“THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM KANDANG KERBAU”, Ada Ngo

In a children’s hospital, at the end of a corridor, lies a locked room. All prospective medical students are brought to that room at the end of their final interview. Everyone knows about the existence of that room; no one speaks of what lies within.

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Here he waits for visitors three times
a day. His step-mothers change every
hour: but always the same palms laced
with stinging chlorhexidine. The lift doors

opening, he counts families going
and going and going but no fathers
will stop for him. Step-mother feeds him
codeine, both threat and promise to

help him go to sleep. Two feet away,
his brother of a different colour has
soiled himself again. He raises a tower
of three blocks before the fourth inevitably

falls again. No one encourages him to
try again. The newest girl here seizes
for six hours: a feat dismissed as mere
hiccuping. Every morning, a different

young doctor steps in and his tiny heart
swells: he has learnt the routine of holding
on. So he cannot see, is much too small to
see how they flinch from simian-creased

palms; why they pry small hands from
their crisp white shirts, why they close
the doors behind them again and again

and leave the state
to be his absentee guardian.