Five Star Billionaire: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  “Really?” There was a murmur of excitement, soft exclamations of approval.

  “No, well, yes,” Justin began. “I’m working on it. There’s still a long way to go—you know what things are like in Malaysia. Bureaucracy, the whole system, you know …”

  “Bureaucracy? You mean corruption! But well done, man.”

  “Ya, man, we’re proud of you,” the Malay girl’s boyfriend said. Justin recognized him; Tony Ramakrishnan was a contemporary of C.S.’s at St. John’s. When Tony was small, he used to wet the bed every time he stayed over, even when he was ten or eleven—anxiety, Justin’s mother had said; now he was six feet one, Oxford-educated, and recently qualified as a criminal lawyer. “People like us, we have to take a stand. Funny, I always thought of you as a real establishment figure, but actually you’re a pretty cool guy—you’re one of us.”

  Yinghui laughed. “You know these Lim boys—full of hidden depths.” She looked at Justin as she climbed back into the hammock, her legs scrabbling awkwardly as she hauled herself up.

  Time—how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meager experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled, because for him, time was always an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so that he would have something substantial to hang on to later. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.

  Later that afternoon, they went swimming. The sea was warm and gray, and there was flotsam in the water—small pieces of driftwood, rafts of casuarina needles, plastic bottles. There must have been a storm out at sea, someone said: Everything was churned up. The boys had had a few beers; Yinghui was the only girl who’d joined them in drinking, but the alcohol had made her silent, not raucous. She swam on her own, breast-stroking placidly with her head above the low waves. They swam for an hour, perhaps, until dusk began to settle, an unshifting cloud dampening the colors of sunset. But, in Justin’s mind, that relatively brief time spent floating in a warm sea swelled and expanded over the years and now seemed like hours and hours, stretching into eternity. Any remark she made—a compliment on his powerful swimming stroke, his unexpected grace in the water, the fact that his skin seemed to tan easily or that the turtles on his shorts were kind of cute, offhand comments, blithely delivered over the foamy wash of the waves—seemed rich with meaning, even though she meant nothing, he knew that. She might have said the same thing to everyone present, but time made those compliments belong entirely to him.

  They stayed up late that night, chatting about how they were going to save their country. They had a vision of how the future should be. But how their vision would shift: They could not know that, in planning so assiduously, they’d failed to take into account that they would change. Tony Ramakrishnan would eventually abandon the criminal bar to set up a telecommunications company with a former client of his, supplying satellite-TV and mobile-phone services to 80 percent of the country; his pretty Malay girlfriend would soon be discovered by a new TV channel and become a celebrity, famous for being famous. C.S. would end up running the family firm when it was on its last legs, trying in vain to save it from total collapse, spending his days looking over accounts and spreadsheets he could not understand, married to a wife who had fallen in love with him because of the lifestyle he once represented but now didn’t, their marriage permanently alternating between states of boredom and semi-separation; they would stay together only for the sake of their two young children and because they lacked the youth and courage to start afresh with anyone else. Yinghui would go to Shanghai, where she would, against all odds and contrary to everyone’s expectations, become a businesswoman—a job description she once described as worse than a death sentence. And Justin—he would meet a sad fate; “gone a bit loco,” people would say. Or, as the more polite put it, “he opted out of the system.”

  At around 1:00 A.M. they began to tire. They had promised to stay up to witness the dawn, but the beer had taken its toll and, slumped in their deep rattan armchairs, they began to doze. Yinghui was snoring gently with her mouth open, her head thrown back, face to the night sky. C.S. was fidgeting as he tried to find a comfortable position, pulling his knees up to rest his feet on the chair. Justin tried to fight the weight of slumber, but eventually he, too, fell asleep, and when he opened his eyes no one was there. The chairs were empty, the kerosene lamps that had lit their little circle gone; the lawn was dark, bounded by the silhouettes of the coconut trees that ran parallel to the beach.

  The house, too, was dark—Justin had no clue as to who was sleeping in which room. He stood up and began to walk down to the beach. He was tired but did not want to go back into the house and stumble around trying to locate his room, waking everyone up in the process. He walked along the beach, tracing the line where the waves washed onto the shore. Even in the dark, this stretch of the coast was familiar to him, as if illuminated in permanent daylight. He had known it ever since he was a small child—with his eyes shut, he knew where the fine sand became studded with seashells before turning briefly to gravel; he knew where the lines of fishing boats were tethered to a row of coconut trees; he knew where the rocky barriers jutted out into the water, knew the best places to clamber over them. He walked for a long time, until he was far from the house and could see it from the other end of the bay. Framed by low hills, it looked the same as it always had. He had spent the whole evening talking about change, and yet it was familiarity that moved him, he thought.

  He decided he would walk home along the road. He would have to cut through a small coconut plantation to reach it—a place he had been forbidden to enter when he was a child, because it had for a while become known as a gathering place for drug users. It was overgrown with low shrubs, but its paths were still clear enough, even at night, and he had no trouble easing his way through the vegetation. He was just approaching the run-down attap hut in the middle of the grove when he saw two people standing in its shadows. One of them remained close to the shack, the other kept pulling away before drifting slowly back to the first person, their T-shirts gleaming a ghostly white in the gloom. Justin crouched down behind some bushes. Even from a distance he could tell that the person leaning against the hut was his brother—the movement of his arms, the way he inclined his head to kiss the other person: C.S.’s traits were unmistakable. Gradually the other person ceased to move away from C.S. but remained close to him, their forms becoming indistinct. Justin looked at the ground, at the black earth under his feet. He was trapped—any movement would alert the amorous couple. Eventually the other person walked away swiftly, down another path that led to the beach. As she passed not ten paces away from Justin, he saw that she was the pretty Malay girl, Tony Ramakrishnan’s girlfriend, picking her way doelike through the shrubs. Ten long minutes later, C.S. made his way in the opposite direction, toward the road, where Justin had been heading.

  Justin waited, crouched in the dark. Long after C.S. had gone, he was still there, motionless, as if he had done something wrong—which was ridiculous, he thought. Yet he was incapable of moving. Eventually he turned back and made his way to the beach, walking as slowly as he could. By the time he arrived at the house, the inky sky was beginning to lighten, the first hints of dawn appearing.

  He sat on the sand in front of the lawn. The waves seemed stronger now, as if enthused by the prospect of dawn; a westerly wind blew across them, rippling their crests. He heard footsteps approaching, the creaking of the low gate that led from the lawn to the beach. He turned around and saw Yinghui walking toward him.

  “I didn’t think anyone else would be awake,” she said. “Everyone said they would be up to watch the sun rise, but I think it’s going to be only you and me. Don’t think C.S. is going to make it—he just stumbled into bed not long ago. Guess you guys have been chatting all night long.”

  Justin nodded. “Yes. You know, brother
ly stuff.”

  “That’s what he said—shooting the breeze and all that. It’s good for him to chat with you. Sometimes I think you guys are so different that you have nothing in common, but I guess brothers always have a lot to talk about—especially now.”

  Justin shrugged.

  “Will you get into huge trouble with your family for saving the New Cathay?” she asked after a while. She was rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, but when she looked at him she seemed alert, her gaze steady, patiently awaiting his response, as usual.

  “I’m going to try to find a way to please everyone,” Justin said. “There’s got to be a solution that will appease them while saving the cinema.”

  “You think so? I don’t see how that’s possible. That’s why I think you’re incredibly courageous.” Her gaze did not waver as she said this. “It means a lot to me that you’re doing this.”

  “Um,” he said.

  “I was really surprised, to tell the truth. But now that I think of it, you’ve never actually done anything bad. I don’t know why I’ve thought about you as one of them. I’m not even sure who they are. Just not us.”

  “There’s lots of stuff about me you don’t know.”

  She smiled; her eyes looked watery. “Yes, I’m sure there is. Thanks, anyway, for all you’re doing. It feels like … something personal. I know this sounds silly, but it makes me feel as if you’re doing it to make C.S. and me happy.”

  Justin remained silent for a while. The clouds were beginning to lighten now, the velvety texture and soft folds becoming apparent. “It’s going to be dawn soon.”

  “Yeah. I’m so sleepy.” She laid her head on his shoulder; it felt comfortingly heavy. “By the way, if you need any help, just let me know.”

  The sky lightened, but there was no amber dawn, no dazzling color, only cloud on cloud, a marbling of cobalt and gray.

  “Rain today,” he said, but her breaths were already sleep-heavy.

  Early in the afternoon, when they’d about slept off their late night, Justin drove C.S. and Yinghui back to KL. The roads were busy with people driving in on a Sunday; it had started to rain, not heavily but enough to make the streets muddy and slow, and even the highways were stop-start with traffic. He dropped Yinghui at her parents’ house, stopping for a moment with the engine running as she collected her things from the trunk.

  “Time for the usual Sunday evening dinner ritual,” she said as she leaned in through the window to give C.S. a quick kiss on the cheek. She reached her hand in and squeezed Justin’s forearm. “Thanks for the lift, Elder Brother.” He watched as she walked through the electric gates flanked on either side by a pair of scarlet-stemmed rajah palm trees. He waited until the gates had closed and she was safely inside.

  “Can you step on it, please?” C.S. said, stretching and yawning. “There’s a TV show I want to watch. Oh, God, I drank too much last night.”

  “She’s great, Yinghui,” said Justin.

  “Yeah, but.”

  “Things not going so well, then?”

  “Yeah, it’s all fine,” C.S. said, yawning again. “It’s just I’m feeling a bit … stale. You know?”

  Justin shrugged and drove on in silence until they reached home. He had been planning to spend the evening looking at the papers concerning the Cathay: On the drive back from the seaside, it had suddenly occurred to him that he might be able to make a viable financial case for turning it into a mixed-use development, the kind he’d heard of in cities like London or New York, where important buildings had been converted into five-star hotels and high-end apartments, alongside shops selling luxury brands. Why not the Cathay? It would make a splendidly situated boutique hotel right in the middle of town, where there was nothing of the kind, and would revitalize the area. Yinghui and her friends would complain that it hadn’t been preserved in its original use, but it wouldn’t take them long to realize that what he had done was better than nothing; at least the building would still be there.

  It was entirely true what people would soon begin to say of him in his career: Compromise was his forte; he always found a way to sort things out.

  He had just settled down to looking at some accounts when the phone rang—Sixth Uncle inviting him out to dinner, sounding bright and over-cheerful. In their family’s unspoken code, Justin knew that something was wrong and that this was not the casual invitation it purported to be.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m busy preparing for Monday. In fact, I’m looking at figures for the Cathay.”

  “The Cathay, huh? Forget it for now; let your uncle buy you a chicken chop at Coliseum. You used to love it there, all the old Hainanese guys fussing over you when you were a boy. See you there in an hour, okay? Take a taxi—big traffic jam here. It’s the rain, isn’t it?”

  Sixth Uncle was right: The roads were terrible. Tired of waiting in the unmoving taxi, Justin got out and walked the last half mile in the rain, his sneakers growing damp even though he had a big golfing umbrella with him. The sky was darkening swiftly; what little light of the afternoon that remained was giving way to night, a deepening gloom urged on by the rain clouds. Scooters streaked through puddles, splashing muddy water onto his ankles as he walked along the broken pavements. Everywhere, people were walking in the rain, wearing plastic ponchos that hid the shapes of their bodies. Jostled by the crowds along the narrow strip of uneven paving, he stepped into the road, his foot sinking into a rivulet of water, the grit working its way quickly between his toes.

  Sixth Uncle was waiting for him outside the restaurant, taking a final drag from the stub of his Benson & Hedges.

  “It’s packed in there. I said we’d come back in a few minutes—they’re going to keep a table for us,” he said. “Why don’t we take a walk round the block?”

  “But, Sixth Uncle, it’s raining.”

  “Fuck the rain,” Sixth Uncle said as he lit another cigarette. He began walking slowly away from the restaurant. “Stop being such a pussy.”

  Justin noticed that the traffic was still tightly packed and had been for some time—even the honking and jostling had calmed down, as drivers resigned themselves to the situation. Some roads had been cordoned off—a fire engine blocked one of the main roads.

  “What a mess,” Justin said. “Something must be going on.”

  “Uh,” Sixth Uncle grunted. “So how was the weekend? The old house still standing? I haven’t been down to Port Dickson in so long—I keep thinking maybe the old caretaker down there is dead.”

  “No, all is fine. Yeah, it was cool.”

  “Good.”

  They rounded the corner and saw a small gathering of fire engines in the distance. Here, too, a calm had settled over the proceedings: Firemen were standing in small groups, drinking teh-tarik from plastic bags, the lights of the engines still flashing but the sirens silent; shopkeepers were standing at the front of their shops or sitting on rattan stools, looking vaguely in the direction of the fire engines. Everywhere there was the sort of lassitude one feels when a moment of great danger has passed and one realizes that life will continue as it always has. Beyond the fire engines, a thin spire of smoke rose into the sky, barely discernible in the damp gloom.

  “Lucky thing it was raining,” Justin heard a shopkeeper say to a passerby. “Otherwise I think all these shops around here also kena burn to the ground.”

  “Ya-lah, nasib.”

  Justin began to slow as they headed toward the fire engines, allowing Sixth Uncle to walk ahead. He paused by a group of shopkeepers who were standing at the entrance to a Chinese medicine shop, the shutters pulled halfway down. “Morning already it started, what time I don’t know—ten, eleven? After lunch only the firemen can put it out. Over thirty firemen, you know. You see? Now also still got smoke and all that. Wah, it was really big, man. Old buildings like that, not surprising, what. The electric wires all rosak already, isn’t it?”

  Obscured by the fire engines, there was a perfect square of charred timber jutti
ng at odd angles, rising half a story into the air—it looked like one of those ghostly pictures of redwood forests after a fire, silent and still. It took Justin a few moments to recognize this as the site of the New Cathay cinema; above the quieting hush of the rain and the low, respectful rumble of the traffic, he thought he could hear the sizzle and fizz of the ashes.

  “What?” Sixth Uncle said. “What are you giving me that look for? You just spend all your time relaxing with your friends, lepak-ing down by the beach, and I have to end up sorting out your shit.”

  “I said I was going to figure things out.”

  “Figure things out, figure things out. How damn long was it going to take you? You’re still such a mommy’s boy. You need to grow up, stop being a sissy.” He put his arm around Justin’s shoulder. “Sometimes we have to do stuff we don’t like. I’ve tidied things up for you this time, but next time you’ll have to do it yourself. Come on, the table will be ready now. I’m hungry. What are you going to have, chicken chop as usual?”

  They walked slowly back toward the restaurant. Sixth Uncle took out his pack of cigarettes but found it was empty; he scrunched it up and threw it into the drain. “Dammit, I’m getting too old for this,” he said, and went into the restaurant.

  Justin stood outside for a moment, looking up to try to find the spire of smoke again. The rain was clearing and the twilight was tinged an ash-brown, otherworldly in appearance; the traffic was still solid, people were still walking about wearing plastic ponchos, there were still scooters weaving their way between the stationary cars. Time, Justin thought again: how it expands to fill the spaces that life creates, how it stretches brief moments and makes them last forever.

  27.

  NOTHING IN LIFE LASTS FOREVER

  ON THEIR RETURN FROM BEIJING, BOTH YINGHUI AND WALTER were swept up by other business and could not concentrate on figuring out the terms of their joint venture, as they promised each other they would. Yinghui tried to think of their collaboration solely as a business enterprise, but it was not easy now; things had changed.