by Tash Aw
Speaking of dreaming: during the trial, when my thoughts began to drift away in the heat and endless talking in the courtroom, I’d think back to those long days on the farm, my whole body training itself to cut and slash at everything that stood in my way. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that my arms and legs reacted the way they did all those years later, on the riverbank facing that as-yet nameless man. When my defence lawyer insisted that I had no control over my actions, and that they had been totally without precedent, I suddenly remembered the sharpness of the blades of my childhood – their lightness in my hands.
As I began to see the boundaries of our piece of land – began to see bare earth and water now that the thorny scrub had been cut back – I started to feel a sense of permanence that I’d never experienced before. A feeling that I was connected to an unchanging place that belonged to me. A place that owned me. The sea was always restless, constantly twisting and warping, flowing away from us or overwhelming us. We were never certain of anything with the sea, but the soil – our soil – was solid. It would not leave, not even after we had left it.
When we were digging the first of the vegetable beds, my mother would often stop and stare at our plot of land. She’d shield her eyes from the glare of the sun and stand motionless.
‘What’s the matter?’ I’d ask.
‘Just looking,’ she’d reply. ‘Checking.’
‘What do you think is going to happen – the land is going to disappear like smoke?’ I joked. ‘Even if you set fire to it, the land will still be the same.’ It was true. When we burnt one part of the land to clear space to plant vegetables, the flames had danced over the surface of the earth, but after the fire had died out the soil remained exactly as it had been before. Rich red-brown in colour.
She laughed as she resumed tilling the soil. We were working the earth with cangkuls at that point – the one I was using was the same size as the ones adults use, and each time I lifted it and brought it crashing down into the thick red mud I knew that I was now able to do as much work as my mother. I hadn’t fully realised up to that point how much of a burden I’d been to her. Perhaps I’d sensed it in the way that children do, but once that awareness had fully entered my thinking, I had to prove to her that I could make her life easier, not harder.
We planted the first of the vegetables just at the end of the rainy season, when the heaviest downfalls were over and the earth was heavy with moisture. We chose leafy vegetables we knew would grow quickly, as well as sweet potato, which in just a few months began to grow like a weed. Towards the end of the season we harvested some things for ourselves – for the first time in our lives we enjoyed a feeling of abundance, of having a supply of food that wasn’t dependent on someone else. Nature, from which we’d always protected ourselves, was now providing us with a means to survive and be independent.
The rains were just right that first year – constant but never too heavy, and all our crops grew well. My mother was able to take a stall in the market in Kuala Selangor and sell whatever we grew. We dug a second vegetable plot, and a third, and soon my mother had a bigger stall, and regular customers who especially liked our string beans and choy sum. The first time I helped out at the stall, on a Saturday morning, I heard people greeting my mother by name. Boss Lee they called her, as they exchanged their news. ‘That’s your son that you’ve been talking about!’ they said when they saw me. ‘What a strong healthy boy – you’re lucky!’
‘Must be joking.’ My mother laughed, and ruffled my hair. ‘Look at this good-for-nothing lazy worm.’
Her customers dressed differently from the people of the village – not exactly like big-city dwellers, but not country folk either, with proper shirts and trousers, that didn’t look as if they came from a night market. They spoke to my mother politely, even when they haggled over the price. They seemed to know about me – the fact that school was becoming a problem because I wasn’t very good at maths or science – and sometimes my mother talked to them about me as if I wasn’t there at all. What can I do, he’s lost interest in school. His teacher says he doesn’t pay attention, he’s tired all the time. Boys must be good at maths, otherwise die wor. I hated being invisible, but I was comforted to see the customers’ familiarity with my mother. She had a life outside the farm, a life that included other people than me, who knew about the problems she faced, and even if only for a few minutes a day, she could feel as though they took an interest in her.
It was about that time that her hearing began to fail. I’d always known that she had a slight problem, because she spoke louder than she needed to. I don’t mean that she shouted, it was just that her voice was pitched as though she was constantly making an announcement. It was the result of an infection in her inner ear that she’d suffered as a child, she’d always explained. ‘Too much playing in the rain.’ I never believed she’d ever had a proper medical assessment of her condition. How could she have? Families like hers wouldn’t have had the means to send her to a doctor for something as minor as that. During that period, when the small farm was expanding and we often found ourselves working the soil fifty or sixty yards apart from each other, I’d call out to her and she wouldn’t look up, but continued carefully pressing the earth around the base of the seedlings she was planting row by row. I thought it might have been the intense concentration on her task that distracted her; I thought she was in her own bubble, savouring the knowledge that those little sprigs of green – barely even recognisable as leaves – would soon be sold for money. Ma! It was only when I emptied my lungs in a full-throated cry that she’d look up in surprise and wave at me. Otherwise she’d continue working the soil, squatting so she could get close to the ground. Her back had started to ache from all the work we were doing, so it was easier that way. ‘Look, my hips are still flexible,’ she’d say. ‘I’m still a young woman!’
I knew for certain that the problem was getting worse the week we released the fish into the ponds. We’d cleared the edges of the two murky pools of water to reveal a pair of neat squares. Old Pak Awang must have used a bulldozer to dig them all those years ago – there was no way nature was capable of such perfection. Once the edges of the ponds were defined, I slid into the water to clear away the weeds that had entirely covered their surfaces with a thin carpet. I trod water carefully – growing up in a fishing village teaches you never to trust what lies under the surface – and I was afraid of cutting my feet on sharp pieces of wood, or sheets of metal or other junk that had been thrown into the ponds’ surprising depths. Unlike the sea, their water was stagnant and slightly cold, and I wondered what lay at the bottom, whether if I dived down to the muddy bed I’d find old bones – the skeletons of fish or monkeys, or even humans. I scooped the weed out of the ponds and dumped it on the grassy banks, where it collected in small piles.
I’d been in the water for some time on the second day when I felt my leg twitch – a sudden sharp contraction. A monster, I thought. A real goddamn monster. I writhed in panic as I felt my leg tighten from the toes all the way to the calf. I didn’t know what was happening, and I began to thrash about, but I was in the middle of the pond, and the safety of the banks seemed far away. I tried to swim towards the edge, but the more I moved, the more my leg seized up, weighing me down like a block of concrete. I looked around for my mother, and saw her walking along the edge of the other pond. Ma, I cried weakly, but my voice was strangled by the pain and the fear that gripped me. Later – much later – I would know that I’d just had cramp, and that if I remained calm it would pass. But that first time I had no idea what was happening to my body, and the terror of the unfamiliar sensation was worse than the pain itself. I began to sink, my mouth and nose dipping below the water. Where were my superhero powers now? The monster was dragging me to the depths of the pond, and I was fighting, but losing.
My mother must have walked farther away – I could no longer see her. I called out for her again, loudly now. Again and again. I found strength in my legs and kicked towards
the grassy bank closest to me, but I was still sinking. Maaa! I didn’t know if I would make it. The monster was ferocious, it had caught hold of my leg and wasn’t letting go. I pulled and kicked. I would make it. I would escape the beast, and one day I would return to kill it. My head dipped under the surface, but by then I was no longer afraid, I was close enough to the side of the pond to know that I had won. The creature would not claim me. We would duel another day.
I lay on the grass and looked around for my mother. She was not so far away, on the other side of the second pond, crouching on all fours as she reached into the water to salvage something from under the surface. ‘Ma!’ I shouted. I wanted to tell her about my ordeal, but she didn’t look up, peering instead into the water as she fished around for something I couldn’t see. My leg began to relax, and I felt as if I wanted to cry – out of embarrassment more than anything. I stretched out my leg and stood up. My body felt perfectly normal, as if nothing had happened to it. Why had I reacted so badly? I felt ashamed at having been so afraid, and even wondered if I’d imagined the whole pain. Call yourself a wuxia hero. It had been nothing. But my mother hadn’t looked up – she hadn’t heard anything.
We bought twenty tilapia and released them into the ponds. ‘They’re like us,’ my mother said. ‘They can survive anywhere.’ They sank slowly into the water, as if they were too surprised to swim, and I never saw them apart from when I came to feed them. My mother and I spent even more time outdoors – now that the vegetables were under control we had to devise ways to chase away the egrets that came to fish in our suddenly fertile ponds. At the start, welded by the invisible ties that bond a mother to a child, I worked in close proximity to her, and she’d give me instructions on how to carry out my tasks, but now we often worked on opposite ends of what we referred to as ‘the farm’. That meant calling out to each other, and I soon got used to the fact that she could no longer hear me unless I was standing close by.
‘Buy her a hearing aid,’ Keong said. I’d become friends with him by then, and – being older and from the city – what he said carried weight. In fact I had been thinking of a hearing aid for some time, but I knew we couldn’t afford it. When I’d suggested it to my mother she’d said, ‘But I can hear just fine.’ Which I knew meant: We can’t afford to buy anything.
‘Leave it to me,’ Keong said. ‘You’re my little brother. I’ll fix it for you.’
The next day, late in the afternoon, I was harvesting some water spinach when I heard an unfamiliar beeping noise – a scooter coming down the lane that led to our farm, its rider honking insistently. No one ever came our way at that time of the day. The moment I saw the little red scooter I knew it was Keong. He stopped, and beckoned me over.
‘I don’t want to get mud on the wheels!’ he shouted.
I jogged over to him and admired the scooter, a Honda with red and white stripes on its fuel tank. ‘You’re kidding me! Where’d you get that?’
‘Outside the Nasi Kandar shop in Kuala Selangor.’
I knew what he meant, but I still asked, ‘You bought it from someone?’
‘Dumb fool!’ He threw his head back and laughed. ‘Of course I didn’t buy it. This old guy went in for lunch, wasn’t paying attention. I knew he was the type of idiot who wouldn’t keep an eye on his bike. I broke the lock and rode off. Easy as anything.’ He produced a screwdriver from his pocket and held it in front of my face as proof of his cunning.
‘Better not let anyone see you riding it.’
‘Relax, brother. I’m taking it down to Klang to sell it right now. New bike like this will attract maaaaaany customers.’
‘How much will you get for it?’
‘Enough!’ he shouted as he rode away. I wanted to call out and tell him he should wear a helmet, but he was already too far away.
The next day, when my mother and I were packing up the stall in the market, I saw Keong sitting under a tree across the road, smoking a cigarette. He waved at me and I went over to see him.
‘Don’t let your mother see you hanging out with a scoundrel like me.’
‘Think you’re such hot shit? She’s got better things to worry about than you.’
He reached into his pocket and drew out a fistful of cash. ‘Well, she can stop worrying about her hearing.’ He handed me the money, and I put it in my pocket without counting it. I felt the thick bundle pressing against my thigh, and suddenly I felt scared of losing it. What if it fell out of my pocket? What if someone stole it? What if the police knew I had something I shouldn’t have had? Later, I’d feel guilty that I didn’t feel more shame. That I didn’t think, This money isn’t mine. This money was stolen. This money belongs to someone else. But at that moment I didn’t consider any of those things. The only fear I had was of losing the cash.
‘Thanks, Keong,’
‘No need to thank your big brother.’ He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Now I’m going to take you to the shop in Klang to buy the damn thing. I don’t trust a kid like you to do it yourself.’
We sat on the bus in silence, and later we cycled back to the farm together. He had nothing to do, he said, so he might as well come with me. Get some fresh air. ‘Otherwise I’ll be bored and get into trouble again.’ He took charge of the hearing aid, strapping it tightly to his handlebars with some raffia string he’d brought along specially. ‘You’re such a bad cyclist,’ he said. ‘If you fall, you’ll fuck everything up. Better that I take it.’ He wouldn’t let me touch the hearing aid until we were at the front door, and he didn’t leave until I’d gone inside the house.
I waited until the next morning to give the new gadget to my mother. She eyed it suspiciously and said, ‘But I don’t need it, I can hear just fine.’ I waited for her to ask me where I’d got it, whereupon I’d tell her the story Keong and I had prepared: that he had an aunt who worked in a shop in town, and who occasionally got to buy unsold stock at bargain prices. But she didn’t ask, she just kept turning the small lump of flesh-coloured plastic over in her fingers. ‘My friend Keong got it,’ I said.
‘I don’t need it. My hearing is good.’
‘Please, Ma. Just try it. If you don’t need it I’ll sell it.’
‘OK. Make sure you get a good price! I’ll just use it once, so it’ll be like new.’
Of course she never took it off again after that, except to wipe it clean and put it in its box every night before she went to bed. ‘I’ll keep it in good condition in case you need to resell it,’ she’d say from time to time, even a couple of years later when it had begun to malfunction, and would make all sorts of high-pitched screeching noises in the middle of conversations, or in the middle of a working day when we were digging the soil in the vegetable beds. I’d hear that strangled wail drifting in the air, and I’d chuckle at the thought of selling it on to someone else.
The farm gave us three years of stability, and although we never had enough money to live the way we wanted – the way people did on TV or in magazines – we had the sensation of control. We had mastered the small patch of land we owned, were extracting from it everything it was capable of giving us. We sold vegetables and a modest but steady catch of tilapia at the market each week, but we knew that we could never afford to expand the farm. We felt the limits of our potential – but the presence of those boundaries also felt comforting, in a way. For once we had a sense of our place in the world.
Curiously, the only other time I felt properly rooted to somewhere was when I was in jail. The routine, the frustration that was common to all the inmates, the meaninglessness of time, the absence of options – I was locked in a space that was mine, and nothing could change that, not even all the books I read to pretend I was somewhere else. I could read stories about life in Brazil or snowy Sweden, but when I finished I’d still be in my cell, just as I was before, the days stretching ahead of me.
That third year at the farm, people in the village began to talk about the spring tides, but we weren’t concerned. When you grow up by the sea in an area li
ke that, the tides are as constant and present as the air around you. You think you know everything about them. You understand how destructive and regenerative they can be. How they carry the boats out to sea and bring them back again. How they swell with the seasons, bringing greater harvests at some times of the year, growing lean at others. When you know something so intimately, you don’t fear it. We’d seen the spring tides before, always towards the end of the year, which doesn’t make sense because that’s not springtime. You’d get a sense that the tides would be higher than usual, because of the way the moon shone – with an unusual glow, not really brighter than a normal full moon, but with a strange intensity. You wouldn’t notice this unless you spent a lot of time studying it – unless your livelihood depended on it. The winds would gather from the south-west, and you’d know that cyclones were building further north in Asia.
During these times, the village would prepare to defend itself against the onslaught of the sea. We’d rebuild the flood defences and move the boats further up the creek. Sometimes the families closest to the sea would move themselves and their belongings into the homes of relatives further inland, and resign themselves to rebuilding their houses once the floods had subsided. They’d done it before, and they’d do it again. It wasn’t the end of the world.
People said, Looks like it’s going to be bad this year. They said that every year – we didn’t care too much. Just to be safe, though, my mother and I borrowed sandbags from someone in the village, planning to stack them around the seaward boundary of the farm, three bags high. That would stop the worst of any floods, we thought. They were so heavy it took both of us to lift them. Wuxia warrior, you have to help this poor villager, I told myself as I strained to lift each bag. Without you the sea monster will claim your mother and all her land. We hadn’t finished building the barrier when my mother pulled a muscle in her back. I could see her struggling, but she was barely able to hold her end of the sandbag. When she bent down to lift the next one with me she let out a sharp cry. Aie! Followed swiftly by a sharp intake of breath. Sucking in the air between her teeth.