The Saddening

"...I saw multitudes
to every side of me; their howls were loud
while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.
They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?”- Dante

*

Mr. Tan is in hell.  No really, he is.  He’s been there for the past sixty eight years, since he was fifteen, and he’s old and tired now. 

He rises for work early in the morning, painting the figures in the theme park hell of Haw Par Villas, before the heat and humidity of the day make it unbearable.  He works alone, colouring the cement figures with his patient, fine brush strokes. 

Haw Par Villas depicts the ten courts of hell – for the tourists and the saucer eyed children, with their hectoring parents.  Parents so eager to teach these children by confronting them with the strange wrongs of people.  The heartless with their insides ripped open by demons.  The old and jealous, sucking on the breasts of the young. The mean with their disembodied heads stuck into the cracks of rocks.  The gossips with their tongues cut out.

Mr. Tan believes in none of it.  It’s all nonsense to him.  His only intention is to ensure the scenes are as ghastly and realistic as possible. 

He particularly likes working on the animal figures of hell. Humanised in their little dresses and aprons and smoking jackets. He likes the painted seas and dragons too.  And the bare-chested mermaids, basking in shallow waters, under the questionable shade of plastic trees.

Sometimes, in the heat of the evening, when the visitors have left, Mr. Tan curls up to sleep by the mermaids.  He dreams of Dante’s hell.  Of the howling, hoarding throng, greedy for whatever brought them to that particular circle.  Mr. Tan knows what he’s greedy for – and that’s solitude.  A strange greed, he knows, when he lives alone and rarely sees anyone other than the park’s visitors. 

But that’s the thing about greed.  It expands to fill a space.  And Mr. Tan remembers the people he’s left over the years and the people who have left him.  He remembers the inconvenience of people and their unpredictability.  In hell, everything is predictable.  He’s not touched another human being for over forty years and the feel of cement and paint is cold, but at least it’s predictable.  The thought of the alternative to cement and paint figures and the clamour of the past, makes him greedy for more time alone.  Oh, how he longs for it.

Mr. Tan’s bones are stiffer these days, but still he works – repairing and fixing the figures, painting hell’s dioramas.  Each day, he completes his jobs and goes back to his cluttered room on the edge of Haw Par Villas.  He drinks his tea and eats his rice. 

He’s been by himself so long now, he doesn’t even realise he’s unhappy.  One’s own sorrow is only reflected in the gaze of others, but the cement eyes in hell have no reflection.  There are many different forms of hell and Mr. Tan’s is a slow and gentle form.  A gradual saddening.

*