A Hideout Named Fajar

Elephants
By YAP Shi Quan

Deep inside Tekong’s forests and meandering roads, there was an unmapped and unheard-of hideout where us gay and lesbian soldiers mingled. It was an abandoned stumpy building which was previously used to train recruits for urban warfare. Electric lamps placed beside the entrances and hung on the corners of the roof illuminated its cracked exterior at night amidst a grassless clearing.

This was 1990. Rohan introduced me to the hideout three months after I was posted to Tekong in the training school Eagle Company as an armskote, stocking and cleaning M16s which perpetually greased up my hands. I knew Rohan prior to conscription — we were similar the way we preferred to gallivant than commit, the idea of making compromises dreary to us. So when he first described the hideout to me, like a mythic place where all sorts of fun were allowed, I’d thought he meant the members went there only to have sex, to escape their musty and cramped dormitories. But I found out that most of them, like Weixin, went in search of like-minded people: they shared with each other their future plans — some wanting to migrate, some wanting to enter civil service, prepared to hide their sexuality — all while drinking semi-cold Tiger Beer and eating peanuts; they exchanged political views, sometimes with fingers pointing at one another, the air warm with accusation, but always walking back to the dormitories together; they shared relationship stories of heartbreaks, of unrequited and requited love.

We hardly mentioned the hideout in public, not only because it was terrifying to affirm its existence in the presence of wide-eyed officers and sergeants who were ready to ensnare and discipline wrongdoing soldiers, but also it was exciting to keep the hideout a secret, as though we were doing something behind the watchful gazes of our parents. So we spoke in code: if we asked, “You going to the club this weekend?” we were, in fact, asking, “You going to the hideout tomorrow night?” or if we said, “I think the cookhouse serving Western food tonight,” we were saying, “A lot of us going to the hideout tomorrow night.”

I was with Rohan and Weixin in the hideout one night, the three of us taking turns talking about our past crushes. As we laughed and teased each other about the embarrassing things we did for puppy love, somebody in the hideout suddenly shushed the whole room silent, and one by one, the electric lamps were turned off, the candles on the tables snuffed out. I looked at Rohan in shock. His body contours sank into the heavy shadows. He pressed a finger to his lips. Then I heard the unmistakable growl of a car engine and the uneven crunch of tires. I realised what was happening, so I tried to listen if there were footsteps, or any sound that indicated human life. After ten minutes of nothing happening, everyone relit the candles, but the lamps remained switched off.

“Does this happen often?” I asked Rohan.

“Not really. But can’t be too careful,” he said.

“Not scary meh?”

Something lurked in his expression for a brief moment – something solemn, so unlike the Rohan I knew who once rolled his eyes and scolded an elderly man because the man told him that his silver-hoop earrings were too unbecoming of a man. But he just smiled at me and said, “It’s worth it.”

After that, we drank and talked until dawn came, when it was time to return to our respective dormitories. When we walked into the forest, breathing in the cold grassy scent, I turned to look at the hideout. Carved on the front entrance was the word Fajar in a jagged way which suggested a blunt rock had been dug into the wall. Nobody knew why the hideout was named so, its origins lost as the members changed every few months. But that moment when dawn graced the hideout with its dewy light, dappling the grey walls like a bridal veil, I realised perhaps this was what the person who named the hideout had seen, and if I were carrying my camera, I would have taken a picture of this passing beauty.


Rohan brought me to the hideout for the first time on a February night. We walked out of Ladang camp, landing our boots softly and staying away from the dormitories. The moonlight and our torchlights lit our way along Tekong Highway, although the narrow beam from the torchlights barely held their ground against the night. The forest rose from both sides of the highway and stretched ahead, the tree crowns eclipsing the bottom half of the horizon. Midway, a wild boar emerged from one side of the forest. It looked at us with its twinkling eyes, perhaps curious and cautious of us trespassers, before scampering into the other side of the forest.

After some time, we turned left onto a path devoid of shrubs or leaves, which alerted anyone to the fact that it was a walkable path. The palm trees hid away the moon. My breathing was loud and dense. Gradually, an orange glow emerged in the distance, and within it, the hideout. When I entered, I noticed instantly a mild floral smell. Ten-over people sat on foldable camping chairs, squeezed around crates that were repurposed into tables with pine-green cloths draped over them, and on top of them were lit scented candles. Warmth ballooned in the room and gloved my cold arms. Everybody cheered with welcome when they noticed Rohan and me coming in.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Rohan said. He brought me over to a table in the corner of the room, introducing me to Weixin for the first time. She was wearing a brown uniform, her long hair tied into a ponytail. She sat with her legs crossed, the polished tip of her black boots pointing upwards.

Rohan unfolded a camping chair, sat beside me, and rested his legs on the table. Weixin said, “Wah, I thought you’ll go find somebody and abandon your friend here with me.”

“Do you really think I’m that bad?” Rohan barked out a laugh. The top button of his uniform was unbuttoned, revealing the glint of a silver necklace chain. “But who knows? Little Ronnie here’s playful tonight.” He looked around the room, eventually spotting someone, whom he waved hello to with a cheeky smile.

“I’m fine lah. You can go if you want,” I said.

“Week after week,” Weixin said and sighed. “Better be careful now that the sex disease is spreading around US.” She tucked a few strands of her fringe behind her ear, revealing a small hairless scar on her left eyebrow.

“What are the chances?” Rohan said.

She shrugged. I found out weeks later that Weixin hoped to join the armed combat forces, but wasn’t allowed to by the army. So she settled for being a medic first. “You should be careful too,” she said to me. “You like to fool around also right?”

“Not as much as Rohan,” I laughed. I lacked the stamina he possessed – not physical stamina, but mentally, the pride and thrill and patience he had when exploring new bodies, whereas I felt mostly exhaustion, unless I was in the mood. Of course, it helped that Rohan was much fitter than I was. An officer once encouraged him to sign on to SAF, but he refused, saying he wanted to live up to his father’s expectations of becoming a doctor.

The hideout had settled into a murmur, and everybody’s shadows terraformed across the walls and low ceiling when a breeze blew in and agitated the candle flames. Rohan and Weixin brought me around to make further introductions. As we walked around, I saw a cupid sign in the corner of the room, its heart and arrow symbol with two initials, J & A, written in white chalk. A group of guys were munching on potato chips while playing poker, but without the whooping or cheering if somebody won, opting for silent punches in the air or suppressed laughter instead.

They brought me to an adjacent room. That was when I saw Joseph. I hadn’t expected to see him here in the hideout. He was sitting alone in the corner of the room, and because of the dimness, it took me a while to realise it was him.

“Hey, I know him,” I said. “He’s my sergeant in Eagle.”

When I said that, Weixin yanked me back to the previous room and said, “You know Joseph?”

I nodded. Rohan and Weixin shared a look before Rohan asked, “Are you on good terms with him?”

“We don’t really talk to each other,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Joseph is a little infamous.” Then in a softer voice, he said, “He only makes out with experimenting straight guys.”

I’d heard there were experimenting straight guys here from Rohan, but he’d never mentioned Joseph before. “Why?”

“Nobody knows,” Rohan said. “He keeps to himself a lot. I tried talking to him once, but he obviously wasn’t interested in talking to me, giving only one-word replies. Then his date came along and he just abandoned me.”

“He’s a little plain-looking hor?” Weixin said. “Some men are just full of ego, but actually, they live up to it only this much.” She made a pinching motion in the air, leaving a tiny pocket of space in between her short and slender fingers, while her gaze swept across the room.

Rohan cleared his throat. “Anyway, that’s his usual spot. If you don’t bother him, he won’t bother you.”

I tried looking at Joseph again in the adjacent room, but my line of vision was blocked by the wall. “But not like he’s dangerous, right?”

Rohan frowned. “Maybe he terrorises other people outside of the hideout.”

Weixin asked, “How is he like in Eagle?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really notice him.”

“Not at all?”

I shook my head. “So he’s a nobody in Eagle also,” she said. “Poor guy.”


I wasn’t being honest with Weixin. The truth was, Joseph had come under my radar a week before, when my sergeant friend in Eagle – whose name I can’t remember – asked me what I thought of Joseph. And I told him I thought nothing; Joseph had been invisible until my friend pointed him out to me.

So my friend told me to start observing Joseph, and I did so, as a wildlife photographer would with a newfound animal. When Joseph debriefed the recruits after the training ended, he sat on the grassy field together with them while the other sergeants and officers stood around them like a fence. His voice would boom across the parade square when he taught the recruits drills and marching. At night he liked to jog after everybody else had bathed, and I’d catch him heading towards the running track, his bulky figure small against the dormitory cluster.

With the knowledge of his idiosyncrasies in the hideout, I continued observing him during a field camp, a five-day exercise where recruits trained in the wild. That afternoon, I eavesdropped on a discussion between Joseph and his fellow signed-on sergeants and officers. I couldn’t hear everything, but I overheard an officer asking Joseph repeatedly if he could handle all of the jobs assigned to him during field camp, to which Joseph nodded, his oblong face blank and tired. All of us huddled beneath a makeshift tent, whose moss-green tarpaulin sheets flapped and whipped as gusts of wind swept through the forest. I was shivering even though my uniform sleeves were down to my wrists. The trees hardly provided shelter with their spindly branches and sparse foliage. The recruits sat in the open, hugging their M16s while chewing on their mushy rations mixed with the camouflage-stained sweat that trailed from their foreheads to their mouths.

At night, my sergeant friend asked me again what I thought of Joseph. I said, “He seems like a pushover.”

“More like he’s damn wayang.”

“How?”

“His father is a captain in another battalion,” he said. “So the officer commanding wants him to rise up the ranks fast.”

“Doesn’t look like he wants responsibility though.”

My friend gave me a pitying look. “When you go into the working world, you’ll know.”

If he was so insistent on his own opinion, why did he come looking for mine? Of course, I didn’t say that to him; I’d learnt how to play it safe in the army, avoiding as much conflict as I could.

Back in polytechnic and secondary school, I made my fair share of enemies. There was, for instance, a project groupmate who plagiarised another group’s business report. When he refused to admit it, I refused to contribute anything to the project, which resulted in a failing grade and us having to retake the module the following semester. My best friend was cheated on by some guy, so to avenge her, I spread rumours about how he had a micro dick.

But I could never replicate such pettiness in the army because of its insidious hierarchies and spiderweb of politics. So you skirted around these spiderwebs by gossiping about inconsequential and boring topics, such as what kind of girls we liked, what we disliked about a particular superior, which university course in Singapore could secure a stable career, and so on.


Two weeks later, I went to the hideout with Rohan or Weixin. Only a handful of people were in, and Joseph was at his usual spot. He was hunched over the table, staring at the candle. His left leg was restless, his boots thumping against the ash-flecked ground. The shadows flocked around him, burrowing into the creases and folds of his uniform.

I sat beside him. He snapped out of his reverie and asked, “What you doing here?”

“Same as you lah. No?”

He opened his mouth, probably to defend himself, but closed it lamely. He kept looking at the entrance behind me, so I asked, “You waiting for someone?”

“Yeah,” he said. Then after a while, he asked, “Are you…?”

It took me a while for him to realise what he was asking, but it took less than a second to say, “No. I’m experimenting.”

“Oh,” he said. “What made you join?”

I tried to think of a convincing answer. “I guess I don’t know whether I’m gay or not. So if I join the hideout, I thought, maybe I can find out without getting into trouble.”

Joseph hummed thoughtfully. “So, you figure out already?”

“I’ve been here for two weeks only. I haven’t even touched anybody.”

“You don’t seem bothered though.”

“I don’t want wrinkles to start forming by the time I’m thirty mah.”

He smiled. Then, a guy whom I recognised as Wayne, an officer from the training school Apache Company, walked from behind me and patted Joseph on the shoulder. Joseph stood up and left with him, not before saying bye to me.

I left to chat with the other members, until everyone left except me. I would’ve sat in the darkness, the candle extinguished, if not for the drizzle outside. Back at home, I transformed my bedroom into a dark room by taping black trash bags over the windows and gaps between the door and the ground, so I could develop the photographs I took from my freelance photoshoots. I was pretty adept at taking corporate head or group shots or recipe photographs for restaurants, but I shunned taking portraits, even though I liked admiring them. I thought that every portrait I took was ugly, worsened by how uncomfortable I felt when I zoomed into people’s faces and dictated their body positions or facial expressions. They’d look at me with those eyes full of expectations and sincerity, completely at my mercy.

After some time passed, a voice from behind me said, “How come you’re still here?”

I turned to see Joseph. “I thought everyone left,” I said.

“I’m waiting for the drizzle to stop,” he said. Then he asked, “Can I sit beside you?”

“Sure.”

After he sat down, he asked, “Are you by yourself usually?”

“I’m with Rohan and Weixin most of the time,” I said. “Where’s Wayne?”

“We finished our business long ago.”

It occurred to me then that he might have been eavesdropping on the rest of us talking while he was in the adjacent room alone, only choosing to come out after the others had left. “Why don’t you hang out with the other people besides experimenting guys?” I asked.

He wanted to say something, but shook his head instead and said, “Never mind.”

We waited for the drizzle to stop. The raindrops pattered against soil, making the sound children made when they ran with their tiptoes across a matted floor. I wondered which was loudest – the rain, the silence after his curt words, or the mulled silence now? The silence weighed between us, it seemed like we were on the cusp of saying something, but weren’t sure how to say it.

When the drizzle stopped, Joseph said, “I go back first.”

“I’ll stay longer.”

“Don’t stay too long or you might catch a cold. See you.” And he left.

I went back to the dormitory later, braving the cold night.


A month later, Eagle Company planned a unit cohesion activity back in Singapore to celebrate the recruits completing their BMT. Everybody was ordered to go, but I volunteered to stay back and handle administrative duties in Eagle headquarters. Joseph was nominated to stay back, which I only knew after I volunteered.

That Saturday afternoon, grey clouds swarmed the sky, but it was humid enough for me to dress down to my olive-brown army shirt. I’d brought a stack of National Geography and Vogue magazines to read in the headquarters, snipping out photographs and filing them into a file which collated my favourite pictures. Beside me was a black radio. Earlier, it had broadcasted an interview about a married couple who was a success story of SDU, and I switched it off when it started broadcasting that.

Joseph came in and shuffled into the cubicles beside the front desk where I sat. Even without the presence of our superiors, he wore his uniform primly, the sleeves folded and creaseless above his elbows. He rattled open a cabinet and took out documents. While sifting through them, he asked, “You going to the club this weekend?”

“Don’t think so,” I said. “You?”

“No.”

I told Weixin and Rohan about my brief encounter with Joseph, but spared them the details, assuring them that nothing much happened. “Doesn’t look like nothing happened,” Rohan said, when Joseph started waving to me whenever we walked past each other in the hideout. I didn’t tell them I had lied to Joseph. In Eagle we were still strangers, but there were more furtive glances between us, and he approached the armoury more often, asking about the rifles for no official reason.

Joseph asked, “When did you first know you’re, y’know, into guys?”

This question somehow irked me, and I considered not replying. But I reminded myself I should commit to my lie in front of him. “I don’t know,” I said, “I guess one day I caught myself thinking how handsome guys were, and maybe I could explore that possibility.”

“Did it bother you?”

“Who wouldn’t be bothered?”

There was a stark truth to this statement which coagulated into something alien and fatiguing in my chest. I leaned back into the chair, my head hanging upside-down from the support, and looked out of the window, whose lattices and mosquito net marred my view. Suddenly, rain started pouring, its vast sheets rising from the sky and tearing through the floating treetops.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

After a brief moment of silence, he said, “Your hair looks long.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “I think an officer told me to cut it last week.”

He clicked his tongue. “You should cut it before everyone returns tomorrow.”

“If a barbershop magically appears in Tekong.”

Joseph went to the storeroom. There was some rustling of plastic boxes and containers, then he returned wielding an electric hair clipper.

I straightened myself. “You know how to cut?”

“I cut my father’s hair sometimes.”

I must’ve looked uncertain, because he said, “C’mon, I’ll just shave and trim a little. Or you want to get punished?” He seemed serious, yet his eyes were bright with mischief.

I didn’t know what possessed me to say yes. We got to work, laying out newspapers on the floor and placing a chair in the middle. Then we reassembled more newspapers with tape around my neck which prevented cut hair from falling onto my shirt. The edges tickled my neck. We placed an oval mirror on the desk which reflected my face, my thin lips pursed and jaws stiff with anxiety. I couldn’t see much of him in the mirror, but he could see me just fine.

“Ready?” he said.

I nodded. The hair clipper buzzed alive. His left palm, warm against the left side of my head, held steady as he pressed forward the clipper on the right side. Clumps of hair thudded onto the newspaper and slid down. His palm, damp and large, trailed from my scalp to my neck and rested there. He stooped down to examine my hair, entering the mirror’s frame. I noticed for the first time he had a widow’s peak. His eyes were narrowed with concentration, and his fingers dug into my neck as he angled the clipper around my head. The ghost of his breath lingered on my nape.

“Who taught you how to cut?” I asked.

“My mom,” he said. “She’s a hairstylist.”

“I heard your father is a captain in a battalion.”

He went silent, and I said, “I shouldn’t—”

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “The other sergeants must’ve told you. It’s true. That’s why the officer commanding gives me so many jobs. He knows my father. But I don’t really know how to live up to their expectations. Maybe it’ll be easier without everyone pressuring me. My father too; all he likes to say is how our generation has it much easier than his, and I should just suck thumb. I followed in his footsteps because I didn’t know what to do after polytechnic.”

“Maybe signing on doesn’t suit you?”

“But it’s safe here.”

I wanted to say that what he described didn’t seem enjoyable at all, but what did I know? Maybe there was a comfort to being jostled around, a comfort I wasn’t privy to, since all I’d known in my life so far was getting subpar results for my studies because I indulged in my photoshoots, coming back home past curfew, and skipping family time and meals.

When Joseph was done, he asked how the haircut looked. The sides were shaved short, and the middle tuft of hair was less puffy. My scalp felt airier. I said it was passable, and he laughed; I hadn’t noticed how it looked until he’d prompted me.


At midnight, after tossing and turning in bed, I sought Joseph in his bunk. I wasn’t surprised to find him awake on his bed. I asked him if he wanted to go to the hideout. He said yes.

It didn’t occur to us that we could’ve done it in Eagle headquarters since we were the only people there, or we could’ve done it in the windowless armoury, away from prying eyes. But the hideout made sense, even if it was far away; or, perhaps, it made sense precisely because it was far away.

Through it all, the way our hands roam each other’s bodies, my fingers brushing over a scab on his forearm, the way granules and pebbles dig into my back and his, the way moonlight glides off our bodies like teardrops, there is a slow, tender burn in my stomach, a sensation which I’ve never felt before and have been cheated of with my past partners, its newness intoxicating to the extent it becomes terrifying. I want to ask why he came to the hideout, why he approached and trusted me, why he never approached the other members. But I don’t. Instead, we lie silently beside each other until dawn, the light illuminating his face. And – I’m ashamed to admit this – when I reach out to hold his face, I’m briefly reminded of my first night in field camp as a recruit. I was in my shell scrape, my head lying on the field pack, with clumpy soil raised around me like I was in a shallow grave. When I woke up I stretched out my hand, and breaking through the amorphous tree crowns was the lustre of dawn which outlined my hand, giving it body in the darkness, and I thought, This is what it means to be alive, alive, alive.

Years later when I came out to my father, he said, spitting out the last word, “When you first know you were into guys?” My mother, whom I came out to months ago, stood beside me and tried to calm me down. However, overcome by rage, I said to him, “So when you first know you wanted to cheat on Ma?”

My father used to boast that he had achieved many of his milestones in life before he turned thirty. He started working in LTA as an engineer when he was twenty-five, married Ma at twenty-seven, and had me at twenty-nine. And because his last milestone was retirement, he religiously planned the family’s expenses. I often saw him holding bills and taxes with his age-spotted hands, the calculator beside him, eyes squinting as though there was some secret formula to be gleaned.

There were nights he came home late, claiming to have worked overtime. Those nights, when I was thirteen, were filled with laughter because Ma brought me to watch comedic television shows at the nearby community centre. She’d bun up her hair to enjoy the cool breeze, and wear a knee-length dress. “Do you like it?” she’d asked after the shows. I used to think she loved comedy, but after a while, I realised it was because she couldn’t enjoy anything else. Dramas like Samsui Women made her cry. Even though she knew about the affair, she never confronted my father, and because of that, I grew to scorn her. It was only in my late twenties when I realised this weakness, this servility was deliberate, to keep the family together for my sake.

When my father spat the question at me, I finally made sense of my annoyance towards this question. What he really meant with the question was, When did you know you were different from other people? as though the lenses everyone else used to observe their world were borderless and bird’s-eye, as though they knew what it took to live morally in this immoral world. And the answers you give can feel inane, and you’ll suddenly realise how inadequate you are amongst everybody else.

But Joseph had a different reason when he asked me the same question — except I didn’t see it then, seeing only a man who failed to understand his place in this world because of his own short-sightedness. And so I belittled him in my mind, until the day he confronted me about my lie, the day the elephants came to Tekong.


There were rumours about the elephants having a slavish master, or that they lived in a zoo enclosure, condemned to a life of spectacle and voyeurism. So they escaped, swam from the east of Johor, across the straits, and found Tekong with its abundance of forests and vast grass clearings by chance. But nobody knew the true story. The only thing that mattered was elephants weren’t native to this island, and Tekong was unforgiving to its intruders.

May. Tropical heat returned with vengeance. Heat waves radiated off the concrete ground where sunlight pooled. The forest, for all the refuge it provided, couldn’t shield the hideout from the sunlight. The hideout smelt claustrophobic with sweat.

Joseph found out about my lie, perhaps from the other guys in the hideout whom I got fleetingly intimate with. So that afternoon, he dragged me to the outskirts of the forest where the gravelly road was, some distance away from the hideout.

“You were never straight, were you?” he said.

The forest around us was troubled. Flocks of birds burst from the tree crowns, rustling the leaves and causing the nearly-dead ones to detach and sway to the ground, where there were already beds of brown, dried leaves. The smell of soil was unbearably rich between us. I’d thought I would be happy to stop lying, but I couldn’t come clean.

That was when the elephants appeared. The ground trembled, and then three elephants emerged from one side of the forest. They walked in a single file and looked roughly the same size, but the one in front seemed more imposing, the folds on his greyish-brown hide thick and leathery, with spots that suggested age, while the ones at the back seemed meeker, their hides had lesser spots and folds.

“Where did they come from? How?” Joseph said.

It felt surreal seeing real elephants after seeing plenty of them in National Geographic magazines. But unlike the ones photographed majestically against the vast green plains, the elephants in front of me were dirty and worn out. I looked at Joseph, who was gaping at the elephants, and I looked back at the elephants. I said, “I’m going to follow them.”

“What?” Joseph looked as though I spoke in a foreign language. “Don’t be crazy.”

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

“What if they attack us?”

They were now re-entering the forest on the opposite side. “They look gentle.”

“I think we should leave them alone.”

But I was already chasing after the elephants, taking big steps to catch up with them and to get away from Joseph. “Whether you’re coming or not, I don’t care,” I said. After a while, I heard the sound of dead leaves crackling behind me, and I turned to see him catching up. He had a hardened but concerned expression on his face.

We followed the elephants deeper into the forest, which got dimmer as the trees huddled closer and provided shade. The ground was almost barren of grass, matted with clumpy and pebbly soil, dead leaves, and an overgrown army of surface roots. There was the occasional litter, like biscuit wrappers or Ziploc bags, with trails of ants crawling over them. We dug our boots into the hard soil and walked up and down knolls. The back of my uniform began to dampen from the glare of the sun.

“We can still turn back,” Joseph said. “If we go any deeper, I’m not sure we’ll know our way back to camp.”

“Can put your navigation skills to test.”

“Is this funny to you? Even lying to me?”

I didn’t like the tone he adopted, a tone which suggested he was the victim and I was the perpetrator. “Can’t you take a joke?”

“Can’t you stop avoiding me with jokes?”

I looked at Joseph. He was breathing heavily. “You still owe me an answer,” he said.

What did it mean to owe somebody an answer? Was it my fault I hadn’t lived up to his expectations, or was it his for trusting me? “Why should I when I did nothing wrong?” I said.

The elephants slowed down as the forest got denser. Despite their hugeness, the elephants landed their feet with gentleness, as though they were conscious of where they stepped. When they realised they couldn’t go any further, the trees too congested, they changed directions. Soon, we were all back on the road with the evening light floodlighting us. The elephants stopped and looked around, perhaps trying to gain their bearings. I asked Joseph if he knew where we were, and he said everywhere in this damn forest looked the same.

The elephants had taken notice of us, but they kept still, their tails swinging slowly. I wondered where they came from. They seemed like a family, but they could be strangers who clung onto one another to endure loneliness in this unfamiliar land, heading towards a destination perhaps unknown even to them, drifting towards the familiar, the comfortable. Before I knew it, my legs carried me closer to the elephants. Joseph hissed at me, asking me what I was doing. The older elephant now looked straight at me, its tail becoming rigid like a lightning rod, its ears fanned outwards. When I was around fifteen paces away, it whipped its tusks and trunk upwards and trumpeted, the blare reverberating through my body. I jerked to a stop and raised my hands overhead, as though I were surrendering myself. Joseph pulled me away. Still reeling, I watched numbly as the elephants lumbered away without giving me another look.

I was about to follow them again, but Joseph whirled me around and said, “Tekong Highway is there.” He pointed in the opposite direction where the elephants headed.

“Wait. Let’s follow them further.”

“We’re going back.”

“Who the fuck are you to control me?”

“And who do you think you are to those elephants?”

“They’re just scared,” I said. “They don’t know I’ll be nice to them.”

“They’re trying to survive, they don’t need you to be nice,” he said. “When are you going to realise you’re just a nuisance to them?”

It was the way he said ‘just’ so matter-of-factly. It was the way he talked about the elephants as though he could see them for what they were. And if he understood them with such piercing clarity – so much so that it admonished me – then what if he’d seen me all along for who I was behind the lies and half-truths? Alarmed by this, I said, “That’s why you never mixed with us gay people, right? Get over yourself, Joseph. We never liked you anyway.”

His face and shoulders went stiff. A vacant look took over. He said, “So you admit you’ve been lying?”

I didn’t know what to say.

Then the stiffness in his face gave way, and his shoulders sagged. He said, “All this time, I thought we were the same.”

I was looking beyond his shoulders when he said that, at the endless stretch of trees. From the corner of my vision, a bead of sweat rolled down from his temple to the cheek I’d held just two months ago. I hated this island, I hated it so much I wanted to raze all of the buildings to the ground and watch the ashes plume towards the sky and swallow the sky up.

“I’m going back to Eagle,” he said. “Whether you’re coming back with me or not, I don’t really care.”

I decided to follow him. “I don’t know my way back to the hideout.”

“I don’t really care.”

We kept our distance all the way back. While walking, I asked him if we should tell the others about the elephants. He kept quiet, perhaps out of spite, but I already knew his answer.


I wanted to tell Rohan and Weixin about what happened. But after Joseph and I returned to Eagle Company, Weixin came looking for me. She was trembling, looking around her as she told me what happened. A group of soldiers had followed two unsuspecting members to the hideout, barged in, and shouted at twenty members to stop what they were doing and face the walls. Then they escorted everybody, including Rohan, with their hands behind their heads back to Tekong headquarters. Weixin was peeing in the forest, and she hid behind a tree until they were gone. “I couldn’t do anything,” she choked.

I woke up to a flurry of news about the elephants the next morning, including a front-page article in The Straits Times. But there was no news about the hideout; it was as though the raid hadn’t happened, or the hideout never existed. I waited weeks for news of Rohan, but none came. I still met up with Weixin and the members who weren’t captured, but we rarely talked about the hideout. Or when I tried to they’d steer the conversation away, preferring to talk about something less incriminating. Sometimes I felt the urge to tell them things needn’t change, or at least, we needn’t change. But I couldn’t. In just one evening, the world we inhabited had been taken away, denied from us, leaving the rest of us out in the brutal cold, our self-preservation instincts startled and screaming at us to flee. Once, I asked Weixin if she ever wondered where Rohan had been taken to. “So many times,” she said, and I was stunned by the redness and weight in her gaze, as though her eyes and face carried the day of the raid with her every day.

I told Joseph what happened as well. He tried to look composed, but he was clearly disturbed. “We should lie low and stay away from trouble,” he said. And after that, we never talked to each other again. Sometimes I thought about apologising to him for what I’d said in the forest, but it felt more convenient not to, and wedge a reason for conflict between us, like thrusting a knife into the flesh and letting it rust there. Even so, whenever we passed by each other in Eagle, I’d think back to the times we had in the hideout. I wondered if he did too.


A week after the elephants were discovered, some trackers from Singapore Zoo came to Tekong to capture and bring them back to the mainland. I asked my sergeant friend in Eagle, who was one of the soldiers assigned to track down the elephants, if he could bring me along to see them.

We drove down to the site where they were the next afternoon. I gave directions to my friend using a map, the capturing site marked with an X. I rolled down the window to ventilate the car. On our way there, I traced the route from my dorm to the hideout, which was inside an empty space designated as forest. I allowed myself, in that brief fifteen-minute ride, to reminisce about the times with all of the members, feeling the warm breeze gushing into the car.

The site was cordoned off by a red-and-white safety barricade tape, with a few people standing around the tape. I spotted the elephants even before I stepped out of the car: two of them were lying sideways on the ground, and only one was standing; all of their legs were chained to nearby trees. There were a few rangers standing around them with guns in their arms, loaded with what I thought were tranquilizer darts. I circled around the tape until I stood in front of the last standing elephant. It looked like the oldest-looking one, the same elephant that trumpeted at me. It wobbled a bit and growled, a deep but weak rumble. Those large inky eyes, half-covered by its wrinkly eyelids, stared at me, but they seemed hazy.

I didn’t rush forward and kneel down in front of the elephant. I didn’t shove the rangers away. I didn’t reach out and rub its grey, dirt-lacquered hide to placate it. It didn’t take notice of me. It didn’t open its eyelids and gaze upon me with recognition. It didn’t summon its final ounce of strength to flourish his trunk and trumpet the last time, to strike fear in people’s hearts.

Instead, I watched the rise and fall of its belly and its trembling eyelids, before it closed its eyes and succumbed to sleep.


YAP Shi Quan is a recent graduate of Nanyang Technological University and an aspiring writer. He has dabbled in film reviews, journalism, and copywriting, but always returns to creative writing to ground himself in emotional truths. He has a non-fiction piece published in UEA's Undergraduate Creative Anthology, Underscore.