Images - Chien Swee-Teng

I heard more about the death of a dictator from a friend who has seen the video footage. Inside my head, I only have a vague image of the photograph on the front page. It reminded me of the head shots of two dead men years back. They were the sons of another dictator that was executed later by his people under the instigation of some other foreign power. The obscenity of these images is equivalent to the closed-up moments of triple X porn, and the truisms about happiness, life and death in the spiritually pornographic speech of a New Age monk or guru with an enlightened smile. It is horrible and, at the same time, ironic that these images denuding death could be published ‘uncensored’ on the morning papers, while we continue our endless debate about the moral and social aspects of categorising fictitious sex and violence in films and plays.

But I find it somewhat pointless, if not ridiculous, to think about this while sitting on an old wooden bench outside a neighbourhood clinic and smoking. An armchair critic sits on the armchair at least. The clinic is closed today - or perhaps at this time of the day. A middle-aged woman walked past me. Framed by her untidy shoulder length hair, the features of her face are slightly distorted, more akin to those photographs exposing cases of plastic surgery gone wrong than natural birth defects. I thought, but the face of the earth is more than just a case of plastic surgery gone wrong. Perhaps, what happened to her could also be the result of an accident. She noticed I was observing her. I looked away.

A rather old black cat came towards me and sat under a cracked, dirty blue plastic chair next to the bench. Despite the thinning and greying fur it should still be regarded as a black, I guess. The cat was spying on a bald-headed Javan Myna pecking at a piece chicken bone next to the green rubbish bin. I once said to the friend who told about the video footage that a bird pecking at chicken bone is a cannibalistic sight. The friend once, after seeing another bald-headed Javan Myna, lamented, ‘look at the kind of shit we are eating, even the birds are losing feathers.’ It does not matter if his statement is scientifically valid. When I threw the cigarette butt on the floor and stood up the black cat ran away, the Javan Myna, alarmed by this series of manoeuvres, took flight, leaving the chicken bone on the floor to resume the status as an unwanted litter. Out of curiosity, I looked at the board next to the closed metal shutters of the clinic for the consultation hours. Why do doctors need such a long lunch break? And next to it is a poster advertising the health check packages and the prices in larger fonts, larger than the yellowing white fonts stating the consultation hours at least.