by Sandi Tan
I shook Issa. He lurched awake. To judge from his wild eyes, he was as mortified as I was, as if we’d gotten deliriously drunk together and shared a forbidden passion.
Seeing the devastation below, his panic erupted. “Those two!”
Without another word, we raced down the hill.
At the end of the straight dirt road was the caretaker’s house, or what was left of it: a roofless box with blackened walls, looking ready to crumble at the slightest touch.
We didn’t have to kick in the front door. There was no door; nor did there remain any windows. The roof appeared to have been ripped off by some tornado’s hand, but a tornado would have been kinder and left the rafters out of mercy. Nearly all the furnishings had been reduced to powder. Only random metallic things were still recognizable—an iron stove, a brass bed frame, two desks with blistered typewriters. These all seemed like sculptures made out of black sand.
“Hello?” I yelled, hoping for a miracle.
No answer.
“Maybe they saw the flames coming and drove away,” I said.
This wishful scenario, too, went up in smoke when we reached the back of the house. A Chevrolet truck, burned black, sat spent on the dirt driveway. Its tires had melted into gummy paste.
Issa looked around cautiously. “They may still be around. Check the lobes.”
We ran back to Blood Hill, Issa slowing from the exertion. Where the path forked, just beyond the mound, we found the young English couple.
Or what remained of them. They were mangled and black, as if someone had taken two shop mannequins, twisted them into poses of agony, and dipped them in tar. Had I seen them from the hill, I might have taken them for tree branches. Up close, there could be no mistake. They smelled like cooked meat—with a rancid, sulfurous overlay. I covered my nose and backed away.
“How could you let the girls do this?” Rage was strangling my voice. “Didn’t you give them proper instructions?”
Issa stumbled back, startled by my fury.
“I asked them to destroy the plantations. Just the plantations.” He shook his head. “But there were more of them than I expected. I’ve never been able to call up this many. I never expected you…a woman’s power…to be so…I should have known better.”
His shoulders slumped in defeat. The great Issa was suddenly lost, helpless.
“Forgive me, Cassandra.” He sank to his knees. Tears streamed from his eyes, two black rivers flowing down his ash-covered cheeks. “I’ll find their souls. I’ll bring them peace.”
Weeping myself, I helped him to his feet.
“No friend of mine should ever have to kneel,” I said, and clasped his withered hand in both of mine. “Do what you must do, Iskandar.”
I set off through the blizzard of ash. It had picked up one last burst of intensity as the winds changed. But the falling flakes were no longer white—humidity had turned them all gray—and the day spread out before me as dark as twilight.
I ran through swaths of burned plantation floor, the embers hissing as I stepped on them, singeing the soles of my shoes and releasing little black puffs of acrid smoke.
Through the silence, Issa’s cry resounded in the distance:
“Don’t tell Kenneth…”
I wouldn’t have to tell Kenneth a thing. Even the blind could have sensed the vastness of the damage. What I saw filled me with mortal horror. But I would be lying if I didn’t also admit to feeling awe at my own strength. Issa was right. It was my power that had caused this dreadful, eerily beautiful apocalypse. My doing. If only I had called them up during the war…if only I had set them upon Taro…
Melmoth wasn’t the only estate to have been devastated. Gone, too, were the grand British plantations and the thriving ones owned by the great American tire companies, Firestone and Goodyear—and frankly, we had nothing against the Americans. In the distance, the jungle wilderness remained richly verdant, but here, the world was charcoal black. I sprinted across acre after acre of charred fields where only a day before there had been thick skeleton armies of rubber trees. Now, nothing moved, nothing lived. Aside from my own footsteps and panting, I heard no other sound—no hint of people, animals, or even birds.
Had my girls slaughtered every living being?
I kept going. My eyes burned; my lungs heaved ashy dust. The air felt sinister, as if I were running through an endless thicket of cobwebs. So much soot had collected on my hair and skin that the more I ran, the more I must have resembled a kind of ghoul.
By the time I caught the first signs of human life—Malay tappers salvaging what they could from smoldering barracks, a European family packing into an armored Ford—I was filled with too much anguish to stop and savor my relief.
I fled the blackened wasteland.
At long last, I reached the moist green jungle and tripped over a crow with a tattered wing, hobbling to get out of my way. I knelt there, panting. Trembling in the undergrowth were other injured creatures—frogs, field mice, lemurs, pangolins, all in a state of shock. The poor things were gasping for air, their big round eyes staring back at me through foliage. I had to watch my every step to avoid crushing their tiny feet and tiny tails.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t know where I was going, but I had to get up and keep running.
Perhaps a mile later, I rounded an ancient cycad with a gigantic fountain of fronds and—smack!—slammed into someone, knocking him to the ground.
“Cassandra.”
I jumped. It was Kenneth, his voice every bit as raspy and hollow as that of the dead girl on Blood Hill. He was stunned and exhausted, but I also sensed his enormous relief. I helped him to his feet. Above our heads spread the vast canopy of a banyan tree that looked to be a thousand years old, its wise dangling roots furry with ash.
“I’m sorry,” I said, more out of reflex than anything.
We stood motionless for a while, two old friends shrouded in many kinds of fog, our hair prematurely gray, our skin already turned to dust. Without thinking, I gave him a hug. Just as spontaneously, he returned my embrace, holding on for a long, long time.
“We won,” he murmured. “I think we won.”
We returned to a city that was in a state of emergency. Riots broke out day and night.
One of Kenneth’s cellmates from Shahbandar ran a rooming house and allowed him, Issa, Cricket, and me to stay there until we were sure we weren’t wanted by the authorities. Until then, we kept a low profile, moving only within trusted circles in Chinatown where the Brits had no intelligence. It appeared that nobody was hunting for us, but we couldn’t take our anonymity for granted. Desperate to arrest anyone related to the up-country chaos, the government had posted huge rewards for tips. And betrayal is, after all, one of the great leitmotifs of revolution.
My handiwork stayed front page news for weeks, as did the terrible numbers: thirty-six planters and more than a hundred workers dead. I didn’t regret the loss in property, but for the lives lost, I prayed for every one of their souls.
Somewhere along the way, an editor at the Daily Monitor came up with “The Night of the Burning Trees,” and this colorful title gave the holocaust a second explosion of life. Months after the fact, eyewitness accounts still flooded the tabloids. Surviving planters spoke of “mists” moving across the up-country darkness, told tales of gold and silver “flags” shimmering in the trees. Their wives reported footsteps and the “shrill, wicked laughter of little girls at play.” But the Malay and Tamil tappers who slept closest to the crop provided the most chilling testimony. They said they saw lightning flashes that “shot out of nowhere,” sparking huge flames that only the swiftest could outrun.
In the city, everybody had an opinion about what had happened. The official government line, as always, was to blame the Communists. In Chinatown coffee shops, I listened in as shopkeepers and clerks, red in the face with conviction, insisted that the British had planned the sabotage themselves. In the wet markets, ner
vous housewives blamed the Island’s unseen forces, saying, “It’s very, very dirty.”
I’m sure Kenneth had his own convoluted theory, but he never voiced it. With his usual nose for history, he’d been right to declare our victory in the forest. We had won—at least up-country. Most of the colonials abandoned their plantations, many leaving the Isle altogether. But whether he felt that the fire had been an act of God or the result of human error, I had no clue. He remained, as ever, a cipher as he scanned the daily headlines, lingering only on the numbers that he cared about: the financial toll of the destruction, the steep decline in the government’s popularity. As to the other figures—the human figures—he displayed no discernible interest.
He didn’t learn of the Mannings’ deaths until he read it in the papers one evening, at a Cantonment Road newsstand. The color drained from his face and he propped himself up against a rack of Hindi film journals.
“Good God…,” he gasped. Three months after the fact, the tragic, human dimension of the Burning Trees finally touched him. “I’d hoped to become friendly with those two, you know. Eventually, I mean, when things boiled over. I’d never come across people who read and write for pleasure, not on the Isle. It may sound crazy, but I felt they were the kind of people who might understand me, that we could and would become friends, comrades, equals. That we’d go to shows together, have serious discussions about books and ideas over supper and drinks, that maybe I’d even visit England with them, bicycle around the countryside with scones and clotted cream in our picnic baskets, and talk and fish and read and dream…” He clutched his head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen Issa crack open any book aside from the Koran, and that doesn’t exactly count. As for Zhang, he’s so thick sometimes I wonder if he can even write his own name.”
He sputtered on like this, tears welling in his eyes. What seemed clearer than ever was his sense of isolation. His loneliness had reached its limit and was pushing through his cool exterior to emerge as spite and whimsy. Scones and clotted cream? Kenneth Kee was having a nervous breakdown. To keep from crying, he peeled off a random magazine and began crushing and twisting it into a ball.
Watching him succumb to his emotions, his unfamiliarity with them making the outburst all the more awkward and childish, I suddenly grasped how powerful I was compared to him. I, a penniless, unconnected girl, could do secret, invisible, mighty things that the brilliant war hero Kenneth Kee could not.
“Would you like to get something to eat?” I finally said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Come on, now. Even Mao eats.”
I took him for chicken rice at Mitzi’s, a favorite of mine since my days with the Wees. It was the first time Kenneth and I had really been alone since our long embrace in the jungle, a display of feeling I suspected embarrassed him as much as it surprised me. We chose a booth in the corner of the boisterous dining room and drank hot pu-erh tea as we waited for our food.
“I hate this place,” he said. “I’ve always thought of it as a place the rich went whenever they wanted to pretend they were of the people, or to remind themselves what real people ate. Because in truth, ‘the people’ never eat here. We all know this is the preserve of the rich, where philanthropists bring their mistresses on weeknights and their families on Sundays. Real people eat at the nameless canteen across the road, where everyone has to share tables and the tea is always cold. That’s where I take my chicken rice. And by the way, did you know that this was one of the five or six restaurants on the Isle that went on, business as usual, for the duration of the war?”
“This was Mr. Wee’s favorite restaurant.”
“Then you know exactly what I mean.” He took a long draft of his tea. “I hope you don’t feel I’m being ungrateful.”
“Kenneth, we’re just here to eat dinner. It’s not that complicated. You don’t owe me a thing.”
“I didn’t mean to you. I meant to him. But honestly, it’s much easier to give than to receive, don’t you think?”
What exactly was he saying? For the briefest moment, my gaze fell upon his gold Rolex. Of course he instantly seized on this, his brain whirring afresh.
“Do you hate me, Cassandra?”
“Hate you?”
“Yes. Is that so odd a question? After all, I hated you for years.” He watched for my response.
“Those years were hardly voluntary. I had to survive, Kenneth.”
“No, no. It’s not your years as a whore that I hate. Those I don’t like but I understand. What I hate is that you engaged yourself to that useless spaniel Daniel. You see, that convinced me that things would never be fair, that even someone who should know better would always choose wealth over synchronicity.”
What was he talking about? Was he actually accusing me of choosing Daniel over him or simply making a general point about class?
He let out a growl, sounding like a child who’s unable to stop himself. “He was so bloody good. So ineffectually good. I mean, how deeply boring can a person be? Good God, how I loathed his puppy-dog eyes! What a bloody princeling!”
Just then, aromatic platters of chicken and rice arrived at our table on the arms of a nervous young waiter.
“Stop it. You’re frightening this poor child,” I said, forcing a smile at the boy, in whose palm I placed a few extra cents as tip.
“Cassandra, I don’t care who I scare. I’m telling you the truth, at long last. And if I can’t speak my mind to you, then…” He squeezed out a tight giggle so I’d think he was joking. “Sure, Danny boy was nice, but dolts are often nice. He took everything for granted. And he tainted everything he touched.”
“Including me?”
“Absolutely.” He smirked. “Perhaps the worst of all.”
I pushed my plate away. “Look, you snake, how dare you talk about Daniel like that? He brought you into his family and treated you well, even when you didn’t deserve it. Just so you know, I’d much rather be sitting here with him today than with you. It’s too bad that he’s the one who’s gone and not you. Because, honestly, if we were to talk about fairness, you owe him everything—and not just that stupid watch!”
I stood up to leave. He looked surprised that his barbs had so offended me.
“Don’t you, too?” he asked.
“What?”
“Owe him.” He gazed at my plate. “You’re wasteful to boot. You might as well finish it. You’ve already paid.”
I should have left. My story could be happier if I had. But I just stood there.
Kenneth was infuriating. I’d begun the dinner on my terms, in a position of strength, yet he’d managed to rile me until he was back in control. If I walked out on him now, it was admitting defeat. Finally, hunger decided. And in the moment that I sat back down, my fate was sealed. Because a plate of chicken rice had beckoned to me, because I had nothing better to do, and perhaps most of all because I’d seen him cry, I failed to flee the sticky threads of Kenneth Kee’s ever-spiraling web.
We finished the meal in silence. We were both ravenous—the boiled yam dinners at the boarding house had been uniformly atrocious. With each mouthful, I was sucked back into Kenneth’s dominion of pregnant pauses, doublespeak, and roundabout thinking.
“Do you think things will ever get better?” he asked when the last bite was gone. His voice was calm, as if we’d been chatting amiably the whole time. “Do you think what we’ve gone through has been worth it?”
Despite myself, I was touched. He was, in his willfully opaque way, asking to be reassured.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Good.” He smiled. “I thought so, too, but I wanted to hear it from you.”
We wandered slowly back to our boarding house at the edge of Chinatown, now a labyrinth of cheap rooming houses, many of them also serving as bordellos. The zoning laws had been relaxed, as part of the government’s last-ditch effort to quell the restless natives. Ludicrous as this might sound—using prostitution to quash dissent—the lawmakers were convin
ced it would work. And perhaps it did. In the past weeks, there had been next to no rioting.
The curfew was nine o’clock, so although it was only half past eight, men of all ages on our street were kissing their escorts good night before scurrying to catch the last ride home. Kenneth eyed them dispassionately, as if they were anthropological specimens placed in his path expressly for his study. I expected him to say something caustic about the aging courtesans or the resilience of the world’s oldest profession, but he remained quiet all the way to our ramshackle house.
We both had rooms on the third floor. When we neared mine, I said good night.
“Good night?” he asked, smiling oddly.
He reached over and pulled me into the clumsy embrace of a man unaccustomed to giving hugs. All his weight shifted onto me, and I had to lean back against the wall to steady myself. It was like holding up a collapsing suit of armor. But the instant I relaxed and gave in, his embrace turned eloquent. He thanked me for the meal, apologized for his eruptions, rejoiced that our jungle days were over, and worried about the fate of our beloved city. Anyone who saw us would have thought we were conducting some kind of strange communion in the hallway.
They wouldn’t have been completely wrong. When Kenneth’s garlic-scented mouth brushed against my ear and neck, I realized that his outburst at Mitzi’s had indeed been personal.
It was a lamentable seduction. More an attack than a wooing. Nevertheless, I unlocked the door to my room and removed us from the view of potential gossips.
Given all that would happen, it seems incredible that I remember nothing else about my first night with Kenneth Kee. I’d never thought of him as handsome or erotic, and I’m certain that even as he lay in my bed that evening, I did not think of him in those terms. Truth be told, Kenneth had only ever struck me as alluring when he was animated by the badi, who, drawing on my own nature, knew how to arouse me. Inhabited by his own self, he was an odd collection of angles, a bit sharp-jawed and narrow-featured for my taste. His eyes were too close together. He reeked of Brylcreem. To top it all, he was short—no taller than me. I continued to see all the faults I had noticed in him the first time we met in the Wees’ library.