by Sandi Tan
My cheeks prickled. It was Cricket who came to my rescue.
“So, should we tell her?” he asked Kenneth. It was strange to hear Cricket speaking English—stranger still that he spoke it so well.
Kenneth sucked in his breath. “I’d hoped to wait till teatime, but now that you’ve brought the matter up, fine.” He glanced around for eavesdroppers and, finding none, turned to me. “We are regrouping, like vermin, like bacterium. The war’sh not really over, not yet, and I think you know what I mean. They think they can buy our favor with a coin, a medal, like we’re children. We’re ash much children as Mohandash Gandhi, Chandra Boshe, or all the othersh they’re worried about in Burma, in Egypt, in Paleshtine. We’re all marching to the same deshtiny.
“You know I’m no romantic, sho don’t take me for one when I tell you that it’sh deshtiny you were there today, that we met again. The fact that you’re alive ish proof of your durability.” He spoke this last word, I thought, with a tinge of bitter irony. “We could do with a woman like you—with your unique outlook.”
I glared at Issa. Had he told Kenneth about my eyes? Issa gave me the subtlest of winks, assuring me he hadn’t betrayed the secret we shared. All right. Then did Kenneth know about Taro? Taro—my shame and sorrow. I felt a knot tighten in my gut.
“Do you hear me, Ca— Are you paying attention? I’m inquiring if you’d like to join me. Join we three.”
I was so stunned that I remained mute. A stream of what-ifs flooded my mind, ruthlessly stirring up all the questions I’d long tried to still: What if I’d gone up-country when Kenneth made his first offer? What if I’d worked with Issa to raise up armies of ghosts? What if I hadn’t met Taro? What if Mr. Wee and Daniel were still alive? Would I still go with Kenneth now?
“Yes, of course!” I nearly shouted. I was being given a purpose, a second chance. I wouldn’t let it slip by this time. And then, like a shot in the heart, I remembered Li.
Again, Kenneth was quick to read me. “Ah, but you have doubtsh.”
“It’s her brother,” Cricket murmured.
“Believe me,” said Kenneth with the soothing tones of a longtime preacher. “Family is patient. History is not.”
History also needed money. After wrestling with my conscience for a few days, I told Kenneth about the buried treasures at the Wee house. Was it immoral to steal from the dead? Who can say. All I knew was that the cause had to have funds.
As the four of us drove up to the old address, I asked Issa—behind the wheel, as ever—to let me out at the gate. Unlike the others, whose emotional ties to the place had either been extinguished in prison or never really existed at all, I couldn’t bring myself to enter the estate.
The jungle had reclaimed it. Grasses grew wild, and rustling unseen were snakes, toads, monitor lizards. These invisible residents didn’t disturb me as much as the ones I could see: faceless, anonymous ghosts wandering the property. Some must have been Mr. Wee’s associates and some Japanese soldier boys, but from where I stood, beyond the gate, it was impossible to distinguish between the two.
I was most terrified of encountering the dog-man. Whether it was a badi or just a restless spirit, it was proof of my failure. Another secret shame I wanted to forget.
“No need to worry about the gendarmerie,” Kenneth told me when I said I’d be the lookout. “They don’t bother to patrol here anymore. Now we watch for lootersh.”
Cricket nodded and handed me his loaded rifle, which only made me more anxious. I looked over at Issa, who gave me a sympathetic nod—he alone understood how disturbed I was by the ghosts I was seeing. Whether he had any intention of “putting them to sleep,” as he’d done the spirits of Forbidden Hill, I couldn’t tell. And I was in no mood to tell him about the dog-man.
“Under the roses” was all I needed to say. Issa knew exactly where to dig.
In a flash, the trio disappeared into the dark carrying shovels and gunny sacks.
Aside from the mating calls of cicadas and toads, the whole of Tanglewood was cloaked in an acquiescent muteness. I could hear my every breath, punctuated by the sounds of shovels striking earth.
I told myself that Mr. Wee would have wanted his things to go to his surrogate son. If not, the colonials were sure to raid the unclaimed goods in any case. But even as I parsed these thoughts, I still felt like a thief.
One agonizing hour later, Issa’s silhouette emerged from the dark. Kenneth and Cricket followed close behind. They all carried bulging sacks, and when they brushed by me, I smelled the coppery scent of wet earth. At night in the tropics, especially after a full day of pounding rain, the soil always smelled of old blood.
Wordlessly, the three began squeezing their gunny sacks into the back of the van that Kenneth, ever resourceful, had talked a factory watchman into lending him. Their faces, particularly Cricket’s, were grim. I knew they had come upon bodies.
Cricket, his hands shaking, dropped his shovel on the driveway. It made a loud clang. We froze, but except for a barking dog going crazy in the distance, the world didn’t care.
As we sped away, I saw that Kenneth was wearing Mr. Wee’s gold Rolex, its dull shine illuminating the cab’s dark interior. It sat a little loosely on his wrist, but he wore it with delicate pride, as if it’d been his to own all along. He made no big show of it, but I could already tell that he regarded this watch, and not the brass medal, as the true reward for his gallantry, the real compensation for his mutilated tongue.
Kenneth had been right about himself: He wasn’t a romantic. He was a pragmatist. He believed in fairness, equality, and, above all, payment for work done.
“We’re not thieves,” he said resolutely as we stole into the night.
I continued working as a receptionist at Woodbridge, visiting my brother every day. By night, I went to meetings with Kenneth and his friends, preparing to adopt the life of a freedom fighter.
Li was still trapped with the mind of a seven-year-old and was prone to a seven-year-old’s tantrums. Whenever I pushed him to recall anything beyond Shanghai, he would either wail or descend into a hostile silence. Again and again, Miss Joseph advised me to give him time.
Always that word: time. It is a convenient illusion, beloved by so many, that time—meaning patience, meaning passivity—is able to heal all wounds. What people fail to reckon is that time is the sore itself, a greedy, devouring mouth.
I was twenty-six when I left Li and Woodbridge to join Kenneth and his group. Up-country in 1948 was no longer the untamable mass I’d known. I had somehow expected the jungle to remain vast and eternal, not realizing that while the jungle was content to remain as it had been for millennia, progress had expanded and encroached. Rubber plantations now covered twice the area they had during my days on the Melmoth estate. The Japanese, who’d invaded the Isle ostensibly for its strategic location, had also set their eye on its rubber. So, far from being dismantled, the Isle’s plantations had grown fat during the war. After the war, planters—mostly British—did their math and grew even more rubber, flattening the township of Ulu Pandan to make way for groves. Rubber had become the government’s largest source of income—and destroying the plantations Kenneth’s obsession.
When I first arrived, his camp was more precarious and exposed than I could have imagined. It sprouted in a clearing that had once been a Malay family farm.
His recruits had laid down running paths and shooting ranges over old tapioca beds. The kitchen and storehouses were improvised out of coops and barns. The thirty of us slept in tents, ready to pack up at a moment’s notice, which we had to do every few months.
Kenneth may have claimed allegiance to Communism but I never once saw him toting around the books of Marx and Engels or heard him proselytize. The only Russian works I ever saw him read were novels—War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. Communism, I quickly grasped, was a convenient banner under which to unite his disparate recruits. His populist goal was actually more basic and, at the same time, grander: independence. This was
our only real religion, and we kept the faith zealously.
Much of what we did in pursuit of independence has a poor reputation today, and I am slightly embarrassed to recount our activities in detail. Suffice it to say that many in Kenneth’s camp studied maps, made blueprints, shot guns, and built bombs.
Not Cassandra, however. Kenneth excluded me from this training, assigning me instead to “domestic” tasks. Like the five other female recruits, my duties were to cook and clean, raise fowl, and grow vegetables, in service of the men. I bristled at the role but couldn’t complain. We saw fighters returning from raids bloody and in pain. A youth named Samuel Lee died from an attack by guard dogs, his mutilated body left behind on enemy land.
We kitchen hands knew whenever something terrible happened. Dinner passed in a grave silence, the food hardly touched and the whisky soon gone. Cricket became my gauge: His trembling hands spoke volumes. And in washing the men’s clothes, we witnessed the private evidence of fear staining their undergarments.
I also reacquainted myself with the jungle. I became intimate with its plants and creatures—our stomachs depended upon its offerings, after all. I couldn’t bear the thought of our men risking their lives on a daily basis only to sit down to a supper of boiled yam and grass soup. Subsistence didn’t have to be drab. Not when mangos, bananas, coconuts, and passion fruit proliferated around us. For our men, I cooked stews with jungle fowl, slow-simmered with pepper and clove, stolen in fistfuls from nearby plantations.
For three years, this was how I lived—my voice hushed, my head low, grateful to have a purposeful life, where my work bore visible results: full bellies, clean clothes, brave men.
As it happened, the Melmoth plantation sat next to our fifth and final campsite. It had never quite recovered from the trauma of my family’s caretaking, but its dilapidation proved ideal. Kenneth used its weed-covered lobes as a training ground for his unit.
Posing as a traveling salesman, he had met its current owners. They were a fresh-faced English couple named Manning, who’d purchased the estate for next to nothing, taking it on as more of a romantic experiment than a proper commercial enterprise. Armed with pickaxes, they had tried to revive the remaining plant stock without any hired labor—which would have been a tragic mistake if they’d actually been serious. Kenneth quickly grasped that the Mannings would never be able to keep up with the jungle, nor did they have any genuine desire to do so. Ironically, it was their indifference that kept them safe from his plans. He loved the way that, instead of the Union Jack, they flew a Jolly Roger on the rusty old flagpole in front of the house.
The Mannings would have been easy to finish off, but Kenneth desperately wanted to believe that they were special. From the clattering typewriter sounds he heard emerging daily from the caretaker’s house, he decided that they were poets. When he wasn’t speaking of annihilating the enemy, he brought the Mannings to life with loving descriptions: Mr. Manning was curly bearded and walked around in batik shifts, his nose deep in books, while the blond, ethereal Mrs. Manning liked to play tunes of her own devising on a pan flute. “Bucolic pagan reveries,” Kenneth called her compositions, “evoking wood sprites on a midsummer’s night.”
“They remind me of many good people I knew up at Oxford,” he once declared over dinner, in a tone that verged on Wodehousian parody. “I do like those two. They make such handsome mascots.”
Cricket made his own forest friends. Although hard to reconcile with his trembling hands, it was well known in the camp that he was Kenneth’s best killer, not just a formidable shot but a stealthy hand with a bowie knife.
Every now and then, to soothe his nerves, he returned to the insect love of his youth. I sometimes saw him striding out of the bush at dusk with bright green stick insects, red moths, and monarch butterflies clinging to his hair and clothes. In those moments, he looked majestic, peaceful, and his colorful discoveries brought much-needed bursts of optimism to our bandit camp.
It was in the camp that I watched Kenneth the Leader begin to flourish and my old friend Kenneth slip away from me.
Not only had he sentenced me to a segregated life, far from the center of action, but also he deliberately distanced himself. Instead of being inducted into the charmed circle, I became for him, as soon as I arrived, just another recruit with whom he shared no history. He rarely spoke to me alone, and when he did, he conveyed only kitchen orders or complaints in his damned neutral tone. Though I saw him almost daily for three years, I learned less about him than I had from our rushed conversations in hallways during those first crucial days of the invasion, when he barged his way into my life with Daniel.
So what kept me there wasn’t altruism. It was something more complex, more elusive. After all, it was I who’d led Kenneth to the Wees’ treasures. Every Sunday, when the camp sat down to its communal supper, I pictured the pawned jade brooch or silver teaspoon that had paid for the meal. Each time a bomb exploded, Mrs. Wee’s diamond rings came to mind. No doubt these thoughts occurred to Kenneth, too. Whether or not we shared a spiritual connection, the gold Rolex he wore even on the most sweltering of days was surely a constant reminder that he and I maintained a material bond.
For three years, I watched him devote his energies to secretive planning, taming both body and tongue—his diction had regained all of its original luster—and living in what appeared to be fastidious, monastic solitude. Not that he was a Zen master. There were many days when he wore the aggressive loneliness of the banished child, ready to hurl rocks at his friends.
His remoteness made me all the more determined to win back his affinity, or at least our prewar cordiality. Gaining his attention, however, was another issue. Increasingly, he lived in a bubble of his own making, with Issa and Cricket guarding him like sphinxes. He was shielded from the rest of us. Even when by chance he ended up next to me at one of the Sunday feasts, he never addressed me except to say, “Pass the salt”—a criticism, by the way.
Many in his position might have used it to procure lovers or companions. Not Kenneth Kee. As far as I knew, Kenneth always slept alone.
After we firebombed the first few plantations, the British began fighting back in earnest. They built high fences around their estates, armored their vehicles, and hired mercenary commandos to comb the rainforest, searching for us.
We had no choice but to keep moving around like fugitives. Even as our opponents grew stronger, Kenneth was determined that we not give up. It was a sour irony indeed that both sides had been toughened by their loss to the Japanese.
One night in early 1951, after several dispiriting weeks in the rain-pelted wilderness, Issa gathered the remainder of our group, halved to a mere fifteen, around a small fire. It was the first time this hater of public speaking addressed us. Naturally this brought me a feeling of dread.
“We have reached a turning point,” he said, his voice growing graver. “I was in the city this morning. A state of emergency has been called. Chinese students have been holding boycotts, protests, just like in China. All the schools have been closed for weeks now. I saw police charging into Chinatown, waving their truncheons. And they weren’t afraid to use them, even on children. But it’s not just Chinatown that’s in trouble. Factory workers are on strike. Bus drivers are on strike. Everybody’s on the street, all the time—cops, looters, troublemakers. Everybody’s restless. It’s like the old days, only now there’s no longer the same old fear. It’s complete chaos.”
Recruits whispered among themselves. Without saying it, Issa had stirred up the doubts we’d been quietly harboring for weeks. By being in the jungle, were we fighting on the wrong front? For once, I was grateful that Li remained confined in Woodbridge, and not free to raise hell on the streets.
Issa waited for the murmurs to subside. “I strongly believe we should return to the city and join in the struggle there.”
“Nonsense,” Kenneth cut in. “Let the schoolboys make noise. Up here is where we stand a chance of victory.”
Issa
did not argue. He had registered his point—that was all he’d wished to do. Quietly, he nodded and receded into the darkness.
The group, including Cricket, trickled back to their tents, until only Kenneth and I were left standing by the dying fire. In the glow of the embers, I saw how tired he looked, how gaunt. He was in dire need of a good night’s rest and, I felt, a friend’s good faith.
“Ken—” I began to say.
He turned away, perhaps shunning me, perhaps daring me to come closer. I couldn’t tell what he wanted. After a few minutes of his impenetrable silence, I left him alone.
That night, I went to Issa’s tent. He jerked up, grabbing his keris. Seeing me, however, did nothing to subdue the look of trouble on his face.
“I need your help,” I whispered. “I can’t do this on my own.”
He understood instantly. Our conversation had been interrupted years ago, and it was time that we saw it through to the end.
I followed him deeper into the jungle, feeling a surge of déjà vu when I realized that his hair had regained its original length and luster, although most of it had turned gray. But he no longer intimidated me. His footing was not always sure, and in his withered right hand, which could no longer make a proper fist, I saw the abominable effects of torture. He was now less a ruthless pirate than an aging chieftain, long abandoned by his tribe.
After we had walked about a mile, he abruptly stopped. “Do you know the nearest burial ground?”
I, too, understood instantly and assumed the lead. I took us through the darkened wood to Blood Hill on the old Melmoth estate.
Since the poetical Mannings had never bothered to put up barbwire or even keep dogs, we simply walked onto their property. The caretaker’s house was dark, and it was safe to assume that the young couple was asleep. Of course, if either had come running out with a loaded rifle, Issa and I would be finished. We only had parangs with us to slice at the bush and fend off beasts.