Asia Literary Review No. 22, Winter 2011

WINTER 2011

No. 22 WINTER 2011

Also in this issue:

AMITAV GHOSH – interviewed by Fionnuala McHugh PHOTOGRAPHY – Java’s roads; Inner Mongolia’s ghost town; Hong Kong’s street scenes POETRY – Andrew Barker, Scott Ezell, Trina Gaynon, Hu Dong, Justin Hill, Changming Yuan REVIEWS – Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table; Jill McGivering’s The Last Kestrel; Ali Smith’s There but for the

asialiteraryreview.com

Fiction | Non-fiction | Poetry | Photography | Reviews

PICO IYER – celebrates new horizons and the English language as the Empire writes back SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA – a playful story of modern Sri Lanka, cricket and an elusive sporting hero E. V. SLATE – a poignant and tragic tale of a retired couple’s desire to recreate the past CHEN XIWO – an extract from the translation of his shocking novella, banned in China SINDHU RAJASEKARAN – a surprising narrative of a village child’s sexual awakening MICHIEL HULSHOF – puts forward the case for Special Academic and Art Zones in China GYAN PRAKASH – and his capricious driver give us a tour of Bollywood film-star neighbourhoods DAWN STARIN – a rollicking meander down the sidewalks of Hanoi A. K. KULSHRESHTH – intrigue in a court of ancient Singapore RAHUL JACOB – twenty years on and Jan Morris’s observations of India still hold true

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 22, Winter 2011

www.AsiaLiteraryReview.Com

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

No. 22, Winter 2011

Publisher Ilyas Khan Managing Editor Duncan Jepson Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Literary Editor Kelly Falconer Features Editor Kathleen Hwang Poetry Editor Martin Alexander Art Editor John Batten Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Production Shweta Moogimane, Michael Chau Design Gabriel Kicks Proofs Alan Sargent, Elizabeth Reichert Main Cover Image Internal outdoor mezzanine podium and flats, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong (2010) © John Batten Back Cover Image © Arun Venkatesan

Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Submissions: subm@asialiteraryreview.com Editor: editor@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: (852) 2167 8947 Advertising: (852) 2167 8910/8980 Extracts from Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew courtesy of Random House Extracts from I Love My Mum courtesy of Make-do Publishing Extracts from ‘Mrs Gupta Never Rang’ courtesy of Jan Morris Quote from Karma Cola in ‘Recalling Mrs Gupta’ courtesy of Gita Mehta Photos from ‘The Sidewalks of Hanoi’ © Dawn Starin Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro Printed in Hong Kong by Magnum Offset Printing ISBN: 978-988-18747-9-5 Individual contents © 2012 the contributors This compilation © 2012 Print Work Limited

Contents From the Editor

5

Fiction from Chinaman Shehan Karunatilaka

19

The Ferry E. V. Slate

67

The Sacred Cow Sindhu Rajasekaran

85

from I Love My Mum Chen Xiwo translated by Harvey Thomlinson

119

The King, the Saint and the Fool A. K. Kulshreshth

147

Poetry The Loss of a National Identity The Well Changmin Yuan

16 18

from Hanoi Rhapsodies Scott Ezell

41

Marriage Trina Gaynon

66

from The Village Andrew Barker

83

Gloomy Spring Day Hu Dong translated by Shirley Lee

117

The Ghost Ubume The Dreary Season Out of the Wound Trina Gaynon

127 128 129

from Fragments from a Northern Dreamland Justin Hill

161

3

Non-Fiction The Empire Writes Back, Revisited Pico Iyer

9

The Sidewalks of Hanoi Dawn Starin

32

Bombay Setting Gyan Prakash

49

Profile: Amitav Ghosh Fionnuala McHugh

99

Recalling Mrs Gupta Rahul Jacob

107

Special Academic and Art Zones Michiel Hulshof

131

Photography East meets West in Hanoi Dawn Starin

8

City Scenes and Signs – Hong Kong John Batten

31

from Hanoi Rhapsodies Scott Ezell

41

Becak Mark Ikin

57

Lakshmi Arun Venkatesan

85

Kangbashi: China’s Empty City Philip Gostelow

139

Reviews The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje Fionnuala McHugh

165

The Last Kestrel by Jill McGivering Michael Hoffman

169

There but for the by Ali Smith Hsu-Ming Teo

171

Contributors

176 4

From the Editor hese are interesting times to be living in Asia. In the midst of broken financial systems, faltering economies, ravished ecosystems and in­ adequate food production, Asia is expanding in power, confidence and influence. It seems about to push the West out of its way – not as an enemy or an oppressor but as an irrelevance.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Asia’s major cities, which are vibrant with energy, optimism and potential. In this issue, we explore some of them: Mumbai, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. We travel with our writers in Indian auto-rickshaws, on Indonesian becaks, on Chinese bicycles, buses and taxis, in Singaporean ferries and fishing boats, and on foot through the streets and alleyways of these crowded cities.

Mark Ikin uses his iPhone as he travels across Java to record the daily life of a tukang-becak – a pedicab driver – and his passengers; and Philip Gostelow ventures across barren Inner Mongolia to photograph Kangbashi, a new city that has begun its life as a ghost town, still waiting to be filled with inhabitants and their energy.

Writing from Shanghai, Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen whim­ sically propose that China set up Special Academic and Art Zones, where experiments with freedom for the arts might lead to a cultural renaissance, just as its Special Economic Zones have propelled China towards the top of the prosperity pile. Though this idea may seem fanciful, a speaker at the recent International Writers’ Workshop in Hong Kong declared that this Special Administrative Region is effectively the Free State of China. Since the Asia Literary Review is based in Hong Kong, we plan to continue to exercise our freedoms and encourage others to allow them elsewhere.

Here in Hong Kong, John Batten photographs the interface where people make their mark on the hard fabric of the city. One of these images is on our cover. Not far away, Dawn Starin takes us on a gritty and psychedelic walking tour of the sidewalks of Hanoi, complemented by the despairing rhapsodies of Scott Ezell. Gyan Prakash, riding an auto-rickshaw through the streets of 5

From the Editor

Mumbai/Bombay, explains how the city’s two names co-exist, discovers why ordinary people consider themselves on intimate terms with the stars, and shares with us the wry and fatalistic philosophy of his driver.

In Recalling Mrs Gupta, Rahul Jacob expands on this view. Using Jan Morris’s pessimistic 1975 essay ‘Mrs Gupta Never Rang’ as a point of reference, he considers the Byzantine complexities underpinning both the capital of India and the nation itself.

Though Jacob sees the potential for reform in the anti-corruption movement, his conclusion is that India continues to be held back by endemic bribery and by the petty political infighting that stifles any prospect of progress.

None of these writers has romanticised or trivialised life in Asia, and our fiction takes an incisive and clear-eyed approach to community, identity and purpose.

Fiction, through fabrication and sleight of hand, sometimes tells truths more compellingly than a factual account. A. K. Kulshreshth in The King, the Saint and the Fool takes us into Singapore’s past with a tale of ancient politics and betrayal that reveals the frailties we all share, whether we are royalty or paupers.

We’re also invited into the fragile psyche of a once-powerful man in E. V. Slate’s wonderfully imagined The Ferry; and Sindhu Rajasekaran’s The Sacred Cow makes us intimately aware of the painful choices a young woman makes when faced with the conflicts of marriage, friendship, love and religion.

In a journal like this, space is inevitably limited. Although we can’t print a whole novel, we have included extracts from two that we hope will send you to the library, the bookshop or the web. Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, follows one man’s quest for truth about himself, his family and the elusive cricketer Pradeep Mathew. Karunatilaka’s Sri Lankans are so fiercely obsessed by cricket, and so possessive in their obsession, it seems as though the game belongs entirely to them. The ‘chinaman’ of the title is not what the reader may expect.

We are also pleased to present an extract from I Love My Mum, Chen Xiwo’s controversial novel, banned in China and now translated into English.

Like Karunatilaka, Chen confounds the reader, and his deeply unsettling account of a crippled man and broken taboos suggests profound dysfunction beneath the surface of the narrative. Art can empower an idea by making it visceral: Chen, like Nabokov, does exactly that, and a disconcerting truth is absorbed through metaphor with the force of lived experience.

6

Martin Alexander

That could be a definition of poetry, and the selection we offer in this issue is linked by distinctively Asian scenes – many of them with the pastoral familiarity of the past – unsettled by voices that are strikingly contemporary in their confrontation of the present.

Rahul Jacob links past and present in his pessimistic appraisal of modern India; Pico Iyer, on the other hand, looks back at the nineteen years that have passed since his essay for Time magazine, ‘The Empire Writes Back’ and is optimistic about the future of Asia. In his introductory piece, he analyses the state of Asian writing in English over the last two decades. For Iyer, English represents a global soul that inhabits what he has called ‘the state of motion’ – a state in which its speakers must also live. English is no longer merely the language of Britain: it has left home and multiplied, and its hybrid forms belong to the speakers and writers who have made it, for the moment, the lingua franca of the world. Influenced by Asian voices, it is now ‘an English both purer and fresher than anything to be found in England’.

This emancipated English, ‘giving us a faraway place in its own terms’, is a far and jubilant cry from its old national and colonial shaping of worlds. In this spirit, the Asia Literary Review aspires to present – in English – the best writing from and about the world that stretches between the Bosphorus and the Bering Strait.

Like the borders of many entities and identities, those of Asia are blurred and long-disputed. The Sinai Peninsula places an Egyptian foot on Asian soil; though Cyprus floats in the Mediterranean, it is both European and Asian.

Turkey has toppled westward as a member of the European Union, while in the Far East Russia’s Asian toes dip into the Pacific and its European head rests on the Baltic shore.

It is easy – in theory – to dissolve all identity into homogeneity. But while Asia is a concept that we may broadly understand, it would be foolish to attempt a precise definition. Asia’s identity is in a state of motion; we aim to capture that motion in these pages.

7

East meets West in Hanoi. Photograph © Dawn Starin.

8

The Empire Writes Back, Revisited Pico Iyer

I

n Michael Ondaatje’s shimmering new novel, The Cat’s Table, an elevenyear-old boy takes off on a classic adventure in a great ship full of wonders.

The book’s epigraph comes from Joseph Conrad, and the tale that begins to unfold arises straight out of the great British tradition, from Fielding through Dickens, of a boy travelling to the big city and experiencing wonders and dangers en route. Yet this particular boy, Michael, comes from Ceylon, and the names that stud his story are Perinetta Lasqueti and Anabella Escudero, Gunesekera and Ramadhin.

When he reaches London, he ends up in ‘the small solar system’ of foreign families who find themselves in a country that will never be quite theirs. The man who teaches him about three-quarter time and how to spell Egypt is a typical wanderer, half Sicilian, who has worked in Europe and travelled in America before settling in the tropics. The young woman who will become Michael’s friend and cynosure rejoices in the wonderfully half-Victorian name of Emily de Saram.

The Cat’s Table is a distinctly English tale told in reverse – by a foreigner travelling to England. Slowly we realize that the epigraph from Conrad, and his novel, Youth, about first setting eyes on the East, is being meticulously inverted here in this account of first setting eyes on the wild and exotic West.

To most readers today, such radical turnings inside out might not seem strange at all. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, after all, begins in mid-air and features souls who are permanently in passage, not fully at home anywhere.

Caryl Phillips’s novels often dwell on boats, but these are Middle Passage boats that carry a very different fascination from the drifting nomads’ ships we meet in Graham Greene. There’s a whole genre of books in English now about the protagonist’s bittersweet encounter with the supposed ‘mother country’, 9

The Empire Writes Back, Revisited

England, and their common title could be that of V. S. Naipaul’s classic, The Enigma of Arrival. Even those books that are set entirely in contemporary London are often works like Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen, about the ‘Hispanic, Asian, African and Baltic’ immigrants who have taken over the carefully named ‘Imperial Hotel’ – or indeed, Ali’s first novel, Brick Lane, about an otherwise typical English area now populated almost entirely by immigrants from Bangladesh.

Exactly nineteen years ago I was asked to write a cover story for Time magazine called ‘The Empire Writes Back’ . My editors had noticed that more and more of the people who were claiming the Booker Prize (there was no ‘Man’ in the title then) had names that looked strange and were not traditionally ‘British’ at all: Ondaatje and Rushdie and Ishiguro and Coetzee.

When occasionally a writer called something like Byatt won, it was a shock in the midst of the many other winners of African and Caribbean and Maori and Indian descent.

It almost seemed as if the windows and doors of that stuffy house called the English Language – as well as the guest cottage called English Literature – had suddenly been thrown wide open to admit tropical smells and indigenous rhythms, strange histories – and in fact new ways of telling history, all of which could seem at once alien and seductive to readers in London or Manhattan.

When I studied English literature in England in the 1970s, our syllabus consisted of Beowulf, George Eliot and occasionally someone as modern as Thomas Hardy (the bulk of our course ended in 1832); even the American writers T. S. Eliot and Henry James were consigned to the tiny ghetto of a ‘special paper’, and it became symbolic (as well as a huge pain) that I had to spend a year learning the dead language of Anglo-Saxon in England, and then another year learning it again when I went across the water for graduate school in the USA. By 1993, however, all that was changing, fast, if only because members of Britain’s former colonies were fast streaming into their step-motherland.

Vikram Seth was publishing what many were calling the longest novel in the history of English, A Suitable Boy, and including no glossary to explain gulab jamun or gajak and no italics on the namastes or the khatri boys that surround the reader by the second page. In his next novel, An Equal Music, there was not a single indication in 383 pages – if you didn’t see an author photo or know the author’s name – that it came from someone who wasn’t 10

Pico Iyer

called John Smith. The Anglo-Chinese writer Timothy Mo set his novel Sour Sweet in London, but without a single white, traditionally ‘English’ character. Ondaatje, in The English Patient, performed a precise and quiet kind of anarchism by deliberately making his eponymous ‘Englishman’ not English at all and one of his other characters, who fights for the British Army, a Sikh. The novel begins with the explosion of nationalisms towards the end of the Second World War, and suggests the possibility of a new order in which you can’t begin to tell where characters called ‘Hana’ or ‘Caravaggio’ come from – and don’t need to.

Nineteen years is a long time, though, especially in our accelerated age, and professional lit-critters tell me now that the once fashionable word ‘transnational’ is passé. Nobody thinks twice when the Man Booker Prize goes to someone called Adiga or when the National Book Award in the USA is won by Ha Jin, the relatively recent Chinese immigrant who had been working as a busboy at a Friendly’s restaurant and who had few words of English not long before he claimed one of the country’s highest literary honours. Indeed, American literature is going through the same change that Britain saw a generation ago – in this regard, Britain is ahead of America if only because its empire came and went first – and today many of the young writers writing and rewriting the American canon, in part by bringing their parents’ homes together with their own typically American concerns of assimilation, identity and dreaming, have such all-American names as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz and Chang-rae Lee. The International Empire, which grew out of Western pop culture as it spread across the world, has struck back as the Spanish, French and British did before it.

What happens when the formerly colonized take charge of the cultural centre? And what does it say for the 220 million of us living in countries not our own for whom ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ are slippery and shifting concepts? Is Jhumpa Lahiri (born in England and living nearly all her life on the East Coast of the USA) really an Indian writer? And does it matter?

Readers today hardly care or even register, perhaps, that our stories, like our friends, originate from all over, and rarely define themselves as ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’. This is a wonderful emancipation, happily in tune with the new combinations and possibilities we enjoy while we listen to sitar and guitar duets over our French kaiseki cuisine; after all, the leader of the most powerful 11

The Empire Writes Back, Revisited

nation on the planet is half Kenyan, half Kansan, grew up in Indonesia and has a Buddhist sister in Hawaii.

When I am asked where I come from (this is surely typical of the new century), I riffle casually between the place where I was born and grew up (England), the place where my parents were born (India), the place where I’ve been officially resident for almost half a century (the USA) and the place where I have been living, on a tourist visa, for more than twenty years (Japan). Often I’ll shift my answer according to who’s asking – or say, ‘None of the Above’ or define myself by my enthusiasms, by what moves me, even by where I’m going rather than where I came from. The young people I meet are even more multicultural and all over the place in their affiliations.

Home, increasingly, has less and less to do with anywhere geographic and more and more to do with a state of mind, a set of values, a group of affiliations (for which websites such as Facebook are a handy metaphor). ‘Belonging’ in the old-fashioned sense may be becoming obsolete: ‘we don’t belong anywhere, I guess’, is how the main character in The Cat’s Table assesses their condition to a fellow migrant. He’s not speaking only wistfully. The Cat’s Table itself is the kind of novel that doesn’t belong either to England or to South Asia, and has at its centre the image of a floating society that is again, quite literally at sea, making itself up in a vacuum.

Even those who never leave their homeland – Arundhati Roy, for example, has always lived in India – are revising the classical lines of power. Five years after Ondaatje’s English Patient, The God of Small Things – Roy’s only novel so far – set about remaking the canon (and the world) with the insouciant confidence of Eve naming all the flowers in the Garden. Her use of language was impenitently strange – ‘hair-oil darkness’ and ‘pickle-smelling silence’ – and it spoke for Roy’s sense that traditional English had to be reinvented if it were to fit the lush, synaesthetic, tropical world of her native Kerala, where people dress and act – as well as think – differently from the way people do in London. Strange insects appear ‘like ideas in the evening’ and a character has a ‘mind full of cupboards’.

Beneath the bejewelled invention, though, there was a point, and a strikingly sharp one: the ‘Half-Hindu Hybrids’ at the centre of her South Indian landscape had previously been marginal figures in English literature, and seen only through the eyes of the oppressors; but, as in the course of Roy’s 12

Pico Iyer

novel, they recite Shakespeare or Lochinvar, or speak of the Odyssey, they begin to claim these classical foreign artefacts as their own. At the centre of the narrative sits a ‘History House’, once inhabited by an Englishman – Indians having been excluded – that is now being taken over by local creatures. After it is turned into a heritage hotel, it almost becomes part of the jungle, engulfed in coconut, cashew and mango trees.

Roy’s writing could not be further from that of R. K. Narayan, whose tales were likewise set in a small town in South India, precisely described right down to its jitkas and their samosas, but instantly apprehensible to anyone in Gloucestershire or Connecticut. Narayan took pains to write in a form and a language that all but stand outside of time and place. Roy, by contrast, took literary globalism to a place even the likes of a Rushdie hadn’t been: she didn’t bring different worlds together so much as show us a faraway world that insists we take it on its own terms. Not many years later, new books by Rohinton Mistry and Manil Suri and Aravind Adiga were making it clear that Bombay would be a centre of twenty-first-century fiction, much as London was the centre of nineteenth-century fiction and New York of the twentieth.

Perhaps – as in the case of the Nobel Prize-winners Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul two generations ago – those born far from the centre of the English-language universe are bringing particular devotion and intensity to their projects, if only to overcome the tyranny of distance and possible exclusion.

It is writers from Ireland and Canada, from Australia and Pakistan who are at once creating new forms and mastering the old ones – be these writers Colm Tóibín or Anne Michaels or Daniyal Mueenuddin or Nadeem Aslam – while writing an English both purer and fresher than anything to be found in England. Anita Desai (half German and half Indian) blazed a new trail forty years ago, by giving us patient and sensitive explorations, often of Europeans in India; her daughter, Kiran, offers us a more kinetic and contemporary version of the world in which everyone’s from everywhere, or so it seems, and where identity is up for grabs.

There will always be imperfections in the literary export business. Those of us still living in Asia may feel that the only way to make our voices heard is via the tannoy of London or New York; others, including many in India, are understandably indignant that works in English have greater access to a literary audience and the success that can come with it, than can any writer 13

The Empire Writes Back, Revisited

using one of India’s more than 22,000 dialects. If the world is getting its news about contemporary China from exiled writers such as Yiyun Li and Ha Jin (both writing in English and based in America), it is hearing only one side of the Chinese story, and one that would be anathema to hundreds of millions back in the People’s Republic. There are too few voices coming to us in English from Afghanistan or Bangladesh or Laos.

The trade winds of culture have almost reversed since I first travelled across Asia in 1985 and noticed that the ‘American Century’, as described by the founder of Time magazine, Henry Luce, was fast turning into an ‘Asian Century’. In those early travels I noticed how often otherwise washed-up American baseball players would tear up the professional leagues in Japan, how India’s manic film industry was making six different versions of the then-hot movie Rambo, and how Thailand was copying the stores and fashions of New York. Within a few years, however, American Major League Baseball was being transformed by players with names such as Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui; the West was drawing on the props and dance moves of Bollywood movies (in the case of Slumdog Millionaire, to the tune of eight Academy Awards); and if I were looking for the latest in iris-reading technology or chic cafés serving green-tea pinda cake with strawberry and basil I would turn not to Manhattan but to Bangkok.

I almost wonder whether, culturally as well as economically (and sometimes educationally) the West isn’t now travelling as a supplicant to the East, which brings us full circle from Ondaatje’s novel set in the 1950s. Some of the best writing in and about Asia in recent years has come from David Mitchell, the Englishman living in Hiroshima whose 1999 debut, Ghostwritten, was perhaps the first novel calmly and naturally to inhabit the global world Salman Rushdie had described, as it effortlessly moves from Japan to China to Mongolia to St Petersburg, all the way to New York City. Nell Freudenberger’s long short stories in Lucky Girls – like much of her novel, The Dissident, about a Chinese artist in California – sit quietly in an Asia she knows from within but can view from an outsider’s perspective. Peter Carey from Australia and Lloyd Jones from New Zealand have lit up Malaysia and Bougainville without a trace of imperial presumption. The Canadian Yann Martel may have won his own Man Booker Prize in part by becoming an 14

Pico Iyer

honorary Indian and giving us the ecumenical South Indian protagonist, Piscine Molitor ‘Pi’ Patel, in The Life of Pi. Perhaps the moment has arisen, in literature as in geopolitics, when emissaries from the waning powers travel to Asia’s epicentres of energy, growth and dynamism, at once to observe them and to see what can be learned from them. Where London now is the literary province of a Zadie Smith, a Hanif Kureishi, a Hari Kunzru, India is being excavated by such commanding imperial historians as Patrick French and William Dalrymple and by novelists such as the Aussie travellers Gregory David Roberts and John Murray. When I was a boy, I imagined that Singapore – and Bombay and Kuala Lumpur – longed more than anything to become the ‘London of the East’. Not long ago, the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingston, asserted that his city might do well to dream of becoming the ‘Singapore of the West’. Not least, I suspect, because Empire – like Singapore – is now a mongrel. In theory at least – and increasingly in literary practice – Empire belongs to us all, wherever we happen to come from and however mixed-up we happen to be.

15

Changmin Yuan

The Loss of a National Identity Neither Chinese foods nor Chinese parents nor the Chinese language nor our Chinese outlooks not even our Chinese names make us truer Chinese now.

Just as all the Chinese born after the Song dynasty were no Chinese to the Japanese, so one Chinese coming of age after the Ming was no more Chinese than another to Koreans while to other Westerners we Chinese were never the Chinese they had known or known about.

No, we are indeed no longer the Chinese our ancestors used to be: during the Yuan, we became a nation of slaves, lesser even than animals in our own land; during the Qing we learned to dress ourselves up inside out like our conquerors with queues.

16

Since the Opium War, we have been trying to modify ourselves, to remove all our yellowish Chinese genes deeply coded within Chan within Confucianism within the one hundred flowers that came to full blossom once upon a long time . . .

Yes, we are offspring of ancient Chinese – we still eat and look like our ancestors but we are not Chinese any more – no more than the Japanese or the Koreans who, like us, still use some ancient Chinese characters.

17

Changmin Yuan

The Well In the lowest terrain of my father’s native village there used to be an old well deep as the memories of last century, around which boys would run at noon in summer and girls would dance under the willow at midnight, where my father often sat, listening to his sick mother telling stories about his unknown ancestors.

The well finally ran dry after God knows how long, and since electricity came across the hills and ponds, nobody has returned to it other than the mosses and lichens that have colonized the whole territory, and where my grandma’s ghost shines down from time to time trying to guard its walled-in secrets now as dry as its mouth.

18

Extracts from

Chinaman Shehan Karunatilaka The Wall that I Stare at I cannot face a window when I write. I cannot begin the writing of anything on a Friday. I cannot write without liquid passing my lips. I have learned over the years that it pays to nurture your idiosyncrasies. Even a hack must respect his muse.

I begin my assignment on Monday, 4 January 1996. I am asked to stay at home and manufacture scripts that are everything to everybody. Ari and Brian will haggle, renegotiate, coordinate, source and organise. I am grateful to be excused from the tedium of production meetings.

Before we are given the equipment and the budget, we are given the deadline. We must be ready to shoot straight after the World Cup. ‘In case we get to the semis,’ suggests Rakwana.

‘In case we whack the Cup,’ says Brian.

I spend the first two weeks drinking stout and going through my library.

Throughout my life, even when times were tough, I never stopped buying books. Or, come to think of it, booze. My library is dusty and well stocked.

My liver is well worn. I skim through my cricket collection and delve into my favourite wastes of time. Byron, F. Scott and the Bible.

To me, the Bible is perhaps the greatest book ever written. Not as a stepby-step guide to life or as a travel brochure for the afterlife. In that respect, it is positively dangerous. But as a tightly written work of fiction, it is magnificent.

There is a knock on my door and then a turning of the handle. I see the unruly hair before I see the ungrateful lad.

‘Thaathi. Busy?’

‘A bit. Why?’ 19

from Chinaman

My office is strewn with paper cuttings and books. Garfield looks about and nods. ‘Ammi says you and Ari Uncle are doing a TV show?’

‘With Graham Snow and Brian Gomez,’ I say nonchalantly. ‘When are your results coming?’

‘Next month.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Need to discuss . . . things.’

‘Bit busy. After lunch?’ I say, knowing that I take my lunch when others take their tea.

He is gone.

That was our first conversation in three weeks. He had caught me off guard. I usually prepare for my meetings with Garfield by making my heart into a fist.

Our fights began shortly after his fifteenth birthday. First he joined a rocker band. Then he was suspended for smoking. Then he was dropped from the Wesley College 2nd XI cricket team. Sheila broke the news and I accidentally broke one of her vases. That conversation ended badly.

‘He is playing in a band, smoking, running with girls, of course he will be dropped. What do you expect?’

Sheila spoke quietly. ‘Gamini. This is good in a way. Now he can concentrate on studies.’

‘This fool? Concentrate on anything?’

The boy never talks back to me. At least I have taught him something.

Our last argument had been over his choice of A-level subjects. I recom­ mended he study commerce or science and he went behind my back and enrolled in history, Japanese and logic.

The reason he was now breaking the silence was obvious. Money. But what for? To travel to Japan and study Confucius? To marry some girl he’d impreg­ nated? To buy guitar strings for his rocker band?

I turn to Ari’s notebooks. I have borrowed his collection of 1985–95. The blue ones include scorecards and written summaries for each match he has seen. And Ari claims to have seen them all. The yellow ones are the fattest.

Scrapbooks of paper cuttings. The pink ones contain undecipherable diagrams and formulae.

With our combined libraries, I have enough data to hammer short films on each cricketer. Except for one. I appear to be the only person to have written 20

Shehan Karunatilaka

about Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew in the last ten years. By the time I am ready to meet Garfield, it is five in the evening and he has left for tuition class.

I spend weeks scribbling and pasting notes on walls. For inspiration I have a mess of books, a window overlooking flowerpots and a wall that I stare at. The wall gazes down on my flimsy table and my flimsier typewriter.

It is a 1971 Jinadasa, gifted to me by my sister, the only relative not to file me under lost causes. The keys are as brittle as my bones, but the ribbon is fresh and the ink is wet.

I type career summaries for my top ten and paste them on the wall. I draw up a list of potential interviewees and a list of potential questions. I compile a list of memorable footage to be sourced. Mendis’s twin centuries vs India in ’82, Ratnayake’s catch in our first test win in ’85, Aravinda’s 267 vs the Aussies in ’88 and Mathew’s ’94 Zimbabwe tour. I then type random sentences and paste them on the wall. Pretentious stuff that I may never use.

‘Goonesena, a gentleman to his fingertips, placed etiquette above aggression.’

‘Ranatunga was a fox in a grizzly bear’s clothing.’

And then, with three days to deadline, with the wall I stare at full of scribblings, I sit in my banian and sarong before my 1971 Jinadasa and daydream as hard as I can. It is the compulsory procrastination before each assignment. I think of Garfield and of our history of silences. I think about opportunities squandered. I think about Sathasivam. And then I start typing.

I quickly realise that everything – Satha, Garfield, even this Jinadasa typewriter – is a product of its era. The Jinadasa company was propped up by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, under the assonant slogan ‘Stationers to the Nation’. The products were hardy and underpriced. But after just three months of free market capitalism under the United National Party, the company collapsed spectacularly in 1978.

They say countries with the word democratic in them usually aren’t.

Throughout the 1970s, the SLFP’s policies involved the culling of economic freedoms. For most of the 1990s, the UNP have been hopelessly divided.

Back to Satha. He was perhaps the most elegant cricketer of them all.

A gentleman drunk, a playboy who could play. Notorious for turning up at games minutes before the first ball, attired in the previous night’s evening dress, smelling of alcohol and someone else’s wife, Satha would order eggs and bacon at the clubhouse, shower, knock back a hair-of-the-dog scotch and score a scintillating double century.

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from Chinaman

Writing at the speed of arrack, turning article to voice-over is easier than I thought. Then we pick out as many friendly commentators, coaches, hasbeens and current players as we can think of, and post them questionnaires for interviews. The rest would be up to Brian and Ari. When Garfield barges in, I have finished the questionnaire and written eight profiles. I am also pretty tanked up. He brings Sheila and I know I can no longer avoid this. I stop jabbing at the Jinadasa and remove my glasses.

‘Sorry to disturb, Gamini,’ says my darling wife. ‘Juices are flowing today, no?’

She looks at the typewritten sheets on the table and thankfully, not at the empty bottle by my chair. ‘Garfield wants to talk to you.’

They sit on the cane chairs by the window. I swivel around and light myself a cigarette.

‘I thought you gave up?’

‘Writing, no?’ I grin.

Smoking history of W.G. Karunasena: • Years 0–16: 0 cigarettes.

• 17–48: 12 a day, sometimes 25.

• 49–59: 0 cigarettes.

• As of last year: 2 a day. Before writing and after.

Sheila shakes her head and says nothing. She points her chin towards our son. ‘So. Tell, tell.’

Garfield doesn’t look me in the eye. His eyes dart along the books on the floor and rest on the empty bottle of Old Reserve. ‘I want to do an engineering course in India.’

It takes all the muscles in my lower body to stop me from falling off my chair. ‘Without science subjects?’

‘They need good A-level marks. They don’t care what subjects.’

‘So will you get good marks?’

Garfield looks at me for the first time and nods.

‘You can study Japanese and become an engineer?’

Sheila butts in. ‘He wants to study sound engineering.’

‘Sound engineering? Like Sony Walkmans? That’s why you need Japanese?’

I only mean to smile kindly. I end up letting out a high-pitched giggle.

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Shehan Karunatilaka

My son gives me a look. A look I recognise instantly as one I gave my teachers and elder siblings. A look I frequently got slapped for.

‘Putha, go and check if the kettle has boiled,’ says Sheila, as our son exits.

She stares at me. Despite my behaviour, I’m in a good mood. Good booze, a good day’s work, my son having not impregnated a Japanese teenager.

‘OK. OK. How much?’

‘Airfare and fees will come to three–four lakhs. Then accommodation . . . ’ ‘Sheila, I don’t have anything. We sold the family plot to buy this house.’

‘What about the leftovers?’

‘Nothing’s left over.’

‘I have a bit I saved up.’

‘Where money for you?’

She puts her hands in her lap. There is no raising of voices. She has obviously prepared for battle. ‘I saved, Gamini, I didn’t waste.’

Sheila didn’t like me going overseas on assignments, unless the newspaper or the sponsor paid my expenses. Sadly, the per diem I received was not enough to enter a homeless shelter and obtain a bowl of soup. I always returned in debt.

‘You must ask your Loku Aiya.’

My cigarette over, I pour myself the last drink of the day. I have no desire to talk to my eldest brother.

‘Now why are you drinking? How many times have they offered? If we say for Garfield’s education, they will give.’

I shake my head. ‘You know what Loku Aiya said about me, no?’

Sheila says nothing.

‘No need of borrowing from anyone, I will give.’ I squeeze her arm. ‘Write down the amount and give. I will somehow get it.’

That night, the three of us eat at the table, though we keep the TV on. Sri Lanka, invited to make up the numbers at the 95/96 World Series, look about to beat Australia and perhaps even book a place in the final.

Garfield doesn’t say a word, but his face has something resembling a smile.

Sheila is happy and has cooked kiribath, the only dish she can make better than anyone else in the world. I’m having my third last drink of the day.

And even though I have no idea how I am to raise nine lakhs, I decide to put off worrying till tomorrow. Another day, another bottle. Procrastination is as much a group activity as watching cricket.

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from Chinaman

Old School Tie School cricket is what feeds the Sri Lankan national side. We have no counties or Sheffields or shields and earlier, had no academies or strong first-class tournaments. Before the 1990s, two schools in particular fed Sri Lankan cricket, fed Sri Lankan politics and fed themselves from the fat of the land.

All of our male prime ministers and presidents have been from Royal College, Colombo, or St Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia, except for the Rt Honourable Mr StopGap in the 1960s and His Excellency Mr Benevolent­ Dictator in the 1980s.

It’s funny how legacies are passed on. They say in a mixed marriage children are beautiful. This is true if you get a pleasing combination of white features and black complexion. Not so, if vice versa. With age, I have realised that we are doomed to be parodies of our parents and that if there are virtues and vices to inherit, we will get a fraction of the former and a multiplication of the latter.

Nations are prey to my genetic Murphy’s Law. Ideally, we Sri Lankans should have retained our friendly, childlike nature and combined it with the inventiveness of our colonisers. Instead, we inherit Portuguese lethargy, Dutch hedonism and British snobbery. We inherit the power lust of our conquerors, but none of their vision.

The old school tie is one such trait. Ari tells me that its influence is on the wane. ‘Look at our World Cup squad. Ananda, Nalanda, Richmond, Mahinda, St Servatius, St Sebastian’s. One Josephian. Royal–Thora no show.

Same with all the top jobs.’

The unwritten school hierarchy is as follows. The top table is occupied by Royal, STC, St Joseph’s, St Peter’s, Ananda, Nalanda, Trinity. The next table would seat Thurstan, Isipathana, St Sebastian’s, Prince of Wales, DS, Wesley and Bens.

‘So this means the cream is rising to the top and replacing the cherries.’

‘Nonsense,’ says Ari. ‘The cherries have all gone to London, Washington and Sydney. The dregs at the bottom are rising to the top.’

‘I wouldn’t call Sanath and Kalu dregs, my friend.’

‘Maybe so. But I tell you, Wije, they are intentionally keeping us Thomians out. The Ananda–Nalanda brigade. Payback for the Brown Sahib treatment.’

Legend has it that when teenager Arjuna Ranatunga, an Ananda boy, first arrived at the Sinhalese Sports Club and addressed stalwart F. C. de Saram, a proud Royalist, the latter smirked, ‘It speaks English, does it?’

24

Shehan Karunatilaka

Ari is an old Thomian who played for College in the 1940s and secretly believes that because he went to one of the Royal-Tho-Jo-Pete, he is somewhat less of a savage. I grew up in Kurunegala and attended Maliyadeva College. The old school tie bullshit neither benefits nor impresses me.

Like my office, Ariyaratne Byrd’s front room is littered with paper cuttings. He has lived down the road from me since Sri Lanka got test status.

His office room is as dusty and dingy as mine. But it is neat. Cobwebs hang on alphabetised shelves; teacups with fossilized cockroaches are stacked in symmetrical towers. Another important difference: air conditioning.

Both the front room and neighbouring garage are AC-ed. Ari managed to tap into a roadside power cable and make sure that Mr Marzooq from No. 17 got the bill. Don’t ask me how. In the garage are a beat-up 1979 Ford Capri and dozens of broken gadgets. In the front room are the shelves of notebooks that deal with two broad subjects: electronics and cricket.

The electronics books are orange, the cricket books are blue, yellow, pink, grey and purple. Each has articles under various headings culled from the Cricketer, Sportstar, Kreeda, the Island, the Weekend, the Observer and Wisden Cricket Monthly. We stumble upon Pradeep Mathew’s 1987 World Cup profile from the Daily News: Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew Left-arm chinaman. Right-hand batsman Born: 19 February 1965, Colombo Test debut: vs India, Colombo, 1985 ODI debut: vs West Indies, Hobart, 1985 School: Thurstan College Club: Bloomfield CC Pradeep Mathew is a spinner of some promise who has excelled for Bloomfield this season, becoming the second highest wicket taker in the 1986 Lakspray Trophy. He made his debut in Sri Lanka’s inaugural test victory against India. He has played mainly as a test bowler despite good performances in the 1985/86 World Series, including two 5-wicket bags against Australia and the Windies. This is his first World Cup.

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from Chinaman

Ari has even collected school cricket reports. We dig out three mentions of Mathew. This time playing U-15 and then U-17 for Thurstan.

‘Here, my dear. Thurstan vs DS, Astra Margarine U-15 trophy 1979.

Thurstan takes first innings lead, P. Mathew takes 4 for 17.’

‘Ariya-pala-rala . . . ’ My voice is slurring and my motor skills are waning.

Ari frowns. ‘I think it’s time for your nap, Putha. And I think Sheila knows that you’re boozing during the day.’

‘She said something?’

‘Manouri saw her throwing out bottles. How much are you whacking?’

Ariyaratne uses his three-year head start in life and the size of his brood to put the fatherly act on me. Like any brat worth his salt, I know how to change the subject.

‘We have no records of Mathew playing 1st XI cricket? Here. Thurstan team profiles for ’82 and ’83. No Mathew.’

‘That is the thing. I know the Thurstan coach, Lucky Nanayakkara. Maybe I can put a call to see if he’s still around. Now kindly go wash your face before Sheila gets back. I will only help you if you behave.’

I make the Scout’s honour sign and promise.

Yellow Card These days I only smoke when I write. Drink, however, is a different story. If I could I would drink in my sleep. I know men younger and healthier who have suffered the inconvenience of multiple bypasses. I know drinkers whose bodies were unable to keep up. Who exchanged the bottle for sobriety and the permanent frown it brings.

I have watched drinking acquaintances find solace in religion and family. I have seen men go from being life-and-soul-of-the-party to disagreeable old teetotaller. I have seen diabetic thirty-year-olds convinced that they were cursed.

I, on the other hand, have been blessed. For the mornings and afternoons of my working life, I have treated myself to a compulsory shot, and have treated breakfast and lunch as optional extravagances. And, contrary to chemistry and biology, for sixty years my bill of health has been clean.

And while Sheila and Ari argue that alcohol cost me jobs at the Daily News and the Island, they do not know of what they speak. Alcohol has enhanced 26

Shehan Karunatilaka

my life and the world I inhabit. It has given me insight, jocularity and escape. I would not be who I am without it.

It begins with the swellings around my stomach and legs. Then I am unable to sleep. Then I shit droplets of blood. I tell no one about my visit to Nawasiri or the tests that I took or how much they cost. I take it as a warning. A yellow card. If I behave myself, I may not have to miss any games.

Check-up Last week I woke up shivering. This week I wake up sweating. Sheila spies a note from Nawasiri in the post. It is the hospital calling me in for my annual check-up. My body notifies me that the prognosis will not be good.

‘Didn’t you just go for a check-up?’

‘No. That was to make an appointment.’

‘When is your appointment?’

‘Sheila, I have writing to do.’

I lock myself in my room and decide to leave it till after next month’s World Cup. The Chinaman ‘Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman,’ said 1930s’ English batsman Walter Robins in a jibe that today would have required a disciplinary hearing. It was

27

from Chinaman

Mathew’s bread-and-butter delivery. Pitching outside the batsman’s bat and cutting into him. Ellis Achong, a West Indian of Chinese descent, dismissed Robins with one such delivery, and sparked both the outburst and the term.

A ball turning in from a left-arm bowler is not considered as dangerous as one that turns away. The logic being that it is not difficult to combat something that moves towards you. Mathew bowled two variations of the chinaman.

One with cocked wrist and one with rolling fingers. He would drift it to wide outside the off stump, giving it the appearance of a wayward delivery, and then rip it in at awkward angles.

The chinaman accounted for most of Mathew’s early wickets and remained his stock delivery throughout his career. It can be difficult to combat something that moves towards you, if it arrives unexpectedly.

Shades of Brown I am watching football with Jonny. This is a long time before allegations and excreta in pools. He is cursing people from Manchester, a city just a few hours’ drive from his own. I ask him what the difference between a Geordie and a Manc is and he starts explaining the accents, both of which I find equally incomprehensible.

I ask him how many accents his little island has and he demonstrates through famous sportsmen. He begins in Scotland with Kenny Dalglish, takes me through the North East, via Messrs Boycott, Trueman and Clough. Then we visit Atherton’s Manchester, the Midlands courtesy of Mansell, and end up in the east of London with Phil Tufnell.

By the time he takes me to Wales via the great Gareth Edwards, my stomach aches from laughter. But I am also amazed. One island, three nations, countless accents, but one united race. The race of Britons, united long enough to rule the world, at least for a while.

As much as Keegan hates Ferguson, he doesn’t refer to him as belonging to a different species. But sadly in Sri Lanka, that is exactly what we do. It is race and religion first, country last.

‘OK then. Explain the differences between Sinhalese and Tamils,’ asks Jonny.

I am stumped.

I could start with the stereotypes. Sinhalese are lazy, gullible bullies.

Tamils are shrewd, organised brown-nosers. Tamils have moustaches and 28

Shehan Karunatilaka

chalk on their foreheads. Sinhalese are less dark, though not as fair as Muslims or Burghers.

The Sinhala language is sing-songy, Tamil is more guttural. Tamil names end in consonants, Sinhalese in vowels. Tamils are Hindu, Sinhalese are Buddhist. Tamils mispronounce the word baaldiya. Sinhalese eat kavum and don’t like people getting ahead unless it is them.

All this tells you nothing. I can introduce you to a fair-skinned Tamil who speaks perfect Sinhala and follows the teachings of Christ and his Mother. Or take you to Tamil places that end in vowels where you may visit a Sinhalese doctor named Kariyawasam.

Sri Lanka is filled with many shades of brown. Not unlike the stuff that ended up in Jonny’s pool. It is not so much the colours as the ideas that these colours spawn that I find objectionable. The united super-race of Britons may have started it when they, among other things, segregated our cricket clubs.

Though it is perhaps unfair and inaccurate to lay the blame for our racial problems on the streets of Downing or the palaces of Buckingham. Despite the existence of a Sinhalese Sports Club, a Tamil Union, a Moors SC, a Burgher Recreation Club and a perversely christened Nondescripts Cricket Club, cricket as a sport refuses to be segregated. Clubs grab talent regardless of vowels or consonants or moustaches or chalk. So much for divide and conquer.

By the 1950s, we begin to develop our own dangerous ideas without any foreign assistance. The idea that the nation belongs to the Sinhala. Or that the Tamil deserves a separate state. Ideas that have clashed and exploded for the last thirty years. Perhaps one day they will be replaced by an idea of Sri Lankanness that welcomes all shades of brown. Though I suspect that my generation will have to die to give birth to it.

India got independence a year before us. They are larger, more diverse and more excitable than us Ceylonese, but still embrace the idea of India above the idea of being Bengali or Sikh or Muslim, something we have been incapable of doing. We are smaller in every way, including being smaller minded.

If I had to explain it, I would adopt the approach of a famous divide and conquer man, Mr Rudyard Kipling. Sinhalese are sloth bears. Lethargic, cuddly creatures of modest brains who break things if riled. Tamils are carrion crows.

Resourceful creatures, resilient and peaceful unless provoked. Forget this nonsense of lions and tigers, neither of which have lived in Sri Lanka for over a millennium.

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from Chinaman

But then I look closely at the shades of brown and I see interlocking patterns.

The Tamil Zion is called Eelam which derives from the same Sanskrit word as Hela, the Sinhala word for sovereignty. Men from both races gobble rice and acquire bellies at middle age. Women of both races oil their hair and spread malicious gossip. Both races can be equally feudal, equally cruel and equally capable of turning on their own. Both can be proud to the point of stupidity.

Explain the differences between Sinhalese and Tamils? I cannot. The truth is, whatever differences there may be, they are not large enough to burn down libraries, blow up banks, or send children onto minefields. They are not significant enough to waste hundreds of months firing millions of bullets into thousands of bodies.

Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is published by Random House

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Stairwell and sign for dentist Choi Chun Keung. Cheung Sha Wan, Hong Kong.

Photograph by John Batten (2010).

City Scenes and Signs – Hong Kong Photographs: John Batten

I

nitially, these photographs of Hong Kong’s older urban areas were for my own interest. Increasingly, I grew concerned about the city’s fast-disappearing vernacular street architecture, older buildings, public housing estates, markets and the minutiae of people’s interventions on the street, such as handwritten signage. Since jointly founding the Central and Western Concern Group, an active heritage and urban planning lobby group, I have worked to document and explain the importance of preserving Hong Kong’s inner urban areas and streetscapes as a representation of the city’s freedom of expression – a freedom that is unique in China.

31

The Sidewalks of Hanoi

32

The Sidewalks of Hanoi Dawn Starin bove my head, the wires: electric; telephone; loudspeaker; cables; some obsolete, some illegal. Transporting the must-have news, the mustknow slogan, the must-repeat motto. The ropes and cords and hooks for hanging laundry and household pots and pans and shop goods and cages imprisoning birds and signs advertising the cheapest clothes and red-andyellow banners flapping the latest dictum. Head-height boxes holding mirrors and combs and brushes and razors and creams and clippers for servicing the many manly facial needs, for the young and old as they make their way home, to work, to play, to school.

The branches of trees planted by the French that witnessed devastation wrought by American bombs gently hold the last remaining bones and bits of a traditional singing kite from the northern regions of this land. The loudspeakers broadcasting the rumours and gossip, repeating the hearsay, accompany the sound, the non-stop, blasting, screaming, yelling, honking sound of this twenty-first-century city wrapped around the muddy, swirling, silt-rich, iron-rich, flood-prone, cholera-laden, arsenic-laced waters of the primordial artery Song Hong, the mother of all sources, the ancient Red River as it awakens, as it eats, when it retires, as it moves from place to place throughout the day, shrinking to its lowest level in one hundred years.

All these wires and cords and ropes and boxes and messages and speakers hang in the trees, winding in and out of the branches, swaying in breezes, creating knots and snarls and whorls and curls of amazing opinionated chaos while the live bats, with no political agenda, hang upside down on the branches spanning the street theatre that is Hanoi, and the dead bats lie in handmade baskets soon to become part of a night’s meal.

33

The Sidewalks of Hanoi

On the edge, beside the kerb, below my feet, the gutters grey and smelly, scary and foul, spreading cholera germs over the city carried on phlegm-stained, piss-covered pieces of tightly controlled, overly censored newspapers written in a script created by a French Jesuit priest, and candy wrappers and dead and dying leaves and wisps of corn silk and fag ends and empty, cracked and cooked crab shells and broken bamboo toothpicks made by poor indigenous tribeswomen cursed by the state and used and broken condoms for preventing the masses from growing and the politicians from instituting baby-boom rules; floating around corners, attaching themselves to the bottoms of massproduced Chinese sandals and flat tyres and homemade baskets swollen with fungi-shaped, tasty green and yellow and orange and red and white produce carried by swaying, smiling old women in conical hats, wrinkled and gnarled and balancing bamboo poles, carrying goods on shoulders bent with age and long histories of plying their trade up and down the alleys and lanes, calling out in voices made of a hundred thousand musical tones: ‘Buy my goods, buy my goods . . .’

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Dawn Starin

The six-and-a-half million souls, the twelve-something million feet walking these pavements are slowly collecting arsenic, slowly, slowly becoming toxic, slowly, slowly balls of skin cancer and high blood-pressure and cardiovascular diseases are finding their way into the shod-and-unshod-peopled sidewalks from the polluted underground water resources.

Live clucking chickens, crowing roosters – Ri, Mia, Dong Tao and Ho, longestablished breeds, traditional centrepieces of the Tet meal offered to a family’s ancestors – roam in and out of people’s feet and bicycle tyres and peck at fallen noodles and spilled succulent bean sprouts and pieces of French bread with no oomph and no taste and no texture and spread their own natural fertiliser and potential disease – H5N1 – next to mounds of chicken carcasses with bright crimson, scarlet, blood-red roses sticking out of their silenced beaks.

A voyeur. Never closed, never shut: my eyes open wide to the sights/sites, the people, the traffic, to the infinite chaotic wonders, the living, frenetic theatre, of the commercial communist sidewalks that lie within the belly of the muddy, filthy waters of the Red River.

35

The Sidewalks of Hanoi

36

Dawn Starin

My ears seek the mad, feverish stories that slip between the cracks of the uneven pavement slabs. The whispered political thoughts, the tribal fears, the religious panics of a thousand dissidents trip over each other as they vie for space on the fractured sidewalks.

My nose sniffs and smells the foul, rotten, fetid fat and putrid oil used to cook the creatures of the forest and the sweet perfumes from the myriad bouquets for all the thank yous and the I’m sorrys and the weddings and the births and the dyings and the deaths.

Far from the sparsely inhabited, endangered-monkey mountains and the eroding hills wrinkling and crumpling most of this land, here man and his cultures of things and wares and objects rumple and crease and clutter the concrete sidewalks. The splayed feet and cracked heels with torn and tattered and ripped nails in shoes too large or too small mince around and over and under the doings and undoings that take over the space, the stage, between the walls and kerbs, below the trees, above the ground.

These are parking lots for resting and repairing and cleaning cars, motorbikes and bicycles. For cutting hair and shaving chins and cheeks and foreheads and necks. For cleaning deep inside wax-encrusted ears with torturous instruments while on occasion puncturing eardrums. For clipping fingernails in the shape of talons and cutting cuticles so close that little drops of blood fall to the ground to be lost in the cracks of a thousand stories. For clipping nose hairs and tweezing out grey hairs from the heads of young and old. And knitting clothes from imported Chinese polyester yarn and sewing long, flowing, transparently elegant, midriff-revealing ao dais, and nursing and weaning infants, and washing dishes and bowls and wooden chopsticks and razor-sharp meat cleavers, and preparing fruit and vegetables, and drinking bitter green tea and sugary, milky coffee or weak beer, and slurping beefy pho and crunching dog and cow and goat and endangered snake and sheep and buffalo and crab and big-eyed, small-bodied fish and soft-shelled turtle and fat duck and chicken bits between your teeth and playing mah-jong and chess and cards and fishing with bamboo poles from lakes shimmering with the silver sides of a thousand dead floating fish, and selling jars of rice wine stuffed with baby bears and king cobras and imperilled sea horses and geckoes and scorpions and pangolins and all manner of Dr Seuss-like creatures and miniature Damien Hirst artworks, the amber-coloured drink said to make men more manly and the world more beautiful. And next to corkscrew-shaped bonsai trees and pots of expensive 37

The Sidewalks of Hanoi

threatened orchids, not far from the worm- and mange-riddled puppies and kittens in rusty cages, beside the wild mynahs and parrots confined behind bamboo, squat the thin saleswomen holding small, young, plucked but living, breathing, whistling, wriggling quails. Teetering on the sidewalk edge, dangling their live goods for passing motorists to see, these hawkers of soonto-be-boiled naked creatures try desperately to make a sale while their charges try frantically to escape.

These are slabs where shoes are cobbled and shined and resoled and sold and locks are picked and fixed and old computers and CD and DVD players and TVs, with their guts falling out and their plastic skins pocked and dented, are repaired and shared among friends and relatives who sit mesmerized by the sobbing, moaning Korean soap operas that dominate the airwaves and street life for tiny blocks of time each day.

This is where the many beggars with their USAF Agent Orange-induced deformities ask the tourists for dong and dollars. And this is where vendors hawk their fat-filled, MSG-laden snacks, and postcards and pirated copies of Lonely Planet guides and cheap plastic and paper fans from China and bootlegged discs while capitalism runs amok on the communist sidewalks of the republic’s capital. And this is where ersatz American dollars are burned to send to ancestors in the next life – a life with the same needs as this one being lived out on the slabs of concrete ecosystems. A life sustained by, and sustaining, a system far from the temperate coniferous forests and mangroves and grasslands and bamboo stands and karst outcrops and coral reefs mapped out in other parts of this land.

Here, where Mammon beds down with Marx and where Lenin lies quietly entwined and twisted with voracious private enterprise, all the people – sometimes I think all eighty-seven million of them, from every corner of this country – are sitting or walking or running or lying on the sidewalks. All of them, the young ones that is, the smiling lovers courting, hands on top of hands, feet on top of feet, eyes glued to eyes, are pacing the pavements and wondering if they will have to adhere to a two-child policy. Will a third cost them a penalty? An expulsion from the Party? A reprimand? A firing or 38

Dawn Starin

39

The Sidewalks of Hanoi

maybe a not-hiring? And the older ones – the men who have already spawned – play board games with pegs and pebbles and tiles and soda-bottle caps and beer-can tabs gambling and winning and losing and stamping their feet and hiding their cards.

Early, very early, before I’ve had my thick coffee made with Dutch evaporated milk and Vietnamese beans harvested in villages far away, the pavements become playing fields. Men and women with their rubber and plastic, cellophaneribboned shuttlecocks and their feet and knees flying and forcing points across nets shout and laugh and enjoy da cau, the game of a thousand years, played every morning on the modern sidewalks of Hanoi.

And later, after noodle oxtail soup is slurped for breakfast and roasted silkworms and crispy fried crickets and whole roasted sparrows are crunched for lunch, the betting and the cheering and the yelling and the praying from the men squatting so close to the concrete surface, their knees hitting their ears, bellies full of beer, spitting and smoking and egging on the kicking, pecking, long-necked, strong-necked, featherless-necked, specially bred, seriously trained fighting cocks. Bleeding cocks, with necks wrapped around each other, semi-feathered martial-arts experts, obey the primeval rules bred and beaten into them before they cracked through muddy shells.

And then later, much later, over the many, the hundreds of blue-plastic chairs and tables made for doll-sized people telling long-winded stories and dreaming centuries-old dreams, I stumble. My large feet walking in thin, black-cotton Vietnamese shoes with a single strap, sidestepping small Vietnamese feet, falling and tripping and reeling and nursing my wounds, I drink light bai hoi, the fresh taste of Hanoi, with the squatting and standing and sitting and even lying men smoking their bamboo water pipes, inhaling the harsh tobacco and exhaling the sweet, the oh-so-sweet, the throbbing, life-enhancing, wonderful smell of Hanoi.

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Scott Ezell

from Hanoi Rhapsodies 1 The city opens us like a pair of wounds.

We suck in salt and lead particulate, press against each other, lips of blood that split and breathe, we fall into resuscitation driven by engines and tarmac grime.

I sweat and burn with fossil heat buried a hundred million years – close my eyes and touch my tongue to the petroleum residue on your skin.

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from Hanoi Rhapsodies

2 This wound in me goes back 10 million years in you – through the crust of earth through magma, swamp, stone, lime and mineral ore into your Mesozoic flesh and fluids, flow of empires and extinctions rivers and the sea your breath slips through eons and emerges – a green tendril opening into petals blooming through a crack in city days.

3 The girls outside the brothel lean against the wall and stain their cigarettes with lipstick.

Their eyes are slits in castle battlements to shoot arrows out but let nothing in, and what they defend against is the marauder, hope.

They watch me come and go in my cheap haircut and expensive shoes and never beckon to me – maybe love is like a haircut and they figure that I want it quick and cheap – or they see me carry my native tongue in a body bag to barter at the market day by day, and know my love is already bought and sold.

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Scott Ezell

4 I hate the city when I am waiting for you.

It is just impediment, dross and metal dreck, an umbrage of noise pollution like the skeletons of four million wingless birds mouldering the air.

Every rasp and blade of engine noise is a crucifixion, the city a vanquished Christ, the idea of redemption beaten by sun and internal combustion till it cracks and flakes away like the ochre on the plaster walls abandoned here by Europe.

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from Hanoi Rhapsodies

The grid of engines and offal constrains me.

A lattice of metal holds me still against exhausted earth while time breaks down on the face of clocks, crumples to a rusted heap.

There is nothing to do as I wait for you but pray to die a short, quiet death till you arrive till streets turn liquid, minute and hour hands loosen and revolve, the city shines silver and begins again to sing.

5 We never quite become what we once were – engines stammer like tortured beasts, pig and cow carcasses are trucked in from abattoirs at the edge of town, a dull river of suffering flows across the plexus of commerce, aspiration, and shortcoming that is ‘metropolis’.

I move in broader and broader orbits through urban effluence, reach outward and inward to you.

These strands connect – a circuit is complete, electromagnetic current flows – we fluoresce and incandesce and all these beasts and engines swell with light.

44

Scott Ezell

8 You are the sound of oceans buried in the city’s heart, a well of tides beneath the surface.

Your skin slides across a slanting shore each pore a breath embracing grains of sand.

I am lost to you in cacophony, the city a desert of noise where I am always thirsty for silence.

45

from Hanoi Rhapsodies

Rain moves across the city on the bones of wind – a veil of water closes over me.

I dig down a thousand feet and there, contained by walls of clay and lime, you move through me water through water wave through wave a convection of rivers, the city’s metal sex recedes and we remain a sheen of grease a hush of light and skin.

46

Scott Ezell

9 You are moulded from warm oil, you curl around my lips and eyes pool in the hollow of my throat and drip into the space within my ribs, my lungs fill with you instead of breath, my heart pushes you through my body like blood.

Coda Some days hatred swarms like insects and fevers me before I can slap it away, but even a sparrow is a miracle in city streets between the wheels of cars.

In a temple courtyard, children play beneath a starfruit tree and dance on fallen leaves.

Men drink beer on curbs, a crow tumbles from the sky into the groan of engines, a haze of light nests above the city like a migratory bird.

The city shaves my face away replacing it with slag.

I throw a cup of dice into the sky they hang there like stars.

47

Artist’s installation protesting the planned construction on villagers’ land of a high-speed rail link from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. Lunar New Year, Choi Yuen Village, Hong Kong. Four-character Chinese idioms (top to bottom) read: ‘Peace for young and old; land of milk and honey; retreat to the countryside; Choi Yuen revival.’ Photograph by John Batten (2011).

48

Bombay Setting Gyan Prakash

T

he auto-rickshaw neared Mannat, the sea-facing mansion of the popular Bollywood star, Shah Rukh Khan. Uniformed watchmen guarded the tall gates. A short distance away, a crowd of young men and women milled about. Their backs were turned to the sea, their eyes fixed on the mansion, hoping to catch a glimpse of King Khan, as the star is often called.

‘What does Mannat mean?’ the auto-rickshaw driver asked in Bambaiyya, that expressive street language of Mumbai, a charming mongrel tongue fashioned out of Hindi, Marathi and English.

‘It means a vow of offering to God if a wish is fulfilled,’ I replied.

‘So Shah Rukh is offering his house to God because he became a big star?’

‘Or he is the god to whom everyone makes a vow.’

‘Let’s hope they get to see their god today!’ the driver said with a laugh.

We were passing through Band Stand, an upscale Bandra neighbourhood along the rocky shore of the Arabian Sea. Known as the ‘queen of suburbs’, Bandra lies to the north-west of the old island city of Bombay but to call it a ‘suburb’ is a misnomer. With a cosmopolitan population of nearly 340,000 Hindus, Muslims, Catholics and expats, it is completely integrated into the Greater Mumbai region. The moneyed elite and business houses still call South Mumbai home but Bandra, with its street bazaars, shops, pubs, cafés, restaurants, boutiques and residences, is widely regarded as the ‘happening’ place: after 10 p.m., when the streets of South Mumbai are deserted, Bandra’s nightlife is just getting started.

Adding to its allure is the dense concentration of movie stars: Mehboob Studios, established in 1954, is a local landmark. Its Pali Hill neighbourhood is the Beverly Hills of Bollywood. The home addresses of stars are common knowledge in Mumbai, and it is not unusual for fans to gather outside the 49

Bombay Setting

houses of their screen idols and for tour itineraries to include a drive-by of the more well-known apartments and bungalows. Mumbai is not a city with monuments and sites of great antiquity; there are no temples or mosques dating back to pre-modern times. Its lures are entirely contemporary, with the film industry providing a vital element in the composition of its image as a city of dreams. The city and cinema bleed into each other in Mumbai as nowhere else.

The auto-rickshaw driver knew the magical spell that the movies cast. He knew Shah Rukh Khan’s mansion was called Mannat, and took for granted the sight of fans gathered at its gates. A couple of minutes later, as he navigated the auto-rickshaw through the crowd, he pointed to an apartment tower to our right.

‘Apna John has bought a flat here.’

Apna John, meaning ‘our John Abraham’. It was as if we knew the movie star, as if he belonged to us. We may never have laid eyes on our heroes and heroines in flesh and blood, yet they seem close, almost as if they were relatives.

This is true not just for fans who avidly follow the newspaper and magazine gossip surrounding these gods and goddesses of the screen. Even ordinary folk refer to the film stars in everyday conversations as if they were mutual acquaintances: Shah Rukh Khan is simply Shah Rukh; John Abraham is John, or Apna John; and Salman Khan is Salman, or just Sallu.

We next approached Galaxy Apartments, the home of Salman Khan, a megastar with a fan base any politician would envy. On this particular day, the crowd outside the apartments was large and restive. The presence of TV vans and cameras added to the excitement, so much so that it even caused the previously blasé rickshaw driver to slow down.

‘Why such a big crowd?’ he glanced back to ask.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Murli.’

‘Murli, this is Salman’s house.’

‘I know that,’ he said impatiently. ‘But what has happened? Why so many people? Why all these media people?’

‘Perhaps the fans have come to greet him after his release from jail.’

‘From jail? Why?’ I explained that there was a case registered against him in Rajasthan for killing a black buck, an endangered species of antelope, in 1998. Convicted in 50

Gyan Prakash

2006 and given a five-year-prison sentence, Salman Khan had appealed, but the higher court ruled against him. He was arrested and had to spend nearly a week in jail before he was released on bail. This crowd, including the media, had gathered to welcome him back to freedom. Murli nodded his head in understanding as he accelerated, expertly and nonchalantly navigating through the clusters of TV cameramen and joyous fans.

It is always an experience to ride auto-rickshaws in Mumbai. They take sharp corners to get ahead and whiz through narrow openings between cars, buses, and pedestrians. While your heart rushes to your mouth at every near miss, the driver coolly speeds on. I have often thought that drivers, as they steer through unruly traffic, must experience the city at the most elemental levels: speed, stasis, chaos and death afford them a visceral understanding of the world.

It is no wonder they are quick to share their unambiguous, no-holds-barred commentary on the city – about what it is, what ails it, what its future may be. I was about to be treated to such a narrative. It began with a question: ‘And what happened to that Sanju?’

Murli was referring to another court case involving a popular film star, Sanjay Dutt. The case went back to the 1992–3 Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai. In the tense atmosphere that gripped the city during that time, the actor had secured illegal weapons, including an AK-47 rifle, from a Muslim underworld don. The son of a Muslim mother and a Hindu father, both of whom were film stars of the 1950s, the actor said he had acquired the weapons because he feared his family would be attacked. In 2007, the court acquitted Sanjay Dutt of the more serious terrorism charges related to the 1993 bomb blasts in the city, but convicted him of illegal possession of weapons and ammunition. He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. I explained to Murli that Sanjay Dutt was free on bail granted by the Supreme Court and pending his appeal.

‘This country’s legal system needs a change,’ Murli said with disgust, shaking his head. ‘What is this? First he goes to jail, then comes out on bail, then the case resumes once again. Jail today and free tomorrow? If you have committed a crime, then you should pay for it! If you are in, then stay in; if you are out, then stay out. Why should this be? This in-and-out business has to go!’

I tried to explain the intricacies of the principle of innocence until proven guilty and the judicial process of appeal. Murli was having none of it. He 51

Bombay Setting

wanted a legal system free of ambiguities and dull due process. Either you were guilty or not, in or out. ‘No appeal-shapeel,’ he declared. As to why Sanjay Dutt had been released in spite of his evident guilt, Murli had an explanation.

‘He must have paid off the lawyers and judges.’

‘No, things don’t work like that in such prominent cases. He had a great lawyer.’

‘Not a great lawyer but a great dalal,’ he said contemptuously.

Dalal means an agent, but Murli used it to suggest its more colloquial connotation akin to a sleazy tout, or a wheeler-dealer. My defence of lawyers, in the form of an explanation that they plead cases on points of law and evidence, was summarily rejected. Hadn’t Sanjay Dutt got the guns from the underworld? Weren’t all the film stars in bed with them? Weren’t the dons financing films? Didn’t the stars go to Dubai to attend parties thrown by those matherchod [motherfuckers]? All this was true. In the nineties, the newspapers had published transcripts of phone conversations between certain movie stars and gangsters, suggesting their close connections. This was old news, I said. Besides, the lawyer must have secured Sanjay’s release on bail on some legal point.

Murli was adamant. ‘You can call him a lawyer, but he is just a dalal. A good dalal ! He got Sanjay released from jail.’

I knew that Murli spoke from his daily experiences in the city, where it was common to see auto-rickshaw drivers and taxi drivers hauled up on minor or trumped-up charges. The law they face is summary: either pay up or risk suspension of your licence. The force of the policeman’s authority is absolute. With this in mind, I relented a little. Perhaps the court had cut the star some slack because of who he was, I offered, but I reiterated that judges and lawyers had to be cautious when under the media’s glare. Money couldn’t have changed hands.

Murli took pity on my naïveté and decided to set me right.

‘Now, look at this bungalow.’ He gestured off to our left. ‘If you want to buy it, you will have to approach a powerful dalal. You cannot buy one without him greasing palms, right?’

‘Why not? I can buy anything if I have the money. All the dalal will do is put me in touch with the owner.’

‘Sir, you are educated but you don’t understand Bombay.’

‘You said Bombay, not Mumbai. Why?’ 52

Gyan Prakash

‘Arre, sir, if I were talking in Marathi I would have said Mumbai. But we are talking in Hindi.’

Actually, he was talking in Bambaiyya. But, in any case, he reaffirmed my sense that Mumbai had not completely replaced Bombay. For centuries the two names had coexisted. Speaking in Marathi or Gujarati you said Mumbai; in Hindi or English you said Bombay. When the nativist political party Shiv Sena came to power in 1995, they changed the official name to Mumbai in an effort to bolster their claim that the city belonged exclusively to Marathi speakers. Official letterheads and the names of government organizations and buildings changed. A state-sanctioned nativist ethos cast shadows over a city that had long advertised itself as cosmopolitan. Recently, the authorities withdrew Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey from the university curriculum under pressure from nativist activists who claimed that the novel offended Marathi sentiments.

In spite of such setbacks, everyday life has not bent to official dictates.

Exchanges and affinities across religious and ethnic boundaries have survived the nativist assault. As before, Mumbai remains an immigrant city: people continue to wash up on its shores and bring with them diverse religions, languages and cultures. Even the multiplicity of names survives. Murli was a Maharashtrian. It would have been perfectly understandable to hear him say Mumbai had he been speaking Marathi. But he was talking in Bambaiyya. It was all a matter of context.

‘Look at Bombay,’ he continued. ‘Yahaan, Asia ka setting hone wala hai.

Pura Asia ka.’

I understood the words, but they didn’t make sense. He was saying that there was going be a ‘setting’ for Asia, all of Asia. What did this mean? I asked him to explain.

‘Simple!’ he said in English. ‘The government has a plan. Remove all jhopadpatti [slums] and do a setting.’

‘What is this setting you are talking about?’

‘The government will give a 220-square-foot room to each poor family and tell them to live in it. What will they do with that?’

Murli had swiftly moved from a discourse on the legal system to one on slum rehabilitation schemes. The government had established the Slum Re­ habilitation Authority (SRA) in 1995 with a view to rehousing the vast population of slum inhabitants in Mumbai. Largely market-driven, the SRA 53

Bombay Setting

planned to sell slum lands to private developers who would provide housing to existing inhabitants in exchange for the right to develop the remaining land for commercial purposes.

A major target of the SRA has been Dharavi, commonly referred to as ‘Asia’s largest slum’. Adjacent to the banks and commercial offices of the Bandra-Kurla complex, Dharavi is a goldmine for builders, who stand to acquire 535 acres of prime land, in return for providing free apartments for 52,000 families and developing some public facilities. But since each ‘apartment’ is only to be 220 square feet, and the minimum distance between two buildings only five metres, the builders will have 20 million square feet to sell on the commercial market. Furthermore, the government will grant permission to build taller structures than usually allowed by building regulations. No wonder the builders have enthusiastically welcomed slum rehabilitation.

Murli was a Dharavi resident, and he was on to their game. ‘What am I going to do with 220 square feet? Look, I drive a scooter rickshaw. The government will give me a room. I live with my wife and two young sons. It is all right now, but what will happen when I die? The children will have grown.

They will have families. They can’t live in a single room. They will fight. So, what will they do? They will sell it and move out of Bombay.’

‘They could also move somewhere else in the city, ’ I suggested.

‘No, no. No one will be able to afford to live in the city. One by one everyone will have to sell their rooms.’

‘Why?’ ‘Builders will offer money to each one of them to move out. One by one, the rooms will be demolished and then towers will be built. There will be no jhopadpattis in Bombay. Only towers. This is the government’s plan. The city will have no poor. If your monthly income is at least Rs30,000 to 40,000 [US$650 to 900], you can afford to stay. Otherwise, out. You cannot stay here.

It is all decided.’

I finally understood what he meant by ‘setting’. It was not just that money had power but also that there was a plan to make it all-powerful. What was happening in the city was not due to the intrinsic potency of money but because of a conspiracy to give it supreme control. On the surface it appeared that Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt had been lawfully released but, actually, they were released because dalals worked behind the scene to set them free.

54

Gyan Prakash

The legal system and the principle of due process were just façades, just as the SRA schemes were merely covers to hide the gift of precious lands to builders.

The government, the builders and the legal system were working in tandem to make Mumbai the city of money. The fix was on.

Here it was, that visceral view, a reading of the city in all its rawness. Basic emotions such as greed and lust (in this case for power) were the currency of urban life. Politicians and planners and lawyers and judges were all to be bought. They danced to the jangle of money and worked to make Mammon their god.

‘Bombay will only run on setting. If you want money, come here. You won’t have to go to America any more. Even America will have to come here. Japan needs money? It will have to come here. All of Asia will have to come here. ’ And with this, Murli had shifted his argument, from insinuating that there was a conspiracy afoot to taking pride in the ‘setting’. All the breathless talk of ‘shining India’ and 8 per cent growth seemed to have rubbed off on him. He echoed the boosterish sentiments of the media, government, business elites and pundits that the future belonged to Asia. The new slogans boasted that Mumbai would be the new Shanghai, rather than the new London, or the next New York.

While he continued in this reverie of a fabulous future sloshing in money, I wondered how to make sense of this abrupt change in the meaning of the ‘setting’. Here was a migrant from a small town in Maharashtra, lured to the city by its promise of a livelihood, self-determination and freedom. He worked long days and faced regular humiliation at the hands of traffic policemen; his experience had taught him that money tainted the legal system. He entertained no hope of sharing the riches that Mumbai’s ‘setting’ pledged. He was even ready to write off to land sharks and builders the 220-square-feet ‘apartment’ in Dharavi. Nevertheless, none of this seemed to dim his eager anticipation of the city’s imagined future as Asia’s financial hub.

As the auto-rickshaw approached the café on Carter Road I paid Murli the fare and struggled to get my head around the wild swings of his stark philosophy. I remembered how he had begun with a question about the meaning of Mannat. Like many in Mumbai, he drank from the same well of movie magic. And, even as he was deeply convinced of their guilt, Sallu and Sanju were a part of his world. He was on a first name basis with John and Shah Rukh. One stance did not contradict the other; rather, it helped sustain 55

Bombay Setting

it. The darkness of ‘Bombay ka setting’ did not tarnish its shine but was made bearable by it.

It is our happy dreams that allow us to carry on, to endure the nightmares.

In this, Murli is not alone.

The fix is on.

56

Becak Mark Ikin

57

Becak

58

Mark Ikin

I

ndriati grew up in Java and regularly took a becak to and from school – usually with her brother and sister, all of them fighting to avoid the middle seat, just as I had done with my siblings in the family car in Australia. Her family often used this mode of transport and it evokes in her feelings of nostalgia for a simpler time.

To her delight, and despite the myriad changes to towns like Solo in central Java – such as the steady traffic of fume-spewing trucks and cars – the amiable tukang becak, the pedicab drivers, were still smiling and ready to serve.

The becak is hardly the anachronism the rickshaw has become in Hong Kong; it is still a much-used and loved mode of transport in Indonesian towns and cities. And while heavier traffic has lessened its ubiquity, most street corners will have at least one tukang becak ready and waiting for passengers. Indeed, outside any pasar you will find a line of ten or more waiting to pick up shoppers with the bags of goods they’ve bought at the market.

The lean drivers will take almost any burden, hopping off to push if the overloaded vehicle proves too heavy to pedal. They are never perturbed if you wake them from a well-earned nap because you require a ride, or even if you just want to ask them for directions. Despite the difficulty and danger of their occupation, and especially given the poor road conditions and the dense traffic, the drivers take pride in their work and their machines.

We saw the towns of Java from the seat of a becak. In Solo other drivers raced against ours, and at times we sheltered from the rain under a plastic sheet while our driver pedalled on. We choked in traffic as our driver negotiated the busy streets of Malang; in Blitar we enjoyed a quiet Sunday touring the town and visiting the grave of the country’s beloved first president Sukarno.

Along the way we developed a deep respect for the drivers’ skill and endur­ ance, and for their willingness and kindness. As I watched Indriati lapse into reverie I was happy – most of the time – for the chance to share a slow trip down her memory lane and around the colourful towns of Java.

59

Becak

60

Mark Ikin

61

Becak

62

Mark Ikin

63

Becak

64

Mark Ikin

65

Trina Gaynon

Marriage In winter, wrap yourself in a kimono the shade of plum blossoms, white with a red lining, tints of the last blossom and the first snowfall, layered with others, holding the heat close to the body. Two pieces of cloth sewn together, cut to the same size, make every kimono.

Two hundred rules apply to the colors worn and how they are combined for each season.

Each is tied to close it, the knot a resting place for the soul and each knot different.

And the year turns to shades of wisteria, lavender for spring, lined in blue. Winter garments are folded away. Others come out of chests, the seams unsewn for cleaning, then basted together again. Wrapped in a kimono, movement becomes slower, balanced, easier.

Tradition offers harmony. Yet each will shape itself to the body that it holds.

66

The Ferry E. V. Slate

O

n the first day of their last vacation together, Mr and Mrs Seah waited to board the ferry that would take them across the strait to a resort on Bulan Island. This was low season, just before the southwest monsoon, and since they were the only guests waiting on the dock they expected to be given a lot of attention. A trinket salesman, a handsome young Malay in black trousers and a blue batik shirt, came down to meet them on the ramp. Mrs Seah, mistaking him for a porter, handed over her rose-patterned suitcase. Smiling, the young man took both their bags and quickly led them past the crew, who were crouched under the pilot house and eating nasi lemak from bowls made of banana leaf.

Mr Seah shook his head at the air-conditioned lower deck, so they climbed up the steps and sat on wooden chairs shaded by a faded tarpaulin that sagged in the middle and nearly touched their heads. The young man put down the suitcases and, backing away from Mrs Seah with a series of little bows meant to hold her gaze, slipped behind his booth and began whisking red silk handkerchiefs from his wares.

‘So hot, lah,’ Mrs Seah said as she took from her bag an ivory fan, flicking it so that the little slats went click-click-click as it opened. ‘So still.’

Just when they were about to call for drinks a bow-legged old man came up the steps with two glasses of milky tea.

‘What’s the hold-up?’ Mrs Seah asked him. She fished in her bag again for a tissue to wipe the rims.

The old man nodded and smiled.

‘What’s the hold-up?’ Mrs Seah asked him again, this time in Malay.

The crew, he answered, were waiting for the hotel’s daily order of vegetables.

Ten minutes later, when they were still waiting, Mrs Seah turned to her husband and said, ‘Whoever is responsible should be shot.’

67

The Ferry

This was something Mr Seah had heard so many times that he hardly noticed the words, just the warning that Mrs Seah was becoming peckish. She would snap at the maids, at the driver, at a salesgirl in a shop, and Mr Seah would have to intervene in his kindly way to smooth things over. This time, though, he glanced at his wife so quickly that one of the muscles in his neck went into spasm.

He imagined the crew roused from their naps, lined up on the dock in their flip-flops, cotton T-shirts and shorts and summarily shot. By whom? he wondered, rubbing his neck. Not his dainty Singaporean housewife, barely one and a half metres tall, her hair brushed that morning into a wispy confection that hid a recent bout of baldness. She might stand beside the gunman, the way she usually did with the gardener, pointing out where he should plant the new seedlings. Mr Seah supposed he would be the one who would have to do the shooting. Strangely enough, he had a gun and three bullets in his satchel, which was why on this morning he was feeling so unlike himself.

He had bought them as a set – the gun and bullets – from the slimshouldered boy he had paid five ringgits to look after his Mercedes-Benz in the car park. It had been a fatherly compulsion to take something dangerous away from a child. That and an inclination to buy, for a good price (only seventyfive ringgits), as others had always bought from him for whatever sum he had convinced them was a bargain at the time.

He always joked that his education had been interrupted by history too many times for him to succeed in anything but sales, that arena for the unschooled.

First the Japanese occupation and then, in ’56, the communist riots at Chinese High School that culminated (for him at least) in a tug on his sleeve as he was about to slip through the back gate one night. Four friends had been waiting on Bukit Timah Road with their haversacks and boat tickets to China. Strident letters from Guangzhou arrived, some confiscated by his father, and then, all at once, the silence of the Cultural Revolution. Much later, the two who survived sent intermittent requests for loans and handouts; there were children to be put through school. It was the least Mr Seah could do. To keep him out of trouble, even if that trouble meant school, his father had sent him to work for a marine safety company at Collyer Quay, which Mr Seah eventually bought, expanded and reluctantly sold, at his wife’s insistence, just five years ago.

*** 68

E. V. Slate

‘Madam, Madam!’ The trinket salesman beckoned Mrs Seah with coconutshell serving spoons, songkets and batik place mats. As soon as she left his side, Mr Seah felt as though a blanket that was making him just a little too hot had been lifted from his shoulders. He tilted his chair back, closed his eyes and tried not to think of the gun. Where did he find it, that boy? Mr Seah hadn’t had time to ask – his wife had been less than ten metres away, pawing through durians at a makeshift market. When they reached the hotel, he decided, he would go for a swim and sink the gun.

Thinking of the weapon made him slightly ill; it made him think of the war, of the Japanese, but he didn’t want to think of the Japanese, so he thought instead of his daughter Puay, studying in the United States. People there were known to shoot each other all the time. It was an American custom; it was even written into their constitution that they be allowed to do this.

Would she ever come home to them? His children had never been Chinese enough, in his eyes; now they weren’t even Singaporean, though they certainly missed their mother’s Nonya cooking. They lived in corporate apartments, shopping malls and airports, in the cables that stretched across the Pacific Ocean.

If he were caught with the gun he would be imprisoned in a Malaysian jail.

How would that figure in their emails or text messages?

During the long school holidays, Mr and Mrs Seah used to drive over the causeway into Malaysia. Fishermen in those days were glad to make a few extra ringgits renting out their beachside huts. Sometimes his younger brother would follow in his own car and they would take two huts side by side. They fished in the mornings and dozed all afternoon. His brother’s wife would dash in and out of the waves in her American bikini. Mrs Seah would peer up into the trees and wander until she found a shady spot with no ripe coconuts overhead. Then she would arrange her folding beach chair, needlepoint basket and stack of Australian and British magazines. The children – Puay, her brother Teck and their twin cousins – all as brown as Malays, snorkelled and explored the shore. Far, far out they would go, until their sleek heads seemed nothing more than small lava rocks, the shiny rounded tips of vast underwater mountains. He never worried about them when they were in the water. They came ashore glistening, their bathing suits hanging from their bodies, so hungry, thirsty and tired that they fell asleep 69

The Ferry

right after dinner. Only years later did his heart twist with regret when he overheard them reminiscing at family reunions: ‘Remember the time we swam into that sea cave and couldn’t find our way out? We almost drowned!

And Mum and Daddy just sitting on the beach, lah, so clueless!’

While his platinum card was being processed at reception, Mr Seah noticed a pretty young woman sitting behind the travel-services desk. That’s what his daughter would look like, he thought, if she applied make-up and had her hair done the way her mother was always suggesting. This young woman was gazing at her mouth in a compact mirror and smudging it with a thick wedge of lipstick the colour of mangosteen skin.

Later, after he had tipped the bellboy, turned off the air conditioning and opened the glass doors to the balcony of their suite, Mr Seah thought with pity of the young woman. She might not have had the advantages he had given his own children. But then travel-service desks always gave him an uneasy feeling.

They were a constant reminder that he and Mrs Seah would soon be leaving – they almost made him want to check out sooner, to make arrangements to go to a better place, if there were one.

After Mrs Seah finished in the bathroom and told Mr Seah to put on a clean shirt, they went down for noodles in the garden café. The waiter showed them to a table in front of a miniature waterfall that trickled over a basin of artfully placed rocks. The only other diners, a heavy-set Australian with an angular crew cut and a Malaysian beauty who was obviously not his wife, seemed embarrassed to be seen together. So Mr and Mrs Seah sipped their lime juices and out of courtesy pretended not to notice them.

When he had first seen his wife walking in the Botanic Gardens, one of many white-frocked students from Raffles Girls’ School, he thought, Impossible, impossible, but he had fallen in love at that moment and wouldn’t be talked out of it. He worked for six lonely years to accrue enough in his bank account to gain the approval of the Lims. And all because she was so pretty, so fair for being a Nonya and therefore a small portion Malay. Her skin then was the colour of apple flesh and she had such thin, delicate features, offset by her dark, liquid, almost round Malay eyes.

She had grown up in a stately villa along Cluny Road. Mr Seah’s father had done well enough before the war to move his family out of Chinatown 70

E. V. Slate

after only ten years in the colony, but their bungalow, located straight down from the causeway, had been confiscated by the Japanese on the second day of the invasion. His father went into hiding during the Sook Ching purges, when so many Chinese men and boys were rounded up and shot in rows along the beaches of Changi and Punggol. He hadn’t been able to go back to work during the occupation, and even now Mr Seah remembered his mother lifting a meagre piece of chicken with her chopsticks, wondering which child to give it to.

‘Daddy,’ Mrs Seah said. ‘I guess I’ll go to the gift shop. See what they have there, lah. Maybe the same things I got on the ferry, only more expensive.’

‘Don’t worry, get what you like. Let’s enjoy ourselves.’

Mr Seah signed the café bill, though he couldn’t remember his room number or even which floor they were on. He considered going for a swim, to sink the gun, but he was afraid it would slip from his towel on the way to the beach. Anyway, he felt too sluggish. The sea breeze rustled the leaves of the frangipani trees and caressed his face and neck so gently that he could almost feel himself in a skiff, drifting out to sea. How pleasant to close one’s eyes, to make believe as he sometimes did that the last moment of life would be something like this: the gentle tug of a boat tied to a dock, the rope cut and released, the utter lack of interest in the doings of the world.

But the dream was interrupted by the clatter of dishes as the waiter cleared the table and Mr Seah opened his eyes to find himself looking directly at the woman sitting at the other table. She was not as young as she had seemed.

Pretty – in a yellow sundress he had seen hanging in the gift-shop window – but he couldn’t help noticing the tawny scars of sores up and down her ankles and calves. The Australian by her side seemed uneasy. He kept glancing at Mr Seah, but Mr Seah averted his eyes and, feeling no other escape, closed them again. Let the poor woman enjoy her stay here, he thought. He drifted off again with the sensation of his head bobbing in water.

That afternoon he found the young woman at the travel-services desk leafing through a glossy fashion magazine. She slid it into a drawer as he sat on the teak captain’s chair facing her and lit a cigarette.

‘Yes, Uncle? How may I help you?’ She spoke with a strong Singaporean accent that made him think of hawker centres and crowded wet markets. Sylvia 71

The Ferry

Wong, the nameplate on her desk read. Sylvia Wong had a buoyant hairdo and a warm smile crowded with oversized teeth. In his younger days he would have smiled back. Now, he sighed and picked a fleck of tobacco leaf off his tongue.

‘Enjoying your stay here?’ she asked. ‘Nice and quiet this time of year. Have you stayed with us before?’

‘Oh, yes. Maybe two years ago, though usually we just fly to Penang.’

‘And where do you stay there?’

‘At the Shangri-La, Rasa Sayang.’

‘I did my internship there!’ She brightened. They could talk resorts all day.

Bali, Phuket, Koh Samui. Hyatts, Meridians, the Sheraton Grande Lagoon.

Then they could move on to any continent she liked. Since he had retired and sold the bulk of his businesses seven and a half years ago, Mr Seah and his wife had been to Australia; three times to Europe; the United States, to visit Puay each year; and most recently Vancouver, where they had clothed themselves in puffy down jackets with the labels sewn on the outside and boarded a cruise to Alaska. Of course, they had taken the obligatory tours to Egypt, Israel and the Greek islands. They had seen and smelled many things. They had ridden high on the backs of elephants, something neither of them had ever expressed a desire to do. They found Chinatown wherever they went and it was up to Mr Seah to have a special word with the chef in Cantonese or Hokkien so they could enjoy the only cuisine they really liked to eat: home-style cooking. Stirfried vegetables, light on the oil and garlic, steamed fish if they could find it, prawns, the tender dark meat of chicken thighs.

‘Would you be able to do something for me?’ Mr Seah asked.

‘Of course! I can arrange your connections, make reservations. How about a cruise of the strait islands?’

‘I would like to stay with my wife on a beach.’

Sylvia Wong blinked. ‘You mean a different beach?’

‘No, not a resort. No tourists, please. Can you arrange it with some local fishermen?’

‘Fishermen? You must be joking, lah!’

That night over plates of mee siam and sambal pomfret that could not compare with her own recipes, Mrs Seah told him that the next day she would be lunching with some ladies she had met at the spa. Mr Seah intended to wake before dawn and go for a swim to take care of the gun. But the next morning he 72

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overslept and woke feeling congested. His wife lay snoring softly by his side, her hair flattened beneath the net she wore on her head; the side of her chest, where her left breast had once been, resembling that of a small boy. He remained still while she woke, got out of bed and showered. She was meeting the ladies at noon. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten to pack the strappy sandals that matched the purple-flowered blouse she wanted to wear. After she closed the door behind her, the metallic smell of her perfume made him think she was still there.

Finally, Mr Seah turned off the air conditioning, opened the glass doors and started his stretching exercises on the balcony, but it didn’t feel right: his chi was blocked. He leaned from side to side and looked longingly at the water he could only just see between the palm trees. The pool, in imitation of a winding river, snaked along the grass under his window, where workers in rubber boots and straw hats were planting daisies. Before reaching the sea it emptied into an infinity pool, where sunburned ang mohs were showing off their Olympic strokes or lying as if drugged in the full sun.

Someone was knocking on his door. When he opened it, in his boxers and tank top, he saw by the maid’s expression how he must look, and felt like an intruder in his own room.

‘Uncle, how are you this morning? Have you eaten?’ Sylvia asked with a snap and click of her make-up containers. She hid them away in her desk drawer, where she seemed to keep all manner of things. ‘Enjoying your stay yet? You know, we have a shadow-puppet performance this evening, if you choose the round-the-world buffet.’

‘What we were talking about yesterday . . .’

‘Oh, that! Maybe I didn’t understand you.’ She covered her mouth in embarrassment. ‘Did you want to go fishing? Because I can easily charter a boat for you.’ She was offering him back his face, as any good daughter would.

‘No, no. Well, I do want to fish. At the sort of place we used to stay when the children were small.’

‘Oh, my parents are like that too! So nostalgic, lah. But I don’t even think those old places exist anymore. You know the Malaysians, they live in very nice houses these days!’

Mr Seah lit a cigarette. The last time they had gone to see Puay, neither he nor Mrs Seah had been able to sleep on the flight. They had flipped through 73

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magazines and pointed at pictures that reminded them of something, other trips they had taken. Up and down turbulence over the Pacific was followed by thunderstorms swirling around the Great Lakes. They had economized by sitting in coach because they were feeling a little guilty about spending the children’s inheritance on all these pleasure trips. But everything felt different in coach: bumpier, with less room to breathe and be oneself. When they got to Ann Arbor, Puay took them to eat without even giving them a chance to freshen up. She pointed to her own chin to show Mr Seah where he had a dab of mustard, a grain of rice. She made an impatient, suckingin-of-the-saliva sound to stop Mrs Seah, just in time, from walking into the men’s room. Later that night, he couldn’t sleep and got up to find something to read. The shag carpeting felt soft and forgiving under his bare feet and as he padded past the kitchen, swinging his arms to get the blood flowing, he saw his daughter illuminated by her desk lamp, her stockinged feet propped up on her schoolbooks. ‘I can’t wait for them to leave so we can be together,’ she was whispering into her mobile. ‘So troublesome, I can’t stand it. I think they must be going senile. What? Quite old already. Must be in their sixties or more.’

‘No!’ Mr Seah pounded his fist on the travel-services desk, making Sylvia Wong flinch. ‘They do exist! Arrange it by tomorrow morning, or we’ll check out and arrange it ourselves, like we used to do.’

The next day Mr Seah woke before sunrise, and for once he wasn’t thinking about the gun. He lingered over a bowl of porridge in the restaurant, alone except for the waiters who rushed by with lidded silver platters to set out on the buffet tables. Then he went to the lobby, retrieved the previous day’s newspapers from the rack and sat down on one of the rattan couches under the birdcages. He read, again, about the unchecked forest fires in Indonesia that were smothering Singapore with smoke and haze. He crossed his legs and listened to the fretting of the birds.

‘Oh, Uncle, you’re here early, lah! Never mind, I’ve got it all arranged.

It wasn’t easy, you know, but I did it especially for you. You can leave on the afternoon ferry, how’s that?’

Mr Seah answered by handing Sylvia Wong a generous tip in crisp Singaporean dollars. *** 74

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Mr and Mrs Seah boarded the ferry along with a Korean couple dressed in golfing attire. The trinket salesman came down the ramp and he and Mrs Seah greeted each other like old friends. She had bought a straw bag to hold all her purchases from the previous two days, and they each tugged on the handle, laughing over who should carry it.

At lunch, Mr Seah had told her that he had made other arrangements for their stay. He could tell she was expecting a surprise, some extravagance, like when he upgraded their tour of England to the staying-at-castles option without telling her until the bus pulled up at the first moat.

They sat on the upper deck again and Mrs Seah began rearranging her gifts in the straw bag. As she was putting things back a glossy brochure fell at Mr Seah’s feet: Little Bulan Island – Pulau Bulan Kecil – twelve nautical miles to their east. A resort run by the same management as their hotel but apparently as a cut-rate version. Blue-painted bungalows crammed together on a small beach, blonde women basking in the sun, teenagers slicing the sea on waterscooters. How relieved he was that they would never have to stay at a place like that.

‘Where did you get this?’ Mr Seah asked, crushing the brochure.

‘Hey, don’t throw that away, Daddy! Sylvia wrote the sales manager’s name on it – an old school chum of hers. He’s going to give us the VIP cabin for half price!’

So, his wife and Sylvia Wong had made their own arrangements. Humour the old man, he imagined them saying. He’ll think he’s having an adventure.

He felt his face flush, his throat tighten. Didn’t she, Mrs Seah, remember how happy they had been, sleeping under mosquito nets those long years ago, within reach of their children and lulled by the murmurs of the sea?

His eyes filled with tears. But then, blinking them away, he saw a strip of golden sand, a long stretch of shallow water the colour of liquid sapphire. The beach seemed to be deserted, though he could make out the straw roof of at least one hut.

Mr Seah was aware that sometimes he forgot the power of money. Since retirement, it had been easy to think that people did things for them out of kindness, friendship or as special favours. The ferry captain was not his friend.

He made Mr Seah very glad that he had stopped at the bank and money changer before leaving Singapore. Not long after he discovered the brochure, 75

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the ferry made a wide turn, retraced its own wake and turned again. An old wooden lifeboat the crew used as a dinghy was lowered over the transom.

At first Mrs Seah refused to budge from her beach chair but in the end she had to relent: it was one of the few things a man of Mr Seah’s generation could still count on. She was silent, her face rigid as he helped her down into the boat.

She sat with her suitcase pressed between her knees, her hands gripping the gunwale, and wouldn’t look at him.

The trinket salesman leaned over the railing and said something to her in Malay that Mr Seah didn’t catch. At first the young man had tried to intervene, but after Mr Seah raised his fists to him, ready to fight them all if necessary, Mrs Seah sighed as if being deflated and waved the salesman away. He had wanted to go with them, to row, he said, but Mr Seah had shoved him away.

Perhaps Mr Seah had always known he would end up in one of his own lifeboats.

Perhaps that was why he refused to cut costs, even when his young managers lectured him in their tiresome way on the fundamentals of profit margins. His lifeboats, even these old ones, were extremely seaworthy and easy to row. Or, perhaps because he knew how sturdy they were, how they would ride endlessly up and down swells, he was a little too eager to get into one with his wife and make his own way. This had been the first business he had bought, the last one he’d sold. Highly profitable in its own way; every ship needs lifeboats. And it had always been a pleasure to see his safety equipment on board seagoing vessels all over the world. Mrs Seah didn’t share his enthusiasm. Whenever new friends asked them what Mr Seah did for a living, she always named the business he had sold first: insurance.

He rowed wildly in the beginning because he knew they were all watching: the captain, the crew, the trinket salesman, even the Korean couple sitting on the lower deck. Let them enjoy Little Bulan Island. Fools. Riding in chilled-air comfort, passengers, tourists of their fate!

Finally, after a few minutes, the ferry restarted and pulled away, creating in its wake a fast-moving swell that gave him a rest from rowing and broke his wife’s silence with a screech.

Time, Mr Seah couldn’t help noticing, passed slowly in a lifeboat. The shore seemed far away. The sun seemed to shine from every angle, even from beneath them. The sea, though calm and clear, seemed unpredictable, even malevolent, now that they were dependent on it. He started rowing again, 76

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pulling on the starboard oar to straighten the boat, but his muscles had tightened while they were riding the ferry’s wake and he felt an angry spasm in the flat of his lower back.

‘Did you hurt your back again, Daddy?’ Mrs Seah asked.

‘No, no. I feel fine. Strong,’ he said, thankful that she had spoken to him.

Now he was rowing through his pain as well as through the water.

Just when he was sure he couldn’t continue, he looked down and saw a pink and yellow coral garden. He peeled off his shirt and tipped the boat dangerously as he slipped, stiffly and with great pain, into the sea. The water felt cool and bracing. Mrs Seah began scolding him, but he only gave her a reassuring look, took hold of the rope and began to tread over the reef in his leather sandals.

The water numbed his back. The reflection of the sun sent sparks into his eyes whenever he blinked. Slowly he felt himself coming alive. This was all it took to feel young again! He wasn’t going to spend his last years sitting on balconies and checking in and out of hotels. He sent the striped triggerfish scattering in his wake, then felt them come back and make furtive bites at the back of his calves.

Mr Seah staggered as he dragged the boat up the beach. She reached for him and he carried her like a child to the dry sand. There were no boats, no fishermen to be seen on either side of the cove. The hut he had spotted from the ferry was made of planks and seemed to be nothing but the remains of a small barracks. He knew that Vietnamese boat people had been housed for years on some of the strait islands. He had read about it in the newspapers.

‘Did you bring a fishing rod, Daddy?’

Mr Seah froze. There hadn’t been one for sale in the gift shop at the hotel.

In the rush to settle the deal with the captain, he had forgotten to buy one from the crew. In a week the ferry would be back for them, but how could they live for a week without a fishing rod?

Mrs Seah pushed open the door of the barracks, took a quick look inside, then sat on the steps with her hands on her knees. Mr Seah pretended not to hear her sniff, sniff, sniff.

With his back turned to her, he went to his satchel and pulled out the gun. How fortunate that he hadn’t thrown it away earlier! It was heavy with purpose, a wonderfully good fit in his hands. He fiddled with it and managed to load one of the bullets. He cocked it the way he had seen it done in American movies.

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He slipped out of his heavy sandals and waded into the water. The little fish scattered, but after a while returned and swam around his legs. He imagined stir-fried fish fillets seasoned with oyster sauce, pea sprouts and steaming, white fluffy rice. He lost track of time as sweat dripped down his forehead and neck.

Squinting, he thought he saw something: a garoupa hovering in tendrils of seaweed. Slowly, stealthily, Mr Seah held the gun up and tilted his wrist down.

He aimed, readjusted, aimed again and pulled the trigger.

Nothing. Was it defective? He moved a little piece from up to down and tried again, pulling slightly on the trigger, as if it were a camera shutter, to see if it had any give. Crack! The gun went off and Mr Seah fell backwards into the water.

Mrs Seah was yelling at him from the shore but he couldn’t hear her; his ears were ringing: Waah-Waah-Waah. He stood up and was relieved to see that he hadn’t shot himself, that he had even managed to hold up the gun, again like a camera, to keep it dry. One bullet wasted! How loud that was, and the splash it made! Or had that been him falling?

‘Daddy, Daddy!’ Mrs Seah splashed out and clung to him, shaking. When she saw he was unhurt she hit him, hard, on a shoulder with her little fist.

‘What are you doing with that gun? Does it come with flares? We can paddle out and send one off and they’ll come back and rescue us.’

How could she have so little confidence in him, he who had been providing for her and their children for the last thirty-six years? He was about to say this when he spotted the fish, bobbing towards them. He had shot it!

They had a fire, thanks to Mrs Seah, who had taken a book of matches from the room because it had the hotel’s phone number on it. They laughed about it as they cooked the fish. Food made everything right. If only they had something to drink! Mrs Seah had found a coconut on the ground but they had no way of opening it. If Mr Seah smashed it with a rock they would lose the juice. The small knife he kept on his keychain had been handy enough for cleaning the fish, but the blade was too small for anything else. As the bloody flesh of the garoupa turned white on the stick, Mr Seah tried not to think of his thirst.

Surely they could manage for a week. Their standards would change. Their stomachs would shrink the way they did whenever they went on holiday and couldn’t find Chinese food. Hadn’t they lived off Ritz crackers and processed 78

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cheese that time in Israel, when the tour guide had been so weak from fasting that she couldn’t show them around and all the restaurants around their hotel had been closed?

Later, while they sat cross-legged on the sand, picking at the fish with their fingers, Mrs Seah asked him: ‘Where did you shoot it?’

‘Right out there, you saw me.’

‘No, I mean where, in the tail, the eye? There’s still so much meat, you eat some, lah, don’t give it all to me.’

Mr Seah hadn’t noticed where he had shot the fish. He had been so excited, so hungry, he had taken out his keychain knife with a flourish, the keychain his wife hated because she said one day he would stab himself in the hand when he started the car. He had cleaned it right away while Mrs Seah collected driftwood for a fire.

‘Oh, in the tail. Or I might have stunned it to death.’

‘Stunned it to death? Then why didn’t all the fish in the sea float to the surface, instead of just this one?’

‘Anyway, tomorrow I’ll fashion a rod of some sort. Did you bring any string with you?’

‘String, no, why would I bring string? If you had told me we were coming to a place like this, I would have stocked up! Remember all the things I used to pack in the old days? Tins of soup, instant noodles, fish floss to sprinkle on toast. So inventive, the way I used to pack all sorts of things that would keep.’

‘I remember Ah Di and I used to fish –’ ‘Yes, Daddy, but not enough to feed us. The fish was like a side dish, lah.

And not even every day. Too hot to stand out there in the sun all day!’

Mr Seah didn’t remember it that way.

At sunset Mrs Seah vomited into the sea. She ran down to the shore and bent over, so that the regurgitated fish went straight into the water and not onto her legs. Swish, swish, she scattered it all away with her foot.

On the second and third occasions she lay in the sand and scooped out a hole. The powdery sand stuck to her hair and to the tears on her cheeks and chin. Mr Seah told himself that ever since her chemotherapy her stomach had been tricky. If only he could give her some water or, better yet, some ginger tea with honey. He chiselled into the coconut with his knife. In the morning he would be able to find her some fruit, but not now: the jungle behind them 79

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had become dark and forbidding. Monkeys screeched high in the trees. Bats twisted and made short dives.

How long had the fish been dead when it floated by? It had not tasted bad, though he had hardly eaten any of it. Mrs Seah should have noticed; didn’t she go to the wet market every week? She told the fishmongers she wanted snapper for sushi even when she was making curry.

Mr Seah dug a hole in the ground and helped Mrs Seah sit over it. She was moaning and really not in her right mind. Mr Seah hoped she wouldn’t remember this, how he had helped her take off her shorts and underpants and squat in the sand. He had many jobs to do but really, only one. Keep the fire going, which meant venturing to the dark edges of the jungle after he had used all the driftwood along the shore. Keep Mrs Seah comfortable, keep her from fouling herself, keep her head propped up, keep her warm by the fire, though she insisted that it was the fire that was making her cold. Never mind the mosquitoes. Keep drilling into the coconut – give her something to drink!

Take care of her. Night lasted for twelve hours so close to the equator. How he wished they were on their Alaskan cruise, that time they had stayed up until three in the morning because it was too light to sleep. They had giggled like children and leaned on each other as they made their way through the corridor to their cabin.

At first light Mr Seah pushed the lifeboat out with Mrs Seah curled up in the stern. He couldn’t take the chance of missing the morning ferry as it passed by. He had lost face even in his own eyes and now he would gladly kowtow to them all. The captain. The trinket salesman. Sylvia Wong. Without a dollar in his pocket he would beg them to rush Mrs Seah to a hospital on the mainland.

Yet he couldn’t stop thinking about the gun, the two bullets he had left.

Did it hurt to be shot? Would you have time to hear it, to be frightened of the sound before you realised what was happening? In a situation like this it was possible to regret not only what you had done but what you would be willing to do to try to fix it.

Mrs Seah had scratched the skin around her lips red and rashy yet, even after so many hours of pain, she leaned up towards him with a hopeful look.

He stopped rowing long enough to drop the gun overboard. Plunk. Only then did it occur to him that he could have used it to alert the ferry crew. The sound of its firing would have been amplified over the water.

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He dipped an oar to fish it out but the gun was gone. It was too late. It had been too late for years to do anything but ride these last waves into shore. If only he had known – pedalling his bicycle through the wet streets along the godowns, steering with one hand, holding an umbrella over his head with the other – not how short life would be, but how little he would make of it.

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Personal ad from Chinese mainlander posted in Central, Hong Kong. Notice reads: ‘Want to remarry. Age doesn’t matter…slight disability OK…I’m a 45-year-old widower…healthy…my son is a university graduate and married…have worked as a welder for many years…ideal man.’ Black graffiti tag reads ‘Storm Kids’. Photograph

by John Batten (2011).

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Andrew Barker

from The Village Prologue 1 The band around her neck rusts open, Unclips, falls in pagoda curves Through Yellow River waters. Broken, An instinct he refined, to serve, To dive for all that moves beneath her . . .

It’s gone. A weight is there no longer.

A world has changed. A time has passed.

The master on the bamboo raft Is lying, quiet, still: this master Who tied her neck. She could not eat The fish she brought in throat and beak, To choke-up for him. Since her capture She’s only eaten what he’s fed.

This master lies beneath her. Dead.

2 Cold tips of cold hand trail in water, The other hand upon his chest Is nudged aside. Deceased, its owner Spans wide his skiff in crucifix.

Her wings rise slow in mirror-image Of bone-thin man beneath. A visage Deep-lined by situation. Here 83

from The Village

Made him so. He, not it, made her.

In shallows, mud-crusted buffalo Wallow. The bamboo raft floats by.

Silence. Then the cormorant cries As if to say: ‘I outlasted you.’

Her time to leave. Her wings are dry.

She dips her beak. Pecks out his eyes.

3 From karsts to wetlands, on through cities She flies, so hungry, never sure The food she earns is hers. Though freed she Will choke on freedoms swallowed – for How many find the world confusing?

How many, given it, can’t use it?

She never settles, flies afraid Of memories that refuse to fade.

O’er mountain tops, she comes to land on A human-dense, hard, high-peaked karst.

So long she’s flown. She now will rest.

She’s crossed the backs of nine dead dragons, To land on ferry-railing rungs.

She waits, then opens wide her wings.

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Lakshmi © Arun Venkatesan

The Sacred Cow Sindhu Rajasekaran nd I never thought this day would come, but here I am, sitting in front of the ritual fire, repeating Sanskrit mantras I don’t understand. He’s looking at me now, and I can feel it on my skin. We are getting married.

Damini is locked away somewhere in a room, Lakshmi’s at Lord Krishna’s feet in the heavens, and I’m going to be his wife.

We moved into the new house on the corner of the street next to the village well, and that’s when I first saw her. They made her walk around the house, to bring us good luck. She smelled like warm milk and hay, was covered in turmeric paste, and a bell was hanging around her neck. Her hock looked so bent I thought she was born deformed. When her hoof touched the mud‑plastered 85

The Sacred Cow

ground, it made a noise like the click of chalk on a blackboard. She chewed and dribbled as she walked around the house with her mother, and I asked my father if I could keep her.

I did not know then that a day like this would come.

Father had said, ‘The calf belongs with the mother, Kayal, my dear girl.

Look, she’s so puny. She needs to get strong first.’

‘Iyo! Appa, how long will that take?’ I had asked, not looking away from Lakshmi even once. That’s when I named her. I always knew she’d be mine.

‘Maybe two months or so,’ Appa had said, and started discussing something important with Udayan Maama. And Amma always told me not to interrupt men when they were talking.

Lakshmi did look thin. Her coat of white-and-brown hair was patchy and looked soaked. She wouldn’t leave her mother, Bhagyam, and was very shy. I tried to separate her from Bhagyam every way possible, so that I could play with her. I tempted Lakshmi with grains, hay, terracotta toys, even my favourite cart. She had a glaze over her eyes, and I wondered what she thought about.

The cow boy, Ramu, who had accompanied Bhagyam and Lakshmi, said they lived nearby, in a shack behind Kittu Maama’s house.

Amma forced me to go inside to participate in the rest of the ceremonies, but I wanted to play with Lakshmi. The mantras the priest chanted while sitting next to the fire – I never understood a word of them, they were all in Sanskrit, but Amma and Appa always looked mesmerized. I don’t think they understood what the words meant either.

‘Kayal, pray properly,’ my Amma prodded me, but I could not help peeping out of the main door to see if Lakshmi were still there.

I reminded my parents about Lakshmi every day of that first month in the new village. Even all the games I played revolved around her. That’s when I became friends with Damini, Udayan Maama’s daughter. We became close right away. She showed me around the whole village, the mango farms, the lakes, and the temples of the scary goddess, Kali. I told her about Lakshmi, and she was immediately interested, but I did not know then that this day would come.

Damini and I used to play in the cowshed where Lakshmi lived, getting our long skirts dirty, which our mothers hated. Kittu Maama’s wife had no children but she liked me, and let me play with the cows as long as I wanted.

She did not like Damini much, because Damini would always break things like water pots or ploughs in that old cowshed of grimy pillars.

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My favourite game was to hold Lakshmi’s long tail and run behind her. I made sure that Lakshmi saw me every day, so it wouldn’t be hard for her when she came to live with us.

Appa decided to buy Lakshmi for me only after Amma convinced him: ‘It’ll improve our standing in society, to own a cow,’ she argued.

‘That is true, but it’s so expensive to maintain one, we’d need a shack, a cow boy . . .’

‘Iyo! Don’t argue so much. It’s auspicious to own a cow. All of Bhagvan’s blessings will be on us,’ Amma said, pursing her thin lips but somehow grinning at the same time, smiling the way she did when she wanted Appa to concede to something. I always wondered what secrets that smile held.

Appa did buy Lakshmi the very next day, and I swore I’d become like Amma when I grew up. Even though I knew I was not as beautiful, I learned to smile like her. She has a delicate, parrot nose, but I have Appa’s nose, bulgy like a red pepper. She is fair, but I’m dark like Appa.

The day Lakshmi came to our house there was a fight in the village. A Muslim man had slaughtered a Hindu man’s wandering cow. There was rioting, and people walked in groups holding knives and burning torches. Fights were common in the village but my street’s people did not get involved, so we weren’t usually worried by them. Also, the Muslims lived far away in other settlements in the village, and we hardly ever had to see them. People from my side of the village were all pure Hindus, and we never mingled with the Muslims, even in business.

Amma often told me about how the Muslims eat God’s animals, including cows, and how any association with them would make a Hindu impure.

Damini’s father, Udayan Maama, was one of our schoolmasters. He often told us: ‘All religions are one, and all customs should be looked upon with respect.’ Appa did not agree with him and neither did Amma. Appa liked Udayan Maama, but he and Amma often spoke about how everyone else in the street disliked him for teaching us children bad ideas.

We always kept ourselves indoors during the fights and pretended they never happened, but on the night of the fight I was in the backyard feeding Lakshmi her grains. She mooed suddenly, and I realized that someone was screaming on the street. Amma, Appa and I rushed to the front yard, and through the openings on the huge wall bordering our yard, we saw a group of people throwing fireballs on Damini’s house.

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‘Dei savugraki!’ someone in the group abused Udayan Maama.

‘All because of your bloody preaching they are killing our cows now,’ said the grocery storekeeper. I could see his gold chain gleam and sparkle in the torchlight.

‘Mayiru, you say that the Muslims and we are the same.’

Udayan Maama did not come out of his house, although his roof was burning. I was worried about Damini. I cried, imagining Damini burned to ashes. She was going to teach me to tie stones to dragonflies’ tails; she was my only close friend. We loved to swim in the lake and she always pushed me into the water to help me lose my fear of diving.

‘Don’t cry, Kayal. They won’t hurt anyone; they are Hindus. Our people,’ Appa consoled me, stroking my hair. Then he turned to Amma. ‘They are just threatening him. But Udayan needs to think before he speaks. He’s turning his own people against him,’ he said, nodding to himself.

‘They know we are close to Udayan’s family. It’s the auspice of Lakshmi that those rioters did not torch our house,’ Amma whispered.

I did not understand why we couldn’t go out and bring Damini to our house, safe from the flames, but Appa did not let me go out till the rioters had left. I thought we were only against the Muslims. I did not understand how Hindus could be against Hindus.

But nothing happened to anyone in Damini’s house.

The next day, khaki-uniformed officers were in the village. They asked everyone questions, even my parents, and me, about who threw fire on Udayan Maama’s house. Appa told me not to tell on the grocery storekeeper, and I didn’t; but I couldn’t forget the gleam of his gold chain, and I never went to his store again.

What annoyed me most was that I was to go to the mango farm with Lakshmi and Damini that day, but we couldn’t because of all the interrogations.

Eventually we did go to the farm, played with the fairy flowers that fell from the trees, took a dip in the stream, and gave Lakshmi a bath. Stole some mangoes. Damini loved to climb trees, to swing on hanging banyan roots and jump from heights; she often scraped her knees. She was more like a boy, played pranks on elders, and her mother yelled at her for it, all the time.

Two years and more passed and Lakshmi grew up faster than I thought she would. She got taller, was healthy and fat, and had given birth twice.

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Ramu, the cow boy, told me that Lakshmi would soon become a mother again, and she did. Amma was so excited. The more a cow gave birth to healthy calves, the more the entire family who owned her would be blessed, even the future generations. Amma made sure I fed Lakshmi well and took good care of her. We usually sold Lakshmi’s calves to good Hindu families, but this calf we were going to keep.

On the day Lakshmi calved, I bled for the first time. Amma celebrated my puberty, and I received many gifts. She did not lose one opportunity to tell some relative, ‘All three of Lakshmi’s calves were female. Lord Krishna is blessing us. See, Kayal attained age the same day Lakshmi calved.’

I named the new calf Padmini. She was so puny when she was born and had the blackest of noses. It was about this time, when all the aunties of the village came to see Padmini and the newly matured me, that I found a picture of Lord Krishna with the cows in an old trunk. Lord Krishna, the cow boy, herder of divine cows and prankster who plays tricks on maidens, and an ideal lover. All women want to fall in love with someone attractive and heroic like Lord Krishna.

Many nights I sat on stacks of soggy hay in the murky cowshed, my bare feet feeling the mush on the ground, or touching Lakshmi’s wet nose – she always snorted when I did that – telling her about the man of my dreams, and how I wanted him to be.

Damini refused to let her mother celebrate her puberty; she said it was shameful to do so. ‘It’s disgusting. Publicizing to the world that you are ready for marriage. To sell you off to someone, like a cow,’ she said, throwing stones into a puddle by the paddy fields where we sat.

‘What did your mother say?’ I asked her, watching her flip back her short black hair.

‘That nobody would marry me if I roamed around like a boy; that I am fourteen and old enough to be married, that I should learn to be like you.’ She smiled her twitchy smile and from her satchel pulled out a small, wrapped parcel. ‘I have something for you,’ she said.

‘What is it?’

‘Open and see.’

My heart started to beat very fast, and I tore off the paper enthusiastically.

Damini shook her head. ‘Slowly,’ she admonished. The way she always did, as though I was a little girl.

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The parcel contained glass bangles. Of blue and pink and red and green – all my favourite colours. I smiled into her eyes and said, ‘I like them.’ She sat quietly and didn’t reply. ‘Why did you get me a gift?’

Still, she said nothing.

‘Damini, I asked you something.’

‘I thought of you when I saw the bangles. Your dark hands.’

‘So?’ ‘You like gifts, Kayal.’

I put the bangles on both wrists and shook them to make them clank together.

‘I knew you would do that.’

We sat hushed for some time but there was something unsaid which tortured me.

I showed her the picture of Krishna. She looked away, smirking, and suddenly seemed very distant, as if she did not care. I looked at Lakshmi grazing further ahead; she never ate the paddy. She was a good cow.

‘Don’t you want to marry someone like him?’ I asked her, in a very nonchalant tone.

She stretched her dusky arm towards me, took my head in her hands and shook it, saying, ‘I want to study.’

But I knew she was thinking something else. I did not want to ask her then what it was. Instead, we sat silently watching Lakshmi. Damini’s tall frame looked relaxed but her dusky forehead creased, her thick, boyish eyelashes drooped and her voice . . . but I did not know then that this day would come.

Our street once again found itself the centre of a fight, this time because a Muslim family wanted to move in. All the rest of us were Hindus, and such things had never happened before, not in any Hindu village.

‘They eat cows!’ Amma hollered.

Appa did not like it much either, I could tell, but he kept his views to himself. Only Udayan Maama seemed to support the proposal. I could not understand how anyone could eat a cow. A cow is not like other animals. It’s not a hen or a goat; it is a cow, with feelings. The thought of eating Lakshmi made me feel sick. How could people eat cows? They are God’s animals.

Wouldn’t Lord Krishna, the protector of cows, the Gopala, punish those who eat his animals?

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The Muslim family did move into our street, as the authorities said something about the country being secular, and laws. Almost everyone protested. Our people paraded with sticks, threatened to exterminate the family. We called them parasites; we called them all sorts of names.

We performed many rituals and poojas to cleanse us from the impurity of having to live so close to them. Some of us used black magic to place a curse on them. But nothing happened to the Muslims; they seemed to be just fine.

And once again, we were visited by the khaki-uniformed men. Two this time, who patrolled our street for a whole week to make sure nobody threw fireballs on the Muslims’ house. Damini echoed her father’s thoughts, and she and her father even invited the Muslim family home for lunch. I did not understand why she’d chosen their side. I was angry with her and did not speak to her for a day or two. She was going against her own people: Hindu versus Hindu.

‘You are an ignorant village girl, Kayal,’ she said, beaming, the usual way, with her lips twitching on one side.

‘So are you.’

Her lips twitched still. We were by the temple pillar, and the moon was up. It was one of those secluded places Damini found. I wanted to forgive her, because I wanted to speak to her, and tell her many, many other things. So I smiled like my mother and said: ‘Say you take my side, and I’ll talk to you.’

She came towards me and rested her heavy head on my breast. ‘Saree, I take your side,’ she said, and I felt a warmth gurgle in my heart.

Amma caught me looking at Krishna’s picture. ‘I always wanted to marry someone like Lord Rama,’ she said, ‘but I ended up marrying your father.’ It embarrassed me that she knew what I was thinking. ‘I have many boys in mind for you, Kayal,’ she added, ‘and some of them even look like Krishna.’

I did not reply, but felt excited about the future, about finding my Krishna. I did not know where he would come from, but I always knew I would find him.

After school one day, Damini and I took Padmini to the mango farm. We stayed there till late evening, talking and watching the sun set. She was not the kind of person who spoke much. She liked to listen to me gossip.

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Padmini had wandered off into the dark. I only noticed when I realized I could not hear her bell anymore, only the distant prayer call of the mosque. I got up from under the tree where we were sitting, and ran off in the darkness in search of her. I stumbled upon a piece of rock and fell, hitting my knee on the hard muddy ground.

Damini came running to me. My skirt had torn. I sat holding my bleeding knee and crying in pain.

‘Where does it hurt?’ Damini asked me over and over again. When she tensed up, her face looked like a little cat, eyes wide open.

I kept crying, but noticed her eyelashes as she blinked worriedly. She pulled me close to her and kissed my teary cheeks. A cold wave washed over me, from my thighs to my forehead. I looked into her eyes for a flicker of a second, and she moved her lips to mine.

We lay there kissing a while. Padmini had wandered back to us; I could hear her mooing, and the bell. I could not move, Damini’s arms were wrapped around me. I broke into a smile, and she just sat there holding me, swaying me slowly, softly.

That night I sat by Lakshmi in the cowshed, looked into her glazed eyes and wondered if she understood anything I said to her. She mooed, and I reassured myself that she did understand. I thought then that maybe she was the only one who would understand. Until Damini kissed me I did not know, but when her lips touched mine I knew she was my destiny, that the Gods had sent her to me, that she was my Krishna.

We started hiding from everyone, wandering into the farms and fields and away from prying eyes. Amma chided me when I came home late. She said we girls should be indoors by the time the sun set. But the sun was not our friend. We waited for the darkness, and in those sultry summer nights just before it rained, we lay coiled within the roots of banyan trees, her heart beating against mine.

We would sneak out on rainy nights and take shelter in the dilapidated mansion on the village outskirts. We would fling off our wet, clinging clothes and warm each other with embraces. Her wet body always smelled of turmeric, and sometimes of bay leaves.

‘Will you ever leave me?’ she murmured, curled up in my arms on one of those nights.

‘Never,’ I said, lightly touching the bruise on her arm. ‘Does it hurt?’

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Her mother had hit her when Udayan Maama wasn’t home. Damini had been adamant about studying higher but her mother wanted her to get married.

They quarrelled and, as always, Damini’s mother imposed her view with force.

‘Not anymore.’

I held her head in my hands. ‘Udayan Maama didn’t scold your Amma for this?’

‘I didn’t tell him.’

‘Why not?’ I softly kissed her bruise, admiring her courage. She always stood by what she said, even if her Appa was against it. She never cried, not even when she was young, not even to me. She kept all her pain inside.

‘My Appa and I don’t think alike in everything.’ She looked me in the eye saying, ‘Their opinion does not matter to me.’

‘Whose does then?’

I ran my fingers through her thick hair. I knew what she was thinking, but I wanted to know for sure.

‘Yours.’

We listened to the rain outside for some time, safe in each other’s warmth.

Damini suddenly stirred and asked, ‘What if they separate us?’

‘I can’t be without you,’ I whispered, holding her tight and kissing her forehead.

She did not say anything else. Her silence was loud enough. I have on me now all the scars from our time together.

Pongal was when Amma started to suspect something.

The village celebrated the festival elaborately as usual, and my family was expecting a big harvest from our small lands, so we had to celebrate in a grander manner to entice the gods to grant our wishes. Lakshmi and Padmini were decorated with powders of deep-yellow turmeric and intensely red kumkum.

We hung garlands of jasmine, rose and chemburathi around their necks. In the evening, Amma made Lakshmi and Padmini stand in front of our house so that everyone could see that we owned two healthy cows. Amma swirled a coconut and incense sticks around them, chanted a few Sanskrit verses, performed some other minor rituals and prayed to them.

‘They are God’s animals,’ Amma said loudly when the Muslim woman from that impure house passed by us. We all thought they were sacrilegious, not just because they ate cows but also because they owned a butcher shop.

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After the ceremonies, Amma asked me to take Lakshmi and Padmini to the temple for a dip in the holy pond. At that moment, I was lost in thought.

Of Damini. She had told me the night before, the night of Boghi, when the whole village burnt everything old or of no value to bring in a fresh year of success, that she had burnt her childhood skirts. She wanted to marry me and be my man, my Krishna. But she already was my Krishna.

‘Can I go later?’ I asked Amma, ‘Damini is not home yet.’

‘See, you are both big girls now. You should learn to do things separately,’ Amma said with raised eyebrows and a stern face, her lips thin and tight in a straight line.

I did not know then this day would come. I thought Amma just said that as a passing statement. But, thinking back now, I should have known Amma suspected something, for she never means what she says. She is full of secret smiles and words.

Time passed quickly; it felt as if my whole life had happened in the moments it took for a cloud to pass over a hill.

It was the last day of school. Damini was to continue her studies in town; Udayan Maama had convinced her Amma. But, as for me, my parents had already started searching for a bridegroom.

It killed me inside to think of parting with Damini; I did not know what to do about it. I had convinced myself to accept life as it happened. I knew my parents would marry me to some man, and that everything would change, but when I thought of Damini quietly holding me, all I wanted was to be with her.

But how could we change God’s creations, and the way things were meant to be? How could I go against my parents’ wishes?

Why wasn’t she born a man? Life could have been so simple. I could have married her, and we could have had babies. But she’s not a man. What did she expect me to do?

‘We need to run away from everyone, Kayal, to the town,’ Damini declared.

‘We can’t do that.’

‘Look at me. You love me, don’t you?’ she asked in that voice of hers that always melted everything inside me.

I touched her cheek softly and nodded.

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by her side, I was, and I reassured her that I would stay, even though deep down I knew I couldn’t.

‘Then come with me.’ Damini looked earnest.

‘But, what will we do, where will we go? Who’ll give us money?’

‘I have a plan, but you will not approve.’

‘What plan?’

‘I was talking to Abdul from the butcher shop the other day, and he said that a marriage was coming. They need meat. They need cows. They . . .’ she looked away from me.

‘Damini!’ I started to cry. How could my Damini even think of such a thing, to give Lakshmi away to that Muslim family? They’ll butcher her, leaving no trace of her existence behind.

‘We have no other way.’

I turned away from her. ‘If you really loved me, you wouldn’t even think of such a thing!’

She came close to me, wrapped her arms around me from behind and rested her head on my shoulder. I could feel her breath on my neck, and smell the fragrance of bay leaves. ‘There’s no other way. We can’t take any money or jewels, they are all locked away. This plan will leave no trail behind,’ she said, mouthing each word slowly.

The next day, many guests came to our house, including all my relatives and even the grocery storekeeper. And not until after they started to dress me up did I realize it was my engagement. I saw the bridegroom through my bedroom window. He sat in the front yard with his family, with various fruits and jewels laid out on golden plates in front of him. My heart pounded when I saw him, tall and good-looking. But then I panicked, my thoughts went to Damini, my Krishna. She said she was my man.

‘Amma, I don’t want this engagement.’

Amma dragged me by my hand to the corner of my room, looked piercingly into my eyes, slapped me across my face, and said, ‘I know what’s on your mind Kayal. And you better listen to what I say.’

I had never seen Amma like that before. It scared me, and I did not say anything else for the rest of the evening. My mind was blank, and I was lost.

Though my eyes often searched for Damini in the crowd, it was in vain. She wasn’t there, and neither were her mother and Udayan Maama. I sat through the Sanskrit mantras and got engaged.

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The groom, he tried to look at me and smile. I kept my eyes on the ground but I felt his eyes on my skin, and I liked it.

That night, after everyone at home had fallen asleep, I met Damini in the dank shadows of the cowshed. Padmini was lapping up water from the barrel, and Lakshmi rubbed her head on her calf’s body once in a while. Damini did not say a word. She stood staring at me, her boyish lashes curled upward, as though waiting for me to confess my sins. What was worse was that I felt as if I had sinned.

She abruptly walked towards me and held me by my shoulders. ‘What about all your promises?’ she asked, shaking me.

‘What about them? What could I do? I had no choice,’ I cried.

She pushed me towards Lakshmi; I stumbled and fell on a trough of muddy hay. Damini started to walk towards me but I had managed to get up by myself. She then stopped and glared at me. I tried to touch her but she batted my hand away.

Lakshmi gazed at us; only she knew all my secrets.

‘What choice do I have?’ I pleaded.

‘You have a choice, Kayal,’ Damini said, letting her hands hang loose at her sides. That’s when I noticed a fresh wound on her wrist.

I still felt the sting of Amma’s slap on my face. Damini had been thrashed so many times, yet, for all her strength, I knew how fragile she was. My eyes filled with tears. I inched closer to her, put my arms around her hips and rested my head on her chest.

‘You don’t want me anymore, do you?’ She started to cry, her lips twitching in pain. Damini never cried. My Damini never cried. I felt a sudden urge to show her how much I loved her. I wanted to heal all her wounds. I wanted to soothe all her pain. Our pain.

‘Take her, Damini,’ I said suddenly. ‘I’ll come away with you. You are all I want.’ I was surprised by the words that fell from my lips.

Damini stared at me for a few minutes, and let me wipe her tears.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ Everything seemed to whizz past me. My head felt heavy, and all I could make sense of was the salt of my tears. I barely had the courage to gaze into Lakshmi’s unsuspecting eyes. She stood licking Padmini’s neck. Padmini’s 96

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bent hock caught my eye, and it brought me memories of Lakshmi as a calf. I glanced at Damini from the corner of my eye; she stood there sadly. I touched Lakshmi’s wet nose; this time, she did not snort. I held her close, breathing in the smell of warm milk and hay, stroking her coat of white-and-brown hair.

I sat crying on the ground next to Padmini. ‘Forgive me, Padmini, I know no other way.’ And I watched Damini lead her away. Lakshmi walked to her death without making a fuss, without a noise.

There are drums and nadhaswarams playing outside, there are children running around the temple pillars, the sun is shining. I am dressed in a heavy silk sari, necklaces of gold hang around my neck, the priest is throwing rose water and hemp into the flames . . .

And I never thought this day would come, but here I am, sitting in front of the ritual fire, repeating Sanskrit mantras I don’t understand. He’s looking at me now, and I can feel it on my skin. We are getting married. Damini is locked away somewhere in a room, Lakshmi is at Lord Krishna’s feet in the heavens, and I’m going to be his wife.

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Covered back alley behind mixed-use residential/commercial building, Tin Hau, Hong Kong.

Photograph by John Batten (2011).

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© Dayanita Singh

Profile: Amitav Ghosh Fionnuala McHugh ast November, the Asia Society in New York held its inaugural Asian Arts and Ideas Forum. The theme, over three days, was ‘The Chindia Dialogues’ and the programme began with an evening of conversation between the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh and the China scholar and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, Jonathan Spence. ‘Two wonderful people to take us back to the beginning of this relationship between China and India’, as Orville Schell, director of Asia Society’s Center on US-China relations, put it in his introduction.

Three days earlier, Ghosh’s most recent book, River of Smoke, had been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, which will be awarded on 15 March 2012. The book is the second in his Ibis trilogy, which began with Sea of Poppies (shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize) and which continues to follow the lives of characters variously connected to the nineteenth-century opium trade. Sea of Poppies begins in India; by the time River of Smoke moves into full flow, much of the action is taking place in the Chinese city of Canton (now Guangzhou).

‘The joy of reading Amitav’s work is the completely new way of reading about things I thought I knew,’ Spence enthused. ‘You completely changed 99

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my way of looking at the opium trade. The farmers come first and from that beginning, at family level, you take us into this chaotic global world.’

‘For me, as a writer of fiction, it’s the most amazing compliment to hear you say that,’ Ghosh responded. ‘For me, your work has been my introduction to China [which] was this vast area of darkness. I’m not an incurious person but it’s extraordinary to me how completely blind we were in India to this world, and your works – Gate of Heavenly Peace, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci – were a small window.’

On this note of mutual admiration, the evening continued pleasantly, if a little predictably. Ghosh talked about his research into the involvement of Indian merchants in the opium trade, a connection which still goes unremarked in India: ‘And in a way, China does not recognize it; the Indians are completely effaced. How come some Chinese leader didn’t say, “You guys were the running dogs of imperialism?”’ He talked about his starting point for the trilogy: the way people leave India. ‘I started asking, how did they leave? What were the ships like? I started to look at the crew lists, and they were incredibly varied, while the actual officers were always European.’ He talked about one of the sources of what Spence called the ‘breathtaking cascade of language’ in the first two books: ‘I did a little sailing and sailing is very dependent on words. I thought there has to be a dictionary. I happened to be at Harvard but I found the Lascari dictionary in Michigan – published in 1812 in Calcutta by a Scottish linguist. I didn’t have to make anything up.’

Despite, or possibly because of the men’s evident respect for one another, the event only truly came to life during the question-and-answer session.

The first questioner, an American journalist called Christopher Lydon, said to Ghosh, ‘You haven’t touched on the other way to read this book,’ before pointing out that the lead character in River of Smoke is called Bahram (not a major phonetic leap from the first name of US President Barack Obama), and asking if it could be read as ‘coded commentary’ on more recent wars involving that other ‘Big O commodity’ – oil.

Ghosh laughed. ‘I wouldn’t say that the book came out of my response to the Iraq war but I would say I was writing it at a time when the parallels were so obvious and so evident – even the language – that you couldn’t escape it. The British were saying things like “When our troops march into Canton, they’ll be cheering them in the streets” [and] many of those merchants were Scottish; 100

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they were the first generation fully exposed to Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

To them, free trade was a kind of religion.’

Then, with greater passion than he’d shown all evening, he suddenly leapt from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first: ‘Economics has managed to persuade us that free trade’s not an ideology – that it’s like a law of nature!’ The previous day, a group of Harvard students had walked out of the introductory economics class taught by Professor Greg Mankiw. Maybe, said Ghosh, this represented the beginning of a ‘sea change’ in contemporary attitudes towards free markets and free trade. ‘It’s extraordinary how they [the lecturers] get away with this stuff!’

When Lydon went on to suggest that perhaps Harvard students should walk out of classes given by the historian Niall Ferguson (author of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World), Ghosh laughed again and cried, ‘Absolutely! I couldn’t agree more!’

‘Why don’t you write history?’ asked a voice from the audience.

‘I’m not a historian,’ Ghosh replied. ‘My talents are in another direction.’

And he went on to describe the confined enclave where foreigners found themselves obliged to live if they wanted to make the most of those brief trading seasons reluctantly permitted in Canton by China. ‘So you had different people sitting next to each other, the botanist and the merchant,’ he said. ‘To imagine the totality of that experience is what the novelist can do.’

Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and that is where he suggested meeting for lunch the day after the Asia Society talk.

He likes the area’s quiet avenues and back yards, and its literary connections: neighbouring writers include Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan and Colson Whitehead. He points out that nearby Fort Greene Park was championed as a public space by Walt Whitman when he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.

Ghosh’s wife, Deborah Baker, is also a writer. Her book The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism was one of this year’s US National Book Award nonfiction finalists. The award ceremony was due to take place two weeks after this interview ‘so it’s a very exciting time for us’. (The non-fiction prize subsequently went to Stephen Greenblatt for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.)

Do husband and wife read each other’s work?

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restaurant’s cutlery. ‘But I tend to talk about my work much less than Debbie does. I think it’s the difference between fiction and non-fiction.’

This makes interviewing him slightly ticklish. It’s not that he’s being difficult or brusque (although there’s a pinched moment when he declines even to discuss that bastion of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling). He asks courteous questions, he responds politely. But he’s not immediately expansive. His books are packed with information and are wildly discursive; their creator is not. At one point, he happens to mention a stay at Santa Maddalena, the Italian retreat for writers run by the novelist and memoirist Gregor von Rezzori’s widow, Beatrice. It is not an experience he will be repeating.

‘But Zadie Smith loved it . . .’

‘Maybe it worked for her. I need my space.’

He’s also exhausted from the River of Smoke treadmill. The Asia Society evening was his seventh New York event in four weeks, and these were in addition to events in other US cities. The following day he was due to fly to Rome for the book’s Italian-language launch (Il fiume dell’opio). ‘We’re in an industry whose base is shrinking,’ he explains, simply. ‘I have to do what I can to support the publishers. It’s not a process to which I, as a writer, am suited.

There are many more ebullient, demonstrative people who can do that. I spend so much time in my head; I find it harder and harder.’

He’s travelled a long arc, then, since 1986 and the era of his first book, The Circle of Reason?

Ghosh agrees, wryly. ‘No, it wasn’t like this when I started. I was teaching at Delhi University on 600 rupees [about HK$90] a month . . .’

Although he studied social anthropology in Delhi and at Oxford, he always wanted to write. He ascribes some of this desire to the influence of the Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray. ‘Looking back now,’ he wrote in a 2002 essay, ‘I am more than ever aware of the part that Ray played in shaping the imaginary universe of my childhood and youth. I see this even in such details as my interest in science and science fiction; in ghost stories and the fantastical.’

He spent two years in the early 1980s living in Egypt, a period he describes in his non-fiction book, In an Antique Land. While there, he read Gabriel García Márquez and Boswell’s Life of Johnson; he would say later that his time in Egypt, ‘was absolutely the fundamentals of my education as a writer’.

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He can remember the minute his life changed with news of his first novel’s acceptance.

‘What happened?’

‘A telegram!’ he says, and suddenly giggles with pleasure into his napkin.

‘I’ll never forget that day; I had clouds under my feet. That moment you never relive – I always tell that to young writers. These moments of affirmation have an outsize impact on your life and morale. And, later in life, it’s the writing itself that has that impact.’

In a review in The New York Times, Anthony Burgess gave The Circle of Reason the sort of literary thumbs-up a young writer could warm his hands by for many a fallow year. As well as comparing Ghosh to the leading Indian writer of that decade (‘Mr Ghosh writes at least as well as Mr Rushdie’), Burgess invoked the names of Cervantes, Tolstoy and Sterne. In an accompanying interview, Ghosh revealed that reading Herman Melville was his inspiration and that he had no plans to give up teaching: ‘I love the stimulation,’ he said. ‘I would hate to sit in a room writing all day.’

The Circle of Reason foreshadows Ghosh’s later work with its large cast of characters, its vivid language, its maritime setting and the historical expositions.

Early on, a character discourses on cotton (‘Every scrap of cloth is stained by a bloody past’); it is set in Oiltown, an area on the African coast inhabited

by Westerners and which could easily be 1830s Canton. The narrative veers off into a strange subplot about the economy (the lead character declares war on money) and, as is often the case when reading Ghosh, you find yourself puzzling over who’s who and what’s what. But it’s lighter – less ponderous, more droll – than some of his later books.

It won him the first of his prizes, the Prix Médicis étranger, which recognizes those whose ‘fame does not yet match their talent’; it succeeded in making his name. Another international prize, in 1997, was the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Calcutta Chromosome, a distinctly baffling book that hangs a theory about time travel and mind mutation on the history of the fight against malaria. Calcutta comes off best: Ghosh’s consistent gift is his ability to convey a sense of place. He may not, as he said at the Asia Society, be a historian, but you sometimes feel that the anthropologist in him is standing on the sidelines, more in love with the research than the characters.

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Subsequent prizes, however, brought a certain notoriety. In 2001 he discovered that he was the Eurasian regional winner – for The Glass Palace – of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He turned it down on the grounds that the prize only applied to works from a region ‘that was once conquered and ruled by imperial Britain’, and written in English.

‘Of the many reasons why a book’s merits may be recognized,’ he wrote in a letter to The Times of India, ‘these seem to be the least persuasive.’

The prize was re-assigned to J. G. Ballard, who remarked of the controversy, ‘The prize would be ungovernable if you included all the possible regional languages; no judge would be qualified to discriminate among them.’

On the other hand, in 2010, Ghosh (and Margaret Atwood) accepted the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University despite a vociferous campaign pressuring them to spurn it because of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

‘I thought, “You guys want me to refuse it?” Ghosh recalls. ‘On what grounds? It was on Israeli soil? Those were the grounds! I know the Middle East. The day it landed on my lap I knew there would be a problem. But I’ve always thought you must have some privileged spaces – this was a university – and the things being written were incredibly manipulative. These people were saying they were my friends and I thought, You’re not my friends. I knew these people in India and they’re Stalinist.’

He accepts that the years in the public domain have hardened him. ‘You face their anger when you’re young and you get used to it,’ he says wearily.

‘You face so much hostility – in the first ten years, so much hostility. You’re a Bengali! You’re a filthy, worthless, upper-class person! They froth and they fume . . . What can you say? This is what I am! If you don’t like it, go to another reading.’

‘Are appearances a form of torture?’

He laughs, a little, and describes a world-famous author ignoring his fans: ‘Two or three of them gather around and he won’t respond. He looks at them and turns away, refuses to kowtow. He’s amazing . . .’ His tone is a mix of puzzlement (Ghosh is solicitous of his followers) and envy.

His writing time is being squeezed these days, and fans may have a while to wait for the third book of the Ibis trilogy – if indeed it is only a trilogy.

‘I feel I’m just getting started,’ Ghosh says. In one sense, there’s already a sequence of three books because his research during the writing of The Glass Palace, which starts in Burma when it was still part of the British Empire, 104

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connects Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke. ‘The Glass Palace led very directly to Sea of Poppies because one of the things I was interested in was Indian coolies going abroad.’

Can he see how his style has shifted between the books?

‘One’s head changes with every book,’ he says slowly. ‘It’s true, by the time I’d finished The Glass Palace I did feel lingering regret that I hadn’t drawn it out more.’

Sea of Poppies feels more accomplished than The Glass Palace – which has rather too many moments of clunky exposition – although there are certainly scenes in it when the dead hand of James Clavell falls across the page like the literary equivalent of Captain Hook. Sensitive readers will wince to recall the final parting between Zachary Reid and the cruel first mate of the Ibis, Mr Crowle; and Zachary’s tremulous relationship with Paulette Lambert might have been plucked straight out of M. M. Kaye.

The dictionary research, too, can ensnare the helpless reader. Mr Doughty, for instance, sounds tiresomely like the incomprehensible love child of Dickens and Hobson-Jobson: ‘Hands off my gander! . . . Avast with your launderbuzzing! . . . or I’ll stuff your laurels between your teeth . . . tear out your jaunties . . . chowder your chutes . . . damned luckerbaugs and wanderoos! . . . where’s my dumbpoke and pollock-saug . . .?’ Even so, the vividness of the tale eventually takes over. One extraordinary scene takes us to an Indian opium factory and tells us more about that shameful slice of imperial industry than if we’d read a hundred history books. By the time Ghosh reaches Canton in River of Smoke, he’s far more adept at pace and character and the book’s momentum is fuelled by history and fiction; it’s become a genuine epic. You want to know what happens next.

He writes in two places: New York and Goa. He has the same desk in both places (‘I am fetishistic’). After this lunch, after the book events in Italy, after his return to New York for the National Book Awards, after the flight to India – he can start working again. ‘It takes weeks to get back into the rhythm,’ he says. ‘Goa helps me de-stress and tune out the world beating at the door. I long for it.’

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Minibus supervisor’s stand, Kwun Tong, Hong Kong. Photograph by John Batten (2009).

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Recalling Mrs Gupta Rahul Jacob ‘Certainly,’ said the government spokesman, perusing my list of questions, ‘by all means these are very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once. As I told you, it is our duty! It is what we are paid for! I myself have to attend an important meeting this afternoon but I will leave these little matters with our good Mrs Gupta and all will be taken care of . . . But mark my words, you will find the spiritual aspects of [Delhi] the most rewarding. Remember the River Ganges . . . Another cup of tea?

You have time?’

– Jan Morris in ‘Mrs Gupta Never Rang’, Rolling Stone, 1975 he press conference held in early July 2011 by India’s home minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, came at a delicate time for the central government. The day before, India’s Supreme Court had issued a judgment reprimanding the state of Chhattisgarh for major human-rights violations.

For the past six years Chhattisgarh had sponsored a vigilante army to fight a Maoist terrorist movement. By implication, New Delhi was censured as well because it had backed the provincial government’s indiscriminate violence, resulting in thousands of deaths as villagers turned against each other. The judges were moved to quote from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in their reproach.

That week, in another judgment, this one concerning the slow pace of New Delhi’s investigations into money hoarded in Swiss bank accounts by wealthy Indian citizens, the judges appeared to be nearing the end of their tether: ‘What the hell is happening to this country?’ they demanded.

In the circumstances, Home Minister Chidambaram might have been discomfited. Instead, dressed in a white sarong and loose-fitting shirt, he 107

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glowed with his customary confidence and breezily dismissed the questions about the judgment. He had not had time to read the judgment, he said, even though it had come out twenty-four hours earlier and had been quoted at length in newspapers. A question about the government’s mishandling of a violent separatist movement in southern India the day before was dealt with in schoolmasterly fashion: ‘This is not a place for arguments,’ he said primly. ‘This is a place for questions and answers.’

What New Delhi’s most senior official on internal security wanted to talk about instead was a new initiative to send young doctors from governmentfunded colleges to look after soldiers and paramilitary forces in northeastern India, where the government has faced a decades-long secessionist movement. ‘Our boys need the best care,’ he said. The news ticker on India’s twenty-four-hour-news channels duly flashed an unintended double entendre: ‘Chidambaram: Need best medical services for special forces in sensitive areas.’

On days like this it was hard to imagine a government more out of touch with the task of running what often seems to be the world’s most ungovernable country.

No one appeared more trapped by the burden of bureaucracy and the peculiar protocols of the dynastic Nehru-Gandhi political party he belongs to than the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who seemed the most powerless person in public life. The government had been reeling from the resignations of ministers in the wake of a long-running, billion-dollar scandal involving the allocation of mobile-phone licences. Punch-drunk from the abuse in the media, Singh stood accused of policy paralysis. ‘The government is completely fossilised,’ an executive with one of the country’s largest conglomerates grumbled to me as we waited for the beginning of a US-India round-table meeting on India’s infrastructural needs in the twenty-first century. Just as the meeting began in a ballroom of the Taj Mahal Hotel, the electricity went off, part of India’s daily ration of power cuts.

Everywhere I went, the chattering classes were rueing the missed oppor­ tunities of Singh’s second term, just two years after he had been re-elected as head of what seemed to be the strongest coalition government in decades. There had been hints in the press that the younger generation in the Congress Party would be given increased opportunities in the Cabinet; however, the anticipated July reshuffle amounted to more of the same. The average age of Cabinet ministers increased from sixty to sixty-five: Singh, believed to be an incorruptible man cast 108

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in the strange position of heading India’s most corrupt government, is seventynine; the finance minister, widely believed to be hankering after the prime minister’s job, was in his seventies; the foreign minister, nearly eighty, looked especially out of step with the brisk, businesslike manner of his US counterpart, Hillary Clinton, and Pakistan’s youthful foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar.

One of India’s astute political commentators, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, wrote of the reshuffle, ‘The only signal that the Congress Party gives these days is that it does not know what signal to give . . . in the Congress, you have to be somewhere in your sixties to even begin to be counted as not young.’

There is a tendency in India to personalise such failures; consequently, it was hard to find anyone who had a good word for Singh, fêted just two years earlier for adeptly steering the Congress coalition to victory in parliamentary elections. But, as Jan Morris pointed out, there was a broad institutional apathy that long predated Singh’s stewardship and will continue for decades after it.

Consider these news stories, all of which appeared in July: Item: After a train crash in Fatehpur in northern India that claimed the lives of more than sixty people, it was discovered that the government-run Indian Railways had in the past few years left more than 100,000 safety jobs vacant. In the whirlwind pantomime conducted by India’s excitable twenty-four-hourTV channels, this failure was quickly forgotten in the wake of another corruption scandal involving India’s main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Item: The removal of 350 million tons of toxic chemicals from the site of the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 had only just begun in July, a result of the government’s own lethargy and its futile stand-off with Union Carbide’s parent, Dow Chemicals, over responsibility for the disaster.

Item: The Food Corporation of India, the government’s grain procurement agency, was running out of money because the Ministry of Finance was US$2.5 billion behind in payments. It was not that the government lacked the cash; it had simply not bothered to fulfil its obligations.

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Item: After terrorists detonated bombs in three public places in Mumbai in July, killing 26 people and injuring 130, it was discovered that in the aftermath of the 26 November 2009 attacks on hotels and the city’s railway terminus a plan to install CCTV cameras had been approved but never progressed beyond bureaucrats’ files. The funds allocated were still unused.

One early Saturday morning I drove from Delhi to witness the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, address a farmers’ rally in Aligarh.

The city is less than 200 km north of Delhi but more than six hours’ drive away because of roads so poor that on some stretches they resembled alluvial sludge after a morning’s downpour. En route we passed road-widening schemes, part of a Keynesian government effort to create one hundred days per year of employment for agricultural labourers. The projects we saw were pointless, unmanned or carried out with such slothful shovelling that their completion looked unlikely. Recent news reports had said the Ministry of Agriculture was pleading for the scheme to be put on hold during the harvest: farm labour was in short supply because people preferred to be employed by the government.

An economist explained to me that the labourers were actually expected to work on the farms but preferred the government jobs, which often didn’t require the workers to show up if they were prepared to split the wages with the government official in charge of the project. What Salman Rushdie once described as a democracy that rested on the principle of ‘one man, one bribe’ was reaching Kafkaesque proportions.

When we arrived at the vast grounds where Gandhi would address 20,000 farmers and party workers, I asked a man in his fifties if he had voted in the last election. He thought about it, shrugged and said he could not remember. We were in Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of 200 million and is governed by Chief Minister Mayawati, who has become an icon for the lower castes. Ahead of the rally by her Congress Party rival, Mayawati had ensured that the town’s usually unstaffed healthcare centre now had six doctors and nurses waiting inside.

I joined the crowds alongside a senior journalist with a major Hindi newspaper. As we were pressed forward by the eager spectators breaking the bamboo barricades as easily as if they were made of toothpicks, I asked him if this enthusiasm would translate into votes in the 2012 elections.

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‘In UP the vote is strictly for caste; it is not for development,’ he said.

‘Educated people in this country generally don’t vote . . . People who understand democracy don’t vote. People who vote on caste do. This is our country’s problem.’

After the event, a middle-aged man who made brass fittings for ox carts told me he had waited for an hour to see Rahul Gandhi but that the tinted windows on his car had rendered this impossible. ‘He will see the public, but the public will not see him,’ he said. It was as telling an assessment of Indian politics as I had ever heard.

When we left Aligarh we were caught in a traffic jam so bad we did not move for more than an hour. Then two policemen made their way ahead and, miraculously, as if the Ganges had parted, the road opened up enough for the passage of an official car that had been behind us. Riding in the back seat was most likely one of the politicians who had surrounded Gandhi when he was giving his speech on stage. Like him, they were children of politicians – men who had worked for his grandmother, Indira, when she was prime minister.

This is one of the curious commonalities between the politics of communist China and democratic India: the only -ism politicians believe in is nepotism.

My driver tailgated this car for an hour. I had travelled to Aligarh to witness India’s political heir mingle with the masses. I returned having enjoyed with gratitude the privileges of democratic feudalism.

While I was in Delhi I heard Montek Singh Ahluwalia speak at a conference about the challenges facing the Indian economy. A wit once said that one of the problems with India is that it has too many clever economists but Ahluwalia, the deputy head of the powerful Planning Commission and Prime Minister Singh’s right-hand man, is one of the cleverest. He is an accomplished orator and gave a comprehensive survey of the problems likely to plague the country for the next couple of decades, ranging from water shortages to energy security, from sluggish agricultural productivity that would probably lead to increased food imports, to outdated labour laws that were causing India to be bypassed for manufacturing jobs in favour of Bangladesh. There were solutions to these problems, he said, but he hinted that the divisive Indian political system might not be up to tackling them. He added that those people who attributed the slow progress in reforming the economy to the ‘pusillanimity’ of the government should ‘wake up and smell the coffee’.

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A German agronomist in the audience asked a question about the slowing growth in Indian agriculture even as the population had surged to 1.2 billion.

(The country has suffered a near double-digit inflation in food prices for almost two years.) Listening to Ahluwalia’s response was alarming: India, which much of the world considers poised for global economic leadership, would in a decade or two not be able to feed its people without resorting to imports, nor have enough water for its crops; its factories, already the victim of daily brownouts, would be even more starved of electricity; and the country’s most powerful economic official after the finance minister could do little about it because he was handicapped by a fractious political system.

The next day, I arrived for the morning session of the same conference.

The round table featured some of the brightest Indian economists working at home and abroad in places such as Yale, MIT and Berkeley. The subject was the spectacular inefficiency of Indian government subsidies, which are estimated to cost more than 10 per cent of the country’s GDP. More malnourished children live in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. The government’s faith in legislation as a solution to the problems of malnutrition was ridiculed. Abhijit Banerjee, an MIT economist, said there would soon be laws establishing a right to haircuts. The problem, he said, was the lack of awareness among mothers of transitional foods appropriate for toddlers and because repeated bouts of stomach upsets owing to the lack of clean drinking water led children very quickly to become underweight.

Another wished aloud that India’s huge subsidy bill could be reduced by buying off vested interests, and worried that the problem was exacerbated by the government’s muddled ideological thinking. The discussion drifted to the reliability of income data in India and to the decline in the quality of the researchers who collected this information. Digression followed arcane digression until the existential question of the relevance of social sciences in India was raised.

Indians have ‘in their long evolution spent a couple of thousand years cultivating the transcendence of reason, another couple of thousand years on the denial of reason, and even more millennia on accepting reason but rejecting its authenticity’, wrote the satirist Gita Mehta in Karma Cola about the arrival of thousands of flower children in India in the 1970s. ‘To be cast adrift in this whirlpool of differing views on the validity of simple mental activity seems a very high price to pay.’

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Exactly twenty years after economic reforms were initiated by Singh when he was finance minister in 1991, what should have been a happy anniversary in July this year for his Congress Party went by unheralded.

Instead, the debate about setting up a national ombudsman to deal with corruption took centre stage, even though it meant the establishment of yet another gargantuan bureaucracy. And because of these distractions it was easy to overlook some of the unfinished reforms dating back to the early 1990s, including making it easier to hire and fire workers, or coaxing consumers into paying a market price so that state electricity boards would not repeatedly be driven to bankruptcy. Ahluwalia, then a civil servant, had pleaded passionately for both. That he was still doing so to no avail was a reflection of the stasis of the Indian political system.

I had walked home from the dinner that followed Ahluwalia’s speech through the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi – so-called after the British architect Edwin Lutyens, who designed this part of town and dotted it with sprawling white bungalows that look more like Mughal mausoleums than the government officials’ mansions they are. There was hardly anyone on the sidewalks, but everywhere I looked there were drivers sitting in cars waiting for their masters and mistresses to emerge from dinner. The car park outside the venue of the conference had overflowed and, outside, uniformed retainers seemed to have set up an alternative parliament which was deep in discussion.

As I strolled past the beautiful Lodi Gardens,­a public park that seems more cared for than the entire infrastructure of Uttar Pradesh,­I mused that nowhere else in the world was so well suited to democracy. In every corner of the country there was the equivalent of a parliamentary committee, debating this or that without ever seeming to reach any conclusions: dissent and debate were not a means to the end of better governance but the very point of it.

New Delhi, relative to the impoverishment of India’s citizens, seems the most cosseted capital in the world. If the cars of the city’s grandees come with a chauffeur attached to the wheel – ­ the modern-day equivalent of a mahout or palanquin bearer – their distorted perspective from the back seat must induce complacency. The colonial construct of Lutyens’ Delhi, which took over from Calcutta as capital one hundred years ago, has remained unchanged, indifferent to the government in power.

As Jan Morris concluded in her essay, ‘You think you can change the system? Try it, try it, and when the elaborations of Delhi have caught up with 113

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you, when you realise the tortuous significances of the old method . . . when it dawns upon you gradually that it has been done more or less this way, come conqueror, come liberation, since the early Middle Ages, with a relieved and affectionate smile you will probably agree it had better be left as it is. As it is!

India is always as it is.’

Another day, another scandal: my editor at the FT rang me for an article as soon as the chief minister of the southern state of Karnataka had been asked to resign by the party’s high command. Karnataka’s capital, Bangalore, is an IT hub but known also for its corruption scandals, which at that point allegedly involved the chief minister and bribes from the state’s iron-ore tycoons that implicated some 700 officials at all levels and across the political spectrum.

A couple of days later, the mild-mannered prime minister said that the Congress Party could face the monsoon session of Parliament confidently because the opposition had ‘skeletons in its cupboard’. It was an unwise remark that provoked the leader of the opposition to screech with indignation.

As the new session opened with more than eighty bills pending, I watched in disbelief as members from opposing parties hurled accusations at each other with such ferocity it looked as though they would come to blows. This continued for two days.

Jan Morris’ 1975 essay was a meditation on Delhi’s dysfunctional modus operandi that remains profoundly relevant: ‘Delhi is the capital of the losing streak. It is the metropolis of the crossed wire, the missed appointment, the puncture, the wrong number. Every day’s paper in Delhi brings news of some failure in diplomacy, in economics, in sport.’

In the weeks after I left, the Indian cricket team would receive a memorable drubbing, losing all the tests it played against England, some by impossibly wide margins. The Congress government would blunder from crisis to crisis, jailing the populist septuagenarian Anna Hazare (who had demanded the passing of an ombudsman’s bill to punish corruption), and then hastily releasing him after thousands of supporters demonstrated against his arrest. In a complete turnaround, the government then acceded to almost all his demands on the new bill.

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and a ‘Jasmine Revolution’; however, it was a denigration of both: many of the middle classes who were demonstrating against corruption brazenly admitted to paying bribes in the course of doing business; for example, as payments for the sale of their flats without declaring the full transaction to tax authorities.

This was India, there was no other way, they declared on TV. (I learned soon after that my friend’s seventy-something mother had recently sold her family’s farm and had moved with her ninety-four-year-old mother into a small flat – all without accepting or paying a rupee in so-called black money.)

Data released in July 2011 showed that India’s share of foreign direct investment was half that of Brazil’s and had dropped sharply to US$23 billion from US$33 billion the previous year. The country’s fall from grace was felt most acutely by the business class. Sensing that India’s feet of clay were now exposed to the world, an industry lobby group initiated an international advertising campaign to correct the situation. Its tagline ‘Credible India’ was intended to reassure; but in a characteristically clumsy, tragicomic way, the campaign only further revealed the country’s insecurity.

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Plumber and locksmith’s roadside booth and sign, Tai Kok Tsui, Hong Kong.

Sign says: ‘Lock installation, drain cleaning, lock picking, key cutting.’

Photograph by John Batten (2009).

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Hu Dong translated by Shirley Lee

Gloomy Spring Day Nettles drape the sky.

A peasant woman lops off dandelions’ heads.

In the geometrically partitioned fields the grass goes horse-riding, the rape plant chews on bees.

A tree with its permanent teeth stands firm against the window.

It is a spring day of bursting dams. In Sichuan where the land is green here and purple there the thrashing wheat shoots capsize the sun.

Dark as a palace opened wide, Night is like a commune’s cellar.

Here, so long as life exists there are seeds enough for beggars to squander.

Yet still, there is no shaman in distress, only a rat king who feasts every day calling forth a paper-cut doll that cannot burn to death— wiper of the silence from my lips.

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Gloomy Spring Day

阴沉的春天 荨麻密布的天空。 农妇剁掉蒲公英的头。 在割成几何的田野上， 草骑马，油菜嚼食蜜蜂。 一株换牙的树顶住窗口。 决堤的春天，在四川 青一块，紫一块的乡下， 抽打的麦苗掀翻日头。 黑得象敞开的宫殿— 夜，恍若公社的地窖。 在那儿，只要活着， 就有足够乞丐挥霍的种子， 但没有忧戚的巫师， 只有夜夜欢宴的鼠王， 召来烧不死的纸人， 为我擦掉嘴边的寂静。

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Extracts from

I Love My Mum Chen Xiwo translated by Harvey Thomlinson here he was. A murder suspect.

I’d just released some prostitutes – a bunch of hostesses we’d rounded up from a nightclub. As a vice-squad captain it was my job to keep our streets clean, but I hadn’t foreseen the consequences and the numerous injured parties. Without a sex industry, the entertainment business took a hit; if the entertainment business suffered, that was bad news for hotels; with hotels half empty, fewer people went out at night, and so the taxi drivers had fewer customers and roamed around instead like angry ghosts, slamming their steering wheels and cursing the authorities. The whole city was in an uproar: the traffic police couldn’t issue any fines; the industry and commerce ministry couldn’t collect any fees; the tax bureau couldn’t receive any taxes. Profits were down, bosses were upset.

My superior trembled indignantly as he lectured me. ‘The sex industry is a pillar of our city’s economy. Don’t you want us to get rich? Well, a city has to rely on whatever it has, and what we have here is prostitutes. There’s no choice but to release them!’

These prostitutes knew the score. They took their sweet time getting their things together; one even put her hairclip in her mouth and then, with a sort of insolent insouciance, put her hair up.

I told them they should find new jobs, and they just looked at me. Their wordless replies were eloquent.

I said, ‘So you are only willing to sell yourselves?’

‘Why not?’ They laughed. ‘Not to would be a waste. Our bodies are gifts from our parents, just like your parents made you one-metre-eighty: perfect for making arrests.’

‘I don’t arrest people because I’m tall.’ I looked stern. ‘I represent the law; law needs reasons.’

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‘But when you want to arrest someone, the reasons all depend on you,’ they said.

I admit that in this job my size and strength are, literally, big assets. My victims, whether or not they are guilty, all act guilty in my presence. If adults who lived on my beat wanted to scare kids into behaving properly they’d say: ‘I’ll call One Metre Eighty to lock you up!’

My nickname, One Metre Eighty, was a gift on my wedding day. My wife’s family are well off and many men liked her, but she only had eyes for me. On the day of the ceremony, when we were playing the traditional wedding games, some of the guests asked her why she had chosen me.

She laughed at first but then became thoughtful. One of my colleagues cleared his throat and dared to say: ‘Is it because he is one-metre-eighty?

Is that why?’

From that time on I was known as One Metre Eighty, and whenever I arrive at a crime scene, the cry goes up: ‘One Metre Eighty is here! One Metre Eighty is here!’

I am proud of my height. How many men are depressed because they are short? My parents gave me a strong body and with it came bright prospects. It was a gift, and as far as I was concerned their gift could never be repaid.

When I sat the police academy entrance examination, they went easy on me at the interview. At athletics meetings, I was the one chosen to parade in front carrying the flag; in college plays, I was usually the hero. And wherever I went I could always feel the openly lustful eyes of women looking at me. For me all this was normal, so when this case came along I was lost. It was a murder case, and the victim was a woman in her fifties. The murder suspect wasn’t a stranger, it was none other than her own son.

This world has it all: prostitutes who know no shame, and a son who kills his own mother. What a mess.

And here I was looking right at him: a disabled man.

As a kid he had suffered from polio, which explained the way he sat with his body twisted on the bed. I had someone help him up. Unexpectedly, as soon as he had been lifted, he slumped forward as if he were about to drop to the floor. His legs and feet had no strength to support him.

One of his neighbours, who was at the scene, said, ‘You’ll have to carry him out.’ No one else could do it; only I was strong enough to move him to the car.

Could a person like this really kill?

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Another neighbour said, ‘He rode everywhere on his mother’s back. He couldn’t stand up, even with a stick, so they threw the stick away.’

I couldn’t understand how he’d managed to kill his mother. Couldn’t she have just moved out of the way? Most people have an instinct to save themselves.

If she had shifted a little, he wouldn’t have been able to get near her.

Maybe she hadn’t had the heart. If she had moved, he would have fallen to the ground. A mother can’t easily watch her son suffer from such a fall; she probably preferred to suffer herself. No doubt this was why she had let her son kill her.

The murder weapon was a whip; her body was covered with lash marks.

Each lash, every single one, had pushed her towards death. It was hard for me to imagine how she could have endured that, being flogged relentlessly closer to the final point of life.

I inspected the whip. It was made of leather, the real thing. It looked hard and dried up, as if it had been soaked for a long time in water. I didn’t know how the murderer had got this. Even if he had made it himself, he would have needed the raw materials. How could he have got hold of them? Everywhere he’d gone had been on his mother’s back. It seemed certain therefore that he’d obtained this whip with his mother’s help.

I noticed the whip’s cotton sheath, which had been custom-made to fit the handle. The sheath had apparently been made of rags, sewn together with very fine, nearly invisible stitching. The detail held my attention. I ran my fingers over it and there was no sign of a join; it passed softly under my touch. Who had made this? Was there another person involved? If not, had the deceased made it herself?

The murderer still hadn’t said a word.

The neighbours claimed that at the time of her murder the mother had called out once. Her distended lungs had released a little air and then repressed the remainder. After that they heard nothing. The door was closed. Some of the more curious went to the small adjoining grocery kiosk and put their ears to the wall. They heard the sound of the whip but no groans. If a person were being beaten to death, surely there would be some cry? But there was nothing, and so it was impossible for them to confirm who was wielding the whip and who was being beaten.

The man who ran the grocery store said, ‘This is a cavity wall, there’s only a thin layer of clapboard between us and them. If the wall was bare we might 121

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have seen shadows.’ But the wall was papered over, obscuring any silhouettes.

In recent weeks, no one had been to the house. Previously there had been a few incidents involving the mother and son and they had asked their neighbours for help; however, nothing like that had happened recently. One time the head of the residents’ committee had knocked on the mother’s door and told her: ‘If you need anything, call us,’ but the mother had blocked the entrance with her body and replied, ‘Need what?’

The neighbours said that a sour smell had seeped out from behind her.

‘Since she took that attitude, we didn’t go there again,’ the committee member said. ‘There’s plenty to keep us busy: family planning; health and hygiene; rubbish collection; park construction; and our local song-anddance troupe, which is great by the way. Whenever there’s something going on, a festival, or the Sixteenth People’s Congress, or some campaign, they get everyone going. The whole neighbourhood comes alive. But all this had nothing to do with this flat; they kept themselves to themselves. They were good citizens though, they never caused any trouble. At least our committee didn’t have to worry about them messing with the one-child policy; that man was never going to find a wife.’

There were just the two of them in the household: mother and son.

The husband had died long before. Widowed at the age of thirty, the mother had never married again because of her child. She and her son were dependent on each other. The child contracted polio when he was just two years old. The experts insisted that there was no cure, but the mother devised her own treatment: she tied a wooden board to his feet, propped him up, and left him like that. At other times she lashed the child to the bedpost and let him hang there, writhing and twisting, to exercise his spinal column. She sometimes left him this way for five or six hours.

People pitied him when they saw that he was in obvious pain, exhausted, with beads of sweat trickling down his face. Surely his mother suffered, too? But she forced the small child to keep doing this; in fact, she would beat him for not trying hard enough. Other people attempted to intercede but she prevented them, saying: ‘If he doesn’t do this now, what kind of life will he have later?’

‘But will this do any good?’

‘Good or not, we can’t give up, we’ve got to keep trying,’ she answered. The treatment ultimately made no difference at all to the child’s legs.

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The son was bright, the neighbours said. He hadn’t gone to school, but he had a good vocabulary; he could read a few characters. Despite this he had no way to join society. People often saw the mother carrying him. All through his childhood and even after reaching adulthood, she took him everywhere on her back, or else in her arms. Sometimes he embraced her neck, sometimes her waist; on occasion he even hung on to her breasts. One time he seemed about to slide out of her grasp and he seized hold of her breasts, as if he were grabbing a safety bar.

What about bathroom visits? Had his mother helped him with that, too?

One young guy had raised this question only to be shouted down. ‘You lowlife!

There’s no need to mention that.’ Everyone knew that the child and his mother slept in the same bed. No one felt this was wrong. One disabled person and his mother; from necessity. So what? Anyway, he had come from his mother’s body, so how could he have inappropriate thoughts about that body? All people saw was a lonely mother and her son.

The mother had been a factory worker but had been laid off when the factory was sold. She was sent home with 10,000 yuan from the severance fund.

Afraid of blowing that money, the mother had put it in a savings account, and then found a part-time cleaning job in a private household. She earned fifteen yuan for each shift. This work was convenient for her, because at lunchtime she could rush back home to cook and look after her son. But she couldn’t keep it up. Aged just fifty, her strength was already failing. As long as she was around, the son could have a life. But what if she weren’t there? Who would support him, take care of him? For this reason she decided that she had to find the son a wife.

The man she had cleaned for said, ‘At first we couldn’t think what kind of wife her son could possibly have; we said that he should just forget about it. No one thought that this disabled person had the right to get married.’

However, this man was actually the first one to introduce the woman’s son to a potential bride. He did it at the mother’s request, because she had been such a good employee. She didn’t just clean and tidy up, she also washed his bowls and chopsticks. After a while, her employer didn’t bother with the dishes, and left his clothes in a pile for her. But what kind of girl could he introduce to his cleaner’s son? For a long time he was puzzled. Of course the girl had to be physically normal, and she also couldn’t be an idiot. She had to be able to look after the son. Apart from that, he decided the girl’s appearance wouldn’t really 123

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matter and eventually he introduced the son to an ugly girl, a real fright. She had been warned beforehand that the son’s legs and arms were a bit stiff, but had been led to believe that he could still manage to walk with a limp. She hadn’t expected that he couldn’t even manage to stand up in her presence. She told them to forget it.

They had no choice but to lower their standards. But what did ‘lower’ mean in this case? Uglier? Missing some vital feature: face, nose, eyes, etc.?

It was human nature to search for the higher thing, the employer reflected, but his job was to find someone ugly. Depressed by this thought, he wondered whether he might have better luck in the countryside and decided to travel to a village where people didn’t have enough to eat. There he might at least be able to select someone good looking.

When the son heard this, his mouth started to water.

‘We have 10,000 yuan in our deposit book,’ his mother said. ‘Spend whatever’s needed.’ But her employer didn’t use their money. Somehow, I don’t know the full story, but with many twists and turns along the way, he brought a young Sichuanese girl, a real beauty, back to their house. She lived with them for a while and everyone said how nice she was. Then one day the mother staggered into the street yelling that their deposit book and even their ID cards were missing. The girl had taken everything. When they investigated, she turned out to be unknown at the address she had given them. They also learned that she was divorced. Everyone said, well, that’s modern society for you. But those words, ‘modern society’, couldn’t make the situation seem less bleak. Even a divorced woman had left him.

Afterwards, they put the word out that they would consider widows, they would consider women with children. Still, no one was interested. Without that 10,000 yuan they didn’t have a dowry; even a disabled girl was beyond their reach. No one could think of a single thing that would make any girl consider him.

The son started to resent his mother, and eventually to beat her. The mother was powerless. The neighbours said that as a mother you give your child everything, and your only fear is having nothing to give. A mother would cut flesh from her body for her son to eat.

They couldn’t bear though to let the woman’s son beat her, and pleaded with him to stop. But the mother said, ‘Let him. After he’s beaten me for a while he feels better.’ She offered her body to soak up his frustration.

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Later she had simply shut the door on the world. When she did go out, she greeted the neighbours with a cheery good morning. Her smile made the marks on her face even more noticeable. She went down to the market for food because if she didn’t cook for her adored son, he might starve. No doubt the child had exhausted himself beating her and was hungry.

No one had foreseen that he would beat her to death.

At one point, the mother came up with a plan to barter herself for a daughterin-law.

A decrepit old guy lived a few streets away and was so feeble that he didn’t even complain about life any more; he couldn’t really do anything. His wife had died and left him with a disabled daughter who would beat him when she was upset. She would beat him so hard that the father would stumble out to the street cursing furiously: ‘Fuck your mother!’

Everyone would roar with laughter and say: ‘Haven’t you already fucked her? ’ The old guy would sigh: ‘Yes, that’s why I have this evil daughter. There’s nothing I can do about it.’ He would shake his head. ‘If your daughter beats you, there’s not a thing you can do.’

Someone had joked that this daughter and the polio-stricken son nearby would be well-matched. Everyone laughed, but word got round to the mother, who took it seriously and launched a campaign to win over the old man. It was well over the top.

She went to the old guy’s house, cooked for him, managed his household, humoured his simple daughter. Then she took her son there on her back. While she got on with things, her child was left to entertain the daughter. Well, his body may be disabled but there was nothing wrong with his brain. It wasn’t much fun for him to keep such an idiotic girl company – her IQ was barely at the level of a three-year-old. No one could see what could be achieved by such a match. The girl needed people to look after her, not the reverse. She was incapable of looking after someone else. But the mother reasoned that after they had their own child, and the child had grown up, then he could look after his parents.

The old man revealed that the mother had made him an unusual proposal: ‘I will marry you, and then you can marry your daughter to my son. Our two families can live together and take care of each other.’

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‘Isn’t that prostitution?’ some people said.

Others defended her: ‘She has no choice! It’s unkind to say that.’

‘She was selling herself to get a grandchild.’

Someone quipped that it would have been simpler for her to have a grandchild with her son, but others protested that was too outrageous, even though people went to all kinds of lengths to have children.

The old man hadn’t answered her proposal but the mother just went ahead and moved her quilt to his house. ‘She climbed into that old guy’s bed!’ everyone said. Maybe it was tactical, but she didn’t immediately make her son sleep with the daughter. Instead she put a mattress down on the floor. But that very night her son was dragged out of there like a dead dog. It wasn’t because he had molested the girl; she had no sexual awareness at all. He had only wanted to play with her, and she was bored with him and wanted him to go. Because he couldn’t move, she dragged him out and left him in the middle of the road. A truck couldn’t get past him and the driver made a fuss, waking the whole street.

All the windows opened and people looked out as the girl ran around the son shouting: ‘Go away, go away. I don’t want to play with you.’

No one knew whether to laugh or cry. The son crawled along the ground, his neck tense with the massive effort of trying to escape. But his mother blocked his path. She entreated that stupid girl, bowed down to her. No matter how she implored, the girl wouldn’t give in: she demanded that they both leave. In fact, it seemed that she had some basic smarts because she actually ran into a nearby telephone box and dialed 110. The cops showed up and, without bothering to establish the facts, took the disabled son off in a car.

It was as if he was being abducted, one eyewitness said. When the son didn’t move as commanded, the cops lost patience and simply took him off. He thrashed about under the cop’s arm, but his kicks were random. His feet struck out blindly, his eyes were full of despair. He could see his enemy, but he lacked the ability to direct his movements.

He was quickly released but then became even more depressed. After that, the door of their house was always locked.

I Love My Mum (Make-Do Publishing, 2010) is a title in Make-Do Publishing’s Modern Chinese Masters imprint. For details please visit makedopublishing.com.

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Trina Gaynon

The Ghost Ubume I. The old woman peers out from the book of ukiyo-e and I know her face from the dream that came into a restless night spent high in the New Mexico desert, where she asked me to hold the infant sleeping heavy in her arms with his twisted face and oxygen-starved brain.

Loving him seemed so easy once I reached out my arms.

II. A ghost wanders the night in her white kimono, a farmer’s wife dead when nine months pregnant, searching for rice candy for the boy child born in her burial mound and waiting for rescue.

III. If the burden becomes heavier and heavier in your arms, remember reaching out to take it, and beware: if you’re not equal to the task, the child may turn on you.

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The Dreary Season The hem of her kimono leaves a trail of water on the floor.

Kneeling beside your futon, head-bowed, she weeps.

Her copper-streaked hair, foreign to Tamura-no-Go, feathers your sleep-creased face on nights when the moon hides.

Your falcon no longer responds to your whistles and clicks.

She huddles inside her hood, the bell on her ankle silent.

Could it be that your bird mourns the mandarin that she trussed – pluming him, scattering purple breast feathers and orange sails.

Do you know what you did at the river crossing at Akanuma?

The drake rose before his mate, startled out of the rushes at twilight.

His whistle splashes against the air.

You, hungry, let your eyas take him – that scrawny old bird – barely a mouthful for dinner.

Though it is the season of cicadas their rasps never break the silence.

Chill winds move through your taku.

Damp seeps through rice-paper screens.

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Out of the Wound Cradling the trunk of the fig tree in my palm I brush the dirt from the roots and cut back those that dangle thin and wispy as hair.

The bonsai guide doesn’t provide instructions broken down into a numbered list; I flounder, worried about the tree’s distress more than a choice between creating an epiphytic or banyan-style tree, or the aesthetics of aerial roots, wired branches, or defoliation. Its silhouette will give me away as being a casual gardener under the weight of responsibility so great.

Its new home, the bottom raised on scrolled feet, seeks to connect this Chinese banyan to a tradition as tangentially related to nature as bunraku puppeteers (three to a puppet and dressed in black) are to shadows.

Before the play begins, the chanter vows, before the text, to be faithful to the words there. My vow is to keep this fig alive. Neither my tree nor the puppets are life-sized.

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Roadside fruit stall during Lunar New Year. Prince Edward, Hong Kong. Photograph by John Batten (2011).

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Special Academic and Art Zones Michiel Hulshof

T

he making of ideas follows the same logic as that of laws and sausages: ‘Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion to our knowledge of how they are made’, according to the nineteenth-century American poet John Godfrey Saxe. And contrary to the common notion of a sudden, bright insight, an idea tends to grow gradually, nurtured by reflection and discussion, improved after opposition and setbacks.

Seen in this light it is difficult to reconstruct how the idea for a Special Academic and Art Zone emerged, but I like to think it began on a sunny morning while I was riding my bike to our office in Shanghai. Traffic was chaotic as usual and demanded my constant attention, but my mind kept drifting off. For weeks, one question had been bothering me: would Chinese cities ever become thriving, mind-blowing, cultural hotspots, true metropolises that attract not merely businessmen but artists, entrepreneurs, writers, actors and intellectuals from all over the world?

In 2009 architect Daan Roggeveen and I began the Go West Project, a think tank tracking the development of megacities in China’s hinterland. We travelled to sixteen megacities including Wuhan, Chongqing, Shijiazhuang and Guiyang – fast-growing urban agglomerations with millions of people and impressive skylines comparable to those of London, Hong Kong or Sao Paolo. We were finishing our book, How the City Moved to Mr Sun, which would show the results of our work, and we needed to draw conclusions about everything we had seen.

As I was cycling, I structured my thoughts. All the Chinese cities we had visited seemed prepared for the future: they had promising new business districts, gleaming new airports and endless new residential districts. They were interconnected with high-speed bullet trains that made the American 131

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and European railway systems seem like children’s toys from another, bygone age. Judging from their infrastructure and physical appearance, most Chinese megalopolises resembled the world’s biggest, tallest and most modern cities; however, in other aspects of urban life we found Chinese cities lagging behind culturally and intellectually, despite their immense populations.

We were sure this had to change. ‘It’s inevitable that Chinese cities will enter a new phase,’ Daan said. ‘At some moment, their focus will have to shift from physical growth to non-physical growth, from hardware to software.’

We realised this was easier said than done. One of the obstacles to creating cultural life is China’s rigid political system. In a lecture at Xiamen University, China’s literary bad boy and blogger Han Han addressed this issue: Leaders, teachers and students, hello. Do you know why China can’t become a cultural power? Because in most of our speeches, “leaders” always come first, and our leaders are illiterate. Moreover, they are scared of culture. Their job is to censor culture so they can control it. How can such a country become a cultural power? What do you say, leaders?

On that sunny morning, riding my bike in Shanghai, I was not looking to lay blame; I was searching for a solution, and I thought the answer lay in a concept that Chinese government officials would understand because they had seen it work before.

When I arrived at our office, Daan was already there. I poured a cup of coffee, sat down and told him what I had come up with. ‘If you think about it, it’s quite incredible what Chinese leadership did in the eighties: they changed a planned economy into a market economy. All these booming cities that we’ve visited are a direct consequence of that decision.’

‘I’m listening,’ Daan said.

‘Couldn’t we apply the same tools they used to create a market economy, to stimulate cultural life? Look at the Special Economic Zones – created when the Chinese leadership wanted to experiment with economic liberties.

Couldn’t they try to do the same with other liberties?’

Daan immediately grasped the idea and improved it in an instant. ‘A Special Art Zone!’ he said. ‘A place where the authorities can experiment with freedom of speech and freedom of expression!’

‘That would be so cool,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it could be done.’

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Later that afternoon, a Shanghainese journalist interviewed us about our upcoming book and we mentioned this idea for a Special Academic and Art Zone to her. The next day it was printed on page sixteen of the Global Times.

Now it was official.

To find out how cultural life in Chinese cities is changing we travelled to Chengdu, where a local gallery owner advised us to visit San Sheng Xian, loosely translated as ‘Three Saints Village’, in the nearby countryside. It turned out to be a pleasant and relaxed place, with numerous teahouses and restaurants scattered among vast bulb fields and ponds, and populated by the city’s most prominent artists.

On a small road we found a wooden noticeboard with an arrow pointing down a path to ‘The Artist Village’, which, contrary to the quirky, ramshackle image evoked by its name, consisted of a dozen modern villas surrounding a central lawn. A car park full of Mercedes, Audis and BMWs also hinted at the inhabitants’ prosperity. We soon spotted a man who looked to be in his forties and who introduced himself as Luo Fahui. He had a broad smile, closely cropped hair, big eyes and a friendly face. He was dressed in thick winter pyjamas and blue slippers, and was walking in his front garden. He pointed a remote control at the automatic gate to let in first his dog, and then us.

We followed him through a large garage to his studio, a high-ceilinged space overlooked by two glazed statues of boys in underwear, pierced by arrows in their chests. The room was filled with dozens of monochrome paintings of faceless, naked bodies. When we told him we were from the Netherlands, he gave us the name of an art gallery in Amsterdam that sold his work and revealed that he had just returned from San Francisco, where his solo exhibition was a smash hit.

‘One visitor was so touched by one of my paintings that she started to cry,’ said Luo. On a table in his studio lay some of his sources of inspiration: an American edition of Penthouse: Early Erotic Pictures, published by Taschen; and a photograph of a Chinese tour group.

We spent the afternoon talking and drinking Chinese tea from small ceramic cups. Luo’s life story was an illustration of how, after years of neglect, Chinese cities suddenly began calling on their artists to help change their image from drab communist conformity to something more creative and modern.

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Luo grew up in Chongqing during the Cultural Revolution, when art served only politics. He learned to draw with charcoal on walls: ‘Propaganda pictures, of course. We did not dare to make anything else.’ When Chinese universities reopened in 1978, art education had to start practically from scratch. Luo was seventeen when he enrolled at the Sichuan Academy for Fine Arts. He remembered how his university had bought an international encyclopaedia of art history and exhibited it as a relic in a glass showcase in the library. ‘Every morning a security officer would open the case and turn another page of the encyclopaedia.’

As the planned economy slowly gave way to a guided market economy, homogenous communist art began to mix with outside influences. Western rock music found its way on to university campuses and students traded in their grey Mao uniforms for the jeans, dresses and sunglasses in vogue in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Young intellectuals immersed themselves in Western literature, philosophy and art through books and magazines.

The newly flourishing art scene kept pace with the growing economic prosperity – all the way up to 1989, when many among the young Chinese intelligentsia had become convinced that economic reforms would soon lead to political change. But after demands for change were answered with bullets in Tiananmen Square that year, Chinese artists collectively withdrew from urban life. Sipping tea in his Chengdu villa, Luo did not want to elaborate on this period. He said he ‘had to leave Chengdu for a bit’. He went to Shenzhen and later to Beijing, where he witnessed public security officers harassing artists.

‘They arrested them and sent them to building sites to work in construction.’

Two years after his forced departure, Luo was able to return to Chengdu.

He took a job as a university lecturer and continued to paint; because his art was not considered politically dangerous, he received invitations to various exhibitions. In 1996 he displayed his paintings at the first Shanghai Art Biennale. Such official exhibitions of modern art were rare in China. In 1999 the art historian Francesca Dal Lago wrote that ‘for artists, the lack of exposure is suffocating. Neither persecuted nor openly criticized, China’s avant-garde is held back – or simply ignored. And for an artist, that’s far worse than public criticism’.

Then, halfway through the nineties, diplomats and businessmen started to buy Chinese art and set up galleries. Dictated by the law of supply and demand, the prices of Chinese modern art began to climb, with some works 134

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fetching record prices. In March 2006 Zhang Xiaogang’s Comrade No 120 was sold for the astonishing sum of US$970,000 at Sotheby’s first New York auction of modern Asian art. In October that year Charles Saatchi, the trendsetting British collector, spent US$1.5 million on a second painting

by Zhang, and in November his abstract Square of Heavenly Peace went for a stunning US$2.3 million. That same month, a panorama of the Three Gorges Dam by his colleague Liu Xiaodong sold for US$2.7 million. Then the merry-go-round began to spin out of control, culminating with the sale of Yue Minjun’s Execution, depicting four laughing prisoners waiting to be shot by an equally jubilant firing squad. Hidden for more than a decade, the work appeared for auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2007, and was bought by an anonymous collector for €4.2 million. The US magazine Portfolio contemptuously christened the craze the ‘Ka-Ching Dynasty’, after pop singer Shania Twain’s ode to materialism.

International success helped provoke change within China. City authorities suddenly began to appreciate the potential of the artists they had ignored for years, now that their value was confirmed in dollars and euros.

In 2005 Luo Fahui worked in an artists’ colony known as The Blue Roof, consisting of a number of empty shacks and the blue-roofed factories typical of the area. The Blue Roof counted among its residents more than fifty artists and quickly became the most important art district in central China. But the city government paid it hardly any attention.

‘They weren’t interested. They had never heard of us,’ Luo said.

Nevertheless, art traders from the West had begun to forage through China in search of interesting artists and, as a matter of course, found their way to Chengdu. In 2005 a curator from Montpellier arrived at The Blue Roof to invite Luo and four others to the Montpellier Biennale, ‘the first large-scale event outside China exclusively dedicated to contemporary Chinese art’.

When the artists returned from France following the exhibition they found, to their surprise, a delegation from one of the city districts waiting to greet them. The officials invited the artists to ride with them in their limousines back to The Blue Roof. Upon arrival, they revealed their ambitions: ‘They told us this was to be the future cultural district of Chengdu,’ said Luo. In a couple of years a new museum for modern art would rise between the bulb fields, as well as numerous galleries and other cultural facilities. The officials made Luo and his colleagues an attractive proposal: because they were among the twelve 135

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most famous artists of Chengdu, they would each receive a piece of land in the new area, where they would be free to build a studio. ‘It was a clever way of keeping us in the city,’ laughed Luo. ‘Many artists were thinking about moving to Beijing, where it was much easier to find an appropriate studio at the time.’

Like many officials in other parts of the world, the Chinese bureaucrats’ actions were triggered by the concept of the ‘creative city’, as coined by the American sociologist Richard Florida, whose book The Rise of the Creative Class was translated into Chinese in 2003. It asserts that urban regions with high concentrations of internet entrepreneurs, writers, artists and entertainers represent high economic impact. He suggested that young, hip and creative companies should take possession of old, abandoned industrial sites and dock areas. These ideas had only been current in obscure squatter and artist subcultures, but Florida made them mainstream at a stroke.

Chinese city governments were enthusiastic, and took part in the international mania to present their own cities as innovative and creative.

After threatening for years to close it down, the Beijing authorities suddenly revitalised the capital city’s famous 798 Art District, where dozens of artists inhabited former arms factories of East German design. The area underwent a metamorphosis: factory sheds were neatly plastered and the roads were paved, provided with street lights and marked with new signs in Chinese and English.

Soon crowds of tourists from home and abroad were visiting the district to soak up the atmosphere, drink lattes and eat pizza in trendy bars and restaurants.

In Shanghai, a city traditionally known for its economic focus, the municipal council decided on the large-scale transformation of empty factories into ‘centres of the creative industry’ with offices and studios for graphic designers, internet companies, architects and marketing agencies. Cities in the interior were likewise transformed: Chongqing changed its Huangjueping neighbourhood into an art district around the academy where Luo Fahui had studied in the 1980s. Strikingly, artists covered a 500-metre stretch of buildings in the main street with graffiti at the instigation of local authorities.

The requisitioning of such areas by local governments has been controversial, notably for the artists who colonized them originally. In Xi’an, capital of Sichuan’s neighbouring province of Shaanxi, when the city council bought factory sheds used by artists in ‘Textile Town’ from a former state enterprise, over seventy artists wrote to the Global Times to express their concern. They said they hoped the area would be maintained as ‘a simple place for artists to 136

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live and work’ rather than an area that was ‘commercial and successful’ like 798 in Beijing. Likewise, the construction of Chengdu’s art district in Three Saints Village has worried some of the original residents. As Michael Keane, an Australian academic and writer about China’s creative industry, commented in a lecture he gave in Shanghai, ‘The government believes it can construct a creative class in this manner but in many places you see the artists leave as soon as the government moves in.’

It was this understanding of how Chinese cities are struggling with cultural policies that prompted us to come up with a new idea. The top-down planned cultural theme parks that local officials are now designing function similarly to the top-down planned economy of Maoist times – not very well. Just last October the Chinese government announced its ambition to ‘boost cultural system reform and cultural industry development’. If it wants to live up to that promise it needs a new, preferably bottom-up approach.

In promoting culture, as with economic development, this has proven the more successful model. The question is how to stimulate the intellectual and creative potential of a highly literate workforce in what is quickly becoming the world’s largest urban society. Soon, millions of urbanites will want more from life than jobs and housing.

During the Chengdu Biennale of Architecture and Design in September, we returned to Chengdu to present our ideas to a group of fifty local artists, journalists, cultural entrepreneurs and academics. We gathered them into several small groups to discuss the conditions needed to make cultural life in their city flourish.

To our surprise, every group came up with the same answer: ‘The main thing that has to change is too sensitive to discuss openly. The Chinese government has to change its policies related to freedom of expression. After that, the rest is easy.’

It might be too much to hope for, at least all of a sudden. The concept of localised change might be more palatable for a leadership that fears revolutions like that in Libya. Instead, we propose the founding of a Special Academic and Art Zone where authorities can experiment with unleashing the liberties yet to be granted to a 1.4 billion-strong population.

When the zone becomes a success, the policy can be rolled out to the rest of the country.

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Will it happen? Daan and I can’t be sure. We can only hope our ideas will appeal to someone who has the power and the will to instigate change. Like sausage making, it will probably be a messy process but, frankly speaking, if Chinese cities want to continue their development they have few options other than to give this idea a try.

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A typical crossroads in suburban Kangbashi: rows and rows of identical apartment blocks along deserted streets.

Kangbashi: China’s Empty City Philip Gostelow he late afternoon sun bathes the great Gobi Desert in a golden light.

I’m looking out the window of a sleek new bus, my eyes fixed on the horizon. We are driving on an unusually smooth, silvery new motorway and I’m anticipating the first glimpse of Kangbashi, the city without people forty minutes south of the Dongsheng district of Ordos in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia.

Were it not for the bilingual road signs marking the location I could easily mistake the panorama, with its gently undulating arid terrain of spindly bushes and yellow sand, for southern California.

As we approach Kangbashi the wind pools sand into the new roadside kerbs, and I begin to make out the hazy silhouettes of condominiums in the distance and the skeletal shapes of cranes hovering over them.

Near the turn-off into the city, a large digital screen displays a rotating series of images portraying – in an updated version of socialist propaganda 139

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A cyclist battles against the wind blowing into Kangbashi and bringing a sandstorm from the Gobi desert.

posters – an idyllic city life and happy citizens. The view opens onto a full-scale urban landscape.

I get off the bus at a stop near the city centre. Traffic consists of a single vehicle dwindling slowly into the distance. The road is bordered on one side by countless rows of stark flats, functional but unimaginative in design, and on the other by rows of trees, planted in perfect alignment, drawing a shallow line between the sand and the city. I walk towards downtown dodging tumbleweeds as they cartwheel across the road, and see that the traffic has swelled to four vehicles, including both cars and construction trucks.

Kangbashi was founded with the intention of housing one million inhab­ itants. Accommodation for at least 300,000 has been built, but the reality is that the vast majority of these apartments are empty. Some are for sale; some are untenanted investment properties.

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Despite its windswept desert and rolling steppes, China’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region is one of the nation’s wealthiest areas. The city of Ordos, riding high on a decade-long resources boom thanks to nearby coal and natural gas reserves, has benefitted to the extent of a per capita GDP of US$14,500 (2008), nearly twice the national average of US$7,544 (2010).

In 2003, when Ordos officials were keen to reinvest the prefectural wealth in new urban infrastructure, the result was the initiation of Kangbashi’s development. According to Kevin Hamlin at Bloomberg’s Beijing bureau, as of June 2010, Standard Chartered Bank figures indicated the cost of construction to be US$161 billion.

I wander around with my camera and find myself at the junction of two sixlane roads, where I am approached by an inquisitive off-duty policeman.

Anyone walking in Kangbashi stands out against the barren and deserted urban backdrop, no one more so than a foreigner. The policeman asks why I have come all the way to Kangbashi. Curiosity, I reply, adding that I’d arrived from Shanghai via a two-and-a-half-hour flight to the Inner Mongolian capital, Hohhot, where I’d boarded a bus that took me two hours west to Baotou and then two hours south to Dongsheng before I finally boarded the local commuter bus that brought me here.

The policeman tells me he’s moved here with his family from Hohhot.

Braced against the wind and brimming with pride in his new home, he says Kangbashi is the only city in the whole of China that provides free public transport.

But what other incentives can the city offer to entice new settlers?

There appears to be no industry or other infrastructure that would provide employment beyond the building of the city.

The policeman and I look up as a dust storm begins to blow in from the desert, softening the light from the sun. We take it as a cue to say our goodbyes, and I watch him walk jauntily homewards towards a vanishing point between the vacant buildings.

Considering the giant steps China’s economy and industry have taken in the last two decades, and its continued expansion and reserves of cash, Kangbashi may yet fulfil its potential and become an oasis metropolis.

Until then, its lonely roads await the signs of life a traffic jam might bring.

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Centre of town – Kangbashi, Ordos.

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Ordos Public Library, Kangbashi.

A display of potted plants lies withered in suburban Kangbashi, empty and lifeless like the buildings themselves.

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Ordos Museum forecourt, Kangbashi.

A woman waits to cross an almost traffic-free intersection near the Ordos Museum designed by MAD, a Chinese firm of architects.

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A man walks past sculptures of rearing horses – emblems of Mongolia – in Genghis Khan Square at the end of a huge public promenade. In the distance are four even larger Genghis Khan monoliths.

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The King, the Saint and the Fool A. K. Kulshreshth

B

1

ut listen to me, Raja! And listen clearly. You will not come back alive from that hill if you go now,’ Rahim Shah had said in that tone of his.

I hung on to every word. I did not, of course, allow the steady rhythm of the fan to falter. Lord Temagi sat slumped on his throne. He had been like that since morning. I worried for him, but focused on my job: to fan my Lord, protect him from heat and insects. What else could I do?

‘Raja, I do not predict the future,’ Rahim Shah continued. ‘Your pandit claims to, and if you ask him for a prediction, you will get words without meaning. It is the opposite of what I teach: the use of zikr, achieving meaning without words.

‘I live on the ground. When I stamp my foot, like this, there is this sound.’

There was a thump as Rahim Shah’s right foot contacted the earth. ‘When you meet Parameswara, only one of you will come back alive. The chances are that it will not be you.’

My Lord Temagi spoke hoarsely: ‘I cannot live like this. I will go.’ He stood up. Rahim Shah did not give way.

‘Raja, understand this: no one did anything unexpected. It is only the outcome of simple actions which you find criminal.’

‘If I die, how will people remember me?’ Temagi asked. He stood hunched, with his head listing to one side. His hand on the hilt of his sword was limp.

‘I cannot say. It will depend on what is written, what is preserved, what is understood by the fools who pretend to be wise, and what their kings tell them to say. If you live, you will decide what is written. We do not know the other things. In this world, this is how it works. And this is the only world we know, Raja. Do not leave it so easily.’

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My Lord straightened himself. ‘You call me Raja now, when . . .’ His voice was weak. ‘My mind is made up. I will go. Tell me: what is your wish? You say that you want nothing, but you have not travelled here from Kaling for nothing. ’ I strained to hear him as I chased away a mosquito that had landed on his divine bare shoulder.

‘Raja, I do not want things. I stand before you with most of what I have.

On the other hand, I do like to live. To be honest, I travelled from Kaling, but I come from Kashi. I didn’t tell you about it as I have reason to be unpopular there.’ He beamed.

‘I will make myself scarce, and come back later when things have settled down. I like Temasek. But I will ask you for three things. First, there is this person in whom everyone sees a fool, but in whom I see God. He stands behind you.’

My Lord turned and looked at me. I saw his dark brown eyes for the first time in my life. It happened so quickly that I had no time to lower my gaze as I should have. Rahim Shah was like that. He was always making strange things happen.

It was a magical moment. I remember it even now, when many monsoons have passed and so many things have changed for me. That was the moment when everything started to change. Rahim Shah made it happen, praise be on him. I remember everything: up close, there was my Lord’s face, revealed to me for the first time. Behind him stood Rahim Shah, much the same as he was when he had come into our world.

2 That had been just two days before. From the back entrance to the court, as usual, the guard had announced the Lord’s entry: ‘Lord of the Three Worlds, Protector of Temasek, Knight of Ayuthaya, Divine Temagi approaches!’ How blessed I was to be in the Lord’s shadow! I had kissed his toes first thing in the morning. As we entered the court, all inside rose.

‘Victory to Raja Temagi!’ the audience roared but, amid all of them, one man stood silent. While I fanned the Lord, I could not help staring at this man.

He was tall. Or was he? When I think back now, I am not sure. He wore a white cap which left only a bit of short hair visible. His beard was trimmed. He wore plain robes of a dull white. And his eyes, yes, I think it was the eyes which held me even that first time. Was he looking at me?

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‘Who wishes to see me today, Mantri? Is all well in Temasek?’ the Lord boomed. While we were walking in, Meghnath had bowed to him and spoke very fast, as usual; so fast that I could not make out what was said. The Lord had nodded. Meghnath had flashed his teeth at me, as he always did, when we walked on.

The Mantri stammered. I wondered why. ‘My Lord, first of all, there is the honourable envoy from Cheen. Admiral Zheng is passing by to Kaling. He wishes to speak to you.’

I could see that our Lord’s hands trembled with happiness. They often did when he received envoys from Cheen, Nagapattinam or Kaling.

The envoy and the three men with him wore armour, which was just as well because it hid their strange red robes. They had all left their swords outside.

They bowed before our Lord. I wished all those foreigners would learn how to bow. They hardly bent. It must have been because they were tired and stiff.

The envoy spoke a few words. The translator, Chatur, waited for a gap and then started to speak: ‘We salute Your Highness and bring presents of steel and silk from Li’nan. These have been submitted to the treasury, and we hope Your Highness deems them useful.’

Lord Temagi nodded.

‘We have need of a suitable place to rest for our fifty men, ’ Chautura continued, ‘ and later we shall need some girls and boys to comfort us.’

Lord Temagi nodded and pointed to Meghnath.

‘We will take leave of Your Highness, and should he wish us to carry any gifts to Li’nan for the Song Emperor, we would be happy to be of service. We shall make ourselves available tomorrow. ’ Lord Temagi spoke directly to Chatur: ‘Tell them Meghnath will see to their comforts and that Mantri Laxman will arrange gifts of lakawood and hornbill. If they have any trouble in their business or pleasure, they may ask for another audience with me.’ Chatur started talking to them in their tongue, which always seemed so fast and funny.

They bowed and stepped out. Unfortunately, they had not been taught that they must not turn their backs on the Lord. But our Lord was merciful.

Mantri Laxman stepped forward and bowed properly. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘this holy man wishes to see you. He has come here from Kaling.’

Rahim Shah stepped forward. I almost stopped moving the fan in my shock! He did not bow, and he looked straight at the Lord! He spoke haltingly 149

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in our tongue! ‘I am Rahim Shah. I bring you nothing but good wishes, as everything I own is in this bag I hold,’ he held up a small bundle in a brown cloth, ‘and I ask nothing except your permission to stay in Temasek.’

The court was silent.

Our Lord straightened. His voice rang out: ‘By what right do you ask this?’

‘The right of a wanderer asking for shelter.’

Temagi was quiet. The Pandit had been fidgeting. ‘Lord, pardon me for interrupting. Which god do you believe in, holy man?’ he asked. His voice was high-pitched.

Rahim Shah smiled. ‘I believe in your god if that is a condition you impose.

But I do not pray to any god. And definitely to no man.’ He looked at our Lord and smiled! ‘I am a talib and a yogi.’

The Pandit turned to our lord and bowed. ‘Lord, I warn you: this man will bring destruction to Temasek. His brothers have razed larger cities. Thousands of temples have been burnt down. Kashi was razed again two monsoons ago.’

Our Lord sighed. ‘Tell me, Rahim Shah, why should I trust you?’

Rahim Shah smiled. ‘A king, who has much to lose, must trust no one. I do not ask you to trust me, only to distrust me no more than anyone else. I, who have nothing to lose, can trust everyone. I have nothing to do with those you call my brothers. They have killed and looted in the name of God. They came with swords; I come with this bundle.’ He held it up again.

‘I will make cloth. If a poor man asks me for help, I will help him. That is my religion. I practice zikr, the art of silence, which is not very different from maun. If I disturb the peace of Temasek, then cut off my head.’

Our Lord flicked his hand, meaning that Rahim Shah was dismissed. ‘Go now, and keep to your word. Or I will have your head with or without your permission.’

The Pandit started to protest, but was silenced by a raised finger. ‘Anything else, Mantri?’

Mantri Laxman said, ‘Lord, your guest Prince Parameswara desires to have a word with you in private when it suits you.’

‘I shall send for him.’

The Mantri made his ritual announcement: ‘Who seeks justice in this court?’

Two people stepped forward and Lord Temagi continued his duties. My mind wandered and I did not hear what was being said. Such was the effect of that Rahim Shah. I had never seen one like him.

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Soon it was time for our Lord to retire and rest from his tiresome work. He stood up, and that shook me out of my trance. The people prostrated themselves and I followed him out the back entrance. I placed the fan in the holder on my back and lifted the umbrella.

As we stepped out into the sun, I made sure that our Lord did not face the sudden glare of the Temasek day. It had rained a bit, and there was that wonderful smell of moisture rising from the damp red soil of the Holy Hill.

I followed the Lord to the second lady’s hut, not the fourth lady’s. For many full moons now the fourth lady had graced our compound, and our Lord had spent all his free time, such as he could afford, with her. She had come with her brother from a village near Ayuthaya. Our Lord had been kind enough to give her brother a separate hut. I remembered how the Queen had closed her door and stayed alone for many nights in protest.

But of course they were together for the worship every morning, the Lord and the Queen.

I, who was laughed at by so many, was liked by our Lord. Why else would he have allowed me into all parts of the compound? That day, after he reached the second lady’s hut, the Lord gave me a packet to take to the fourth lady.

When I went there, the eunuch – what’s his name – wasn’t on guard.

I did look forward to seeing the fourth lady, even then.

She asked me in and everything happened so fast. I placed the packet at her feet. When I rose up, of course I could not look her in the eyes; therefore, since she had uncovered herself, what else would I see but her breasts?

Though I had never seen breasts before, something told me they could not be more perfect than these. Though I did not touch them, I knew then that they must be soft and firm, yielding and resistant, smooth on the sides and wonderfully rough at the points. And I looked at them for a long time.

She burst out laughing and said, ‘Will you not do anything?’

I lowered my gaze. ‘It . . . it.’ I cursed myself.

‘It’s quite magnificent!’ she said, looking at me wide-eyed, pointing at my thing.

‘I . . .’

‘What?’

‘I . . . cannot . . .’

She laughed again, and my eyes filled with tears. I was used to being laughed at, but sometimes it hurt more than at other times.

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She stopped then, God bless her, and covered herself quickly. She reached out for my bent shoulder, but stopped herself from touching me. And it was just as well because I do not know what her touch might have done to me.

‘Forgive me,’ she whispered. ‘Go now.’

I turned and went out the door. Meghnath was waiting there, under the durian tree. He seemed to be grinning and glaring at the same time, but not at me. It took a moment for me to realize that he was focused on the fourth lady, framed in the door. She quickly shrank back into her hut, and my heart shrank for her. I started to say something, and cursed myself again. The tears swelled in my eyes; luckily my swollen lump had subsided.

I wanted to go past him but he stood in the way.

‘W-W-what did you just do, f-f-foo—’ he mocked me.

‘Let him go.’ The voice was measured and low, but very firm. It was Rahim Shah. I don’t know where he had come from to save me. Meghnath stood uncertain for some time, then smirked and let me pass before he sloped off, glancing back at the fourth lady’s hut.

3 ‘Tell me, what is your name?’ Rahim Shah asked me.

‘Nn . . .’ I struggled. But strangely, instead of fighting my tears, I found myself smiling. Rahim Shah did not laugh at me!

‘Do you have one?’

I lowered my head. I did not want to tell him that they called me the fool.

‘Do you know that you are strong?’

I did not know what to say.

‘I thought not. I will call you Fakir, though it may yet be a strange name in these parts.’

I nodded.

‘You have a good smile. Tell me, have you talked to her before?’

I signalled that I didn’t get it.

He pointed at the fourth lady’s hut.

I lowered my gaze. It would take too much effort to explain to him that I had pointed out the dead bird to her, so that she had known her meal was poisoned – and that she had looked at me in a way which made me dream hopeless, guilty dreams of her.

He laughed, and patted my shoulder. I felt a warmth. I don’t think anyone 152

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had ever laughed so close to me, without laughing at me. I pointed to the second lady’s hut.

‘You have to wait for your master?’

‘Hmm,’ I said. I took out my lunch – dried fish and rice – and offered it to him.

‘No, I cannot eat your lunch, and I do not need to eat now.’

I nodded hard and again held it up.

‘No, Fakir, I do not eat any living creature.’

I must have looked surprised.

‘Do not worry. I will not go hungry. ’ He smiled again. Then I saw that he was looking past me. The fourth lady had come back to her doorway; the eunuch guard was at his post now. She seemed worried. Rahim Shah sighed and looked at both of us. Then he was off, and it was time for me to go as well.

The rest of that day passed in a strange way. That night passed with great difficulty. If I’d had more rice, and had not been afraid of being scorned, I would have taken it and gone to the street of pleasure. But I think something also made me think that Rahim Shah would not want me to go there. And the fourth lady? What about her? After a point, I could not control myself anymore and the shivering and wetness happened. I fell asleep after that.

4 The worship was performed and our Lord was ready to undertake his worldly duties. The visitors from Cheen were waiting for him.

‘Your Highness,’ Chatur announced, ‘Admiral Zheng wishes to convey his gratitude for your hospitality. He says he was tempted to stay on, but as the winds and stars appeared favourable, his ship will leave tomorrow. Your gifts will surely be appreciated by the Song Emperor. In return, the Admiral wishes to present you with a gift which the Song Emperor asked him to present to a recipient of the Admiral’s choice during this voyage.’

Our Lord waved his hand, and granted permission. Admiral Zheng was alone. He stepped forward, bowed – not properly – and placed a silk packet at our Lord’s feet. I hastened to pick it up and place it in his palms. Then I stepped back. Only I saw our Lord tense up.

The Admiral said something. Chatur translated: ‘We are grateful, and with Mazu’s wishes we wish to see the great Temagi of Temasek again.’

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Our Lord sat with his fingers stroking his forehead. I saw beads of sweat on his left shoulder and fanned him a little faster. There was silence in the court.

The Cheen people hesitated. Mantri Laxman then stepped forward and said, ‘Please tell them, Chatur, that we would be happy to receive them again.’

Admiral Zheng looked puzzled. He glanced at Mantri Laxman, shrugged, bowed and stepped out.

‘Raja, is all well?’ the Mantri bowed and asked.

‘Dismiss the court. Send for that Rahim Shah who was here.’

‘Raja!’ the Pandit said. ‘I have already warned you . . .’ He stopped halfway, and gulped as the Lord looked at him.

Soon the last of the people in the court had made their bows and left, some only after pleading with Mantri Laxman.

The Lord asked, in a low voice, ‘Did you take the packet straight to Mayawati?’

I was still behind him, but he had turned his head towards me.

It took me a while to understand that I had been spoken to. In my excitement I almost looked straight at the Lord. But then I checked myself and nodded.

Rahim Shah stepped in. I am quite sure he looked at me and smiled! Again he stood straight before the Lord. I wished he would not do that. ‘I salute you,’ he said.

‘I see that you do not.’

Rahim Shah smiled. ‘I do. I am only a bit . . . different. I stand before you as I would stand in the bazaar, as one who does not consider anyone a friend or an enemy. I wish all well – and since you have granted me shelter, you more than others. Do I appear false to you?’

‘No. No. There is something I wish to discuss.’ Our Lord signalled with his hand that I should go.

‘Let him stay, Temagi of Temasek,’ Rahim Shah smiled.

I saw our Lord stiffen, and then shrug. He was quiet.

‘Tell me, what can I possibly do for you?’

‘Give me an answer.’

‘I do not read, Temagi. I do not have answers to all the questions in the world. But I live in this world. And I know that asking the right questions is more important than searching for answers. If you ask, I will be true.’

The Lord obliged. ‘Tell me this, Rahim Shah: yesterday I sent a perfect round pearl, this one, the most valuable one I have seen in my life, to Mayawati, 154

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my favourite woman. Today the Cheen Admiral gifted it back to me. How did this happen?’

Rahim Shah was grave. ‘Should you not ask your spy, Meghnath?’

‘You know about him?’

‘The whole city knows.’

‘Are you saying that you will not answer my question?’

‘I will. But to find out how it happened I would need to be allowed into any room in this compound, or in the city. I should not be barred from anywhere.

Everyone should know that I work for you. I will start with the Admiral, before he leaves.’

‘I grant that. I will send word to Mantri Laxman. When will you return?’

‘You must wait for me. If you cannot, I shall make myself present when you send for me. But that will only make things slower.’

‘I will wait.’

Rahim Shah smiled. ‘Do not be so despondent, Raja.’ I noticed Lord Temagi’s head jerk up in surprise. ‘Sleep well. I will aim to have your answer after the next sunrise.’

5 Our Lord spent the whole of the day walking around his empire. I followed him faithfully. He walked very slowly. When the sun was setting, he watched from the corner of the hill as the shadow of the rock at the mouth of the river grew longer. Praise be to God that on that day I spent much time with him.

Two guards followed at a distance.

He headed back to the palace compound after the sun had set. He walked past the temple and through the Royal Garden. The lamps were still burning in the huts of the four ladies, but the Lord did not deign to stop at any of them.

He went straight on to the palace.

The Queen was waiting for him at the entrance. She must have seen him walking up. Once the Lord had crossed the threshold, I stayed back and prostrated myself on the ground. The maid washed his feet. Then he continued walking at his slow place, without turning towards the Queen, who followed him.

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before the first rays of light began to appear. The guards had not yet snuffed out the lamps. In the Royal Garden, the songs of the birds were at their loudest. But on that day I did not linger to enjoy them, as I sometimes did.

I waited, but Lord Temagi did not appear for his morning walk in the Royal Garden. The guards waited too. Finally, when the song of the birds was drowned out by the noise of men, and the sky had turned a light blue, the Lord and his Queen made their appearance. We prostrated ourselves on the ground and kissed their feet.

Then we followed them into the temple. There were many people from the village that day. One large family seemed to have come to celebrate some auspicious event – perhaps the birth of a boy. They brought many fruits and some cloth. The Pandit chanted the verses and at the hour, the rays of the sun burst through the darkness inside to light up the presence of the Lord and his Queen.

Yet I sensed that the Lord was completely listless.

Then, without a word to the Queen, the Lord started walking towards the court. I was right behind him. Meghnath appeared at the usual time and started to murmur something, but the Lord cut him short. I was overjoyed, though I kept a straight face.

The audience prostrated themselves as he entered. As soon as he had taken his throne, he asked Mantri Laxman, ‘What is most urgent today?’

‘There are four petitioners, two of whom were here yesterday, Lord.’

‘What else?’

‘Nothing.’

‘We will hear them all tomorrow.’

‘My Lord?’

‘Yes?’ ‘Of course, my Lord.’

‘I will wait here for Rahim Shah. Send word that I am waiting, but there is no hurry.’ He flicked his hand and the court was quickly cleared.

We waited.

The court started to heat up as the day progressed. A layer of sweat appeared on the Lord’s left shoulder and he removed his top garment. I fanned him faster and positioned myself so that the smell of my sweat would not carry to his divine nostrils. Two flies appeared. I kept them from landing on the Lord, but it took some effort. We were together in that silence, and I was grateful 156

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for the opportunity to be near him. Now I sometimes wonder: what was he thinking all that time?

Then we heard the faint sound of Rahim Shah’s peculiar wooden sandals, clopping against the tiles. The sound grew louder. Our Lord drew himself up straight. There was more noise as Rahim Shah removed his sandals. We heard next the soft thuds of the balls of his feet landing on the floor. The court guards were at either side of the doorway and were not visible to us. From where I stood, I saw the long central aisle of the court, its mahogany floor, polished by the feet of visitors from all over the world, and reflecting both the red floor of the hall outside and the blue sky beyond it.

Into this frame strode Rahim Shah.

7 He paused at the doorway and had a word with the guards. They moved away towards the main door of the building. Rahim Shah moved towards us, and his shadow fell on the Lord. The soft thump of his feet was the only sound until, suddenly, the call of a crow broke the spell.

‘I salute you,’ Rahim Shah said.

‘Have you the answer?’

‘Not the answer; there is not only one. I have some answers, which lead to more questions. I have not rested. I will try to be brief. Will you promise not to stop me until I am finished?’

Our Lord shrugged. ‘I will listen.’

‘Temagi, here is how it happened. You gave the pearl to Mayawati without extracting a promise that she would not pass it on to anyone. Meghnath, who is incidentally the most hated man in your city, threatened to send Mayawati’s brother with the Cheen who are leaving in a few hours. He also asked for her . . . favours.’

‘Why did she not approach me?’

‘Because Meghnath was blackmailing her. Let me continue,’ he raised his hand to ask the Lord to pause. ‘She offered the pearl to him. It was her most valuable possession. He promised to keep it to himself.

‘Within a few moments, he had decided what to do. By the way, I confess that I have not spoken to him, but I have spoken to thirty-one other people, including the eunuchs. He went to the Queen to give the pearl to her, knowing she would use it to get Mayawati executed.

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‘But the Queen has been talking to your guest, Prince Parameswara.

She gave the pearl to him. What exactly they talked about, I cannot say.

Nor have I discovered why Meghnath does not know this.

‘But to be brief, I shall continue with the story of the pearl. The Queen could have used the pearl to separate you from Mayawati. Instead, she chose to give it to your guest. Again, the person who told me this says that Parameswara promised not to pass it on, and he was of course not told the story of its provenance.

‘Parameswara – now there is a man who has taken shelter with you, and . . . but let’s stick to the pearl. Parameswara, in order to ingratiate himself, gave it to Admiral Zheng. He told the Admiral it was a gift from the people of Palembang. Why does a prince without a kingdom want to find favour with the Admiral from Cheen?

‘I leave that for you to figure out.

‘I spoke to Admiral Zheng, who delights in collecting things: swords and boys are two of them. When it comes to currency, he believes in something called paper money, which is used in Cheen. I myself do not understand any kind of money, so I will not go into that crazy idea.

‘He saw no point in carrying a pearl to Kaling; therefore, he decided to thank you for your hospitality, especially since he could not imagine you discussing a state gift with Parameswara.’

Rahim Shah stopped. I had continued to fan my Lord. It was upsetting to see the state he was in – he was distressed, breathing hard and his head rolled from side to side.

Perhaps Rahim Shah would call for a vaid? But no, he did nothing.

Lord Temagi pulled the cord next to him. There was the sound of a guard running in. It all happened very fast. I could see that even Rahim Shah was surprised.

‘Send word to Mantri Laxman that he should come here at once. Wait.

Tell him to order Parameswara to meet me on the Hill at noon. He should go with his sword and be prepared to fight.’

All this was said before the guard had fully stood up after prostrating himself. He gaped open-mouthed at our Lord.

‘Did you hear me? Run now!’ My Lord Temagi’s voice was hoarse but steady.

‘My Lord.’ The guard prostrated himself again and ran out.

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Lord Temagi sat slumped on his throne. I did my best to cool him. My hands trembled.

He drew up his legs and sank his head between his knees. I could not believe it. His voice was broken when he spoke next: ‘Rahim Shah, you are a fortunate man. Are you holding back your laughter?’

‘Temagi, do you see me laugh? I do not betray someone who has given me shelter. You have already been betrayed thrice over – by the Queen, by Parameswara and by Meghnath. I do not consider Mayawati and Admiral Zheng to be traitors. And I will not betray you by laughing at you.’

‘You would make a good king, Rahim Shah,’ Lord Temagi said hoarsely, ‘but I don’t know if I would make a good saint.’

Rahim Shah smiled. ‘Do not be despondent, Temagi. All of us play many parts in our lives – we are all kings, saints and fools. And we all have bits of Meghnath in us. Who knows where one part ends and another begins?

‘But listen to me, Raja! And listen clearly. You will not come back alive from that hill if you go now.’

8 This is the vision that remains imprinted on my mind: of Lord Temagi, and of Rahim Shah behind him when we were alone in the court.

‘He has served me well. What do you want for him? I will grant you one wish,’ My Lord Temagi said to Rahim Shah. I was still trembling from the sight of my Lord’s eyes.

‘Before you go to the Holy Hill, ask the Mantri to send the fool and Mayawati to the sea village of the Orang Laut. I have made arrangements for them to be received there. I know these people are considered thieves and pirates but they are more honourable than the most refined people of this city.

Your fool and Mayawati will be able to live peacefully there.’

Temagi looked at me, and then at Rahim Shah. ‘But I have already sent for Mantri Laxman. I intend to have Mayawati, the Queen and Meghnath executed.’

‘Allow me to finish, Temagi,’ Rahim Shah continued. ‘Here is my second wish: a boy for the Admiral Zheng. I suggest you send Meghnath. He is quite . . . suitable, though my knowledge of such matters is limited.’

My Lord Temagi folded his hands and tilted his head to one side. ‘Holy man, I granted you one wish but you have asked for three. It interests me. What is your third wish?’

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‘Raja, we come into this world crying, while others around us laugh. What ought we to want when we die? That others should not laugh behind us! I ask you not to go to the duel at this time. But if you do choose to go, I ask you to tell Mantri Laxman that you order all prisoners to be released. Do not execute the Queen and Mayawati. Thus, people will remember you the way you and I would wish.’

9 Many monsoons have passed since then. My friends tell me that Parameswara became Lord of Temasek and that later Temasek was flattened by the soldiers of Ayuthaya in revenge. We were lucky not to be there. It is now again inhabited, but there are many ghosts there.

We lead a quiet life in this sleepy village, where no one troubles us. My experience has made me invaluable to the headman, who knows I have no desire to replace him. I have made a good, clean life for Mayawati and our three daughters and four sons, the eldest of whom is building his own hut as he has found a woman for himself.

We are old now but I still enjoy Mayawati sometimes. Very often, I rem­ ember the first time, after which everything changed for me. I ordered her to cook for me, and she did it with tears of happiness in her eyes. Every so often, I remember Rahim Shah, praise be on him.

Acknowledgements and Notes Parameswara and Temagi are historical figures, but this story is fictional.

Historians tell us that Parameswara fled Palembang, took refuge in Temasek (present-day Singapore) and killed his host Temagi to become regent of Temasek.

Temagi had been a vassal of the King of Ayuthaya; whose army later pursued Parameswara, forcing him to flee once again, this time from Temasek.

My mother told me an ancient Indian story about a king whose heart was broken when his gift to his favourite wife came back to him. He discovered it had been passed around to several people before it was unwittingly returned to him.

Some of Rahim Shah’s lines are based on the couplets of Kabir, a weaver and a mystic of Varanasi (Kashi) in India. He preached against bigotry and is believed to have been born after Parameswara allegedly murdered Temagi. My story assumes that Rahim Shah drew inspiration from sources that also inspired Kabir.

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from Fragments from a Northern Dreamland Early Autumn On distant mountains young flowers are drenched in red by the sunset light.

A chill wind frightens the green trees.

A regular rhythm drowns out the soft music of a lonely woman, spinning silk and dreaming of a soldier sent beyond the Wall.

Wild geese, fly like fish in water – take my thoughts to him.

161

from Fragments from a Northern Dreamland

A love letter for Li Zian Drinking ice and taking my medicine listlessly the river passes in a dream the mirror reflects the fallen magpie and migrating geese flee the zither music.

Under the tree the well sounds with autumn rain.

Under the window a glimmer grows and a secret dawn wind sends a bleak letter asking where you spend each day punting the empty river.

Looking across Han River I send this poem to Li Zian Sadness flows along the river north and south as I remember your empty promises.

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On the sandy banks ducks sleep snugly.

Geese soar over the citrus trees.

A faint song grows in the mist and the ferry emerges into moonlight.

Love reduces distance to nothing; around me I hear women washing.

Passing Ezhou Oars stroke the water and willow branches ripple as we drift past town.

Over white snow high music floats down from the temple bringing new poetry.

We drift down river trying to fill the traveller’s heart with ten thousand lines of verse.

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Mother and child on bicycle, Cheung Sha Wan, Hong Kong. Sign reads: ‘Secondhand goods wanted: domestic appliances, electronics, sound systems, computers, hi-fi products, no matter good or bad.’ Photograph by John Batten (2010).

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Fionnuala McHugh ith a Michael Ondaatje book, the images persist long after you’ve forgotten the intricacies of the story: a woman dying within a cave of swimmers in a desert (The English Patient); a young nun falling into the arms of a man building a bridge (In the Skin of a Lion); a truck driver crucified to the tarmac on a Sri Lankan road (Anil’s Ghost). His latest work, The Cat’s Table, includes another image that’s both spectacular and matter-of-fact: a ship passing through the Suez Canal, the demarcation line between Asia and Europe and the journey within a journey at the heart – and the exact midpoint – of this tale of transition. (A little tease with real-life is going on here: the ship, the Oronsay, really existed. Hong Kong was her final port of call before she was broken up in Taiwan in 1975.)

The narrator, like Ondaatje, is a writer who lives in Canada. He is remembering his passage through the rites of childhood into adulthood while 165

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sailing, as Ondaatje did, from 1950s Sri Lanka to join his divorced mother in England. He hasn’t seen her for several years and is afraid she won’t know where to find him when he disembarks after three weeks at sea. We don’t discover the boy’s name until page 58, when he replies to a fellow passenger who asks for it: ‘“Michael,” I said.’ We learn that Michael, aged eleven, is a former pupil of St Thomas’ College at Mount Lavinia, Sri Lanka (as was Ondaatje) and will later attend Dulwich College in England (as did Ondaatje).

Ondaatje has played a variation of this game before. Running in the Family, published in 1983, is a memoir that reads more like fiction. ‘I wanted to touch them into words,’ he wrote about his initial desire to travel back to Sri Lanka from Canada and recreate his unknown family. Almost thirty years on, The Cat’s Table presents us with the reverse: fiction that reads more like memoir.

Michael is one of three boys who are travelling unaccompanied on the voyage. The other two are the asthmatic Ramadhin and the exuberant Cassius, who continues the Ondaatje tradition of endowing vivid characters with names borrowed from the past (cf. Cato from In the Skin of a Lion and Caravaggio from In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient). These Sri Lankan children are unused to stairs, to blankets, to sandals; they are ‘naked with innocence’.

The Cat’s Table, at the opposite end of the dining room from the Captain’s Table, is as fellow-passenger Miss Lasqueti remarks, ‘the least privileged place’ on the ship but to the boys it’s a convenient outpost that offers them a chance to escape all order.

Each day, they decide, they must do at least one thing that’s forbidden: together they find a garden with poisonous plants blooming in the hold; they spy from a lifeboat on a prisoner who only emerges late at night for a chained shuffle on deck; they observe unreliable adults behave in bewildering ways, like the Baron who encourages the athletic but cautious Michael to wriggle through the windows of first-class cabins to unlock the doors from the inside and let him in. On one of these thieving expeditions Michael, covered in oil from the engine room, glimpses a wild, semi-naked boy in a stateroom mirror.

It’s the first reflection of himself he can remember: ‘someone startled, half formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet.’

On the cusp of sexual awareness, the boys are baffled by its mystery. They’re entranced by a roller-skating Australian girl who showers fully clothed on deck (‘the gush and spray of it’) and they are never sure what they are witnessing 166

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from their nocturnal hiding places ‘so that our minds were half grabbing the rigging of adult possibility’.

Michael’s cousin, Emily, is on board. She’s a few years older and half mother figure, half crush. He spends one lonely morning weeping in her bed, where he suddenly feels a thrilling desire he can’t understand (‘It was as if with its existence I was lacking something essential, like water’). His experiences will make a stranger of his mother when he meets her on the docks at Tilbury.

Emily, we discover, has a disguised life, as do many of the other passengers, including a deaf girl, a dumb tailor and a blind Perera (a linguistic joke – unlike the Pereira family, this one has no ‘i’). People have hidden scars. And when someone is murdered on board the boys, again, don’t understand what’s happening, and this occludes our own understanding of events. (‘Was it all part of a boy’s fervent imagination?’) There’s a subplot about a key which could be metaphorical or actual, but reading The Cat’s Table for its thriller aspects would be like reading The English Patient for an analysis of Rommel’s desert strategy.

This is a book about transience. One of the diners at the Cat’s Table is a ship’s dismantler, and it’s a shock to Michael when he realises that, one day, the Oronsay will also be cut into pieces. There’s a wonderful moment when a film screening on deck is interrupted by a storm: ‘A gust ripped the screen loose and sent it skittering over the ocean like a ghost, and the images continued to be shot out, targetless, over the sea.’ Further recognition of life’s passing comes at Suez, a dark scything of trapped water ‘as if within the gradual unrolling of a scroll’. The adult Cassius, who becomes a painter, will create a canvas of this scene from the perspective he had as a child, and when Michael sees this painting displayed in a London gallery, he finally understands that part of his journey: ‘Goodbye, we were saying to all of them. Goodbye.’

Ondaatje is a poet and in his novels the action is often fitted around the imagery, which can make for a beautiful but baffling read; however, The Cat’s Table is relatively linear. There are leaps forward in time – we learn about the adult Ramadhin and Cassius and there’s an entire Tuscan section about Miss Lasqueti that seems to have been beamed in from another book altogether – but, mostly, we stay cocooned within the rhythm of ship life. When Michael meets Emily many years later on an island near Vancouver, there’s hardly need 167

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for him to remark that the ferry ride feels like an echo, ‘a small rhyme from the past’ because we, too, are still on board.

The Cat’s Table is published in the UK by Jonathan Cape and in the USA by Knopf.

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Michael Hoffman ‘A metallic click. A gun being cocked . . . A searing flash of white light. Cleansing and bleaching everything in an instant. The halo of the gunshot Jalil didn’t live to hear.’

E

llen Thomas is a seasoned, award-winning British journalist embedded with British troops in Afghanistan; Jalil had been her ‘turp’ (interpreter).

They were friends. He had saved her life, yet she refused to give him a loan that would have allowed him to study engineering in the United States. After he is killed she is remorseful and feels indirectly responsible, and takes it upon herself to find out how he died.

Major Mack, commander of the platoon Ellen is with, tells her, ‘This enemy, you see, they have no morality.’ And when the corpses of three children are dug up in a village bombed by the British, he says, ‘They [the enemy] do it 169

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deliberately, you know. They use civilian shields . . . What we’re doing here is right . . . But it’s messy.’

Messy is the word, and Ellen begins to question Mack’s authority. Her investigation becomes entwined with the life of Hasina, an Afghan woman being looked after in the British camp hospital. Hers was the bombed house where the three dead children – not hers – were found. The subplot involving her is McGivering’s attempt, fitfully successful, to give us an Afghan’s point of view. Hasina’s beloved son is a naïve, would-be suicide bomber; her husband a simple farmer in a land where simple farming is no longer viable; her brotherin-law a thuggish petty potentate who enriches himself while encouraging the glorious martyrdom of others, Hasina’s son included.

Hasina’s character is the most complex and the most perceptive: it is through her that we begin to understand why there will never be a meeting of minds between Afghanistan and the West. We are given a glimpse into her thoughts while she lies bandaged in a British camp hospital: ‘The water was clean and tasted of nothing, neither of stones nor of earth.’

McGivering, like Ellen, is a veteran British journalist; like Ellen she has covered Afghanistan and been embedded with British troops there. In her acknowledgements she writes: ‘Any negative portrayals are entirely fictional.’

But are they? Ellen’s dilemma is that she suspects but cannot prove that Major Mack has been using aid money to buy support from corrupt local bigwigs like Hasina’s brother-in-law, and to pay them to organize suicide bombings which can be blamed on the Taliban so that terrified locals will welcome foreign forces as defenders and liberators. She learns that Jalil had found out about this, and connects it with his death. Ellen confronts Mack, who immediately crumples.

The best this highly intelligent, battle-hardened officer can do is sputter, ‘Nonsense.’ His woodenness convinces Ellen she’s right, but with no hard proof her editor won’t buy the story. Should we? Had McGivering perhaps been in a similar predicament? Is this ‘entirely fictional’ presentation her way of serving the truth? No reader who follows the news from Afghanistan will be shocked by allegations that the West, righteous in its good intentions, blunders into evil. But McGivering’s account of it is unconvincing: Ellen unearths no proof and expects her editor, as the author apparently expects us, to take her suspicions for facts.

The Last Kestrel is published by Blue Door.

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Hsu-Ming Teo very summer Genevieve and Eric Lee hold an ‘annual alternative dinner party’ in their Greenwich home. They invite ‘people who were a bit different from the people they usually saw’ because ‘it was always interesting to branch out’. Previous guests have included a Palestinian couple and a Jewish doctor and his wife, which had ‘resulted in a very entertaining evening.’ This year’s dinner diversion includes the Lees’ new black neighbours, Terence and Bernice Bayoude, both academics, their precociously punning child, Brooke, and a gay man, Mark Palmer, whose dread of this dinner party prompts him to bring along an acquaintance, Miles Garth.

Miles is a discomfiting guest from the start. He commits the faux pas of neglecting to inform his hosts that he is vegetarian. Gen is mortified. She has carefully prepared a menu worthy of our multicultural, gastro-porn times: seared scallops and chorizo as a starter, lamb tagine as the main and crème 171

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brûlée with chilli-vanilla ice cream for dessert. Miles makes do with salad instead. While Gen gets ready to torch the crème brûlée, Miles slips a salt cellar into his pocket, amiably toasts his hosts, goes upstairs and never comes back down: he has locked himself into the spare bedroom and refuses to come out.

This is the whimsical premise of Ali Smith’s new novel There but for the.

Gen is particularly agitated by Miles’s self-imposed sequestration. ‘There is lovely, lovely furniture in there,’ she says. ‘It is a really outstanding spare room in there. Everybody who has stayed there has told us so.’ She is relieved that ‘the bedroom is en suite’. She doesn’t want the door broken down because it is an eighteenth-century original (as are all the doors on the second floor), and she is too kind-hearted to call the police. The only concrete measures she takes to force Miles out of the room are to feed him wafer-thin turkey slices under the door, knowing he is vegetarian, and to email one of his acquaintances to come and get him. One might ask why she doesn’t call for a locksmith, but if she did there would be no plot. And plot is not what one reads an Ali Smith novel for; rather, we read to enjoy her careful observations of the minutiae of modern life, her musings on memory, history and existence, and her exuberant relish of wordplay expressed in puns and jokes, as well as the way she takes the most ordinary and unnoticed of words, holds them up to the light and shows us their dazzling refractions.

The novel is divided into four sections: There; But; For; The – each recounting the story principally from the perspective of one character. ‘There’ tells the story of Anna Hardie’s peripheral connection with Miles. Summoned

by Gen to entice Miles out of the spare room, Anna barely remembers him at first; their acquaintance was very slight, and a long time ago. Gradually, she recalls that she met Miles when they had both won a place on a European tour for fifty British teenagers who had written short stories on what Britain would be like in the year 2000. She was the only one on the tour from Scotland and was ignored by the articulate English students until Miles befriended her. He told her a story: ‘There was once, and there was only once,’ he said, ‘once was all there was,’ and by doing so he connected her to the others on the tour.

At the point when Gen contacts her, Anna has just given up her job as Senior Liaison at what she calls ‘the Centre for Temporary Permanence’, a job which is ‘to make people not matter so much’. She realizes that when she was a young and vulnerable teenager who did not matter to anyone else, Miles had ‘reinvented her. He’d moved up and made space for her on a bus. In her home 172

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he’d been kind to her parents’. Thinking about this memory, she cries, ‘which was something she hadn’t done for quite some time. This knowledge, in turn, made something deep inside her chest crack open and shell off’.

The second part of this novel, ‘But’, focuses on Mark Palmer, a sixtysomething picture researcher who is haunted by the voice of his dead mother, an artist who erupts into his melancholy thoughts with sarcastic rhyming triplets: ‘banal philosophizing for God sake / how long’s this sermonizing going to take / you sound like an old vicar on the make’. We learn that Mark met Miles at a play, when the ringing of a mobile phone interrupted the performance. This intrusion aggravated Mark but not Miles, who found it unexpectedly apt because it formed a connection between two characters who couldn’t communicate. Over drinks afterwards, Miles says that he likes the word ‘but’ because ‘it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting’.

Appropriately enough, then, ‘But’ is full of detours about people and loosely related events. It also contains an extended parenthetical aside which reveals what happened that night at the Lees’. The dinner party seems to have become the standard topos to mock the urban middle classes. It produces a complicity between reader and writer aimed at proving our own authenticity against the cultural philistinism of bourgeois characters. Bourgeois bashing has become a popular sport, and Smith does it very well. As the conversation ranges across disparate subjects such as musicals, refugees, toothpaste and contemporary art, the Lees’ close friends express homophobia, condescension and passive aggression towards the black academics and the gay guest. We are invited to share Smith’s disapproval of the Lees and their friends, but their bigotry seems rather contrived and the whole scene seems a bit dated these days.

Some time after the dinner, Mark visits the Lees’ home to see what has become of Miles. He realises that Genevieve has turned Miles’s selfincarceration into a media event that has generated its own group of fans waiting for a sign of ‘Milo’: the twitching of a blind that signals a presence, or the hand that appears at one o’clock every afternoon to collect the food basket Anna has begun to organize. Mark meets Anna and the neighbour’s child, Brooke, and it becomes apparent that Miles’s role in this novel is to connect people to each other. ‘But,’ says Miles, ‘is very occasionally a preposition but is mostly a conjunction, and the word “conjunction” means “connection, union, combination, simultaneous occurrence in space and time”.’

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Thus, section three is about one of Miles’s own connections, particularly to May Young, an elderly resident of a nursing home who has never recovered from the death of her sixteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer. Miles had been Jennifer’s friend, and he visits May every year on the anniversary of her daughter’s death.

While he is sequestered at the Lees’ he sends Josie, the Lees’ daughter, to visit May Young in his place, forging another connection since Josie rescues May from the home and takes her to visit Miles.

Miles’s ability to facilitate relationships between strangers contrasts starkly with the tendency of people such as May to look away from what is disturbing to their lives. It is suggested that he may have been sexually abused by his grandfather. Jennifer had told her mother: ‘He said when he was small, and his grandfather was still alive, his grandfather would have him to the tunes off the soundtrack record he had at his house of the Mary Poppins film.’ May forbade Jennifer to see Miles after this revelation because ‘people who tell manipulative troublemaking lies to cause a drama are not decent’. How pitiful it is, then, that when Jennifer asks her mother, ‘What’s the point of human beings? I mean like what are we for?’ May replies: ‘for looking after each other.’

The last section of the novel, ‘The’, is told largely from the interior perspective of the only character who is looked after in this novel: Brooke Bayoude, a ‘cleverist’ disliked by her teacher and bullied at school, but treated with indulgence and kindness by the adults who enter her life because of Miles.

Brooke is the only one who has any physical connection with Miles throughout this period. She collects facts and writes them down to give to Miles so that he can learn something while he’s in the spare room; he in turn invites her into his room one day to talk about words and stories. ‘What is the point of a book, I mean the kinds that tell stories?’ Brooke asks. ‘If a story isn’t a fact, but it is a made-up version of what happened . . . what is the point of it? Mr Garth leaned his head on the handlebars. Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.’

Meanwhile, Miles’s self-imposed seclusion has generated its own myths.

One of the dinner guests has created a dramatic monologue, Miles To Go Before I Sleep, and is performing it at the theatre. The ‘Milo Multitude’ continue to gather outside the spare-room window, where they wait to see the fluttering of the blind. And all kinds of agendas are attached to Milo: women turn up claiming to be his wives; a psychic interprets specially channelled Milo Messages for the price of £30; and Gen makes a fortune out of Milo 174

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merchandise. Nobody has seen him for months, few realise when he leaves, but his initial, random presence at the dinner party is transformed into a religious, divine visitation for the spiritually hungry while the commercially savvy commodify his presence in the spare-room shrine.

Brooke has the final say in this story, for she is the appointed historian, collecting facts even though she increasingly doubts their reliability. Alongside Ali Smith’s meditations on the strange wonder of words, meaning, puns, connections, memory and nostalgia is a reflection on the nature of history: What is it? Which facts matter? What does it mean? Initially, for Brooke, history is the dramatic, often tragic things that happen to people: ‘Just because someone is in authority . . . doesn’t mean history won’t happen back to them.’

It is the fickle force of retribution. But she eventually realises that history is also all the things that are unseen and unknown: ‘It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.

The fact is, history is actually all sorts of things nobody knows about.’ This is precisely the history of Miles in the spare room. ‘But the fact is, how do you know anything is true? Duh, obviously, records and so on, but how do you know that the records are true? Things are not just true because the internet says they are. Really the phrase should be, not the fact is, but the fact seems to be.’ And history emphasizes the evanescence of the past: ‘places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just disappear. And if it could happen then it could happen now or any time, because there is a historical precedent’.

There is an existential anxiety that lies at the heart of the novel. Smith muses over questions such as: what gives our lives weight, permanence and reality, if not history? What makes us there? An audience? Is that how we know we are alive and that our lives matter? What are human beings there for? There are no definitive answers. What we are left with in this novel are words, incomplete stories, fragments of phrases wrenched into disconcerting but dazzling unfamiliarity, pregnant with the unspoken and unfinished: There but for the.

There but for the is published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton and in the USA

by Pantheon.

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Contributors ANDREW BARKER is a writer and academic whose poetry has been published in the Asia Literary Review, Fifty-Fifty and City Voices: Hong Kong. His first book of poetry, Snowblind from my Protective Colouring, was published by Chameleon Press and the villanelle-sequence ‘Everything in Life is Contagious’ was performed at The Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He has recently completed The Village, a novel in Onegin stanzas set in Hong Kong.

JOHN BATTEN is a curator, writer and critic on art, culture and urban planning and a former art gallery owner. Born in Melbourne, he has lived in Hong Kong since 1992. He is an organizer of the annual charity event Hong Kong ArtWalk and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Australian art magazine Broadsheet.

CHEN XIWO teaches comparative literature at Fuzhou Normal University and is a prolific, controversial writer, described by Asia Sentinel as ‘one of China’s most outspoken voices on freedom of expression’. Chen Xiwo has written seven major novels, but because of his refusal to compromise on style or content it was nearly twenty years before his works were published in China. In 2007, he sued the Chinese government after they confiscated his copy of the Taiwan edition of I Love My Mum, which is still banned in the mainland.

SCOTT EZELL has been based in Hanoi since 2009. He has composed and recorded more than a dozen albums of folk and experimental music, including collaborations with Vietnamese composer Vu Nhat Tan. His books include Songs from a Yahi Bow, a collection of poems about Ishi, and Petroglyph Americana, a poem about landscapes of the American West and with reflections from Asian landscapes and cultures.

TRINA GAYNON, a graduate of the University of San Francisco’s MFA program, volunteers with WriteGirl, an organization in Los Angeles that provides workshops and mentors for young women in high school who are interested in writing. She also works with an adult literacy program. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Bombshells and Knocking at the Door, as well as in numerous literary journals.

PHILIP GOSTELOW is an award-winning photographer from Perth, Australia.

His work has been published in Time, the Independent on Sunday Review, Figaro and Condé Nast Traveler and has been featured at the Noorderlicht Photo Festival in the Netherlands. His project, Visible, Now – The Fragility of Childhood is published as an e-book, and his Black Christmas Bushfire Series is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Philip is also a journalist, and is currently involved in the production of a short film and other documentary projects.

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Contributors JUSTIN HILL has been likened to George Orwell, to a boxer and to Tolstoy. His acclaimed first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse, won the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a 2002 Betty Trask Award and was banned by the Chinese government. His second novel, Passing under Heaven, won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award. Shieldwall, the highly praised first novel of his Conquest Trilogy, was published in May 2011.

MICHAEL HOFFMAN is a fiction and non-fiction writer from Montreal and has lived in northern Japan for the last thirty years. His non-fiction appears regularly in The Japan Times and irregularly elsewhere. He is the author of five books of fiction, his latest collection being Little Pieces: This Side of Japan.

HU DONG is a distinguished figure in contemporary Chinese writing. His work includes poetry, fiction and essays. Born in Sichuan, he was among the earliest members of the New Generation poetry movement after the Cultural Revolution. Since then he has been published underground, establishing a distinctive voice to reveal unspeakable darkness through the mystery of language. Since the 1990s he has lived in London as a writer in exile.

MICHIEL HULSHOF is the China correspondent for the Dutch news and opinion magazine Vrij Nederland. Together with architect Daan Roggeveen he founded the Go West Project, a think tank tracking the development of emerging Chinese megacities. They publish articles in international media, lecture at universities in China and the Netherlands and organize exhibitions and events in both Asia and Europe.

MARK IKIN believes that if one has grown up in Australia one tends, if photography is of interest, to begin with landscapes. It’s difficult not to attempt to capture the raw beauty of the country; however, once he began travelling overseas it was people who interested him. He’s taken many environmental portraits with a Canon, but has recently used an iPhone for the ‘shooting-from-the-hip’ flexibility and unobtrusive capture of others’ lives.

PICO IYER is the author of the novels Cuba in the Night and Abandon. He has also written eight works of non-fiction, among them Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and The Open Road. His newest book, The Man within My Head, on Graham Greene and hauntedness, came out earlier this year. Resident since 1992 in rural Japan, he’s long since lost the ability to tell whether he’s from the East, the West or nowhere at all.

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ASIA LITERARY REVIEW RAHUL JACOB is the South China correspondent for the Financial Times and the author of Right of Passage: Travels from Brooklyn to Bali. As a writer on business in Asia for Fortune and Time magazines, he covered India’s economic reforms in the 1990s. He was born in Calcutta and studied history at the University of Delhi.

SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA has written basslines, travel stories, ads and most recently a novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, the tale of an alcoholic sportswriter tracking down a lost cricketer. Chinaman won the 2008 Gratiaen Prize, was shortlisted for South Asia’s DSC prize and was selected for Waterstones’ Top 11 of 2011. He lives in Singapore, where he is growing his hair and working on a second novel.

A. K. KULSHRESHTH has had stories published in two anthologies of new writing, Bear Fruit and Silverfish 4, and in Muse India. He has BS and MS degrees in engineering and a PhD in management.

SHIRLEY LEE is a composer and musician, currently reading Classics and Persian at Oxford. She has read at the Man Hong Kong and Orient-Occident International Literary Festivals and has had poetry and translations published in various journals and anthologies. Lee is currently working as a co-writer on a progressive opera about the life of Nina Simone, and on her second album.

FIONNUALA MCHUGH was born in England, lived in Northern Ireland for ten years, began travelling to Asia as a journalist in 1986 and has been based in Hong Kong since 1993. Her work appears in many publications and will also feature in Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper, a Daily Telegraph-commissioned anthology of railway travel for which she ventured from Hong Kong to Lhasa.

GYAN PRAKASH is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. He has written Bonded Histories and Another Reason and has edited several volumes of essays, including the recently published Noir Urbanisms.

His latest book is Mumbai Fables. He has also written the script for Bombay Velvet, a film to be produced and directed by Anurag Kashyap in 2012.

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Contributors SINDHU RAJASEKARAN is a twenty-four-year-old Indian writer and Bharatanatyam dancer. Her debut novel, Kaleidoscopic Reflections, was published

by Frog Books in 2010 and was longlisted for the 2011 Vodafone-Crossword Book Award. She recently graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Rajasekaran currently lives in Mumbai, where she is working on her next novel.

E. V. SLATE’s short stories have appeared in such journals and anthologies as the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, Ploughshares, New England Review, Crazyhorse and Best New American Voices 2005. She has lived in Singapore since 2007 and is currently working on her first novel.

DAWN STARIN has a PhD in anthropology and is an honorary research associate at University College London. She has been conducting research in Africa and Asia for decades. Her non-scientific pieces have appeared in various newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Natural History, New Statesman, New Internationalist, Index on Censorship, Areté and Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.

HSU-MING TEO is a novelist and historian based at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her first novel Love and Vertigo won the The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and her second novel Behind the Moon was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. She was one of the judges of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the editor of Cultural History in Australia, the author of Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (2012) and of a range of articles on the history of travel, Orientalism, fiction and popular culture.

She is working on her third novel.

HARVEY THOMLINSON is the founder of Hong Kong-based press Make-Do Publishing (makedopublishing.com), which in the last two years has published fiction by several previously untranslated contemporary Chinese writers, as well as Asia-themed non-fiction. His translation of Murong Xuecun’s novel Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu (Allen & Unwin, 2009) was nominated for the 2009 Man Asian Literary prize. Harvey’s novel The Strike was shortlisted for the 2011 Patchen Award.

CHANGMING YUAN is a four-time Pushcart nominee and co-author of Chansons of a Chinaman and Three Poets. He grew up in a remote Chinese village and published several monographs before moving to North America. Yuan has a PhD in English and teaches in Vancouver. His poetry has appeared in eighteen countries in 420 literary publications including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, London Magazine, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Salzburg, Taj Mahal Review and Yuan Yang.

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WINTER 2011

No. 22 WINTER 2011

Also in this issue:

AMITAV GHOSH – interviewed by Fionnuala McHugh PHOTOGRAPHY – Java’s roads; Inner Mongolia’s ghost town; Hong Kong’s street scenes POETRY – Andrew Barker, Scott Ezell, Trina Gaynon, Hu Dong, Justin Hill, Changming Yuan REVIEWS – Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table; Jill McGivering’s The Last Kestrel; Ali Smith’s There but for the

asialiteraryreview.com

Fiction | Non-fiction | Poetry | Photography | Reviews

PICO IYER – celebrates new horizons and the English language as the Empire writes back SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA – a playful story of modern Sri Lanka, cricket and an elusive sporting hero E. V. SLATE – a poignant and tragic tale of a retired couple’s desire to recreate the past CHEN XIWO – an extract from the translation of his shocking novella, banned in China SINDHU RAJASEKARAN – a surprising narrative of a village child’s sexual awakening MICHIEL HULSHOF – puts forward the case for Special Academic and Art Zones in China GYAN PRAKASH – and his capricious driver give us a tour of Bollywood film-star neighbourhoods DAWN STARIN – a rollicking meander down the sidewalks of Hanoi A. K. KULSHRESHTH – intrigue in a court of ancient Singapore RAHUL JACOB – twenty years on and Jan Morris’s observations of India still hold true