by Tash Aw
At dinner that evening I asked some of the old fools what they thought about my sketch. “Oh,” one of them said, “that piece of paper on the notice board. Very nice, yes.” I explained again the theories behind my scheme for borders; I talked about Capability Brown and the Georgics, Hinduism versus Buddhism. Of course they did not fully comprehend what I said. Whenever I speak I know it is a case of pearls before swine. They smiled and glanced at one another surreptitiously in an attempt to hide their discomfort and embarrassment at not being able to understand what I was saying. Poor souls.
Whilst the overall inspiration of the garden is, as I must stress, Oriental, I confess that my borders are not entirely devoid of English undertones. Anyone can see that they are a subtle nod of acknowledgement to the humble cottage garden such as that at Hemscott, my childhood home in Gloucestershire, whose herbaceous borders were exemplary.
Hemscott’s influence on me has been stronger than I imagined. I have only realised this of late. All my life I wanted to escape it, but now I find it is still with me, the only thing I have left.
It was not a pretty place. The house itself appeared grey in colour, whatever the weather. Its walls of Cotswold stone—wrongly described by visitors as “golden”—always seemed cold to me, always silent. My father died when I was four and my mother took a younger man as a lover. They spent all day in her boudoir, festering in each other’s company. They surfaced occasionally for meals, and sometimes I was called down from my room to join them at dinner. Mother would look at me with vacant eyes. “What a funny little face you have,” she would say each time, with the mild surprise of someone discovering a titillating piece of trivia. With her left hand she stroked my hair; with her right she gorged herself (fork only: table manners did not apply to my mother) on scrambled eggs and boiled chicken. Across the table, her dark-eyed lover ate with sickening speed, never seeming to chew on his food. He seemed desperate to return to the languid, lotus-eating surroundings of his fetid chambre, to the arms of his intoxicated lover. Not once did he look at me; his lank chestnut hair hung thickly over his brow, hiding his lowered gaze.
Predictably, I spent much time on my own. Nanny was around, of course, but she had been my father’s nanny before, and was now too infirm to be of use. She sat in her armchair all day, with nothing to keep her company but a tin of shortbread biscuits and letters from a long-dead son, killed on the steep scrubby shores of Gallipoli in the summer of 1915, the year of my birth. When she leaned forward to receive her good-night kiss from me each evening I could see the sweat stains on the faded chintz behind her. She smelt of damp straw, a perfume I always found repellent.
The potting shed became my place of refuge. I was introduced to its silent, earth-scented charms by Robinson, our one-armed gardener (who was, despite his disability, wholly responsible for the exceptional vigour of the borders in our garden). He regarded my solitudinous boyhood with pity, I think, and one day invited me to share in his tasks. I stood beside him on a low wooden stool, learning to prick out seedlings and plant them in little pots, ready to be moved to the cold frames. Robinson took his glove off and held my fingers with his one hand, guiding them as he showed me how to squeeze the compost gently around the base of the trembling plant. I began to go to the shed when no one else was there. Light struggled to filter through the murky windows; its dimness comforted me, for in the shadows that Funny Little Face of mine became invisible. When I sat on the dusty, soil-scattered floor, my mean, bloodless lips and minklike snout seemed not to matter; no one could see me there. The tender plants, too, became mine. I didn’t know, nor care, what I was potting up: every time I saw a tray of seedlings I would seize upon them, desperate to move them on so that before long they could be planted in the ground.
One day I found a shovel and took it to a spot far away from the confines of the house and its walled garden. I chose a long-abandoned border as the site for my first planting, and began to prepare the ground for the imminent arrival of some Lupins. I began to dig. The shovel came to my armpits and was difficult to manoeuvre; the earth was as hard as bedrock but still I persevered, holding the handle against my chest and pushing down at an angle. I dug until the skin on my palms became thin and raw; a splinter pierced my thumb, embedding itself just beneath the fingernail. I knelt down, exhausted. It began to snow. It was nearly April—Passiontide, I recall; my young ears were rich with the strains of “Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott.” I looked at where I had dug and saw that I had only succeeded in scraping away a thin layer of soil. Snowflakes alighted on the sorry, shallow patch I had created, their frail crystals resting gently for a moment before dissolving into the black earth.
I remained like this, crouching and defeated, until Robinson found me and led me back to the dark solace of the potting shed. Poor Robinson. He alone brought colour to the gardens and kept Hemscott alive for me, until one summer I returned from school to find that my mother had dispensed with his services. Well, she said, he was getting too old for the job. The truth was that there was no money to pay him. There had been none for a very long time. In spite of my best efforts, the plants soon went to seed and the garden finally—fittingly, one might say—became a dilapidated mess.
And yet, curiously, whenever images of Hemscott invade my sleep now, it is not this sorry tangle that I see. What appears before me is the late-winter view from my bedroom as I stand at the dormer looking at the neat rows of box hedge against a snow-softened landscape, the topiary animals poised under a chalky sky. Although the hard, bare beds sparkle with frost, I know that soon it will be spring, and life will return to the garden once more.
AFTER MY FIRST MEETING with Johnny, I returned to the coffee shop every night, hoping to see him again. I sat on my own, testing my bladder with cup after cup of milky tea. Carefree matelots and pouting cocottes called to me as they went past, but I would not be seduced from my solitude. I asked the wizened old woman who ran the coffee shop about the Valley, but she seemed incapable of comprehending my need to go there.
“Are you a tin miner?” she kept asking, as if that were the only reason anyone would wish to visit the Valley.
One evening I took my place as usual, surveying every passing face, carefully looking out for Johnny’s. After some time a very young woman, little more than a girl, approached my table and sat down in the manner of a familiar old friend. She lit a clove cigarette and looked out at the street with me.
“Waiting for your girlfriend?” she said. I knew immediately she was a prostitute.
“No,” I replied, somewhat curtly. I did not appreciate this disruption of my vigil. “I’m waiting for a friend.”
“OK,” she said, exhaling a plume of pungent smoke. Her crude maquillage of thickly rouged cheeks and bright lipstick emphasised rather than disguised her youth.
“Actually,” I added, “I’m waiting to join my friend. He is going to take me somewhere rather wonderful.” I do not know why I felt the need to elaborate.
She lifted an eyebrow as if to say, Where?
“The Kinta Valley,” I said.
She opened her mouth and threw back her head in an ugly laugh. Her cackle revealed a set of perfectly brown teeth, which stood out starkly against her powdered skin. The chrysanthemum she wore in her hair suddenly seemed ludicrous and inappropriate. “That place,” she said, “what a shit pile that is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“It’s full of nothing,” she said.
“I’m sure you’re mistaken.”
She turned to the shopkeeper. “This idiot wants to go to the Valley, can you believe it?” Their rough laughter tore into my head.
“Please, go away.”
“Hey, I’m telling you the truth.” She leaned across the table. Her voice was hard, stabbing.
“How would you know?”
“It’s my home, mister. My home.”
I got up and left the table, managing to raise a weak smile as I did so. Their laughter rang loudly as I stepped out into the street. I blinked back the first prick
of hot tears in my eyes. I ran back to my lodgings and began to pack. I left for the Valley at dawn the next day, after a breakfast of sweet coffee and glutinous rice.
I found a lorry driver who offered to take me to the Valley in return for the brogues I was wearing (which I gladly surrendered—they were a battered old pair from Ducker’s on Turl Street). He did not enquire as to the purpose of my journey nor question the wisdom of it, and for that I was glad. He seemed content to sit in silence with my shoes now adorning his feet. Every so often he would raise one foot onto his seat to admire his trophy. I did not fear for our safety as much as I admired his dexterity. My limbs and joints suddenly felt ridiculously stiff and superfluous; my blood, after a month in the Orient, still felt cold and viscous.
We drove past tranquil villages where sleepy-eyed children with distended stomachs played amongst rainbow-plumed fowl. Their tiny wooden houses looked fragile, perched as they were on delicate stilts. They seemed so vulnerable to the forces of nature, to the sun and rain and the very trees that surrounded them; they were transient, almost nomadic, I thought. In the shade, indolent as Bruegel swineherds, young men watched me with reddened eyes without ever rousing themselves from their tropical languor. I thought, naturally, of Gauguin, and realised how wrong he was in his quiet romanticism. The beauty of these hot lands is not feminine nor lyrical, I thought; it is dusty and muscular.
“How wonderful to live like this,” I said to the driver, hoping to encourage conversation, but he merely looked at me with an uncomprehending expression.
I began to feel the heat and the dust gather on my face, yet I refused to yield to their force. Like my silent companion, I sat staring at the red road before me as if I had travelled it many times before. On either side the jungle seemed ancient and impenetrable. Every so often its murky darkness would suddenly vanish, giving way to a plantation of rubber or oil palm whose trees were arranged like columns in a vast cathedral. I closed my eyes and felt the base of my neck throb with the heat. I knew I was not far from the Valley now.
When I stirred from this gorgeous stupor I found my driver shouting aggressively. Cyclists swarmed around the lorry, impeding our progress and inducing bursts of swearing from my hitherto taciturn companion. The houses looked different here. Rough timber dwellings gave way to larger, sturdier-looking brick-and-mortar buildings. Shops advertised their wares by displaying them prominently in their doorways: sacks of dried fish, peeled open to reveal their contents; large pyramids of rice; strange, dried, mud-coloured leaves; combs of tiny golden bananas. My driver stopped abruptly and, without looking at me, said, “Kampar.” He reached for his shoes and laced them up tightly. He walked down the street with his back held straight, lifting his feet so that his new leather heels clicked loudly against the gravelled road.
I found a guest house at the far end of town. The room was exactly as I imagined it would be, invaded at every moment by the sounds and smells of life around me. The kitchen lay at the other end of the small courtyard, and its aromas seemed to have embedded themselves in the upper-floor rooms. Roasting coffee produced a perfume that was unpleasant but not unbearable; it paled, however, beside the smell of shrimp paste. The cooks pounded the dried shrimp in a mortar and pestle together with an assortment of other noxious ingredients before moulding it into a damp mass and leaving it to ferment in the courtyard right below my room. I arrived to find a huge basin of it sweltering in the late-afternoon heat, filling the air with its fumes. The emaciated man who showed me to my room pointed excitedly at this glorious creation and intimated that it would play a starring role in my dinner that evening.
I bathed—as everyone else did—by dousing myself in spring water from a vast earthenware tub. I scooped the water with a wooden pail and poured it over my head, delighting in the shock of the cold on my travel-weary senses. Afterwards, as the tropical night fell swiftly around me, I moved my bed next to the large windows. I left the shutters open and lay shirtless as I listened to the feasting downstairs. I was not hungry. The heat and the sharp smell of the shrimp paste had drained me of all desire. Nonetheless, curiosity got the better of me and I stood at the top of the darkened stairs and spied on the convivial gathering below. On the table lay a single oval dish bearing a mass of dark green vegetables, which, I presumed, were cooked with the shrimp paste. All eight people hungrily attacked this offering; there was nothing else on the table. I crept back to my room, careful not to make a noise.
Much later, I woke in darkness and silence. I thought I had heard a knock at the door, but when I opened it no one was there. A plate of food had been left for me, protected by a piece of muslin and a fly net. I felt a dull throb of hunger in my belly, but when I unwrapped my promising little picnic I found that it contained nothing but some rice and those vegetables, desecrated by shrimp paste. I lifted a spoonful of rice to my mouth, carefully leaving aside the more offensive items on the plate, but I found that the rice had become infected by the sour, rancid smell. I simply could not eat it.
Rain began to fall, heavy drops thudding one by one on the tiled roofs before gathering into a steady, hypnotic drumming. I had not expected rain: it was, after all, at the very height of the dry season. The noise outside—a strange and intense hushing as the rain rustled the leaves on the trees—soothed my ears. I lay on the side of the bed next to the open window so that my skin would catch the odd droplet of moisture, blown astray by the swelling breeze. Lightning illuminated the distant skies, and I fell asleep to the comfortable rumble of thunder. It was my first true equatorial downpour.
That night I knew my life was about to change. For many years afterwards I relived the quivering, insistent sensations of that particular storm-washed evening and wondered if I had merely imagined it all. But now, at the end of my days, I see that it was true. Although the passing of time has tried to muddy it, the clarity of that night remains with me. Even in my sleep I sensed that I was poised on the brink of something epochal. It was not—I am utterly clear about this—my Road to Damascus, but rather a gradual, gentle realisation that by the morning, the course of my life would be altered irrevocably.
When, therefore, I was awakened by a thundering that shook the timbers of the guest house, I knew at once it was not the storm: it was the start of the rest of my life. I lay in bed with my eyes open for a few seconds, listening to the cries of the people running into the street. As I sat up, there was another explosion. I felt it trembling in my rib cage. Out on the street, a small child lay crouching in a doorway with her hands on her ears. The rain was falling hard; shimmering pools had formed in the muddied road. In the distance, about half a mile away, a spire of black smoke rose into the sky. I dressed hurriedly and joined the throng of people hurrying in the direction of the smoke. No one spoke; we merely splashed our way through the rain and the red mud, guided by the charcoal cloud that hung in the air. At last I saw the inferno: a giant mass of flame engulfing a building that was collapsing, timber by timber, as I approached it. A large crowd had gathered on a grassy bank nearby, and as I pushed through I became aware that they too were not speaking. Nothing was audible but the sound of the same rain which had washed through my sleep. At last I found what lay at the heart of this silent congregation: a pair of bodies, one shielding the other. I moved closer and saw that they were two men. The younger man, naked to the waist, lowered his face slowly toward the elder’s; he hesitated for a moment before pressing his lips firmly onto the old man’s weakly gasping mouth. I held my breath as I watched this young hero breathe life into the pale and lifeless body. It was some time before the old man, motionless on the wet grass, began to cough, wheezing as he heaved air into his lungs. He opened his eyes and stared at the sky. The younger man withdrew, exhausted from his exertions. He lifted his head to look at the crowd around him. Even before I saw his face I knew, with absolute certainty, that it was Johnny.
THE BROWN SHRIKE, Lanius cristatus, is a noisy and quarrelsome bird. It spends its summers feasting on insects in Siberia and Manchuri
a before journeying south to spend its winters infesting the countryside around this House. From morning till dusk they squeal, chatter, and fight in the garden, flitting across my field of vision so as to make it impossible for me to concentrate for any length of time. Now that the other residents have realised the seriousness of my undertaking, they pester me constantly with requests to devise a planting scheme that will encourage these violent hordes of irritating little birds to remain longer in the environs of the House. Unlike me, they seem actually to enjoy the sight of these winged pests.
“What about a birdbath?” Gecko trilled. “Right outside the dining hall window, so we can watch them whilst we breakfast. Or a table with rice and breadcrumbs and groundnuts on it.”
“No,” I said. “How common.”
“What beautiful red heads they have,” Alvaro said, lowering his binoculars. “I hope you are going to have lots of tall grasses, and maybe put in some big rocks too. They seem to like perching on the stones and reeds by the paddy field down the road.”
“Do you want me to re-create the Steppes just for these little buggers?”
“It’s not only for them,” Gecko chirped. “There are lots of other birds too.”
“Look here,” I said, “this is a garden, not a bloody bird sanctuary. Its primary purpose is to provide pleasure to humans. It isn’t a playground for truculent birds.”
“You told me that this garden—any garden—is a re-creation of the Garden of Eden,” said Alvaro. “It is the recapturing of our Paradise Lost, you said. Those were your exact words.”
“My dear boy,” I replied, “I think I may have been misinterpreted.”
“No, those were the words you used,” he insisted, shaking his head like a stubborn child.
“Well then, you’ve been too literal in your understanding of what I was trying to express.”
He looked puzzled. “Explain it to me again, please.”