But the legend was the legend. A Syed was a Syed, and an Alwi an Alwi. And the legend was that Syed Alwi’s grandfather, who was distantly related to the Perak royal family, had rebelled in some way, had rejected the life of the royal enclave and crossed the river and married a commoner on the other side. There were no dates to the legend; but that rebellion might have been in the 1880s. At that time people would have been locked into ritual and clan ways; and there would have had to be a very good reason—Syed Alwi’s grandfather was not an educated person—for something as desperate as rebellion and running away. Syed Alwi could find out nothing beyond the legend.
The rebel’s son, Syed Alwi’s father, was made to suffer. He was born in 1900. He was adopted by the royal community and sent to the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar, the college for the sons of ruling families. That was the family’s public obligation; the boy was of royal blood. In private, though, he was badly treated by the royal family. They didn’t allow him to eat with them. He was made to do housework and treated as a servant.
In spite of everything, the boy did well at Malay College. When he was sixteen he got a job with the land office as a settlement officer. A settlement officer helped kampung people claim lands in a new settlement; the officer made recommendations to the land office. This would have been quite a high job for a Malay in the colonial setup of 1916, and remarkable for someone so young.
The royal community then chose a bride for the settlement officer. The story was that she was a sharifa, a female sayed, and rich. That was all that the legend said, and the legend must have left out a lot. Because the boy or young man didn’t want to get married to the girl who had been chosen for him, and on the eve of his wedding he—like his father before him—ran away. This would have angered many people. They would have felt that their honor had been violated. The young man knew he was going to be pursued. He had to find protection.
He had been working as a settlement officer in the north of Perak, and that was where he thought he would go. He went to a kampung he knew very well. He said to the headman there, “Find a wife for me.” This was acceptable Malay custom. You normally asked a relation to find a wife for you; you could, in an extension of that practice, ask the headman.
There were rajas in the kampung, people of princely lineage; so there were suitable families. The headman chose two girls. The first girl was not a raja and was divorced. It was her privilege as a divorced woman to refuse; and she refused the seventeen-year-old settlement officer. The second girl had to accept.
She was a raja. Her ancestors had founded the kampung. They were of Bugis descent. They were people from Sulawesi (the Celebes in colonial days), and at some unknown date they had migrated to the northern Malaysian state of Kedah. There they had intermarried with the local Malays and had in time acquired their status as rajas. The archipelago in the nineteenth century was full of this kind of movement; Europeans and Chinese were not the only people intruding into the territory of others. At some stage the neighboring Siamese attacked Kedah, and the Kedah rajas ran down south to the state of Perak. They settled on a promontory on a bend in the river. They cultivated the land there and the place developed into a kampung called Pondoktanjung, which meant “a hut on the promontory.”
The raja bride from Pondoktanjung was thirteen, four years younger than her husband. It was the duty of a wife to follow her husband; it was what girls held themselves ready for. But the life of this girl was to change more than anyone knew. Sacrifice and pain and passages of pure darkness awaited her.
In the beginning, though, perhaps for as much as four years, everything went well. The bride had her first child, a boy, the year after her marriage; it was the first of fifteen conceptions. She had two more children in the next four years, the good years, and in that time her husband also rose fast in the civil service. The people of Pondoktanjung grew to accept him as one of themselves; so he was no longer a man without a clan.
In 1921, when he was twenty-one, he became a magistrate. To rise to that position he would have needed a fair amount of legal knowledge. He would have had to study a lot; this would have been in addition to the traveling and the work he was doing as a settlement officer. His life would have been like a continuation of his time at Malay College: classes during the day, homework in the evenings. With that study there came an increasing restlessness of mind. And even while he was becoming more secure in the world he was turning away from it. He was becoming fascinated by philosophy, religion, the nature of God.
He used to discuss these matters with a friend, a teacher at the teachers’ training college. The story was that they met every evening. No one else knew about the turbulence in the magistrate’s mind. To the people in the kampung and to his wife’s family he was simply living in the Muslim way, like everybody else, and doing the rituals. He was careful, it would seem, not to worry or offend people; he kept his agitation to himself. He didn’t talk to the British officers either. It would have been awkward for him. He didn’t like speaking English, and he made a point of not living in the colonial style. So he was quite alone.
In 1922, when he was twenty-two, he broke down. This seemed to have happened almost in a physical way, and at a particular moment. He was in Perak, in a town called Tapah, when it happened. He was able somehow to go back, or was taken back, to Pondoktanjung. He never recovered. For the remaining twenty-three years of his life he moved in and out of his two worlds. His wife was eighteen when he broke down. She stayed his wife in every way until the end.
He was medically boarded out from the civil service. He was given a pension of seventy-five Malay dollars a month, worth in strict exchange terms about twenty-three dollars today, but in 1922 quite a fair sum. The pension was paid until the Japanese occupation. Then there was nothing.
He lived two distinct lives, one in this world, the other in his private world.
In his normal life, if the words can be used, he didn’t like speaking English; he spoke it only when he had to. In his other life he spoke nothing but English. In his normal life he wasn’t much of a writer; in his other life he spent much of his time writing. The family bought him lots of exercise books and pencils, and he wrote and wrote. When he came out of that world everything he had written was burnt. Syed Alwi wasn’t sure whether, in his normal personality, he wanted it burnt; or whether the family wanted it burnt.
In the normal world he was not a smoker. In the other world he smoked four or five cigarettes at the same time, holding them between his fingers.
In the normal world he couldn’t bear to see anyone suffering physical pain. If his wife beat any of the children, he would run away from the house. He might stay away for weeks; sometimes the family couldn’t find out where he had run to. But in the other world he was violent. Though in the other world he didn’t recognize his family as his family, he was never violent with them. The violence was for others. His wife’s brother might be taking him to get his pension. On the way he might meet someone and for no reason he would slap that person. There was a time when he was so violent that a cage had to be built for him in the house. In the eighth year of his breakdown his violence began to lessen. When Syed Alwi was born, in 1930, the violence had practically stopped.
In the normal world he liked to cook and he liked to eat. In the other world he didn’t care about food. He had two passions only, writing and talking.
In 1953, by an extraordinary chance, Syed Alwi met the friend, the teacher at the teachers’ training college, with whom his father had been having nightly discussions just before his breakdown, thirty-one years before.
Syed Alwi was going to the United States, to Minnesota, to take up his Fulbright fellowship. The friend came on the airplane at Manila, for the Manila-Hawaii sector of the journey; and by a further chance he was given, or took, the seat next to Syed Alwi. During the long flight he told Syed Alwi what he remembered about his father’s mental restlessness and breakdown. And for the first time Syed Alwi understood that while his father was doing hi
s magistrate’s work as assistant district officer in the land office, and working very hard, he was facing a spiritual horror. It was undoing his world. He couldn’t accept the Islamic God. He wanted to know God more personally, more intimately. He was reading the books of other religions in his search for a God he could accept.
It was Syed Alwi’s idea that at some stage his father might have had to compromise, or might have had to accept that he couldn’t find the God he was looking for. But this was only conjecture, and for Syed Alwi painful conjecture. I felt, from what he said, that fifty years after his father’s death—out of grief, love, and a wish to share the pain—he still very much wanted to have a glimpse of his father’s internal life, still wanted to understand his father’s other world. That world was lost, and for that reason always a cause for grief. He had only scattered clues, to cherish and examine, like the memories of the friend from 1921.
(And this meeting with his father’s friend, just at that moment, when his thoughts were of the United States and writing, might have been one of the critical things in Syed Alwi’s own career. It might have driven him, some months later, to that creative burst in which he wrote his first play, with its coded references to the mystery of his father.)
Syed Alwi said of his father, “To me he was not strictly looking for God. He was searching for the meaning of life. That was translated into the search for God because of his Islamic upbringing, where Allah is the ultimate. The search for Allah or God was the constant in both worlds, and probably the only thing that could exist in both worlds for him. Although it does not explain why he was violent, or explain such diametrically opposed behavior. I often ask myself: What was his real world? The world that was created for him, or the world he created for himself?”
And it was possible, as Syed Alwi was suggesting, that the world his father had found had been too much for him. In what Syed Alwi had said of his father’s behavior in his other world there were hints and echoes of torment in this world. He had suffered, and perhaps even been maltreated, as a child. In his normal self he couldn’t bear pain; in his other world he inflicted it; he slapped people for no reason. As a kind of social outcast, he would have had to prove himself at Malay College; and in the colonial world he would have had to prove himself as a Malay. So, in his other world, in a parody of school and the civil service, he wrote all the time, and in English; and, in colonial style, he smoked cigarettes (the best cigarettes) four and five at a time.
Syed Alwi said, “The Malays have been under pressure to prove themselves. And one of the things the Malays were not supposed to be capable of was to be people of the mind. They were conceived as creatures of habit, or subjects of the sultans or the British. They had to have other people think for them, and lead them, and they would be loyal—to the sultans, and to the British, who in return protected them by laws that said that non-Malays could not interfere with their customs and ways of life.”
When it was understood in the family that something was very wrong with their son-in-law, they took him to the sanitarium. The place was little more than a madhouse, and the people in charge weren’t going to cure anyone. They had certain tests for lunacy. One test was for the patient to be shot at with water from a fire-brigade hose. The other was for the patient to be fed rice mixed with sand. If the patient didn’t complain about the water hose or the rice, he was mad. Those things were done to Syed Alwi’s father. Worse things, Syed Alwi said, were done to other people.
Then the family took him to bomohs, one after the other; and again there were tests and treatments. A bomoh would look into a bowl of water and see why the man before him had become what he was; he would see heredity, or ghosts, or upbringing.
Once Syed Alwi’s father and uncle sat side by side in front of a bomoh. Incense was smoking away and filling the room—Syed Alwi had the story from his uncle—and at last the bomoh said that there was someone trying to destroy Syed Alwi’s father. This wicked person had buried evil things around the house, and for Syed Alwi’s father to break out of his spell, those things had to be removed. The bomoh said that was what he was going to do, right then, and sitting right there, in his room. He began to go through his bomoh’s act, making big, mystical gestures in the incense smoke, and talking all the time, explaining what he was doing. The smoke wasn’t thick enough, though. Syed Alwi’s uncle saw the bomoh take a little packet from below his knee, something wrapped in yellow cloth, and throw it to one side. The bomoh then said, “The man is now cured.” And, in spite of what his uncle had seen, money was paid.
There were other cures like that. The family went to bomohs for years. Then they ceased to hope for a cure, and they let the invalid be.
At one time he ran away from the house. Again there was no date; people didn’t want to talk about this episode too much. He went to the state of Kelantan, and there he had a breakdown within his breakdown. When the family went to bring him back, they found that he had been translating the Koran, from English into Malay. They burned what he had written.
Syed Alwi said, “The translation is important, because it shows that even in the other world he was still trying to find God. But I am not sure whether this translation was done in the other world, in this world, or in both. He accepted the burning as a natural thing to have happened, because it was in accordance with their beliefs. As he accepted the way of life of the kampung.”
So all the writing of his father, from the time before he was born, was lost to Syed Alwi. Many years later he saw some of his father’s exercise books.
“The handwriting was bad. I couldn’t read it very well. Hardly at all. But practically at the end of every other sentence was the word ‘always.’ ”
For Syed Alwi it would have been a haunting word.
There were lucid periods. In one of those, some time before 1930, he began to build a new house in the kampung, but the money ran out and he couldn’t put up the first floor. Syed Alwi, telling the story in his own unfinished house, between the snake holes in the hillside cutting on one side and the little stream on the other side, said, “So when this thing happened to me in my house, the image of my father’s unfinished house came to my mind.”
When Syed Alwi’s father broke down in 1922 there were three children. After that six more children were born, and there were six miscarriages. Out of the six born, two were stillborn.
Syed Alwi said, “So my mother had fifteen conceptions.”
Twelve of those were after the breakdown.
I said, “It sounds murderous.” It was the word that came.
He looked very worried. He said then, with melancholy, “I don’t know.” Tears came to his eyes.
His father wanted his children to be educated. He had only his pension, but there was an Indian woman in the kampung who helped. She had a great regard for the family, and she loved the children. She had a certain amount of jewelry in solid gold, and whenever money was needed for the children’s education or for their books she lent all her jewelry to Syed Alwi’s father for him to pawn. She lent her jewelry in this way only for the education of the children. When one of the sons came back from Singapore in the uniform of Raffles College, a famous colonial college, she was as proud of him as if he were her own son. Her own son—she had only one—worked as a laborer on the railway.
She was a Tamil. She was not rich. Apart from her jewelry she had nothing. She made a living preparing small snacks and savories for the government-run toddy shop in the kampung. Her father would have come from South India to work as a contract laborer on the estates. Her husband would also have been a laborer on an estate. When he died, she left the estate and the estate life and struck out on her own. She came to the kampung and built a house not far from the Alwis’ house.
This woman became Syed Alwi’s fairy godmother when he began to go to the Malay primary school in 1936. He remembered her as a woman in her late thirties, wiry, not kindly-looking, off-putting but not ugly. Every morning on his way to school he stopped at her house. She had a jug o
f hot milk waiting for him on her earthen fireplace. Milk was seldom drunk in the Alwi house. Malays didn’t drink milk; they used condensed milk in coffee, but that was all. The milk used in cakes and curries and meat was always coconut milk, made from the white kernel of the ripe nut.
In 1940, after four years at the Malay primary school, where they mainly studied geography and literature, Syed Alwi and an elder brother were sent to the King Edward VII secondary school in the town of Taiping. Syed Alwi’s father, at great sacrifice, and again with the help of the Indian woman, rented a house there for his sons. Syed Alwi understood later that his father, through all his darkness, was educating him to be a high civil servant, as he himself had once been.
Everyone in the kampung knew about the condition of the father; and people knew about it at the school in Taiping as well. There was no stigma. In fact, there was a little awe. Malays felt that great minds cracked when they were over-extended; and Syed Alwi’s father, known to have been quite brilliant when very young, was considered such a great mind. There was a word in Malay for that kind of crack-up: gila-isin, becoming mad through over-application, studying too hard, believing too hard.
Syed Alwi said, “My father was considered gila-isin because he was pursuing God or something like that. Though the idea of pursuing God was something that only some relatives knew. It was not spread out, just in case people might misinterpret it, and think that this gila-isin was a kind of punishment.”
In 1941 Syed Alwi’s brother ran away and joined the Royal Navy in Singapore. He was a kampung boy, really; he liked the kampung life, the kampung fellowship. He liked going out to work in the rice fields with relatives. He didn’t like being at the college in Taiping; that was his father’s idea. So—with the help of people in the kampung: there was a kind of kampung conspiracy—he ran away to Singapore and said he was older than he was and joined the Royal Navy. Syed Alwi’s father, apart from wanting his son to finish his secondary education, was a pacifist; he hated the idea of pain and killing. He went to see the British Resident in Perak; and in the end, after a lot of trouble, he paid seventy-five dollars, a month’s pension, to buy his son out of the navy. Just then the war started. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed the Singapore naval base, and no one in the family ever got to know what happened to that brother.