Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (80 page)

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.

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S
YED
A
LWI, 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-figure 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.

But the legend was the legend. A Syed was a Syed, and an Alwi an Alwi. And the legend was that Syed Alwi’s grandfather, who was distantly related to the Perak royal family, had rebelled in some way, had rejected the life of the royal enclave and crossed the river and married a commoner on the other side. There were no dates to the legend; but that rebellion might have been in the 1880s. At that time people would have been locked into ritual and clan ways; and there would have had to be a very good reason—Syed Alwi’s grandfather was not an educated person—for something as desperate as rebellion and running away. Syed Alwi could find out nothing beyond the legend.

The rebel’s son, Syed Alwi’s father, was made to suffer. He was born in 1900. He was adopted by the royal community and sent to the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar, the college for the sons of ruling families. That was the family’s public obligation; the boy was of royal blood. In private, though, he was badly treated by the royal family. They didn’t allow him to eat with them. He was made to do housework and treated as a servant.