“That’s nice. Clean, clear notes, that’s what we want. Now play these eight bars again, paying attention to the wave of the theme. There’s a wave here that repeats itself, from the first to the fourth bar, then again from the fifth to the eighth. Can you hear it? Can you sense it, love?”
Can I hear the wave? Can I sense the wave? I know the wave by heart. I have heard it from somewhere. From a distance. From the past. Ode to Joy beckons me from the dusky roads outside No.9 Sembawang Road like a mother calling out hoarsely to her children to quit playing and return home for tea and kaya toast.
Fields of white, blue and green. Where white cotton sails across the blue ocean of a sky, held fast and still in opposite attraction to the rolling greens. Many a times I have wandered and played and laughed and sung in those fields. I have lain on the grounds to spit at the sky, only to be spat back at, with lashings of rain.
My best friend Kamala had this theory about rain. If you told a lie, it would rain that very day. I found this to be true. I lied to mummy that I had to go pick flowers for ‘show and tell’ in school. But instead I caught tadpoles in the slithery stream that snaked through the wasteland beyond the row of Colonial black and white bungalows, leading into the darkness of the woods. I was forbidden to venture out far. But I knew Kamala wouldn’t squeal on me, and so we went.
And it rained. The tadpoles squiggled away. I returned home shifty-eyed, empty- handed and wet to the aroma of freshly baked bread with sweet coconut and pandan jam, and a frowning mummy with a warm towel.