The Great Railway Bazaar

  23. The North Star Night Express to Singapore

  ‘I WOULDN’T go to Singapore if you paid me,’ said the man at the end of the bar in the lounge car. He was an inspector in the Malaysian police, a Tamil Christian named Cedric. He was getting drunk in the lazy confident way people do when they are on a train and have a long journey ahead of them. It was overnight to Singapore, and the people in the lounge car (Chinese at mahjong, Indians at cards, a scrum of English planters and estate managers telling stories) had the relaxed look of members in the bar of a Malaysian club. Cedric said Singapore had lost its charm. It was expensive; people ignored you there. ‘It’s the fast life. I pity you.’

  ‘Where are you headed for?’ I asked.

  ‘Kluang,’ he said. ‘On transfer.’

  ‘Let’s hear it for Kluang!’ said one of the planters. ‘Hip! Hip!’

  The others, his friends, ignored him. A man near by, with his feet wide apart like a mate on a quarter deck – it is the stance of the railway drinker – said, ‘Hugh got his fingers burned in Port Swettenham. Chap said to him –’

  I moved over to Cedric and said, ‘What’s the attraction in Kluang?’ Kluang, a small town in Johore State, is the typical Malaysian outstation, with its club, rest house, rubber estates, and its quota of planters going to pieces in their breezy bungalows.

  ‘Trouble,’ said Cedric. ‘But that’s why I like it. See, I’m a roughneck.’ There were labour problems with the Tamil rubber-tappers, and I gathered Cedric had been chosen as much for his colour as for his size and intimidating voice.

  ‘How do you deal with troublemakers?’

  ‘I use this,’ he said, and showed me a hairy fist. ‘Or if we can get a conviction, the bloke gets the rotan.’

  The rotan is a cane – a four-foot rod, about half a finger thick. Cedric said that most jail sentences included strokes of the rotan. The usual number was six strokes; one man in Singapore recently got twenty.

  ‘Doesn’t it leave a mark?’

  ‘No,’ said an Indian near Cedric.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cedric. He thought a moment and sipped his whisky. ‘Well, it depends what colour you are. Some of the blokes are pretty dark, and rotan scars don’t show up. But take you, for instance – it would leave a huge scar on you.’

  ‘So you whip people,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s much worse in Singapore, and they’re supposed to be so civilized. Let’s face it, it happens in every country.’

  ‘It doesn’t happen in the States,’ I said.

  ‘And it doesn’t happen in U.K.,’ said one of the planters, who was eavesdropping on the conversation. ‘They did away with the birch years ago.’

  ‘Maybe they should still have it,’ said Cedric. It was a genial challenge.

  The planter looked a bit nonplussed, as if he believed in corporal punishment but didn’t want to admit his agreement with the views of a man he held in contempt. He said, ‘It’s against the law in U.K.’

  I asked Cedric why, if it was such a marvellous solution, he was being sent to Kluang, where obviously they had been caning men for years?

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ he said. ‘It teaches them a good lesson. Wham! Wham! Then they’re nice and quiet.’

  As it grew late, some of the drinkers left the lounge car, and Cedric (shouting ‘Boy!’) told the Tamil barman to open the windows. He obeyed, and in the dark, just above the rumble of the train wheels, there was a continuous twitter, like amplified bubbles rapidly popping; and a whine, a vibrant warble that was nearly the crackle of a trunk call on a Malaysian telephone: the sound of locusts, frogs, and crickets, hidden in a pervading dampness that muffled their hubbub.

  Cedric finished his drink and said, ‘If you’re ever in Kluang give me a tinkle. I’ll see what I can fix up for you.’ Then he staggered out.

  ‘Peeraswamy,’ said one of the planters to the barman, ‘give each of these gentlemen a large Anchor and see if you can find a whisky for me.’

  ‘There’s someone missing here,’ said one of the men, looking around the lounge car. ‘Tell me who it is – no prizes.’

  ‘Hench!’ said another man. ‘Used to stand right by that pillar. “Charming,” he used to say. Christ, could that man drink!’

  ‘Doesn’t seem the same without Hench.’

  ‘What do you hear from him?’

  ‘Rafe was in touch with him.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ said Rafe. ‘I just heard some stories. You know the ones.’

  ‘Someone said he went blind,’ said one man, who was pouring beer into a glass. ‘Cheers, Boyce,’ he said, and drank.

  ‘All the best,’ said Boyce.

  ‘I never believed that story,’ said Rafe.

  ‘Then we heard he was dead,’ said the third one.

  ‘Didn’t you say he went to Australia, Frank?’

  ‘That’s worse than being dead,’ said Boyce.

  ‘Cheers, Boyce,’ said Frank. ‘No, I never said that. In fact, I thought he was in the Federation somewhere.’

  ‘Reminds me,’ said Rafe. ‘Used to be a bloke on the estate who thought he was going blind. Irish – complete hypochondriac, always pulling down his cheek and showing you his horrible eyeball. Bloody sickening it was, but everyone humoured him. Anyway, he goes and sees this specialist in Singapore. Comes back furious. “What’s wrong, Paddy?” we ask. And he says, “That quack doesn’t know a thing about glaucoma!” ’

  ‘Sounds like Frogget,’ said Boyce.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Frank.

  ‘Tell Rafe about your diabetes,’ said Boyce.

  ‘I never said I had it,’ Frank complained. Then he spoke to Rafe. ‘I just said it was possible. One symptom of diabetes – I was reading this somewhere – is that if you piss on your shoe and the spot turns white you’re in trouble.’

  ‘I think I’m in trouble,’ said Boyce, lifting his foot to the bar.

  ‘Very funny,’ said Frank.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Rafe. He leaned towards the window. ‘I can’t see a thing. Peeraswamy, what’s the next station? And while you’re at it bring two more beers and a whisky for my father here.’

  ‘This is my last one,’ said Boyce. ‘I’ve paid for a berth and I’m going to use it.’

  ‘Coming up to Seremban,’ said Peeraswamy, uncapping two bottles of beer and sliding over a glass of whisky.

  ‘God, I miss Hench,’ said Rafe. ‘He was waiting for his chance to go. I never knew that. I hope he’s not dead.’

  ‘Well, I’m off,’ said Frank, and, picking up his bottle of beer, he added, ‘I’m taking this with me. Wish I had a woman.’

  When he had gone, Boyce said, ‘I’m worried about Frogget.’

  ‘That caper about diabetes?’

  ‘That’s only part of it. He’s beginning to behave like Hench did just before he disappeared. Secretive, you might say. Mention Australia sometimes – see what he says. He goes all queer.’

  The whistle blew at Seremban, hushing the insects. Rafe turned to me. ‘Saw you talking to that Indian chap. Don’t let him worry you. In fact, if I were you I’d divide everything he said by ten. Good night.’

  Then I was alone at the bar of the North Star Night Express. At the far end of the car the mahjong game was still in progress, and the curtains swayed as we left Seremban. Some insects had blown through the windows; they clustered at the lights and chased each other in dizzying spirals.

  ‘Singapore?’ said Peeraswamy.

  I said yes, that’s where I was going.

  ‘Last year I myself in Singapore.’ He had gone down for Thaipusam, he said. He had carried a kavadi. Thaipusam, a Tamil festival, has been banned in India. It is encouraged in Singapore, for the tourists, who photograph the frenzied Tamils parading to Tank Road with metal skewers through their cheeks and arms. The Tamils meet at a particular temple in the morning, and after being pierced by long skewers and having limes hung all over their bodies with fishhooks, carry enormous
wooden shrines on their heads about two miles to another temple. I was interested that Peeraswamy had done it; I asked him about it.

  ‘I have sixteen – one-six – what you call them, knives? – in body. Here, here, and here. One sticking through tongue. Also hooks in knees and up here, in my soldiers.

  ‘I do this because wife getting pregnant ready, and I worried. I pray-pray for this matter, and son come out ready, so I give the thanks for my god Murugam, brother to Subramaniam. I make more prayers. We cannot sleep on the bed, cannot sleep on the pillow. Only can sleep on the floor until two weeks. Then, one week before, we cannot take the meat, just milk – banana and the fruits. I go to temple. Other people there, maybe one hundred or two. I pray ready, I take bath. The padre come and we make songs’ – he showed me how he sang, clasping his hands under his chin, bulging his eyes, and jerking his head back and forth – ‘and after songs is coming ready, we pray ready. The god comes inside! We hurry, cannot wait. The padre take the tongue and pop! Pop with the knives, pop with the hooks ready – no blood from knives, not hurting – can even kill me! I not care! The song come and the god come and we don’t know anything. We want to go out, not want to stop. They put in knives, hooks, what, and we just walk ready.

  ‘The crowd follow – lot of people. The traffic stop – all cars let us pass – and my wife and sister pray-pray and the god come inside them and they faint. I don’t see anything. I go fast, almost running down Serangoon Road, Orchard Road, Tank Road, and three times around the temple. The padre is there. He pray and putting the powder on face and take out the pop. We don’t know anything – just faint inside the temple.’

  Peeraswamy was out of breath. He smiled. I bought him a bottle of Green-Spot and then set off for my compartment, banging my shoulders as I felt my way down the corridor of the speeding train.

  I got up early to be on the balcony for the crossing of the causeway from Johore Bahru. But I was met in the corridor by two men, who blocked my way and demanded to see my passport. One said, ‘Singapore immigration.’

  ‘Your hair is radda rong,’ said the other.

  ‘And yours is rather short,’ I said, feeling that one impertinence deserved another. But according to Singapore law the immigration officers were within their rights to refuse me entry if they thought my hair was untidy. Singapore police, who have virtually no effect on the extortionists and murderers in the Chinese secret societies, are in the habit of frog-marching longhaired youths into the Orchard Road police station to shave their heads.

  ‘How much money you have?’

  ‘Enough,’ I said. Now the train was on the causeway, and I was eager to have a look at the Strait of Johore.

  ‘Exact amount.’

  ‘Six hundred dollars.’

  ‘Singapore currency?’

  ‘American.’

  ‘Show.’

  When every dollar had been counted they gave me an entry visa. By then I had missed the causeway. The North Star was rolling past the wooded marshland on the northern part of the island to the Jurong Road. I associated this road with debt: five years before, I drove down it in the mornings to take my wife to work. It was always cool when we left the house, but so quickly did the rising sun heat the island that it was nearly 80 by the time my small boy (carsick in his wicker seat) and I got back – he to his amah, I to my unfinished African novel. It was curious, travelling across the island, having one’s memory jogged by the keen smells of the market near Bukit Timah Circus and the sight of the tropical plants I loved – the palms by the tracks called pinang rajah, which have feathery fronds gathered at the top and look like ceremonial umbrellas, and the plants that spray green plumes from the fissures and boles of every old tree in Singapore, the lush ornament called ‘ghost leaf’ that gives the deadest tree life. I felt kindly towards Singapore – how could I feel otherwise in a place where one of my children was born, where I wrote three books and freed myself from the monotonous routine of teaching? My life had begun there. Now we were passing Queenstown, where Anne had taught night-school classes in Macbeth; Outram Road General Hospital, where I’d been treated for dengue; and the island in the harbour – there, through the trees – where, on various Sunday outings, we had been caught in a terrifying storm, and seen a thick poisonous sea snake, and been passed (‘Don’t let the children see!’) by a human corpse so old and buoyant it spun in the breeze like a beach toy.

  Singapore Station is scheduled for demolition because its granite frieze of Anglo-Saxon muscle men posed as ‘Agriculture’, ‘Commerce’, ‘Industry’, and ‘Transport’ is thought to be as outmoded as the stone sign on the wall: FEDERATED MALAY STATES RAILWAY. Singapore thinks of itself as an island of modernity in a backward part of Asia, and many people who visit confirm this by snapping pictures of new hotels and apartment houses, which look like juke boxes and filing cabinets respectively. Politically, Singapore is as primitive as Burundi, with repressive laws, paid informers, a dictatorial government, and jails full of political prisoners. Socially, it is like rural India, with households dependent on washerwomen, amahs, gardeners, cooks, and lackeys. At the factory, workers – who, like everyone else in Singapore, are forbidden to strike – are paid low wages. The media are dull beyond belief because of the heavy censorship. Singapore is a small island, 227 square miles at low tide, and though the government refers to it grandly as ‘the Republic’, in Asian terms it is little more than a sand bank – but a sand bank that has been enriched by foreign investment (Singaporeans are great assemblers of appliances) and the Vietnam War. Its small size makes it easy to manage: immigration is strictly controlled, family planning is pervasive, no one is allowed to attend the university until he has a security clearance to show he is demonstrably meek, Chinese (from America, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) are encouraged to settle there, and everyone else is encouraged to leave. The police in Singapore are assigned to the oddest tasks; the courts are filled with the unlikeliest criminals. In what other country on earth would one see such items in the paper?

  Eleven contractors, three householders and a petrol-kiosk proprietor, were fined a total of $6,035 yesterday for breeding mosquitoes.

  Tan Teck Sen, 20, unemployed, was fined $20 for shouting in the lobby of the Cockpit Hotel yesterday.

  Four people were fined $750 yesterday under the Destruction of Disease-Bearing Insects Act for allowing insects to breed.

  Sulaimen Mohammed was fined $30 yesterday for throwing a piece of paper into a drain at the 15½ mile, Woodlands Road.

  Seven or eight years is not an uncommon sentence for a political offence, and criminal offences usually include a whipping. An alien can be deported for having long hair, and anyone can be fined up to $500 for spitting or throwing paper on the ground. Essentially, these laws are passed so that foreign tourists will come to Singapore and, if the news gets out that Singapore is clean and well disciplined, then Americans will want to set up factories and employ the nonstriking Singaporeans. The government emphasizes control, but in such a small place control is not hard to achieve.

  Here is a society where newspapers are censored and no criticism of the government is tolerated; where television is a bland confection of quiz shows, American and British situation comedies, and patriotic programmes; where mail is tampered with and banks are forced to disclose the private accounts of their clients. It is a society where there is literally no privacy and where the government is in complete control. This is the Singaporeans’ idea of technological advance:

  How would you like to live in a futuristic Singapore where mail and newspapers arrive at your home electronically by facsimile ‘print-out’? Sounds like science fiction, but to the Acting General Manager of the Singapore Telephone Board, Mr Frank Loh, they could ‘become reality before long’.

  He said, ‘Developments in telecommunications have already done much to change the pattern of our lives. Concepts such as the “wired city” in which a single cable to each home or office would handle all communication needs could soon be put into
practice.’

  Mr Loh, who was speaking on ‘Telephone Communication’ at the convention of the Singapore-Malaysia Institutes of Engineers, gave more details of such exciting developments which the future holds.

  ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘at your home communication centre, both mail and newspapers might arrive electronically delivered by facsimile “print-out”.’

  (Straits Times, 20 November 1973)

  It struck me as a kind of technology that reduced freedom, and in a society that was basically an assembly plant for Western business interests, depending on the goodwill of washerwomen and the cowardice of students, this technology was useful for all sorts of programmes and campaigns. In a ‘wired city’ you wouldn’t need wall space for SINAGAPORE WANTS SMALL FAMILIES and PUT YOUR HEART INTO SPORTS and REPORT ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS: you would simply stuff it into the wire and send it into every home.

  But that is not the whole of Singapore. There is a fringe, latterly somewhat narrower than it was, where life continues aimlessly, unimpeded by the police or the Ministry of Technology. On this fringe, which is thick with bars, people celebrate Saturday with a curry lunch and drink beer all afternoon, saying, ‘Singapore’s a shambles – I’m going to Australia,’ or ‘You were lucky to get out when you did.’ It is a place where nearly everyone talks of leaving, but no one goes, as if in leaving he would have to account for all those empty, wasted years playing the slot machines at the Swimming Club, signing chits at the Staff House, toying with a coffee, and waiting for the mail to arrive. On the fringe there are still a few brothels, massage parlours, coffee shops, and discounts for old friends; there are fans instead of air conditioners, and some of the bars have verandahs where in the evening a group of drinkers might find a half-hour’s diversion in watching a fat gecko loudly gobble a sausage fly.

  It was a gecko on the wall that provoked the reflection that sent me away. I was staying at The Mess, a tall airy house on a leafy hill, and I realized that I had been staring at a gecko on the wall for fifteen minutes or more. It was an old habit, begun in boredom. It seemed as if I had been in Singapore a long time ago, when I was young and didn’t know anything, and being there this second time, after two years’ absence, I had a glimpse of this other person. It is possible at a distance to maintain the fiction of former happiness – childhood or school days – and then you return to an early setting and the years fall away and you see how bitterly unhappy you were. I had felt trapped in Singapore; I felt as if I was being destroyed by the noise – the hammering, the traffic, the radios, the yelling – and I had discovered most Singaporeans to be rude, aggressive, cowardly, and inhospitable, full of vague racial fears and responsive to any bullying authority. I believed it to be a loathsome place: many of my students thought so too and they couldn’t imagine why anyone would willingly stay there. At last I left, and on this return I could not imagine, watching this gecko, why I had stayed three years there; perhaps it was the deceived hesitation I had called patience, or maybe it was my lack of money. I was certain that I would not make the same mistake again, so after seeing a few friends – and everyone told me he was planning to leave soon – I flew out. The previous day I had spent at a club where I had once been a member. The secretary of this club was an overbearing man with a maniacal laugh, but he had been in Singapore since the thirties. He was a real old-timer, people said. I asked about him. ‘You a friend of his?’ said the man at the bar. I said I knew him. ‘I’d keep that quiet if I were you. Last month he did a bunk with 180,000 dollars of the club’s money.’ Like me – like everyone I knew in Singapore – he had just been waiting for his chance to go.