FATHERS

Father died in his little room while I was abroad. An e- mail informed me, and though the family could have afforded my airfare back, they said it was better if I tended to my struggles freelancing here.
The advice made sense to a degree. Father was out of my life between the ages of four and 22, till three years ago. And though I knew for the last year the cancer had been nibbling away pretty good, I hardly thought about him.
To this day, I harbor no desire to piece together his past. I am content with the little I know–that he had spent time in a Nazi concentration camp, that six of his seven siblings had starved to death when the Germans cut the rail lines, that he might have been a Communist, and that he had wished since he was a boy to have a son who would become a famous violin player. I am his only child.
I mention him because I see now that who he was–or wasn't–had something to do with why I chose to settle in this fast-developing "paragon of tolerance and diversity" in the first place.
Not much else did. Not then. I could say the editing did, but then I could have done that from other places. I could say the exotic, but then it looks more like home here than anything out of Henry Morton Stanley's diary. I could say the religion, and there might be something to that (as a Westerner abroad these days being with the Muslims matters) but only about two-thirds of the population is Muslim, and they lacked the air of zealotry that makes such endeavors seem meaningful.
Mostly, though, going somewhere– anywhere–"foreign" was my attempt to settle the score, to rid myself of one-half of my history, Dad's history, which never felt like mine to begin with.
Most everything I remember about him boiled down to snippets, like during our last visit, in response to my decision to come here, "You don't care to see vheres the faters is from? In time, in time–vhat is tis?"
He leaned back in the window booth of his friend's Midtown diner, long face bruised-gray as an Austrian church, knobby thumbs looped into his alligator belt, polished shoes set flat and wide–a specter of disgust, a shadow of elegant surrender. I sensed he felt the weight of his neglect, that for the first time he realized I wasn't him–or his–that he had nothing to show as a father.

I settled in a blind neighborhood across from the new train station; three blocks of crumbling four-story concrete; the sidewalk lain with striations of yellow rubber; every few doors leading up a dank stairwell to a blind massage and Super Sauna. After a while you didn't notice the blind people any more than they noticed you. Sure, they caused the occasional disruption. They might run into a table of beer-drinkers (to which I heard a man slur once, "Whose drunk now?"), drift up the dotted white, or mistake a brothel entrance for 7-11. But they weren't odd by comparison, next to the spandex-clad old women harrumphing their way through stacks of cardboard, the Cantonese- speaking junkies flashing sheathes of pirated DVDs from their seats along the curb; or Jamu, the limbless boy wonder who snatched up used condensed-milk cans with his teeth, thrashing his head about like a dog tearing meat as he flung them into the bamboo basket on his back. And the tap of their canes was less disruptive than the azan's call, Vishnu's bells, or the karaoke that rang till late through my alley-facing window.
I loved it all, even if, to them, I appeared like the blind one, someone who'd hung a wrong left at the train station. There you saw tourists, white folk, but not here, which I cherished: slipping into a dissolving shadow of breakneck progress; the Sheratons, the KFC's, the mega malls and light rails, all I'd known and was trying to get away from.
It helped that I found a local housemate, an affable graduate student, Razali, who in his own way was a little out of sorts in the neighborhood: his family had moved around, from England to the States to Singapore before resettling here when he was 16. "I don't have that kampong mentality, you see."
That was the first morning of the fasting month, and he was at the dining room table, robe undone, smoking a cigarette, wincing like poison into the sunlight slanting across his frying rice.
As the month progressed he grew bolder, parking himself with his exam books at the sidewalk tables downstairs, ordering food and drink as he wished.
"Hey brother Roommate," he would say whenever I passed on the way to the library, or the train station for inspiration that rarely came. "Come join brother Roommate for a teh o ice, la. Let's watch the blind watch us, ah."
This was dangerous because he was Malay. The Malays, a race by one definition, were born into Islam, and Muslims were prohibited from violating fasting hours. The Malay could not hide.
When dusk arrived and others in the neighborhood gathered in front of food carts to break fast, Razali was usually fast asleep or tweaking his building designs on his Mac, or in the dining room smoking and drinking powdered Milo with his friends.