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looking after the place, following the instructions I have given them. The garden has been maintained by untrained hands: branches that should have been left to grow pruned away; a view that should have been obscured opened up; a path widened without consideration to the overall harmony of the garden. Even the wind streaming through the shrubs sounds wrong because the undergrowth has been allowed to grow too densely and too high.
    The omissions and errors are like the noise generated by a collection of badly tuned musical instruments. Aritomo once told me that of all the gardens he created, this one meant the most to him.
    Halfway in my walk through the garden, I stop, turn around and head back to the house.

    * * *
    The fourteenth-century bronze Buddha in the study has not grown older; his face is unmarked by the cares of the world. Ah Cheong has opened the windows to air the room all day, but the smell of mildew from the books on the shelves ages the twilight filling up the house.
    The feeling that something was wrong with me surfaced five or six months ago. I was often awakened by headaches in the night, and I began to tire easily. There were days when I could not summon up any interest in my work. My concerns sharpened into fear when I began to forget names and words. It was not merely the unfolding of age, I suspected, but something more. I was frail when I had emerged from the slave-labour camp, and my health had never recovered completely. I had forced myself to pick up the life I had known before the war. Being an advocate, and later on, a judge, had given me solace; I had found enjoyment in working with words, in applying the law. For over forty years I had succeeded in staving off this exhaustion of the body, but I had always feared that a day would come when there was nothing left to be depleted from me. What I had not expected was how soon, how swiftly that moment had arrived.
    I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.
    Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrifies me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.
    Frederik’s suggestion that I write down the things I do not want to forget has rooted itself into the crevices of my mind. It is futile, I know, but a part of me wants to make sure that, when the time comes, I will still have something that gives me the possibility, however meagre, to orient myself, to help me determine what is real. 

    Sitting at Aritomo’s desk, I realise that there are fragments of my life that I do not want to lose, if only because I still have not found the knot to tie them up with.
    When I have forgotten everything else, will I finally have the clarity to see what Aritomo and I have been to each other? If I can still read my own words by then, with no knowledge of who had set them down onto the page, will the answers come to me?
    Outside, the mountains have been drawn into the garden, becoming a part of it. Aritomo had been a master of shakkei , the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.
    A memory drifts by. I reach for it, as if I am snatching at a leaf spiralling down from a high branch. I have to. Who knows if it will ever come back to me again?
    During the Emergency, some of the people who were given a private tour of Majuba Tea Estate would also ask to see Yugiri. And sometimes Aritomo allowed it. On such occasions, I would be waiting for them at the main entrance. Most of the visitors were senior government officials taking a holiday with their wives in Cameron Highlands before going back to waging war on the communist-terrorists hiding in