May

Unlike my mother and brother, who have published their poems extensively, I never really embraced the form. Played around with poetry when I was a kid – I remember my cousin Shyam Puthucheary encouraging me to enter a newspaper competition. Graduating to poems and haikus for a fellow students as a teenager (none I can recover), culminating in this second prize during my third year at university. Felix Chong,  who I lost touch with but who I knew when I was at the National University of Singapore, captures my seriously earnest side. My last attempt at poetry was a poem about a Form 1 classmate, Patrick Hew, who had died tragically from a heart infection (as was reported to me). I didn’t hear of his death for some years as I had already moved to Singapore and had lost touch with most of friends from Saint Joseph’s School JB, the alumnus of which maintain a Facebook page, for those mired in nostalgia or just curious about what’s become of each other.