Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

'I can't climb the coconut trees/ he said. 'So I do the next best thing. I write about it. You see?'

He raised his foot to the low wicker table and with his toe pushed a book towards me. The title in green was The Coconut Gatherer. He said, 'This is my tree.'

'I'd love to read it,' I said.

'Take it with my compliments,' he said. 'It is about a boy who lives in a kampong like this. He is a sad boy, but one day he climbs a coconut tree and sees the town of Ayer Hitam. He leaves home, and the book is a record of his many unfortunate adventures in the town. He is bitterly disappointed. He loses his money. He is starving. He climbs a coconut tree in Ayer Hitam and sees his kampong. He goes home.' Sundrum paused, then said, 'I am that boy.'

A Malay woman entered the room with a tray of food. She set the tray down on a table and withdrew, self-conscious as soon as her hands were empty.

'I hope you're hungry,' said Sundrum.

'It looks good,' I said.

He urged me to fill my plate. It was nast padang, prawns, mutton-chops, chicken, curried vegetables and a heap of saffron rice; we finished with gula malacca, a kind of custard with coconut milk and sweet sauce. Sundrum ate greedily, wiping his hands on his sarong.

'I wish I had your cook,' I said.

'I have no cook. I made this myself. That girl you saw— she is just the amah.'

'You're not married?'

'I will marry when my work is done,' he said.

'You should open a restaurant.'

'Cooking is a creative activity,' he said. 'I would rather cook than write. I would rather do almost anything than write. For me, enjoyment is going down to the jelutong tree where the old men gather, to listen to the stories of the old days. They are much wiser than I am.'

I couldn't mock him; he spoke with feeling; I believed his humility to be genuine. And again I was ashamed, for what did I know of the town? I had never spoken to those old men. Indeed, my life seemed to be centred around the Club and the Consulate, the gossip of members, the complaints of Americans. Sundrum said he envied the coconut gatherers, but I envied Sundrum his peace of mind in this green clearing. It was an aspect of life that was so often overlooked, for there was contentment here, and just admitting that made me feel better, as if somehow Sundrum represented the soul of the people.

After lunch he took me around the kampong and introduced me. My Malay was no good then; I let him do all the talking and I barely understood what he was saying. I was impressed by the familiar way he greeted the old men and by their respectful attitude towards him. And I think that if I could have traded my life for his I would have done so, and changed into a sarong and spent the rest of my days there, swinging in a hammock and peeling prawns.

'Don't forget the book,' he said, when I told him I had to go. He rushed back to the house to get it, and he presented it in a formal, almost courtly way. 'I hope you enjoy it.'

'I'm sure I will.'

'You were very kind to come out here,' he said. 'I know it is not very exciting, but it is important for you to see the whole of Malaysia, the great and the small.'

'The pleasure is mine.'

He took my hand and held it. 'Friendship is more important than anything else. I tell my students that. If people only realized it, this would be a happier world.'

I hurried away and almost hated myself when I realized that I was hurrying to a cocktail party at Strang's. Now it was clear that Milly Strang wasn't coming back, and Strang was behaving like a widower. He needed cheering up; he would have taken my absence to mean moral disapproval.

That night, after the party, to recapture the mood of my visit to Sundrum's I took up The Coconut Gatherer. I read it in disbelief, for the story was mawkish, the prose appalling and artless, simply a sludge of wrongly punctuated paragraphs. It went on and on, a lesson on every page, and often the narrative broke down and limped into a sermon on the evils of society. The main character had no name; he was 'Our Hero'. I was surprised Sundrum had found a publisher until I looked at the imprint and saw that it was the work of our local Chinese printer, Wong Heck Mitt.

I soon forgot the book, but Sundrum himself I thought of often as a good man in a dull place. He was a happy soul, plump and brown in his little house, and I was glad for his very existence.

It was a year before I saw him again. The intervening time had a way of making Ayer Hitam seem a much bigger place, not the small island I knew it to be, but a vastness in which people could change or disappear.

I had expected to see him at Alec's Christmas party. He was not there, though the party was much the same as the first one. I arrived at Sundrum's house one day in early January, and he looked at me half in irritation, half in challenge, the kind of hasty recognition I had become accustomed to: he saw my race or nationality and there his glance ended. He didn't remember my name.

'I hope I'm not disturbing you,' I said.

'Not at all. It's just that I've had so many visitors lately. And I've been on leave. Singapore. The Straits Times was doing a piece about me.'

His tone was cold and self-regarding, but the room was as before — bizarrely so. The same arrangement of books, the open dictionary, The Coconut Gatherer on the low wicker table, and at the window the children's laughter. Sundrum offered me Chinese tea and said, 'Listen to them. Some people call that noise. I call it music.'

'They seem pretty excited.'

'They caught a python in the monsoon drain yesterday. That's what they're talking about. The whole kampong is excited. They've probably killed it already.' He listened at the window, then said, 'They have no idea what I do.'

'How is your writing?'

'Writing is my life,' he said. 'I learned that in jail when I had no pencil or paper. But I make up for lost time.'

I said, 'It must have been the worst month of your life.'

'Month?' His laugh was mocking and boastful. 'It was closer to a year! I'll never forgive them for that. And I know who was behind it — the British. It was during the Emergency — they couldn't tell us apart. If you were a so-called native you were guilty. You people have a lot to answer for.'

'I'm not British,' I said.

'You're white — what's the difference? The world belongs to you. Who are we? Illiterates, savages I What right do we have to publish our books — you own all the print-cries. You're Prospero, I'm Caliban.'

'Cut it out,' I said. 'I'm not an old fool and your mother isn't a witch.'

‘I’ll tell you frankly,' said Sundrum. 'When the Japanese occupied Malaysia and killed the British we were astonished. We didn't hate the Japanese — we were impressed. Orientals just like us drove out these people we had always feared. That was the end, when we saw them fall so easily to the Japanese we knew we could do it.'

'Really?' I said. 'And what did you think when the Japanese surrendered?'

'I wept/ he said. 1 wept bitterly.'

'You should write about that.'

'I have, many times, but no one wants to hear the truth.'

'I take it you're having some difficulty being published.'

'Not at all,' he said. 'I've just finished a book. Here.' He picked up The Coconut Gatherer and handed it to me. 'Just off the presses. It's coming out soon.'

I turned the pages to verify that it was the same book and not a sequel. It was the one I had read. I said, 'But this isn't about the Japanese.'

'It is about self-discovery,' he said. 'Do you know what I always wanted to be?'

'A coconut gatherer?'

He looked sharply at me, then said, 'I'm not ashamed of it. I can't climb coconut trees, so I do the next best thing. I write about it.'

I handled the book, not knowing what to say.