The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “There is a white man who has married a Malay woman and has entered the Faith. You have heard that? He is a very white man.”

  “Entered the Faith. They pretend to enter the Faith to marry our girls. And then when they go home it is all finished. I have heard too many such stories. And this man certainly has a wife in his own country. They are a treacherous lot.”

  “There will be a reckoning soon.”

  “Yes. Call for two more glasses of cold water.”

  The samsu was going down well. Mohinder Singh said, “No one can deny that at least one Sikh has shown enterprise. There are very few in trade. But, please God, I shall yet have a car and assistants and a telephone. And then you will be proud of me.”

  “We all show enterprise,” said Kartar Singh. “It requires enterprise to be a good policeman. And perhaps,” he added, “to be a good night-watchman. The Sikhs are everywhere engaged in the important things. Guarding the lives of those who are sleeping, guarding valuable property, tending cattle so that there shall be fresh milk, and in the post offices and on the railway stations you will find them. They are the backbone of this country.”

  “We will drink to the Sikhs,” said Mohinder Singh.

  One of the Malay workmen belched briefly on a gulp of cold water. The Sikhs looked across, dark fiery eyes over warriors’ beards, the ghostly swords of their ancestors at the ready. “Ignore them,” said Teja Singh. The bottle went round and round, and turbans were cocked awry. A Chinese came in for a cup of coffee, a harmless youth who was a clerk in the Airways office. He smoked a cigarette over a newspaper.

  “There he is,” said one of the Malay workmen. “A pincered crab. Smoking his cigarette like a bloody raja and pretending to read that paper. It stands to reason you can’t write down words that way. Like kids’ drawings.”

  “Their time is coming,” said the other. “There won’t be a Chinese alive when we get independence.”

  “Another glass of water. Then we’d better get back to work.”

  Customers came and went, but the Sikhs stayed. They became happier and happier, the potent lead-poison of samsu heartening them, crying great music through their arteries. Soon Kartar Singh obliged with a song:

  “A bird sat high on a banyan tree,

  Carolling night and carolling day,

  And on the heads of the passers-by …”

  “Look,” said Teja Singh, “we have no more samsu. And we have spent Mohinder Singh’s money on nuts.”

  “We will sell something,” said Mohinder Singh recklessly. “We will sell something from the shop. Better, we will take the camphorwood chest to the pawnbroker’s. He will lend us good money on it.”

  “And each bemerded passer-by

  Cried loud in anger on that bird

  Carolling night and carolling day,

  Wiping from his eye …”

  “A third at least of its value,” cried Mohinder Singh. “One cannot work all the time. Even the self-employed man is entitled to his relaxation. We will go now.”

  “I must go to work at ten o’clock,” said Teja Singh. “The watchmen of the shops are less lucky. They seek their watchman’s bed at six. I have greater responsibilities and must not abuse them.”

  “We shall not be late. See, the sun is but setting. There is time enough.”

  “And still that bird upon the tree,

  Carolling night and carolling day,

  Ignored the plaints of the passers-by …”

  But, sitting by the opening of Ismail’s Muslim Eating Shop, Inder Singh was spooning in soup, tall, thin, saturnine, his beard cut, contrary to the laws of religion, trimmed in a Mephistophelian manner, his turban neat and starched, so that it could be doffed and donned like a skullcap. He was midway between the old Sikh and the new—bald and smoking—and read the modem books of the West. He was a teacher at the Haji Ali College. He greeted his co-religionists and offered them beer.

  “Let us like birds upon the tree,

  Carolling night and carolling day,

  Ignore each hairless passer-by,

  And say …”

  “And how is the white man there?” asked Teja Singh, politely.

  “As the rest,” said Inder Singh. “He has much to learn. He sweats too much. His shirt is like cellophane at all hours of the morning.”

  “And his wife, the gold-haired one?” asked Mohinder Singh. “She flew with me that time, she and I, from Timah.”

  “She grows thin and never smiles.”

  “Ah.”

  They drank and laughed full-beardedly, rolling in their chairs. The kedai had a tame bird which hopped from table to table, chirping and pecking rice-grains. This they petted, calling it pet-names, accusing it of being a spy, of being able to fly back to their wives and tell tales of their spendthrift bibulosity. They had a very good time.

  “Now I must go home to my wife,” said Kartar Singh. “About now she expects me.”

  There were great obscene jokes about strongly-made beds and convenient positions. In high spirits, Kartar Singh told the story about the man who took the wrong bottle of urine to the Medical Officer. It was a very good evening.

  Down Jalan Laksamana they staggered. Next to Mohinder Singh’s shop the Chinese druggist still sat, reading a newspaper in the neon-light, a toothpick fixed in his mouth. He looked up at Mohinder Singh staggering, arms round his friends, and rebuked him in staccato Chinese Malay.

  “Early this evening,” he said, “a red-haired dog came, a woman with gold hair. She wanted to buy many things from your shop. She wanted a camphorwood chest …”

  “No!”

  “And many yards of silk. And also a comb. And glasses and tea-cups. And also mattresses …”

  “No!”

  It was not all lies. He was right about the comb.

  “This may be as a warning. If you are to do trade you must do trade. It is not right for a shop-man to go roistering off …”

  “Why did you not call me? You know where I was. …”

  “And leave my shop? It is the first rule of trade—always to be there. There is only one man on this street who is not always there, except for you, Sikh. He is the white lawyer. He too has no trade sense. But if you wish to learn the hard way …”

  Mohinder Singh turned on his fat friend and gave him a feeble punch in the belly. The old Chinese cackled with pleasure.

  “You come seducing me from the right way, spending money from the till. How shall I succeed like this? Now you give me the trouble of going up to the white woman’s house with the things she wishes to buy. And there is the cost of a taxi, of two taxis. You are no true friend. …”

  “You will not hit me in the belly like that. I tell you, men have died for less. If you dare to do that again …”

  “It is not right,” said Teja Singh, “to hit him again off his guard. He was not expecting that. …”

  “You are a false friend. Now I am ruined. Now my honour is besmirched.”

  A little crowd had collected, including two Malay workmen with towels round their heads. One said to the other:

  “Hairy sods. When they’re not drinking they’re fighting.”

  “More money than sense,” said his friend. “Shit in their heads.”

  “Like prawns.”

  “Like prawns.”

  The Sikhs had grown heated. Angry words flew. Soon Kartar Singh cried:

  “If you continue to abuse me, I shall call the police.” The word started something off in his slow mind. “Police. By God, I am the police.” He sought in his pocket for a whistle.

  “Ruined. … Moreover …”

  “And it is certainly no friendly act …”

  “And when you come to consider it soberly …”

  “If you dare to do that again …”

  “Apart from that …”

  Crabbe and Fenella drove past, on their way to the party at the Istana. “Look,” said Fenella, “it’s beginning. Riots, fights, brawls. Tomorrow it will be murders. Oh, let’s
go home, Victor. Let’s go home.”

  “Quiet, dear,” said Crabbe. “Do please be quiet.”

  8

  “LOOK,” SAID CRABBE, warm orange crush in his hand, “I’m not starting anything.”

  “Oh, you make me sick.” Anne Talbot looked demurely ravishing, as was her intention, in a very low-cut evening frock of bottle-green, choker of Kelantan silver, ear-rings in the shape of small sharp krises. She was painted, whitewashed, rouged, scented, heady, intimidating, goddess-like, irresistible, like any other personable woman in evening dress, more especially here where the flash-point was low, under a tropic moon, among palms, orchids, hibiscus, brown polished bodies. “Sick, sick, sick.”

  “And I didn’t start anything,” said Crabbe, “as you know,” He was sweating into his white tuxedo, his shirt dark with wet, feeling heavy, lumpish, boorish, the orange crush in his hand growing warmer and more undrinkable.

  “It isn’t a question of who starts,” said Anne Talbot. “It’s all a question of what starts. Look,” she added, “that Asian over there, the one in glasses, is pouring something into the glass of that other man, the one with a turban and a moustache. I’m sure it’s gin. Do go and see if you can get some. Here, take my glass.”

  “Yes,” said Crabbe. “Kadir and Haji Zainal Abidin. But I’m not starting anything.”

  At the flood-lighted end of the Great Hall, under high gilt beams, the Sultan sat on his throne, Yang Maha Mulia Sultan Idris ibni Al-Marhum Sultan Yassin, smiling somewhat foolishly as though drugged for the occasion, the occasion of his sixty-third birthday. Smoke rose high—cigarettes and golden table-lighters brought round by undeferential white-coated flunkeys—but there was nothing to drink except orange crush—officially. In the lavatories, behind screens, pillars, out among the bushes, flasks and bottles flashed amid giggles and guffaws, and improvident newcomers to the State grew sour in sight of the hilarity of the long-seasoned.

  The Abang, God bless his name, was talking to Fenella. He wore Malay evening dress of rich tunic, trousers and apron, his well-shaped head sleek under a velvet songkok. He was a handsome man, his face a fine blend of Bugis and Siamese, his hair black and thick at fifty, his moustache luxuriant, shaking the confining bars of its recent neat clipping. He spoke English well, using it efficiently like any other tool of government, but unseduced by the connotations of its words. He had been taught it by a Japanese, alumnus of an American university, and nothing could have better emphasised his independence of the fussy British arm of protection than those drawled sound-track vowels and brash folky idioms. He was talking to Fenella because he proposed, at leisure, to attempt her seduction. There was no question of personal attraction: it was a tradition among his ancestors that power had been granted to the family by the fair-haired Ghost Princess and that the blood of the family must be refreshed whenever possible by copulation with blonde women. He now attempted to make a preliminary appointment with her—lunch at the Istana—in the hallowed language of film.

  “You’re kind of pretty. Pretty as a picture. I guess they all tell you that.”

  “Really …” Fenella looked well in black, her skin faintly flushed with sun, the rich gold in tight curls above her tiny ears.

  “I reckon you and me could get together. We could meet some place and talk. We could have a real long talk and get kind of better acquainted.”

  “My husband …”

  “I guess I haven’t had the pleasure of making his acquaintance. I understand he’s a very lovely person, though. They tell me he’s making a real fine job of the College.”

  “I mean, I don’t want to seem rude or anything …”

  “I guess he’ll be understanding. He won’t think you’re rude or anything. How’s about lunch tomorrow?”

  Rupert Hardman slunk about self-consciously in a songkok. His wife, magnificent in a tight European gown, had insisted that he wear this token of his conversion, and after a quarrel in which he had seen, perhaps for the first time, the potential heat of her temper, he had submitted with an ill grace. He felt foolish under the black oval cap and he sought strong drink from Abdul Kadir. Haji Zainal Abidin greeted Hardman with loud harsh laughter and a vista of red throat and many teeth. He cried:

  “Tonight they try to make us both bloody fools, me in my haji’s turban and you in that stupid little cap. Still,” he said, gulping orange crush that was fat with gin, “we must proclaim to the world that we are of the Faith. Not like this bloody fool here who looks like a bloody tramp.”

  Abdul Kadir had come straight from a party in one of the town kedais, and had had little time to change. He had borrowed a pair of white trousers too small for him, and his shirt, lacking collar-buttons, gaped at the throat, disdaining the weak constriction of a loosely knotted tie. He blinked nervously over his glasses, trying to hide in a huge hairy hand his flask of gin. Soon, Hardman foresaw, he would grow nautical, jolly Jack in port for the night, cursing and blinding but, like a court jester, without rebuke.

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Kadir. “What kind of a fucking party is this, anyway?” Hardman took his slug of gin and moved off to talk to the fat young Protector of Aborigines. The exposition of Kadir’s nocturnal symphony was beginning.

  “False pretences,” said the fat young Protector of Aborigines. “Everything is granted under false pretences in this damn place.” He poured orange crush into his lively greasy face, and said: “I understood this was a straightforward anthropological job. But, damn it all, it’s political—trying to get the aborigines on the right side, bribing them with nicotine to accept the democratic faith. And I can’t learn the language. Nobody’s ever thought of giving it an alphabet, and I’m essentially a visual type. In Africa they put me in a native hut for six months, made me live with a family, just to learn the language. It was no damned good.”

  “No?”

  “After six months all I could do was point at things—that’s what my hosts did—and when I got back to Nairobi I found I was making unequivocal gestures at the women in the Club, and that didn’t go down at all well.” He sighed. “I find anthropology much more attractive in a library. Sir James Frazer did a lot of harm really, making the whole thing so Hellenic and aseptic. I don’t think I’m really cut out for field work.”

  “But it is important,” said Mr. Jaganathan, polished and round in his white dinner jacket, “that you do your best to combat Communism in these primitive communities. It is insidious ideology.” Mr. Jaganathan had again been making a speech somewhere.

  “Oh, we talk too much about ideology,” said Hardman. “When people are only concerned with ideology it’s harmless enough, a kind of intellectual game, one that we all played when we were undergraduates. In the late thirties and early forties it was very popular, but it didn’t tie up in any way with machine-guns and barricades and gas-chambers. It was, to use our friend’s term, Hellenic and aseptic.”

  “I am shocked to hear these things,” said Mr. Jaganathan, a great gush of insincerity coming from his inclined left armpit. “For here the British always prided themselves on bringing the justice and the institutions of their traditional parliamentary democracy. And they who came here were always the kind of persons you mention—good clever young men from the universities.”

  “It doesn’t last,” said Hardman. “Why, look at your boss over there: Conservative, Christian, almost reactionary.” He gestured towards Crabbe, who was delivering a long frowning speech to Mrs. Talbot. “He was a great Communist when I knew him, leader of the Communist Group and all that sort of thing. His conversation was thick with Lenin. But he changed.”

  “That is very interesting what you tell me,” said Mr. Jaganathan. “I did not know Mr. Crabbe was a Communist.” He drank to his discovery.

  “You are very kind,” said Fenella to the Abang. “I must see if I can persuade my husband to let me come.” She looked for her husband and found Anne Talbot simpering at him in a far corner. “But I don’t think he will mind.”

  “That�
��s swell,” said the Abang. “I’ll send a car round for you. Would you like to see my cars? I’ve got a swell collection, finest in the Federation, every kind you can think of.”

  “We have an Abelard,” said Fenella.

  “An Abelard? That’s one kind I don’t have. You don’t see many in these parts. An Abelard. Well …” He began to steer Fenella to the royal garages at the back of the Istana.

  “I don’t think I’d better,” said Fenella. “People are looking.”

  “Of course they’re looking. It isn’t often they see a dame like you.”

  To the sound of a bugle, covers were whisked off the buffet tables that were ranged on each side of the long hall. Plates of cold meat were disclosed, rolls, platters of rice and brown viscous curry. There was a rush, headed by Talbot.

  Crabbe found himself set upon by starving rajas who stabbed forks into his hand. They stabbed indiscriminately—here a slice of dried-up beef, there a chicken-wing, here a dripping hunk of cold curried mutton, there a human hand. Talbot fought his way out, protesting loudly, holding his spoils clear of the stabbing. From the dark recesses of the hall odd dark men had appeared, the scavengers. Crabbe observed a tall intellectual-looking Indian in a creased suit; he was cramming his pockets with meat passed to him by a tiny raja. Crabbe was interested to note that the flunkeys joined in with the guests, laughingly grabbing ice-cream and dishes of pickle, and that rank was forgotten in this elemental clawing for food. Every man for himself, including the Abang. The essential Malaya is jungle.

  After refreshments came dancing. The sole dance band of Dahaga sat in the musicians’ gallery, discoursing approximate versions of popular tunes, in unison and without bar-lines. Cars went and came, bearing more gin and whisky. The brightly coloured wrapper of orange crush passed around, the dry bread of delectable hilarious sandwiches.

  “Would it interest you to know,” whispered Anne Talbot, all close mobile perfume and softness and warmth, “that I love you?”

  “Even if it were true,” said Crabbe, “it wouldn’t elate me, it would worry me. God knows I’ve enough trouble.” He muffed a reverse turn. “Sorry.”