Nury Vittachi - The Feng Shui Detective

She showed him the masthead on page two. ‘First, the publisher’s name and registered address and the printers’ details have been changed from yours to Hollis’s.’

She flicked back to the front page. ‘Second, the paper looks the same, but look closely and you notice the name has been changed. It does not say Update. It says Upyours.’

She opened the magazine again. ‘Third, most of the actual articles don’t appear in this. Dudley replaced them with what he called “dummy text”. They obviously didn’t read the thing but just put it into the printing machine and pressed the button. Hee hee.’

Tin, moving in slow motion, took the magazine out of her hands and slowly flicked through the pages with amazement. ‘I see. Dudley did all this?’

‘Yeah. In minutes. He’s pretty cool.’

The publisher was tugging uncomfortably at his collar. ‘You said four changes.’

‘The fourth one is-I’ll show you,’ said Joyce, taking the magazine out of his hands again. ‘Just here. Look, just read that paragraph. Dudley inserted this little article in the Upyours edition about various people.’

Tin scanned the report on page three. ‘Good grief, Wong. You guys have insulted practically everyone that counts in this city.’

‘Not me,’ said Wong. ‘Not us. Hollis publishing. Their name is all over the publication. They financed it. They signed it. They printed it. And they distributed it. It is their liability. Not yours. Not mine. Shall we go and have that breakfast now? The cha siu so at Tai Tong Hoi Kee very good.’

The two men, Tin in a daze, started to move back towards the restaurant, but Joyce moved in the other direction. ‘Bye guys. You go and have a dimsum orgy. I’m meeting Dud for a cappuccino at Starbucks on Orchard Road. He’s asked me to do some CD reviews for him. You don’t mind me moonlighting a bit, do you, C F? I get the latest CDs before they hit the shops and I get to keep them. Way cool.’

She plugged her ears with her CD headphones before he had a chance to reply, and walked away, her head keeping time with an unheard rhythm.

A little mystery always remains. Such is life. The ultimate can never be understood. But this should not frustrate you, Blade of Grass. Knowing that you cannot know is the First Principle.

In the year 950, the Ch’an Master Wen-yi was asked: ‘What is the First Principle?’

He replied: ‘If I were to tell you, it would be the Second Principle.’

The Record of the Transmission of Light, chuan five, tells the story of Hui-chung. He was a monk. He died in 775. One time, he agreed to take part in a debate. It was about Wu. This is translated as ‘nothingness’ or ‘inexpressibility’.

He sat in the chair but said nothing. The time for the debate began. Hui-chung said nothing.

The other monk said: ‘Please propose your argument so that I can argue.’

Hui-chung said: ‘I have proposed my argument.’

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’,

by C F Wong, part 90.

This, thought Joyce McQuinnie, is just too weird. C F Wong had just introduced her to an old Indian guy who appeared to be wearing two tiny wigs, one on each ear. Small but thick mats of white hair, they caught and widened her eyes, and it took a considerable effort to wrench her gaze from the man’s miniature ear-muffs to his heavy, hooded eyes as she shook his hand. No way could they be natural. He told her his name.

‘Uhh, hi.’

‘Hello. Extremely pleased to meet you I’m sure, Ms McQuinnie,’ he said.

‘Yeah, thanks, good to meet you, too, er…’ She had immediately forgotten his name.

‘Dilip Kenneth Sinha,’ he reminded her. ‘My friends call me Dilip, or D K, or ‘you silly old fool,’ more likely. The more honest of them, anyway.’ He flashed a row of long, horse-like teeth, gave a staccato laugh like a burst of gunfire and turned his palms outwards in an elaborate flourish. ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh.’

‘Ha ha. Just call me Jo.’

He was rather over-dressed for the location, in an expensively tailored dark Nehru-collared suit. The rather featureless outfit on his tall, stooping, waist-less body made him look like an upholstered banana. His hair was white, contrasting sharply with his dark, almost aubergine, skin. His eyebrows looked like blow-dried caterpillars. He was extremely hirsute. She noticed that the peppery five o’clock shadow on his face went all the way up to the bags under his eyes. She decided that the wiglets on his ears might be real after all.

Dilip Sinha beamed at her and swayed slightly. He had a tendency to move his head up and down and diagonally like the spring-headed dolls you find on taxi dashboards, but his wrinkle-nested eyes were pleasantly grandfatherly, and he spoke with easy sincerity. ‘Delighted to have you join us tonight. Can’t remember when we last had a visitor to the mystics. Many, many moons, it must have been.’

‘Thanks for having me,’ she said, blushing at her phrase, which she suddenly thought better suited to a six year old leaving a birthday party.

‘I think our last visitor was six years ago, or was it seven? It was the year after Chandrika’s brother left. Now when would that have been?’ He started to ramble inconsequentially about dates and Joyce found his droney tone hard to listen to. His old-fashioned Edwardian English had a little Indian twang, and there was a clipped quality to some of the words that she was beginning to recognise as a distinctively Singaporean intonation.

She was grateful that the old man had proved so welcoming, as she felt totally adrift, for many reasons: the people, the time, the location, the planet. What was she doing here? She had a strange feeling that she was sticking her head out of a box. She felt oddly exposed. She felt alien. Her breathing was slow but her heart was beating fast. She felt tired, as if energy was pouring out of a hole in her abdomen. Concentrating was an effort.

Scheduled tonight was a special emergency meeting of the Investigative Advisory Committee of the Singapore Union of Industrial Mystics. The union had only a handful of active members, although Wong had told her that meetings had attracted as many as twenty-five in the past, and there were more than forty names in the books. Visitors were technically not allowed, but Wong had phoned a couple of other committee members in advance and received permission for Joyce to be there. ‘These are the real old masters of Eastern thought. They use different names for different things, but really, it is all the same under the skin. A rose by any other name is still smelling, right, understand or not?’

At first she had been reluctant to cancel the just-hangingout evening she had planned with her friends. She found Wong to be difficult company at the best of times, and was rather daunted by the idea of spending her evening in a meeting with three or four Wongs, some of whom may even be more weird and impenetrable than he. But her friends had been blown over by her account of her adventures in Malaysia -‘You saw like a real corpse?’- and she had decided that it was worth sacrificing a night out for an experience that may make a story to tell. ‘Yeah-yeah, I’ll come,’ she had said to Wong earlier that day. ‘It’s cool. You have to keep pushing the envelope, right?’

‘Right,’ Wong had replied in a neutral tone to disguise his bafflement.

Shortly before 8 p.m., the geomancer and his assistant had marched through some narrow streets in what seemed to be an older part of town, and had turned a corner to enter a large area of restaurants and open-air food stalls. It was so poorly lit that Joyce wondered how diners could see what they were eating. After walking a few yards, she realised that the restaurant through which they were walking was part of a series of street cafes, forming a lengthened, disjointed circle, with the jumbled seating for the public filling the centre of the ring.