As an emotional backdrop to this piece, I should make a disclosure to my readers that I had just tendered my resignation this morning. I believe I had just joined the many souls whose beads were torn off from their string, of a dream or hallucination that had led them to a place where they realise they no longer belong. And even so, they would not have escaped the crucible any sooner than the time that was already served; for being there, showed them a lot more about their own soul, as onion skins licked off by a coal flame. In this way, Penang, is my crucible.
Penang had started calling to me since the year when i left college. I made a secret pact with myself that I would in due time sign into what Penang had, in its most ambiguous ways, offered me. It took me another 2 years to make good the promise.
Penang is full of people who came to watch Penang. A lot of them came with an eye of appreciation whether for all the varieties of art, film, photography… Having given a place in the UNESCO Heritage Council, many efforts have been made towards acknowledging the identity of the old town, retaining its old face, and then re-igniting it in a contemporary fire, feeding off gunpowder that seems to lace the air in George Town. People from all over the world come flocking over and under her wall paintings, into her galleries and theatres, museums, and where every street corner houses an old curiosity shop, there you’ll find someone who’s ever eager to exalt its presence. But as a medic working on the ambulance going mostly to where trouble is, I immediately find myself coming into very close quarters with people who are not pickled in the world of technological pretentiousness or abstractions. I get a backstage pass to the deep aisles and valleys of the city, and i saw many things.
Working and living in Penang helped me appreciate Penang in a totally different spirit, it’s almost like walking in an adjacent neighbourhood looking in. It is strange how one would think that living in a place should paint for you a picture that is more intimate than those brought home by tourists. But that is the problem. When Penang have you, she won’t be satisfied being just a picture. She wants consume you, tease you, challenge you by exposing just how vulnerable and restless you are. With her myriads of small economies hawking wares and food, her incessant and convoluting traffic, her religious festivals sprinkled across the calendar, this town is unlike any other vibrant and lively town. This town has a spirit that runs deep in the veins underground, a pulse that is inaudible but as gravity pulls, it causes you to vibrate, and resonate with her, she seeps into under your skin and takes over your circadian rhythm, as a bass beat you cannot but allow your heart to thump with. This life, is not just liveliness, but as a sun, calls forth humans to participate in life.
It had not been easy for me living in Penang. As beautiful as she is, she has a way of unsettling me. There was not one day that passed where I did not feel challenged by the spiritual strength that people here exhibit. I did not notice how frustrated i was until I left for Kuala Lumpur for a short vacation, and having the frame of mind of a distant observer. Over the weekend, I had the honour of meeting an acquaintance, whose heart, as still waters would allow your conversations to reveal the ripples that yearns release from an imprisoned head. Her voice broadcasts the sense of a natural metronome, the timing of earth, who also understood that rhythm is only important because of the sporadic tones and tunes it keeps in a silent duet. On that night, she took a polaroid shot of me with her eyes in low lights, showed me the dim photograph with me inside, and asked with a calm quietness, “Would you allow this person to be who she was, is, and ever will be?”
I always tell people what i had observed from Penang, is that when Penang is stripped off of her food, what she will be left with is her character. She is the type of woman who insists in all her imperfect and sometimes ugly ways, that whose lives she has, what beauty or filth she holds, what impatience and curtness she exhibits, in sinning or in praying, in tsunami and freak storms, she keeps them all, and she keeps them close to her heart as puppies to the warmth of their mother.
That time, I stumbled upon a voice workshop, and as the prelude to anything vocal, was posture and breathing exercises. We all had our eyes closed, anticipating an instruction to take deep breathes. But what the instructor told us was something I had not thought would be such a potent idea. With our eyes closed, being just there with our consciousness, we heard from the teacher, that we could draw in not just air, but a gentle, warm and loving breath. This, is what Penang is able to do. She is not friendly, nor is she nice, but Penang has love – of a fierce and calmly intimidating kind. As dough and yeast going into the clay oven, it cannot help but ripen and flourish into fresh and sweet smelling bread.
snout sniffer 