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Death and
Taxis
Zafar Anjum
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Rabab researcher and Australian convert to Sikhism, Chris Mooney
Singh, has discovered the poet in him. He will be in India this
week at the invitation of the National Sahitya Akademy and would
be part of a poetry performance session -a unique art which he
has mastered in Singapore and is determined to spread it
worldwide. Since the last many years, Singapore has seen umpteen
competitions of the learners and the competent in this field.
Chris will be spending a few days in Delhi and Chandigarh
meeting friends and well-wishers and once again igniting the
still dormant field of Rabab research and recital.
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 When
you see Chris Mooney Singh, it would be hard for you to slot him the
way we are used to slot people in the hierarchy of identities.
Perhaps you also wouldn’t know how best to describe the man.
But not to worry
on this count. Chris himself has done this job brilliantly in one of
his poems, A Council Flat in Leicester. So, listen on.
In that poem,
Chris talks about his appearance of being a ‘turbaned, bearded–yet a
white-skinned sahib’ which startles an ‘earth-brown skinned Punjabi
fellow.
“A beard, a
turban, and a white skin brings some kind of a novelty value for
some,” Chris says self-mockingly. Truth be told, I too was startled
to see him first but that was a in a literary reading. For this
interview, we meet Chris in Earshot cafe in the Arts House. “Once I
walked into a crowded market in Adelaide and I was surprised how
people parted ways for me,” he tells us over the din of screeching
chairs and clinking china.
He then goes
into the history of turbans–how turbans have always stood to
indicate rank and class and commanded respect, how in the Mughal
times, wearing a turban was a sign of class and how Guru Gobind
Singh threw a challenge to the powers that be by making it mandatory
for all Sikhs to wear turbans, proclaiming that people with low
caste or no caste could also wear turbans.
So, you see,
this is how Chris speaks. You scratch him and gushes forth the
knowledge, passionate observations and articulations of an erudite
mind, affording you moments of epiphany as you move deeper into the
discussion with him.
Eastern
Promises
Of
Australian-Irish descent, Chris was born in 1956. He had a typical
middle class childhood. His parents were not religious at all. But
he had been reading books on mysticism from an early age and that
had some influence on him. That love for mysticism led him to the
Sikh faith when he went to Indian as a young man to indulge in arts
journalism.
Chris was
practicing meditation in Australia for almost 15 years. But he was
not satisfied. There were questions, a quest, and a thirst to
quench. “I wanted to have some deeper experience, with people of
some spiritual stature,” he says. Off he went to
India.
He stayed in Delhi, in a Punjabi neighbourhood.
Once in India, a
Western-educated Chris found poetry as an art form in the Eastern
traditions. In the Sikh faith, he saw poetry, music and spiritualism
all coming together and that resonated well with him. “I connected
with the eastern traditions from an artistic point of view, not from
a religious point of view,” he says.
But this
spiritual change muscled into his poetic sensibilities. “Embracing a
new faith brought in an inward sort of a change in me,” he says
reflectively.
Mysticism and
poetry engaged Chris’ mind from early on. He got interested in
poetry while he was still in primary school. During the composition
classes, he says, he was more interested in the language, in the
atmospherics, in the micro-moments of the story than in the story
itself. “One thing that poetry does is it looks at the mirco-moments
and so, I was inwardly always poetry driven,” he says. The early
interest in poetry sprouted into a deeper passion. Later on, he got
to understand more about writing, about narratives, as he formally
studied journalism.
But his poetry
quintessentially contains a specific flavour—the flavour of
narrative. “Even when I write poems, if you look at my collection, I
have a narrative element in it,” he says. “I think I have a cross
over, sort of a poet inside a storyteller and a storyteller inside a
poet.”
In search of
the rabab
Kirtan, a form
of poetry, fascinated Chris. As he delved deeper into Sikhism and
its art form, he realized that there were instruments of the Sikh
faith that had been lost. “I call the harmonium the magarmach
(crocodile) of Indian music or the African killer bee of Indian
music,” he says, referring to how it has killed off ancient musical
instruments like the rubab and Saranda.
“In Guru Nanak’s
time, his companion played the rubab,” he says. “I went looking for
that instrument and it took me a decade to uncover it.”
From Himachal
Pradesh, he started to make rubab and saranda and took the craft to
some villages in Punjab where the youth were trained to make such
instruments.
Who would have
imagined that it would take an Australian young man to revive the
community’s interest in the ancient musical instruments of the Sikh
faith?
Turning point
It was only in
India where he tragically lost his first wife. His wife literally
died in a taxi in India. He puts that experience, from his wife’s
last breath to the rites of her funeral, in the initial part of his
anthology, The Laughing Buddha Cab Company. The second section of
the book is about taxis in
Singapore.
“Both signified to me as vehicles of transportation, from place to
place, a journey of life,” he says.
After his first
wife’s death, Chris came to
Singapore
and settled here. After spending more than a decade in India,
Singapore offered him a different experience, and posed a challenge
to his muse.
“India was an
immediate connection with me,” he says. “Coming from a meditation
background, I was inwardly attuned to that culture. I stayed in all
kind of dwellings in India, the experience was very wide. I saw
tragedy. I experienced life in all its nakedness. In Singapore,
though it is comfortable and everything works–lights, buses,
taxis—the electricity is always there, the buses are not very far
and taxis are frequent and available but somehow it also insulates
you from that naked raw reality of life.”
Singapore’s
urban jungle, in his eyes, also affects a writer’s sensibilities.
“Poets and writers here audit their thoughts for public so I though
I had to develop a different sort of skin here,” he says. “I like
the Asian society but I needed to find another way to look at it. I
realized that I took a lot of cabs and that sort of provided me with
a way to look at life in
Singapore.”
That’s how he
began to think of writing poems on cabs, and The Laughing Buddha Cab
Company came into being. This is not Chris’ first collection though.
“I have a few collections earlier–one was a collection published in
Australia in 1989, then I put out a chapbook in
Singapore
in 2003 but it was really a privately distributed thing,” he says.
“This is my long overdue collection.” In addition, Chris co-edited a
poetry anthology, The Penguin Book of Christmas Poems, and has three
spoken word CDs to his credit, the latest being ‘Living in the Land
of the Durian Eaters’.
Singapore
soirees
Meanwhile, Chris
became restless with the prevalent literary culture in Singapore.
“After settling back from India in 2002, I saw events where poets
were there for poets,” he says. He wanted to bring literature and
poetry out of the closed doors to public venues.
“I went to
America in 2003 to a writers’ festival and saw the poetry slam and
took it as a model for Singapore,” Chris says. “In Singapore, we
have this kopitiam culture and I tried to marry poetry with that
culture,” he says on his idea of the poetry slams. “Poets should
meet with a non-poet audience and hold their interest. That’s the
challenge of poetry slam.”
Since 2003, he
has been a full-time organizer of literary events, writing groups
and, of course, the Poetry Slam in
Singapore.
All these activities, including the Writers’ Connect
 programme
for emerging and established writers, are held under the aegis of
Word Forward.
Chris, with his
life partner Savinder, have proved that a life committed to arts and
literature can be built around here in Singapore. Now they are going
beyond Singapore, exploring new horizons.
27January 2010
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