The Gift of Rain

by Tan Twan Eng

‘Lately I’ve been wondering, how much can one hold on to history?’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to stop time from going forward and perhaps that’s misguided and foolish.’

I was you before you were born and you will be me after I am gone. That is the meaning of family.’

What made it worse was that we could never truly share such burdens with even those closest to us. In the end, the mistakes were our own, the consequences to be borne by us alone.

Some mistakes can be so great, so grievous, that we end up paying for them again and again, all our lives until eventually we forget why we began paying in the first place.

‘I’ve never felt blessed,’ I said. ‘There must be free will to choose. Do you know the poem about the two roads, and the one not taken?’ ‘Yes. That has always amused me, because who created the two roads in the first place?’ It was a question I had never considered.

The mind forgets, but the heart will always remember. And what is the heart’s memory but love itself?’