I’m very happy to see pictures of Haresh Sharma in Bangkok, collecting his well-deserved SEA Write Award. He was someone I looked up to when I was much younger—not just because his plays spoke deeply to me but also because he was a minority playwright in Singapore (and yes even then I was very conscious of minority presence in the arts and literature). In fact, Haresh used to joke that he was a minority within a minority—a Sindhi within a largely Tamil Indian community. And so did Alvin Tan, artistic director of The Necessary Stage, the theatre company they co-founded—he is Peranakan. I found myself speaking in smatterings of Malay with both of them. Haresh himself had a Malay babysitter so he was conversant in the language. I remember attending the Creative Arts Programme when I was 14, and at the end of it we were all supposed to hand in a portfolio to be considered for mentorship. I didn’t. The reason was that I had felt that everyone was a better writer than I was, had neatly typed in their initial portfolios while mine was photocopies of compositions I had written in class (complete with the teacher’s grading and comments!). Also, the fact that I was the only express stream student among gifted stream students had made me feel like a sympathy-case exception from the very beginning. So I was very surprised by a call a few weeks later by someone from the MOE who said that Haresh was interested in mentoring me. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, ‘because I didn’t submit a follow-up portfolio’. The person assured me that there had been no mistake. All I remembered was that I had attended a workshop by Haresh during the programme. I recalled that I had felt a little humbled because everyone was writing in quite literary English and the scene that I came up with—two kids quarreling at a playground—was written in Singlish. But maybe that was what had made me stand out. Or maybe it was because Haresh could sense how my confidence was wavering—the sole Malay kid (another of the participants was Indian Muslim)—in a sea of bright Chinese faces. If indeed there was some element of affirmative action (that I was picked because of what someone from my cultural and class background could bring to the stage) in that decision to mentor me then I don’t mind at all being one of the poster boys for it! Because being picked for mentorship certainly restored my faith in my own writing and encouraged me to take it seriously. One of my most memorable mentorship sessions was when Haresh suggested that I write a scene of conflict between two characters. He asked me, ‘have you ever quarreled with your mother before?’ Immediately I said, ‘no’. This was a lie. But I was afraid of self-exposure in my writing—certain things would be too private, too painful to share. Haresh did not press on. But on my own, I gave it a shot, replaying voices in my head, the violence of the recollected emotions causing me to forcefully press the nib of my pen into the paper (cellulose keloids emerged on the other side). When I finished, I thought to myself, ‘so this is what it means to write’. Haresh has taught me many things, but what makes him forever my guru, my shifu, my cikgu was that lesson: to write honestly meant looking at what one feared—the mirror, the abyss, the heart of the fire—and not look away. To transform something by looking at it, at the risk of being transformed by what is looked at. To keep looking, and to keep writing.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 18:26:06 +0000
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