The Black Isle (10 page)

At the mouth of the Black River, which snaked its way through D’Almeida Place, stood a cast-iron statue on a stone pedestal. Not of a founding father but a Bengal clipper, its sails fully unfurled, a potent symbol of the British East India Company to which the Isle owed its existence. The water was packed with bumboats, each painted with large, sad eyes. We could hardly see the brackish river but we could certainly smell its fetor, perhaps even greater proof of its existence. Tanned Chinese and Indian men, bare from the waist up, were heaving rattan baskets full of vegetables from the boats to the warehouses lining the banks. Plump Chinese overseers watched from the shade, shouting.

“Look at them,” Father told us. “Which would you rather be? The man giving orders or the man taking orders?”

“I’ll never take orders from anyone,” said Li.

Father chuckled. “Then you’ll like it up-country. Up there, we’ll be the boss.”

Li sat back, a smile sneaking across his face.

I was eager to give Father the benefit of the doubt—his new buoyancy was a nice change—but could we ever really be the boss on this island?

Looming over the river was lush, fern-covered Forbidden Hill, so called because pirates had made their nest there for hundreds of years. Though I couldn’t have known it then, the Hill would one day ruin my life. A dozen or so figures dotted its steep sides, climbing up and down like pale spiders, undeterred by the terrain: ghosts. All of them. As long as they were on the Isle, no living soul could truly be boss.

“Uncle”—our driver pointed—“they say that hill
very dirty
.”

“Dirty?” Father scoffed. He had clearly never heard the expression. “Then they better ask somebody to wash it clean, right? Come now, Ahmad, take us to where the rich towkays stay!” He turned to Li and me. “We might as well see where we’ll be living someday.”

Our carriage sped out of the city and into the unchecked splendor of Tanglewood. This was the plushest of the colonial estates, the last gasp of civilization before the jungle began. Winding, shaded lanes with Scottish names—Inverness, Glencoe, Dalkeith—were lined with the large “black-and-white” bungalows I’d read about at school, each a fiefdom unto itself. I saw the much-praised black timber frames, the zebra-striped verandah shades, and the blazing white walls. The effect was watered-down Tudor, yet, like so many things on the Isle, attractive in its own mixed-up way.

“Europeans stay here?” Father asked our driver.

“Peranakan Chinese also,” came the sneering reply. “They think they are
orang puteh
. U-rope-pien.”

We galumphed over a python, stretched twenty feet across the road, already turned
paillard
by a dozen earlier cars. Everywhere we looked, moss coated walls, tree roots buckled footpaths. And the mad profusion of plants! It looked as if vines would lasso the whole enclave into oblivion if its gardeners so much as took an afternoon off. Missing from the picture, however, were the owners of these homes. Those, Father said, hid indoors with tumblers of gin until the moon showed its face.

A fugitive strain of German opera blew into the cab, along with a breeze.

“Tannhäuser.”
Father smiled, puffing up with recognition. However, I knew that it was in fact
Das Rheingold
because Sister Nesbit had been playing Wagner at assembly. Father leaned forward. “You know opera, Ahmad?”

His tone made me cringe. Ahmad flared his nostrils and floored it until we were well out of the gramophone’s range. He slowed the car when we neared a mansion on a knoll, set back from the road. Its black timber highlights had been painted over in white and its sides extended into wings. In front, a porte cochere pushed out, club-style, and a black Bentley sat parked in its circular driveway like a well-fed dog. Neither gardeners nor ghosts sullied the perfect setting.

“This one Wee house,” said Ahmad. “You know, Ignatius Wee, that rich baba?”

“Of course,” said Father, so brusquely that I could tell he had no idea.

But I knew Ignatius Wee. Or rather I knew his name and, as prefect, had polished with Darkie toothpaste the brass plaque bearing it. So this was the way our grand patron lived, more European than the Europeans, on manicured, ghost-free grounds. The gap between his castle and our guano-encrusted asylum was vast indeed. Did he have any idea how dirty his school was? Would he even care?

“His father, Old Man Wee, make money in rubber,” Ahmad went on. “But Ignatius Wee only know how to spend money—give to schooling, to church, his own kind only. Never give to poor people. These rich babas, they got no use!”

“Rubber…,” Father cooed to himself, hearing only what he wanted to hear. “I say, I say.” He was mapping out his own rubber-derived destiny, buying imaginary manses next to these first-class men. If them, why not him? He roused me with a slap on the cheek, uttering, “Rubber!”—a word he made sound fatty with promise. Ever the good sport, I obliged him with a tiny nod.

Li’s eyes were devouring the Wee house. I could tell from his furrowed, sweat-soaked brow that he was entertaining some private resolution to become very rich. Like father, like son. I wanted our villa on the green, too, of course. But could Father get us there? As the family pragmatist, I had to think, Were we setting ourselves up for heartache?

North of Tanglewood, the suburbs came to an abrupt end. The roads turned into narrow dirt lanes pocked with the stink of animal ordure. Flies buzzed into our car. Through overgrown bushes, we glimpsed the haphazard sowings of family farmers too dispirited to care; roosters, all feather and bone, staggered from plot to plot in slow motion. As we drove by this seemingly never-ending patchwork of indifferent soil and corrugated tin shanties, I fought my dismay: This was exactly what I feared our future would look like.

“Eh!
Eh
! Why you bring us here?” Father growled to Ahmad as a gaggle of emaciated geese trudged across our path.

“You want scenic tour, right?” our driver replied provocatively. “I show you where Malay people stay.”

“No need.” Father shook his head. “No need to frighten my children.”

The coward blamed us, when we were
all
afraid.

Storm clouds charged together, crowding the sky and bathing us in an artificial night. The air simmered against my skin. No one in the taxi said a word, as if any sound launched into the atmosphere would send rain crashing down upon us.

A ten-car traffic jam slowed us on the dirt road into the jungle—there was a police roadblock, out here in the middle of nowhere. Ahmad offered to circumvent it by cutting through marshland, but thankfully Father said no. We soon saw the cause of the holdup: swamp clearance. But not just any routine swamp clearance—this was Jervois swamp, the largest of the mangrove wetlands that the government had been trying to drain for years. The city was constantly running out of living space. A year before, this had been jungle; next year, maybe a school.

A Sikh policeman in a yellow slicker walked from vehicle to vehicle, leaning his turban into each driver’s window. His pants were knee-high with reddish mud. Finally he reached us. “Prepare to wait, ah.” Enormous trucks rumbled ahead.

“What’s happening?” Father shouted impatiently.

“Swamp clearance, Uncle.”

“Yah, I know swamp clearance, but how come we wait so long?”

The policeman considered for a moment. “A dead body is down there—female.” He peered into the car, and seeing Li and me, lowered his voice to a whisper. “With two small choo-ren. She drown them first; then she drown herself.”

“Aiyah…”
Father clucked his tongue. “What a waste.”

“Yah, boss. So young some more.”

I shivered. Fifteen minutes later, the roadblock was removed and our line of vehicles clattered slowly through like a funeral procession. Even our driver had grown subdued.

Roots and fresh mud mixed uneasily in the brush. Three long, unmarked vans were parked on the side of the road, shielding the traffic from the investigation underfoot. But of course we all peered between their bumpers and saw three bodies covered in tarpaulin—one large, two small. The small ones were both the same size. I had a sudden vision of Mother and the twins: This could have been them, driven to harsh measures by despair. If it was bad being tethered to Father, I didn’t dare imagine what life must have been like with Mother. That woman seemed capable of anything. I remembered her tantrums, her threats, the sharpness of her claws against my flesh.

I scanned the scene for ghostly signs of the woman and her children, expecting to find her watching the inspectors from the vine-entangled bank or perhaps reliving over and over the moments before her regrettable act. I wanted to see if she was indeed remorseful, if she at least looked sorry for what she’d done to her helpless babes. But…nothing.

Evidently I assumed wrong. In the years to come, I would learn that death, like life, will always find ways to surprise you.

ALL WE SAW WAS GREEN
—a hegemony of green.

Green enshrouded everything. As Ahmad drove us north of the city, toward the plantation, the trees, shrubs, stumps, took on unexpected shapes—the Eiffel Tower, fornicating dragons—random acts of nature that were like deliberate provocations from some puckish topiarist. In the undergrowth, hidden from all eyes, loomed a shadow economy of snakes, lizards, spiders, scorpions. I heard their hisses. I knew that if the car slowed down even a little, they would swarm out and engulf us.

“By the way, Uncle,” Ahmad said once he had dropped us off and collected his fare. “My name is
not
Ahmad! Why you Chinamen like to call us all Ahmad? We got names. My name is Ishak bin Shamsuddin.”

He sped off, leaving us in front of a bungalow that sweated mildew and slime—the caretaker’s house. Our new home. I couldn’t picture what it originally looked like, for it came swathed in never-ending waves of climbing plants. Knee-high grasses beat a path to the front door, cracks in the walls hemorrhaged three different types of fern, and the windowpanes were opaque with moss. On the roof, a clan of gray monkeys romped possessively, staring down at us with pink, sarcastic faces.

“Ooo-oo-oo-oo-Ooo!” they cried.

This was our auspicious welcome. I almost wept.

On the front lawn, a rusty flagpole flew a rain-mottled Union Jack at half-mast, the unwitting result of both gravity and lackadaisical knotting. Father told us that the previous caretaker—English, a drinker—had taken home leave three months earlier, but for reasons unknown never came back. He shrugged. “His loss is our gain.”

Pulling out his pocket knife, Li cut away some surprisingly tenacious pitcher plants. Half-digested beetles fell out of these bright green cups, and his hands became covered in sticky, bitter-smelling sap. It looked poisonous.

“Careful,” I said, handing him my handkerchief.

“Nonsense!” Father pushed my hand away. “We’re going to tame this jungle. We’re going to be masters here.”

He kicked the front door open.

Inside, it was almost black. The bungalow had the thick, earthy reek of exotic plant matter new to our urbanized noses. We turned on the lights and explored. It could have been worse: There were three bedrooms, so we would each have our own room, not to mention a sitting room, a study, a kitchen, and a full, hot-water bathroom. If only the smells of algae and animal waste hadn’t filled every corner.

The kitchen greeted us with presents left behind by some considerate soul:
Malay for Mems
, a phrasebook made ratty by desperate thumbing; a half-drunk bottle of Beefeater gin swimming with dead ants; and a farm implement similar to a pitchfork, with its middle tine sawn off. I would have found the latter intriguing even without the attached handwritten note:
During cases of amok, place affected man’s neck between the tines and pin him down. Best of luck!

Before we left the city, we’d been warned repeatedly about amok, a now-common term that had its origins in the Malay world. During amok, rural men, supposedly inflamed by the fullness of the moon or the pull of the sea, fell into temporary fits of lunacy that saw them murdering their own families and neighbors. The phenomenon was said to be rife up-country. But we could see no evidence of it around us—except this ridiculous fork. Surely men who went amok would have broken into the caretaker’s house or at least tried to tear through its vines.

Father spread open a map of Melmoth Estate’s 498 acres. Our plantation was divided into two distinct and equal lobes; east and west halves grew narrow at the center, where our house sat, and rounded out at the fringes like the two lobes of an enormous heart. The workers’ dormitories ran along the northern periphery of the west lobe.

On paper, the wilderness only began beyond the plantation. But, of course, these boundaries were a legal fiction—we’d already seen the jungle pushing toward our door.

Even a cursory glance outside showed us that no work had been done in months. Tall lalang grass covered the lobes; the rubber trees were overflowing with sap. Father’s duty, it dawned on me, was really foremanship at caretaker’s pay. He was to whip the plantation back into working shape.

“War in Europe is looming,” he told us, his optimism undimmed, even as Li and I exchanged skeptical glances. “Nobody can fight a war without rubber. They need boots, tires, raincoats. We’re going to be rich!”

We spent that first night accosted by strange noises, their origins unseen. Monkey calls mimicked infants in peril; tree branches randomly crackled and collapsed. I had the ability to see more than most, and still the jungle baffled me with its invisible noisemakers. Toots, hoots, hollers, and screams came in orchestral variations—falsetto, basso, cheery, mournful, staccato, on and on. I assigned each note to a different creature, only to discover later on that I’d got the whole thing upside down. The growls were not tigers but bullfrogs; the croaking was not frogs but jet-black horned macaws.

The next day, Father woke us before dawn. “Get up! Time for work!”

Pruning shears in our hands, we marched through the lobes. The east lobe was overgrown and swarming with mosquitoes. Father looked around anxiously. “Where are my workers?”

As if in reply, the sound of distant laughter came from the west lobe. We followed it until we came to a clearing—and a tropical tableau: swarthy men kicking a ball around while their womenfolk lolled in the grass, gossiping and feasting on papayas, rambutans, and chikoos. Dozens of small children traipsed around in the nude.

Father’s face grew red. He tore into the makeshift arena, huffing and puffing with rage. The rattan ball flew at him and lashed his buttocks, making him yelp. The crowd cheered at this stroke of genius. Even angrier now, he shook his shears at the bare-chested footballer nearest him.

“I your boss now,” he shouted in pidgin Malay to all those gathered. “Listen to me! I want you to cut-cut!” He pointed at the shears, then at the creepers choking the rubber trees. “Cut those things! Make pretty-pretty!”

The workers tittered, then resumed their game.

Catching his breath, Father turned to Li and me. “We have to give them some face. They’ll come around in a few days.” We returned to the house to wait for this magical transformation.

Evidently, these rustics—half of them illiterate Tamils and the other half illiterate Malays—had never encountered urban Chinese before. They looked upon us as freakish interlopers, aliens who were neither white sahibs nor dusky communalists like themselves. We had disrupted their sense of the natural order. It took them days to grasp that we’d begun to occupy the caretaker’s house, not that it got them working.

A week later, still no change in the lobes. The grasses continued to grow unabated, and the vines ran riot. We trekked out to the soccer field once more. This time, Father brought along a machete-like parang, the jungle man’s tool of choice. It looked so unwieldy in his puny hand, I felt sure he would accidentally slash one of us.

He waved the rusty sword at the indolent group. “If you like, use this! Look! I’m not playing! You want to eat, yes? You want your children to eat, yes?”

They jeered. The rattan ball flew toward him once more; this time he dodged it.

“Monkey! Monkey!” a small boy yelled. Everybody laughed.

“Look! I’m not playing!”

He stalked over to the boy who had caught the ball and grabbed it from him. Then with the mania of a furious child, he clopped it to bits with his parang.

The crowd thought it was hilarious.

Time and again, Father’s attempts to rouse the workers failed. Three weeks on, he had all but given up. He locked himself in the study—
to think
, he told us. But he was resolutely
not
thinking. His days were spent communing with his Four Treasures, writing out Tang Dynasty poems from memory in ink and brush. Escaping.

Imaginary clouds and mountains became his refuge, while the plantation teetered on the brink of chaos. The owners sent telegrams from the city, and these sat unopened on the dining table, spoiling our appetite every night—not that we had much to eat because there was no money.

There’s nothing quite like lawlessness and poverty to make a person yearn for order. I became nostalgic for St. Anne’s—even the triple inconveniences of early rising, uniform ironing, and homework. I missed the city with its full palette of colors, not just this monochromatic green. I even missed the hairy, desiccated chicken wings sold at the tuck shop. Did I sacrifice my schooling for this? I longed to be pushed, prodded, fed,
tamed
, whereas I knew that out in the country, it was left to me to do my own taming.

Unlike Li, who’d cast away his uniform to a Chinatown urchin like a seasoned philanthropist, I clung to mine and all it represented: discipline, routine, civilization. On the bungalow’s front step each morning, I stood at attention. Dressed in the white blouse and blue pinafore of St. Anne’s, I raised the flag while singing my school song:

Li mocked me mercilessly. But order was my vote of dissent against the messy uncertainty of our lives. Li’s rebellion was more prosaic. He gave Father hell in the form of door-slamming and chair-throwing disagreeability. We were twelve and full of energy, with nowhere to direct it.

Finally, one morning, starved for food and drunk on inertia, Li decided we had to save ourselves. We began tearing open the stack of telegrams. The latest threatened Father with dismissal—and a legal suit for false representation—if the plantation failed to ship rubber within the month. I secretly wished this would happen, but Li held firm.

“I’ll play soccer with the men. To win them over.” His voice was weighted with grave determination. “I don’t care. We
have
to succeed. We have to. I’m
not
going back a failure. I told everyone we were going to be rich.”

So this was why. His pride was at stake. “But how will we make them obey us?”

“These people are like children. None of them can read or write. They believe idiotic things. They’re easily bored. Remember this, and you’ll be able to boss them.”

Miraculously, my brother was right. He took charge of the west lobe, and I took the east. Workers in both listened. They probably found us amusing: Two twelve-year-olds barking orders from bicycles and never taking no for an answer. For me, it was like being a prefect all over again. When they humored us, we humored them. The women of the east lobe insisted on playing with my hair. I gave them free rein with coconut oil, pins, and curlers, ending each session looking like a Tahitian princess, sprouting bouquets from my ears. Li won the respect of the men on the soccer field and promised to teach them rounders—but only after they met the quota.

As the days wore on, the men and women reestablished the routines that had once given their lives meaning. They trimmed the grasses; they cut the vines; they collected the tree sap. Work was like a language they’d momentarily forgotten but regained once gently prodded.

Or maybe that’s the happier interpretation of events. Looking back now, I can imagine they feared us, for there is nothing so capricious as a child with power. The plantation became functional again, if not yet thriving. And while I viewed my lobe as a burden, Li was a natural towkay. He carried the amok fork with him on his rounds, resembling a little devil with his trident.

Money began trickling in. It now seemed possible to dream of moving back to the city—and bringing over Mother and the twins.

Our hope had been that once things were in order, Father would resume his place in the field. But he kept on demurring, saying he was not ready, that he needed still more time. In a matter of weeks, the provisional had become permanent: Li and I ran the plantation by ourselves.

We developed a rigorous routine. Every morning after my flag raising, I changed out of my school uniform and into my work clothes while Li waited for me. We bicycled together before splintering off to our respective lobes as we came to what we called Blood Hill, a gentle rise half a mile from the house, barren but for a cluster of banana trees. When we first arrived, the trees were on the verge of death but Li nursed them back to health—it was his little pet project. They rewarded his efforts with robust, voluminous swatches of bloodred bananas. Ever suggestible, he believed that the red fruit kept his anemia at bay and ate them religiously. Not that his superstition was altogether wrong—bananas have been shown to be highly nutritious.

Until noon each day, Li and I surveyed our matrix of rubber trees, neatly planted by what had to be German cartographers. Every trunk was marked with big white arrows pointing down, down, down toward the ground, each V an open wound dripping with sap. Sarong-clad females twice and three times our age collected the milky lifeblood from these notches. This was rubber tapping; the sap was latex—rubber in its rawest form. Our job was to make sure nobody spilled a drop of this precious liquor as they sashayed back to base with five-gallon tins perched atop their heads. And that they didn’t sashay too slowly.

I called the girls our Javanese Milkmaids, though they were neither Javanese nor milkmaids; that’s how starved I was for poetry in that most unpoetic of workplaces. In the afternoon, when the equatorial sun blazed at its most pitiless, Li and I convened indoors at the processing hut, which we called our factory, to watch over the male workers as they turned the “milk” solid with acid and pressed it into sheets that could be taken to the city in a lorry that came through once a week. I had no funny nickname for these men, however, so afraid was I that they’d come to the house with parangs in the dead of night.

Father took the money we earned, but none of it trickled down to us. We were fed and given shelter, but that was the limit of his largesse. He said no to the new shoes Li asked for and the books I desperately wanted.

“We’re his dogs,” Li grumbled to me many times. “And what do we get fed at the end of the day? Scraps.”