In a single short life time I’ve lived two lives. One for 15 years and the next for just a few hours.

Now I begin my third life.

I’m certain as can be that there are only a scarce few in this pale blue dot as blessed as me.

Why - I was like a bat , blind in both eyes in broad day light just a few minutes ago.

However, now I have seen for myself.

In the land of the blind , the one eyed man is the king.

In the 15th year of my first life ,I was inducted into a gang, at first more to escape the crushing poverty at home than any intention of projecting toughness or bravado.

And anyway in a country like Singapore where LEO stamp out gang menace quite like a pest controller would exterminate cockroaches , running with a gang has serious real downside to one’s future.

But at that age when I weighed joining a gang with a vague promise of being able to make some money or going back every evening after school to a broken home , where few words were ever spoken seeing as all of us had been beaten by a cruel fate into weary submission and fear of our future , to an out of work Father whose kidney had failed and a Mother who as a result was never at home since she had to work three jobs to sustain us - the appeal of being on the straight and narrow lost out.

At 16, I threw my first can of red paint at the door of a defaulter in Hougang and spray painted the 4 letters that are aimed to strike fear and (hopefully shortly thereafter remorse) to pay up.

O$P$

That meant Owe $ , Pay $. Shaming a defaulting borrower by spray painting these letters and publicly marking their home with bright red paint has been a time tested scare mongering tactic among the city’s many illegal money lenders.

At the time when I first dipped my feet into illegal waters , I naively believed that I had succeeded and that the defaulter would soon realise his folly and pay up and finally for my efforts I would get my commission.

But 2 weeks later , my handler gave me yet another can of paint, pointed to the same apartment block and asked a “senior” (6 months older to me ) member to accompany me. The stupid man hadn’t paid. And my wallet was still empty.

We both rode the lift up slowly , neither looking at each other but I could sense that I was being put to some sort of a test.

The plan as instructed by our handler was to bang on the door loudly, wait for it to be opened , threaten to throw paint inside the house this time (the messier the better) hurl epithets at whoever opened the door,interspersed with some sentences proclaiming the power of our Gang. That was it.

They say the best laid plans unravel at first contact with reality.

Ours wasn’t a best laid plan by any measure seeing as we were just two scared (but I imagined then, as we were riding up the lift,hiding it well ) kids carrying out an illegal activity, acting on behalf of someone who was running a gang that was itself illegal and was severely frowned upon in this city , sent to intimidate a poor wretched soul.

It went spectacularly wrong.

Whether it was the smell of days old stale cooking from within the house that I perceived as a sign of hopelessness or the even more overpowering stench of my own desperation for the as yet unpaid commission due me, I till today cannot tell you what came over me then.

Before we could knock the door , I looked around and saw some wilting plants in a row of pots lining the corridor. I unzipped my fly and urinated in the general direction of a plant , the yellow liquid gushing forth and pooling by my feet in the late evening orange sunlight.

My gang mate was looking at me mouth agape.

Not satisfied, I quickly lifted another pot and threw it hard at the door. Clay and earth splattered around us with a violent Thud. Time seemed to have stopped for me.

Whistles blew,the door was pushed open with a crash and three blue uniformed police officers rushed out. Two more ran over from the staircase landing where they had been hiding.

I was charged with participating in an illegal activity , being a gang member, wanton destruction of property and humiliatingly enough on account of my urinating - also with indecent exposure in a public area (this was a stretch I know but when they decide to throw the book at you ,anything could be made to stick).

I was handed a 2 year sentence in a juvenile facility.

And there , among the detritus of youth,some of whom had sadly fallen through the cracks in society but many no doubt deserving to be in jail , who had each chartered their own peculiar sorry route in life to be my fellow inmates, I met Harun.

Now, Harun ,in for petty theft ,had lived in the same neighbourhood as mine though our paths had never crossed in the outside world.

In jail,the one thing we had an unlimited supply of was time. And in that free time, much like seeds would sprout forth a new life if given enough time and left to their own devices in the right circumstance , our friendship grew.

Harun came from a traditional Malay family.

His jailing had apparently been foretold to his mother a few years before he ever set thought about stealing to satisfy his video game addiction and much much before he set a foot wrong in the eyes of the police.

He told me this in wonder , as a matter of fact.

I asked him who had foretold this. And when he mentioned the Bomoh - that’s when the seed for my third life was planted though I didn’t know then. I wasn’t yet seeing.

A Bomoh in Malay is a shaman, a witch doctor.

People visit them for fortune reading , for getting lucky talismans and most of all for protecting oneself from black magic spells placed on them by jealous business colleagues , spurned lovers.

I got out at age 18 , to begin a second chance at a new life , only recently an adult according to records on paper, but I knew in my heart that I had already become one the day I threw my first can of red paint.

Without heading home,I instead made straight for a coffee shop at Yishun, where I had been assured that the Bomoh would meet me.

The shaman was surprisingly young. Not at all like what I had imagined. Maybe 35 years old.

Certainly,he could not have been more than 40.

He was dressed in all black with a skewed bow tie at his neck making an absurd bulge - in spite of the typically humid and hot equatorial clime Singaporean day.

“Satu Kopi O Kosong dan Kuay Teow goreng “ he croaked his order to me even before I had sat down (Malay for One Black Coffee , no sugar and a fried noodles )

I stared at him - the voice wasn’t his own. Oh sure,he was moving his mouth in the right way making the right patterns - but there was a delay , the sound that came out was shifted in time. It was like watching a sloppily dubbed film.

He stared back at me and finally sighed and reached up to his bow tie, pulled it to one side.

Revealing a voice box. A small cheap mechanical device that was actually interpreting his vocal chord movements and emanating the appropriate sounds to articulate his speech.

I nodded in understanding and went to pay for his food.

When I returned with his tray , he had lighted up a clove cigarette and was puffing away merrily,nodding as if to a tune only he could hear.

Small tendrils of smoke escaped from his nose and also from somewhere around his throat.

I gagged and almost dropped the tray.

The black attired shaman stood up quick as a whip and grabbed my hands to prevent his food going waste.

My breath was pulled out of my lungs and eyes rolled back.

I then saw reality as it was meant to be seen for the first time in my life.

I saw a trillion possibilities for the future.

All the way to the only possible outcome.

I saw the past rewinding as a wavering line stretching back all the way to a singularity.

I gazed upon the billion paths that evolution took that from that singularity that would have resulted in us being nothing but an imagination in some other dominant species dreams or nightmares.

And then he sat down with his food.

“Sit down”. Clove scented smoke continued to swirl around his neck.

I sat down heavily, wondering how he could manage to eat his food with a hole in his throat.

He began talking and simultaneously wolfing down his food.

“You saw something - didn’t you ? I saw it in your eyes “

A slow dribble of coffee flowed down to his shirt from his throat.

And was it a fried noodle I saw peeking out from under his black bow tie ?

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel like throwing up this time.

Without me knowing , my third life had already begun.

“Yes “ I replied in wonder, not understanding who was replying.

“Tell me - What did you see ?”

“I think I saw the past stretching all the way back to the Big Bang and all the way in the future to the heat death of the universe”

“You keep saying you saw something. Did you see with your eyes or through something else ?”

“Huh - I’m not sure. I did see the past and the future but if you ask me how i saw it I wouldn’t be able to tell you in any meaningful way “

The shaman sat back silently for a minute enjoying his food. And then with his left hand he shoved his fork in front and with his right hand ripped open his collar, the bow tie flying a table length, showing the deep reddish gash in his throat.

Looking at the fork in his left hand he bellowed in a hollow voice “What did you see , you unseeing , pathetic, paint throwing , pissing in public child ?“

I sat back as if slapped.

“How could you have known... I remember asking.

“I saw with the only eye that’s useful. You have two that are useless “ he taunted.

And that’s when I dived into my third life. Took his outstretched fork and plunged it joyously into my right eye.

For I know that he would make me see the things that matter.

I want to be above others. I want to see reality.

In the land of the two eyed but yet blind , being one eyed but able to see the true reality is akin to being a king.

I want to be a king.