DOUBLE HAPPINESS
It’s that time when the midnight breezes lift the pungent sweet smell of decaying leaves from the gutters and from the few remaining enclaves of profuse vegetation.
It’s that time, when a strange peace permeates the atmosphere and the suspended snake of street lights illuminates the humidity, creating a series of fuzzy halos hovering between the branches of the trees that line the quiet street.
The fluorescent white tiled cavernous coffee shop attracts an array of nocturnal people and creatures from the nearby surroundings. A luminous midnight magnet, with its fold up tables and plastic stools teetering between delicious vapours from the kitchen on one side, and the forever gurgling gaping monsoon drain on the other.
‘DOUBLE HAPPINESS EATING HOUSE’ is emblazoned above the shop front in fluorescent scripts dripping with clicking cicaks. They coil and scurry between the irregular niches of the Chinese characters, they crawl over the neat curves of the Tamil and the Thai script, and they lie and wait for the buzzing of wings in the right angled corners of the Roman letters. Their tiny hearts are made visible by the glowing perspex sign which X-rays their delicate bodies. The sign displays - ‘Thai Moslem Food and Worlds No 1 Roti Prata’ to the universe and the cicaks go on clicking their little clicks and flicking their pink elastic tongues at insects brought to them by their glowing ecosystem.
Below them is another world where the nocturnal people from the nearby surroundings sip their kopi o and Milo peng, slurp their Thai Moslem noodles and dunk their worlds No 1 roti prata into the famous curry sauce while Tamil tunes tumble out of the radio. The air is sweet and a strange peace permeates the atmosphere.
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At first, only their muttering voices are audible, punctuated by giggles and chuckles which rise like soap bubbles, popping on the soft breeze. The little wheels of their overloaded trolley squeak as they push it towards the curb together, giggling and muttering, side by side. The two old women waddle and push and lift and push and bind the cardboard and push the trolley, step by step towards the coffee shop, where, with a squinching smile one of them presses some coins into the tall Indian mans hand in return for two transparent plastic drinking bags of coffee laced with condensed milk. They both sit on the foot-worn step and watch over their trolley laden with bundles of salvaged cardboard and they laugh softly and they mutter special words to each other, to themselves and to the swirling midnight ghosts in their private Chinese dialect. They sit together and pluck the invisible rays of happiness between them like the strings on a musical instrument and their soft bubbly music fills the air.
After they’ve sucked the last bit of warm, sweet, milky brown liquid into their toothless mouths, they neatly fold their little plastic bags and place them carefully on top of their precious cardboard bundles. Slowly, painstakingly, they help each other to stand up, they are surrounded by the smell of joss sticks and tiger balm and by silent breaths whispered by the infinite ghosts of their ancestors, who smile upon them. They mutter in their dialect and side by side they continue pushing their overloaded trolley. Their bodies are bent from the weight of life and the pull of gravity, they are at one with each other. They are at one with the strange peace that surrounds them in the sweet soft air.
One of the pushing pair is momentarily tugged aside by a beckoning distraction, a lily so white that it cuts a star shape into the blackness around it. She stoops slightly and pinches the flower free of its stem with her crooked and wrinkled fingers. Without a word she holds it extended from the index fingers of her palms pressed together like a prayer, to the person that shares her connection, her story, her happiness.
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The lily extends from her fingers bearing a powerfully scented memory, a message from the distant past, an omen indicating the presence of the spirits of the war dead. It draws tears over their smiling cheeks as it draws them back to the time when the first rays of invisible sunshine bridged their fates and bonded them for life. Back to the days of pain and blood when they were forced to watch their young husbands being beheaded by crazed Japanese blades and when they had heard the screams of their children being shredded by drunken British bullets. Those days of murder and terrible loss is what brought their world into being, their world of knowing, their world of protection.
They hadn’t known each other before the struggle, the escape, the weeks of crippling hunger and burning thirst in a jungle infused with the stench of death and violence, fear and war. They hadn’t even known each other’s names while they were helping each other survive for those blurred weeks of running and hiding from the evil that was ripping into their souls. They helped each other crawl through the dirt, drinking from stinking stagnant puddles and eating the flesh of putrefying animals, stolen rice and fruit foraged from forest trees. They pushed the boundaries of existence together, without knowing each other, until that strangely peaceful night when they could finally rest and the echoing screams stopped ringing in their ears and they were captivated by the heavenly sweet scent of a white lily cutting the shape of a star into the blackness around it.
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