The British, of course, don’t agree with Malayan independence. They just got the place back, after all, and they’re damned if they’re handing it over now to a bunch of natives. And so they act, spiriting away the Sultan of Pahang to keep him safe in case any rebel fighters have assassination on their minds. But things don’t stop there. There are still pockets of Japanese soldiers here and there, and when Tokyo learns the Sultan’s gone, it panics. The Sultan’s safety, after all, was in Japanese hands, and if he’s been lost somewhere, then who knows what the victorious British will do in revenge. Tokyo concludes the Sultan must have been captured by those rebel fighters – because where else could he have gone? – and send out a retaliatory force that kills nineteen kampong villagers and Cecelia’s mother, Yoke Yee, before anyone can sort it out.
It’s a difficult time for everyone, the ten years from 1948 to 1958. Malaya’s only just put down its weapons to celebrate the end of one war and now it’s picking them up again to fight for independence. ‘The Emergency’, this fight will later be called. For ten years there are food shortages, gunfights and curfews. On the street corners where Japanese soldiers used to stand there are now British officials, demanding travel passes and respect. If you blinked, you might have thought nothing had changed.
By 1954, though, things are slowly becoming calmer. The worst of the Emergency is over, and in just three years’ time Malaya will win independence. It’ll transform into Malaysia, with as many birth pangs as you might expect.
Ammuma’s Tale: The Inference
Inferences are trickier; there’s nothing to stop you leaving logic and common-sense behind. ‘We leave this as an inference for the reader,’ a mathematician will happily write. Too trustful, these mathematicians. Too trustful by half.
Ammuma always insisted 1954 was a peaceful time. By then she’d closed off most of the rooms in the house and the dung-plastered compound yard had been given over to vegetables. A peaceful time, a time of growing and taking stock.
Mary and Francesca are managing in 1954: they’re making do, they’re raising guinea fowl and growing yams. Francesca is sixteen and nearly grown-up when she delivers her momentous news. She’s sitting on the verandah in her school uniform and scraping the shells from a bowl of hard-boiled eggs.
‘What did you say!’
‘George and I are going to have a baby, Amma.’
George is her classmate. Only fifteen, from a St Thomas Christian family and nervous enough to come out in a rash during mathematics tests. He’s not the kind of boy you remember, and Mary has a hard time even picturing his face. Francesca keeps right on shelling the eggs. She’s a pragmatic child.
‘But your – your training course. And his university plans – and what about –’
Mary drops her spade and treads through the vegetable beds to look up at the verandah with her hands on her hips. She has a right to be aghast, after all she’s done. She’s kept a tight hold on Francesca all through the Emergency, only permitting boyfriends with the most impeccable credentials and no Communist leanings. Boys with shining teeth and Brilliantined hair, with sky-high ambitions and life-size finances. And now, with the Emergency nearly over, Mary’s treasured daughter has only gone and got herself pregnant.
‘We’ll have the baby first,’ Francesca tells her calmly, and puts a clean egg into her overflowing basket. She’s certainly one for metaphors, this girlish mother of mine. ‘Then George will go to technical college in Ipoh, and I’ll do secretarial training. In KL.’
Another shock for Mary. KL is a long way from this bungalow in Pahang, with all her daughter’s toys only put away yesterday and those shut-up spare rooms that would be perfect for a nursery. All her hopes, wrapped up in this one girl-chick who might just fly away. She pulls herself together.
‘I expect you’ll be wanting me to organize the wedding,’ she grumbles. ‘And at a moment’s notice, too.’
She’s shocked enough, but not wholly so. There’s a part of her that likes the sound of another wedding; thinks back fondly to her own red-gold sari and the pre-war extravagance of snake charmers. She’ll open up the old annexes to hold the sangeet in, she thinks. Invite friends. Invite relatives, such as they are. No parents, sadly enough. No Anil (and here’s a tangent, here’s a thorny, thickset path: how did he die? Best not inquire; Mary stitches up a new version every time she tells the story and in Pahang, at least, people understand why).
‘We aren’t engaged, Amma. George hasn’t asked me.’ Francesca gives a doleful sniff that shoves her heavy breasts together under her outgrown bodice.
Mary’s jaws snap together. Her fingers curl and her eyes turn to tiny chips of light. She might have learnt patience, but she’s certainly not practising it. Her hiss carries on the wind; the grit of her teeth drowns out the kampong’s evening call to prayer and her flare of anger turns the rice in cooking pots for a mile around to charcoal. It’s no wonder that, within a day, Francesca’s boyfriend George finds himself climbing up those verandah steps in response to Mary’s summons. Poor George; a burnt dinner is only the beginning of his problems.
‘November,’ is how Mary greets him. ‘After Diwali. That’s when you’ll marry.’
It’s an auspicious time. It’s also a cheap time, snake charmers typically vanishing in the
