By Yeo Wei Wei

The man sits on the daybed in the living room. He looks out of the window. There is a green wire fence between his house and the neighbouring residence. He sees the heliconia bihai his wife planted when they moved in a year ago - the generous leaves and the bracts that are coloured bright red, paling outwardly to orange. He hovers like a humming bird close to the coy flowers inside the watery field of the bracts. Retreating a slight distance backwards and upwards to gain perspective, his eyes take in the resemblance of the bracts to the arched fingernails of a Thai dancer resplendent in traditional dress. The bougainvillea tree takes up two-thirds of the view. There are no flowers. The man peers hard at the crown, feeling its roundness like a floret of broccoli cupped in the palm. His eyes enter into the bower, brushing against leaves, rejecting flatness. He sits and looks out of the window in this fashion every day after breakfast, on dry and wet days, summoning all the will left in his blood to concentrate on capturing every single detail until the wall under the window sways and his feet walk toward his face, or until his wife calls him to sit at the dining table because lunch is ready. He is studying the view for a purpose. The man is a painter and he is going to paint the view of this window.

It is an ordinary window with a view that scarcely anyone would pause to look at. The man's eyes tell him something else and the man trusts his eyes completely, more than even his wife. This relationship with his eyes was not a gift like the dexterity of his hand. He did not realize its primacy until the middle age of his career, so blinded was he by single-minded raw ambition and the sweetness of early won fame. He was among the first to bring the quality of light in this part of the world into his paintings, so different from that of the temperate climes where he studied for two years in his twenties. The immediacy of sight he had learnt from following the Impressionists was replicated in subjects that the European masters would have found exotic. He transposed traditional subjects of Chinese painting into oils. All but two of the paintings at his first exhibition were sold. The work he did next showed his skilfulness at representing the local. He painted Hindu temples with worshippers, Malay women washing by a river, Chinese labourers at a roadside stall. All the paintings were sold within a week. Some of them are now hanging on the walls of the museum of national art.

The man's greatest success was with his third exhibition. The paintings were mainly of still life. The man had fruit delivered to his studio every other day. Scattered on the floor, arranged on a table, absentmindedly placed on bookshelves, were bananas, rambutans, pineapples, papayas, mangoes, custard apples, and apples (in tribute to Cezanne). The man was in the middle age of his life as a painter and he was beginning to see the falsehood of his earlier penchant for the over-spilling of feeling on to canvas by means of grand expressive brushstrokes and transparent emotive composition. The man picked up a nail from the floor of his studio and studied it. He painted it without emotion. And he tried to do the same with the fruit he had arranged on the table. The man painted as if he had a fever and painting was the only way to bring the temperature down. He saw something irrevocable in the shape and solidity of each apple, each papaya and mango. The painted fruit had to show this in spite of the distance of translation, he realized, and he pursued this with the knowledge that it was both possible and necessary. The exhibition was a phenomenal success. This was partly due to a newspaper preview. A friend of his had seen the paintings at the man's studio and he brought other friends, one of them a journalist who dashed off a copy when he returned to the newsroom. The journalist wrote about the dawning of a new age in Southeast Asian art, praising the subtlety of the composition, the artless liveliness of the brushstrokes, the sufficiency of the colouring, and most of all, the effect the paintings had on grown men, visible even in those who did not care for art. The visitors had to be told firmly that they must not touch the paintings. Many left the studio with the sense that they had been treated to something inexpressible in words. One or two, painters too, were able to recognize the feat, and they felt the pang of having caught a glimpse of the realization that eluded their art. After the exhibition ended, the man went away for a few months. One hundred kilos of books were shipped and delivered to his house in his absence. He had spent all the money from the sale of his paintings on these crates of books. In an interview he said he was planning to read his way to another level in painting. Fruit was again delivered to the house every other day. The man was making more still life paintings and laughing all the way to the bank, people said.

Nobody saw the new paintings. Whatever form they took, it is safe to assume that they were the man's final masterpieces. Every single one was destroyed when the studio at the back of the house where he and his wife lived was razed to the ground in a fire a year ago. The studio was a shed in the backyard. The mango tree next to the shed was a blackened truncated sculpture. The man had inherited the house from his grandmother. It was there that he first held a brush in his hand and painted as if he were a copyist. Between what his eyes took in and what his brush translated on to the blank space propped on the easel, there was a distance as palpable as a wall. The day came when he witnessed a nail driven with gentle forcefulness into beloved flesh and bone. The image haunted him, especially on the lids of his closed eyes at night.

The man sits on the daybed in the living room. His eyes are closed. There are images dancing across the inside of his eyelids. The backyard at grandmother's house. The mango tree with plastic bags wrapped around its unpicked ripening fruit and the kitten he and grandmother saved from a drain close by, a grey ball of fur with white patches, a small triangular face, the dark cherry nose. The man looks on as the kitten climbs the tree. It is on the lowest branch and it looks down at him. He joins the kitten and when he looks he sees the horizon line disappear. The kitten starts to mew. Grandmother brings a stepladder. She says the kitten is too young to be climbing trees. He has to climb the ladder and rescue the poor thing. When the kitten is back on the ground, grandmother wraps her arm around him. He is a good boy, she says. The man sees the room where grandmother's body lies on the single bed. From a distance it looks like a Renaissance cartoon with every bit of space taken up by hunched figures and tearful faces, many of them alien to him. He pushes his way to her bedside and he sees the nail that is driven into her forehead. He touches her hand. It does not move. He lays his head on her chest. He hears a mewing sound. He strokes grandmother over and over with his small trembling palms but the mewing doesn't stop and someone pulls him away. The man is turning away to look for the window, it is almost a reflex now with him. He is looking at the view he will start to paint very soon, perhaps today. In a minute or two the heliconia will begin their courtly procession. It takes only a moment before he is back inside the soothing shade of the bougainvillea tree.

It is an ordinary window. Through the window come sounds from the garden – the whistles and squawks of birds, the chatter of cicada, the silent industry of ants, the drop of dew on a blade of grass. There was nothing of this homely nature in the subjects of the man's earliest works of note. They were large oil paintings of stormy seas and monumental mountains, manifesting the grandiose projections of the young man whose hand learnedly executed that which his mind had conjured. The man knows now that those paintings fall short of rendering those seas and mountains in their fullness as the utterly indestructible and the real. His eyes were spent from fixating inwards. According to worldly standards, the view through the window is hardly worth more than a glance. Yet it reiterates for the man the value and conviction of properly seeing, of attending to the stubborn wordless thereness, the inexorable life of things. As the man looks through the window, he does not doubt for a moment that the light gathered by his eyes shall become something beautiful and wonderful to behold.

On the day of the fire the man was out at lunch. His wife was at school. He could see the billowing smoke when he alighted from the bus two streets away. He did not know then that that was the smell of his paintings being turned into ashes. He walked with quickening steps toward the road where his house was. It was cordoned off. There was a fire engine and a police car. A crowd had gathered. He dashed into the road, shoving every obstruction with strength that came from heavens knows where. Inside the shed there were towering tongues of fire that he did not see until it was too late, and he felt the pain and horror of their appetite, or was it the anguish of loved things forever lost. The man suffered thirty-percent burns. He wears protective clothing at all times. He hears his wife sobbing in her sleep sometimes. He will never see again, the doctors say. He knows better than them. He trusts his eyes completely, more than even his wife, he tells them. Soon he will paint the view through the window, very soon, perhaps today.

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