When he finished distributing largesse that day, he took a bottle of whisky he had also been carrying in the basket and sat down with Pa. ‘A mid-autumn sharpener,’ he said, and poured out two glasses. I got on with my work as they sipped and grunted and cleared their throats. Uncle Raja tapped the desk with his finger, staring at it until he was ready to talk.
‘I’ve been thinking about the Toh Kei case,’ he said to Pa. ‘You know … I think we owe Anna Thumboo, as a community, I mean, we owe Anna Thumboo for what those traitorous INA fellows did to her. And not just to her. She lost her husband, of course, but that Indian National Army, they betrayed all those poor Indian POWs. Marched so many of them up to Burma to finish that blasted Japanese railway. They lied to them, said they were working for the freedom of India. So many Indians died because of them. I lost cousins myself.’
Pa nodded and appeared to be weighing up the proposition, and then he said, ‘She talked Toh Kei into it, you know. It was her idea.’
‘So they say.’
‘They?’
‘Oh, you know,’ Uncle Raja said, ‘people talk.’ He glanced at me and I quickly returned to my writing. ‘I suppose something was bound to happen. So long cooped up like that, in secret.’
‘Everyone in Papan knew. They didn’t talk. Not this time, anyway.’
Uncle Raja nodded and started tapping his finger again. ‘What would you say to doing this pro bono? For what we owe her, I mean.’
‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Pa said.
Uncle Raja stopped tapping and sat up. ‘Good! I’m glad you think that way. As far as I am concerned, Anna Thumboo and Toh Kei should be given the opportunity to live in peace. Whether that’s in Papan, in Malaya, or somewhere else. She, at least, deserves it.’
‘Perhaps they both do,’ Pa said. ‘I don’t know if it will ever be possible, but they don’t deserve what they’re getting at the moment.’ He looked at his glass and swirled the whisky around. ‘There’s another reason … for doing this case, I mean, pro bono or not. Perhaps a selfish one on my own part. The powers that be are determined to make a splash with this trial. They want it on all the front pages. That could work for us just as well as them.’
Uncle Raja frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s about time the truth was given an airing. There’s a lot that’s not being said about all this business. A lot that’s just whispered in coffee shops and bars.’
‘Oooh …’ Uncle Raja sucked on his teeth and slowly shook his head. ‘Dangerous territory, my friend. Tan idealism and British law are not often happy in harness together.’
‘No, not often. And hopefully, for the headlines, not this time either.’
‘Well, it’s your case. You’ll conduct it the way you see fit. The only treason in this affair, or sedition, or whatever else they want to call it now, is the government’s failure to honour their surrender guarantees. What’s the point of dropping all those passes out of the sky if they don’t intend to honour them?’
‘Yes, honour,’ Pa said. ‘Sounds old fashioned all of a sudden, doesn’t it. You know, Anna’s idea was that Toh Kei could be used in goodwill by the government, a symbol of the futility of the rebel cause.’
Uncle Raja grunted. ‘She doesn’t understand who she’s dealing with.’
‘She couldn’t see any other way.’
‘Symbols, propaganda,’ Uncle Raja said, shaking his head. ‘Now they’re calling this a battle for the hearts and the minds of the people. It seems to me you can’t win hearts and minds without first demonstrating honour.’
He took his bottle to his office and my father settled back to do some thinking with the help of his white wall. I knew he had done years of studying to understand the law, so long away from home in London wearing the heavy clothes and speaking in the strange ways I had seen in the film at Papan. A happy breed, it said the English were, but I shouldn’t think my father’s time there was particularly happy in those days. He had learned so many words that I never heard anywhere else but in his office, and that day I heard two I had never heard anywhere ever before. I considered them while Pa was gazing out the window, and when he stopped and started sorting through papers on his desk, I asked him what they meant.
‘Pa, what does pro bono mean?’
He put his pen down and smiled at me. ‘It means to do something because you think it’s the right thing to do. To do it, not because you get paid for it or get a reward, but just because it’s right. Do you understand that?’
I said I did. I was learning so many words – two hundred from Mr Ho, and many more from my Chinese comic and my father. Pro bono, I said to myself. Pro bono means to do what is right.
Our mother’s absence began as a kind of holiday for my sisters and me. With her eyes no longer on us, her feet no longer following us, and her rotan gathering dust in a corner, there was no denying a quite unnatural feeling of liberation. But as the weeks wore on the novelty wore off, and we found ourselves content to live more or less within the old boundaries.
Inside those boundaries I had two favourite toys, one new and one passed down to me from Li, who had inherited it herself from Mei. It, or I should say she, was my favourite doll, the one with curly yellow hair and pink cheeks. Li called her Susan, but as she was now mine I changed her name to Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise, which were all the names of the English princess who was born to the Queen the very week she came into my possession. Princess Anne was my regular guest for tea, which gave me the opportunity to use my other favourite toy, a tea set made of tin and painted with a rose pattern that I fancied was not entirely unlike my mother’s best bone china. Uncle Raja gave it to me for my eighth birthday. He took me down to the Paramount Toy Store and said that I could have anything in it, and when I saw those treasures through the cellophane window of the box, I thought it fit for a princess.
A tea party like that, I thought, was surely the very essence of living in peace. What could be more peaceful than a tea party, whether you were in Papan or anywhere else? Whether you were a little girl with her favourite doll, or a lady doctor with her special friend. More than once I imagined Toh Kei and Dr Thumboo at our table, sharing tea with Princess Anne and me, just living in peace. Having them for tea like that, imaginary or not, I regarded as certainly pro bono.
Ipoh was too hot most of the time for outdoor play and Ma was always telling us to come inside. Get out of the sun, she would say, do you want to look like a rickshaw puller? Mei and Li were still pushing the boundaries by getting on their bicycles and disappearing down the road whenever they could. I was too young to join them, of course. The only riding I did was up and down the driveway on my hand-me-down tricycle. I wasn’t allowed past the front gate, but that did not stop my mind wandering, and that way I could find myself pedalling along a distant highway, or a jungle track, or over a bridge. A bridge over the River of Death! And then I’d have to quickly find something to divert my unruly imagination and chase that picture out of it. If I was lucky I could use Ah Kong to chase it away, as there was nothing like ice cream potong to have you thinking only happy thoughts.
Ah Kong was the ice cream man who lived under a bridge, and if he was doing his rounds on his bike I would run inside to get a five or ten cent coin from Ah Mun Cheir. Potong means ‘to slice’ in Malay, and Ah Kong would slice me a length of his red bean or coconut ice cream, always a ten cent length no matter which coin Ah Mun Cheir had given me, stick it with a bamboo skewer, and I could then lap it up in the shade of the house before it melted all over my hand. Ah Kong refused to take my money, and I didn’t find out why until some years later.
It seems that once he was charged with selling ice cream without a licence. Needing a licence to sell ice cream from the back of a bicycle was one law beyond the understanding of a simple man who lived under a bridge, but he had to go to court and so he needed a lawyer. Luckily for Ah Kong my father was that lawyer, because for one thing he didn’t charge him a fee, and for another he managed to get him
off. Pa simply suggested that overlooking the application of that particular law to someone in Ah Kong’s situation would be a triumph of wisdom over dogma, or words to that effect, and the magistrate agreed with him.
It seemed to me that saying came in very useful to my father when he found the law to be not quite up to the task of deciding right from wrong.
With our mother away I was not allowed to go anywhere beyond the front gate without Ah Mun Cheir. When she was not too busy with cooking or ordering Ah Chee Cheir around the house, she might take me down to ‘Ipoh Park’, a ten minute walk down the road. We called it Ipoh Park because it had IPOH laid out in whitewashed stones on a grassy slope to greet vehicles arriving from the south, but it wasn’t actually of a size that warranted a name at all. Here there always seemed to be English children playing on the swings, kicking balls around and riding bikes, getting very sweaty in the sun and causing Ah Mun Cheir to shake her head under her big bamboo hat. Malay boys shot rubber seeds at one another with their ‘lastiks’, which is what they called their catapults, and searched in the bushes for spiders – Malay boys were always searching for spiders to fight another Malay boy’s spider. Everyone liked to play ‘bandits’, a favourite at the time, which was a cross between chasings and hidings and a reflection of the serious world beyond the shelter of Gopeng Road.
After the incident with my geese and the tent, Kebun took more of an interest in our side of the fence. It started with him checking his repairs to the goose pen, and then he brought us fruit picked from Mr Yew’s trees. There were not enough people in that house to possibly eat all the fruit from that garden, and Kebun gave us rambutans, mangoes, even durian. Mr Yew did not have children and it seemed to me that Kebun liked to be around them. Li said he probably had children of his own somewhere and missed them. We ate so much durian on some of those days that our faces glowed red. Too heaty, Ah Mun Cheir would say, shaking her head and then cooking up some barley water to cool us down.
One day Kebun showed us a new game, the frangipani game we called it. Mr Yew had quite a few frangipani trees in his garden and Kebun gathered a basketful of the flowers and showed us how to tie them with rubber bands into a bunch like a ball, and to kick it with our feet to keep it in the air. None of us could do it like Kebun. He had long thin legs and leapt around like a gazelle, bouncing the bunch high and low on one foot and then the other. None of it impressed Ah Mun Cheir who said loudly that girls do not kick flowers. Our mother would be angry with us, she said, but our mother was not there and we kept on playing Kebun’s frangipani game until we were covered with sweat. Kebun didn’t sweat at all, no matter how much leaping around he did. His skin was darker than any rickshaw puller I had seen.
Although there were no frangipani trees in our garden we did have coconut palms. Kebun said the nuts were ripe and ready to fall, and soon we would have to avoid the trees or risk having our heads cracked open when they fell of their own accord. He said he could harvest them for us and to ask our father if he wanted him to do that. We asked him that night. The next morning he went over to Mr Yew’s and came back to tell us that we were going to have a garden party.
That Sunday Uncle Hung Jeuk arrived in his MG sports car with Uncle Raja in the passenger seat, his hair blown over his eyes because Uncle Hung Jeuk had never bothered to have the canvas roof repaired after it got ripped apart some time earlier in a thunderstorm. They had come over to help, although as it turned out what they mostly did was stand around talking and drinking whisky with our father. As far as I could see, lawyers were good at both of these pursuits. Most men in Ipoh who were not lawyers drank brandy. I knew this because I had once read in the Straits Times that more brandy was consumed in Ipoh than anywhere else in the world, which meant Ipoh had a claim to fame beyond its resources of tin. Uncle Hung Jeuk drank both brandy and whisky and generally, from what I could observe, whatever else might be at hand. Ma said that Uncle Hung Jeuk could drink a bar dry. I overheard her one night on the veranda say that Uncle Hung Jeuk’s drinking would get him into serious trouble one day. She said that there were nights when he could not find his way home, like the night he went to the wrong house and crawled into bed with the Malay woman next door. She screamed so much the police came. Humphrey Wilmot is a scandal waiting to happen, Ma said.
Uncle Hung Jeuk wasn’t drinking brandy that day, he was drinking whisky, just like Pa and Uncle Raja and all the other lawyers in Ipoh.
‘The Ipoh bar is the friendliest bar in the land,’ Uncle Raja said. ‘So stock up the bar and let’s drink to it.’
‘Remember, girls,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said, ‘orderly method achieves perfection. Today my job is to make sure you are sufficiently orderly.’
Kebun’s two Indian boys arrived on their bicycles, quietly examined our trees, and hitched up their sarongs. Uncle Hung Jeuk stood under the nearest tree and pointed his spidery fingers at the ripe coconuts.
‘The blessings sent down on us are of every kind,’ he said, which was apparently something Confucius once said, although surely not about coconuts, and then he stepped back to allow the boys to get to work.
They looped thick twine around their ankles and climbed straight up the trunks about as fast as I had ever seen a monkey do it. They cut the coconuts with parangs dangling from their waists, and soon we were being bombarded with the heavy brown pods, each one landing with a thud that I could feel through the soles of my feet.
And then the party began. We all took turns grating coconuts and squeezing milk from the flesh for our curries, cakes, puddings and seri kaya, my favourite jam made with eggs. Ah Mun Cheir then fried the dry flesh in a huge wok over a fire in an oil drum, and rich and sweet coconut fragrance filled the air as it turned gold and oozed its oil. We filled bottles for cooking, for lamps, for rusty hinges and for making laundry soap. The crispy golden coconut that was left in the bottom of the wok was yet another of Ah Mun Cheir’s wondrously inventive kitchen creations. She mixed it with sugar and packed it into paper cones with a hole snipped in the end so we could squeeze the warm, sweet and crunchy delight straight into our mouths. After all that she used some of the fresh milk to cook rice for nasi lemak and chicken curry, and everyone soon settled into a shady spot for lunch.
I sat near the lawyers, because I knew what they would be talking about, and I was not disappointed. As I settled I heard Uncle Hung Jeuk grumbling about ‘the latest news from the front’.
Uncle Raja interrupted him loudly. ‘What front?’ he scoffed. ‘There is no front, just a rabble.’
‘The latest news from the front,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk repeated, undeterred, ‘is that the tuans have flown in Iban trackers from Borneo who are presently leading the Gurkhas a merry dance around the jungle. Ferret Force,’ he sneered, and they laughed and ate their curry.
I was busy conjuring up an image of Ibans and Gurkhas being so happy with their lot that they were dancing in the jungle, when Uncle Raja asked Uncle Hung Jeuk if he was still seeing his Chinese … and he paused to take a quick glance at me before saying ‘niece’.
‘You mean Mona,’ said Uncle Hung Jeuk.
‘Is that a name or a personal peculiarity?’ asked Uncle Raja.
My father cleared his throat loudly. ‘Toh Kei tells me the Emergency was not planned by the communists,’ he said.
‘I’ve always had my suspicions about the local commos,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said. ‘Personally, I’ve never been convinced they are up to planning anything. Mao’s textbook calls for military action.’
‘Oh, not your blessed Chairman again,’ groaned Uncle Raja.
‘Terror isn’t the Mao way,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said, ignoring him again. ‘It has to be the triads who are really running the show. The triads have been behind any trouble in Malaya for a hundred years, and why would it be any different these days?’
My father shook his head as he pushed the curry around his plate. ‘The British government would never spend the kind of money they are spending in Malaya if it was just the triads,’ he said.
‘Nothing opens the purse strings of the tin gods like the flourish of a few red flags. Everywhere in the world, it’s only when the red flags start to wave in the streets and …’
Uncle Raja raised his hand like a policeman stopping the traffic. ‘There’s no point to all this talk,’ he said. ‘The only reason Toh Kei is getting a trial at all is because the government is still in capable hands.’
This made Uncle Hung Jeuk splutter and cough rice straight out of his mouth.
‘We should be thankful the country is being run by someone like Gurney,’ Uncle Raja continued, ‘because he is a civilian and not some trigger-happy general.’
‘He may not be a general,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said, still coughing, ‘but he is definitely a colonel.’ Pa and Uncle Raja looked at him with disbelief. ‘Colonel Blimp,’ he said, and then he straightened himself up and fluttered his long fingers at Uncle Raja. ‘They who know the truth are not the equal of those who delight in it, as the Master said.’
‘You can spout Confucius at me as much as you want,’ Uncle Raja said, ‘but it’s a good thing the old gentleman is not in Malaya today. What would he think of the rabble in the jungle? Not much respect for authority these days.’
They went on like that all afternoon and well into the night, talking and drinking whisky like lawyers, which never happened when our mother was around. After they finally left Pa went into his study again. Soon we heard music through the closed door – the same song, over and over. I recognised the ‘Tennessee Waltz’. I peeked through the keyhole, but couldn’t see Pa’s desk or Pa himself. I could only see the middle of the room. And then he moved across in front of the keyhole, one way and then the other, slowly, and with his arms raised around an invisible partner. He was dancing, just with a whisky glass.
31
If the authorities did know where the guerrilla camps were in the hills then it did not seem to trouble the guerrillas themselves. It was not long before rumours were circulating about their clandestine presence near Papan once again.
The Heart Radical Page 22