By Dr Rahim Said
I first met Agnes in 1979. Fresh out of graduate school, I was thrown into running a department, and she was heaven-sent. She took dictation at lightning speed, and her shorthand was legendary.
When I moved to Kuala Lumpur, I offered to bring her along. She declined. George Town, Penang, was where she belonged. Wise woman. She never lost a file or an argument.
So when Agnes’s name came up over breakfast on Saturday, 7 November, my heart skipped. Agnes was coming to town!
Alas, not my Agnes. According to my friend Priscilla, a close family friend had brought a different Agnes, one from the First World War, back to life in a new book of the same name, launching that afternoon at MPH @ The Exchange.
Between breakfast and lunch, I Googled. There are at least three books titled Agnes. Two were published long ago. The one for us is a historical novel, out this year from Penguin, by Viji Krishnamoorty, author of 912 Batu Road. “Must attend,” Priscilla insisted.
“Gosh, The Exchange at 1 pm on Saturday?” We seldom venture out, preferring the manageable comfort of our little community mall at Senada. But Priscilla does not take no for an answer. Neither, I suspect, did Agnes.
The place was packed. Bookshops are not supermarkets on a Saturday, and they are certainly not where children go to lepak. Yet at the entrance stood ladies in tudung and men in songkok. Agnes must be popular! No, they said, they hadn’t come for Agnes. (I never found out what they came for. Perhaps the air-conditioning.)
Inside, some two hundred people crowded around one small corner, waiting to hear about Agnes. Viji, busy greeting readers and signing fresh copies, did not disappoint. She read beautifully and was friendly and gracious.
Then came question time. I wanted to ask about her craft, not the literary prose. “Do you write in longhand or type on a computer?”
Longhand, she said, though not on a legal yellow pad. Just paper, after which someone must type out the manuscript.
That’s when my Agnes came back to life. “You don’t dictate?” I blurted. I told her I do, in this age of AI, where you speak and the machine writes it all out. And right there, I realised how badly I miss Agnes.
I’m on my second book this year, plus my columns. Every dawn and every night before bed, I whisper sweet nothings into my phone. Kids nowadays must love this feature, which beats pecking at a keyboard.
Claude takes my dictation faster than Agnes ever did, never takes a tea break, and has never once asked for a raise.
But it has never told me, “Boss, you’ve got that wrong,” with a raised eyebrow, either. How I miss Agnes.
Go read Agnes, if only to find out why she went to England later in life. Viji’s husband, a renowned lawyer in town, helped with the historical research. I had Claude. I still love the name Agnes for a secretary, though. Claude is smarter and faster, but Agnes had class.
One last thing: there was no VVIP to launch the book, and no food. You can’t have food in a bookshop. What a refreshing way to launch a book! I told two gentlemen planning to launch their biographies this December. They looked horrified. Nobody has ever launched a biography without a buffet.
WE