The words of death and longing

APRIL 21 — We had been trading telephone texts, and e-mails with each other. This would be what one would call a literary affair. Once upon a time, I had embroiled myself in one.

Many years ago, when the Internet had just arrived in Malaysia, and I wrote a column for a newspaper, I struck up a friendship with a man I shall call Sweets. He introduced me to e.e. cummings and the Russian Greats. I lent him Salman Rushdie’s books and disgusted him with my introduction to American poets.

But this is not about Sweets and me. That, my dear, is a memory that is reminded when the odd e-mail on the pretext of keeping in touch arrives. And that is a story that need not be told here.

We were introduced at a donation drive. He was a young boy who had seen many tragedies, and had crossed borders literally with his hands, and on his knees and feet. I was struck by his height and his fluency in the English language and his passion for Sufi poetry.

It was a brief meeting, but we exchanged numbers. I was struck by what he had said to me when we met, “I’m a refugee. I can survive anything.” I had a couple of small Moleskine paper journals in my bag; I fancied myself a writer and a pure, true one would only write in a Moleskine. One is allowed a vice, yes?

You must write love stories, I told him.

But I am so young. I have never fallen in love before!

Write! Write!

A week or so later, I received a text on my Blackberry:

Life: All that is given cheerfully and generously to another comes back to you and enriches your life in unexpected ways. – Anon

I replied, Prayer is the song of the heart. It reaches the ear of God even if it is mingled within the cry. – Kahlil Gibran.

He wrote back:

Love is like the seeds of life

To root is full of pain and strife

But to grow is like a great oak tree

Straight and strong for eternity

Steadfast, calm and oh so true!

The texts stopped for awhile.

Some time last month, he began e-mailing me longer prose and poetry, written by the Sufi and Persian masters. I replied by e-mailing him Pablo Neruda’s poetry.

One day, and until today I am not too sure, he sent me poetry which I presume was written by him. It was too personal. It cut right through the heart. Imperfect perhaps, but this young 20-year-old boy already had an understanding of meters and stanzas, and was not a pretentious young poet who wrote about twenty-something angst and pseudo intellectual babble.

It took me two days to draft a reply. I may enjoy the lyricism of poetry but I am no poet. I reproduce an excerpt here, so forgive me, if this… is absolutely appalling. I wrote this because upon receiving his latest missive, I kept thinking of a mother figure!

I wrote:

you need a mother young man

to hold you

when the tropics unleash its tears

to warm you

when you seek for understanding

to cry with you

as you search for joy

'i already have a mother'

you need another mother young man

'i already have a mother'

you need a mother young man

who can say this to you

'i am your mother young man'

The e-mails stopped. He was busy. Young men are young men.

The dead live in fiction. And the living re-created. Perhaps it would be apt to write that one day this young boy would cross the seas again, and somewhere, maybe in a market, a bustling Middle Eastern restaurant in downtown New York or Jersey, he meets his family, who had dispersed across the globe. Sometimes the truth cannot be written simply because the reader would think it is too fantastic to be real, that such a person can exist in this country called Malaysia.