Try fly, he said

It was 3.46am when the cell-phone beeped. My elder brother had messaged to say he’s now a dad. First-time dad, and twins too. I was still up working – I work best at night – and immediately called to congratulate the dude. Too bad you’re in Singapore, I told him, I’d love to have a cigar with you right now.

The mother’s doing well, he tells me. Good.

We laughed quite a bit. He was obviously overjoyed with the new additions. We laughed the laughter only brothers share with each other. I felt good for him. The man deserved it.

He's three years older than me and we’ve come a long way together.

It was he who untangled me from the chain-link fence way back when I was a five-year-old. We were trying to do a shortcut to a neighbor’s birthday party and I got stuck in all the wires. When I was six, he held my hand and taught me to draw. At seven, he placed a ball at my feet and said, kick dammit.

At 16, he placed a book by my head prone on the pillow and said, read this dammit. It was Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I tried but it hurt my head. It was full of those Aristotle and Socrates and Plato stuff, and my hormones were pointing to another direction altogether.

In the ensuing years, we developed along separate paths. He remained steady as a rock, and I, the middle child, became the wanderer. As we grew older, he didn’t so much as teach anymore – he couldn’t, we ran on different fuels – rather he enabled.

He didn’t know it then, but these hands that he taught to draw would today draw for a living. These feet he taught to kick, well, they’ve grown to shun mediocrity and strive to kick ass instead. As for Pirsig’s ZAMM, I did finish it and have since reread it numerous times. It remains one of my favourite books, although my head still hurts. Perhaps even more.

In many ways, while my brother dug down in the trenches and moved in-step with the workings of the world, he set me on a ledge and said: “Go ahead. Try to fly. Or you’ll never know.”

I tried and I still don’t know. But I do know the man’s there when I need deep insights. That’s only because he helps me answer my own questions. Like the time I seriously wondered if I shouldn’t be working in Singapore. I was fresh back in the region and feeling the discomforts of culture shock. By all rational measures, the scales tipped heavily towards Singapore. I made a trip to the island and sought my brother’s views.

Over at the kopi-tiam below his HDB flat that evening, in between gulps of kopi-o, I described my dilemma. I skewed it in favour of the Lion City.

“Look,” I pointed to an SBS bus driving past, “Public transport works here! The civil service works here! Things just work! It seems commonsensical, but people with the right skills are in the right place, by and large. And they’re constantly thirsting for ideas. Architecture-wise, you can tell there’s more discourse. They’ve done wonders to the river. We? We turned Klang River into a bloody longkang….yadda yadda yadda…. Tell me how we measure against that back home.”

Brother was silent for a while. He chewed on his boiled kailan and stared towards the shady angsana-lined street.

“I moved here because I’m more relevant here. You did too, many years ago,” he finally said.

“And then you left. Now – what eight, 10 years? – you’ve come back to this region giving up what you had described to be a good life in Oregon. A rich and challenging experience, you said. But between a Green Card and Southeast Asia, you decided this place had stronger appeal. You’ve actually come back.

“Why did you really come back?

“Was it to fight the good fight or did you expect a bed of roses?

“In your emails from abroad you wrote about the unique texture of Southeast Asia and its towns and cities and how these need to be managed with sensitive hands. You wrote about how local materials ought to be pushed. You wrote about the beauty of brick and clay and rattan and bamboo. And you talked about rain and how it is material, like light is material. You talked about social architecture. Frankly, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I’m trained in accountancy. But I’m damned curious.

“So, you gave up the good life and chose a cause. Why did you really come back?”

This time it was I who was silent for a while. In simple symmetry, I chewed on boiled kailan and stared towards the darkened angsana-lined street.

Two youths on trendy mountain bikes complete with biker shorts and torpedo-shaped helmets zipped by. Canggih to the max. And almost instantly, I recall a scene just outside Temerloh many years ago. A father – he must have been a farmer – cycling his little daughter back from school in the bleaching afternoon sun. I remember our bus passed the primary school quite a few kilometres back. Somehow for that brief second, the little girl sitting on daddy’s crumbling bicycle, uniform reddish from laterite dust, looked at me and I her. She smiled the toothiest grin. Two bicycle scenes sat side by side inside me for a brief moment – sleek versus warmth divided by a razor-thin wall.

It was then when I realized why I really came back.

Brother does that to me. He knows the acupuncture points to my Being. Brother has been there as an anchor and a compass all through my life. He’s gifted at that but probably doesn’t realize it.

He’ll make a fabulous father and I am happy for his kids.

And brother, I’ll try my darndest to show you rain is material. I’ll show you sensitive social architecture is more beautiful than any fancy-ass architecture anyday. I’ll walk the walk and fight the good fight. Now that you’ve pointed me home.