandmother trailing
a smoking brazier through the rooms, expelling stubborn spirits
troubling the household peace. Begin the slow chant of street
names: Mayo, Perak, Weld, memory's evening raga tuning up, the
voice recalling, warming the absent air, the melismatic gliding up
and down the streets, itinerant scale that keeps no time, stays in
no place, the voice of the one who stayed and the voice of the one
who left uniting in the recitation of names, notes strung together
like these marigold blooms and jasmine buds threaded into bright
garlands at the flower stalls on Buffalo Road, where your father
was born, you remember him saying. Sometimes he comes back
on a whiff, a note of the coconut hair oil, and he is holding your
hand and walking you with his slightly impaired gait, as if his
right leg were shackled to worry, regret, pain, past the Masjid
Gafoor, where the faithful perform ablutions to the imam's call
climbing into the evening sky, and somehow you lose him, his
coarse tobaccoey fingers, in the flood of glistening dark skin. You
are crying and then his hands find you and lift you up and you are
being carried, riding your father across Perak Street, fording the
main thoroughfare to Buffalo, then to Race Course Road, where
he sits you down on the grass and you watch the simultaneous
football games at Farrer Park. He buys a leaf bowl of rojak from a
street stall and you are both eating off it with toothpicks. You half-
pray: Make time stop, make Father stay. You feel like asking where
he goes when he disappears for months, years, but you don't. You
know that will make him go away, like the raga after it is finished,
and you can't keep the voice, the melody, the presence, the spirit
of the song. You cross Serangoon Road to Campbell Lane and the
raga is finding its groove now, writing the way, and you walk past
the provisions shops, the cadences of spices drumming, urging
the voice on, the medley infusing the night air, saccharine Lata
Mangeshkar love songs kissing the soulful sitar strains of Ravi
Shankar and the plaintive plucks of Ali Akbar Khan's sarod, Zakir
Hussain's earthy tabla marking, making time, and your legs are
now tuned, listening to the song of the street. This is what you
dream of in the wide empty spaces of the migrant's no-man's
land, under the distant antipodean skies over Berowra you hear
this in your sleep, and you dream-walk back into the thick of it,
as now past the pavement fortune teller with his frayed parrot
and pack of cards, onto Dunlop Street and the corner coffee shop
where the old-timers still sit and wait over coffee and smoke,
past the mamak stall and its sweets, lurid weeklies and condom
packs, past the betel-man rolling his little leaf-wraps of oblivion,
smiling as though he knows why you are back, past the barber
shop on Dickson rolling out Bollywood strains, not before you
pause and inhale the scent of hair lotion, see your body read in
the double rows of mirrors, your face multiplied, split between
lives and places. The face of the boy who thrilled and tingled to
the barber's caressing snips, the young man who wanted to walk
away from everything, the man who had walked away, the middle-
aged returnee who has walked back, and behind them the dead
father. The tabla takes over the space the singing has cleared,
quickening memory's passage, the blank, missing years, and
you peer into Woodlands Madras, and see your old friends over
thali plotting routes of escape, finger-scooping dhal-drenched
rice from banana-leaf plates. All gone now. Diaspora. Dispersed.
Disappeared. Why have you come back? Once you've left, there is
no coming back, no place to come back to. Why come back? Back
home, home, om, om. The fiddle takes it up, the question turning
into a mantra on the mournful strings, and you are passing Clive,
Cuff, past Indian-tenanted shop-houses with defunct Chinese
signs, then to Baboo Lane, where Grandmother took you along
the street stalls to her ancient friend who ran a liquor store with
swing doors on the corner of Hindoo and Serangoon, where your
father drank himself out of job and life over and over. Then you
turn into Desker, as the voice of the raga rises to touch the hem of
the divine, the dim red light bulbs of the back doors, the painted
faces and tired bodies, and you remember coming with your men
in the platoon, entering the shadowy room, the woman, beautiful
still, sad-eyed, and the men swapping stories later. Where is
she, where are the jolly men, one a veritable Zorba? Where are
they now? Where are you? Now the instruments return to hold
the voice up, as it finds a way to end, and you cross to Mustafa,
which you knew as President Shopping Centre, where your
mother brought you shopping for clothes, when she appeared.
You remember the trishaw ride with her back to the room she
rented on Race Course Road, wondering where she went to work
at night, leaving you and your sister quietly as she slipped out into
the street. Across the road is the open space, a parched bare field,
where now the workers mill in squads. It was the same month you
were discharged from the army, the Hotel New World collapse,
and now that empty memorial space reminds you of something
unfinished, incomplete, a gaping hole, an absence in your heart
and the heart of the country. Of what you cannot tell. Like the
heart of the raga, emptiness, fullness, nothingness. Ebb and flow.
You begin the walk back, loop to where you started, the raga
ranging back to its first notes, your feet trusting the language, the
song of the remembering streets, the uneven chords of the five-
foot way, at home as if they have never left, as if the question they
tap out is answered by the firm tanpura response of the ground,
the silence at the raga's end looking back down the long way it has
travelled, the echoes trailing into the distance to where the words
have gone.
Note: We recommend reading the above poem on desktop / in landscape orientation.
by Boey Kim Cheng
from The Singer and Other Poems (2022)
