The Devil's Circle, page 9
The graveyard was strangely calming. Europeans have a fascination with tombs and graves. Most Chinese avoid them as places of ill-fortune. Having lived in England for the better part of my life, I didn’t have that superstitious dread of the dead. The birds were singing in the trees and a light breeze ruffled the leaves. It was rather peaceful. I wandered idly along the path, glancing at the graves and tombstones with macabre fascination. I couldn’t read the Chinese inscriptions. I just looked at the names and dates, which were often written in Roman letters. To my surprise, on a tomb tucked away from the main path I recognised the one and only Chinese character that I knew: my surname. I scraped away the moss. There were two photos, a young man and woman. The pictures were familiar: they were my parents.
I have no real memory of my father and mother. They died when I was two. I had seen these very same photos on the spirit tablets placed on the altar in our house. But to me they were just faded pictures on an old table. I stood there in silence for a long while, wondering what they would have thought of what I’d been up to. Did they think that I had neglected my duty as a son and nephew? After half-an-hour Mak was ready. She called to me and I came over. We tidied up the place, leaving the offerings behind. “Shall we go home?” I asked.
She shook her head. “To Chinatown,” she said.
Of all the districts in the city, Chinatown had recovered fastest. It was bustling again, just as before the war. The itinerant hawkers were out, selling food and heaven-knows-what from their wooden pushcarts. Families were squatting at the roadside eating, smoking and doing their ablutions. Some of the buildings were still in ruins but reconstruction was going on. Gangs of samsui women were clearing away the rubble, their red headdresses standing out starkly against the brown and grey stones.
Mak directed me to a little side street near the river. There was a cast-iron art nouveau pissoir here which one could smell two hundred yards down the road. She indicated that I should park there, which I did without enthusiasm, holding my nose with one hand and steering with the other. We got out and walked through the warren of narrow lanes, under the poles of washing that dripped constantly like a drizzle after a monsoon. Life was lived on the road here. There was a barber under a banyan tree, stropping his razor as his customer leaned back in the chair. Over the street a group of coolies was engaged in a card game. A letter writer plied his trade at an intersection, using an upturned crate as a desk. Mak entered a dark shophouse. It was a fortune teller’s establishment.
This fortune teller employed a small parrot to make his predictions. It was a nondescript green creature which had seen better days. Its feathers were unkempt and faded. The bird was offered a cylindrical container with sticks in it. It picked one and the fortune teller squinted at it to interpret the voice of the fates. I never could summon up much confidence in a fortune cast by a bird-brain, but Mak’s faith was stronger than mine. They had a consultation and money changed hands. Mak emerged with a worried look.
“This business with Eng Tong,” she said, “it will end badly.”
“I suppose you’d better tell June,” I replied. “She won’t like it.”
Mak put her hand on my arm. “No, Boy, not June,” she said seriously. “It will end badly for you.”
13
MARGE was duly moved into d’Almeida’s sprawling bungalow, with June as her chaperone and nanny. As expected, Miss Rider had kicked up an almighty fuss. Major Ridley was none too pleased either. He would far rather have sent in his troops with fixed bayonets to get her from the kampong, but since Newman outranked him he could do nothing except glower and simmer in silence. He wanted to post guards around d’Almeida’s place; Newman would have none of that either. Marge would be free to come and go until a court of competent jurisdiction declared that her aunt had custody of her. Ridley agreed with bad grace. However, I noticed that whenever I came to see d’Almeida after that there was an army jeep parked near his gate, apparently with engine-trouble.
Karim insisted on taking up residence at the d’Almeida bungalow too. He couldn’t overtly oppose the arrangement his father had agreed to, but it was obvious that he didn’t like it one bit. D’Almeida installed him in the servants’ quarters and made him kebun. The grounds were large and unkempt after the neglect of the war years, so Karim did have a real job. Most of the garden had been dug up and planted with vegetables and fruit trees. These had still to be tended. Fisherman that he was, gardening didn’t suit Karim’s temperament entirely. But he took to it with gusto, slashing enthusiatically at the long grass with a parang. It allowed him to keep an eye on Mariam and vent his frustrations at the same time.
June spent her days keeping house and watching Marge. She preferred to be called Marge and so we did, at least in private. But in public when Karim or Ahmad were around, we’d use her Malay name. The girl was just over fifteen and painfully shy. Whether this was her nature or because of the trauma she had lived through I didn’t know. June has a natural flair for dealing with children, but even she had difficulty in getting Marge to open up. Marge had been barely twelve when she lost her family. When the bombs fell, the house had collapsed on her and so had her world. The broken bones had healed with time. But the spirit hadn’t; not quite, not yet.
NENEK had rescued her, tended her wounds, made her part of her family. She was of course immensely grateful to Nenek, who loved her as her own until she passed away. Pak Chik Ahmad was like a father to her. He had no daughters of his own, only sons — half a dozen of them by his two wives. Slowly the nightmares receded and the memory of her former life faded. It was hard at first, learning to speak a different language, fumbling with unfamiliar clothes, coping with different customs. People were unfailingly kind. What little they had, they shared with her. She was treated like a little princess, as much as their poverty would allow. Nevertheless, deep down she felt that somehow she was being disloyal to her parents by becoming part of someone else’s family.
She grew up in the kampong, brought up as a Malay girl. Initially, they kept her out of sight for fear of the Japanese. The new administration introduced a system of passes and controls. The ketua kampong was supposed to report any strangers. Fortunately, Pak Chik Ahmad was related to their ketua kampong. Nothing was said about the little white girl in their midst. Later on, she was sequestered because that was the way girls were supposed to be. There were many restrictions on girls in the conservative village society. Mixing with boys of her own age was completely out of the question. She became withdrawn and shy.
In her previous life, she had many playmates and little to do. The kampong children did play with her, but they had chores. So did she as she grew stronger. Once she turned fourteen, she was no longer treated as a child. There was water to be fetched from the well and firewood to be cut. The kitchen was the place for the women and girls. They cooked over a wood stove, simple meals of rice, vegetables, fish and on very special occasions chicken. During Ramadan the kampong folk fasted. At the end of Ramadan there was a feast. New clothes were out of the question, but she had one suit reserved for special occasions like Hari Raya Puasa.
Pak Chik Ahmad tended his vegetable plot and looked after the chickens. His sons continued their trade as fishermen. In many ways the kampong folk were better off than most others, though times were hard for all. In the last year of the war, two of Karim’s half-brothers went off to Bintan to join the colony there as part of the Japanese campaign to grow more food. There were restrictions on fishing near the coast. Able-bodied men were conscripted for war work in the Heiho. Sentries and barbed wire appeared along the road. The old pillbox was equipped with a new machine-gun. It was whispered that the British were coming back. Everyone knew what that meant. The Japanese were not known for giving up tamely. Tension mounted daily.
Then, all of a sudden, came the news came that the Japanese had surrendered. Word went around that the Chinese Communists were coming to take over. The Malay policemen from the police station at the 7th milestone left their posts to take shelter in the kampong. The Communists were taking reprisals against policemen and other so-called collaborators. The kampong folk started arming themselves. Spears were made out of bamboo, the tips whittled down to a wicked point. Parangs were sharpened. But the ruckus died down soon enough. The Communists did not appear after all. Neither did the British, though they heard that the Orang Puteh were back. Life returned to its simple rhythm. Then out of the blue, June and I came into the kampong. Pak Chik Ahmad went back to his old job. They kept the news of Aunt Dorothy from her. It was only when the soliders appeared in the kampong that she discovered that her aunt was alive and demanding to take her back to England.
WE did some digging up about Dorothy Rider to see what we were up against. I had met her sort as a schoolboy in England. A lower-middle class teacher in an upper-class public school, she would have had to constantly endure the condescension of the parents and the slights of some of the girls she taught. They looked down on her as a member of a lower social class. She resented their arrogance while at the same time aspired to join them.
Strangely enough I never felt racial prejudice in England. Social snobbery, yes, definitely. In my public school I was ostracised because I wasn’t rich, not because I wasn’t white. Once I left school the people I met were in general polite and considerate to strangers, if a little reserved. Some were even kind. I remember in particular Mrs MacDougall, who ran a boarding house in Wells-next-the-Sea. I stayed there for a couple of months one summer, during that long break between the end of Easter Term and the beginning of Michaelmas Term. She became quite motherly to me. I suppose that I must have had a very lean and hungry look. She took it upon herself to keep me well supplied with food, which was a mixed blessing because she wasn’t a very good cook. I remember her fondly; though her scones were of stone, her heart was soft.
Out in the East it was different. Europeans were the masters. Like so many of her kind, Dorothy Rider felt that she was one of the ruling class — in Malaya, if not in England. The class barriers that had existed in England were much lower in the East. There were very few real toffs amongst the white British community. The ones who lived in Malaya clung tightly together for mutual support and company. Teachers were in short supply. Once the war broke out in Europe, it was out of the question to send the children home to be educated. Dorothy Rider found a good position in Raffles Institution, the premier school on the island. Sir Stamford Raffles had founded it in order to give the natives a decent education. Raffles was colour-blind; his successors were not. The European teachers had their own common room, separate from the Asiatics. The twain did not meet socially. That was the norm throughout Malaya. The highest position an Asiatic could aspire to in the Colonial Civil Service was that of Chief Clerk. No matter how experienced or talented an Asiatic might have been, the greenest griffin fresh off the boat from England had seniority over him. Miss Rider felt at home at last.
It didn’t last though. The Japanese knocked the whole social pyramid askew when they took over. The civilians were interned first at Changi and then at Sime Road. The women were separated from the men and left to fend for themselves, something that many of them never had to do before. Although the Japanese had a well-deserved reputation for brutality against POWs, they didn’t deliberately mistreat the women. The first camp commandant in Changi was a sadist, but as the tide of the war turned the succeeding commandants were more humane. A lot of the suffering was due to sheer incompetence on the part of the Japanese, who had no idea how to treat a captive civilian population of European stock. I had contacts in Sime Road during the War. They gave me a picture of what it was like. Miss Rider was one of those who stood up to the Japanese and insisted on her right to be treated as a human being. She was one of the leaders of the camp, getting things done by encouragement, cajolery and bullying. By and large, the guards respected her, perhaps even feared her a little. She was not one to put up with any guff from anyone, whether pupils, natives or prison camp guards. She came out of the ordeal in better mental shape than most.
When she learned that Marge had survived, she set her mind to reclaim the girl. There was no monetary motive, unlike in Gim Huat’s case. Marge hadn’t a brass farthing to her name. It was a matter of principle, pure and simple. The very idea of surrendering his sister’s surviving child to the natives revolted her to the core.
IT was clear that Marge was conflicted in her feelings. She made it quite plain that she didn’t want to go off with Aunt Dorothy. England was a foreign place and her memories of it were not pleasant. After nearly 10 years in the tropics, she couldn’t face the cold and the drab greyness of it all. Her new life, simple though it be, was not uncongenial. She hadn’t any friends in England. She didn’t much care for Aunt Dorothy either. But whatever else she might have been, Dorothy Rider was a blood relative — her only one left in the world.
I don’t think that Ahmad or his sons had any inkling of the way Marge felt. To them, the matter was simple. She was one of them now. Ahmad’s boys were fiercely protective of their adopted sister. When Karim said they would die rather than let her be taken, I had no doubts about his seriousness. In the old days, his people had been pirates and warriors. They might be fisherfolk now, but their blood still ran hot when faced with a challenge. The Orang Puteh were not supermen; let them come to take Mariam if they dared. He kept glaring hostilely at the khaki-clad figures who loitered beyond d’Almeida’s gate as he attacked the weeds with his changkul.
14
THE liberation very quickly proved to be a disappointment. People had thought that with the Japanese gone, happy days would be here again. The reality was sobering. Food prices stayed high. Rationing remained in place. There were complaints in the papers every day about profiteers and racketeers. Salaries did not keep pace with the cost of living. The BMA proved not only inefficient but venal. Corruption was rife. Whatever their shortcomings, the pre-war colonial civil servants had a sense of duty. They really believed that they were doing good for the natives. The civilians in uniform who formed the bulk of the BMA administrators knew that they were there only for a limited time. Service was not their first priority. If there was a chance to acquire something of value, it wasn’t to be missed. Palms had to be greased to get things done. Otherwise, things went by the book, which meant at the pace of a crippled snail. Many of the recently-freed civilian internees complained about the slowness of the repatriation process. They felt keenly that the military had let them down in 1942 and were letting them down again.
The Communists were quick to capitalise on the general mood of discontent. The Malayan Communist Party came out of the shadows and started organising the workers. They brought the dockworkers out at the end of October. There were strikes and stoppages all over. The Societies Ordinance remained suspended, which meant that the Communist Party could operate quite legally. So could the triads. Petty crime exploded. When people are scrabbling for their existence, obedience to the law is not the first thing on their minds. The general atmosphere of lawlessness was exacerbated by an underlying tension between the Malays and the Chinese.
During the War, the Japanese had transferred the four northern Malay states to Thailand. This left the Malays as a minority in what was left of Malai. Before the War, the Sultans had been sovereign in their states, in theory at least. The Japanese supplanted the Sultans and ruled through governors. As the writing on the wall got plainer towards the end, they began to give some thought to the future of Malai. There was even a suggestion that it should become part of a new Japanese-dominated China, given that there was an actual majority of Chinese. None of this made the Malays feel any more secure. When the War ended, the predominantly-Chinese MPAJA antagonised the Malays with their arrogance and indiscriminate brutality during the interregnum after the Japanese surrender. The MPAJA had marched like conquering heroes in the victory parade at the Padang. The British passed out gongs to the resistance fighters and treated them as allies. What with the plans for the Malayan Union, the Malays feared that they were about to be sold-out by the British. They took matters into their own hands. The violent extremist fringe hit back at the Chinese, whether Communist or not. At the beginning of November came news of the massacre of 35 Chinese civilians upcountry at a place called Padang Lebar. The British were either unwilling or unable to clamp down effectively. Relations between the races stood on a knife-edge.
The Indians in Malaya were also agitated at almost precisely the same time by the commencement of the trial of three senior officers of the Indian National Army at the Red Fort in Delhi. Major-General Shah Nawaz, Colonel Prem Saghal and Colonel Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon had been officers of the Indian Army and fought in Malaya. They were captured by the Japanese when Singapore fell and subsequently joined the Indian National Army, rising to senior positions. Like Habibullah, they had been in the thick of the fighting in Burma. Unlike Habibullah, they were captured and repatriated to India to stand trial. The charge was treason: or more technically, waging war against the King-Emperor. A whole galaxy of legal stars had volunteered to defend them, with Pandit Jawarhalal Nehru first among them. The trial created a sensation in India. The Congress Party took up the banner. There was mass agitation in the cities and mutiny in the Indian Navy. In Malaya, the English language newspapers kept reporting to a bare minimum, but word of mouth spread the news much more effectively. Many of the Japanese-Indian Fifth Columnists or Jifs, as the British called them, were local boys recruited in Malaya. The all-woman Rani of Jhansi Regiment was raised right here in Singapore. Feelings ran high.
