The Boy Next Door

Tales of Resemblances :18

 

 

 

 

 

 

I grew up with an older sister about 8 years my senior. Slim of waist and a good companion in conversation I experienced many opportunities for the opening of my mind and extroverted nature from her. She was the one who encouraged me to think that I was good looking. I wasn't prepared for what happened next but beyond the age of 16 years I came to an excruciating awareness of beauty in women that lasted throughout my working career.

 

I understood what women wanted, perhaps even better than themselves.  But I did the classic error in growing up. Had no male role model, concerned myself with personal relations and thought I would have a great career in the arts, perhaps acting, painting or a writer. In the years accompanying my pre-adult experiences, I was into smoking grass, cultivated a penchant for speaking of the way things looked to me and was fussy about it being right.

 

I didn't think I needed anything more than that. I had a job as a relief teacher after finishing school and had no plans about further study, figuring that it may be strenuous to my constitution. But things suddenly changed. I got a place in the only university in Malaysia then, still named after pre-independence Malaya, to pursue economics.

 

The study of economics introduced me to the world which I then perceived from a view very separate from my deeply personal view of things. It helped me overcome my liberal attitudes as regards generosity, empathy to all things in creation and the tendency to exaggerate my passions on occasion because Mark Twain seemed to think it was all right.

 

I was unschooled before but when I left the university it was with a fever I couldn't cure that was melting down my fondest illusions. But I resolved to make the graduate degree work. And I still had no male role model. So I read the biography of Laurence Olivier and hoped it would hold. I took to Shakespeare and realized that all personal relations contains a Shakespeare as the mover of people.

 

Last night, in the café, a young waiter who generally avoids me and most people, came up to see what I was doing on the laptop. The crowd was thin and he only understood Tamil. So I translated one of my writings on the Indian epics into Tamil and showed it to him. He read like a breeze that sweeps through the Indian ocean and said it was okay before leaving. At the cashier about half hour later, he came up to me in a serious state of mind and said, ' its kavithai,' translated as ' its art.'

 

I had noticed as he read that, in Tamil, my writings in English translate into a refinement of the Tamil language expression that may well soothe the heart of a beast waiting to find a role model. I realized then what my sister may have been telling me in my childlike conversations. She had manipulated me into giving up the petty vanity of the male ego and to seek him. It had involved some effort but I feel grateful for her intercession.

 

I know why she admires him.