Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

'Take that book,' he said. 'See for yourself if I'm not telling the truth.'

It was too late to say that I had already read it, that he had given me a copy on my last visit. I said, 'Thank you.'

'I'm sorry I can't offer you anything but this tea. My cook is ill. She is lying, of course — helping her husband with the rice harvest. I let her have her lie.'

'This tea is fine.'

'Drink up and I will show you the kampong,' he said.

The old men were seated around the great tree; a year had not changed their features or their postures. Seeing Sundrum they got to their feet, as they had done the previous year, and they exchanged greetings. On my first visit my Malay had been shaky, but now I understood what Sundrum was saying. He did not tell the old men my name; he introduced me as someone who had come 'from many miles away, crossing two oceans'. 'How long will he stay?' asked one old man. Sundrum said, 'After we discuss some important matters he will go away.' The men shook my hand and wished me a good journey.

'What a pity you don't understand this language,' said Sundrum, as he walked back to the house. 'It is music. Foreigners miss so much. But they still come and write about us. And their books are published and ours are not! ' 'What were you talking about to those old men?' I asked. 'About the snake,' he said, and walked a bit faster. 'The snake?' No snake had been mentioned. 'The python that was caught yesterday. It is going to be killed. They think it is a bad omen, perhaps it means we will have a poor harvest. I know what you think — a silly superstition! But I tell you I have known these omens to be correct.'

I said, 'Have you known them to be wrong?' 'To you, this must seem a poor kampong,' said Sundrum. 'But a great deal happens here. This is not Ayer Hitam. Every year is different here. I could live anywhere — a schoolmaster can name his price — but I choose to live here.'

I looked again at the kampong and it was less than it had seemed on my previous visit, smaller, dirtier, a bit woebegone, with more naked children, and somewhere a radio playing a shrill song. I wanted to leave at once. 'I have to go,' I said.

'Europeans,' he said. 'Always in a hurry.' 'I've got work to do.'

'Look at those old men,' he said, and turned and looked back at the jelutong tree. 'They have the secret of life. They sit there. They don't hurry or worry. They are wiser than any of us.'

'Yes.' But I thought the opposite and saw them as only old and baffled and a bit foolish, chattering there under their tree year after year, meeting their friends at the mosque, facing the clock-tower to face Mecca, talking about the Haj they would never take and going home when it got dark. Islanders.

Sundrum said, 'When I was in jail I used to hear the birds singing outside my window and sometimes I dropped off to sleep and dreamed that I was back here on the kampong. It was a good dream.' 'You're happy here.'

'Why shouldn't I be?' he said. Tm not like some people who write their books and then go to Singapore or K..L. to drink beer and run around with women. No, this is my life. I have my books, but what do they matter? Life is so much more important than books. I have no wish to live in Ayer Hitam.'

Ayer Hitam could be seen from the top of a palm tree; for Sundrum it was a world away, a distance that could scarcely be put into words. A year before I had seen him as a solitary soulful man, who had found contentment. Now he seemed manic; another visitor might find him foolish or arrogant, but his arrogance was fear. He had that special blindness of the villager. How cruel that he had turned to writing, the one art that requires clear-sightedness. I said, 'You weren't at the Christmas party this year.' 'I went last year.' 'I know.'

'Were you there? I didn't know the people well. I went to gather material. I've finished with Christmas parties, but I still need perspective — perspective is everything. From the ground, all coconuts look the same, but climb the tree and you will see that each one is different — a different shape, a different size, some ripe, some not. Some are rotten! That is the lesson of my novel.'

We had reached his house. I said, 'It's late.' 'I promised you my book,' he said. 'Let me get it for you.'

I heard him crossing the floor of his house, treading the worn planks. No, I thought: every coconut is the same. It takes time to decide that your first impression, however brutal, was correct.

There was no party that night. After dinner I sat down with The Coconut Gatherer. The book was identical to the one he had given me the previous year, the friendly flourish of his inscription on the fly-leaf exactly as it was in the other copy. But I read it again, this time with pleasure. I admired his facility, the compactness of his imagery, the rough charm of his sermonizing. It was clumsy in parts: he had no gift for punctuation. But I could not fault him for these mechanical lapses, since beneath the husk and fibre of his imitative lyricism so much of what he described was recognizably true to me.

The planter Gillespie swore he'd never leave. Though he remained embattled — one of the last colonials — the changeover from rubber to palm-oil continued on the larger estates. After eighteen months of it, I saw a time, not very far off, when I would gladly close the Consulate — or what was more likely, sell the remainder of my lease to the Arabs or the Japanese. Gillespie wanted me to dig my heels in and stay; he typified the older sort of expatriate, his attitude was a definition of that exile — home was defeat. Estate managers who went home caught cold, drove buses and lived an amah's life, cooking and doing dishes.

And then, like deliverance, Gillespie was ambushed, killed on the road to Kluang. His syce was handed pamphlets and allowed to go free, so we knew it was political. But even that aspect did not shake the others at the Club; they said that a sudden burst of gunfire on the lonely road was preferable to a slow death in Baltimore — Gillespie was an American — and they took.the view that he was luckier than some who, hacked by parangs, had gone home maimed.

I had been told to expect it as the natural result of our collapse in Vietnam, more guerrilla activity in Malaysia, a resurgence of revolutionary zeal. I was not surprised to hear of incidents in the northern states, where there were borders and concealing jungle. But here, in Ayer Hitam? It seemed unthinkable. And I couldn't imagine why anyone here would kill to make a political point or want to repeat the old cycle of taking power just to give another group its turn in purgatory. Yet it had started, and one of the pamphlets handed to Gillespie's syce was titled Sejauh Mana Kita Bersabar? — How Long Must We Be Patient? It could have been the complaint of any political group — of anyone who wanted power. But in the circumstances it was a threat. If this was patience I trembled to think what a loss of temper might mean.

Seeing that the recessional might be bloodier than I'd expected, I decided to stick my neck out and see the Sultan about it — not in my official capacity, but informally, to find out, before State Department representations were made, what steps were being taken to deal with terrorists. Unofficially, I had been told that the Malaysian government expected American military support. Though they had not been turned down, Flint in the embassy in Kuala Lumpur had told me, 'They're whistling in the dark, but if it makes things easier for you tell them we're thinking of giving them air-cover.'

The American position was: we'll help if the casualties are yours. I decided to hint this to the Sultan in the oriental — or at least Malaysian — way. My opportunity came a few weeks after Gillespie's murder when, talking with Azhari, the District Commissioner, at the ceremonial opening of a palm-oil estate, I asked if the Sultan was going to be there.