Chapter 19: The Little Man With the Lamp

I MEET Peter Terence D’Cruz days after my mother passes away on 7 May 2015. My classmate from LSS and a good friend to this day, Andrew Reddy, has opened his home to me when I have returned to KL to make arrangements for Mum’s farewell. “I think you need the space,” Andrew says, and he is right. Andrew gives me the keys to a studio apartment on the ground floor of his home and I am free to come and go as I please. Everything is over, wake, funeral service, cremation. “Everybody” in my family is now gone. I’m only 58.

  Peter Terence D'Cruz

When we have some time to ourselves on my first night there — Andrew’s daughter and her children stay over, and they’ve all gone to bed, along with Andrew’s wife, Trixie — I open up to Andrew about having to make all those judgment calls during Mum’s last days, including signing the papers that basically disallowed any further medical interventions once it became obvious Mum had lapsed into her final stage; the only intervention allowed was medication to ease any stress the body underwent. Then, there was the toss-up between burial and cremation. Where would she rest? Apparently, the columbarium that held my father’s ashes could not be opened to house Mum’s remains, and the only other option was the Methodist cemetery. My brother had passed away in August 2013, and it had been emotionally difficult making all those calls without having someone to bounce those decisions off. “So, you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” Andrew says. “I think you should just do the job you flew over to do. Which you’re supposed to do, as your mother’s son. Here, have another drink.” Again, he is right, and it is just the advice I need. Andrew’s like that — he cuts through and gets straight to the point.

Andrew goes off to work early the next morning and I wake up for a late breakfast. Trixie has already had hers. As the lady of the house, she has been very very welcoming from the start. She has made me feel entirely at home, finding that middle ground between being genuinely friendly, offering to help, offering her car, and leaving me alone. “I’ve invited a good friend of ours to come over and keep you company,” Trixie says. “I think you’ll like him, and you’ll both get on very well together.” I have just met Trixie, so I smile at her very sincere attempt at kindness and caring for someone she has met only the night before. In a couple of hours, I can see him from the patio, sauntering up the road, looking like he doesn’t have a care in the world. I will soon find out he has a lot on his mind, indeed, but you’ll never know it, looking at Terence.

He wears wire-rimmed spectacles and a full head of hair, combed back, held in place by hair-cream, like a lot of Malaysian men, and it is marked just right by streaks of grey. Altogether, someone distinct from others, probably knowing he’s a bit different, totally comfortable in that space.

Terence has come with his wife, Cynthia Soliano, daughter of that famed Malaysian musician, Alfonso Soliano. The Solianos are a huge family hailing from the Philippines, and several of them, over at least three generations, make their mark as respected musicians and leaders in the field. Cyn, as she is called, says hello and goes inside to be with Trixie.

*****

In no time at all, Terence and I are getting on very well, comfortable enough with one another to speak what’s on our minds without thinking. We shoot the breeze on all sorts of matters, try to save the world and decide instead that it is more important to be happy and have fun, by which time Andrew returns. In no time at all, we have wined and dined like sultans and are catching the KL night air back in the patio. For some strange reason, we begin to exchange ghost stories, sharing experiences each of us have been through, which we believe leave no doubt that we have come into contact with elements of the spiritual world.

At some point, I begin to notice Terence has gone quiet, very quiet, and I wonder if he has somehow been offended by anything either Andrew or I have had to say. He just stares into space, unmoving in his chair, and he has the look of someone who has just shut off the conversation because he doesn’t like the way it was going, but it’s too polite to say so. After a few minutes I can’t not say anything.

Terence: "I've never felt better."

I call out his name. Once, twice, three times. Terence does not flinch. Andrew freezes. We are both scared. When I tell Andrew it might be the onset of a stroke — Terence has told me of his heart issues in the afternoon — we panic. Andrew begins punching numbers on his mobile phone, ostensibly to summon an ambulance, or a doctor friend who lives nearby. I walk up to sit next to Terence and slowly, very gently, lay the palm of my hand on his hand, which is holding on to the armrest of his chair. Terence absolutely does not move, his hand is warm. But his eyes are the eyes of a man in another world. I tell Andrew to hang up. I say, “Terence”, my hand clasping his. I again say his name three times, getting louder with each call.

Just as suddenly, Terence blinks, lifts his head slightly, almost imperceptibly, turns to me and asks: “What? What is it?” By this time, I am alone with Terence, and I am really afraid. Hell, we have been talking ghost stories we really believe and here I am, alone with a guy who really looks like he’s returning from sojourn into another world. As it turns out, Terence tells us that’s exactly where he’s been.

I shout for Andrew and he rushes out with Trixie and Cyn, and Cyn starts scolding Terence. “I told you, I told you,” she says. “Stop doing this. You think it’s funny, you’re a hero.” Cyn has seen this before. Terence is communing with spirits. When we have all calmed down, slowed our racing hearts, quietly said our own prayers of gratitude, Terence apologises profusely, especially to me, because I am still holding his hand. He looks so tired, but he smiles and says, “I’m OK. Please don’t worry. Somebody, give me a cigarette.” The hand he uses to mime holding a fag to his lips is shaking. “Please light it for me. My hands are shaking too much,” he says.

“It’s happened before, sometimes when I meditate in my room at home, and Cyn comes in, and she knows what’s happening, and she leaves the room, quietly. I have told her she has to do that, not to disturb me. I can’t explain it, but these… things… come to me. They’re not like people, or even spirits. It’s like there’s a presence, all around me, and it’s not pleasant at all, but I am not scared. I can’t make out what they are saying, but they are trying to communicate and I don’t tell them to leave. They have not stayed this long before.”

I remember the evening and night very clearly, how we all reacted and, most of all, what Terence had to say. We have kept in touch by phone since Day One. Andrew now lives in Melbourne with his big family all around him. After my SOS message to our La Salle chat group, Terence came down to Melbourne, and both he and Andrew came to visit me at home.

This is the man who, many a day when I am in hospital, always makes himself available on the other end of the phone line, talking to me, and mostly just listening to me as I wander and wander in my thoughts, sharing with him the strange and scary trajectories I have taken in my mind, things that I simply will not, can not, share with anyone else because they’ll just feel sorry for me and think the cancer has made me nuts. I speak to Helen of these things only after I have passed them through the Terence D’Cruz bullshit meter. We make an unbreakable connection that day and night in Andrew’s home and it’s like our meeting has been ordained. These days, of course, I can only see it as very much part of the design.

*****

Terence has been a guitarist in a band called Trinity. They are a fixture when I am assigned the performing arts circuit at NST. It’s more than likely I have written about them, but I don’t remember. As Terence tells it, Cyn’s Dad, Alfonso, drops in to give them a listen one night. “Don’t give up your day job” probably sums up what the elder says to Terence. So Terence says. “And I gave up the guitar.” I think Alfonso simply does not want his daughter to marry someone who will leave her alone six nights a week to go play guitar for other people. Terence and Trinity are accomplished performers in a city bursting with talent, and Soliano has seen what can happen when adoring girls are thrown into the mix with music. He’s protecting Cyn.

Terence is now a clinical hypnotist and he’s begun writing a fortnightly column (https://www.thevibes.com/authors/terence-dcruz) for a new Malaysian news website, The Vibes (thevibes.com). His writing delivers a storehouse of valuable information and advice for all of us.

In the early days of our friendship, he told me the story of a “case” he had handled, to do with the daughter of a couple he knew personally. The young girl had been left with severe burns to her right arm from boiling-hot oil. Her parents come to Terence because they are beside themselves — every time her wounds begin to heal, she scratches so hard her flesh bleeds.

Terence takes her in and convinces her parents to let her stay in his and Cyn’s home. He tries all kinds of counselling, which works up to a point only, and doesn’t keep her from scratching and taking the healing process back to Square One all over again, time and time again. Finally, the hypnotist puts the girl under, and gets her to believe that whenever her wounds begin to itch and she just has to scratch, she should scratch her left arm, which has been untouched by the oil. She’s a good subject for the hypnotist. When she begins to feel unbearably itchy on her right arm, she scratches the left. The injured hand is allowed to heal completely.

He has helped many other people, with all sort of afflictions, and addiction. Terence himself has recovered from two heart attacks. When it all begins, under conventional medical treatment, he is prescribed drugs to address the blockages that lead to those attacks. None of it is able to successfully alleviate his problem and he remains dangerously susceptible to another heart attack.

“I was so depressed, I was so sick of what my condition was doing to my family,” he says to me, as he shares more and more about himself in our early days. “Everybody was treating the condition, the symptoms. No one was looking at what was really causing all this to happen, and I’m not talking about prawns and pork fat and cigarettes and alcohol.” And Terence decides to try an alternative path to healing. To start with, he becomes his own doctor, and turns to what you and I might euphemistically describe as “mind over matter”. “I just turned it all around, and changed the way I approached my heart problem, changed my whole attitude towards the condition.” He now climbs mountains and, if he’s too tired, limits himself to hills. “I’ve never felt better.”

*****

During my extended stays in hospital, fighting the blood infections caused by the port-a-cath, managing diabetes, after surgery, Terence and I burn up our battery-charge talking by phone, sometimes for so long that all I can do is close my eyes and fall immediately into a peaceful sleep after our sessions.

There are things I can tell him that I just know will make some other people worry about where my mind is going. With Terence, there is no hesitation on my part. He does not have cancer, but we are fellow travellers as far as I am concerned. I know I am looking at things very very differently since diagnosis. I have the sense Terence has already been here eons back, fighting his own threat of extinction. I tell him about looking out the window in the hospital’s visitors area, and seeing design, a constant intervention, in a roundabout; how the cars comer come in from four entry points and move in and out without a single mishap. Not everyone is using the indicator. Of course, I’m not saying, God’s doing it. It’s about looking around at the simple things, and finding a beauty to it all. And the thought can stop there, and not diminish itself for not going further. I don’t have to think, embarrassed, that I’m sounding like an old hippie. I’m talking to Terence. I’m allowed free-flow.

I share with Terence how I wake one morning thinking I need to buy a book, and the first thing I see in the discount bookstore is Proof of Heaven. How it gives me such deeply penetrating sustenance in the early days of my fight. How my vocabulary is changing irrevocably, and I can no longer refer to things that happen as amazing, incredible, unbelievable. That the wonder of it all is I never knew, am never really aware, that God has his imprint everywhere. I can call on Him, the line’s always open. It’s our choice because He gives us free choice.

I can hear Terence chuckle as I explain how thinking about everybody else, wanting to protect them from the pain of watching me fall into utter depression and sadness, has become the one thing that has protected me most — that not thinking about myself first of all is the best thing I ever do for myself, because it becomes the best medicine for me. How I have never been like this, and why I can’t say, “I don’t know where this comes from.” Because I do. That’s it not about “where it comes from” as much as it’s always been in me, with me, within in.

Finding the words to express all of this to Terence is also a balm. I am making sense to myself, and Terence is encouraging me all the way, extending the lifeline to me from his own boat, telling me in his own way that I should keep swimming to all these new places in my mind.

I tell him about how I close my eyes and pray that the constant rumbling in my tummy will ease and that it feels like I am talking to myself. How I am telling myself, my body, to heal itself. And he says, “William, you are not just talking to your body, what you’re doing is you’re taking control.”

“Imagine,” Terence D’Cruz says, “go somewhere you can be by yourself, where you’re peaceful, maybe your bed, close your eyes, and imagine that in your body is this little man with a lamp.” And I say, “You mean like a Hobbit?” And Terence says, “Yes, exactly,” and I can just picture him smiling his special smile and he talks to me.

“And he’s walking through your entire body and when he sees a part of your body that is wounded, or sore and sick from an illness, this little man holds the lamp over the part that is sick, or wounded, and the lamp is a healing lamp. Talk to that man, walk with him as he goes about your body doing his work. Take him to all the places that need the healing lamp…”

      KL band Trinity in 1978: From left are Kumar, Richard,
      Terence, Lionel and Krishnan. (Photo from Terence's collection)

Terence has taken the idea that I am talking to myself and he’s turned it into a living, breathing, true story from the here and now. I’ll never forget The Little Man With the Lamp. Terence D’Cruz will always be one of the most important lifelines I held on to as I fought, because he understood the power I could feel after I had cast away my ego, my self-centredness. How turning myself into nothing had made me something I could never have been otherwise.

*****

Once I am able to hold it together, months after surgery and chemo, I am surprised and gratified when someone sick calls me on the phone, wanting to talk to me. There’s no sign on my door, I don’t go about advertising any services, but a couple of friends feel totally free to call on me, to talk about their own illnesses, how they cope, how they don’t. One guy calls to ask if I will speak to his sister. I tell them about talking to themselves, mind over matter, when they are sick, or down, depressed, stressed, angry… Terence has helped me believe I am not nuts. Sometimes I feel I am too tired, that I don’t want to talk to someone, offer support, because I am still healing, still fighting, still tired myself.

So I offload. I tell them I am still fighting, that I will fight every day, that fighting becomes so much a part of what I do, what I am, have become, that I no longer notice I’m fighting anymore. I am simply in “auto fight mode”. It doesn’t make me proud, or prideful that I am now this person other people come to. It humbles me. It makes me tear. My words get all choked up as I talk to them. I get very emotional as I recall my own experiences. Just talking about it is exhausting. Some evenings I delay returning a call I know has come from someone who needs help. Helen just looks at me. And I pick up the phone. This is not about me. Someone needs me. This is my purpose. And I am humbled.

What are we for if not to help others? What is the pain that we suffer if it’s not to help others cope? We are all that Little Man. We all have that lamp. And we all can take that light to others, just as shine it on ourselves. By the way, it’s the Festival of Lights as I write this. Every day should be Diwali. Every day should be Christmas. Giving should be all year round. Don’t take the tree down. Don’t take the lights down.