Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Gradually things calmed down. Classes started up again at the schools. The bomoh, born on an Indonesian island in the last century to a Chinese father and a Malay mother, would have always known about Malay hate, Malay racial rage. Yet, perhaps because of his work, which brought sufferers and suppliants of all sorts to him, he felt that people were people. He refused to believe that human beings could cease being human, and he told his children so. He refused to believe the stories that were brought to him of Malay soldiers going round the country shooting Chinese people. He was never vengeful or bitter.

  But it could not have been easy for him when, four years after that terror, his son became a Muslim and took the name of Rashid and stayed away from the old rituals of the house. He hadn’t minded when his two sons sang hymns about Jesus in the temple. But becoming a Muslim was something else. It would have seemed like a turning away from the family. The bomoh could be philosophical about the riots; but the antagonism between Malay and Chinese went deep; it couldn’t be wished away. Officially in Malaysia to be a Malay was to be Muslim.

  And, though Rashid didn’t say so, it was the race riots of 1969 that had given a push to the Malay movement and the new Islam among the young.

  There were twenty people in the house, and Rashid (when he got to the higher forms of the secondary school) could begin to study only at about midnight, when the television was turned off and people went to sleep. He would sit on his father’s bomoh chair in the living room, the chair on which his father sat when, sometimes in a trance, he received people and gave his consultations, and he would study or read or write for three or four hours. That was where, below the deities of snow and fire and sword, he read Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Dickens, and wrote his essays, and studied for his examinations. He never thought he was suffering hardship; that idea came to him much later, when life was easier.

  His time in the family house came to an end when he finished at the secondary school and went on to the university in Kuala Lumpur. He did English. It was an insubstantial thing to do, but—from the account he gave—he was going to the university really to be free. He was able to support himself. The tuition fees were low. And he was able to earn enough in the long vacation doing various jobs to pay for his lodging in the college. He taught; he did little jobs in the media and advertising.

  He didn’t take his studies seriously. He spent so little time at lectures that in his second year the university authorities gave him an ultimatum. A fatherly Indian tutor helped him to pull himself together, and in the end he was able to get a reasonable second-class degree. In the three years he spent at the university he went home only once, for a week. That was in his second year. After he got his degree, at the end of his third year, he began to work full-time in Kuala Lumpur; and he couldn’t even think of going home.

  The insubstantial English degree didn’t help him get a job, and he began to do full-time what he had done in the vacations. What had been exciting in the beginning, part of his freedom, soon became tedious. He could make a living, but his life was unfocused and disordered. Without Islam—which mattered more and more, and had mattered even at the university—his life would have been without point.

  He was driving to work one day when a traffic policeman signaled to him to stop. He rolled down the window and said, “What’s wrong?” There was something in Rashid’s manner that enraged the policeman. He said to Rashid, “What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong?’ It’s ‘What’s wrong, sir?’ ” And he began to write out a ticket.

  The policeman was Indian. It was well known in Kuala Lumpur—so Rashid said—that Indians became arrogant in power. And, though Rashid didn’t say, the Indian policeman might have been especially rough with Rashid because he was a Chinese. Rashid said in his heart, I will fix you up. I will get even. You just wait.

  Rashid decided at that moment that he was going to join the police, to “invest in power.” The decision was sudden, but he had been thinking about it for some time. For some time he had been dreaming of wearing a police uniform, to win respect from people, and to protect himself from people like the Indian policeman and from security guards who chased him away from parking spaces reserved for dignitaries.

  What came out now was that Rashid’s eldest brother was high in the police. This brother was a full twenty years older than Rashid, and Rashid would not have seen much of him. He had joined the police force as a constable and—he was another son with the bomoh’s energy and drive—he had risen through the ranks, becoming first an inspector, and then a gazetted officer. Rashid had a childhood memory of this brother coming to the family house in his inspector’s uniform. At some point the local police station needed to contact the inspector—no telephone in the bomoh’s house at that time—and a police sergeant came to the house and saluted the inspector in front of the whole family. This excited the children. Rashid also remembered the inspector’s handgun.

  Rashid said, “The whole idea of putting on this uniform with the three pips on the shoulder gets the adrenaline pumping. On reflection it all seems silly, but it was real then. Once you had the power”—and Rashid was telling the story from his later position of ease and security and influence—“it was very different altogether.”

  Rashid also felt that, after his too-liberated time at the university, and his unfocused freelance career afterwards, he needed order and discipline, even regimentation, in his life again. He thought the police force would do that for him. And though his insecurity and aggressiveness and drive to power (as he thought) were real enough at the time, he recognized with a part of his mind that his approach was contrary to his upbringing.

  He said. “My father and my brother had different kinds of power. My brother had authority. My father had the respect due to his gifts, and also because he was a very generous man. Which was why, when the riots came, we had a very tough time. We had no savings. My father would buy four or five loaves of bread from the bread man because he didn’t have the heart to tell him no—it didn’t matter how much bread we had. And I still do that today when the bread man comes. And the policy was to give more than the price of the bread. He never took change. He said, ‘With these people you must not be calculating.’ ”

  It was a year before Rashid could join the police. Five hundred applications were processed; many more had been received. After physical and classroom tests two hundred and fifty were called in for the first induction. One hundred got through the formal interviews; that took some months. Examinations and intelligence tests then sifted out half of those. At the end twenty were chosen and sent to the police training school; Rashid was one of them.

  He gave himself a new haircut for the training school. The first thing he and the others had to do was to get their heads shaved by the training school barber. He had joined the police for the sake of power. His first experience as a trainee officer was this ritual humiliation.

  And for the next two months he and the others were at the mercy of sergeants and constables. The police training rules hadn’t changed since the British time. Small misdemeanors—like talking on parade—could be severely punished, with an hour’s double-time marching in full uniform in the heat, with an M-16 rifle held in a position that after a while caused fine, excruciating pain in the triceps and elbow.

  At the end of his two months he had, indeed, become disciplined. The urge to power, the constant little urges to get even when the time came with the sergeants and constables who were roughing him up, had been burnt away. He even felt regard for the men who had trained him.

  When he had graduated and been commissioned he went to see his father. He hadn’t seen him for some years. Rashid knew now that the bomoh would be proud of him; and the bomoh was very proud of him.

  Rashid said, “He was very happy to receive me. In his eyes his son had been transformed. My Muslim conversion wasn’t brought up any more. I had sent him a photograph of me in uniform, with my name tag, with my Muslim name, RASHID. And he had it hanging on the wall of the living room.”r />
  To be a police officer was to do more than wear the uniform and receive salutes. It was constantly to see, in the rough area where he had been posted, dead men, mutilated corpses, cruelty. Rashid soon couldn’t take any more. He joined the intelligence service. It had not figured in his fantasy of power; but he understood now that in the police that was where the real power lay. But he didn’t like it. He had lost his taste for police work.

  He thought of the law. He had been told by one of his police instructors, while he was training, that he reasoned like a good lawyer. That had stayed with him; and after less than four years in the police he resigned, did a business job for a while for the money, and enrolled in the law course at the university. It was what he was born for; the law engaged all his instincts; he was successful from the start. The Malaysian boom had made it possible for him to chop and change as he had done; in an earlier time he would have had to be more cautious, to stay with what he had found.

  He said, “Though now I am in touch with sources of power, all that excitement that consumed me in those days is not there now. Looking back, I feel that all the stages I had to go through were necessary. The stages of my childhood, the conditions I was brought up in, the opportunities, helped me to be self-sustaining.”

  His background had made him a very positive sort of person. He didn’t moan and groan. He didn’t think that was because he was Chinese; he had Chinese friends who moaned and groaned. He thought it was something he got from his father. He never knew his father to complain. He suffered much pain from a hernia, but he told no one about it. He had a problem with his spine that kept him in constant pain.

  Rashid went to see him a few months before he died. He was eighty-eight, and was bedridden. His body had wasted away. He had lost about thirty or forty pounds. He had shrunk.

  Rashid said, “Father, you have grown so thin.”

  The bomoh said, “Everything is O.K. I am fine.” But there were tears in his eyes.

  Rashid, seeing his father so close to death, thought of his hard childhood, and of all that he had managed to do. All his children, so many of them born at an unpromising time, were now well placed.

  Rashid said, “When I was having fantasies of power, even before I was a policeman, he was exercising real power.” As a bomoh. “Compared to him, I was, year to year, infantile. I will not tolerate any kind of criticism of him, not even from members of the family. What he did we saw with our own eyes. He did not have to make a proclamation of his power. It may be that I have a direct affinity with my father. He was an eighth son. I was an eighth son. I was told by my mother that I look exactly like my father. My mother is not very good with words. She doesn’t go around flattering people.”

  Rashid’s father didn’t want anyone to follow his calling as a bomoh, or to profess his faith. He just wanted his children to go through the rituals. Rashid couldn’t do that when he became a Muslim. But it pleased Rashid that his mother did the rituals, and that when she died, other members of the family would be carrying on her worship of her Malay datuk spirit in her kitchen, and doing the rituals on the family altar.

  4

  THE OTHER WORLD

  SYED ALWI, THE PLAYWRIGHT, had sat out the Malaysian boom. People who write Malay plays do not make a great deal of money; and Syed Alwi had made that kind of writing his vocation. Still, with a fee here and a fee there, he had over the years managed to put a little sum by; and when he was in his early sixties he thought he should build a little house to see him through the evening of his days.

  By birth and instinct he was a country boy; he had the Malay love of trees and rivers. He found a plot in a development in a kampung far out of Kuala Lumpur. In his stuttering little red car it was about half an hour’s drive from Kuala Lumpur, even with the fast new highways through the raw, opened-up hills. When you left the highway you drove for a while down a winding road through pleasant sun-spotted woodland, and then you came to the rich green kampung. At the foot of Syed Alwi’s little plot was a small stream, just a few feet wide and a few inches deep.

  The Malay instinct that had led him to this spot made him entrust the building of his house to a young man who was a relation and had set up as a builder. It was a calamity. The money was consumed and the house was unfinished and the builder had gone away. Syed Alwi, in his ambition, had dreamed of a studio section of his house where he might rehearse his plays. But the greater part of what had been put up was a mere dangerous outline, wall-less and floorless (and ambition had led him to ask for a house partly over the stream), an uneven see-through frame of leaning and sagging timbers too slender to bear any weight.

  Syed Alwi, going against his Malay instinct, had complained to the builder’s father. And his instinct was right. The father had become enraged, had said he was in no way responsible for his son’s competence or otherwise as a builder. That was something for Syed Alwi (whatever his feelings about family solidarity or Malay solidarity) to assess for himself.

  And so there Syed Alwi and his wife were, living in a corner of this strange structure (without a telephone), and receiving people and working on plays and trying to get on with things. The hilly land above the little stream had been cut into and leveled for the building. Snakes (attracted by the stream) had made big holes in the dry earth wall at one side of the structure. Syed Alwi and his wife sometimes saw the snakes; neither of them minded. She was a beautiful and serene woman. She liked those things about the site that were nonetheless beautiful: the stream, the trees, the green.

  Something like this had happened to Syed Alwi’s father in 1930. He was distantly related to the royal family of Perak. For some reason it was not a good relationship, and he had suffered as a child because of it. He had then, however, while still very young, become a successful civil servant. The strains—social, academic, colonial—might have been too great. When he was twenty-two he became schizophrenic. In the other world, or in his other personality, he had religious obsessions and could be violent. But he also had his lucid periods. In 1930, in the eighth year of his schizophrenia, during one of his lucid periods, he began to build a two-story house for his family in the kampung. He was too ambitious. He had only his civil service pension and he didn’t have the money to complete the house. It remained without its upper story.

  Syed Alwi was born about this time. He might have been born in the unfinished house; he certainly grew up in it. It was the house in which the family lived out the deprivations and horrors of the Japanese occupation from early 1942 to 1945. And it was the house where, days after the end of the war in the Pacific, Syed Alwi’s father died.

  Unimaginable experience: it could be said it made Syed Alwi a playwright. But it isn’t always easy for a writer to see his material when he is starting out. Sometimes distance is required; and sometimes an experience is so bad it cannot be written about directly. Syed Alwi’s first approach to what he had lived through was oblique, symbolical. It is one way in which the creative imaginative can deal with extraordinary pain. His first play developed slowly, over four years.

  It began with something he wrote in his twentieth year, when he was studying at the Clifford School in Kuala Kangsar. (He had missed four years of school because of the war.) In Kuala Kangsar at that time there was a local man of religion called Sheikh Tahir. He was a learned man who had traveled, and he knew enough astronomy to work out the beginning of the fasting month on his own. He was a local legend. He used to come to town on his bicycle and people would stop him and talk to him. Syed Alwi admired Sheikh Tahir, wanted to be like him. He did a piece about the Sheikh for the Clifford School magazine. It was curiously angled: he wrote of an imaginary encounter on a train between the Sheikh and a boy like himself. The boy boasts and boasts; the old man hardly speaks; and the boy realizes later, with bitterness and shame, that he has been in the presence of the great man without really seeing him.

  The idea of the meeting on the train stayed with Syed Alwi. He added to it. The boy became a university student; the father-fi
gure of the Sheikh became a ghost, seen and not there. The background was developed: it was the Emergency, a time of breakdown and general decay and sudden death in familiar surroundings.

  Four years later Syed Alwi went to Minnesota on a Fulbright fellowship to study journalism. After a long period of idleness he began to write one day, and the play, his first, was done in less than two weeks.

  There is the meeting on the train. The university student thinks the older man is a farmer, talks philosophy at him, and tries to make fun of him intellectually. The older man at last puts a question to the student: “If you knew somebody was going to die, would you tell him?” The student begins to babble; he knows now he is not dealing with a farmer. He can give no answer. The old man says, as if to calm the student, “I have that problem. My daughter is going to die.” And then he isn’t there. He is a ghost; he might have existed only in the student’s head. The train gets to the railway station—it is the time of the communist insurgency after the war, when railway stations were attacked—and an unlikely, random death occurs there. It links the young man and the ghost he had seen.

  The play might have seemed fanciful in Minnesota, but everything in it—the death of the child, the universal decay, even the religious ghost—referred to something in Syed Alwi’s experience. A writer’s earliest imaginative work, even when unachieved or artificial-seeming, can hold, sometimes in coded ways, the impulses and emotions that will always rule him.

  Syed Alwi, talking of his ancestry, said, “Legends are more real than history.” The legend in his family was that his father’s father was a sayed, a descendant of the Prophet. This meant, in Malaysia, that an ancestor would have been an Arab or Indian merchant; and Alwi was an Arab clan name. But Syed Alwi, with all his Malay instincts and passions, looked more European than Arab or Malay; and he said that the doctors had told him that the skin inflammation on the tip of his nose was a European and not an Arab affliction. So, as he said, there was a mystery.