Mrs. Singh, whose name was Aratavari or something vaguely similar, took Laura into the parental bedroom. “We shall get you into some dry clothes,” she said. She opened the closet and took a folded square cloth from the top shelf. It was breathtaking: emerald-green silk with gold embroidery. “A sari will fit you,” she said, shaking it out briskly. It was obviously her finest garment. It looked like something a rajah’s wife would wear for ritual suttee.
Laura toweled her hair and face. “Your English is very good.”
“I’m from Manchester,” said Mrs. Singh. “Better opportunity here however.” She turned her back politely while Laura stripped off her sopping blouse and jeans. She put on a sari blouse too big in the bustline and too tight around the ribs. The sari defeated her. Mrs. Singh helped her pleat and pin it.
Laura combed her hair in the mirror. Her gas-stung eyes looked like cracked marbles. But the beautiful sari gave her a hallucinatory look of exotic Sanskrit majesty. If only David were here.… She felt a sudden total rush of culture shock, intense and queasy, like déjà vu with a knife twist.
She followed Mrs. Singh back into the front room, barefoot and rustling. The children laughed, and Singh grinned at her. “Oh. Very good, madam. You would like drinking something?”
“I could sure do with a shot of whiskey.”
“No alcohol.”
“You got a cigarette?” she blurted. They looked shocked. “Sorry,” she muttered, wondering why she’d said it. “Very kind of y’all to put me up and everything.”
Mrs. Singh shook her head modestly. “I should take your clothes to the laundry. Only, curfew forbids it.” The older boy brought Laura a can of chilled guava juice. It tasted like sugared spit.
They sat on the couch. The Government channel was on, with the sound low. A Chinese anchorman was interviewing the cosmonaut, who was still in orbit. The cosmonaut expressed limitless faith in the authorities. “You like curry?” Mrs. Singh said anxiously.
“I can’t stay,” Laura said, surprised.
“But you must!”
“No. My company voted. It’s a policy matter. We’re all going to jail.”
The Singhs were not surprised, but they looked unhappy and troubled. She felt genuinely sorry for them. “Why, Laura?” said Mrs. Singh.
“We came here to deal with Parliament. We don’t care for this martial law at all. We’re enemies of the state now. We can’t work with you anymore.”
Singh and his wife conversed rapidly while the children sat on the floor, big-eyed and grave. “You stay safely here, madam,” Singh said at last. “It’s our duty. You are important guest. The Government will understand.”
“It’s not the same Government,” Laura said. “East Lagoon—that whole area’s a riot zone now. They’re killing each other down there. I saw it happen. The Air Force just fired a missile into our property. Maybe killed some of my people too, I don’t know.”
Mrs. Singh went pale. “I heard the explosion—but it’s not on the television.…” She turned to her husband, who stared morosely at the throw rug. They began talking again, and Laura broke in.
“I have no right to get y’all in trouble.” She stood up. “Where are my sandals?”
Singh stood up too. “I am escorting you, madam.”
“No,” Laura said, “you’d better stay here and guard your own home. Look, the doors are broken in downstairs, if you haven’t noticed. Those Anti-Labourites took over our godown—they might wander into this place too, any time they like, and take everybody hostage. They mean business, or antibusiness, or whatever the hell they believe in. And they’re not afraid to die, either.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” Singh insisted stoutly. His wife began shouting at him. Laura found her sandals—the toddler was playing with them behind the couch. She slipped them on.
Singh, red-faced, stormed out of the flat. Laura heard him in the hall, shouting and whacking doors with his lathi stick. “What’s going on?” she said.
The two older children rushed Mrs. Singh and grabbed her, burying their faces in her tunic. “My husband says, that it was he who rescued you, a famous woman from television, who looked like a lost wet cat. And that you have broken bread in his house. And he will not send a helpless foreign woman to be killed in the streets like some kind of pariah dog.”
“He’s got quite a way with words, in his own language.”
“Maybe that explains it,” said Mrs. Singh and smiled.
“I don’t think a can of guava juice really qualifies as ‘breaking bread.’”
“Not guava. Soursop.” She patted her little girl’s head. “He’s a good man. He’s honest, and works very hard, and is not stupid, or mean. And never hits me or the children.”
“That’s very nice,” Laura said.
Mrs. Singh locked eyes with her. “I tell you this, Laura Webster, because I don’t want you to throw my man’s life away. Just because you’re a political, and he doesn’t count for much.”
“I’m not a political,” Laura protested. “I’m just a person, like you.”
“If you were like me, you’d be home with your family.”
Singh burst in suddenly, grabbed Laura by the arm, and hauled her out into the hall. Doors were open up and down the corridor, and it was crowded with confused and angry Indian men in their undershirts. When they saw her they roared in amazement.
In seconds they were all around her. “Namaste, namaste,” the Indian greeting, nodding over hands pressed together, palm to palm. Some touched the trailing edge of the sari, respectfully. Uproar of voices. “My son, my son,” a fat man kept shouting in English. “He’s A-L.P., my son!”
The elevator opened and they hustled her inside. They crowded it to the limit, and other men ran for the stairs. The elevator sank slowly, its cables groaning, jammed like an overloaded bus.
Minutes later they had hustled her out into the street. Laura wasn’t sure how the decision had been made or even if anyone had consciously made one. Windows had been flung open on every floor and people were shouting up and down in the soggy midafternoon heat. More and more were pouring out—a human tide. Not angry, but manic, like soldiers on furlough, or kids out of school—milling, shouting, slapping each other on the shoulders.
Laura grabbed Singh’s khaki sleeve. “Look, I don’t need all this—”
“It is the people,” Singh mumbled. His eyes looked glazed and ecstatic.
“Let her speak,” yelled a guy in a striped jubbah. “Let her speak!”
The shout spread. Two kids rolled a topped trash can into the street and set it down like a pedestal. They raised her onto it. There was frenzied applause. “Quiet, quiet …”
Suddenly they were all looking at her.
Laura felt a terror so absolute that she felt like fainting. Say something, idiot—quick, before they kill you. “Thank you for trying to protect me,” she squeaked. They cheered, not catching her words, just pleased that she could talk, like a real person.
Her voice came back. “No violence!” she shouted. “Singapore is a modern city.” Men around her muttered translations in an undertone. The crowd continued to grow and thicken around her. “Modern people don’t kill each other,” she shouted. The sari was slipping off her shoulder. She tugged it back into place. They applauded, jostling each other, whites showing around their eyes.
It was the damned sari, she thought dazedly. They loved it. A tall foreign blonde on a pedestal, wrapped in gold and green, some kind of demented Kali juggernaut thing …
“I’m just a stupid foreigner!” she screeched. A few moments before they decided to believe her—then they laughed, and clapped. “But I know better than to hurt anyone! So I want to go to jail!”
Blank looks. She had lost them. Inspiration saved her. “Like Gandhi!” she shouted. “The Mahatma. Gandhiji.”
A sudden awesome silence.
“So just a few of you, very calmly, please, take me to a jail. Thank you very much.” She jumped down.
&nbs
p; Singh steadied her. “That was good!”
“You know the way,” she said urgently. “You lead us, okay?”
“Okay!” Singh swung his lathi stick over his head. “Everyone, we are marching, la! To the jail!”
He offered Laura his arm. They moved quickly through the crowd, which melted away before them and re-formed behind.
“To the jail!” shouted Striped Jubbah, leaping up and down, striped arms flapping. “To Changi!”
Others took up the yell. “Changi, Changi.” The destination seemed to channel their energies. The giddy sense of explosiveness leached out of the situation, like a blowtorch settling to a steady burn. Children ran ahead of them, to turn and marvel at the advancing crowd. They gawked, and capered, and punched each other. People watched from street-side buildings. Windows opened, and doors.
After three blocks, the crowd was still growing. They marched north, onto South Bridge Road. Ahead of them loomed the cyclopean buildings downtown. A lean Chinese with slicked-back hair and a schoolteacherish look appeared at Laura’s elbow. “Mrs. Webster?”
“Yes?”
“I am pleased to march with you on Changi! Amnesty International was morally right!”
Laura blinked. “Huh?”
“The political prisoners …” The crowd surged suddenly and he was swept away. The crowd had an escort now—two police choppers, hissing above the street. Laura quailed, her eyes burning with remembrance, but the crowd waved and cheered, as if the choppers were some kind of party favor.
It dawned on her, then. She grabbed Singh’s elbow. “Hey! I just want to go to a police station. Not march on the goddamned Bastille!”
“What, madam?” Singh shouted, grinning dazedly. “What steel?”
Oh, God. If only she could make a break for it. She looked about wildly, and people waved at her and smiled. What an idiot she’d been to put on this sari. It was like being wrapped in green neon.
Now they were marching through the thick of Singapore’s Chinatown. Temple Street, Pagoda Street. The psychedelic, statue-covered stupa of a Hindu temple rose to her left. “Sri Mariamman,” it read. Polychrome goddesses leered at each other as if they’d planned all this, just for grins. There were sirens wailing ahead, at a major intersection. The sound of bullhorns. They were going to walk right into it. A thousand angry cops. A massacre.
And then it came into sight. Not cops at all, but another crowd of civilians. Pouring headlong into the intersection, men, women, children. Above them a banner, somebody’s bed sheet stretched between bamboo poles. Hasty daubed lettering: LONG LIVE CHANNEL THREE …
Laura’s crowd emitted an amazing, heartfelt sigh, as if every person in it had spotted a long-lost lover. Suddenly everyone was running, arms outstretched. The two crowds hit, and merged, and mingled. The hair rose on Laura’s neck. There was something loose in this crowd, something purely magical—a mystic social electricity. She could feel it in her bones, some kind of glad triumphant opposite to the ugly crowd-madness she’d seen at the stadium. People fell, but they were helping each other up and embracing each other.…
She lost Singh. Suddenly she was alone in the crowd, tripping along in the middle of a long fractal swirl of it. She glanced down the street. A block away, another subcrowd, and a cluster of red-and-white police cars.
Her heart leapt. She broke from the crowd and ran toward them.
The cops were surrounded. They were embedded in the crowd, like ham in aspic. People—everyone, anyone—had simply clotted around the police, immobilizing them. The prowl cars’ doors were open and the cops were trying to reason with them, without success.
Laura edged up through the crowd. Everyone was shouting, and their hands were full—not with weapons, but with all kinds of strange stuff: bags of bread rolls, transistor radios, even a handful of marigolds snatched from some windowpot. They were thrusting them at the police, begging them to take them. A middle-aged Chinese matron was shouting passionately at a police captain. “You are our brothers! We are all Singaporeans. Singaporeans do not kill each other!”
The police captain couldn’t meet the woman’s eyes. He sat on the edge of the driver’s seat, tight-lipped, in an ecstasy of humiliation. There were three other cops in his car, decked out in full riot gear: helmets, vests, tangle-rifles. They could have flattened the crowd in a few instants, but they looked stunned, nonplussed.
A man in a silk business suit thrust his arm through the open backseat window. “Take my watch, officer! As a souvenir! Please—this is a great day.…” The cop shook his head, with a gentle, stunned look.
Next to him, his fellow cop munched a rice cake.
Laura tapped the captain’s shoulder. He looked up and recognized her. His eyes rolled a little in their sockets, as if she was all that was needed to make his experience complete. “What do you want?”
Laura told him, discreetly. “Arrest you here?” the captain replied. “In front of these people?”
“I can get you away,” Laura told him. She clambered onto the hood of the prowl car, stood up, and raised both arms. “Everyone listen! You know me—I’m Laura Webster. Please let us through! We have very important business! Yes, that’s right, move back away from the hood, ladies and gentlemen.… Thank you very much, you’re such good people, I’m so grateful.…”
She sat on the hood, propping her feet on the front bumper. The car crept forward and the crowd peeled away to either side, respectfully. Many of them obviously failed to recognize her. But they reacted instinctively to the totem symbol of a foreign woman in a green sari on the hood of a police car. Laura stretched out her arms and made vague swimming motions. It worked. The crowd moved faster.
They reached the edge of the crowd. Laura wedged herself in the front seat, between the captain and a lieutenant. “Thank God,” she said.
“Mrs. Webster,” the police captain said. His badge said his name was Hsiu. “You are under arrest for obstruction of justice and incitement to riot.”
“Okay,” Laura breathed. “Do you know what happened to the rest of my Rizome people?”
“They are also arrested. The helicopters got them.”
Laura nodded eagerly, then stopped. “Uhmm … they’re not in Changi, are they?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Changi!” the cop said, nettled. “Don’t listen to globalist lies.”
They were tooling slowly up Pickering Street, crammed with beauty salons and cosmetic-surgery joints. The sidewalks were crowded with grinning, larking curfew breakers, but they hadn’t yet thought to block the street. “You foreigners,” the captain said slowly. “You cheated us. Singapore could have built a new world. But you poisoned our leader, and you robbed us. This is it. Enough. All finish.”
“Grenada poisoned Kim.”
Captain Hsiu shook his head. “I don’t believe in Grenada.”
“But it’s your own people who are doing this,” Laura told him. “At least you weren’t invaded.”
The cop gave her a salt-in-the-wounds look. “We are invaded. Didn’t you know?”
She was stunned. “What? Vienna came in?”
“No,” said a cop in the back with pessimistic relish. “It’s the Red Cross.”
For a moment she couldn’t place the reference. “The Red Cross,” she said. “The health agency?”
“If an army came, we would chop them up,” said Captain Hsiu. “But no one shoots the Red Cross. They are already in Ubin and Tekong and Sembawang. Hundreds of them.”
“With bandages and medic kits,” said the cop eating rice cakes. “‘Civil disaster relief.’” He began laughing.
“Shut up, you,” said the captain listlessly. Rice Cakes throttled it down to a snicker.
“I never heard of the Red Cross pulling a stunt like that,” Laura said.
“It’s the globalist corporations,” said Captain Hsiu, darkly. “They wanted to buy Vienna and have us all shot. But it too expensive, and take them too long. So they buy the Red Cross instead—an army with no guns—
and kill us with kindness. They just walk in smiling, and never walk out of Singapore again. Dirty cowards.”
The police radio squawked wildly. A mob was invading the premises of Channel Four television, at Marina Centre. Captain Hsiu growled something foul in Chinese and turned it off. “I knew they attack the tellies soon or later,” he said. “What to do …”
“We getting brand-new orders tomorrow,” said the lieutenant, speaking for the first time. “Probably big rise in pay, too. For us, plenty busy months ahead.”
“Traitor,” said Captain Hsiu without passion.
The lieutenant shrugged. “Got to live, la.”
“Then we’ve won,” Laura blurted. She was realizing it, in all its scope, for the first time. Ballooning inside her. All that craziness and all that sacrifice—it had worked, somehow. Not quite the way anyone had expected—but that was politics, wasn’t it? It was over. The Net had won.
“That’s right,” said the captain. He turned right, onto Clemenceau Avenue.
“Then I guess there’s not much point in arresting me, is there? The protest is meaningless now. And I’ll never stand trial for those charges.” She laughed happily.
“Maybe we book you just for the fun of it,” said the lieutenant. He watched a car full of teenagers zip past, one leaning through the open window, waving a huge Singapore flag.
“Oh, no!” said the captain. “Then we must watch her make more globalist moralizing speeches.”
“No way!” Laura said hastily. “I’m getting the hell out of here as soon as I can, back to my husband and baby.”
Captain Hsiu paused. “You want to leave the island?”
“More than anything! Believe me.”
“Could arrest her anyway,” suggested the lieutenant. “Probably take two, three week for the paperwork to find her.”
“Especially if we don’t file it,” said the snickering cop. He started laughing through his nose.
“If you think that scares me, go right ahead,” Laura said, bluffing. “Anyway, I couldn’t get out now if I tried. There’s no way. Martial law closed the airports.”
Islands in the Net Page 29