THE CITIZEN

Home as physical place and psychic state of mind, a nest to store your soul and your livelihood, your memories with your loved ones littering the walls and the floors, the odours of domestication and arguments and the trivialities of life absorbed then re-emanated in the twilight and the dawn -- a reminder of the history of romance, regrets, arguments and silence of a relationship. 

Home. The physical journal of a life, accumulating as the long tail our poor lives of existing and survival, no longer passionate, no longer energetic, just another soul conditioned to automation as the walls that initially communicated solace transform to the glass cases of a museum and finally to the jail cell of modern civilization, opening and closing like clockwork for the population, the protoplasm of industry, to spill out into to the veins and arteries and muscles of the metropolitan machine connected to the god of commerce and media and raw power, the unholy partnership of the phallus of destruction and vagina of obliteration. 

I wake up from a nightmare of children. Mutant children, genetically mine but descended from something else, some kind of demonic entity, blasting themselves around my home and ruining the walls carved with my past. Lego bricks, decapitated doll heads, monster trucks, faux fur from soft toys, baby food and baked beans lodging themselves into the folds of my brain: Pasir Ris sunsets, December rain, sweat evaporating under a ceiling fan. I turn to Joanne: she’s still sound asleep. Reality is still here. Everything is fine. I console myself, it was just a dream. 

And then I smell the shit. 

I tip-toe to the laundry, the faint voice, unmistakably Indian, leading me on. Peeping from the ledge, I see it, and him. A lone Indian man in a tank top and sarong, talking on the phone and holding his nose, standing under a lone security light. He’s standing next to a gigantic pile of shit. I think to yell, and then stop -- I’m smarter than this. If I yell, he will run. So I tip-toe to the kitchen, taking out a knife and a heavy kitchen ladle from the drawer, and let myself out of the flat.

He’s still there when I reach the unloading area. I scream and lunge at the man with the kitchen handle, brandishing the knife in the other hand. The fool drops his cigarette and runs. His slippers slap clumsily on void deck concrete, his sarong constantly threatening to drop. We weave through the pillars, benches, stone tables, elevators and hedges of the void decks. The fool cries out for help, but I know what’s what: I know that I am heir to this entire soulless piece of land known as the Lion City, and I will purge it of freeloading, shit dumping, immigrants that think of my land, my people as their stepping stone to some kind of higher freedom, making use of our lack of soul, of spine, of gumption, to treat us like tools. 

No! I say. No more! Starting today, I, the reincarnation of Lee Kuan Yew, will tear this artifice down and bring back the utopic period of our roots, our past, long since forgotten in the rush for the approval of an indifferent world order. I will make them sit up, and I will stamp our country on the conjunctions of export flows, the rivers of money from East to West, from West to East, the proud Singaporean man standing tall with his own culture, his own roots, his own beliefs -- a lone force directing the currents of economic, cultural, political powers across the globe. 

I dive for the Indian man’s legs. His sarong falls along with his person, and I straddle his body, his bare legs flailing about behind me, his arms in front of me attempting to molest my face, and his disgusting mouth crying out for help. I slap his face multiple times, demanding reasons -- reasons for his defecating outside my window, reasons for coming to my country, reasons for his incorrigible disrespect against his host nations’ hospitality. He starts to gibber in tamil, so I pick up the kitchen knife and brandish it against his face, my hand surprisingly steady, and lower my voice, repeating my questions matter-of-factly against his whimpering. 

He begins to calm down, and I continue to hold the knife against his cheek. Around me, the crickets have started up again. The pathways between the blocks of HDB flats, some covered walkways, some pavement, remain empty -- ciphers of human movement, prescribed by the government, sparsely lit by perpendicular outgrowths of energy saving lamps from the ground. The Indian man begins to speak in a halting voice, and I black out.