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  • Rambling on My Mind
  • Kim Cheng Boey (bio)

I fall in with the walking meditators, or meditating walkers, a string of pilgrims revolving around the Mahabodhi Stupa in Bodhgaya, its age-darkened, stone-carved height proclaiming the place where the Buddha had attained enlightenment. This is an international community of differently paced walkers: maroon-robed Tibetan monks prostrating themselves at every step, saffron-clad Thai monks circling the stupa’s base, the somber ochre robes of Burmese monks, the grey attire of their Taiwanese counterparts, and the lay followers from East and West, a motley group of spiritual cripples who have come for repair. Mindful of each step, we are learning how to walk and breathe again. Relearning the first steps.

I measure my steps to my breathing, relishing the cool stone path polished by pilgrim feet through the centuries. Walking is a way of being alive to the present, each press of the foot, each arch and levering of the big toe an ambulatory affirmation. It is a way of shedding karmic baggage, finding the path out of samsara—the Sanskrit for running around—slowing our pace in synchronicity with our breath. Soon my own mantra evolves and I am counting life death life death on each beat, wondering on which note the walk will end.

It is easy to walk into a kind of timelessness in Bodhgaya. The worn stone circuit, the deep intonation of the Tibetan monks, the circumambulatory pilgrims from all over the world, the frieze of the Buddha in different scenes and poses, the Tibetan prayer flags, the absorbed maroon and saffron robes orbiting endlessly, the flickering oil lamps and candles, and the winter twilight—all cohere in a pattern whose meaning you are part of. For the last three mornings I have experienced the fleeting moments of stepping out of time; but now it is something else, something more time-haunted. I am walking the steps of a dead man. The iambic measure, with the accent on the landing of the right step, is my father’s signature, his impaired left giving more stress to the right. He does not appear as frequently in my dreams as he did the first year after his death, but when he does, he is walking, that maimed walk bringing him to life. It was the accented step that I listened for as I waited for him to come home. I would stand sentry at the [End Page 170] gate of the flat in Toa Payoh, where I lived with my grandmother and uncle, and wait for him.

Five or six, I kept watch, when you startednot coming home. An untiring sentry, I listenedfor your uneven step, your maimed left,or was it the right leg hobbling, after you were hit,drunk perhaps, by a car. I would hear the pained stepon the torn ground of my waiting, the ghost step,and would rush to the door to staredown a long shadowless corridor.Sometimes you would go outfor a Guinness and smokes, and we wouldwait, wait for that broken iambic beat.The loser’s gait. I hear it even now,fainter, but there, the absent step.

I am in step with my father. I am walking in his shoes (they were dark tan, creased and worn), am in him, as he walks. A certain rhythm enfolds us, my three steps matching his impaired stride, on the cobbled walk outside Robinsons, on the carpeted floor inside, along the smooth-tiled length of the Arcade, on the uneven and congested five-foot-way of the shops around New Bridge Road and South Bridge Road, on the red-and-white pavers of the Queen Elizabeth Walk. Sometimes I lag behind. I admire the broad shoulders, the silent strength of one who boxed and swam in his youth. But there is also something vulnerable, exposed, hurt, the carriage canted slightly to the side because of his bad leg.

My father was an inveterate walker and before he walked out of our lives, he often took me along on his perambulations. There were the streets around the New World, the amusement park that came alive at night...

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