Earthly Powers

  "Conrad's dead, did you know that?"

  "I didn't, no, we get the news two months late. Dead, is he? I used to have this dream about being called in to save the life of a great man. I've only saved little men, and not too many of those. I take it you'll be writing about the East now. And then some medical student will read you and say ah adventure and go for an interview in Great Smith Street. A big responsibility."

  "So it's not like Conrad?"

  "Conrad left out the hookworm and the malaria and the yaws."

  "What are yaws?"

  "Yaws is not are. You'll see yaws tomorrow. We've got a yaws ward. Tropical paradise, that's a lot of nonsense. Bacilli and spirochetes like the hot damp. Vicious mosquitoes, snakebite. The Malays are mad, they won't report a snakebite, superstitious, then they die smiling, the bite's supposed to bring good luck. Straight to paradise, perhaps, sherbet and houris forever and ever. Then there's amok and latah and the Chinese have this peculiar disease they call shook jong, koro among the Buginese. Paradise indeed. And we can't do a thing for them, can't get into their minds. The Eastern mind, the West can't touch it, they say only Karl Marx can get into an Eastern mind because he's down to rockbottom, more rice and kill the bosses. I don't know, I know nothing about anything."

  "What are those things, mah jong and the other ones?"

  "Shook, not mah. The patient gets the idea that his penis is shrinking and retreating into his abdomen. He gets scared. He ties it to his leg with a bit of string or even tries to anchor it with a pin or a li teng hok, that's a special double-bladed knife that jewellers use. Did you ever hear anything like it in your life? Then he dies of anxiety. You can't do a thing. It's all to do with sex, but it's no use bringing Freud into it. Amok means running amuck. It's nearly always Malays. They get a grievance and then they brood on it and are very sullen. They kill the man who causes the grievance and anybody else who happens to be around, many as possible. And then the amok johnny gets killed himself, if he's lucky. Latah--that's infinite suggestiveness. They'll imitate anything. There was one old lady in Taiping, heard a bicycle bell and started to imitate a cyclist pedalling and she just couldn't stop, died of exhaustion. Tell an orang latah that his mattress is his wife and he'll start trying to give it a baby. Conrad missed all that."

  "The three diseases of modern literature," I said. "D. H. Lawrence for that penis thing, latah is it for James Joyce, amuck for this young Hemingway character. Bang bang, punch punch, but it's really the death urge."

  "Don't know any of those chaps. You'll have to teach me what to read. Send for books from Singapore, that's what some of them do. Look, we'd better think about leaving. Quick shower, change." He was still in his working shorts. "You look very cool and smart, if I may so say. I like the tie. Shan't be a jiffy."

  We set off under a big full moon, bigger than you see in the north, for Mahalingam's bungalow, which was off the Taiping road, easy to find since it was in the grounds of his waterworks. It was warm and damp and I wriggled to detach my damp shirt from my damp back. "How are you feeling?" Philip asked. All right, I said. "Don't eat too much of what he offers. Cold grease, you know. Things looking like toads in warm syrup. Chilies, give you the squitters. Gallons of Beehive brandy, just to show how well off he is. Get offended if you refuse, white man scorning their hospitality sort of thing. Say you've been ill, telling no lie after all, but you just had to come. Knew some delightful Tamils in Ceylon or somewhere. Touchy as hell, some of these people. When I first came here I tried to be matey, you know, sitting at tables with them in drinking shops, chewing the fat. Then one day one of them said to me, Bengali he was, you know, Dr. Shawcross, I despise you. That gave me a shock, I can tell you, but I said why? Because, he said, you lower yourself by drinking with people like me. Oh my God." Flying beetles kept crashing into the windscreen, leaving a deposit like a fingerful of cream and jam. "Look, a flying fox." A burong hantu or ghost bird or white owl swooped into the headlights, beaked something green and squirming, then swooped up back into the dark. What looked like a small brown bear hared across the road from jungle to jungle. "Yes, a beruang it's called. A bit like bruin, coincidence of course. Wonderful country for animal life, but the beasts get sick too. Scabby old tigers, monkey corpses falling from the coconut trees like coconuts. A big dead python, long as a street, lying in a monsoon drain, a whole menagerie gnawing it."

  "Will you come back after you leave?"

  "Oh, I'll be back. Somebody's got to do the job. Here we are." He turned left between huge open metal meshed gates, his headlights catching a big board like a language lesson, three alphabets and a platoon of Chinese ideograms. Pejabat Ayer, Department of Water. The works lay some way away, moonlit, grey as a prison. Then there was a headlit garden obscene with blooms as if to advertise the virtues of water. Mahalingam, I took it to be, was out there quick-eared in the porch of the bungalow, ready to greet.

  "The more the merrier, as you say. Too many cooks spoil the broth, but many hands make light work." It was as if one dicton automatically primed others, relevance being irrelevant. "The name again? Mr. Toomey, very nice in the mouth. A writer? The pen is mightier than the sword, as you say. You must tell me the name of your book and I will get it from the town library." We were now into his living room which, not being in a Class 1 residence, had no ceiling fan. The air was close and complicatedly spiced. "Sit, sit, sitting is as cheap as standing." The standard pattern PWD furniture was a link with home; otherwise I was adrift in a world that was not merely exotic but disinterestedly malevolent. I could smell the richness of it. The dining table in the alcove was already set for two and there were blue soup plates containing cold heavy sauced dishes in nursery jelly colors. A desperately smirking youth with bare feet, shirt and dhoti stood by the table, bowing and bowing. "My eldest son," Mahalingam said. "A fool." And he gave Tamil orders for the laying of another place, hitting out at the lad with both hands. The lad ran to a door and opened it, and the jungle noise of females escaped from cast-iron purdah. He ran back with a plate and cutlery, forgetting to shut the door. Mahalingam slammed it and then his son. He bubbled what seemed a disproportionate quantity of Tamil at him.

  A smoking Sikh taxidriver in the FMS Bar in Ipoh had told me the fable of the origin of the Tamil tongue. One day the Lord God created all the languages of the world, a tiring and sweaty business. The task done, the Lord God doffed his robe and entered a cold bath his number one boy had drawn for him. Cleansing himself, the Lord God felt a timid tap on his shoulder blade. It was a little Tamil complaining in dumb show that he had not been given a language. "No more languages left," said the Lord God. "You'd better take this." And the Lord God subaqueously farted: worrabarrahotwarrerborrel. And lo, Tamil had come into existence.

  Mahalingam was probably about forty-five. In honor of the white visit he was dressed as for tennis with a striped tie very similar to my own. The costume made his blackness peculiarly aggressive. It was really a deep purple with shades of burnt gold under the eyes. Once you got as black as you possibly could you became other colors. In build he was not unlike Carlo Campanati but with a vaster paunch. His feet were bare and his toes prehensile: they seemed always to be about their own work, trying to pick up crumbs and fluff and delicately hammer stray insects. In full face the flatness of his color obliterated all features except the eyes that appeared to have no irises and the forty or so great teeth that champed Tamil and English alike with relish. With a table lamp on him or in profile you saw wholly Aryan features, though wide, spread, big, the nostrils splayed and the mouth corners striving to reach the jaws. A rank but somehow attractive smell oozed with his sweat as he handed me a stiff whisky with ice. He had a Frigidaire, not, like Philip, a mere old-time icebox: it squatted like a disregarded relative in this living room, family photographs glued all over its door, and it hummed and choked as in senility, though it was new.

  "That is as you like it, Mr. Toomey, if that is the name, it is what you will or else much ado about nothing?"

>   "If you had perhaps a little soda water--"

  I had said a terrible thing. Mahalingam turned flailing on the boy, who cowered and whimpered. Then he drove him out of the house by the front door, crying his rage. Once he was driven out the boy seemed, from the tinkle, to have money thrown at him. Too quickly, it seemed to me, we heard the noise of a car starting then starting off with, surely, impossible speed. Philip frowned.

  "You too have sons, Mr. Toomey, or are you living in a state of unwedded bliss?" I was given no time to answer. "So you have written a book, well, you will find much to write about here, a hotbed of vice, intolerance and ignorance, and also superstition. The doctor here will tell you it is so."

  "Oh, come," Philip said. "People are much the same everywhere. In India, too, ure y, he added with caution.

  "In India, yes, and so I left India. What, Mr. Toomey, do you seek out of life?"

  A very straight question. "To enjoy it. To fix the phenomena of human society in words."

  "That is very interesting. You think it can be done with words?"

  "The right words, yes. If one can find the right words."

  "Do you believe in life after death, Mr. Toomey, or are you like your compatriot Prince Hamlet in dubiety since peoples do not come back from undiscovered bourn?"

  "I'm not a Dane," I said, "but since Hamlet's Danishness is very nominal I'll accept that--Sorry, not really relevant. Oh, I was brought up to believe in it but now I'm not really sure."

  "The personalities of the dead do not in your opinion survive and are not susceptible to be--brought back to world of the living by express conjuration?"

  On that last phrase the noise of a car swiftly slowing and then grinding to its stop purred and growled in. "Impossible," Philip said. But then the dhotied boy appeared with six bottles of soda water, Frazer and Neave, Singapore, under his arm and in his grip. Mahalingam grasped one rudely, snarling, untopped it with a chop of the side of the hand against the arm of his chair, then poured into my glass as it were insolently, as though pissing into it, railing at his son as the bubbles overflowed onto the floor. I felt I had to get out of here. I might have to simulate a heart seizure, but Mahalingam's son would be terribly blamed for that. This son now let in more jungle female noise for five seconds and then was standing by the dining table with a bowl of what seemed to be saffroned rice, beseeching, smirking, agonising, he would be blamed if the rice got cold.

  "At the table," Mahalingam said, "we will continue interesting conversations."

  It is always easier to eat things if you know what they are called or, better, if you know what they are made of. There was no cosmological structure in Mahalingam's meal, at least none that could make sense to a Western mind. To begin with what looked like beef rissoles in a black sauce and find them to be piercingly sweet cakes in honey was disconcerting. I mean, a Western banquet recapitulates the history of the earth from primal broth through sea beasts to land predators and flying creatures and ends with evidence of human culture in cheese and artful puddings. Mahalingam's dinner was all brutal surprises. In a sense it was fortunate he did not name anything, saying, for instance, "That curry you are now eating, Mr. Toomey, you are thinking is made of bats, not aha the cricket variety, we have already eaten crickets, and you are nearly right, for it is flying foxes carefully prepared with nourishing parasite life still clinging to body." When Philip or I had downed a spoonful of colored rice, the wretched boy was there with his dish to refill the plate, so that the torture would never be finished. The sweat poured off all of us, and though the liquid loss was more than made good with Beehive brandy and water, the salt loss was not, since there was not one single item in the meal that had salt in it, nor was there salt on the table.

  "There is," Mahalingam was saying, "no death in sense of disappearance forever. Do we not eat the dead? They become a part of ourselves and so go on living. Souls of the dead take other living forms, so my poor mother, long dead in Madras of tertiary fevers, may be in that flying beetle there, or else long eaten by her son in form of beef or sheep or pig."

  "You accept," I said, "transmigration, but you are not a Hindu or anything else er er of a known orthodoxy?" The Beehive brandy.

  "I am what I am, Mr. Toomey," he said like God, "and have been diligent student of many mysteries. I take what I need from all, but I say religion is mysteries at bottom, and such are not made clear, of very nature, to ordinary peoples. There are holy of holies which man of exceptional intelligence must spend his life seeking and attaining. You may say my religion is personal and electric."

  "Surely you mean eclectic?"

  "I mean what I mean," he said loudly. "Because you are an Englishman does not mean you have monopoly of the language."

  "I do beg your pardon. I misunderstood. I see now what you mean. I thought perhaps you had meant to say eclectic, which is from the Greek ekiegein, meaning to choose or single out. That you had chosen from the religions of the East, or perhaps of the world, those elements which pleased you best. I do sincerely apologise."

  "Your apology," he said generously, "is acceptable. What you say is an acceptable summing up of what I believe. Is your mother living, Mr. Toomey?" he seemed to threaten.

  I was happy to be able to say she was dead, like Mahalingam's own, else he might have ranted of white injustice. "Of influenza. There was a terrible epidemic at the end of the war, as you know."

  "It took my father and my sister," Philip said. "Within the same week."

  "Terrible terrible," Mahalingam smiled, "the consequences of human beings meddling with due processes of nature and upsetting delicate equilibrium of the universe. Now, Mr. Toomey, do you see picture behind me on the wall, above my head as it will be, I think?" I saw it, I had seen it already. It was a framed Pictorial chart, in the nursery colors of Mahalingam's own banquet, of a selection of punishments being meted out to brown sinners by what I took to be gods in the forms of elephant--and tiger-headed multibrachiate beings in red underpants. The punished too were in red underpants, and they seemed not to be complaining at being sawn through the middle, decapitated with scissors, and having thick rods thrust down their throats. It was like a page in the colored cartoon supplement of an American Sunday newspaper, though far cruder. It seemed to have no iconic significance in Mahalingam's domestic decor, just something bought for a couple of pice and put on the wall since something had to be done with it, waste not want not; the colors were pretty.

  "Yes?" I said, and lowered my gaze to Mahalingam's smiling teeth in time to see him change for a split second into my sorrowing mother and then become himself again. I did not like this at all. I looked at my wristwatch.

  "You are thinking, Mr. Toomey, you would like to return to congenial company of European gentlemen, having spent long enough in the household of peoples of exterior race and customs."

  "Not at all," I said with guilt. "Dr. Shawcross here ordered me an early bedtime. I've not been too well."

  "Collapsed this afternoon," Philip confirmed. "A kind of cardiac seizure. Giving him a thorough examination tomorrow. It may be the heat, of course, he's not used to it. I told him he ought not to come here this evening, but he insisted. Didn't you, ah Ken?"

  "I have had," I said carefully, "previous delightful hospitality from gentlemen in Southern India. I wanted to come. I'm glad I came. I think we've both had a most refreshing evening." That word refreshing, with its remoter connotations of freshets and bursting water in general, acted on my bowels. "If I could," I said, "make use of your ah." I got up. Mahalingam crashed into his son, being too far away to hit him but making hitting gestures, and the boy bowed and bowed at me, indicating that he would show, would take, do please come, sir. I followed him out of the room and down a dark corridor. He pushed open a door, bowing me toward a Turkish toilet or terrible crouchhole. "What's your name?" I asked. "Siapa nama?" He bowed and bowed, gesturing, please now, while it is still there, my father may make it suddenly disappear and blame me for it. I crouched, and he seemed ready to
watch me, but I waved him away. He shut the door on me but I heard no departing feet. There was no electric light in the toilet, but a great lamp on the periphery of the waterworks I assumed it to be shone in through the high window and was abetted by the moon. I squirted litres from my anus and found a roll of brown PWD paper. There fell from within the cardboard cylinder what looked like a wickless candle-end. It was wax but also hairy. Was there not something in the Book of Revelations? I dropped it as though it burned. And the moon was as sackcloth of hair and the light of a candle shall shine no more? Nonsense.

  "Well," Mahalingam smiled at the front door, "I look forward to reciprocation of hospitality," meaning he was inviting himself back. "Different races must mix together and learn from each other. That also is part of my eccentric religion." For no reason he hit out at his son, who smiled and smiled and bowed and bowed.

  "It was pretty terrible," Philip said when we were a good way down the road. "Rank mutton fat. Things rolled in dirty paws. Where the hell did he get that soda water from? He bought it somewhere, but where? There's no kedai within seven miles. Out and back like a bat out of hell. I can't think of the word, but that boy reminds me of something, one of those dug-up dead they have in the West Indies, working in the plantations, what do you call them--"

  "A zombie. Zumbi, a Congo word, it comes in Conrad, I think." I didn't mention seeing Mahalingam turn briefly into my mother. "Have you had medical dealings with any of the family yet?"

  "No, but I will have. He'll get his money's worth so to speak out of the department. And more. Paid for in advance with all that horrible muck."

  "The whisky was all right. The soda too."

  "Look there," and he slowed. In a scrub clearing at the foot of Bukit Chandan, two old Malay women in sarongs knotted just under their armpits were fixing candles into clay sconces. One struck a match. The candles, alight, did not flicker. There was not a belch of wind. The other woman placed, with a reverent gesture, a bunch of horn bananas on a tump of earth. "A keramat or shrine," Philip said. "A brother and sister disappeared from near that spot about two years ago. They either ran from home or were grabbed for debt slavery, nasty business, father can't pay his debts, children work for the creditors. According to the locals they ascended into heaven like the Prophet himself. But they come back for bananas and they catch the whiff of supplication, you might say. It's the monkeys that eat the bananas, but nobody ever thinks of that. The place is loaded with superstition."