WHEN, SOME YEARS AGO, I began to feel the ravages of middle age, I roused myself from the stupor that had settled over me and began to travel. I gathered my slowly ossifying limbs for one final, tentative peek at the country I had made my home. My spirit of adventure had petrified in the years since the war, and the thought of boarding a bus or a train with a horde of jostling bodies frightened me. Instead, I acquired a car and drove around the country. In the deep north I saw the jewel-green expanses of paddy fields in Kedah and the husks of abandoned villages, emptied by a gathering exodus to the great, growing cities of the newly independent nation. I drove across the mountainous spine that splits the peninsula in two and stayed for some time in Kota Baru, in a motel called the New Tokyo Inn. I wandered through the teeming market, looking at the silversmiths at work with their primitive, intricate tools. The shiny silver boxes they produced were laid out on straw mats on the dirt floor. Massed together in the sunlight, they glinted like beds of crushed glass. I went to the padang where the men threw their giant spinning tops, releasing them violently from coiled ropes as thick as pythons. The tops spun for hours, their painted surfaces a blur of colour on the dry, mouse-brown soil.
As I stood watching the local kite-flying competition, I was befriended by an aged Englishman who was older then than I am now, but alarmingly full of panache. The huge kites trembled in the air; they were tethered to the earth by ropes decorated with small pieces of cloth that fluttered in the wind. Galsworth (that was his name, I think) could tell which kite would win the contest. He pointed it out with a wizened forefinger as it swooned gently in a shallow arc over our heads, the two sickle moons of its body outlined proudly against the ultramarine sky. It came to a rest directly above us, hovering untroubled by the breeze. I had never seen such a thing before.
Afterwards, Galsworth invited me back to his house for a drink. We were attended by houseboys and — girls, all dressed in the gold-woven songket of the North. They waited tremulously as we reclined with our drinks; their smiling presence made me uncomfortable. I asked Galsworth how he came to live there. “I was the sultan’s personal adviser,” he replied simply, smoothing the gilded uniform of one of his androgynous youths with a reptilian hand. He showed me his house, every room sparsely decorated with beautiful things: a bedroom with nothing in it but a mattress on a carved divan and a leopard-pelt rug on the floor; a long shadowed corridor with a single Buddha head in an alcove. Through a window I glimpsed his garden, planted with a single rosebush. It bore no flowers, its branches were spindly, its leaves sparse. It had not taken to the hot winds of the seaside; I knew it would never survive this climate. Galsworth mumbled something about “memory” and “England,” and hurried me along. I smiled as I was meant to, complimented him on his house, and praised his servants. He said, “How nice it is to have one’s things appreciated by someone civilised.” When he smiled, his teeth revealed themselves: sharp and small, whittled away by age and discoloured by cigarettes.
I made my excuses and left as quickly as I could. I walked alone on the Beach of Passionate Love, watching the swell of the waves unfurling as they reached the shore. The sand was grey, not white; the tinge of amber was fading now in the darkening sky.
As I drove back south I knew that trip would be my last. I was ready to surrender to death, and hoped the end would be swift. How could I have known that, thirty years later, I would still be here, still waiting? It is a futile exercise, this contemplation of the end. My lungs still heave and my automaton limbs carry me downstairs to breakfast every morning, but the truth is that I died many years ago, suffocated by my own hands.
THE BOAT WAS CALLED the Puteri Bersiram, the name painted in small calligraphic letters barely visible on the rotting woodwork of the bow. As a means of initiating conversation with Johnny, I asked him what it meant. “The Bathing Princess,” he said brusquely, and he disappeared below deck. He had been sullen throughout the day; no amount of cajoling could coax him from his obdurate silence. During the drive, Snow had leant over to me and asked again if I knew what was wrong with Johnny. She whispered close to me and I felt her cool breath on my neck. Trembling, I lowered my head to her ear, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get to the bottom of things.” She smiled and placed her hand briefly on my forearm. When I looked up at Johnny, I found him staring at me with a dark-eyed glare. He had the look of a man succumbing to an unnamed sickness. Malaise en Malaisie.
“Come on, Johnny,” I called down the hatch after him, “some sea air will do you a world of good.”
No answer.
