mayang sari CNY getaway

I’m sitting in a sort of beach shelter / beach bar. It’s a wooden construction, with wooden pillars and beams apparently tied / fixed together with hemp, the ceiling made of what looks like rows of bamboo, but varnished a deep mahogany. The sea-wind here – not a sea-breeze, not that tame – blows continually from the sea and gives the coconut trees a permanently frazzled look – their leaves straining away from the shore.

I’m the only person here who’s alone. Everyone else seems to be here with their families – whole tribes of adults and youngsters with everything from beach towels to pushchairs, and even crutches (one unfortunate boy, about ten years old I’d guess, wearing a black ankle guard on his right foot, now quietly resting on his left ankle). I watch these families and wonder about them – where they’re from, what they’re like, who loves who and who doesn’t quite like who, what brings them together and what threatens to pull them apart, what draws them here.

Earlier I saw a little boy knock over one of the heavy stone urns guarding the wooden path to this beach bar. He tried to walk away from it but was called to account by a big man I assume was his father and a pony-tailed, pink-clad woman who must have been his mother. They tried to reprimand him but it seemed clear they weren’t really angry – and I’m sure the boy knew it. He opened his mouth wide and wailed. Later, the resort staff came along to look at the damage – the urn fell apart into two jagged pieces in their hands – and their laughter undid whatever little effect the parents’ half-hearted attempts at discipline had on him. Lesson learned – it doesn’t matter if you destroy something that is not yours, because nobody really cares anyway.

Later I saw the family of the boy with crutches seated round a table, all six of them diligently writing postcards, heads bent and brows furrowed with such earnestness over their task that I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of envy for the recipients of so much concentrated epistolatory effort. I wish people would write me postcards like that. I think the family’s German – I just heard the father-figure swearing (“Scheizer…!”) when his son’s crutches slipped on the glossy painted cement floor and the boy landed on the floor.

The waiters and cooks (they double up – multi-taskers, all) are preparing lunch with what looks like gusto – that same attentiveness given to the food as the German family gave to their postcards earlier on. Attentiveness. That’s it. The quality which confers on things their worth. That is why I’d like to be a recipient of that family’s earnest postcards.

If writing is a calling, then what does it call one to do? What am I called to do, really, if and when I am called to write? For every 10 pages of drivel that no one, least of all myself, would ever want to read, there may be one gem of wisdom like that realisation about attentiveness. All that time for so little. Is that what the writing life means? Can I take it, this little reward for so much labour?