Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

'You've got your part,' said Angela, losing control of her accent. 'I should say it's a jolly good one.

'Oh, I know that!' Jan said. 'But I was wondering about—' She looked at the table and said, 'I take it you're going to play Suzie.'

'Unless anyone has any serious objections,' said Angela. No one said a word. Angela addressed her question to Jan, 'Do you have any serious objections?'

'Well, not serious objections,' said Jan, trying to sound good-humoured.

'Maybe she thinks—' Duff started.

Angela interrupted, 'Perhaps I'm too old for the part, Jan, is that what you're trying to say?'

'God, not that,' said Jan, becoming discomposed. 'Honestly, Angela, I think you're perfect for it, really I do.'

'What is it then?'

Jan seemed reluctant to begin, but she had gone too far to withdraw. Her hands were clasped in her lap and now she was speaking to Duff, whose face was the most sympathetic. 'I don't want to make this sound like an objection, but the point is, Suzie is supposed to be, well, Chinese… and, Angela, you're not, um, Chinese. Are you?'

'Not as far as I know,' said Angela, raising a laugh. The laughter subsided. 'But I am an actress.'

'I know that,' said Jan, 'and I'm dead sure you'd do a marvellous Suzie.' Jan became eager. 'I'm terribly excited about this production, really I am. But what if we got a Chinese girl from town to play Suzie. I mean, a. real Chinese girl, with one of those dresses slit up the side and that long black hair and that sort of slinky—'

Angela's glare prevented Jan from going any further. 'It's a challenging role,' said Angela, switching her expression from one of disapproval to one of profound interest. 'But so are they all, and we must be up to it. Henry is going to play the old Chinese man. Would you prefer that Stanley did it?'

Stanley Chee, a man of sixty, with gold-rimmed glasses and a starched uniform, was Head Boy of the club, and at that moment he could be seen — all heads turned — through the bar door, looking furtive as he wiped a bottle.

Jan shook her head from side to side.

'It's going to be a hard grind,' said Angela, and she smiled. 'But that's what acting is. Being someone else. Completely. That's what I tell all the new people.'

The people in Ayer Hitam stopped referring to her as Doctor Smith as soon as they set eyes on her. She was 'that woman', then 'our friend', and only much later, after she had left the district and when the legend was firmly established, was she Doctor Smith again, the title giving her name a greater mockery than anyone there could manage in a tone of voice. She didn't have much luck with her simple name; as everyone knew, even the man she married could not pronounce it. But that was not so surprising: a narrow ornament, a sliver of ivory he wore in his lower lip, prevented him from saying most words clearly.

She flitted into town that first day in a bright, wax-print sarong, and with a loose pale blouse through which you could see her breasts in nodding motion. She might have been one of those ravished American women, grazing the parapet of middle age, with a monotonous libido and an expensive camera, vowing to have a fling at the romance travel was supposed to provide. But she was far from frivolous, and she had not been in the district long before it became apparent that she was anything but typical.

A typical visitor stayed at the Government Rest House or the Club, but Doctor Smith never went near any of them, nor did she stay at the Chinese hotels. Her few days in Ayer Hitam were passed at a Malay kedai, a fly-blown shop on a back road. It was assumed she shared a room. You can imagine the speculation. But she had the magic

travellers sometimes have, of finding in a place something the residents have missed and giving it a brief celebrity.

So, after she had gone into the jungle, some of us used this kedai and we discovered that it employed as sweepers several men from a small tribe of orcmg asli who lived sixty miles to the north, in an isolated pouch of jungle near one of Fred Squibb's timber estates. Their looks were unmistakable. That should have been our first clue: we knew she was an anthropologist, we heard she had taken a taxi north, and Squibb, the timber merchant, said the taxi had dropped her at the bush track which met the main road and extended some fifteen miles to the kampong. There had been, he said, half a dozen tribesmen — Laruts, they were called — squatting at the trampled mouth of the path. Squibb said they were waiting for her and that they might have been there, roosting like owls, for days.

We had seen anthropologists before. Their sturdy new clothes and neatly-packed rucksacks, tape-recorders and parcels of books and paper, gave them away immediately. But Doctor Smith caused a local sensation. No one since Sir Hugh Clifford had studied the Laruts; they were true natives, small people with compressed negroid features, clumsy innocent faces and long arms, who had been driven into the interior as the Malays and Chinese crowded the peninsula. There were few in the towns. You saw them unexpectedly tucked in the bends of bush roads, with the merchandise they habitually sold, red and yellow parrots — flapping things snared in the jungle, unused to the ingeniously-woven Larut cages; and orchids harvested from the trunks of forest trees; and butterflies, as large as those orchids, mounted lopsidedly in cigar boxes. The Laruts were our savages, proof we were civilized: Malays especially measured themselves by them. Their movements, jinking in the forest, were like the flights of the butterflies they sold on the roadsides with aboriginal patience. Selling such graceful stuff was appropriate to this gentle tribe for, as was well-known, they were non-violent: they did not make weapons, they didn't fight. They had been hunted for sport, like frail deer, by early settlers. As the Malays and the Chinese grew more quarrelsome and assertive, the Laruts responded by moving further and further inland, until they came to rest on hillsides and in swamps, enduring the extremes of landscape to avoid hostile contact.

But Doctor Smith found them, and a week later there were no Laruts on the road, no butterflies for sale, only the worn patches on the grassy verge where they had once waited with their cages and boxes, smoking their oddly-shaped pipes.

At the Club, Angela said, 'I expect we'll see her in town buying clothes.' But no one saw her, nor did we see much of the other Laruts. They had withdrawn, it seemed, to the deepest part of the forest, and their absence from the roads made those stretches particularly cheerless. We guessed at what might be going on in the Larut kampong, and with repetition our guesses acquired all the neatness and authority of facts. Then we had a witness.

Squibb went to the area; he brought back this story. He had borrowed a motorbike at one of his sub-stations and had ridden it over the bush track until at last he came to the outskirts of the kampong. He saw some children playing and asked them in Malay if 'the white queen' was around. They took him to her, and he said he was astonished to see her kneeling in the dust by a hut, pounding some food in a mortar with several other Larut women. They were stripped to the waist chanting.

'You could have knocked me down with a feather,' Squibb said. He spat in disgust and went on to say how dirty she was; her sarong was in tatters, her hands filthy. Apparently he went over to her, but she ignored him. Finally, she spoke.

'Can't you see I'm busy?' She went on heaving the pestle.

Squibb was persistent. She said (and this was the sentence I heard Squibb repeating in the club lounge for days afterward): 'We don't want you here.'

There were other stories, but most of them seemed to originate with Squibb: the Ministry of Tourism was angry that the Laruts had stopped selling butterflies on the road; the missionaries in the area, Catholic fathers from France, were livid because the Larut children had stopped going to the mission school, and for the first time in many years the mission's dispensary — previously filled with snakebite victims and Laruts with appendicitis and strangulated hernias — was nearly empty. There was more: the Laruts had started to move their kampong, putting up huts in the heavily-forested portion of jungle that adjoined Squibb's timber estate.