The Gift of Rain: A Novel

by Tan Twan Eng

  “Why do I feel as if we’re walking through a maze inside a fortress?” I asked.

  “It is a fortress, cleverly camouflaged as a warren of streets. There is only one formal entrance here but I have taken you through a side entrance. You are in the streets and lanes of the Khoos.”

  I had never ever walked into these streets. This was the Chinese heart of the island and it was completely alien to me. I had spent my youth among the Europeans, yet I understood the words shouted by the women in the corner market, and the swearwords shouted by the little boys playing policemen and thieves, words that universally seemed to refer to each other’s mothers and their respective private parts. It was an unsettling feeling, as though I had long been asleep and was now awake again, understanding the language, yet not comprehending the patterns of life to which it gave voice.

  We entered a passageway covered by the top floor of a wooden shop and came out into the bright sunshine in a granite-cobbled yard. In the center was a building that looked as if it had been transported from the deepest, densest pages of Chinese myth.

  “That looks amazing,” I told him. “What is it?”

  “The Leong San Thong Dragon Mountain Hall Temple, built by the clan association of the Khoo.”

  He explained to me the significance of a clan association. Each Chinese belonged to a clan, usually either by reason of the village he came from or, more commonly, through his family name. Such associations were common where the Chinese had transplanted themselves, and were formed to provide protection for their members, to resolve disputes, and to act as welfare organizations. The associations also provided education for clan children, arranging medical treatment, and seeing to the funerary arrangement of their members. Each association also played a role in the religious festivals of the lunar calendar and invested heavily in property and businesses, from which it obtained its income to conduct its activities.

  “When I arrived in Malaya this was the first place I came to. I sought the advice of the Senate of Elders and accepted their assistance with gratitude. The property surrounding this temple is owned by the temple. The people we walked past just before we entered—we all have the same family name. No one else may live here.”

  I stroked the two gray stone lions guarding the temple as we went by them.

  “Remember the courtyard I told you about, the one my father and I walked across in the Forbidden City? This reminds me of it, but this is very much smaller,” my grandfather explained.

  The tiered roofs of the temple were turned up at the corners, like the tufts of a Sikh’s mustache, and clusters of carvings and statues—dragons, phoenixes, maidens, heroes, gods, goddesses, fairies, sages, animals, trees, palaces—looked over us, delicate, finely featured, like porcelain dolls, all exquisite and detailed down to the eyelashes, to the creases in the robes, to the smallest scales on the dragons.

  Under the eaves were more carvings, crawling down the columns that held up the roofs like petrified vegetation. If a building had been immersed for centuries in the deepest oceans like some Eastern Atlantis and then taken out, shimmering with coral and barnacles, it would still pale in comparison. Cylindrical lanterns daubed in red writing hung at intervals across wooden beams blackened by decades of soot from burning incense and candles and by time itself, their tassels quivering gently in the heat.

  We walked up the steps and followed the smell of incense into the gloom of the interior. Swallows flew in and out from among the carvings beneath the eaves, as though the stone creatures had been bequeathed life.

  We were met by an elderly custodian, his back hunched, his glasses thick and heavy on his wrinkled face. He stared unabashedly at me, wondering what someone like me was doing in the temple. “Ah, Mr. Khoo,” he greeted my grandfather, receiving the ang pow, a red paper packet of money, with unhidden delight.

  “Mr. Khoo,” my grandfather greeted him in return.

  We stood inside the main hall, beneath the glaring eyes of the gods, their luster covered in the age of smoke from the spirals of incense hanging over us. “This could have been one of the less important rooms in the Forbidden City in my youth,” my grandfather said, as I avoided the wrathful eyes and the raised tridents and broadswords.

  “It is ... I have no words.”

  “According to the older folk this is nothing. The original temple was apparently more incredible still, but it was burned down.”

  “Who burned it down?”

  “Nobody knows, but it was said that the beauty and the opulence of the original building angered the gods and so they struck it down.” He walked to the edge of the altar, his hands gently trailing on it, disturbing a fine line of dust, as though his fingers were burning the wooden surface, raising smoke. There seemed not to be a single empty surface, for the walls, the ceiling, the pillars, the lintels, the skirting, and even the windows and doors were bristling with carvings, statues, drawings, and calligraphy.

  Another custodian came up to us. “Mr. Khoo,” he said to my grandfather.

  “Mr. Khoo, please meet my grandson,” he said. The man hid his inquisitiveness with greater skill than the first one had done.

  This custodian showed us the Hall of Ancestors, the tiers of tablets rising up to the darkened ceiling, generations of our blood, filtered down through my grandfather to me.

  Rectangular slabs of marble filled one of the walls in a room next to the hall and on them were columns of names written in Chinese, as well as a surprisingly large number in English, with a brief description of accomplishments. I saw some MDs, many PhDs, quite a few LLBs, and one QC.

  “All of the Khoos,” my grandfather said. “I have put my name there, look.”

  I followed his pointing finger. “Next to mine is your grandmother’s, below hers is your aunt’s and your mother’s. And there, beneath hers, is your name.”

  He had added a hyphenated Khoo to Hutton, so that my family name now was Khoo-Hutton. I felt a shifting feeling of being brought apart and then placed back together again, all by the single stroke of the hyphen. The hyphen was also similar to the ideogram for “one” in Japanese and, as I discovered, Chinese as well. Once again the feeling of connection and conjunction I had encountered in my room the previous night came over me, fragile and yet evocative as morning mist.

  “When you are lost, in this world or on the continent of time itself, remember who you have been and you will know who you are. These people were all you, and you are them. I was you before you were born and you will be me after I am gone. That is the meaning of family.”

  He took my hands and said, “The story I told you and this temple, these are all I have to teach you.”

  I bowed my head to him, still overwhelmed by what he had done to my name.

  “Mr. Endo is at heart a good man, but he too is lost, confused by all that is happening, by the illusion of the material world. That is why he cannot find his way.”

  “Where is he going?” I asked.

  My grandfather looked sad for a moment. “He wants to go home, like all of us.”

  My awareness of the world now was sufficient to make me understand that he did not mean Endo-san’s home in the village by the sea in Japan.

  “But he is lost and you, young as you are, will have to lead him home.”

  I often wondered how he knew so much about Endo-san, because he was completely correct. In searching for some form of answer, the totality of which would forever elude my understanding, I returned again and again to the story he had told me, of that time in his life in the timeless palace. The Forbidden City—to what and whom was it forbidden? Did the sentries at the gates raise their gloved palms and stop Time from entering? What had he learned within those walls? What had he seen in rooms forgotten by people, forgotten by the years?

  The days after the party seemed to move slowly, without direction. There was a feeling of something coming to a conclusion as William packed his things, his beloved camera and photography equipment, and as we sat in the garden and talked, drin
king iced mint tea, or swam in the pool. William had received his call-up papers to serve on HMS Prince of Wales, and we waited for the day to come, hoping it would not.

  My grandfather, who was staying at Aunt Mei’s house, joined us almost daily. He got along well with us all, even Edward, who could not sustain his superior attitude before the older man. Edward believed in the inherent predominance of the Europeans over the locals and it gave me a wicked pleasure to see his lifetime of beliefs weaken. I had lived with such similar misconceptions for so long that to see them proved wrong made me admire my grandfather more. On the one hand I felt sorry for Edward: my grandfather was a stranger to him and therefore Edward owed him nothing. However, a different part of me—the part bequeathed to me by my mother—felt that, by mere virtue of my grandfather’s age, respect should have been freely granted.

  Always, just before his chauffeur came at the appointed time, my grandfather would ask me to walk with him on the beach, and we would spend a short moment together, something which I soon grew to cherish.

  “I shall be returning to Ipoh soon,” he said one afternoon as we stood looking out to Endo-san’s island. “I would like to spend more time here in future though.”

  “You’re welcome to stay with us if Aunt Mei’s house is too cramped.”

  He shook his head. “A man must always be the master of his own home, especially when he is as difficult as I am. I have considered opening my house on Armenian Street again.”

  “You have a house there?” I asked. I had never heard my aunt mention anything about it.

  “Yes. My first home in Malaya, before we moved to Ipoh to be nearer to my mines. I have never sold it.”

  “Then my mother forgave you a long time ago, when she chose Arminius as my middle name,” I said. I had never liked the name she had given me for I thought it was an absurd choice. But I now thought I understood the message my mother had been trying to convey to her estranged father and it softened the pain of the cruel and constant teasing I had endured from my classmates when I was younger, when they had often called me names like “Verminous Arminius” and thought themselves witty.

  “I have never considered it as such but, yes, it could be so,” my grandfather said, although he did not sound as convinced as I was.

  “Do you still dislike my father? You always leave just before he comes home,” I said.

  “You are very perceptive. Years of bitterness cannot be swept away so easily. We need time to adjust to each other again. At least we talk when we meet now and do not act like cats that cross each other’s paths in an alley.”

  “He loved her completely, you must believe that,” I said. An image of fireflies flashing in the dark came unbidden to my mind.

  He appeared old suddenly, on the verge of fading away, and I had to fight the urge to hold him up. “That makes everything that happened—the time I have thrown away, her death and his loss— harder to endure, does it not?” he asked.

  There was nothing I could say to comfort him, to refute the truth of his words. I saw the pain he had carried since my mother’s death; it was a load that I knew he would never be able to lighten. It frightened me, that a person could be made to bear such a burden, for if what he and Endo-san had said were true— that these burdens were carried from one lifetime into another— how could one endure the accumulation of grief?

  What made it worse was that we could never truly share such burdens with even those closest to us. In the end, the mistakes were our own, the consequences to be borne by us alone.

  The day soon arrived when William had to leave us, and it was hard seeing him off. He was already in uniform as we said our farewells under the portico, his large floppy bags around his legs like faithful hounds unwilling to let their master leave. He looked happy, his eyes bright, his hair perfectly oiled to a lacquered glow.

  My father clasped him tightly. “You’ve made me proud, William.”

  William pulled back from him and looked up at the house, his eyes sweeping from one side to the other and to the rooms upstairs. He turned and gazed at the garden, at my mother’s fountain, our father’s carp pond, and the flowers that bloomed so full with life under the skies. Perhaps the realization of what he was setting out to do dawned on him then and illuminated the goodness and the richness of his life, for he grew quiet, and his eyes became sad. On an impulse, despite the fact that he was already late, he brought out his camera from his bag and asked Uncle Lim to photograph us all beneath the portico.

  My grandfather had asked to be present. He shook William’s hand and then decided to hug him. Edward and Isabel too embraced him. My father stood by watching, his eyes so brilliantly blue. I hugged William close when my turn came, the reality of parting unbearable.

  “Do your best to take care of the family,” he whispered in my ear.

  “I will. You be safe.”

  He handed his camera to me. “Keep it for me. Take some decent snaps and send them to me whenever you can. When I come home again we should plan a trip. Go somewhere. Will you promise me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ll do that.”

  We watched as Uncle Lim drove the Daimler away with William in it. He turned back in his seat to wave at us. Noel Hutton put his arms around his three children, and we stood like that for a long time.

  The two-storey townhouse on Armenian Street was high and narrow, with a plain iron gate. It had never been allowed to fall into neglect, even though my grandfather had long ceased to live there. He had the caretaker quickly put it in good order again. We both knew, without words having to be said, that he was doing it to be closer to me and I was grateful to him.

  “It’s not as grand as your house in Ipoh,” I told him the first time I visited him.

  “I do not need a big house. The older one gets, the more one wishes to simplify one’s life,” he said. “This suits me well now.” He looked around the small garden. We sat beneath a mango tree whose ripening fruit attracted lines of ants on its branches and scented the air with fresh clean sweetness. “In fact, it feels good to come back here again, to where I started. Your mother loved to play on the lawn here.”

  It had become a ritual to visit him when I finished work, to sit with him and hear the sounds of the streets quiet, as though they too were adepts of zazen, preparing for evening meditation, filtering out the cacophony of the day. I enjoyed feeling the evening fade away into night. On my first visit I had sat across the table from him as etiquette decreed but he had said, very irritably, “No, no. Come and sit next to me.” And so after that I always sat by his side without being asked. He would then inquire about the activities of my family, and if I had received any news from William. Then I would pour tea for him. The first time I had done so he had watched me fill the cup, rapping the second joints of the fore and middle fingers of his right hand softly on the table. It happened whenever I served him and eventually I asked him the significance of it.

  “That is how we thank the person serving us,” he replied. “All Chinese people are familiar with it.”

  “I’m not aware of it,” I said.

  “No one knows precisely where and when the practice originated,” he explained. “Legend has it that an emperor in China once decided to walk in the streets like a commoner to see how his people lived their daily lives. There was no need to put on a disguise, since none of the common folk had ever seen the emperor. He was accompanied by a faithful courtier and, at a tea house, when their tea came, the emperor said he wished to experience the novelty of serving his courtier.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” I said, but he wagged a finger at me.

  “This was a grave reversal of the heavenly order and the courtier protested strongly. But he was forced to give way to his emperor, who proceeded to pour them tea. Unable to perform the proper manner of obeisance by getting onto his knees, the courtier resorted to bending his two fingers and tapping them on the table to represent the act of kneeling.”

  I knocked the joints of my two fingers
on the table. The folded digits did appear like a man kneeling.

  “Or it could also be a convenient way of letting you know that you have poured enough into my cup,” my grandfather said.

  “Now I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” I said.

  He looked pensive. “On the few occasions when Wen Zu and I stole out of the palace and visited a teahouse, he too asked to serve and this was the way I thanked him. We both used to laugh about how history repeats itself.”

  We sipped our tea quietly for a while and then he asked, “Do you know the story of the house next door?”

  “No,” I said. I filled his cup with tea once more. He gave a mischievous laugh and I was glad to see that his somber mood had left him. “It used to be the headquarters of the Malayan branch of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Chinese Nationalist party, the Tung Ming Hui,” he said. I saw the rich irony of the joke history had played on us. There was my grandfather, once a tutor to the heir to the Dragon Throne, living next door to the base of the man who had played a substantial role in destroying it all.

  “This was where he planned the Canton Uprising in the spring of 1911. I think that must have been the main reason why I bought this place,” he said, breaking into unrestrained laughter now.

  “You must invite him over,” I said, enjoying his humor. He became serious again.

  “I do not know if he is still alive. He returned to China to lead the government. But the country has erupted into civil war, making it so much easier for the Japanese to conquer it.”

  “Do you miss it, China?”

  “Yes. But I miss the old China. The new one will have no place for me. Perhaps I shall pay a visit once the war is over. Would you like to accompany me?”

  “Yes. I would also like to visit Japan.”

  “And how is Mr. Endo these days?”