From A Hotel Window
by Ken Head ©2007
Christmas: or, at least, the run-up to it, those last few days when the hotel muzak reaches orchestral pitch and taking the lift makes humming Away In A Manger under my breath almost obligatory, even though the faces looking back at me as we glide through the building suggest countries which don't have a winter solstice and may well not be Christian.
On the other side of the plate glass doors, where terrazzo ends and concrete begins, beyond the air-con and the line of waiting cabs, this small local corner of the world goes on regardless, pretty much as it always seems to do, give or take the many events I'll never get to hear about because I'm a foreigner passing through who doesn't understand the language.
The sun's shining out of a hot blue sky, the way you'd expect at this time of year and the whole neighbourhood's choked with traffic. Cars honk endlessly, buses grind through their gears, belching thick, black smoke while they queue to get in lane for the next junction. A few brave pedestrians dash across the road just when the lights warn them not to.
In a narrow side street, cool and shady because the sun hasn't reached it yet and near to a row of narrow shophouses, two old hawkers are hunkered down side by side on the five-foot-way, one selling paper packets of nuts and seeds, the other, cigarettes, tobacco, matches. A woman, head down, walks quietly past them, on her way to work maybe.
From my window, the view is of tall buildings, tenements and office blocks, none of them quite high-rise enough to conceal what they contain. Their flat, grey, asphalted roofs, cluttered with tangles of black cable, water storage tanks and satellite dishes, are home to all kinds of undertakings.On one of them this elderly woman lives.
The largest roof is surrounded by chain-link fencing that must be all of twelve feet high. During the day, every day, it's busy with women carrying big, brightly coloured plastic bowls of laundry who rig it like a galleon with freshly washed white linen, rows of sheets and towels hung from lines to dry, but always gone by sunset, leaving the roof bare.
Rooftops with lives of their own. They're almost all like this in one way or another. A kick-boxing club meets just across the street from the laundry under lights rigged for the purpose, fit, muscled young men who look the business and seem, judging by the pain they inflict on each other, to take the whole thing very seriously indeed. Only the roof where the elderly lady lives, solitary, silent, self-absorbed, leaving every morning as the sun comes up, usually not back before nine or ten at night, seven days a week, is what you might call private space, her home a tiny, windowless, wooden hut about eight feet by six, built beside the metal entrance to the building, her staircase to the streets.
Outside her door stand a cluster of terracotta pots containing orchids and a small shrine where, morning and evening, she lights an incense stick or two and prays, her neat, precise figure, a koan in itself, kneeling in silent concentration, head bowed, supplicant hands held out, before she disappears to face her day or shut herself inside at night. Only the rain is stronger than her will.
Watching her busy about, apparently oblivious to the expensive holy moment gripping the world that I come from, seeing how little she has, no electricity, no running water, no lavatory or means of cooking food, nothing to speak of but the clothes I see her wearing and whatever drives her on to face the daily slog, I recognize how far I am from understanding anything.