The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “Too bad,” she cried. “They take advantage all the time. I’m going back on the next boat.”

  “Never mind, dear,” said Crabbe.

  In the lavatory Alladad Khan heard; his heart was torn by the tears of beauty in distress. But he could do nothing now, nothing. He rested his sweating head on the cold wall-tiles. That he, a Khan, should have behaved so, should have betrayed his name, his race. And he had meant that to-night should be so different. Laughter and politeness and attentiveness and a few drinks. A few drinks. In agony he retched, bringing his heart up.

  7

  UNDULATING THROUGH THE market, who so gay as Ibrahim? He, in crepitating silk, hair-clips holding curls in place, basket swinging, fist clutched tightly round two crumpled dollar notes, went to do the morning’s shopping.

  The market was covered, dark and sweltering. Ibrahim had to mince delicately along foul aisles between rows of ramshackle stalls. Old women crouched over bags of Siamese rice, skeps of red and green peppers, purple eggplants, bristly rambutans, pineapples, durians. Flies buzzed over fish and among the meat bones, ravaged, that lay for the cats to gnaw. Here and there an old man slept on his stall with, for bedfellows, skinny dressed chickens or dried fish-strips. One vendor had pillowed his head on a wash-bowl full of bruised apples. Thin, pot-bellied Chinese blew cigarette-ash on to sheep carcases or tight white cabbages. The air was all smell—curry-stuff, durian, fish and flesh—and the noise was of hoicking and chaffering. Ibrahim loved the market.

  Ibrahim greeted his friends gaily, provocatively, argued shrilly about the price of golden bananas and horn bananas, bought chillis and half a coconut for curry. He wondered whether he should buy, as a little surprise for Tuan, a couple of turtle’s eggs, or perhaps a small blue bird in a cage or maybe a toy xylophone. Ibrahim liked giving little presents. Moreover he felt it only right that Tuan should get back a bit of the money that he, Ibrahim, regularly stole from Tuan’s trousers or from the drawer in the desk. His father had once told him that no good Muslim servant would ever steal from his master. Well, this was not really stealing; it was buying for the house little things that were needed—plastic horses, wax fruit, paper flowers, portraits of film-stars, a brood of ducklings, a tame civet-cat, yellow perfume made in Hong Kong. He, Ibrahim, was entitled to a little commission when he could buy these things more cheaply than his master or mistress. Moreover, Ibrahim often stole things from the School kitchen below. Rice, curry powder and tinned grapes had not cost Tuan a penny in the last month. But, in any case, taking money from Tuan’s desk or pocket was really a kind of mild sexual outrage, an act of revenge on Tuan for being married, having a mistress, and remaining unresponsive to the epicene charms of him, Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh.

  Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh thought he would now have a small bottle of Fraser and Neave’s Orange Crush at the open-air drinking-shop that adjoined the market. He watched with pleasure the food-sellers swirling the frying mee round in their kualis over primitive charcoal fires. He, Ibrahim, had an electric cooker, a nest of bright aluminium saucepans, a day-long-humming refrigerator. He also had a hundred dollars a month, as well as what he made on the side. He was doing very nicely.

  Suddenly a black cloud covered the sun and the orange-crush no longer glistened golden. Ibrahim, watching the swirling mee in the kuali, had suddenly remembered his wife. He blushed, remembering, thinking of how his mother had meant it all for the best, believing that it would make him settle down—settle down! And he then only seventeen years old!—that it would bring his feet to the true one path of Muslim manhood. The marriage had not been a success, naturally. Ibrahim had cried, resisting the rites of the wedding-night. Fatimah, big and heavy-browed, had used the word ‘nusus’ against him, one of the strongest of the Islamic terms of opprobrium, normally applicable only to a woman who refuses cohabitation. Ibrahim had run away from his mother’s house and found a post in the Malay Regiment Officers’ Mess. Fatimah had tracked him down and tried to hit him with a kuali in the mess kitchen. Ibrahim had screamed. And escaping later to the post of cook in Tuan Crabbe’s household he had once again been discovered. He had pleaded, he had prayed, he had begged her to go back to her people in Johore, he would give her her train-fare, he would make her an allowance. Often, at the evening waktu, when he turned towards Mecca, he had voiced a petition to the Deity:

  “Allah, merciful Allah,

  Please make my wife go back to Johore.”

  But Allah had not budged. He had allowed Fatimah to chase him with a carving-knife, to scream her wrongs to a cinema queue when he, Ibrahim, was arm-in-arm with a soldier-friend. Only when Ibrahim was at the point of final despair, ready to run amok—that would have been a pity, because he genuinely did not want to kill anybody, especially Tuan Crabbe—only then had she agreed to go to Johore for a short time, to see her parents and tell them of her wrongs. But she had said she would be back. She would be back.

  Ibrahim closed his eyes for a minute and prayed, “Allah, make her go down with a dread disease, make the train crash, make her be killed by the Communists. But please, please do not let her return.”

  When he opened his eyes he started violently and spilled some of his orange-crush, for standing before him was a woman. Allah, he had thought for a moment it was she, Fatimah. But it was not; it was the mistress of Tuan Crabbe with, clinging to her hand, a small thin finger-sucking boy.

  “Peace be with you.”

  “With you be peace.”

  “There is a little help you can give me,” she said, sitting down, the child on her knee.

  “How? What help?”

  “Your master has deserted me.”

  “Oh.” Ibrahim crossed his legs, shrugged his shoulders, bunched up his face in a gesture of no sympathy.

  “I have lost his love.”

  “But in that matter I cannot help you, even if I wished to.”

  “I have here,” said Rahimah, opening her handbag, “a thing that will restore that love.” She showed Ibrahim a small phial. “I obtained this of ’Che Mat the pawang in Kelapa. It is a powerful medicine for drawing a man back to one’s heart.”

  “I have heard of these things,” said Ibrahim indifferently.

  “It can be put in drink and has no taste. I ask you to put this in your master’s drink. I can pay you a little for this help.”

  “But how am I to know that it will not kill him?”

  “You have my word and the assurance of the pawang. He is a very skilful pawang and I am told this medicine has never yet failed.”

  “And how much will you give me?”

  “Five dollars.”

  “It is not enough.”

  “Allah, you can have a man axed or knifed for two dollars fifty. Five dollars is enough, nay it is generous, for so small a piece of help.”

  Ibrahim fingered the tiny phial. “And if I am discovered and lose my position?”

  “You cannot be discovered.”

  Ibrahim thought for a while, sipping his orange-crush. There was some very good sarong material in the bazaar two dollars a hela. “Make it ten dollars,” he said.

  “Six.”

  “Eight.”

  “Baik-lah.” She gave him a five-dollar note, two single dollars and a handful of small change. “You will swear to do this?”

  “One does not swear.”

  “You will promise?”

  “I promise.”

  She shook his hand and departed. Ibrahim watched the weaving of her small buttocks, watched the finger-sucking child who clung to her. Women, he thought. They will cling to a man like a liana, like a jungle leech. How he hated women. He looked again at the small phial, uncorked it and smelt the viscous potion. There was no smell. Well, he had promised, but the fulfilment of the promise could be postponed. There was no hurry. He did not like meddling with these things. He thought for a moment of the things that magic had accomplished in this very town. The jealous mistress of the Crown Prince who had made his second wife’s hair fall out; the
Tamil in the Town Board Offices who had died of a fever induced by image-sticking because he had had a Malay clerk dismissed unfairly; the innumerable wives who had refocillated a dying passion in their husbands; husbands who had regained the love of their wives. …

  Allah! Ibrahim cringed and began to sweat. Supposing she … But Fatimah would not … Yet she could … Allah Taala, she might. No, no, no. Allah Most High! It was possible. Even now, in Johore, where, it was well known, there were powerful pawangs, she might be brewing something up, something to draw his heart back to hers, to make him want to do that horrible obscene thing. … And again. He swallowed dryly, trembled. She too might seek revenge, regard him as one who had wounded her womanhood by rejecting her advances. She might now be sticking pins in a little wax image of him, Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh. La ilaha illa’lah!

  Ibrahim dropped the deadly phial into the shopping-basket to nest among the red peppers and coconut. Tonight he would go to the small shrine by the servants’ quarters and place upon it bananas and lighted candles. Good spirits haunted that spot, a loving couple who, long ago, taking a walk there, had been whisked up to Heaven like the Prophet himself. They assuredly would help one of a sinless heart. Whimpering to himself Ibrahim went back to Light House, there to start cooking lunch for Mem and Tuan.

  Already cooking lunch was Fatimah, but not Fatimah binte Razak, wife of Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh. This was Fatimah Bibi, wife of Alladad Khan, Police Transport corporal. She had been back a week now, and had found, as she had expected, their quarters in the Police Barracks filthy—floors strewn with cigarette-ends, spiders busy in all corners, sheets that had not been to the dhobi for weeks. She had reviled her husband while, busy with broom, she had restored order and cleanliness to the tiny quarters. What had he been doing, she would like to know, while she had been close to death’s door bearing his child. His child, yes, the fruit of his importunity. He had, without doubt, been around the town drinking with his atheistical friends, he had perhaps even been taking sly mouthfuls of pork and godless bacon. She knew him, let him not think she did not. And he had replied, maddeningly, with that shiftless Malay expression, “Tida’ apa.”

  Fatimah Bibi let the curry simmer on the charcoal stove. The chapattis need not be started just yet. She went to the cradle in their bedroom and smiled at the fruit of his, Alladad Khan’s, importunity. Little Hadijah Bibi lay in milk-fed baby bliss. Fatimah Bibi frowned when she remembered that her husband had said, when she had first fed the child in his presence, that she reminded him of the second Surah of the Koran. She had smiled at first, thinking that perhaps he perceived in her something of the holiness of Muslim motherhood. Then she had recalled the sub-title of the second Surah—Al Baqarah: The Cow. Her strong face, ruddered with a nose that bespoke will in long line and flared nostril, took on an expression that boded no good for him, Alladad Khan. Thank Allah that the women of the Punjab had been reared in no submissive tradition, unlike their sisters of Malaya and the Arab lands. Alladad Khan must be brought to heel. His spending-money must be strictly rationed; so must the pleasure he sought from her in bed. The withholding of that, the granting of that: therein lay woman’s power. And again she could always invoke that paragon, her brother. He had done well, he spoke English, he had a commanding presence, he had the will to succeed. She did not believe Alladad Khan when he told her that Abdul Khan had once been taken home drunk from a party in Sungai Kajar. Nor did she believe the stories of a love affair with an English girl when he had been at the Police College. Abdul Khan would do the right thing always, keeping himself pure till a girl came along who had those qualities he revered in his sister. A girl of the clan, naturally, a good Muslim, demurely beautiful, a good manager, frugal, controlled, intelligent.

  Hadijah Bibi began to cry, beating tiny fists, kicking little brown legs ringleted with fat. Fatimah Bibi picked up the child, soothing in Punjabi, crooning in Punjabi, holding to her strong body, her big breasts, the brown mite she had borne for him, Alladad Khan.

  Who now entered, calling:

  “It would seem that this child is like her mother, always complaining.”

  Fatimah Bibi turned on him, but, suddenly guilty, remembered that she had not yet cooked the chapattis.

  “Here, nurse the child. You should have warned me you would come in early for tiffin. It is not nearly ready.”

  “I am no earlier,” said Alladad Khan, “and no later than usual. Heaven forbid that I should so far forget myself as to come home early.”

  “Take the child and do not drop her. That,” said Fatimah Bibi, as she handed over the precious brown burden, “is no way to hold a child. You show no love for her. You handle her as you would handle a carburettor.”

  “A carburettor is a useful thing. Without it a car will not go.”

  “May God punish you for such sayings,” said Fatimah Bibi, as she went to the kitchen.

  Alladad Khan, left alone, dandled unhandily his child in unfatherly arms. He wanted to finger his moustache, but could not. Allah, two women in the house now, both, as is the way of women, ready to rule one’s last drop of blood. The child cried loudly, and Alladad Khan said to it quietly, “Bloody liar. Bastard.” But no, that last word could not be used in this context. He had discovered its meaning, had found it in Hari Singh’s little dictionary. Hari Singh. Alladad Khan’s face darkened. Still unpunished, still unrepentant. A fortnight had passed since Hari Singh had committed this unforgivable, filthily libidinous act. Yet how could he, Alladad Khan, approach the matter directly? For he must give no inkling to his subordinates of his deep self-interest in the ethical issue. He had said to Hari Singh, “It is unseemly for you to behave in that way with a white woman.” And he had replied, “Let us have no hypocrisy, Corporal. You would do the same had you the courage. Are they not women like other women, with this difference however: that, as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women are? She did not protest, that is quite certain.”

  “That is because she is a lady and would not, as is the way of the English, exhibit her feelings in public. But to me she expressed shame and abhorrence. Indeed, she wept.”

  “She wept? In your presence? That argues some degree of intimacy.”

  “She was overcome, she could hold back tears no longer. And that added to her shame.”

  “It is time that the white man and the white woman wept. God knows that they have many wrongs to repent of, wrongs committed in our country in the name of the British Raj. And even now India is not free, at least the Sikhs are not. If there is Pakistan, why have not we our Sikhistan?” And so on.

  Alladad Khan had been harsh in his official dealings with Hari Singh, and Hari Singh had reported Alladad Khan, complaining of injustice and tyranny. Alladad Khan had been gently reprimanded. It was all very difficult. But, Allah, the time would come.

  “What are you doing to that poor child to make her cry so?” complained his wife from the kitchen. Indeed, the weeping and howling had not ceased, had increased rather. Alladad Khan realised why; he had been tightening his grip on the child’s small body, as on the neck of Hari Singh.

  “Be quiet,” said Alladad Khan indifferently. He rocked the child to and fro like a cocktail-shaker. Soon the child, in the middle of a frog-mouthed yell, decided to stop breathing. Alladad Khan became frightened, ran with the baby to the kitchen. His wife took the precious, precious mite as it drank in a pint of air and began screaming again.

  “My baby, my jewel, my precious little one. Oh, what a cruel father you have, my sweet one.” The child howled agreement.

  “Tida’ apa,” said Alladad Khan, and began smoothing his moustache.

  The baby quietened and laid again in its cradle, the two sat down to tiffin. Alladad Khan had little appetite. He dutifully broke off a piece of chapatti and bathed it in the rather watery curry. Since that meal at the Crabbes he had begun to fancy more exotic food. Langsheer hodpod, or something like that, had been the name of that
dish. Exciting, full of meat, rich in gravy. No rice, no chapattis. He said to his wife:

  “Why must we have always, every day, the same food? Bread at midday and rice at night. Always the same. No variety, no surprise.”

  Acidly she said, her mouth stained with curry sauce, “I suppose you have developed a taste for pig’s flesh while I have been away. I suppose you will not be satisfied till you have for your tiffin a pork chop and a glass of beer, and for your evening meal a piece of fried bacon and a bottle of whisky. God forgive you. I dread to think of the influence you will be having on the child.”

  He said evenly, “The menu you suggest lacks variety, but it would perhaps be a little more interesting than the eternal curry and rice, curry and chapattis I seem to be condemned to eat.”

  As she was eating with her fingers there was nothing to slam down on the table. But she rose, terrible in her wrath, and reviled him bitterly.

  “You were bad enough when I went away, but Allah knows that you are now more like an unclean spirit than a man. You are making my life a hell. You have no love in you, no fatherly feeling, none of the qualities of a husband except an unwholesome lust which has given me more pain than I can describe, the pain of bearing you a child which you will not love, which, it seems, you are even trying to kill. I was a fool to marry you.”

  “You had no choice. Nor had I. Your brother was determined to get you off his hands and marry you to the first Khan who came along. You did not think yourself a fool then.” Alladad Khan pointed with a trembling arm to the wedding portrait—the strong nose, the smiling teeth, the arm laid on the knee of the shy bridegroom. “You did not think me then a devil out of hell. Allah knows I did not wish to give up my freedom. I was bludgeoned into marriage, I was told I was betraying the clan if I remained single while you were panting for a husband. And if I had not married you, if I had waited …”

  The baby had started crying again. Alladad Khan looked gloomily down at the cold curry, the broken bits of chapatti, while his wife ran into the bedroom, crying soothing words.