Among the Believers (44 page)

The trial was taking place far from Kerling, at Klang, on the west coast, about twenty miles from Kuala Lumpur. It was a Tamil taxi driver who took me there. But his thoughts were not of the trial. His thoughts were of money; they always were.

The first day I took him I said, “You haven’t put your meter on.” He said, “My head is full of something. I am thinking about how to go to Malacca tomorrow. It will cost a hundred and forty dollars at least. I don’t have the money. My sister is getting married.” I said, “Why will it cost so much to go to Malacca?” He said, “There are seven of us. My mother, my sister, my wife, and my three children. Seven. The fare will be twenty dollars each, minimum. By line taxi.” And as we stopped and started in the fuming Kuala Lumpur traffic, he involved me in his anxiety.

I said, “Do seven of you have to go to Malacca? Does your wife have to go?”

“She
must
go. It’s her sister getting married.”

“I thought you said it was your sister.”

“Her sister is my sister.”

“All right. I can see that your wife has to go. What about your own sister? Does she have to go to Malacca?”

“She
wants
to go. She knows the girl
well
.”

“Well, let your wife and sister go. Two fares. Forty dollars.”

“What about my mother? You don’t know our customs. My mother has to go.”

“All right. Why not let your mother, your wife, and your sister go? You stay.”

“Three women? Going on their own to Malacca?”

“All right. You go with them.”

“But if I go, the children can’t stay. They are very young and they’re all girls.”

So it was seven to Malacca, or nothing. One man, with six dependent women and girls: no wonder he seemed close to gibbering.

And now, taking me to the trial at Klang, he was close to gibbering again. Money, money: he needed lots of it. If only he could get his hands on sixty thousand dollars he would be all right, he said. He would give up taxi driving and go into stationery. There was money in stationery.
You deposited ten thousand with the wholesaler and he gave you twenty thousand dollars’ worth of goods with three months’ credit.

If only, if only. And he had these seven mouths to feed; and his three children were all girls; and there was his sister to marry off. And the government gave everything to the Malays. The Chinese were much nicer. They were dangerous enemies but good friends. “You know Malays? You like Malays? The Malays stab you in the back.” He bounced about with all his separate anguishes.

I said, “Did you go to Malacca? Did you borrow the money?”

“From a Punjabi. A hundred. Next month I have to pay him back a hundred and twenty-five.”

“So you borrow money at three hundred percent. And now you want to raise sixty thousand dollars.”

He changed the subject by going back to an older one: his expenses. He said he bought ten
cattis
of rice a week. “How much is a
catti?
” “A kilo.” “So you buy
twenty-two
pounds of rice a week?” “Yes.” Twenty-two dollars a day for the hire of his taxi from the company, he had said; twenty-two miles to Klang, he had said; and now, twenty-two pounds of rice a week. It was his fated number.

Yet for all his troubles, he was full of friends. He seemed to see them at every traffic jam. “He’s from my company.” Another time he said, “You see that car. I used to drive it. Then the manager called me and gave me this one and he gave that one to that fellow. He’s a very bad driver. He drinks and drives. I never do that. I just take a little toddy. Once a week. On Saturday afternoon. Two litres.”

“Two litres!”

“It’s good for the body.”

I said, “You don’t have money, but you have three children. You borrow money at three hundred percent to go to a wedding in Malacca. And now you tell me you get drunk every Saturday.” I saw in the mirror that one of his top front teeth was missing. “How did you lose that tooth?”

“In a scooter accident.”

“How do all these accidents happen to you? Why don’t you go back to the country and work your land?”

“Don’t have land.”

And that was so. It was hard to think that—long before Islam and the coming of the West—his southern-Indian ancestors had spread their religion and epics and sculpture and architecture to Southeast Asia. He
wouldn’t have known it himself. He was descended from labourers brought over in the nineteenth century and after to work on the British plantations; that was all his past. Now—in postcolonial, Muslim Malaysia—he was squeezed out. He was as much a lost man as Shafi and the other village Malays. And perhaps he was more lost, not having a sense of community or a knowledge of a pure past, not having a faith to turn to, not being able to blame the world, not knowing who to blame. And the idol-smashing at Kerling and Temerloh, the trial at Klang—in which he pretended not to be interested—these would only have been surface anxieties to a man born with a full burden of distress.

Town followed town on this developed western coastal strip: no Malay villages here. In Klang, we had to ask where the court was. It was a calm, colonial, two-storey building, some way out of the centre. There was no crowd in the yard. And upstairs, in the courtroom, there was no one on the public benches. The trial made headlines; it was closely followed; people were nervous. But the event itself seemed private, as unimportant as Shafi had said it was: a Malay magistrate, two Malay policemen, a young, good-looking Indian boy in the witness stand, an Indian woman interpreter in a yellow sari sitting beside the boy giving evidence, an Indian lawyer with sideburns asking questions.

The seven other accused men—who that night had faced the idol-smashers—were in the dock, a little timber-railed pen in the middle of the room; they seemed quite at ease. Four air conditioners roared; it was impossible to hear anything that was said by lawyer or witness or interpreter. A private occasion; yet four lost and foolish young men, bewildered by the new world, their bewilderment simplified into a dream of thirty smashed idols and an eternity in heaven, had died.

We went back to the town centre and after a drive-around went to the jetty, which was built over a beach of black mud. Rowing boats with missing planks rotted in that mud and were the colour of the mud; on the brown water boats still in use were moored between upright poles; crows and a starved cat picked at refuse. Rain came and dimmed the view without lessening the heat, made everything grey, fleetingly pitted the almost liquid mud. It was possible to imagine this unlovely bay a hundred years before: a fishing settlement perhaps, and it would have seemed then as a place to which the world would never come.

The gap-toothed Tamil driver, lost for some time, came back, wet from the rain. He had found some crabs to buy. He said in his
quick, excited way that crabs were twice the price in Kuala Lumpur.

I said, “Are you going to sell them?”

“Going to take them home. Going to use them.”

“You will never raise sixty thousand dollars.”

F
AR
from that coast, a new-cut road led up through the forested hills to the Genting Highlands. The clouds came down over the hills; it was cool enough for pullovers. But at the end of that road, after the tall white trunks of forest trees, after the forest gloom, the creepers, the large, heart-shaped leaves, the ferns and wild palms and wild bananas; after that, there was no settlement, no town, only a vast amusement area, a concrete playground in the mist: a toy lake, toy walks, toy trains, a hotel and a casino.

The pleasures of money in Malaysia were simple. Money magnified the limitations of places like Malaysia, small, uneducated, and coming late to everything. Money—from oil, rubber, tin, palm oil—changed old ways. But money only turned people into buyers of imported goods, fixed the country in a dependent relationship with the developed world, kept all men colonials.

It was possible to understand the withdrawal of someone like Shafi; the rage of the idol-smashers; and the wish, among other Malays, to pretend that they were Arabs, living as purely as in the days of the Prophet.

  4
Araby

T
here was an Islamic commune in Kuala Lumpur. The young Malays there were said to have rejected modern ways and modern goods; they farmed a little piece of land and lived, as
they thought, like Arabs—old Arabs, not new Arabs. They did not welcome visitors. Shafi—sympathetic to the commune idea, but not wishing to interfere in the affairs of another group—passed on my name to them. For many days nothing happened.

Then Khairul telephoned me. He was of the commune. His English accent was clipped and sharp, like a Japanese in an old-fashioned American war film. And, like a character in a film, he said, “How do I know you are not KGB or CIA?” I thought he knew. He said that some time ago they had allowed two reporters from
Time
to visit them, but they had since grown to feel that the men were CIA. (In fact, as I learned later,
Time
didn’t use the story; and Khairul—like other shunners of publicity running into an unexpected silence—must have been a little peeved.)

He said he was going to bring three people to see me that evening. I asked him to bring two. I said I was too tired to face four people in my Holiday Inn room.

“What aspect are you interested in?” Khairul said, in his snapping Japanese voice. “Spiritual, economic?”

“Spiritual.”

And then I thought I had said the wrong thing. It would have been better to talk about the economic side. From Anwar Ibrahim of ABIM I had heard a little about the economic ideas of some Islamic groups in Malaysia. They said the West was collapsing. “And they’re creating the impression that the Islamic economic system comprises mainly preparing ketchup and
balal
[ritually pure] foods. In terms of slaughtering one cow a week.”

But my worry about the choice of subject was needless, like my precaution about the number of visitors. Khairul and his men didn’t come. Instead, there was a message asking me to meet a man outside the Parliament Building at ten the next morning. I decided not to do that. I thought that if I did nothing, and kept silent afterwards, there was a chance that Khairul’s interest might be piqued, and he might become the seeker. And it was like that.

One evening some days later, about half past seven, Khairul telephoned. He was downstairs, in the Holiday Inn, with his three men. They came up. Or, rather, they blew in. Three of them—including Khairul himself—were quite startling with their turbans and long green gowns.

One man wore trousers and shirt. He sat in one of the armchairs. A turbanned man sat in the other armchair. Khairul, merry-eyed, sunburnt, unexpectedly jovial in his Arab costume, sat on the low table between the armchairs. A very small, bearded man, who said he was a journalist and wished to take notes, sat on the chair at the dressing table and immediately took out pen and paper.

Khairul said, “What do you want to know?”

And the four men so filled the room, and I was still so startled by their appearance—turbans, grubby gowns—and their excited state, that I forgot again about the Islamic economic system.

I said, “You are all different people. I would like to know how you have arrived at where you are.”

“Yes,” Khairul said, “we’re all different.”

All of them, except for Khairul, came from the state of Kedah in the north. The man in trousers and shirt—he looked more Chinese than Malay and didn’t seem as excited as the others—said he was a doctor. Khairul himself was a lawyer. The white-turbanned man with a mulatto cast of face was a missionary and a
haji
, someone who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was the least fine of the four, but he was the spokesman. Khairul interpreted, and soon was quite at ease, drawing up and folding his legs on the low table below the hanging light in its Holiday Inn wickerwork shade. I was on the bed, in pyjamas.

I asked the
haji
whether he had any romantic feeling for village life. He said no. Village life was not Islamic.

The doctor said, “There are many animistic and Hindu traditions.”

It was what Shafi had told me: that contradiction in Shafi’s thought had come out towards the end of our last conversation. The village way was the true Malay way; but that way had to be altered. Belief had to be purified, the old pagan traditions of the village uprooted.

Khairul said, “The wedding ceremonies in the villages are still Hindu.”

“Does it matter?”

Yes, the
haji
said. It went against the Koran.

The
haji
said his mother’s family came from Yemen. They went to Kedah by way of Thailand. His father’s family came from Sumatra. They were—and the
haji
and everybody else laughed—cannibals, head-hunters. It was his grandfather who had been converted to Islam. His father had become a religious teacher. He was a farmer and poor; when
he died he left exactly one dollar. He refused to send his son to the government school. He taught the boy himself.

The
haji
said, in Khairul’s translation, “He taught me everything. He taught me Koran, Arabic. He taught me about Napoleon and Hitler.”