Rating: T
Word Count: 2,183 (part 2) & 4,138 (total)
Summary: Speculative fiction/ urban fantasy. A life for a war. A photograph for a friend. Just before he ends his National Service, Navin is sent to the rebels to negotiate for the release of a fellow servicewoman. But with the war still raging, all he has to give him hope is a photograph she gave him years ago.
[Read Part 1]
My Heart is a weapon the size of your photograph (Part 2)
"Detail 2 chamber 1 firer 2" by Kairin on Flickr
6.
Just before the thousand and five hundred day anniversary to mark Fatehah’s capture, Wee Ming and I meet in a coffeeshop near his house ending training.
Back from deployment, he eats and smokes more than usual. He pats me on the back with a thick sunburnt hand, and sits like a towkay, polishing his bare knee with a meaty palm. He tells me stories out in the combat zone, patrolling hostile towns that look like Singapore in the 1950s. He tells me how much he misses the days at basic training.
“I didn’t enlist and serve NS to kill kids overseas and knock down other people’s doors lah,” he says, more than once.
“It’s just one more deployment before you ORD,” I tell him.
“Yeah man. One more till I get my pink I/C back.”
Again, he does most of the talking. But before he leaves, he asks me about Fatehah. He asks me for news.
“A letter, and some very blur Youtube videos,” I say, and then I surprise myself by saying: “I know she’s alive.”
“Fuck sia. Those fuckers.”
Then he asks about Fatehah’s photograph. I stay silent, but eventually pluck it out from my breast pocket and hand it over. He treats it carefully, like he’s observing a bomb, and spends along moment looking at the girl in the photograph, Fatehah’s Janna.
“I wonder what she thinks sia. Her girlfriend in that massacre and don’t know if alive or not.”
“She’s alive,” I repeat.
Before he leaves, he says: “You should find her.”
“What?”
“This girl lah. This Janna person. You know right? Tell her about Fatehah during basic training. Can tell her what you and her where talking about that night at the gate.”
We agree. We talk about asking our police contacts and friends in the academy. Wee Ming promises to help me once he’s back from deployment to find her.
Much later, the three-tonner transporting Wee Ming and his battalion flips while crossing a hill. And his face and his honorary rank his appears in The Straits Times, in a specially sponsored page in between the sports and business sections.
With the mission approaching, Staff Sergeant Kwan does not grant me compassionate leave to attend his funeral.
7.
As the negotiations go on between the higher command levels of both sides, the Resistance wants to show that Fatehah is alive as a sign of goodwill to the people of Singapore. So they take me deep outside the safe zone, into the rural country on one of their vehicles. Staring out the window, in the square of light I see sunshine pouring over emerald-green fields, filling them with light like a container. We pass towns, quiet and sepia-toned like an old photograph.
But there are overturned tanks bleeding rainbow slicks of diesel fuel. Children wander around them like flocks of desolate birds. Burned out buildings sit like ashy scars on the landscape.
Two escorts guide me into a building bristling with barbed-wire. They tell me to have dinner with them. Over the lapping tongues of a kerosene fire, we share bread and Ayam brand curry. When they laugh and joke, they remind me of the JC kids who report for enlistment at Tekong every month.
When I ask when I will be able to see Fatehah, they say: “Tomorrow. Tomorrow we see sister soldier.”
Before we turn in for the night, they give me a pillowcase thinner than paper and gunny sack for a blanket. They lock the doors and radio their higher command. They load their guns. When I reach for something in my bag, they swing their guns at me.
“No – no – no… Relax!” I pull out my Bible. I put my hands together and mimic praying. “Me. Pray?”
Both of the escorts look at each other. Then they turn their back to me and lie down. Their rifles remain cuddled in their arms like bolsters.
In the piss-coloured light, I read: And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
Outside, airplanes buzz in the distant night sky like insects. The whoop of air raid sirens echo from some faraway town.
And in the margin at the top of my Bible, I trace with hot ash from the fire: 1811 DAYS.
8.
Before leaving for the mission, I take a bus down to Orchard Road to visit Fatehah’s parents as they keep their vigil outside the Istana.
Several people are at the corrugated steel memorial, even as a wispy drizzle soaks everything. Candles line the pavement, their wax trailing from the burnt-out stumps like teeth. A mushy carpet of flowers coats the grass patch. Policemen from the Istana loiter in their ponchos like oversized vultures.
Somebody has put up a photograph of Fatehah there, in laminated in plastic, at entrance to tent. She’s wearing her JC rugby jersey, with the ball nestled in the crook of her arm. A beard of sweat lingers on her upper lip. She stares at the camera, but her gaze is slightly off, as if she were looking at something outside of the photo itself.
Inside the tent, Fatehah’s father sits on plastic hair, looking as if he’s at an East Coast Park barbeque.
“Good afternoon, uncle,” I say.
He shakes my hand. He offers me a seat. He prepares tea. In return, clearing my throat, I tell him that Fatehah and I passed out from the same platoon. I tell him what the defence ministry has been assigned me to do.
Before I can finish, he holds up a hand. He covers his face with it, and he makes a strangled, choking noise. He gets up from his seat and leaves. Outside he raises his head to the TV-grey sky. A girl sitting by the other side of the tent goes up to him. He embraces her. He turns away again, this time to wipe his eyes on his sleeve.
The first thing I notice about the girl are her skinny jeans. Next, her skin: the colour of deeply bruised apricot. But when I see her face, I feel as if something’s hit me in the chest. I close my eyes. I open them again.
“You must be Janna,” I say.
She stares at me, both hostile and uncertain. She gently nudges Fatehah’s father aside. But before I can stop myself, my hand falls to my breast pocket, where the photograph I won from Fatehah sits as heavy as the conscience of one who hasn’t fired a single bullet during the entire war. I hold it out for her as I would a live grenade.
“Where did you get this?”
But when I tell her, she examines the photographs, her frown wrinkling her forehead with grooves. She takes a deep breath and holds out the photograph to me.
“Thanks, but you can take it back,” she says.
And: “I didn’t go through four years of shit in NS so that a guy could keep me safe.”
9.
When morning comes, both my escorts insist that I wear a blindfold before we proceed onto the next safe house. When I consent, they tie a sweaty rag around my eyes like a bandage. They usher me to the truck. Fuel fumes choke the interior of the truck as it bursts into movement.
They drive for hours. Sitting near an open window, the wind lashes at my face. In the dark, I hear the whisper of leaves on trees. Sometimes also: the sonic boom of aircraft followed by deep, punching blows to the earth, or the popping of machine gun fire from somewhere far behind. The proposed agreement, it seems, has yet to take effect – or has failed completely.
The truck bounces, travelling on rough terrain. A moment later, doors slam. The escorts pluck me from my seat and walk me across a ground thick with the shuffling of something like dead leaves.
When they remove the blindfold, the light warps my vision. But when things become clear, I realise I’m standing in the middle of a playground in a bombed-out school. And I’m surrounded by fighters from the Resistance.
The fighters prop their guns on their laps. Most of the fighters cover their faces with scarves or long shawls which loop around their shoulders. The only man whose face isn’t hidden – the likely commander – beckons me forward.
As gunfire clicks away beyond the empty shells of the buildings all around, he says calmly, as if stating a fact: “Your country sends children to my country to kill my children.”
Months of crisis negotiation training kick in, and I try to determine his tone, the simplicity of his words and the context of his statement. Instead, I reply: “If this continues, there’ll be no more children left.”
He laughs. Then, to my surprise, he flings at me the same question asked at every one of the panel interviews.
10.
The commander’s men bring me into the school. We skirt pass totems of ash, melted tables and scraps of clothing burnt into insane black flowers. They turn down a corridor where a fire-blackened whiteboard lies on the middle of the floor like a corpse.
They take me through the school and into a courtyard overgrown with brown grass. A rusting container classroom with tinted windows sits on the far end, splashed with graffiti. Excitement makes me miss a step or two, which the commander’s men joke about. At the threshold, a sentry chucks his cigarette aside when he sees us. He is ordered to open the door.
He releases the lock and yells something to the interior. He escorts his prisoner out as if he were taking care of a queen.
The person who faces me is pale, with flaking lips and hair tumbling down like curtains over her eyes. Her hair looks as if it has been hacked by a machete. Her uniform, with its Third Sergeant insignia, is too faded and too big, puffing out over her like a second skin. It has the back of its collar turned inwards.
But she squints at me, turning her head to flash a scar at her temple. And I salute in return.
The first thing she says is: “Why haven’t you ORD-ed yet?”
When they return us to the safe zone, Fatehah and I sit at opposite ends of the truck. She watches the world moving by under the white flag hitched to the truck, wagging like an enthusiastic tongue. Her upturned hand and its twitching fingers lie in the space between us.
For a short, sharp moment, I want to take her hand. I want to feel the rough grooves of skin, reddened with splashes of old burns suffered during that massacre. I want to tug it to my heart, and want to tell her that so few people have believed her alive, and she’s in the same truck as one of them. I want to hold it, because she’s already a hero – because the mission is a success, because the war will probably end soon and I can really ORD, because finally I’m bringing Fatehah home –
But I don’t. Instead, I recover the photograph of Janna from my pocket and place it in her hands. Fatehah glances down at what’s in her hand. Her fingers curl around it, crumpling the film, holding onto it as if nothing else really mattered.
11.
So Fatehah returns to Singapore. We endure the mission debriefing and a hundred other formalities. There’s the customary act of saluting the Prime Minister when he meets her, a photo opportunity that will make it to his Facebook page. There’s the medical checkup to see where she should be deployed next, the defence ministry’s press conference, the congratulating all the old men in uniforms who took part in the successful return, all of whom will receive more medals. After all this, there’s still the mandatory live interview with Channel News Asia.
I watch the television crew and their cameras descend around Fatehah like a mob. As they question her, she answers with few words, but continuously looks to the right, away from the camera – or at something beyond it.
Following the line of her sight, I meet Janna at the gate to the camp. She’s in her number ones: the white ceremonial vest outlines her shoulders, and her hair is tucked into braids peeking out from the back of her peak cap. She holds a bouquet of blood red roses.
In uniform, I’m compelled to salute her as I pass. In doing so, her face creases into a frown once more. From her bouquet, she detaches a single rose stalk and hands it to me.
“What’s this for?” I ask.
“If a girl gives you something, accept it and shut the hell up,” she says. Then he tone softens and she asks: “She still remembers me?”
I remember Fatehah’s fingers like a cage around the crumpled photograph – the photograph now restored to its rightful owner, returned to its rightful place: tucked in the pocket of her uniform closest to her heart.
“Yes,” I say.
END
NOTES: This short story was prompted by a short, sad episode. It was fun writing about NS again, even though this story is more wistful fantasy than reality. (For the record, if my country's female population had to serve national service, I don't doubt they will outperform the males in terms of physical endurance, achievement and meeting the mark when they are called to it).
GLOSSARY OF SINGAPORE TERMS USED:
On National Service (NS)
A 22-month or 24-month compulsory conscription for all Singaporean males who have reached the age of 18. They serve either in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), Singapore Police Force (SPF) or Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF). Following the end of the compulsory period, they serve as reserve forces until the age of 40 or until they end their reserve cycles, whichever is earlier. Only officers serve till 50 years of age.
Started in 1967, Singapore's National Service is the third-longest in the world, after Israel and South Korea.
Other terms
Channel News Asia - Local news channel
Guards - An elite infantry division in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), trained to be deployed as helicopter-bourne troops. Like all vocations, Guards are recruit full-time National Servicemen (NSFs) and regular soldiers alike.
IPPT - Short for "Individual Proficiency Training Test", the basic test by which all servicemen are tested for fitness
Istana - (Malay for 'palace') The official residence and office of the President of Singapore
Long fours - (NS lingo) Standard issued uniforms
Mangkuk - (Malay for 'bowl') (Police NS lingo) Used as a term for new recruits, because their shaven hair makes their heads look like 'bowls'.
OCT - Short for "Officer Cadet Trainee". A policeman training to be a Police Inspector
ORD - Short for "Operationally-ready date". The end of compulsory full-time service after 22 months.
POP - Short for "Passing out parade". The parade thar marks the end of a recruits three months of basic NS training.
Pink I/C - Pink identity card issued to civilians. Normally kept by the military during NS, and only reissued after ORD.
NSF - Short for "National Service Full-Time". A serviceman undergoing his 22 months of national service obligations
NSmen - Short for "National Serviceman". A serviceman during his reserve period, usually lasting till 40 years of age.
Straits Times - Singapore's main English newspaper
Tekong - Short for "Pulau Tekong". The offshore island that hosts the army's basic military training facilities
Three-tonner - Truck used by the army for transport