I stare studiously at my wooden watch face, and people zoom around me at great speed. When I look up, the soul collector has been around, and people I love have disappeared forever, and new little people have sprung up like seeds from the ground. When you look at me, you only see a man trapped in a menial job—but be careful not to pity me, for like the earth, I will live beyond the pointless comings and goings of man. You’ll see.
Sevenese
It was only when I found out about the snake charmer’s eldest son Raja’s secret love for my sister that I first realized how beautiful she was. It was 1944, and I was eleven years old. I ran home so fast that the wind whistled by my ears and my white shirttails flapped madly in the wind. I dashed past Father dozing with his mouth half open on the veranda and made for the kitchen. She looked up from a bowl of brown chapati dough and smiled at me. I stared at the starburst happening in her eyes. Indeed, Mohini was a spectacular creature. It was a revelation to realize that she was not simply the hand that arranged neat piles of curries around a mound of rice on my plate or the considerably gentler touch (the other, of course, being Mother’s strong, rough hand) that ministered the hated weekly oil-bath ritual.
I looked into the green and brown flecks inside her lovely eyes and felt a warm glow spread inside me at the thought of how well this totally unexpected romantic twist fitted in with my plans. I can actually remember clasping my hands together and saying a prayer to God, thanking him for making my sister beautiful enough to attract the attention of Raja, for Raja was someone whom I had, for as long as I could remember, idolized and longed to befriend.
To others his sullen face on his striding figure embodied the inexplicable sounds and strange cries that came from the snake charmer’s house in the middle of the night. There was talk of evil and black magic. There was even talk of ghosts and spirits come back from the dead. People feared him and his father, but I didn’t. From the day I found out that the grinning skull inside their house belonged to him, I was obsessed with the need to know more. For years I had played with his younger brother, Ramesh, while gazing at the unreachable, tall figure of Raja in the distance. Everything about him was a source of intense curiosity and mystery—his powerful clay-colored limbs, his dirt-encrusted clothes, his unwashed bronze locks, and that peculiar but not unpleasant wild animal smell that emanated from his body in tangible waves. Of course, Mother’s vividly recalled bloody story about him as a little boy with curly hair munching bits of glass in the marketplace elevated him to unimaginable heights of dark powers.
I watched full of awe from afar as he tended to the beehives at the back of their home. I have no love of bees and can never forget the day when Ah Kow from next door threw a stone at one of the hives, and the entire swarm rose up in a dark, angry cloud and roared like a waterfall. Even the Japanese soldiers with their long guns waited outside the house for their bottles of free honey. Unhesitating and fearless, Raja dipped his hand into the droning hives and softly stole their precious honey. Sometimes they stung him, but unperturbed, he casually plucked out their black stingers from his swelling face. Once he even wore a whole swarm on his face like the most repulsive black-and-yellow beard.
All for my pleasure.
Before Raja came into my life I was a Boy Scout by day, a fruit thief by evening, and a chain-gang terrorist on chosen weekends. Raja’s brother Ramesh, Ah Kow, and I used to belong to a gang of boys who ran wild in other people’s fruit orchards and staged fierce fights with rival gangs. It seems incredible to think back now that we actually fought these battles armed with bicycle chains, sticks, and stones. We gathered in the outskirts of the old marketplace and charged at the enemy, screaming frenziedly, hurling stones, and swinging bicycle chains. Quite a lot of blood would spill too, until Chinese housewives with bad hairdos and ill-fitting samfus rushed out of their homes, cursing and brandishing brooms. They hit us over the head and occasionally managed to catch the ears of those too engrossed in the fight. Being caught by the ear was far worse than a hundred lashes on the head with someone’s bicycle chain. The ultimate insult was when they bent very close to our ears and swore at the top of their coarse, uneducated voices, “Devils, devils, little trouble-making devils. Wait till I tell your mother.” The rest of us had no choice but to instantly drop our murderous scowls and menacing stances and scamper away in all directions as quickly as possible. They were good fun, those fights, even if they were few and far between.
Mostly we were content to simply steal into watermelon patches and cart away their biggest and best. We lugged the massive dark-green fruit to a safe place and pigged out on red flesh until we couldn’t move. Then we lay flat on the ground, arms and legs thrown far apart like stranded starfishes, and groaned at the blue skies. Once while we were stealing watermelons from a field a half-dressed man came running out of a dirty unused shed. He shook his fist at us angrily and shouted, “Hey, you greedy pigs. Come back here.” One of the boys in our group yelped in horror, realizing for the first time that it was his uncle’s watermelon patch that we were raiding. His uncle chased us for a long way, cursing and swearing in Chinese.
Sometimes we climbed into fruit orchards and sat among the branches eating sweet mangoes and rambutans until we were literally sick. It wasn’t long before one of the orchard owners bought a big, black guard dog. I must say that animal carried a ferocious bark in his mouth, but we hurled such a rain of unripe fruit on his soft nose that he ran with his tail tucked tight between his legs and his red tongue flying behind him like the tip of a woman’s scarf. After that one time he never came around anymore. Only when we heard that someone had poisoned the unfortunate dog did it dawn on us that others were onto the same good thing as us.
At least once a week we hid behind the big old Chinese bakery in the middle of town, hoping to steal sticky buns filled with grated coconut cooked in molasses. As the van drivers loaded their vans with supplies for all the coffee shops in town, we made a quick job of swiping huge handfuls. The buns were still wonderfully hot when we crammed them into our mouths. It was during those daring heists that we came to realize why the coffee shop beside the bakery sold the cheapest chicken rice in all of Kuantan. You could actually eat a satisfying meal for only twenty cents. Day and night there were people sitting at round tables stuffing their faces. Hidden away behind the dustbins we saw cage after cage of diseased and dead chickens arriving from all the different farms outside town. Unhappy chickens with half-closed eyes and undernourished, scantily feathered chickens swayed and lurched drunkenly over the dead carcasses on the floor of the cages. A young Chinese boy with a harelip slaughtered them, dipped them into a large vat of boiling water, plucked them bald, and chucked them into a square tin container. Every once in a while a bad-tempered cook in dirty black shorts and a white singlet came out, scratching and swearing. He smoked a cigarette, then grabbed a handful of cleanly scrubbed chickens by their dimpled necks and went back into his cooking cubicle. From the busy restaurant came the sound of loud laughter and the call of people ordering more of that delicious chicken rice.
At other times we hung about in the back lanes, trying to catch one of the cheap, painted prostitutes in action. Most of them were ugly and sour-faced. They stood in colorful clusters in the alleyways with bitter, knowing eyes and greedy unnaturally pouting mouths. They leaned back against the dirty walls of the narrow backstreets smoking endless cigarettes, and threw stones at us with surprising viciousness if they spotted us peeping.
Sex was a real curiosity, but only once did Ramesh and I glimpse the act itself. It was late in the evening, and she was very young. Her mouth was deep red and her hair raven black. We hid behind the smelly green dustbins full to overflowing with decaying rubbish and gazed pop-eyed at the man and the girl. It looked like he was bargaining, and he even made as if to walk away, but she smiled, stretched out a very white hand, and looked coyly at him. He fished money out of his shirt pocket and put it into her outstretched hand. Suddenly they were in the middle of the act its
elf. It was all rather sordid and far from the intriguing thing I had imagined it to be. The man dropped his trousers and bent his knees in such a way that his bunched trousers remained trapped in the backs of his legs. His hard hands gripped the soft white flesh of her buttocks. Unconcerned that his wrinkled, thin butt was hanging out for all the world to see, he buried his face in her left shoulder and pumped energetically. Every time he jerked into her, she shouted out ecstatically, “Wah, wah, wah!” But in her powdered, rouged face her glassy eyes had rolled upward, up and away from the smelly gutters and the rusty green weeds that struggled to grow in the cracks by the drain. Away from the edges of the broken stone steps, past the peeling paint on the walls, past the firmly shut windows that told her she was a slut, and past even the roof tiles full of moss, onto a patch of evening sky colored orgasmic tangerine. On her face there was no pleasure, no boredom, no emotion. Just a deeply red mouth shouting, “Wah, wah, wah!”
Inside my shorts a small snake shed its skin and grew thick and hard. As soon as the grunting man had finished, he retrieved his gray trousers from the back of his knees and, stuffing himself back into them with surprising speed, disappeared in the opposite direction. The girl brought out a crumpled, dirty handkerchief from her handbag and wiped herself quickly. There was skill in the flick of her wrist. She wore no underwear. Her private part was white, flat, triangular, and covered in curly black hair. She smoothed down her short Western-style clothing, flicked her black hair over her shoulder, and tottered away on very high heels. We listened to their tapping echo loudly in the deserted alleyway until she was swallowed by one of the anonymous back doors.
I am sure that first encounter with sex had a profound effect on me. It has imbued my idea of sex with the wrong flavor. That young girl’s blank boredom and red lips shimmer before my eyes like a mirage in the desert. I crawl toward it on my hands and knees, only to find myself in the wrong alleyway, wrong hotel room, wrong prostitute. I recognize that it is the prostitute’s ennui that draws and excites me. The prize is the ability to bring animation into a bored face. It has driven me on for years. Even after I realized the truth about their tired souls, I lived for the fantasy that red mouth in the alleyway created all those years ago, paying double if they managed an appearance of enjoyment, if they didn’t ask, “How much longer?” And they, that inexhaustible army of short skirts and smooth thighs, they never missed a beat, laying on a truly admirable repertoire of convincing groans, deep throat moans, dying gasps. Yes, I have wasted my life in bordellos looking for the girl in the alleyway—but isn’t it strange that after all these years, I can still see her so clearly? The spikes of her stilettos forever buried in rotting papaya skin, a cloud of disturbed fruit flies rising up to her ankles, and her knees buckling slightly. “Wah, wah, wah!” she cries once more, her eyes rolling up to meet the evening sky. And then in my fantasy she looks directly into my eyes and moans with surprised pleasure.
Every other week in the afternoon Ramesh and I each put on our mauve Boy Scout uniform with its distinctive scarf and walked to school. There we were taught obedience, helpfulness, the importance of being earnest, and good, upright behavior. Afterward we were issued with rectangular blue work cards, the front printed with the school’s crest. We were then split into groups of twos and dispatched to the different affluent neighborhoods around the school. We called at their gates, knocked at their front doors, and with shining smiles chorused, “Aunty, do you have any odd jobs for us to do?” Invariably they had. We washed cars, cleaned out garages, mowed lawns, cut hedges, swept drains, collected rubbish into piles to be burned. Then we presented our cards, had them signed, and got paid either fifty cents or one ringgit. The money we were supposed to hand over at the end of the day to the Scout master, but Ramesh and I had double cards, so for every ringgit we turned in, we kept one.
You could buy cigarettes singly in those days. The shopkeeper looked you up and down but ultimately minded his own business. As long as money was handed over, he kept his opinions to himself and his abacus busy. At the beginning we sneaked into the clearing in the woods behind Ramesh’s house, blowing hundreds of smoke rings into the humid air, listening for the crash of small wild boar as they hurtled along in the bushes, but as we grew braver, we migrated into town. In the late evenings we sat in a row by the side of the road near the cinema with our legs dangling inside the enormous monsoon drain that ran right through the town, smoking and watching the girls go by. When the monsoon winds blew and the heavy rains poured for days on end, strange things rushed by in the water—a dead water buffalo bobbing stiffly, a large, wildly struggling snake being swept away, a smashed rattan rocking chair, furiously dog-paddling rats with calm faces, bottles, excrement, and one day, what became Lalita’s favorite doll. It was a foot tall with curly yellow hair, pretty blue eyes, and a small plastic mouth painted a pale pink. Some spoiled European child must have tossed it into the water in a fit of temper. The December rains were yet to arrive, so when it floated by with its round staring eyes in the gently moving water, I scooped it out and took it home, where Lalita opened her arms wide with shining, incredulous eyes.
I should say though that smoking by the drains carried far more danger than the gatherings in the woods. Mother had spies everywhere. Any woman in a sari could be counted upon to efficiently broadcast any incident with a great deal of embellishments added. I had seen the effect of one of Jeyan’s escapades. Poor kid. By the time he got home, Mother was already seething. But the sorry part was, he was hardly ever bad. Once in a blue moon sums up the frequency of his stunts, but the unlucky little chap always got caught.
Occasionally we faked illness and skipped school to end up in the cinema. Once, standing in the line to see a new risqué movie, we were surprised to see our headmaster hiding behind a pillar, his bulging eyes darting about suspiciously. He was a man of such excruciating fastidiousness that one imagined him to be sickened by his own bodily secretions. We would have run or ducked or something but for the sight of a light green ticket for the matinee performance of Vimochanam (The Evils of High Drinking) nodding limply between his sweaty fingers. He was not there to pounce on us after all. Locked uncomfortably into his stiffly starched white shirt and old-fashioned black trousers, he was positively bleeding embarrassment from every strict, law-abiding pore. The dreadful, hilarious moment when our glances must meet arrived. He froze, but for a frightened tic at the side of his face that made his mustache twitch madly. Clutching his ticket, he suddenly scuttled into the darkened hall. For days I wondered if he would tell Mother, but apparently shame has a way with outrage.
But some days, nothing could dispel the wind of boredom that blew listlessly in and out of our tiny little town, where it seemed nothing ever happened. When simply going to the river on the other side of town to watch the bare-bodied men catch alligators and turtles was not enough, we turned bloodthirsty and used our slingshots to hunt lizards. The best slingshot among us was Ismail, Minah’s youngest son. He had a passion for killing the pale gray lizards that was legendary. He took it upon himself as a good Muslim to kill as many as his skill allowed. It was a lizard that had betrayed the hiding place of the prophet Nabi Muhammad to his enemies; it destroyed the webs that a faithful spider had carefully spun over the mouth of a cave to conceal the prophet’s entry into it. At the end of a killing session, when Ismail stopped to light a cigarette, he would have amassed a grotesque pile of no fewer than fifteen lizards beside him. Stretched out in the shade of the angsana tree and staring at pieces of blue sky through the leaves, I was secretly envious of Ismail’s pile and engrossed in thoughts of how to increase my own. Thousands of miles away, Nazi soldiers were equally engrossed in thoughts of enlarging their horrific mountains of dead Jews, famished and naked Jews, their skin like polished bone. As I lay in the shade on those sultry afternoons, war felt so far away, but when it came it came, so suddenly there was really no time to prepare for it at all.
The Japanese landed in Penang on December 13, 1941.
After watching movies about “Made in Japan” bombs falling apart with a soft plop and making fun of bow-legged soldiers too cross-eyed to shoot straight, we were stunned by their sudden complete control. Who were these Asian dwarfs who could make the mighty British flee in the night? And then they arrived in Kuantan. In the wake of the deep gravelly voice, the resplendent uniform full of regal color, and the polished boots of the white man, the first Japanese soldier was unattractive and uncouth in ill-fitting clothes. He had a yellow peasant face, wore a cheap, peaked cloth cap with flaps hanging over his neck, and had a flask and a tin container of rice, salt fish, and soya beans secured to his belt. At the end of his short legs he wore rubber-soled canvas boots, split-toed so the big toe was in a separate section from the other toes, and into this cleverly adapted footwear the bottoms of his trousers were pushed. Thus ready for the muddy horror of tropical conditions, he stood as the conquering hero. In our foolish, romantic youth we credited his one and only redeeming feature as his rifle and long bayonet.
“But they look like you,” I whispered incredulously to Ah Kow the first time we saw a group of them in town. Ramesh nodded in agreement, but Ah Kow stared at the soldiers with hatred in his small eyes. How right he was to feel hate, for they tore apart his family. We watched them march up the road until they disappeared from sight, expendable men in expendable uniforms who spoke rough guttural sounds and shamelessly unbuttoned their trousers in public places to let fly streams of urine. How could these men have vanquished the British? People who lived in superior houses with servants and drivers to serve them, eating only choice food made up of hunks of red meat bought from the cold storage shop. And their children, naturally too superior for the local educational system, had to be sent back to the motherland after they had burned themselves brown under our sun. How many times had I stood, head bent, humbly raking leaves in their backyards while surreptitiously listening to their privileged children laughing and talking in that peculiar but superior accent of theirs?