by Nigel Barley
The girl behind me was French and garrulous, eager to tell her life-story. She was going to Australia to get married. ‘I expect it will be all right when I get there,’ she said gamely. Having a well-developed sense of humour, she found my being measured exquisitely funny. ‘They measure you for a coffin?’ she suggested cheerfully. The scowling young man did not appreciate her levity and sent her to the back of the queue to stand in line again. It was just like being back at school. In fact the whole transit area recalled drab, post-war school-days. Stern ladies wheeled trolleys of chipped cream enamel, meaty faces set in disapproval. Surely these were the very women who had dispensed fatty mince at my primary school while discussing the problems of rationing. The broken lavatories of the airport recalled the outhouses of the school.
Younger women in olive-green uniforms saluted soldiers sauntering about with rifles. They had the air of those on important state business. An air of guilt and insecurity seemed to invade the Westerners. We all felt improperly frivolous and facetious, like gigglers at a funeral. One day, perhaps, we would grow up into sober citizens like these people.
All the shops were shut, thus preventing us rushing in to buy nests of Russian dolls and books on Vietnamese collectivization. More adventurous souls discovered a bar upstairs where fizzy mineral water could be bought from a dour man with no change.
We had all been issued with squares of cardboard on which someone had written ‘diner 9.00’. There was an area of tables and chairs so here we all sat down looking more and more like refugees. At ten o’clock the school-dinner-ladies emerged, adjusting their headscarves for action. But, alas, there was no mince for us. They served a copious and leisurely meal to themselves, consumed before our envious eyes with great lip-smacking gestures of content. For once, no chicken seemed to be involved. The ladies disappeared and went into a prolonged bout of off-stage plate-clattering. Shortly before our plane was due to leave, they surged out triumphantly with the enamel trollies. One served us two slices of bread, a tomato and black coffee while two others shooed us into tight groups and examined tickets. When all expectation of more had been abandoned, we were served a single biscuit on magnificent china.
Beneath us, in the space before the departure gates, a lively floor-show was in progress. Two tourists, English by the sound of them, were banging on the glass door of the immigration office. They had tried pushing it. They had tried pulling it. They did not know it was a sliding door.
‘Our plane!’ they shouted, indicating what was indeed a large aircraft parked just the other side of the plate-glass window. Passengers could be seen embarking. A rotund official in a sackcloth uniform stared out of the window, his back turned towards them, and worked hard at ignoring the noise they were making.
‘You phoned us to come to the airport,’ they cried. ‘We’ve been waiting a week for a plane.’
Finally, the disturbance grated on his nerves and, unwillingly, he slid the door open an inch to peer at them like a householder wakened by knocking in the small hours. They thrust tickets at him in justification. This was a mistake. He took them, peacefully closed and locked the door, set the tickets on the end of his desk and resumed his untroubled contemplation of the plane. A wardress appeared at the top of the steps, looked briefly around, shrugged and went back inside.
‘Call someone,’ the travellers pleaded. ‘Our luggage is on that plane.’
In response, the official deftly slid the tickets back under the door and turned his back again. The hatch of the plane was closed, the steps wheeled away. The travellers began hammering on the door in renewed desperation. The official began to smoke. We watched for a full ten minutes before the plane finally roused itself to trundle off. By then, the travellers were sobbing.
Pharisaically, we turned away. Our own plane had finally been called. Following this little morality play, no one wanted to be late. We bayed around the doors like pagan hordes at the gates of Rome. Occasionally, a wardress would appear behind the glass doors and we would surge forward. Then she would disappear again and leave us stranded in foolishness.
The resumed flight brought no relief, only more fried chicken. A bumptious Indian paced the plane, telling all and sundry that he was an admiral in the navy and only travelled by Aeroflot for security reasons, not out of parsimony. In one corner sat a Seasoned Traveller. She dismissed all offers of chicken with a disdainful wave of the hand, having had the foresight to provision herself with a selection of cheeses and a good loaf. At her feet stood a bottle of wine. On her lap rested a stout novel. Most outrageous of all, she had soap and a toilet roll. We regarded her with the undisguised resentment of those faces at the windows of old folks’ homes. We took pleasure in the fact that, as we began our descent to Singapore, a green-faced man emerged from the lavatory and kicked her wine over.
Singapore. The Lion City. Its current symbol – current because everything in Singapore is subject to a ruthless process of revision and improvement – is the merlion, a sickly, coy confection of lion and fish worthy of Walt Disney. Down by the harbour, it belched a spume of dirty water for the sole purpose of being photographed doing so by tourists.
After Moscow it was unmistakably part of the free world but also a place of control and order. The city state’s social charter invokes the name of Raffles, commemorated in place-names all over the island. But its founder, saviour and benevolent despot, Lee Kuan Yew, goes uncommemorated. It is a republic and Lee Kuan Yew is its king. British names have been retained everywhere. To visit the air base is a joy. Bland Chinese officers sit outside bungalows called ‘Dunroamin’, on roads called ‘The Strand’ and ‘Oxford Street’. Singapore has felt no need to obliterate its colonial past. Like everything else, it has been smoothly absorbed.
If Lee Kuan Yew’s name is not omnipresent, his personality imbues all levels of the state. You may not cross a road except at a traffic light (fine $500), or spit (fine $500), or drop litter (fine $500). It is believed that all problems can be solved by making more rules. Again, as in Moscow, the school is the analogy by which we understand all authoritarian systems. Not, of course, the breeding grounds of vice, violence and criminality that are modern English schools, but those strangely innocent institutions of the post-war years. Public spaces are neat and well-tended, every scrap of ground becoming a park. In the huge, terrifying tenements, all the lifts work and are spotlessly clean. Singaporeans, mysteriously, do not bemerde their own surroundings. Even public telephones work. It is a shocking contrast to the squalid self-mutilation of urban London.
It is above all a city dedicated to earning a living. Many have praised the industriousness of Singaporeans. But it is a curious form of industry that seems to consist largely of traders sitting in shopping centres, surrounded by goods made in Japan and sold largely to Westerners. Even by British standards the rudeness of salesmen is astonishing, despite a personal ‘Smile’ campaign by Lee Kuan Yew. (Again one thinks of the school – the headmaster rising to his feet in assembly, ‘I should like to say a few words about the general lack of cheerfulness in the school.’) The English spoken is extraordinary. In this polyglot mix of Chinese, Indians and Malays, some people seem to have ended up with no first language at all.
I stayed with a Malay family in one of the high-rise blocks of steel and concrete that have replaced the old, friendly wooden shacks in which Malays once lived in insanitary ease. By conscious policy, the races are mixed. On one side Indians, on the other Chinese. The corridors are awash with the odours of contesting spices and incense sticks for various gods. Different tongues quack and growl in the stairwells. Inside, five adults and two children dwelt in three small rooms and a kitchen, all spotlessly clean. Stay in a hotel? Nonsense. There is room here. You are as one of our family.
Malay hospitality is overwhelming. The only burden is the obligation to eat three times, as much as you would wish.
It was my first opportunity to try out the Indonesian language – almost. Malay and Indonesian are in the same sort of relationsh
ip as English and American. The television picked up both Singapore and Malay broadcasts from across the causeway that divides the two states. On the Singaporean channel, only good news. Bad events were a truly foreign phenomenon. Singaporeans were shown in a harmony of multi-ethnic progress. See – the new underground. Behold – more land is being reclaimed from the sea. On the Malaysian channel a darker, handsomer people were demonstrating Muslim virtue. The foreign news was of Mecca and new mosques. ‘Are you sure these are not Israeli oranges?’ someone asked behind me.
Telephone calls within the city are free. In ten minutes my air ticket to Jakarta had been fixed at a third of the price I would pay in London. I began to feel like a bumpkin.
We settled back to watch a Malay melodrama that seemed to consist of scandalously obvious wives cuckolding their virtuous husbands who were away at the court. The adulterous act was signified by the closing of the bedroom door.
‘Listen how she laughs, that one. She is not a virgin.’
‘Look. Now she smokes. Wah!’
Sadly, I was unable to understand a word of the film but the anthropologist is schooled from a tender age to sit through dull seminars, boring conferences, incomprehensible presentations. Patience was rewarded. After the infliction of many wrongs on her poor husband, the wife’s crimes were denounced by the rajah. The court spoke a dialect close enough to Indonesian to be intelligible. The enormity of her crime at last was revealed. She had stolen the rice given her for her stepchildren and sold it to buy perfume. Wah!
The commercial centre of Singapore is clearly where Westerners go to get away from Asia. It is a place for getting things done. It is full of oil-men, accountants, lawyers and other shady professions in a setting that apes the worst of Dallas. The somewhat puritanical government is engaged in waging a baffled war on the tastes of Western tourists, seeming unable to understand that if you remove squalor, irrational practices and all that is called ‘local colour’, tourists feel that they might as well have stayed at home.
The current preoccupation was Bugis Street, a name to make many an old British sailor’s loins tremble. It was famous, quite simply, for its transvestite prostitutes. Transvestism is one of the great themes of the East, often a very serious matter indeed, sometimes with religious implications.
In Bugis Street, however, it was purely for rest and recreation. The government, shocked by ‘outrageous exhibitionism’ and always solicitous of its image abroad, had decided to close it down. Much was made of this in the newspapers.
‘Where is it?’ I asked the sons of the house, young men in their twenties. Is it fun to go there?’ They held a whispered conversation.
‘We do not know where it is. We have never been.’
‘Have you a map?’
‘We have no map. But I will ask a friend.’
They dragged the telephone off into the bedroom on its long lead and made a call. They made three calls, blushing the while.
‘None of my friends know. They are all Muslims.’
‘Have you any Chinese friends?’
‘I will try.’
Ten minutes later, we were on our way, giggling with conspiracy. We had explained to the father that we were going to look at the lights of the harbour. When we finally found it, Bugis Street was a dark, narrow street of buildings ripe for demolition. Notwithstanding its narrowness, tables and chairs had been set out on the tarmac and a hundred stalls were cooking all manner of food under the stars. Great herds of tourists roamed up and down in search of the thrill of scandal, many taking to eating in despair of other sensual pleasures. I paid for three of the most expensive drinks I have ever had anywhere. A small girl of about five or six was going from table to table, challenging the tourists to noughts and crosses for a stake of $ I. She was doing very well. Immaculate Malay policemen patrolled up and down, disapproval heavy on their brows.
‘Why are all the police here Malay?’
The boys laughed. ‘All police are Malay except for the high officers. The Chinese do not like the Malays to know how to fly aeroplanes or fire big guns, so when we do national service, they put us in the police.’
The tourists were clearly bored. A party of English had found a stray cat and were dedicating their evening to feeding it with fish bought at huge cost. An American suddenly cried, ‘Quick Miriam. There’s one!’ A lone transvestite swivelled and pouted through the tables in a tight leather skirt. Miriam, blue-rinsed and determined, gamely leaped through the throng and hosed the ‘girl’ up and down with her cine-camera. There was a general snapping and clicking of camera cases and swearing in many European tongues as calculations were made about flash. The transvestite played up splendidly, sticking out tongue and buttocks and swaying away on high heels.
Then doubt set in. It had obviously been a street-walker, but the sex remained unproven.
‘Jus’ some ole hooker,’ opined Miriam.
It would have been a rather sad evening, my Muslim friends disappointed to find that wickedness was not necessarily pleasurable, but it was saved by a hugely wizened Chinese waiter.
‘You want other dlink?’
‘No thank you. Not at these prices.’
‘Psst. You want feelthy picture?’
‘What?’
‘Feelthy picture. You want?’ In a rush, it evoked the heat and dust of imperial service, fresh-faced Tommies disembarking from steamers to the wonders of the East. They would be pictures of belly dancers, or slant-eyed beauties, heavy with silver jewellery and voluptuous promise. He palmed on to the table a plastic folder with pictures in numbered pockets.
Oriental men are not hirsute, but somewhere they had found specimens with an almost Caucasian profligacy of body-hair. They had legs like lavatory brushes, shown to advantage since they were dressed in ladies’ swimming costumes. Many held feathers and simpered. There was about them something very sad and a little bit funny, like the pin-ups of our grandparents. It was as if they wanted desperately to be wicked but did not quite know how.
Another police patrol came past, two Malays swinging truncheons. They looked hard at my companions, two fellow Malays, their eyes slid over the book before us. They shook their heads and passed on. My companions looked chastened and ashamed. Once more I was being a bad citizen. It was time to go. As we left, Miriam reached across.
‘If you’ve finished with those pictures, honey, I’ve a mind to take a look.’
Tales of Two Cities
Airports are the deceitful but unavoidable purveyors of our first impressions of another part of the world. Travel brochures are deliberately misleading and we expect them to be so. They can be lightly shrugged off as mere confections of images. But airports are real. They have the rough-edged feel of true experience.
Singapore airport had been functional and efficient, well-planned and purposeful. It looked as if someone had worked out in advance how much it would cost and it had been paid for on time.
Heathrow is a muddle, a pretentious mess, slow, cumbersome – a ship constantly being rebuilt while at sea. The staff are barely polite and exult in the enjoyment of petty powers. A scene that stays with me over the years is that of an earnest Chinese student being harassed by a snickering immigration official whose Middlesex whine he could not understand.
The new airport at Jakarta was superficially attractive, built like a traditional house, open to the world. The total effect was rather like a Pizza Hut afflicted with gigantism. Soldiers stood around idly in indelicately tight uniforms that seemed to leave them with nothing to do with their hands. If you caught their eye, they blushed and played with their boots. We were directed into two channels, one for those with visas, one for those without. I was without. We were asked in Indonesian, one by one, why we had no visa. Everyone was let in after a ritual hesitation.
‘Why no visa?’
‘Because at the embassy in London, they said I did not need a visa.’ My first sentence in Indonesian to an Indonesian. Would it work? From the outside, a language always looks like
an implausible fiction. The official paused, frowned and then broke into a huge grin.
‘Very nice,’ he said and patted me paternally on the arm. At that moment, I knew Indonesia was going to be all right.
The other side of the barrier was raucous with hot, tired people expressing the ritual outrage of bargaining. I was approached by a stocky man with a scar over one eye, lank, greasy hair and very dirty clothes. An obvious pirate. In fact he was very helpful. We launched into bargaining about the taxi fare. He seemed shocked at the venom of my technique acquired in the sterner school of West Africa.
‘Am I not a man like yourself? Do my children not have to eat? Why do you insult me by asking so much, etcetera, etcetera.’
‘Oh, all right,’ he said, ‘The normal fare is fourteen thousand.’
He led me to a tiny ramshackle van that stood uneasily among long limousines. Another large man of suspect appearance climbed in. In West Africa, I would have been most unhappy about this. Two against one. The car stopping in a deserted spot. A knife pulled out in the dark. As usual, I dithered, discouraged by lack of fluency. It is very hard to be determined and incoherent at the same time. Too late. We were off.
My companions conversed in a language of dark consonants and gurgled vowels, that was unintelligible to me. This must be Batawi, the language of Jakarta. We were all introduced to each other in an almost courtly manner, exchanged clove-flavoured cigarettes. Smiles all round. I learned the word for matches. The driver launched into a long tirade that I could not follow, reduced again to dumbness, nodding feigned comprehension. One word kept coming up again and again, cewek. It seemed always associated with notions of misfortune. What was it? The government, the price of petrol, some metaphysical term of the Muslim faith? In the end, it seemed that some comment was called for on my part.
