Letter 2

I did not think about you for many years. They say it is common between childhood friends. But we were not children anymore then, although perhaps we were like children in our shared world of make-believe.

It was the memory of a song that brought the memory of you back to me. Not my memory, but the memory of a man who had come to visit my school. I no longer remember his name. He was a tall, dark man, elegantly dressed in a grey suit, even in our weather, but it was his hair that struck me. Bouffant, I think, is the word to describe it. Like a 1980s Japanese pop-star. Perhaps like the Checkers. But it had the beginnings of grey.

I can still picture him now – like a Japanese Richard Gere. Like Koizumi. A refined man.

He was an admissions officer, I think, for the Asia Pacific University Ritsumeikan. The university would open that year, and the admissions team had come to Singapore to tell people about the new university. It would be a special university, open to foreign students who did not have to know any Japanese.

In the first year, all courses would be in English. Then after a year of courses in English and Japanese lessons, the second year would have more courses in Japanese until the fourth year, when all lessons would be in Japanese. I thought it was a wonderful idea and I believe I told him so.

I was an English teacher then and one of my roles was giving guidance to students going to university. The senior teacher in charge of giving this guidance felt the university was too new and because there were no scholarships available yet, it would be expensive for our students to go there. Ours was a very good high school and many of our students would receive scholarships from our government or the many companies in Singapore.

But this new university interested me a lot and I told the gentleman who had come to visit us that it was a very promising program. We talked more – about the university, about Singapore and about my high school. And when there were only two of us left talking, he asked me the question that would remind me of you.

“Do you know the song, Bengawan Solo?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. It’s an Indonesian song and very popular once,” I said. I even knew the tune, but did not know the words. And of course, every Singapore person would know the name because it was the name of a very famous chain of cake shops in Singapore.

“Do you know where I can find it?”

It was a surprise – why did this Japanese gentleman want to know where he could find an old Indonesian song? The cake shop would have been much easier to find. There was one down the road.

In those days, I went to music shops a lot. I bought a lot of CDs and it was a joy for me to browse in a CD shop. I went to a different one every week. So in a sense, he had asked the right person. What are the chances of that?

But I knew also that the chances of him finding the song were slight. I had not seen any compilations of old Indonesian songs. It could have been in a compilation of instrumentals – but where would we begin the search? For an album, perhaps. For a singer who recorded it, perhaps. But just the song alone – that would be difficult. They were not catalogued that way in the databases of CD shops.

I told him I did not know where to find it. It was not popular anymore, although he could try asking at any big CD shop. I asked him why he wanted it. He looked a bit sad, but hopeful, as if he thought there was now someone who could help him.

“Twenty years ago, I came to Singapore,” he said. It was not a holiday tour, he explained. It was a special visit and the group had special guides and interpreters.

“One of our guides, a young lady, introduced that song to me,” he said and I began to understand. What he did not say, I could see in his eyes and hear in the softness of his voice.

“She gave me a cassette tape, but I no longer have it. I would like to have that song again. To remember.”

To remember what or whom, he did not say. He had perhaps already said too much to a stranger.

I asked him how long he would be staying and where his hotel was. They were living in town and I gave him the names of some of the CD shops close by.

He and his team would leave a day later and I never knew if he found his song. But I knew where to find ours. They are kept in a secret corner of my heart.

That night, I heard them again in my memory, even the sound of the static I could never quite get off the records you sent me, perhaps because I played them too many times. Round and round, at thirty-three and one-third revolutions per minute, the spirals took me back to a time when you and I were young, when we shared our dreams that once seemed so possible.

And I could almost see your face.