A Sultry Afternoon
so The Raffles Hotel tagline goes.
Closing my eyes as I lean back in the old barber’s chair, I feel the thick waves of heat engulf me as a gust blows from the west. Leaves, loose papers and dirt swirl around my feet and are swept down the cemented corridor, the floor polished by years of feet passing over it, some sticking to pools of oil under the parked motorcycles, while survivors are blown out on to the road to be whipped up by passing cars. Beads of sweat well up under my shirt and above my lips. Falling hair quickly sticks to it, like a badly applied moustache.
There is a hum of hawkers cooking and people eating in the coffeeshop behind, punctuated by sharp metallic clangs of the pilers, their diesels purring loudly next door. A motorcycle throbs past, and all of a sudden, it feels overwhelmingly like India, or perhaps Singapore in the fifties - not that I will have ever known it, for I am a younger man visiting a barber’s shop by the roadside not three hundred meters from where I live. The year is 2006, but the two of us are framed in an age gone by, if only for the next fifteen minutes.
His clientele are old men, men who have seen the war, and possibly both wars at that. Men whose faces are mottled with the scars of time, whose limbs are wrapped in a shrunken web of skin. A man sits in the chair next to mine, his feet bulging as though full of water, the cracked skin pulled taut, like a wine skin about to split. Another comes along, parks his umbrella behind a stool, reaches under the table for the newspaper, sits down and glances briefly at my red Bridgestone glinting in the sunlight. I sneeze.
"Xin lai de" - a new customer. We talk of old times and a new term in school. He tells me that Channel U recently did a show on him. He laments the delay at receiving his VCD. I look at my haircut in the mirror, and cannot help but remember Kenny’s haircut in that same chair, which turned out like a badly worn toupee, much to his dismay and the amusement of all his friends. I burst out laughing.
I remember our film and the filming - a distant memory of the good old times. Someday, my barber like the ones before him, will pass on. I wonder if yet another will take his place at the helm, trimming the nose hairs of all the old men in the neighbourhood, shaving their faces and towelling them dry in the noon day heat, as the four before him have done for decades past.
Or will these men mourn the loss of yet another of their time, and turn resignedly to the modern shops with cooled air and metronomed music, or will they travel in search of yet another roadside barber, the last of their kind in a modern world?
The wind changes direction, and sweeps more leaves under the table. It blows the hair off my cloth gown and into the faces of the waiting customers. They sit back, unfazed, gazing serenly at the world passing by. Each day, each moment a blessing, for their time is over, and the world we live in, their creation.
