October 1987
Seeing the black van snaking up the hill at 2 a.m. on October 28th—its headlights lighting the way like the eyes of some predatory beast—Father Dubois tried to dispel his I-told-you-so thoughts by reading the Gospel aloud but the Word of God froze on his parched lips. Father Dubois was eighty-two years old with a feeble heart and a failing prostate so do not judge him too harshly for this small detail: there at his desk he wet his trousers thoroughly. He felt the warmth of it trickle down his pyjama legs into the sheepskin slippers his sister had sent him from Normandy the previous Christmas. He contemplated the distance between his desk and the corridor telephone. Anyway what’s the use? he asked himself. Will ten minutes’ warning make any difference to Cyril? No use no use. And then, since Father Dubois had from his fifty years in our country acquired an ease with our local lingo, he summed up the situation with a shrug and a What to do.
I too was sitting up sleepless that October morning, though I made no attempts to self-soothe with the Holy Gospel. Oh no. By then there was no Word of any God that could comfort me in my sickening hour of regret. By then so much had happened that had I known of the van beaming its way up the hill I would have thought of it as the necessary final destruction of our filthy world. Like Shiva the Destroyer in the Hindu Mythology we’d studied, the black van was coming to obliterate. It would be neither sufficient punishment for my sins nor salvation but only our inescapable collective fate. I was sitting up in bed in the Boys’ Dormitory and I was the only one there. I was thinking of the boys whose beds were empty and I was thinking of my mother who that evening had produced from somewhere a suitcase I did not remember. I was considering drastic measures. What if I leapt from my bed at this hour what if I ran to her and begged: Take me with you Mama please just take me wherever you are going. But it would have taken more courage than I had left to speak to her at all in these last few days let alone to go barging into her bedroom in the dead of night. She was sick and tired of most of us. She was a powder keg, a she-wolf licking her wounds. When she opened her mouth it was like looking over the rim of a volcano. Sparks and a livid glow. You could feel the heat of it hit your face.
My father was not in that bedroom but perched in his attic office. An eagle in his eyrie. Alone and exposed in what had been his refuge. Like me he had not sought out the Word of any God tonight. He sat at his desk not because he had anything left to do at it but because there was nowhere else to go. Police or no police, his work was done. Things were falling apart and the Centre would not hold. All Papa could do was sit and think his thoughts. Reza had already packed his bag. “I’d rather die than come with you,” he’d said to Mama. He’d never forgiven Mama for dragging him here in the first place and now layered on top of that old grudge were new betrayals.
What a tricky bastard I can be. Why this beating around the bush this pussyfooting this hiding behind my coy Chinese fan? Let me at last say it out loud: I was the one who betrayed him.
I was, I was. It is almost a relief to admit it. Nevertheless I shall show you the aftermath first so that you will not look at my mistakes and think all the usual rot: oh you were just a boy, oh these are just small-small childish sins, no, none of that please. There is no moral to my story but there was an ever after. An unhappily ever after. A bitterly ever after. And that is what I am giving you a glimpse of before I reveal my small-small childish crimes.
“You know I’m going back where you’ve always wanted to go,” Mama had said to Reza. “Back Outside. Back to civilization.”
A note of panic in her voice. Of tell-me-what-to-do-and-I’ll-do-it. Her goldeneldest was the only one she wasn’t sick of, and he didn’t want to come with her.
“But what can you do on your own out there?” she pleaded. “You all didn’t sit for your government exams, no Form Three, no Form Five, nothing. It’s better for you to try to catch up, take some courses, get some qualifications, and then”—you could see she still had trouble conceding it, still could not accept the fact that she had run out of time to Start Over and Make Amends—“and then,” she said quietly, “you can go.”
But by the time the black van was lumbering up our hill Mama’s panic about Reza had subsided a little. He was eighteen years old and had neither money nor friends. It would be easy to call his bluff. When the time came he would follow her just as meekly back into the world as he’d followed her out of it twelve years previously. For now there was nothing for him to do but incinerate his frustrations cigarette by cigarette on the back porch. At least all the toilet-puffery could come out into the open now. Compared to the shithouse, the porch was a downright glamorous smoking spot. Like two factory-strength chimneys they were—Reza on the porch and Mama upstairs downstairs in and out, in short wherever the hell she pleased—and not a word anybody could bring themselves to say about it.
There on the back porch Reza was sprawled as the black van beetled closer and closer to the house. But Reza’s eyes were closed and so, unlike Father Dubois, he did not see its lights slicing through the night. He did not hear it either for his head was full of its own voices there on that porch where he had sat with Leo when they were small boys and when they were not-so-small boys and when they were nearly men. There where they had sat listening to Leo’s mother taking out her steady plodding rage on the mortar and pestle and the batu giling and the coconut grater, all the old-time cook’s tools of sublimation. The back porch in the golden light of all those bygone years was a very different place from the back porch in the dead of night. To the soundtrack of a thousand small creatures—the shrill warnings the low mourning calls the dark rustlings—Reza lit yet another cigarette like it was the funeral pyre of the old innocent back-porch years.
Three simultaneous last puffs on the back porch and in Mama’s locked bedroom. The smoke from Mama’s Virginia Slim snaked across the room and spread its despairing fingers across the inside of the door. Reza lifted himself up onto his elbows. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. And at the exact moment that he opened them—so that forever afterwards he would retain a lingering suspicion that it was the snapping open of his eyelids that had set the final events in motion—we heard the hammering at the door.
All of us heard it but none of us wanted to be the one to answer. In the end it was Harbans Singh who dragged himself out of bed: there was that trademark stomp-and-shuffle of a heavy man on a wooden floor. When I heard the rumble and growl of his “coming coming coming” sinking down the stairwell I crept out to crouch on the first-floor landing. The moment he opened the front door the night air rushed in to fill the vacuum, the cold violence of it making him catch his breath before anyone had said a word. The back door slammed: even Reza had come in to listen.
A strange man’s voice. Then another. We heard them say my father’s name and my mother’s. We heard Harbans Singh’s gruff “Yes yes.” The men pushed past him into the front hall. Their shoes on the wooden floor ruptured the quiet like a sudden downpour. If I had not stood up they would have walked right over me. They were not what you might imagine if you are given to such imaginings, if fuelled by one too many Gestapo-KGB thrillers you imagine uniformed fellows with lean lantern-jawed faces barking furious commands. No these men moved fast but their faces were calm, or even—dare I say it—tired. One of them was paunchy and balding. The other three were not far from school-leaving age. They looked around in bewilderment as they climbed the stairs as though they’d set off on a different excursion altogether and were surprised to find themselves in a dusty colonial bungalow in Cameron Highlands.
They must have expected a bit more excitement because when my father met them on the attic landing—his hands up, and on his face the wistful smile that he had worn all his life—they stopped short and looked at each other. The young ones waited for the older one to speak. A good five seconds that senior policeman stood and looked at my father. When he opened his mouth the words fell out with a slap on the wooden floor between his and my father’s feet.
“Cyril Tertullian Dragon?”
“Yes,” my father said. “I am Cyril Dragon. I am the one who called you about the … about the incident. But I’m sure we were already on your list, yes or not?”
“We have orders for your arrest under the In—”
“Yes, I know,” said my father, and held out his wrists for the handcuffs.
Here was his last stand: exactly as I had imagined it and nothing like I had imagined it. For my anger at him had by now been muddied. The horror of Father Dubois’s cyclostyled sheets still lurked in the back of my mind and I knew my father bore the blame for dragging us all into his reckless heroism. But other calamities had befallen us in our last days at the Centre for which I could only blame—what? God? No. As I was unable to believe in a God who knew exactly how we would behave in any circumstance. He’d conjured up and then punished us for behaving as he knew we would—I was left with no choice but to regard our tribulations as the random cruelties of a blind universe. My father was both responsible and not responsible, both despot and victim.
The policemen trudged through the house opening doors. Their boots were heavy and dusty and their manner weary, as though they could have really used a break from the drudgery of arresting people. You could tell they were resentful that we had all politely rounded ourselves up because now there was no way for them to go through the motions without looking ridiculous. Annabelle Foo stood between Selwyn and Estelle, who for the first time in her daughter’s eighteen years had combed and neatly plaited the girl’s hair as though she were a much younger child. Paralysed by terror, gratefully, desperately (oh comb-comb my hair, for eighteen years I never had a mother and tomorrow I will once again not have one!) Annabelle had let her do it. Someone should have taken a photo to immortalize their brief resemblance to a normal family: two proper parents and their cherished offspring. Rupert and Hilda Boey were pressed close to each other mouthbreathing loudly like two stranded walruses. Harbans Gill was grunting his unnecessary commentary at Gurmeet: “Well, this is it. Our time is up. Flers have come for us.” Mrs Arasu had put on a saree for the first time since 1970. Thomas Mak, thin, white, trembling from an emotion none could identify and all feared, was trying to steady himself by shutting his eyes and chanting Buddhist mantras in his head. Bee Bee was frantically trying to shush her twins and Kiranjit whose shared response to terror was apparently to giggle hysterically. This row of docile dissidents was bookended by Mama, who in her lipstick and kebaya and mother-of-pearl combs looked like she was heading off to a kenduri, and Neela, whose hair was so neatly oiled and bunned that she must have stayed up all night awaiting this moment.
When the youngest of the men took out a pair of handcuffs and stepped towards Neela my father said, “Please, no, no, she is our cook.” His voice was shaking. He could not bring himself to say just our cook even then. Even if it might have saved her.
“Cook or driver or gardener is not my problem,” the oldest man said. “If she is one of you then we are under orders to arrest her.”
The handcuffs clicked shut.
“But she is not here for our … our teachings,” my father said. He looked at Neela then and she looked at him. Unflinching. Unblinking. Without shifting his gaze he went on. “She came here to … just to make a living. She had no … The boy had no … You know, she had a child to bring up all by herself.”
The man in charge grunted and shrugged. But my father would not give up so easily. He cleared his throat and this time spoke in a steady voice.
“Please. You know who she is …”
But his hands shook, even if his voice was now steady. And seeing this—my father shaking after all I had done to protect him!—I felt my blood turn to ice. The blue-green chill of it spread from my chest down to my belly and up behind my eyes.
The policeman held up one imperious hand at my father. Stop. Enough. A schoolteacher silencing a small boy. He did not even bother to meet my father’s eyes.
It was not supposed to be like this. Papa had told Father Dubois: They have bigger fish to fry. They’re not going to come all the way up the hill for a handful of people planting vegetables and praying for world peace.
But then you see it only takes one dirty rat to start sniffing and twitching its whiskers and the whole swarm will come gnawing at your heels.
We all knew why they were really there. Why they had sent the black van instead of just the normal police to follow up on the incident. And had we had any doubt we would have known from the way they not only avoided my mother’s eyes but gave her a wide and judicious berth.
When they had handcuffed all the adults they stood and looked at each other. Uncertainty clouded even the senior one’s eyes. He opened his mouth to speak and we all saw it: that moment of hesitation. What the bloody hell were they going to do with us? But the moment was brief. Before anyone else could speak he clapped his hands and said: “Take them also to the van.”
A fiery ball of fear tore through me singeing my flesh from the inside on this chill night. Maybe it would kill me before they got to me. It was real and it was happening: they were sending us all to the lockup. Thanks to Father Dubois’s cyclostyled sheets nothing needed to be left to my imagination. I knew the details. I had the facts.
The van doors opened as though by magic. Obediently we clambered in for our coach excursion. Two by two straight lines no talking please. Nobody even looked at anybody else. You see by the time the police came for us we were all afraid of each other. Or if not afraid then at the very least we hated each other. We sat in that van as the three younger men huffed and puffed in and out of the house with boxes of Papa’s papers and we did not speak. Not one word. The shared air in the van turned stale from our breaths and still we did not speak. The passing minutes throbbed in our veins until with one bark from the bossman they all climbed in with us and the engine coughed to life.
They’d left the lights on in the Centre. All those sad yellow windows bearing witness. What now? they seemed to ask. Whose desires whose dreams whose schemes will rescue us next? Through the van’s small back window I watched the house shrink. We’d left it all as it was. The sheets and blankets on the beds. The books on the library shelves. All the inspirational signs on the walls. God Is Love. We Are All The Chosen People. Be The Change You Want To See In The World. Whoever landed up here next would walk through the rooms like a tourist through the ruins of Pompeii.
Down down down the hill the black van spiralled like a weighty marble. Round and round and round the curves. The drunken-sailor moon rolling from one side to the other. We were dizzy but numb. Terrified but resigned. We rumbled past Father Dubois quaking in his wool socks behind the window of the Priests’ House. Past the tea plantation and the horse paddock and the reservoir. Past the deserted wet market and the closed roadside stalls. Like cows in the back of a lorry we looked out around us. Wall-eyed and panting. The froth thick in our sour mouths. We were bodies in motion governed by the universe’s most elementary laws. The sons among us would be punished for the sins of their fathers and the fathers for the sins of their sons. Oh say it, say it: the sins of mothers and daughters too. Our collective lapses. What we had done and what we had failed to do.
We reached the main road and picked up speed. The hill receded further and further into the distance. At the exact second it disappeared from view my life at the Muhibbah Centre was irrevocably over.
About ten minutes afterwards we reached the police station. I would like to tell you that I turned to look at my father one last time as they unloaded us children. That Papa wore a weary but loving expression. Tender forgiving eyes and a worried mouth. That he drew his breath in and his shoulders up as if to say Remember all I have taught you and may God be with you.
Oh god how I would like to tell you all this! I would like to have forgotten—by which I mean that I would like to have remembered it all differently.
But the truth is that although I knew Papa was looking at me I did not turn to meet his gaze. It’s all right I thought to myself. Papa understands. It’s the others I won’t see again but that doesn’t matter. My whole body understood I had left those people behind forever. Like a boy in a trance I stepped out of that van onto a new planet. Record the exact hour of my arrival: three thirty-five by the police-station clock. “Sit, sit,” said the young policeman assigned to babysitting duty. Then he began to clear space for us to lie down. Patting the armchairs and the sofa. Pushing chairs together. “Tired?” he said. “You can sleep here until morning.”
But none of us lay down. Stiff as ice sculptures we sat under the framed portraits of Dr M and Mrs M. I recognized Dr M from the newspapers that had appeared daily in the downstairs hall of the Centre before Selwyn Foo whisked them out of my father’s sight and into the archives. The strategy may or may not have worked to shield my father but I, despite my dread, had forced myself to study the face of this man issuing his cool veiled threats in his cool veiled language. Unity. Harmony. Sensitive Issues. National Security. Every day he had smiled up at me over his meaningless meaningful words and now he smiled down at me from his portrait. No, you could not even call it a smile. A contortion is what it was. A grin a grimace a menace. Fattening battening, forever waxing never waning. Look at it: it was ageless and unchanging. (In fact not merely ageless but like all true dealmakers-with-the-Devil aging in reverse. One day it would appear to fade but then—like the grin of the Cheshire Cat’s sinister cousin—it would rematerialize when we least expected. In 1987 we could not have foreseen in concrete terms the grand comeback Dr M would make thirty years later but by Jove did I feel it in my bones when I contemplated that rictus.) After we had all returned to dust its unwholesome gleam would still be there proclaiming dominion over the world. The woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and blood to suck before I sleep. I have only just begun it said. Watch me grow.
I remembered the way this face had chipped away at the veneer my father’s faithfuls had tried so carefully to maintain for sixteen years. The pictures exposed their true colours and reeled in the ugly words from their darkest hidden places: Mamakutty. Mamakthir. Typical bloody Kerala conman. Trying to be more Malay than the Malays. Each time a word like this came out of a mouth they would look at each other wide-eyed realizing what a shoddy flimsy thing they had taken sixteen years to build. Not even a house of straw. Even a medium-sized not-so-bad wolf could blow this shelter down. Or a gust of wind from the wrong direction, no wolf required. Fearful whisperings and mutterings had sprouted like fairy rings around the contraband newspapers and now all the predictions—both about Dr M and about ourselves—were coming true in every way.