i’ve discovered a new favourite author

… and it all started with a bucket

Every week, after my Pilates class, I walk down to a vegetarian Chinese restaurant to order lunch.

It’s always the same vegan seafood — mock seafood, of course — and wonton soup during colder months and vegan Singapore noodles during warmer months. These are great lunch options, and they’re enough for two, as my husband works from home on Thursdays.

I walk in, place my order, and hand over my own bag with both hands, as it’s considered rude in Asian cultures to hand over anything with one hand.

My gesture is always appreciated by the lovely Chinese waitress who makes us feel valued as she even learnt our names. My husband’s name is Western and easy to remember, but mine isn’t. And yet, she made an effort.

While they’re preparing lunch for us, I go out and visit the tiny bookstore, which is conveniently located within the same building, right next door to the eatery. Dangerous for a book-loving person like me, I know.

This tiny bookstore is part of a big chain. There is a big one in the city, and that one in the city has a huge stationery shop attached to it, too. Books and writing material. Total bliss, an absolute writer’s paradise.

I usually walk in and check the best sellers first. They always give me ideas of which book to get next. For me, that book won’t be on paper but on Kindle. My eyes are making it difficult for me to read on paper, even though I love the tactile experience and the smell of books.

Another reason why I prefer Kindle is that English is not my first language, and I still look up words every now and then. I mean, I have to if I want to understand everything. Kindle has a built-in dictionary, and that dictionary makes my non-native life easier.

Back to the bookstore…

I have always been treated nicely in that bookstore, even though our suburb is known for its hedonistic incline.

That day, I was browsing through the shelves of great literature, and a book caught my eye.

There was a bucket on the cover and not much else.

The bucket looked lonely to me, and it reminded me of a one-man play by a Turkish artist who played Van Gogh. A particular scene from the play was quite primitive and yet powerful. A single light bulb shone from above onto the artist, who sat on a stool. It was a scene of a light bulb, a man with one ear, and a stool. It was so spectacular, so powerful.

I felt the same thing when I watched Sir Ian McCallen at the Sydney Opera House. The play was Waiting for Godot. At the end of the first act, they left us with a pair of boots in front of the curtains and a single light streaming from above. The loneliness of those boots took me back to that other play and made me get Van Gogh’s painting with his boots printed on canvas. It’s on my wall right where I’m writing right this minute.

And the bucket I was looking at in the bookstore gave me the same feeling. This time, though, the lonely bucket was on the cover of Claire Keegan’s book called Foster.

The colour of the bucket is exactly the same as its background. Frosty, geyish green, that is. There is a strip of wooden floor underneath it, which makes me think I would love to have wooden floorboards in that colour.

The loneliness of the bucket is palpable, and deep down, I know that it has significance in the story.

The decision was made. So, I grabbed the book, approached the counter and handed it over to a young(ish) lady there.

She looked at the cover and said, “You’ll love this book even more than her other works, like Small Things Like These or Antarctica.”

I noticed her Irish accent. I thought, she is Irish, Claire Keegan is Irish. So, she could be biased, but I’m thinking, I’m following my intuition and buying Foster today. I have the other two — Small Things Like These and Antarctica — on Kindle anyway. They can wait.

… and I was right about the bucket.

I’m not going to spoil Foster for you by revealing much else, but let me tell you this: the bucket has significance in the story.

It’s a tiny book — only 88 pages long. I mean, it’s not Shantaram or Goldfinch. One can easily read it in one sitting.

Claire Keegan’s writing style is so clean, precise, and deep. I think the reason why I like her style is that she doesn’t use a single unnecessary word in her writing.

I just love it!

After discovering Foster and Claire Keegan’s writing, I borrowed So Late in the Day from our local library. It was one of those eBooks you read on your iPad. I devoured it in one go, and it was then and there that I discovered a new favourite author.

Now, let me share with you the bits and pieces I like from Foster…

Part of me wants my father to leave me here while another of me wants him to take me back, to what I know. I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might fall and blow and change things.

Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame — and shame is something we can do without.

Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.

Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy — but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.

Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

“Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what is coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.”

“She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is.”

My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me.

Plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me.