Quite a Figure

  

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Chap footing over Middle Road toward the library, trapped cookie-cutter Joe perhaps unhappy about that. Coming from the Buddhist art shop on Victoria Street, the figures in the window had you swivelling around at the Box, surveying the faces. Not such a lot of pointers 2-300 years later. It was the Renaissance most strongly recalled at that window; nothing of the present; or almost nothing. Glimpses in faces here carried some minute correspondence: a middle-aged woman finding pleasure in her friend’s talk; pensive younger gal fixed on her top. Certainly any Western café would find nada. The figure carrying the lamb or calf on the window shelf strongly suggested the Italian Peninsular, from ages past. Within the hills across the other side of the Adriatic, not so very many ages, in fact. Through the early ‘80s there had been many such examples, women of course more than men. In the Bras Basah Complex window display it was a placid, bald, kindly shepherd figured. Perhaps in the back country in many locales even now suchlike existed. The beauty in the simple robe with head bowed corresponded with the common Roman religious iconography; not so much our mountain form. Here among the remnant kampung folk such was more common. A scholar at his table, accomplished and far-seeing, surprised like a family member suddenly appeared. Child figures carrying some kind of surety, if not authority, one of them pointing a pistol, were something entirely new. They reminded of the importance of students & youth in revolutionary epochs. Bab’s tale of the wild young buck come into ascendency at the end of the war, riding a mule or donkey on a march, while his uncle trudged along wearily beside. When the old man asked the youngster for a turn, the hot young Partizan replied, Da si zasluzio, sad bi jasio. Did you deserve it, you’d be mounted now. Fathers and others who were treated roughly, even brutally, by nearest kin would receive apologies and pleas for forgiveness years later when the inner flames had burned out. The Maoist period, clearly. There were very few lines apparent across the Box’s tables. For some substantial affinity one needed to travel away from tiled walkways and aircon. Green Milo tins lined the upper shelf at Toast Box, a highly popular beverage among young and old alike on the equator. Hanging by the toasting counter the blank, naïve portrait of a woman never failed to shock. Why in the heck would anyone mount that blank nullity for display?