Mr Wong Goes West (3 page)

‘So what colour ink is in this batch?’

‘Hmm?’ the contractor replied, as if he hadn’t quite heard the question.

‘What colour ink is this batch? Neon green?’

Daswani glanced nervously at her eyes and then looked away. ‘We used a different colour for this batch. You’ll have the yellow ink versions very soon.’

‘But
which
colour? Pink? Blue?’

He picked up the highlighter. ‘Er. Actually, we had trouble sourcing those colours too.’

The buyer froze. ‘You had trouble sourcing those colours too? So what colour ink did you use?’

Daswani bit his lower lip. ‘We used a very high quality ink obtained from a factory owned by a friend of my cousin. Highest quality, best possible flow, good value, special price for us, due to our connections. So please don’t worry about the ink, Ms Crumley. It’ll be fine. You have Mr Wong’s personal guarantee.’

She was becoming impatient. ‘But what colour is it?’

‘Er, neutral,’ he said, his voice betraying nervousness.

‘Neutral. Meaning…?’

When the contractor didn’t answer immediately, she reached for the plastic banana. He reached for it at the same time. Wong watched aghast, frozen to the spot.

She got to it first, pulled open the lid and with a violent sweep of her arm, slashed a mark across the table. All three of them stared at it—a jet black scar on the pale pine surface.

Ms Crumley spoke first. ‘Black. You put
black
ink into the highlighters.’

‘The very finest ink on the market today, Ms Crumley. None better.’ Daswani wrung his hands and smiled unhappily.

‘You can’t put black ink into highlighters.’

‘The ink was the finest quality, and flowed into the products’ ink chambers very smoothly indeed. And it flows out equally smoothly. A pure, flowing, er, smooth line.’

‘But…I mean…you can’t have highlighters with black ink.’ She looked at Wong and then at Daswani. ‘Tell him. You just can’t.’

‘Some small problem?’ Wong asked, now panicking inside.

Daswani slowly interlaced his fingers, trying to send ‘keep calm’ signals to her. ‘May I remind you that when I phoned you two weeks ago and said that we were having trouble finding yellow ink for the first batch, you said we could use other colours.’

‘Yes, but I meant other
highlighter
colours. I meant neon green or baby pink or sky blue. Not
black
.’

‘Be reasonable, Ms Crumley. You didn’t specifically say that we could not use black.’

For a moment, she couldn’t speak. She took several deep breaths and then she sat up straight, making herself considerably taller in her seat than the two Asians. ‘Now let’s get this absolutely straight. Are you telling me that you have made me one hundred and eighty thousand fruit-shaped highlighters filled with black ink?’

Daswani did not reply.

Wong felt the world slipping away from him. ‘Black very nice, very elegant colour,’ he said desperately. ‘Fashionable
and
good feng shui. Ha ha.’

Ms Crumley, her nostrils dilating, turned to the geomancer and spoke to him quietly through tight lips: ‘If you think I am going to buy a single one of these, you are very much mistaken. Goodbye, Mr Wong. Goodbye, Mr Daswani.’

She neatly snatched the cheque out of Wong’s hands and marched back into the cabin. They heard a door slam.

There was silence for two seconds and then they heard a door open again. Ms Crumley had accidentally marched into the bedroom.

‘Door that way,’ Wong called out helpfully.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered before storming through the correct door and slamming it behind her.

The two men on the balcony stared at each other.

‘That did not go so well,’ Wong said.

‘She said we could use any other ink colour. She didn’t say we couldn’t use black colour,’ Daswani said in a hurt tone.

Wong nodded. ‘So what are you going to do with so many highlighter with black ink?’

The other man shook his head. ‘Not my problem. You are the middle man. Deal is in the name of Harmoney Private Limited. I want my money. I want it now. Question is: What are
you
going to do with so many highlighters in black ink?’

A travelling feng shui master entered a monastery in Guizhou.

‘I have come to award a title,’ he said. ‘One of the monks here is to be called the Master of Humility.’

The monks went into an uproar. Which of them was the Master of Humility?

‘I am the chief abbot. Surely the title must come to me?’ said the chief abbot.

‘I am the lowliest novice,’ said the lowliest novice. ‘Should it not come to me?’

‘I am neither high nor low,’ said a monk who was neither high nor low. ‘Perhaps I deserve the title, having no other?’

‘I deserve nothing,’ said another monk. ‘So you may choose to give it to me if you think it right.’

The debate raged for many hours. No agreement could be reached.

The feng shui master picked up his bag and started to leave.

‘Which of us gets the title?’ the monks asked.

‘No one,’ said the feng shui man. ‘The Master of Humility is no longer here.’

Blade of Grass, sometimes giving is taking. Sometimes, taking is giving. The man who tries to catch a feather held by a breeze succeeds only in pushing it away, for some feathers cannot be caught.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.

Geomancer CF Wong walked morosely along the street, believing that nothing could worsen his mood, which was pitch-black and vivid crimson at the same time. His life had suddenly turned dark with horror and red with drama. Small and round-shouldered, he stooped even further than usual, his eyes fixed on the ground, a puny Atlas carrying an invisible planet on his shoulders. And the burden he was carrying might as well be as large as a world, given the impossibility of his finding any way to lift it from his back.

What had just happened was so nightmarish to be almost beyond his ken. He had just committed to spending a vast sum of money that he did not have on the purchase of a large number of tiny, ugly, fruit-shaped pens that he could not possibly use. He had experimented with the repulsive plastic bananas after Ms Crumley had left. They produced solid black lines that were too thick to write with, and too black to use for highlighting. Who would want them? They were useless. Harmoney Private Limited of Singapore was set to go bankrupt with its very first deal. Not exactly auspicious. If news of this got round to his rivals…It didn’t bear thinking about. How could everything have gone so dramatically wrong? He
blamed the unidentified Singapore bigwig who had ordered the ship be moved. But to whom could he complain? It was useless. Nothing could be done.

Arun Asif Iqbal Daswani had ended the meeting by saying he would give Wong ten days to make the payment. Daswani had handed him a fresh copy of his business card, pointedly calling attention to the line that described him as ‘The World’s Only Indian Member of the Chinese Mafia’. He had then made some not very deeply veiled threats about getting his triad partners to ‘take an interest’ if the full sum was not delivered on time. He had become hard-eyed and stone-faced. It was the end of an ugly friendship.

Where could Wong get that kind of money at short notice? He kept very little money in the bank accounts he used, and his savings consisted of some tiny investment properties in Guangdong province, all of which were handled by a relative he talked to once a year. It would take weeks or months to arrange a sale. There were no liquid assets that could be cashed in to raise the sum Daswani was demanding.

The feng shui master wearily propelled his miserable bones to his run-down office on the cheaper bit of Telok Ayer Street, just off the main business district of central Singapore, and went up the stairs to the fourth floor—yes, he knew that number four meant bad luck, but it was the only one he could afford. He kicked open the office door, startling Winnie Lim, his office manager. She glared at him with naked hostility.

‘
Aiyeeah
. You break the door, I no fix it,’ she warned.

He returned her dagger-filled look, narrowing his eyes and muttering curses under his breath. It was nothing short of tragic that a man could not even find sanctuary from the pain of life in his own office. He glanced around the small, cluttered room, with its cheap, mismatched furnishings and broken wall
clock. It was not a suitable office for a feng shui master and he knew it. No clients were allowed to visit.

The only consolation was that the desk which normally housed his beyond-irritating assistant, Joyce McQuinnie, was empty. The young woman had been inflicted on him by Mr Pun, the property developer who kept Wong’s business going by paying a regular retainer. She had arrived as a ‘temporary’ intern, but had become horribly, scarily permanent. Wong spent a significant amount of his time dreaming of ways to get rid of her without upsetting his paymaster.

Ignoring the spitting, hissing Winnie, he marched past his desk and headed for the meditation room—a rather grandiose name for what was really an ill-designed room, too small for any purpose beyond being a stationery cupboard. When Wong had initially leased the premises, he had made sure that that room had been kept completely empty except for a meditation mat and a flickering candle—red, electric, purchased from a Roman Catholic trinket shop. Then he had placed a hand-carved hair stick from an ancient branch of the Qidan tribe on the altar, a small table at one end. The hair stick was a sort of ugly, miniature totem pole topped with thick, dreadlock-like tresses. Its purpose was to dismay evil spirits, and to that end it had wide staring eyes and a sticking-out tongue. Wong was fond of it for a number of reasons. First, it reminded him of his mad Uncle Rinchang, who lived in a cabin in the Kunlun Mountains. Second, the Qidan people were reputed to have used real gold leaf in their objets d’art, so he felt it might be valuable. And third, it was so ugly that it put the women off entering the space or using it for anything.

The idea of having a meditation room in the office was well-intentioned but had proved to be impractical. There was always so much pressure to make money to pay the rent that he rarely
used the room, and neither Winnie nor Joyce appeared to be interested in meditation, although Joyce occasionally went to yoga and some sort of church. Winnie’s only interest in life was nail varnish. She used the office computer to subscribe to RSS email alerts informing her of the launch of new nail colours or appliqués. In contrast, Joyce’s main interest was wearing iPod headphones and nodding her head up and down to
tsch-chika-tsch-chika-tsch
noises while idly scanning celebrity magazines.

These two women had grossly tainted the purity of his office—after all, it was supposed to be the headquarters of a practitioner of an ancient, mystical, male-dominated spiritual art. But what could be done? Mr Pun paid the retainer and had given him no choice but to accept McQuinnie as an assistant. And Winnie Lim had organised the files under a system so arbitrary that she was the only one who could find anything. He was stuck with them. His temporal life was cursed. He needed to retreat to a better place to recharge his spiritual batteries. If there had ever been a time when he needed the meditation room, this was it.

He opened the door and peered inside. He hadn’t entered the room for several weeks and expected it to be stuffy and smelly. But something was wrong. It was full of something.

He turned on the light. It had been turned into some sort of sanitation store cupboard. It contained two foul-smelling mops, three red plastic buckets, and a solid wall, taller than Wong himself, of what looked like several hundred toilet rolls. He backed out of the room and turned to face his office manager.

‘Winnie,’ Wong barked. ‘What is in my meditation room?’

‘Mops and toilet rolls and those things,’ she replied, without looking up from her hands. She was applying miniature representations of Old Masters onto her fingernails.

‘I know that. But why?’

‘Because I need to use the toilet cupboard for something else. All full up. No room for that stuff.’

‘Why do we need two hundred toilet roll?’

‘Is not two hundred.’

‘Well, how many is it?’

‘Five hundred.’

‘Why do we need five hundred toilet roll?’

‘Special offer. Twenty per cent off for orders of five hundred rolls. Cheaper to buy five hundred than to buy four hundred. Also we get a bonus ten thousand points on our loyalty card.’

‘But we don’t need five hundred toilet roll. We don’t need four hundred. In one week, we only need one or two.’

‘Well, then, we have enough for a long time.’

‘Ten years.’

‘Right, ten years.’

‘But the lease for this office only has eight month left.’

‘We can take them with us to the next office.’

Wong was speechless, incensed by the image of his having to hire a van and a driver merely to transport several hundred unwanted toilet rolls from one set of premises to another. Then something occurred to him: where was his ancient gold leaf Qidan hair stick? This worry caused the power of speech to return. ‘Where is my totem?’