A Funeral
Walked past Rochor Centre on the way to meet a friend. Passed a row of shops selling Chinese prayer goods: altars stacked up like new housing estates still awaiting their inhabitants, bales of joss sticks waiting to go up in smoke, and a generous pension in paper assets.
Perhaps it was how their neighbourhood was numbered that made me think of LKY's funeral (not his death - that will never happen). I imagine them burning a huge paper replica of Singapore,"'rendering unto Ceasar what is Ceasar's" as Edwin Thumboo might write. Perhaps they'll take a turn for the Borgesian and build a sacrifice so faithful it covers every surface of our territory, a paper husk held by bamboo scaffolding over our island city-state. As it burns, the rising heat lifts it into the air so it appears to our neighbours as a cumulonimbus of light, like the floating pyres of offshore platforms forming in the south.
Slowly the edifice rises into the air, sheets unfurling as it sails to its maker in the western skies. It will not survive this journey: a flurry of ashen refugees litters the earth.
(15/1/12)