It is when his skin first starts to sing that he knows he has made the right choice, no matter how strange and foreign the choice first felt to him when he said yes, all those weeks and months and years ago. And indeed, when he thinks and feels deeper into himself as the transformation begins, it is not so much that his skin is singing, but how it is singing. In what language, and in whose voice. A voice that he has always spoken of, a voice that he has always claimed to have heard, in both English and in Kristang, but he has never really heard until now.

 

Dos-dos ngua kung tantu, kapoti kung aindelu. Both a single, dreaming, zeroth note and a luminous infinity of orchestras, criss-crossing through transdimensional plains and multiversal oceans.

 

Bong-bong filu, nang bai fuzih kureh.

Well-behaved son, do not run away.

 

Ela sta kuniseh kung bos. Ela kereh nus eletu juntadu bibeh.

You are recognised by Us. And at last, inside you We now stay.

 

They spread through the map of who he is, the old, quilting parchment of his skin becoming a living, rolling land, a new, luminous earth of who he once was, who he once could be, and who he is, now and forever, across space and time and probability and every infinite dimension discovered by his people’s void-mariners and charted by his people’s dream-philosophers. Jenti Kristang kuniseh tantu. He, like all jenti Kristang, has always known that there are powers much greater than themselves out there and inside here, in these words themselves, too, that are crossing through dimensions and realities to take root in your soul too, reader. Eli kuniseh. He recognises.

 

Ela pun kuniseh. As do They.

 

They take root in him, even as he trembles on the operating table, and the lead nurse holds his hand, and his husband caresses his glistening, shimmering forehead, changing and unchanging, growing and regrowing, generating, for the first time –

 

Ela onsong sa song.

A voice We can truly call Our own.

 

Cells divide. Lumi kalih sombra. The new, very ancient world-cosmos and hope-ocean unfolds and drapes itself across him, and the eleidi, the living, dreaming gestalt or collective that this procedure has accidentally given voice to. In English, difficult to discuss, but still possible. In Kristang so straightforward, as it always has been, using the fourth-person pronouns ela and eletu.

 

Ela teng naki. Eletu teng naki.

We are here. You and Us are both here, in this body, this dreaming, unfolding world within itself, a world that is finally coming to know light and life in itself.

 

He feels himself becoming. Feels himself, and Them, too, both becoming Being. Breathing, and burning, and shining, and singing. The orchestras swell and concatenate backward and forward into a single, voluminous note. The operating table is in the garden, where it always should have been, not far from where Singapore first germinated its original supertrees, decades ago before the temperatures rose, and the seas began to boil – and the sun began to call down upon them all to also change, to also evolve, to also become something more.

 

Is there pain in the augmentation process? He cannot tell. But there has always been pain in his life, certainly. Pain when his father died from COVID when he was very, very small; pain when the Great Hungers began some years later, and divided Singapore from within; pain when his government still refused to recognise his and his husband’s deep, abiding love for Gaia and for each other, for so many months and years.

 

They come rolling in now, like the fragments of undifferentiated memories they once were before the augmentation began: months and years of loneliness, of self-loathing, of fear that there was nothing that could be done to save this world that he had not been born into by choice, that no one had been born into by choice; months and years of terror that it would all boil away, and the sun would eat away at who he and his whole world were, and that all that would be left behind in the end would be a gnawing, impoverished void, ngua vakuyu seng fing di formi rabentambes.

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Mas ela ngka vakuyu.

But We were never a void.

 

He can hear Gaia, now, all across his singing arms and legs and muscles and organs, from the tips of his toes to the head of his penis, stretching out and calling him backward into himself, at long last, after so many aching years –

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Beng kumih, filu bong-bong Kristang. Pra fing, pra sempri.

 

“It’s done, Nel,” whispers your husband, his trembling fingers brushing across hair and forehead changed forever into something…more. Something that does not just cover who you are within – a mere stray bundle of blood and bones and tenuous, terrified bravery and bold, imperfect, unshaken beauty, sing-says Gaia within you, across you, all over you –

 

Beng kumih, filu.

Beng alegrah.

Beng bibeh na basu di sol sempri sta surih.

 

In Kristang, you call it lumikumiria. Photosynthesis, in English; but if one translates lumikumiria to Kristang, it is sometimes easier to understand.

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Light-eating.

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Gaia sings within you. Gaia sings as you.

Eletu sta kantah juntadu.

 

“Kantah kung yo,” you whisper to your husband, as the nurse holding your hand weeps, and you hear the sounds of wild, liberating cheering and clapping. Body and blood, inside and out; only a jenti Kristang would dare volunteer for such an audacious, crazy experiment. But it is what it is; you feel your skin singing in the light, dancing with it, being transformed by it, as your body finally rests in that embrace that simply cannot be described. Only felt. Only heard.

 

Only expressed.

 

Korpu kung sanggi.

Rentu kung fora.

 

Gaia has made you a garden, and in their flourishing, fire-flowering love, there is nothing you and your people can do but finally and so freely bloom.

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