The not-so-Victorious Return of a Victorian: Two Weeks in Search of Choice China and/or Wax Figures in the Tumasik Almeirah under a/the Haze

For several days I toyed with the idea of looking up The Hon'rable Mr. S. Rajaratnam, and don't pretend you didn't know he was a Victorian, too, the prewar variety, only, after acquiring the enviably inimitable Victorian knowhow, he decided to infect Raffles Institution with it as well. Not just for several days but from time to time since I was last there in 1962 I had wondered how he was getting on for no more particular reason than for his luck in being the first non-Chinese in the higher echelons of power in a to-all-intents-and-purposes Chinese State. I last saw him precipitately in London in 1965 when he came over with Premier Lee Kuan Yew and retinue and stayed at a hotel in Hyde Park Corner. It was certainly not the very best of memories to retain since he was more than unusually abrupt and suavely rude. He couldn't pretend I wasn't an old Victorian, the postwar variety.

I was asked by the reception to mount the stairs to his room on the first floor: he came out of a room after a powwow with probably his Chief - perhaps not an accommodating meeting for he was less than friendly, displaying less than his usual charming calm and enigmatic smile, in fact not even a smile, his eyes narrowing, other things on his mind, perhaps a tiff with the Chief Minister for not coming up with solutions, ideas for the advancement of the State! He wished me rather reluctantly as I stretched out my hand, shook it in passing, shot an order softly, worryingly, to a subordinate Chinese or Malay who came out of another room on the landing, the doors heavy and looking heavier from the natural mahogany colour of the wood, which didn't give off an air of poshess, nor did the rough beige of the carpet; in short, a « socialist » tight-budget hotel, looking both inside and outside like a nineteenth-century less-than-royal trysting demeurre, the dull-white paint and small and sparsely decorated and furnished rooms testifying to the rigorously frugal anti-corruption stance of its leaders.

The door to his room lay open. He entered briskly and looked for some papers on a low, narrow table, a lighter brown than the door; a suitcase was still open on the high, covered bed; he espied me at the doorway. I thought he meant me to come in. Instead, he turned rather vigorously in his light shirt and longs and gestured abruptly with his hands and arms: « Wait for me down there in the bar! »

I thought I noticed more than a mark of irritation in his eyes. I didn’t mean to intrude. I didn’t feel like remaining, but then I did, hoping to find some kind of employment. I walked desolately down the carpeted stairs and entered the vast ante-room to the restaurant opening into the road behind black-rimmed window panes arranged in a semicircular bend. There was some scaffolding outside all along the small facade; paint-drenched or stained canvasses jutting down thick rough wooden boards. It was around eleven in the morning. On the phone, he asked me to come at that time.

I let my instincts take over. When a situation turns the way you don’t expect it to, the only thing to do is to let it happen and watch; that’s what I must have thought. That’s what happened anyway. Taking umbrage is all fine for the ego, but you’ll never know the outcome if you dashed away in a huff. Even if the ego takes a beating (it’ll always be better for it: you’ll become more flexible and resilient, less irascible which is always a good thing), and there’s always the advantage you’ll add to your experience and stock your memory and have something to write about - not that this matters in the long run. You’ll have more to think about, more insights into your own self which is what matters most! don’t you think? I’ll tell you about another encounter a few days earlier in Singapore [see below and check out "Punch" Coomaraswamy for this incident] before meeting with Rajaratnam at the ISEAS when my ego got just that sort of drubbing, and I’m glad - I’m not merely justifying my lack of daredevil courage even in the face of unmanageable odds à posteriori. Though I went through it all dutifully, I was somewhat quite diminished in stature from then on in my own eyes. Tant pis for my battered ego!

Oddly enough he was sounding me out. He wanted to know how Singapore could become self-sufficient economically. I said what Singapore has to excess is its qualified personnel - brains and ability. So, loan it out! He wanted details on how to realise this potential. I laid out my unplanned plans. I asked him for a job, any job, and suggested a chauffeur's post at any of the official Singapore establishments in London. He offered me a top post in his foreign ministry but hooked an impossible condition to it: "Get your Malaysian passport back!" he said.

In the hurly-burly of arriving finally at a place one has not seen in over thirty-two years (though memories of people, incidents and the old layout of the town still clung to the living recollection with awesome clarity), I hadn’t quite gathered my wits about me to make out a plan for visiting old haunts, for making calls on old friends or to go on book-buying sprees. So I let or couldn’t help letting my time go astray: called those whose names first came to mind or were easily locatable in the telephone directory, apart from two or three persons I made it a point of contacting for they were closer to recollection for special reasons: Lee Ting Hui, aka Lee Ah Chai, formerly on the Nanyang and Singapore U. teaching staff, a historian and Chinese scholar. Jane, Johnny and Freddy Vias, my KL-Brickfields mates: Jane, a social welfare worker commuting with prisons on the island had just then become a grandmother; Johnny, the London-trained engineer, still the bachelor, and Freddy, the social welfare officer was somewhere upcountry. Others: Joe Manuel Pillay and who doesn't know him? One was an old Victorian chum, Nadeswaran, older and gifted in a few « sparkling » ways; another a former neighbour and his brother: the Ratnams, both Victorians, leading lights in their own rights, and the third party, a distant cousin and famous cricketer Sooceleraj, with whom I picked up better now than in the old days. Nadeswaran, S. T. Ratnam, and Sooceleraj, a Penang Free School and KL-MBS old boy, were retired from government service while S. S. Ratnam continued as a much-talked-of obstetrician and surgeon, ministring even now to the local «royal court»‘s inmates. I wanted to see P. Coomaraswamy, the ex-Ambassador and Supreme Court judge as well, very much to my regret indeed, for we were Bar-final law students together in London. Still others: Dudley, ex-Judge John Dorairaj, Tang, Hwang Peng Huan, Henry Loo, Keith Tan, and so on and so forth... not forgetting one I wouldn't want to miss in a lifetime: Kishen Jit (Nades said he had already gladly exited before my arrival)!

... as I limbered up and down the transit lanes one face kept cropping up... a familiar face... another Victorian who had cheated ageing... his looks with that special recognition mark were unmistakable... I said you were at the VI... he said I looked familiar to him as well... Dato Ramon Navaratnam of the Institute of Strategic Studies his card announced... that's the only thing that seemed to have transpired in the meantime... we stood in midlane and chewed the old rag... recalled old friends... he wanted to know what happened to me... I told him... he was genuinely disturbed I thought even sympathetic...I said I must salute Zain Azraai for his concern though... a true gentleman I said he was... he concurred... said he would convey my best to him... did he before Zain left this world without a goodbye?

... no sooner past the controls check I beelined for a call at the post office... the voice of an Indian maiden at the other end asked my name and in a jiffy one of the most renowned of Victorians S. S. Ratnam intoned... where was I he asked to know... I said on my way... would I stay with him on my way back he wanted to know... I was honoured by the request... his brother S. T. whom we called "Thillai" said so too... to be invited to share his upstairs flat in Wallace Way... but I stayed in hotels until the imperative was delivered: if I wanted to see the famed sex-change surgeon I'll simply have to berth with him... I did the last two days of my sojourn in the island... outside the towering bare trees rained petals down by the dozen every minute...it was late in the evening... the taxi pulled up in front... Thillai said he had arrived... I dashed out... he was the same build as in the old days... somewhat tired out... I was demonstrative... I touched him... he was still withdrawing his briefcase and other material from the boot... I felt he resented my overt demonstration of longlost feelings... he was eighteen when I first met him at thirteen and I was much impressed by the man: erect, sober, and intègre! he was the exemplary older brother even if we were classmates for a couple of months at the Vivekananda Ashramam's Tamil class... who would believe this artful surgeon in his youth was a daredevil whirlwind fisticuffs featherweight... not even him nor his brother... I saw this fight in defence of "Baby" Murugaratnam, the other late brother in a tussle with the terror of the Chan Ah Thong field "Ah Yam" (Ayam) and his brothers in Brickfields-KL... Thillai who was PR-man and general advisor to the round-the-clock professor-administrator tried to extend my sense of admiration to "hero-worship" so in his presence I didn't object lest... Shan was reticent to Thillai's constant expressiveness... I must say I liked Thillai better now than in the old days... he was open bright attentive kind... direct with his views and we found much to agree with... a competent astrologer he strung out analyses as good as could be got in any Indian milieu for a fee... for Jane Vias's I warned her being seated too close to him might have got his calculations all askew...he was out on a religious binge... must be the post-glasnost phenomenon now the Singapore HAZE... even Lee Ah Chai took trips to Southern India...and I suspect a good many doctors and the like did as well...churches and mosques re-opened all over the former USSR... here Swami Sathananda and Sai Baba reigned... Thillai took me there to the sanctuary the very next day... vegetarian fare in an atmosphere of fine fretworked screens and boutiques of things Indian: veenas, sarees, mirthangams, brassware, tapering kuttuvilakus... yoga and bharatha natyam classes... all for sale in one square floor... a young irate woman in a tightly wrapped saree with steely black eyes berated me for having entered one room with my shoes on and continued to stare at me like as if she was going to pick another fight or throw a punch... and to top it all an altar to the Maître with burning incense and flowers guarding a photograph of Swami Sathananda... I went close up to take a peek at the face... an irate woman in a saree came up and rudely slammed the tiny altar doors... his singing voice encapsulated in cassettes... but the man was no where in sight...some sort of a ban on his return... there was some small talk of his tampering with someone but that was as far as Thillai would unbundle the riddle... I was treated to a video cassette of Sai Baba performing miracles: sleights of hand before admiring Americans with gold watches with chains in his palms tons of vibhuthi dug with an upturned hand from an inverted chembu... then Sai Baba for his birthday on a Tamil film decor swing lying in a Krishna pose with followers arranged in rows watching the live film... Shan said Sai Baba came round to where he was seated and gave his blessings to him personally but admitted that may have been due to foreknowledge of his presence... he had a sense of his own importance...this was new to me... I had always regarded him as humble and self-effacing... not so now I suspect... at the police station when he was taken in after the accident and charged with drunken driving... he said, if I'm not mistaken, "Do you know who I am?"... it didn't change a bit of the way I felt for him... he was still in my eyes the "older brother" one forgave any mishap... some days after my arrival a Japanese-looking shortish man attached himself to both Thillai and myself... I was obliged to put up with some close private interrogation - he became rather unruly and gruff after a couple of highballs - at Wallace Way and Sterling Entreprises next door to the one-man opposition leader Jeyaretnam's HQ... the man wanted to know if Lee Kuan Yew could not be invited to mediate the Tamil question in Sri Lanka... I told him what I thought... I'm still to be rewarded for my advice...

...Johnny Vias, who in his teens already toyed with the idea of dedication to the Bible, was still the same quietly feeling suffering human... he listened in absolute silence with all his body and talked in hushed tones...the endless hours we communed and argued his anger if anger it was never surfacing on the wooden bridge over the monsoon drain in front of his house in Brickfields-KL... John Dorairaj lamented without any prodding from me; "how could I have been that bad ...done all those bad things in London?" I was in a hurry to get to know the newly repented John but that was never to be... his secretary called to say he had gone to Australia... Tang likewise could not be reached... so were the old Malaya Hall crowd...Dudley as luck would have it had the same English girl still reading to him from over forty years back... the Gunaratnams they disappeared with the feeling of free speech and movement... other airs took hold of the man in the street...even at the Ceylonese Cricket Club I was signalled by Sooceleraj to restrain my questions... the West Indian test cricketer coach more than friendly at the first presentation turned sour at the subsequent calls... bats had ears like balls had piercing eyes...

I called one Rajaratnam in the directory, one with an S. A woman’s voice answered. She sounded old and yet curiously younger as the conversation prolonged.
    « Who is calling? » she asked. At first her voice sounded inviting, even willing. She was obviously happy that somebody called. She wanted to talk and talk a lot; she dragged the conversation along. She could have simply told me that I had the wrong number, but she was rather curious, rather unwilling for the conversation to die out, before she could let me know of her plight.
    « I’m an old acquaintance of Mr.Rajaratnam. Been living in Europe. Now I’m back, back after thirty-two years. I’d very much like to see him. »
    « Who are you? From where are you? »
    So I told her again, only this time with more details.
    « So you are from France. But what are you doing here? »
    « I’m just passing through. »
    « How long are you going to be here? »
    « Oh, I’ve got about a week left. »
    « So you are going back to France. You live in France? »
    « Yes, yes, I live there. »
    « Where do you live in France? »
    « In Paris. »
    « Ah, in Paris? »
    « Yes, in Paris. »
    « You are from Ceylon? »
    « No, I’m from here, myself. »
    « Where? Here in Singapore? »
    « Yes, both from Malaysia and here. »
    « Who are your people? »
    « You mean my parents? Well, they are no more... »
    « What’s your father’s name? »
    I told her.
    « You mean in K.L.? »
    « K.L. and here. »
    « Where was he working? »
    « Railways. »
    « Ah, railways! So you are from Ceylon? Jaffna? »
    « Yes, alright, if you want that too. » I was not willing to go into details.
    « What are you doing here? »
    « I said I’m passing through. »
    « So you don’t live here. »
    « No, I don’t. »
    I thought her next question was going to be: « What are you doing here? » but then her curiosity subsided and she broke down rather precipitately.
    « It is true we have the same initial as the Minister, but I’m a widow. My husband passed away some years ago. He was a surgeon. Now I’m all alone. I think you got the wrong number. I’m sorry I can’t help you. I don’t know the Minister’s number. So, please excuse me. »

So I asked my mercurial Victorian friend who had known better days in the island as one of the blue-eyed boys of the rising city-state and who had laboured under Rajaratnam’s old ministry of culture where being of the same race did not quite pay off since the minister apparently was afraid of being caught - according to the Victorian - favouring his own kind. My friend told me to try the exchange. I did. The voice came on, a rather intimate voice of a woman whose race I couldn’t make out. Perhaps a Eurasian.
    « I’m trying to get in touch with S. Rajaratnam, you know, the ex-Deputy... ex-Senior Deputy Prime Minister. He’s not in the directory, and I was told I could give my name and see if he would accept my call. He’s on the list, isn’t he? »
    « I don’t know, I’ll see. I’ll have to speak to my supervisor. »
    « Tell him I’ve been away in Europe and I’m passing through now. I used to have his number and address, but after all these years, I just can’t even remember where he lives. »
    « After all these years, his number is certainly not valid. Give me your name and telephone number, and I’ll see what I can do. »
    I gave the lady my name and number and added I was from Paris.
    « Where do you live? »
    « I live and work in Paris, » I said.
    « I mean, where do you live normally? »
    « I live in Paris. »
    « You mean, you live in France? »
    « Yes, that’s where I work and live, » I said, realising the difficulty some had in associating such a typical Indian name to anything French. Besides, as I had experienced in Adelaide, « Paris » was/is a magic word with people who had/have not moved out of their natural habitat.
    « Let me see what we have on the list. » I could hear a computerised screen whining and ticking. « Yes, we have one Rajaratnam with an S. »
    « I have tried that already. »
    « Ah, I have one... in Chancery Lane... »
    « That’s it », I said. I remembered the address I went to in 1961 and 1962, in the days when Alex Josey - the journalist, lived in an adjunct behind the minister’s house, a sort of servant’s quarters and who published a politico-biography of the island's leader [Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore: rev. edn., 1971, 630 p.] - a dimunitive middle-aged man with fading olive complexion and a goatee beard kept the PAP co-founder-leader "socialist" company. I thought to myself then that he was oddly enough very Brahmin in appearance, dressed in khaki shorts and leather sandals. Access to his quarters was by a shady two-tire path along the right side of the rather long one-storey house. There were trees in full foliage, one in particular, perhaps a mango tree, brushing the servant’s one-block room-and-other facilities. I only got a look at the book strewn entrance hall or lounge, a low wooden table in the centre, under a lazily swishing fan. It was dark in there and Josey had not expected a stranger to come barging in. Rajaratnam then simply told me to go see him, just like that, probably because he thought as a former reporter for the Malay Mail I had some sort of right of way into journalists’ presences, not to mention their hovels.
    « That’s the address. Mr.Rajaratnam lived there alright in 1962. »
    « You can understand I can’t give you the number. I’ll have to see my supervisor. »
    « That’s O.K. with me. Just go ahead. »
    The supervisor came on, a rather more brisk and economical a voice but just as feminine. There was no mistaking the tone as it so often could be the case in France or in England. I gave my particulars again.
    « You’ll have to wait for a while. Is that alright? »
    « That’s perfectly alright, » I said and hung on with some apprehension. What if the gentleman at the other end of the phone refused to accept the call? A loss of face - even if the face was invisible to the intermediaries - nonetheless!

    During the wait I shifted rather unhappily on my hotel bed, still unmade. I had not as yet breakfasted and felt an urge to hang up. What was I doing calling up a man who did not particularly care for me, though he seemed to receive me with much ceremony the first day I met him in 1961 at City Hall. The late Barrister Gunaratnam, a middle-aged lawyer, whom I got to know as a law student in London’s Malaya Hall in Bryanston Square, insisted on taking me to see him. Surprisingly we were let in by the Malay secretary-like sentry seated in the first-floor foyer of an office leading to his chambers from the cold, massive-stone landing up the wide heavy steps of the staircase in the staid Victorian Municipal building. On the way, I passed my now Mercurial friend who wished me then with much circumspection. He was then a secretary, a politico-civil service post. Later he was to rise in the hierarchy to head some department in the self-governing and subsequently independent city state. Gunaratnam passed the Bar with a Second Class, a rare feat - like another lawyer, also a Gunaratnam, now maimed by a motor-cycle accident in London and residing in Johor who I wanted to but felt no willingness to contact since I was told that his memory failed him (I didn’t think reviving old memories of stalwart days on the phone would have been a task to relish). The older Gunaratnam seemed to know the minister in person, but he said that wasn’t a necessary trump card. It was enough just to call on him for one to be received. My ex-political secretary « host » said the same this time, in between cursing him rather volubly.

   « One thing I must say for him, he’ll receive anyone any time. If he is free, there’s no reason why he’ll not receive any visitor. That much I must say for him. For the rest, the bugger, the bloody beggar, he’ll not lift a finger to help one of his own kind. He calls himself a Ceylonese, a Tamil. What a little saniyan! Chi! » Let's admit it, this's great praise, indeed!

The exchange people put me through, saying that there was only the maid and if I wanted to speak to her. I agreed. The maid’s a rather not-too-cultured voice, explained that the ex-minister was not at home, and that he was gone to the office. It was past ten o’clock. I thought « office » meant some chambers in government. I didn’t know that he was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, a political post which later made me wonder what the place was about. The maid asked me to call back at two when he would be back. I waited till after two in my hotel room to make the call all over again.
The voice came on rather abruptly after the exchange supervisor asked me to go ahead and speak. There was the twinge of intimacy in a mellow « hello » that caught me almost unawares. I felt called upon to reciprocate rather warmly.
   « This is Wignesan on the line. »
   « Oh, yes, » I could hear him intoning in spite of himself. He appeared hard at hearing, but the voice was clear and still firm though only slightly slowed down compared to the old days. No sign of ageing, I thought. Not shaky.
   « I wonder if you remember me, » I said and regretted it immediately, for I could feel I was giving him room to manoeuvre. « We last met in 1965 and now I’m passing through. I live in Paris. I wonder if we could meet and talk.»
   « Hello! Hello! Can you speak louder! »
   I more or less repeated myself.
   « Wignesan. Wignesan. I can’t place you, not quite. »
   « It was me who did Bunga Emas... »
   « I’m sorry I can’t really recall you. »
   « I did the...I edited and published the ..the anthology of Malaysian literature. » I realised I was fumbling. I was losing my touch for I felt quite embarrassed, trying to foist myself on to his memory which apparently had no place in such a past.
    « You know, the Bunga Emas anthology in which I put your stories... er...er...your short stories. »
   « Oh, yes, I remember. » There was a pause during which I could hear mnemonic bells ringing. « Yes, what is it you want to see me about? »
   I felt sheepish.
   « Oh, just to see you again and talk, if it isn’t going to take too much of your time. »
   « I’m now no more in the government, you know. »
   « Yes, yes, I know. »
   « Oh, no, I’m just preparing to go to Seremban for the Deepavali celebrations. They are waiting for me there. I go there every year. How long are you going to be here?»
   « Not very long. I’ll be leaving next week. »
   « I’m afraid that will not be possible. I’m at present actually preparing to leave. »
   He gave me his private number before. So I thought I might try getting it again.
   « Can I have your personal number just in case I drop by again and want to see you. »
   His voice gushed as though he felt awkward about refusing. He appeared genuinely to apologise. So I didn’t take it so badly.
   «No, no. » There was a moment’s hesitation. « You know, my number is secret. Is there something urgent? »
   « No, nothing urgent, » I said, feeling I had pushed things too quickly. « I’m just passing through and I wondered if I could call on you. It’s alright, I understand.»
   « O.K. then, goodbye, » he said and hung up.
   I had just enough time to reciprocate.

   It took me quite a while to get over the rebuff, or was it genuine inopportuneness? I kept reproaching myself for a few days for even attempting the call. Even my sportsman cousin who, I take it, is quite apolitical ventured to upbraid me in his soft gentle voice with not even a hint of malice.
   « Why do you want to see people like that? »

Later, I discovered that it was the ex-minister’s way of putting me off. I had no idea Rajaratnam was a Senior Research Fellow at the ISEAS. Even if I did, I didn’t know he « went to office » there. I had just then come out of a meeting with the Institute’s director, the political scientist Miss Chan Heng Chee. The appointment scheduled to have taken place at short notice - actually arranged by a friend of a friend over the weekend (I suspect it was through some kind of Sai Baba association network) - for midday on my last day in the island took some time as I waited in the open airy anteroom to materialize. The genial, very youngish-looking, slim director - one had the impression one was talking to an undergraduate until one catches the gleam in her dark eyes and perceives the well-oiled sense of authority and intelligence sitting quite nimbly in her steady looks - had most probably other more pressing duties to worry about to receive me on time.

The subject of my negotiations with her had to do with a translation I was undertaking of Na Tian Piet's epic poem published in Malay in 1896. Cf. "Sha'er of the Late Sultan Abu Bakar [of Johor], Translated from the Malay with an Introduction by T.Wignesan. A Peranakan's View of the fin de siècle monde malais: Na Tian Piet's Endearing syair of Epic Proportions", in The Gombak Review, Vol. 4, N° 2 (Kuala Lumpur: International Islamic University Malaysia), 1999, pp. 101-121.

The director of the laboratory I was attached to at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris as a Research Fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) wanted me to translate the work, and as such, it was decided that the ISEAS in Singapore might be the right body to put the book out. Na Tian Piet, a Chinese-Malay métis, lived as a lay preacher and a freelance journalist in Singapore for about twenty-five years after his peregrinations in the Malay Archipelago as a peripatetic trader in small produce had come to an end. Negotiations had already been in progress between the director and a Research Fellow over there. Since I was going down to Adelaide to give a paper at a conference, my very presence in Singapore to discuss the ways and means of publication procedure was thought to be useful. So I had to make plans. I called the Singapore Embassy about visa facilities, and I was told that anyone could embark there and remain for a fortnight without a visa, unless...and the cool, familiarly warm voice of the Second Secretary warned...one feared of being persona non grata.

   "In which case, what could happen?"
   "You will be asked to board the next flight out." After a brief silence, she added: " At your own expense, of course!"
   "It's risky business then." She must have been weighing the odds, having already the lowdown on me.
   "I would suggest you write to the Immigration Chief first, just in case." There was a pause between us when bells began to ring in lost corridors. "At least, this way you'd know whether you'd be sent back!"
   "How long would it take? I mean, how long before I get a response?"
   "You are certain to get a reply within a month."
   The reply took over six weeks. I was granted a two-week permit to enter the country for social reasons.

To my utter dismay (my trip from an official point of view was therefore an échec), I found the cheery head of the ISEAS quite adamant about the conditions for publication. She wanted the entire manuscript first. I was averse to doing anything like that. I had insisted that the sample ten to fifteen per cent of the poem I had already submitted could be sufficient to convince the publication committee as to its merits or to my ability to undertake the charge. I didn't want to embark on a marathon project without some assurance of finding it on bookshelves. The ISEAS research fellow with whom the project was first broached had declared the very same position vis-à-vis the publication procedure. And the ISEAS director refused to budge from the unbending sclerosed stand, in spite of her courteousness, warmth and understanding in her attitude towards me. Later on, in our correspondence, when I had occasion to "complain" to the head on the "subordinate's" obvious tactics with me, I found the same obdurate blind stand in defence of the "subordinate".

The country had attained to fame and prosperity. The instances of notoriety like the "caning incident" [See the not very particularly well-written book: Gopal Baratham's The Caning of Michael Fay, "The Inside Story by a Singaporean" who is a neurosurgeon-cum- novelist.] were soon forgiven by the Western press, for the island was the exemplary pliable Asian partner polished to a blinding shine in the Western image. There was absolutely no need to be supple or even generous. Nothing happened, it seemed, without the imprint of the Father of the Nation explicitly directing events. The idea was, "I know best" what is good for everybody, and therefore for the country. He has even threatened to rise from the grave if things after his passing don't stick to the pattern he has drawn up for the place. And no-one need be reminded that the British-instituted no-trial Detention Law is always there ready to be dusted at the slightest show of rebellion.

When I had finished talking with the ISEAS director and was ushered warmly into the carpeted corridor by Professor Chan dressed in a straight, almost ankle-length light-blue dress without any sort of hip-gripping belt, her sleek black hair reaching down past her shoulders, her looks then tempered by the resolution of a case, a slight limbering smile giving evidence of a warmer person, I walked the twenty paces or so to the reception automatically and stopped, for there was the charming Indian lady - not the cute statuesque Sikh girl I saw a few days back and with whom I bandied some words, drawn as I was to her very Parisian schoolgirlish looks (the first thing that came to my mind: Was she handpicked by Kernial Singh Sandhu? the first director of the Institute whom I got to know, but slightly though comfortably in 1961-2 and later in London when we lectured for the Commonwealth Institute.) I met and spoke to the "receptionist" a couple of days earlier on at the Regent Hotel where a conference organized by the Institute was in full swing. She emitted a kind of a glint in her large dark eyes that bespoke of a happy situation in her life, both marital and professional perhaps. She was married to a Malabari, but I couldn’t say if she was Sri Lankan or Indian Tamil, or some other South-Indian. I didn’t wish to pry that far. At first, I thought she could have been the daughter of some one or other of my old friends, but she had been defensive, but less so in giving me her husband’s name. So we talked generally and exchanged addresses. The sight of her sitting in the receptionists’ cubicle made me stop to have a few words with her, but she took charge of the conversation and asked me if I would like to see Mr.Rajaratnam.

   « I called him last week but he said he was preparing to leave for Seremban.... for the Deepavali celebrations. »
   « Yes, that’s right, but he is here. Do you want me to try his phone and see? »
   I was taken aback by the news. I didn’t know what to say. I said alright or not, I’m not quite sure, such was my surprise that he was to be found in the establishment right at that moment. Almost as if by chance, I picked up the Institute’s brochure sitting in a pile on the narrow counter, flicked open the pages and saw Rajaratnam’s passport-size colour photo in one of the first few pages, while the brightly smiling girl was talking to somebody on the phone, and before I could collect my wits about me, she handed me the receiver, after saying: « Dr. Wignesan has just finished his interview with the director. He is here, you can speak to him, yourself. »
    I took the phone and politely asked who was at the other end. The voice said: «Kline. I’m Mr. Rajaratnam’s secretary. So, you want to see Mr. Rajaratnam? »
   « Yes, if that can be arranged. I called and spoke to him last week. He said he was preparing to leave for Seremban. For the Deepavali celebrations. »
   « Yes, yes, that’s true, but he’ll be leaving next week. He’s being interviewed by the press right at this moment. If you’d like to come up here - we’re on the opposite side, fourth floor - and wait in the lounge, I’ll see what I can do once the interview is over. »

I thanked him and made doubly sure I had the location of the ex-minister’s office confirmed by the « receptionist » [Was she a receptionist? Maybe she was sitting in for somebody else? She looked too much an intellectual for that sort of post. Only the other day when I came in there for the first time, I had to make all my enquiries from a less than middle-aged-looking bespectacled Chinese lady who said she was sitting in for somebody else; she was then working busily in a large table-ridden office open to view through a glass wall opposite the reception.] The whole place gave off a feeling of cramp-crumpledness, if I may coin a word, that is, compared to the rest of the dispositions in the island’s official buildings. The greyish bunker colour of the exterior jutting slabs of reinforced concrete and its precarious ensconcement into the side of a hill gave the building an air of a hasty but stocky wartime construction. Was there some underground secret to protect? one wondered! One would associate such a construction to the country’s defence establishments. The calibre of the political names associated with the institute, too, made one wonder. What was Rajaratnam doing in a place like that, headed by the country’s first locally-trained political science professor and chaired by a former Supreme Court judge and Ambassador to the States: P. Coomaraswamy. Among its former chairmen, an ex-ambassador to Paris and first Chief Minister: David Marshall, and an ex-Speaker of the National Assembly?

Before I knew it, I was out on the narrow tar road, having hesitated on the long, narrow « gangway » of an entrance. The noonday sun beat down on me channeling ventilation exhausts of sauna hot air from the Parisian Metro. After the air-conditioned rooms I had emerged from, well, I had to quickly adjust my mental barometer. The noonday heat in these parts actually brings out a shield of defiance in anyone. Like stepping through an imaginary door or dimension. Fortunately, there were huge shady trees - whose names I had no inkling of: they were obviously part of the wild before the National University buildings sprung up in their midst, and no sooner I made for the stone slabbed five-foot way on the left I had to leave it, for the Civil Service Building was to the right and towering above the institute across the road. The palm fronds and bushes leading to the entrance of the four or five-storey building gave it a more than « civil » look. The entrance was broad and open; no sentries or commissionaires or watchmen. In the great open foyer, a long counter with no officious-looking Malay or Tamil peon in uniform to look at you sullenly while you endeavoured to explain yourself in vain. The man at the counter blandly gestured, his right hand pointing to the left first, and then displaying four of his fingers. I understood but pretended for some unknown reason not to. Maybe because I resented his overt discourteousness and abruptness. This time he gestured rather annoyingly and uttered « four » as his fingers splayed themselves out. I pretended to understand him only then (so I got him to speak) and looked in the direction of the lifts some few steps up the floor on which I was standing and looked back at the man and nodded in assent. He gave me a mocking look and turned his head away just as quickly.

I got out of the lift on the fourth floor and didn't expect to see that there was no corridor leading away to rooms. A whole glass wall with glass doors opening in the middle caught my attention on the right. Seated within a huge low semicircular counter was yet another Malay girl in absolute silence, much like the uniformed hooded Malay postal clerks at the Geylang post office, across the road from my hotel. I wondered why there were always Malays or Indians - at the airport hotel reservation service there was a tough-but-winsome-looking Tamil girl - at reception counters, or Indian and/or Malay security guards at banks, mostly Chinese banks. Did the Chinese not trust their own kind? Or did these Malays and Tamils/Indians form a sous-classe of beings in Singapore? Like the Africans, Arabs and West Indians in Europe, or the Negros and Chicanos in the States? How was I to know, I saw so few people and so little of the island.

I ambled in while gaping around like an ingenu in the Louvre, for I noticed I was in some sort of library, though I was less certain as I saw rows of computers to the left and a lounge set of settees and chairs along the backwall of shining glass windows. The sky practically came into the vast open room cleaved by rows of metallic book cases running parallel to one another. Strangely they seemed empty or only half-filled. The girl behind the counter dawdled and then flashed a genuine glee of welcome. So another example of multi-racial equality in the showcase. To my question, she said, « Right here. That door. » I hesitated. « Yes, go in. His secretary is in there. » I knocked on the chipped surface of brand-new looking, unvarnished wood. Ferns guarded the entrance to the right of the glass doors.

Mr. Kline, a tough lean balding man in his fifties, I thought, came out of a low carved wooden barrier, like the ones one sees in courts and national assemblies, where he was seated amidst tables and typewriters and machines, and we shook hands. He led me out, back to the semicircular counter and pointed at the lounge chairs at the back.

   « Mr. Rajaratnam is still being interviewed. Please take a seat there. I’ll have a word with him as soon as the lady comes out. »

He didn’t move during the time I took to find my way to the settee, almost as if he was afraid I might run away and leave his boss in the lurch. The glint of the sky and the haze over the port made everything look half-real. I made an effort to sit and saw Mr.Kline retreat behind the low counter and disappear. The Malay girl eyed me and turned to her occupations with some papers or cards on the low counter sill. I saw a door similar to the one leading into Mr.Kline’s office. I thought that this other door must be the real entrance to Mr.Rajaratnam’s office and that he would probably open it himself to usher me in, once the press left. The haze, a product of huge voluntarily-lit fires in Borneo and Sumatra, hung over and around the island every morning for some days then. That day itself, my last day in the island, seemed tempered considerably by the haze - it was less oppressive, or was it merely an illusion: not seeing the sun and therefore not feeling the heat? Or was it merely a personal reaction? I picked up a bunch of The Straits Times in a wooden clasp. The frayed pages stuck out. I glanced through the day’s paper.

Splashed on the front page was the hullaballoo about the entitlement certificate for cars, and the country’s Prime Minister was expounding the virtues of restriction lest the parking becomes an insuperable problem. The COE was a toll the government imposed to restrict the number of cars in town: for small cars, it amounted to 31,246 Singapore dollars; for medium-sized cars: S$56,000, and for open and luxury cars: S$100,000. Lest you don’t know, this was the price a potentially future car-owner had to pay to enjoy the right to buy a car. This is a practice hardly heard of elsewhere, a point of contention - mostly under one’s breath - with almost all the lower income group and the middle class white-collar and semi-professional workers like teachers and technicians, etc. The P.M. Goh Chock Tong was emphatic about its benefits to the country at large.

   « But I can tell you that it is causing me the most unhappiness because I have to face elections... When COE prices go up, I don’t get any joy. I worry because my support will be eroded, » he said. The paper then quoted him as saying that ‘if the Government increased the number of COEs, prices might come down, but the problem of road congestion would surface again. If the COE system was scrapped, and the roads were congested, it would be too late to solve the problem.’
   By « increasing the number of COEs » I suppose he meant the lowering of the price of the COEs; if not, I wonder who would have the money to pay for cars? Add the COEs, and the price of cars would be three times as much as it would cost in Europe?

Since I had nothing to do but wait, and time was dragging on, I flipped through The Straits Times page by page and read bits and pieces of everything and was surprised that not much differed - whether in style or material - from the stuff the paper published when I worked for it in 1964/65. Then I stumbled on a page, a literary page of sorts and saw an article I read closely, the sort of articles one reads with intentional care, for it had to do with a person I had no reason at all to like. The title with a photo read as follows: « Prof D. J. Enright back at National Institute of Education for poetry reading session » by Koh Buck Song, probably the literary editor for he had the entire page to himself with another longer article running down the page. The Singapore version of Kee Thuan Chye's, up in the Kuala Lumpur New Straits Times. In the old days, when I began as a reporter in 1954, under Leslie Hoffmann as the Managing Director, The Malay Mail was the Straits Times’ counterpart in the Malaysian capital and all the sister papers came under the one roof of The Straits Times Press Group. Today, I was surprised to learn that the separate national English dailies were prohibited from being circulated across the Straits of Johor, a kind of paranoïa between brothers-under-the-skin that should not surprise anyone who knew the places well. The island however depended for its daily supply of drinking and tap water from the peninsula. So, you can well imagine how well I had been informed!

That same morning I had met the affable and more-than-obliging Kirpal Singh, Senior Lecturer of English at the NIE, an all-purposes literary man of the island. He kindly went out of his way to pick me up at Wallace Way, where I was berthed for the last two days of my sojourn. We stopped for a rushed breakfast at my Sikh friend's favourite haunt - a small corner coffee shop. A cramped place with rough wooden oblong tables and benches, a disorderly and filthy joint that rose out of the squalor days of old in a well-preserved state, shared between a Malay cooked-food provider and a Chinese coffee-shopkeeper. The usual buzz of flies and insects infested the joint to remind one of one's presence in the East. He later drove me to the ISEAS. During the drive, he told me who and what brought the Lee Kuan Yew-branded « beatnik mendicant professor » to the island; the newspaper report confirmed his account. Enright had in 1959 occupied the Chair of Johor Professor of English at the University of Malaya in Singapore, and he had stirred up quite a hullaballoo when he ventured to publicly comment during his inaugural lecture on the PAP government's plans to curb "yellow culture" in the island. I had met the man when I was a student at the Free University of West Berlin where he taught English, and a mutual friend who also taught English there, Dr. D. Brown, arranged for a formal meeting in London in 1959 during lunchtime when I was an employee at Harrod's. I found him to be dry, unnecessarily circumspect, and wilfully distant even though we were seated around a small table in a restaurant in Knightsbridge. Kirpal wanted me to meet him, and I most vigorously put my foot down in his car, seeing absolutely no singular virtue in such an encounter. Recollections of my meetings with him in 1961-62 were still fresh, and I had no desire whatsoever in a replay of old one-upmanship games.

Enright’s claim to fame in these waters stems from his prying critique into local policies, newly-introduced puritanical restrictions with which the young PAP leaders in 1959 were hoping for new directions. They planned to eradicate « yellow culture » and rowdyism by banning juke-boxes and pornography, and Enright swooped down on them by declaring that a culture could not be created or planned, and that it should be allowed to flourish of its own accord. He quoted W. B. Yeats and insisted that a culture grows from « the foul rag and bone shop of the heart » and warned that the island should not be allowed to degenerate into a sort of Sunday school catechism class. In retort, he got branded by the PAP leaders as a « beatnik mendicant professor » and was told to keep his nose out of internal affairs. Since then, he had written Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor, published in 1969, « which », according to Mr. Koh, « gives a penetrating and candid account of ‘60s Singapore and is studied by political scientists ». He also reports the former professor as saying that ‘he once found the book in a shop here, wrapped in plastic « like some dirty book », and asked if it was for sale. The bookseller’s reply: « No lah, only for foreigners. »’

Enright was/is a co-editor of Encounter, a Haymarket monthly which was in the fifties and sixties edited by Stephen Spender and Laski. Certain powers-that-be used the monthly as their intellectual showcase to impress Asians and Africans with. Mr.Koh declared with obvious approbation that Enright had won the « Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in Britain in 1981 and was once tipped to become poet laureate... ». He said the Englishman was down there for a « week-long visit organized by a group of about 35 former students, including NIE’s Dean of Arts Koh Tai Ann and novelist Suchen Christine Lim. [The latter writer who has published several books including Ricebowl, The Amah and two collections of stories won local fame through writing and publishing a short novel entitled: Gift from the Gods which, according to her, took « three years of hard labour -drafting, re-drafting and yet more re-drafting ».One thinks immediately of Nobel Prize Winner V. S. Naipaul's equivalent three-year effort in the late fifties to produce A House for Mr. Biswas. Lim's story covers the lives of a Chinese grandmother, her adopted daughter and her daughter. Destitute on account of bearing a baby-girl, she becomes a dance hostess to support her child. The rest of the story explains how she went through various trials and tribulations to receive or rather conceive a son, a gift from the gods! A very feminist theme to ensure her a lasting place in Commonwealth writing which is at the moment dominated and run by women of all sorts who are at the moment flexing their very un-feminine mental muscles. Koh Tai Ann, the editor of Commentary, a Singapore journal with academic pretensions, goes by her editorial and teaching authority to exert her influence.] One has to admit, however, that Enright still enjoys the particular distinction of being the mentor of independent Singapore's literary lights!

In the meantime, I had the feeling the haze was clearing up. I was mistaken. I got up to survey the enormous panaroma through the clear glass windows which occupied half of the outer wall of the library. Three Chinese or Chinese-looking ladies in rather short skirts, revealing sleek thighs and thin shins, marched together down one of the ailes, their high-heeled shoes pecking intrepidly the polished floor. For the first time, there appeared a sign of activity in the library. The Malay girl at the counter worked away noiselessly. I wondered how long it would be before I was ushered into Rajaratnam’s presence. To tell you the truth, I was curious. I wanted to see how the man was, what he looked like, whether his memory held good, etc. At the same time, I wondered whether he would receive me. After all, the secretary merely asked me to come up and wait in the lounge; he didn’t or couldn’t as yet have asked his boss about me. [Unless my presence at the ISEAS in the morning had already reached his ears and the whole impromptu process set rolling by the young lady at the reception was after all a ruse! My ex-civil servant friend who sort of introduced me to local politics as it was practised then would have naturally thought so.] I even got to wondering if the man had already left after the interview, and the secretary had knocked off for lunch. I had been there nearly an hour. I flipped through the New Straits Times again and suddenly I felt that the title was after all appropriate: it had changed. It was bulkier, more news of the kind that flattered politicians and the commercial-minded, simply more pages with adverts and the like. The obituary columns proliferated with huge, oddly enough, lifeless faces! Why should the dead look dead? The prose, an English that tried to be slick in an affected manner, reflected the style of the new tabloid press in London while trying to be serious. All in all, I felt that the publishers were right in changing the old banner title.

I was still engrossed in the pages of the New Straits Times when, out of the corner of my left eye, I espied hectic waving and gesticulating. I turned my head to see Mr.Kline and the Malay lady at the reception-counter beckoning to me in a rather disorderly fashion. I realised immediately that all the politeness and civility that was somehow due me earlier on had in the meantime simply evaporated, probably because of the reaction of Mr. Rajaratnam when told I was waiting for the un-asked-for interview. It reminded me instantly of another interview I called to fix with Dr. Gopal Baratham. He gave me an appointment at his hospital floor. When I presented myself at the reception counter to announce my arrival and on time, the woman there while chatting conspiratorially with another man and woman, phoned the good doctor to say: "There's a bloke here waiting for you!" Before she put the phone down, she managed to secure for the two interlocutors the appointment they had come to keep. Of course, the novelist doctor cancelled the appointment with me, and he proceeded to do the same with a second appointment. Would he do that sort of thing with an Enright, I wondered! In his book on the caning of Michael Fay, he gives a collection of black and white photos in an annexe at the end. Two of them depict veritably cloistered bungalows in the midst of packed housing estates, and one is captioned: "Where author spent childhood years."

Just great, this new code of Singapore etiquette! In any case, this sort of thing would not have been common in Europe, I thought. If you are, for instance, in the street and asked someone for directions in Europe, more often than not your interlocutor would take the trouble to give you detailed instructions, making quite sure by repetitions that you got the directions right. This was also my experience in Adelaide, but in Singapore whoever you approached in the street for directions would look at you rather curiously, either registering surprise and/or annoyance, or he or she would wave his hand in the general direction you are supposed to take and turn away quite brusquely. If you stopped to verify the general wave of the hand, your interlocutor would again very generally wave his hand, only this time with some more amusement or disgust. So much for oriental hospitality or courtesy. And who would be the first to talk of racism and/or the colonial superiority complex?

Mr. Kline had already entered his ante-room when I got round the counter. I was sort of hurriedly urged to go past the newly carpentered massive-looking door by the hooded Malay lady who blinked at me as one looking through the grill in a prison cell. When I stepped into Mr.Rajaratnam’s ante-room, I saw a somewhat rough-looking middle-aged Chinese gentleman sitting in a low arm-chair to the right of the door. He was obviously there for some reason. Perhaps he was the chauffeur. He was there when I came out of Mr. Rajaratnam’s office. Mr. Kline merely waved me in, his face making no effort - as he had done earlier on when I first saw him - to appear placating. I couldn’t help feeling that the « meeting » with the Tamilian who made it big with the Chinese was not going to be as expected. To tell you the truth, I didn’t much care what happened. I have a knack of getting into all sorts of horrible imbroglios, and this one was surely not going to be any worse. At the back of my mind, I felt I should make an effort anyway. The man was going on eighty-five, and if I didn’t see him this time, when will I be able to again? Certainly not after another thirty-two years. That’s as long as I had been away, or rather, was obliged to.

That same library lounge window extended into his room, and the haze reflected thick dizzyingly dull light which invaded his room. On to the left of the door a carpeted space with lounge chairs around a low table served as a tête-à-tête meeting ground. The carpet and armchairs were a soft greyish beige with lines running through them. All round the walls, panelling in thick sound dark wood serving both as book cases and almeirah. To the left again, a little behind the lounge set, a huge glass-topped table filled with papers, documents and trays and office paraphernalia. The ex-Minister, now darker and lighter than he was in the old days, but still sporting his laconic smile rose from his chair and moved towards me. I shook his hand firmly. There were just skin and frail bones in my hands, a hand like a child’s, I thought. His fine, short aquiline nose appeared just as polished and bright; his eyes less pensive, yet dreamier, the limply expressive face affixed a constant pose, as though he had consciously cultivated a mask. Three changes were nevertheless apparent to the eye: he had lost weight, his thin sandy hair receded to a near total baldness and his complexion in parts from face to exposed forearms revealed a sort of charring that I noticed in a few Tamilians I had known from the old days. Skin seemed to shrivel in patches, due to the scorching sun I thought. The full dome of his forehead was scarred by this skin burn; so were his forearms in places. You could still see the bright ripe-mango skin colour showing through in other places. He had a way of holding his set smile, his still firm frontal rows of teeth visible through lifeless lips, and I wondered whether he resembled the painting in technicolour on the library wall as the second chairman of the institute.

The first was Mr. David Marshall, the Iranian Jew who became the first Chief Minister of the island. Later, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew had him shunted off to Paris where he became after nearly a quarter of a century one of the doyens of the ambassadors in the French capital, a sort of venerable figure there qualified to be consecrated at Madame Tussaud’s.

The third chairman was Mr « Punch » Coomaraswamy (Punch for Panchacharam). He too had a painting of himself hanging on the wall. He was also once an ambassador in Canberra and in Washington where he got written up by the New York Herald Tribune for over-zealousness, that is, overtly doing too much for his country, through too much public involvement. The report to say the least was caustic, ironic. Did Singapore, a small island nation, need to have an ambassador in the role of a social lion? That was what the report tried to shore up. He had also been a Speaker of the National Assembly and then a judge, ending up in the Supreme Court. When I met him a few days earlier, he told me he was teaching the Law of Evidence at the law faculty. At sixty-seven he was looking dried up and, oddly enough, empty. He had nothing to say. One eye gave in on him while he was doing his Bar Finals in London, he said. « I should have had an operation immediately, but I waited the four days. And it was too late. The retina was gone. » He looked a tragic figure, lost in his slight nondescript build and voice, which he had to raise with flailing arms to make known his high position and authority for no apparent reason at all. Otherwise, only those who recognised him, probably from under the curls of his judge’s wig, salaam-ed and saikere-ed him as he passed along well-treaded passageways and hallways, up and down short flights of stairs and escalators, as if the greater the exposure the less the insult of being dragged down by retirement, for there were no books or achievements to sound a fanfare as one headed for real oblivion at sixty-seven. "That comes from being a crony of Kuanyewism: all posts achieved through nominations", my forthright mercurial friend said in as many a word.

A curious thing happened after lunch at a self-service in the centre of town. He took me on a well-planned jaunt up and down stairs and finally to a patio with lean pillars surrounded by cement seating. He wanted me to be seated in a particular place. I "obeyed" for there was no other way of finding out why. When I looked up, I saw a huge camera mounted on a tripod in front of a shop some twenty yards away flashing away at me. The photo session over, he took me outside and asked me to go to Change Alley. I looked at him all bemused, for his game was up, and he was only going through the motions of what had been prepared for me. We said goodbye, shaking hands. I made as if to remount the steps to the building we emerged from. He insisted again that I should go to Change Alley and went some way in the trottoir to show me the building. I gave him a blank look and mounted the steps to the first floor from which I had a vantage view of him. He was non-plussed. He looked up at me in distress. All his shouting at me didn't quite work. Perhaps, somebody told him I was a latah case!

On the nearly up-to-the-ceiling wall panelling behind Mr. Rajaratnam’s massive desk were files and great big books haphazardly propped up back to back, some slanting and lying one over the other. In between them, there lay two or three machines with their pilot lights on. They looked to me like some recording equipment; so, I thought, that was the ex-politician’s way of listening in on his interlocutors without having to take notes. I thought of Richard Nixon putting the noose around his own neck in the Watergate scandal by installing recording equipment in the Oval Office. He was free to play cat-and-mouse with the unsuspecting visitor. I have to rely almost entirely on my memory. The conversation I’m about to relate, of course, is not a verbatim report, but it is a faithful account of the tenor of our discussion or interview, or just meeting, if you like. It doesn’t really matter. You are not reading this as a newspaper article. If you are reading it at all, it is because you like to know what I think and feel about an important personality of the region. I’ve come back to a place where I had first grown up as a child for about four years - from 1937 to 1940 at the Negri-Sembilan Railway Quarters at Kampong Baru Lama - after having been forced to spend the better part of my life in Europe. To have taken a notebook and pen out would have put the politician on his guard.

   After we had cordially shaken hands, he gestured to one of two chairs laid out almost together in front of the table and sat himself down without bending his torso. The smile was still alight as he strained to take my presence in. His eyes shone though rather meekly. None of the energy of the old days in them. I didn’t expect it either.
   « Do you remember me », I asked, feeling rather amused at the same time, as though I was the show-piece in the place. He surveyed me and nodded.
   « Yes, yes. It’s a long time ago. How long was it since you went away? »
   « The last time we met was in 1965. »
   « Where are you staying now? »
   « I am in France. I work there you know. »
   « What are you doing there? »
   « I’m an academic, work for the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. »

   « Yes, yes, I recall you; not very well but I recall you, » he said, rather gingerly, I thought.
   « That seems such a long time ago, » I said, and looked around quickly, as though searching for some missing pieces of memory lying around somewhere in the room. The room I met him in then was far more imposing, though drab and the light dimmer, a somewhat Lynchian setting. The furniture at City Hall was staid, colonial, Victorian. There was less flamboyance about the tableware: just trays and files and penholders and the like. The lights too were of an older era: they shone but spread a dull splash only where they were directed; nothing of the diffused daylightness inside the open light of the day coming through the firmly closed glass windows. His looks then were equally gentle in appearance, even if a touch of steel withheld them from dispersing; now, they were mellow though quite restrained, only the thoughts betrayed them. They shifted, hovered, the phrase or sentence unfinished...
   « There was this... this man from USA... Thambiah. He... he was here just a while ago, » he gestured with his hand and face to the seat next to me as though the man was seated there right then. I almost turned to look. « He said he came to do some research on Ceylon... Sri Lanka. Do you know him? » From his looks and voice I made out that he didn’t think much of the man.
   « Who... What’s his first name? » I asked, for Thambiah is a common enough Tamil name.
   « I don’t know... something like... Stan...yes, Stanley. He was here for a short while to consult something or other on Sri Lankans in the library. »
   « You mean, Stanley Thambiah, the Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University? » I raised my voice somewhat in surprise, but more out of an attempt to reproach him for his attitude. I saw his expression turn to something more approving; he seemed almost to regret his ignorance in this case. Actually Professor Stanley Thambiah, the Esther & Sydney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, not the holder of the Chair at Harvard, and one of twenty-nine professors in the department, is an eminent anthropologist who has published several books, including a couple on Sri Lanka. He was also once president of the Association for Asian Studies in the States. Very few Sri Lankans had risen to his position outside their country of origin, among them the late Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, former Curator of Indian Art at the Boston Museum; Prof. Abeyesekera, Professor of Anthropology at Yale University; the late Prof. Xavier Thani Nayagam, former head of Tamil Studies at Kuala Lumpur and one time president of the International Association for Research in Tamil Studies; Prof. Jeyaretnam Wilson, Professor of Political Science at Brandeis University; and another Jaffnese Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Virginia whose name I have forgotten, and so on and so forth. There was also James Meary Tambimuttu who during the forties made a name for himself as a poet, critic and publisher in London, having notably edited Poetry London. I put Rajaratnam’s lack of tact down to old age. But then I was wrong. It was also, it seemed, his way of slipping into a conversation - or perhaps an interrogation (but then I keep asking myself, for whom?) - about Sri Lanka and the Eelam question.
   « Tamils want a separate state. How long can they go on fighting like this... » He looked at me for a reaction. I obliged.
   « They are committed to achieving independance for themselves since nobody is going to give it to them... » He hesitated, his voice dragged slightly, meekly.
   « First, the Tamils in Sri Lanka want to separate, then the Tamils in India. » I could see the catch in his voice. He was baiting me. If I kept quiet, the conversation might die out or might even turn cold. So I obliged. That was what I was there for, to see the man, talk to him and in an oblique way say my goodbyes to him since he certainly was not going to hang around for another thirty-two years or who knows? how long before I’m allowed back in the island. He was obviously well informed of my own views or connections or past dealings in the situation.
   « Oooh! that, » I said, « would certainly take a very long time. Not certainly in this century. Besides, it’s their affair. It has nothing to do with Sri Lankan Tamils and Eelam. » I checked his face again. He seemed quite satisfied. Things were going as he had - or somebody else wanted it. He could now pop the crucial question. One thing at least I must say for him; he used none of the rowdy stuff of secret service-instituted conversations. Those who were prepared by them would suddenly - out of the blue - yell at you, knowing very well that either out of politeness or sheer embarrassment you would not yell back or get up and leave, and that you might even try to make amends for the interrogator’s lack of tact and decorum. Remember that in such cases the crucial information sought by the secret service will always come as a question at the beginning, and if the interrogator is a man of little moral fibre, he will yell like a hyena. As for Rajaratnam, I must say, he was the perfect gentleman, the suave Mandarin, noblesse d’esprit or noblesse oblige? A whole life from middle-age on spent in the company of Chinese intellectuals, academics and political and commercial leaders and magnates.
   « If every people wanted their independence, then there will be Bosnias all over the place, all wanting to fight for their separate state and culture, » he ventured, trying to draw me into assent.
   « What about you here, you, too, wanted out of the federation. Singapore, too, was a Bosnia. »
   I thought he felt quite stung, but his enigmatic smile disappeared for the fleeting-est of moments and returned to stay. From then on, it seemed to me he had lost track of his thoughts. I felt he rambled. But it was late. Had he had his lunch? At that age, who wouldn't tire after two long interviews?
   « I was just telling that woman who came to interview... », he gestured while turning his head in the direction of the cushioned-armchairs - I too felt drawn by his digression and looked at the way he gestured to his right, half-expecting to see some white foreign woman journalist sitting there and listening to us with a half-amused look on her face - (Was it an old Foreign Ministry game? -when you are one down, draw your interlocutor over fresher/newer ground, I really couldn’t say. Instead, I even felt he needed to be thought of as an older person, a high dignitary in his state called to occupy a post of lesser relevance, no retirement for the care-worn, no golden or diamond handshake! It was obvious that Lee Kuan Yew couldn’t do without him. He had probably been a sort of éminence grise behind the PAP (People’s Action Party, the party in power since 1959) leadership, now he was too old and therefore - on account of his experience - too indispensable perhaps to be put on the sidelines. The question is why the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies? That's none of my business, I'd say alright.)
   « ... me on... on. She wanted to know what I think of the future of the world. So I was telling her, now there is no more Cold War. The Russians have gone over to the West. The Americans are doing what they can to keep the peace, but the Japanese, well, they are ready for anything. They have even got their army back. Given the opportunity, they can become a military power again. »
   « But the Americans under MacArthur took care of all that. »
   « Yes, they won the peace, they are on top. They can prepare for another war in no time at all. First there’ll be a Third World War, and when that’s finished, there’ll be the Fourth World War and... »
   I interrupted him rather familiarly, and I didn’t much like what I did.
   « How can there be a Fourth World War after a Third World War? »
   We looked at each other for a moment in a frozen stance. His face fell for a moment.
   « Yes, yes... », he said distractedly. I felt rather annoyed with myself for contradicting him once too often. After all, it was me who wanted to see him in the first place. For all I know, he couldn’t give a damn if I existed. Perhaps, as one of the few former journalists of the same clan of Tamils, I had a right to see and record him in old age for the community? Perhaps again I did not have this self-arrogated right? So, what was I doing in there watching and wondering at an old man - who, rightly or wrongly, I thought was tottering in his thoughts. When I recounted the encounter to my KL-teenage companion in the presence of his sister that same afternoon, he warned me:
   « No such thing! He’s a wily old fox. There you are thinking he’s senile and all that time he’s listening and watching you behind that smile of his. You know, I think, with his colour, his nose and good looks, he’s actually got some white blood in him. He’s surely descended from them. And then, when you’re gone, he’ll take out his typewriter and with his two fingers poking at the keyboard, he’ll rip you apart. He’ll destroy you. He takes a hell of a long time even to write a paragraph, chain smoking all the time and throwing paper after crumpled paper into the waste-paper basket, but he’ll finally write his copy after a whole day and night and you’re finished. »

I had by then got such a healthy notion of how to size up my friend that I didn’t feel like contradicting him or holding on to my opinion. My friend had worked under him, had not liked him for not coming to his defence when he was repeatedly subjected to attacks by a colleague of the minister, but had nevertheless a high opinion of his ability, despite the curses he would subject him to from time to time.

   « He’s a fantastic writer, man », he would say in his defence. He praised and defended a man he didn’t either quite like for personal reasons, nor disliked him for not coming to his aid when his meteoric career with the PAP government came to an abrupt end, for he felt it necessary to resign. That was good enough for me. So I said:
   « If I wrote out in detail our conversation, any one reading it would think him senile, » I said and left it at that. But my friend was adamant. He shook his head decisively.
   « Be careful, you got him wrong. »
   But when I related the bit about the Third and Fourth World Wars, and the Bosnia bit, my mercurial friend sniggered and said: « When they are caught with their pants down, they will just sidestep the question and pretend nothing had happened. »

I was, for my part, not interested in catching anybody with his or her pants down, whether they pretended it was nothing or not, but I was already feeling that at any moment the highly-placed man I chanced to see that afternoon was about to put an end to our conversation. I was wrong. He had already given me about twenty minutes of his time, and it was well past two. Only the other day when I called, his maid said that he would be back from office at two. I wondered if he wasn’t hungry yet, or didn’t he - at that age - take a siesta? No, he was interested after all in what I had been doing.

   « Where are you based now? » I remember distinctly having told him all that on the phone. Perhaps he wanted details, or the fact may be that he hadn’t then quite located me in his memory.
   « I’m in Paris. I work for the National Centre for Scientific Research », I said.
   « What do you research? » he said, looking quite relaxed, despite the heavy schedule of callers he must have had during all the morning.
   « I’m doing research in poïetics, » I said, and as is the custom, extracted a copy of the journal I edit from my sling bag and handed it to him.
   « Oh, poetics, » he said, bemused.
   « No », I said. « Poïetics. It’s the science and philosophy of creation. It’s a new science. The French developed it, mostly in the past twenty years or so. This is the first journal on the subject. »
   « Ah », he said and flicked through it and paused on one page.
   « There’s even an article by Ananda Coomaraswamy », I said.
   « Yes, I see. » I gave him time to run through the pages. There was a glint in his eyes. « I met him in London, you know », he said.
   « He died in 1947 », I remarked. He cocked his head slightly. He was recollecting.
   « That must have been during the War, or... er... maybe after », he said as an afterthought crossed his mind.
   « I think I met him through Saravanamuttu, you know, the former Ceylon Ambassador... »
   « I met Sara, too, with my uncle Clough Thuraisingham », I let go, rather pointedly for I wasn’t quite sure he remembered who I was. His eyes brightened and his face opened up.
   « Is Clough Thuraisingham your uncle? » he said in amazement.
   « Yes, he is. He’s my father’s cousin. You may perhaps know my father. Thuraiappah. » I looked at him in the hope of seeing some sign of recognition, for I would have liked to know. Once again, his eyes strayed to remember but registered a blank. « He was in the railways here before the War », I tried again with no success. In those days, there were so few white-collar Tamils that it would not have been a surprise to me if Rajaratnam knew my father since he knew my father’s cousin quite well.

...... my mind trailed off..... the fire surged and crackled, lighting one house after another, sending up volley after volley of darts of charred atap... the mail train had just passed the overhead bridge supporting a narrow tar road overlooking the padang and clubhouse in front of the Negri Sembilan railway quarters... the solitary fire brigade engine clanked the entire railway community still not at work or at school to the scene... the Sikh and Malay policemen in their strict brown shorts and sleeveless tunics and polished boots and puttees held the Chinese kampung dwellers from running in to save their belongings and who knows their old or young... that was all they could do... the wails the cries the tears the one or two naked babies on hips... their men were absent... away... at work... the kampung well ensconced in a grove on the other side of the playing field burst out loud tongues of leaping flames blinding the sky... every atap roof taking turns to flare up... the heat the crackling noise of wooden walls aflame and coming apart and the caving in of atap roofs and the littering of cinder... ash... and the charred remains of leaves as the trees caught fire swaying in speechless protest... that was another time another place of careless romping on the grounds in this islet of Malayan territory in a PAP stronghold... Ah Feen our bosom pal next door on the ground floor had grown up to settle in Australia... we cried buckets the day we were bundled into the mail train destination Port Swettenham... Gopalakrishnan on the third storey had joined the police force to keep swinging his bat and bowler's arm... Vivian on the groundfloor mid-flats whose muscular father engineered the engines up and down the Singapore-KL trajectoire dreamed of driving them himself: "Can your father fight my father?" he said and I returned with the reply: "My father says he'd give your father size!" Vivian never quite got over that... the Singhs at the other groundfloor end who ate greasy saffron-rice and chicken kept their distance from us boys running all over the terrain... the headhigh lallang jungle at the back eclipsing the goodsyard with its whitewashed godown lying like some mammoth sea-creature heaved and humped all the time [it was still there only now manned by Malays... they didn't take kindly to my queries... the Negri Sembilan flats had disappeared... in its place: three rows of low stained cement interlinked workers quarters... so was the clubhouse and ground though not the relief workers boarding house nor the select bar and club now all jazzed up like an inner sanctum... probably a select committee controlled the membership according to some secret criteria of initiation... no sooner I passed the front well-leathered door a young man at a table hushed within dimmed coloured lights and those at the bar all stopped whatever it is they were doing to keep the conversation as brief as possible...one word or one phrase answers: no... no... don't know... not here... nobody knows... a middle-aged Indian on a used bicycle got down to answer my questions... and no sooner I told him I grew up in this vicinity his demeanour changed... his own life suddenly took precedence... he said he was the station master... he obviously had no time to waste on a former Malayan... he was Malaysian living in this anachronistic islet in Malaysian territory leased out to keep the railways and the main railway station still under the Malayan Railway Administration in KL ] and harbour from view... not when the Prince of Wales docked in... we stole all along the roads to watch the massive slate dirt dented hulk rise from the docks from behind wirenetted fences... the hawkers' cries and clap-clapping of wooden-blocks to waken the morose rang in my ears... upstairs the Rozario woman had a visitor every morning... as the days passed his attire and mien were less cared-for... I had found a girl-friend... she was four nextdoor and willing... I was the wrong age born in the middle of the year and had to wait till 1940 to be enrolled in primary one at Redin Mas School on the hill [from where I saw today enormous crates cranes tankers and cable wires all bathed in technicolour in full blast of night turned to artificial day]... this is another place all neat to look at from a distance ... the heart of the city dwarfing the tallest Cathay building of these parts in my time... and a bit troublesome to think about...

   « So you are Thuraisingham’s nephew », he said rather reassuringly. I shook my head sheepishly and felt abashed having to call up old men’s names to invoke recognition. Besides, although I liked Thuraisingham very much as a person, I had pointedly refused his help when I most needed it. So, why was I invoking his name again? Meanwhile, Rajaratnam had gone through the second issue of my journal. I had my bag open on my lap as though in readiness to put the copy of the journal back in its place, but the ex-minister merely put it down in front of him. It was the only copy I carried with me of that issue, and I had thought of leaving it with Professor S. S. Ratnam. He looked at me and smiled. I was reassured. There was a moment’s pause, that awkward moment when you know you are going to be dismissed.
   « When are you going back? »
   « Tonight », I said. Again, there was that awkward moment, again he smiled and wagged his head ever so slightly. « Alright, then » he said and raised himself. I got up to my feet and slung the handbag over my shoulder. Just before taking leave of him, I went up to him, took the journal in my hands, opened the front page and said, « My address is in here, so is my telephone number. If ever you want to get in touch, there you have it all. »

We shook hands. There was, I noticed, a sort of abashedness in our parting, not really gushing with feeling but a shade of awkwardness. I wondered why as I made my way through the secretary’s anteroom. I shook hands with Mr.Kline. He looked worried or harrassed I couldn’t tell. The middle-aged rough-looking Chinese gentleman was still seated silently in the armchair. Maybe he was the man who had to follow me around, I thought and nodded at him. He appeared discomfited. I was just about to turn left through the wall-like glass doors to take the lift when I espied the Research Fellow of the place with whom I had dealings over the translation project seated in front of the first of a row of computers directly opposite Rajaratnam’s office. I hesitated. I thought she would look at me. She didn’t. She obviously was aware of my presence like she must have been of my meeting with Rajaratnam. But she didn’t even make the slightest move. I raised my hand to say hello, but she pretended not to see. I felt trapped. I knew I had to go up to her to say goodbye. So I went the ten paces or so towards her. She didn’t even so much as give me a glance. She knew I was there, and I was saying, « Well, imagine meeting here again. I’m leaving tonight. So I thought I might wish you goodbye again. Do you want me to say anything at all to Madame Salmon? »

He need shed no tears nor be impious to retrieve lines. Whole truths are unpalatable; half-truths - minus the lies - are the only truths of the past the Moving Finger cannot completely bungle. So what about the whole truth and/or whole truths? One should perhaps learn to read between the lines. They are in there somewhere waiting to be discovered!