by Tash Aw
Nowadays I’ll often come across news reports on Facebook about men and women who die the way he did, and always they’re just called ‘a 33-year-old Bangladeshi man’, or ‘a 28-year-old Myanmar national’, or ‘a 40-year-old Indonesian female’. Maybe that’s why the man’s name lodged in my head – because all the time I spent hearing him being discussed in front of me, I remembered the way he stood, his feet planted widely apart so that he seemed solid and unmoving, unlike the other foreign workers. Rooted to the earth, that’s how he seemed. As much a part of the landscape as the trees around us. He wasn’t going anywhere. The sharp smile on his face. His watch that glinted in the dark. The way he addressed me as brother – the single English word that popped up amid his broken Malay. The surprising warmth of his laughter.
These are details about the man that you cannot possibly know. You, the police, the lawyers, the judge, the jury – no one knew, and no one asked. But I knew. And that’s why his name has stuck in my memory all these years, because I thought: My friend, you and I, we’re pretty similar after all. Your name has been forgotten, just as mine will be very soon. I, at least, have existed for a brief moment, a few days when my name has been hauled from the shadows and repeated in public, but in less than a week I’ll disappear too. I’ll have a prison number, and the photo they’ll take of me will make me look just like any other small-time Chinese gangster, a dim sum waiter who made a couple of bad choices. There are lots of us. I know that from the time I’ve already spent in the lock-up. My name will become irrelevant, just as it was before the trial, before the killing, and I will vanish, just like you.
Mohammad Ashadul. Who knows if that was his real name? Who knows if his identity card was genuine? It probably wasn’t, because that was his line of work, faking ICs and passports. If you can print fifty counterfeit cards a day, you can print one for yourself, that’s for sure. You can say anything you want on the card. You can add the right digits to your IC number so that when the police stop you and check your details, you have a convincing explanation for your accent, your limited Malay vocabulary. I saw them all the time at the farm – 61, 62, 64, 68, 79. Especially 61 and 79. Indonesia and Bangladesh. You see those numbers, you know where the person was born. We’re not talking about those flimsy temporary foreign worker cards that migrants are supposed to have – those are worthless. No one needs them. What I’m talking about is fake ICs that look exactly like the genuine ones you and I have. Pay the right guy enough money and you can get one. Or maybe you’ve married a local girl and got yourself an IC. Who knows. All I know was that guy was in the business of running cards, and in the days leading up to that evening, I never heard a single person refer to him by the name I heard in court. Mr B, Bobby, the boss – that was what people called him. Keong called him sei hak gwai. If you understand Cantonese you can translate that yourself. It was hard to know who Keong was talking about, because he often called dark-skinned people that name. That was what he was like. [Shakes his head; laughs.] Or maybe Mohammad Ashadul was his real name. All I’m saying is that you can’t trust what you read on a piece of paper.
That was why we were going to see him – to sort out some paperwork. That’s what Keong said. He laughed when he said it. ‘It’s like office work. I just need to sort out some problems.’
‘What kind of problems?’
He laughed.
Even at that point, when I knew why Keong had come back to Klang, I didn’t think things would turn out the way they did. He arrived in town about three months before that evening. He’d sent a few texts after he rang me at the farm – cheerful notes just to say Hi, what’re you doing today. Damn I can’t wait to finish work and go home. Screw it the rain is just too bad today. The type of message you send your best friend, someone you see every other day, who knows the pattern of your days and understands how you might feel early in the morning, or after a long day – not someone you haven’t seen in years, someone with whom you’ve had no contact at all, with whom you share nothing apart from a couple of teenage years, when you were no longer boys but not yet men. When you didn’t really know who you were, and were trying to figure out how to live. In the span of someone’s entire life, that period amounts to little more than a few heartbeats – a time that means nothing. Weather today reminds me of being back in our village. Whenever I got a text like that from Keong, I thought, You kidding? Surely that time of your life doesn’t mean anything to you now. He’d only spent a year and a half there. Now he was thirty-two years old, but still referring to things that happened half his lifetime before.
I didn’t know how to reply to the messages. A guy like Keong turns up after nearly a decade’s silence, what am I supposed to feel? I should have been happy, I guess, or at least relieved to know that he was safe and healthy. When someone disappears like that, as Keong had all those years before, it’s only natural to be concerned. But instead I felt a numbness that spread through my thoughts and even the muscles in my body, as if I’d been bitten by a sea snake. Back in the village, people often got into trouble with snakes. They get tangled up in the nets, and when you try to free them, sometimes you get bitten. Unlike with land snakes or stone fish or urchins, a sea snake’s bite doesn’t swell up. No agonising pain, almost nothing at all to begin with. But later your head starts to ache, you feel your throat tightening, your breathing slowing down, your muscles refusing to obey your commands – a paralysis that overcomes you so slowly you barely realise it’s happening. I saw this happening to people from the village, watched them succumb slowly to the venom as they were taken to the hospital – it looked as though their bodies were turning against themselves.
Once I got bitten myself – a flash of black and white stripes striking out from the mass of writhing silver fish; the dull ache spreading from my leg to the rest of me; the world turning into a place I couldn’t control. And then – after a few minutes, half an hour, who knows? I really can’t remember – it was over. It turned out that the snake hadn’t released any venom. I’d been lucky. Who knows why that particular snake chose not to poison me that day. But my body had prepared itself for the shock, and started to sink into that unfeeling, unthinking state in order to protect itself. The body learns from what it observes. It remembers. It anticipates.
When I answered the phone that first day when Keong rang the farm, I just stood there saying nothing, just listening to his voice, as energetic and cigarette-rough as it had always been. I was remembering what it was like to be with him, and maybe I was already defending myself. My body knew how to produce sounds: Yes, en, really, ya see you soon. I thought he’d understand that I wasn’t keen on seeing him again, that my lack of joy would mean something to him – but he didn’t. I’d never been one to say much, and he probably thought I hadn’t changed at all.
As that strange dull fatigue took hold of me, I thought of Jenny. I thought of her sitting at the computer in our new house, sending emails to customers, making calls to people across the country, all the way to Sabah, even Singapore. Behind her, the sofa still covered in plastic to protect it from the last of the dust left behind from the construction work. The pure white walls, slightly chalky to the touch. The faint smell of paint and glue that we both found intoxicating. The sheen of the terrazzo floors. The certainty of things. We’d sometimes plug in our mobile phones to charge them even when we didn’t really need to, and we’d joke that we missed trying to guess whether the socket would work, as we had done in our previous house, or whether the fusebox would trip when we turned the switch on. I’d turn on the lights in the kitchen and still be amazed that the bulbs underneath the cupboards on the wall glowed gently, just like the small glass dome on the ceiling. Jenny would laugh and say that I preferred the harsh light of the fluorescent strips that we had in the old house, that I couldn’t see things clearly without that kind of low-class lighting. In the evenings, just before going upstairs to bed, I’d see her in front of the TV with a cup of leung cha, or spooning some gui ling gou out of a jar she’d bough
t at her favourite place in Jusco Mall. She seemed so settled in that spot that I never thought of asking her to join me in bed so we might fall asleep together, or make love, or talk – none of those things was more important to her than her place on that sofa. To disturb her space would be to destroy everything, for her and for us. Our house was new, it would last many years, maybe a lifetime, and in it we had found – quickly, so quickly – a way to live that would not be troubled by anything.
During that first phone call, Keong asked for my mobile number, and I gave it to him, not thinking that he’d ever use it. And if he did, I could simply not respond. That was what happened for two, maybe three weeks – every time I received one of his chatty meaningless texts I’d just delete it. But still, I’d feel the numbness start to creep into my body whenever I saw his number pop up on the screen of my phone. When the texts started to arrive more or less daily, I’d feel a kind of ache in my stomach every time I reached for my phone, wondering if I’d find a message from him. I knew I’d soon have to decide what to do. Ask him politely to go away. Tell him to fuck off. Meet him and have a Kopi-O and a stilted conversation so both of us could see once and for all that we had nothing in common – that I’d changed, that I was a different person. Tell him that my wife didn’t like me getting texts from people she didn’t know. Change my number. Take some of the boys from work to meet him and beat him up. Kick him until he was black and blue and half-conscious, just as I’d seen him doing to others when we were young. The options ran through my mind constantly, until I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. ‘Wai, people are talking to you, dickhead!’ Mr Lai shouted one day at work. ‘Anyone at home there?’ I’d been looking at him, nodding, but in fact I was thinking of my phone, clipped to my belt. It had just beeped twice, indicating a new text message.
What do you think I did? Of all the solutions available to me – some good, some bad, some complicated, others simple – I chose the worst. But when you have to make a decision like that, sometimes the most rotten choice, the one that everyone else knows will lead to disaster – that path seems the most sensible to you. Or maybe it only seems that way because you don’t actually have a choice. Perhaps there’s only one true way forward. All the others are false paths, illusions that exist only to give you the impression of freedom of choice. No one can alter the course of things. Your karma is set, it determines everything. I’d never believed in anything like that before – all the temples and prayers and amulets in my childhood, they proved nothing to me. But when I was in prison a few months later, I began to realise that it was all true. The joss-sticks and the offerings to the gods were a recognition of life’s inevitability. Those attempts to appease the gods were our way of acknowledging our helplessness. We were trying to soften the rougher edges of our fate, but really we knew that nothing would truly change. If your boat was going to capsize, it was going to capsize. Your death in the storm was predetermined. God wanted it to be so. You could have stayed home that day, but you decided to go to sea, because it was the only thing you could do. Likewise, when I rang Keong, the choice had already been made for me.
Of course, that wasn’t what went through my head the day I decided to meet him. My thinking was simple. I’d meet him out of respect for an old friendship. Village ties. The spirit of clans. It wasn’t so much that I had to give him face, it was because I had to respect customs. Someone from your old village resurfaces in your life, you treat them to dinner. I guess I’m very traditional in that respect. I don’t know what it’s like to turn my back on someone from my past, who knew my mother, whose mother fed me when I was hungry. No matter how difficult the experience of meeting Keong might be, I would do what was expected of me by suggesting that we meet, and he would recognise that I was merely fulfilling an obligation. We’d chat about life, quickly run out of things to say, and finally try to end our meeting as soon as possible.
More importantly, he would realise that I had changed, was no longer the person he knew, and maybe when he heard about my achievements since we last met on the streets of Puchong, he’d feel chastened, embarrassed by his own lack of success. He’d think, Why am I still scratching around in the dirt like a skinny chicken looking for worms, when I could be a cow eating grass like Ah Hock? Our meeting would be an awkward experience for him, even more than it was for me, and he would be the one to say, It’s getting late, I have to go now. And he’d never contact me again. He’d see that the brief bond we’d shared in our teenage years and early adulthood amounted to nothing, that we were different people now, worlds apart.
That was the choice I made.
We met at Ah Chan’s on Jalan Meru, a place I often used to stop at for dinner on my own before heading home, especially when I knew Jenny was having people over for one of her work gatherings, when they’d try out the latest products that had arrived from America, and discuss the various strategies they’d employ to sell them. They’d started to drink wine with the snacks they ate while they were chatting, and sometimes when I arrived home the house would be filled with voices as bright and clear as the clinking of their glasses. They’d smile at me as I walked in, and Jenny would wave from across the room, but their conversation would barely pause. I felt as if my presence was an intrusion, and it was safer to keep out of their world.
Ah Chan’s place was set back from the main road into town, and although it was covered with a zinc roof it had no walls, so the rush of traffic was always present – a constant dull river of sound that I found comforting after a day at the farm, with its unsettling noises. The bark of men’s voices, shouting, always shouting. The grinding of machinery. Even water, when it crashed down onto the planks of wood, had a jagged quality to it.
Ah Chan herself – in her sixties, with long, neat pure-silver hair – never spoke loudly. She talked to everyone – whether to me or the other customers or Hayati, the Indonesian helper who’d been with her for twenty years – in little more than a murmur. She and Hayati had got to know me over time, and I liked chatting to them. Hayati even spoke some Hokkien from working with Ah Chan. Can you believe that? We’d make jokes in our dialect that you wouldn’t be able to understand. Sometimes, if it was raining hard and there were no other customers, they’d sit with me, drinking tea while I ate my bak kut teh. They asked about Jenny as if they knew her – how was her business, was she eating well – but in fact Jenny had never been there, not even once. They’d tell me about their lives – back then Ah Chan was worried about her son in KL, who’d just lost his job because his factory was closing down and moving operations to Suzhou in China. She was hoping he’d move back to be close to her in Klang, but suspected that he’d leave the country altogether and look for work in China or Australia. He wanted to be successful, he told her, he didn’t want to work in a factory any more. And Hayati, who’d just got divorced but was happier than she’d ever been. Dumped her cheating asshole husband in Bandung when she’d last gone home and found out that he was having an affair with another woman. Living in a house that they’d built with Hayati’s money – all the cash she earned working a thousand miles from home. What do you expect, he’d said. You’re away for so long, what am I supposed to do? I expect you to get out of my life and never come back, she replied. Now she had her entire month’s salary to herself, didn’t have to send anything back to that bastard. She could spend it how she wanted. Men, she said. No point relying on them – in this life, you gotta do everything yourself.
‘You sure you don’t want to find another one?’ I sometimes asked. ‘Now that you’re single again.’
‘Find me a man who’s not a liar and a cheat and I’ll marry him straight away!’
A few times, when it was clear that no one else would be turning up because of the bad weather, they’d close early. They’d leave me a couple of portions of leftover soup to take back to Jenny, and turn off all the lights before making their way home. But I’d sit there in the half-dark for a while longer, listening to the drumming of the rain on the roof that drowned
out the noise of the traffic. The headlamps of the cars sparkling in gloom and mist, the water coursing along the open drains nearby. I’d feel like staying there all night.
Recently, just a few months ago, I went back to Ah Chan’s after many years, and only Hayati recognised me. Ah Chan did not. ‘Auntie! It’s me, Auntie,’ I said, but she just smiled briefly before looking away. At first I thought she might be going senile. She didn’t look any older, but it had been such a long time since my last visit, it wouldn’t have been surprising for her to have started losing her memory. Then I thought, maybe she’d heard about what I’d done, and didn’t want to talk to me. That must have been it – there was no other explanation. Hayati said, ‘It’s been a long time,’ but she too was subdued, distracted by the bubbling pots and the other customers who were calling for her. She didn’t try to exchange any words with me, didn’t smile when she walked past. I thought of asking how she was, whether she’d been back to Indonesia recently, whether she’d remarried – but I didn’t. Couldn’t. I finished my meal and left as quickly as I could. Didn’t even wait for my change. I’ve never gone back.
Ah Chan didn’t warm to Keong when we met there that first time. He looked much the same as he had nearly a decade earlier, only even skinnier, with dark rings under his eyes, his complexion slightly grey and powdery. Cheeks sunken. The long wispy ends of his hair, both front and back, were dyed coppery orange, just as they had been all those years before. But his clothes were smarter – a proper short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck to show off a gold chain, trousers with creases pressed down the front, and black leather shoes that made a clicking sound on the concrete as he approached. I thought, Those must have cost a lot.