Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

'You foreigners know all the tricks.'

'True,' I said. 'If he was a Malay or a Chinese I probably wouldn't have been able to catch him.' I tapped my head. 'I understand the mind of the West.'

Almost the worst corpse I've ever seen was that of a Malay woman, an epileptic, who, out planting rice in a field, had had a fit and tumbled into a flooded ditch. She was alone, and as soon as she was submerged the horse-leeches swarmed beneath her loose blouse and over her legs and face. She hadn't drowned; she died from loss of blood — it had been sucked by those fattened leeches. They still clung to her, black with her blood, after she was hauled out. Her colour was the most awful grey, like a dead sea creature with salt in her veins. Then the leeches were struck by the air and they peeled off and sank in the ditch, leaving the woman covered with welts the shape of watch-straps. It gave Ayer Hitam a week of fame. People came from all over to look at the ditch, and even now you can see the spot clearly because no one would plant rice near it after the tragedy. It had the makings of a horror story: the corpse found with its blood sucked, an investigation, some detective work, the news that she was an epileptic, and the chilling truth— leeches.

I never thought I would see anything worse; then the corpse of the child turned up, Aziza binte Salim. I suppose what made it particularly dreadful was her age — not more than seven — and the fact that she was a girl. Most people are apprehensive about their daughters; Malays turn apprehension into paranoia, or at least underpin it with the ferocity of Islamic suspicion. Aziza was a prize, a cute round-faced girl with jet-black hair. She lived in the kam-pong at the northern end of the town, which bordered on the derelict rubber estate. The Malays there had repossessed the huts of the Tamil rubber-tappers, shading them with banana groves. I often used to walk out that way in the late afternoon when the consulate closed, to limber up for tennis. My walks were a displacement activity: I would have had a drink if I had gone to the Club after work; then another drink, and another, and no tennis. Though I never knew her name, I went through the kam-pong afterwards and — how shall I put it? — I noticed she was missing. Then I remembered her laughing face.

The monsoon was late that year, so late it looked as if the rice shoots would never be planted. The fields had been prepared in that clumsy traditional way, by buffaloes dragging the metal ploughs through the water, stirring the mud. But weeks later there was still no rain, and the paddy fields were beginning to show the ridges of the empty furrows as the water-level dropped. The ditches dried and the embankments came apart as the grass that knitted them together died. A sad sight: the quilt of drying fields that had been so green in the previous planting, the sun's slow fire bringing death.

While the agricultural officers were deliberating over their clip-boards (one American-trained Malay used to come to the Club and say, 'These guys haven't got a chance' —I wanted to sock him in the jaw), the kampong was deciding things its own way.

I had the story from Peeraswami. As soon as it became clear that the situation was desperate, the Malay rice-farmers met and decided to bring their problem to a bomoh — a medicine-man — whose hut was deep in the bush, not far from the village of aboriginal Laruts who acted as his messengers. It was a part of the jungle where not even the Sultan's tax-collectors showed their faces. This bomoh, Noor, had a reputation. Later when I saw him in court he looked a most mild man, somewhat comic in his old-fashioned wire spectacles.

But he scared the life out of Peeraswami, who said that the Malays from the kampong had sworn that no one should reveal their identities — they took a vow of secrecy before they set out. Most of the stories about the bomoh Noor came from the Laruts, who spoke of goats that had disappeared and odd howlings from the bomoh's hut. The Laruts had never engaged him, but the reason was simple: Noor was expensive. He asked the visiting Malays to make a contribution before he allowed them in.

The next thing he said was that the kampong was cursed: the curse was keeping the monsoon away.

They expected to hear that. They would have been surprised if he had said anything else. But how to cure it?

'There is always a cure.’ said the bomoh Noor. 'Can you afford it?'

They said yes, of course, but when the bomoh only smiled and said nothing else for several minutes they began wondering if their answer should have been no.

'Three hundred dollars,' said Noor, finally.

At that time, the exchange rate was three to one, Straits dollars to American green. But this was quite a sum to simple rice-farmers who, long before the next harvest, would be living on credit from the Chinese shops. They had a fear, common in agricultural societies, of being uprooted and driven to a hostile part of the country to begin again. They asked the bomoh his terms.

'Half the money now, the balance when it is finished.'

'When the rain falls,' said one man.

'When it is finished there will be rain.'

The strange distancing construction of the Malay verbs made them inquire further: 'You're going to do it yourself?'

'It will be done,' said the bomoh, using the same courtly remoteness.

'By you?'

'It is tiger's work,' said the old man. He smiled and showed his black teeth. Even the most menacing bomoh had an access of comedy — it could be as effective a curative as fear. The ramshackle hut, the clay bowls of beaks and feathers, the stink of decayed roots had, mingled with the riddle of their threat, an element of the clownish. But according to Peeraswami no one laughed. The old man said, 'The money.'

They handed over the hundred and fifty. The bills were counted and put in a strong-box. The old man gestured for them to sit down.

The sun continued hot, wilting the foliage of the elastic figs; the frangipanis lost their leaves, and the bougainvillaeas at the Club took on a frail drooping look, rusted blossoms and slack leaves hanging from brittle branches. The dust was everywhere. The grass courts behind the Club were impossible, and I recall how an especially hard backhand shot would send the ball bouncing into my opponent's face with a great puff of red dust. This was bad, and most people said it would get worse. It was a suffocating business to take the shortest walk. I worked late just to be away from the Club and the temptation to drink heavily. The other members wilted visibly at tables, cursing the heat over glasses of beer. Ayer Hitam was parched, changed in colour from the yellow stucco to the deep red of the risen dust, and the tyres of the trishaws left marks in the sun-softened tar.

After another week I was drinking — the joyless anaesthetic of gin. One lunchtime, on the Club verandah, I heard a commotion — whoops, shouts, a great gabbling. Odd sounds in such exhausting weather. On the road beyond the Club's cricket ground were running people, twenty or more. They were gibbering and crying out, beating their way from a banana grove. The cries reached us, 'Matjan! Matjan!'

At the next table Squibb said, 'Something's up.' We went to the rail. The elderly Chinese Head Boy, Stanley Ghee, crossed the verandah with a tray and towel. He peered at the road and cocked his head.

'It's a tiger,' he said.

'Balls,' said Squibb. 'There hasn't been a tiger here for twenty years. Sure, you get them in Tapah, the Cameron Highlands, those places. They can feed there. But you never get them as far south as this. There's nothing for them to eat, and they've all been poached away.'

'Matjan!' The word was clear.

'If it is a tiger,' said Angela Miller, 'I'd love to see it. But an Ayer Hitam tiger would probably look like the one in that Saki story — toothless and frightened.'