Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

Partial ingredients to a ground spice paste (rempah), commonly used in Nonya cooking in Singapore.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson & CM Cordeiro 2020

“Suzie! Come in here! I want you to watch, we’re going to do the rempah for buah keluak so next time you know how to do for yourself!”

Susan’s mother, Li, waited for a response from her daughter. Not a sound from little Suzie. Li glanced sideways at her own mother, Cecilia, who already head a firm grip of hand on the batu lesung. Cecilia called the stone mortar and pestle tembok-tembok, so named because of the material, but also the empty hollow of the sound made when using the stone mortar and pestle. Once, a housing and development board (HDB) surveyor visited Cecilia in her newly built Queenstown 2-bedroom apartment. The train track ran just behind that block between Malaysia and Keppel Road Railway Station in Singapore [1]. The surveyor wanted to know if Cecilia and family were doing well, and if it was overly disturbing with the noise whenever the train passed, “So Aunty, how is it you find living in this new block? Is the train very noisy and disturbing?” Li sat on the modest sofa in the tiny living room with her mother, translating into Baba Malay for Cecilia, the English questions posed by the surveyor. “Yah, whenever train pass, you can feel so strong kejung-kejung! kejung-kejung! But otherwise, this place nice la.” Cecilia replied. Li kept a straight face throughout the interview visit from the surveyor, but could not help but blurt in Suzie’s direction the minute the little girl was old enough to string two words together, “Your grandmother, don’t talk about her la. When you ask her about the train, you know what she said, the train goes kejung-kejung, kejung-kejung. Ah, that’s your grandmother for you.” At age two, Suzie’s wide eyes spanned the face of her mother. It was a beautiful face that Suzie had the privilege of peering at everyday.

Continue reading “Tembok-tembok” →

Colours tourmaline.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2018

Guen sunk back into her rattan seat, overlooking an open patio of a riverside restaurant, its lush garden lit in mellow tourmaline colours of pink, yellow and green. She had a glimpse view of the skyscraper housing apartments through the leaves of a pong pong tree. Basking in the night’s tropical warmth and listening to the ongoing light jazz filling the atmosphere, she contemplated what it would’ve been like if she were still living in the country. Her faraway gaze into the tourmaline lights broke when she spotted a mosquito whiz by the tip of her nose. By instinct, she first felt for breeze. There was none. How about a fan above her seated dining table? None. In light panic, Guen jumped from her rattan seat, almost accosting a waitress, “Hi, yes, I’m sorry to bother you, but, there are mosquitos out here. Is there any chance that you could move our dining reservation into the air-conditioned space indoors?”

Continue reading “Colours tourmaline” →

Illustration by Michael Whelan for Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Cat Who Walked Through Walls” (1985)
Text © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2016

In 4170s where Time is iffy, in a R.A. Heinlein world, Madame Pixel attends a court hearing regarding her filing for divorce. Due to that she is of the constellation of Andromeda whose mother tongue is Triangulum, and Mister Pixel is of Barnard 33 of the constellation of Orion whose mother tongue is Flamean, the divorce petition in the Third Way Galaxy Court were filed in both languages, plus a third language, a more formal version of the Third Way Galaxy lingua franca known as Standard Galactic English.

Judge: I am here referring to case number 17V17XIII1.1.1.1. Madame Pixel? In view that Mister Pixel is time travelling, I understand you are attending alone?

MPixel: Yes, your honour.

Judge: Your divorce request has been evaluated. Due to the condition of Quantum Entanglement, in an undisclosed clausal agreement between you and Mister Pixel, I regret to inform that this falls outside the jurisdiction of the Court. Continue reading “Case number 17V17XIII1.1.1.1.” →

Day’s pickings from the garden.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2016

This first pickings of strawberries from the garden much reminded me of chapter one of the book by A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) in its first volume of stories when we are introduced to both Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh:

“Good morning, Christopher Robin,” he said.
“Good morning, Winnie-ther-Pooh,” said you.
“I wonder if you’ve got such a thing as a balloon about you?”
“A balloon?”
“Yes, I just said to myself coming along: ‘I wonder if Christopher Robin has such a thing as a balloon about him?’ I just said it to myself, thinking of balloons, and wondering.”
“What do you want a balloon for?” you said.
Winnie-the-Pooh looked round to see that nobody was listening, put his paw to his mouth, and said in a deep whisper: “Honey!”
“But you don’t get honey with balloons!”
“I do,” said Pooh.

East to west bound, Sweden.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2016

“The first aspect of systems thinking concerns the relationship between the part and the whole. In the mechanistic, classical scientific paradigm it was believed that in any complex system the dynamics of the whole could be understood from the properties of the parts. Once you knew the parts, ie their fundamental properties and the mechanisms through which they interacted, you could derive, at least in principle, the dynamics of the whole. Therefore, the rule was: in order to understand any complex system, you break it up into its pieces. The pieces cannot be explained any further, except by splitting them into smaller pieces, but as far as you want to go in this procedure, you will at some stage end up with fundamental building blocks- elements, substances, particles, etc- with properties that you can no longer explain. From these fundamental building blocks with their fundamental laws of interaction you would then build up the larger whole and try to explain its dynamics in terms of the properties of its parts. This started with Democritus in ancient Greece and was the procedure formalized by Descartes Continue reading “Train of thoughts” →

It was soon that Alice found herself in front of the Caterpillar again. Instead of waiting patiently first for him to speak, she ventured a step forward to the mushroom where he usually sat, in a swirling cloud of smoke.

“Caterpillar, I think I can answer your question now on who are you?”

“I know who I am, there is no need for you to tell me.” The Caterpillar replied indignantly, even if with patience.

“I meant your question, to me from fore – who are you?” Alice tried again. The Caterpillar remained silent, and at this point Alice didn’t quite know if it was because he was inhaling on his hookah that he didn’t respond of if he had lost sight of her that he was not responding. “It is not the question of who are you, but what are you actua –” Continue reading “Alice and the Caterpillar” →

Architecture as spacetime fabric.
PhotoAlto, Johnér Bildbyrå AB.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

He was Managing Director of a large construction company. Everything of his followed a tight schedule, yet he wore no wristwatch. I asked him why.

– Ten years ago, I went to the Middle East to meet a client. The meeting was scheduled at twelve noon. By one o’clock, still no client. But I had to negotiate this deal, so I waited. I was going to fly home the next day, so there was no choice. I waited. The client walked into the office at six in the evening. I was very angry, and asked how come so unreliable in meeting time? But the client, he was very happy. He told me he was on his way here when he met a friend he had not seen in very many years, just like that on the street! They decided to have lunch and spend the afternoon together, talking. They were just done talking, so now he’s here. After that story, I took off my wristwatch and threw it away. Never used it again. Continue reading “Time like Dalí” →

Tesseract living in gross/material form.
Text & Photo © CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

“So what is it like after six o’clock in the evenings here?” Marshall asked Jim, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. He had resolved to quit smoking eighty years ago in his early thirties, but kept at it when he realized he was more alive than most others he met at the various intersections of spacetime. Continue reading “Tesseract living” →

he concert was about to begin. The crowd, dressed in black tie, stood chatting animatedly in an adjacent hall where the pre-concert mingle was held. I stepped away from the hall where family and friends were standing to roam the corridors of the building, once an old fortress now turned into a theater and concert hall. There was still time before the concert began – my niece would be on stage that evening – and I thought to return to the area of the elevator, where in order to arrive at the mingle hall, we were all instructed to turn right. I now wanted to see where left led.

It was not a long walk from where most of the crowd was, but I noted that the sounds of the crowd went distinctly quieter as I continued on my steps towards the elevator. Upon reaching the area, I turned left, and was led into the left wing of the building. I went down a smaller corridor with walls just as sturdy and slate grey as the right wing, but here, a hint of green had come over them. I stretched out my hand and ran my fingertips along the stonewalls as I walked just to see if it was moss or an algae that grew on the insides of this fortress. Continue reading “Labyrinth” →

Across the globe from the monsoon kingdoms, the Swedish west coast.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

2015. History was not a subject of particular interest to her. But the thick book, bound in green, fell into her hands, with its pages opening to the chapter entitled The Coming of the Europeans. This was his book. She sat and proceeded to read. She smiled when she encountered a paragraph that described the city in which she was raised, Singapore, in the 1500s, compared to the great emporium of Malacca, Java and the Spice Islands, as known for ‘nothing much’. Malacca in the Far East was the flourishing main trading port where every year, between eighteen to twenty ships were laden with numerally Sumatran pepper bound for China. Continue reading “The monsoon kingdoms: a languid afternoon read” →

View from Sentosa.
Text © CM Cordeiro, Sweden 2015

Clarissa sat at the table with five other persons, to a Japanese lunch. She noted the interest of a friend to the family, a suitor, in the family daughter. The suitor had for some years ago, gone on a parent approved date (in Asian tradition of chaperoning) with the daughter. It had been some years in-between, but the suitor felt as if nothing had changed between he and the daughter of the family. So time was of no barrier. He felt they could carry on the conversation from where they had left off some more than a decade ago. He was about to leave the bright city lights of his home country for a new one. The new country being nothing short of a paradise island located in the crystal blue oceans of the Caribbean. He was to be there for at least a year, and most everything of his essentials were contracted to be looked after by the company that was sending him on this expatriate assignment. Continue reading “Daifuku | a small Japanese dessert” →