The Catherine Lim Collection (35 page)

K. C. was not fighting his cancer in the
dogged manner of a person determined to go on living. He simply did not take
heed of it in his pursuit of this and that.

At the time that he collapsed and had to be
taken to hospital, he was still giving lectures and was deep in research on
some aspect of psychic phenomena. His sparkling wit and sense of humour
remained with him till the end, and after his death, I was told of practical
jokes that he had played on one of the hospital nurses.

I went to see K.C. at the hospital several
times. His family had transferred him to the best private hospital, and they
tolerated my presence in the hospital room only because K. C seemed so happy to
see me. The cancer was spreading throughout his body; he was almost skeletal,
racked continually by painful coughing. Yet there was a serenity about him that
was almost reassuring.

It was hard to reconcile that I was about to
lose someone whose friendship I had learnt to treasure. And once when I could
no longer control my tears (it also made K.C. uneasy to see a woman cry), I
walked out swiftly from the hospital room. I was around on the day of his
death. He was already very weak, but was, as always, still alert.

“This is for you,” he said, handing me a
sealed white envelope with great effort, “and you are not to open it till a
year after my death.”

I took the letter sadly and then I could see
that K.C. wanted to be alone; he died alone, by choice, in the large, spacious
hospital room. I went home immediately afterwards, and attended his funeral and
cremation the next day. His ashes were strewn over the sea, as he had wanted.

How could I not have wanted to see what was
inside the sealed white envelope? I had never outgrown the childhood predilection
for secrets and the tendency to be completely unsettled by the tantalizing
promise of secrets not yet revealed.

This sealed letter now in my hand, from a
friend on the clay of his death – it triggered off emotions at once gratifying
and awesome. It was fraught with portentous possibilities – sentiments never
before expressed? Some mighty secret revealed? Some insight that only people
about to die were privileged to have? Some direful warning about my life? Yet
there was this superstitious fear of breaking faith with the dead.

Many times had I taken out the envelope,
scanned its surface for clues, even held it against the light hoping to catch
some words that would provide the answer. But I saw nothing, and then it
occurred to me that it could have been a huge joke being perpetrated by the
irrepressible K.C.

One day, I was suddenly overcome by the
desire to rip open the envelope, to put an end, once and for all, to the
suspense.

I took the envelope out of the drawer; my
hands trembled a little and then strangely I could not open the envelope. It
may sound strange, but I could not open the envelope. My fingers seemed to have
been suddenly benumbed. A sensation difficult to describe, but my hands seemed
to have been independent of the rest of my body and not coordinating with it at
all.

I had the curious feeling that something odd
was happening, quite independently of me. If it was indeed K.C. who was
preventing me from breaking a promise to him, it was quite uncharacteristic of
him.

Since then, I had only been tempted at one
other time to touch the envelope, but that morning, try as I would, I could not
open the drawer. It appeared stuck, although that had never happened before. I
struggled with it for half an hour, then gave up. Then I tried again, and this
time, it slid open easily, with the envelope lying inside.

Small signs, these; they could almost be
interpreted as signs of displeasure, and I have no desire to provoke them
further.

It has already been six months since K.C.
died; another six months before I can open the envelope. I have never told his
family, fearing, perhaps groundlessly, an attempt to break into the privacy of
a communication meant only for me.

This is the
strange story
of one Mr Sai Koh Phan, one of the
faceless thousands in Singapore, rescued from the facelessness by a malady. Mr
Sai Koh Phan, civil servant, is now a celebrity of sorts in the country and
region, and since his case will be presented by his doctor at the next Geneva
International Conference of Remarkable Disorders, there is a chance that he
will be known to the world as well, at least the medical world.

The malady has, moreover, created
considerable ripples in the political world. But for adroit top-level
manoeuvring, it could have resulted in serious political repercussions for
Singapore.

“I’m only a humble civil servant. I suffered
much, but I’m glad that in the end it was for the good of so many
Singaporeans,” says Mr Sai Koh Phan, when he is interviewed by a reporter from
Newsweek
who asks him how it feels to be the centre of so much attention. And he
repeats, “I’m only a humble civil servant, and I’m glad to be of service to my
country,” when another reporter, from
TIME
, asks him how it feels to
have helped avert a national crisis. He adds, with a sudden access of
gratitude. “I must express my deepest thanks to my government and to my doctor,
Dr Sindoo, without either of whom this miracle would not have been possible.”

Now gratitude has been the abiding principle
of all Mr Sai Koh Phan’s actions, a gratitude constantly evoked by the daily
reminders of his secure, well-paying job as the principal of a school, his
well-furnished two-storey semi-detached house where he lives with his wife,
four sons and mother-in-law, his other equally well-furnished apartment which
he is renting to a Japanese bank executive, his sizeable bank account. To
comprehend the full extent of his rise from the deprivations of his childhood,
Mr Sai Koh Phan matches each deprivation against the solidity of present
comforts, so that daily routines in the home become so many cautionary tales to
his children.

“Chicken? I never ate chicken except once a
year, on the first day of Chinese New Year, so eat up all that chicken on your
plate, and be grateful,” he would admonish his children.

“Air-conditioning? I shared a room with
three brothers and two sisters on the top-floor of a shophouse in Chinatown. We
had two mattresses to share among us. Most of the time, I slept on rice-sacks.
Now my son says he can’t study except in an air-conditioned room!”

Mr Sai Koh Phan’s gratitude to the country
that has given him and his family this good life, is of the deep-welling, not
the merely perfunctory kind, and extends retrospectively on behalf of those
ancestors who had come from China with nothing but the proverbial shirt on
their backs, and on their behalf, Mr Sai Koh Phan’s eyes fill with grateful
tears.

Mr Sai Koh Phan’s position as principal of a
large primary school offers him plenty of opportunities for the expression of
this emotion, for the school is in the constituency of a very active Member of
Parliament who likes to make visits to show up Mr Sai Koh Phan’s school as the
model of a well-run, well-disciplined school. Mr Sai Koh Phan is all
effusiveness when the Member of Parliament comes calling, he is even more
fervid when the Minister of State for Education drops in one day, and when the
Senior Minister for Education himself indicates that he would like to come for
a visit, Mr Sai Koh Phan knows that he has reached the apotheosis of his career
and there is nothing more that he could wish for in this life. The depth of the
gratitude expressed in his welcoming speech that day has been without parallel.

Now so powerful an emotion must have a
channel for its proper ordering, and Mr Sai Koh Phan has found the perfect
channel in the national campaigns. The comprehensiveness of the campaigns,
covering nearly every aspect of the Singaporean’s life, from the way he grows
his hair, to the size of his family, together with the regularity with which
they occur in the course of the individual’s life, has provided the ideal
framework within which the awesome power of Mr Sai Koh Phan’s emotions can be
organised and structured. Hence the campaigns have provided the guiding
principle of Mr Sai Koh Phan’s existence, and he has never felt more contented
and happy. The campaigns have provided an overriding philosophy that can be
expressed concretely in 101 ways in his daily life at work and at home. Mr Sai
Koh Phan needs not the posters
and
advertisements and handbills to remind him of what he must do and
must
not do. For the injunctions and admonitions are etched deep in his
consciousness so that any infringements, no matter how small, are instantly
felt and appropriately responded to. Long hair is frowned upon, so a single
hair springing up in defiant growth out of the neatly cropped head of a pupil,
is immediately noticed and seized upon by Mr Sai Koh Phan in his vigilant
rounds of the school. Mr Sai Koh Phan likes to be a good example to his pupils,
so he wears a crew-cut and no hair of his will be seen to even remotely violate
the official stipulation of the above-the-back-collar hair length, and he
continues to keep the crew-cut long after the campaign against long hair is
over. Mr Sai Koh Phan prides himself on being different from those who are
quite content to fulfil only minimum requirements or who grudgingly comply
because they fear the fines that come with non-compliance. Mr Sai Koh Phan
believes in going the extra mile; indeed, his sense of gratitude will not let
him do less. And that is why he not only cuts his hair very short, but keeps it
that short, beyond campaign time. And that is also why he has four children
when the campaign urges Singaporeans to have three. The age gap between his two
elder sons and the two younger ones matches exactly the time gap between the
campaign to ‘Stop at Two’ and the campaign to ‘Have Three – or more, if you can
afford.’

This full, total and whole-hearted response
to the campaigns has not been without personal sacrifices, but it would take
more than personal sacrifices to daunt Mr Sai Koh Phan. There is the Incident
of the Bee, and there is the Incident of Xiu, both of which vividly testify to
Mr Sai Koh Phan’s readiness to put up with any discomfort in his commitment to
the campaigns.

The Incident of the Bee: Mr Sai Koh Phan
stands at attention during the singing of the National Anthem at the morning
school assembly in the school field, his chest pushed out, his shoulders pushed
up, his fists clenched, his facial muscles taut with the effort of a full
display of patriotic fervour. Now this position of ramrod straightness is not
without cost to a body long trained to respond to a built-in dictum that crawling
is a more effective mode of locomotion than walking, and the constant demands
made of that poor body in terms of abrupt changes from the bowing, bobbing and
scraping motions to perfect erectness, must be great indeed. But that is of
little concern to Mr Sai Koh Phan. He stands, muscle-taut, singing the National
Anthem, when suddenly a bee works itself up his left trouser leg and stings him
right up there. It is a large and most vicious bee, and the pain it inflicts is
excruciating, but Mr Sai Koh Phan’s disciplined patriotism will not allow even
the smallest tremor in that superbly erect frame, so he goes through the whole
morning’s ceremony, perhaps only a little paler than usual, and it is only when
the last strains of the song have faded away in the air, and he is back in his
office that Mr Sai Koh Phan groans a little, slumps back in his chair and calls
for help.