The Black Isle

by Sandi Tan

  “I your boss now,” he shouted in pidgin Malay to all those gathered. “Listen to me! I want you to cut-cut!” He pointed at the shears, then at the creepers choking the rubber trees. “Cut those things! Make pretty-pretty!”

  The workers tittered, then resumed their game.

  Catching his breath, Father turned to Li and me. “We have to give them some face. They’ll come around in a few days.” We returned to the house to wait for this magical transformation.

  Evidently, these rustics—half of them illiterate Tamils and the other half illiterate Malays—had never encountered urban Chinese before. They looked upon us as freakish interlopers, aliens who were neither white sahibs nor dusky communalists like themselves. We had disrupted their sense of the natural order. It took them days to grasp that we’d begun to occupy the caretaker’s house, not that it got them working.

  A week later, still no change in the lobes. The grasses continued to grow unabated, and the vines ran riot. We trekked out to the soccer field once more. This time, Father brought along a machete-like parang, the jungle man’s tool of choice. It looked so unwieldy in his puny hand, I felt sure he would accidentally slash one of us.

  He waved the rusty sword at the indolent group. “If you like, use this! Look! I’m not playing! You want to eat, yes? You want your children to eat, yes?”

  They jeered. The rattan ball flew toward him once more; this time he dodged it.

  “Monkey! Monkey!” a small boy yelled. Everybody laughed.

  “Look! I’m not playing!”

  He stalked over to the boy who had caught the ball and grabbed it from him. Then with the mania of a furious child, he clopped it to bits with his parang.

  The crowd thought it was hilarious.

  Time and again, Father’s attempts to rouse the workers failed. Three weeks on, he had all but given up. He locked himself in the study—to think, he told us. But he was resolutely not thinking. His days were spent communing with his Four Treasures, writing out Tang Dynasty poems from memory in ink and brush. Escaping.

  Imaginary clouds and mountains became his refuge, while the plantation teetered on the brink of chaos. The owners sent telegrams from the city, and these sat unopened on the dining table, spoiling our appetite every night—not that we had much to eat because there was no money.

  There’s nothing quite like lawlessness and poverty to make a person yearn for order. I became nostalgic for St. Anne’s—even the triple inconveniences of early rising, uniform ironing, and homework. I missed the city with its full palette of colors, not just this monochromatic green. I even missed the hairy, desiccated chicken wings sold at the tuck shop. Did I sacrifice my schooling for this? I longed to be pushed, prodded, fed, tamed, whereas I knew that out in the country, it was left to me to do my own taming.

  Unlike Li, who’d cast away his uniform to a Chinatown urchin like a seasoned philanthropist, I clung to mine and all it represented: discipline, routine, civilization. On the bungalow’s front step each morning, I stood at attention. Dressed in the white blouse and blue pinafore of St. Anne’s, I raised the flag while singing my school song:

  Glad that I live am I

  That the sky is blue

  Glad for the country lanes

  And the fall of dew…

  Li mocked me mercilessly. But order was my vote of dissent against the messy uncertainty of our lives. Li’s rebellion was more prosaic. He gave Father hell in the form of door-slamming and chair-throwing disagreeability. We were twelve and full of energy, with nowhere to direct it.

  Finally, one morning, starved for food and drunk on inertia, Li decided we had to save ourselves. We began tearing open the stack of telegrams. The latest threatened Father with dismissal—and a legal suit for false representation—if the plantation failed to ship rubber within the month. I secretly wished this would happen, but Li held firm.

  “I’ll play soccer with the men. To win them over.” His voice was weighted with grave determination. “I don’t care. We have to succeed. We have to. I’m not going back a failure. I told everyone we were going to be rich.”

  So this was why. His pride was at stake. “But how will we make them obey us?”

  “These people are like children. None of them can read or write. They believe idiotic things. They’re easily bored. Remember this, and you’ll be able to boss them.”

  Miraculously, my brother was right. He took charge of the west lobe, and I took the east. Workers in both listened. They probably found us amusing: Two twelve-year-olds barking orders from bicycles and never taking no for an answer. For me, it was like being a prefect all over again. When they humored us, we humored them. The women of the east lobe insisted on playing with my hair. I gave them free rein with coconut oil, pins, and curlers, ending each session looking like a Tahitian princess, sprouting bouquets from my ears. Li won the respect of the men on the soccer field and promised to teach them rounders—but only after they met the quota.

  As the days wore on, the men and women reestablished the routines that had once given their lives meaning. They trimmed the grasses; they cut the vines; they collected the tree sap. Work was like a language they’d momentarily forgotten but regained once gently prodded.

  Or maybe that’s the happier interpretation of events. Looking back now, I can imagine they feared us, for there is nothing so capricious as a child with power. The plantation became functional again, if not yet thriving. And while I viewed my lobe as a burden, Li was a natural towkay. He carried the amok fork with him on his rounds, resembling a little devil with his trident.

  Money began trickling in. It now seemed possible to dream of moving back to the city—and bringing over Mother and the twins.

  Our hope had been that once things were in order, Father would resume his place in the field. But he kept on demurring, saying he was not ready, that he needed still more time. In a matter of weeks, the provisional had become permanent: Li and I ran the plantation by ourselves.

  We developed a rigorous routine. Every morning after my flag raising, I changed out of my school uniform and into my work clothes while Li waited for me. We bicycled together before splintering off to our respective lobes as we came to what we called Blood Hill, a gentle rise half a mile from the house, barren but for a cluster of banana trees. When we first arrived, the trees were on the verge of death but Li nursed them back to health—it was his little pet project. They rewarded his efforts with robust, voluminous swatches of bloodred bananas. Ever suggestible, he believed that the red fruit kept his anemia at bay and ate them religiously. Not that his superstition was altogether wrong—bananas have been shown to be highly nutritious.

  Until noon each day, Li and I surveyed our matrix of rubber trees, neatly planted by what had to be German cartographers. Every trunk was marked with big white arrows pointing down, down, down toward the ground, each V an open wound dripping with sap. Sarong-clad females twice and three times our age collected the milky lifeblood from these notches. This was rubber tapping; the sap was latex—rubber in its rawest form. Our job was to make sure nobody spilled a drop of this precious liquor as they sashayed back to base with five-gallon tins perched atop their heads. And that they didn’t sashay too slowly.

  I called the girls our Javanese Milkmaids, though they were neither Javanese nor milkmaids; that’s how starved I was for poetry in that most unpoetic of workplaces. In the afternoon, when the equatorial sun blazed at its most pitiless, Li and I convened indoors at the processing hut, which we called our factory, to watch over the male workers as they turned the “milk” solid with acid and pressed it into sheets that could be taken to the city in a lorry that came through once a week. I had no funny nickname for these men, however, so afraid was I that they’d come to the house with parangs in the dead of night.

  Father took the money we earned, but none of it trickled down to us. We were fed and given shelter, but that was the limit of his largesse. He said no to the new shoes Li asked for and the books I desperately wanted.

>   “We’re his dogs,” Li grumbled to me many times. “And what do we get fed at the end of the day? Scraps.”

  “Maybe he’s saving up for Mother and the twins.”

  “Maybe.”

  Three years passed. Three years during which our bodies went through bewildering changes. First I outgrew Li. Then he caught up and sprouted half a head taller. His voice broke. I started menstruating—an event that terrified me more than any ghost sighting. It was only from the kind women in my lobe that I learned I wouldn’t die from it. I developed curves, breasts, all of which made the St. Anne’s uniform harder and harder to squeeze into. And we both became captive to our many, ever-shifting moods.

  After a childhood in the city where we seemed to live in two separate worlds, our shared sense of persecution reunited us in the jungle. To further estrange ourselves from Father, we began speaking to each other in English. Li even joined me at flag raising, singing his school anthem alongside mine:

  In days of yore from Western shores

  Oldham dauntless hero came

  And planted a beacon of Truth and Light

  In this Island of the Main…

  I reveled in the fact that I was no longer the family black sheep. If anyone was the odd one out now, it was Father. He clashed with Li at every opportunity. Watching my brother explode was like watching a storm crackle or a wild horse break free, and it was especially exhilarating when the furor came without warning or provocation. Li would enact wickedly accurate impressions of Father fending off sunlight like a spineless vampire or take mocking stabs at his halting, unidiomatic English. Father called him unfilial—that most overused of Confucian damnations—and made feeble threats of expulsion that were met only with derisive laughter. “Who would run this plantation for you, then?” Li would sneer. “Your Four Treasures?”

  One evening, the inevitable occurred.

  Li came to the dinner table nursing scrapes from a bicycle accident.

  “If only Mother could see what was happening to us,” he said, glowering at our mousy paterfamilias, who was stuffing his mouth with the rice our labor had earned. It had been months since either of us raised the subject of Mother to him. Her letters had dried up, and with the Japs rampaging all across China, neither of us dared to speculate out loud about the missing half of our clan, even though I was sure we were all haunted by those thoughts.

  The veins on Father’s forehead quivered. “Your mother is no longer relevant to us. She stopped being relevant the day we left Shanghai.”

  “What do you mean?” Li was livid. “How dare you write her off just because you failed to send money back to her?”

  “Your mother banished us.”

  “She banished you. You took us along because you were afraid of being alone.”

  Father pursed his lips and thought for a few seconds, giving himself over to moral superiority. “Before we left, your mother and I had a divorce.”

  A divorce? Was he being metaphorical? A pair of gray monkeys shrieked outside the window, but nobody moved.

  “You’re lying,” Li finally said.

  “What about her letters?” I asked. “If she really banished us, why did she bother to write us those letters?”

  “I made her write them.” Father pounded a fist against his chest. “It was me! I begged her to write those letters, for the two of you. She may no longer be my wife but she’s still your mother. And you both read them, so you know. It was like wringing blood from a stone. Wasn’t it clear she had no interest in either of you?”

  Li backed away from the table, his lips curled in a mixture of disgust and disbelief. “Go to hell!” he spat in English. “And I hope you burn!”

  He raced outside, leaving the door wide open behind him—an invitation perhaps for me to follow. He was running toward Blood Hill.

  My thoughts flew not to Mother, whose kisses had always felt insincere, but to the twins, the little baby girls I’d not thought about since our arrival at Melmoth except as abstract, sentimentalized symbols of purity. They’d become cooing ambassadors from a vanished way of life, forever frozen in midsong. But Xiaowen and Bao-Bao were not even babies anymore. They were now nine, older than I was when we left.

  In that instant, I was hit with the guilt of abandoning them that fateful morning, sneaking out of the house like a common thief while they slept. Had I no heart? I was their beloved jie jie! Seven was never that innocent an age—I had to have known that losing them was the price of my freedom. Yes, yes, I did know, yet I’d still chosen flight.

  I took off after Li, but two steps beyond the house, I felt a hand reach up my throat from within. I fell to my knees and vomited on the footpath until I was drained.

  An hour later, from the living room window, I watched two monkeys dancing in my grotesque puddle. Then the rains came and washed everything away.

  Our plantation wasn’t much haunted.

  There were a few wayward spirits, of course—every place has them, no matter how “clean”—but far fewer than one would imagine from a cursory inspection of the surroundings, what with rapacious jungle and the macabre shrines the natives maintained. I learned that how a place looks has little to do with how much supernatural activity it actually hosts.

  My guess was that the people who worked here never had much chance to be alone. The tappers slept in overcrowded barracks, segregated by sex. We had a hundred workers living in three such hives, each about the size of the caretaker’s bungalow, and many of the workers even had their families with them. They slept in cycles. The first shift rose at four and by five were already out and about, collecting and transporting sap; the second shift rose at noon to make fresh cuts in the bark or to press sap into sheets in the factory. When not working, the workers sang, ate, bathed, and worshipped together—living for them was very much communal.

  Ghosts, in contrast, are mostly solitary. As a woman of some experience, I have a theory as to why this is so: Those emotions powerful enough to transcend death tend to be ones experienced alone. Only when alone do we truly open ourselves to fear, lust, hatred, regret, and desolation in their most tenacious forms.

  Having little privacy, and therefore little opportunity for such deeply personal emotions to fester, the workers were not a haunted people. This was not to say that they were slaphappy simpletons, easily appeased with white rice and a clean bunk, just that there was no time for introspection.

  In plainer words: Li and I worked our men and women to the bone.

  We could tell the Malays on the plantation were not like the Islamized Malays we had known in the city. They adhered more closely to the beliefs of their ancestors than to the teachings of Mohammed, although orthodoxy did inform their practice of circumcision—and polygamy. Instead of mosques, they built makeshift shrines to gods whose names we didn’t know and knew we’d never be told. On these woebegone altars we saw unusual items of devotion, including the umbilical cords of babies left to rot on black stone cubes.

  “Malays are aimless by nature,” Father always said, “so we might as well let them worship something. As long as it doesn’t interfere with their work…”

  Where our Tamil workers were like Tamils elsewhere on the Black Isle—highly adaptive and highly motivated—our Malays were ruled by superstition. Their chief grievance was Blood Hill, which they took great pains to avoid, often walking an extra half mile so as not to even see it. They had their own name for the mound: Tomb of the Dead Girls. The older workers believed no crop would grow on it because unwanted baby girls had been buried alive there generations before. Others said it housed the corpses of unfaithful wives.

  I looked for signs of haunting on Blood Hill but never saw anything, not that I would have shared my findings with anyone. As for the blood bananas that grew on the hill, Rani, my most trusted Tamil girl, told me why the Malays feared them. Rural Malays believed that banana groves harbored the vengeful she-demons they called pontianak.

  “They are women who die giving baby,” she said. “That’s
why they like to kill pregnant girl. They jealous!” During full moon, the pontianak emerged from the space between two adjacent banana trees and went in search of prey—that is, very pregnant women. They drove their long claws into the mothers’ bellies and drank the fetal blood, although during desperate times, they were known to eat even men. If a woman died in labor, the Malays took extreme measures to prevent her from becoming a pontianak. They stuffed glass beads into her mouth, placed an egg under each of her arms, and stuck needles into her palms so the corpse could not open her mouth to shriek, spread her arms as wings, or flex her hands in flight. “But the number one way to stop pontianak,” Rani said firmly, “is do not grow banana tree.”

  I told this to Li repeatedly, and he took offense each time. Blood Hill was his monument. If the Malays could just see what marvelous fruit the trees produced, he insisted, they would stop fearing. “Then they can plant bananas all over the place!”

  It was this willful arrogance that led Li to take a heavy, freshly plucked phalanx of blood bananas as a gift to Mina, one of his Javanese Milkmaids, on the day she was to give birth. I tried to talk him out of it and felt a shiver of déjà vu at his stubbornness: He’d been like this at the park in Shanghai. Ever since Father mentioned the divorce, this callous streak in him, subdued for years, had been reemerging. Perhaps proving to himself that he wasn’t a weakling like his father, he was constantly priming himself for a brawl.

  I was cleaning a catfish for dinner when Li stormed into our house with the bananas intact and threw the lot onto the foyer rug.

  “Mina’s father had the gall to tell me to leave! And all those women—his wives— standing around him—not one stopped him! He’s got a strange hold over them. I’ve heard he fancies himself some kind of magician or witch doctor. But if he really knows magic”—he smirked—“why’s he working on a plantation?”