The Garden of Evening Mists (9 page)

Magnus, who had once hiked up one of the mountains in that region, saw the potential of the plans immediately. A week later he obtained a concession of six hundred acres in the highlands from the government. He sold off his shares in the rubber plantations to my father just before the Great Slump, an act which my father would always hold against him.

A government surveyor, William Cameron, had mapped out the highlands in 1885. He had come upon the endlessly unfolding misty mountains and valleys while traversing the ranges on his elephants, charting the borders of Pahang and Perak. ‘Like Hannibal crossing the Alps,’ I would often hear Magnus tell visitors during my stay in Majuba.

Magnus brought in seeds and tea plants from the hills of Ceylon. Labourers were shipped in from Southern India to clear the jungle. In the space of four, five years, the slopes and hillsides in his estate were covered with tea bushes. The tea trees eventually became stunted from the workers’ constant picking, like the bonsai trees maintained by generations of Japanese nobility. A few years after he started planting, two other rival tea estates were also established in Cameron Highlands, but by that time the Majuba label had taken root in Malaya.

It was the only brand of tea my father prohibited in our home.

* * *

Frederik tried to engage me in conversation on the short drive back to Majuba House, but my thoughts were on Aritomo and on my failure to convince him to design a garden for me. Staring out of the window, I paid scant attention to the terraced slopes of the vegetable farms outside Majuba, or the occasional bungalow we passed. It was only when the Gurkha at Majuba House opened the gates for us that I noticed the cars parked in the driveway.

‘What’s happening here?’

‘Magnus’s
braai
. He has one every Sunday,’ Frederik said. ‘Starts at eleven in the morning and usually goes on till seven, eight at night. You’ll love it.’ I vaguely recalled Magnus telling me about the
braai
the night before, but I had forgotten all about it.

In the passageway outside the kitchen, we nearly collided into Emily scurrying out with a tray of strange-looking tubes. ‘
Aiyoh
, we were so worried about you-
lah
,’ she scolded me.

‘Everyone’s outside already.’ She nudged her chin at the back of the house. ‘Go and join them.

No, not you, Frederik! You come and help me. Take these out to Magnus.’ She pushed the tray to me. The glistening tubes, I saw, were coils of uncooked sausages, each one about an inch thick and one and a half feet long.

Fifteen to twenty people were gathered on the terrace garden behind the house, a mix of Chinese, Malays and Europeans. Some lounged in rattan chairs while others stood talking in small groups, a drink in their hands. The day was bright and windless, but the atmosphere was sombre. A woman laughed, then stopped abruptly and glanced around. Plates and cutlery and casseroles of food took up a long table at one end of the terrace. Curries simmered over charcoal stoves and sunlight winked off the tuberous bottles of Tiger beer planted in a tub of ice. In the shade of a camphor tree, Magnus watched over a barbecue grill that had been made from an old oil drum cut in half lengthways and laid on a trestle. The ridgebacks lazed at his feet, scratching themselves and looking up at me as I approached.

‘Ah, You’ve been found!’ Magnus said. ‘Knew you’d be at Yugiri when you didn’t show up for breakfast.’

‘I’ve never seen these at the Cold Storage,’ I said, handing the tray of sausages to him.

‘
Boerewors
. Made them myself.’

‘They look like something Brolloks and Bittergal might leave behind,’ I said. The dogs glanced up at the sound of the names, their tails flattening the grass.

‘
Sies!
’ Magnus grimaced. ‘Put them on the
braai
. You’ll soon see how
lekker
they taste.’

The sausages were flecked with coriander seeds and other spices Magnus refused to divulge. ‘It’s my Ouma’s recipe,’ was all he would say. They gave off the most wonderful aroma when they began cooking over the coals and I realised suddenly that, except for the tea I had drunk with Aritomo, I had consumed nothing all morning.

‘Before you think I’m being disrespectful,’ Magnus tilted his bottle of Tiger Beer at the people scattered across the lawn, ‘by the time we heard about Gurney’s death, it was too late to cancel.’ He took another swig from his bottle. ‘You get what you wanted from Aritomo?’

‘He turned me down.’

‘
Ag
, shame. But stay here. For as long as you want. The air will do you a world of good.’

His eye searched the crowd. ‘Didn’t Frederik remind him about the
braai
?’

‘He has work to do,’ I said. Magnus picked up a pair of metal tongs. ‘Were there reprisals against him when the Occupation ended?’

‘By the anti-Japanese guerrillas?’ He wiped his lips with his hand. ‘Of course not.’

‘He told me he was arrested.’

‘Well, the Brits couldn’t charge him with anything,’ Magnus replied. ‘And I vouched for him.’ He turned the
boerewors
over and fat dripped into the coals, sending up a cloud of fragrant smoke. ‘He made sure we weren’t sent to the camps. At one point in the war he had more than thirty people working for him. All of them – and their families – survived the war.’

‘We should have come here to wait out the war.’

He stopped rearranging the sausages on the grill and looked at me. ‘Weeks before the Japs attacked, I told your father to bring all of you here.’

I stared at him. ‘He never said anything about it.’

‘He should have listened to me. I wish he had.’

The noise of the party behind me seemed to recede into the distance. I felt a sudden fury at my father’s obdurate pride. Magnus was right – things would have turned out differently: I would be unharmed, my mother would not be lost inside her mind, and Yun Hong would still be alive.

‘You knew early on that the Japanese would attack us?’ I asked, watching him carefully.

‘Anyone with half a brain looking at a map would have realised that,’ Magnus replied.

‘China was too big for Japan to swallow – all it could do was nibble at the edges. But these smaller territories in the southern seas were easier meat.’

Frederik came out with another tray, this one filled with lamb chops. ‘Buy a donkey,’

Magnus said to him.

‘Buy a what?’ I wondered if I had heard him correctly.

‘I’m trying to make this young man here speak more Afrikaans,’ Magnus said. ‘He’s been mixing with the English for so long he’s forgotten his own language. Tell her what it means.’

‘
Baie dankie
,’ Frederik said, and I asked him to spell it out for me. ‘It means “Thank you”. I’ve been taking lessons in Malay too,’ he added. ‘It’s funny, how many words they both share:
pisang, piring… pondok
.’

‘It’s because of the slaves taken from Java to the Cape,’ said Magnus. He poured his beer into the coals and asked the two of us to follow him. He introduced us to the guests. In spite of the chill in the air, I was the only one wearing gloves.

‘Meet Malcolm,’ Magnus announced. ‘He’s the Protector of Aborigines. Be careful of what you say when he’s around – this man speaks Malay and Cantonese and Mandarin and Hokkien.’

‘Malcolm Toombs,’ the man said with a warm smile. He was in his late forties, with a guileless face I immediately took to. It probably helped in his work, looking after the welfare of the Orang Asli.

‘Not a grave person, in spite of his name,’ Frederik whispered to me.

We piled our plates with food from the buffet table and were about to start eating when Toombs asked us to stand in a loose circle. Magnus’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. We closed our eyes in a minute’s silence in memory of the High Commissioner. Only now did the full import of Gurney’s death strike me. Despite what the government had been telling us, things were getting worse.

‘How’s the
boerewors
?’ Magnus asked once everyone had sat down and begun eating.

‘They taste much better than they look.’ I chewed, swallowed and said, ‘How did Gurney die?’

‘Terrorists ambushed his car and shot him. Happened yesterday afternoon on the road up to Fraser’s Hill,’ Magnus said. ‘They were going on holiday, apparently – he and his wife.

Travelling in an armed convoy.’

‘And yet they managed to kill him,’ said Jaafar Hamid, the owner of the Lakeview Hotel at Tanah Rata. He pulled his chair closer to us.

‘Why was the bloody news kept back until today?’ Magnus asked.

‘Everything’s censored these days,’ I said. ‘But, by now, there’ll hardly be a wireless anywhere in the world that isn’t broadcasting what has happened. They must have already killed him when you were bringing me here from the station. That’s why there were so many army vehicles on the road.’

‘That’s possible... ’ Toombs said, quietly. ‘It’s quite a coup for the Reds. They’ll be dancing and singing in the jungles tonight, I’m afraid.’

‘Gurney’s wife?’ I said, looking at Magnus.

‘The wireless said the CTs fired at the vehicle in front first. When they started shooting at his Rolls, Gurney got out from the car and walked away from it.’

‘That was reckless of him,’ one of the European women spoke up.

Magnus corrected her immediately. ‘He was drawing fire away from her, Sarah.’

‘Poor woman… ’ said Emily.

Magnus squeezed his wife’s shoulder. ‘I think it’ll be good for us to look at our security measures again, come up with some suggestions to improve them.’

‘There’s not much more we can do, is there?’ a middle-aged man said. Earlier he had introduced himself to me as Paul Crawford, telling me that he owned a strawberry farm in Tanah Rata, and that he was a childless widower. ‘We’ve put up fences around our homes, trained our workers to be sentries, and formed a Home Guard in the kampongs. But we’re still waiting for the Special Constables we asked for.’

When the war ended, I had hoped I would never have to experience something like that again. But here I was, in the heart of another war.

‘Those few weeks after the Japs surrendered,’ Emily said, ‘we kept hearing about the communists killing the Malays in their kampongs, and the Malays taking their revenge on the Chinese. It was frightening.’

‘The Chinese squatters I’ve spoken to still believe that it was the communists who defeated the Japs,’ Toombs remarked.

‘My first week in Malaya,’ Frederik said, ‘a soldier told me he had been with the first batch of troops coming back to take control of the country. He thought the communists had won the war. Every town his regiment drove through had buntings and posters celebrating the communists’ victory against the Japs.’

‘Malaya, Malaya,’ Hamid grumbled. ‘None of you find it strange that what you English so carelessly named ‘Malaya’ – my
tanah-air
, my home – didn’t
officially
exist until only recently?’

‘This is my home too, Enchik Hamid,’ I said.

‘You
orang China
, you’re all descendants of immigrants,’ Hamid retorted. ‘Your loyalty will always lie with China.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ I replied.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. You’re a
Straits
Chinese aren’t you? Even worse! The whole lot of you think home is England – a place few of you have ever seen.’ Hamid rapped his chest with his fist. ‘We Malays,
we
are the true sons of the soil, the
bumiputera
.’ He looked around at us. ‘Not one of you here can be called that.’

‘Please-
lah
, Hamid,’ Emily said.

‘Old countries are dying, Hamid,’ I said, keeping a grip on my anger, ‘and new ones are being born. It doesn’t matter where one’s ancestors came from. Can you say – with absolute certainty – that one of
your
forebears did not sail from Siam, from Java, or Aceh, or from the islands in the Sunda Straits?’

‘What do you mean, that Malaya didn’t exist until recently?’ This was Peter Boyd, the assistant manager of a rubber estate; he had only arrived from London a few weeks before to take over from his predecessor who had been killed by the CTs.

‘It’s always been a convenient name for the rag-tag collection of territories the British had obtained control of,’ I explained before Hamid could reply. ‘First there were the Federated Malay States, each one headed by a governor and situated on the west coast.’ It shocked me that such ignorance among the Europeans sent out to administer Malaya was still common; no wonder the Malays had had enough and wanted the
Mat Sallehs
out. ‘Then there were the Non-Federated Malay States,’ I continued, ‘ruled by their sultans with assistance from British advisers. And then there were the Straits Settlements – Malacca, Penang and Singapore.’

‘And all stolen from us Malays,’ Hamid said.

‘Who were too lazy to have done anything with it,’ Emily cut in. ‘You know very well, Hamid, that we Chinese built up the tin industry. We established towns, and we brought in commerce. Kuala Lumpur was founded by a Chinese! Don’t pretend you didn’t know.’

‘Hah! We were far too clever to want to spend our days slaving for the
Mat Salleh
in the tin mines, unlike you
orang China
.’ Hamid leaned forward with his plate. ‘Eh, Emily, some more of your
belachan
please.’

The discovery of tin in the Kinta Valley in the eighteenth century had compelled the British to ship indentured coolies from southern China to work the mines, as the Malays preferred to remain in their kampongs and till their own fields. The Chinese immigrants came with the intention of returning to their homeland after making their fortune. Many had stayed on, however, preferring the stability of life in a British colony to the wars and upheavals in China.

They established families and fortunes in Penang, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur, and opened the way for more of their countrymen from the southern ports of China. These immigrants soon became part of Malaya. I never wondered about it, just as I never thought it strange that I should also have been born beneath the monsoon skies of the equator, that with my first breath I would inhale the humid, heated air of the tropics and feel immediately and forever at home.