By Lee Wei Ling, Published The Sunday Times, 20 Jan 2013
The photograph in The Straits Times showed a man standing in a room with a wet floor, and two other men with their backs to the camera mopping up the mess. The headline read: "Top artist's works damaged in blaze."
I scrutinised the man in the centre. He seemed to be grinning but his eyes showed no signs of mirth. Indeed, his eyes had a sad expression.
Mr Tan Swie Hian is one of Singapore's most successful painters. There was a fire in a unit neighbouring his at Telok Kurau Studios. He did what he could. He grabbed six works from his collection - including a painting of my parents, Mr and Mrs Lee Kuan Yew - and fled.
When the firemen came, they doused the fire with water. In the process, several other works in his studio were ruined. The artist couple in whose unit the fire had begun - Mr Anthony Chua Say Hua and his wife Hong Sek Chern - fared even worse. They lost more than 1,000 of their works, the product of over 30 years of faithful creation.
I was intrigued by Mr Tan's facial expression in the photograph and wondered what he was thinking about. "Mr Tan had called his friends to help him clear up the mess and said that he did not have the heart to check the damage to his works," The Straits Times reported. I guessed his smile was a stoic attempt to hide the pain he felt over the destruction of his works.
Through contacts I managed to get his telephone number and called him. We spoke for 30 minutes.
It was not a smile of happiness, he confirmed. Rather, it was ku xiao, a "bitter grin". He had posed for the photographers with that grin to hide his sadness.
Just last month, one of his paintings sold for $3.7 million. But what was destroyed by fire and water did not represent just a financial loss to Mr Tan. What upset him was the destruction of his artistic creations.
He had put his body and soul into creating them. Even if he were to try to replicate them in the future, they would not bear the freshness of spontaneous creation.
He told me that he had been painting a scene of my parents together when they were students at Cambridge University. Although he had grabbed that painting as he ran out of the studio, it had already been partially damaged. He later told The Straits Times wryly: "The painting has gone through the baptism of fire."
I quoted to him two lines from one of my favourite poems, Rudyard Kipling's If: "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same…"
He agreed that he had no alternative but to just carry on. Crying over spilt milk was a waste of time and effort.
All of us have experienced the equivalents of "triumphs" and "disasters", though not perhaps on as dramatic a scale as Mr Tan, Mr Chua and his wife have. As difficult as it is, each of us must learn to cope with "those two impostors just the same".
When I failed a postgraduate examination in 1982, it seemed to me my world had collapsed. In 1995, when I developed peripheral neuropathy, I read extensively about it and imagined the worst-case scenario. More recently, I have had new health problems.
There are moments when I feel enormously frustrated with my ill health. But at other times I try to stay positive with the following thought: None of us knows our tomorrow. Indeed, the very next moment may bring either triumph or disaster.
My next moment may be less certain than the next moments of most other people. But I can choose to either wallow in despair, paralysed by uncertainty, or live each moment as fully as I can, never putting off till the next what I can do now.
Perhaps because I have been facing my present ailment since 2006, I have come to terms with it. Perhaps with time I can learn that true detachment that scripture tells us is the mark of wisdom.
After all, what are these losses that we suffer in life - creations destroyed, health lost - but advance lessons that we can't take any of this with us when we die.
The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute.