Novelist with Wheels for Lloyd Fernando

Though you are for now in a wheel-chair for meetings in public, because it's your sari-soft hand I'm holding I don't feel I'm bending, kneeling, 'God forbid' I hear your thought say in the silence of a smile. The words we always were to each other have resisted impairment and decay. It's horses for courses as usual, so galloping is not on for the present. But resuming a golden gait is — not, I mean Straight is the Gate, a text you know better than me anyway. Your patient ambition to climb a mountain a few toe and finger metres high will be applauded by companies of butterflies spraying, by fireflies incandescent in the Malacca day and the Malay night enamoured of your inexhaustible charm, your placing the wrong word and the right word on the notice-board for the public to see and judge and improve, and for generations honey-hived by love.