Evanescent Shadows
Variations on a Theme of Thomas Eliot
by Benjamin Ong Jia Ming
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
~T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding~
* * * * *
Like a fire alarm on what would otherwise be a peaceful watch in the night, the bell rings.
Sixty seconds up; someone shouts, “Time!” Swift as a shadow, he lifts a piece of paper from the table, and
saunters to a wooden block in the middle of a platform. The sheet is scrawled all over with words—a random
mess to all but the mind of the one who crafted them out of nothingness. Immediately, a spotlight falls on
this spectre on the stage, illuminating a room otherwise bathed in darkness.
* * * * *
I nearly didn’t miss the train. As I rushed onto the platform,
the taillights of the last carriage faded away into the distance, and I found myself
engulfed in the dust of time and tide. Truly, it waits, but man cannot bear time; he
is inhospitable, and sends time off as soon as it comes. We would rather be ruined
than changed by the currents of time. No one knew how to wait anymore; not in the city,
not even in the country. But I did, or at least I thought I did. I was tired of a
photographer’s busy life in the Grey Town, and took a fortnight’s retreat some
thirty-one miles away from it, in the midst of open fields where no one else could
come too close. I wanted to live in long exposure instead of continuous shutter
for a while. But just as I was ready to return home, it seems the train wasn’t going
to be merciful.
Gathering my breath from the debris of this disappointment,
I resigned myself to a few more hours of vulnerability in the open air. It was
a starry night and nothing stirred about the rustic train station, or so it
seemed. A gentle breeze wafted into the cool night air, carrying a cookie-sweet
fragrance off a young lady who could hardly have seen more than thirty years
of life—about as old as me.
Sitting hunched in one corner of the wooden platform, her
eyes were fixed intently on the track. Though I was burning with questions, I
wasn’t sure if I should interrupt her reverie, lest I break a silence that
should shatter the tranquil night. So I stood at the edge of the creaking planks,
breathing in my last drafts of the halcyon country air. I thought of how quickly
time seemed to pass, the last thirteen days disappearing like morning grass
that withers in the evening. And then she spoke.
“Can you count the stars?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The stars—can you count them?”
“No, I—why?”
“Oh, it’s just that I’ve been waiting a long time for
the train. It hasn’t come and I’ve run out of things to count. I’d count
the dandelions in the fields around us, but that would mean I’d have to get
off the platform and maybe miss the train.”
“One should’ve arrived about an hour ago. How long have
you been here?”
“Two days. Two weeks. Two months? Who knows? I don’t
keep track.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“Those weren’t my trains.”
“Oh.”
I studied her carefully: she seemed disillusioned with
something. Perhaps, like me, she’d also travelled out of some busy town to
hit the ‘pause’ button on an endless routine. She held a stack of thin
booklets, and I could see from the cover of one that they were music scores.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“This? Music. Words and music. To sing.”
“Sounds nice. Are you a singer?”
“I was in a choir once. Played piano and conducted at times.”
“Not much of that in these parts.”
“I needed time off. Inspiration was running low, and
what was once a joy became a burden, a job I had to do. I quit the choir;
music drained me.”
“And have you found what you’re looking for out here?”
“A little. When you leave an oasis, it takes some time
before you find another. Even beauty along the way, like desert flowers and
fiery sunsets, cannot fully satisfy. I sometimes wonder if I was meant for
more than this. It’s like I’m not home yet.”
“Where do you live?”
“A place they call the Bright Town. That’s where my address
is, but it’s not home. At least, it’s not where I feel safe. Not when there’s
light everywhere, like a football stadium. Here you can count the stars,
even name each one.”
Maybe, I thought, the stars don’t demand the darkness,
but darkness is required for the stars to shine forth their little light.
“When is your train coming?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. But I will when
it does.”
“Don’t you have a ticket or something?”
“I’ll get one when I board.”
“When will that be?”
“Soon.”
Unsatisfied, I pressed her further. “But if you keep
missing these trains, you’ll just waste your time standing around here.
You won’t get anywhere.”
“Oh yes I will. Time isn’t like a train, you know.
It doesn’t just disappear from a station. Every train I didn’t board
still took me somewhere.”
I’ll admit I did not think of that. A decision unmade
is no less potent than one made. Walt Whitman observed; When a defining
moment comes along, either you define the moment, or it defines you.
Many doors must have opened and closed for my fellow sojourner here,
but she chose none of them. We are all afraid of making choices sometimes;
some of us are afraid all the time. We’re afraid of where we might end
up, what we might lose along the way. As a photographer, I just observe
the action—no need to fan the flames.
“What do you fear losing most?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied nonchalantly. Then, with a voice
which quavered ever so slightly, she continued, “Everything. Time can level
overnight what it took a lifetime to build. Leaving a platform is like
jumping off a cliff.”
“No.”
“Okay, maybe not. But even falling headlong from the
third floor of a building is enough to kill.”
“Will a train ride do that?”
“I don’t know. In a moving train, the faces of a thousand
passengers become a transient blur against a star-studded sky. They lose
themselves, they forget who they are.”
Not just in a train, but also in a war, a queue, a census,
I told myself. It occurred to me that she was probably hiding behind her
apparent silence, maybe even behind her music. There were many untold stories
beneath her impassive countenance. But there is something in a person’s eyes
that cannot be hidden beneath any guise, and the agony abides beneath saccharine
smiles.
“Tell me about your music,” I ventured.
“What about it?”
“Oh, anything. Everything. Like your experiences, what
you enjoy about it… Any embarrassing moments?”
She sat thoughtfully for a moment, then with a twinkle in
her eye, set down her scores and took a few steps in my direction. “There
is one,” she said. “When I was nineteen, I went to see an orchestra perform.
Before the concert started, the players set about tuning their instruments.
Believe it or not, I actually thought they were playing the first piece,
and nearly applauded at the end of the tuning!”
I laughed. “That’s funny.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s plain silly.”
“That’s what I meant.”
After a pause, I recollected an experience from my teenage days.
“I had a friend who conducted the school choir. She once told them, ‘I don’t
want to have to smile at you after scolding you. I feel so fake.’”
“That’s funny, in a sad and twisted way,” she said
wistfully.
“You remind me of her.”
At that moment, the sky began to thunder. She looked up
and, staring at the clouds as if there were words written in them, said,
“When the clouds are stemmed, the wells are dry. Tears are like seasons,
you know? Each time they come, they’re the same yet different. I can cry
for the same reasons this year as I did last, but they’ll be different
tears.”
Our griefs are sluiced away like winter in the torrents of
spring, I thought. Or maybe they are fossilised forever beneath strata of
resentment and hatred.
“I think my train is coming soon. I can hear it in the
distance,” she said.
“How do you know? I don’t hear anything.”
“Not with your ears, you won’t. There’s a train coming
nonetheless, as certainly as the thunder trudges towards us. It was nice
meeting you.”
I nodded. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
As I think about that night, I wonder: does the passenger
change the face of a station, or does the station change the passenger?
In waiting, we found patience in the crawling hours, and were none the
worse for wear when our trains arrived. I never saw her again after that,
but on that platform, time stood still. Time is no train, but ephemeral
moments of opportunity come every now and then, swallowing the gruelling
pauses in between. The moment of action is now—the fleeting ‘present’
where time touches eternity. Voices call us off our platforms; will we
follow?
Our journey is between two shores, and on the dark waters
along the way, we never really know who we are. Just before her train arrived,
I gingerly lifted a lens out of my bag and attached it to the camera’s body.
Looking up at her, I asked, “May I?”
“Sure.”
The station was lit with fireflies and stars, but I
could only see her through the lens darkly; perhaps it takes more than a
lens to see a person. Amidst the rumbling of the tracks and the roar of
the train’s headlights, I composed the shot and, as if on cue, pressed
the shutter just as the doors were flung open.
* * * * *
Like stars on a clear night, tiny lights cling to the ceiling,
illuminating the speaker. The stage—a platform upon which the traveller stands,
no matter how weary and fearful, or even tearful—is silent, and the murmur of
a restless audience descends onto the podium, like a train chugging off into
the distance. Yet the emptiness reverberates with the music and mirth of myriad
conversations, heard forever in the halls of remembrance and regret.
“Testing mike, one, two, three.” The auditorium echoes with
anticipation. He adjusts his notes, swallows, takes a deep breath… and begins.
“Ladies and gentlemen…”
returned the following year to take the Gold for Extemporaneous Speaking and
to lead the V.I. to its best Forensics outing yet, beating every other school
for first placing in the overall Sweepstakes Awards and winning the Rafidah
Aziz Challenge Shield for Best Government School.
