A street side Christmas musing on synodality
People either have trained their eyes not to see him or they are short-sighted, callously blind, even to cast a fleeting glance at him.
Dec 22, 2023

Yes, that’s him, Kuppusamy, the street side beggar.
Just call me Kuppu, he tells this scribe, but many perceive him as “Kuppeh” which means garbage in Tamil.
Now you see him, sometimes you don’t, but most people never “notice” him, though he shows up like a sore thumb daily.
People either have trained their eyes not to see him or they are short-sighted, callously blind, even to cast a fleeting glance at him.
So what if he is there, so strikingly present?
Kuppu’s pangs of hunger, sparkling in his dewy eyes matter not to the one and many who pass him by
After all, who the heck is Kuppu? Am I my brother’s keeper?
Kuppu is part of that invisible Chow Kit Road story.
His past is a stranger.
When it rains, he retreats to a shopping mall where the Yuletide mood puts him in a fit of loss and loneliness
He nods his head in timely cadence to the poor drummer’s song rolling out from a speaker
Ra-pa-pam-pam … ra-pa-pam-pam … the chorus echoes, and Kuppu keeps time, as did Mary, the ox and lamb on Holy Night.
At night when the stars come out, Kuppu shelters in an abandoned public phone booth refurbished with discarded card box.
Nobody troubles him in his phone booth house, as public phones are as bygone as Kuppu’s antique dotage.
No one can ever remember Kuppu washed and clean.
Old, gnarled, and bearded, he seems like he has stepped out of the past — a Depression-era ghost of 1929 in the modern streets of Kuala Lumpur.
Kuppu’s face graphically exposes a social stigma that dumps the mentally ill on our city’s streets.
A human derelict of yore, Kuppu squints up to take a peek at the Twin Towers just as a deep rumble from his famished tummy towers to a crescendo.
Oh what clarion signal this … mitigating for a theology called liberation.
The Twin Towers, a grand symbolism of one man’s Vision for 2020
But now its 2023 and Kuppu has very scant vision of a future for himself, as his eyesight at 20/400 is failing him.
I wonder why, a story like Kuppu’s never made it as the scoop of the day?
Are journalists too turning blind like Kuppu, leaving human interest narratives to the poet and the artist?
Synodality!
Coming together? Sharing? And listening?
The Gospels have spoken through Rome’s citadels.
And so has Kuppu, through this scribe.
But is anyone listening?
Merry Christmas!
(This literary reverie is written by Joseph Masilamany in memory of the late Fr Jestus Pereira (1955-2023), who had a special place in his heart for the poor in his neighbourhood.)
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