The Colonisation
Cheriel Neo
It began with the smells. On Brasenose Lane, the familiar odour of damp gutters was replaced by the faint scent of frying shallots, ginger and garlic. The kitchens must be serving Chinese tonight, I thought. In the college library, bewildered undergraduates frowned over battered books as the aroma of sesame oil and spring onions rose up strongly from their pages. The irate librarian ordered a search for the student irresponsible enough to sneak a noodle box into the library, but the culprit was never found. Visitors to Christ Church Cathedral were disconcerted by the unaccountable tang of curry wafting from the shrine of St Frideswide that no amount of incense could dispel.
Although it was only February, the weather grew muggy and humid. Embracing the warmth, everyone but the most hardened of postgraduates abandoned their books for the green pastures and blazing sunshine of the University Parks. Gradually though, as the cool ivy-covered walls of colleges began to sweat with condensation, people began flocking back to the libraries for shade, and there was a rash of fainting fits as students struggled to think in stifling tutorials. The Met Office called it a ‘localised heatwave’—the result of climate change and Oxford’s unique geography. Whatever the reason, as March drew on, the dreaming spires began to shimmer in the oppressive heat. The smells persisted too. An irresistible smell of roast duck permeated the Covered Market day and night, and hapless butchers were forced to turn away customer after customer, protesting that they sold no cooked meats. Meanwhile, I was haunted everywhere by the fragrance of some purple dendrobiums I’d potted years ago for a homework assignment. Their fresh, delicate perfume lingered like a half-forgotten dream, or a word unspoken, troubling and elusive. But they were thousands of miles across the ocean; I put it down to the vagaries of homesickness.
It was only when the buildings started moving in that people began to suspect something was happening. I experienced it as a kind of double vision at first. The building in front of me blurred, and appeared to split and resolve into two outlines. One outline was that of the original building, an elegant yellow brick townhouse. The other was entirely different. It was a peeling old two-storey shophouse of the sort familiar at home, whitewashed with slatted wooden window shutters painted pale blue. It was like seeing a person closely followed by their shadow—except it was impossible to say which was real and which the shadow. I looked up and down the street and realised that the same thing had happened all around—a new set of buildings had been superimposed onto the original, like a badly photoshopped image. Each set jostled the other in overlapping layers of distorted space-time. The whole effect was jarring and more than a little dizzying.
For most people, this new development was a bit too much to handle. Some took to their beds in hopes that this strange sweaty nightmare would soon pass. It was about this time, though, that an energetic fellow from the Oriental Institute took it upon himself to look into the whole affair. First the outbreak of rogue smells, then the unseasonable heat, and now this abrupt intrusion of foreign architecture—all told, he was strongly reminded of his gap year travels in Malaysia and Singapore. It was impossible, he knew, but what better explanation for these goings-on could there be than that Oxford was being overtaken—colonised, even—by the sights and sensations of Southeast Asian life? With great hesitation he wrote a paper suggesting that perhaps Oxford, this bastion of privilege and imperial heritage, was being colonised in reverse by the spirit of the Asian countries to which it had once sent so many masters. Absurd though it seemed, his theory did make sense of these mysterious events—and although it was never seen as more than pseudo-science by the most rigorous of scholars, it quickly became extremely popular and was hotly debated for a long time to come. I personally believe there was more than a grain of truth to it.
The reason for this was that I had been recognising several of the ghostly buildings popping up around town. The Tesco on Cowley Road had morphed into the shabby community centre where I used to have abacus and piano lessons as a very small child; though the bright red and blue supermarket sign could still be seen through the translucent white walls of the community centre, the place was unmistakably and assertively there. Similarly, sitting squarely in the middle of New College’s beautifully manicured gardens was the block of government flats in which my grandparents lived. Though I now saw them only once a year, I remembered that spare, practical, unsmiling frame well. Perforated with regular windows, its stairwells lit with white fluorescent light, painted red and pink—it was identical in every way. Block 229 from Jurong East Street 21, Singapore, had audaciously, improbably, come to roost in Oxford. None of these apparitions amounted to more than a shadowy shell, but there was a queer and intrusive pathos about them, almost as if a figment of one’s imagination had one day obligingly materialised, and then refused to ever go away.
I took a friend to see Block 229. ‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘It’s odd,’ she said. ‘It makes me feel as if I’ve lost something precious.’
In the week after the buildings moved in, as temperatures reached the impossible heights of 31 degrees, the supernatural colonisation of Oxford took a deeply personal turn, and I began to wish I had never even come. Pursued constantly by the powerful odour of dendrobiums, I started having visions of far-off family and friends. I would glimpse my mother turning a corner, or see my sister disappearing into a crowd, always too quick for me, and always just out of reach. At night I lay awake hearing snatches of conversation from my grandparents’ dinner table filtering through the walls, as though they were just next door. Familiar pairs of shoes would appear in front of my room in college as if surprise visitors had come, but upon entering, my room was always empty. Once, I saw my own home just down the road, and ran towards it with wild hope—only to find myself bursting unceremoniously into a Chinese takeaway joint. It seemed to me that whatever the force behind these events was, it had taken a cruel and detailed interest in the things I loved.
Eventually, the tide that had overwhelmed Oxford receded as mysteriously as it had advanced. With the man from the Oriental Institute live-tweeting the progress of the colonisation, the residents of Oxford watched the interloping buildings grow fainter by the day and eventually disappear altogether. The heat lessened steadily, and dovetailed into the damp clammy weather typical of early spring in the Thames Valley. The smells were the last thing to go. But one day we noticed that the Covered Market no longer smelt quite so strongly of duck, and that the college library had regained its familiar fragrance of paper and old wood. Visitor numbers to Christ Church Cathedral increased to healthy levels once more.
Even after all the other smells had faded, however, the scent of my dendrobiums remained. Finally I wrote to my mother asking her to send a cutting of the plant by courier. If I had to be continually in the presence of that fragrance, I decided, I would rather care for the real thing than be haunted against my will. The day it arrived, the smell of dendrobiums vanished as completely as if a tap had been shut off.
My real dendrobiums, on the other hand, flourished. They were best suited to the Singaporean climate, but with careful tending, they began to bud and flower in Oxford, and remain a living reminder of this episode. Now, although I partly accept the theory of the Oriental Institute fellow, I have a few notions of my own too. Why did the sights and sounds of home come so close, yet remain so firmly out of reach? Why did I have my own personal ghost-smell? It was as if there was some message I was meant to receive—some epiphany the whole series of events was meant to trigger. After wrestling with these questions for many long months, I reached a conclusion that finally brought me peace. I believe this was never meant to be a colonisation, but rather, an expurgation—of collective and personal nostalgia. Why else did the smell of dendrobiums disappear only when I dragged them out of my past and into the present? Why else did I have to be disappointed over and over again? The message I received was this: the past is a ghost that will haunt you until you begin living for the present. And I am thankful for this lesson.
~
Cheriel Neo was born in Singapore, and now lives in Edinburgh as a postgraduate student of Japanese-English translation. She studied History and English Literature at Oxford, and is writing her Master’s dissertation on the retranslation of contemporary tanka poetry. She enjoys thinking about community, faith, culture and poverty, and is looking forward to starting work soon at a finance company which specialises in funding sustainable social change. She has a cat named Nala and a fiancé named Fraser.
Shain Ramjan was born on the 20th of December 1994 in Edmonton London, England. He studied at the New Eton College where his interests for Art and Designing extended. Later he was then introduced into fashion designing by his sister Insheera Ramjan. Attracted to grotesque figures and avant-garde, Shain started doing portraits of celebrities but re-interpreted them to his own views. He plays with different trends and ‘must haves’ in ‘MODE’ to give his artworks a bold daring appeal. Shain mainly paints feminine portraits which are sometimes pure and innocent or morbid and dark; he tries to reflect his dreams and nightmares through his works. He uses crayonnage, ink, pastel, charcoal, paint and some other techniques to add the ‘fashion art’ touch to his works. He believes that art, fashion and music are the three factors which define himself.
