measuring in memories

Earlier, Gabby e-mailed me the trailer of RENT - yes, it's a musical, but apparently they're making a movie version. She also told me that they will be using the original cast for all the characters - all save Mimi, who will be played by Rosario Dawson. In other cases that would have disappointed me, but not this time - I didn't like the original Mimi. You're going to cry when you see it, just like me, Gabs promised, and when I finally got to see it I understood why - they used one of the musical's most touching songs for the trailer.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes ... how do you measure a year?

One of the things I loved about KL was its multi-ethnicity, and part of that was getting to participate in all sorts of holidays and celebrations. Aside from the usual Easter and Christmas, one of my favorite holidays was Deepavali - how can you not love a holiday that is known as the Festival of Lights? In KL, Deepavali also marks the beginning of an almost six-month stretch of holidays that span all four major religions: Deepavali; Ramadan and the daily breaking of fast, or buka puasa; Eid-il-Fitr; Christmas; New Year; then Chinese New Year.

My office was walking distance from Suria KLCC, one of the prettiest malls in the city. In October they would start hanging the decorations: huge colored hangings that were studded with tiny mirrors. When I first started working, I used to take the LRT in to work; I would get off beneath KLCC and walk through the mall in order to get to my office. I always got there an hour before the mall actually opened, so I would walk through KLCC's wide centre court, the click of my heels on the marble floor echoing against the high glass ceiling. Riding on the escalator headed toward my exit, I would see the tiny mirror-bits sparkling, reflecting the sunlight coming in through the glass doors, and that would make my morning.

Sometime during that first year of my work, they blocked off the entire centre court - a minor inconvenience for me, since I now had to walk around the blocked-off area instead of running straight through the court, as I normally did. Since the centre court is usually reserved for all sorts of displays, this made me wonder what they were coming up with. A day or so later, I got my answer: when I came in, the floor of the blocked-off area was covered with an oval-shaped white sheet, on which were about twenty teenagers, busily arranging small colorful heaps of something.

What are they doing? I asked another bystander that afternoon, as I passed through the centre court on my way home.

Those are students from Lim Kok Wing, she answered, naming Malaysia's top fine arts university. They're making a kolam.

You're kidding me, I gasped. The size of the blocked-off area was easily the size of a small house, and kolams are made by arranging heaps of dyed rice into patterns. However, the bystander was not kidding me, and a week or so later it was completed. I told Yas about it then, and promised to show her pictures - but was unable to scan them in at the time.

Yas: this is four years late, but this is still for you. Take note - I had to go up to the third floor to take these, because otherwise the entire thing wouldn't have fit into the frame. It was that big. Behold:



Take note that the entire picture is composed of colored rice and the students from Lim Kok Wing made this kolam with their bare hands. I don't know if you can see it, but the entire oval is framed with a tiny, colorful fringe; those are colored chilies.



Here's a view of it from another angle. I know it's off-kilter, but I was kind of hanging off the balcony when I took this picture and it was very hard to take a good photograph when I was fearing for my life. My mother very kindly held on to me so that I would not kill my fool self for want of a photograph, but - obviously - I managed to survive and take the picture.

As beautiful as it was, that kolam didn't last long. A week after the students had completed it, the entire thing was swept away and the centre court was cleared; I walked into KLCC one day and stopped dead because there was nothing to walk around. My mother was similarly disappointed, when I texted her about it. At least we got to take a picture of it, she messaged back, trying to console me, and I cheered up.

It's sad that beauty doesn't last forever, but for everything that fades away, there will always be photographs ... and when photographs fade away, there will still be memories. How do you measure a year?