Made-in-Chinatown

You ascend the stairs of a station underground and find a roof of panels of glass and mis-matched paper lanterns over your head before even reaching the top. Take two steps more and a myriad of bulbous red lanterns emerges and rippling satin sheets fly from roof to roof; an infinite meander of bloody gashes against the pure and cloudless sky. You see immediate, fiery blazes of festive red and gold as your ears try to make sense of the noise, all of which is under a pulsating, incandescent sun. The upbeat female voice of a Chinese pop song fades with every step you take and soon becomes the typically oriental sound of hammered string instruments and cymbal crashes, every gong in perfect syncopation. A miscellany of dialects and tones create a distortion that makes everything undefined. You find yourself at the end of a road you once thought ceaseless and, turning the corner, your eyes meet with a most welcome serenity. 

The street is practically desolate, where birdsong overpowers an accompaniment of modestly quiet conversation and anonymous footsteps. Sunshine crashes down on the brickpaved street, yet falls from the sky like the smooth cascade of a waterfall, uninterrupted by lanterns and table umbrellas like it was mere seconds ago. To the right of you are the wrought iron gates of the Sri Mariamman temple, and to the left are several shophouses and small venders. But this paradisal avenue soon bashfully diminishes to nothing, and a reluctant pair of feet are dragged into a half-turn and find themselves going back the way they came. 

Tranquility, as it seems, has done something in the act of clearing your mind, and when viewing what was once a perturbing chaos around you with a fresh pair of eyes, it begins to make visual sense. Decorative tassels of red and gold, purple and green hang in uniform decorum on the walls of a shop display, stubborn and strong in their will to stay inanimate, yet a few of the threads give way to the breeze once in a while, in a dance of spontaneous whimsy. Hours and hours worth of queuing shrouds from the onlooker the source of the pungent, smoky smell of meat cooking in honey glazes. An antique rickshaw stands before an homage to its heritage. Silenced by time's unforgiving wave of impairment, the tarnished paintwork and shallow scratches on the now-motionless wheels are the only things that speak for its past, and the lives of the people that were once carried by it. Above your head are rows of umbrellas lining the streets, most of them with the burden of a company’s branding trademark. The once-crimson hue of the sturdy fabric has sacrificed itself to sunlight's fading properties, so that the sweaty, panting tourist is granted a moment of shade. 

The backstreets of Chinatown, the dark, tiled paths that live in the constant shadow of arched alleyways, have a completely different ambience. Hardware stores and shop displays dedicated to faux-Ming-Dynasty ceramics replace the mass-produced souvenirs and three-for-ten-dollar artifacts. Occasional puffs of cigarette smoke thicken the atmosphere from time to time, but other than that the air is clear and bleak.

The hours of scorching midday sun are nearing to an end as you tread the last of your footsteps that will contribute towards the teeming, syncopated rhythm of Chinatown. There comes a point where the steps you take propel you down as well as forwards, as you find yourself descending into the hole in the ground that started your journey.

Blighty

My first week in England for the first time in a year is closing to an end. I'm lounging about the sofa bed in my grandma's guest room all day because of stomach cramps and what-have-you, which I have mostly managed to sleep off in a painless bout of hourly naps. And after convincing my ever-fretful grandma that I can in fact sleep with mild, explicable pains without dying, and can in fact construct a cheese sandwich without the serrated edges grating at my (currently intact) cuticles, I am in fact home alone for an hour or so. A hundred minutes of solitude, I think to my slow-witted self.

So I have dosed the pain off into the midday hours, and I now attempt to keep bread/crisp crumbs off the bed as I single-handedly hold open my copy of The Help, which I am about halfway through. The speed at which I am suddenly getting through this book is a genuine surprise to me. I'll try to string together a draft of a review while I'm at it.

By the late afternoon They're back from shopping and I have on me a frumpy grey jumper, my indian floral trousers and my hair's in a bun that says "I don't care what amount of time has passed since I last looked presentable, but at least I've been reading more than you." (Yes I have suddenly begun to personify hairstyles - and become complacently condescending). I've made an attempt to write that review. But I've gone off on a worthless tangent before I have even got to drawing the curve of my critique. I can't think how to analyse and articulate like I once considered with stupid complacency that I once thought I had the capacity to do. With bigoted arrogance I'm showing complete disregard for the nagging voice of my intellectual honesty. I suddenly feel like I know very little about the world, or indeed the area of expertise that I would love to pride myself in having estimable talent in.

Sabbath

Folded, covered arms across my chest. I huddle in a slight shiver as we cross the road. Just a two-hour service. Two hours where I have to pretend to listen with attentive ears and a graceful smile, while my atheist mind can wonder. I can ponder over how to write my review of The Help, now that I'm finished with it. 

Wrinkly hands and cheeks regularly pass my own in a pre-service gathering, all of which I meet with obligation and feigned attentiveness. Politeness, if you will. Words pass over me in the form of monotonous voices, words of praise, words that speak of a lifetime of dedication, for something that does not even exist. It makes me want to scream. The minutes pass by in a fumble of fleeting eyes and hands that clumsily search for the right page of the hymn book, a dormant brain that improvises with the organists playing and melismatic words that I am ill-informed about. 

A lady in clerical robes walks towards a book sermons and begins what I think was a half-hour session of preaching. From what I actually took in it appeared that she was talking about the gospel; how it is not eternal damnation that we should be focusing on, but the do-gooding that will guarantee us a place in heaven (no idea why I use the first person plural here). But most importantly, she talked of the need to convince others to become christians such as themselves. This was the point where I was truly screaming "bullshit" in my own head. I wonder if the lady ever considered that a non-believer sat amongst her congregation, doing whatever the mental equivalent is of shaking one's head as she spoke. I couldn't bear to look her in the eye, so instead I stared meekly at the bottom of the pew in front of me. A tiny shred of sallow paper lay dusty on the wooden floor, and I thought to myself, "I am going to learn so much more about the world, so much more truth in that single piece of paper that lies unacknowledged on the floor than the lady I am listening to. Unlike the lady, the paper is not tainted by the ink of man-made doctrine and dogma. Why should I listen to someone who has assumed the truth in what she heard as a girl from other ladies who have believed in the same thing since they were girls because they were taught so? Why should I, when before me stand millions of atoms that show so much more integrity and intelligence in order and form than we can ever assimilate with our own minds? When I see rows of folded hands that are so clearly the product of eons of evolution, the greatest design of all? When invisible - proven - waves of light travel millions of miles from the sun and adorn the dark rings of wooden floorboards and cast shadows from the legs of chairs? All of these have been proven to us-  an absolute explanation of what is there and where it comes from is there for all of us to see and understand - and yet we still listen to the lady at the altar who tells us that it all came about six days of intelligent design by a higher power of mercy that our world is so void of.