Tropical Fish

It is nearly midnight when he comes home. A research report has to be ready in a fortnight, and he likes working in his office: quiet, spacious, shelves of books and references within reach. A few sandwiches, some cups of coffee and tea, and time passes without him realising.

The hallway is dark, and then the light flashes. He looks up. There is a shockwave of red in the bigheaded pearl bulb, trembling, struggling to bring forth brightness. He noticed it last night, was hoping the bulb would be replaced by now. He was hoping his father would take care of it as he always does. But. He scratches his head and makes a mental note: Change the bulb in the morning. He turns the switch off and moves slowly to the hall. He is careful not to wake his father up.

He approaches the floor lamp but drops his hand before it reaches the switch. He sits instead - jacket and shoes on, document bag by his side – slumping heavily into the couch in the dark silence. Tiredness quietly crawls into his pores, seeping through his veins. He lets them, eyes closed, hands and legs sprawled, feeling the heaviness on his limbs, head and eyelids.

He sits.

There is a sound, so soft that it is almost inaudible, burr-burr-burr-burr, droning across the quietness. He opens his eyes.

At the end of the hallway, a faint streak of light sneaks out from under the door of a room. His father’s.

He makes his way to it and opens the door onto a flush of faint yellow, spreading from the glass box on the desk by the bed, the only source of light in the room. An aquarium. Waves and ripples cast moving shadows on the wall. In the water there are tiny specks of movement.

He frowns. In the dark corner his father lies asleep facing the wall. A strange hue of yellow gleams on the upward side of the old man’s wrinkled face. He wonders when and why and how his father got the fishes. Without consulting him.

He closes the door, shutting the light behind him, yet the monotonous droning of the air pump follows him.

Burr-burr-burr-burr. Burr-burr-burr-burr.

Like the humming of killer insects from the nether world as told in the folktales.

***

He keeps his eyes closed long after his son has left the room. He wonders what the young man makes of it, the aquarium. What he would think of him if he told his son that he pointed at the glass tank and fishes, showed his fingers to the shop owner for his orders. That the shop owner counted the notes in his palm and shook his head, and so he had to use the supplementary credit card (in case, just in case you have to buy something more than twenty pounds) he carefully kept in his secret pocket. That the kind man not only drove him home but also set up the aquarium for him, fully equipped with light, air pump, filter, thermostat and heater, plants and ornamental rocks, and food for the fishes.

There is a sound of toilet-flushing. He hears his son’s footsteps leave the bathroom and then disappear into the bedroom.

He went for his usual walk this morning. His daily routine: two flights down to the ground, left turn, ten minute walk to the main street, past the cinema and on to the pedestrian zone. Then shop after shop: the café, the newsagent, the many department stores with mannequins in the windows (he knows by heart the prices of the clothes they wear), the bookshop (the colourful pictures and book jackets are pleasing to the eye).

Six months on and the shop owners and sales assistants know him. He reads in their eyes: The strange old man who wanders in every day and buys nothing. So sometimes he prefers to take long walks up and down the street, as if trying to make up the amount of energy he would have consumed if he were still there, ploughing or sowing the fields. Or harvesting the crops. He would think about his friends, the chats they had over packed lunch under the trees, the sharing of tips on seeds and soil. Other times, though, he would sit on the bench in the pedestrian zone, and if he has remembered to bring them, he gets out breadcrumbs for the pigeons and watches them flapping and competing for food.

But today, he decided to venture further afield.

He walked, straight on towards the end of the main street, turned right, then left. Straight on. Another turn. And another. When the pale winter sun ceased in the early afternoon, he knew he was lost. He felt the coins and two ten pound notes in the left hand pocket of his jacket, and his son’s calling card (in case you are lost or something) in the right, complete with the young man’s office contact at the front and home details at the back. He took up the card, recognising the numbers but not the addresses. Imagining the young man cracking his head in front of the computer in his office, he put the card back in his pocket.

His legs began to feel heavy, a siege of weariness. He squatted down and kneaded his calves, and cursed: Useless. Only six months and his body was beginning to fail him. He had tried to make himself useful. Tried to tighten the screws and joints of chairs and tables that were loose. Clean the bathroom and kitchen, hall and rooms, stairs and landing. Scrub the pots and pans. Mend the cracked tiles. But this morning—. He sighed, recalling his shameful failed attempt to change the light bulb in the hallway. His legs trembled as he climbed the ladder.

He shook his head. It seemed only yesterday that he had cycled for miles in the narrow paths of the countryside to the fields, marketplace and beyond.

Useless.

He felt the card in his pocket with his hand. Let it drop again. A sudden gust of wind sent a chill spell. He pulled his jacket tighter and shivered inside it. Looking around, he found himself in a side lane off the main road. In the darkening winter afternoon, yellowish streetlight flooded the foggy air. At the end of the lane a sign glowed faintly, reflecting the light. There were fishes, colourful, scattered on the aluminium board as though they were swimming through yellow waves.

He walked towards it.

Lying in bed he stares at the wave-shadows on the wall, recalling the moment when he first caught sight of the fishes. In a corner of the shop, catfishes hid at the bottom of the aquarium. Long, dark, ugly. Like the eels burrowing in the muddy pools of the paddy fields. He would catch plenty of them during the rainy seasons and sell them in the marketplace.

Thinking back, he is surprised at how he had, almost instantly, pointed at them and counted his fingers to the shop owner waiting to one side.

Burr-burr-burr-burr. Burr-burr-burr-burr.

Like an orchestra of the active lives in the fields at night: the frogs and toads, crickets and cicada. Familiar and soothing. He sleeps.

***

It is already afternoon when he feels the gradual chilling of his office, and knows the central heating system has broken down again. It has happened so often lately, apparently a major technical fault which needs the urgent attention of the management. Yet. He shakes his head, warms himself with a big gulp of coffee, and suddenly the burnt-out bulb in the hallway at home comes to mind. He pats his head and reminds himself, yet again, to replace it.

A push at the desk, and he glides himself away from it in his chair. Leaning back, he averts his gaze from the computer screen. On top of the pullout cabinet the corner of an atlas sticks out from under a heavy pile of research reports, books and journals. He draws it out, striving to keep the load above it intact. Sweeping aside his notepads and pens, he opens the post-it-ed page of the atlas and lays it on the desk.

It has an awkward shape, the place he comes from. Some compare it to a sweet potato, but others—. He laughs, remembering the geography lessons of his adolescent years. Some of the bolder boys in the class took to embarrass the young miss into blushing with sketches of a giant penis for their homeland. He didn’t. Instead he spent those sweaty nights in the wooden house, his family home, poring over his books and atlas, and then impressed his teacher with accurate figures of populations and land areas, the correct sources and quantities of income, the names, locations and patterns of mountains and rivers. He felt close to them, as he knew it was the lives of his fellow countrymen that he was reading. He could see the trees and waters, fields and cattle. The people, and what they did.

But now.

He studies the map, observing the toned browns for highlands, greens for the plains and blues for waters. The square mark for the capital, bigger dots for cities, smaller ones for towns, and the names on them.

For a week he has been scrutinising the map. Time is running out and his report is heading nowhere. He flicks through the data he had collected on his last research trip back home, the results of numerous interviews, questionnaires, surveys and figures from the Department of Statistics. It was a successful trip, not only did he gather a handful of materials for his paper, but he also managed to persuade his father to leave with him. It’s time for you to relax, for me to serve you, he told his old man.

The respondents he picked at random from the village for his interview were mostly as old as his father, an apparent fact to note yet again: the village is emptying of younger people. There have been talks of a university town in the suburbs, aiming at re-capturing the lost generations. Scholars like him who have made their names abroad have been invited to forums on the subject. He has never attended.

He spent long hours talking to his respondents, by the fields, at the open air roadside tea stalls and marketplaces, and in their homes, where he was treated with generous servings of sweet tea and curry-puffs.

He checks the notes for the records of their details: name, age, occupation, marital status, family members, and more. A long list of them, in his clear, forceful handwriting. He thinks hard, but is unable to trace the faces to which these particulars belonged, the men and women who sat so close to him, who breathed into his face and ears as they talked. Who served him with tea and desserts.

Vague, distant.

Even the taste of the hot and spicy curry-puff seems to have eluded him.

He puts down his papers and refers to the map again, running his finger along the coastal line, mountains and rivers, cities and towns, rail track and highways. Flat. Nothing more than colourful printouts of lines, symbols and names.

Another push, and he is away from the desk again. This time he swivels his chair so as to face the window. Outside, there are traces of white flakes, loose, sparse, whirling down from the sky. In seconds, lumps of snow begin swirling down. Everything turns pale and grey. In the near distance, the sharp spire of the landmark building of the institution to which he now belongs pierces the snow curtain.

Like the picture he once saw years ago.

It was on a school trip to the capital for an education fair. It’s time to plan for your future, the head teacher said. Future? He scratched his head. The hall was filled with stall after stall of brochures and prospectuses, and people. He walked from one stall to another, first with his friends, later alone when he had lagged behind. Flicked through the leaflets and booklets. Shied away when the white men and women approached him with accents he couldn’t understand. Then. In the brochures in one of the stalls, the picture stood up. It is the main building of a university in the faraway land: tall, solemn and solid, demanding respect. He stared at it, long and hard, until the crowd dispersed, until the anxious head teacher found him in a secluded corner of the hall, alone, holding the brochure.

That night, he cut out the picture, pinned it on the wall by his bed and quietly promised himself he would be part of it.

As he glides closer to the window he keeps his eyes on it, the dream spire of his youth, framed in a square of windowpane. Right in front of him. He holds out his hand, touches not the pinnacle but glass; feels not the concrete of the building but the outside chill that seeps through the thin layer of glass. His palm lies flat on it, unable to move further.

Cold.

He wraps his arms across his chest, considering whether to have another cup of coffee.

The phone rings.

***

A pattern of yellow and red light falls on his son’s face through the window as the ambulance speeds forward. There are intervals of darkness, on streets or parts of streets where the lights and neon do not reach. From the position of the stretcher he lies on, he is unable to see the young man’s expression. Unable to read his thoughts.

A bump, and the stretcher wobbles. A sharp, tearing pain bursts out in his right leg. He moans.

His son leans forward, holding onto the sides of the stretcher, and then his shoulder and arm. It feels warm, the young man’s palms. He stares up to his son’s worried eyes, only inches away, and feels the intermittent puffs of the young man’s breath on his face.

When was the last time we were so close together? He thinks hard.

The ambulance speeds ahead.

***

He returns home alone. Come back tomorrow; he’ll be fine with us, the doctor said. He let’s the main door open, and light sneaks in from the naked bulb in the landing. In the soft yellowish hue he examines the hallway: the ladder on the floor, the debris of the light bulb, the trail his father made as he dragged himself to the hall; and inside the hall, the slant side table and the telephone on the floor. He imagines how the old man had fallen, broke his leg and lay for hours before struggling to ring him. His first call in the six months since he joined him.

It must have been intolerable, the pain.

He puts the ladder back in the storeroom, clears the debris, rights the side table and puts the telephone in place. His heart tightens as he recalls how his father had lain moaning on the floor when he rushed home.

Burr-burr-burr-burr. Burr-burr-burr-burr.

He stares ahead. A flood of faint yellow light pours through the open door of his father’s room. Feed the fishes, the old man told him at the hospital.

He enters the room, does not turn on the light but goes straight to the aquarium instead.

Catfishes, four of them, hide at the bottom of the glass tank.

He strains his eyes, tries hard but there is no sign of angelfishes or guppies or swordtails, the hobbyists’ favourites: colourful and attractive. Nor can he find, at least, a goldfish.

Only catfishes.

He shrugs, takes the jar of fish food from the table and lifts the hood of the aquarium. A gust of heat and smell comes rushing to his nose. The smell. Suddenly he remembers the muddy soil at the riverside of his childhood, the rotten leaves and dead insects fast decomposing in the hot, humid days. It was under the shadowy trees by the river that he and his friends went, every afternoon after school, to catch fighting fishes or stage fights with the fishes they caught.

He especially liked those with dark colours, purple or blue. He would admire them for long hours after he had finished his homework. They don’t like sunlight, though, the fighting fishes. So he always kept them in separate glass jars in a dark corner of his house. His father let him, built a two-tier wooden case for him to house his pets, indulging him in his hobby.

Father.

He holds his breath and stares at the catfishes, this time with his father’s eyes.

Long, dark, ugly. FAMILIAR.

The smells of soil and leaves and insects have grown stronger. He breathes in, long and deep, and understands.

***

The evening breeze caresses his face and ears as he cycles, balancing the basket at the back of his bicycle, loaded with sweet potatoes and swamp cabbage fresh from the plantation. There are occasional whisks of reeds against the sides his legs as he moves along the path, soft and comforting.

He is thinking about his dinner tonight. Chicken curry, maybe, his son’s favourite.

The setting sun behind him casts a golden glow on the hill in the far distance. There are flashes of light at the foot of the hill. He squints. The multi-storey buildings of the new university town look like toys from the distance. The penthouses gleam reflecting the evening rays. He knows that soon his son will be driving home from one of the office buildings.

His shadow extends itself in front of him as he pedals ahead. A young man jogging along the path smiles at him. He nods, smiles back, and speeds up.