The Orientalist and the Ghost Read Free

shall do my best to avoid the same fate!’ I joked, fatigue robbing me of taste.
    Charles apologized for the mess on my desk, cluttered with the late Ah Wing’s unfinished paperwork, a green Olivetti and a portrait of a fierce little Chinese lady. The table legs stood in china cups of kerosene and water, ant death traps full of their little black carcasses. It was late in the afternoon and the villagers were returning from the vegetable gardens, jangling bicycle bells and calling to one another, voices rising and falling in colloquial scales. I heard a woman shouting: ‘Second daughter! Where are you? Tell third brother to fetch water from the well!’ I heard notes faltering from a bamboo flute and the bleating of a goat in its pen.
    Let me stop here and confess: my memory is not what it used to be. The events of this morning are already lost in the mists of vagueness. Did I return my library books? Did I go to the town hall and register Adam and Julia for free school dinners? Other resources have to be consulted. So how can it be that the dull, plaintive, half-century-old bleats of a goat are sharper in my memory than a news bulletin heard on the radio not twenty minutes ago? The ether amasses into a finger of blame and points to all the ghosts, the spectral émigrés of my days in Malaya. I often wonder why I’ve only acquired ghosts from the bandit-ridden end of the Colonial era, and not from any other time in my life. I can’t puzzle it out. Old Smythe across the hall died of natural causes in February (God rest his soul) and I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since. Resettlement Officer Charles Dulwich, on the other hand, committed suicide forty-eight years ago, but was in my kitchen only last night, smoking opium and reminiscing about the evening we sat on the veranda drinking whisky
stengahs
, as the gramophone trumpeted out ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and the villagers cooked Humphrey the Saint Bernard on a great fire.
Do you remember the smell of roast dog?
Charles said.
I drool at the memory
. I’d been terribly fond of Humphrey and didn’t care to remember. But
eau de
charred canine filled my nostrils anyway. Just as Charles, the beast, wished it to.
    Not all the ghosts are as bothersome as Charles (thank God). Most of the visitations are silent, isolated fragments of the past, recurring in the here and now, before dissolving into nothingness. Sometimes the Sikh guard stands sentinel outside the hallway cupboard, rifle slung over his shoulder, his skin slick with equatorial humidity. Sometimes the pretty girl with the plaits bends in front of the fireplace, washing potatoes as the gas valves hiss. The girl, absorbed in rinsing mud off a potato, then looks up, startled, and the potato once again makes that eternal leap of lust, as though I were a handsome young man of twenty-five, and not the rheumy-eyed old devil lying in ambush in the bathroom mirror. Every day dozens of the not-so-dearly departed come to my living quarters, whatever non-corporeal substance they are made of transfiguring into ephemeral scenes of the past. Every single Godforsaken day. Pity this old man, for they will never let me forget.
    The bicycle bells trilled and the bamboo flautist performed his folk-song, and Charles clapped his hands and shouted,
Boy!
and a sulky-mouthed Malay presented himself in the doorway. Charles barked an order to the youth, who disappeared, then reappeared with two glasses on a teakwood tray; all sensual hip movement and demurely lowered camel lashes. He had the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen, and had obviously been destined to be a seductress of the highest order, though some unhappy quirk of fate made him a boy instead, which was of no good to anyone (or so I naively thought at the time). He served us our drinks and lemon-barley water spilt everywhere.
    ‘That vain creature is incapable of putting anything down without sloshing it,’ Charles said crossly.
    He barked again to the boy, who sulked out on