Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Syed Alwi said, “The Japanese came at the end of December 1941. In January I was thinking of going back to school. It was the end of the school holiday. But then I was told there was no English school any more.”

  There was also a rumor that the Japanese would punish people who had English books in their houses. There were many English books in the Alwi house, brought back by the two boys who had studied at Raffles College in Singapore. Nearly all these books were destroyed. Some were buried; some were burnt, as Syed Alwi’s father’s writings were burnt. The one important book that was kept back was a dictionary. Syed Alwi was hoping one day to read his father’s writings, and he thought he would need the dictionary to help with the big words. That day did come; but he couldn’t decipher the writing in his father’s exercise books. He could only make out the word “always.”

  The British had blown up a road bridge outside the kampung, and the Japanese spent some weeks putting up a new bridge. So Japanese soldiers were about, foraging. One afternoon a Japanese soldier came with a drawn sword to the Alwi house. The children ran away. The father stayed, and after half an hour he began shouting to them to come back. When they went to the house they saw the Japanese soldier leaving with a chicken and a pineapple. Nobody knew what had passed between the two men, and the father never said.

  Syed Alwi said, “He was not afraid. He was not a brave man, but he wasn’t afraid.”

  The Japanese were in Malaysia for three years and eight months. Until they came, Syed Alwi had not seen violent death. Now, near the market in Taiping, where his old English-language school was, he would see staked heads. He was told that they were the heads of Chinese people.

  Syed Alwi said, “After the first year things became bad. Food became very short—the basic necessities, rice, sugar. The life in the kampung began to go very bad when disease became rampant. We didn’t have much nourishment. So you got ulcers, skin diseases. We had lost our knowledge of local herbs. We had grown used to hospitals and Western medicine. We couldn’t cope with the breakdown of society.

  “Besides, the Japanese had promised that everything was going to be all right, and that there would be abundance of everything. They specifically mentioned that a lot of rice would be coming, because in Japan they grew a lot of rice. Whenever they took anything from us they would say it would be repaid many times over. They would say, ‘I take your bicycle now. I will repay it with five bicycles or more.’ And they would add, ‘Not only bicycles, but other things as well.’ They mentioned silk. And for months and months the community waited. The Japanese kept that promise alive by circulating rumors that shipments of rice had arrived and people in certain kampungs had already received theirs.

  “At the beginning of newsreels, in the mobile cinemas and the theaters, they would say in Japanese, Malay, and English: ‘Thank God Asia has been given back to Asians.’ What followed were images of the greatness of Japan: bundles and bundles of silk and other luxury goods. This had an effect. The first Hari Raya—the festival after the fasting month—we were talking about how everybody would be dressed in Japanese silk.”

  But things just went from bad to worse. At about this time Syed Alwi’s uncle died. He was the uncle who had figured in many of Syed Alwi’s stories about his father. He was the uncle who used to go with Syed Alwi’s father to get his pension; he sat with him before bomohs, in the days when they went to bomohs. Syed Alwi was full of grief. He and his father were chopping wood one day. With all the grief, it was a precious moment of companionship; Syed Alwi remembered it. He talked about the uncle, and his father said, “Your uncle didn’t die.”

  Syed Alwi said, “What do you mean?”

  His father said, “Later you will understand what I mean.”

  The words made an impression on Syed Alwi. He thought he should talk more to his father about what he had said. But he didn’t; the occasion never came again, the moment of companionship. Because his father then entered his other world and stayed there for almost three years, until the end of the war. When he came out of the other world it was only to die.

  It was Syed Alwi’s idea that this going into the other world had always been deliberate or willed, a form of cutting out. And in the normal world, or the outer world, things had now broken down.

  Syed Alwi said, “A new way of life, a decayed way of life, began to develop. Right and wrong began to be decided not by any moral or religious or spiritual standard, but by what was good for the self and survival. If moral values were applied you couldn’t survive. What was normal life then? Pain and suffering and starvation and deprivation and disease. If those were things of normal life, why should morality be the deciding factor? What was of value would be what could alleviate your pain. Or what you could find to keep yourself some self-esteem. What was normal was that you saw Japanese soldiers beating up people. You saw people being snatched in all kinds of ways. You saw people being destroyed by torture, or escaping torture or worse by jumping in the river.”

  Young men—of all races, Malay, Chinese, Indian—abused young girls, and never felt they were behaving abnormally.

  “I always think of this beautiful Indian woman, probably in her twenties or early thirties. She was from another estate, where her husband was a tapper. He had disappeared, and she was looking for him, going from estate to estate. She passed through my kampung. There were a number of young people doing hardly anything, being just there, and they saw this woman and they looked at one another, and I knew—I was with them—that they were going to have fun with her.

  “They followed her some distance beyond the shopping area, and they raped her. When it was supposed to be my turn, they said no—I was underage. I was then about twelve. So there was still some kind of morality. There were two of us who were considered underage. If not for this, some kind of morality, I would have been one of the rapists.

  “And then they left her, and she continued her journey. We saw her again as she passed through the village center again, on her way to another kampung. She looked none the worse for wear. Maybe she had been raped before. It was something that had happened. It didn’t stop her searching for her husband. For the young men it was just another activity. They never mentioned the girl again. Yes. They mentioned how beautiful she was.”

  It was during this time that Syed Alwi, in his own eyes, became a man. He began to work, and was at last able to help with the upkeep of the family.

  The Japanese set up a charcoal factory. They came to the kampung and announced that they wanted people; and Syed Alwi, in his fourteenth year, became one of the workers. The factory was two and a half miles away, a longish walk morning and afternoon through a rubber estate and jungle. He was paid eight Malay dollars and a tin of rice a day; the big attraction was the rice. Later, cigarettes were also given. The job was easy, to see that cracks in the kiln were patched up. He did it for a year or so.

  There was double pay for heavier work: breaking open the kiln door when the charcoal was ready, and pulling out the charcoal. Syed Alwi tried it once. The heat was scarcely to be borne, and the hot charcoal dust got into his lungs. When he went to bathe he coughed up black phlegm. He kept on coughing black, and that so frightened him he never did that job again.

  Late in 1944 he became a junior lumberjack for the charcoal factory. It paid more: twenty Malay dollars a day, a bigger tin of rice, cigarettes. The cigarettes were usually local, and quite ordinary; but sometimes now there were Japanese cigarettes—he still remembered the brand name: it was Koa—which were much nicer.

  Cigarettes were important, because in the other world, where he was, his father was a smoker. There was a kind of country or kampung cigarette with a wrapper made from the nipah palm leaf; but Syed Alwi’s father wanted none of those. He insisted on “real cigarettes,” and when they had none to give him, he became angry and violent, not hitting anyone, just knocking things about.

  But he was now fading. There was little food to give him; and he was bedridden. He seemed gradually to understand th
at there had been a calamity outside, and that cigarettes were scarce. And, anyway, he was weak; he would manage only one cigarette a day. There was no shortage of exercise books, but he was writing less and less. In the last six months of his life he hardly wrote. But—and it was like a remnant of his writing passion—he became very particular about his pencils. He had used them down to the stump, but he never threw them away, and he didn’t want anyone to touch them.

  One day, when Syed Alwi and the lumberjack gang had gone to the jungle to cut wood for the charcoal factory, they found—about a mile and a half in from the road—an unexpected clearing: a rice field, five or six acres.

  It was in this way that Syed Alwi got to know about the communists—mainly Chinese—of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, the MPAJA. The rice field was theirs; and the kampung was to some extent already under their protection.

  The men didn’t want to drag the logs through the rice field. But the boss of the gang—not a Japanese: there were no Japanese bosses in the kampung—had to do his job. Syed Alwi remembered him saying, “Go on, drag the logs through the rice.” Some of the men said, “But it’s sinful to destroy rice.” And Syed Alwi understood that some of the lumberjacks would have known the people in the kampung who were looking after the rice field.

  So, as a man, earning money and entering the world, he became aware of things in the kampung that had so far been hidden from him. He even had a kind of explanation for the staked Chinese heads near the market in Taiping.

  The work was hard; he had little food; there were no medicines. He had fourteen ulcers. And then one day a log fell on his ankle. The scratch didn’t heal; it developed into a big ulcer. It hurt him night and day. It was hard for him to sleep. He would shake the ulcerous leg to deaden the pain, and then he might sleep for an hour or so. From time to time he drained the ulcer, collecting about a half a cupful of pus. The flesh was rotting away inside; after he drained the ulcer his calf was slack. He walked or hobbled on one foot.

  Other people in the kampung were worse off. A woman in her forties had ulcers all over her body. These ulcers spread, and her body became one big ulcer. Worms, maggots, and flies lived in her flesh. The smell—even from yards away, even from outside her house—was very bad. In the last weeks of her life she was a mass of rotting blood. She wailed and shrieked. There was no painkiller. People wouldn’t go near her. She was abandoned. This added to her pain and gave a special quality to her cries.

  A few days after the Japanese surrender—some food had already begun to come to the kampung from outside—Syed Alwi’s father came out of his other world. He had been there for nearly three years. In the family they knew he had come out of the other world because he had stopped talking to himself and was no longer asking for cigarettes. He had been bedridden for a long time. Now he was badly undernourished, and weak and ill.

  He wanted to see outside. Syed Alwi and his mother together helped him up and brought him near a window. He looked for a couple of minutes and didn’t say anything. Then—Syed Alwi hobbling on his good leg—they took him back to his bed.

  The world he had looked out at was a little more decayed than it had been during the Japanese time. In the two weeks between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of British troops, the communist MPAJA ruled. They had many scores to settle and they were going about punishing people, betrayers, deserters, collaborators.

  The real world had fallen to pieces, but Syed Alwi and his mother were glad that the father had come out of his other world. He had never been so long there; and Syed Alwi, and his mother, felt that he might have had enough of that world and wouldn’t want to go back there; and that now, with food and medicine, he might become well again. Syed Alwi was hoping—as an adult now—to talk to his father about his writing; to ask him what he had meant three years before when they were chopping wood together and he had said that there was no such thing as death; and to find out about the world he used to go to.

  None of this was to be. About a week after they had taken him to the window he died. It was as if, at the very end, he hadn’t wanted to die alone in the other world.

  Syed Alwi said of his mother, once the thirteen-year-old bride of the seventeen-year-old settlement officer, “She was the community. From her Malay upbringing, her Islamic upbringing, she provided him the support that enabled him to have his two worlds. Without her he would have been thrown into the madhouse”—the place of water hoses and rice mixed with sand—“and he wouldn’t have lasted two years. As it was, he lived in his two worlds for twenty-three years.”

  July 1995–May 1997

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In Indonesia: John H. McGlynn; Navrekha Sharma; Eugene Galbraith. In Pakistan: Ahmed Rashid. In Malaysia: Karim Raslan.

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