Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (82 page)

There were other cures like that. The family went to bomohs for years. Then they ceased to hope for a cure, and they let the invalid be.

At one time he ran away from the house. Again there was no date; people didn’t want to talk about this episode too much. He went to the state of Kelantan, and there he had a breakdown within his breakdown. When the family went to bring him back, they found that he had been translating the Koran, from English into Malay. They burned what he had written.

Syed Alwi said, “The translation is important, because it shows that even in the other world he was still trying to find God. But I am not sure whether this translation was done in the other world, in this world, or in both. He accepted the burning as a natural thing to have happened, because it was in accordance with their beliefs. As he accepted the way of life of the kampung.”

So all the writing of his father, from the time before he was born, was lost to Syed Alwi. Many years later he saw some of his father’s exercise books.

“The handwriting was bad. I couldn’t read it very well. Hardly at all. But practically at the end of every other sentence was the word ‘always.’ ”

For Syed Alwi it would have been a haunting word.

There were lucid periods. In one of those, some time before 1930, he began to build a new house in the kampung, but the money ran out and he couldn’t put up the first floor. Syed Alwi, telling the story in his own unfinished house, between the snake holes in the hillside cutting on one side and the little stream on the other side, said, “So when this thing happened to me in my house, the image of my father’s unfinished house came to my mind.”

When Syed Alwi’s father broke down in 1922 there were three children. After that six more children were born, and there were six miscarriages. Out of the six born, two were stillborn.

Syed Alwi said, “So my mother had fifteen conceptions.”

Twelve of those were after the breakdown.

I said, “It sounds murderous.” It was the word that came.

He looked very worried. He said then, with melancholy, “I don’t know.” Tears came to his eyes.

His father wanted his children to be educated. He had only his pension, but there was an Indian woman in the kampung who helped. She had a great regard for the family, and she loved the children. She had a certain amount of jewelry in solid gold, and whenever money was needed for the children’s education or for their books she lent all her jewelry to Syed Alwi’s father for him to pawn. She lent her jewelry in this way only for the education of the children. When one of the sons came back from Singapore in the uniform of Raffles College, a famous colonial college, she was as proud of him as if he were her own son. Her own son—she had only one—worked as a laborer on the railway.

She was a Tamil. She was not rich. Apart from her jewelry she had nothing. She made a living preparing small snacks and savories for the government-run toddy shop in the kampung. Her father would have come from South India to work as a contract laborer on the estates. Her husband would also have been a laborer on an estate. When he died, she left the estate and the estate life and struck out on her own. She came to the kampung and built a house not far from the Alwis’ house.

This woman became Syed Alwi’s fairy godmother when he began to go to the Malay primary school in 1936. He remembered her as a woman in her late thirties, wiry, not kindly-looking, off-putting but not ugly. Every morning on his way to school he stopped at her house. She had a jug of hot milk waiting for him on her earthen fireplace. Milk was seldom drunk in the Alwi house. Malays didn’t drink milk; they used condensed milk in coffee, but that was all. The milk used in cakes and curries and meat was always coconut milk, made from the white kernel of the ripe nut.

In 1940, after four years at the Malay primary school, where they mainly studied geography and literature, Syed Alwi and an elder brother were sent to the King Edward VII secondary school in the town of Taiping. Syed Alwi’s father, at great sacrifice, and again with the help of the Indian woman, rented a house there for his sons. Syed Alwi understood later that his father, through all his darkness, was educating him to be a high civil servant, as he himself had once been.

Everyone in the kampung knew about the condition of the father; and people knew about it at the school in Taiping as well. There was no stigma. In fact, there was a little awe. Malays felt that great minds cracked when they were over-extended; and Syed Alwi’s father, known to have been quite brilliant when very young, was considered such a great mind. There was a word in Malay for that kind of crack-up:
gila-isin,
becoming mad through over-application, studying too hard, believing too hard.

Syed Alwi said, “My father was considered gila-isin because he was pursuing God or something like that. Though the idea of pursuing God was something that only some relatives knew. It was not spread out, just in case people might misinterpret it, and think that this gila-isin was a kind of punishment.”

In 1941 Syed Alwi’s brother ran away and joined the Royal Navy in Singapore. He was a kampung boy, really; he liked the kampung life, the kampung fellowship. He liked going out to work in the rice fields with relatives. He didn’t like being at the college in Taiping; that was his father’s idea. So—with the help of people in the kampung: there was a kind of kampung conspiracy—he ran away to Singapore and said he was older than he was and joined the Royal Navy. Syed Alwi’s father, apart from wanting his son to finish his secondary education, was a pacifist; he hated the idea of pain and killing. He went to see the British Resident in Perak; and in the end, after a lot of trouble, he paid seventy-five dollars, a month’s pension, to buy his son out of the navy. Just then the war started. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed the Singapore naval base, and no one in the family ever got to know what happened to that brother.

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.